A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [14]
The Coucys maintained a sense of eminence second to none, and conducted their affairs after the usage of sovereign princes. They held courts of justice in the royal style and organized their household under the same officers as the King’s: a constable, a grand butler, a master of falconry and the hunt, a master of the stables, a master of forests and waters, and masters or grand stewards of kitchen, bakery, cellar, fruit (which included spices, and torches and candles for lighting), and furnishings (including tapestry and lodgings during travel). A grand seigneur of this rank also usually employed one or more resident physicians, barbers, priests, painters, musicians, minstrels, secretaries and copyists, an astrologer, a jester, and a dwarf, besides pages and squires. A principal vassal acting as châtelain or garde du château managed the estate. At Coucy fifty knights, together with their own squires, attendants, and servants, made up a permanent garrison of 500.
Outward magnificence was important as a statement of status, requiring huge retinues dressed in the lord’s livery, spectacular feasts, tournaments, hunts, entertainments, and above all an open-handed liberality in gifts and expenditure which, since his followers lived off it, was extolled as the most admired attribute of a noble.
The status of nobility derived from birth and ancestry, but had to be confirmed by “living nobly”—that is, by the sword. A person was noble if born of noble parents and grandparents and so on back to the first armed horseman. In practice the rule was porous and the status fluid and inexact. The one certain criterion was function—namely, the practice of arms. This was the function assigned to the second of the three estates established by God, each with a given task for the good of the whole. The clergy were to pray for all men, the knight to fight for them, and the commoner to work that all might eat.
As being nearest to God, the clergy came first. They were divided between two hierarchies, the cloistered and secular, meaning in the latter case those whose mission was among the laity. Presiding over both hierarchies were the prelates—abbots, bishops, and archbishops, who were the equivalent of the secular grands seigneurs. Between the prelacy and the poor half-educated priest living on a crumb and a pittance there was little in common. The Third Estate was even less homogeneous, being divided between employers and workers and covering the whole range of great urban magnates, lawyers and doctors, skilled craftsmen, day laborers, and peasants. Nevertheless, the nobility insisted on lumping all non-nobles together as a common breed. “Of the good towns, merchants and working men,” wrote a noble at the court of the last Duke of Burgundy, “no long description is necessary, for, among other things, this estate is not capable of great attributes because it is of servile degree.”
The object of the noble’s function, in theory, was not fighting for fighting’s sake, but defense of the two other estates and the maintenance of justice and order. He was supposed to protect the people from oppression, to combat tyranny, and to cultivate virtue—that is, the higher qualities of humanity of which the mud-stained ignorant peasant was considered incapable by his contemporaries in Christianity, if not by its founder.
In his capacity as protector, the noble earned exemption from direct taxation by poll or hearth-tax, although not from the aids or sales taxes. These, however, took proportionately more from the poor than from the rich. The assumption was that taxpaying was ignoble; the knight’s sword