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By Root 1573 0

art of portraiture was hardly yet practiced. The 14th century seems to have been interested in individual appearance and character traits only in the case of ruling figures or an occasional oddity like Bertrand Du Guesclin. Other people are undifferentiated by chronicles and illustrators and become personalities only through their deeds. For Enguerrand de Coucy two clues to appearance exist; one that he was tall and strong, as his figure was described under a rain of blows in his last battle; the other that he may have been dark and, in maturity, saturnine, as he appears in a portrait painted more than 200 years after his death. Since the portrait was commissioned by a Celestine monastery which Enguerrand had founded, some tradition of the founder’s looks may have survived to instruct the artist, but the face portrayed could just as well have been imaginary.

The most vivid description of all is non-specific; yet in his singing and dancing, elegant horsemanship, charm of manner, and lover’s talents, it is impossible not to see the young Enguerrand de Coucy in the Squire of the Canterbury Tales. Which is not to say that Chaucer, who saw knights and squires every day during his career at court, had Enguerrand particularly in mind when he drew the sparkling portrait in the Prologue. Nevertheless it fits.

A lovyere and a lusty bacheler

With lokkes crulled [curled] as they were leyd in presse,

Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse.

Of his stature he was of evene lengthe,

And wonderly deliver, and great of strengthe.

And he had been sometime in chevachye,

In Flaundres, in Artoys, and Picardye,

And born him wel, as of so litel space,

In hope to stonden in his lady grace.

Embroudered was he as it were a mede

Al ful of fresshe floures whyte and rede.

Singing he was or floytinge [fluting] all the day;

He was as fresh as is the month of May.

Short was his goune, with sieves long and wyde.

Wel coude he sitte on hors and faire ryde.

He coude songes make and wel endyte,

Jouste and eek daunce, and wel purtreye and wryte.

So hote he lovede that by nightertale [nighttime]

He sleep namore than dooth a nightingale.

Headed by the four “Lilies,” Anjou, Berry, Orléans, and Bourbon, the hostages in their silks and parti-colors, “embroidered like a field of flowers,” brought no less splendor to England than the prisoners of Poitiers whom they replaced. They were required to live at their own expense—considerable in the case of the Duc d’Orléans, who had sixteen servants with him and a total retinue of over sixty. Handsomely entertained with banquets and minstrels and gifts of jewels, the hostages moved about freely and joined in hunting and hawking, dancing and flirting. French and English chivalry took pride in treating one another courteously as prisoners, however greedy the ransom—in contrast to Germans, who, according to Froissart’s scornful report, threw their prisoners “in chains and irons like thieves and murderers to extort a greater ransom.”

Coucy would not have felt alien in England. His family possessed lands there inherited from his great-grandmother Catherine de Baliol, although these had been confiscated during the war by King Edward and handed over as a munificent reward to the captor of the King of Scotland.

English and French, like English and Americans of a later day, shared a common culture and, among nobles, a common language, the legacy of the Norman Conquest. At about the time the hostages arrived, the use of French by the upper class was beginning to be replaced by the national speech of the commoners. Before the Black Death, French had been the language of the court, Parliament, and the lawcourts. King Edward himself probably did not speak English with any fluency. French was even taught in the schools, much to the resentment of the bourgeois, whose children, according to a complaint of 1340, “are Compelled to leave the use of their own language, a thing which is known in no other country.” When many clerics who could teach French were eliminated by the Black Death,