A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [90]
“What is done?” he asked for the record, and they answered, “The Constable is dead.”
The audacity of the blow, as close to the King’s person as it was possible to come, brought Charles of Navarre instantly to the forefront as a political factor. The King at once declared his Norman properties confiscated, but this would have to be made good by force.
Charles’s contemporaries generally ascribed his act to hatred and revenge, but was it passion or calculation? While total absence of inhibition was characteristic of persons born to rule, bizarre bursts of violence were becoming more frequent in these years, perhaps as a legacy of the Black Death and a sense of the insecurity of life. In 1354 one of the periodic town-gown riots at Oxford exploded in such fury, with the use of Swords, daggers, and even bows and arrows, that it ended in a massacre of students and the closing of the university until the King took measures to protect its liberties. In Italy in 1358 when Francesco Ordelaffi, tyrant of Forlì, known for a fearsome subitezza or quick temper, persisted in a last-ditch defense of his city against the papal forces, his son Ludovico dared to plead with him to yield rather than continue in war against the Church. “You are either a bastard or a changeling!” roared the infuriated father and, as his son turned away, drew a dagger and “stabbed him in the back so that he died before midnight.” In a similar fit of ungovernable rage, the Count of Foix, who was married to a sister of Charles of Navarre, killed his only legitimate son.
The age had long been accustomed to physical violence. In the 10th century a “Truce of God” had been formulated to meet the craving for some relief from perpetual combat. During the truce, fighting was to be suspended on saints’ days, Sundays, and Easter, and all non-combatants—clerks, peasants, merchants, artisans, and even animals—were to be left unharmed by men of the sword, and all religious and public buildings safeguarded. That was the theory. In practice, like other precepts of the Church, the Truce was a sieve that failed to contain human behavior.
In England coroners’ rolls showed manslaughter far ahead of accident as cause of death, and more often than not the offender escaped punishment by obtaining benefit of clergy through bribes or the right connections. If life was filled with bodily harm, literature reflected it. One of La Tour Landry’s cautionary tales for his daughters tells of a lady who ran off with a monk and, upon being found in bed with him by her brothers, they “took a knife and cut away the monk’s stones and threw them in the lady’s face and made her eat them and afterwards tied both monk and lady in a sack with heavy rocks and cast them into a river and drowned them.” Another tale is of a husband who fetched his wife back from her parents’ house, where she had fled after a marital quarrel. While lodged overnight in a town on the way home, the lady was attacked by a “great number of young people wild and infect with lechery” who “ravished her villainously,” causing her to die of shame and sorrow. The husband cut her body into twelve pieces, each of which he sent with a letter to certain of her friends that they might be made ashamed of her running away from her husband and also be moved to take vengeance on her ravishers. The friends at once assembled with all their retainers and descended upon the town where the rape had occurred and slew all its inhabitants.
Violence was official as well as individual. Torture was authorized by the Church and regularly used to uncover heresy by the Inquisition. The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people’s bodies. In everyday life passersby saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed