A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [6]
What compounds the problem is that medieval society, while professing belief in renunciation of the life of the senses, did not renounce it in practice, and no part of it less so than the Church itself. Many tried, a few succeeded, but the generality of mankind is not made for renunciation. There never was a time when more attention was given to money and possessions than in the 14th century, and its concern with the flesh was the same as at any other time. Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.
The gap between medieval Christianity’s ruling principle and everyday life is the great pitfall of the Middle Ages. It is the problem that runs through Gibbon’s history, which he dealt with by a delicately malicious levity, pricking at every turn what seemed to him the hypocrisy of the Christian ideal as opposed to natural human functioning. I do not think, however great my appreciation of the master otherwise, that Gibbon’s method meets the problem. Man himself was the formulator of the impossible Christian ideal and tried to uphold it, if not live by it, for more than a millennium. Therefore it must represent a need, something more fundamental than Gibbon’s 18th century enlightenment allowed for, or his elegant ironies could dispose of. While I recognize its presence, it requires a more religious bent than mine to identify with it.
Chivalry, the dominant political idea of the ruling class, left as great a gap between ideal and practice as religion. The ideal was a vision of order maintained by the warrior class and formulated in the image of the Round Table, nature’s perfect shape. King Arthur’s knights adventured for the right against dragons, enchanters, and wicked men, establishing order in a wild world. So their living counterparts were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder. When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always reflected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the effort begins anew. Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man retains his vision of order and resumes his search.
A Note on Money
Medieval currencies derived originally from the libra (livre or pound) of pure silver from which were struck 240 silver pennies, later established as twelve pennies to the shilling or sous and 20 shillings or sous to the pound or livre. The florin, ducat, franc, livre, écu, mark, and English pound were all theoretically more or less equivalent to the original pound, although in the course of things their weight and gold content varied. The nearest to a standard was the coin containing 3.5 grams of gold minted by Florence (the florin) and Venice (the ducat) in the mid-13th century. The word “gold” attached to the name of a coin, as franc d’or, écu d’or, or mouton d’or, signified a real coin. When expressed by the name of the currency alone, or, in France, as a livre in one of its various forms—parisis, tournois, bordelaise, each differing slightly in value—the currency in question represented money of account which existed only on paper.
Given this glimpse of the complications of the problem, the non-specialist reader would be well advised not to worry about it, because the names of coins and currency mean nothing anyway except in terms of purchasing power. From time to time, in mention of the pay of men-at-arms, the wages of laborers, the price of a horse or a plow, the living expenses of a bourgeois family, the amounts of hearth taxes and sales taxes, I have tried to relate monetary figures to actual values. I have not attempted to