A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [13]
In 1242 Enguerrand III was killed at the age of about sixty when in a violent fall from his horse the point of his sword was thrust through his body. His eldest son and successor, Raoul II, was soon afterward killed in battle in Egypt while on St. Louis’ unhappy crusade of 1248–50. He was succeeded by his brother Enguerrand IV, a kind of medieval Caligula, one of whose crimes became the catalyst of a major advance in social justice.
On apprehending in his forest three young squires of Laon, equipped with bows and arrows but no hunting dogs for taking important game, Enguerrand IV had them executed by hanging, without trial or process of any kind. Impunity in such affairs was no longer a matter of course, for the King was Louis IX, a sovereign whose sense of rulership was equal to his piety. He had Enguerrand IV arrested, not by his peers but by sergents of the court, like any criminal, and imprisoned in the Louvre, although, in deference to his rank, not in chains.
Summoned to trial in 1256, Enguerrand IV was accompanied by the greatest peers of the realm—the King of Navarre, the Duke of Burgundy, the Counts of Bar and Soissons among others, grimly sensing a test of their prerogatives. Refusing to submit to investigation of the case as touching his person, honor, rank, and noble heritage, Enguerrand demanded judgment by his peers and trial by combat. Louis IX firmly refused, saying that as regards the poor, the clergy, “and persons who deserve our pity,” it would be unjust to allow trial by combat. Customarily, non-nobles could engage a champion in such cases, but King Louis saw the method as obsolete. In a long and fiercely argued process, against the strenuous resistance of the peers, he ordered the Sire de Coucy to stand trial. Enguerrand IV was convicted, and although the King intended a death sentence, he was persuaded by the peers to forgo it. Enguerrand was sentenced to pay a fine of 12,000 livres, to be used partly to endow masses in perpetuity for the souls of the men he had hanged, and partly to be sent to Acre to aid in the defense of the Holy Land. Legal history was made and later cited as a factor in the canonization of the King.
The Coucy riches restored Enguerrand IV to royal favor when he lent King Louis 15,000 livres in 1265 to buy what was supposed to be the True Cross. Otherwise he continued a career of outrages into the 14th century and died at the ripe age of 75 in 1311, without issue though not without a bequest. He left 20 sous (equal to one livre) a year in perpetuity to the leprosarium of Coucy-la-Ville so that its inmates “will pray for us each year in the Chapel for our sins.” Twenty sous at this time was equal to a day’s pay of one knight or four archers, or the hire of a cart and two horses for twenty days, or, theoretically, the pay of a hired peasant for two years, so it may be presumed to have underwritten a reasonable number of prayers, though perhaps not adequate for the soul of Enguerrand IV.
When that unlamented lord, though twice married, died without heirs, the dynasty passed to the descendants of his sister Alix, who was married to the Count of Guînes. Her eldest son inherited the Guînes lands and title, while her second son, Enguerrand V, became the lord of Coucy. Raised at the court of Alexander of Scotland, his uncle by marriage, he married Catherine Lindsay of Baliol, the King’s niece, and held the seigneury only ten years. He was followed in rapid succession by his son Guillaume and his grandson Enguerrand VI, who inherited the domain in 1335 and five years later was to father