A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [225]
Famous knights who were to be Coucy’s companions in future ventures took part in episodes of the Normandy campaign, among them the late Queen’s brother, the good-tempered if unremarkable Louis, Duc de Bourbon; also the energetic new Admiral, Jean de Vienne; and, most notably, one-eyed Olivier de Clisson, who brought a Breton company to Coucy’s aid at the siege of Evreux. Whether at this time or some other, these two disparate personalities joined in the special comradeship of brotherhood-in-arms, a formal arrangement in which the partners drew up terms of mutual aid and equal division of profits and ransoms.
Clisson came of a turbulent family embattled on both sides in Brittany. His father, discovered in dealings with Edward III, had been beheaded by Philip VI, who had him arrested in the middle of a tournament, thrown in prison, and conducted almost naked to his execution without trial. The victim’s wife was said to have carried her husband’s severed head from Paris to Brittany to display before her seven-year-old son and exact his oath of vengeance and eternal hate for France. Then in an open boat, storm-tossed and starving, they escaped to England, where Edward, who was making every effort to win the loyalty of the Bretons, showered favor and properties on the widow and son.
Olivier was brought up at the English court along with the young Jean de Montfort, his Duke, whose jealousy and dislike he reciprocated. While he displayed a noble’s haughty manners, reinforced by an inflated opinion of himself, Clisson was called at one time “the churl” for his coarse language. Pursuing his vowed revenge, he fought against the French with incredible ferocity at Reims, Auray, Cocherel, and Najera in Spain. He wielded a two-handled ax with such force that it was said “no one who received his blows ever got up again,” although he failed to avert the enemy ax that cut through his helmet and took out his eye. In the course of the war in Brittany, Montfort enraged Clisson by favoring Sir John Chandos, and when he rewarded Chandos with a town and castle, Clisson denounced the Duke in terrible wrath, assaulted and razed the castle intended for Chandos, and used the stones to reconstruct his own.
Charles V had returned to him the lands confiscated from his father and wooed him with gifts, even sending him venison “as to a friend.” Whether it was these material persuasions or, as Olivier claimed, the arrogance of the English toward the French that he could no longer suffer, he turned French in 1369 and redirected his ferocity against his former associates. It reached a peak when he learned that his squire, wounded and captured by the English, had been killed as a prisoner on being discovered to belong to Clisson. Olivier swore a great oath never “by the Mother of God throughout this year, neither in the morning nor in the evening, to give quarter to any Englishman.…” The following day, though lacking siege engines, he attacked an English stronghold with such fury and took it with such slaughter that no more than fifteen defenders were left alive. After locking them up in a tower room, Olivier ordered them released one by one, and as each came through the door he struck off his head with a single blow of a great ax and thus, with fifteen heads rolling at his feet, avenged his squire.
The cool-headed Coucy and the savage Breton must have found a complement in each other, for these two powerful barons, according to Clisson’s biographer, “remained always in the most perfect harmony.” At this time Coucy had just lost in shocking circumstances his companion from the Swiss campaign, Owen of Wales. While Coucy was in Normandy, Owen was conducting the siege of Mortagne on the coast at the mouth of the Gironde. Arising early on