A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [293]
Book One of Froissart’s Chronicles, in which chivalry immediately recognized a celebrator, had appeared in 1370, at once creating a wide demand. The oldest extant manuscript copy of Book One, now in the Royal Library of Belgium, bears the Coucy coat-of-arms.
Multiple copying of manuscripts was no longer the monopoly of lonely monks in their cells but the occupation of professional scribes who had their own guilds. Licensed in Paris by the University, supposedly to ensure accurate texts, the scribes were the agony of living authors, who complained bitterly of the copyists’ delays and errors. The “trouble and discouragement” a writer suffers, wailed Petrarch, was indescribable. Such was the “ignorance, laziness, and arrogance of these fellows” that when a writer has given them his work, he never knows what changes he will find in it when he gets it back.
The rise of a bourgeois audience in the 14th century and the increased manufacture of paper created a reading public wider than the nobles who had known literature from recitation or reading aloud in their castle halls. The mercantile class, familiar by reason of its occupation with reading and writing, was ready to read books of all sorts: verse, history, romance, travel, bawdy tales, allegories, and religious works. Possession of books had become the mark of a cultivated man. Since the magnates and newly rich imitated the manners, ideals, and dress of the nobility, the chronicles of chivalry had a great vogue.
What books Enguerrand VII may have owned in addition to Froissart’s Chronicles are not known except for those listed in the royal archives as gifts to him from the King. In addition to the French Bible from Genesis to Psalms, which he was given for his services in subduing the Duke of Brittany, he received in 1390 the romance of King Peppin and His Wife Bertha Bigfoot and the rhymed Gestes de Charlemagne, “well-inscribed on three columns to the page in a very large volume,” which had belonged to the Queen and which “the King took from her and gave to Monsieur de Coucy.”
Froissart arrived in Paris from the south, where he had visited another patron, the Count of Foix, and had been received by the Pope in Avignon. He had also attended the wedding of the Duc de Berry to a twelve-year-old bride, the occasion of much ribald comment. Eager for first-hand reports of these affairs, Coucy invited Froissart to accompany him on a journey to his fief at Mortagne. Riding together, they exchanged news, Coucy telling the chronicler what he knew of the truce parleys, and Froissart full of tales about his effulgent host at Foix. It appeared that the Count of Foix, who had the wardship of Berry’s bride, had taken cool advantage of the Duke’s ardor; he had strung out the marriage negotiations until Berry, in his impatience, agreed to pay 30,000 francs to cover the maiden’s expenses while she had been Foix’s ward.
In the course of persistent questioning, Froissart had drawn from the Count of Foix a contemporary view of the 14th century, seen from a position of privilege. The history of his own lifetime, Gaston Phoebus said, would be more sought after than any other because “in these fifty years there have been more feats of arms and more marvels in the world than in 300 years before.” To him the ferment of the times was exciting; he had no misgivings. In the midst of events there is no perspective.
No misgivings about knighthood played a part in a frenzied celebration of that dignity on the occasion of the