A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  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 the
m, 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 decide
d 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.