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Weakness of defense was not due to any false sense of security. These were the same towns attacked by the French in previous raids. Moreover in the last six months, as the truce waned, royal decrees had been raising the blackest specters of French invasion, but in the disarray of the time few defense measures had been taken. When the invader came, the fate of the towns did not greatly excite the nobles’ protective efforts. Sir John Arundel, a knight of later infamy, successfully defended Hampton with 400 lances, but not until the citizens at his demand had put up the money in good coin to engage them.

When Lancaster’s castle of Pevensey on the Sussex coast was endangered, the Duke was reported by the ever-hostile Walsingham to have refused to send defenders, with the callous remark, “Let the French burn it. I am rich enough to rebuild it.” The remark sounds invented and as such breathes the same malice toward the nobles as animated another clerical chronicler, Jean de Venette—and for the same reason: failure of the knights to defend the land and people against their enemies. It was no accident that out of these invaded counties, Kent and Sussex, the Peasants’ Revolt was to come.

* The others were Lionel, dead in Italy, Joanna in the Black Death, and two daughters, Margaret, married to the Earl of Pembroke, and Mary, married to the Duke of Brittany.

* It is not entirely clear whether the couriers were sent to her in France or by her from England to her husband in France.

* Robersart settled in England with three sons and founded a line that terminated some 200 years later in Amy Robsart, the ill-fated wife of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

Chapter 15

The Emperor in Paris

The most spectacular if not the most significant event of the decade in France was the visit to Paris of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, in December to January 1377–78. Coucy’s notable social presence was again called on, as it had been for the wedding of the Duke of Burgundy, to lend his quality of grace and splendor to the escort of nobles for the visitor. In the jeweled glow of the occasion’s majestic pageantry, Charles V’s reign came to its zenith. The public was awed and gratified by the splendid ceremonies, and the propaganda value for Valois prestige probably equaled the incalculable expense.

Although Charles V was the third generation of Valois on the throne, he was not entirely free of uneasiness about the legitimacy of the title, the more so because of doubts about his own paternity. For private and for state reasons, his constant effort was to enhance the dignity of the crown. Politically his purpose in arranging the visit was to isolate England by tightening his ties with his uncle the Emperor, and he also had questions of territorial transfer and marital arrangements to discuss with him. Emotionally the kinship was important to him, although he knew his uncle to be calculating and slippery when it came to the test. Above all, he would have an occasion for the kind of grandiose public ceremony so important to medieval rule.

In theory the Holy Roman Emperor exercised a temporal sway matching the spiritual rule of the Pope over the universal community under God. Although vestiges of the imperial prestige remained, neither theory nor title any longer corresponded to existing reality. Imperial sovereignty in Italy was hardly more than a sham; it was dwindling on the western fringe of the empire in Hainault, Holland, and Luxemburg, and retreating in the east before the growing nationhood of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland. Its core was a haphazard federation of German principalities, duchies, cities, leagues, margraves, archbishoprics, and counties under shifting and overlapping sovereignties. Hapsburgs and Luxemburgs, Hohenstaufens, Hohenzollerns, Wittelsbachs, and Wettins despoiled each other in endless wars; the Ritter or knight lived by robbing the merchant; every town believed its prosperity depended on the ruin of its rival; within the towns, merchants and craft