A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  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 c
alled 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 expen
ditures 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.