Author: Will Durant
Category: Nonfiction
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Chaucer knew the faults, sins, crimes, follies, and vanities of mankind, but he loved life despite them, and could put up with anybody who did not sell buncombe too dearly. He seldom denounces; he merely describes. He satirizes the women of the lower middle classes in the Wife of Bath, but he relishes her biological exuberance. He is ungallantly severe on women; his mordant quips and slurs reveal the wounded husband revenging with his pen the nightly defeats of his tongue. Yet he speaks tenderly of love, reckons no other boon so rich,75 and fills a gallery with portraits of good women. He rejects the gentility that rested on birth, and calls only him “gentil that doth gentil deeds.” But he distrusts the fickleness of the commons, and counts any man a fool who hitches his fortunes to popularity or mingles with a mob.
He was largely free from the superstitions of his time. He exposed the impostures of alchemists, and though some of his storytellers bring in astrology, he himself rejected it. He wrote for his son a treatise on the astrolabe, showing a good grasp of current astronomic lore. He was not a very learned man, for he liked to display his learning; he swells his pages with large patches of Boethius, and makes even the Wife of Bath quote Seneca. He mentions some problems of philosophy and theology, but shrugs his shoulders at them helplessly. Perhaps he felt, like any man of the world, that a prudent philosopher will not wear his metaphysics on his sleeve.
Was he a believing Christian? Nothing could exceed the ruthlessness and coarseness of his satire on the friars in the prologue and body of the Somnour’s Tale; such darts, however, had more than once been aimed at the brothers by men of orthodox piety. Here and there he raises a doubt of some religious dogma: no more than Luther could he harmonize divine foreknowledge with man’s free will;76 he makes Troilus expound determinism, but in an epilogue he rejects it. He affirms his belief in heaven and hell, but notes at some length that those are bournes from which no attesting traveler returns.77 He is disturbed by evils apparently irreconcilable with an omnipotent benevolence, and makes Arcite question the justice of the gods with reproaches as bold as Omar Khayyam’s:
O cruel goddes, that governe
This world with binding of your word eterne,
And wryten in the table of athamaunt [adamant]
Your parlement, and your eterne graunt,
What is mankind more un-to yow holde [your estimation]
Than is the sheep that rouketh [huddles] in the folde?
For slayn is man right as another beste,
And dwelleth eke in prison and areste,
And hath sicknesse, and great adversitee, And ofte tymes giltiless, pardee!
What governaunce is in this prescience,
That giltinesse tormenteth innocence? ....
And when a beest is dead he hath no peyne,
But man, after his death, must weep and pleyne . ..
Th’answere of this I lete to divynis [divines].78
In later years he tried to recapture the piety of his youth. To the unfinished Canterbury Tales he appended a “Preces de Chaucer.” or Prayer of Chaucer, begging forgiveness from God and man for his obscenities and worldly vanities, and proposing “unto my lyves ende .... to biwayle my giltes, and to study to the salvacioun of my soule.”
In those last years his joy in life yielded to the melancholy of a man who in the decay of health and sense recalls the carefree lustiness of youth. In 1381 he was appointed by Richard II “Clerk of our Works at our Palace of Westminster” and other royal residences. Ten years later, though he was little more than fifty, his health seems to have broken down; in any case, his tasks proved too much for his strength, and he was relieved of his office. We do not find him in any later employment. His finances failed, and he was reduced to asking the King for six shillings eight pence.79 In 1394 Richard granted him a pension of twenty pounds a year for life. It was not enough; he asked the King for a yearly hogshead of wine, and received it (1398); and when, in that year, he was sued for a debt of fourteen pounds he could not pay it.80 He died on October 25, 1400, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, the first and greatest of the many poets who there again bear the beat of measured feet.*
VI. RICHARD II
“For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.”81
“Richard II,” says Holinshed, “was seemely of shape and favour, and of nature good enough, if the wickednesse and naughtie demeanour of such as were about him had not altered it.... He was prodigal, ambitious, and much given to pleasure of the bodie.”82 He loved books, and helped Chaucer and Froissart. He had shown courage, presence of mind, and judicious action in the Great Revolt; but after that enervating crisis he lapsed into enervating luxury and left the government to wasteful ministers. Against these men a powerful opposition formed, led by Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, Richard, Earl of Arundel, and Henry Bolingbroke, grandson of Edward III. This faction dominated the “Merciless Parliament” of 1388, which impeached and hanged ten of Richard’s aides. In 1390 the King, still a youth of twenty-three, took active charge, and for seven years he governed constitutionally—i.e., in harmony with the laws, traditions, and chosen representatives of the nation.
The death of Richard’s Bohemian Queen Anne (1394) deprived him oí a wholesome and moderating influence. In 1396 he married Isabelle, daughter of Charles VI, in the hope of cementing peace with France; but as she was a child of only seven years, he spent his substance on male and female favorites. The new Queen brought a French retinue to London, and these brought French manners, perhaps French theories of absolute monarchy. When the Parliament of 1397 sent Richard a bill of complaint against the extravagance of his court, he replied haughtily that such matters were outside the jurisdiction of Parliament. He demanded the name of the member who had proposed the complaint; Parliament, cowed, condemned the proponent to death; Richard pardoned him.
Soon thereafter Gloucester and Arundel suddenly left London. Suspecting a plot to depose him, the King ordered their arrest. Arundel was beheaded, Gloucester was smothered to death (1397). In 1399 John of Gaunt died, leaving a rich estate; Richard, needing funds for an expedition to Ireland, confiscated the Duke’s property, to the horror of the aristocracy. While the King was restoring peace in Ireland, Gaunt’s exiled son and disinherited heir, Henry Bolingbroke, landed in York with a small army that rapidly grew, as powerful nobles joined his cause. On returning to England, Richard found his reduced forces so outnumbered, friends falling away from him in panic, that he surrendered his person and throne to Bolingbroke, who was crowned as Henry IV (1399). So ended the Plantagenet dynasty that had begun with Henry II in 1154; so began the Lancastrian dynasty that would end with Henry VI in 1461. Richard II died in prison at Pontefract (1400), aged thirty-three, perhaps from the winter rigor of his confinement, possibly slain, as Holinshed and Shakespeare thought, by servants of the new King.
CHAPTER III
France Besieged
1300–1461
I. THE FRENCH SCENE
THE France of 1300 was by no means the majestic realm that today JL reaches from the Channel to the Mediterranean, and from the Vosges and Alps to the Atlantic. On the east it reached only to the Rhone. In the southwest a large area—Guienne and Gascony—had been added to the English crown by the marriage of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine (1152); in the north England had taken the county of Ponthieu, with Abbeville; and though the English kings held these lands as fiefs of the French monarchs, they maintained over them an effectual sovereignty. Provence, the Dauphiné, and Franche-Comté (“free county”) belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, whose heads were usually Germans. The French kings ruled indirectly, through their close kin, the princely appanages of Valois, Anjou, Bourbon, and Angoulême. They ruled directly, as royal domains, Normandy, Picardy, Champagne, Poitou, Auvergne, most of Languedoc, and the Ile-de-France the “island” of north central France centering about Paris. Artois, Blois, Nevers, Limoges, Armagnac, and Valentinois were governed by feudal lords who alternately lip-served and fought the kings of Fran
ce. Brittany, Burgundy, and Flanders were French fiefs, but they were, as Shakespeare called them, “almost kingly dukedoms,” behaving as virtually independent states. France was not yet France.
The most vital and volatile of the French fiefs at the opening of the fourteenth century was the county of Flanders. In all Europe north of the Alps only Flanders rivaled Italy in economic development. Its boundaries fluctuated confusingly in time and space; let us denote it as the region enclosing Bruges, Ghent, Y pres, and Courtrai. East of the Scheldt lay the duchy of Brabant, then including Antwerp, Mechlin (Malines), Brussels, Tournai, and Louvain. To the south of Flanders lay the independent bishoprics of Liége and Cambrai, and the county of Hainaut, around Valenciennes. Used loosely, “Flanders” included Brabant, Liège, Cambrai, and Hainaut. On the north were seven little principalities roughly composing the Holland of today. These Dutch regions would not reach their flowering till the seventeenth century, when their empire would stretch, so to speak, from Rembrandt to Batavia. But already in 1300 Flanders and Brabant throbbed with industry, commerce, and class war. A canal twelve miles long joined Bruges to the North Sea; a hundred vessels sailed it every day, bringing merchandise from a hundred ports in three continents; Aeneas Sylvius ranked Bruges among the three most beautiful cities in the world. The goldsmiths of Bruges made up an entire division of the town’s militia; the weavers of Ghent provided twenty-seven regiments of its armed forces, which totaled 189,000 men.
The medieval guild organization, which had dowered the craftsman with the dignity of freedom and the pride of skill, was now giving way, in the textile and metal industries of Flanders and Brabant, to a capitalist system* in which an employer supplied capital, materials, and machinery to shop-workers paid by the piece and no longer protected by the guild. Admission to a guild became ever costlier; thousands of workers became journeymen—day laborers—who went from town to town, from shop to shop, getting only temporary employment, with wages that forced them to live in slums and left them little property beyond the clothes they wore.1 Communistic ideas appeared among prolétaires and peasants; the poor asked why they should go hungry while the barns of barons and bishops creaked with grain; and all men who did not work with their hands were denounced as parasites. The employers in their turn complained of the risks their investments ran, the uncertainty and periodicity of supplies, the foundering of their cargoes, the fluctuations of the market, the tricks of competitors, and the repeated strikes that raised wages and prices, unsettled the currency, and narrowed some employers’ profits to the edge of solvency.2 Louis de Nevers, Count of Flanders, sided too strongly with the employers. The populace of Bruges and Ypres, supported by the neighboring peasantry, rose in revolt, deposed Louis, plundered abbeys, and slew a few millionaires. The Church laid an interdict upon the revolted regions; the rebels nevertheless forced the priests to say Mass; and one leader, stealing a march of 450 years on Diderot, vowed he would never be content till the last priest had been hanged.3 Louis appealed to his liege lord, the French king; Philip VI came, defeated the revolutionary forces at Cassel (1328), hanged the burgomaster of Bruges, restored the count, and made Flanders a dependency of France.
France in general was much less industrialized than Flanders; manufacturing for the most part remained in the handicraft stage; but Lille, Douai, Cambrai, and Amiens echoed the textile busyness of the near-by Flemish towns. Internal commerce was hampered by bad roads and feudal tolls, but favored by canals and rivers that constituted a system of natural highways throughout France. The rising business class, in alliance with the kings, had attained by 1300 to a high position in the state and to a degree of wealth that shocked the land-rich, money-poor nobility. Merchant oligarchies ruled the cities, controlled the guilds, and jealously restricted production and trade. Here, as in Flanders, a revolutionary proletariat simmered in the towns.
In 1300 an uprising of poor peasants, known to history as Pastoureaux—shepherds—surged through the cities as in 1251, gathering resentful prolétaires in its wake. Led by a rebel monk, they marched southward, mostly barefoot and unarmed, proclaiming Jerusalem as their goal. Hungry, they pillaged shops and fields; resisted, they found weapons and became an army. In Paris they broke open the jails and defeated the troops of the king. Philip IV shut himself up in the Louvre, the nobles retired to their strongholds, the merchants cowered in their homes. The horde passed on, swelled by the destitute of the capital; now it numbered 40,000 men and women, ruffians and pietists. At Verdun, Auch, and Toulouse they slaughtered all available Jews. When they gathered in Aiguesmortes, on the Mediterranean, the seneschal or sheriff of Carcassonne surrounded them with his forces, cut off their supplies, and waited till all the rebels had died of starvation or pestilence except a few, whom he hanged.4
What kind of government was it that left France at the mercy of greedy wealth and lawless poverty? In many ways it was the ablest government in Europe. The strong kings of the thirteenth century had subjected the feudal lords to the state, had organized a national judiciary and administration with a trained civil service, and had on occasion summoned an Estates-or States-General: originally a general gathering of estate owners, then a consultative assembly of delegates from the nobility, the clergy, and the burgesses or middle class. All Europe admired the French court, where powerful dukes, counts, and knights mingled with silk-robed women in elegant festivities and graceful cuckoldry, and clashing jousts in glittering tournaments sustained the glamour of chivalry. King John of Bohemia called Paris “the most chivalrous residence in the world” and avowed that he could not bear to live outside it.5 Petrarch, visiting it in 1331, described it less romantically:
Paris, though always inferior to its fame, and much indebted to the lies of its own people, is undoubtedly a great city. To be sure, I never saw a dirtier place, except Avignon. At the same time it contains the most learned men, and is like a great basket in which are collected the rarest fruits of every country. There was a time when, from the ferocity of their manners, the French were reckoned barbarians. At present the case is wholly changed. A gay disposition, love of society, ease and playfulness in conversation, now characterize them.
They seek every opportunity of distinguishing themselves, and make war against all cares with joking, laughing, singing, eating, and drinking.6
Philip IV, despite his quasi-piratical confiscations from Templars and Jews, bequeathed an almost empty treasury to his son (1314). Louis X died after a brief reign (1316), leaving no heir but a pregnant wife. After an interval his brother was crowned as Philip V. A rival faction sought the throne for Louis’ four-year-old daughter Jeanne; but an assembly of nobles and clergy issued the famous ruling (1316) that “the laws and customs inviolably observed among the Franks excluded daughters from the crown.”7 When Philip himself died sonless (1322), this ruling was repeated to bar his own daughter from the throne, and his brother was proclaimed king as Charles IV.* Very probably the decisions aimed also to exclude from the succession the sister of Philip IV, Isabelle, who had married Edward II of England and had borne Edward III (1312). The French were resolved that no English king should rule France.
When Charles IV died without male issue (1328) the direct line of Capetian kings came to an end. Edward III, who had become King of England the year before, presented to the assembled aristocracy of France his claim to the French throne as a grandson of Philip IV and the most direct living descendant from Hugh Capet. The assembly denied his claim on the ground that Edward’s mother could not transmit to him a crown from which she herself had been excluded by the rulings of 1316 and 1322. The barons preferred a nephew of Philip IV, a count of Valois; so Philip VI began that Valois dynasty which ruled France till Henry IV inaugurated the Bourbon line (1589). Edward protested, but in 1329 he came to Amiens and did homage, and pledged full loyalty, to Philip VI as his feudal lord for Gascony, Guienne, and Ponthieu. As Edward grew in years and wile, he repented his homage, and dreamed again of sitting on two thrones at once. His advisers assured him th
at the new Philip was a weakling, who planned to leave soon on a crusade to the Holy Land. It seemed a propitious time to begin the Hundred Years’ War.
II. THE ROAD TO CRÉCY: 1337–47
In 1337 Edward formally renewed his claim to the French crown. The rejection of his claim was only the proximate cause of war. After the Norman conquest of England, Normandy had for 138 years belonged to the English kings; Philip II had reconquered it for France (1204); now many English nobles of Norman descent could look upon the coming war as an attempt to regain their motherland. Part of English Guienne had been nibbled away by Philip IV and Charles IV. Guienne was fragrant with vineyards, and the wine trade of Bordeaux was too precious a boon to England to be lamely lost merely to defer by a few years the death of 10,000 Englishmen. Scotland was a burr in England’s side; and the French had repeatedly allied themselves with Scotland in its wars with England. The North Sea was full of fish; the English navy claimed sovereignty in those waters, in the Channel, in the Bay of Biscay, and it captured French ships that flouted this first proclamation of English rule over the waves. Flanders was a vital outlet for British wool; English nobles whose sheep grew the wool, English merchants who exported it, disliked the dependence of their prime market on the good will of the King of France.
In 1336 the Count of Flanders ordered all Britons there to be jailed; apparently Philip VI had recommended this as a precaution against English plots. Edward III retaliated by ordering the arrest of all Flemings in England and forbidding the export of wool to Flanders. Within a week the Flemish looms stopped for lack of material; workers darkened the streets crying for employment. At Ghent artisans and manufacturers united in renouncing allegiance to the count; they chose an alleged brewer, Jacob van Artevelde, as governor of the city, and approved his policy of seeking the friendship and wool of England (1337). Edward lifted the embargo; the count fled to Paris; all Flanders accepted Artevelde’s dictatorship and agreed to join England in war on France. On November 1, 1337, Edward III, following the custom of chivalry, sent to Philip VI a formal declaration that after three days England would begin hostilities.