His own domain, judging by a major step he took in the following year, suffered from the shortage of labor that was afflicting landowners everywhere since the Black Death. Picardy, in the path of English penetration from the start, had suffered not only from invaders but also from the Jacquerie and the ravaging of the Anglo-Navarrese. Rather than pay the repeated taxes that followed upon French defeats, peasants deserted to nearby imperial territory in Hainault and across the Meuse. To hold labor on the land, Coucy’s rather belated remedy was enfranchisement of the serfs, or non-free peasants and villagers, of his domain. From “hatred of servitude,” his charter acknowledged, they had been leaving, “to live outside our lands, in certain places, freeing themselves without our permission and making themselves free whenever it pleased them.” (A serf who reached territory outside his lord’s writ and stayed for a year was regarded as free.) Except for the charter issued to Coucy-le-Château in 1197, Coucy’s territory was late in the dissolution of serfdom, perhaps owing to former prosperity.
