CORONATION OF CHARLES V. AT REIMS
(From a MS. Histoire de Charles V.).
The great planting of vines in the Champagne district plainly dates from the last quarter of the fourteenth century, at which epoch large exports of wine to the provinces of Hainault and Flanders, and especially to the ports of Sluys, are noted. In a list of the revenues of the archbishopric of Reims, drawn up by Richard Pique towards 1375, are included patches of vineland and annual payments of wine from almost every village and hamlet within twenty miles of Reims; though it is only fair to mention that many of the places enumerated produce to-day wines of very ordinary character, which, although they have a local habitation, have certainly failed to secure themselves a name.[40] A general return of church property made to the Bailli of Vermandois, the king’s representative in 1384, at a time when Charles VI. was busily engaged in confiscating whatever he could lay hands on, shows that the religious establishments of Reims were equally well endowed with vineyards. These were mostly situate to the north-east and south-west of Reims, or in the immediate vicinity of the city; and according to their owners, whose object was of course to offer as few temptations as possible to the monarch, they frequently cost more to dress than they brought in.[41] In the return furnished by the archbishop in the following year, he complains that, owing to the great plantation of vines throughout the district, the right of licensing the brewing of ale and beer had failed to bring him in any revenue for the past three years. This prelate, by the way, seems to have loved his liquor like many of his predecessors, judging from the inventory made after his death, in 1389, of the contents of his cellars.[42] All this abundance of wine was not without its fruits; and we find the clerk of Troyes asserting that liars swarm in Picardy as drunkards do in Champagne, where a man not worth a rap will drink wine every day;[43] and a boast in the chanson of the Comte de Brie to the effect that the province abounded in wheat, wine, fodder, and litter.[44]
CHURCH OF ST. REMI, REIMS.
Under these circumstances it is not at all surprising that that renowned vinous soaker, King Wenceslaus (surnamed the Drunkard) of Bohemia, found ample opportunities for self-indulgence when he visited Reims to confer with Charles VI. on the subject of the schism of the popes of Avignon, then desolating the Church—certainly a very fit subject for a drunkard and a madman to put their heads together about. No sooner had the illustrious visitor alighted at the Abbey of St. Remi—to-day the Hôtel Dieu—where quarters had been assigned him, than he expressed a wish to taste the wine of the district, with the quality of which he had long been acquainted. The wine was brought, and tasted again and again in such conscientious style that when the Dukes of Bourbon and Berri came to escort him to dinner with the king they found him dead-drunk and utterly unfit to treat of affairs of State, still less those of the Church. The same kind of thing went on daily—the ‘same old drunk,’ as the nigger expressed it, lasting week after week; and the French monarch, who must have surely had a lucid interval, resolved to profit by his guest’s weakness. Accordingly he gave special orders to the cup-bearers, at a grand banquet at which matters were to be finally settled, to be particularly attentive in filling the Bohemian king’s goblet. This they did so frequently that the royal sot, overcome by wine, yielded during the discussion following the repast whatever was asked of him; whilst his host probably returned special thanks to St. Archideclin, the supposed bridegroom of the marriage of Cana, whom the piety of the Middle Ages had transformed into a saint and created the especial patron of all appertaining to the cellar. This triumph of wine over diplomacy occurred in 1397.[45]
A charter of Charles VI., dated July 1412, which gave the municipal authorities of Reims the sole right of appointing sworn wine-brokers, expressly mentions that the trade of the town was chiefly based upon the wine grown in the environs.[46] The wine, the charter states, when stored in the cellars of the town, was customarily sold by brokers, who of their own authority were in the habit of levying a commission of twopence, and even more, per piece, selling it to the person who offered them most, and taking money from both buyer and seller. To remedy this state of things, from which it was asserted the trade had begun to suffer, it was decreed that every broker should take an oath, before the Captain of Reims and the eschevins, to act honestly and without favour, and not to receive more than one penny commission. In the case of his receiving more, both he and the seller of the wine were to forfeit two-pence-halfpenny to the town.
The sales of wine mainly took place at the Etape aux Vins, where most of the wine-merchants were established, the busiest time being during the three great annual fairs, when no duties were levied. The old Etape aux Vins is now the Rue de l’Etape, jocularly styled the Rue de Rivoli of Reims, on account of the arcades formed by the projecting upper floors of its fifteenth-and sixteenth-century houses, which rest upon wooden and stone pillars. To-day the casino and the principal restaurants of the city are installed here; still the locality retains much the same aspect as it presented in the days when Remi Cauchois and Huet Hurtaut stood here and chaffered with the peasants who had brought their casks of wine on creaking wains into the city; when S. de Laval glided in search of a customer among the long-gowned fur-capped merchants of the Low Countries; when bargains were closed by a God’s-penny and wetted with a stoup of Petit Jehannin’s best; and when files of wine-laden wagons rolled forth from the northern gates of the city to gladden the thirsty souls of Hainault and Flanders.