• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1638 0

his object. After first persuading Montfort to give up Clisson’s castles, he was sent back to get full restitution of the money and, most difficult of all, to push, wheedle, and drag the Duke to judgment in Paris. Desperately wanting to avoid Clisson, Montfort advanced a thousand excuses, but with added pressure from Burgundy, now anxious for a settlement, he was overborne. Against his alleged fear of assassination, Coucy persuaded him to go as far as Blois, where the King’s uncles would meet him. With a safe-conduct from the King, reinforced by his own escort of 1,200 men, Montfort ventured up the Loire in a flotilla of six ships and, in June 1388, ultimately arrived at the gates of the Louvre in Paris. Restitution of Clisson’s property and a formal pardon by the King were sealed by the usual formula of reconciliation in which the Duke and the Constable swore to be “good and loyal” sovereign and vassal respectively and, glaring at each other, drank from the same cup in token of “love and peace.”

From the King, in token of royal appreciation, Coucy received a French Bible, and from history, through Froissart, a more memorable tribute. “And I knew four lords who were the best entertainers of others of all that I knew: they were the Duke of Brabant, the Count of Foix, the Count of Savoy, and especially the Lord of Coucy; for he was the most gracious and persuasive lord in all Christendom … the most well-versed in all customs. That was the repute he bore among all lords and ladies in France, England, Germany, and Lombardy and in all places where he was known, for in his time he had traveled much and seen much of the world, and also he was naturally inclined to be polite.”

With these talents Coucy had brought to heel the most troublesome vassal since Charles of Navarre.

* By a fluke of survival, the domestic accounts of Coucy-le-Château for the year 1386–87 remained in existence long enough for a local antiquarian, Lucien Broche, to publish a report of them in 1905–09. The originals disappeared during the First World War, in which Picardy suffered great destruction.

Chapter 21

The Fiction Cracks

The double collapse of the French invasion of England and, on the English side, the successive fiascos of the Buckingham and Norwich raids revealed the hollowness of knightly pretensions. Adding to the indignity, Austrian knights were slaughtered in 1385 by Swiss commoners at Sempach in a battle that reversed the verdict of Roosebeke.

The Austrians, expecting to duplicate the French massacre of “miscreants” of the non-warrior class, had dismounted to fight on foot as the French had in Flanders. But the Swiss had been trained in flexibility and rapid movement, just the opposite of the impacted line that had caused the Flemings’ defeat. When the tide turned against the Austrians, their mounted reserves fled from the field without engaging, as Orléans’ battalion had fled at Poitiers. Out of 900 in the Austrian vanguard, almost 700 corpses, including Duke Leopold’s, lay on the field at the end.

What knights lacked in the fading 14th century was innovation. Holding to traditional forms, they gave little thought or professional study to tactics. When everyone of noble estate was a fighter by function, professionalism was not greater but less.

Chivalry was not aware of its decadence, or if it was, clung ever more passionately to outward forms and brilliant rites to convince itself that the fiction was still the reality. Outside observers, however, had grown increasingly critical as the fiction grew increasingly implausible. It was now fifty years since the start of the war with England, and fifty years of damaging war could not fail to diminish the prestige of a warrior class that could neither win nor make peace but only pile further injury and misery upon the people.

Deschamps openly mocked the adventure in Scotland in a long ballad with the refrain, “You are not now on the Grand Pont in Paris.”

You who are arrayed like bridegrooms,

You who talk so well when you are in France

Of the great deeds you will do,