A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  On May 28, 1358, in the village of St. Leu near Senlis on the Oise, a group of peasants held an indignation meeting in the cemetery after vespers. They blamed the nobles for their miseries and for the capture of the King, “which troubled all minds.” What had the knights and squires done to liberate him? What were they good for except to oppress poor peasants? “They shamed and despoiled the realm, and it would be a good thing to destroy them all.” Listeners cried, “They say true! They say true! Shame on him who holds back!”

  Without further council and no arms but the staves and knives that some carried, a group of about 100 rushed in fierce assault upon the nearest manor, broke in, killed the knight, his wife, and children, and burned the place down. Then, according to Froissart, whose tales of the Jacquerie would have been obtained from nobles and clergy, “they went to a strong castle, tied the knight to a stake while his wife and daughter were raped by many, one after another before his eyes; then they killed the wife who was pregnant and afterward the daughter and all the children and lastly the knight and burned and destroyed the castle.” Other reports say that four knights and five squires were killed on that night.

  Instantly the outbreak spread, gathering adherents each day to join with torches and burning brushwood in the assault upon castles and manors. They came with scythes, pitchforks, hatchets, and any kind of implement that could be made a weapon. Soon thousands—ultimately, it was said, 100,000—were engaged in attacks covering the Oise valley, the Ile de France, and closer regions of Picardy and Champagne, and raging “throughout the seigneurie of Coucy, where there were great outrages.” Before it was over more than “100” castles and manors in the territories of Coucy and Valois and the dioceses of Laon, Soissons, and Senlis were sacked and burned and more than “60” in the districts of Beauvais and Amiens.

  Forming no concerted defense, the nobles at the outset panicked and fled with their families to the walled towns, leaving their homes and all their goods. The Jacques continued killing and burning “without pity or mercy like enraged dogs.” Surely, says Froissart, “never among Christians or even Saracens were such outrages committed as by these wicked people, such things as no human creature should dare think or see.” The example he cites, taken from the antecedent chronicle of Jean le Bel, tells of a knight whom the Jacques “killed and roasted on a spit before the eyes of his wife and children. Then after ten or twelve of them violated the lady they forced her to eat some of her husband’s flesh and then killed her.” Repeated over and over in subsequent accounts, this one story became the mainstay of the atrocity tales.

  In registered accusations after the event, the killings amount to a total of thirty (not including the roasted knight and lady), including one “spy” who had a trial before his execution. Destruction and looting were more practiced than murder. One group of Jacques made straight for the poultry yard, seized all the chickens they could lay hold of, fished carp out of the pond, took wine from the cellars and cherries from the orchard, and gave themselves a feast at the nobles’ expense. As the insurgents organized, they supplied themselves from the castles’ stores, burning furniture and buildings when they moved on. In districts where hatred for the clergy equaled that for the nobles, the Jacques warred on the Church; the cloistered trembled in their monasteries, the secular clergy fled to refuge in the towns.

  A peasant leader arose in the person of one Guillaume Karle or Cale, described as a strong, handsome Picard of natural eloquence and experience in war, which was what the Jacques most needed. He organized a council which issued orders stamped by an official seal, and appointed captains elected by each locality, and lieutenants for squads of ten. His men fashioned swords out of scythes and billhooks and improvised armor of boiled leather. Cale adopted “Montjoie!” as his battle cry and ordered banners made with the fleur-de-lys, by which the Jacques wished to show they were rising against the nobles, not the King.

  Cale’s hope was to win the alliance of the towns in a joint action against the nobles; it was here that the two movements, peasant and bourgeois, came together. Few towns of the north “were not against the gentilhommes,” according to the monk of St. Denis who wrote the Chronicle of the Reigns of Jean II and Charles V, while at the same time many feared and despised the Jacques. Lesser bourgeois, however, saw the peasant rising as a common war of non-nobles against nobles and clergy. Towns like Senlis and Beauvais where the party of the red-and-blue hoods was dominant and radical, acted in solidarity with the Jacques, supplied food and opened their gates to them. Many of their citizens joined the peasant ranks. Beauvais, with the consent of mayor and magistrates, executed several nobles whom the Jacques had sent to them as prisoners. Amiens held trials condemning nobles to death in absentia.

  Compiègne, on the other hand, which was Cale’s major objective refused to surrender the nobles who had taken refuge there, shut its gates, and strengthened its walls. At Caen in Normandy, where the rising failed to take fire, an agitator for the Jacques, with a miniature plow pinned to his hat, toured the streets crying for sympathizers to follow him, but aroused no recruits and was later killed by three townsmen whom he had insulted.

  According to letters of pardon after the event, individual bourgeois—butchers, coopers, carters, sergeants, royal officers, priests and other clerics—made themselves accomplices of the Jacques, especially in the looting of property. Even men of the gentry appear in the pardons, but whether they were moved by belief, opportunity for loot, excitement, or force majeure is uncertain. Knights, squires, and clerks accused of having led peasant bands always claimed afterward that they had been forced into service to save their necks, which may well have been true, for the Jacques felt painfully the lack of military leaders.

  Their captains had little control. At Verberie a captain, on returning from a raid with a captured squire and his family, was surrounded by citizens howling death to the squire. “For god’s sake, good sirs,” the captain pleaded, “keep yourselves from such an act or you will be committing a crime.” To this man the killing of a noble was still a fearsome thing, but not to the mob, who sliced off the squire’s head on the spot.

  As the rampage spread against all landowners’ estates, the Jacques, when asked why they did these things, replied “that they knew not but they saw others do it and they thought they would thus destroy all the nobles and gentry in the world and there would be none any more.” Whether or not the peasants really envisaged a world without nobles, the gentry assumed they did and felt the hot breath of annihilation. Seized by that terror the mass inspires when it overthrows authority, they sent for help from their fellows in Flanders, Hainault, and Brabant.

  At a critical moment for Marcel, the rage of the Jacquerie offered him an added weapon, which he seized in a fatal choice that was to lose him the support of the propertied class. At his instigation, the estates of the hated royal councillors were made the targets of a band of Jacques organized in the environs of Paris under the command of two merchants of the capital. The properties of the King’s chamberlain, Pierre d’Orgement, and of those two inveterate peculators, Simon de Buci and Robert de Lorris, were sacked and destroyed. Breaking into the castle of Ermenonville, one of the many benefits of royal favor bestowed on Robert de Lorris, a combined force of bourgeois and Jacques cornered the owner inside. On his knees before his enemies, he was forced to take an oath to disown the “gentry and nobility” and swear loyalty to the commune of Paris.

  Compromised by murder and destruction, Marcel had mounted the tiger. The royal family at Meaux was the next target of the band from Paris. Enlarged as they marched along the Marne by bands of Jacques coming from many places and by many paths, the combined group numbering “9,000” reached Meaux on June 9 “with great will to do evil.” Prospects of rape and death filled the fortress called the Market of Meaux, where the Dauphin’s wife, sister, and infant daughter with some 300 ladies and their children were guarded by a small company of lords and knights. The Mayor and magistrates of Meaux, who had sworn loyalt
y to the Dauphin and promised to allow no “dishonor” to his family, crumbled before the invaders. Either in fear or in welcome, the citizens opened the gates and set out tables in the streets with napkins and bread, meat and wine. On approaching a town, the marauding Jacques customarily let it be known that they expected such provisions. Pouring into the city, the fearful horde filled the streets with “savage cries” while the ladies in the fortress, say the chroniclers, trembled in anguish.

  At that moment, knighthood errant galloped to the rescue in the persons of that glittering pair, the Captal de Buch and Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. Although one owed fealty to England and the other to France, they were cousins who were riding home together from a “crusade” in Prussia, where they had gone to keep themselves occupied during the truce after Poitiers. Neither was a friend of the Valois, but noble ladies in danger were every knight’s cause, and these two from the south did not share the initial paralysis of the northerners under the onslaught of the Jacques. Nor had either been involved in the shame of Poitiers. Learning of the peril at Meaux, they hastened to the relief with a company of forty lances (120 men), reaching the Market of Meaux on the same day the commoners entered the city. Connected by a bridge to the city, the fortress, surrounded by walls and towers, was situated on a strip of land between the river and a canal.

  At the head of twenty-five knights in bright armor with pennants of argent and azure displaying stars and lilies and couchant lions, the Captal and the Count rode through the portcullis onto the bridge. In its narrow confines where superiority of numbers could not be mustered, the commoners unwisely chose to fight. Wielding weapons from horseback, the knights cut down their opponents, trampling them, toppling bodies into the river, forcing the rest back across the bridge, and opening the way to carnage. Despite some hard hand-to-hand fighting, the “small dark villeins poorly armed” recoiled before the lances and axes of the mailed warriors and, succumbing to terrorized retreat, were butchered. The knights charged, hacking furiously, killing the commoners like beasts, until exhausted from the slaughter.

  “Several thousand” were slain, according to the chroniclers’ impossible figures, which testify nevertheless to an appalling toll. Fleeing remnants were chased through the countryside and exterminated. The knights lost but a few, one with an arrow through his eye. Their fury, growing by what it fed on, was unleashed in vengeance upon the town, which was put to pillage and flames. Houses and even churches were sacked, leaving nothing of value behind; the Mayor was hanged, many of the citizens massacred, others imprisoned, others burned inside their houses. Meaux burned for two weeks and was afterward condemned for lèse majesté and suppressed as an independent commune.

  Meaux was the turning point. Gaining courage from the conquest, French nobles of the area joined in desolating the surrounding country, wreaking more damage on France, said Jean de Venette, than had the English. From there, the suppression of the Jacquerie followed, and in its train the fall of Marcel.

  Charles of Navarre led the counter-action in Picardy and the Beauvais region, pushed thereto by the nobles of his party. They went to him saying that “if those who are called Jacques continue for long they will bring the gentry to nothing and destroy everything.” As one of the great nobles of the world, he must not suffer his own kind to be so reduced. Knowing that he could gain the crown, or the power he wanted, only with the support of the nobility, Charles was persuaded. With a force of several hundred including the “baron de Coussi,” he marched against the Jacques gathered at Clermont under Guillaume Cale. Cale sensibly ordered his army of several thousand to fall back upon Paris for the support and aid of the city, but the Jacques, eager for a fight, refused to obey. Cale then deployed them in the traditional three battalions, of which two, led by archers and crossbowmen, were stationed behind a line of baggage wagons. The third, of 600 horsemen poorly mounted and many without arms, was held in support.

  Sounding trumpets and shouting battle cries, with tattered banners flying, the peasants faced the enemy. Surprised by this organized resistance, Navarre preferred guile and treachery. He invited Cale to parley, and upon this invitation from a king, Cale’s common sense apparently deserted him. Considering himself an opponent in war to whom the laws of chivalry applied, he went to the parley without a guard, whereupon his royal and noble opponent had him seized and thrown into chains. The capture of their leader by such easy and contemptuous treachery drained the Jacques’ confidence and hope of success. When the nobles charged, the commoners succumbed like their fellows at Meaux and suffered equal slaughter. Only a few who hid among the brush escaped the swords of the searching horsemen. Surrounding villages handed over fugitives to the nobles. Pursuing the attack elsewhere in the region, Navarre and his company massacred “3,000” more peasants, including 300 burned alive in a monastery where they had taken refuge. To consummate his victory, Charles of Navarre beheaded Guillaume Cale after reportedly crowning him, in wicked mockery, King of the Jacques with a circlet of red-hot iron.

  As the savage repression swept north, its new leader emerged in Enguerrand de Coucy, whose domain had been at the center of the storm. The Jacques were never able to reassemble, says Froissart, because “the young sire de Coucy gathered a great number of gentlemen who put an end to them wherever they found them without pity or mercy.” That so young a man should have taken the leadership bespeaks a strong personality, but nothing more about him can be learned from the episode. The Chronique Normande and other accounts also mention his hunting down peasants through hamlets and villages and hanging them from trees while his neighbor the Comte de Roussi hung them from the doors of their cottages. The totality of what is known is fixed by the 19th century authority Père Denifle: “It was chiefly Enguerrand VII, the young seigneur de Coucy, who, at the head of the gentry of his barony, completed the extermination of the Jacques.”

  Reinvigorated by the blood of Meaux, the nobles of that region finished off the Jacquerie between Seine and Marne. “They flung themselves upon hamlets and villages, putting them to the flame and pursuing poor peasants in houses, fields, vineyards and forest to be miserably slaughtered.” By June 24, 1358, “20,000” Jacques had been killed and the countryside converted to a wasteland.

  The futile rising was over, having lasted, despite its long shadow, less than a month, of which two weeks were taken up by the repression. Nothing had been gained, nothing changed, only more death. Like every insurrection of the century, it was smashed, as soon as the rulers recovered their nerve, by weight of steel, and the advantage of the man on horseback, and the psychological inferiority of the insurgents. Reckless of consequence, the landowners, who were already suffering from the shortage of labor after the plague, let revenge take precedence over self-interest.

  Within the next month the struggle in Paris came to a climax and an end. Since the day after Poitiers, Marcel had kept men at work extending the walls, strengthening the gates, building moats and barriers. Now fully enclosed and fortified, the capital was the key to power. From Vincennes on the outskirts, the Regent with assembled nobles was probing for an entry; Marcel, who had lost sight of every purpose but overpowering the Regent, was planning to deliver the capital to Charles of Navarre; the eel-like Navarre was negotiating with both sides and was in contact with Navarrese and English forces outside the walls.

  At a mass meeting staged for him by Marcel in the Place de Grève, he told the crowd that “he would have been King of France if his mother had been a man.” Planted demonstrators responded with shouts of “Navarre! Navarre!” While the majority, shocked by the disloyalty, remained silent, he was elected by acclamation Captain of Paris. His acceptance of the office on the side of the people alienated many of his noble supporters, for they did not wish to be “against the gentry.” Probably at this time Enguerrand de Coucy fell away from the Navarrese party, for he soon afterward appeared in opposition to it.

  Under Marcel too the ground was breaking away like ice in a river. His connivance with the Jacques f
rightened many of the “good towns” and, more seriously, caused the disaffection of the upper bourgeois in his own city. In the chaos and scarcities and disruption of trade, they veered toward the Regent as the only focus in the desperate need for authority. Paris was coming apart in furious factions, some for fighting to the end behind Marcel, some for deposing Navarre, some for admitting the Regent, all fired by hatred of the English, who were ravaging the outskirts with daily atrocity. With his support waning, Marcel was reduced to the naked need of armed force. On July 22, in the act that turned sentiment against him, he allowed Charles of Navarre to bring a band of English men-at-arms into the city. Aroused and armed Parisians fell upon them with such effect that they had to be locked up in the fortress of the Louvre for protection.

  Meanwhile the prosperous bourgeois feared that if the Regent succeeded in taking the city by force instead of surrender, all citizens alike would be subjected to punishment and plunder. Unable to force Marcel to yield the city, they determined to dispose of him on the theory that “it was better to kill than be killed.” Amid cabals and enemies and inexplicable events, the citizens were easy prey to whispers of treachery on the part of the Provost.

  On July 31 the end came when Marcel appeared at the Porte St. Denis and ordered the guards to deliver the keys of the gate to officers of the King of Navarre. The guards refused, shouting betrayal of the city. Weapons flashed, and a draper named Jean Maillart, evidently pre-equipped, unfurled the royal banner, mounted his horse, and raised the royal battle cry “Montjoie–St. Denis!” Crowds took up the cry, clashes and confused alarms erupted. Marcel next appeared across the city at the Porte St. Antoine, where he again demanded the keys and met the same response, which was led by a certain Pierre des Essars, a knighted bourgeois and cousin by marriage of both Maillart and Marcel. In a rush upon the Provost, the guards of St. Antoine struck him down, and when the bloodstained weapons had lifted and the melee had cleared, the body of Etienne Marcel lay trampled and dead in the street.