A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [336]
In France, the failure to conclude peace and the renewal of the King’s madness—intensifying, the struggle between Burgundy and Orléans—weakened the impetus for the Way of Force. The French were not prepared to move into Italy until they had settled with England. Indeed, when the English got wind of French plans, they conveyed a warning that they would break the truce if France took up arms against the Roman Pope. Mistrusting Gloucester’s war party, the French sent heralds through the realm to order strengthening of defenses and repair of crumbling walls. In a renewed effort to train archers, an ordinance was issued prohibiting games. Tennis, which the common people were adopting in imitation of the nobles, and soules, a form of field hockey popular with the bourgeois and seldom played without broken bones, as well as dice and cards, were banned in the hope of encouraging practice in archery and the crossbow. This was the same effort Charles V had made in 1368 and it shows that the rulers were acutely conscious of the failure of French archery.
Skills were not lacking; the trouble was that French tactics did not allow archery an essential place. Combined action of archers and knights was not adopted; crossbow companies were hired and barely used. The reason was clearly a mixture of contempt for the commoner and fear for chivalry’s primacy in battle. By 1393 the added fear of insurrection caused the new ordinance to have a short life. After a period during which practice with the bow and crossbow became very popular, the nobles insisted that the ban on games be revoked, fearing that the common people would gain too effective a weapon against the noble estate. They were caught in that common irony of human endeavor when one self-interest cancels out another.
Conflicting pressures were rising around the Voie de Fait. The Florentines sent an imposing mission of sixteen envoys to Paris to plead against a French alliance with Gian Galeazzo. They found an ally in the Duke of Burgundy, who, because of his Flemish subjects, had never been a strong partisan of Clement and was certainly not prepared to help him to Rome if it meant advancing Louis to be King of Adria as well as Regent. The Duke in turn found an ally—although he despised her—in Queen Isabeau, who would have supped with the Devil to harm Gian Galeazzo.
Publicly, the strongest influence against the Voie de Fait was that of the University, stronghold of the intellectual clerical establishment. Clerics of the University had never been happy with the Babylon of Avignon. Its consequences in simony and corruption and increasing materialism, in loss of prestige, in rise of protest and movements of dissent among Lollards and mystics, in nationalism stimulated by the French attempt to dominate the papacy and sharpened by rival states taking opposite sides in the sehism, had brought the Church to low esteem. Historically, the breaking-up of the old unity of the Faith and the rise of nationalism were advanced, but not caused, by the schism. On the river of history, universality lay behind and break-up ahead, but men see what is immediately at hand and what they saw at the close of the 14th century was the schism’s damage to society and a desperate need to re-unite the Church.
The faculty of theology was now openly advocating the Way of Cession despite the edict banning discussion of the subject. Gerson, in oral defense of his thesis on “Spiritual Jurisdiction” for a degree in theology in 1392, provided the doctrinal basis for mutual abdication of the popes. “If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished,” he argued, and boldly asserted that to retain authority in such case was mortal sin. Further,