A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [156]
If ties between lord and dependent were weakened by the transfer to a paid basis, the revenue from rents gave the wealthier nobles greater goods and comforts and freedom of residence. They were building great hotels in Paris and acquiring urban interests. The center of attraction was now the King’s new residence called St. Pol, a collection of houses which he had assembled and converted into a palace with seven gardens and a cherry orchard on the eastern edge of the city near the present Place de la Bastille. Twelve galleries connected its buildings and courtyards; topiary figures adorned the gardens, lions were kept in the menageries and nightingales and turtledoves in the aviary.
Charles reigned in a time of havoc, but in all such times there are unaffected places filled with beauty and games, music and dancing, love and work. While clouds of smoke by day and the glow of flames by night mark burning towns, the sky over the neighboring vicinity is clear; where the screams of tortured prisoners are heard in one place, bankers count their coins and peasants plow behind placid oxen somewhere else. Havoc in a given period does not cover all the people all the time, and though its effect is cumulative, the decline it drags behind takes time before it is recognized.
At Coucy’s level, men and women hawked and hunted and carried a favorite falcon, hooded, on the wrist wherever they went, indoors or out—to church, to the assizes, to meals. On occasion, huge pastries were served from which live birds were released to be caught by hawks unleashed in the banquet hall. At the turret of the castle where the lord’s flag flew, a watchman was stationed with a horn to blow at the approach of strangers. He blew also for the hour of rising at sunup or cockcrow, after which matins were chanted by the chaplain, followed by mass in the chapel. In the evening minstrels played with lutes and harps, reed pipes, bagpipes, trumpets, kettle drums, and cymbals. In the blossoming of secular music as an art in the 14th century, as many as 36 different instruments had come into use. If no concert or performance was scheduled after the evening meal, the company entertained each other with song and conversation, tales of the day’s hunting, “graceful questions” on the conventions of love, and verbal games. In one game the players wrote verses, more or less impolite, on little rolls of parchment, which were passed around and, when read aloud, supposedly revealed the character of the reader.
At such evenings grand seigneurs liked to preserve the old custom of lighting rooms by means of torches held by servants, instead of wall sconces, because it satisfied a sense of grandeur. They built their “follies,” of which the most elaborate were the mechanical practical jokes devised by Count Robert of Artois at the château of Hesdin. Statues in his garden squirted water on visitors when they walked past or squawked words at them like parrots; a trapdoor dropped the passerby onto a featherbed below; a room, on the opening of the door, produced rain or snow or thunder; conduits under certain pressures “wet the ladies from below.” When the château passed into the possession of Philip of Burgundy, the devices were kept in working order by a resident artist.
In Picardy, for more general enjoyment, the swan festival was held in July and August, when all three estates joined to chase the young swans raised in local ponds and canals and not yet able to fly. Led