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What is it? Renown that for so long

Honored your country.

If you seek to recover it in battle,

Display your hearts, not your fancy clothes.…

You are not now on the Grand Pont in Paris.

Mézières, too, writing his Songe du Vieil Pélérin in 1388, did not restrain his scorn as Honoré Bonet had not restrained his reproaches. Because the knights had won a victory “by the hand of God at Roosebeke against a crowd of fullers and weavers, they take on vainglory and think themselves the peers of their ancestors, King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godefrey of Bouillon. Of all the rules of war written by Assyrians, Jews, Romans, Greeks, and all Christians, this French chivalry does not keep one tenth, yet thinks there is no chivalry in the world of valor equal to theirs.”

The nobles’ fashionable clothes and habits of luxury, their private bedrooms where they shut themselves up till noon, their soft beds and perfumed baths and comforts on campaign were cited as evidence that knighthood had gone soft. The ancient Romans, as Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University, remarked sarcastically some years later, “did not drag after them three or four pack horses and wagons laden with robes, jewels, carpets, boots and hose and double tents. They did not carry with them iron or brass stoves to make little pies.”

More than soft beds and foppery, the moral failure of chivalry spread dismay. Instead of troubadours glorifying the ideal knight and ideal love in romantic epics, moralists now deplored in satire and allegory and didactic treatise what the knight had become—predator and aggressor rather than champion of justice. Chansons de gestes were no longer composed in the second half of the century, although, since the lusty fabliaux disappeared at the same time, the cause cannot be said to have been failure of the ideal so much as some mysterious failing of the literary spirit. The vices and follies and strange disorders of the time demanded moralizing, yet, ironically, it is Froissart’s celebration of chivalry in its own image that endures.

In Italy, the complaint had a different source: knighthood was detached from nobility. “A few years ago,” lamented Franco Sacchetti at the end of the century, “bakers, wool-carders, usurers, money-changers, and blackguards became knights. Why does an official need knighthood when he goes to preside over some provincial town?… How art thou sunken, unhappy dignity! Of all the long list of knightly duties, what single one do these knights of ours discharge? I wish to speak of these things that the reader might see that knighthood is dead.”

If Sacchetti’s tone was morose, it was widely shared. With the courts of France and England ruled by minors and prey to factions, with the new Emperor Wenceslas proving a drunkard and a brute, with the Church split between two popes, each as remote from holiness as it was possible to be, no brilliance of the ruling class could cover its tarnish. Coucy was right in his perception of diminishing prestige, even if his suggested remedy was only to make matters worse.

The Guelders campaign of September–October 1388 proved that snafu was a military condition long before the word was coined. The expedition was mobilized on a scale out of all proportion to its petty issue or possible gain. Because of his relationships in Bar and Lorraine, which lay on the way, and his knowledge of the terrrain, Coucy was designated to recruit the lords of the area and plan the campaign. The preferable route lay through Brabant, but the towns and nobles of that duchy warned that they would never allow passage of a French army because it would cause more damage to their lands “than if the enemy were in the country.”

A decision was perforce taken to march straight through the dark, forbidding forest of the Ardennes, where, Froissart remarks with awed inaccuracy, “no traveler had ever before passed.” This necessitated sending surveyors to find a way through, followed by a force of 2,500 men to cut a road, an engineering task hardly less challenging