A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [330]
The sentiments were not new, but in the 14th century they were more pervasive and more disparaging of the human kind. “Time past had virtue and righteousness, but today reigns only vice,” is Deschamps’ lament. How may safe-conducts be trusted? asks Christine de Pisan, discussing the failures of chivalry, “seeing the little truth and fidelity that this day runneth through all the world.” Elsewhere she writes, “All good customs fail and virtues are held at discount. Learning which once governed is now of no account.” Her complaint had some justification, for even the University had taken to selling degrees in theology to candidates unwilling to undertake its long and difficult studies or fearful of failing the examination. License to grant the degree was extended to other universities, even to towns which had no university, giving rise to the sarcastic saying, “Why not [a degree] from a pigsty?” Denouncing the age for decadence was in fashion, but the decadence was felt as real, and the sense of a moral decline from some better day in the past was insistent. The poets wrote for the very circles they denounced and they must have touched some responsive chord. Deschamps—who never left off scolding—was made chamberlain to Louis d’Orléans in 1382.
All ranks of life shared in the blame. Deeply shaken by the Peasants’ Revolt, Gower wrote a jeremiad on the corruptions of the age called Vox Clamantis, in which he unfolds a “manifold pestilence of vices” among poor as well as rich. The unknown author of another indictment entitled it “Vices of the Different Orders of Society,” and found all equally at fault: the Church is sunk in schism and simony, clergy and monks are in darkness, kings, nobles, and knights given over to indulgence and rapine, merchants to usury and fraud; law is a creature of bribery; the commons are plunged in ignorance and oppressed by robbers and murderers.
Mankind was at one of history’s ebbs. At mid-century the Black Death had raised the question of God’s hostility to man, and events since then had offered little reassurance. To contemporaries the miseria of the time reflected sin, and, indeed, sin in the form of greed and inhumanity abounded. On the downward slope of the Middle Ages man had lost confidence in his capacity to construct a good society.
The yearning for peace and for an end to the schism was widely voiced. A notary of Cahors said at this time that in all 36 years of his life he had never known his diocese without war. Thoughtful observers, conscious of social damage, called for peace as the only hope of reform, of re-uniting the Church, and of resisting the Turks, who had reached the Danube. In his Dream of the Old Pilgrim, written in 1389 to persuade Charles VI and Richard II to make peace, Mézières draws a pathetic and dramatic picture of an old woman in torn clothes, with disheveled gray hair, leaning on a cane and carrying a little book gnawed by rats. She was called Devotion, but is now called Despair because dwellers of her kingdom are in slavery to Mohammed, Christian trade is endangered, the eastern ramparts of Christendom menaced by enemies of the Faith.
“Veniat Pax!,” the cry of Gerson’s famous sermon of fifteen years later, was already sounding in people’s minds. Few could tell what the war was fought for. In England, Gower thought it no longer a just war but one prolonged by “greedy lords” for gain. Let it be over, he cried, “so that the world may stand appeased.” French peasants may be heard, if Deschamps is a good reporter, discussing the war as they reap. “It has gone on long enough,” says Robin, “I know no one who does not fear it. Surely the whole thing is not worth a scallion.”
“Nevertheless,” replies hunchback Henry, sadly wise,
“Each will have to take up his shield,
For we’ll have no peace till they give back Calais.”
That is the refrain of each stanza and that was the sticking point. Anxious as they might be for an end to the state of war, the rulers of France were not prepared to conclude a