of the seventh French cohort along with two other Normans, the lord of
Tancarville and the count of Aumale.^49 What no one had anticipated,
though, is that the French knights’charge would be hamstrung by a fatal
combination of marshy terrain and judiciously extended ditches,
allowing the Flemish pikemen to emerge from behind their defensive
wall andfinish off the riders at their leisure.^50 The slaughter was unpre-
cedented. Almost every single member of the French high command was
killed, including John and his fellow Normans.^51 Whilst Courtrai was
regarded, at the time, as a shocking aberration, it is still tempting to
interpret it as‘almost exactly on cue’: that is, as thefirst great French
chivalric defeat of the calamitous fourteenth century.^52
The BeaumontsThe earliest member of the house of Brienne to become a vassal of
Charles of Anjou was Alfonso’s younger brother, Louis, who did this
well before Charles’s future role, as king of Sicily, had even been sug-
gested. As we have seen, Louis had married Agnes, heiress to the vis-
county of Beaumont (mod. Beaumont-sur-Sarthe), not long after that
lordship and the whole of the surrounding area had passed under
Charles’s suzerainty. In this way, Louis founded a new cadet branch:
the Briennes of the house of Beaumont.
The new viscount worked very hard to be identified with his wife’s
family, rather than to be regarded as a well-connected interloper. We can
see something of this in the alliances that Louis and his dynasty forged
with their neighbours, siting him and his descendants much morefirmly
within their new heartland. The most important of these alliances was a
series of marriages into the family of the lords of Craon, the hereditary
seneschals of Anjou and Maine.^53 Although this title was‘largely honor-
ific’, there are plentiful signs of the benefits that the Beaumonts could
receive from being so close to such a dynasty, near to the heart of the
(^49) See Verbruggen’s reconstruction inThe Battle of the Golden Spurs (Courtrai, 11 July
1302): A Contribution to the History of Flanders’War of Liberation, 1297– 1305 , tr. and
ed. D. R. Ferguson and K. DeVries (Woodbridge, 2002), 223.
(^50) Adapted from Strayer,The Reign of Philip the Fair, 334.
(^51) See Verbruggen,The Battle of the Golden Spurs, 239.
(^52) For the ongoing debate surrounding the military significance of the battle, see1302: le
désastre de Courtrai. Mythe et realité de la bataille des Épernons d’or, ed. R. C. van Caenegem
(Antwerp, 2002); and Dunbabin’s comments inThe French in the Kingdom of Sicily,
53263 – 5.
For these marriages in context, see F. Lachaud,‘Les alliances de la famille de Craon:
stratégie et opportunism (milieu XIe-fin XIIIe siècle)’,inLes stratégies matrimoniales
(IXe–XIIIe siècle), ed. M. Aurell (Turnhout, 2013), 119–39.
The Beaumonts 113