A Fool and His Money: Life in a Partitioned Town in Fourteenth-Century France
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A Fool and His Money: Life in a Partitioned Town in Fourteenth-Century France
256eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466894945 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 10/20/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 510 KB |
About the Author
Ann Wroe is the author of A Fool and His Money: Life in a Partitioned Town in Fourteenth-Century France.
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A Fool and His Money
Life in a Partitioned Town in Fourteenth-Century France
By Ann Wroe
Hill and Wang
Copyright © 1995 Ann WroeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-9494-5
CHAPTER 1
HUC DEL CAYRO
and the town at war
This story begins with the clang of a shovel, and a clatter of gold coins. The coins were found in a jug, hidden in a drain. The drain was in a square in a town which, if you could hover over it like a bird, was perched on a high hill in the loop of a river in wild limestone country in south-central France. The town was Rodez; the river was the Aveyron. The year was 1369 or 1370, though nobody can say for sure.
On that day, a man on a pack-horse was travelling towards the town. He may have had salt meat in his saddlebags, or cheeses, or iron nails. He may have been wide awake, alerted by the stumbles of his beast on the rough stones of the road; or half-asleep, lulled by the sense that his destination was close. The landscape he travelled in was vast. The far bare hills were known as segalas, ryelands, thin, bitter soil producing bitter bread. After each harvest these uplands lay fallow for two or three years to recover, turning into a wilderness of broom and thin grass. In winter they would lie under snow, criss-crossed by padding wolves and, it was said, by more sinister beasts. Shepherds in their huts had sometimes seen them, materialising silently from the white land and the white sky.
Occasionally the rider would plunge down into woods, woods so thick that he was forced to lie on the neck of his horse to keep the scraping branches from his eyes. The trees were oaks and chestnuts, food for the thin local pigs and their scrawny masters. Somewhere below lay the river, curved deep into gorge and rock and wood; somewhere, still out of sight, lay the town he was making for. From time to time he glimpsed it, only to lose it again round the hills and twists of the road. At moments it seemed close, a canter away; then it was distant, unreachable, a town in a vision that would blink and disappear.
An ancient account of the miracles of St Amans, the patron of Rodez, told of a merchant travelling in like this from the south-west, weary and longing to be home. He had seen the river winking below him at the base of the cliffs, the hills around the town, the town on its peak. His mind was already wandering to the warmth of a fire, the hugs of his family, the stories he was going to tell them. Then, quite suddenly, his cart hit a rock bigger and more vicious than the rest. His pitcher of wine, bouncing, turning in the air, plunged down and smashed on the rocks below. The merchant, in tears, knelt and prayed to St Amans; and the saint restored the pitcher whole, as if it had never broken.
A prayer to St Amans, as to St Christopher, was good insurance on journeys out of town; for the devil haunted this country. There were places locally where he had leapt over gorges; his fossilised hoof-prints marked where he had taken off and landed. In the wilds of these high plateaux, on the edge of these dizzying drops, echoes could be tossed around like the looping cry of a falling man. Local shepherds had a style of singing — indeed, they still have it, though it is rare to hear it — that could carry for miles across valleys, bearing news, or warnings, or simply musing on the bitterness of life. One such song, from the time of the war, might have been whistled by our traveller on the windy road: the song of a girl who, given a ring by a passing knight on horseback, dropped it into the Aveyron from the Mirabel bridge near Rignac, down-river, and let another knight dive down for it; and both were lost.
Al' pon da Mirabel
Catarina lababo.
On the Mirabel bridge
Catarina was washing.
Venguero a passa
Tres cabelhes d'armada.
Three mounted knights
Came riding past.
Lo premier li diguet
'Ne ses pas maridada?'
The first said,
'Aren't you married?'
Lo segon li donet
Uno polido bago.
The second gave her
A shining ring.
Mas lo bago del det
Tombet al fon de l'ayo.
But the ring from her finger
Fell in the water.
Lo trosieme sautet,
Foget lo cobussado.
The third jumped down,
Leapt over the parapet.
Mas tornet pas monta,
Ne trobet pas lo bago.
He never came up,
Never found the ring.
Al' pon da Mirabel
Catarina plorabo.
On the Mirabel bridge
Catarina wept.
The Aveyron was still a wild river, flowing strongly with plumes of foam among the rocks; and it had a place in the town's heathen past. It was here, at a spot called Laguiole, that St Amans had performed his vital miracle, the conversion of Rodez to Christianity. The name Laguiole meant the idol's whirlpool; the river there still flowed green with strands of weed, and tall trees overhung it. St Amans, it was said, walking by the bank some time in the fourth century, had found the people playing viols and drums to a small stone statue raised on a column. This was the idol called Ruth, after which they had named both their town and themselves. The saint withdrew to a little chapel, conjured up a small black cloud, and with a single bolt of lightning exploded the stone god. One piece fell into the river to make the idol's whirlpool; another fell into the meadow to make a great pit that men could still see and wonder at, though it was now full of cabbage plants and regiments of bean-sticks; splinters fell into the rocks to make holes, cracks and crevasses, permanent signs of the vigour of the saint.
As the traveller came on, the river ran loudly beside him. It was narrow, but hard to cross. There was (and still is) a little pack-horse bridge at Laguiole, with barely room for a loaded beast and niches for men to pass. This bridge had been started in the 1320s because the crossing was too perilous: 'travellers have often crossed from earth to heaven, and to the perpetual mansions'. By 1370 the stonework was in bad repair again, the sides and balustrades crumbling, the road-stones loose. The traveller picked his way above the swirling water, noticing the sections of hewn stone that lay already, tumbled askew, on the deep bed of the river.
More meadows appeared here, spread with bright drying cloths. Bare-legged men and women, trampling cloths in the water, stared at him as he passed. Behind them were fields just large enough for an ox-drawn plough to negotiate; and the traveller as he rode could watch the muffled ploughmen haranguing their beasts in the cold, wreathed in white breath, or the stooping summer workers with their sickles and broad-brimmed hats.
The town was now above him, looming almost unseen at the top of high red cliffs. Some years later, bushes were deliberately planted at the base of the town walls to stop children tumbling down into the river. Rodez had only one approach, on the western side of town, that was at all easy to negotiate. A traveller coming in on any but that western road faced a nerve-racking zig-zag route, some of it up steps, the mules and ox-carts desperately held to the path, the men sliding. People had dug allotments and little gardens on the slopes, and the plots could be made to produce cabbages and bent fruit trees; but the red soil was held in with walls, and each heavy rain brought a slithering descent among the bushes and loosened stones.
Coming closer, the traveller found himself under a ring of walls, the stone raw and new. Men were still working on them: hammering, shouting, pointing. Just above them he could pick out the tops of individual buildings among the huddled roofs, overhung with smoke as if they steamed after rain. In 1370 the cathedral was still half-finished, with a prefab bell-tower made of wood, and a wooden crane poking out of the top of it. It was either this, or the spires of smaller churches, or the high barbicans (sometimes daubed with 'nice colours' of paint, or battened with bright bits of tin) that caught his eye and the sun.
If he had looked up, on that day in 1370, he might also have seen a ladder set against the roof-beam of a house, and a man on high scaffolding directing the setting of stone. The wind — never anything to stop the wind in Rodez — ruffled his hair and billowed the shirt on his back. The man was Huc del Cayro, mason and wall-builder. The house belonged to Peyre de la Parra, a lawyer of standing; it was a lucrative commission, a clue that del Cayro was expert at his job. And indeed he was good, and knew he was. A few years later, he became a building inspector; and when bids were taken in 1380 for the building of one small upper wall ('with one or two arrow-slits if the consuls want them'), del Cayro dropped out of the bidding early as the offers fell, knowing what his work was worth and not prepared to undersell himself.
As he worked, two men came running up. One was Johan Manha, a consul, in his red-and-beige consular robes and his consular hat, which the Rodez wind would do its best to remove from his head; the other was Deodat Segui, also once a consul, therefore also to be respected. Manha, much the older, was the more out of breath; Segui was the more insistent; but both men gasped out to del Cayro that he should grab his tools and come at once.
It was not how del Cayro had expected his day to go; but he stopped work, climbed down, gathered up the tools he needed, and went with them. In another street, the traveller and his pack-horse made their last weary steps to the door of a lodging-house.
* * *
We have said that this happened in France; but that is not quite true. In the fourteenth century Rodez, ruled first by the counts of Rodez and then by the counts of Armagnac, was in one of many fiefs that were in loose association with France. The counts sometimes helped the king of France in his wars against the English, and sometimes careered off by themselves. Had you asked del Cayro and Manha what country they were in, they would not have said France; indeed, they might have found the question puzzling. France, they knew, was up north somewhere. It was not to the east, for Avignon and Montpellier, according to the town accounts, were not in it. Nor was it to the west, where the area was Gascuenha, Albiges, Quersi or Lemozi, rather than Fransa. To the north, the far hills were those of Alvernha, Auvergne; beyond this, possibly, opening out in woods and fields from those black mountains, France began.
And what was France? The king lived there, with his parlement, in a city called Paris, crowded with the spires of palaces and churches. Sound money was meant to come from France: francs, louis d'or, parisis, reals, those heavy impressive coins that money-changers laid out on their baize tables, but that men like del Cayro seldom had to jingle in their pockets. From time to time, too, emissaries would go up there, to return dazzled and exhausted.
Manha, as it happened, had been to France that very year. He was renowned for his travelling, but the longest journey of his life had been to Paris to ask King Charles V to ratify the town's privileges (and so, with luck, escape tax). He and a colleague, Berengar Natas, who will also feature later, struggled up over the mountains, pack-horses carrying their trunks, on a gruelling midwinter round-trip of sixty-eight days and eight hundred miles. They took a servant with them, and a lawyer to help with procedure. And they ran out of money; at the end of the journey they had spent 22 livres, the equivalent of their keep for twenty-two days, on tips for porters and presents for royal doorkeepers. The paperwork alone 'for writing the letters, and for sealing, and for the seals on the duplicates, and for registering the letters in the Chambre des Comptes and all that this entailed' came to 90 livres.
Manha and Natas also bought a cloak costing 17 livres, almost twice the price of their consular robes in Rodez. (What possessed them we cannot say; maybe it was only the winter cold in strange hotel rooms; but they were both cloth merchants, and knew good stuff when they saw it. Charitably, or timidly, the accounts did not say which of them ordered it, or who it was for.) At any event, when they fell into debt their instinct was to seek help from people who spoke their language. They borrowed money from Peyre Gras, a merchant of Montpellier, rather than from Parisians.
No local, in fact, could speak French. A line running roughly from La Rochelle to Lyon separated the pays d'Oc, the country of Occitan-speakers, from the lisping and pointed speech farther north. Frenchmen came to the town occasionally, and one wonders how they made themselves understood; it may well have been through interpreters. Little by little, French was beginning to creep in as the language of an élite and governing class, though still far away and seldom heard, like the cry of an exotic bird. Occitan, by contrast — the people of Rodez called it romans — was the language of life, rough, slangy, full of variants. When del Cayro came upon the job Manha and Segui wanted him to do, which involved unblocking a drain, he found it bunged up, in his words, with bueg, mortier, arsila am peyre freial (mud, mortar, clay and broken stones); he tried to shift it am sas aysaias, with his tools. The notary had no idea how to put such things in lawyer's Latin, so he did not try.
Another, more pressing consideration kept del Cayro from going to France; and that was war. For more than ten years bands of mercenary soldiers under the notional command of the Black Prince, the eldest son of Edward III of England, had been rampaging through the region. The prince was anxious to consolidate, his new-won power as ruler of Aquitaine; the warring bands were there to help both him and themselves. This was no campaign of set-piece battles or organised offensives; it was guerrilla warfare and general marauding, punctuated by sieges of any towns that showed resistance. The soldiers were undisciplined and hungry, billeted in woods and fields, their ranks increasingly swollen by local miscreants; their campaigns, ostensibly about sovereignty, often seemed to have no purpose but the spread of terror. Rodez, in its mountains, was almost the last place they came to. From the dark plains of Picardy, through the Norman orchards and the vineyards of Gascony, the English wave petered out almost at the doorstep of the town. And the town waited.
For much of the time the war was distant: somewhere 'out there' towards Villefranche in the west, or the higher mountains to the north. The great war heroes of either side — Bertrand du Guesclin, Constable of France after 1370, and Robert Knowles, commander of the English — barely rated a mention in the Rodez records, where they were called 'De Clequi' and 'Quanola'. But their movements could not be ignored. Much of Manha's time that year, as a consul, was spent obsessively watching the borders of the region, the hill-forts and the outlying towns, to try to tell where the English were heading. Spies were sent to Entraygues, twenty miles due north, 'to see if the English are going to cross the river Olt', to Villefranche (forty miles away) 'to find out what's happening', to far-off Limoges 'to see whether the city is destroyed or not'. Messengers were despatched in every direction, often on foot with a spare pair of shoes in a bag, to bring back news of the enemy.
In these months, the region lost its character of isolated towns in difficult country and became vulnerable and small. The consuls of Cahors, Villefranche and Figeac (which was captured by the English in 1371) kept sending disconcerting messages, convinced that Rodez was the next town to fall. Rodez itself seemed uncertain how to behave, whether boldly or with circumspection. There was a curfew and a watch, for which every male over the age of fourteen was enlisted at 4 blancas a night, with a fine of 10 sous for not turning up; but at least twice a year, during the fairs, the night watch would be manned by strolling fiddlers and the whole town would be lit up with a lantern in every window, flickering across the hills.
The men of Rodez were hardly ever called on to fight in this war. In 1355, when the English reached Clairvaux to the north-west, miscellaneous weapons — crossbows, slings, pikes — were handed out to certain townsmen, who handed some of them back in, having lost most of them in 'practices', a few weeks later. In those nerve-racked days cotton wicks, rather than reeds, were put in the watchmen's torches, so that they would burn more slowly and give light all night. But the enemy never turned up. By 1369 the closest the town had come to battle was to send a contingent of ten crossbowmen (in bits of borrowed armour), four carpenters and a pack-horse with their food to the siege of Castelmary, where the English were holding the castle. They were fortified with strong drink before they left; and a supplementary mule, with more food, had to be sent five days later, as if there was nothing to do at Castelmary but sit around and eat.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Fool and His Money by Ann Wroe. Copyright © 1995 Ann Wroe. Excerpted by permission of Hill and Wang.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Cast of characters,
A note on currencies,
Introduction,
The place, the sources and the story,
1. Huc del Cayro and the town at war,
2. Johan Gasc and the pride of partition,
3. Gerald Canac and the lord's demands,
4. Helias Porret and the weight of the law,
5. Peyre Marques and the will to succeed,
6. Alumbors Marques and the shame of debt,
7. Huc Rostanh and the service of God,
Drawing the moral,
Epilogue,
Notes and Sources,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Ann Wroe,
Copyright,