A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [184]
Berne decreed an annual distribution of alms in thanksgiving; songs and chronicles celebrated the victory over the dreaded companies which had so long harassed Christendom. Ballads told how the “Knight of Cussin set out to seize castle and town,” with “forty thousand lances in their pointed hats”; how he “thought the land was all his and brought his kinsmen of England to help him with body and goods”; how “Duke Yfo of Wales came with his golden helm”; how the Bishop of Basle treacherously promised to serve the Gügler, and how at last when Duke Yfo came to Fraubrunnen,
The Bear roared “You shall not escape me!
I will slay, stab and burn you”;
In England and France the widows all cried,
“Alas and woe!
Against Berne no one shall march evermore!”
For posterity, Coucy’s role was recorded more soberly, if inexactly, in Latin on a stone pillar erected at Fraubrunnen:
Seeking again the dowry of the beloved wife
Which the Austrian brother gave, Coucy, the English leader,
Led across the sea the standards of strong cohorts—
A knight attacking foreign fields far and wide.
In this place, on this ridge, the people of Berne
Destroyed the enemy camp and slaughtered many men
In this unjust war. Thus may Omnipotent God
Protect the Bear from the open [attacks] and secret stratagems
Of the enemy.
The voice of an aroused pride and confidence sounds in these war songs and memorials. The fights at Buttisholz, Jens, and Fraubrunnen in Christmas week of 1375, although they did not destroy the Güglers, were greater in significance than in size. They re-energized the Swiss struggle against the Hapsburgs and propelled it toward the decisive battle at Sempach in Schwyz eleven years later in which Leopold was to be killed and the Hapsburg hold over the cantons all but broken, although it took another century before independence of the Confederation was definitely won. As catalyst, Coucy’s expedition played an unhappy role in the growth of a nation, not unlike the Black Prince’s massacre at Limoges. But if the clashes he generated confirmed the fighting capacity of commoners when engaged in their own cause, the lesson did not apply beyond the Swiss and, to some extent, the Flemish. Other attempts like the Jacquerie in the recurring civil struggles of the 14th century were smashed.
After Fraubrunnen, Coucy was forced to turn back to France. Against Leopold’s refusal to fight he could not regain his inheritance, nor could he hold the companies any longer in a scorched and empty country in freezing weather and in the sunken morale left by defeats at the hands of the populace. Like Edward, like Lancaster, like every invader of his time, he had set out to live off the country with no chain of supply, and he met no different result. The gloomy repetitions of history were never more apparent than in the Gügler War. Habit has an especially tenacious grip when, as in the Middle Ages, the pace of change is slow.
The exit through Alsace in January was dogged by hunger and cold. Men dropped by the way or deserted, starving horses were left to die, harness and armor abandoned. The strong continued to pillage. Cities closed their gates against the ravagers and in one case, with the aid of the Virgin Mary, added the humiliation of another defeat. The citizens of Altkirch, resolved to do battle against a Gügler company which was preparing an assault, were waiting on the walls for the signal to begin combat when the night sky was suddenly illuminated by colored lights like an aurora borealis. Convinced that their patron, the Holy Virgin, was manifesting her aid, the emboldened