Intellectual approach

How to read this site

We take history seriously. We do not romanticise. We do not embellish. When we do not know, we say so.

The Tour Musée website depicts the ordinary life of the castellany of Coucy in the 13th and 14th centuries: craftswomen and craftsmen, peasant women and men, militiawomen and militiamen. Each article is a typological reconstruction, never a biography. This page sets out the editorial stance underlying the whole body of work.

Three principles

We source what we tell

A date, an attribution, a gesture or an object only appears in an article if a source supports it. This is the condition for serious experimental archaeology: reconstructing an old trade, tool or gesture on the basis of what the sources really allow us to say, not of what would make a good story. When the sources are silent on a point, we say that too.

We state what we really know

Each article carries a label: attested, probable or hypothetical. A piece of information drawn from a local source and cross-checked does not carry the same weight as a hypothesis built by analogy with a neighbouring region. Distinguishing these levels is a way of respecting visitors: showing them where certainty lies and where caution begins, rather than presenting everything as equally sure.

The people first

Heritage interpretation most often puts kings, knights and lords in the foreground. Here it is the other way round: craftswomen and craftsmen, peasant women and men, builders, those who kept Coucy alive day to day, take the main place. The lords only appear in the background.

A brief typology of sources

Administrative written sources: charters, cartularies, seigneurial accounts, legal records. Relations of property, law and money, where ordinary people appear when they pay, owe, inherit or appear before a court.
Normative written sources: craft statutes, customaries, town regulations. They say what ought to be, not always what is.
Iconographic sources: illuminations, sculptures, stained glass. Precious for gestures and tools, but to be handled with care: their conventions of representation belong to their own time and do not match the way we see today.
Archaeological sources: objects, traces of dwellings, bone remains, seeds.
Narrative, literary and ecclesiastical sources: chronicles, exempla, fabliaux, parish registers, pastoral visitations. To be cross-checked, never used in isolation.