Long exasperated by the anarchy of royal finance and the venality of royal ministers, the Third Estate of Paris seized upon the decapitation of the monarchy to try to impose some form of constitutional control. The summoning of an Estates General to grant money for defense in the crisis provided their opportunity. As soon as the 800 delegates could meet in Paris in October, the inexperienced Dauphin, humiliated and frightened by the defeat at Poitiers, had to report the battle’s shameful outcome and ask the Estates for aids to deliver the King and defend the realm. The bourgeois, chief creditors of the state, made up half the delegates and listened coldly while King Jean’s Chancellor, Pierre de la Forêt, supported the request. After voting themselves into a standing Committee of Eighty, including nobles and clergy, and allowing the rest gratefully to go home, the Estates prepared to confront the Dauphin with their demands. They asked to speak to him privately, believing that without his councillors he would be more easily cowed.
The major figure among them, who was to be the moving spirit of the coming eruption, was the Provost of Merchants, Etienne Marcel, a rich draper whose post was equivalent to that of Mayor of Paris. He had been the spokesman when the Estates of 1355 made manifest their mistrust of the royal government. Marcel represented the mercantile magnates of the Third Estate, the producers and businessmen of medieval society who over the last 200 years had achieved an influence, in practice if not in status, equal to that of the great prelates and nobles.
His first demand on behalf of the Estates was dismissal of the seven most notoriously venal of the royal councillors whose property was to be confiscated and who were to be barred forever from holding public office. In their place a Council of Twenty-eight, consisting of twelve nobles, twelve bourgeois, and four clerics, was to be appointed by the Estates, and on that understanding the Estates agreed to grant certain taxes in aid of the war. A final condition, which they would have done better to avoid, was the release from prison of Charles of Navarre.
They wanted him because his potential for trouble would put pressure on the Dauphin and because Navarre had an ally among them, a plotter like himself, who was the gray eminence of the reform movement. This was Robert le Coq, Bishop of Laon, a cleric of bourgeois origin and “dangerous” eloquence who through the avenue of the law had risen to favor and high office as King’s Advocate under Philip VI and to the Royal Council under Jean II. He owned a library, large for its time, of 76 books, of which 48 dealt with civil and canon law, reflecting his concern with problems of government, and seven were collections of sermons used for models of the oratorical art. Style and language were a medieval preoccupation of which Le Coq made himself a master. Appointed Bishop of Laon, he had stage-managed the exquisite reconciliations of Jean II and Charles of Navarre, whose ambitions he saw as the chariot of his own. He wanted to be Chancellor and hated both the King for not giving him the office and the existing Chancellor for having it.
The Dauphin Charles, weakling though he seemed, possessed beneath his sickly exterior a hard core of resistance and a native intelligence, which came to his aid in adversity. Pale and thin, though not yet subject to the maladies that were later to be his portion, he had small, sharp eyes, thin lips, a long, thin nose, and an ill-proportioned body. He was anything but a libertine in appearance, although the two bastard sons credited to him by contemporaries must have been fathered, judging by their age, when he was fifteen or sixteen. Having neither taste nor capacity for military pursuits, he exercised his mind instead, which was useful for rulership, if not characteristic of the Valois. In fact there was gossip about his mother (who had been sixteen when she married Jean at thirteen) which suggested that her eldest son may not have been a Valois. He certainly resembled Jean in no way whatever.
For the moment, left to defend a crown amid the wreckage, Charles on the advice of his father’s councillors rejected the Estates’ demands and ordered them to dismiss. At the same time he removed himself from Paris as a precaution. Refusing to disperse, the standing committee assembled the day after he left, in November 1356, and listened to an inflammatory address by Robert le Coq denouncing royal misrule and specifying enlarged demands for reform. “Shame to him who speaks not forth,” he cried, “for never was the time so good as now!”
The bid to limit the monarchy was now in the open. It might have been the French Runnymede if the challengers had been as cohesive as the English barons of 1215, but they were soon to split into factions.
The upper level of the Third Estate, made up of merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, office-holders, and purveyors to the crown, had nothing left in common with its working-class base except the fact of being non-noble. To overcome that barrier was every bourgeois magnate’s aim. While climbing toward ennoblement and a country estate, he emulated the clothes, customs, and values of the nobles and on arriving shared their tax exemption—no small benefit. Etienne Marcel had an uncle who had paid the highest tax in Paris in 1313 and whose son bought a patent of nobility for 500 livres. Marcel’s father- and brother-in-law, Pierre and Martin des Essars, starting from bourgeois origins in Rouen, had become enriched and ennobled in the service of Philip the Fair and Philip VI. As the crown’s agents, they and their kind provisioned the royal households, commissioned their tapestries and books, purchased their jewels, fabrics, and works of art, served as their confidants and moneylenders, and held lucrative office as treasurers and tax-collectors. Pierre was able to give his daughter Marguerite, when she married Marcel, a princely dowry of 3,000 écus.
Nobles and clergy resented the royal favor shown and the opulence allowed to officials chosen from outside their ranks. Especially they hated the finance officers, “who travel in pomp and make fortunes greater than the dukes and marry their daughters to nobles and buy up the lands of poor knights whom they have cheated and impoverished … and appoint their own kind to offices whose numbers grow from day to day and whose salaries keep pace.”
Between the official class and the mercantile bourgeois like Marcel, no love was lost, though they shared the enterprises of capitalism. When capitalism became feasible through the techniques of banking and credit, it became respectable. The theory of a non-acquisitive society faded, and accumulation of surplus wealth lost its odium—indeed, became enviable. In Renart le Contrefait, a satire of the time, the wealthy bourgeois enjoy the best estate of all: “They live in a noble manner, wear lordly garments, have falcons and sparrow hawks, fine palfreys and fine chargers. When the vassals must go to join the host, the bourgeois rest in their beds; when the vassals go to be massacred in battle, the bourgeois picnic by the river.”
Chosen by the leading citizens, the Provost of Merchants and his fellow magistrates administered all the usual municipal functions and assigned daily duty to the police force, which was manned by the obligatory service of citizens in units of ten, forty, and fifty. Assisted by four deputies and a council of 24 clerics and laymen, the Provost was supposed to be on duty from seven A.M. every day except holy days. His seat was the Châtelet, which was also the city prison and was located on the right bank at the entrance to the Grand Pont, the only bridge leading over to the Ile de la Cité. Nearby the Châtelet was the City Hall on a large open square called the Place de Grève, where the unemployed came to be hired.
The city Marcel governed covered an area, by present landmarks, from approximately the Grands Boulevards on the right bank to the Luxembourg Gardens on the left, and east to west from the Bastille to the Tuileries. Everything beyond these boundaries was faubourg or countryside. The center of Paris was the Ile de la Cité in the middle of the Seine, on which stood the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Hôtel Dieu or public hospital, and the royal palace built by St. Louis. The right bank, which had expanded beyond the old walls, was the side of commerce, industry, public markets, luxury trades, and wealthy residences, while the left bank, much smaller in populated area, was dominated by the University. According to a tax survey of the year 1292, the city at that time had 352 streets, eleven crossroads, ten squares, fifteen churches, and 15,000 taxpayers. Fifty years later, in Marcel’s day, its total population after the Black Death was probably around 75,000.
Main streets were paved and wide enough to accommodate two carts or carriages, while the rest of the streets were narrow, muddy, and malodorous with a gutter running down the middle. For the average citizen the rule for elimination was “all in the street,” and in lower-class quarters a pile of ordure usually lay at every doorway. Householders were supposed to carry the deposits to disposal pits and were reminded by repeated ordinances to pave and sweep their doorsteps.
Traffic jams blocked the narrow streets when pack mules with baskets hanging on either side met street vendors with their trays or porters bent under loads of wood and charcoal. Tavern signs on long iron poles further crowded the streets. Shop signs were gargantuan, the better to overwhelm customers, since shopkeepers were forbidden to call to buyers until after they had left the neighboring shop. A tooth-puller was represented by a tooth the size of an armchair, a glover by a glove with each finger big enough to hold a baby.
The noise of signs rattling in the wind competed with the cries of street vendors, the shouts of muleteers, the clatter of horses, and the announcements of public criers. Paris had six Master Criers appointed by the Provost, each with a number of assistants who were sent out to the crossroads and squares of the various quarters to announce official decrees, taxes, fairs and ceremonies, houses for sale, missing children, marriages, funerals, births, and baptisms. When the King’s vintage was ready for sale, all the taverns had to close while public criers twice a day cried the royal wine. When deaths were announced, the criers rang bells as they moved along, calling in solemn tones, “Wake, you sleepers, pray God to forgive your trespasses; the dead cannot cry; pray for their souls as the bell sounds in these streets.” Stray dogs howled to hear them.
Each trade occupied its own quarter—butchers and tanners around the Châtelet, money-changers, goldsmiths, and drapers on the Grand Pont, scribes, illuminators, and parchment- and ink-sellers on the left bank around the University. In the open shops worked bakers, soap-makers, fishmongers, hatters, cabinet-makers, potters, embroiderers, launderers, furriers, blacksmiths, barbers, apothecaries, and the myriad sub-specialties of the clothing and metal trades. Below the artisan class were day laborers, porters, and domestics. Named for their job or place of origin or some personal trait, they might be called Robert le Gros (the Fat), Raoul le Picard (of Picardy), Isabeau d’Outre-mer (from overseas), and Gautier Hors-du-sens (Crazy Walter).
In each quarter were public baths, providing either steam or hot water. A total of 26 were listed in the survey of 1292. Though considered dangerous to morality, especially of women, they were recognized as a contribution to cleanliness which the city took pains to keep from closing during a bad winter when fuel was costly. They were forbidden to admit prostitutes, vagabonds, lepers, or men of bad repute, or to open before dawn because of perils in the streets at night, but at daybreak the crier’s voice was heard,
Calling to you to bathe, Messire,
And steam yourself without delay.
Our water’s hot and that’s no lie.
As a capital city with a great university, Paris was host to a turbulent horde of students from all over Europe. They had privileged status not subject to local justice but only to the King, with the result that their crimes and disorders went largely unpunished. They lived miserably, overcharged for dirty rooms in dark neighborhoods. They sat on stools in cold lecture halls lit only by two candles and were perennially complained of for debauchery, rape, robbery, and “all other enormities hateful to God.”
Though Oxford was growing as a center of intellectual interest, the University of Paris was still the theological arbiter of Europe, and the libraries of its separate faculties, some numbering up to a thousand volumes, augmented its glory. Added to these were the fine library of Notre Dame and no less than 28 booksellers, not counting open-air bookstalls. Here were “abundant orchards of all manner of books,” wrote an enraptured English visitor; “what a mighty stream of pleasure made glad our hearts when we visited Paris, the paradise of the world!”
Water was supplied to the city at public fountains fed by aqueducts leading from the hills northeast of Paris. Windmills filled the faubourgs, where houses had room for gardens and vineyards, and abbeys stood amid cultivated fields. Produce entered the city mainly by riverboat to be laid out on market tables or sold from the trays of vendors. Beggars sat by church doors asking for alms, mendicant friars begged bread for their orders or for the poor in prison, jongleurs performed stunts and magic in the plazas and recited satiric tales and narrative ballads of adventure in Saracen lands. Streets were bright with colored clothes. Crimson, green, and particolored, being the most expensive, were reserved for nobles, prelates, and magnates. The clergy could wear color as long as their gowns were long and buttoned. At sundown the curfew bell rang for closing time, work ceased, shops were shuttered, silence succeeded bustle. At eight o’clock, when the Angelus bell signaled bedtime, the city was in darkness. Only the crossroads were lit by flickering candle or lamp placed in a niche holding a statue of Notre Dame or the patron saint of the quarter.
On Sundays all business was closed, everyone went to church, and afterward working people gathered in the taverns while the bourgeois promenaded in the faubourgs. On holidays it was a Paris custom to dine at a table set outside the front door. Houses were the characteristic high narrow urban type built side by side, sometimes with a courtyard between the front half and the back. They were half-timbered, with the spaces filled by clay or stone and each story cantilevered over the one below. The hôtels of nobles and magnates kept some elements of the fortified castle with conical towers and high walls. As a concession to urban life they had large glass-paned windows opening onto courtyards, and belvederes with many ornamental pinnacles on the roofs from which a watch could be maintained on all sides. The owner was made known by his coat-of-arms sculpted over the doorway. Streets had no inscribed names, so that people had to search for hours to find the place they wanted.
Indoors the noble residences were decorated with murals and tapestries, but furniture was meager. Beds, which served for sitting as well as sleeping, were the most important item. Chairs were few; even kings and popes received ambassadors sitting on beds furnished with elaborate curtains and spreads; otherwise, people sat on benches. Torches in wall sconces lit the rooms, and massive fireplaces were built into the walls. These wall chimneys “in the French fashion,” as they were called in Italy, were the greatest luxury of middle-class homes. The only other warmth came from the oven and cooking fire and warming pans in bed at night. Like sanitation, heating was an arrangement that the age seems technologically equipped to have handled better than it did, were it not that man is as irrational about his comfort as about other activities. Fur coverlets, fur-lined clothes, or separate fur linings worn under tunics and robes substituted for active sources of heat. The furs of otter, cat, miniver, squirrel, and fox were less expensive than heavy wool cloth; ermine and marten adorned the rich.
Floors were strewn in summer with fragrant herbs and grasses and at other times by rushes or straw changed four times a year, or once a year in poorer homes, by which time it was filled with fleas and rank with dog droppings and refuse. A well-off merchant scattered violets and other flowers on his floor before a dinner party and decorated his walls and table with fresh greens bought in the market at early morning.
Rooms were few, servants slept where they could, privacy was nonexistent, which may have increased irritability. Whether it hampered or facilitated seduction is an open question. The two Cambridge students in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale were conveniently enabled to enjoy the favors of the Miller’s wife and daughter because they were put to bed in the same room with the family. Even in greater homes guests slept in the same room with host and hostess.
Such was the Third Estate of Paris, from the poorest workman to the richest magnate, whom Marcel tried to mobilize in his struggle against the Dauphin. To make him submit, the Provost began to use the threat of strikes and popular violence. When the Dauphin tried to raise money by another devaluation of the coinage, arousing the wrath of Paris, “the Provost ordered all guilds and trades throughout the city to stop work and everyone to arm.” Forced to cancel the edicts and left without funds, the Dauphin had no recourse but to recall the Estates and return to Paris to meet with them.
At this session, lasting a month from February to March 1357, all the proposed reforms, formulated in writing, were presented in a Grand Ordinance of 61 articles, the Magna Carta of the Third Estate. Written in French rather than Latin as if to emphasize a new voice, the ordinance set forth an ideal of “Good Government” as if its framers were trying to implement Lorenzetti’s delectable vision under that name painted a few years earlier in Siena. In the painted city, citizens in gowns of gentle colors go harmoniously about their business, and mounted men-at-arms pass them by in mutual tolerance and benignity. In a distraught time, the Grand Ordinance was grasping for the same order and decency.
The framers had devised not a grand new scheme of government but rather a set of corrections of existing abuses into which were tossed three political fundamentals. These provided that the monarchy could levy no tax not voted by the Estates, that the Estates General had the right to assemble periodically at their own volition, and that a Grand Council of Thirty-six, twelve from each estate, was to be elected by the Estates to advise the crown.
The purge of King Jean’s councillors was reaffirmed and the members of the new Grand Council “were abjured to forgo the habit of their predecessors of coming late to work and working very little.” All officials were to be at work “every day at sunrise”; they were to be well paid, but lose their pay if they failed to appear early in the morning. The currency was not to be altered without the consent of the Estates, royal and princely expenditures were to be reduced, judicial cases in Parlement were to be speeded up, provincial bailiffs were not to hold two offices or engage in commerce, the summons to military service was to be issued only under specific conditions, nobles were not to leave the country without permission, and their private wars were sternly forbidden. Justice and charity for the poor were to be expedited, their property was not to be confiscated without just price, and their vehicles for never more than one day; the right of villagers to assemble and take arms against robbery and force was affirmed. Finally, the Estates undertook to raise taxes sufficient to pay 30,000 soldiers for one year, but the money was to be administered by the Estates, not through the crown.
Resisting and procrastinating, the Dauphin refused to sign the ordinance until he was browbeaten into it by Marcel’s technique of bringing mobs released from work into the streets, increasing in numbers each day, and encouraged to shout, “To arms!” By this treatment the Dauphin’s signature was obtained under the title of Regent, which the Estates required him to assume so that he could commit the monarchy. The new Council of Thirty-six was installed, while the ousted councillors hastened to Bordeaux to inform King Jean. Just before he was carried off to London, the King repudiated his son’s signature and the entire ordinance.
During the summer of 1357 neither the Dauphin nor the Council was able to govern effectively while both sought support from the provinces. By making a royal progress through the country to show kingship still functioning, Charles had more success than Marcel. When the Estates reconvened in April with very few nobles present, it was clear that the nobility, resenting the terms of the Grand Ordinance, was withdrawing support. The reform movement was in trouble. Outside Paris the breakdown of authority was reaching catastrophe.
Its catalyst was the brigandage of military companies spawned by the warfare of the last fifteen years. These were the Free Companies who “write sorrow on the bosom of the earth” and were to become the torment of the age. Composed of English, Welsh, and Gascons released after Poitiers by the Black Prince, as soldiers customarily were to avoid further payment, they had acquired in the Prince’s campaigns a taste for the ease and riches of plunder. Along with German mercenaries and Hainault adventurers, they gathered in groups of twenty to fifty around a captain and moved northward to operate in the area between the Seine and the Loire and between Paris and the coast. After the truce of Bordeaux they were joined by the forces of Philip of Navarre, by leftovers from the Duke of Lancaster’s forces, and by experienced Breton captains and men-at-arms, masters of the art of exploiting a region. The refrain of the chronicles, arser et piller (burning and plundering), follows their kind down the century.
The loss of the King and of so many nobles eased their opportunity. In the year after the truce they swelled, merged, organized, spread, and operated with ever more license. Seizing a castle, they would use it as a stronghold from which to exact tribute from every traveler and raid the countryside. They would spy out a good town at one or two days’ journey “and go by covert ways day and night and so enter the town unknown in the morning and set fire on some house; then they of the town would think it was done by some men of war and so fly away out of the town; and then these brigands would break up coffers and houses and rob and take what they list and fly away when they had done.”
They imposed ransoms on prosperous villages and burned the poor ones, robbed abbeys and monasteries of their stores and valuables, pillaged peasants’ barns, killed and tortured those who hid their goods or resisted ransom, not sparing the clergy or the aged, violated virgins, nuns, and mothers, abducted women as enforced camp-followers and men as servants. As the addiction took hold, they wantonly burned harvests and farm equipment and cut down trees and vines, destroying what they lived by, in actions which seem inexplicable except as a fever of the time or an exaggeration of the chroniclers.
Companies of this kind had existed since the 12th century and proliferated especially in Italy, where the nobility, more urban than elsewhere, left the profession of arms increasingly to mercenaries. Led by professional captains, the companies, sometimes numbering 2,000 to 3,000, were composed of exiles, outlaws, landless or bankrupt adventurers, Germans, Burgundians, Italians, Hungarians, Catalans, Provençals, Flemish, French, and Swiss, often splendidly equipped on horse and foot. In mid-century the outstanding captain was a renegade prior of the Knights of St. John called Fra Monreale, who maintained a council, secretaries, accountants, camp judges, and a gallows, and could command a price of 150,000 gold florins from Venice to fight Milan. In the single year of 1353 he extorted 50,000 florins from Rimini, 25,000 from Florence, and 16,000 each from Pisa and Siena. Invited to Rome by the revolutionary Cola di Rienzi, who wanted his wealth, Monreale overconfidently entered alone, was seized, tried as a public robber, and executed. He went to the block magnificently dressed in brown velvet embroidered in gold and had his own surgeon direct the ax of the executioner. Unrepentant at the end, he declared himself justified “in carving his way with a sword through a false and miserable world.”
The most damaging aspect of the companies was that in the absence of organized armies they filled a need and became accepted. Philip VI, on learning how effectively a captain known only as Bacon had surprised and seized a castle, bought his services for 20,000 crowns and made him usher-at-arms, “ever well horsed, appareled and armed like an earl.” Another, named Croquart, starting as a “poor page” in the Breton wars, rose by prowess to become a captain of brigands worth 40,000 crowns whose military repute caused him to be chosen as one of the English side in the Combat of Thirty. Afterward King Jean offered him a knighthood, a rich wife, and annual pay of 2,000 livres if he would enter the King’s service. Preferring his independence, Croquart refused.
More brigand than mercenary, the companies in France, though basically English, attracted French knights ruined by the ransoms of Brittany and Poitiers who now shared in the ravaging of their own country. Lesser nobles reduced in revenue, younger sons and bastard sons, made themselves captains and found in the companies a living, a path to fortune, a way of life, a vent for the restless aggression once absorbed by the crusades.
The most notorious of the French was Arnaut de Cervole, a noble of Périgord called the “Archpriest” because of a clerical benefice he had once held. Wounded and captured at Poitiers, he had been released on paying his ransom, and on return to France in the anarchic months of 1357 made himself commander of a band which called itself frankly enough Società dell’ acquisito. In collaboration with a lord of Provence named Raimond des Baux, the band grew to an army of 2,000 and the “Archpriest” into one of the great evildoers of his time. In the course of a raid Cervole launched through Provence in 1357, Pope Innocent VI felt so insecure in Avignon that he negotiated for immunity in advance. Cervole was invited to the papal palace, “received as reverently as if he had been the son of the King of France,” and after dining several times with the Pope and cardinals, was given a pardon for all his sins—a regular item in the companies’ demands—and the sum of 40,000 écus to leave the area;
His equal among the English was Sir Robert Knollys, “the man of few words,” whom Froissart judged “the most able and skillful man-at-arms in all the companies.” He too had risen from the ranks in the Breton wars and fought with the Thirty, gaining knighthood along the way. After service with Lancaster he remained to plunder Normandy with such skill and ruthlessness that he amassed in the year 1357–58 booty worth 100,000 crowns. During the next two years he established himself in the valley of the Loire, where he gained control of forty castles and burned and sacked from Orléans to Vézelay. In a raid through Berry and Auvergne his company left a trail of ravaged towns whose charred gables were known as “Knollys’ miters.” Such was the terror of his name that at one place, it was said, people threw themselves into the river at word of his approach.
Upon his informing King Edward that all the strongholds he had captured were at the King’s disposal, Edward—who was pleased to share, like other rulers, in the benefits of banditry—handsomely pardoned Knollys for activities that violated the truce. Knollys was ultimately to earn high command and military renown on a level with Chandos and the Black Prince. In truce and war he passed back and forth from brigandage to service under the crown without missing a beat or changing his style. At the end of his career he retired with “regal wealth” and great estates to become a benefactor of churches and founder of almshouses and chantries. The French wrote him down as Sir Robert Canole, who “grievously harmed France all the days of his life.”
In the anarchy after Poitiers, knights and brigands became interchangeable, bringing added popular hatred upon the estate of the sword, though not necessarily disrepute among their own kind. The “young, bold and amorous” Eustache d’Aubrecicourt, a knight of Hainault and companion of the Prince at Poitiers, turned brigand with such élan and material success that he won the love of the widowed Countess of Kent, a niece of the Queen of England and Hainault-born like himself. She sent him horses, gifts, and passionate letters which excited him to ever bolder if not more chivalrous exploits. He fastened a savage grip upon Champagne and part of Picardy until he was captured when French knights at last organized in defense. Greedy as he, they let him be ransomed for 22,000 gold francs, so that he promptly renewed his warfare. In command of 2,000 freebooters, he organized a traffic in seized castles, which were sold back to their owners at lucrative prices. In some way understandable to the 14th century, his use of the sword for robbery and murder carried no quality of dishonor to Isabelle of Kent, who was to marry her now wealthy hero in 1360.
In response to French complaints that the English companies were violating the truce, King Edward ordered them to disband, but his orders were neither meant nor taken seriously. While peace terms were still being negotiated, he was quite willing to let the companies keep up pressure on France. No less averse to fomenting trouble was Charles of Navarre. Though still in prison, he had agents, including his brother Philip, active in his behalf. Where the Navarrese joined forces with the English, the ravages were worst—deliberately so, some thought, as a means of applying pressure for Charles’s release.
For defense against the companies, villages made forts of their stone churches, surrounding them with trenches, manning the bell towers with sentinels, and piling up stones to throw down upon the attackers. “The sound of church bells no longer summoned people to praise the Lord but to take shelter from the enemy.” Peasant families who could not reach the church spent nights with their livestock on islands in the Loire or in boats anchored in mid-river. In Picardy they took refuge in underground tunnels enlarged from caves dug at the time of the Norman invasions. With a well in the center and air holes above, the tunnels could shelter twenty or thirty people with space around the walls for cattle.
At daylight the lookouts peered from the bell towers to see if the bandits had gone and they could return to the fields. Country families hastened with their goods to take refuge in cities, monks and nuns abandoned their monasteries, highways and roads were unsafe, robbers rose up everywhere, and enemies multiplied throughout the land. “What more can I say?” writes Jean de Venette in his catalogue of miseries. “Thence-forward infinite harm, misfortune and danger befell the French people for lack of good government and adequate defense.”
A sympathizer of the Third Estate, Jean de Venette was a Carmelite prior and head of the Order in the 1360s at the time he was writing his chronicle. He blamed the Regent, who “applied no remedy,” and the nobles, who “despised and hated all others and took no thought for the mutual usefulness of lord and men. They subjected and despoiled the peasants and villagers. In no wise did they defend their country from its enemies. Rather did they trample it underfoot, robbing and pillaging the peasants’ goods” while the Regent “gave no thought to their plight.”
The nobles were to blame also, as Jean de Venette saw it, for discord among the Estates General which caused the Estates to abandon the task they had begun. “From that time on all went ill with the kingdom, and the state was undone.… The country and whole land of France began to put on confusion and mourning like a garment because it had no defender or guardian.”
Grief and wrath pervade too a Latin polemic called “Tragic Account of the Miserable State of the Realm of France” by an obscure Benedictine monk. Ashamed for once-proud France which let her King be captured “in the heart of the kingdom” and led without interference to captivity on foreign soil, he raised the crucial question of military discipline. “Where did you study [the art of war]? Who were your teachers? In what was your apprenticeship?” he asks the knights. “Was it while fighting under the banners of Venus, sucking sweetness like milk, abandoned to delights …” and so on in this vein until he suddenly concludes with the practical question, “Can the military art be learned in the games and hunts in which you pass your youth?”
The friar has censure left over for the common people, “whose belly is their God and who are the slaves of their women,” and for the clergy, who receive the worst scolding of all. They are sunk in luxury, gluttony, pomp, ambition, anger, discord, envy, greed, litigation, usury, and sacks of silver and gold. Virtues die, vices triumph, honesty perishes, pity is stifled, avarice pervades, confusion overwhelms, order vanishes.
Was this merely the traditional monastic tirade upon the world, or a deeper pessimism that begins to darken the second half of the century?
King Jean’s release was still unsettled. While treating the royal captive with elaborate honor, Edward was determined to squeeze from his triumph every last inch of territory and ounce of money that France could be made to yield. The great King of France, snatched from the field of Poitiers, was an extraordinary prize. Jean’s entry into London as the Black Prince’s prisoner in May 1357 occasioned one of the greatest celebrations ever seen in England and “great solemnities in all churches marvelous to think of.” Such was the curiosity to see the French King that the procession took several hours to cross the town to the palace of Westminster. As the center of attention among the thirteen other noble prisoners, Jean was dressed in black “like an archdeacon or a secular clerk,” and rode a tall white horse alongside the Prince on a smaller black palfrey. Past houses hung with captured shields and tapestries, over cobblestones strewn with rose petals, the procession moved through fantasies of pageantry that were the favorite art of the 14th century. In twelve gilded cages along the route, the goldsmiths of London had stationed twelve beautiful maidens, who scattered flowers of gold and silver filigree over the riders.
The éclat of the noble prisoners added chivalric distinction to the English court. Christmas and New Year’s of the first winter were celebrated with extra pomp, including a splendid tournament held at night under torchlight. Housed in the Savoy, the new palace of the Duke of Lancaster, Jean was at liberty to receive visitors from France and enjoy all the pleasures of court life, although assigned a guard to prevent his escape or attempted rescue. Languedoc sent a delegation of nobles and bourgeois with a gift of 10,000 florins and the assurance that their lives, goods, and fortunes were dedicated to his delivery. Even Laon and Amiens sent money. The mystique of kingship possessed his subjects more than its responsibilities concerned the King.
In France’s miserable hour, his accounts show expenses for horses, dogs, and falcons, a chess set, an organ, a harp, a clock, a fawn-colored palfrey, venison and whale meat from Bruges, and elaborate wardrobes for his son Philip and for his favorite jester, who received several ermine-trimmed hats ornamented with gold and pearls. Jean maintained an astrologer and a “king of minstrels” with orchestra, held a cockfight, commissioned books with fine bindings, and sold horses and wine he had received as gifts from Languedoc. The success of this venture led him to import more of both from Toulouse for sale as a profitable business. Reading through Jean’s accounts in the archives 500 years later, Jules Michelet, France’s most vivid if not most objective historian, said they made him sick.
Negotiations of terms for the ransom of the King and the conditions of a permanent peace treaty were obstructed by Edward’s exorbitant demands. He wanted outright cession of Guienne, Calais, and all the former Plantagenet holdings in France, plus an enormous ransom of three million écus for Jean, in return for which he would give up his claim to the French crown. Under pressure of the papal delegates, the parleys dragged on while the French commissioners twisted and turned in agony. The one solution they never considered was to leave the King unransomed and go home. For one thing, this would have meant no peace treaty, and battered France had to have peace. More fundamentally, the King was a principle of order. Since the reign of St. Louis, who had used the royal authority to eliminate private wars, impose justice, and systematize taxes, the crown had come to be equated in the public mind with greater protection and law. All the back-sliding of his successors could not soil the kingship, and Jean, its careless representative, was yearned for as if he had been St. Louis.
The French provinces, believing royal power to be their last resource for defense against the companies, did not want to see the monarchy enfeebled. In August 1357 the Dauphin was emboldened to reinstate the dismissed councillors and defiantly to inform Marcel and the Council of Thirty-six that he intended to govern alone without their interference. Made an extremist by his frustrations, Marcel accepted an ally utterly incompatible with his purpose.
Into the turmoil of November 1357 stepped Charles of Navarre out of his prison near Cambrai in Picardy. Although a plot of his partisans was credited with effecting his escape or release, behind it the hand of Marcel and the mind of Robert le Coq were at work. Charles of Navarre was to be used as an alternative King against the Valois. He entered the capital “grandly accompanied” by nobles of Picardy and Normandy, among them “Monseigneur de Coussi.” At seventeen, Enguerrand had been receiving the homage of vassals as their acknowledged lord. Probably sharing the anti-Valois sentiments of many nobles of the north, he would have been swept into the following of Charles of Navarre, although, with the remarkable political sense he was to display throughout his life, he did not stay there long.
With wonderful eloquence “seasoned by much venom,” Charles of Navarre harangued a great assembly of Parisians, mentioning without actually pressing his claim to the crown, which he said was at least better than King Edward’s. His challenge forced the Dauphin to reenter Paris and recall the Estates, and within a month, when he had assembled “2,000” men-at-arms in the fortress of the Louvre, he too took to the people. Sending couriers through the city to assemble them, he spoke on horseback before a crowd gathered at the Halles on January 11, 1358, turning sentiment at once in his favor. Marcel’s deputy, who tried to make himself heard in opposition, was drowned out in the shouting and turbulence. Intensely susceptible to the spoken word, people of the time responded to any Mark Antony and would listen for hours to the outdoor sermons of great preachers, which they regarded as a form of public entertainment.
Alarmed by the Dauphin’s success, Marcel resorted to an act of violence in the unmistakable style of Charles of Navarre, and generally believed, after the event, to have been instigated by him. The pretext was the death of a citizen named Perrin Marc, who had murdered the Dauphin’s treasurer and in turn had been forcefully taken from sanctuary in a church by the Dauphin’s Marshal and hung. Assembling 3,000 artisans and tradesmen, armed and wearing the red-and-blue hoods of the popular party, Marcel marched at their head to the royal palace. Regnaut d’Acy, one of the Dauphin’s councillors, encountered in the street, was recognized and greeted by shouts of “Death!” Before he could flee, he was struck down by so many blows that he died without uttering a sound.
On reaching the palace, Marcel mounted with part of his company to the Dauphin’s chamber, where, while he made a show of protecting the prince, his men fell upon the Dauphin’s two Marshals and slew them before his eyes. One was Jean de Clermont, son of the Marshal killed at Poitiers; it was he who had broken the church sanctuary. The other was Jean de Conflans, Sire de Dampierre, a former delegate to the Estates who had abandoned the reform party for the Dauphin. Every illuminated chronicle pictures the scene: the upraised swords of fiercely frowning men, the terrified Dauphin cowering on his bed, the bloodied bodies of the Marshals at his feet.
Their corpses were dragged to the courtyard of the palace and left there for all to see while Marcel hurried to the Place de Grève, where he addressed the crowd from a window of the city hall, asking their endorsement of his deed. It had been done, he said, for the good of the kingdom and the removal of “false, wicked, and traitorous” knights. With one voice the mob shouted its approval and its adherence to the Provost “through life and death.” Marcel promptly returned to the palace to present the Dauphin with that ever-justifying formula: the deed had been done “by the will of the people.” The prince, he said, must show himself at one with the people by ratifying the act and pardoning everyone concerned.
“Grieving and dumbfounded,” the Dauphin could read the warning of the sprawled bodies on the pavement. He prayed to the Provost that the people of Paris might be his good friends as he was theirs, and accepted from Marcel two lengths of red-and-blue cloth to make hoods for himself and his officers.
The terrible assault virtually upon his person had been designed to intimidate the Dauphin into accepting rule by the Council of the Estates. Instead it hardened the will beneath his deceptively feeble exterior. All he could do for the moment was to send his family for safety to the nearby fortress of Meaux on the Marne and remove himself to Senlis outside the capital. Once violence had been used against the monarchy, and against the nobility in the person of the Marshals, the conflict was to turn from political struggle to open strife with a decisive shift in the balance of forces. The murder of the Marshals cost Marcel what remained of support among the nobles for reform. It convinced them that their interests lay with the crown.
In May 1358 an act of the Dauphin-Regent precipitated the ferocious uprising of the peasantry called the Jacquerie, in which Enguerrand de Coucy at eighteen was swept into an active and visible role. Intending to undercut Marcel by blockading Paris, the Regent ordered the nobles along the valleys of waterborne commerce to fortify and provision their castles. According to one version, they seized the goods of their peasants for this purpose, provoking the uprising. According to another chronicler, the Jacques rose at the instigation of Marcel, who stirred them to believe that the Regent’s order was directed against them as a prelude to new oppressions and confiscations. But the Jacques had reason enough of their own.
What was this peasant who supported the three estates on his back, this bent Atlas of the medieval world who now struck terror through the seigneurial class? Snub-nosed and rough in belted tunic and long hose, he can be seen in carved stone medallions and illuminated pages representing the twelve months, sowing from a canvas seed bag around his neck, scything hay bare-legged in summer’s heat in loose blouse and straw hat, trampling grapes in a wooden vat, shearing sheep held between his knees, herding swine in the forest, tramping through the snow in hood and sheepskin mantle with a load of firewood on his back, warming himself before a fire in a low hut in February. Alongside him in the fields the peasant woman binds sheaves wearing a skirt caught up at the belt to free her legs and a cloth head-covering instead of a hat.
Like every other group, peasants were diverse, ranging in economic level from half-savage pauper to the proprietor of fields and featherbeds who could hoard money to send his son to the university. The general term for peasant was villein or vilain, which had acquired a pejorative tone, though harmlessly derived from the Latin villa. Neither exactly slave nor entirely free, the villein belonged to the estate of his lord, under obligation to pay rent or work services for use of the land, and in turn to enjoy the right of protection and justice. A serf was someone in personal bondage who belonged by birth to a particular lord, and, so that his children should follow him, was forbidden under a rule called formariage from marrying outside the domain. If he died childless, his house, tools, and any possessions reverted to the lord under the right of morte-main, on the theory that they had only been lent to the serf for his labor in life. Originally he owed, in addition to agriculture, every kind of labor service needed on an estate—repair of roads, bridges, and moats, supply of firewood, care of stables and kennels, blacksmithing, laundering, spinning, weaving, and other crafts for the castle. By the 14th century much of this was done by hired hands and the castle’s needs were supplied by purchase from towns and peddlers, leaving a large part of the peasantry on a rent-paying basis with a certain number of days’ work owed on the lord’s fields.
Besides paying the hearth tax and clerical tithe and aids for the lord’s ransom and knighting of his son and marriage of his daughter, the peasant owed fees for everything he used: for grinding his grain in the lord’s mill, baking his bread in the lord’s oven, pressing apples in the lord’s cider press, settlement of disputes in the lord’s court. At death he owed the heriot, or forfeit of his best possession to the lord.
His agricultural labor was supplied under rules that favored the seigneur, whose fields were plowed and seed sowed and hay cut and crops harvested and, in case of storm or pests, his harvest saved before the peasant could attend to his own. He had to drive his beasts to pasture and bring them home across the lord’s fields rather than his own so that the lord should have the benefit of the manure. By these fees and arrangements, economic surplus was produced for the proprietors.
The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek. The Church taught that failure to do the seigneur’s work and obey his laws would be punished by eternity in Hell, and that non-payment of tithes would imperil the soul. The priest exerted constant pressure for tithes in kind—grain, eggs, a hen or a pig—and told the peasant these were a tax “owed to God.” Everyday life was administered by the lord’s bailiff, whose abuses and extortions were a constant source of complaint. The bailiff could levy an augmented tax, keeping a percentage for himself, or accuse a peasant of theft and accept a fee for letting him off.
Rents were generally reckoned in pennies earned by paid labor and sale of produce in the market. At harvest-time, men and women flocked to the grape-picking for extra cash and a few weeks’ fun. Women were paid at half the rate of the men. The worst fear was famine, and local shortages were common because transportation was poor and yield, owing to inadequate fertilizer, low.
Possession of a plow which cost 10 to 12 livres and of a plow horse at 8 to 10 livres was the line between a peasant who prospered and one who just survived. Those too poor to afford a plow rented a communal one or turned the earth with hoe and spade. Perhaps 75 to 80 percent were below the plow line, of whom half had a few acres and some economic security while the rest lived on the edge of subsistence, cultivating tiny plots supplemented by paid work for the lord or for richer neighbors. The lowest 10 percent existed in misery on a diet of bread, onions, and a little fruit, sleeping on straw, living without furniture in a cabin with a hole in the roof to let out the smoke. Without even the tenure of serfs, they were a new agricultural proletariat created as the old manorial system was changing to a money basis.
What proportion of the peasantry was well off and what poor is judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of the historian, wie es wirklich war (how it really was), so elusive. For every statement on peasant life there is another that contradicts it. It has been said that “bathing was common among the lower classes … even small villages had their public bath houses,” yet the French peasant’s contemporaries incessantly complained of his filth and foul smell. While the English of the time seem to agree that the French peasant was worse off than their own and frequently comment on his meatless diet, he is elsewhere recorded as regularly eating pork and fowl roasted on a spit. He also had access to eggs, salt fish, cheese, lard, peas, beans, shallots, onions, garlic, and some leaf vegetables grown in his kitchen garden, fruits cooked in juice or dried for winter, rye bread, honey, and beer or cider.
The middle group would own a bed for the whole family, a trestle table with benches, a chest, cupboard, wardrobe, iron and tin cooking pots, clay bowls and jugs, homemade baskets, wooden buckets and washtubs, in addition to farming tools. They lived in one-story, wood-framed houses with thatched roof and plaster walls made of various mixtures of clay, straw, and pebbles. Most such houses had Dutch doors to let light and air in and smoke out, some had tiny windows, the best had walled chimneys. Life expectancy was short owing to overwork, overexposure, and the afflictions of dysentery, tuberculosis, pneumonia, asthma, tooth decay, and the terrible rash called St. Anthony’s Fire, which by constriction of the blood vessels (not then understood) could consume a limb as by “some hidden fire” and sever it from the body. In modern times the disease has been identified in some cases as erysipelas and in others as ergot poisoning caused by a fungus on rye flour kept too long over the winter.
The affluent few might own sixty to eighty acres, plow-horses and rope harness, sheep, pigs, cattle, stores of wool, hides, and hemp, and of wheat, oats, and corn, a boat and net for fishing in the river, a vineyard, a woodpile, and vessels of copper, glass, and silver. Their homes contained, in the case of one comfortable peasant of Normandy, two featherbeds, one wooden bed, three tables, four skillets, two pots and other cooking utensils, eight sheets, two tablecloths, one towel or napkin, a lantern, two vats for trampling grapes, two barrels and two casks, a cart, a plow, two harrows, two hoes, two scythes, one spade, one sickle, three horse collars, and a pack saddle. Rich peasants are recorded who employed a dozen field hands and gave their daughters dowries of 50 gold florins plus a fur-trimmed mantle and fur bedcover.
Truer to the mass is the peasant who cries, in the French tale Merlin Merlot, “Alas, what will become of me who never has a single day’s rest? I do not think I shall ever know repose or ease.… Hard is the hour when the villein is born. When he is born, suffering is born with him.” His children go hungry, holding out their hands to him for food; his wife assails him as a poor provider. “And I, unhappy one, I am like a rooster soaked in the rain, head hanging and bedraggled, or like a beaten dog.”
A deep grievance of the peasant was the contempt in which he was held by the other classes. Aside from the rare note of compassion, most tales and ballads depict him as aggressive, insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious, tricky, unshaved, unwashed, ugly, stupid and credulous or sometimes shrewd and witty, incessantly discontented, usually cuckolded. In satiric tales it was said the villein’s soul would find no place in Paradise or anywhere else because the demons refused to carry it owing to the foul smell. In the chansons de geste he is scorned as inept in combat and poorly armed, mocked for his manners, his morals, even his misery. The name Jacques or Jacques Bonhomme to designate a peasant was used by nobles as a term of derision derived from the padded surplice called “jacque” which the peasant wore for protective armor in war. The knights saw him as a person of ignoble instincts who could have no understanding of “honor” and was therefore capable of every kind of deceit and incapable of trust. Ideally he should be treated decently, yet the accepted proverb ran, “Smite a villein and he will bless you; bless a villein and he will smite you.”
An extraordinary passage from the tale Le Despit au Vilain breathes hatred with an intensity that seems more than mere storytelling. “Tell me, Lord, if you please, by what right or title does a villein eat beef?… And goose, of which they have plenty? And this troubles God. God suffers from it and I too. For they are a sorry lot, these villeins who eat fat goose! Should they eat fish? Rather let them eat thistles and briars, thorns and straw and hay on Sunday and pea-pods on weekdays. They should keep watch without sleep and have trouble always; that is how villeins should live. Yet each day they are full and drunk on the best wines, and in fine clothes. The great expenditures of villeins comes at a high cost, for it is this that destroys and ruins the world. It is they who spoil the common welfare. From the villein comes all unhappiness. Should they eat meat? Rather should they chew grass on the heath with the horned cattle and go naked on all fours.…” These tales were addressed to an upper-class audience. Was this what they wanted to hear, or was it a satire of their attitude?
In theory, the tiller of the soil and his livestock were immune from pillage and the sword. No reality of medieval life more harshly mocked the theory. Chivalry did not apply outside the knights’ own class. The records tell of peasants crucified, roasted, dragged behind horses by the brigands to extort money. There were preachers who pointed out that the peasant worked unceasingly for all, often overwhelmed by his tasks, and who pleaded for more kindness, but all they could advise the victim was patience, obedience, and resignation.
In 1358 his misery had reached a peak. Brigands seized the seed grain out of his hand, stole his animals for their food, his carts for their loot, his tools and plowshares to forge their weapons. Yet the lords continued to demand fees and taxes and extra aids for their heavy ransoms, “and even for that hardly put themselves out to protect their vassals from attack.” The common people “groaned,” wrote Jean de Venette, “to see dissipated in games and ornaments the sums they had so painfully furnished for the needs of war.” They resented the nobles’ failure to use them in the fight against the enemy and felt less fear of them as the knights lost prestige in the defeats since Crécy and in the cowardice at Poitiers. Above all, they saw the complicity in lawlessness of the knight who, if he could not pay a brigand’s demand for ransom, took service with his company for a year or two, “so easy it was to make out of a gentleman a brigand.” No plan of revolution, but simple hate ignited the Jacquerie.
On May 28, 1358, in the village of St. Leu near Senlis on the Oise, a group of peasants held an indignation meeting in the cemetery after vespers. They blamed the nobles for their miseries and for the capture of the King, “which troubled all minds.” What had the knights and squires done to liberate him? What were they good for except to oppress poor peasants? “They shamed and despoiled the realm, and it would be a good thing to destroy them all.” Listeners cried, “They say true! They say true! Shame on him who holds back!”
Without further council and no arms but the staves and knives that some carried, a group of about 100 rushed in fierce assault upon the nearest manor, broke in, killed the knight, his wife, and children, and burned the place down. Then, according to Froissart, whose tales of the Jacquerie would have been obtained from nobles and clergy, “they went to a strong castle, tied the knight to a stake while his wife and daughter were raped by many, one after another before his eyes; then they killed the wife who was pregnant and afterward the daughter and all the children and lastly the knight and burned and destroyed the castle.” Other reports say that four knights and five squires were killed on that night.
Instantly the outbreak spread, gathering adherents each day to join with torches and burning brushwood in the assault upon castles and manors. They came with scythes, pitchforks, hatchets, and any kind of implement that could be made a weapon. Soon thousands—ultimately, it was said, 100,000—were engaged in attacks covering the Oise valley, the Ile de France, and closer regions of Picardy and Champagne, and raging “throughout the seigneurie of Coucy, where there were great outrages.” Before it was over more than “100” castles and manors in the territories of Coucy and Valois and the dioceses of Laon, Soissons, and Senlis were sacked and burned and more than “60” in the districts of Beauvais and Amiens.
Forming no concerted defense, the nobles at the outset panicked and fled with their families to the walled towns, leaving their homes and all their goods. The Jacques continued killing and burning “without pity or mercy like enraged dogs.” Surely, says Froissart, “never among Christians or even Saracens were such outrages committed as by these wicked people, such things as no human creature should dare think or see.” The example he cites, taken from the antecedent chronicle of Jean le Bel, tells of a knight whom the Jacques “killed and roasted on a spit before the eyes of his wife and children. Then after ten or twelve of them violated the lady they forced her to eat some of her husband’s flesh and then killed her.” Repeated over and over in subsequent accounts, this one story became the mainstay of the atrocity tales.
In registered accusations after the event, the killings amount to a total of thirty (not including the roasted knight and lady), including one “spy” who had a trial before his execution. Destruction and looting were more practiced than murder. One group of Jacques made straight for the poultry yard, seized all the chickens they could lay hold of, fished carp out of the pond, took wine from the cellars and cherries from the orchard, and gave themselves a feast at the nobles’ expense. As the insurgents organized, they supplied themselves from the castles’ stores, burning furniture and buildings when they moved on. In districts where hatred for the clergy equaled that for the nobles, the Jacques warred on the Church; the cloistered trembled in their monasteries, the secular clergy fled to refuge in the towns.
A peasant leader arose in the person of one Guillaume Karle or Cale, described as a strong, handsome Picard of natural eloquence and experience in war, which was what the Jacques most needed. He organized a council which issued orders stamped by an official seal, and appointed captains elected by each locality, and lieutenants for squads of ten. His men fashioned swords out of scythes and billhooks and improvised armor of boiled leather. Cale adopted “Montjoie!” as his battle cry and ordered banners made with the fleur-de-lys, by which the Jacques wished to show they were rising against the nobles, not the King.
Cale’s hope was to win the alliance of the towns in a joint action against the nobles; it was here that the two movements, peasant and bourgeois, came together. Few towns of the north “were not against the gentilhommes,” according to the monk of St. Denis who wrote the Chronicle of the Reigns of Jean II and Charles V, while at the same time many feared and despised the Jacques. Lesser bourgeois, however, saw the peasant rising as a common war of non-nobles against nobles and clergy. Towns like Senlis and Beauvais where the party of the red-and-blue hoods was dominant and radical, acted in solidarity with the Jacques, supplied food and opened their gates to them. Many of their citizens joined the peasant ranks. Beauvais, with the consent of mayor and magistrates, executed several nobles whom the Jacques had sent to them as prisoners. Amiens held trials condemning nobles to death in absentia.
Compiègne, on the other hand, which was Cale’s major objective refused to surrender the nobles who had taken refuge there, shut its gates, and strengthened its walls. At Caen in Normandy, where the rising failed to take fire, an agitator for the Jacques, with a miniature plow pinned to his hat, toured the streets crying for sympathizers to follow him, but aroused no recruits and was later killed by three townsmen whom he had insulted.
According to letters of pardon after the event, individual bourgeois—butchers, coopers, carters, sergeants, royal officers, priests and other clerics—made themselves accomplices of the Jacques, especially in the looting of property. Even men of the gentry appear in the pardons, but whether they were moved by belief, opportunity for loot, excitement, or force majeure is uncertain. Knights, squires, and clerks accused of having led peasant bands always claimed afterward that they had been forced into service to save their necks, which may well have been true, for the Jacques felt painfully the lack of military leaders.
Their captains had little control. At Verberie a captain, on returning from a raid with a captured squire and his family, was surrounded by citizens howling death to the squire. “For god’s sake, good sirs,” the captain pleaded, “keep yourselves from such an act or you will be committing a crime.” To this man the killing of a noble was still a fearsome thing, but not to the mob, who sliced off the squire’s head on the spot.
As the rampage spread against all landowners’ estates, the Jacques, when asked why they did these things, replied “that they knew not but they saw others do it and they thought they would thus destroy all the nobles and gentry in the world and there would be none any more.” Whether or not the peasants really envisaged a world without nobles, the gentry assumed they did and felt the hot breath of annihilation. Seized by that terror the mass inspires when it overthrows authority, they sent for help from their fellows in Flanders, Hainault, and Brabant.
At a critical moment for Marcel, the rage of the Jacquerie offered him an added weapon, which he seized in a fatal choice that was to lose him the support of the propertied class. At his instigation, the estates of the hated royal councillors were made the targets of a band of Jacques organized in the environs of Paris under the command of two merchants of the capital. The properties of the King’s chamberlain, Pierre d’Orgement, and of those two inveterate peculators, Simon de Buci and Robert de Lorris, were sacked and destroyed. Breaking into the castle of Ermenonville, one of the many benefits of royal favor bestowed on Robert de Lorris, a combined force of bourgeois and Jacques cornered the owner inside. On his knees before his enemies, he was forced to take an oath to disown the “gentry and nobility” and swear loyalty to the commune of Paris.
Compromised by murder and destruction, Marcel had mounted the tiger. The royal family at Meaux was the next target of the band from Paris. Enlarged as they marched along the Marne by bands of Jacques coming from many places and by many paths, the combined group numbering “9,000” reached Meaux on June 9 “with great will to do evil.” Prospects of rape and death filled the fortress called the Market of Meaux, where the Dauphin’s wife, sister, and infant daughter with some 300 ladies and their children were guarded by a small company of lords and knights. The Mayor and magistrates of Meaux, who had sworn loyalty to the Dauphin and promised to allow no “dishonor” to his family, crumbled before the invaders. Either in fear or in welcome, the citizens opened the gates and set out tables in the streets with napkins and bread, meat and wine. On approaching a town, the marauding Jacques customarily let it be known that they expected such provisions. Pouring into the city, the fearful horde filled the streets with “savage cries” while the ladies in the fortress, say the chroniclers, trembled in anguish.
At that moment, knighthood errant galloped to the rescue in the persons of that glittering pair, the Captal de Buch and Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. Although one owed fealty to England and the other to France, they were cousins who were riding home together from a “crusade” in Prussia, where they had gone to keep themselves occupied during the truce after Poitiers. Neither was a friend of the Valois, but noble ladies in danger were every knight’s cause, and these two from the south did not share the initial paralysis of the northerners under the onslaught of the Jacques. Nor had either been involved in the shame of Poitiers. Learning of the peril at Meaux, they hastened to the relief with a company of forty lances (120 men), reaching the Market of Meaux on the same day the commoners entered the city. Connected by a bridge to the city, the fortress, surrounded by walls and towers, was situated on a strip of land between the river and a canal.
At the head of twenty-five knights in bright armor with pennants of argent and azure displaying stars and lilies and couchant lions, the Captal and the Count rode through the portcullis onto the bridge. In its narrow confines where superiority of numbers could not be mustered, the commoners unwisely chose to fight. Wielding weapons from horseback, the knights cut down their opponents, trampling them, toppling bodies into the river, forcing the rest back across the bridge, and opening the way to carnage. Despite some hard hand-to-hand fighting, the “small dark villeins poorly armed” recoiled before the lances and axes of the mailed warriors and, succumbing to terrorized retreat, were butchered. The knights charged, hacking furiously, killing the commoners like beasts, until exhausted from the slaughter.
“Several thousand” were slain, according to the chroniclers’ impossible figures, which testify nevertheless to an appalling toll. Fleeing remnants were chased through the countryside and exterminated. The knights lost but a few, one with an arrow through his eye. Their fury, growing by what it fed on, was unleashed in vengeance upon the town, which was put to pillage and flames. Houses and even churches were sacked, leaving nothing of value behind; the Mayor was hanged, many of the citizens massacred, others imprisoned, others burned inside their houses. Meaux burned for two weeks and was afterward condemned for lèse majesté and suppressed as an independent commune.
Meaux was the turning point. Gaining courage from the conquest, French nobles of the area joined in desolating the surrounding country, wreaking more damage on France, said Jean de Venette, than had the English. From there, the suppression of the Jacquerie followed, and in its train the fall of Marcel.
Charles of Navarre led the counter-action in Picardy and the Beauvais region, pushed thereto by the nobles of his party. They went to him saying that “if those who are called Jacques continue for long they will bring the gentry to nothing and destroy everything.” As one of the great nobles of the world, he must not suffer his own kind to be so reduced. Knowing that he could gain the crown, or the power he wanted, only with the support of the nobility, Charles was persuaded. With a force of several hundred including the “baron de Coussi,” he marched against the Jacques gathered at Clermont under Guillaume Cale. Cale sensibly ordered his army of several thousand to fall back upon Paris for the support and aid of the city, but the Jacques, eager for a fight, refused to obey. Cale then deployed them in the traditional three battalions, of which two, led by archers and crossbowmen, were stationed behind a line of baggage wagons. The third, of 600 horsemen poorly mounted and many without arms, was held in support.
Sounding trumpets and shouting battle cries, with tattered banners flying, the peasants faced the enemy. Surprised by this organized resistance, Navarre preferred guile and treachery. He invited Cale to parley, and upon this invitation from a king, Cale’s common sense apparently deserted him. Considering himself an opponent in war to whom the laws of chivalry applied, he went to the parley without a guard, whereupon his royal and noble opponent had him seized and thrown into chains. The capture of their leader by such easy and contemptuous treachery drained the Jacques’ confidence and hope of success. When the nobles charged, the commoners succumbed like their fellows at Meaux and suffered equal slaughter. Only a few who hid among the brush escaped the swords of the searching horsemen. Surrounding villages handed over fugitives to the nobles. Pursuing the attack elsewhere in the region, Navarre and his company massacred “3,000” more peasants, including 300 burned alive in a monastery where they had taken refuge. To consummate his victory, Charles of Navarre beheaded Guillaume Cale after reportedly crowning him, in wicked mockery, King of the Jacques with a circlet of red-hot iron.
As the savage repression swept north, its new leader emerged in Enguerrand de Coucy, whose domain had been at the center of the storm. The Jacques were never able to reassemble, says Froissart, because “the young sire de Coucy gathered a great number of gentlemen who put an end to them wherever they found them without pity or mercy.” That so young a man should have taken the leadership bespeaks a strong personality, but nothing more about him can be learned from the episode. The Chronique Normande and other accounts also mention his hunting down peasants through hamlets and villages and hanging them from trees while his neighbor the Comte de Roussi hung them from the doors of their cottages. The totality of what is known is fixed by the 19th century authority Père Denifle: “It was chiefly Enguerrand VII, the young seigneur de Coucy, who, at the head of the gentry of his barony, completed the extermination of the Jacques.”
Reinvigorated by the blood of Meaux, the nobles of that region finished off the Jacquerie between Seine and Marne. “They flung themselves upon hamlets and villages, putting them to the flame and pursuing poor peasants in houses, fields, vineyards and forest to be miserably slaughtered.” By June 24, 1358, “20,000” Jacques had been killed and the countryside converted to a wasteland.
The futile rising was over, having lasted, despite its long shadow, less than a month, of which two weeks were taken up by the repression. Nothing had been gained, nothing changed, only more death. Like every insurrection of the century, it was smashed, as soon as the rulers recovered their nerve, by weight of steel, and the advantage of the man on horseback, and the psychological inferiority of the insurgents. Reckless of consequence, the landowners, who were already suffering from the shortage of labor after the plague, let revenge take precedence over self-interest.
Within the next month the struggle in Paris came to a climax and an end. Since the day after Poitiers, Marcel had kept men at work extending the walls, strengthening the gates, building moats and barriers. Now fully enclosed and fortified, the capital was the key to power. From Vincennes on the outskirts, the Regent with assembled nobles was probing for an entry; Marcel, who had lost sight of every purpose but overpowering the Regent, was planning to deliver the capital to Charles of Navarre; the eel-like Navarre was negotiating with both sides and was in contact with Navarrese and English forces outside the walls.
At a mass meeting staged for him by Marcel in the Place de Grève, he told the crowd that “he would have been King of France if his mother had been a man.” Planted demonstrators responded with shouts of “Navarre! Navarre!” While the majority, shocked by the disloyalty, remained silent, he was elected by acclamation Captain of Paris. His acceptance of the office on the side of the people alienated many of his noble supporters, for they did not wish to be “against the gentry.” Probably at this time Enguerrand de Coucy fell away from the Navarrese party, for he soon afterward appeared in opposition to it.
Under Marcel too the ground was breaking away like ice in a river. His connivance with the Jacques frightened many of the “good towns” and, more seriously, caused the disaffection of the upper bourgeois in his own city. In the chaos and scarcities and disruption of trade, they veered toward the Regent as the only focus in the desperate need for authority. Paris was coming apart in furious factions, some for fighting to the end behind Marcel, some for deposing Navarre, some for admitting the Regent, all fired by hatred of the English, who were ravaging the outskirts with daily atrocity. With his support waning, Marcel was reduced to the naked need of armed force. On July 22, in the act that turned sentiment against him, he allowed Charles of Navarre to bring a band of English men-at-arms into the city. Aroused and armed Parisians fell upon them with such effect that they had to be locked up in the fortress of the Louvre for protection.
Meanwhile the prosperous bourgeois feared that if the Regent succeeded in taking the city by force instead of surrender, all citizens alike would be subjected to punishment and plunder. Unable to force Marcel to yield the city, they determined to dispose of him on the theory that “it was better to kill than be killed.” Amid cabals and enemies and inexplicable events, the citizens were easy prey to whispers of treachery on the part of the Provost.
On July 31 the end came when Marcel appeared at the Porte St. Denis and ordered the guards to deliver the keys of the gate to officers of the King of Navarre. The guards refused, shouting betrayal of the city. Weapons flashed, and a draper named Jean Maillart, evidently pre-equipped, unfurled the royal banner, mounted his horse, and raised the royal battle cry “Montjoie–St. Denis!” Crowds took up the cry, clashes and confused alarms erupted. Marcel next appeared across the city at the Porte St. Antoine, where he again demanded the keys and met the same response, which was led by a certain Pierre des Essars, a knighted bourgeois and cousin by marriage of both Maillart and Marcel. In a rush upon the Provost, the guards of St. Antoine struck him down, and when the bloodstained weapons had lifted and the melee had cleared, the body of Etienne Marcel lay trampled and dead in the street.
Two of his companions were also killed, and others of his party were stripped, beaten, and left naked under the walls. “Then the people rushed off to find others to treat the same way.” More of the Provost’s partisans were murdered and dumped naked in the streets. While Charles of Navarre escaped to St. Denis, the royalist faction took control and two days later, on August 2, 1358, opened the city to the Regent.
He at once proclaimed a pardon for the citizens of Paris except for close associates of Marcel and Navarre, who were executed or banished, and their confiscated property turned over to the Regent’s party. But the spirit of the blue-and-red hoods remained strong enough to cause angry demonstrations when more of Marcel’s adherents were arrested. The situation was sullen and dangerous. On August 10 the Regent issued a general amnesty and ordered nobles and peasantry to pardon each other so that the fields might be cultivated and the harvest brought in. The extermination of the Jacques was making itself felt.
With Marcel’s death the reform movement was aborted; the glimpse of “Good Government” was to remain only a glimpse. After Artevelde and Rienzi, Marcel was the third leader of a bourgeois rising within a dozen years to be killed by his own followers. The people of France on the whole were not ready for an effort to limit the monarchy. They blamed all their troubles—heavy taxes, dishonest government, debased coinage, military defeats, banditry of the companies, the fallen condition of the realm—on the crown’s evil councillors and the caitiff nobles, not on the King, who had fought bravely at Poitiers, or even on the Dauphin. No political movement sprang from Marcel’s bones. The right of the Estates General to convene at will was lost, the provisions of the Grand Ordinance largely, though not entirely, discarded. The crown was left free for the period of royal absolutism that history held in waiting.
Though the Regent held Paris, he was ringed by enemies. From St. Denis, Charles of Navarre announced open defiance and renewed his alliance with King Edward. “Very grievous and cruel,” the undeclared warfare of Navarrese and English companies intensified, individual groups were fighting back, the land was prey to local battles and raids, the besieging of castles and burning of villages. Caught up in the havoc, “the young Sire de Coucy carefully guarded his castle and territory,” with the aid of two redoubtable warriors. One was his former guardian Matthieu de Roye, who on one occasion forced the surrender of and took prisoner an entire English company of 300. The other was the governor of Coucy’s domain, a “hard and valiant knight” called the Chanoine de Robersart, who “made himself more feared by the English and Navarrese than anyone else, for he chased them many times.”
Enguerrand’s own feat was to destroy the castle of Bishop Robert le Coq, who was attempting to carry Laon over to the camp of Charles of Navarre. The particulars are unrecorded except for the fact that the Sire de Coucy “did not like the said Bishop.” Otherwise, by paying wages to his men-at-arms and allowing no one to remain outside the walls, he kept the brigands at bay, although they succeeded in capturing the neighboring castle of the Comte de Roussi, “causing great scarcity” in the district. Through untilled fields and charred villages, scarcity was stalking France.
1. Concy-le-Château as it would have appeared in the 14th century.
From a 16th century engraving.(illustration credit 7.1)
2. The abandoned castle in later years.
From Du Sommerard’s Les Arts au Moyen Age, 1838–46.(illustration credit 7.2)
3. Fortune’s wheel.
From a mid-14th century manuscript of Roman de la Rose.(illustration credit 7.3)
4. COUCY’S SEALS (illustration credit 7.4)
5. Chaucer’s squire.
From the Ellesmere manuscript, c. 1410.(illustration credit 7.5)
6. A 14th century carriage (followed by three horsemen wearing Jews’ hats). From an illustrated Bible showing Jacob’s journey to Egypt. The three horsemen are Jacob’s sons.(illustration credit 7.6)
7. View of Paris. From Froissart’s Chronicles, Louis de Bruges copy, c. 1460.(illustration credit 7.7)
8. A country village among the trees. From Bartholomew of England’s Book on the Nature of Things, a manuscript of c. 1410.(illustration credit 7.8)
9. Charles of Navarre. From a window in the Cathedral of Evreux.(illustration credit 7.9)
10. Jean II. Portrait attributed to his court painter, Girard d’Orléans.(illustration credit 7.10)
11. The Black Prince. Effigy in Canterbury Cathedral.(illustration credit 7.11)
12. English archers training with the longbow (the unpulled bows are the height of a man). From the Luttrell Psalter, late 13th century.(illustration credit 7.12)
13. View of London.
From Poems of Charles d’Orléans, early 15th century.(illustration credit 7.13)
14. The Last Judgment, the Elect and the Damned.
From the Cathedral of Bourges, west portal.(illustration credit 7.14)
15. The world as a globe. From L’Image du Monde by Gautier de Metz, a 14th century manuscript.(illustration credit 7.15)
16. The child’s education. From Avis aus Roys, a manual of instruction for French kings and princes, mid-14th century.(illustration credit 7.16)
17. The pillage and burning of a town. From Froissart’s Chronicles, Louis de Bruges copy, c. 1460.(illustration credit 7.17)
18. A charivari. From Roman de Fauvel, an early 14th century manuscript.(illustration credit 7.18)
19. The fourth horseman of the apocalypse. “And Behold a pale horse, and he that sat upon him his name was Death …” (Revelation 6 : 8). Illustration for the Office of the Dead by Jean Colombe for the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, c. 1470.(illustration credit 7.19)
20. The Triumph of Death. A detail from a fresco by Francesco Traini in the Camposanto, Pisa, c. 1350.(illustration credit 7.20)
21. Burial of the plague victims. From Annales de Gilles li Muisis.(illustration credit 7.21)
22. Penitential procession led by the Pope during the plague (pictured in 14th century Rome although it purports to illustrate the 6th century plague under Gregory the Great). By Pol de Limbourg for the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, c. 1410.(illustration credit 7.22)
23. A Cardinal. Detail from the Nine Hours Tapestries, French, late 14th century.(illustration credit 7.23)
24. Knights. Seals of Amadeo V of Savoy (right) and Louis I, Duc d’Anjou.(illustration credit 7.24)
25. Peasants. Labors of the Twelve Months. Manuscript of Crescenzi li Rustican, c. 1460.(illustration credit 7.25)
26. The slaughter of the Jacques on the bridge at Meaux. From Froissart’s Chronicles, Louis de Bruges copy, c. 1460.(illustration credit 7.26)
27. Murder of the marshals. From the Grandes Chroniques, copy executed for Charles V, c. 1375.(illustration credit 7.27)
28. The alaunt as war-dog, used against the horses of mounted brigands or men-at-war. From the 14th century manuscript Tractatus de Pauli Sanctini Ducensis de re militari et machinis bellicis.(illustration credit 7.28)
29. The Battle of Slays. From Froissart’s Chronicles, Louis de Bruges copy, c. 1460.(illustration credit 7.29)
30. Widowed Rome.(illustration credit 7.30)
31. Florence, 15th century.(illustration credit 7.31)