Enaud, François. Coucy. 2nd ed. Paris: CNMHS, 1978.
Lefèvre-Pontalis, Eugène. Le château de Coucy. Paris: Laurens, 1913.
Lepinois, Eugène de Bouchère de. Histoire de la ville et des sires de Coucy. Paris: Dumoulin, 1859.
Mesqui, Jean. Île-de-France gothique. 2 vols. Paris: Picard, 1988, Vol. 2, pp. 134–59.
Salch, Charles-Laurent. L’atlas des villes et villages fortifiés en France. Strasbourg: Pubitotal,
1987, pp. 176–78.
Tuchman, Barbara W. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. New York: Knopf,
1978.
COUCY, CHÂTELAIN DE
(d. 1203). An outstanding early trouvère, Guy de Thourotte was governor of Coucy castle
in Picardy from 1186 until his death as a crusader. Of more than thirty compositions
ascribed to him in medieval songbooks, only fifteen or so seem authentic. All texts
survive with music, and all pieces are courtly chansons in a style derived from the
Provençal tradition. Like his friend and fellow trouvère Gace Brulé, the Châtelain sings
invariably of love, but his songs are more poignant than despairing and suggest an erotic
reality. By the end of the 13th century, the Châtelain had been mythified into a great
tragic lover, whom Jakemes, an otherwise unknown writer, made the hero of his Roman
du castelain de Coucy et de la dame de Fayel.
Samuel N.Rosenberg
[See also: GACE BRULÉ; REALISTIC ROMANCES; TROUVÈRE POETRY]
Châtelain de Coucy. Chansons attribuées au Chastelain de Couci, ed. Alain Lerond. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1963.
van der Werf, Hendrik, ed. Trouvères-Melodien I.Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1977, pp. 186–282.
COUNT/COUNTY
. The 174 administrative counties, or pagi, into which France was divided in 950 began to
disintegrate between ca. 980 and 1030, and many of the banal powers formerly reserved
to the count were progressively usurped by the lesser nobles who throughout France
began to carve out zones of command around the castles they either seized from the count
or built for themselves. The period 1025–1125 was characterized by a constant struggle
not only between the rising castellans and the counts, who sought to reestablish some sort
of authority over them, but also among neighboring counts in many regions, who
commonly struggled for control of castellanies whose territories fell partly or wholly
outside the traditional boundaries of their county.
When the social and political structures crystallized once again in the 12th century,
there were still about a hundred dominions bearing the title “county” (OFr. conté, Old
Occitan comtat) in the kingdom, but they were now, like the kingdom as a whole, federal
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