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and magnificent chapel, larger than the Sainte Chapelle that St. Louis was to build in Paris a few years later. Vaulted and gilded and rich in carving and color, it glowed with stained-glass windows so beautiful that the greatest collector of the next century, Jean, Duc de Berry, tried to buy them for 12,000 gold écus.
    Enguerrand III was now seigneur of St. Gobain, of Assis, of Marie, of La Fère, of Folembray, of Montmirail, of Oisy, of Crèvecoeur, of La Ferté-Aucoul and La Ferté-Gauche, Viscount of Meaux, Castellan de Cambrai. Long ago in 1095 the crown had retrieved sovereignty over the fief of Coucy from the Church; it was now held directly of the King, and its seigneur paid homage only to the King’s person. During the 12th and 13th centuries the seigneur of Coucy, like the Bishop of Laon, coined his own money. Judged by the number of knights that royal vassals were obligated to provide at the King’s summons, Coucy at this time was the leading untitled barony of the realm, ranking immediately behind the great dukedoms and counties which, except for homage owed to the French King, were virtually independent lordships. According to a record of 1216, the domain of Coucy owed 30 knights, in comparison to 34 for the Duke of Anjou, 36 for the Duke of Brittany, and 47 for the Count of Flanders.
    In 1242 Enguerrand III was killed at the age of about sixty when in a violent fall from his horse the point of his sword was thrust through his body. His eldest son and successor, Raoul II, was soon afterward killed in battle in Egypt while on St. Louis’ unhappy crusade of 1248–50. He was succeeded by his brother Enguerrand IV, a kind of medieval Caligula, one of whose crimes became the catalyst of a major advance in social justice.
    On apprehending in his forest three young squires of Laon, equipped with bows and arrows but no hunting dogs for taking important game, Enguerrand IV had them executed by hanging, without trial or process of any kind. Impunity in such affairs was no longer a matter of course, for the King was Louis IX, a sovereign whose sense of rulership was equal to his piety. He had Enguerrand IV arrested, not by his peers but by
sergents
of the court, like any criminal, and imprisoned in the Louvre, although, in deference to his rank, not in chains.
    Summoned to trial in 1256,Enguerrand IV was accompanied by the greatest peers of the realm—the King of Navarre, the Duke of Burgundy, the Counts of Bar and Soissons among others, grimly sensing a test of their prerogatives. Refusing to submit to investigation of the case as touching his person, honor, rank, and noble heritage, Enguerrand demanded judgment by his peers and trial by combat. Louis IX firmly refused, saying that as regards the poor, the clergy, “and persons who deserve our pity,” it would be unjust to allow trial by combat. Customarily, non-nobles could engage a champion in such cases, but King Louis saw the method as obsolete. In a long and fiercely argued process, against the strenuous resistance of the peers, he ordered the Sire de Coucy to stand trial. Enguerrand IV was convicted, and although the King intended a death sentence, he was persuaded by the peers to forgo it. Enguerrand was sentenced to pay a fine of 12,000 livres, to be used partly to endow masses in perpetuity for the souls of the men he had hanged, and partly to be sent to Acre to aid in the defense of the Holy Land. Legal history was made and later cited as a factor in the canonization of the King.
    The Coucy riches restored Enguerrand IV to royal favor when he lent King Louis 15,000 livres in 1265 to buy what was supposed to be the True Cross. Otherwise he continued a career of outrages into the 14th century and died at the ripe age of 75 in 1311, without issue though not without a bequest. He left 20 sous (equal to one livre) a year in perpetuity to the leprosarium of Coucy-la-Ville so that its inmates “will pray for us each year in the Chapel for our sins.” Twenty