Let him go to the Devil! He lived long enough,” cried a workingman on the death of the King. “It would have been better for us if he had died ten years ago!” Within a few months of the King’s death, France experienced the explosion of working-class revolt that had already swept through Florence and Flanders. In addition to oppressive taxes, a rising rancor of the poor against the rich and a conscious demand by the lowest class for greater rights in the system supplied the impulse. Concentration of wealth was moving upward in the 14th century and enlarging the proportion of the poor, while the catastrophes of the century reduced large numbers to misery and want. The poor had remained manageable as long as their minimum subsistence could be maintained by charity, but the situation changed when urban populations were swelled by the flotsam of war and plague and infused by a new aggressiveness in the plague’s wake.
As the masters became richer, the workers sank to the level of day labor, with little prospect of advancement. Membership in the guilds was shut off to the ordinary journeyman and reserved under complicated requirements and fees for sons and relatives of the master class. In many trades, work was farmed out to workers in their homes, often at lower wages to their wives and children, whose employment was forbidden in the guilds. Obligatory religious holidays, which numbered 120 to 150 a year, kept earnings down. Although forbidden to strike and, in some towns, to assemble, workers formed associations of their own to press for higher wages. They had their own dues and treasuries and connections across frontiers through which jobs and lodgings could be secured for members, and which doubtless served as channels of agitation.
Self-consciousness as a class—the “people”—was growing. Christ was often portrayed as a man of the people and shown in frescoes and carvings surrounded by an artisan’s or peasant’s tools—hammer, knife, ax, and wool-carder’s comb—instead of by the instruments of the Crucifixion. In Florence, the workers called themselves il popolo di Dio. “Viva il popolo!” was the cry of the revolt of the Ciompi in 1378. As the greatest industrial center of the day, Florence was the natural starting place of insurrection.
The Ciompi were the lowest class of workers unaffiliated with any guild, but while the revolt came to be called after them, artisans of all levels and degrees below the major craft guilds were involved in the rising. They worked at fixed wages, often below subsistence level, for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, and their wages might be withheld to cover waste or damage to raw materials. The alliance of the Church with the great was plain enough in a bishop’s pastoral letter declaring that spinners could be excommunicated for wasting their wool. Workers could be flogged or imprisoned or suffer removal from the list of employables or have a hand cut off for resistance to employers. Agitators for the right to organize could be hung, and in 1345 ten wool-carders had been put to death on this charge.
In the outbreak of 1378, after a storm of violence throughout the city, the workers rushed up the steps of the Signoria’s palazzo to present their demands. They wanted open access to the guilds, the right to organize their own unions, reform of the system of fines and punishments, and, most significantly, the right “to participate in the government of the City.” In an era without guns or tear gas, mobs inspired immediate terror. Although the city hall was well supplied with means of defense, the Signoria were “frightened men,” and capitulated. The workers installed a new government based on labor’s representation in the guilds. It lasted 41 days before it began to crumble under internal stress and the counter-offensives of the magnates. Reforms gained in the revolt slowly eroded, and by 1382 the major guilds had reasserted their control, if not their confidence. Thereafter the fear of another proletarian outbreak contributed to the decline of republican government and the rise of the Medici as the dominant ruling family.
The weavers of Ghent had greater staying power. At Ypres and Bruges the original revolt had been suppressed by the Count of Flanders with fearful vengeance of burning and hanging. But the Gantois, through sieges, truces, treacheries, and brutal retaliations on both sides, had maintained their war despite blockade and near starvation. Ghent’s struggle was not in fact class war, though it came to be perceived as such. Rather it was a stubborn defense of town autonomy against the Count, crisscrossed by the strife of social and religious factions. It was a complex of rivalries between towns, between trades, and among different levels within a trade. The weavers oppressed the lower-class fullers with as much animus as they directed against the Count.
In France, the King’s deathbed promise of abolition of taxes aroused a fever of impatience for its fulfillment. Anger at taxes continually levied in the name of fighting the English had reached outrage when Buckingham raided the countryside unopposed and the people saw their money go, as it seemed, for nothing. In fact, as a result of funds spent by Charles V on improved defenses, towns and castles were better able to withstand the enemy than in the miserable years after Poitiers. But this did not lessen the burden on the lowest taxable class nor the resentment of the independent towns at having to pay for what was considered to be the King’s business. Such, was this feeling that Laon refused to open its gates to Coucy as Captain-General of Picardy and refused also to send him a company of thirty archers he had demanded. The towns of Picardy balked at further payments. At St. Quentin and Compiègne, crowds rioted, burned tax offices, assaulted tax-collectors and chased them out of town.
In Paris, the government was half paralyzed by the scramble for power around the throne. As eldest uncle, Anjou held the title of Regent, and used it to seize as much of the Treasury as he could for the purpose of pursuing the kingdom that beckoned him in Italy. Aware of his brothers’ predatory habits, the late King had arranged for the Regency to end when his son was fourteen, but he had died two years too soon. He had named his brother Burgundy and his wife’s brother Bourbon as guardians of his son. With Anjou as Regent, they were to rule with a Council of Twelve. Bourbon, who had no ambitions and held aloof from cabals, was known as “the Good Duke” in nice distinction to the paternal uncles, but he had less influence than they because he was not of the blood royal.
Pulled apart by their separate interests—Burgundy in Flanders, Anjou in Italy, Berry in a passion for collecting—the paternal uncles had no common interest in the integrity of the realm. Their only cohesion was in desire to remove the hands of the late King’s ministers from the controls. Meanwhile, amid their discords, they found time to divide up his magnificent library of a thousand volumes. Anjou took 32 carefully chosen books with silk and enameled bindings and golden clasps, among the most beautiful in the collection, including one entitled The Government of Princes.
Clisson was named Constable and the coronation was hastened to strengthen the authority of the regime. A disgraceful scene marred the monarchy’s sacred ceremony on November 4. At the banquet table, Anjou and Burgundy, who detested each other, engaged in a physical scramble for the seat of honor next to the new King. Amid tumult of partisans’ and prelates’ dismay, a Council was hastily convened which decided in favor of Burgundy as premier peer of France, whereupon Anjou seized the seat anyway, only to be shoved out of it by Philip the Bold, who sat down in his place. In this sorry exhibition, the reign began.
Its sovereign, twelve-year-old Charles VI, was a handsome, well-built boy, tall and fair like his grandfather, with an inexpressive face, mirror of a shallow soul. “Shining and polished arms pleased him more than all the jewels in the world,” and he adored the rituals of chivalry. These were never more fittingly displayed than at the coronation banquet when Coucy, Clisson, and Admiral de Vienne, magnificently mounted on horses caparisoned in cloth of gold down to the ground, served the King’s dishes from horseback. To give the King’s entry into Paris the greatest possibleéclat, three days of splendid festivities with music by minstrels were held in squares hung with tapestries. “New marvels,” in the form of artificial fountains running with milk, wine, and clear water, were constructed to amaze the people.
They did not suffice. The summoning of an Estates General for November 14 to provide a substitute for the hearth tax intensified public anxiety at the prospect of a new levy. Excited clusters of artisans discussed their grievances in the streets, secret meetings were held at night, assemblies gathered to denounce the government, the people were “inflamed and agitated by an ardent desire to enjoy liberty and free themselves from the yoke of subsidies.”
When the Chancellor, Miles de Dormans, Bishop of Beauvais, informed the Estates that the King needed aids from the people, the predictable explosion came. A crowd of commoners rushed upon a meeting of merchants, who, though opposed to the aids, were not prepared to force the issue.
“Know, citizens, how you are despised!” cried a cobbler in passionate oratory to his followers. All the bitterness of the little against the great was expressed in his denunciation of the “endless greed of seigneurs” who “would take from you, if they could, even your share of daylight.” They crush the people with their exactions, more each year. “They do not wish us to breathe or to speak or to have human faces or mix with them in public places.… These men to whom we render forced homage and who feed on our substance have no other thought but to glitter with gold and jewels, to build superb palaces and invent new taxes to oppress the city.” He poured scorn on the cowardice of the merchants, citing in comparison the stalwart citizens of Ghent who at that very moment were in arms against their Count because of taxes.
If the cobbler’s eloquence was owed in part to embellishment by the Monk of St. Denis, who recorded it, that only serves to indicate the sympathy of many monastic chroniclers with the plight of the people. In his famous prophecy, the friar Jean de Roquetaillade had seen the day coming when “the worms of the earth will most cruelly devour the lions, leopards and wolves … and the little and common folk will destroy all tyrants and traitors.”
For the cobbler and his 300 companions, that day was at hand. Screaming and brandishing knives, they forced the Provost of Merchants to carry their demand for tax abolition to Anjou and the Chancellor. At the Marble Table in the palace courtyard, the Provost pleaded for a lifting of the “intolerable burden.” With “terrible shouts” the crowd confirmed his words, swearing they would pay no more but die a thousand times rather than suffer “such dishonor and shame.” These unexpected words appear frequently in the protests, as if to add the dignity of knightly formula. The poor no less than the great needed to feel themselves acting nobly.
Anjou, in smooth and soothing words of pity for the poor, promised to obtain by the next day the King’s assent to abolition of taxes. During the night the people listened to dangerous counsels about challenging the sovereignty of nobles and churchmen. They believed, according to the chronicler of St. Denis, “that the government would be better directed by them than by their natural lords.” Whether this revolutionary sentiment was in fact in the minds of the people or only feared to be by the chronicler, it was certainly in the air.
When the frightened government confirmed abolition next day, the relief was all too quick. In a frenzy of triumph and unspent wrath, the people rushed to rob and assault the Jews, the one section of society upon whom the poor could safely vent their aggression. The assault was instigated, it was said, by certain nobles in the crowd who saw a way of wiping out their debts. While some of the crowd raced through the city to seize tax coffers and destroy the registers, the main body, with nobles participating, rampaged through the Jewish quarter to cries of “Noël! Noël!” (referring to the birthday of Christ). They broke down doors, looted goods and documents, carried off valuables, pursued Jews through the streets to throw those they could catch into the river, and seized numbers of children for forced baptism. Most of the Jews fled for refuge to the dungeons of the Châtelet, but ten bodies, including a rabbi’s, were recovered after the carnage. The pogroms spread to Chartres, Senlis, and other cities. As the symptom of a disturbed society, the persecutions continued off and on over the next decade until the crown was forced to decree yet another expulsion of the Jews in 1394.
For the moment, the crown’s need of money dictated an effort through Hugues Aubriot, Provost of Paris, to take the Jews under royal protection. Aubriot, a contentious figure and notorious libertine, sent out heralds ordering restoration of everything stolen from the Jews including the kidnapped children. “Very few obeyed the order,” and the Provost’s snatching of souls from Christian baptism was to be a charge against him in his coming downfall.
By edict of November 16, the government, as promised, abolished “henceforth and forever all taxes, tithes, gabelles, by which our subjects are much grieved, quitting and remitting all aids and subsidies which have been imposed for the said wars since our predecessor, King Philip, until today.” This stroke of fiscal suicide reflected momentary panic rather than serious intention. Aside from Charles V, most rulers governed by impulse in the 14th century.
In search of other money, the government immediately appealed to the provincial Estates for voluntary aids, with generally meager results. At the Estates of Normandy, when one member proposed to vote a grant, the assembly cried with one voice, “Nothing! Nothing!” At Rouen and Amiens, the people “were all of one will” against it. “By God’s blood, it shall never pass!” shouted a bourgeois orator to a protest meeting in the pig market of Sens. Opinion was general that the King’s treasure was enough for his needs and that more money would only go into greater extravagances by the nobles. While some districts voted aids, the major result of summoning the provincial Estates was to spread discussion and excite resistance.
Divided interests in the Third Estate complicated the struggle. The petty bourgeois were seeking to wrest control from the ruling oligarchy of merchants and masters of guilds, and both parties used the rising agitation of the working class for their own ends. They had inflammable tinder in the unhappy ranks of the unskilled and in dispossessed peasants, driven into the cities by the wars, who created a reservoir of anger and misery.
The late King’s ministerial structure, like the financial, was soon riddled by the uncles’ efforts to remove his councillors. Bureau de la Rivière, whom Charles V had loved and wished to have buried at his feet, was accused of treason by a spokesman of the Dukes but was saved when Clisson threw down his glove in the presence of the whole court and no one dared take up the awful challenge. In fear of reprisals, Rivière afterward left office, d’Orgement and Mercier were eventually pushed out, and another of the former councillors, Jean de La Grange, Cardinal of Amiens, found good reason to depart.
La Grange was disliked by the young King, who had been led by the Cardinal’s enemies to believe that he kept a familiar demon. On one occasion when Charles was ten, he had crossed himself at the Cardinal’s approach, crying, “Flee from the Devil! Throw out the Devil!”—to the considerable annoyance of that prince of the Church. On learning that the young King, on his accession, had said to a friend, “This is the moment to revenge ourselves on this priest,” Cardinal La Grange put his treasure in safekeeping and fled to Avignon, never to return.
The sensational fall of the Provost of Paris added to the sense of crumbling authority. Hugues Aubriot was a man in his sixties who had won the favor of Philip of Burgundy by extravagant banquets and gifts, and the favor of the bourgeois by construction of the first sewers and by vigorous repair of walls and bridges. But he was marked for destruction by the clergy, whom he openly insulted, and by the University, which he scorned as that “nursery of priests” and whose privileges he combatted and members he arrested on any pretext. It was said that he reserved two dungeons in the Châtelet expressly for scholars and clerics. At the funeral of Charles V, when Aubriot refused to allow the University to take precedence in the procession, a furious fracas broke out between the Provost’s sergeants and the scholars, ending with many of the University wounded and 36 thrown in jail. “Ha, that rabble!” Aubriot exclaimed. “I am sorry that nothing worse happened to them.”
Aubriot’s intervention in the case of the Jews gave the University its handle for revenge. Accused of heresy, sodomy, and being a false Christian, and, specifically, of “profaning the sanctity of baptism” by returning the Jewish children, he was brought to trial before the Bishop of Paris in May 1381. Besides charges of voicing contempt for the Eucharist, failure to take communion at Easter, and public disrespect of the clergy, he was accused of neglect of a virtuous wife, of buying virgins, and having “recourse to sorcery that his passions might triumph,” of imprisoning husbands to have freedom with their wives, of cohabiting bestially with women against nature and having carnal relations with Jews.
Convicted, but spared a death sentence by Burgundy’s influence, he was exposed on a wooden platform in front of the cathedral, where, on his knees and hatless, he was obliged to beg for absolution and vow an offering of candles for the baptized Jews he had returned to their parents. Absolved by the Bishop and Rector of the University, he was then condemned to perpetual penitence in prison on bread and water. His removal, contributing to the weakening of government, left the people of Paris readier to rise.
Coucy during these uneasy happenings remained in the Royal Council on good terms with the Dukes, each of whom desired his support. One of Anjou’s first acts as Regent, on September 27, had been to confirm Coucy in lifetime possession of Mortaigne on the Channel, bestowed on him by the late King. In addition to grand estate, Coucy clearly possessed a personal power of attraction and a faculty for not making enemies. In the great game of “who’s in, who’s out,” he was always able to work with whoever held power, perhaps owing to political sophistication gained from the circumstances of his marriage. After accomplishing the treaty of peace with the Duke of Brittany in January 1381, he was sent once more as ambassador to the English at Montreuil to negotiate a dispute over terms of the truce. Later in the year, documents show him paying spies for information on Calais, Guînes, and other English fortresses. While charged with defense of the frontier, he was recalled to Paris in May to advise Anjou on his projects in Italy.
Spoiling for a kingdom, Anjou needed money. Informed of the treasure stored by Charles V at Melun for the use of his son, Anjou laid hold of it by the direct expedient of threatening to execute the guardian of the fund. The Monk of St. Denis, however, does not vouch for this story because “one never knows the truth about these things that take place in the shadow.” Whatever Anjou obtained, it was not enough. He continued pressing for aids through 1381, winning a few grants here and there, but generally meeting sullen resistance.
While France smoldered, true revolt erupted in June 1381 in England, not of the urban class but of the peasants. In a country whose economy was largely rural, they were the working class that mattered. The third poll tax in four years, to include everyone over the age of fifteen, was the precipitant. Voted in November 1380 by a subservient Parliament to finance Lancaster’s ambitions in Spain, the collection brought in only two thirds of the expected sum, not least because tax commissioners were easily bribed to overlook families or falsify their numbers. A second round of collecting became necessary, which could have been foreseen as an invitation to trouble if the lords and prelates and royal uncles of Richard’s government had paid attention to the constant complaints of rural insubordination. They did not, and brought upon themselves the most fearful challenge of the century.
At the end of May, villages in Essex on the east coast just above London refused payment; the resistance spread with some evidence of planning, and burst into violence in Kent, the adjoining county south of the Thames. Peasants mingled with yeomen from the French wars armed themselves with rusty swords, scythes, axes, and longbows blackened by age, and triumphantly stormed a castle where a runaway villein had been imprisoned. Electing Wat Tyler, an eloquent demagogue and veteran of the wars, as their commander-in-chief, they seized Canterbury, forced the mayor to swear fealty to “King Richard and the Commons,” and liberated from the Archbishop’s prison the idealogue of the movement, John Ball. He was a vagrant priest, scholar, and zealot who had been wandering the country for twenty years, frequently hauled in by the authorities for prophesying against Church and state and preaching radical doctrines of equality.
Although the poll tax was the igniting spark, the fundamental grievance was the bonds of villeinage and the lack of legal and political rights. Villeins could not plead in court against their lord, no one spoke for them in Parliament, they were bound by duties of servitude which they had no way to break except by forcibly obtaining a change of the rules. That was the object of the insurrection, and of the march on the capital that began from Canterbury.
As the Kentishmen swept forward to London, covering the seventy miles in two days, the Essex rebels marched southward to meet them. Abbeys and monasteries on the way were a special object of animosity because they were the last to allow commutation of servile labor. In the towns, artisans and small tradesmen, sharing the quarrel of the little against the great, gave aid and food to the peasants. As the sound of the rising spread to other counties, riots and outbreaks widened.
The “mad multitude” on its march from Kent and Essex opened prisons, sacked manors, and burned records. Some personally hated landlords and officials were murdered and their heads carried around on poles. Others, in fear of death, fled to hide in the same woods where villein outlaws frequently hid from them. Certain lords were forced by the rebels to accompany them “whether they would or not,” either to supply needed elements of command or the appearance of participation by the gentry.
At the same time, peasant spokesmen swore to kill “all lawyers and servants of the King they could find.” Short of the King, their imagined champion, all officialdom was their foe—sheriffs, foresters, tax-collectors, judges, abbots, lords, bishops, and dukes—but most especially men of the law because the law was the villeins’ prison. Not accidentally, the Chief Justice of England, Sir John Cavendish, was among their first victims, along with many clerks and jurors. Every attorney’s house on the line of march reportedly was destroyed.
If the Jacquerie 23 years earlier had been an explosion without a program, the Peasants’ Revolt arose out of a developing idea of freedom. Though theoretically free, villeins wanted abolition of the old bonds, the right to commute services to rent, a riddance of all the restrictions heaped up by the Statute of Laborers over the past thirty years in the effort to clamp labor in place. They had listened to Lollard priests, and to secular preachers moved by the evils of the time, and to John Ball’s theories of leveling. “Matters cannot go well in England,” was his theme, “until all things shall be held in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.… Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?”
Wyclif’s spirit, which had dared deny the most pervasive authority of the time, was abroad. What had happened in the last thirty years, as a result of plague, war, oppression, and incompetence, was a weakened acceptance of the system, a mistrust of government and governors, lay and ecclesiastical, an awakening sense that authority could be challenged—that change was in fact possible. Moral authority can be no stronger than its acknowledgment. When officials were venal—as even the poor could see they were in the bribing of tax commissioners—and warriors a curse and the Church oppressive, the push for change gained strength.
It was encouraged by the preachers’ castigation of the powerful. “The tournaments of the rich,” they said, “are the torments of the poor.” They regularly denounced “evil princes,” “false executors who increase the sorrows of widows,” “wicked ecclesiastics who show the worst example to the people,” and, above all, nobles who empty the purses of the poor by their extravagance, and disdain them for “lowness of blod or foulenesse of body,” for deformed shape of body or limb, for dullness of wit and uncunning of craft, and deign not to speak to them, and who are themselves stuffed with pride—of ancestry, fortune, gentility, possessions, power, comeliness, strength, children, treasure—“prowde in lokynge, prowde in spekyng,… prowde in goinge, standynge and sytting.” All would be drawn by fiends to Hell on the Day of Judgment.
On that day of wrath, said the Dominican John Bromyard in terms that spoke directly to the peasant, the rich would have hung around their necks the oxen and sheep and beasts of the field that they had seized without paying for. The “righteous poor,” promised a Franciscan friar, “will stand up against the cruel rich at the Day of Judgment and will accuse them of their works and severity on earth. ‘Ha, ha!’ will say the others, horribly frightened, ‘These are the folk formerly in contempt. See how they are honored—they are among the sons of God! What are riches and pomp to us now who are abased?’ ”
If the meek were indeed the sons of God (even if they too were scolded by the preachers for greed, cheating, and irreverence), why should they wait for their rights until the Day of Judgment? If all men had a common origin in Adam and Eve, how should some be held in hereditary servitude? If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?
At its climax on the outskirts of London, the Peasants’ Revolt came to the edge of overpowering the government. No measures had been taken against the oncoming horde, partly from contempt for all Wills and Cobbs and Jacks and black-nailed louts, partly from mediocre leadership and lack of ready resources. Lancaster was away on the Scottish border, Buckingham was in Wales, and the only organized armed forces were already embarking at Plymouth for Spain under the command of the third brother, Edmund of Cambridge. Except for 500 or 600 men-at-arms in the King’s retinue, the crown controlled no police or militia; London’s citizens were unreliable because many were in sympathy and some in active connivance with the rebels.
Twenty thousand peasants were camped outside the walls demanding parley with the King. While they promised him safety, they shouted for the heads of Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hailes, the Chancellor and Treasurer, whom they held responsible for the poll tax, and for the head, too, of the arch “traitor,” John of Gaunt, symbol of misgovernment and a failing war. John Ball harangued them with a fierce call to cast off the yoke they had borne for so long, to exterminate all great lords, judges, and lawyers and gain for all men equal freedom, rank, and power.
In agitated council, the government could find no course but to negotiate. Richard II, a slight fair boy of fourteen, accompanied by his knights, rode out to meet the insurgents and hear their demands: abolition of the poll tax and of all bonds of servile status, commutation at a rate of four pence an acre, free use of forests, abolition of the game laws—all these to be confirmed in charters sealed by the King. Everything the rebels asked was conceded in the hope of getting them to disperse and go home.
Meanwhile, partisans had opened the city’s gates and bridges to a group led by Wat Tyler, who gained possession of the Tower of London and murdered Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hailes. Balked of Gaunt, they flung themselves upon his palace of the Savoy and tore it apart in an orgy of burning and smashing. At Wat Tyler’s order, it was to be not looted but destroyed. Barrels of gunpowder found in storage were thrown on the flames, tapestries ripped, precious jewels pounded to bits with ax heads. The Temple, center of the law with all its deeds and records, was similarly destroyed. Killing followed; Lombards and Flemings (hated simply as foreigners), magnates, officials, and designated “traitors” (such as the rich merchant Sir Richard Lyons, who had been impeached by the Good Parliament and restored by Lancaster) were hunted down and slain.
In the hectic sequence of events, only Richard moved in a magic circle of reverence for the King’s person. Perched on a tall war-horse before the peasants, a charming boy robed in purple embroidered with the royal leopards, wearing a crown and carrying a gold rod, gracious and smiling and gaining confidence from his sway over the mob, he granted charters written out and distributed by thirty clerks on the spot. On this basis, many groups of peasants departed, believing in the King as their protector.
While in London, Sir Robert Knollys, the Master of War, was urgently assembling an armed force, Wat Tyler, inflamed by blood and conquest, was exhorting his followers toward a massacre of the ruling class and a takeover of London. He was no longer to be satisfied by the promised charters, which he suspected were hollow, and he knew he would never be included in any pardon. He could only go forward toward a seizure of power. According to Walsingham, he boasted that “in four days’ time all the laws of England would be issuing from his mouth.”
He returned to the camp at Smithfield for another meeting with the King, where he put forth a new set of demands so extreme as to suggest that their purpose was to provoke rejection and provide a pretext for seizing Richard in person: all inequalities of rank and status were to be abolished, all men to be equal below the King, the Church to be disendowed and its estates divided among the commons, England to have but one bishop and the rest of the hierarchy to be eliminated. The King promised everything consistent with the “regality of his crown.” Accounts of the next moments are so variously colored by the passions of the time that the scene remains forever obscure. Apparently Tyler picked a quarrel with a squire of the King’s retinue, drew a dagger, and in a flash was himself struck down by the short sword of William Walworth, Mayor of London.
All was confusion and frenzy. The peasants drew their bows; some arrows flew. Richard, with extraordinary nerve, ordering no one to follow, rode forward alone, saying to the rebels, “Sirs, what is it you require? I am your captain. I am your King. Quiet yourselves.” While he parleyed, Knollys’ force, hastily summoned, rode up and surrounded the camp in mailed might with visors down and weapons gleaming. Dismayed and leaderless, the peasants were cowed; Wat Tyler’s head displayed on a lance completed their collapse, like that of the Jacques at the death of Guillaume Cale.
Ordered to lay down their arms and assured of pardons to encourage dispersal, they trailed homeward. Leaders, including John Ball, were hanged and the rising elsewhere in England was suppressed—with sufficient brutality, if not the wild massacre that had taken place in France after the Jacquerie. Except for scattered retribution, the English revolt, too, was over within a month, defeated more by fraud than by force. The pardons issued in the King’s name were revoked without compunction, and the charters canceled by a landowners’ Parliament on the grounds that they had been issued under duress. To a deputation from Essex who came to remind the King of his promise to end villeinage, Richard replied, “Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain.”
The assumptions of autocrats are often behind the times. Economic forces were already propelling the decline of villeinage, and commutation continued, despite the crushing of the revolt, until the unfree peasant gradually disappeared. Whether the revolt hastened or delayed the process is obscure, but the immediate outcome encouraged complacency in the ruling class, beginning with the King. Perhaps intoxicated by success, Richard developed all the instincts of absolutism except the toughness to quell his opponents, and was to end as the victim of one of them. The military saw no need for improvement; the Church was stiffened against reform. Alarmed by the Lollards’ leveling doctrines, the privileged class turned against them. In Gower’s “Corruptions of the Age,” the poet denounced them as breeders of division between church and state sent into the world by Satan. Lollardy went underground, long postponing the Protestant separation.
In these “days of wrath and anguish, days of calamity and misery,” the laboring men’s revolt seemed to many but one more tribulation signifying, like the Black Death, the anger of God. An anonymous poet, associating the rising of the peasants with an earthquake that occurred in 1382 and with the “pestilens,” concluded that these three things
Beeth tokenes of grete vengaunce and wrake
That schulde falle for synnes sake.
Even the French raids on the English coast could be taken, as the monk Walsingham suggested, as the Lord “calling men to repentance by means of such terrors.” Seen in these terms, revolt conveyed no political significance. “Man cannot change,” a Florentine diarist wrote at this time, “that which God, for our sins, has willed.”
How much impact the insurrection in England had on revolutionary sentiment abroad is uncertain. With or without it, war and its attendant demon, taxes, would have supplied enough fuel for discontent. Yet war could hardly have failed to give employment and spread money—to armorers, carters, grain dealers, bakers, horse-breeders, and a hundred other trades besides the archers, foot soldiers, and servants in the army. Contemporaries are silent on the subject of war as economic stimulus, but very vocal about its unequal burden on the poor. “It should be an established principle,” wrote Villani, “that war ought not to be paid for out of the purses of the poor but rather by those to whom power belongs.”
This was not a principle recognized by the Duc d’Anjou, whose pursuit of money provoked a new wave of insurrection in France beginning in February of 1382. His projected inheritance of the Kingdom of Naples had just been jeopardized by the overthrow of Queen Joanna by a rival. Against the advice of Coucy, who was summoned again from Picardy for consultation, Anjou was bent on leading an army to Italy. At a meeting with the Provost of Merchants and principal bourgeois in January 1382, he seems to have wrung consent for a new sales tax on wine, salt, and other merchandise. In fear of popular reaction, the edict was issued secretly and the bidding for the lucrative post of tax-collector was held behind closed doors in the Châtelet. Many came willingly enough to bid, but hesitated to make the public announcement. No less apprehensive, the court remained at Vincennes outside the walls.
When tradesmen and travelers spread news of the new tax, an outcry of angry refusal was voiced in riots at Laon, Amiens, Reims, Orléans, and Rouen, as well as in Paris. As spokesman for the bourgeois of the capita], Jean de Marès, an aged, respected, and eloquent advocate who had served under every King since Philip VI, tried in vain to persuade Anjou to rescind the order. Shopkeepers locked out tax-collectors who came to evaluate their merchandise; citizens seized arms, rang the tocsin, and rampaged through tax offices. That the agitation was heated by “the example of the English,” and even by “letters and messages from the Flemings” was common belief. Concerted action, however, was less a fact than a fear of the ruling class.
The riots burst into violence at the end of February in Rouen, capital of Normandy. Here the tax on wine injured important vintners who wished to excite popular resistance without compromising themselves. They harangued artisans and poor workers of the cloth trade about the shame of submitting to the tax while distributing free wine among them. To shouts of “Haro!” against the government, “Haro!” against tax-collectors (an obscure cry implying rebellion), a company of 200 intoxicated drapers rushed for the city hall to ring the tocsin. So began the famous Harelle.
Gathering adherents, the drapers sacked the houses of the rich, broke open coffers, threw furnishings into the streets, smashed windows and wine barrels, and let the contents flow after drinking all they could hold. Priests, pawnbrokers, Jews, and the houses of all former mayors were attacked, while the tocsin rang all night. The rich fled for refuge to monasteries, and a few royal officials and tax-collectors were killed. The chief of the drapers’ guild, a fat, simple-witted character called, for his bulk, Jean le Gras, was dragged against his will to leadership of the mob and paraded through the streets on a throne, thus compromising the upper bourgeois in spite of their effort to remain behind the scenes.
In climactic assault, the rioters, joined by many of the better class, attacked the Abbey of St. Ouen, hated for its large land holdings and the privileges it maintained against the town. Doors were smashed with axes, rent registers and charters burned, and the Abbé forced to sign remittances of all dues owed by the town. The fact that these documents were formulated in proper legal language testifies to the role of the upper bourgeois in the affair. Afterward, in a solemn if not sober assembly in the market place, the crowd petitioned their fat “King” to declare them “free of the yoke of taxes,” while some “laughed and shook their heads” at the performance.
Fearing royal punishment, the upper bourgeois sent delegates to Vincennes to plead for pardon. The Royal Council, fearing in its turn the spread of rebellion to other towns, advised the boy King to conceal his wrath and “appease the people who were very riotous.” With appropriate display of the sacred aura of kingship, Charles VI was sent to Rouen, where the town’s leaders, evidently nervous of the agitation they had unleashed, promised a fixed sum in aids in return for the King’s pardon. Underneath the temporary lid, the struggle was unresolved, and wrath on both sides only awaited another chance.
In the same moment that Rouen was subdued, Paris rose. No one had yet ventured to proclaim the new levy in public until one herald, on being offered a bonus, rode into the market place and, having won all ears by announcing a reward for the return of gold plate stolen from the palace, then cried out the new tax and, setting spurs to his horse, galloped away. As the news sped through the streets, people gathered in angry groups, vowing with “terrible oaths” never to pay, and plotting resistance. Arrests of the agitators brought in porters, tinkers, candle-makers, pastry cooks, knife-grinders, cowl-makers—the small tradesmen, artisans, and servants of Paris. Next morning, March 1, when a tax-collector was seen to demand payment from a woman vendor of watercress at Les Halles, the market people fell upon him and killed him.
In an instant Paris was in an uproar. People ran through the quartiers calling on their neighbors to arm “for the liberty of the country” and rousing them with fierce yells and threats. “If you do not arm as we do,” cried one, “we will kill you right here in your own house!” Then, in “terrible tumult,” the crowd broke into the Hôtel de Ville in the Place de Grève, where they seized 3,000 long-handled mallets normally used by the police. Mounted with cylindrical heads of lead and wielded with both hands, these had been stored by Hugues Aubriot in case of need against the English, and now gave their name to the insurgents as Maillotins.
So armed, they inspired extra terror. While they were absorbed in rampage throughout the right bank, nobles, prelates, and officials, hurriedly filling carts with their valuables, escaped to Vincennes. Belatedly, the Maillotins closed the gates, fastened street chains, and posted guards to block the exodus of the rich, even bringing back some whom they caught. They hunted down notaries, jurists, and everyone connected with taxes, invaded churches to drag tax-collectors from sanctuary, seized one from the altar of St. Jacques, where he was clinging in terror to a statue of the Virgin, and cut his throat. Records everywhere were burned, the Jewish quarter looted as always. “Turn Christian or we will kill you!” a Jewish woman was ordered. “She said she would rather die,” an onlooker testified, “so they killed and robbed her.” The Jews again sought shelter in the Châtelet, but were turned away by officials in fear of the Maillotins. Of some thirty persons murdered the first day, half were Jews.
The upper bourgeois were anxious both to contain the rising and to use it to force concessions from the crown. They quickly mobilized a militia to resist both the rebels and armed intervention by the King. Squads were stationed at street crossings and scouts sent up into church towers to watch for the approach of men-at-arms. “They soon showed themselves so strong,” wrote Buonaccorso Pitti, a Florentine banker in Paris, that the Maillotins in time obeyed them, with the result that the bourgeois were able to use the armed rebels in their own struggle against the crown.
Following so closely on events in Rouen, the uprising in Paris deepened fears of a conspiracy of revolt. The court decided to parley. Coucy, known for his tact and persuasiveness, was sent with the Duke of Burgundy and the Chancellor to the Porte St. Antoine to hear the insurgents’ demands. Jean de Marès acted as mediator. The Parisians insisted on an abolition of all levies since the coronation, plus amnesty for all acts of riot, and the release of four bourgeois arrested earlier for having advised against Anjou’s tax. The royal negotiators, until they could return with an answer, granted release of the four prisoners as a gesture of appeasement—with contradictory results. Without waiting to hear more, the mob stormed the Châtelet and other prisons, opening every cell and dungeon, releasing inmates so broken or emaciated that they had to be carried to the hospital wards of the Hôtel Dieu. All records of trials and convictions were destroyed in bonfires.
The most celebrated prisoner of Paris, Hugues Aubriot, was among the liberated. Mounted on a “little horse,” the former Provost was escorted to his home by the Maillotins, who begged him to become their leader. In every rising, the same need was felt and the same effort made to persuade or force someone of the governing class to take charge and give orders. Aubriot wanted no part of it. During the night, while the insurgents caroused “in eating, drinking and debauches,” he managed to leave Paris, and when in the morning they found him gone, a great cry was raised that the city was betrayed.
The bourgeois pressed for a solution, anxious that “the hot imprudence of the lowest people should not be turned to the detriment of men of substance.” Ready to subdue Paris by whatever means, the crown agreed to everything except pardon for those guilty of breaking into the Châtelet—but its intent was no more honest than Richard II’s. On receiving the royal letters confirming the agreement, the bourgeois leaders alertly noted that the language of the remittance was ambiguous and the document, instead of being sealed in green wax on silk, was sealed in red wax on parchment, denying it the quality of perpetuity.
Despite popular rage at this duplicity, the court was stiffening. Other towns where protest had erupted were found to have been acting not in concert but independently, thus subject to local suppression. Armed force was gathering at Vincennes and fear of punishment spreading in Paris. The court was able to force the city’s leaders to yield forty fomenters of the revolt, of whom fourteen were publicly executed to the great indignation of the populace. According to the Monk of St. Denis, others were secretly drowned in the river by royal order. Gaining security, the Dukes sent the King back to Rouen on March 29 to impose reprisals held in abeyance. In a miserable exhibition of ritual joy at the royal approach, the people, in festival clothes of blue and green, were lined up in organized plea for clemency, crying “Noël, Noël, Vive le Roi!” which did not suit the Duke of Burgundy. To induce the proper mood for heavy fines, he ordered his men-at-arms to ride among the people with drawn swords telling them “to cry rather for Mercy, la hart au col” (with a rope around the neck), signifying the right of the King to hang or spare them at will.
For a gift of money to the King and the Duke, all the silver and gold plate of the confréries and their candlesticks and incense boxes were sold. Royalty was not mollified. Despite the original pardon, twelve of the rioters were executed, the tocsin bell taken down, the chains for closing streets removed, fines imposed, Rouen’s charter of liberties revoked, and its administration turned over from the independent guilds to a royal bailiff. Cowed by the example, the Estates of Normandy voted a sales and a salt tax and a tax on income. In suppression of revolt, the crown was finding a way to fill its treasury and, more significantly, an opportunity to cancel town charters and extend royal power.
The wrath of Paris was still far from subdued, and dangerous events in Ghent augmented the fear that a general rising, if not yet concerted, might become so. The cry of solidarity, “Vive Gant! Vive Paris no’ mere!” was being heard in towns from the Flemish border to the Loire.
In Ghent, the White Hoods of Jacob van Artevelde’s day reappeared. A people’s militia was organized and a captain found in Artevelde’s son Philip, a small, sharp-eyed man of aggressive energy and “insinuating eloquence,” chosen largely for the aura of his name. Forced by circumstance, if not preference, to depend on the common people, he ordered that all classes would be heard in counsel, “the poor like the rich,” and all would be fed alike. When 30,000 had eaten no bread for two weeks, he forced abbeys to distribute their stores of grain and merchants to sell at fixed prices. Traditionally, the turmoils of Flanders had divided the Count, the nobility, the urban magnates and guilds in shifting alignments against each other, but this time they began to see in the sustained rebellion of Ghent the red vision of revolution and closed ranks under the Count to suppress it.
Reduced by hunger, the city agreed to a parley in April 1382. The Count, confident of mastery, demanded that all the Gantois from fifteen to sixty should come bareheaded in their shirts with halters around their necks halfway to Bruges, where he would determine how many would be pardoned and how many put to death. At a meeting in the market place, the starving townsmen were told these terms by their deputies and offered three courses of action—to submit, to starve, or to fight. The third was chosen: an army of 5,000 of those best fit to fight was mobilized and launched against Bruges, headquarters of the Count’s party. The result was one of the stunning upsets of the century.
The militia of Bruges, no less confident against their old rivals than the Count, caroused through the night and staggered forth on the morrow, May 5, shouting and singing in drunken disorder. In vain the Count and his knights endeavored to hold them back for orderly advance. A blast of stone and iron cannonballs followed by an assault of the Gantois mowed them down. Panic and flight could not be stemmed and seem rather easily to have swept the Flemish knights into the retreat. Louis de Male, the Count, was unhorsed and, despite efforts to rally his forces after dark by lantern light, avoided capture only by changing clothes with his valet and escaping on foot to refuge in a poor woman’s hut. “Do you know me?” he asked. “Oh yes, Monseigneur, I have often begged at your gates.” Found by one of his knights, he called for a horse and, provided with the indignity of a peasant’s mare, rode bareback into Lille, a less happy journey than when long ago he had galloped briskly away from marriage with Isabella.
Ghent was provisioned and joined in her triumph by other cities under the cry “Tout un! (All one).” Having taken possession of Bruges and 500 of its most notable bourgeois as hostages, Philip van Artevelde declared himself Regent of Flanders. All the towns surrendered to his rule, “and there he made new mayors and aldermen and new laws.” He adopted a noble’s trappings of command: trumpets heralded his approach, a pennon displaying three silver hats preceded him in the streets, minstrels played at his door. He wore scarlet and miniver and dined off the Count’s silver plate, seized as booty.
Once again, as in the days of his father, the interests of England and France were at stake. Louis de Male appealed for French aid to his son-in-law and heir, the Duke of Burgundy. Artevelde offered alliance to England. The English Commons favored it for the sake of the wool trade, and because the Flemish, like themselves, were Urbanist in the schism. Pope Urban declared an expedition in aid of Flanders to be a crusade, which meant that clerical tithes could be used toward the cost. Despite this advantage, the English nobility hesitated to ally themselves with rebels, and while they hesitated, their opportunity was lost.
In April the Duc d’Anjou had departed for Italy, having amassed, by whatever means, enough money to recruit 9,000 men and furnish himself with pavilions and equipment “the most sumptuous that any lord had ever commanded.” The crown had less success in a renewed demand for aids from Paris. The King at this time was at Meaux on the Marne. Hoping that a settlement might be reached if he placated Paris by his presence, the Council decided to send Coucy to negotiate with the Parisians, “for he knew better how to manage them than any other.”
Accompanied by no other lords but only by members of his household, Coucy entered the hostile city, where he appears to have been well regarded and well received. He went to his own residence, recently acquired, a hôtel called the Cloître St. Jean off the Place de Grève.* Summoning certain leaders for a conference, he reproved them “wisely and prudently” for their wickedness in killing officials of the King and breaking open his prisons. For this the King could make them pay dearly if he wished, but he did not desire to do so because he loved Paris as his birthplace and because, it being the capital of the kingdom, he was “unwilling to destroy its well-intentioned inhabitants.” Coucy said he had come to make up the quarrel between the citizens and their sovereign and would entreat the King and his uncles “mercifully to pardon them for their evil deeds.”
The citizens answered that they had no wish to make war against the King but that the taxes must be repealed, at least as regards Paris. When exempted, they would be ready to assist the King “in any other manner.” Pouncing on this, Coucy asked, “In what manner?” They said they would pay certain sums into the hands of a chosen receiver every week for support of the soldiers. When Coucy asked how much they would pay, they replied, “Such a sum as we shall agree upon.”
Coucy managed smoothly by “handsome speeches” to obtain a preliminary offer of 12,000 francs on condition of a pardon. This was accepted by the King, but the conditions for his re-entering Paris testified to the court’s nervousness: the people were to lay down their arms, open the gates, leave the street chains down at night so long as the King was in the city, and send six or seven notables to Meaux as hostages. Submitted to an Assembly in Paris, the conditions were angrily rejected by the Maillotins, who demanded with threats and curses that the merchants join in their opinion. With greatest reluctance, six bourgeois carried this refusal to Meaux, under the pressure, as they told the court, of the great fury of the people. The government decided on force. Men-at-arms were sent to occupy the bridges upstream to cut off the supply of food to the city, while others were let loose to pillage the faubourgs, committing such excesses “as by an enemy upon an enemy.” Preparing for assault of Paris, nobles collected empty wagons “to carry away plunder from the said city if occasion offers.” The Parisians fastened the street chains, distributed arms, and mounted a watch on the walls.
Moderate parties on both sides, led by Coucy for the crown and Jean de Marès for the city, still worked for a settlement. Their combined eloquence and influence gained the people’s consent to a tax of 80,000 francs to be collected by their own receivers and distributed directly to troops on active service, untouched by royal uncles or treasurers. Paris was to receive in exchange a general pardon and the King’s written promise that the aids would not be used as a precedent for new taxes, and that he would hold no malice against Paris in the future. If any trust in a royal pardon still remained, it was because of a quality of sacredness in an anointed king and a profound need to perceive him—as opposed to the lords—as the people’s protector.
At this moment Ghent’s startling victory over the Count of Flanders intervened, frightening the propertied class and giving the court urgent reason to settle with Paris. With Anjou gone to Italy and Berry dispatched as Governor of Languedoc, the Duke of Burgundy was in control, and his dominant purpose now was to employ French force for the retrieval of his heritage in Flanders. Terms with Paris were hastily concluded.
The King re-entered the capital only for a day, to the great displeasure of the citizens. Rouen erupted again when tax-collectors set up their tables in the Cloth Hall but the rising was quickly suppressed bythe royal governor with the aid of an armed galley in the river. Southern France too was in turmoil, spread by bands of dispossessed peasants and vagabond poor. The Monk of St. Denis called them the désespérés and crève-de-faim (the hopeless and starving), but locally they were called the Tuchins. Some say the name derives from tuechien (kill-dog), meaning people reduced to such misery that they ate dogs as in times of famine; others, that it derived from touche, meaning, in the local patois, the maquis or brush where the dispossessed took refuge.
Through the uplands of Auvergne, as well as in the south, the Tuchins, in bands of 20, 60, or 100, organized a guerrilla warfare against established society. They preyed upon the clergy—hated for their tax exemptions—ambushed travelers, held lords for ransom, attacking all, it was said, who did not have callused hands. Like the Mafia of Sicily, they originated out of misery to prey upon the rich, but, on becoming organized, were used by the rich in local feuds and brigandage. Towns and seigneurs hired them in their war against the crown’s officers, who were called the “eaters.” The unrest in Languedoc was to reach the force of insurrection in the following year.
In all these evils, the upper class felt the rising tide of subversion. The rioters of Béziers in Languedoc were reported in a plot to murder all citizens having more than 100 livres, while forty of the plotters planned to kill their own wives and marry the richest and most beautiful widows of their victims. The English peasants seemed to one chronicler “like mad dogs … like Bacchantes dancing through the country.” The Ciompi were “ruffians, evil-doers, thieves … useless men of low condition … dirty and shabby,” and the Maillotins were viewed as their brothers. The weavers of Ghent were credited with intent to exterminate all good folk down to the age of six.
The source of all subversion, the focus of danger, was seen to lie in Ghent.
Conscious of all that hung upon the outcome, the French prepared for an offensive in strength in Flanders. Rebellion of the lower class against the upper, danger of an English alliance with Artevelde, the hostile allegiance of Flanders to the Urbanist cause in the schism were involved. Coucy was among the first designated for the army, which he joined with a retinue of three other knights banneret, ten knights bachelor, 37 squires, and ten archers, subsequently enlarged to 63 squires and 30 archers. His cousin Raoul, Bastard of Coucy, son of his uncle Aubert, was his second in command, though listed as a squire. In the sullen atmosphere, it took six months before an adequate and well-equipped force was assembled, and it was November before the march began. Many advised against starting on the edge of winter, but anxiety to forestall the English carried the enterprise forward through days of rain and leaden cold.
The army’s strength, wildly and variously reported at figures up to 50,000, probably numbered about 12,000—large enough to require foot soldiers, as was often necessary, to cut down hedges and trees to widen the line of march.
The King, now fourteen, rode with the army accompanied by his uncles Burgundy, Bourbon, and Berry and the foremost lords of France—Clisson, Sancerre, Coucy, Admiral de Vienne, the Counts de la Marche, d’Eu, Blois, Harcourt, and many notable seigneurs and squires. The scarlet Oriflamme, reserved for urgent occasions or war against the infidel, was carried for the first time since Poitiers to emphasize the character of holy war—which was somewhat embarrassed by the fact that if the enemy was Urbanist, so was the King’s ally Louis of Flanders. Unpopular in any case because of his dealings with the English, Louis was coldly treated throughout the campaign.
Hostility lay at the army’s back. French towns and populace, sympathetic to Ghent, withheld or hampered supplies and continued to resist the payment of aids. The Duke of Burgundy, if not the King, was denounced aloud. In Paris, the Maillotins swore on their mallets an oath of collective resistance to tax-collectors. They began to forge helmets and weapons at night, and plotted to seize the Louvre and the great hôtels of Paris so that these could not be used as strongholds against them. They were restrained from action, however, by the counsel of Nicolas de Flament, a cloth merchant who had been associated with Etienne Marcel in the killing of the two Marshals in 1358. He advised waiting until it was seen whether the men of Ghent prevailed; then the right moment would come. At the same time, commoners rioted at Orléans, Blois, Châlons, Reims, Rouen, voicing such sentiments as showed that “the Devil was entered into their heads to have slain all noblemen.”
On reaching the river Lys at the border of Flanders, the royal army found the bridge across to Comines destroyed by the enemy and all boats removed. The river’s banks were marshy and muddy; 900 Flemings waited on the other side under the command of Artevelde’s lieutenant, Peter van den Bossche, standing with battle-ax in hand. Coucy had advised crossing farther east at Tournai so as to be in contact with supplies from Hainault, but Clisson had insisted on the more direct route and was now greatly vexed, acknowledging that he should have taken Coucy’s advice.
While foragers were sent for timber and fence rails to repair the bridge, a party of knights was guided to three sunken boats, which were hauled up and rigged by ropes to both banks at a spot concealed from the Flemings. By this means, nine at a time, an adventurous force of knights and squires was ferried across while the main force diverted the Flemings’ attention by fire of crossbows and “bombards” or small portable cannon. Fearing to be discovered, yet determined “to gain reputation as valiant men-at-arms,” the adventurers, joined by Marshal Sancerre, continued crossing until 400 had reached the other side. No varlet was permitted to accompany them.
Deciding to seize Comines at once, they buckled their armor, raised their banners, and marched into the open in battle formation, to the extreme anxiety of the watching Constable, whose “blood began to tremble in fear for them.” “Ah, by St. Ives, by St. George, by Our Lady, what do I see over there? Ha, Rohan! Ha, Beaumanoir! Ha, Rochefort, Malestroit, Lavalle,” Clisson cried, naming each banner as he recognized it. “What do I see? I see the flower of our army outnumbered! I would rather have died than witnessed this.… Wherefore am I Constable of France if without my counsel you put yourself in this adventure? If you lose, the fault shall be laid to me and it shall be said that I sent you thither.” He proclaimed that all who wished should now join the force on the other side and issued frantic orders to hasten repair of the bridge. With darkness falling, the Flemings were ordered by their leader not to attack, and the French for the same reason halted. Unsheltered in a cold wind, with their feet in mud and rain running down their helmets, they remained in armor through the night, keeping up their spirits by staying alert against attack.
At daybreak both sides advanced, the French shouting the war cries of many absent seigneurs to make their numbers seem larger. Again Clisson suffered unrestrained agonies of anxiety, bewailing his inability to cross over with all his army. In the event, when the clash came, the long French spears tipped with Bordeaux steel outreached the Flemings’ weapons, pierced their thin mail, and gained the ascendancy. Peter van den Bossche was struck down, wounded in head and shoulder, but was carried to safety. While the Flemings fought in despair and village bells rang to summon help, the French finished repair of the bridge. Clisson’s force thundered across, routed the defenders, and completed the capture of Comines. Flemings were chased and killed in streets and fields, in mills and monasteries where theysought shelter, and in neighboring towns. In a moment the pillagers were scouring the country and finding rich plunder, for—trusting in the Lys—the Flemings had not removed their goods or cattle to the walled towns.
Upon the King’s entry into Comines, the upper bourgeois of Ypres and neighboring towns overthrew Artevelde’s governors and sent deputies to the French with terms of surrender. On their knees before Charles VI, twelve rich notables of Ypres offered to turn over their town to him permanently in return for peaceful occupation. The King was pleased to accept at a price of 40,000 francs, which was immediately pledged. Malines, Cassel, Dunkirk, and nine other towns followed suit at a further payment of 60,000 francs. Although the terms of surrender supposedly exempted towns from pillage, the Bretons could not be restrained. Rather than encumber themselves with furs, fabrics, and vessels, they sold their loot cheap to the people of Lille and Tournai, “caring only for silver and gold.” Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
At Ghent, some fifty miles to the north, Philip van Artevelde summoned from the vicinity every man capable of bearing arms, assuring them they would defeat the French King and win independent sovereignty for Flanders. For months his envoys had been pressing England, but though a herald had come with terms of a treaty, no ships filled with soldiers followed. Even so, he had another ally: winter was closing in. If he had fortified his position and stayed on the defensive, he could have left it to winter and scarcity to defeat the invaders. But the threat of an internal rising by the Count’s party which might turn over Bruges to the French forced Artevelde into action, even though he still held the principal citizens of Bruges as hostages. Perhaps he was moved not by fear but overconfidence; perhaps he simply miscalculated.
Armed with bludgeons and iron-pointed staves, with large knives in their belts and iron caps on their heads, a formidable force of “40,000” or “50,000” Flemings (in reality, probably under 20,000) was collected, led by 9,000 of Ghent on whom Philip relied most. Carrying the banners of towns and trades, they marched south to meet the enemy. Scouts reported their approach to the French, who took up a position between the hill and the town of Roosebeke a few miles from Passchendaele, where history held another bloodshed in waiting for 1916. As an Urbanist, Louis de Male was forced by the French to withhold his division from the order of battle so they should not have to fight alongside a heretic and schismatic. In rain and cold the King’s army awaited the conflict impatiently, “for they were very discomfited at being out in such weather.”
At the final war council on the eve of combat, an extraordinary decision was taken: that Clisson should resign his office for the day of battle to be near the King’s person, and be replaced as Constable by Coucy. Very agitated and pleading that he would be thought a coward by the army, Clisson begged the King for a reversal. The bewildered boy, after a long silence, consented, “for you see further in this matter than I do or those who first proposed it.”
What lay behind the proposal is unspoken in the chronicles; the only clue is Clisson’s fit of anxiety at the Lys. In a man who could cut off fifteen heads without a twinge, it reflected unusual tension and must have persuaded his equally tense colleagues to turn to Coucy and the extreme expedient of changing Constables in midstream. Win or lose, fighting against other knights changed nothing fundamental, but in this fight the nobles felt their order itself endangered. The sentiment is reflected by Froissart in many variations of his statement that if the French King and “noble chivalry” had met defeat in Flanders, all nobles would have been “dead and lost in France” and “commoners would have rebelled in divers countries to destroy all the nobility.”
Artevelde on the eve of battle now favored the defensive and advised standing in place against the enemy. He had the advantage of terrain, having taken up a good position on the hill, and he believed the French in their impatience and discomfort would grow reckless or careless or even turn back. He was overruled by men still in the pride of their earlier victory over the Count at Bruges and eager for a fight. Accepting the decision, Artevelde ordered the army to give no quarter and take no prisoners other than the King, “for he is but a child who acts only as instructed. We shall bring him to Ghent and teach him to speak Flemish.” As for tactics, he commanded the men to keep always in a compact body “so that none may break you,” and for greater solidarity to hold their weapons with arms intertwined. They were to confound the enemy with the heavy fire of the crossbows and bombards they had used at Bruges and then, advancing shoulder to shoulder, overcome the French line by the sheer weight and solidity of their ranks.
In the tension of the night before combat, Flemish guards reported shouts and clang of arms from the French camp, as if the enemy were preparing a night attack. Others thought it was “the devils of hell running and dancing about the place where the battle was to be because of the great prey they expected there.”
On the morning of November 29, 1382, two hostile halves of society moved toward each other through a mist “so thick it was almost night.” With their horses held at the rear, the French advanced on foot and, contrary to custom, in silence without battle cries, all eyes on the dark mass ahead. Descending the hill in close order with staves upright, the Flemings appeared like a moving forest. They opened with a massive fire of crossbows and bombards, then charged with lowered staves and the force of “enraged boars.” The French plan was for the King’s battalion under the Constable to hold the center while two stronger wings—of which one was commanded by Bourbon and Coucy—closed in on the enemy from either side. Under the force of the Flemish charge, the French center gave way and in the turmoil the Bourbon-Coucy battalion found itself blocked.
“See, good cousin,” cried Bourbon (as reported by his contemporary biographer), “we cannot advance to attack our enemies except through our Constable’s ranks.”
“Monseigneur, you say true,” answered Coucy, here credited with devising a plan of action on the spot. “And it seems to me that if we were to advance as a wing of the King’s battalion and take the hill we should have a good day’s fight at God’s pleasure.”
“Fair cousin, that is good advice,” Bourbon agreed, and so, as 14th century military history is written, they went up the hill and took the enemy from behind with terrible blows of lance, ax, and sword, and “whoever saw the Sire de Coucy break through the press and strike the Flemings, cutting and killing, he will forever remember a valiant knight.” In the respite afforded by this attack, the Constable’s battalion recovered and returned, along with the other wing, to the fray. Heavy battle-axes and maces cut through Flemish helmets with a noise “as loud as all the armorers of Paris and Brussels working together.” Compressed ever more tightly by the French, the Flemings were so squeezed against each other that the inner ranks could not raise arms or weapons; even breathing became difficult—they could neither strike nor cry out.
As French lances pierced and axes hacked at the solid mass of bodies, many of whom lacked helmet or cuirass, the dead piled up in heaps. French foot soldiers, penetrating between the men-at-arms, finished off the fallen with their knives, “with no more mercy than if they had been dogs.” Under the attack of the Bourbon-Coucy wing, the Flemish rear turned and fled, throwing away their weapons as they ran. Philip van Artevelde, fighting in the front ranks, tried to rally them, but from his position could exercise no effective command. He lacked the assurance of the Black Prince at Poitiers to retain control from a hilltop above the battle. Borne backward by the mass as the rout spread, he was trampled and killed under the feet of his own forces, as was his banner-bearer, a woman named Big Margot.
Bourbon and Coucy, mounting their horses, led their battalion in pursuit of the fugitives, and in a fierce fight routed 3,000 Flemings from a wood where they had gathered for a final defense. The debacle was complete. While their battalion pursued and killed as far as Courtrai, Coucy and Bourbon rode back to Roosebeke, where the King “welcomed them joyously and praised God for the victory which, through their efforts, He had given.” The battle was over in the space of two hours. Many Flemish bodies were found without wounds, crushed to death under their companions’ pressure, but so many thousands were killed by French weapons that “the ground was inundated by blood.” The number of dead “miscreants” was reported in figures of fantasy, but agreement was general that few of the Flemish army survived. Fit only to be the “prey of dogs and crows,” the bodies were left unburied, so that for days afterward, the stench of the battlefield was insupportable.
While being divested of his armor in his scarlet pavilion, the King expressed a wish to see Artevelde dead or alive. For a reward of 100 francs, searchers found his body, which was taken before the victors, who stared at it for a while in silence. The King gave it a little kick, “treating it as a villein.” Then it was taken away and “hanged upon a tree.” Artevelde’s image was subsequently woven into a tapestry depicting the battle, which the Duke of Burgundy commissioned and used as a carpet because he liked to walk on the commoners who had attempted to overthrow the ordained order.
The sack of Courtrai was merciless, in revenge for defeat in the Battle of the Spurs eighty years before. Citizens fled vainly to cellars and churches to escape the soldiers; they were dragged into the streets and killed. On his knees Louis de Male begged mercy for the town, but was ignored. Every house was ransacked and even nobles of the town and their children carried away for ransom. The Duke of Burgundy, with a Valois eye for the best, dismounted the cathedral clock, finest in Flanders, and transported it by ox wagon to Dijon (where it still is). When the King departed, Courtrai was set on fire at his command, “so that it should be known ever after that the French King had been there.” Clisson, restored to his normal ferocity, was thought to have had a hand in the order.
The totality of victory had one major exception. Ghent, the main objective, was never taken. At first news of their army’s defeat, the people were stunned and despairing, so that if the French had come to their gates in the several days after the battle “they would have suffered them to enter without resistance.” But medieval war had a tendency to stop short of political objective. Weary of cold and rain, occupied with profit and revenge in the immediate aftermath of Roosebeke, and confident that Ghent would surrender on demand, the French did not go north.
Peter van den Bossche, despite his wounds, had himself carried to Ghent and re-inspirited the city, insisting the war was not over, that the French would not come in winter, and with new men in a new season “we shall do more than we ever did before,” even without English help. The English, as soon as they heard of the Flemish defeat, broke off negotiations and were “not greatly displeased” by the outcome. Had it gone otherwise, they feared the “great pride of the commoners” would have encouraged a new rising in their own country.
Afterward, when the French attempted a parley, Ghent, as “hard and proud” as if it had won the victory, refused absolutely to yield to the Count of Flanders but only to the direct suzerainty of the King of France. The Count, and more especially Philip of Burgundy, the heir apparent, rejected that arrangement. By this time at the end of December it was too late to begin a siege. Having restored authority in the rest of Flanders, though they failed to convert it to Pope Clement, the French were ready to go home. They had business to settle with Paris.
In the first week of January 1383 the royal army halted outside Paris and sent for the Provost and magistrates to assure the capital’s submission. With armed forces at hand, and strengthened by the victory of Roosebeke, the crown had greater authority than in the year before, and was prepared to use it. Breton and Norman companies were deployed in a semi-circle around Paris, champing on the brink of pillage. A huge force of Parisians, in a desperate show of the strength which they had long prepared, marched out armed with crossbows, shields, and mallets and assumed battle formation beyond Montmartre. Warily, the crown sent a delegation including the Constable and Coucy to appraise their strength and ask why they advanced thus combatively. The commoners replied that they wished the King to view their strength, which, being very young, he had never seen. They were sternly ordered to return and lay down their arms if they wished the King to enter Paris. Subdued since the verdict of Roosebeke, their spirit did not match their show; they turned back without resistance. The royal army was nevertheless notified to appear in the guise of war, not peace—that is, in armor—for the entry into Paris.
Coucy and Marshal Sancerre were sent to open the city by taking down the solid gates from their hinges and removing street chains. The gates were thrown into the streets that the King might ride over them—“to trample the pride of the city,” as the Monk of St. Denis sadly acknowledged. Alarm and anger rose among the citizens, who posted guards at night and said, “There will be no peace yet. The King has destroyed and pillaged the land of Flanders and he will do the same in Paris.” To dampen trouble, heralds proclaimed to the people that no sack nor harm would come to them. On the day of entry, the bourgeois, represented by the Provost of Merchants, the magistrates, and 500 notables, came forward in festival clothes in the ritual plea for pardon. As they knelt, the King and his nobles, Coucy among them, flanked by men-at-arms with lances poised, rode past them through the shorn gates into the city.
Men-at-arms were immediately posted at all bridges and at squares where the people were accustomed to gather. Houses where soldiers were to lodge were required to keep their doors open. Everyone possessing arms was ordered to bring them in a sack to the Louvre, from where they were removed to Vincennes.
Arrests began at once, with special attention to the bourgeois notables, in whom the crown recognized its real opponents. Jean de Marès and Nicolas de Flament were among 300 substantial citizens arrested. Two rich merchants, a draper and a goldsmith, were executed at once, and thirteen more within a week. Nicolas de Flament, spared in 1358, went to the block now. All the bourgeois who had served in the city militia during the revolt were summoned one by one before the Council to be sentenced to heavy fines. Free to take revenge, the King’s government continued to impose convictions, fines, and executions for the next six weeks. “They cut off heads,” recorded the Ménagier de Paris, “three and four at a time,” to a total of more than 100, not counting those executed in other rebel towns.
The seal of conquest was the re-imposition of a sales tax of twelve pence in the livre on all merchandise, plus extra on wine and salt—the same tax that had provoked the revolt of the Maillotins and that the Parisians had been refusing to pay for the past year. A week later, before a full assembly of the governing class of the city, the King’s ordinance was read revoking the privileges and franchises of Paris. The proud rights of self-government and chartered liberties, hard-won by the towns through the High Middle Ages, were being drained off and absorbed by a central government. In Paris the offices of Provost of Merchants and of the magistrates were suppressed and their jurisdictions taken over by the crown. The major trades were deprived of autonomy, as at Rouen, and subjected henceforward to supervisors appointed by the Provost of Paris. The police squads formerly maintained by the Provost of Merchants were abolished and the defense of Paris taken into the hands of the King. Meetings of confréries, as possible breeders of trouble, and all public assemblies except for attendance at church were forbidden. Participants in illicit meetings were to be treated as “rebel and disobedient,” subject to the death penalty and confiscation of property.
The trial of Jean de Marès followed. He had not left Paris like other notables, the Monk of St. Denis recalled, but for more than a year had contained and moderated the fury of the people and striven to mediate between the court and the city. For that the hatred of the Dukes pursued him. A train of informers was brought forward to support the charge that he had counseled the rebels to take up arms. He was convicted, condemned to death, stripped of gown and hood, and carried in a cart with twelve others to the place of execution at Les Halles. Placed above the others in the cart, “so that he should be viewed by all,” he cried to the crowd collected in the streets, “Where are those who have condemned me? Let them come forward to justify my conviction if they can.” The people sorrowed for him, but none dared to speak.
Told by the executioner to beg mercy of the King that he might be pardoned for his crimes, Marès replied that he had done nothing for which to beg pardon, “but from God alone I shall beg mercy and ask Him humbly to forgive me my sins.” After words of farewell to the people, who were all in tears, he turned to his death.
Not yet done, the crown summoned a mammoth assembly in the courtyard of the Marble Table on March 1, anniversary of the Maillotins’ revolt. One person from every house in Paris was required to attend, without head covering. Charles VI, attended by his uncles and Council, sat on a platform while Pierre d’Orgement as Chancellor read in the King’s name a harsh accusation of all the crimes committed by the people of Paris since the death of Charles V. After speaking of the executions, he cried in a terrible voice, “It is not finished!” The people knew their roles. Wails of fear rose from the crowd. With disordered clothes and hair, the wives of imprisoned men stretched out their arms to the King, imploring mercy in tears. The proud uncles and the King’s younger brother, Louis, knelt to beg for the relief of civil rather than criminal punishment—civil meaning fines. Orgement announced that the King, obeying his natural goodness and the pleas of his kin, consented to a general pardon, revocable if ever the Parisians returned to their evil ways. The convicted would be released from prison and pain of death but not from payment of fines. Some men of ample property were fined amounts equal to all they owned in money, houses, and land, reducing them to ruin.
Similar punitive measures were taken at Amiens, whose ancient charter was revoked, at Laon, Beauvais, Orléans, and other cities. The immense sums collected in fines amounted to 400,000 francs from Paris and a comparable figure from the provinces. Much of it went to enrich the uncles, to pay the Constable and other royal officials who had received no salaries for the past two years, and to reimburse nobles, including Coucy, for expenses of the Flanders campaign. Coucy received 13,200 francs and a pledge of one third of the aids levied on his domain to cover the expense of fortifying his towns and castles.
Strangely, in view of his role in removing the gates, Coucy retained a favorable image in Paris. A saying was recorded among the people that “the Sire de Coucy had not feared to remonstrate with the King and tell him that if he destroyed his own country he would be reduced to plying the workman’s spade.” The prophecy picturing the King doing a peasant’s work captured the public mind and was to have a long and curious fife.
The authority of the lions was regained in full. Paris did not recover a Provost of Merchants for thirty years; Rouen never recovered the liberties it had enjoyed before the Harelle. Where insurgency had won momentary control, it was because of the absence of organized and ready forces of public order. The state had no arrangements for meeting revolution, although, by contrast, the role of suppression was as formalized as a ceremonial rite.
Except in Ghent, insurgency could not retain a grip because it, too, had no prepared role and its ranks were divided. The poor provided the explosive force, but became the agents of the merchant class, whose interests were not theirs. The towns themselves failed in their aim because they were each other’s enemies. Ghent maintained its struggle for two more years until, on the death of Louis de Male, its liberties were restored by the Duke of Burgundy to consolidate his heritage. Elsewhere, communal liberties and autonomy were lost or reduced. The process that had operated in Etienne Marcel’s revolt continued: to the extent that the towns lost, the monarchy gained, while through financial support the crown increasingly made partners of the nobility.
After the storm, the lower class was seen as more dangerous, more suspect. It gained recognition as a dynamic rather than passive section of society, by some in fear, by others in sympathy. “Therefore the innocent must die of hunger with whom these great wolves daily fill their maw,” wrote Deschamps. “This grain, this corn, what is it but the blood and bones of the poor folk who have plowed the land? Wherefore their spirit crieth on God for vengeance. Woe to the lords, the councillors and all who steer us thus, and woe to all who are of their party, for no man careth now but to fill his bags.”
The wave of insurrection passed, leaving little change in the condition of the working class. Inertia in the scales of history weighs more heavily than change. Four hundred years were to elapse before the descendants of the Maillotins seized the Bastille.
* The hotel, called Rieulet or Nieulet in some contemporary manuscripts, was located in the now non-existent Rue St. Jean-en-Grève, which ran from the present Hôtel de Ville to the Rue de Rivoli. The residence was listed as sold to Raoul de Coucy, “conseiller du Roi,” in 1379, probably an error for Enguerrand, who in a charter of 1390 referred to it as “nôtre hostel à Paris.”