A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [87]
The ordinance proved ineffective chiefly for lack of dependable revenue to support an organized army. Provisioning added to the cost of wages. While local peasantry, paid or pillaged, usually furnished food and horses’ forage, a major expedition or siege or fleet at sea required organized supply of biscuit, smoked or salted meat and fish, wine, oil, and oats and hay for the horses. Ordinarily knights ate white bread made from wheat, meat in the form of beef, pork, and mutton, and drank wine daily. The common soldier received wine only on feast days or in active combat; otherwise he drank beer, ale, or cider, and ate rye bread, peas, and beans. Fish, cheese, olive oil, occasionally butter, salt, vinegar, onions, and garlic also figured in the rations. Poultry was so widely consumed and easily obtained that it was not recorded. Sugar, honey, mustard, spices, and almonds were kept for the wounded and sick and the privileged. On active duty, soldiers did not fast but were allotted fish as substitute for meat on the twelve “thin” days a month. The more continuous war became, as it did in the 14th century, the more organization and money it required.
The crown grasped for money by every means and favored the least scrupulous, which was debasing the coinage. Less directly obvious than aids and subsidies, it required no summoning of the Estates for consent. Coins called in were re-minted with a lower proportion of gold or silver and re-circulated at the old face value, with the difference being retained by the Treasury. Since the petty coins of daily use were those affected, the system reduced the real wages and purchasing power of the common people while bankers, merchants, and nobles, whose movable wealth was in large gold coins or gold and silver vessels and plate, were less affected. Under Jean II, manipulations were so frequent and erratic that they upset all values and succeeded in damaging and infuriating everyone except the manipulators themselves and those who could profit by holding back their gold. Abbot Gilles li Muisis of Tournai found the mysteries of the coinage even more obscure than the plague and was inspired to a famous verse:
Money and currency are very strange things.
They keep on going up and down and no one knows why;
If you want to win, you lose, however hard you try.
In 1351, the first year of Jean’s reign, the currency suffered eighteen alterations, and seventy in the course of the next decade.
The King’s personal idea for improving the military arm was to found an order of chivalry modeled, like King Edward’s recently founded Order of the Garter, on the Knights of the Round Table. Jean’s Order of the Star was intended to rival the Garter, revive French prestige, and weld the splintered loyalty of his nobles to the Valois monarchy.
The orders of chivalry, with all their display and ritual and vows, were essentially a way of trying to secure a loyal body of military support on which the sovereign could rely. That was in fact the symbolism of the Garter, a circlet to bind the Knight-Companions mutually, and all of them jointly to the King as head of the Order. First broached with much fanfare in 1344, the Order of the Garter was originally intended to include 300 proved knights, starting with the most worthy of the realm. When formally established five years later, it was reduced to an exclusive circle of 26 with St. George as patron and official robes of blue and gold. Significantly, the statutes provided that no member was to leave the King’s domain without his authority. The wearing of the Garter at the knee was further intended, in the words of the