A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [289]
A royal grant made to Coucy at this time testified to the scars left by plague and war over the last decades. In November 1388 he was appointed Grand Bouteiller (Grand Butler) of France, the equivalent of chief seneschal or domestic steward to the crown. At the same time he was granted the privilege of holding two annual fairs of three days each, with the sale of all merchandise exempted from taxes. The language of the grant states that the town of Coucy had three times suffered “the fires of mischief, which occurred in the said town because of lack of laborers who died during the great mortality. And also owing to preceding wars, the inhabitants and community of the said town, castle and lands of Coucy were so impoverished, diminished and reduced in people, houses, manors, rents, revenues and all other goods and chattels, that the said town was in danger of becoming deserted and uninhabitable, and the vines, fields and other husbandries going to waste.”
The intent of the grant, which followed a survey of the barony at the time of the King’s visit to Coucy the year before, was clearly designed, in the royal interest as much as in Coucy’s, to restore the health of a crucial domain. The barony is described by the grant as the “key and frontier” of the kingdom with borders reaching to Flanders and the Empire, and the castle as “one of the most notable and beautiful of the realm.” By the “deserting and uninhabiting of the said town and castle, if that should happen, many great perils, damages and irreparable inconveniences could issue.” The fact that the grant followed immediately upon the transfer of power to the group dominated by the Marmosets, Clisson, and Coucy himself, was certainly no coincidence.
From this time on, Coucy served as first Lay President of the Chambre des Comptes, a post associated with the office of Bouteiller, which originally had charge of the royal revenues and accounts. While he does not seem to have collected wages for the office, he continued to receive an annual pension from the crown. His domain, greatly enlarged by his many acquisitions, and now comprising 150 towns and villages, was apparently extensive enough to surmount the declining fortunes of lesser landowners.
Picardy, his native region, so often in the path of invasion, was “beaten and chastised,” wrote Mézières, himself a Picard, “and today no longer flourishes.” From places reduced to misery, the last peasants fled to other regions so that “at present,” according to a complaint of 1388, “laborers cannot be found to work or cultivate the land.” The marks of a century of woe—lowered population, dwindling commerce, deserted villages, ruined abbeys—were everywhere in France, and cause enough for the climate of pessimism. Certain communes in Normandy were reduced to two or three hearths; in the diocese of Bayeux several towns had been abandoned since 1370, likewise several parishes of Brittany. The commerce of Châlons on the Marne was reduced from 30,000 pieces of cloth a year to 800. In the region of Paris, according to an ordinance of 1388, “many notable and ancient highways, bridges, lanes, and roads” had been left to decay—gutted by streams, overgrown by hedges, brambles, and trees, and some, having become impassable, abandoned altogether. The same examples could be multiplied for the south.
The schism had caused physical as well as spiritual damage, as when a Benedictine abbey, already twice burned by the companies, was cut off from the revenue of its estates in Flanders and spent so much money on lawyers in various disputes that the Pope was obliged to reduce its tax from 200 livres to 40 for a period of 25 years. Other abbeys, robbed by the companies or depopulated by the plague, fell into indiscipline and disorder, and in some cases into disuse, their lands reverting to waste. Decreased revenue and rising costs impoverished many landowners, causing them to exact new fees and invent new kinds of taxes to impose on their tenants. When this hastened flight from the land, the nobles tried to prevent it by confiscating