The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants' Revolt 0198856415, 9780198856412

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OXFORD STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN HISTORY General Editors      .              .             

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The Jacquerie of 1358 A French Peasants’ Revolt JUSTINE FIRNHABER-BAKER

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Justine Firnhaber-Baker 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950990 ISBN 978–0–19–885641–2 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For James, a good man

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Acknowledgements This book was researched and written with the support of a British Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Fellowship (grant reference AH/ K006843/1) and a Research Grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, for which I am profoundly grateful. I also thank the School of History at St Andrews for two terms of institutional leave. Colleagues, students, and friends have helped shape my thinking and provided valuable feedback. I would particularly like to thank Frances Andrews, John Arnold, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Warren Brown, Frederik Buylaert, Vincent Challet, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Jan Dumolyn, Sylvia Federico, Paul Freedman, Chris Given-Wilson, Erika Graham-Goering, Jelle Haemers, Rafael Oliva Herrer, Helen Lacey, Patrick Lantschner, James Palmer, Andrew Prescott, Teofilo Ruiz, Graeme Small, Alice Taylor, Craig Taylor, John Watts, and Chris Wickham. All Souls College and its Fellows offered a welcome refuge and witty conversation. My colleagues at St Andrews are especially to be thanked for creating an environment conducive to research and writing. My students, especially those in ME3425 ‘The Age of Revolt’, also have my gratitude for a decade’s worth of their insights and enthusiasm. The University of St Andrews is truly one of the best places in the world to be a mediaeval historian. A number of librarians and archivists went out of their way for me. The staff at the Archives nationales, the Bibliothèque nationale, and the Archives départementales of the Aisne, the Marne, and the Oise were all very helpful. My particular thanks to Jean-Christophe Dumain at the AD Aisne, to Christèle Potvin at the AD Seine-Maritime, and to Michel Ollion at the Archives nationales for providing particular documents. The staff of the Library of the University of St Andrews were indispensable and very efficient, and those at the Bodeleian also came through in a pinch or two. I appreciate it. My greatest debts of gratitude are owed to my family, including those both near and far. Thank you especially to Jan and Trevor Palmer and to Caroline and David Blackler for taking such good care of my children and my cats. Above all, thank you to James, Adryan, Sophie, and Hayden for your love and support, and for understanding when I disappear into the archives. Coming home is always the best part.

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Contents List of Figures Abbreviations A Note on Names and Spelling A Note on Money Maps Timeline of Events in the Jacquerie and Counter-Jacquerie

Introduction: Telling Stories The Stories in the Sources The Chronicles Judicial Sources: Remissions, Lawsuits, and Accords Local Documents The Stories in This Book

xi xiii xv xvii xix xxi

1 6 7 12 18 20

1. Complaints: The Aftermath of Poitiers Defeat and its Discontents The Triumph of Reform The Great Ordonnance of 1357 The Navarrese Alliance Soldiers and Refugees

23 24 29 33 38 44

2. New Marvels: Turning the World Upside Down Murdering the Marshals Reactions: Paris and Provins The Blockade of Paris The Northern Towns and the Estates of Compiègne The Silence before the Storm

49 49 56 59 65 68

3. An Unheard of Thing: The Massacre at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent Strategic Objectives: Rivers, Roads, and Rocks Communicative Violence Contacts and Communication Provincial Notables and Networks From Saint-Leu-d’Esserent to the Jacquerie

71 73 79 82 88 91

4 All Masters: From Massacre to Movement The Moment of Mobilization Immediate Grievances Justice in an Age of War and Plague Planning Behind the Scenes

96 97 102 106 112

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5. Noisy Terrors: The Violence of the Jacquerie Targets: Les nobles Interpersonal Violence Rape Murder Castles and Houses Objectives I: Valois Loyalists Objectives II: Nobility and Status Pillage, Play, and Performance

119 120 123 125 129 132 135 139 140

6. Captains and Assemblies: The Organization of the Jacquerie Guillaume Calle and his Circle Local Leaders Communications and Logistics Constraint and Conflict

144 144 150 157 164

7. The Non-Nobles: Rebels and their Communities Men and Women, Young and Old Rich and Poor Urban and Rural

169 170 176 181

8. Slaughtered like Pigs: The Battles of Meaux and Mello-Clermont The Road to Meaux Chivalry at the Market The Battle of Mello-Clermont Charles of Navarre and the Jacques

190 191 197 203 206

9. Hatred and Malevolence: The Counter-Jacquerie Early Days: Poix, Senlis, the Marne Valley Champagne and the Southern Parisis Charles of Navarre in the Beauvaisis Far Echoes: Normandy, the Loire, and Beyond

212 213 219 226 234

10. Good Love and Hard Words: The Legacy of Revolt Mercy and its Benefits A Story Takes Shape Subjects’ Stories Making and Breaking Peace

241 244 248 252 259

Conclusion: Forgetting and Remembering the Jacquerie Bibliography Index

267 273 299

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List of Figures 0.1 Map: The full extent of the Jacquerie

xix

0.2 Map: The main theatres of revolt

xx

1.1 A simplified Capetian/Valois/Évreux family tree

25

1.2 Jean II and Charles of Navarre

40

1.3 Map: Military violence, autumn 1357 to spring 1358

43

2.1 The murder of the marshals

55

2.2 Major river castles

64

3.1 Map: The outbreak of the Jacquerie

75

6.1 Jacques carry flags into battle with Navarre

162

7.1 Socio-economic attributes of Jacques

177

7.2 Overlapping socio-economic attributes

179

8.1 Battle for the Marché de Meaux

201

8.2 Decapitation of a Jacquerie captain

206

9.1 The Jacquerie in the Perthois

219

10.1 Total remissions granted over time

251

10.2 Use of the Jacquerie formula in remissions for Jacques

253

10.3 Parlement suits and settlements

258

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Abbreviations 4 Valois:

Chronique des quatre premiers Valois (1327–1393), ed. Siméon Luce, SHF, publications in octavo 109 (Paris, 1862) AD: Archives départementales AHR: American Historical Review AN: Paris, Archives nationales Beaumanoir: Philippe de Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, ed. Amédée Salmon, 2 vols, CTSEEH (Paris, 1899–1900 [repr. 1970–1974 with vol. of commentary by Georges Hubrecht]) BEC: Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes BL: London, British Library BM: Bibliothèque municipale BnF: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Chron. norm.: Chronique normande du XIVe siècle, ed. Auguste and Émile Molinier, SHF 205 (Paris, 1882) Chron. reg.: Chronographia regum francorum, ed. Henri Moranvillé, 3 vols, SHF, publications in octavo 252, 262, 284 (Paris, 1891–1897). All references to vol. 2 unless otherwise specified. CTSEEH: Collections de textes pour servir à l’étude et à l’enseignement de l’histoire d’Avout: Jacques d’Avout, Le meurtre d’Étienne Marcel, 31 juillet 1358 (Paris, 1960) DI: Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire de France EHR: English Historical Review Froissart, Chicago MS: Chicago, Newberry Library MS f.37, 2 vols. Transcribed online: Peter F. Ainsworth and Godfried Croenen (eds), The Online Froissart, version 1.5. Sheffield, 2013 (www.dhi.ac.uk/ onlinefroissart, last accessed 22 November 2020). All references to vol. 1 unless otherwise specified. Froissart, SHF: Jean Froissart, Chroniques de J. Froissart, ed. Siméon Luce et al., 16 vols, SHF 147–48, 154, 159, 164, 169, 180, 188, 237–238, 269, 282, 294, 425, 461, 472, 484 (Paris, 1869–1975). All references to vol. 5 unless otherwise specified. Gallia regia: Gallia regia, ou état des officiers royaux des bailliages et des sénéchaussées de 1328 à 1515, ed. Gustave Dupont-Ferrier, 6 vols (Paris, 1942–1961) GC: Chronique des règnes de Jean II et Charles V, ed. Roland Delachenal, 4 vols in 3, SHF 348, 375, 391 (Paris, 1910–1920). All references to vol. 1 unless otherwise specified.

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xiv

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HL:

HYW: Jean le Bel:

Jean de Venette: JMH: Luce: Ord.:

P&P: Religieux:

RH: RHDFE: Secousse, Recueil:

SHF:

Claude Devic and Jean-Joseph Vaissete, Histoire générale de Languedoc avec des notes et les pièces justificatives, new edn by Auguste Molinier et al., 16 vols (Toulouse, 1872–1904) Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 4 vols to date (Philadelphia and London, 1990–2015) Jean le Bel, Chronique de Jean le Bel, publiée pour la Société de la histoire de France, ed. Jules Viard and Eugène Déprez, 2 vols, SHF 317 and 324 (Paris, 1904–1905). All references to vol. 2 unless otherwise specified. Jean de Venette, Chronique dite de Jean de Venette, ed. Colette Beaune (Paris, 2011) Journal of Medieval History Siméon Luce, Histoire de la Jacquerie: d’ápres des documents inédits, new edn (Paris, 1894–1895) Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race, recueillies par ordre chronologique, ed. Eusèbe de Laurière, Denis-François Secousse et al., 21 vols and supplement (Paris, 1723–1849) Past and Present Chronique de Richard Lescot, religieux de Saint-Denis (1328–1344), suivie de la continuation de cette chronique (1344–1364), ed. Jean Lemoine, SHF 278 (Paris, 1896) Revue historique Revue historique de droit français et étranger Denis-François Secousse (ed.), Recueil de pièces servant de preuves aux Mémoires sur les troubles excités en France par Charles II, dit le Mauvais, roi de Navarre et comte d’Évreux (Paris, 1755) Société de l’histoire de France

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A Note on Names and Spelling I have used modern, standard French spelling for most of the common names used here: thus, Jean not Jehan and Jacques not Jaques, but I have not changed diminutives, such as Jehannot and Jaquemin. I have retained the French spelling of the names of the French and Navarrese royalty. Regarding medieval authors, my practice has varied according to custom. Thus, I speak of Philippe de Beaumanoir as Beaumanoir but Christine de Pisan as Christine. I have followed Anglophone usage in not adding diacritical marks to my own transcriptions from manuscripts in Middle French, but I have retained those in printed sources by French editors. I have added apostrophes according to modern usage in order to improve readability. One particular choice to note is my decision to call King Jean II’s eldest son and heir Charles ‘the Dauphin’. The Dauphiné had only recently become part of the French royal domain, and Jean had been the first French prince to hold it. Charles and others gave precedence to his position as the Duke of Normandy, which was a grander and more venerable title than that of Dauphin. Nevertheless, for most readers, ‘the Dauphin’ is as readily identifiable as the heir to the French crown as ‘the Prince of Wales’ is to that of England. My apologies to anyone whose sensibilities I have offended.

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A Note on Money The money supply was one of the most important political and economic issues facing the people of France in the mid-fourteenth century. It is also one of the most confusing to understand and explain now. For a full explanation, see John Bell Henneman, Royal Taxation in Fourteenth-Century France: The Development of War Financing, 1322–1356 (Princeton, 1971), 331–353. Prices, fines, tax receipts, etc. were often expressed in terms of money of account, livres, sous, and deniers tournois (abbreviated l.t., s.t., d.t.) or livres, sous, deniers parisis (l.p., etc.). One l.t. was worth 4/5th of one l.p. One livre was worth 20 sous. One sou was worth 12 deniers. To give some sense of value, a male labourer might earn as little as 4 d. or as much as 12 s. per day, while the annual revenues of a modest lordship averaged about 200 l. A basic pair of men’s shoes cost 6 d., and a good warhorse might go for upwards of 500 l. The main gold coins in circulation included the mouton (so-called because of its angus dei device), worth around 30 s.t./24 s.p., with the demi-mouton or denier de l’aignel worth half that, and the écu or florin à l’écu worth 16–30 s.p. When King Jean returned to France in 1360 he had minted a new coin, the franc à cheval, socalled because he was free (franc) and the coin showed him on a horse. Silver coins included the gros tournois, worth variously 10–12 d.t. and the double tournois, worth 2 d.t., as well as the petit paris and the petit tournois worth 1 d. each. The denier blanc was worth 8 d.t. until being revalued at 3 d.t. in November 1356. As is obvious from the remarks above, the value of these coins fluctuated frequently over the period covered by this book. The royal mint pocketed the difference between a coin’s bullion content (measured in marcs) and its face value (its cours), a difference called the monnayage. The monnayage could be manipulated through reducing the bullion content of the coin, minting more coins, or decreeing a change in their value. Manipulation of the monnayage was a major financial expedient for the crown in the period of this book but also a major source of political dissension as changes in the value of coins played havoc with prices, consumption, debts, and business. When money is discussed in this book, I have kept the terminology used by the source, which is variously expressed in terms of coins, monies of account, or both. Peter Spufford with Wendy Wilkinson and Sarah Tolley, A Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London, 1986) can be consulted for conversions.

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Figure 0.1 The full extent of the Jacquerie

Maps

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Figure 0.2 The main theatres of revolt

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Timeline of Events in the Jacquerie and Counter-Jacquerie (bold typeface indicates certainty of dating) 28 May – Massacre of nine noblemen at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent 31 May – Feast of Corpus Christi c. 31 May – Execution of Jean Bernier of Montataire at Montataire First week of June – Nobles entreat Charles of Navarre for help at Longueville-sur-Scie. 3 June – Execution of a squire at Verberie c. 5 June – Parisian militia under Pierre Gilles and Pierre les Barres leaves Paris heading to Gonesse and thence to Tremblay and Meaux. c. 7 June – Parisian and Jacques attack on Ermenonville begins. 8 June – Armies face off near Mello and Clermont. 9 June – Assembly of Parisian and Jacquerie troops at Silly-le-Long 10 June – Parisian, Meldois, and Jacquerie troops attack the Marché at Meaux and are defeated. 10 June – The noble army led by Charles of Navarre routes the Jacques between Mello and Clermont; Guillaume Calle and other captains are taken to Clermont and executed soon after. c. 13 June – Defeat of Jacques near Poix by Baudrain de la Heuse’s troops; Guillaume ‘Testard’ de Picquigny is killed 13 June – Nobles coming from Meaux are refused entry to Senlis, attack it and are repulsed. 14 June – Charles of Navarre arrives at Saint-Ouen on the outskirts of Paris. 15 June – Charles of Navarre proclaimed Captain of Paris; Dauphin leaves Sens and begins leading noble repression of the Jacquerie along the Marne. Third week of June – Jacques besiege Plessis-de-Roye; Mahieu de Roye escapes and recruits help from nobles in the Empire. 22 June – Charles of Navarre assembles troops at Gonesse to march to Senlis. 24 June – Feast of John the Baptist; Étienne Marcel orders villagers south of Paris to assemble at Chilly-Mazarin. c. 27 June – Nobles’ second entreaty to Charles of Navarre 28 June – Étienne Marcel writes first letter to the councillors of Ypres 29 June – Dauphin arrives at Charenton where a large army has assembled. First week of July – Defeat of Jacques at Montdidier by Charles of Navarre and nobles 8 July – Meeting between Dauphin and Navarre near Saint-Antoine, seemingly resulting in a peace 11 July – Étienne Marcel writes second letter to Ypres; Compiègne remains a CounterJacquerie headquarters; Navarrese and Parisian troops attack Dauphin’s forces.

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xxii

       -

12 July – Dauphin’s troops cross the Seine to begin attacking villages, including at Vitrysur-Seine. 19–20 July – Truce agreed with Parisians; Dauphin’s host at Charenton breaks up. 22 July – Anglo-Navarrese troops massacre Parisian militiamen at Saint Cloud; further west, ‘Jacques Bonhommes’ attack the house of a squire at Bailly. c. 25 July – The Lord of Portieux attacks Pierre Baudin, who had been attacking a noble’s valet, in Normandy. Late July/early August – Jean Bernier writes to Beauvaisis villages, asking them to come to Senlis to plan a response to the Counter-Jacquerie. 31 July – Death of Étienne Marcel and end of the Parisian revolt 2 August – Dauphin enters Paris. 10 August – Issuance of the general remissions for participation in the Parisian revolt, the Jacquerie, and the Counter-Jacquerie c. 15 August – Anceau la Pippe and his servant kidnap people and seize animals and goods in the village of Acy near Soissons in reprisal for damages to la Pippe’s manor.

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Introduction Telling Stories

At the end of May 1358, as summer approached and people prepared to celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi, thousands of French villagers revolted. In the Île-deFrance north of Paris, Normandy to its west, Picardy and Champagne to its east, and further afield, they attacked the nobility’s castles and manor houses, burning them down and destroying or stealing their contents. They killed noblemen and assaulted their families. According to some reports, they even killed noble children and gang-raped noblewomen, murdering some pregnant ones. On 10 June at the eastern city of Meaux, they allied with urban commoners and troops from Paris, itself in rebellion against the crown, in order to attack a castle on the Marne River that was sheltering nobles, among them the Dauphin’s wife and baby. But there, they were defeated. The castle’s noble garrison chased down those who managed to flee and slaughtered them ‘like pigs’ in the city’s outskirts.¹ At the same moment, 70 kilometres to the north-east, a noble army led by King Charles II of Navarre, himself a great French prince, had captured the rebels’ general and was obliterating their forces in a battle near Clermont-en-Beauvaisis. Bands of enraged nobles, their fear of the peasants mastered and their natural advantage regained, took it in their turn to overrun the countryside, carrying out executions of suspected rebels wherever they found them and burning villages wholesale. The rebels tried to regroup, but July saw their efforts definitively extinguished and the Parisian rebellion crushed. The revolt was soon called ‘the Jacquerie’, a term first attested in 1360 and derived from the sobriquet ‘Jacques Bonhomme’ (James Goodman) borne by its participants.² Along with the Black Death (from 1348) and the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), the Jacquerie is one of the headline events of the ‘calamitous’ fourteenth century. In French and even in English, its name is still used to connote ¹ Jean le Bel, 262. ² ‘Chartre de Jacquerie pour Jehan Heudeman demourant a Dury. Donne a Hedin l’an mil ccclx ou mois de Juillet.’ (AN JJ 88, no. 43, fol. 29v). The contents are not transcribed. The relevant chapter heading in the Grandes chroniques, written in the 1370s, also called the revolt ‘la mauvaise Jaquerie’ (GC, 9, 177). Froissart called the rebels ‘jakes’ used the term: ‘celle jakerie’ (Froissart, SHF, §415, pp. 103–104). The term ‘Jacques’ first appears royal judicial sources in October 1358: ‘avec pluseurs des Jaques de la dite ville et les genz du pais de Meucien’ (AN JJ 86, no. 430, fol. 151r). The chronicler Jean le Bel, writing a month or two earlier, erroneously reported that the rebels’ captain was called ‘Jaques Bonhomme’ (Jean le Bel, 260).

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0001

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   

a violent uprising. At the time, royal documents more usually spoke of it as les effroiz—that is, the ‘noise’ or ‘terrors’—or les commotions, which country people (gens du plat pays) had unleashed against the nobility.³ Echoing these sentiments in more colourful terms, contemporary chroniclers offered their own versions, calling the rebels ‘rabid dogs’ and ‘crueller than Saracens’.⁴ Evoking fear, chaos, and the rural mob’s rage against its social superiors, such language eloquently testifies to the uprising’s emotional effects on its victims, but it does little to elucidate the Jacquerie’s causes or mechanics. Nor does its homogeneity reflect the varieties of individual experience that lay behind and together constituted the rebellion for its participants. The language chosen by elite, literate contemporaries reveals how they understood the revolt, but it also shows us how little they wished to understand it. Modern historians have sometimes done better. The first and until now the only scholarly book devoted to the rebellion, Siméon Luce’s 1859 Histoire de la Jacquerie, placed the revolt in its specific historical context and paid attention to the particular people and places it implicated. Luce highlighted evidence connecting the Jacquerie with the Parisian rebellion led by the merchant Étienne Marcel and argued that he probably orchestrated it for political ends.⁵ A century later, Raymond Cazelles went further, arguing that the Jacques themselves were mostly well-off professionals; that the revolt’s inception had clear military utility to the Parisian rebellion; and that rustics’ cooperation with the Parisians and other urban allies evinced a pioneering social vision, one dominated by the town and the countryside’s economic relationships to the exclusion of the outmoded ‘feudal’ nobility.⁶ Luce’s and Cazelles’s explanations jibe with a slew of recent work on late medieval uprisings that emphasizes their rationality, organization, and political motivations.⁷ Rural–urban cooperation of the type they posited now seems more ³ In other contexts, the chancery used effroiz in the sense of ‘terrors’ or ‘confusion’ of war, e.g. ‘les effroiz des ennemiz estoient sur le pays’ (AN JJ 118, no. 276, fol. 148r). Its etymology is the same as that of the English word ‘affray’. ⁴ Jean le Bel, 255–257; Froissart, SHF, §413, p. 100. ⁵ Luce, 53–55, 93–104. The second edition of this book, published posthumously in 1894 and 1895, slightly revised the text but also included an expanded appendix of edited documents. ⁶ Raymond Cazelles, ‘La Jacquerie fut-elle un mouvement paysan?’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres 122 (1978): 654–666; Raymond Cazelles, Société politique, noblesse et couronne sous Jean le bon et Charles V (Geneva, 1982), 321–329; Raymond Cazelles, Étienne Marcel, champion de l’unité française (Paris, 1984), 296–303. See also David M. Bessen, ‘The Jacquerie: Class war or co-opted rebellion?’, JMH 11 (1985): 43–59, whose arguments on the relationships between the Jacques, Paris, and Charles of Navarre are discussed in Chapter 8. ⁷ Violence et contestation au Moyen Âge: Actes du 114e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris, 1989), Section d’histoire médiévale et de philologie (Paris, 1990); Ghislain Brunel and Serge Brunet (eds), Haro sur le seigneur! Les luttes anti-seigneuriales dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne: Actes des XXIXes Journées internationales d’histoire de l’Abbaye de Flaran, 5 et 6 octobre 2007 (Toulouse, 2009); Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, Lust for liberty: The politics of social revolt in medieval Europe, 1200–1450: Italy, France, and Flanders (Cambridge, MA, 2006), esp. 135–147, 236–242; Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, Vincent Challet, Jan Dumolyn, and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz (eds), La comunidad medieval como esfera pública (Seville, 2014); Jan Dumolyn, Jelle Haemers, Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, and Vincent Challet (eds), The voices of the people in late medieval Europe: Communication and popular politics (Turnhout,

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likely than not, for such partnerships have been documented in revolts ranging from the Flemish Maritime Revolt of 1323–1328 and the English Rising of 1381 to the Comuneros movement in sixteenth-century Spain.⁸ Yet, the tradition of seeing the Jacques Bonhommes as beastly louts and their actions as irrationally vicious is a strong one. In 1879, Jules Flammermont attacked Luce’s argument in an article that described the Jacquerie in terms not that different from those of the chronicles. According to Flammermont, the Jacquerie was a spontaneous ‘explosion’ of instinctive hatreds nourished for centuries by ‘rude peasants, without education or direction, dazed by poverty and drink’, who lacked the basic intellectual capacity for plotting.⁹ This is almost an anti-explanation, one notably at odds with newer scholarship demonstrating the intellectual range and political consciousness of rural people, but it has remained surprisingly central to the scholarship.¹⁰ Although Guy Fourquin and Rodney Hilton viewed the Jacquerie as having some organization and rational features, Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff ’s classic book on late medieval revolts called the Jacquerie ‘as incoherent as it was spontaneous’, an interpretation shared

2014); Patrick Lantschner, The logic of political conflict in medieval cities: Italy and the southern Low Countries, 1370–1440 (Oxford, 2015); Fabrizio Titone (ed.), Disciplined dissent: Strategies of nonconfrontational protest in Europe from the twelfth to the early sixteenth century (Rome, 2016); Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (eds), The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt (Abingdon, 2017); Vincent Challet and Héloïse Hermant (eds), Des mots et des gestes: Le corps et la voix dans l’univers de la révolte (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles), special issue of Histoire, économie & société 38 (2019). ⁸ Rodney Hilton, Bond men made free: Medieval peasant movements and the English rising of 1381 (London, 1973), 214–232; A.F. Butcher, ‘English urban society and the revolt of 1381’ and R.B. Dobson, ‘The risings in York, Beverley, and Scarborough, 1380–1381’ in R.H. Hilton and T.H. Aston (eds), The English rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984), 84–111, 112–142; William H. TeBrake, A plague of insurrection: Popular politics and peasant revolt in Flanders, 1323–1328 (Philadelphia, 1993) esp. Appendix 2; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434 (Cambridge, 1999); Vincent Challet, ‘Le Tuchinat en Toulousain et dans le Rouergue (1381–1393): D’une émeute urbaine à une guérilla rurale?’, Annales du Midi 118 (2006): 513–525; Andrew Prescott, ‘ “Great and horrible rumour”: Shaping the English revolt of 1381’ in Firnhaber-Baker and Schoenaers (eds), Handbook of medieval revolt, 78–79; Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, ‘Popular voices and revolt: Exploring anti-noble uprisings on the eve of the war of the communities of Castile’ in Dumolyn, Haemers, Herrer, and Challet (eds), Voices of the people, 49–61. ⁹ Jules Flammermont, ‘La Jacquerie en Beauvaisis’, RH 9 (1879): 123–143, quotes at 127 and 129. ¹⁰ Bessen, ‘Jacquerie’, 44–46; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (ed. and trans.), Popular protest in late medieval Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders (Manchester, 2004), 149–150. For rural political consciousness, see Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, 1999); Pierre Boglioni, Robert Delort, and Claude Gauvard (eds), Le petit peuple dans l’Occident médiéval: Terminologies, perceptions, réalitiés. Actes du Congrès international tenu à l’Université de Montréal 18–23 octobre 1999 (Paris, 2002); François Menant and Jean-Pierre Jessenne (eds), Les élites rurales dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne: Actes des XXVIIes Journées internationales d’histoire de l’Abbaye de Flaran (Toulouse, 2007); Richard Goddard, John Langdon, and Miriam Müller (eds), Survival and discord in medieval society: Essays in honour of Christopher Dyer (Turnhout, 2010); Vincent Challet and Ian Forrest, ‘The Masses’ in Christopher Fletcher, Jean-Philippe Genet, and John Watts (eds), Government and political life in England and France, c.1300–c.1500 (Cambridge, 2015), 279–316; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Two kinds of freedom: Language and practice in late medieval rural revolts’, Edad media: Revista de historia 21 (2020): 113–152.

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by André Leguai in an influential article.¹¹ Étienne Marcel’s biographer, Jacques d’Avout, also dismissed all the evidence of cooperation, while Hugues Neveux’s book on European peasant revolts simply omits any consideration of the Jacquerie’s urban allies from its discussion of their movement.¹² In royal biographies and histories of the Hundred Years War period, the Jacquerie appears at least as often in the guise of a regrettable episode of ‘undirected fury’ as it does one of ‘social as well as political protest’.¹³ For good historians to have arrived at such different conclusions suggests that those conclusions may not be mutually exclusive. As will be seen, there is considerable evidence to support Luce’s and Cazelle’s arguments about organization, coordination, and objectives, but there is also some evidence that points in other directions. One can have good reasons for privileging some sources over others, such as their circumstances of composition or evident authorial intentions, but the interpretative impasse has not stemmed from such methodological considerations. Rather, all of the Jacquerie’s interpreters on both sides of the Luce/ Flammermont divide have viewed the revolt as a homogenous movement with a unitary purpose and fate. They have understood it as a ‘thing’ to which contemporaries ascribed a single, stable meaning. Yet, the revolt took place over a number of weeks. It was not a single event but a constellation of many events, and it evolved over time. Involving thousands or even tens of thousands of individuals in hundreds of places, it was understood in different ways by its participants, as well as its victims, and those understandings, too, were liable to shift during the revolt, as well as after it. To adopt Flammermont’s explosion metaphor, even if combustible materials are lying around, they have to be carefully assembled with skill and knowledge before being detonated, ideally at a specific time and place in order to cause maximum damage, but people, unlike shrapnel, have some agency as to where the blast takes them or whether it takes them at all, and they might decide to change direction mid-flight, perhaps several times. My purpose in researching this book was to disassemble the Jacquerie and to disaggregate the Jacques and their associates. My purpose in writing it was to put it all back together again as a story about how individuals reacted to a specific set of circumstances, how events ¹¹ Guy Fourquin, The anatomy of popular rebellion in the Middle Ages, Anne Chesters (trans.) (New York, 1978), 24, 78, 134–139; Hilton, Bond men made free, 116–117; Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, The popular revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, A. L. Lytton-Sells (trans.) (London, 1973), 123; André Leguai, ‘Les révoltes rurales dans le royaume de France, du milieu du XIVe siècle à la fin du XVe’, Le Moyen Âge 88 (1982): 49–76. ¹² d’Avout, 186, 195–196; Hugues Neveux, Les révoltes paysannes en Europe, XIVe–XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1997). ¹³ Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols (Paris, 1909–1931), I: 394–416; Jean Favier, La guerre de Cent ans (Paris, 1980), 247–256; HYW, II: 327–336, quote at 328; Georges Minois, La guerre de Cent ans: Naissance de deux nations (Paris, 2008), 156–159. Cf. Françoise Autrand, Charles V le sage (Paris, 1994), 327–330; David Green, The Hundred Years War: A people’s history (New Haven, 2014), 42–47, quote at 44.

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both planned and accidental altered their course, and what and how they chose to remember (or to forget) in its aftermath. The story that I will tell in this book goes roughly like this: the first episode in the Jacquerie, an attack on some noblemen in the Oise River village of Saint-Leud’Esserent on 28 May, was undertaken as a quasi-military response to a specific crisis in royal politics. It was brought about through cooperation between a Parisian faction opposed to the crown and a cohort of rural individuals, much as Luce and Cazelles argued, although there is as much reason to believe that the impetus for this attack came from the country-folk as from the Parisians. The political crisis had originated in the French defeat at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 when the English captured King Jean II. The government of France had devolved upon the adolescent Dauphin Charles (later King Charles V) and to the assemblies of the Three Estates of northern France, which were dominated by the head of the Parisian merchants, Étienne Marcel, and the bishop of Laon, Robert le Coq. These men and their followers favoured a thoroughly reforming governmental agenda. They were friendly with King Charles II of Navarre, who was a potential rival to the Dauphin, and they were critical of the Dauphin’s close counsellors. In early 1358, they fell out with the Dauphin, murdering two of his familiars in front of him, and he decided to expel their party from Paris by force. In April, he occupied castles on the Marne and the Seine rivers, threatening Paris’s supply lines, and he began assembling an army from his noble supporters. The first incident in what became the Jacquerie was intended to counter these efforts by keeping the Oise River traffic flowing, but it is not clear that all the parties involved had meant the incident to spark the massive movement that quickly followed. Rather, large-scale rural revolt seems to have coalesced in its aftermath and to have developed in ways that many of its participants and allies had not foreseen. Primarily targeting noble castles and property, the Jacquerie as it evolved over the next two weeks was nevertheless very useful to the Parisian faction because it diverted the nobles’ attention away from Paris. In early June, the Parisians were able to move from defence to offence, culminating in an unsuccessful joint assault with the Jacques on Meaux. The nobles’ victory at Meaux, combined with the Jacques’ betrayal and subsequent defeat by Charles of Navarre near Clermont, turned the tide against the rebels. The Parisian faction tried to reignite the revolt, especially in the south and the south-west, but, in the north and east where it had begun, nobles were already taking sanguinary vengeance. This ‘Counter-Jacquerie’ gave the movement a more pronounced character of social war than it had at first possessed, and it may have actually served to incite an uprising in Champagne where there was none before. But many rural rebels had understood what they were doing as a social war from the beginning. They opposed their leaders’ efforts to limit and focus their violence, and pressed them to take riskier actions. For their part, the Jacques’ allies in Paris and in provincial cities like Amiens were more cautious and considered themselves to be distinct

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from the country-folk, as well as from the nobility. The conflicting visions among the Jacques and the latent socio-economic and cultural differences between the country-folk and their urban allies were never resolved. Those fissures constituted a major weakness and contributed a great deal to the movement’s ultimate failure. As the last pockets of rural rebellion were defeated in July, the Dauphin and the nobles returned their attention to Paris. The city fell at the end of the month, when Marcel was killed in a riot by unknown hands. After 10 days of spectacular reprisals, the Dauphin turned to reconciliation, granting a general pardon (lettre de rémission) for all the crimes committed during the Parisian rebellion, the Jacquerie, and the Counter-Jacquerie. Individual pardons—dozens and eventually hundreds of them—followed in a flood of bureaucratic mercy into the autumn and well beyond. Requesting these pardons and writing them required imposing a narrative on the summer’s events. (In some cases, a little invention was also required.) Alternative versions nonetheless proliferated, due to both long-running lawsuits for damages and simmering resentments that sometimes boiled over into homicidal rage.

The Stories in the Sources Along with about a dozen chronicle accounts, these narratives created the Jacquerie as an event with meaning for its contemporaries and their successors, including us. There are no documents dating from the time of the revolt itself: no rebel letters or petitions, no communications from authorities, no poetry or songs or pamphlets such as exist for other uprisings like the English Rising of 1381 or the fifteenth-century revolt of the Catalan Remenses.¹⁴ That means we have almost no window onto what people thought was happening at the time. Such things did once exist—the sources mention that the Jacques sometimes sent written messages—but by accident or design they have not survived.¹⁵ All the textual evidence that we possess either pre-dates the revolt or is coloured by its failure, the nobles’ revenge, and the fall of Paris. One of the basic arguments of this book is thus that the sources tell us at least as much about the acts of narrative creation and imagination that were committed in the wake of the revolt as they do about what actually happened out in the countryside in the summer of 1358. Retrospection is a fundamental characteristic of the Jacquerie sources that affects interpretation at every turn. Partiality, in the senses both of incompleteness and of bias, is another. The main corpus of sources for the Jacquerie is made up of two types of documents:

¹⁴ E.g. Steven Justice, Writing and rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994); Paul Freedman, The origins of peasant servitude in medieval Catalonia (Cambridge, 1991). ¹⁵ For literacy in the Jacquerie, see Chapters 6 and 7.

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narrative accounts in over a dozen chronicles written between 1358 and 1410, and judicial or quasi-judicial sources. Most of the judicial sources are letters of remission, about 180 of which were issued to individuals or, less often, to communities implicated in the revolt or its suppression. The chronicles have all been published in scholarly editions. The remissions, on the other hand, are mostly unedited and exist only in registry copy manuscripts that were kept by the royal chancery, now housed at the French Archives nationales. (Luce was familiar with most of these and published a somewhat unrepresentative sample as an appendix to his Histoire de la Jacquerie.) In addition to Jacques or CounterJacques, dozens of members of the Parisian faction and partisans of King Charles of Navarre also received remissions, which help to flesh out the wider political context. While chronicles and remissions form the backbone of the source material for the study of the Jacquerie, I have found a variety of other complementary sources. Many of these are legal documents. The revolt produced several dozen or so records from lawsuits that were heard by the supreme royal court known as the Parlement de Paris. This was France’s court of final appeal, as well as the court with jurisdiction over many nobles and the venue of choice for some elites. Some of these suits have been known for a long time and some of them have been newly identified.¹⁶ All these documents come from civil suits between parties claiming damages inflicted during the Jacquerie or the Counter-Jacquerie.¹⁷ I was also able to exploit the records of quasi-judicial settlements made between parties and known as accords, which Parlement validated and stored.¹⁸ In addition to the strictly legal documents, a range of sources from local archives gives insight into the identities, relationships, and possible motives of many of the people involved in the Jacquerie.

The Chronicles Of the two main genres of sources, historians have often privileged the narrative accounts. Although it is generally recognized that chronicles tell us as much about their authors and audiences as they do about the events they report, in pleasant contrast to the fragmentary, atomized accounts in the judicial records, chronicles

¹⁶ I was able to find legal suits overlooked by Luce through keyword databases of the Parlement registers maintained by the Institut d’Histoire du Droit. See www.ihd.cnrs.fr [last accessed 21 November 2020]. ¹⁷ One of these documents, AN X2a 7, fol. 213r, appears in a register from Parlement’s criminal section, but it is a mandate to a royal sergeant to execute a civil settlement. ¹⁸ On accords, see Chapter 10. My survey of this uncatalogued and probably incomplete series, AN X1c, was extensive but not exhaustive.

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offer a holistic picture.¹⁹ This is especially true of the chronicle that has had the greatest influence on the reception and memory of the Jacquerie, that of Jean Froissart. Froissart took nearly all of his Jacquerie stories from the much less popular chronicle of Jean le Bel, who wrote his chapters on the Jacquerie between autumn 1358 and 1359.²⁰ Froissart’s chronicle exists in over a hundred contemporary manuscripts that can be grouped into four successive redactions, the first three of which include the Jacquerie episodes.²¹ The third redaction, composed between 1395 and 1399 and extant only in a recently relocated manuscript at Chicago’s Newberry Library, contains some stories unknown from other sources.²² The tales in Jean le Bel/Froissart are particularly notable for their chivalric ethos and the window that they thus provide onto noble perceptions of the revolt, but also because Jean le Bel’s chronicle is the earliest narrative account. Of the other chronicles composed in the half century or so after the revolt, the earliest after Jean le Bel’s is a Latin chronicle written in Paris by a Jean de Venette, possibly the same Jean de Venette as a Carmelite monk by whom we have other, very different writing.²³ The Jacquerie section, probably written between 1359 and 1360, may give us the closest thing to a perspective from country-folk, for its author hailed from a Picard village and is certainly the most sympathetic chronicler of the revolt.²⁴ Around the turn of the fifteenth century, this chronicle served as a source for a monk (religieux) of Saint-Denis, the grand seat of French historical writing in the Middle Ages, who abridged some of it in his continuation

¹⁹ Neithard Bulst, ‘ “Jacquerie” und “Peasants’ Revolt” in der französischen und englischen Chronistik’, Vorträge und Forschungen 31 (1987): 791–819. ²⁰ Marie-Thérèse de Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs: Une étude comparée de récits contemporains relatant la Jacquerie de 1358 (Paris, 1979), 27. ²¹ On the chronology of the chronicle’s various redactions, including the Chicago MS or ‘version C’, see Godfried Croenen, ‘La guerre en Normandie au XIVe siècle et le problème de l’évolution textuelle des Chroniques de Jean Froissart’ in Anne Curry and Véronique Gazeau (eds), La guerre en Normandie (XIe–XVe siècle), Colloque international de Cerisy, 30 septembre–3 octobre 2015 (Caen, 2018), 111–147, esp. 141–142. The extant redactions were based upon earlier drafts which do not survive. De Medieros, Jacques et chroniqueurs, 47 suggests the Jacquerie section was initially composed between 1369 and 1376. The newly discovered manuscript of the fourth redaction does not contain the Jacquerie sections (personal communication from Godfried Croenen). ²² Paul Saenger, ‘A lost manuscript of Froissart refound’, Manuscripta 19 (1975): 15–26; Godfried Croenen, ‘A “re-found” manuscript of Froissart revisited: Newberry MS F.37’, French Studies Bulletin 31 (2010): 56–60. A transcription is available from the online Froissart project edited by Peter Ainsworth and Godfried Croenen at www.dhi.ac.uk/onlinefroissart[last accessed 21 November 2020]. ²³ The authorship debates are outlined in Colette Beaune, ‘Introduction’ to Chronique dite de Jean de Venette, Colette Beaune (ed.), (Paris, 2011), 10–16. ²⁴ Richard A. Newhall, ‘Introduction’ to The chronicle of Jean de Venette, Jean Birdsall (trans.), Richard A. Newhall (ed.), (New York, 1953); de Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs, 70–73. This chronicle is sometimes known as the second continuator of Guillaume de Nangis because it was given that title in the nineteenth-century SHF edition, Chronique latine de Guillaume de Nangis de 1113 à 1300, avec les continuations de cette chronique de 1300 à 1368, Hércule Géraud (ed.), 2 vols (Paris, 1843), but this is based on a codicological relationship not a textual one. Géraud used BnF lat. 11729 (formerly Saint-Germain 435) for his edition. Beaune’s edition and Birdsall’s English translation are based on BL (formerly British Museum) Arundel 28, an earlier and better manuscript.

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of a chronicle by Richard Lescot. The religieux, who was much less sympathetic to the rustics than his primary source, also drew upon a vernacular chronicle (or its sources) that continued the Grandes chroniques tradition for the reigns of Jean II and Charles V.²⁵ This chronicle, lavishly illustrated in a manuscript destined for the royal library, was composed at Charles’s direction, the passages on the Jacquerie being completed in the mid-1370s, and both text and decoration articulate a strongly Valois ideological bias.²⁶ Around the same time, an anonymous author wrote a narrative known as the Chronique normande, upon which was based a redaction known as the version non-normande (BnF franç. 5610), later adapted for the Istore et croniques de Flandres; Jean de Noyal’s ‘Miroir historial’, written at Laon and also drawing material from Jean de Venette and other chronicles; and the fifteenth-century Chronographia regum Francorum, composed at Saint-Denis.²⁷ The Chronique des quatre premiers Valois, compiled in the 1390s, possibly in Rouen, is independent of these others. It exists in only one, fifteenthcentury manuscript copy (BnF franç. 10468, fol. 113–190). In addition to these French chronicles, the Jacquerie also appears in several foreign chronicles, including the English Anonimalle Chronicle, Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica, and Matteo Villani’s Cronica.²⁸ These diverse narratives do not always agree, not least because their authors had access to different sources of information: what the royal counsellor saw was not what the Norman soldier experienced, and what the chivalrous Froissart valorized or deplored, the humble monk passed over in silence. None of the writers was himself among the rebels. Only the Norman chronicler may have been an eyewitness to the Jacquerie, but only on the side of its suppressors, possibly while serving in the noble army led by Charles of Navarre. The chronicle of Jean de Venette alone shows any familiarity with the country-folk. None of the ²⁵ de Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs, 93–95. ²⁶ BnF franç. 2813 (formerly Regius 8395 and Dupuy I 471); Anne D. Hedeman, The Royal Image: Illustrations of the Grandes chroniques de France, 1274–1422 (Berkeley, 1991), 95–133; Christiane Raynaud, ‘Le langage de la violence dans les enluminures des Grandes chroniques de la France’, JMH 17 (1991): 191–209. Following an attribution made by Léon Lacabane, the authors of this chronicle is usually identified as Charles’s chancellor, Pierre d’Orgemont, who was victimized by Marcel’s government and the Jacquerie (‘Recherches sur les auteurs des grandes chroniques de France, dites de SaintDenys’, BEC, 1st ser., 2 (1841): 57–74). Roland Delachenal, editor of the chronicle and biographer of Charles V, had doubts about this attribution, as well as about an alternative attribution to the poet Eustache Deschamps (‘Introduction’, GC, III: xii–xx). If d’Orgemont was the author, it is curious that the chronicle’s Jacquerie passages do not mention the attacks on his houses, which are discussed in Chapter 8. ²⁷ de Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs, 132–139, 147–148, who discusses the controversy over whether the version non-normande is the earlier text. On Jean de Noyal, see Auguste and Émile Molinier, ‘Introduction’ to Chron. norm., lviii–lxiv and Auguste Molinier, ‘Fragments inédits de la chronique de Jean de Noyal, abbé de Saint-Vincent de Laon (XIVe siècle)’, Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France 20 (1883): 246–247. ²⁸ The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333 to 1381, from a MS. Written at St Mary’s Abbey, York, V. H. Galbraith (ed.), (Manchester, 1927); Thomas Gray, Scalacronica, 1272–1363, Andy King (ed. and trans.), (Woodbridge, 2005); Matteo Villani, Cronica: Con la continuazione di Filippo Villani, Giuseppe Porta (ed.), 2 vols (Parma, 1995).

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chroniclers had a monopoly on the information. Each one must be read as an incomplete account. Each must also be read as the product of a particular authorial programme that determined how the chronicler told his story. Moral, didactic, political, and aesthetic aims structured their tales, reflecting but also seeking to shape social relations and values. What was ‘true’ or worth telling for a medieval chronicler did not necessarily correspond to what a modern reader would consider ‘the facts’.²⁹ The celebration of aristocratic society and mores that underpins Froissart and Jean le Bel’s stories led them to treat the Jacquerie as a morality play about the failures of noble virtue. The horrifying stories they told about gang-rape and (in Froissart) attempted cannibalism did much to illustrate the perils of aristocratic cowardice and the monstrosity of peasant pride, but they may have been embellished or even invented for dramatic effect, as I discuss in Chapter 5.³⁰ Historians often put more faith in Jean de Venette because of his supposedly peasant background, but, whatever his identity, he intended his chronicle to be a record of wonders and portents connected to the apocalyptic predictions of the friar Jean de Roquetaillade, and he classed the Jacquerie among the nova mirabilia heralding the End.³¹ If the writer of this chronicle is identical to the Jean de Venette who served as prior of the Carmelite convent in Paris, he also owed a debt of patronage to the pro-Navarrese Dowager-Queen Jeanne d’Évreux and her daughter Blanche Capet.³² Although most of the chroniclers suggest that something was out of balance in the countryside’s ‘moral economy’, none of them was sympathetic to the Jacques or even much interested in their point of view. This hostility toward, or incomprehension of, medieval rebels is a welldocumented phenomenon in sources for popular rebellions across Latin Europe. Like other recent historians of medieval revolt, I have tried to work around this problem by being attentive to their inadvertent disclosures about the rebellion and its participants.³³ That is, moments when the texts seem to reveal something ²⁹ Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The writing of history in medieval England (London, 2004), ch. 1. On Jean le Bel, cf. Diana B. Tyson, ‘Jean le Bel: Portrait of a chronicler’, JMH 12 (1986): 315–332 and Nicole Chareyron, Jean le Bel: Le maître de Froissart, grand imagier de la guerre de Cent ans (Brussels, 1996). On Froissart, see J. J. N. Palmer (ed.), Froissart: Historian (Woodbridge, 1981); George T. Diller, Attitudes chevaleresques et réalités politiques chez Froissart (Geneva, 1984); Peter F. Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the fabric of history: Truth, myth, and fiction in the chroniques (Oxford, 1990). ³⁰ See also de Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs, 32–36, 48–49, 63–64. ³¹ Newhall, ‘Introduction’, 9–10. Quote at Jean de Venette, 162. Jean le Bel was interested in the same prophecies as Jean de Venette, but considered the Battle of Poitiers and the ravages of the Free Companies to be their manifestation (Jean le Bel, 273–275). ³² Raymond Cazelles, ‘Le parti navarrais jusqu’à la mort d’Étienne Marcel’, Bulletin philologique et historique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (jusqu’à 1610), année 1960 (Paris, 1961): 860; Anne-Hélène Allirot, ‘L’entourage et l’Hôtel de Jeanne d’Évreux, reine de France (1324–1371)’, Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 116 (2009): 169–180. For Blanche, see Chapter 2. ³³ Literary scholars working on the 1381 English Rising have led the way: Derek Pearsall, ‘Interpretative models for the Peasants’ Revolt’ in Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen Damico (eds), Hermeneutics and medieval culture (Albany, 1989), 63–70; Paul Strohm, ‘ “A revelle!”: Chronicle evidence and the rebel voice’ in Hochon’s arrow: The social imagination of fourteenth-century texts (Princeton, 1992), 33–56; Justice, Writing and rebellion.

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unintentionally. One such instance is Jean le Bel’s confused addendum to his account of the Jacquerie, in which he meditated on the seemingly inexplicable origins of the revolt. Over the course of a brief passage, the chronicle moves from the possibility of outside help, to the response of the Lord of Coucy, to the Jacques’ captain, whom it erroneously calls Jaques Bonhomme, this man’s possible ties to Robert le Coq, and the strained relationship between Coucy and le Coq. Jean le Bel mused: One can hardly believe that such people would have dared to undertake such devilry without the help of some others, especially in the kingdom of France. In the same manner [as nobles discussed in the previous passage], the Lord of Coucy summoned people from wherever he could get them; thus he attacked his neighbours and destroyed them, hanging and having them killed in such a horrible way as it would be terrible to remember; and these bad people had a captain called Jacques Bonhomme, who was a real hick/terrible person (parfait vilain) and who tried to claim that the bishop of Laon had urged him to do this, for he was one of his men. The Lord of Coucy also did not like that bishop.³⁴

Here, for a moment, we see behind the neat narrative to its messy details. When Froissart retold this story some decades later, he smoothed out the wrinkles that Jean le Bel, writing only months after the revolt, was not sure how to straighten. Except for briefly mentioning Jake Bonhomme and the Lord of Coucy in other parts of his narrative, Froissart completely omitted this passage. He also passed over speculations found earlier in his source text about the possible role of tax collectors, Robert le Coq, Étienne Marcel, and even Charles of Navarre in inciting the uprising.³⁵ Froissart’s narrative neatening of Jean le Bel’s rough edges throws the process of composition into relief: Jean le Bel told what he knew about the Jacquerie, but it is clear that he did not know all he thought there might be to tell about it. Later, when Froissart came to write his more artful tale of vicious peasants, distressed damsels, and dashing knights, these logistical and political considerations seemed less important to the story that he wanted to tell. How and why the chroniclers told a story, or did not tell a story, often tells us as much as the story itself.

³⁴ Jean le Bel, 259–260. The passage is smoothed out in Jean le Bel, The true chronicles of Jean le Bel, 1290–1360, Nigel Bryant (trans.), (Woodbridge, 2011), 237. ³⁵ Jean le Bel, 258; Gerald Nachtwey, ‘Scapegoats and conspirators in the chronicles of Jean Froissart and Jean le Bel’, Fifteenth-Century Studies 36 (2011): 103–125; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The eponymous Jacquerie: Making revolt mean some things’ in Firnhaber-Baker and Schoenaers (eds), Handbook of medieval revolt, 59–60; see Chapter 3.

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Judicial Sources: Remissions, Lawsuits, and Accords Story-telling (or not-telling) was also a process that shaped the information available in the judicial sources. It is true that the pardons, lawsuits, and accords are not stories in the same sense that the chronicles are. They are not structured as continuous narratives, and they were composed for quite different purposes, including discovery of what might be considered ‘the facts’, a process that Chapter 10 discusses in depth. One might be tempted to trust such sources more, despite (or even because of) the fact that they are less entertaining and more labour intensive than chronicles. Produced for individuals and bearing on their actual situation and experience, they offer different opportunities for investigation and discovery, and a sense of getting closer to real people. They nevertheless pose problems of partialness and partiality that are at least as serious as those presented by the chronicles. Like the chronicles, the judicial texts required creating a storyline for an inchoate and incomplete jumble of experiences and information. A messy collection of news, rumours, fears, and lies had to be moulded into a story that served both men (and some women) in need of justice or mercy and a crown in search of authority and reconciliation. Just as Froissart had to decide what he believed and what served the purposes of his story, when the Dauphin extended his pardon to the rebels and their persecutors after his return to Paris, he and his bureaucrats had to decide what it was, exactly, that was to be forgiven or punished, and what it was, exactly, that had happened. The judicial sources do not provide all the pieces of the puzzle, and the information that they do offer has been intensively managed and manipulated by a variety of ‘authors’, each with their own agenda. These considerations are particularly acute for the letters of remission, which make up the bulk of the judicial sources.³⁶ Issued upon the recipient’s humble supplication to the crown, remissions are made up of not only the grant of pardon, but also a narrative section of varying length that explained what the recipient had done to need pardon. In over 40 per cent of the Jacquerie remissions, this narrative portion simply repeats a standard formula:

³⁶ See Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the archive: Pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France (Stanford, 1987); Claude Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’: Crime, état et société en France à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols (Paris, 1991); Peter Arnade and Walter Prevenier, Honor, vengeance, and social trouble: Pardon letters in the Burgundian Low Countries (Ithaca, 2015). On the pardoning procedure, see Ord., III: 219–232, art. 11–13, and 385–89, art. 21; Yves-Bernard Brissaud, ‘Le droit de grâce à la fin du Moyen-Âge (XIVe–XVe siècles): Contribution à l’étude de la restauration de la souveraineté monarchique’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Université de Poitiers, Faculté de droit et des sciences sociales (Poitiers, 1971); Louis de Carbonnières, ‘Les lettres de rémission entre Parlement de Paris et chancellerie royale dans la seconde moitié du XIVe siècle’, RHDFE 79 (2001): 179–195.

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N. was with many others of the surrounding countryside in the noisy terrors (effrois) that were recently committed by the country-folk against the nobles of the kingdom for tearing down fortresses in many places, destroying their belongings, and setting fires, and on account of this, some of these nobles could bear malevolence and hate toward N. and hurt him in body or goods . . .³⁷

This formula is instructive in its own right as evidence for how the crown standardized its account of the revolt, its participants, their opponents, and the Dauphin’s role in reconciling them, as I discuss in Chapter 10.³⁸ The remissions that do not employ this formula are often far richer in detail, offering longer, individual accounts of their recipients’ deeds, sometimes even ascribing motivations or attempting explanations. For example, one issued to Arnoul Guenelon, who served as a village captain in the Jacquerie, explains that he: agreed under fear of death and of losing all his houses and goods to be captain of Catenoy and to ride and accompany its inhabitants for several days in the company of Guillaume Calle, who had been chosen Captain of the people and commune of the Beauvaisis, during which time a few ‘disorderlies’ of the company killed some people, did some pillaging, set some houses on fire, and committed many other crimes, while Arnoul was with the company but not at all in agreement with these things in his heart or his will and would gladly have impeded all their wickedness if he had dared. And when they returned from the castle of Ermenonville, he left their company and went to Senlis, where he has since comported himself well and honestly, as he says, in the defence of the town against the enemies of the realm . . .³⁹

³⁷ ‘ait este avec pluseurs autres du pais d’environ aus effrois qui derrainement & nagaires ont este faiz par les genz du plat pais contre les nobles du dit Royaume a abatre en pluseurs lieux forteresses disciper (sic) leurs biens & bouter feux Et pour ce que aucuns des diz nobles pourroient avoir malivolence & haine aus dessusdit . . . pour occasion des choses dessusdites et le grever en corps & en biens’ (This example from AN JJ 86, no. 222, fol. 73r). ³⁸ See also Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The heart of rebellion: Law, language, and emotion after the French revolts of 1356–58’ in Jesús Ángel Solórzano Telechea, Jelle Haemers, and Roman Czaja (eds), Exclusión y disciplina social en la ciudad medieval europea (Logroño, 2018), 281–296. ³⁹ ‘par la force & contrainte de feu Guillaume Calle nagaires esleu Capitaine du pueple & commun de Beauvaisiz . . . Arnoul Guenelon de Castenoy pour paour de mourir & de perdre toutes ses maisons & autres biens se feust consentu d’estre Capitaine de la dite ville de Castenoy et de chevauchier & aler avecques les habitanz d’icelle par aucunes Journees en la compaignie des diz Guillaume Calle & de ses adherens ou quel temps par aucuns desordenez de la dite compaignie furent pluseurs personnes mises a mort pluseurs pillages arsines de maisons et pluseurs autres maux faiz lui estanz en la dite compagnie sanz ce que ycelui Arnoul en feust oncques consentans en cuer ny en volente mais eust volentiers empesche toute leur male voulente se il eust ose Et au Retourner qu’il firent du chastel d’Ermenonville s’en departi et s’en ala hors de leur compaignie mettre en la ville de Senliz ou il s’est depuis bien portez & loyaulment si comme il dit a la defense d’icelle contre les ennemis du Royaume de France’ (AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r). Luce referred to this man as Arnoul Génelon, but there seems no justification for that orthography.

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Another remission, for one Pierre le Debonnaire, recounts his experience at one of the big assemblies of villagers that characterized the revolt: Around the feast of Jean the Baptist (24 June) two years ago, at the time of the commotion and assembly between the country-folk on one hand and the nobles on the other, Pierre le Debonnaire and Jean le Debonnaire, his brother, [who were] nephews and family members of Jean des Murs, their uncle, went to this assembly on account of youthful folly, without the permission or knowledge of their uncle, and so as soon as he found out about it, out of good and true love for them, their uncle went to find them at a commotion or assembly taking place in the village of Goyencourt. In that village, this uncle took Pierre by the hand and led him far away from the said assembly. And a lot of fellows (compaignons) then at the assembly, shouted and cried to Jean des Murs, saying ‘Jean, come to your nephew, who is being beaten up!’ At this shout, Jean des Murs came [back] and Pierre returned with him, and took his nephew [Jean le Debonnaire] by the hand and tried to pull him out of the crowd . . . Michel Wastel, accompanied by many other accomplices, hit Jean des Murs in the head with a cudgel called ‘Cormiel’ (sweetheart) so hard that a lot of blood came out, which a lot of people saw, but Pierre le Debonnaire, induced by good and true love in avenging his uncle, with hot anger (chaude melee), and, indeed, in self-defence and repelling force with force, fearing that he and his uncle might die and wishing to avoid this with all his power, hit Michel with a small club (macelotte) in such a way that Michel’s death followed pretty soon afterward⁴⁰

Such stories have obvious appeal to a historian trying to find out ‘what happened’: the role of captain, the existence, name and title of a greater captain, the description of the crowded assembly, its violent, emotional character and appeal to hotheaded young men, the relative wealth of Arnoul, who had more than one house, the inference that some Jacques rode horses, the kinds of weapons they had on ⁴⁰ ‘environ la saint Jehan baptiste derrein passe ot ii ans ou temps que la commotion & assemblee estoit entre les genz du plat pays d’une part et les nobles d’autre part ala quelle commotion ou assemblee le dit Pierre le Debonnaire & Jehan le Debonnaire son frere neveuz & amis de char [de] Jehan des Murs leur oncle alerent par leur Jeunece senz le congie ou sceu de leur dit oncle et pour ce leur dit oncle meu de vraye & bonne amour vers eulz sitost qu’il vint a sa cognoissance les ala querre en une commotion ou assemblee qui lors estoit en la ville de Goiencourt a la quelle ville ycelluy oncle prist par la main le dit Pierre & le mena bien long de la dite assemblee. Et pluseurs compaignons lors estans a la dite assemblee hucherent & appellerent le dit Jehan des Murs en disant ‘Jehan venez a vestre neveu que l’en bat!’ Au quel appel ycelluy Jehan des Murs ala et le dit Pierre retourna avecques luy et prist son nepveu par la main & le voult tirer hors de la presse & assemblee ou il estoit et en le tirant ainsi Michiel Wastel acompaigne de pluseurs autres complices fery d’un baston appelle Cormiel le dit Jehan des Murs en la teste et telement que sanc en yssi grandement et que pluseurs genz le virent, toutevoies le dit Pierre le Debonnaire meu de bonne & vraie amour en Revenchant son dit oncle de chaude melee et luy mesme defendant et Reppellant force par force doubtans le peril de la mort de son dit oncle & de luy et le voulans eschiver a son pouvoir, fery le dit Michiel d’une macellote par tele maniere que mort s’en ensuy assez tost apres en la personne dudit Michel’ (AN JJ 88, no. 89, fol. 56v–57r).

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hand, the mention of particular places, and so on. But remissions cannot be simply mined for ‘the facts’, as work by Natalie Zemon Davis, Claude Gauvard, and others has made amply clear.⁴¹ Social conventions, as well as narrative and generic ones, shaped the pardon tales’ stories. The family relationship and the ‘good and true love’ that Jean des Murs had for his nephews covers over any other reason he might have gone to Goyencourt, and the nephews’ own presence there is excused by their youth, a conventional source of medieval imprudence, again eliding any other motives. Pardon-tale tellers sought to incite sympathy and deflect blame— for example, by reporting the mortal fear that had kept Arnoul Guenelon from following the better intentions of his heart—and it is well to remember that the alternative to remission was usually execution or impoverishment. For all that, remission stories were not necessarily untrue. Indeed, some reliability is assured because remissions were investigated and overly mendacious ones could be challenged and overturned.⁴² The importance of this subsequent investigation is demonstrated by the hesitancy that two noblemen named Gilot and Jean Dudelange expressed about a remission granted to them for killing one Jean ‘called the Golden’ (dit d’oré). The only witnesses to their claim that the latter had insulted them and threatened them with an axe were unfortunately either dead or had fled, so they had not tried to have the letter verified nor dared to use it (n’ont encores verifie le contenu en nos dites lettres & ne s’en sont osez aidier). Rather than risk it, they decided to go through the expense and trouble of procuring a second remission confirming the first and affirming its validity ‘regardless of words or axe’.⁴³ Problems of partiality nevertheless remain. From Guenelon’s story, for example, we might never guess that Ermenonville was the site of an important siege against one of the Dauphin’s counsellor’s castles or that Senlis was the Jacques’ most loyal urban ally. How the Debonnaire brothers came to know about the Goyencourt assembly, and why that assembly was being held, play no part in the story. These are omissions by design, not accident. We know from other sources that the Jacques’ leaders sent messengers to call villagers to central assemblies where they received their marching orders from higher-ups, including from Étienne Marcel himself. Some such assemblies were only attended by those Jacques with leadership responsibilities, a role that would make the Debonnaire brothers especially culpable.⁴⁴ There were good reasons to tell the truth, but maybe not the whole truth. ⁴¹ Davis, Fiction in the archive; Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’. ⁴² de Carbonnières, ‘lettres de rémission’. A Jacquerie–related example challenging a remission at AN X1a 18, fol. 63. The record of testimony from such an investigation at the local level for a remission associated with the Tuchinat revolt in southern France is published in Marcellin Boudet, La jacquerie des Tuchins (1363–1384) (Paris, 1895), no. viii (mis-numbered vi), pp. 134–144. ⁴³ AN JJ 102, no. 96, fol. 35; original letter at AN JJ 100, no. 683, fol. 202r. This altercation and the legal procedures surrounding it are discussed in Chapter 10. ⁴⁴ On these assemblies, see Chapter 6.

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By contrast, the records from Parlement cases often give us two sides of the story. While for this period we do not have the transcriptions of testimony that are preserved for lawsuits from later decades, the arguments made are epitomized in the decisions Parlement handed down. Sometimes this was done at length, as in the extensive and competing descriptions of what happened at Pierre d’Orgemont’s houses in Gonesse.⁴⁵ Contradictory claims pose their own problems, but it is also important to remember that the stories in lawsuits were shaped by what the court thought was relevant and the diplomatic form into which its clerks had to fit the material. The accords made between parties are much less formal and do not even have a uniform diplomatic structure. This looseness can lend itself to revelation, as in the long tale that opens an agreement made between the Lord of Vez and his subjects, but most accords are too short to reveal much.⁴⁶ We often get considerably less detail—perhaps only a brief mention of the matter requiring settlement—than in the lawsuit records. Less visible, but possibly even more important than the self-interest and generic conventions that constrain the stories in the documents we possess, are the social and procedural factors that limit the kinds and numbers of these documents. It is impossible to measure the actual effect of these kinds of factors, but they may be profound. The social and economic cost of justice in late medieval France means that these sources predominantly concern those able to bear it. Because obtaining a remission cost money and required some legal knowledge, only the relatively well off and reasonably sophisticated were usually able to procure one.⁴⁷ The same sorts of constraints applied to fighting a lawsuit. Those too poor to be worth pursuing for damages might not appear, and a prohibition in the general remission forbidding criminal prosecution against Jacques and Counter-Jacques meant that civil complaints could not be jointly prosecuted with a criminal case. This removed an avenue that allowed claimants to pursue their causes at crown expense.⁴⁸ That men—they were almost exclusively men, as I discuss in Chapter 7—who were comfortable and cosmopolitan enough to navigate royal justice were implicated in the Jacquerie gives us valuable insight into the uprising’s constituency and appeal, but the poor, the ill-connected, and the female may all be significantly under-represented.⁴⁹

⁴⁵ AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320, discussed in Chapter 8. ⁴⁶ AN X1c 32, no. 31. ⁴⁷ The average price of a lettre de rémission was 32 s. (Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’, I: 68), equal to nearly 100 days of an unskilled male labourer’s 4 d. average daily wage. Associated costs, such as the notary’s fee and the (optional) chancery registration might push the total up considerably (Brissaud, ‘droit de grâce’, 246). ⁴⁸ Yvonne Bongert, ‘Rétribution et réparation dans l’ancien droit français’, Mémoires de la Société pour l’histoire du droit et des institutions des anciens pays bourguignons, comtois et romands 45 (1988): 64–69. ⁴⁹ See also Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The social constituency of the Jacquerie revolt of 1358’, Speculum 95 (2020): 689–715.

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Another procedural factor shaping the evidence is France’s jurisdictional fragmentation. Those who lived under direct royal jurisdiction would have come before the provincial courts of the regional bailli in the first instance (or the royal prévôt if they lived in an unincorporated city), whose fourteenth-century records have mostly disappeared.⁵⁰ But most of those involved in the Jacquerie were not under the crown’s immediate jurisdiction. Rather, they were direct subjects of a local lord, usually a noble person or a clerical institution, such as an abbey, canonry, or episcopal see. These people came before their lord’s court in the first instance and would normally have had access to royal courts only upon a successful appeal.⁵¹ There may have been as many as a thousand seigneurial courts in late medieval northern France, whose complicated jurisdictions were ‘entangled and overlapping’ (entermellees et enclavees les unes dedens les autres), as the lawyer Philippe de Beaumanoir remarked, although whatever records they were keeping have mostly vanished.⁵² While the general remission forbade criminal prosecution and reserved all civil cases to the crown, some seigneurial prosecutions did take place, as discussed in Chapter 10. The dangers and opportunities that multiple jurisdictions might present is particularly well illustrated by the case of one Jean de Chauny: imprisoned, criminally prosecuted, and heavily fined by the lord of Berzy-le-Sec, he appealed to the crown on the basis that the general remission had forbidden such prosecutions and, anyway, he was a justiciable of the canons of Soissons.⁵³ We know about Jean’s case, and others like it, because the defendants successfully appealed to Parlement and thus appear in its registers. There were likely many cases in which the defendants were too poor, unsophisticated, or short-lived to have appealed successfully, or whose appeals were denied, especially because appeals for capital cases were almost always deemed inadmissible.⁵⁴ Some seigneurial subjects did seek a royal pardon, with the right to remit also extended to their lord or lords (concedentes . . . ut similem gratiam facere valeant et faciant) but, again, we have no way of knowing how many did not.⁵⁵ Seigneurial jurisdiction may, for instance, explain why we have so few records pertaining to inhabitants of the countryside around Beauvais, despite the revolt’s known concentration in that area, or in the counties of Valois, Clermont, and Montmorency. These areas were outside direct royal jurisdiction and filled with lesser lords holding varying ⁵⁰ Bernard Guenée, Tribunaux et gens de justice dans le bailliage de Senlis à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1380—vers 1550) (Paris, 1963), 19–21. ⁵¹ Ferdinand Lot and Robert Fawtier, Histoire des institutions françaises au Moyen Âge, 3 vols (Paris, 1957–1962), II: 153–156; Guenée, Tribunaux, 64–67. ⁵² Beaumanoir, cap. X, LVIII, vol. I: 146–152, vol. II: 340–353, quote at cap. LVIII, §1653, vol. II: 345. ⁵³ AN X1a 17, fol. 272v–74. ⁵⁴ Louis de Carbonnières, La procédure devant la chambre criminelle du Parlement de Paris au XIVe siècle (Paris, 2004), 60–64 and see Beaumanoir, cap. X, §295, vol. I: 146–147. ⁵⁵ Quote taken from AN JJ 90, no. 82, fol. 40v. See also Chapter 10, n. 34.

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degrees of justice over their subjects.⁵⁶ In the case of Montmorency, the count had remitted all his subjects who had been involved in the revolt.⁵⁷ Who they were and what exactly they may have done are unknown.

Local Documents I have been able to round out the picture of the rebellion and the rebels given by the chronicles and royal judicial sources with documents drawn from France’s provincial archives, particularly those of the Archives départmentales de l’Oise in Beauvais, de la Marne in Châlons-en-Champagne, and de l’Aisne in Laon, as well as the fonds Picardie at the Bibliothèque nationale and the Collection Bucquetaux-Cousteaux at Beauvais. Some municipal records for the cities of Laon and Senlis are still extant, although for Senlis they begin only in 1383. Whether by chance or design, some significant losses took place around the time of the Jacquerie. The cartulary of Laon’s cathedral chapter, for example, skips from 1351 to 1370.⁵⁸ This is not the fault of the revolt because, unlike their later English counterparts, the Jacques did not target documents. Likely, this warfilled period of history was simply not kind to parchment. There are only a very few local sources that bear directly on the Jacquerie’s events, but many more that reveal those involved in more quotidian contexts. The rebel leader Arnoul Guenelon, for example, can be found attending municipal assemblies in Senlis alongside a number of men with whom he had attacked Ermenonville a quarter century before.⁵⁹ Lay seigneurial documents are scarce on the ground, but records from clerical sources, especially monastic ones, are overwhelmingly ample. Much of this material has not been sufficiently catalogued, if catalogued at all.⁶⁰ There can be no question of exhaustively examining these records, but with patience it is possible to find Jacques and their opponents in them, especially in land transactions, rent and tithe lists, and lawsuits. From local documents, information emerges about Jacques’ and Jacques’ enemies’ property, family relationships, social networks, and sometime even a little bit about their personality. In 1398, we once more find Arnoul Guenelon in Senlis: now 70, he is ‘a frail, old man of great age’, donating the vineyard he had bought with his wife Geneviève to the monks of Saint-Maurice in exchange for ⁵⁶ For the bishop of Beauvais’s temporal jurisdiction, see Chapter 7. ⁵⁷ ‘toutes ycelles males facons le seigneur de Montmorency . . . a pardonnee a lui et a touz autres qui en sa terre ont este aus diz faiz’ (AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256, which misprints ‘feux’ for ‘faiz’). ⁵⁸ Laon, AD Aisne G 1850. ⁵⁹ Beauvais, AD Oise Edt 1 BB 1. ⁶⁰ There are over 12,000 cotes (call numbers or shelfmarks) in series H (regular clergy) at the AD Oise, each of which contains anywhere from a few to several hundred individual documents. The two volume inventaire sommaire completed at the end of the nineteenth century covers less than half of the cotes and often does not mention most of the documents under each cote.

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their caretaking while he lived and for their masses after he died.⁶¹ Sometimes, rebels appear among the petty officials under whose authority such acts were issued. For instance, the Jacques’ lieutenant Germain de Réveillon can be found in 1350 serving as the sworn clerk (tabellion juré) of Pont-Sainte-Maxence, a town in which he also acted on behalf of the rebellion.⁶² Fremin de Berne, recipient of a formulaic remission for Jacquerie at Beaumont-sur-Oise, later served as the warden of the seal for the same village’s provost.⁶³ Identifying the right people and understanding their relationships presents some challenges beyond the sheer mass of material. Arnoul de Guenelon, Germain de Réveillon, and Fremin de Berne all had distinctive names and the documents in which they appear offer further information corroborating their identities, but not every case is as clear-cut as these.⁶⁴ For example, the rebel named Jean Bernier, whose adventures in the Jacquerie are discussed in Chapter 4 is demonstrably not the same man as the royal counsellor Jean Bernier, for the latter already held the high office of Maître des Requêtes in August 1358, when Jean Bernier the Jacques was leading Noyon’s city guard.⁶⁵ Tracing family adds another layer of difficulty. Fremin de Berne worked for the same authority as one Simon de Berne, the latter also serving as a captain of the Jacques in that area, but their surname ‘from Berne’, a nearby village, may indicate a relationship of past (and perhaps distant) proximity rather than a familial one.⁶⁶ ⁶¹ ‘homme faible ancient et de grant aage par quoy desormais il ne peut traveiller souffrir ne endurer aucune peine de corps ne a ses besoignes entendre en maniere que aucun prouffit lui en peust venir’ (AD Oise H 841). ⁶² AD Oise H 2439, no. 4; AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262. ⁶³ AD Oise Hs 667; AN JJ 90, no. 162, fol. 92. ⁶⁴ See the critical cautions of Zvi Razi, ‘The Toronto School’s reconstitution of medieval peasant society: A critical view’, P&P 85 (1979): 142–145 apropos of the prosopography of English medieval villages. For naming and proposopgraphy in France, see Karl Michaëlsson, Études sur les noms de personne français d’après les rôles de taille parisiens (rôles de 1292, 1296–1300, 1313), 2 vols (Uppsala, 1927–1936) I: 118–142; Karl Michaëlsson, ‘Les noms d’origine dans le rôle de la taille parisien de 1313’, Symbolae Philologicae Gotoburgenses 56 (1950): 355–400; Marie-Thérèse Morlet, Étude d’anthroponymie picarde: Les noms de personne en Haute Picardie aux XIIIe, XIVe, XVe siècle (Amiens, 1967), 135–137; Albert Dauzat, Les noms de famille de France: Traité d’anthroponymie française, 3rd edn by Marie-Thérèse Morlet (Paris, 1977), 45–47, 163–175; Caroline Bourlet, ‘L’anthroponymie à Paris à la fin du XIIIème siècle d’après les rôles de la taille du règne de Philippe le bel’ in Monique Bourin and Pascal Chareille (eds), Persistances du nom unique, vol. 2.2 of Samuel Leturcq (ed.), Genèse médiévale de l’anthroponymie moderne, 6 vols in 8 (Tours, 1992), 9–44; François Menant, ‘L’anthroponymie du monde rural’ in Monique Bourin, Jean-Marie Martin, and François Menant (eds), L’Anthroponymie: Document de l’histoire sociale des mondes méditerraneéns médiévaux. Actes du colloque international organisé par l’École française de Rome avec le concours du GDR 955 du C.N.R.S. ‘Genèse médiévale de l’anthroponymie moderne’ (Rome, 6–8 octobre 1994) (Rome, 1996), 349–363; Patrice Beck, ‘Personal naming among the rural populations in northern France at the end of the Middle Ages’ in George T. Beech, Monique Bourin, and Pascal Chareille (eds), Personal names studies of medieval Europe: Social identity and familial structures (Kalamazoo, 2002), 143–156. For the thirteenth-century Oise, the names and surnames of serfs are discussed in Louis Carolus-Barré, ‘L’affranchissement des serfs de la châtellenie de Pierrefonds par Blanche de Castille (v. 1252) et sa confirmation par Saint Louis (septembre 1255)’ in Violence et contestation, 66–69. ⁶⁵ See further discussion and Chapter 4, n. 96. ⁶⁶ AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256.

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His given name ‘Fremin’, by contrast, is typical of the region around Amiens, rather distant from the Oise banks. The surname Calle (or Cale), borne by the Jacques’ general captain Guillaume Calle, was quite uncommon, as it remains in France today. It seems certain that an Isabelle ‘widow of Guillaume Calle’ who sued in 1361 for return of her dowry, given to a favourite of the count of Clermont, was his wife.⁶⁷ But, without corroborative information, we cannot be sure that a Thibaut Cale, who fought against the Anglo-Navarrese in 1359, or a Guérin Calle, who leased some farmland in 1369, were his relatives, let alone that William and John Calle, archers in the fifteenth-century English army and active in Normandy, were his descendants.⁶⁸ The new information gleaned from these sources sometimes raises more questions than it answers.

The Stories in This Book The stories that I tell in this book are thus constructed out of a mass of incomplete and unruly evidence. Like crown’s judges and the chroniclers, I have had to determine what had happened and what it meant from sources that could not, or did not want to, tell me everything I wanted to know. Unlike them, I have access to mapping and relational database software that facilitates the collection and analysis of a relatively large amount of geographical and prosopographical detail.⁶⁹ This made possible the visualization, organization, and retrieval of information required to navigate a very complex event that occurred in many places over an extended period of time. While textual analysis is the bedrock of this book, I have set that analysis within the context of a larger picture aggregated from less textually-bound information. Pictures are worth a thousand words, and sometimes numbers tell a story clearer than, or different from, the texts themselves. The relationship between the analysis of collective data and the close reading of individual texts is necessarily a complementary one. Neither approach trumps the other. Every point on a map or entry in a database represents multiple interpretive decisions made through close reading. It is also imperative to remember that the collective picture drawn from the aggregated stories is not always a better guide to events than an individual story. Given that the sources are mendacious, generic, stereotyped, and incomplete, to ignore minority reports would be to miss some of

⁶⁷ AN X1c 13b, no. 272, 274. Calle’s name and identity are discussed in Chapter 6. ⁶⁸ AN JJ 90, no. 549, fol. 272v–73r; AD Oise H 672. Both Thibaut and Guérin were located near Pontoise. Archers: Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry, Andy King, David Simpkin, Adam Chapman, and Aleksandr Lobanov, ‘The soldier in later medieval England online database’ (Reading and Southampton, 2006–2016) at www.medievalsoldier.org [last accessed 21 November 2020]. ⁶⁹ An open-access version of the map that I created for this project can be found at http://worldmap. harvard.edu/maps/Jacquerie_1358 [accessed 21 November 2020].

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the most valuable information available, although, as I discuss in Chapter 10, these, too, have their pitfalls. Moreover, and as I will stress again and again throughout this book, the Jacquerie was a collective event made up of individual experiences that changed over time. What the Picard coq du village did was not what the Norman carter saw or the champenois squire suffered. How someone understood what was happening on 28 May 1358 might have been very different from how she thought about it three weeks later or in 1372. I have already emphasized that the sources for the Jacquerie were all written after the revolt. It is also important to keep in mind that the revolt itself took place over a six-week period and went on considerably longer in some parts of the kingdom. There was plenty of time for interpretations, motivations, and loyalties to shift. What the Jacquerie meant for contemporaries was fluid, depending on who or where they were, what they knew or thought had already happened, and what they hoped or feared might happen in the future. In writing this book, I have tried to retain some of that fluidity, leaving open questions to which the sources do not provide definite answers and allowing contradictory evidence to point interpretation in different directions. The book’s largely chronological structure is intended to facilitate the understanding of ‘the revolt’ as a process, which unfolded over time in not-always predictable ways, as well as ‘a thing’ to which observers later ascribed meaning. The nature of the evidence and of the revolt itself nevertheless makes isolating chronological change during the revolt itself challenging. The ex post facto nature of the evidence means that we cannot directly observe shifts of intention or interpretation during the revolt. Trying to make inferences about chronological development on evidence such as targets attacked, spatial dispersion, communication with allies, and so on is hampered by the fact that almost none of the stories in either remissions or chronicles is exactly dated or datable. Only a few of the remissions give any specific information about chronology, most simply speaking of the ‘time of the non-nobles’ terror against the nobles’. The few dates available, used to construct the timeline in the front matter, tell only a small part of the story. Most of what is exactly datable are events that happened before or after the revolt, or incidents at which the country-folk and the Parisians and other towns’ citizens were acting together. Much of what happened did so simultaneously across a number of different theatres of action. In the chapters that follow, I have tried to keep a sense of change over time, while also drawing out thematic issues of the violence, identity, and organization that characterized the revolt overall. I begin with a chapter that tells the story of France, its politics, and its unfortunate people from just before the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 to the collapse of the modus vivendi between Marcel’s reform faction and the Prince’s counsellors soon after Charles of Navarre arrived in Paris in late 1357. The second chapter opens with the watershed moment in February 1358 when Marcel’s minions murdered two royal officers in the Dauphin’s presence, and follows that act’s

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reverberations through the consolidation of a noble faction opposed to the reform government and the military preparations they undertook against Paris up to the eve of the Jacquerie’s outbreak in May. Chapter 3 looks at the military and political reasons behind the massacre of nine noblemen at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent on 28 May, and the links between this incident and Parisian interests. Chapter 4 considers how and why that massacre became the beginning of a massive social uprising, highlighting both long-term structural factors like demographic and economic change after the Black Death and more immediate political and military concerns, as well as individual and community relationships. Chapters 5 through 7 are devoted to thematic issues of the rebellion’s violence, which was considerably more targeted and limited that its reputation suggests; its remarkable leadership structure and logistical organization; and the uneasy alliances between different social groups that both made the revolt possible and led ultimately to its failure. I return to the chronological narrative in Chapter 8, which covers the joint Jacques-Parisian endeavours in the Paris Basin in the second week of June through the defeats at Meaux and Mello-Clermont. Chapter 9 traces the development of the Counter-Jacquerie after these battles and the spread of the revolt to Normandy, Champagne, and further afield. Chapter 10 focuses on the legal and social aftermath of the revolt following the death of Étienne Marcel and the Dauphin’s return to Paris, and the evolution of the conflict’s consequences in the years that followed. The Conclusion considers the revolt’s legacy and memorialization from the later fourteenth century to the present day.

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1 Complaints The Aftermath of Poitiers

The regions of France where the Jacquerie took place were the epicentre of a political disaster whose proximate cause was a military catastrophe. Since 1337, France and England had been at war, ostensibly over the English King Edward III’s claim to the French throne. His mother was the daughter of the French King Philippe IV (r. 1285–1314), whose last son King Charles IV had died without male issue in 1328 and put an end to the Capetian dynasty’s 300-year reign. The roots of the war with England reached back centuries and were at least as much about Edward’s lordship over the duchy of Gascony and England’s trade relations with Flanders as they were about his claim to be king of France. But while the Hundred Years War might have started as a strategic move in a limited enterprise, its opening decades had gone remarkably well for the English. A resounding victory on the battlefield at Crécy at 1346 followed by the capitulation of Calais the next year was complemented by a strategy of raiding the countryside for supplies, booty, and sheer intimidation.¹ Already disadvantaged by not being Capetian, the first Valois king of France Philippe VI (r. 1328–1350) suffered a grave loss of prestige. Worse, he lost the confidence of the political elite who ran the kingdom. A near revolution saw his familiars imprisoned, his council reorganized, and his heir, the future Jean II (r. 1350–1364), nearly excluded.² Philippe regained his power, but note had been taken, a model outlined. A respite from English invasion allowing king and kingdom to regain their footing was the silver lining to the Black Death’s first onslaught in 1347–1352.³ But in 1355 Edward Prince of Wales, one of the fourteenth century’s greatest soldiers, landed in Bordeaux and laid waste to a swath of Languedoc running from Gascony to Narbonne, while the French king’s officers did nothing to stop him.⁴

¹ Clifford J. Rogers, War cruel and sharp: English strategy under Edward III, 1327–1360 (Woodbridge, 2000). ² Raymond Cazelles, La société politique et la crise de la royauté sous Philippe de Valois (Paris, 1958), 178–205, 427; Françoise Autrand, ‘The Battle of Crécy: A hard blow for the monarchy of France’ in Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston (eds), The Battle of Crécy, 1346 (Woodbridge, 2005), 273–286. ³ On the Black Death and the Jacquerie, see Chapter 4. ⁴ H.J. Hewitt, The Black Prince’s expedition of 1355–1357 (Manchester, 1958); HYW, II: 175–187; Rogers, War cruel and sharp, ch. 13; Peter Hoskins, In the steps of the Black Prince: The road to Poitiers, 1355–1356 (Woodbridge, 2011); Mollie M. Madden, The Black Prince and the Grande Chevauchée of 1355 (Woodbridge, 2018).

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0002

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When he began a new campaign of raiding the next year, Jean II and his counsellors had no choice but to march to meet him.⁵ The armies faced each other outside the ancient city of Poitiers on 18 September. Parleys went nowhere. The next day, the French army was utterly routed in one of the great military defeats of French history.⁶ In addition to an unknowable number of common soldiers, nearly 2,500 noblemen died.⁷ Among them were some of France’s best military and political minds, like Geoffrey de Charny, in service to the crown since 1337, and Jean de Bourbon, Count of Clermont. Thousands more were captured and held to ransom, especially nobles who could fetch a high price.⁸ Worst of all, the captured included Jean II himself. Taken to England, his ransom was eventually set at an astronomical 4 million écus.⁹

Defeat and its Discontents Even more than a financial calamity, the captivity of King Jean was a political nightmare. His son and heir-apparent, Charles, was 18, inexperienced, and unreliable. Poitiers had deprived him of many of the crown’s most able advisors. As had happened after Crécy, the king’s favourite officers were removed from power and a ‘reform party’ took over. The Dauphin Charles, styled his father’s ‘lieutenant’, worked off and on with the reformers over the next year and a half, but there were deep and lingering fissures between them. Be they ever so rich, the shopkeepers and artisans who dominated the reformers were not the Dauphin’s usual company. This party also included many members who sympathized with King Charles II of Navarre. Charles of Navarre, who was also Count of Évreux in Normandy, was the grandson of King Louis X on his mother’s side, the greatgrandson of King Philippe III on his father’s side, and married to the Dauphin’s sister (Figure 1.1). Complicated by the dynastic threat implicit in his Capetian lineage and his parents’ long struggle to secure their heritage, the relationship between Charles of Navarre and the Valois was a difficult one.¹⁰ He had murdered one of Jean’s favourite courtiers in 1354 and may have colluded with the Dauphin ⁵ Rogers, War cruel and sharp, ch. 15. ⁶ David Green, The Battle of Poitiers, 1356 (Stroud, 2008); HYW, II: ch. 5. ⁷ Rogers, War cruel and sharp, 384. ⁸ Françoise Bériac-Lainé and Chris Given-Wilson, Les prisonniers de la bataille de Poitiers (Paris, 2002); Rémy Ambühl, Prisoners of war in the Hundred Years War: Ransom culture in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2013). ⁹ Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols (Paris, 1909–1931), II: 325–331; John Bell Henneman, Royal taxation in fourteenth-century France: The captivity and ransom of John II, 1356–1370 (Philadelphia, 1976). ¹⁰ Cazelles, société politique . . . sous Philippe, 205–208; Philippe Charon, Princes et principautés au Moyen Âge: L’exemple de la principauté d’Évreux, 1298–1412 (Paris, 2014), esp. 109–132, 231–251; Georg Jostkleigrewe, Monarchischer Staat und ‘Société politique’: Politische Interaktion und staatliche Verdichtung im spätmittelalterlichen Frankreich (Ostfildern, 2018), ch. 6.

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Philippe III

Philippe IV

Louis X

Jeanne, Queen of Navarre

Philippe V

Charles IV

Blanche of France

Charles de Valois

Louis d’Évreux

Philippe VI

Philippe d’Évreux

Isabelle

Edward III King of England

Charles II d’Évreux King of Navarre

Jean II

Charles II d’Évreux King of Navarre

Dauphin Charles

Figure 1.1 Simplified Capetian/Valois/Évreux Family Tree

in an aborted coup at the end of 1355.¹¹ In April 1356, Jean had imprisoned him and executed some of his followers, including some important Norman noblemen. Jean’s treatment of the Navarrese king divided opinion. Many influential people thought it excessively harsh or at least very impolitic.¹² Chief among Navarre’s supporters were his aunt, the Dowager-Queen Jeanne d’Évreux, widow of Charles IV, and his sister, the Dowager-Queen Blanche d’Évreux, widow of Philippe VI. A revolution in the high politics of the capital was dramatic, but not unprecedented. The reaction after Crécy-Calais was still a recent memory, and like other French towns, Paris had a history of uprisings. Other French cities, from Arras to Toulouse, were in more or less open revolt against taxation in 1356–1357.¹³ That the countryside and its small towns would also experience such a thing had no precedent on such a scale.¹⁴ But there, too, Poitiers had undermined confidence in the status quo. The nobles’ dominance in the countryside was predicated on their landed wealth and their fiscal and judicial exercise of lordship, but it was justified by their role as warriors in service to king and country. The old tripartite ordering ¹¹ Denis-François Secousse (ed.), Recueil de pièces servant de preuves aux Mémoires sur les troubles excités en France par Charles II, dit le Mauvais, roi de Navarre et comte d’Évreux (Paris, 1755), 45–49; Raymond Cazelles, Société politique, noblesse et couronne sous Jean le bon et Charles V (Geneva, 1982), 211–213; Françoise Autrand, Charles V le sage (Paris, 1994), 164–167. ¹² Raymond Cazelles, ‘Le parti navarrais jusqu’à la mort d’Étienne Marcel’, Bulletin philologique et historique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (jusqu’à 1610), année 1960 (Paris, 1961), 839–869; Delachenal, Histoire, I: 156–157; Autrand, Charles V, 169–173; Charon, Princes et principautés, 201–203. ¹³ Arras: GC, 62, 66; HYW, II: 202–203; Émile Molinier, Étude sur la vie d’Arnoul d’Audrehem, maréchal de France, 1302–1370 (Paris, 1883), 54–56; Toulouse: HL, X: 1129–1132; HYW, II: 284. Villefranche and Belleville in the Maconnais: Titres de l’ancienne maison ducale de Bourbon, Alphonse Huillard-Bréholles and Albert Lecoy de La Marche (eds), 2 vols (Paris, 1867–1874), I: no. 2743, pp. 475–479 ¹⁴ The Flemish Maritime Revolt of 1323–1328 and the revolt of the Laon serfs in 1338 are two partial exceptions. See discussion at the end of Chapter 3.

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of society as ‘those who pray (oratores), those who fight (bellatores), and those who work (laboratores)’ was far from defunct in the fourteenth century.¹⁵ At Poitiers, however, the nobles had not fought, or at least, they had not fought hard enough, and many of them had run. That the Battle was lost through the nobles’ cowardice—or even treachery—was a widespread explanation.¹⁶ In the Norman village of Lyre, the inhabitants vilified two noblemen who, as they thought, had proved their cowardice, shouting, ‘Here are some of those traitors who wickedly fled the army’ (Isti sunt de proditoribus qui per suam maliciam de exercitu aufugerunt).¹⁷ A famous poem, called the Complainte sur la bataille de Poitiers, composed in 1357 (probably in Paris, possibly by a canon of Notre Dame) speaks: Of the host before Poitiers, there, where many people Were killed and the king [taken] on account of the false, feigning people Who fled; by which their treason was achieved For this they are not forgiven what should be censured Of their great treason, for which they have [received] so much scorn That their gentility has lost honour and value. They claim to be born of noble parentage.¹⁸

This story, current in literate circles, may have also been making the rounds in the taverns and the markets and the workrooms. The catchy rhyme scheme of the Complainte’s Middle French suggests it might have been sung, as was common for popular political satire of the later Middle Ages.¹⁹ Some of the material in the ¹⁵ Georges Duby, Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris, 1978); Paul Freedman, Images of the medieval peasant (Stanford, 1999), 20–24. ¹⁶ Françoise Autrand, ‘La déconfiture: La bataille de Poitiers (1356) à travers quelques textes français des XIVe et XVe siècles’ in Philippe Contamine, Charles Giry-Deloison, and Maurice H. Keen (eds), Guerre et société en France, en Angleterre et en Bourgogne XIVe–XVe siècle (Lille, 1991), 93–121. ¹⁷ Remission of February 1357: AN JJ 84, no. 715, fol. 357v-58r, partially ed. in Delachenal, Histoire, I: 397, n. 2. In fact, the noblemen had been captured and ransomed, but by the Navarrese at the Battle of the Ford of Saint-Clément, not at Poitiers as the villagers seemingly thought. De l’ost devant Poitiers, là où persone meinte ¹⁸ Fut morte et le roy [pris?] par la fausse gent feinte Qui s’enfoy; dont fut leur traïson atteinte. . . . Por ce ne sont pas quite que ne soient repris De leur grant traïson, en quoy ont tant mespris Que leur gentillece a perdu honneur et pris. Ils se dient ester nez de noble parenté. (ed. Charles de Beaurepaire, ‘Complainte sur la bataille de Poitiers’, BEC 12 (1851): ll. 2–4, 14–17, pp. 260–261). ¹⁹ Marcela K. Perett, ‘Vernacular songs as “oral pamphlets”: The Hussites and their propaganda campaign’, Viator 42 (2011): 371–392; Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘Political poems and subversive songs: The circulation of “public poetry” in the late medieval Low Countries’, Journal of Dutch Literature 5 (2014): 1–22; Wendy Scase, ‘ “Strange and wonderful bills”: Bill-casting and political discourse in late medieval England’ in Rita Copeland, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase (eds), New

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Complainte has parallels in the chronicle of Jean de Venette, who was from a rural, Picard background. A specific criticism of the Complainte about the nobles’ sartorial frivolity: Ostentation and vainglory, shameful clothing Gilded belts, a feather on the head, A big billy-goat beard . . . ²⁰

is echoed in that chronicle as grounds on which the commoners criticized the nobility in 1356: ‘the luxury and dissoluteness of many of the nobles and knights became still more deeply rooted . . . They wore pearls on their hoods or on their gilded and silver girdles . . . Men also began to wear the plumes of birds fastened on their hats’.²¹ In an earlier passage, the chronicler railed against the ‘long beards’ grown by the nobility, as well as the brevity of their clothes, which ‘upsettingly revealed their private parts’ (eorum nates et pudenda confusibiliter apparerent).²² The chronicler commented further that this luxurious frippery angered the common people because ‘the taxes levied on them for the war were uselessly spent on such sport and converted to such uses’. Commoners’ own recent experience of soldiery may have sharpened their opinions against the nobility. In 1355 and 1356, the arrière-ban had been called. This was a summons that at least hypothetically required the military services of all adult males younger than 60.²³ Often arrières-bans were called to exact money in lieu of actual service, but this was not always the case. In 1355, the ban had certainly demanded that ‘all manner of persons, nobles and non-noble’ (toutes manieres de personnes tant noble comme nonnoble) to respond to its summons, for we have an account of its publication and the subsequent arming of recruits in

Medieval Literatures II (Oxford, 1998), 230, 239. Notably, Robert le Coq and his associates were accused of ‘chantent’ against the nobles who lost at Poitiers (Louis Douët d’Arcq, ‘Acte d’accusation contre Robert le Coq, évêque de Laon’, BEC 2 (1841): 380), though the verb might mean gossiping, not literal singing. On late medieval ‘public opinion’ more generally, see Luc Vaillancourt, ‘Introduction’ in Luc Vaillancourt (ed.), ‘Des bruits courent’: Rumeurs et propagande au temps des Valois (Paris, 2017), 5–26. Bonbanz et vaine gloire, vesture deshoneste ²⁰ Les ceintures dorées, la plume sur la teste, La grant barbe de bouc, qui est une orde beste (ed. Beaurepaire, ‘Complainte’, ll. 25–27, p. 261). ²¹ ‘magis se incoeperunt sumptuosius deformare, perlas et margaritas in capuciis et zonis deauratis et argenteis deportare . . . Incoeperunt etiam gestare tunc plumas avium in pileis adaptatas’ (Jean de Venette, 142, 144; Jean de Venette, The Chronicle of Jean de Venette, Jean Birdsall (trans.), Richard A. Newhall (ed.), (New York, 1953), 62–63). ²² Jean de Venette, 74; Jean de Venette, trans. Birdsall, 34 (with bowdlerizing elision). ²³ Philippe Contamine, Guerre, État et société à la fin du Moyen Âge: Études sur les armées des rois de France, 1337–1494 (Paris, 1972), 35–36. See Ord., III: 19–37, art. 26 and 121–146, art. 32.

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villages near Soissons.²⁴ In 1356, Jean’s great army was full of common-born men (planté de communes).²⁵ Participation in royal armies may have given some commoners a growing sense that they had a military vocation every bit as legitimate as that of the aristocratic bellatores. Jean de Venette reported that rustics marching off to war in 1356 had positively adopted the nickname ‘Jacques Bonhommes’, a sobriquet given to them in derision, and which was, of course, the name given to—or perhaps claimed by—the rural rebels of 1358.²⁶ But before marching to Poitiers, King Jean had dismissed the communal levies.²⁷ Inevitably, many people felt that if only he had trusted his common-born soldiers better, things might have turned out differently.²⁸ The author of the Complainte certainly believed this and hoped for greater wisdom next time; the poem’s final verses, which are unfortunately illegible after this point, begin: If [the Dauphin] is well advised, he will hardly neglect To lead Jaque Bonhome in his great company; Wars he will not flee to save his life!²⁹

Commoners’ disdain for the nobility was a key precondition of the Jacquerie, which had specific political implications for the struggle between the reformers’ party and that of the officers. The nobles so despised by the commoners were not initially allied as a class with the officers and many nobles had ideological sympathies, business or family interests, or political alliances in common with the reform party, but over the next year and a half these commonalities became fewer or less important while the division between ‘noble’ and ‘non-noble’ became ²⁴ Laon, AD Aisne H 1508, fol. 356v-57. Those failing to show were to have their wives and children turned out of house. Similarly, BnF Picardie 89, fol. 197, a letter of King Jean to Amiens in November 1355, mentioning the ‘copiosa mutitudine civium burgensium aliorumque fidelium subditorum nativorum’ in his army. ²⁵ Robert of Avesbury estimated their numbers at 40,000 (De gestis mirabilibus Regis Edwardi Tertii, Edward Maunde Thompson (ed.), (London, 1889), 464.) Quote at Chron. norm., 110. See also, 4 Valois, 46. ²⁶ ‘Tunc temporis [1356] nobiles, derisiones de rusticis et simplicibus facientes, vocabant eos Jaque Bonne homme. Unde in illo anno qui in bellis rusticaliter missi portabant arma sua, trufati et spreti ab aliis, hoc nomen Jaques Bonne homme acceperunt, et nomen rustici perdiderunt’ (Jean de Venette, 144); 4 Valois, 64, notes a derisive usage in 1357. See Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The eponymous Jacquerie: Making revolt mean some things’ in Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (eds), The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt (Abingdon, 2017), 68; cf. Vincent Challet, ‘L’exclusion par le nom: Réflexions sur la dénomination des révoltés à la fin du Moyen Âge’ in Nicole Gonthier (ed.), L’exclusion au Moyen Âge (Lyon, 2007), 373–388. ²⁷ Rogers, War cruel and sharp, 356. ²⁸ ‘Dont ce fut folie à lui et à ceulx qui conseil lui en donnerent, se disorient plusieurs’ (4 Valois, 46); HYW, II: 251–252. S’il est ben conseillé, il n’obliera mie ²⁹ Mener Jaque Bonhome en sa grant compagnie; Guerres ne s’en fuira pour ne perdre la vie! (Beaurepaire, ‘Complainte’, ll. 94–96, p. 263).

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increasingly salient.³⁰ In spring 1358, an important group of nobles made common cause against the reformers in Paris. By the time the Jacquerie began in May 1358, the political division of the kingdom visible since Crécy had become synonymous with a newly sharpened social division. The division between reformers/non-nobles on one side and officers/nobles on the other made social revolt in the countryside a possible outcome of the political crisis in Paris. When the situation became dangerous for the Parisians in April and May 1358, the reformers looked to the country-folk, whose enemies—the nobles—had become synonymous with the reformers’ enemies.

The Triumph of Reform These divisions were yet incipient when the Dauphin returned to Paris at the end of September and urgently recalled the Estates General of northern France.³¹ The Estates were a representative body made up of delegates from the three elite social divisions of France: the clergy, the nobility, and the male citizens of walled cities with royal privileges (gens des bonnes villes). The people of the countryside (gens du plat pays) and of small towns without the status of bonne ville (villes champestre) were not represented. The Estates’ function was to agree to taxation, in exchange for which the crown would grant its representatives’ requests in the form of a royal ordonnance—that is, legislation or, more accurately, a set of binding privileges. The Estates first met under Philippe IV and had been a staunchly royalist body for its history, albeit one whose history was tightly linked to the spirit of governmental reform.³² A meeting in December 1355, the first in four years, had produced a long list of reforms to the behaviour of royal officers and to royal finances, including a new system for administering taxation that bypassed the royal treasury (Chambre des comptes).³³ Acquiescing readily enough to these provisions, Jean had formed a working partnership with the rich bourgeois of northern France, but when the tax experiment failed to produce sufficient revenue, the partnership foundered.³⁴ Mutual disillusionment set the assembly that gathered in October 1356 on a less conciliatory path.

³⁰ On ‘salience’ and the activation of identity boundaries in violent conflict, see Chapter 4. ³¹ The Estates of Languedoc met separately, with arguably more radical results (GC, 86–87; Henneman, Royal taxation . . . John, 184; Cazelles, Société politique . . . sous Jean, 233–236). ³² Élisabeth Lalou, ‘Les assemblées générales sous Philippe le Bel’, Recherches sur les états généraux et les états provinciaux de la France médiévale, vol. 3 of Actes du 110e Congrès national des sociétés savantes, Montpellier, 1985, Section d’histoire médiévale et de philology, 3 vols (Paris, 1986), 7–29; An excellent survey of the historiography is Sébastien Drolet, ‘Les assemblées représentatives dans la première moitié du XIVe siècle en France: Deux traditions historiographiques’ in Luc Vaillancourt (ed.), ‘Des bruits courent’, 29–42. ³³ Ord., III: 19–37. ³⁴ Cazelles, Société politique . . . sous Jean, 195–225.

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Eight hundred men descended on Paris for the meeting, about half of whom were townsmen.³⁵ This being too large a number to make any decisions, a still sizable committee of 80 (or 30 or 50, reports differ) was nominated to hammer out a proposal. A fortnight later, this committee presented the Dauphin with their plan: in exchange for a grant of taxation sufficient (they claimed) to support an army 30,000 strong for a year, they required the removal of bad councillors from office and their subsequent punishment; the release of King Charles of Navarre; and the institution of advisory councils drawn from the Estates to supervise the Dauphin’s government of the realm.³⁶ The Dauphin was first inclined to agree, but under the advice of his father’s counsellors, he prevaricated, claiming the need to consult with his father and his maternal uncle the Holy Roman Emperor. He then dismissed the assembly.³⁷ The Estates therefore issued no ordonnance, but Bishop Robert le Coq of Laon, a representative of the First Estate, gave a stirring speech in which he outlined the proposal and the Dauphin’s response to the full assembly of Estates representatives ‘so that everyone could report it back to their regions and to those who sent them’.³⁸ This account may have circulated widely in written form—the royal chronicle reports that all the representatives were to take home a copy—and it served as a reference for later reformers to draw upon.³⁹ Opposition to the Estates’ demands was made possible by the tax proposal— which like that of 1355 was unworkable—but its defeat was the result of political machinations on behalf of the proscribed officers, rather than any ideological or social conflict.⁴⁰ Had not Jean’s own counsellors intervened to change the Dauphin’s mind, it seems that he would have agreed to it. Its efforts to ensure efficient and industrious administration—officers were to begin their work at sunrise and truces were to be spent preparing for war—were unobjectionable, as was its invocation of God’s honour and the commonweal (la chose publique).⁴¹ In the light of later events, the Estates’ championing of Charles of Navarre appears practically treasonable, but at the time, his freedom was a sensible political and military measure. His imprisonment at King Jean’s command was widely thought ³⁵ Roland Delachenal, ‘Journal des États généraux réunis à Paris au mois d’octobre 1356’, Nouvelle revue historique de droit français et étranger 24 (1900): 430, 437; cf. GC, 77. ³⁶ Pierre de la Fôret, Simon de Bucy, Robert de Lorris, Nicolas Braque, Engerran du Petit-Celier, Jean Poillevillain, and Jean Chauveau of Chartres (GC, 78–79). Amauri Braque is also named in Louis Douët d’Arcq, ‘Acte d’accusation’, 375. ³⁷ GC, 88. ³⁸ Delachenal, ‘Journal’, 440. ³⁹ GC, 89. The earliest, if incomplete, witness to the proceedings of the 1356 Estates is BnF franç. 5273, fol. 15–21r, a fifteenth-century compilation that also contains the Ordonnance cabochienne, a sweeping reform programme promulgated in the aftermath of the Parisian revolt known by the same name. The only other medieval witness, also fifteenth-century, is BL Cotton Titus D XII, fol. 58–74, a manuscript probably owned by Margaret of Anjou. See Delachenal, ‘Journal’, 425–429. ⁴⁰ The tax followed the assessment of spring 1356, modified in the light of popular resistance, in being a tax on wealth, rather than consumption, but this still provoked popular opposition and, as the anti-reformers pointed out, ‘it was impossible to know how much each person was worth’ (Douët d’Arcq, ‘Acte d’accusation’, 376). ⁴¹ Geneviève d’Harcourt, ‘Une tentative de reforme de l’État au XIVe siècle’, Annales du droit et des sciences sociales, 2–3 (1934): 15–44.

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unjust or at least arbitrary, and it had led his brother Philippe to wage a war in Normandy that France could not afford. As le Coq noted, the Norman castles currently in Navarrese hands would serve to destroy the country if Philippe decided to give them to his English allies.⁴² Navarre would make a much better friend than enemy. None of these was a provision offensive to noble sensibilities, and while some of le Coq’s rhetoric sounds populist, repeatedly referring to the suffering of les peuples, he also spoke of the administrative delays that hurt knights and nobles, as well as townsmen.⁴³ The nobles seem to have fully participated in the assembly. Their opinion was sought as to how large an army was needed, and all of the nobles, ‘except one’, approved the proposal, which the Duke of Brittany pronounced bon, juste, loyal et raisonnable.⁴⁴ Indeed, among the most prominent noble representatives were men who would later become enemies of the reformers, including the Duke of Orléans, the Count of Saint-Pol, and even Jean de Conflans, whom the reformers would murder less than a year and a half later.⁴⁵ What the Estates of 1356 did do was to bring greater prominence to the reformers’ leaders, Robert le Coq and his bourgeois counterpart, Étienne Marcel, and to set in motion events that would bring them greater power. A canon lawyer and royal avocat in the Parlement court, le Coq was born in Montdidier, a bonne ville north of Paris, reportedly to bourgeois parents who had had him well educated despite their modest means.⁴⁶ Le Coq had great ambitions and obvious jealousies. His professional rivalries with the chancellor Pierre de la Fôret and with Simon de Bucy, president of the Parlement court, made them convenient targets for his reforming zeal. At least, the accusation these men and/or their friends drew up against him alleges these motivations.⁴⁷ They also accused him of creating the enmity between Navarre and King Jean and between the King and the Dauphin. Still, the speech that catapulted him to prominence may have owed as much to principles as to pettiness. He did not speak as the First Estate’s chief representative, a capacity filled by the archbishop of Reims, but rather took the decision upon himself. Reportedly, he said, ‘Now is the time to speak. Whoever will not speak should be ashamed’ (honnis soit).⁴⁸ The eloquence and emotion of his oration, with its impassioned defence of the wisdom and virtue of the Estates, suggests ⁴² Delachenal, ‘Journal’, 444–445. On Philippe’s alliance with the English during this period, see Charon, Princes et principautés, 203–206. ⁴³ Delachenal, ‘Journal’, 434–435. ⁴⁴ Delachenal, ‘Journal’, 438. The unnamed exception was probably Robert de Lorris, the only nobleman among the seven proscribed councillors. ⁴⁵ Delachenal, ‘Journal’, 438; GC, 84. ⁴⁶ Arthur Layton Funk, ‘Robert le Coq and Étienne Marcel’, Speculum 19 (1944): 471. ⁴⁷ Douët d’Arcq, ‘Acte d’accusation’. The editor dated this document’s redaction to around the Assembly at Compiègne held in May 1358, but Delachenal, Histoire, I: 263, n. 3. and Edmond Faral, ‘Robert le Coq et les états généraux d’octobre 1356’, RHDFE, 4th ser., 23 (1945): 175–180 argued for late 1356/early 1357. ⁴⁸ Douët d’Arcq, ‘Acte d’accusation’, 370.

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convictions whose strength might overwhelm the conventions of hierarchy and the risks of speaking. His concern for the suffering of les peuples may well have been genuine. His own background was of the middling sort, and as bishop of Laon he had pursued lawsuits in favour of villagers’ claims against local lords, including the eminent lord of Coucy.⁴⁹ Le Coq’s bourgeois counterpart Étienne Marcel was similarly someone in whom ideals and ambitions were thoroughly mixed. Marcel firmly believed in the principle of virtuous government for the public good. His own writing—we possess three letters—testifies to importance of these principles to his project.⁵⁰ His supporters considered him a man of upstanding character (un preudomme), and Jean de Venette, who was more critical, nevertheless characterized him as ‘very concerned for the commonwealth’ (de re publica multum sollicitus).⁵¹ He named two of his children Marian and Robin, perhaps with some, now inscrutable, sympathy with the people’s thief.⁵² But unlike le Coq, Marcel was born into real wealth. Drapers and money-changers for generations, the Marcels were among the leading bourgeois families of Paris, and their ties to the crown dated to at least the reign of Louis IX in the thirteenth century.⁵³ Since 1354, Étienne Marcel had been the governor of the Parisian merchants (prévot des marchands), an office that made him the chief representative of the most important delegation of bonnes villes to the Estates.⁵⁴ Marcel’s adherence to the reform party was contrary to his family’s interests. He was married to Marguerite des Essars, scion of another leading family with many members in royal service, including her father Pierre and her cousin Martin who were long-standing enemies of the reform party and who had fallen victim to the reaction that followed Crécy in 1346–1347.⁵⁵ Two of the councillors proscribed by the 1356 Estates, Robert de Lorris and Jean de Poillevillain (the latter also proscribed after Crécy), were his relatives by marriage.⁵⁶ Of course, not all families are happy ones. His wife’s relatives may have disliked him or his politics, for several des Essars fomented the riot that led to his assassination and his rebellion’s downfall.⁵⁷ Relations with his sisters’ husbands were even worse.

⁴⁹ Laon, AD Aisne G 13, G 69, and G 77, pc. 2. The lords of Coucy and bishops of Laon had a decades-old history of conflict, but Robert le Coq’s reign does seem to coincide with greater attention paid to the villagers of the places under dispute. ⁵⁰ Reprinted from earlier editions in d’Avout, appendix iv, pp. 301–310. ⁵¹ GC, 138; Jean de Venette, 154, who adds the caveat pro tunc. ⁵² AN X1c 11, no. 81–82, ed. Siméon Luce, ‘Documents nouveaux sur Étienne Marcel’, Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 6 (1879): no. 2, pp. 310–311. ⁵³ Henri Fremaux and Adolphe Guesnon, La famille d’Étienne Marcel, 1250–1397 (Paris, 1904). See p. 7 for a description of the Marcel family heraldry. ⁵⁴ GC, 56, n. 2. Delachenal does not give his grounds for the date. The first mention of Marcel’s title in the chronicle is from the Estates at the end of 1355. ⁵⁵ Cazelles, Société politique . . . sous Philippe, 181–183. ⁵⁶ AN JJ 87, no. 10, fol. 7v-8; Fremaux and Guesnon, Famille, 35–38. ⁵⁷ AN JJ 99, no. 598, fol. 182v, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 296–297; see Chapter 10.

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Marcel had good reason to hate both de Lorris and de Poillevillain for the way they had turned ruinously expensive family legal problems to their own spectacular personal profit.⁵⁸ Both were targeted by the Estates’ reforms, and de Lorris saw his castles wrecked during the Jacquerie. But if Marcel was jealous of these relatives’ riches, it was also the case that they were rank profiteers, whose personal wealth was accumulated at public expense. Marcel’s commitment to the ends of reform drove him to dangerous means. It is telling that the motto of his party, inscribed on enamel brooches or buckles was à bon fin (‘to a good purpose’ [whatever we do]).⁵⁹ He did not hide his frequent exasperation with the Dauphin, a fickle man at least 30 years younger than he. Pope Innocent VI had to counsel him to be patient when the prince ‘behaved like a child’ (juveniliter ageret).⁶⁰ Nor did he shy from violence or the threat of violence. He seems himself to have enjoyed martial trappings, riding at the head of a horsed entourage of 500 men and passing through Paris with his own standard-bearer.⁶¹ He was willing to commit murder and to wage war when the time came. This predilection for violence was not something that set the prévôt des marchands apart from his contemporaries. While the later Middle Ages may not have been quantifiably more violent than our own time of school massacres, drone assassinations, and ubiquitous sexual assaults, violence was fundamental to medieval French political life and social practices in a way different from modern experience. For Marcel and his contemporaries, acts of violence functioned as a political language through which claims could be made or rebutted.⁶² What distinguished Marcel’s approach to violence—and contributed to both his striking success and his ultimate failure—was that he disregarded the grammar of that language, especially when it came to the relationship between violence and noble status. Some things were supposed to be inviolable.

The Great Ordonnance of 1357 Marcel first tasted the fruits of an intimidatory approach in the winter of 1356–1357 when he forced the Dauphin to recall the Estates. The confrontation ⁵⁸ Cazelles, Société politique . . . sous Jean, 201–203; Autrand, Charles V, 244–245. ⁵⁹ On these badges and other partisan clothing, see Chapter 2. ⁶⁰ GC, III: no. 8, pp. 73–75, also ed. in Henri Denifle, La guerre de Cent ans et la désolation des églises, monastères et hôpitaux en France, 2 vols (Paris, 1897–1899), II: 138, n. 2. ⁶¹ Cazelles, Société politique . . . sous Jean, 219; ‘complicis quondam prepositi mercatorum ac vexillum seu penuncellum ipsius deferentis’ (AN JJ 86, no. 321, fol. 107v). ⁶² Warren C. Brown, Violence in medieval Europe, (Harlow, 2011); Hannah Skoda, Medieval violence: Physical brutality in northern France, 1270–1330 (Oxford, 2013) Vincent Challet, ‘Violence as a political language: The uses and misuses of violence in late medieval French and English popular rebellions’ in Firnhaber-Baker and Schoenaers (eds), Handbook of medieval revolt, 279–291; Matthew S. Gordon, Richard W. Kaeuper, and Harriet Zurndorfer (eds), 500–1500 CE, vol. 2 of Philip Dwyer and Jouy Damousi (eds), The Cambridge world history of violence, 4 vols (Cambridge, 2020).

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began over the Dauphin’s decision at the end of November to fund his expenses through manipulation of the coinage, because the Estates had granted him no taxes. He ordered the money strengthened by 20 per cent while simultaneously putting into circulation weak and defective coins which he then ordered devalued.⁶³ Particularly noxious to common people was the revaluing of the silver denier blanc from 8 d.t. to 3 d.t.⁶⁴ Marcel made his refusal on the city’s behalf to the Dauphin’s lieutenant, the 17-year-old Louis d’Anjou, in person with a large crowd of townsmen at his back.⁶⁵ The Dauphin was then meeting with the Emperor at Metz, but when he returned in January, Marcel repeated the refusal, this time threatening strikes (cesser tous menestereux d’ouvrer) and general violence if the coinage was altered.⁶⁶ In the meantime, the military situation had deteriorated. Joining forces with the Duke of Lancaster, the Navarrese made themselves masters of Anjou, Maine, and Lower Normandy. In January, Philippe of Navarre took his troops raiding along the southern bank of the Seine as far as Chartres, panicking Paris.⁶⁷ Facing a military emergency with no money, the Dauphin had no choice but to bow to the Estates’ wishes and call them back into session in hope of a grant of taxes.⁶⁸ Marcel’s position against monetary manipulation enjoyed wide support. Debasements were noxious to nobles on fixed rents and to merchants agreeing contracts, as well as to labourers whose wages had been set at artificially low levels by post-Black Death legislation.⁶⁹ Yet, although ‘strong’ money was generally preferred for moral as well as financial reasons, it was also the case that any sudden strengthening of the money was disastrous for those paying rents, buying goods, or agreeing contracts. Indeed, the only people who benefitted from fluctuations in the coinage were money-changers (like some of Marcel’s less-loved relatives) and royal insiders who could parlay their insider knowledge into a quick profit.⁷⁰ Stable coinage was the central argument of the treatise De moneta written by Nicolas Oresme, a schoolman at the University of Paris and Navarrese supporter. The treatise’s final chapter starkly warns that the immoral expedient of monetary manipulation might lead to the dynasty’s fall from power.⁷¹ Although ⁶³ Ord., III: 87–88, 89–91, 94–95, 95–96; d’Avout, 83–84. ⁶⁴ Ord., III: 90. This expedient was firmly rejected in the Estates assembly over which Marcel presided in February–March 1357 (Ord., III: 121–146, art. 21). ⁶⁵ GC, 93–94. ⁶⁶ GC, 96. ⁶⁷ HYW, II: 267–274. ⁶⁸ GC, 96–97, dates this decision to 20 January, the same time that the Navarrese were in the Chartrain (GC, 100). ⁶⁹ As in England, inelasticity in labourers’ wages had been decreed after the Black Death in France; the Estates confirmed similar provisions in 1355 (Ord., II: 350–380, 563–566, III: 19–37, art. 23; Cazelles, Société politique . . . Jean, 209–210; discussion in Chapter 4). ⁷⁰ Cary J. Nederman, ‘Community and the rise of commercial society: Political economy and the political theory in Nicholas Oresme’s De Moneta’, History of Political Thought 21 (2000): 10. ⁷¹ Nicolas Oresme, ‘De moneta’ in Charles Johnson (ed. and trans.) The De Moneta of Nicholas Oresme and English mint documents (London, 1956), 46–48; Nederman, ‘Community’. It is possible that Oresme and le Coq, both University men and Navarrese supporters, were in communication about coinage. Robert de Corbie, also a reformer and sometime rector of the University, is another likely contact: Cazelles, ‘parti navarrais’, 858–862; Jacques Krynen, ‘Entre la réforme et la révolution: Paris,

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monetary manipulation had been a financial expedient of French kings since the turn of the century, the war with England meant that Jean and his predecessor had had much more frequent recourse to it. During the summer of 1356, his profits from coinage rose as high as 60 per cent.⁷² An end to such chicanery was a pillar of the reformers’ programme. The assembly that met in February 1357 and finished its work on 3 March issued a long ordonnance that was based on that of 1355 but with extensive innovations adopted from the reforms proposed by the 1356 assembly. The assembly reversed the defeats of November and December, authorizing the Estates to meet whenever they wished in future without new royal authorization and restoring the white penny’s value to 8 d.t.⁷³ Even more severe toward royal officers and abuse of office than the autumn proposal, it removed from office the seven men proscribed in November, as well as 15 others, including Pierre d’Orgemont and Regnaut d’Acy, later targets of the reformers’ violence, and it thoroughly reorganized the Parlement, the Chambre des comptes, and the Great Council.⁷⁴ While harkening to the spirit of reform and efficient administration inculcated by Philippe IV and his great ordonnance of 1303, the assembly privileged local and communal structures over centralized, royal institutions.⁷⁵ Particularly notable in light of future events was the Estate’s authorization of communal violence, allowing communities to defend themselves forcefully from pillaging soldiers and royal seizures alike by assembling their neighbours from bonnes villes and elsewhere in order to mount more effective resistance.⁷⁶ For the reformers and their partisans, this ordonnance was the touchstone of their movement. According to the Norman chronicler, Étienne Marcel’s last words to his former comrades were: What I did, I did for your good as much as my own. And before I undertook anything, you made me swear that that I would do everything I could to uphold the ordonnance made by the three estates.⁷⁷ 1356–1358’ in Frédéric Bluche and Stéphane Rials (eds), Les révolutions françaises: Les phénomènes révolutionnaires en France, du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris, 1989), 104–107. On the dating of the text, likely composed or revised between September 1356 and winter 1358, see Adam Woodhouse, ‘ “Who owns the money?”: Currency, property, and popular sovereignty in Nicole Oresme’s De moneta’, Speculum 92 (2017): 87, n. 9. ⁷² John Bell Henneman, Royal taxation in fourteenth–century France: The development of war financing, 1322–1356 (Princeton, 1971), 341. ⁷³ Ord., III: 121–146, art. 5 and 21. ⁷⁴ Ord., III: 121–146, art. 11. ⁷⁵ This was especially true of justice and land resources, where stipulations of the Estates of 1355 were repeated that removed them from official royal purview and returned their administration to local or seigneurial representatives (e.g. Ord., III: 121–46, art. 23–24). ⁷⁶ Ord., III: 121–46, art. 2, 17, 37, and see art. 57–58; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘À son de cloche: The Interpretation of public order and legitimate authority in northern France, 1355–58’ in Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, Vincent Challet, Jan Dumolyn, and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz (eds), La comunidad medieval como esfera pública (Seville, 2014), 357–376. ⁷⁷ ‘Ce que je faisoye, je faisoye pour vostre bien comme pour le myen. Et ains que j’enprinse riens, vous me feistes jurer que l’ordonnance que les trois estas avoient ordonnée je maintendroye de mon povoir’ (4 Valois, 85).

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The chronicler may well have invented this speech, but it faithfully reflects the ordonnance’s importance for the reformers. In July 1358, when Marcel wrote to the city councillors of Ypres for desperate help against the Dauphin’s siege of Paris, he framed his efforts in terms of the ‘holy ordonnances’ (sainctes ordonnances) that had been proposed in November 1356 and finally adopted in March 1357.⁷⁸ Like civic rebels across late medieval Europe, the reformers were fundamentally legalistic, conceiving of their actions within the framework of legitimately constituted, legal authority.⁷⁹ The ordonnance gave legal force to their political programme, and its publication throughout northern France also made it known widely and brought the weight of public opinion behind it.⁸⁰ In the rural bailliage of Vitry in Champagne, at least two assemblies were held so that the ordonnance could be read out (recitée) to the villagers, who found it ‘very agreeable’ (moult agreable).⁸¹ Later accused of participating in the Jacquerie for convoking assemblies of villagers, they argued that they were only following the ordonnance’s instructions on self-defence.⁸² It was therefore a very unwelcome development when the Archbishop of Sens, the Count of Tancreville, and the Count of Eu arrived in Paris on 5 April with news that a truce had been made with England and that King Jean had annulled the Estate’s ordonnance as ‘not at all arising from the free and pure will of our son’.⁸³ The royal chronicler reports that most Parisians considered it ‘deception and treason’ (fausseté et trahison) to publish the truce and to impede the Estates and the subsidy that they had granted.⁸⁴ The messengers were forced to flee, and

⁷⁸ d’Avout, 304–10, at 305. ⁷⁹ See Patrick Lantschner, The logic of political conflict in medieval cities: Italy and the southern Low Countries, 1370–1440 (Oxford, 2015), esp. ch. 1; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Introduction: Medieval revolts in context’ in Firnhaber-Baker and Schoenaers (eds), Handbook of medieval revolt, esp. 5 and works cited therein. ⁸⁰ Because of its subsequent cancellation, there are far fewer copies of this ordonnance than that of the Estates of 1355. In addition to the cancelled entry at AN Y 2, fol. 15v–23r (modern foliation) and AN P 2293, pp. 351–416, there are early modern copies in Valenciennes (Médiathèque Simone Veil MS 256) and at Châlons-en-Champagne (AD Marne G 168, fol. 55v–57), the latter badly mutilated. A fourteenth-century copy from Orléans (BnF franç. 11988, fol. 53v–80) could be associated with Robert le Coq’s connection to the city, where he studied law (Kouky Fianu, ‘Le petit cartulaire d’Orléans, est-il un cartulaire municipal?’, Memini: Travaux et documents 12 (2008): 85–113). ⁸¹ ‘environ Pasques derrein passé . . . pour enteriner ceste ordenance, les genz de plusieurs villes d’icelui païs se feussent assemblés par deux foiz en deux places, aus quelles la dite ordenance fu recitée, et leur fu moult agreable’ (AN JJ 86, no. 355, fol. 121, ed. Luce, no. 33, pp. 268–270) and see AN JJ 86, no. 465, fol. 164, ed. Luce, no. 40, pp. 281–283. Firnhaber-Baker, ‘À son de cloche’, 370, n. 47 is wrong that the measure mentioned here is unlikely to have been that of March 1357. While the Estates closed on 3 March and Easter fell on 9 April that year, the ordonnance was not mandated for publication until 30 March and was not collated until 1 April (Ord., III: 146). Its publication in the bailliage of Vitry, about 175 kilometres from Paris, thus probably did take place around Easter. ⁸² Luce, 160–167; Firnhaber-Baker, ‘À son de cloche’, 368–370; see Chapter 9. ⁸³ GC, 108–109; ‘mandement que nostre tres chier filz . . . vous envoie sur ce, car nous sommes bien certains, car (sic: que) ce ne vient pas de la franche et pure volenté de nostre dit filz’ (Delachenal, Histoire, I: 312–313, n. 5). ⁸⁴ GC, 109.

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the city, expecting reprisals, set a watch. The Second Estate had been fully involved in the February assembly, but now a reaction set in. The taxes agreed weighed most heavily on the nobles, as had all taxes since the Estates of 1355, and many were unhappy to see some of their most respected members so treated by townsmen.⁸⁵ The city’s suspicions and the nobles’ indignation opened a rift that would grow into a chasm. In the immediate term, le Coq—whom the royal chronicle calls the Dauphin’s principal gouverneur—pressured the Prince to declare that the ordonnance would continue in force, but the reformers’ reprieve was brief. The dismissal of royal officers had already created bureaucratic problems: It was with no little satisfaction that the royal chronicler reported that those appointed to fill the vacancies in the Chambre des comptes lasted only a single day before they asked for the return of experienced men.⁸⁶ The subsidy granted amounted to very little, and over the spring and summer the military crisis deepened. The Estates had not broached the delicate topic of Charles of Navarre, but by July his brother’s troops had taken Honfleur and controlled the Seine estuary. Anglo-Gascon troops, freed by the truce to follow their own interests, spread out, occupying fortresses great and small.⁸⁷ Their presence made collection of the subsidy more difficult. In parts of the kingdom, its collection ceased altogether.⁸⁸ Disgusted, the Dauphin turned again to his father’s counsellors. In mid-August, he dismissed Marcel from his service and announced his intention to govern for himself. Bypassing the unworkable subsidy granted by the Languedoïl’s Estates, he negotiated for money directly with the bonnes villes.⁸⁹ Royal pensions, annulled by the Estates, were reinstated.⁹⁰ Robert le Coq retired to Laon, ‘for he knew he was deeply disgraced’ (il veoit bien que il avoit tout honny).⁹¹ For Marcel, insult was added to injury. In August, favours were showered upon his hated brother-in-law, Robert de Lorris. In a letter signed de nostre propre main, the Dauphin granted his personal protection to de Lorris, his property, and his family. Observing that ‘the assemblies held in Paris since the capture of our father’ had shown de Lorris special hatred, the Dauphin also confirmed de Lorris’s possessions at Ermenonville and Beaurain, which Philippe VI had given to him in exchange for the money his wife (the sister of Marcel’s wife), the heiress of ⁸⁵ Henneman, Royal taxation . . . John, 49; Delachenal, Histoire, I: 316. ⁸⁶ GC, 106–107. ⁸⁷ HYW, II: 286–301. ⁸⁸ ‘fu le dit moys de mars et avril ensuivant commencement de lever le premier sixte, duquel subside et les moys de may et de juing furent le second sixte . . . Et jasoit ce que il eust esté accordé a estre levé de deux moys en deux moys jusques a un an . . . il ne fu levé que les quatre moys dessus diz’ (BnF nouv. acq. fr. 3547, no. 2, accounts of one of the subsidy’s receivers, see Catalogue de comptes royaux des règnes de Philippe VI et de Jean II, Raymond Cazelles (ed.) (Paris, 1984), no. 511, pp. 188–189.) Alfred Coville, Les états de Normandie: Leurs origines et leur développement au XIVe siècle (Paris, 1894), 84–86. Cf. Henneman, Royal taxation . . . John, 63. ⁸⁹ GC, 111–112; Paul Viollet, ‘Les états de Paris en février 1358’, Mémoires de l’Institut national de France 34 (1895): 275–276, n. 1. ⁹⁰ BnF franç. 20402, no. 26. ⁹¹ GC, 113.

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Pierre des Essars had inherited, as well as at Montépilloy and Pontarmé, which were her dower and dowry. Half of this fortune would have been Marcel’s, had only he not decided to renounce his wife’s inheritance because at the time the estate owed an enormous fine due to Pierre des Essars’s disgrace after Crécy.⁹²

The Navarrese Alliance The Dauphin was free to grant favours to his familiars, but his soldiers, officers, servants, and purveyors wanted cash. By October he was forced once again to call the Estates back into session. This time, the reformers produced a trump card. Two days after the delegates assembled on 7 November, Charles of Navarre escaped from prison.⁹³ He accomplished this feat with the help of a group of nobles led by Jean de Picquigny from Amiens and the probable collusion of Robert le Coq.⁹⁴ The Chronique des quatre premiers Valois reports that Charles’s brother Philippe of Navarre sent a letter to the three Estates, promising to support them if they would help release his brother from prison. In response to this letter, ‘which pleased the leaders very much’, the Parisians sent troops led by the spicer Pierre Gilles to join a force of nobles who broke into the castle of Arleux, where Navarre was being held.⁹⁵ Once free, Navarre behaved like what he was, a sovereign king with independent political objectives. He went first to Amiens, where he gave a speech defending himself and decreed the liberation of all those in the city’s prisons, a show not of sympathy for criminals, but of kingly mercy.⁹⁶ His aunt and sister, the DowagerQueens Jeanne and Blanche d’Évreux, arranged for letters of safeguard allowing him to come to Paris. On 29 November he arrived in the city with the Bishop of Paris and 200 men-at-arms and made his way to the Abbey of Saint-Germain-desPrés on the Left Bank. On 30 November he stood on the platform from which King Jean sometimes watched judicial duels at Pré-aux-Clercs and reprised the ⁹² ‘cinquante mille chaeres d’or que nostre dit Segneur a fait audit messier Robert a cause de sa femme heritiere de feu Pierre des Essars, les quelles chaeres nostre treschier segneur & ayeul le Roy Philippe (que dieux absoille) voulu avoir pour certaine composition dudit feu Pierre des Essars . . . la maison & toute la terre d’Ermenonville le Chastel & toute la terre de Beaurain en Artoys . . . le chastel et toute la terre de Montespillouer, que le dit messier Robert a baillies & assignez a sa dite femme en douaire & la maison & toute la terre de Pontarmier . . . qu’il a bailliez & assignez en heritage perpetual a sa dite femme pour Recommpensation de terre que elle apporta Avecques luy en marriage qu’il a alienee, Nous avons franchis delivres & deschergies a tous Jours de toutes cherges & ypotheques actions & obligacions quelcomques que nostre dit Segneur ou nous y pourrions ou devrions avoir a cause des dites mille chaers’ (AN JJ 87, no. 10, fol. 7v–8). Cazelles, Société politique . . . sous Jean, 201–203; Autrand, Charles V, 244–245. ⁹³ On the dating here, see GC, 115–116, n. 1. Except where noted, the next two paragraphs are based on GC, 115–120. ⁹⁴ Charon, Princes et principautés, 207; Autrand, Charles V, 279; cf. Funk, ‘Robert le Coq’, 482–483. ⁹⁵ 4 Valois, 60–61, which misidentifies the castle as being at Crèvecoeur rather than Arleux. ⁹⁶ Claude Gauvard, ‘Grâce et exécution capitale: Les deux visages de la justice royale française à la fin du Moyen Âge’, BEC 153 (1995): 275–290.

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speech he gave in Amiens. The stands were filled with citizens whose attendance Marcel had assured by sending out the neighbourhood captains (quarteniers et cinquantiers) to round them up.⁹⁷ According to the royal chronicler, Navarre spoke for a long time and said many things about his unjust imprisonment and the perfidy of royal officers. It is possible that during this speech he may have made the explosive claim that he had a right to the French throne. The Chronographia regum francorum reports that in Amiens he had argued that: the crown of France, from which his grandfather Louis, Count of Évreux, had descended in the male line, more suitably belonged to him (melius sibi competebat) through the death of his [maternal] grandfather Louis [King Louis X] and his son King Jean [I the posthumous], Charles’s uncle, than it did to Edward’s, King of England, who was claiming it.⁹⁸

The Chronographia is a late source and somewhat confused in its chronology at this point. This episode at Amiens is noted as happening at the same time (tunc temporis) as events that occurred in March 1358. While Jean le Bel does report a similar speech in Paris at this moment, it is likely that Charles of Navarre did not say these things until some weeks or months after his escape, as other sources claim.⁹⁹ It was not until January 1358 that Navarre’s erstwhile ally, Edward III, agreed to renounce his claim on the French throne in the draft Treaty of London. Given Navarre’s cooperation with the English, it would not have been politically astute to float his own claim until then at the earliest and perhaps not even until May, when the peace was more firmly agreed (though never ratified). The royal chronicle first reports Navarre making explicit dynastic claims in a speech in June. By contrast, it notes carefully that Navarre said nothing openly against the King and the Dauphin in his November speech, but that he implied many dishonest and ignoble things about them (choses deshonnestes et vilainnes à euls par paroles couvertes).¹⁰⁰ Yet even if Navarre was not yet noising these claims aloud, the dynastic threat was implicit in his very person. The decisions about succession that had followed the death of the infant-king Jean I in 1317 and that of the last Capetian Charles IV in 1328 were neither so clear-cut nor so ancient as to be beyond question.¹⁰¹ ⁹⁷ Georges Picot, ‘Recherches sur les quartiniers, cinquanteniers et dixainiers de la ville de Paris’, Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 1 (1875): 132–166. One of these quartiniers was Jean Maillart, who turned against Marcel on 31 July 1358 and led the mob that murdered him (Chron. norm., 134; Chron. reg., 279; see Chapter 10). ⁹⁸ Chron. reg., 267–268. ⁹⁹ Jean le Bel, 253. ¹⁰⁰ GC, 185; Charon, Princes et principautés, 241–242, esp. n. 85; see Chapter 9. Quote at GC, 120. ¹⁰¹ Richard Lescot, ‘Genealogica aliquorum regum francie, per quam apparet quantum attinere potest regi francie rex navarre’ in Religieux, 173–178; Cazelles, La société politique . . . sous Philippe, ch. 1.

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Figure 1.2 Jean II and Charles of Navarre, backed by his aunt and sister, Grandes chroniques, BnF franç. 2813, fol. 395r, reproduced by permission

The Navarrese chronicle of Garci López of Roncesvalles portrayed Charles II of Navarre as a sympathetic individual and a good king, but his role in French history has long been a black legend.¹⁰² He is considered a traitor, an attempted usurper, an opportunist, and a liar. Since the sixteenth century, he has been known as Charles ‘the Bad’.¹⁰³ None of this does justice to his actual position, nor to the ¹⁰² Garci López de Roncesvalles, Crónica de Garci López de Roncesvalles: Estudio y edición crítica, Carmen Orcastegui Gros (ed.), (Pamplona, 1977), 79–100. See particularly pp. 81–82, 84 for positive contrasts with Jean II and Charles V. ¹⁰³ Suzanne Honoré-Duvergé, ‘L’origine du surnom de Charles le Mauvais’, Mélanges d’histoire du Moyen Âge dédiés à la mémoire de Louis Halphen (Paris, 1951), 345–350.

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strength of his support among French nobles and commoners alike. As the sovereign king of Navarre and one of the great princes of France by both blood and territory, Navarre’s position bears greater resemblance to that of Edward III than to that of an important but nonetheless subordinate French vassal. Like Edward, Navarre probably did not really intend to seize the French crown.¹⁰⁴ He was probably more interested in maximizing his leverage in negotiations over his lands in Normandy and Champagne. On the other hand, he might actually have had a better chance at the French throne than Edward did. His mother, as the Navarrese chronicler repeatedly emphasized, was the daughter of King Louis X of France, and his father, Philippe d’Évreux, had been considered for the succession in 1328 alongside Edward and Philippe de Valois.¹⁰⁵ Given not only his lineage but also his army, the capable lieutenants he had in his younger brothers, and his record of military success, not to mention the Valois dynasty’s short but disastrous history and the ineffective way its heir-apparent had handled power thus far, many good and sensible people might well have seen Navarre as an interesting alternative. The man was clever and well educated; Froissart reported that he spoke in Latin before an assembly in Paris.¹⁰⁶ Michel Pintoin, writing decades afterward and with full knowledge of Navarre’s later conduct, nevertheless balanced his criticism with a description of the king’s good qualities, describing him as spirited, perspicacious, astute, and possessed of an easy eloquence and a singular affability, although rather short in stature.¹⁰⁷ Charles obviously had considerable personal charisma, and his skill as an orator comes through in the chronicles. Still, his success rested on the fact that his claims were at least as arguably legitimate as those of anyone else and that he was politically and militarily more palatable to many people than the other options. The reform party thus gained a great deal by Navarre’s affiliation with their cause. The obvious advantages of his army and the dynastic threat were amplified by strengthened alliances with other bonnes villes, especially Amiens, whose leading noble family, the Picquigny, were staunchly pro-Navarre, and those towns along the Seine that needed Navarrese garrisons to leave their shipping alone.¹⁰⁸ But there were also disadvantages. Charles of Navarre, to repeat, was a

¹⁰⁴ Autrand, Charles V, ch. 6–7; Charon, Princes et principautés, 227–250; Jostkleigrewe, Monarschischer Staat, ch. 6. ¹⁰⁵ John Milton Potter, ‘The development and significance of the Salic Law of the French’, EHR 52 (1937): 235–253; Craig Taylor, ‘The Salic Law and the Valois succession to the French crown’, French History 15 (2001): 358–377; Cazelles, société politique . . . sous Philippe, 205–208; Charon, Princes et principautés, esp. 109–132, 231–251; Jostkleigrewe, Monarschischer Staat, ch. 6. ¹⁰⁶ ‘là préeça et remoustra premierement en latin’ (Froissart, SHF, §412, p. 98). ¹⁰⁷ ‘vivacis ingenii, habensque oculum perspicacem; gratum et sponte fluens ei non deerat eloquium. Inaudite quoque existens astucie, et affabilite singulari’ ([Michel Pintoin], Chronique du religieux de Saint-Denys, contenant le règne de Charles VI, de 1380 à 1422, M.L. Bellaguet (ed.), 6 vols (Paris, 1839–1852), I: 468). ¹⁰⁸ Cazelles, ‘parti navarrais’, 853–854. One of Amiens’s representatives at the Estates General was le Coq’s close associate, Master Robert de Corbie.

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sovereign king. This fact is much clearer in the Navarrese sources than those from France, but Charles, at least, never forgot it. He could not be controlled by the likes of a merchant or a common-born bishop, and indeed they did not try. His interests were imperfectly aligned with theirs, and his troops were simply dangerous. The alliance also lost the reformers the support of some of the bonnes villes in Burgundy and Champagne, whose representatives left Paris and had no further involvement with the reform party.¹⁰⁹ The Second Estate also fractured. The nobles did not as a class abandon the reform party at this point, and some individuals never abandoned it at all.¹¹⁰ Norman and Picard nobles tended to sympathize with Navarre for reasons that ranged from vassalic duty to military necessity to frank disapproval of King Jean’s harsh treatment of King Charles and his associates. But there were also nobles who were staunch Valois loyalists, and others who were driven away from the reformist-Navarrese axis by the way military matters were being handled.¹¹¹ For either side to triumph would require the Dauphin’s support. This was a thing easy to get but hard to keep. Navarre won the first round with the help of his aunt Queen Jeanne, who succeeded in turning the Prince’s initial diffidence toward the King into moult bonne chere; and by 13 December, Prince Charles and King Charles had agreed to return all the castles they had taken from one another.¹¹² It was bad timing that messengers from London arrived just then to say that a treaty had been concluded and that King Jean was expected in France very soon, news that once again put the reformers on the backfoot.¹¹³ The French officers guarding Navarre’s key castles at Breteuil, Évreux, Pont-Audemer, and Pacy refused to hand them over without King Jean’s permission.¹¹⁴ So, Navarre increased the pressure. In January, he oversaw the Christian burial of his partisans’ bodies, which had been exposed for over a year at King Jean’s orders, and he proclaimed them martyrs in one of his stirring speeches in Rouen. (By some strange chance, the Dauphin’s nearby manor burned down just then.)¹¹⁵ He also allowed—and probably encouraged—soldiers who had fought for his brother or for England to take over fortresses in the countryside west of Paris as far south as Chartres.¹¹⁶ Such freebooting soldiers were the scourge of mid-fourteenth-century France, destabilizing every region they entered. Many of them were English, Gascon, or

¹⁰⁹ GC, 118. The chronicler overstates the extent of the disaffection. Reims and Bar-sur-Aube, as well as Meaux and Soissons, remained allied with Paris (see Chapter 2). ¹¹⁰ For example, AN JJ 86, no. 238, fol. 78 and AN JJ 86, no. 248, fol. 82v–83r (remissions for a squire and a knight, both participants in Marcel’s rebellion, including wearing the Parisian hoods and attending armed assemblies). ¹¹¹ Cazelles, ‘parti navarrais’, 867. ¹¹² GC, 122–26, quote at 126; ed. Secousse, Recueil, 65–68; BnF franç. 27501, no. 122. The release of prisoners in Paris was also agreed (ed. Secousse, Recueil, 64–65, 68–70). ¹¹³ GC, 127. Cazelles, Société politique . . . sous Jean, 299–301. ¹¹⁴ GC, 130. ¹¹⁵ GC, 130–134. ¹¹⁶ HYW, II: 303–305; GC, 127–28, 158–159.

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Hesdin

Blangy-sur-Bresle Grainville-la-Teinturière

Longueville-sur-Scie

Saint-Maulvis

Laon Honfleur

Hodence-l'Évêque

Grand-Couronne

Creully Évrecy

Rouen Pont-Audemer

Argences

Lisieux

Le Bec-Hellouin

Torigni-sur-Vire

Évreux Pacy-sur-Eure Fontenay-le-Marmion Conches-en-Ouche Poissy Maule-sur-Mandre Sablonnières Thury-Harcourt Paris Villepreux Breteuil Saint-Evroult-Notre-Dame-du-Bois Frênes Verneuil-sur-Avre Fresnes Trappes Montlhéry Épernon Corbeil-Essonnes Châteauneuf-en-Thymerais Saint-Chéron Provins Melun Arpajon Gallardor Corbon Bréthencourt Étampes Milly-la-Forêt Montereau Trézan Sillé-le-Guillaume

Bonneval

Moret

Larchant Nemours

Cloyes-sur-le-Loir

Orléans

Chéroy

Château-Landon Montargis

Branches

Meung-sur-Loire Beaugency

Le Bouchet Cravant,

Figure 1.3 Military Violence, Autumn 1357 to Spring 1358

Navarrese mercenaries who had fought against the French in recent conflicts. Truces proclaimed, they now fought on their own behalf for booty and adventure or hired themselves out for use in local conflicts. Roving the countryside in ‘free companies’, they took over castles and used them as bases for pillage, stealing livestock, burning villages, killing, raping, and holding people to ransom.¹¹⁷ The people of Paris and its hinterlands had heard what such men had done in Normandy. It thus caused terror in December when their ilk took over fortresses at Maule-sur-Mandre, Villepreux, and Trappes, only 30 kilometres west of Paris (see Figure 1.3).¹¹⁸ By the end of the month, the great castle of Épernon, on the road from Chartres to Paris, had fallen to troops under the command of James Pipe, an English adventurer with Navarrese affiliations.¹¹⁹ In January, freebooters took Saint-Cloud and sacked Étampes.¹²⁰ Companies commanded by a certain

¹¹⁷ Denifle, Guerre de Cent ans, II: 179–188; Nicholas Wright, Knights and peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French countryside (Woodbridge, 1998); Kenneth Fowler, The great companies, vol. 1 of Medieval mercenaries (Oxford, 2001). ¹¹⁸ GC, 127. ¹¹⁹ GC first mentions the occupation of Épernon on 12 March 1358 (159) and does not name its captain as James Pipe until May (175–176), but it had been taken over at Christmastime: ‘villa & castro de Espernone et ea occupare ac eos circumcirca discurrere . . . circa festum natis domini ultimum preteritum’ (AN JJ 86, no. 350, fol. 119v and see discussion below). ¹²⁰ GC, 141–142. HYW, II: 304–305. The violence between the Count’s troops and the Dauphin’s garrison related in AN JJ 86, no. 395 (misnumbered 385), fol. 137v, paraphrased in Luce, 193, did not

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‘Ruffin’ occupied castles to the west, including Gallardon and Saint-Arnoult-enYvelines, and to the south-east, like Larchant and Château-Landon.¹²¹ Even the western edges of Champagne may have been affected.¹²² Refugees and their stories multiplied. Jean de Venette reports that ‘a great part of the rural population (populi rusticani), no longer wishing to stay in their villages, went to Paris with their wives and children and other possessions’.¹²³ Overrun with refugees, a major supply route cut, and not wholly trusting their city’s high walls, Parisians increasingly saw military security as the political issue of overriding importance.

Soldiers and Refugees The invasions of the countryside exacerbated the factional split in Paris. There was sharp disagreement about who was to blame and what was to be done. Charles of Navarre’s role in fomenting the violence was not entirely clear. Even the antiNaverrese royal chronicler admits that ‘no one in Paris knew who the captain of these men-at-arms was’ and that he had only hearsay (comme l’en disoit) evidence for reports that it was Anglo-Navarrese who took fortresses at Trappes and Villepreux west of Paris.¹²⁴ He is similarly vague about who was responsible for the threat to Saint-Cloud, simply calling the attackers ennemis.¹²⁵ On one occasion, at least, Navarre intervened to tamp down some of the violence. The Quatre Valois chronicle reports that, at the reformers’ behest, Navarre led troops from the bonnes villes to besiege the castle of Fresne, south of Paris, which had been occupied by the English.¹²⁶ Yet if Navarre did not foment all of the violence in the countryside, he was certainly closely associated with many of the military bands roaming the Chartrain. James Pipe, whose occupation of Épernon was a major source of devastation, had enjoyed employment as a commander in the Navarrese army under Philippe de Navarre in Normandy the previous year.¹²⁷ Navarre may not yet have regard him as his lieutenant, as he would name him in May 1358, but Pipe was nevertheless likely among the ‘captains of the castles and fortresses of Normandy, held by the enemies of the king of France’, with whom Navarre reportedly made grans aliances at Christmas.¹²⁸ The sacking of Étampes, which occurred on the very same day that its count got married, was certainly of Navarrese doing. Although Count Louis d’Évreux of Étampes was of Navarrese lineage, he was also of the lineage of Charles d’Espagne, whom Charles of Navarre take place until late May or June: ‘que pour le temps des diz crimes & malefices perpetrees les genz de commune du plat pais estoient rebelles a nous & aus gentilz hommes’. ¹²¹ Froissart, SHF, §409, pp. 94–95; Jean le Bel, 249–250. ¹²² BnF franç. 25701, no. 121. ¹²³ Jean de Venette, 154. ¹²⁴ GC, 127. ¹²⁵ GC, 141. ¹²⁶ 4 Valois, 70. ¹²⁷ Froissart, SHF, §407, p. 93. ¹²⁸ GC, 128. On Pipe’s lieutenancy, see GC, 175–176 and Delachenal, Histoire, II: 22–23.

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had assassinated, and his bride was the sister of the late Count of Eu, whose execution on Jean II’s orders in 1350 was among the Navarrese partisans’ major complaints.¹²⁹ King Jean had given Eu to Jean d’Artois, who may have provided the impetus for Navarre’s arrest in April 1356.¹³⁰ That the Étampes patrimony was sacked the same day that Louis married the woman who, in Navarrese opinion, ought to have inherited Eu sent an unmistakable message. If some of the companies were Navarrese surrogates, however, it did not necessarily follow that everyone faulted Navarre for the violence. Many people blamed the Dauphin’s bumbling. By failing to deliver on the promises he had made in December, he had led Navarre to exercise his military options or—in a more charitable light—had at least forced him to concentrate his energies on retaking his patrimony rather than defending the Chartrain. The feeling that the Dauphin was mismanaging the situation was exacerbated by a decision taken by his marshals of Champagne, Normandy, and Burgundy in mid-December to convoke 2,000 soldiers to Paris for 14 January. Not by coincidence, this was the day scheduled for the opening of the next Estates General and the confirmation of the deal with Navarre.¹³¹ Sensing intimidation, the city prohibited unknown armed men from entry and set an armed watch at the city gates.¹³² Ostensibly, these troops were meant to protect the countryside, but their summons effectively ramped up the arms race, pushing Navarre and France closer to open war. As the royal chronicler reports: The King of Navarre, who knew that the Duke [the Dauphin] was making the summons [of men at arms], reconstituted his forces as much as he could, and truly the people of Paris and its surroundings were greatly dismayed, for they feared that there would be conflict between the two lords leading to the destruction of the country.¹³³

For many people, sympathy for Navarre and/or disapprobation of the Dauphin did not stem from popular political sentiments in favour of a particular man or the policies associated with him. Rather, it reflected their sense that a dispute between two powerful people was being handled in such a way as to visit violence on common people. The weight of public opinion was such that the Dauphin had to make a speech at Les Halles in Paris on 11 January defending himself against ‘those who had said and made publicly known (publié) that he had ordered soldiers to come pillage ¹²⁹ GC, 141–42, 141 n. 4; Cazelles, ‘parti navarrais’, 840, 845–846. The bride, Jeanne de Brienne, was also the widow of the Duke of Athens, Gautier de Brienne. It is not clear what patrimony, if any, she brought to her second marriage, which remained childless. Interestingly, her mother was Jeanne de Mello, Mello being the likely hometown of the Jacques’ leader, Guillaume Calle (see Chapter 6). ¹³⁰ Delachenal, Histoire, I: 142–143. ¹³¹ HYW, II: 303; ed. Secousse, Recueil, 67. ¹³² GC, 129. ¹³³ GC, 129–130.

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and destroy [the Parisians]’. At a counter-demonstration the next day organized by Marcel and his associates, the Dauphin’s chancellor was forced to answer: the claims made by many that since the Dauphin did not keep the agreements he had made with the King of Navarre, [he] could not do what he ought to repel the enemies who ravaged the countryside around Paris, Chartres and the surrounding areas . . . ¹³⁴

Rebutting the chancellor’s defence, Marcel’s supporters alleged that the prévôt des marchands was doing all he could, but that the Dauphin had paid enormous sums to ‘several knights’ which they used to no good end, a reference to money allotted for the soldiers convoked by the marshals.¹³⁵ In fact, even the royal chronicler agrees that soldiers summoned by the marshals did nothing of value (sanz rien faire).¹³⁶ The bourgeois reformers had already begun to take the military situation into their own hands. The impetus may originally have come from the Dauphin: A lawsuit from 1362 alleges that the prince had given Étienne Marcel ‘a certain order’ to arrange troops, fortifications, and the defence of Paris.¹³⁷ In December, the city sent out an expedition of troops drawn from both the city and its rural hinterland (tant de Paris comme de la viconté) to retake Maule-sur-Mandre and other fortresses west of Paris.¹³⁸ Around Christmas, Étienne Marcel sent out another municipal expedition, whose troops again included country-folk (this time paid refugees from the area), against the freebooters occupying Épernon.¹³⁹ Both of these expeditions failed, but they would not be the last time that Paris turned to common-born militias and troops hailing from both city and countryside to

¹³⁴ The chronicle’s manuscripts disagree here about whether it was the King of Navarre or the Dauphin who could not do his duty to push back the freebooters (GC, 137, n. 2). If the reformers’ propaganda did claim that Navarre would protect them if only he could, that would suggest a close partnership between the reformers and Charles of Navarre and a real belief that Navarre might serve as their military arm. Placing the duty of protection on the Dauphin would have been a less radical move and is in keeping with Marcel’s later claims made before the marshals’ murder and in a letter to the Dauphin in April that the prince had failed to deal with the freebooters (d’Avout, 301; see Chapter 2). ¹³⁵ GC, 137–139. ¹³⁶ GC, 141. ¹³⁷ ‘sub umbra certi mandati a dicto primogenito nostro sibi facto ad ordinandum circa congregaciones, fortalicia armaturas et custodiam ville Parisiensis’ (Siméon Luce, ‘Pièces inédites relatives à Étienne Marcel et à quelques-uns de ses principaux adhérents’, BEC 21 (1860): no. 8, p. 88). ¹³⁸ GC, 128; cf. Religieux, 115–116, which describes this expedition as one ordered by the Dauphin. ¹³⁹ ‘ad ipsos inimicos a dicto loco de Espernone repellendo cum certis aliis personis per tunc prepositum mercatorum ad hoc stipendiis ville parisis ordinatis promisisset ante castrum & villam de Espernone predictas (sic) adire causa dictos inimicos debellandi & ut dictum negotium suum sortiri posset effectum, ipse Clemens cum certis aliis ad hoc ordinatis apud Chaliacum (Chilly-Mazarin) ubi omnis propter hoc congregare debebant accessisset et carente commitiva sufficienti ad dictum factum perficiendum ad villam redisset Parisis’ (AN JJ 86, no. 350, fol. 119v, remission for Clement Dure, who had fled to Paris with his wife at Chistmastime 1357 ‘lest he be subjugated by the power of the kingdom’s enemies’). For Chilly-Mazarin, a proposed mustering ground during the Jacquerie, see Chapter 9.

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tackle military objectives.¹⁴⁰ Remissions speak of armed assemblies in Paris attended by bourgeois de Paris, but which also included men with ‘foreign’ names, like Geoffroy le Flamenc (the Fleming) and Thomas Gascoigne (Gascon).¹⁴¹ The citizen militia was complemented by paid soldiers, especially archers like the Breton Salomen de la Tour (archier & soudoier aus gaiges de la dite ville de Paris), whose forenames suggest origins outside the Paris basin.¹⁴² Later remissions often speak of the Parisian forces as commanded by Marcel himself, but also of ‘others chosen by Marcel for this purpose’.¹⁴³ One of these commanders was Pierre Gilles, a spice merchant originally from near Montpellier.¹⁴⁴ A long-time Navarrese partisan, he had helped free Charles of Navarre in November and would lead the Parisian army to Meaux in June.¹⁴⁵ These forces were employed not only to recuperate territory lost to enemies, but also to demolish fortifications that might fall into enemy hands in the future. The first known efforts along this line dates to the opening days of the Estates in November 1357. On 9 November, an expedition was sent out under the Dauphin’s authority to determine, with the advice of local people, which of the episcopal fortification in the diocese of Beauvais should be reinforced and which should be torn down, lest they fall into enemy hands. On 31 December, the commissioners reported back that while most of the castles should remain in service, Houdenc-l’Évêque and the motte at Sorcy presented dangerous opportunities to enemies and should be destroyed.¹⁴⁶ The ordonnance issued by the Estates in February 1358 enshrined this approach to castles as policy.¹⁴⁷ Two of the central elements of the Jacquerie were thus prefigured in military efforts undertaken during Marcel’s government in the winter of 1357–1358: the ¹⁴⁰ See the expedition to Corbeil, discussed in Chapter 2. ¹⁴¹ ‘Foreigners’: AN JJ 86, no. 271, fol. 91r; AN JJ 86, no. 272, fol. 91. Armed assemblies: AN JJ 86, no. 253, fol. 84v–85r; AN JJ 86, no. 285, fol. 95; AN JJ 86, no. 390, fol. 135, among others. ¹⁴² AN JJ 86, no. 519, fol. 187v–88r; BnF nouv. acq. franç. 5846, no. 25 (‘Raoullet de Pemerit, Sallemon Leslen, Alain de Villeneuve, Jannequin le Boutteillier & Jeusson de Ranis archiers’). ¹⁴³ ‘aliorum per eundem tunc prepositum ad hoc in ipsa villa ordinatorum’ (AN JJ 86, no. 35, fol. 119v). Luce, ‘Pièces inédites’, no. 8, p. 88 reports that Marcel had 14 or 15 men closely involved with his military activities. ¹⁴⁴ Vincent Challet, ‘Les bons, la brute et le truand: Le meurtre d’Étienne Marcel vu de Montpellier’ in Vincent Challet and Patricia Victorin (eds), Du meurtre en politique: Regards croisés sur l’utilisation de la violence en contexte populaire, special issue of Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 34 (2017): 23–28. ¹⁴⁵ Executed in August 1358, Pierre Gilles [Pere Gilli in Occitan] is listed, along with Josseran Mâcon, among those Navarrese partisans pardoned in the 1355 Treaty of Valognes (ed. Secousse, Recueil, 582–96, at 585). For the November release, see 4 Valois, 61. For his activities in June, see Chapter 8. ¹⁴⁶ ‘li ennemi se il venoient en pais se pourroient tenir legier et enforcier a l’aide des bois & des bonnes genz qui prennent chascun jour si comme il apperte que il ont fait en pluseurs lieux & pais pourquoy tout le pais d’environ seroit tost robez perillez & gastez et les bonnes genz prins’ ( Oise G 21; AN JJ 90, no. 563, fol. 278). For the episcopal fortifications, see Léon-Honoré Labande, Histoire de Beauvais et de ses institutions communales jusqu’au commencement du XVe siècle (Paris, 1892 [repr. 1978]), 230–231; Olivier Guyotjeannin, Episcopus et comes: Affirmation et déclin de la seigneurie épiscopale au nord du royaume de France (Beauvais-Noyon, Xe–début XIIIe siècle) (Geneva, 1987), 158–160 and map 14, p. 89. ¹⁴⁷ Viollet, ‘états’, 269.

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use of rural people as troops and the destruction of fortresses. In both cases, these elements were efforts to devolve some of the responsibility for military defence to the localities, with local people ensuring the security of their area. In the November–December commissions for the Beauvaisis castles, the language used to describe the actions—abatre & arraser par terre—and the local people involved—genz du pais—parallels that which was later used to describe the Jacquerie and the Jacques. Indeed, one of the commissioners sent out to inspect the castles in the Beauvaisis, a royal sergeant named Philippe Poignant, later received a remission for his service to the Jacques.¹⁴⁸ This is not, however, to say that Marcel and his party were purposefully planning the Jacquerie in the winter of 1357–1358. At any rate, they had as yet no need. Although contested, their position was relatively safe. But some of the necessary infrastructure was already available, and some of the ideas about the nobility’s failures that would animate some Jacques and underlie some Jacquerie propaganda were already circulating. These were assets that could be mobilized if the need arose. Had events taken a different course, the potential might never have been realized. But on 22 February 1358, the struggle between nobles and commoners for control over military matters became spectacularly acute. The political situation, fluid since Poitiers, was pushed beyond a point of no return.

¹⁴⁸ AN JJ 90, no. 148, fol. 79v–80r, ed. Ghislain Brunel, ‘Archives de la révolte et lettres de rémission: Des serfs du Laonnais (1338) aux Jacques de Picardie (1358)’ in Pierre Rigault and Patrick Toussaint (eds), La Jacquerie: Entre mémoire et oubli, 1358–1958–2008 (Amiens, 2012), no. 3, pp. 71–72). Philippe Poignant is further discussed in later chapters.

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2 New Marvels Turning the World Upside Down

The reformers’ military strategy put them into direct competition with the royal marshals, who considered it an usurpation of their professional prerogatives and a social affront. Although their forces were led by a minor nobleman, the Parisians’ employment of communal and rural troops in preference to warrior aristocrats recalls the advice of the Complainte sur la bataille de Poitiers to eschew ineffective nobles in favour of doughty commoners. Indeed, many of Marcel’s troops may have been called Jacques Bonhommes, given the term’s pre-revolt usage for common-born soldiers.¹ There is evidence, too, that the reformers, particularly Robert le Coq, were becoming increasingly involved with wider military operations—for example, by ordering naval preparations in La Rochelle.² The same disregard for expertise—albeit expertise discredited by failure—that had driven the reformers to turn the royal bureaucracy upside down in 1357 was now directed at the military hierarchy. The marshals may have been divided when it came to the question of Navarre—the marshal of Champagne was probably proNavarrese; the marshal of Normandy certainly not—but the bourgeois infringement of their hard-earned command was insupportable.³ For their part, Marcel and le Coq could not back down. For reasons logistical, political, and ideological, they had to have troops.

Murdering the Marshals On 22 February 1358, this conflict and a number of related complaints drove Marcel to oversee the murder of the marshals of Champagne and Normandy, as

¹ See Chapter 1. ² Siméon Luce, Histoire de Bertrand Du Guesclin et de son époque: La jeunesse de Bertrand (1320–1364), 1st edn (Paris, 1876) no. 13, pp. 534–535; BnF franç. 27501, no. 124, 127. The dispute over the nomination of admiral, at issue in the Estate’s meeting of February 1358, was another aspect of this struggle over the war effort: Paul Viollet, ‘Les états de Paris en février 1358’, Mémoires de l’Institut national de France 34 (1895): 270–271, 276–278. ³ HYW, II: 303; Raymond Cazelles, ‘Le parti navarrais jusqu’à la mort d’Étienne Marcel’, Bulletin philologique et historique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (jusqu’à 1610), année 1960 (Paris, 1961): 847, 867.

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0003

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well as that of a lawyer and diplomat named Regnaut d’Acy.⁴ Each had committed sins against the reforming party. Aside from summoning soldiers to Paris, Robert de Clermont, marshal of Normandy, had led an expedition against the Navarrese in Normandy in November 1356 during which Godefroy de Harcourt, an important Navarrese partisan, was killed.⁵ Perhaps more upsetting to municipal sensibilities, only a few weeks before the murders he had ordered to be hanged a man who had killed the Dauphin’s treasurer. As the man was being led to the gibbet, Clermont had threateningly predicted that many of the greatest and richest men in Paris would come to a similar end.⁶ The main fault of Jean de Conflans, marshal of Champagne, from a family of staunch Navarrese supporters, seems to have been his association with the marshal of Normandy and their military plans, although the failure of a diplomatic mission to Navarre undertaken in January may have contributed.⁷ Regnaut d’Acy, while unaffiliated with the marshals’ military strategy, had been among those deprived of office by the Estates in 1357.⁸ He had recently returned from a mission to England for the negotiations of the proposed Treaty of London, whose consequences included the failure of agreements with Navarre, and he had reportedly brought with him letters to the Dauphin and his council that were kept from the Estates, ‘on account of which they were fearful and agreed together to kill the regent’s council’.⁹ They may have believed these letters contained instructions against the agreement with Navarre. D’Acy had also recently taken the king’s side in a matter detrimental to the University, whose members were largely favourable to the reform party.¹⁰ These were men blocking the reformers’ access to power, especially their efforts to pacify Navarre. The situation had reached a particularly delicate point in the past few days, as the Estates finished their deliberations.¹¹ Their ordonnance had reinstated that which had been issued by the Estates of February–March 1357, the ⁴ The marshal of Burgundy, Géraud de Thurey, seems to have escaped harm, but he may have been an intended target because the speech given the next day by le Coq’s associate, Robert de Corbie, stated that there were four councillors misleading the Dauphin (GC, 154). ⁵ 4 Valois, 66–67; Chron. norm., 119–120. This may be the reason why the Dauphin later blamed the assassinations on Charles of Navarre in a letter to the Count of Savoy (Charles V, Lettre inédite du dauphin Charles sur la conjuration d’Étienne Marcel et du roi de Navarre, adressée aux comtes de Savoie (31 août 1358), ed. François Combes (Paris, 1869), 6). Regarding this letter, see d’Avout, 259–262. ⁶ ‘Et si comme l’en le menoit, le dit Monseigneur Robert de Cleremont disoit que ainsi feroit on des plus grans et des plus suffisans de Paris, et moult foulloit les diz bourgeois de sa parole et menaçoit’ (4 Valois, 68; GC, 142–143). ⁷ Cazelles, ‘parti navarrais’, 846–847; BnF franç. 27501, no. 125. ⁸ Ord., III: 121–46, art. 11. ⁹ Chron. norm., 123; Chron. reg., 265. ¹⁰ Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols (Paris, 1909–1931), I: 356. On connections between the reformers and the University, see Cazelles, ‘parti navarrais’, 860–862; Raymond Cazelles, Société politique, noblesse et couronne sous Jean le bon et Charles V (Geneva, 1982), 302–303; Jacques Krynen, ‘Entre la réforme et la révolution: Paris, 1356–1358’ in Frédéric Bluche and Stéphane Rials (eds), Les révolutions françaises: Les phénomènes révolutionnaires en France, du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris, 1989); see Chapter 1; cf. Charles Jourdain, L’Université de Paris au temps d’Étienne Marcel (Paris, 1878). ¹¹ Ed. in Viollet, ‘états’, 273–292, based on a municipal register from Tours. A better manuscript is BnF nouv. acq. fr. 20075, no. 20 (Delachenal, Histoire, I: 351, n. 2).

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touchstone of the reformers’ vision and efforts. It had reiterated the proscription of the officers excluded by that measure, and it had extended the reformers’ military efforts: the Dauphin’s choice for admiral (a hostage of the English in no position to take up the office) had been replaced with the reformers’ man, and the policy on castle fortification or demolition in place since November was codified.¹² Navarre’s interests were not mentioned, but two of the four administrators of the taxation granted were his partisans.¹³ The Estate’s ordonnance was issued no later than 21 February, but it was the freebooters’ occupation of the Chartrain that served as the justification for the assassinations on the 22nd.¹⁴ That morning, Marcel convoked another of his citizen assemblies, this time on the Île-de-la-Cité, near where tourists now queue to see the Sainte-Chapelle. There he gave a strongly worded speech about the military threat and the failure of the traditional authorities to do anything about it. The chronicle of Jean de Venette, who said he was himself among the crowd (me et multis audientibus), reports that Marcel reminded them of the Dauphin’s failure to defeat the freebooters, despite the citizens’ frequent requests. Marcel further explained that he and the community (communitas) believed that this was due to ‘the advice of some of his counsellors’ and then announced that he and ‘the citizens of Paris’ (cives de Parisius) had therefore decided to ‘remove some of these councillors from the regent’s (sic) company’ (aliqui de assistentibus ipsi regenti de medio tollerentur).¹⁵ What exactly he meant by ‘remove’ became clear when he led the crowd across the street to the royal palace and into the Dauphin’s own apartments, where the marshals were in attendance upon him. Marcel gave the signal to his companions: ‘My dears (Karissimi), quickly do what you came here to do.’ Run through with swords, the marshals’ bloodstained corpses were dumped in the palace courtyard, a horrible spectacle to behold (horribile spectaculum de eorum cruentatis corporibus). As the news of the murders spread through the city, many of the Dauphin’s councillors took to flight, among them Regnaut d’Acy. Caught outside his house, he was killed on the street. D’Acy’s death might be thought an accidental corollary to the marshals’ deaths, an overspill of the mob’s violent emotion.¹⁶ A remission for one Guillaume Gargoule, goldsmith of Paris, however, suggests that they were part of the same plan: Gargoule was present at both incidents, both committed under orders from the prévôt des marchands and his confederates, and a Jehannin

¹² Luce, Histoire de Bertrand Du Guesclin, no. 13, pp. 534–535; Viollet, ‘états’, 270–271, 276–278. ¹³ Viollet, ‘états’, 289–290, art. 18: Mahieu de Picquigny, member of the solidly Navarrese family of Amiens, and Jean de Saint-Aude, who appears on the Navarrese pardon roles of 1360 (Secousse, Recueil, 177–81, at 180, and 181–85, at 184). The other two, Jean de Lille and Pierre Chappelu, were more closely associated with Paris. ¹⁴ On the timing of the ordonnance, see Viollet, ‘états’, 281, n. 4; 291, n. 1. ¹⁵ Jean de Venette, 154, 156. The Dauphin did not take the title of regent until March. See n. 40. ¹⁶ Arthur Layton Funk, ‘Robert le Coq and Étienne Marcel’, Speculum 19 (1944): 484; d’Avout, 152.

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Gargoulle, certainly a relative, was among the Parisian troops sent to attack the fortress of Meaux alongside the Jacques in June.¹⁷ Other chroniclers disagree with Jean de Venette about the exact course of events on 22 February, but one detail on which they all—save Jean le Bel—agree is that the Parisians were wearing matching hoods (chaperons, capucia).¹⁸ Except for Jean de Venette’s chronicle, all these chronicles go on to say that, after the murders, Étienne Marcel handed the Dauphin his own hood to put on. The royal chronicle further specifies that Marcel then put on the Dauphin’s own luxuriously ornamented fur hood in exchange.¹⁹ These hoods, half red and half blue, had begun to appear in the city the first week of January.²⁰ As the chroniclers’ nearly unanimous attention to them suggests, wearing them was a serious political statement. In a mostly non-literate age of heraldry and liturgy, and in which fabric was expensive, clothing communicated as much or more than words could.²¹ The putting on of such a hood was a performative act, like taking an oath. After Marcel’s fall in the coming summer, wearing these hoods constituted an offence to be pardoned.²² The reform party was not the only group to wear chaperons: Charles of Navarre’s partisans wore green and camel hoods, and during the counter-Jacquerie some nobles also had distinctive hoods, perhaps those of Navarre.²³ The red and blue hoods of Paris served to identify the reformers’ ¹⁷ ‘homicidio nuper perpetrato in personis deffunctorum Roberti de Claromonte et Marescalli Campanie, consiliariorum nostrum, militium, in nostra camera & nobis presentibus, et Reginaldi Dacy, quondam advocati carissimi domini genitoris nostri et nostri in parlamento Parisiensi per defunctum prepositam mercatorum Parisiensium et suos fautores, presens fuisset’ (AN JJ 86, no. 203, fol. 66v, ed. Siméon Luce, ‘Pièces inédites relatives à Étienne Marcel et à quelques–uns de ses principaux adhérents’, BEC 21 (1860): no. 11, p. 91); Jehannin Gargoule: AN JJ 86, no. 281, fol. 93v–94r. Guillaume Gargoule may have been swayed by the recently adjourned Estates attenuation of provisions from January 1358 that goldsmiths found noxious (ed. in Viollet, ‘états’, 281, art. 10, and see also Ord., III: 200–201). Jean de Lille the younger, who served as a general élu for the aide agreed by the February Estates (Viollet, ‘états’, 289, art. 17) and who was killed alongside Marcel on 31 July 1358 was also a goldsmith (GC, 209, n. 3), as was Pierre des Barras, leader of the army that took the army to Meaux in June, at which Gargoule’s relative was present. Guillaume de Gargoule later received the space on the goldsmiths’ bridge that had been held by des Barras (AN JJ 86, no. 447, fol. 157v–58r). Perhaps it was a reward for betraying this relative? ¹⁸ Jean le Bel, 252, who does mention that the Dauphin’s robe was bloodied. ¹⁹ GC, 149. ²⁰ GC, 130; Jourdain, Université, 11–12; César Egasse du Boulay, Historia universitatis parisiensis, 6 vols (Paris, 1665–1673), IV: 336. ²¹ Christian de Mérindol, ‘Mouvements sociaux et troubles politiques à la fin du Moyen Âge: Essai sur la symbolique des villes’ in Violence et contestation au Moyen Âge: Actes du 114e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris, 1989), Section d’histoire médiévale et de philologie (Paris, 1990), 267–302; Denis Bruna, ‘De l’agréable à l’utile: Le bijou emblématique à fin du Moyen Âge’, RH 301 (1999): 3–22; Sarah-Grace Heller, ‘Anxiety, hierarchy, and appearance in thirteenth-century sumptuary laws and the Roman de la rose’, French Historical Studies 27 (2004): 311–348. ²² For remissions, see AN JJ 86, no. 214, fol. 69v–70r, confirmed at AN JJ 86, no. 255, fol. 85v–86r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 83–85; AN JJ 86, no. 238, fol. 78; AN JJ 86, no. 240, fol. 79–80r, ed. Ord., IV: 346–348 (general remission for Paris, 10 August 1358); AN JJ 86, no. 248, fol. 82v–83r; AN JJ 86, no. 266, fol. 89; AN JJ 86, no. 282, fol. 94; AN JJ 86, no. 390, fol. 135; AN JJ 86, no. 582, fol. 211, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 117–118; next two notes. ²³ Navarre: ‘les chaperons de sa livree de drap vert & camelin’, as well as the Parisian hoods (AN JJ 86, no. 266, fol. 89); ‘roy de Navarre . . . fist à ses aliez porter chapperons semblables pour cognoisance’ (Chron. norm., 127), followed by Chron. reg., 269: ‘fecitque sibi federatos portare capucia unius liberate,

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partisans to one another and to the world at large as adherents to the programme advocated by Marcel or, as one remission put it, ‘as a sign of true love and alliance against the realm’s enemies’.²⁴ During the spring of 1358, citizens of other northern French cities began wearing them, at Marcel’s request or on their own initiative, to show their dedication to the cause.²⁵ The royal chronicle’s story of Marcel’s cap on the Dauphin’s head has a double significance. First, it demonstrates that the reformers tried to identify him as a supporter of their cause. In the royal chronicle, once Marcel had assured himself of the Prince’s forgiveness for the murders, he sent over blue and red fabric (deux draps, un de pers et un rouge) so that the Dauphin could have chaperons made for himself and his people. All the officers of the royal government in Parlement and elsewhere in the Palace began wearing them. Even the Duke of Orléans, the Count of Étampes, and Charles of Navarre himself put on the red and blue hoods of Paris.²⁶ Visibly, northern France was now united behind one party. Second, if the new fashion manifested Marcel’s success, his sartorial exchange with the Prince also pointed to his downfall. The story suggests an intolerable inversion, similar to Wat Tyler’s disastrously familiar approach to Richard II, 23 years later, when he shook the King’s hand and spoke to him rudely, just before being cut down.²⁷ Claude Gauvard argues that in fourteenth-century France the act of removing a man’s hat—Marcel prist le chaperon du dit duc—was a symbolic castration.²⁸ The usurpatory act of Marcel putting the Dauphin’s hat on his own head, as if crowning himself, only appears in the royal chronicle, but even the lesser act of proffering his own cap to the Dauphin was itself a scandalous

ut per hoc agnoscerentur’; ‘prins des chaperons du Roy de Navarre’ and those of Paris (AN JJ 86, no. 582, fol. 211, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 117–118); ‘pris des caperons de Paris, partis de rouge & de bleu, en signe de vivre & alliance avec la dite Ville de Paris & ledit Roy de Navarre’ (AN JJ 90, no. 81, fol. 40r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 132–133). Nobles: ‘un chap[er]on my parti per quoi il cuidièrent . . . qu’il fussent des espies des gentils hommes’ (AN JJ 96, no. 425, fol. 145, ed. Luce, no. 62, pp. 331–332). ²⁴ ‘en signe de vraie amour & alience contre les ennemis du dit Royaume’ (AN JJ 86, no. 248, fol. 82v–83r). ²⁵ GC, 157–158. Amiens: AN JJ 86, no. 239, fol. 78v–79r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 97–99; AN JJ 90, no. 81, fol. 40r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 132–133. Laon: AN JJ 86, no. 446, fol. 157, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 103–104. Bar-sur-Aube: AN JJ 86, no. 302, fol. 101r. François-Tommy Perrens, Etienne Marcel: Prévôt des marchands (1354–1358) (Paris, 1874), 201 does not say that the citizens of Beauvais, Senlis, and Rouen also wore the chaperons, just that they allied with Paris, which other evidence demonstrates (cf. Cazelles, Société politique . . . sous Jean, 306). ²⁶ ‘Le quel duc . . . pria au dit prevost que ceuls de Paris vousissent ester ses bons amis, et il seroit le leur. Et, pour celle cause, le dit prevost envoia à monseigneur le duc deux draps, un de pers et un rouge, pour ce que le dit duc feist faire des chaperons pour li et pour ses gens, telz comme ceuls de Paris les portoient . . . et ceulz du Parlement et des autres chambres du Palais, et tous autres officiers communelment estans à Paris.’ (GC, 151–152, 157–158.) ²⁷ Vincent Challet, ‘Violence as a political language: The uses and misuses of violence in late medieval French and English popular rebellions’ in Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (eds), The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt (Abingdon, 2017), 287–288. ²⁸ Claude Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’: Crime, état et société en France à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols (Paris, 1991), II: 724–726.

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inversion, as the illustrative miniature in the royal copy shows (Figure 2.1).²⁹ The gesture was certainly over-familiar and, worse—as the chronicles that mention it agree—the cap was offered as reassurance to the Dauphin, ‘who was very much afraid’ (qui moult estoit effraié).³⁰ It was protection. But, as Marcel himself had just argued before the assembled people of Paris, protection was supposed to be the Dauphin’s duty to his frightened people. Here was a merchant (a drapier, who thus sent draps) proffering protection to his future sovereign, whom he had terrified. That the earliest chroniclers, Jean le Bel and Jean de Venette, did not mention the Dauphin’s hood-wearing suggests that it is an embroidered tale, meant to signal not the facts of the incident (the Dauphin wearing a hood) but its deeper meaning (the inversion of social hierarchy). At this moment, the chroniclers were saying, the world was turned upside down. The assassinations were a watershed moment, laying bare the social split that had developed since Poitiers, would lead to the Jacquerie, and would culminate in its repression. As Jean de Venette mourned, ‘But alas! Why did they commit such crimes? For such evil—and so much of it—came out of this excess, so many men were killed, and so many villages laid waste that it cannot be described.’³¹ The murders turned a considerable group of nobles implacably against the Parisians and against Navarre, whom many saw as the massacre’s author.³² The death of the marshal of Champagne, Jean de Conflans, whose family was one of the most pro-Navarrese among the champenois nobility, destroyed that party in that region and created a nucleus of resistance.³³ It was in Champagne and with the champenois nobility’s aid that the counter-coup was to be initiated. Marcel and the reformers—their eyes too-fixed on Paris and royal politics—had seriously miscalculated the strength of regional loyalties and the importance of noblesse to the Second Estate. ²⁹ See, similarly, Jean de Venette’s remarks on the Jacques’ dressing themselves and their wives in the nobles’ clothes (Jean de Venette, 176, and discussion in Chapter 5). On the miniature, see Christiane Raynaud, ‘Le langage de la violence dans les enluminures des Grandes chroniques de la France’, JMH 17 (1991): 199, 201. ³⁰ GC, 149. Froissart, SHF, §410, p. 96: ‘en fu il meismes en grant peril, mès on li donna uns des caperons à porter’; 4 Valois, 68: ‘oult grant doubte le duc de Normendie . . . Et donc lui dist le prevost: “Sire, ilz sont voz bien vueillans, car ilz ne sont cy venuz fors que pour vostre profit”. Et lors lui bailla le prevost son chapperon; Chron. norm., 123: ‘fut le regent en grant doubte de mort, mais le prevost des marchans lui bailla son chaperon’); Chron. reg., 265–266: ‘Cumque regens formidaret ne similiter ipsum occiderent, pro majori tutella prepositus mercatorum proprium capucium porrexit illi, quod erat simile capuciis illorum de sui confederatione’; ‘Dominus dux . . . timens pro salute sua prepositum exoravit, qui, ad majorem securitatem, inter ipsum et ducem capuciis commutatis’ (Religieux, 120). ³¹ Jean de Venette, 156, 158. ³² Charles V, Lettre inédité, 6. ³³ John Bell Henneman, Royal taxation in fourteenth-century France: The captivity and ransom of John II, 1356–1370 (Philadelphia, 1976), 67. There had been long-standing Navarrese sympathies in Champagne, because the counties of Champagne and Brie had belonged to Charles of Navarre’s grandmother, Jeanne de France, but had been removed to and by the crown in 1318 (Philippe Charon, Princes et principautés au Moyen Âge: L’exemple de la principauté d’Évreux, 1298–1412 (Paris, 2014), 120; see also Carmen Orcastegui Gros (ed.), Crónica de Garci López de Roncesvalles: Estudio y edición crítica (Pamplona, 1977), 81–82.)

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Figure 2.1 The murder of the marshals, Grandes chroniques, BnF franç. 2813, fol. 409v, reproduced by permission

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Reactions: Paris and Provins It nevertheless took some time for the consequences to become clear. In the murders’ immediate aftermath, Marcel must have felt that at last a path had opened to pacify Navarre and to implement the ‘holy ordonnances’ of 1357. On the very night of the murders, after the bodies had been cleared from indecent view, he asked Queen Jeanne to invite Navarre to Paris. He then firmed up his support with the bonnes villes. He justified his actions to those representatives of the Third Estate still in Paris, securing their agreement to ‘approve that which had been done and to consider themselves in strong alliance (bonne union) with those of Paris’, and he sent letters out to the bonnes villes themselves, asking them to wear the Parisian hoods as a sign of their true alliance (vraie union) with the capital. On 24 February, in the Parlement de Paris, with armed men at his side, Marcel supervised the Dauphin’s confirmation of the ordonnances that King Jean had cancelled the year before, reiterating the opening provision of the Estates that had concluded some days before.³⁴ Two days later, Navarre arrived in Paris and once more charmed his brotherin-law into at least a show of companionable cheer, while the Dowager-Queens, le Coq, and Marcel worked out the details of a new agreement.³⁵ The proposal they made in the second week of March offered Navarre the Pyrennean county of Bigorre and the districts of Rieux and Rivières near Toulouse.³⁶ This deal had the distinct advantage for the Valois of giving Navarre something to occupy himself with far from Paris, closer to what one might hope would become his core interests in Spain. True, it also offered Edward III a potential ally near Gascony, but the jockeying between the great southern houses of Albret, Armagnac, Foix, and Comminges showed that this might provide as many opportunities for diplomatic manoeuvre to the French as to the English.³⁷ For his part, Navarre granted a letter of safe conduct to two knights in Parisian service and their entourage, letters that the royal chronicler observed ‘were obeyed rather more readily than the Dauphin’s safe-conducts’.³⁸ He also promised not to return his brother Philippe’s Norman castles at Longueville, Anet, and Nogent-le-Roy until Philippe was demonstrably a friend (bienweillant) of France.³⁹

³⁴ GC, 154–55, 157–158; Viollet, ‘états’, 273, art. 1. ³⁵ GC, 155–156. On the Dauphin’s possibly warm feelings toward Navarre at this point, see Charon, Princes et principautés, 249, and Françoise Autrand, Charles V le sage (Paris, 1994), 304. ³⁶ BnF nouv. acq. fr. 7376, fol. 310–14v; AN JJ 86, no. 50, fol. 21, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 73–76. The account in GC, 159–160, also says that Navarre received the county of Mâcon and his sister, Queen Blanche, received Moret-sur-Loing. Other gifts to Navarre included the Dauphin’s Hôtel de Nesle on the Left Bank and funds to support an army of 1,000 men for the war effort (AN JJ 86, no. 52, fol. 21v, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 71–73; Delachenal, Histoire, II: no. 21, pp. 399–400). ³⁷ On Navarre’s claim to Bigorre, see Charon, Princes et pricipautés, 198, 204–205, 209. ³⁸ GC, 160–161. ³⁹ Secousse, Recueil, 71.

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The stipulation regarding Philippe’s castles suggests that he might have been hesitant to endorse the agreement, but the deal-breaker, as usual, was King Jean. The agreement in December had fallen apart because he would not approve it (a fate much resembling, Étienne Marcel must have thought, that of his precious ordonnances the year before). The Navarrese-Parisian group now tried to circumvent this problem by declaring the Dauphin, acting up to then as the king’s lieutenant, his regent, thus giving him full authority to act not in the king’s name but as the king.⁴⁰ The King himself, however, had already made decisions that undermined his son’s proposals. Just as the negotiations were concluding, Jean’s messengers arrived in Paris with news that the Treaty of London would soon be agreed.⁴¹ Among other provisions, the treaty ceded Bigorre to the English.⁴² Fed up with Valois perfidy/incompetence, Navarre left Paris for Mantes and refused to attend any of the assemblies that the Dauphin called that spring.⁴³ The garrison under James Pipe at Épernon ravaged the village of Châtres (now called Arpajon) south of Paris.⁴⁴ Parisian efforts to buy a truce were rebuffed and Pierre de Villiers, the city’s captain, was sent to try to take control of the Chartrain’s fortresses.⁴⁵ For the reformers, the removal of the marshals and d’Acy seemed to have had no lasting effect. The situation seemed right back where it started. In fact, their position had deteriorated considerably. Many nobles saw the assassinations as an act of war. It opened a new phase of conflict in which violence rather than oratory would be the key method of struggle. The news that there were ‘disturbances and conflict between nobles and some Parisians’ spread fast.⁴⁶ The week after the murders, Pierre ‘le Bègue’ de Villaines, a skilled commander, a royal administrator, and a dear friend of the late Robert de Clermont, declared war on Paris.⁴⁷ He gathered a great army (magna milicia) and captured the town of Corbeil

⁴⁰ GC, 161, dates this to 14 March, which Delachenal pushed back to 1 March (Histoire, I: 371, based on a mandate published at Histoire, II: no. 20, pp. 398–399). After 14 March, the title appears consistently, which reflects its increased importance after news of the peace treaty. ⁴¹ GC, 156–157. ⁴² Delachenal, Histoire, II: no. 23, pp. 402–411 at 402. ⁴³ News of the treaty came either on 10 or 12 March; Navarre left Paris on 13 March (GC, 156–57, 161). Assemblies: BnF franç. 27501, no. 129; GC, 163–165. ⁴⁴ GC, 159; Delachenal, Histoire, I: 368. ⁴⁵ Luce, Histoire de Bertrand Du Guesclin, 119–121, 248, no. 12, p. 533; R.A. de Vertot et al., ‘Liste chronologique des frères chevaliers de l’Ordre de Saint Jean de Jerusalem de la Vénérable Langue de France’ in Histoire des chevaliers hospitaliers de S. Jean de Jerusalem, appellez depuis les Chevalier de Rhodes et aujourd’hui les Chevaliers de Malte, 5 vols (Paris, 1692–1776), IV: 60. ⁴⁶ ‘Rumores et discentionem inter nobiles et quosdam alios parisienses (prouthdolor!) nunc subortas’ (AN JJ 86, no. 109, fol. 39v, remission issued for a noble who killed a rustic in April 1358. See discussion in Colette Beaune, Le Grand Ferré: Premier héros paysan (Paris, 2013), 195–196. ⁴⁷ GC, 163. The two had fought together in the battle at which Godefroy de Harcourt had fallen in 1356 (Jean de Noyal, ‘Fragments inédits de la chronique de Jean de Noyal, abbé de Saint-Vincent de Laon (XIVe siècle)’ in Auguste Molinier (ed.) Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France 20 (1883): 256. Funk, ‘Robert le Coq’, 484, conflates Pierre de Villaines with Pierre de Villiers, captain of the Paris guard (Luce, Histoire de Bertrand Du Guesclin, 119–121, 248, no. 12, p. 533; de Vertot, ‘Liste chronologique’, IV: 60). Pierre de Villiers, however, also had many reasons to be loyal to the Valois and

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south of the capital on the Seine River. Prefiguring the Dauphin’s use of castles at Meaux and Montereau the next month, Villaines chose Corbeil because it allowed him to cut off Parisian food supplies, most of which came by river, a point that several chroniclers emphasize.⁴⁸ But unlike their future disaster at Meaux, the Parisians were successful at Corbeil.⁴⁹ Marcel’s forces retook the town on Good Friday (29 March), having marched out through the port Saint-Antoine ‘to show themselves in arms’ (ostenderent se in armis).⁵⁰ Although the nobleman’s forces dispersed to neighbouring fortresses and took their spoils with them, bread once more flowed north to Paris. The city’s militia returned home ‘with joy, healthy and happy’ (cum laetitia sani et hilares),⁵¹ and with renewed confidence that commoners could wage war as well as, or better than, nobles. If the noble faction was willing and able to act without the Dauphin, its members, like the reformers, knew that they had to have the prince and his royal authority on their side. His assumption of the regency made the matter all the more pressing. In mid-March, they had attempted to kidnap him ‘in order to get him out of the power and hands of the Parisians’, but the squire entrusted with the mission was captured and executed at Les Halles.⁵² An assembly of the Estates of Champagne convoked for 9 April at Provins provided a different kind of opportunity. The champenois nobility’s disaffection was particularly acute because of the assassination of their marshal, but those who attended the meeting included the Duke of Orléans (the Dauphin’s uncle), the Count of Étampes, and Simon de Roucy, Count of Braine, as well as Robert de Corbie, a University colleague of Robert le Coq and fellow reformer.⁵³ With the exception of Simon de Roucy, none of these men was a champenois delegate. They came to keep watch on the Regent. The Prince and Robert de Corbie opened the assembly by promising the delegates that there was a good explanation for the seemingly scandalous (moult merveilleuses) things that had recently been done. Robert de Corbie then probably repeated the speech he had given in Paris on the morrow of the assassinations.⁵⁴ At this remove, we may well doubt the Regent’s sincerity, but the nobles could not be sure where that changeable young man’s thoughts lay.⁵⁵ Charles had not spent to be angry about the marshals’ murder, and his mission to the Chartrain may reflect sentiments incompatible with remaining in the city. ⁴⁸ ‘in Corbolio se posuerant, ut impedirent ne panis qui de Corbolio ferri solet Parisius per Secanam amplius pertransiret’ (Jean de Venette, 170); ‘c’estoit la ville qui plus soustenoit de vivres ceulz de Paris’ (Chron. norm., 124); ‘inde multa victualia mitterentur Parisius’ (Chron. reg., 266). ⁴⁹ On Meaux, see Chapter 8. ⁵⁰ Quote at Chron. reg., 266. Jean de Venette, 170 (on whose chronology, see Birdsall’s comments in Jean de Venette, The chronicle of Jean de Venette, Jean Birdsall (trans.), Richard A. Newhall (ed.), (New York, 1953), 239, n. 33); Chron. norm., 124. GC, 164, reports that on Holy Thursday ‘les ennemis’ sacked Corbeil, while Chron. reg. blames le Bègue’s troops for pillaging before dispersing when they knew that the Parisian troops were camped nearby, celebrating the feast. ⁵¹ Chron. reg., 266; quote: Jean de Venette, 170. ⁵² GC, 162–163. ⁵³ GC, 164–167. ⁵⁴ GC, 154, 165–166. ⁵⁵ According to the chronicle, Robert de Corbie and the Dauphin spoke in complementary terms, Corbie using this phrase in his speech after the murders in February and in his speech at Provins. This

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much time in Paris since the assassinations, and he had probably moved his female dependants to Meaux earlier in the month, perhaps indicating some fear of Marcel and his partisans.⁵⁶ On the other hand, he had worn the red and blue hood. He had reinstated the March 1357 ordonnance. He had made a sweetheart deal with Navarre, even if he had not been able to implement it. Jean II’s envoys, who had spoken with the Prince the week before, had probably given him an earful, but father and son had long had a contentious relationship over Prince Charles’s share in power. One might well believe that Charles was seduced by the regency. (Indeed, he never renounced it, even after the defeat of the Parisian rebellion.) The effort to kidnap him suggests that the noble faction was not sure that he would have come willingly. In this uncertainty, Orléans, Étampes, and Roucy accompanied the young prince to a garden, where the nobles of Champagne had gathered to relay the result of their deliberations. On behalf of the delegates, Roucy expressed their willingness to serve him but their refusal to have anything to do with Paris. He then inquired as to whether the Dauphin ‘knew of any evil of the marshal of Champagne who had been killed at Paris, or any misdeed for which he ought to have put to death’. Perhaps encouraged by champenois noble support—the nobles of Picardy and the Beauvaisis, mostly Navarrese in their sympathies, seem to have offered no such assurances at a similar assembly two weeks before—the Regent responded that he believed that both marshals had served him well and truly. Thanking him for that assurance, Roucy told him that they would expect him to visit justice upon those who had killed Jean de Conflans.⁵⁷ This garden interlude put an end to the Prince’s prevarications. In whatever light he had considered the situation before, whatever personal ambitions or secret stratagems he may previously have harboured, his face was now set firmly against both the reformers and Navarre.

The Blockade of Paris Charles of France immediately adopted Pierre de Villaines’ strategy of using river castles to block Paris’s supply lines. On 11 April, the morrow of his conversation with Roucy, he left Provins for Queen Blanche’s castle Montereau at the made Delachenal doubtful that the Prince actually spoke these words on his own behalf (GC, 165, n. 3, following Perrens, Étienne Marcel, 206–207). ⁵⁶ The Regent went to Meaux on 6 April, prior to attending the Provins assembly (Delachenal, Histoire, I: 379). Many years later, it was recalled that he had sent the women there to escape Marcel and his partisans: ‘pour eschiever la fureur et tirannie du dit prevost et de ses alyez’ (AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244). ⁵⁷ GC, 167–168. For the assembly of the Second Estate in Senlis, see GC, 163–164; Delachenal, Histoire, I: 378; Alfred Coville, Les états de Normandie: Leurs origines et leur développement au XIVe siècle (Paris, 1894), no. 18–19, pp. 365–367.

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confluence of the Rivers Seine and Yonne and forced her commander to render it.⁵⁸ (She was absent at the time.) Montereau was ‘the key to the country’, perfectly situated to control Champagne, Brie, and the Gâtinais. By seizing it, he simultaneously reinstated the river blockade that the Parisians had removed not even a fortnight before and removed a major Navarrese fortress from play.⁵⁹ This time, if the Parisians wished to lift the blockade, they would have to travel much further and deal with a much stronger fortification than Corbeil had presented. The Regent then turned back north, heading for Meaux on the River Marne, where he had sent 60 men under the Count of Joigny’s command from Provins.⁶⁰ Eschewing the less defensible royal fortress in the city proper, he garrisoned his men in the great island fortress-compound called le Marché (the Market).⁶¹ Reachable from the city only by a narrow bridge and nearly impregnable, le Marché was an ideal refuge for his wife, daughter, and sisters, and, like Montereau, it allowed control of the river traffic. Situated on an island made by a bend in the Marne and a channel, the forteress could block the bread and wine that normally flowed west to Paris.⁶² Paris soon had word of these events. Marcel and his associates must have been dismayed, maybe even frightened. Losing the Regent deprived them and their acts of authority. Actual physical danger threatened. Their reaction was consistent with the strategy they had pursued since December: they expanded their own security operations while undermining the Dauphin’s authority by stressing his military failures. On 18 April, a week after the seizure of Montereau, Marcel and the city councillors countermanded the Dauphin’s order to send the royal artillery (engins, canons, garros, arbelestres à tour, & autres arteillieries de plusieurs manieres) to Meaux and moved the munitions from the Louvre to the municipal hôtel at the Place de Grève.⁶³ The same day, Marcel informed the people of Paris of his actions in an open letter (sachant tuit), which would have been read aloud and posted throughout the city.⁶⁴ He also sent a strongly worded ⁵⁸ GC, 168–169. ⁵⁹ ‘clavis patrie & taliter situatum quod patrie campanie brie & vastineti poterant per illud defendi & custodiri’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 503v–504r). See also AN P 2293, pp. 453–456. ⁶⁰ GC, 169. ⁶¹ Mickaël Wilmart, Meaux au Moyen Âge: Une ville et ses hommes du XIIe au XVe siècle (Montceaux-lès-Meaux, 2013), 162–163, 165, 288, 293–296. For the royal castle formerly belonging to the counts of Champagne, see the plate in Georges Gassies, Histoire de Meaux, 2 vols (Meaux, 1982–1983), opposite I: 65. ⁶² Étienne Marcel’s letter of 18 April beseeched the Dauphin to release Montereau and Meaux ‘afin que vostre peuple de Paris n’ait cause de commotion pour faute de vivres’, which may indicate that lack of food was a prospective rather than actual danger. ⁶³ Quote at AN JJ 86, no. 471, fol. 167r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 100–101, vidimus at AN JJ 89, no. 531, fol. 242v. See also GC, 170; AN JJ 86, no. 285, fol. 95; AN JJ 86, no. 390, fol. 135 (which states that the artillery was to be sent by the Seine: ‘par la Reviere de Saine en certains lieux’); BnF franç. 20692, pp. 172–174. ⁶⁴ BnF Clairambault 69, no. 214, ed. in [Antoine-Jean-Victor] Le Roux de Lincy, Histoire de l’hôtel de ville de Paris, suivie d’un essai sur l’ancien gouvernement municipal de cette ville (Paris, 1846), 234, n. 1. Notably, the letter shows that some of the artillery consisted of powder-driven cannons.

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letter to the Dauphin, decrying his garrisoning of castles ‘in regions of peace and without war’ when the Chartrain was overrun with pillagers and the Norman frontier was undermanned.⁶⁵ The Dauphin found this letter ‘uneducated, ugly, and ungracious’.⁶⁶ The language, sharply direct, perhaps reflected Marcel’s commercial rather than literary education, but more likely it was a rhetorical indication of the loss of respect and honour normally due to a prince.⁶⁷ The missive’s central message was the social and political consequences of a ruler’s failure to fulfil his responsibilities toward his subjects. Marcel wrote, ‘you owe them (your subjects) protection and defence, and they ought to give you honour and obedience, and if the first is lacking, they are not to be held liable for the other’.⁶⁸ Although addressed to the Dauphin, the letter was meant to sway the feelings of a wider audience. The manuscript copy of it used for the modern edition—now unfortunately lost—came from a municipal cartulary of Bruges, meaning that the councils of other towns sympathetic to Paris probably also received copies. Marcel was not alone in his opinions. Indeed, he was probably only echoing what was said on the street. Paris had had Anglo-Navarrese troops and other unsavoury sorts to its south and west for months, and repeated efforts to do something about them had produced no results. Paris’s citizens were apparently and understandably unhappy with the Dauphin’s (mis)allocation of precious military resources. The letter Marcel addressed to the Dauphin notes that bills denouncing his actions had already been anonymously posted on the gates of Paris (lettres qui furent trouvées ès portes de Paris), an almost treasonable act of political protest.⁶⁹ It is of course possible that Marcel’s own supporters had posted these libels, but the patent letter he sent to the people of Paris suggests that he believed these sentiments to be widespread, perhaps even dangerously so for his own position. Besides carefully inventorying exactly what had been taken, the letter explained forthrightly that the munitions had been destined for Meaux ‘on account of which the people murmured very greatly’ (dont le peuple murmuroit très grandement), a rationale he also cited in his patent letter explaining the ⁶⁵ d’Avout, 301–303. ⁶⁶ ‘Nous envoyer à Maulx Lettres contenant plusieurs parolles rudes, laides & mal gratieuses’ (AN JJ 86, no. 240, fol. 79–80r, ed. Ord., IV: 346–348). ⁶⁷ d’Avout, 173–175. ⁶⁸ ‘vous leur devés protection et deffense, et eux vous doivent porter honneur et obéissance, et qui leur faut de l’un ne sont tenus en l’autre’ (d’Avout, 302). ⁶⁹ Wendy Scase, ‘ “Strange and wonderful bills”: Bill-casting and political discourse in late medieval England’ in Rita Copeland, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase (eds), New medieval literatures II (Oxford, 1998), 225–247; Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin, ‘Des portes qui parlent: Placards, feuilles volantes et communication politique dans les villes des Pays-Bas à la fin du Moyen Âge’, BEC 168 (2010): 151–172; Christian D. Liddy, ‘Bill casting and political communication: A public sphere in late medieval English towns?’ in Jesús Ángel Solórzano Telechea and Beatriz Arizaga Bolúmburu (eds), La gobernanza de la ciudad europea en la Edad Media (Logroño, 2011), 447–461; Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘ “A bad chicken was brooding”: Subversive speech in late medieval Flanders’, P&P 214 (2012): 63–64.

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seizures. In later medieval Europe, ‘murmuring’, similar to bill-casting, signalled crisis-level discontent, a prelude to open revolt.⁷⁰ They had good cause to mutter, for the Île-de-France was now occupied to its west, south, and east. Only the northern regions—the Beauvaisis, the Vermandois, parts of lower Normandy, and Picardy—remained unclaimed by Navarre or Valois. The attention of all parties turned northward in April and May, as the Parisians sought to keep a lifeline open and the Dauphin tried to close the circle around them. These urbanized and highly commercialized regions were more hospitable to the Parisians than rural Champagne, and many of their nobles remained strongly Navarrese in their sympathies and perhaps even sympathetic to the reform party. Few of them had attended the assembly of the Second Estate held at Senlis in March.⁷¹ The meeting may have provided more of an impediment to the Dauphin’s efforts than a boon to the Parisians, but the Prince could not do in the north what he had done in the east and the south without the solid support of the regional nobility. He needed their fortresses and manpower, conveniently offered in goodwill or political expediency rather than for the money he did not have.⁷² For the Parisians, the situation was becoming critical. Having lost the Dauphin, they had few cards left to play. If he won control of the north, particularly of the River Oise, the game was over. Yet the Oise was still open. After assuring themselves of control of the Seine and the Marne, the Dauphin and his party must surely have thought about how and where to cut this river, which ran south from Flanders through this part of France, bringing grain and wine to Paris and carrying their products back north to their trading partners in the cities of Picardy and Flanders.⁷³ One reason for the Dauphin’s failure to secure this vital strategic interest is probably that his choice of fortifications was limited. Pontoise was too close to Paris to be useful for blockade.

⁷⁰ W. Mark Ormrod, ‘Murmur, clamour and noise: Voicing complaint and remedy in petitions to the English crown, c.1300–c.1460’ in W. Mark Ormrod, Gwilym Dodd, and Anthony Musson (eds), Medieval petitions: Grace and grievance (Woodbridge, 2009), 146–152; Dumolyn and Haemers, ‘ “A Bad Chicken” ’, 56–60; Christopher Fletcher, ‘Rumour, clamour, murmur and rebellion: Public opinion and its uses before and after the Peasants’ Revolt (1381)’ in Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, Vincent Challet, Jan Dumolyn, and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz (eds), La comunidad medieval como esfera pública (Seville, 2014), 193–210; Michael Sizer, ‘Murmur, clamor, and tumult: The soundscape of revolt and oral culture in the Middle Ages’, Radical History Review 121 (2015): 13–15. ⁷¹ The eye-witness account published in Coville, États de Normandie, no. 19, pp. 366–367, does not indicate problems with attendance; cf. BnF franç. 27501, no. 129; GC, 163–164; Delachenal, Histoire, I: 378. ⁷² The nobles whom we know to have garrisoned Meaux hailed from Champagne, Burgundy, or southern France (see Chapter 8). The Dauphin referred to the garrison he installed at Montereau as consisting of ‘our knights’ (‘notres chevaliers vint pour le garder’, AN P 2293, pp. 453–456). ⁷³ André Lesort, ‘Le trafic du vin sur l’Oise au Moyen Âge’, Bulletin philologique et historique (jusqu’à 1610) du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, année 1960 1 (Paris, 1961): 295–302; Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘La circulation fluviale dans la France médiévale’ in Recherches sur l’économie de la France médiévale: Actes du 112e Congrès national des sociétés savants (Lyon, 1987), Section d’histoire médiévale (Paris, 1989), 30–31; Pierre-Henri Guittoneau, ‘Entour Paris’: Une capitale et ses petites villes sur l’eau au XVe siècle, unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2 vols (Paris, 2014).

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Further up the Oise at its confluence with the Aisne, the ancient royal seat of Compiègne, where the Dauphin had spent much of March and April, was a possibility, but, despite its extensive ramparts, the city lacked a castle on the river and probably had nowhere to place artillery. The lack of such a fortress in his hour of need may have motivated Charles’s construction in 1374 of a new royal castle in Compiègne, which he sited directly on the river.⁷⁴ Two better options were Beaumont-sur-Oise and Creil, but these, too, presented difficulties. The county of Beaumont-sur-Oise belonged to the Dauphin’s young uncle, the Duke of Orléans, a major opponent of the reformers. Its great castle overlooking the Oise was, however, occupied by his wife Blanche of France.⁷⁵ We know nothing explicit about Blanche’s politics, but, as the posthumous daughter of the last Capetian king of France and Jeanne d’Évreux, they may not have matched those of her Valois husband, a man 10 years her junior. Although never seriously considered for the succession herself, Blanche had good dynastic reasons to sympathize with the Navarrese views of her formidable mother, to whom she remained close throughout her life.⁷⁶ She may have been among those northern nobles who were pro-Navarre and willing at least to entertain an alliance with the reformers. During the Jacquerie, Beaumont’s seigneurial prévôt served as a rebel captain in the county and, while Blanche eventually fled the Jacques when they attacked Beaumont, she ran not to Meaux like other noble refugees but instead to Paris, where Étienne Marcel and Charles of Navarre held sway, a strange choice if they were her enemies.⁷⁷ Her aunt Blanche d’Évreux, of course, had not managed ⁷⁴ Martine Petitjean, ‘Compiègne’, Revue archéologique de Picardie 16 (1999): 159–161. On artillery emplacements in the fourteenth century, see Kelly Devries, ‘The impact of gunpower weaponry on siege warfare in the Hundred Years War’ in Ivy A. Corvus and Michael Wolfe (eds), The medieval city under siege (Woodbridge, 1995), 233–236. ⁷⁵ GC, 178, places her there (dedanz) just a few weeks later. Beaumont, along with Pontoise and Aisnières, had been a Navarrese holding, but the three castellanies were returned to the crown by the Treaty of Mantes in February 1354 and transferred to the Duke of Orléans a few weeks later (Secousse, Recueil, 33–36, at 35; Charon, Princes et principautés, 130, 134–135, 138, 141; AN JJ 82, no. 254, fol. 173v–75r; BnF nouv. acq. fr. 7376, fol. 118–124). Blanche inherited it upon Orléans’ death: Bernard Guenée, Tribunaux et gens de justice dans le bailliage de Senlis à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1380—vers 1550) (Paris, 1963), 66, n. 27. Detailed valuation of the seigneurie upon her widowhood edited in Louis Douët d’Arcq, Recherches historiques et critiques sur les anciens comtes de Beaumont-sur-Oise, du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Amiens, 1855), no. 207, pp. 182–198. ⁷⁶ I have been able to locate few documents from Blanche de France/Orléans, and all are from later decades: AN P 1893 (description of fiefs from 1376–77); Cartulaire du prieuré de Saint-Leu d’Esserent (1080–1538), Eugène Müller (ed.), (Pontoise, 1901), no. CICbis, pp. 161–162; Gaston Vignat, ‘Note sur une des chapelles absidiales de la Basilique de Sainte-Croix de Orléans’, Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de l’Orléanais 9 (1866): 100–144. On Jeanne and Blanche, see Anne-Hélène Allirot, ‘L’entourage et l’hôtel de Jeanne d’Évreux, reine de France (1324–1371)’, Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 116 (2009): 169–180; Brigitte Buettner, ‘Le système des objets dans le testament de Blanche de Navarre’, Clio: femmes, genre, histoire 19 (2004): 37–62. On the dynastic implications of the marriage, see Raymond Cazelles, La société politique et la crise de la royauté sous Philippe de Valois (Paris, 1958), 203–204. It is notable that her marriage was childless. ⁷⁷ ‘Symon de Berne, prevost de Beaumont sur Aise et capitaine de la conté de Beaumont et de tout le païs environ’ (AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256). ‘Et s’en fouy la duchesse d’Orliens, qui estoit dedenz, et s’en ala à Paris’ (GC, 178). Marcel’s letter to Ypres in July lists her,

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to retain control of her own strategic dowry fortress at Montereau, but she had not been in the castle at the time. Blanche of France, likely present at Beaumont since the royal chronicle places her there a few weeks later, may have been better able to refuse than had her aunt’s representative. The Dauphin’s best option was thus probably the great fortresses at Creil. While it may have been in some disrepair, the castle there was located on an island at the confluence of the Thérain and Oise rivers, analogous to situation of the castles at Meaux and Montereau on the Marne and Seine (Figure 2.2).⁷⁸ But, unlike Meaux, at the mercy of its reform-minded citizens, or Montereau, which belonged to a Navarrese supporter, Creil was already in friendly hands: it was held in fief from the Count of Clermont by his aunt Béatrix de Bourbon, DowagerQueen of Bohemia and now wife of the crown’s military counsellor Eudes de Grancey. Béatrix was also the aunt of Jeanne de Bourbon, the Dauphin’s wife.⁷⁹ With many French troops still occupied on the frontier as negotiations with

Figure 2.2 Major river castles

Jeanne d’Évreux, and Philip of Navarre’s wife, Yolande de Flandre, among those nobles staying in Paris during the Jacquerie (d’Avout, 308). ⁷⁸ The castle probably did have some unsatisfactory aspects. While Charles of Navarre did occupy it to great effect in his war against the French crown later in 1358 and 1359, using it to control the Oise as well as the country around, Charles of France had it rebuilt at the same time that he built the castle at Compiègne. GC, 218; Jean de Noyal, ‘Fragments inédits’, ed. Molinier, 263; Charles-Laurent Salch (ed.), Dictionnaire des châteaux et des fortifications du Moyen Âge en France (Strasbourg, 1979), 386. ⁷⁹ Raymond Cazelles, ‘The Jacquerie’ in R.H. Hilton and T.H. Aston (eds), The English rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984), 77; [C.] Le Payen de Flacourt, ‘Notice historique sur a ville et le château de Creil

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England dragged on, it made sense for the Dauphin to concentrate his forces at the stronger and more politically delicate places, leaving Creil for the moment in the care of these trustworthy supporters. At any rate, there is no evidence that troops were sent to Creil until the end of May, when, as the next chapter discusses, a mission to garrison the fortress may have precipitated the first incident in what became the Jacquerie.⁸⁰ For the moment, Charles had to bide his time.

The Northern Towns and the Estates of Compiègne The northern towns presented even thornier difficulties for the Regent than did its fortifications. The Parisian sympathies of important eastern towns, such as Soissons, Reims, and Châlons, were counterbalanced by his control of strategic castles in the region’s east and south. But, in the north, not only did the Dauphin’s party lack such a fortress, the capital’s urban support mattered more in this more mercantile and densely populated region. Northern Parisian allies included large, commercially developed cities like Laon, Beauvais, Senlis, Amiens, and Noyon. Except for Compiègne, the Dauphin had no major northern town on his side and, even in Compiègne, the citizens entertained other offers.⁸¹ The support of the towns was important, not only for the tax revenue that their wealthy citizens could provide but also for their military potential. Surrounded by high, crenelated walls, fourteenth-century towns were becoming large fortifications in their own right, and fourteenth-century military strategy—especially English military strategy—was employing towns as fortresses in preference to castles.⁸² Towns were useful as defensive refuges in the same way that castles were, but, unlike all except the largest fortresses, towns could also house large numbers of troops. This was not a feature of great importance to the Dauphin because his forces were scant, but the common folk, especially those of the countryside outside the towns (le plat pays), were much more numerous. A combination of those numbers and the cities’ walls could prove a force to be reckoned with.

(Oise)’, Revue archéologique 9 (1852): 54–57; Olivier Troubat, ‘Béatrix de Bourbon, reine de Bohême’, Annales de l’Est 40 (1988): 259–279. ⁸⁰ The complaints about soldiers at Creil all refer to depredations committed by Charles of Navarre’s troops after they occupied the castle, which probably happened in August 1358 (discussion in Chronicle of Jean de Venette, trans. Birdsall, ed. Newhall, 251–252, n. 116; AN JJ 90, no. 82, fol. 40v; AN JJ 91, no. 319, fol. 166; cf. Luce, 23; AN JJ 90, no. 351, fol. 179v–80, ed. Siméon Luce, ‘Négociations des Anglais avec le roi de Navarre pendant la révolution parisienne de 1358’, Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 1 (1875): no. 3, pp. 125–129. ⁸¹ See Chapter 7. ⁸² Michael Wolfe, ‘Siege warfare and the bonnes villes of France during the Hundred Years War’ in Ivy A. Corfis and Michael Wolfe (eds), The medieval city under siege (Woodbridge, 1995), 49–66; Philippe Contamine, ‘Les fortifications urbaines en France à la fin du Moyen Âge: Aspects financiers et économiques’, RH 260 (1978): 23–47; HYW, II: 391–400.

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Sentiment within these towns was not necessarily homogenous, any more than were the views of the northern nobles. In some of them, uprisings may have been fomented to ensure support for Paris. In Laon, Robert le Coq’s episcopal seat, the city’s proctor later confessed, although under threat of torture, that he had incited the poor to rebel against the rich and induced the inhabitants to wear the Parisian hoods.⁸³ In Amiens, whose dominant noble family, the Picquigny vidames, numbered among Navarre’s closest supporters, the citizens had grant descort among themselves in mid-April.⁸⁴ When the Dauphin summoned the city’s mayor and guildsmen to Corbie to explain themselves, they refused to come. Ostensibly afraid of his noble companions, they asked him to come instead to Amiens without an armed guard (senz ce toutevoiez que noz genz y venissent armez), an invitation he was probably wise to refuse.⁸⁵ Further afield, in northern cities like Arras, Abbeville, and Caen, there are recordings of ‘stirred-up commoners’ (gentes communitatis . . . mote; motion de peuple; comocions, conspiracions, et descort . . . le peuple commun) around the time of the Jacquerie.⁸⁶ As April turned to May, the Dauphin sought to defuse both the bourgeois and the Navarrese threats. He invited Charles of Navarre to negotiations held between Mello and Clermont on the second and third of May.⁸⁷ Since leaving Paris after news of the imminent treaty with England, Navarre’s surrogates had applied steady pressure in the Chartrain. In the third week of April, James Pipe and his troops had left Épernon to pillage Château-Landon and Chéroy.⁸⁸ But according to the royal chronicler, whose report is our only information, the purpose of this meeting was not to settle Navarre’s complaints but to win him away from the Parisians.⁸⁹ At this meeting, the Dauphin complained about how some of the Parisians had killed his people in his presence and taken his artillery, and he asked the King to stand with him against them (que il feust avecques lui et li aidast).⁹⁰

⁸³ AN JJ 86, no. 446, fol. 157, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 103–104. He later disavowed the confession. ⁸⁴ GC, 171. ⁸⁵ ‘quant nous nous partîmes de Compiegne pour aler à Corbie, acompaigniez lors de plusieurs genz d’armes, nous escrivismes audit Majeur, à plusieurs Majeurs de Banerez & autres d’icelle Ville, qu’il venissent par devers nous à Corbie, pour parler à nous, lesquelx n’obéirent pas, ne ne vindrent à nostre commandement, mes envoierent par devers nous, afin que nous vousissions aler en la Ville d’Amiens, senz ce toutevoiez que noz genz y venissent armez, pour ce, si comme il disoient, que il se doubtoient des Nobles qui lors estoient en nostre compaignie, pour aucunes paroles sentans menaces, qui dictes avoient esté d’aucunes personnes, & aussi que il doutoient que se il feussent entrez armez en la dite Ville en nostre compaignie, que granz dommages & escandéles n’y feussent lors avenuz’ (AN JJ 86, no. 239, fol. 78v–79r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 97–99). ⁸⁶ Quotes from, respectively, Arras: AN JJ 86, no. 140, fol. 48v; Abbeville: BnF Picardie 91, fol. 147, ed. Augustin Thierry, Recueil des monuments inédits de l’histoire du Tiers-État, Première série: Chartes, coutumes, actes municipaux, statuts . . . région du Nord, 4 vols (Paris, 1850–1870), IV, no. 43.x, p. 200; Caen: AN JJ 87, no. 321, fol. 204v–205, partially ed. Luce, no. 45, pp. 291–292. See HYW, II: 323–325; see Chapter 7. ⁸⁷ GC, 173–174. One manuscript adds that the meeting occurred at a place called Dommage-Lieu, probably the farm Damascelieu that belonged to the episcopate of Beauvais (AD Oise G 270). ⁸⁸ GC, 171; AN JJ 90, no. 421, fol. 212r. ⁸⁹ Cf. Funk, ‘Robert le Coq’, 485. ⁹⁰ GC, 174.

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Navarre refused and returned to Paris, where he was much fêted by its citizens. Negotiations having failed, the Dauphin turned to force: the captain of the castle of Évreux, which was still in French hands, was ordered to burn the town to the ground. Charles of Navarre now had pressing business to attend to in Normandy. Upon leaving the meeting with Navarre, the Dauphin had ridden to his stronghold at Compiègne, where a meeting of the Estates—originally planned for Paris—opened on 4 May.⁹¹ Robert le Coq went to the assembly, but found himself in physical danger from nobles in the Dauphin’s entourage and fled secretly back to Paris.⁹² Paris’s First and Third Estates boycotted the assembly, for no one could be found among Parisian clerics or bourgeois to serve as collector for the tax agreed.⁹³ The assembly was certainly a victory for the noble faction now allied with the Regent. The ordonnance it issued on 14 May removed the officers put in place by Marcel’s regime for the collection of taxes and administrative reform, decreeing that those reformateurs were now to be reputed private persons, and it annulled all gifts and graces previously issued by the Prince.⁹⁴ The money was strengthened, a measure that was to take effect in June, but with which the Parisians refused to comply.⁹⁵ The ordonnance also modified the reformers’ castle policy, calling for the reinforcement of all of the countryside’s fortresses, including the small, largely indefensible ones that had been targeted for destruction under Marcel and le Coq’s regime.⁹⁶ An aide was also agreed. Its reach was universal—even widows and orphans were to pay it—but its burden fell unevenly. The nobles were to pay 5 per cent on their income (12 deniers per livre), just as widows, wards, and servants were, but they were simply to be believed as to the value of taxes from their serfs.⁹⁷ The clergy, too, were allowed to estimate their dues, but their percentage was increased from the twentieth decreed in February to a tenth.⁹⁸ The city and townspeople were to fund one soldier for every 60 hearths, up from every 75 hearths in February. The free people of the countryside (gens du plat pays) were assessed at the same rate of one soldier’s pay per 100 hearths as in February, but serfs, unmentioned in February (probably because their noble lords did not attend that assembly), were to pay for a soldier per 200 hearths.⁹⁹ The clergy thus had ⁹¹ GC, 173, characterizes the planned meeting at Paris as an assembly of the bonnes villes, although all three Estates met at Compiègne. Luce, 50, seems to have believed that it was a regional assembly, restricted to the Vermandois, but cites no support for this. ⁹² GC, 174–175. ⁹³ AN P 2292, pp. 779–781. ⁹⁴ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 4, art. 8. ⁹⁵ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 1. The announcement of the change was to be made on 2 June. The decision was notified to the mint in Paris on 7 May, with instructions to keep it quiet (AN Z1b 56); ‘refuser & contredire la monnaie pour le cours que ordene li avions en l’assemblee de Compiengne’ (AN JJ 86, no. 390, fol. 135). ⁹⁶ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 15. ⁹⁷ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 14, art. 16. ⁹⁸ Interestingly, both assemblies specified that the Hospitallers were to pay on their previously exempt property: ‘excepté toute-voyes lesdiz Hospitaliers qui paieront Disieme entier de toutes leurs possessions & revenues, ja soit ce que elle soient mie tauxée’ (Ord., III: 218–32, art. 14). ⁹⁹ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 14–15.

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their burden doubled, while the townspeople saw an increase of 25 per cent, and the poorest rural people were subject to both direct and indirect increases. But the ordonnance also embraced many of the provisions set out by the Estates of February 1358, in most cases adopting them wholesale.¹⁰⁰ Like that of February, the Compiègne measure took steps to safeguard the abuse of the Dauphin’s authority, adopting almost verbatim the February measures limiting the use of his private seal and stipulating that no measures issued in his name were to take effect unless at least three members of the Great Council ‘signed their approval with their own hands, or put their mark if unable to write’ (se subscripsent de leurs mains, ou en y mettrent leurs signez se il ne scevent escrire).¹⁰¹ Of course, the Great Council no longer included the reformers added to it in February, but the nobles no more trusted the Dauphin than the reformers had. They also copied the reformers’ restraint of his finances. While they doubled the percentage of tax receipts dedicated to his private use, he and his household were limited to a tenth of the taxes collected.¹⁰² In ‘exactly the same manner’ as the reform assembly of February 1357, the ordonnance also forbade seizures and forced loans.¹⁰³ For many people, especially nobles who had seen their taxation burden decrease, Compiègne may have offered sufficient checks against the abuse of power to satisfy the ideals of good government that the reform movement claimed to represent.

The Silence before the Storm On 15 May, the day after the Compiègne assembly broke up, news arrived once more in Paris that peace had been made with England. The royal chronicle reports that ‘many did not believe it, some because they did not wish to, and others because they had heard it too many times before’.¹⁰⁴ Still, the news turned the political calculus upside down. Peace destroyed whatever leverage remained to the reformers, whose fragile power owed entirely to the needs of war and the foibles of the Dauphin. Peace presaged the imminent return of King Jean, who had always been their enemy, and it loosened their alliance with Charles of Navarre. Navarre had been extremely angry (forment courrouciez) at the Dauphin’s destruction of the town of Évreux.¹⁰⁵ Upon news of the peace, he left Paris and rode north to take

¹⁰⁰ Eight of the February Estates’ 18 measures were included in the Compiègne provisions; Henneman, Royal Taxation . . . John, 73. ¹⁰¹ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 11–12; Viollet, ‘états’, 283, art. 13. ¹⁰² Ord., III: 218–32, art. 23. ¹⁰³ ‘toutes manieres de Prises & de empruns efforciez cessent & cesseront du tout . . . tout en la fourme & maniere contenues en noz autres Ordenances faites à l’Assemblée qui de nostre commandement fu faite à Paris ou mois de Fevrier l’An 1356 & à autres Assemblées’ (Ord., III: 218–32, art. 18; for the earlier prohibition: Viollet, ‘états’, 269, n. 2; see Chapter 1). ¹⁰⁴ GC, 176–177. ¹⁰⁵ GC, 175.

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back his family’s Norman possessions, promised to him in March.¹⁰⁶ He spent the rest of the month besieging Longueville at the mouth of the Seine, far away from his allies in Paris.¹⁰⁷ What happened in and around Paris after the announcement is an open question. The royal chronicler, who had been giving a nearly day-by-day account, fell silent until reporting the Jacquerie’s beginning on 28 May.¹⁰⁸ Nor have I been able to locate any records from either the royal or the reform administrations. This dearth of information may reflect intentional destruction, whatever moves either side made in that fortnight not being ones that it was convenient to remember later on. In the absence of information, we are left with inference, as indeed were the chroniclers themselves. Jean le Bel’s suspicion that the Navarrese-reform axis ‘sought ways of impeding the peace’¹⁰⁹ seems reasonable, given how peace or rumours of peace had cost them their advantages repeatedly over the past 19 months. It is unclear to what extent, if any, the Parisians had ever had a formal understanding with Navarre for military protection before June 1358, although the presence of his troops may have been an implicit deterrent to the Dauphin. But, after his meeting with the Dauphin at Clermont and the destruction of Évreux, the Parisians knew that Charles of Navarre’s attentions would soon turn elsewhere. On 8 May, they had sent a messenger toward Avignon to buy the services of mercenaries there, but the Count of Poitiers had intercepted him and seized the money.¹¹⁰ With Navarre now far away and the reformers unable to buy soldiers of their own, while the Dauphin’s controlled the Seine and the Marne and his noble allies were reinforcing their fortresses, Paris was in serious peril. The Prince had not yet done on the Oise what he had on the Seine and the Marne in April, but either he had changed his mind or the reformers and their agents thought he had. Sometime in the third week of May, he left Compiègne and went to Meaux,

¹⁰⁶ Charles returned to Paris on 4 May and remained ‘par l’espace de X ou XII jours’ (GC, 174), so it is possible that he left just before news of the treaty with England arrived (GC, 176–177) and was thus motivated only by the burning of Évreux, dated vaguely by the chronicler to ‘en celui temps’ (GC, 175), but announcement of the treaty would only have hardened his position. He must also have dispatched his brother Philippe to make a traité d’alliance with Edward III, on account of which Edward ordered Navarrese Norman fortresses in English hands returned to Philippe and Charles on 2 June (Luce, ‘Négociations’, 120). ¹⁰⁷ 4 Valois, 70–71. The chronicler reports that the castle had been given to ‘Charles d’Artois’. Jean d’Artois, Count of Eu and Charles of Navarre’s enemy of longstanding, is probably meant. See Chapter 1. ¹⁰⁸ GC, 177. D’Avout, 181–182, argued that, after Compiègne, Marcel sent an embassy from the University to the Dauphin to plead on the city’s behalf, but this account is based on the confused chronology of Jean de Venette’s chronicle. ¹⁰⁹ Jean le Bel, 254. ¹¹⁰ AN JJ 90, no. 132, fol. 72r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 142; Raymond Cazelles, Étienne Marcel, champion de l’unité française (Paris, 1984), 294. This was Jean II’s third son, Jean, later Duke of Berry. In May 1358, he was serving as the Dauphin’s lieutenant.

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perhaps to increase the pressure on Paris.¹¹¹ When a troop of noblemen led by a scion of the Clermont family tried to cross the Oise at a village called Saint-Leud’Esserent at the end of May, possibly in order to garrison the fortress at Creil and blockade the Oise, they were attacked by a crowd of villagers. Nine of the nobles were killed. The Jacquerie was beginning.

¹¹¹ He was at Compiègne as late as 17 May (Laon, AD Aisne G 253, fol. 61v–62r) but at Meaux well before the end of the month (AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278, and ed. Secousse, Recueil, 95–97).

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3 An Unheard of Thing The Massacre at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent

Contemporaries agreed that movement that became the Jacquerie began in the Beauvaisis, a region that extends northward from a 100-kilometre stretch of the Oise River between Pontoise and Compiègne. Four chronicles specify that one of the original sites was Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, a village on the Oise about 60 kilometres north of Paris. The Quatre Valois chronicle reports that the Jacquerie ‘began around Saint-Leu-d’Esserent and around Clermont in the Beauvaisis’.¹ Jean de Venette’s relates that the Jacquerie originated with the country-folk (rustici habitantes) around Saint-Leu-d’Esserent and Clermont in the diocese of Beaumont.² In a passage followed closely by the monk of Saint-Denis, the royal chronicle states that ‘many low-status people (menues gens) of the Beauvaisis, from the towns of Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, of Noitel [Nointel or Maysel], and of Cramoisy, and from other neighbouring places rose up and joined together in a wicked movement’.³ The royal chronicle, alone in specifying an exact date—the 28th—for the revolt’s beginning, also gives the additional information that at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, the country-folk attacked a number of gentlemen, killing four knights and five squires among them.⁴ No further information is available about events at Cramoisy, Clermont, Nointel, or Maysel, but two remissions provide some complementary information about what happened at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent. One, written with the characteristic formulae of Jacquerie remissions, simply mentions that this village was the original home of one of its recipients, Jean Lespert, who was now living in ¹ 4 Valois, 71. ² Jean de Venette, 174. ³ GC, 177. Though Nointel has been often assumed for the chronicler’s unidentifiable and probably mistaken ‘Noitel’, the substitution of Maysel, a small village on the Thérain river, was suggested by Auguste Boursier, Histoire de la ville et châtellenie de Creil: Topographie, domaine, institutions civiles et religieuses, Chapitre de Saint-Évremond (Paris, 1883), 86, n. 2 and adopted by Pierre Durvin, ‘Les origines de la Jacquerie à Saint-Leu-d’Esserent en 1358’ in La guerre et la paix, frontières et violences au Moyen Âge: Actes du 101e Congrès national des Sociétés savantes, Section de philologie et d’histoire jusqu’à 1610 Lille, 1976 (Paris, 1978), 365, 367. Religieux, 126, which partly depended on the royal chronicle, suggests that Maysel is correct because it gives ‘Morecelli’ rather than ‘Noitel’ in addition to Cramoisy and Saint-Leu. Following Jean de Venette, he also added ‘the diocese of Beauvais’ and Calvummontem, probably meaning Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, but conceivably indicating Chaumonten-Vexin, which appears as the site of Jacquerie violence in AN J 737, no. 36, ed. Henri Gravier, Les prévôts royaux du XIe au XIVe siècle (Paris, 1904), no. 25, pp. 130–136. ⁴ GC, 177; Religieux, 126, derived from GC, gives XXVII die mensis maii, but this is likely a copying error.

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0004

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Senlis, that Lespert had participated alongside his son-in-law Benoît Paingart, and that both were subjects of Saint-Leu’s Cluniac priory.⁵ The other remission, this one a bespoke pardon for Sir Jean de Clermont-Nesle’s participation in the rebellion’s suppression, gives more detail. It relates that the non-nobles were in rebellion (rebellion) against the nobles and that the country-folk (gens du plat pays) of the Beauvaisis had assembled a great crowd and come to Saint-Leud’Esserent.⁶ There they found Jean’s brother, the knight Raoul de Clermont-Nesle, along with a number of other knights and squires, whom they killed. None of these sources gives any reasons for why these villagers killed these noblemen, let alone why this episode set off the largest rural uprising medieval France had ever seen. Historians’ interpretations have been divided according to the two views discussed in the Introduction. Those who think the uprising was closely linked to the reformers’ rebellion have seen the incident as an expression of their political and military interests, the whole revolt being, as Raymond Cazlles put it, téléguidée from Paris.⁷ Those sympathetic to Jules Flammermont’s approach adopt his view that the revolt began as an instinctive outburst of ancient, simmering class hatreds (explosion de la haine qui depuis des siècles s’était accumulée).⁸ For Jonathan Sumption, while ‘the main causes of the great revolt of 1358 were political’, the politics only implicated the peasants of the Oise as the uncomprehending victims of its violence. For them there was ‘no longer any distinction between friend and foe . . . the only recognizable enemy was a nobleman’.⁹ The evidence better supports Cazelles’s interpretation than Flammermont’s. Certainly, the latter was wrong to portray the Jacquerie’s inception as spontaneously triggered by the ‘accident’ that some noblemen happened to pass through a village.¹⁰ As is discussed here and in the next chapter, there was no precedent for such an outburst—strange if the impetus was long-standing animus—and the specific circumstances which have been said to have focused the rebels’ minds, ⁵ ‘Jehan Lespert de Saint Leu d’Esserans, demourrant a present a Senliz, et Benoit Paignart, son gendre, communis en biens, subgiez des Religieux de Saint Leu d’Esserans’ (AN JJ 90, no. 356, fol. 183v). For the Jacquerie formulae, see the Introduction and Chapter 10. ⁶ ‘les gens du plat pais de Beauvoisis . . . assamblez à grant compaignie s’en feussent venuz à Saint Leu de Seranz’ (AN JJ 92, no. 227, fol. 55v, ed. Victor de Beauvillé, Histoire de la ville de Montdidier, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Paris, 1875), I: no. 29, pp. 516–517). ⁷ Quote at Raymond Cazelles, Société politique, noblesse et couronne sous Jean le bon et Charles V (Geneva, 1982), 326. See also Françoise Autrand, Charles V le Sage (Paris, 1994), 320–322, 328–329. Jacques Krynen, ‘Entre la réforme et la révolution: Paris, 1356–1358’ in Frédéric Bluche and Stéphane Rials (eds), Les révolutions françaises: Les phénomènes révolutionnaires en France, du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris, 1989), 98. ⁸ Jules Flammermont, ‘La Jacquerie en Beauvaisis’, RH 9 (1879): 129. ⁹ HYW, II: 328. See also Luce, 165; d’Avout, 186. ¹⁰ See also Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, who blamed the uprising’s outbreak on an (unrecorded) ‘exchange of insults’ between men-at-arms and peasants at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent (The popular revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, A.L. Lytton-Sells (trans.) (London, 1973), 123). Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols (Paris, 1909–1931), I: 402 also conjectures insultes that pushed the peasants over the edge.

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that is the ravages of soldiers in the countryside post-Poitiers, had almost uniquely spared the areas most affected by the Jacquerie.¹¹ The revolt’s outbreak at that particular moment, at such a delicate point in the struggle between the reformers and the nobles, seems anything but accidental. Nor does it seem spontaneous. The events at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent required cooperation and prior planning. They did not just happen. Examined with attention to the events of the previous 18 months and the specific context of that moment, the attack on Raoul de Clermont-Nesle and his entourage looks instead like a carefully coordinated and targeted event, meant to bring maximum political and military advantage to the Parisians and their allies. It was a shot across the Dauphin’s bow, an answer to moves he was making (or which they thought he was making) to threaten Paris. But it is not necessarily the case that the attack was directed by Paris, as Cazelles thought. The rustics may have acted on their own initiative, for while the incident did serve the Parisians’ purposes, they do not seem to have anticipated it. Nor were urban sophisticates the only ones to have opinions about politics. Country-folk knew what was happening in Paris, and some were sympathetic.¹² A month earlier, a villager had been killed near Compiègne for telling some noblemen, ‘Go to Paris, where all you nobles will be killed just as others already have been’.¹³ The interests and objectives of the Parisians and the country-folk were not, however, wholly identical. Although the rural revolt that grew out of the massacre at Saint-Leud’Esserent helped the reformers’ military situation in some ways, the Jacquerie does not seem to be a consequence that they expected or intended. This chapter looks at how and why the Saint-Leu incident occurred, while the next considers how and why that incident catalysed the revolt that developed out of it.

Strategic Objectives: Rivers, Roads, and Rocks Saint-Leu-d’Esserent might seem like a random place to carry out a violent strike against the Regent and his noble supporters. A village of probably fewer than 200 ¹¹ Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Soldiers, villagers, and politics: Military violence and the Jacquerie of 1358’ in Guilhem Pépin, Françoise Lainé, and Frédéric Boutoulle (eds), Routiers et mercenaires pendant la guerre de Cent ans: Hommage à Jonathan Sumption. Actes du colloque de Berbiguières (13–14 septembre 2013) (Bordeaux, 2016), 101–114; see the map in Chapter 1 and further discussion in Chapter 4. ¹² On the circulation of ideas and news, see John Watts, ‘The pressure of the public on later medieval politics’ in Christine Carpenter and Linda Clark (eds), Political culture in late medieval Britain (Woodbridge, 2004), 159–180; Frédéric Boutoulle, ‘ “Il est un meilleur roi que le roi d’Angleterre”: Note sur la diffusion et la fonction d’une rumeur dans la paysannerie du Bordelais au XIIIe siècle’ in Maïté Billoré and Myriam Soria (eds), La rumeur au Moyen Âge: Du mépris à la manipulation (Ve–XVe siècle) (Rennes, 2011), 279–290. ¹³ ‘Ite, ite Parisius vos omnes nobiles occidemini prout alii hactenus sunt occisi’ (AN JJ 86, no. 109, fol. 39v) reportedly said by a rustic to some nobles with whom he was arguing around Easter 1358. The remission was issued to the nobles while the Dauphin was at the Estates of Compiègne in May.

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households in 1358, its only buildings of note were the church of a Cluniac priory and small seigneurial fortress.¹⁴ Its strategic importance becomes clear upon closer inspection. Following an article written by the archaeologist Pierre Durvin, Raymond Cazelles argued that the villagers were preventing a bridge from falling into the Dauphin’s hands and allowing him to cut the Oise as he had done the Marne and the Seine.¹⁵ Attractive as this proposition has been to later scholars, including myself, this was not the draw, for there was no bridge in Saint-Leud’Esserent in 1358.¹⁶ Nor would a bridge, even one fortified with towers as some medieval bridges were, have enabled the Dauphin to blockade the Oise.¹⁷ Based on his occupation of major fortresses to control the Marne and the Seine, such an operation required a significant castle. What Saint-Leu-d’Esserent did offer was a ferry over the river, connecting the Beauvaisis to the Île-de-France.¹⁸ On the other side of the river was the road to Creil with its great fortress on the River Oise (Figure 3.1). If properly garrisoned, the fortress at Creil would allow the Dauphin and his partisans to close the last river route to Paris. Jean le Bel reported that the nobles believed that the Jacques themselves occupied Creil.¹⁹ There is no other support for that proposition and it seems unlikely given the rebellion’s policy of destroying rather than occupying castles, but the nobles’ belief does attest to the fortress’s strategic importance.²⁰ That the Dauphin had not already garrisoned this castle may have been due to a paucity of troops and the need to concentrate his forces elsewhere, as discussed in the previous chapter, but the recently announced peace with England would have enabled some movement of men away from the ¹⁴ Durvin, ‘Origines’. An agreement between the monks of the priory and the village in 1327, confirmed in 1337, lists 232 inhabitants by name (Beauvais, AD Oise H 2441; Cartulaire du prieuré de Saint-Leu d’Esserent (1080–1538), Eugène Müller (ed.), (Pontoise, 1901); CLXXII, 151; AD Oise Hs 664). ¹⁵ Durvin, ‘Origines’, 366, 371–372; Raymond Cazelles, ‘The Jacquerie’ in R.H. Hilton and T. H. Aston (eds), The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984), 77; followed, unfortunately, by Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The eponymous Jacquerie: Making revolt mean some things’ in Justine FirnhaberBaker and Dirk Schoenaers (eds), The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt (Abingdon, 2017), 63, among others. ¹⁶ Durvin assumed that the bridge envisaged by an agreement of 1176 between the count of Clermont and the priory of Saint-Leu was eventually built (‘Liceat etiam Comiti pontem lapideum facere’: Cartulaire, Müller (ed.), no. LXXX; chirograph AD Oise H 2440), but there is no mention of this bridge in later documents. ¹⁷ Bridge towers: Marjorie Nice Boyer, Medieval French bridges: A history (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 131–132, 135, 163–164. ¹⁸ The 1176 agreement says that a crossing (transitus) already existed and would continue to do so (‘salvo illo transitu qui per longum aque fit, quem monachi ex antiquo possident et eis remanet liber et quietus’), and there are numerous references to crossing the Oise at Saint-Leu, sometimes with horses (equitaturas), and associated tolls (pedagium a transeuntibus) from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries (quotes at Cartulaire, no. LXXXIX, pp. 93–94, no. CXLVI, pp. 135–136. See also AD Oise H 643; AD Oise H 2473; Cartulaire, Müller (ed.) no. CXXII, pp. 120–121). There was only a ferry (bac) in the sixteenth century (Charles Estienne, La guide des chemins de France (Paris, 1552), 19). ¹⁹ Jean le Bel, 259. ²⁰ For the Jacques’ anti-castle policy, see Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Eponymous Jacquerie’, 64–66, and Chapter 5.

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Figure 3.1 The outbreak of the Jacquerie

frontier.²¹ At any rate, the country-folk may have thought that this was what was happening when Raoul de Clermont-Nesle and his entourage appeared in SaintLeu-d’Esserent: the obvious conclusion was that they were headed to Creil, a dower holding of the Dauphine Jeanne de Bourbon’s aunt Béatrix de Bourbon, whose husband was a royal favourite.²² This conclusion would have been particularly compelling if Raoul and his company had been riding down a road, analogous to the modern D12, that connected the other villages, Maysel and Cramoisy, which are named by the royal chronicler as the original epicentres of the revolt. Running along the Oise’s tributary the Thérain between those villages, that road passes over the Oise via a nineteenth-century bridge at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent to join with a road to Creil on the southern bank. Another important Jacquerie site, the village of Mello named in Jean de Venette’s chronicle as the home town of the Jacques’

²¹ E.g. Marshal Arnoul d’Audrehem’s troops were on the move in May (Laon, AD Aisne Edt 1 CC 1, fol. 33r: ‘le XIIe jour de may envoye Le Camus . . . a Saint Omer par devers monseigneur le Mareschal d’Audeneham pour ce que on disoit qu’il estoit descendu a Calais grant quantite de gens d’armes’). ²² See Chapter 2.

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leader Guillaume Calle, also lies on that river and that road.²³ East of Mello, this road connects with the modern D110, leading north-east to Clermont, a place several chroniclers noted as another original Jacquerie site. The very patchy state of our knowledge about the medieval road network means that we cannot be entirely certain that these roads had medieval precursors.²⁴ We are on relatively firm ground about the road to Creil on the south bank of the Oise, for it is mentioned in the earliest guide to French roads, published in 1552 and it had a roughly analogous Roman precursor.²⁵ There is no such evidence for pre-modern analogues of the D12 and D110, but this is not at all conclusive. We know that the remains of Roman roads were very far from the only routes available, and the sixteenth-century guide is far from exhaustive.²⁶ That guide lists only one road through the Beauvaisis, though the actual density and complexity of the late medieval road network north of Paris is demonstrated by Philippe de Beaumanoir’s extensive discussion of the region’s roads, ranging from tiny sentiers to highways ‘built by Julius Caesar’, in his treatise on the customs of the Beauvaisis, written in the 1280s.²⁷ Even if we cannot be entirely certain about how the passage over the Oise fitted into the road network, controlling the passage at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent certainly closed one of the main river crossings to the Île-de-France from the north. Another possible crossing, a substantial and well-attested bridge at Beaumontsur-Oise that also led to the Creil road, was already in the hands of a likely Navarrese sympathizer, Jeanne d’Évreux’s daughter Blanche, along with the castle there.²⁸ Other crossings between Pontoise and Compiègne were also kept out of ²³ Jean de Venette, 174. ²⁴ Jean Mesqui, Les routes dans la Brie et la Champagne occidentale: Histoire et techniques (Paris, 1980); Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘La route française et son évolution au cours du Moyen Âge’, Bulletin de l’Académie royale de Belgique, Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques, 5th ser., 73 (1987): 70–104, reprinted in Sur l’histoire économique de la France médiévale: La route, le fleuve, la foire (Aldershot, 1991); Catherine Delano-Smith, ‘Milieus of mobility: Itineraries, route maps, and road maps’ in James R. Akerman (ed.), Cartographies of travel and navigation (Chicago, 2006), 16–68. A stone boundary marker currently standing in the fields along the D12 between Cramoisy and SaintLeu-d’Esserent suggests a pre-modern path between the villages along the same route if not exactly identical to it. ²⁵ Estienne, guide des chemins, 14; Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire: http://dh.gu.se/dare [last accessed 21 November 2020]. ²⁶ On whether Roman roads remained in use and unchanged in the Middle Ages, see Frank Imberdis, ‘Les routes médiévales coïncident-elles avec les voies romaines?’, Bulletin philologique et historique (jusqu’à 1610) du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques 1 (1960): 93–98; Mesqui, Routes, 119–122. ²⁷ Estienne, Guide des chemins; Beaumanoir, cap. XXV, vol. I: 367–82, quote at §719, vol. I: 369. Another demonstration of Estienne’s incompleteness is his omission of two roads from Senlis attested in 1280 (AD Oise H 577 and 531). See also Mesqui, Routes, 153–173, and Bautier, ‘Route française’, 95–98, for density and maintenance. ²⁸ See Chapter 2. Bridge: existed by 1143–45 (Boyer, Medieval French bridges, 172) and is attested in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Louis Douët d’Arcq, Recherches historiques et critiques sur les anciens comtes de Beaumont-sur-Oise, du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Amiens, 1855), 141, 183, etc.). A bridge at Creil, attested in 1144 (Cartulaire, ed. Müller, no. XLI–XLII, pp. 45–46 Müller), has no further witness until 1415, after King Charles V’s reconstruction of the castle complex in 1374 (Boyer, Medieval French

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the hands of the Dauphin and the nobles. Pontoise, itself a dower-holding of Charles of Navarre’s sister Queen Blanche and the domicile of at least one Jacques, saw conflict on its bridge in June.²⁹ The bridge at Pont-Sainte-Maxence would soon be under the control of the Jacques, who executed two noblemen by throwing them off of it.³⁰ The Jacques also took control of Précy-sur-Oise downstream from Saint-Leu, which probably had a ferry, as well as the ferry at Jaux near Compiègne, where one rebel leader refused to bring the boat over for the crown’s officers.³¹ Control of rivers more broadly—but especially of the Oise, which was so vital to the provisioning of Paris—was an objective of the Jacquerie as a whole. A thick line of villages and towns implicated in the revolt, running along the Oise and its tributaries, testifies eloquently to their importance to the uprising in the Beauvaisis. A remission for one of the Jacques’ leaders speaks of ‘the inhabitants of the towns of the Rivers Oise and [its tributary] Thérain’, acting together to assemble the people of the countryside.³² The inhabitants of the countryside around the Ourcq River (genz du plait païs de Oursois), a tributary of the Marne, were also implicated in the revolt, as were those of the Automne, another Oise tributary.³³ This fluvial emphasis is an artefact of planning rather than an accident of geography. The importance of rivers to the Parisian interests in the Jacquerie is explicitly indicated in a remission for the captain of the Jacques in the castellany of Montmorency, which was located between the Seine and the Oise. It recounts that Étienne Marcel himself sent this captain a commission, ordering ‘all fortresses and houses sited in the heart of France [i.e. the Île-de-France] between two rivers, which appeared prejudicial to the town of Paris and the whole countryside, to be pulled down and destroyed’ (mises à terre et arrasées).³⁴ The Oise appears

bridges, 174; Ord., X: 331–332; Boursier, Histoire, 4, 19, 34–38, 397–398, 402). The Roman bridge that seems to have been located between Saint-Leu-d’Esserent and Creil (Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire, http://dh.gu.se/dare [last accessed 21 November 2020]) has no medieval attestation. ²⁹ An ambiguous conflict related in AN JJ 86, no. 199, fol. 65v. Jacques at and around Pontoise: AN JJ 86, no. 313, fol. 104v–105r, partially excerpted at Luce, p. 212; AN JJ 86, no. 496bis, fol. 175r. ³⁰ AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330. ³¹ Précy-sur-Oise: AN JJ 86, no. 246, fol. 82; AN JJ 90, no. 82, fol. 40v. Précy had a ferry in the sixteenth century, noted as an alternative to crossing at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent in Estienne, guide des chemins, 19. Jaux: AN JJ 86, no. 223, fol. 73; AN JJ 86, no. 361–362, fol. 123. ³² ‘environ la feste du Saint Sacrement derrenier passé les habitans des villes de la rivière de Oyze & de Thérain feissent une grant assemblée des genz du dit païs de aler avec eulx’ (AN JJ 90, no. 148, fol. 79v–80r, ed. Ghislain Brunel, ‘Archives de la révolte et lettres de rémission: Des serfs du Laonnais (1338) aux Jacques de Picardie (1358)’ in Pierre Rigault and Patrick Toussaint (eds), La Jacquerie: Entre mémoire et oubli, 1358–1958–2008 (Amiens, 2012), no. 3, pp. 71–72). ³³ AN JJ 86, no. 291, fol. 97v, ed. Luce, no. 26, pp. 256–257; ‘pluseurs Jacques, malefacteurs dudit pais de Beauvoizin, de la Riviere d’Automne & d’ailleurs’ (AN X1c 32, no. 31). The latter is the report of the villagers of Vez, a placename suggestive of a ford (gué) there. ³⁴ ‘le dit Jaquin eust eu en ce temps du feu prevost des marcheans de Paris certaine commission, contenane que toutes forteresses et maisons qui seroient assises ou cuer de France entre deux yeaues, qui au dit Jaquin sembleroient estre prejudiciables a la ville de Paris et a tout le plait païs, feussent mises

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important not only as a shipping route, but also as a border, beyond which Marcel wished to create a cordon sanitaire north of Paris. Saint-Leu-d’Esserent’s strategic importance as a gateway across this border was not its only interest for the capital’s safety. Another key factor was the stone produced by the village’s limestone quarries for the building of fortifications, an attribute made all the more important because its location on the Oise made for easier transport of the heavy stone. The other villages in which the Jacquerie began, Cramoisy and Maysel (and equally Nointel), were also quarry towns.³⁵ Saint-Leu-d’Esserent itself was particularly famous for the quality of its stone, much of which was destined for Parisian building projects.³⁶ Under Marcel, Paris had embarked upon an ambitious construction effort for the defence of the city; even Froissart, who considered Marcel the basest of scoundrels, admired his efforts on this front.³⁷ Competition for the stone the city needed for these efforts had likely been increased by the order made by the Compiègne assembly on 14 May to fortify the countryside’s castles and strong-houses, just as the increased threat from the Dauphin’s growing army forced the Parisians to redouble their efforts to fortify the city.³⁸ Stone workers were as important as the material itself. There is no positive evidence for Pierre Durvin’s belief that since the revolt began in quarry towns, quarrymen—rough, hard-drinking men in his estimation—were themselves involved at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent or the other original sites.³⁹ Of course, these are exactly the kind of people who would not have been able to afford the costs associated with a remission or a lawsuit, and their possible participation should not be discounted. We do, however, have considerable evidence for the involvement of skilled building professionals in the revolt that unfolded afterward. The Jacques’ supreme leader in the Beauvaisis, Guillaume Calle, may himself have been a mason: he came from the quarry village of Mello and his widow, Isabelle, later re-married a mason, medieval widows often remarrying within the same

à terre et arrasees, en telle manière que personne n’y peust habiter’ (AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–56, discussed in Luce, 107–108). ³⁵ Durvin, ‘Origines’, 366–367. ³⁶ Estienne, Guide des chemins, 9; André Lesort, ‘Le trafic du vin sur l’Oise au Moyen Âge’, Bulletin philologique et historique (jusqu’à 1610) du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, année 1960 1 (1961): 295–296; Annie Blanc and Jean-Pierre Gély, ‘Stone from medieval churches located to the south and east of Paris’ and Jean-Pierre Gély and Michaël Wyss, ‘Building stones at Saint-Denis from its beginnings to the eighteenth century’ both in Vibeke Olson (ed.), Working with limestone: The science, technology and art of medieval limestone monuments (Farnham, 2011), 59–74, 75–103. ³⁷ Froissart, SHF, §414, p. 103. ³⁸ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 5; see Chapter 2. Jean de Venette, 164, 166 traces the impetus for fortification to the Dauphin’s unyielding response to the city’s attempts at rapprochement at Compiègene and Meaux. See also Durvin, ‘Origines’; Raymond Cazelles, ‘La Jacquerie fut-elle un mouvement paysan?’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 122 (1978): 664–665. ³⁹ Durvin, ‘Origines’, 366.

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profession.⁴⁰ There is a touch of a professional, occult ritual to the report, discussed toward the end of the next chapter, that when the Jacques executed a traitor on Calle’s orders, a mason was made to hit the lifeless body with his rule.⁴¹ Building workers were important for demolition, as well as fortification, and as Chapter 5 outlines, such destruction was the main focus of the Jacques’ violence. Although we might imagine thousands of peasants with pickaxes, if Jean le Bel/ Froissart’s estimate that the Jacques destroyed 140 fortresses and houses is accurate—and the number is not out of line with the 80 or so identifiable from judicial and administrative sources—the scale and speed of demolition that took place required skill. When the Parisian army that joined with the Jacques decided to destroy noble houses in the village of Gonesse, an incident discussed in Chapter 8, they ordered that it be done not by the villagers at large but specifically by demolition men and carpenters (pro discopertoribus et carpentariis).⁴² The interests of these professional groups are also indicated by the destruction of receipts paid by the royal master of waters and forests, one Pierre de Saint-Jean, to workers (ouvriers & laboureurs) for building works at royal castles and houses. In one of the very few incidents of document destruction during the revolt, these were ‘hacked into so many pieces that no one knew how they could ever be reassembled’.⁴³ It may be that Saint-Jean, who received a letter of remission for this destruction, was covering up the evidence of work done for the Parisians under his supervision: taking the documents to Senlis for safe-keeping (pour doubte des guerres) as he claimed to have done, makes little sense, given that city’s strong and unwavering adherence to the anti-noble cause.

Communicative Violence The focus on rocks and rivers that we see at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent and in the Jacquerie as it developed later dovetails neatly with the concomitant activities of Marcel’s regime in Paris: the day after the attack on the Clermont-Nesle entourage, the city executed the city’s bridge-master (maître du pont), who controlled the Seine river traffic, and the crown’s master carpenter, in charge of building ⁴⁰ Mello: Jean de Venette, 174; widow: ‘Ysabelle uxoris defuncti Guillaumi Calli’ (AN X1c 13b, no. 272); ‘Ysabel Calle jadis femme de feu Willaume Calle . . . Hernilg le Macon ad present mari de la dite Ysabel’ (AN X1c 13b, no. 274). Further discussion in Chapter 6. ⁴¹ ‘Mahieu de Leurel, maçon . . . tenant en sa main une rieulle à maçon, le dit Estienne lui dist et commanda que il ferist et frappast sur le dit Bernier quand il le vit ainsin cheu à terre’ (AN JJ 98, no. 252, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 63, pp. 333–335). ⁴² AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320. ⁴³ ‘pour les quelles edefices . . . il a receu pluseurs sommes d’argent . . . les quels deniers il a paiez & distribuez loyalment & entierement aus ouvriers & laboureurs . . . sicomme ce povoit apperoir par lettres de quittance . . . les dites lettres & escriz depeciez & dehachiez par petites pieces teles que nulz ne les sauroit ne pourroit assembler’ (AN JJ 90, no. 151, fol. 81).

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works.⁴⁴ These were offices closely associated with the municipal government offices occupied by Marcel and his allies: the bridge-master’s election was supervised by the prévôt des marchands and the échevins. He was accompanied by a handful of masons and carpenters who served as the sworn masters of the city and water of Paris (jurés de la ville de Paris et de l’eau), responsible for ensuring the repair of bridges and the navigability of the Seine through Paris under the bridgemaster’s supervision.⁴⁵ The royal chronicler reports that the charge was to have connived with the Dauphin’s people to sneak soldiers into Paris, and one wonders if this was intelligence they had received from those involved at Saint-Leu.⁴⁶ This intimidatory display did not go off without a hitch. The executioner was struck with an apparent bout of epilepsy, causing some people in Paris to mutter (murmuroient) that God had shown his displeasure.⁴⁷ But the point was driven home by the subsequent exposure of the victim’s body parts on the gates of Paris. An unambiguous advertisement of the reformers’ hold on power, this gruesome warning was meant to silence dissent from within and without. If a counter-coup had been afoot, the effort had failed spectacularly. The communicative impact of violence is also apparent in the choice of victims at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent the day before. The death of Raoul de Clermont-Nesle, the only one of the nine noblemen killed at Saint-Leu-d’Esserant whose name is known to us, has often been considered an accident. If so, it was a very convenient one for the politics of the reform party. While it has been argued that the inhabitants attacked Raoul because the Count of Clermont had granted their predecessors a charter in 1176 exempting them from contributing to the fortification of their lord’s castles, this cannot have been their motive.⁴⁸ For, even if requisition was part of his mission—and there is no evidence that it was—the charter had no bearing on him. Despite his surname, Raoul was not related to this count, who was Louis II de Bourbon. In 1218, King Philip II had assimilated the county to the royal domain, whence it was later granted as an appanage to King Louis IX’s youngest son and Count Louis II’s great-grandfather, Robert.⁴⁹ The ⁴⁴ GC, 178–180. These executions feature in the general remission for Paris, where the victims, Jean Perret and Thomas Foquaut, are mentioned by name (AN JJ 86, no. 240, fol. 79–80r, ed. Ord., IV: 346–348; repeated in AN JJ 86, no. 390, fol. 135). See also GC, 179, n. 2, AN JJ 86, no. 128, fol. 46, and next note. ⁴⁵ For the responsibilities and election of the maîtres du pont see Siméon Luce, ‘Pièces inédites relatives à Étienne Marcel et à quelques-uns de ses principaux adhérents’, BEC 21 (1860): no. 8, pp. 87–89; Ord., X: 323–325; Raymond Cazelles, Nouvelle histoire de Paris: Paris de la fin du règne de Philippe Auguste à la mort de Charles V (1223–1380) (Paris, 1972), 212. ⁴⁶ Chron. norm., 126 and Chron. reg., 268 incorrectly state that these two helped the Dauphin escape from Paris, an event that did not happen. Luce, ‘Pièces inédites’, no. 8, p. 87, states vaguely that the maître du pont was executed for loyalty to the crown. ⁴⁷ GC, 179. On the seditious connotations of murmuring in later medieval Europe, see Chapter 2. ⁴⁸ AD Oise H 2440; Durvin, ‘Origines’, 371–372. ⁴⁹ Ord., XI: 342. Some of this history was recounted in 1329 by the Count’s representatives in a lawsuit with the monks (AD Oise H 2517). See also, Louis Carolus-Barré, ‘La réunion du comté de Clermont-en-Beauvaisis à la couronne (25 décembre 1327–1er juin 1329)’, Bulletin philologique et

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priory at Saint-Leu, unharmed during the revolt, held most of its lands in fief from Louis, whose own small fortress below the monks’ church was unscathed.⁵⁰ Raoul was the cousin of a rather less illustrious local lord, Jean II de Nesle, lord of Offemont and Mello.⁵¹ Raoul de Clermont-Nesle’s importance to the current political situation was that he was the nephew—and likely the heir—of the marshal Robert de Clermont, murdered before the Dauphin’s eyes by Marcel’s mob in February.⁵² This was the act that had irretrievably alienated the nobles from the Parisians’ reform project. The remission granted to his brother and heir Jean that details the attack highlights Raoul’s relationship to Robert de Clermont (son oncle) and the latter’s shocking murder ‘in the royal palace at Paris by the prévôt des marchands and his accomplices in our presence’ (mis à mort ou palaiz roial à Paris par le prévost des marchans & ses complices en nostre presence).⁵³ Jean’s remission also makes reference to the family’s long history of service and mortal sacrifice to the crown: ‘many others of his lineage having well and loyally served [the King and Dauphin] in the realm’s wars, in which they were killed’.⁵⁴ That lineage included Raoul’s great-uncle and namesake, the Constable Raoul de Clermont, fallen at the Battle of Courtrai in 1302, a stunning defeat for the French nobility at the hands of commoners, and one that still smarted more than a half century later.⁵⁵ (In 1358, the defeated French nobles’ golden spurs still hung as trophies in Courtrai and would yet do so for another quarter century, until the French put down another

historique (jusqu’à 1715) du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, années 1942–1943 (1945): 189–198. ⁵⁰ Les Olim, ou registres des arrêts rendus par la cour du roi: sous les règnes de Saint Louis, de Philippe le Hardi, de Philippe le Bel, de Louis le Hutin et de Philippe le Long, [Auguste-Arthur] le Comte Beugnot (ed.), 3 vols in 4 (Paris, 1839–1848), III.1: 516; Actes du Parlement de Paris, deuxième série, Jugés (1328–1350), Henri Furgeot et al. (eds), 3 vols (Paris, 1920–1975), I: no. 577, 59; AD Oise H 2517. JeanLouis Bernard, ‘Le prieuré de Saint-Leu-d’Esserent (Oise): Une réinterprétation du site après les fouilles de 1998’, Revue archéologique de Picardie 3–4 (2000): 162–163. The monks’ maisons et edifices were burned by the Anglo-Navarrese soldiers stationed at Creil later in the autumn–winter 1359 as noted in a remission issued to the priory in 1359, but there is no mention of earlier property damage (AD Oise H 2242, no. 2). The priory’s fortifications, still visible today, were built later in the century. ⁵¹ Anselme de Sainte-Marie et al., Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la maison royale de France, des pairs, grands officiers de la couronne & de la maison du roy & des anciens barons du royaume, 3rd edn, 12 vols (Paris, 1726–1879), VI: 51; Olivier Troubat, La guerre de Cent ans et le prince chevalier le ‘bon duc’ Louis II de Bourbon, 1337–1410, 2 vols (Montluçon, 2001), II: 733. There was a small fief, Sauveterre, in or near Saint-Leu-d’Esserent that was held from Nesle-Offemont (AD Oise H 2502). In 1365, the Lady of Caillou held it (AD Oise H 2437; Cartulaire, ed. Müller, no. CLXXXVI, p. 159). ⁵² Luce, 69–70. ⁵³ Jean and Raoul de Clermont-Nesle also had a younger brother, named Robert, who is conflated with their uncle in Anselme de Sainte-Marie, Histoire généalogique, VI: 54–55. ⁵⁴ ‘plusieurs autres de son linage aient bien & loyalement servi monsire & nous ès guerres du Royaume ou il ont este occiz & mors’ (AN JJ 92, no. 227, fol. 55v, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 29, pp. 516–517). On the Nesle family to the 1320s, see Quentin Griffiths, ‘The Nesles of Picardy in the service of the last Capetians’, Francia: Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte 20 (1993): 69–78. ⁵⁵ Annales Gandenses, Frantz Funck-Brentano (ed.), new edn (Paris 1896), 32–33, n. 3; Frantz Funck-Brentano, Les origines de la guerre de Cent ans: Philippe le Bel en Flandres (Paris, 1896), 409.

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Flemish rebellion at the Battle of Roosebeke). Jean de Clermont-Nesle, who had been with his brother at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, did not know for certain that these resonances were the reason that his brother had been killed, or at least the redaction of his remission does not explicitly state this. But he felt that these relationships and this history mattered, that it contextualized the violence, as well as justifying his own violent response to it.

Contacts and Communication The Jacquerie’s origins at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent thus show numerous, specific connections with the interests and activities of Marcel and Le Coq’s regime in Paris. The mechanics through which the incident occurred are less clear. Had sentries been posted along the roads with orders to challenge any intrusion? Had alert villagers noticed suspicious movement on the roads and decided to act? Perhaps, as Françoise Autrand speculates, ‘they had gotten wind of something’.⁵⁶ An intriguing hint comes from a letter for one Philippe Poignant. A royal sergeant commissioned by the reform government to evaluate the defensive capabilities of fortresses in the Beauvaisis in November 1357, Poignant was later asked to serve as captain during the Jacquerie. His letter begins its narration of the revolt with the statement that ‘around Corpus Christi [31 May], the inhabitants of the settlements (villes) of the Oise and Thérain Rivers had made a great assembly of the local people (genz du dit pais) to go with them’.⁵⁷ Poignant’s letter does not clarify where or for what purpose the people were to go, but it is clear that some such assembly, called by someone, preceded the violence enacted there. Other sources confirm that the villagers first assembled and then attacked. The remission for the Senlisien immigrants Jean Lespert and Benoît Paingart indicates that some villagers from Saint-Leu-d’Esserent did participate in the Jacquerie (though not necessarily at Saint-Leu), but the remission for Jean de ClermontNesle is explicit that the operation began elsewhere. The villagers first assembled and then came to Saint-Leu: ‘the country-folk of the Beauvaisis, having assembled (aynz . . . assamblez) in a large company, went (s’en feussent venuz) to Saint-Leud’Esserent’.⁵⁸ The royal chronicler, too, emphasized that they first came together and then attacked Raoul and his company in Saint-Leu-d’Esserent. After listing the original villages, he noted that they ‘joined together’ (se assemblerent) for the attack.⁵⁹ Even the impressionistic accounts of Jean le Bel and Froissart say that ⁵⁶ Autrand, Charles V, 320. ⁵⁷ AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–56, discussed in Luce, 107–108. Earlier commission: AD Oise G 21; AN JJ 90, no. 563, fol. 278; see Chapter 1. ⁵⁸ AN JJ 92, no. 227, fol. 55v, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 29, pp. 516–517. ⁵⁹ ‘pluseurs menues gens de Biauvoisin, des villes de Saint-Leu de Serans, de Noi[n]tel, de Cramoisi et d’environ, et se assemblerent par mouvement mauvais. Et coururent sur pluseurs gentilz hommes,

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assembling (s’assemblèrent) occurred before violence, not that violence by previously unconnected individuals broke out.⁶⁰ This was a planned attack in SaintLeu-d’Esserent by a geographically diverse group who came together for that purpose, not a spontaneous uprising in that village by its normal population. How much of that purpose had been communicated to them by Étienne Marcel and his associates must remain an open question. Marcel protested in a letter to the town council of Ypres in July that the Jacquerie had ‘begun without his knowledge and desire’, that he ‘would rather have died’ than authorize the murder of gentlemen and their dependents in the Beauvaisis and that he ordered that none be killed ‘unless an enemy of Paris’.⁶¹ But aside from his obvious self-interest and the notably careful language of this denial, there is considerable evidence of contacts between him and the Jacques during the revolt as a whole.⁶² A letter by the Dauphin written at the end of July accused Marcel, among many other crimes, ‘of having stirred up (esmeu) the country-folk of the Île-de-France, the Beauvaisis, Champagne and other places against the nobles of the realm’.⁶³ This charge is echoed in a remission for Marcel’s brother, which reports that Marcel and his partisans incited popular revolt (commocions de pueple) against the crown and the nobles.⁶⁴ Pope Innocent VI also thought that Paris, in alliance with other towns, was responsible for setting the ‘people (populi) against the nobles’.⁶⁵ Of the nearly 500 Jacques (or accused Jacques) whom I have identified, 38 were also implicated in attacks led by Parisians or had associations with Marcel. Five of these reported having received—or in one case, said he was accused of seeking—orders (commission, ordinatio) from Marcel.⁶⁶

qui estoient en la dicte ville de Saint-Leu’ (GC, 177). The royal chronicler, writing in the mid 1370s, could have drawn upon Jean de Clermont-Nesle’s remission (or its recipients’ memories) when composing his own account of these events. ⁶⁰ Jean le Bel, 256; Froissart, SHF, §413, p. 99. ⁶¹ d’Avout, 308. ⁶² Luce, ch. 2, esp. 105–108; Cazelles, ‘La Jacquerie’ 660–663; Cazelles, Société politique . . . sous Jean, 325–329; Autrand, Charles V, 329–330. ⁶³ ‘d’avoir esmeu les genz du plat païs de France, de Beauvoisis, de Champaigne et d’autres lieux contre les nobles du dit royaume’ (Charles V, Lettre inédite du dauphin Charles sur la conjuration d’Étienne Marcel et du roi de Navarre, adressée aux comtes de Savoie (31 août 1358), François Combes (ed.), (Paris, 1869), 2–3). ⁶⁴ AN JJ 86, no. 195, fol. 64, ed. Luce, ‘Pièces inédites’, no. 5, pp. 81–83 and Secousse, Recueil, 139. ⁶⁵ Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, sub auspiciis consilii generalis Facultatum Parisiensium, ex diversis bibliothecis tabulariisque collegit et cum authenticis chartis contulit, Henri Denifle and Émile Chatelain (eds), 4 vols (Paris, 1889–1897), IV: no. 1239. ⁶⁶ Hue de Sailleville, captain at Angicourt near Clermont (AN JJ 90, no. 288, fol. 148r, ed. Luce, no. 24, pp. 253–254); Jacquin de Chennevières, captain of the Jacques of the castellany of Montmorency (AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256); Jean Herssent of Châtres-sous-Montlehery (Arpajon), village crier (AN JJ 86, no. 231, fol. 75v–76r, ed. Luce, no. 30, pp. 263–264); Laufred Goupilh and Philippe le Bouchier of Bessancourt: ‘auditis de certis ordinationibus prepositi mercatorum Parisiensis apud Gonesse missis, per habitantes predictos fuerat ordinatum ut predicti capitaneus & Philipus eius consiliarius apud Gonesse accedere pro dictis ordinationibus audiendis’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r); accused: Jean le Jaqueminart of Thièblemont (AN JJ 86, no. 355, fol. 121, ed. Luce, no. 33, pp. 268–270).

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There are some interesting points of contact between the reformers and the countryside, including an associate of Robert le Coq named Jean de Saint-Leu. A priest of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris and a partisan of Navarre, this de Saint-Leu allowed his house to be used as a meeting place—and later a hiding place—for the reform party’s elites, including their spokesman, Robert de Corbie.⁶⁷ The surname ‘de Saint-Leu’ here may not definitely designate Saint-Leu-d’Esserent. SaintLeu-la-Forêt near Taverny (itself an important Jacquerie village), is also a possibility, nor does a toponymic surname necessarily indicate the man’s own personal origin.⁶⁸ But there was a family of the lower nobility who lived in the village that went by the same surname, including a Jean de Saint-Leu, the right age to be this curé’s father, and the Parisian priest was certainly himself noble, for his remission notes intervention by aucuns Nobles à qui ledit Curé est de lignage.⁶⁹ Another reformer with knowledge of the village was Jean Vaillant: a Navarrese partisan and leader of one wing of the Parisian troops that attacked Meaux in June, he had a turbulent history with the priory’s monks and had been made to swear not to harm one of the brothers in 1343 when he was serving as the royal prévôt-fermier in Senlis.⁷⁰ The anti-noble and reform-friendly citizens of Senlis were deeply implicated in the Jacquerie and had many connections with Saint-Leud’Esserent, as discussed below. Another possible point of contact is Philippe Poignant, the reform government’s sergeant and Jacquerie captain with knowledge of the Jacques’ early assemblies, whose remission is quoted above.⁷¹ There is also Regnaut Martin. A draper like Marcel, he had been resident in Paris for 20 years but was born in the Francilien village of Rueil, where he had family and ⁶⁷ ‘Jehan de Saint Leu, Cure de Sainte Genevieve a Paris, ait par pluseurs foiz receuz en son hostel herberges & hostellé Maistre Robert le Coq & Jean de Pinquegny . . . Et en ycelle maison, sicomme l’en dit, aient pluseurs proditions, traisons contre la couronne de France monseigneur & nous esté machines, promeues & tractiees; & aussi depuis que nous venismes à nostre dit Ville, Maistre Robert de Corbie, Conseillier dudit Prevost des Marchanz, & de ses diz complices, eust esté trouvé en la dite maison comme recelé pour sa salvation’ (AN JJ 86, no. 527, fol. 190, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 101–102). A Jean de Saint-Leu ‘dit petit’ also appears alongside a Guillaume de Saint-Leu among those Navarrese partisans pardoned in 1360 (Secousse, Recueil, 177–181 at 180, 181–185 at 184). ⁶⁸ See the Introduction, n. 64, and Sharon A. Farmer, Surviving poverty in medieval Paris: Gender, ideology, and the daily lives of the poor (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 19, n. 22. For Taverny: AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256 and AN JJ 90, no. 419, fol. 211. ⁶⁹ AD Oise H 2463, no. 6: ‘Jehan de Saint Leu escuier filg de feu noble homme monssire Estienne de Saint-Leu chevalier’; and see AD Oise Hs 666 (formerly AD Oise H 2463, no. 2) for other members of the family. Parents often gave their first-born son his grandfather’s name, in this case Étienne, and their second-born, his father’s name. Clerical vocation, of course, was also a common path for a younger son. ⁷⁰ ‘Ad requestam fratris Johannis d’erchies [from Herchies, a village north of Beauvais] monachi sancti lupi de cerento Johannes Vaillant ad presens prepositus firmarius prepositure nostre Silvanensis . . . per eius Juramentum legitimum prestitit assecuramentum’ (AN X1a 9, fol. 396v; my thanks to Dr Erika Graham-Goering for sending me an image of this document). Vaillant’s name also appears near that of Jean and Guillaume de Saint-Leu on the Navarrese pardon rolls (Secousse, Recueil, 177–181 at 180, 181–185 at 184). For his role at Meaux, see Chapter 8. ⁷¹ AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–56, discussed in Luce, 107–108. His surname is somewhat similar to that of Benoît Paingart, named in the remission noted above that he shared with his father-in-law, a native of Saint-Leu-d’Esserent. Another possible relation is Pierre Painguant (AN JJ 90, no. 264, fol. 186), and see Cartulaire, ed. Müller, no. CLXXXII–CLXXXIII, p. 157.

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friends and where there was Jacquerie violence. He was remitted for suspicion of both participation in the commotions and aiding the Anglo-Navarrese.⁷² Even if none of these was in fact a liaison between the Parisians and rustics, the urban reformers and the rural rebels had many opportunities for contact with one another. There are demonstrable ties between reformers and the villages and villagers implicated elsewhere during the Jacquerie. The village of Puisieux, whose inhabitants were ordered to join the assault on the Marché at Meaux led by the Parisian Pierre Gilles, was the home town of one of Gilles’s associates, Pierre de Puisieux, later executed in Laon when the reform government fell.⁷³ Jean Maillart, a leading reformer, held lands in the County of Dammartin, where Jacquerie activity was intensive.⁷⁴ Marcel’s own rural holdings included houses, woods, and lands at Choisy-le-Roi, where there was violence during the revolt, while the personal possessions of Robert le Coq, eloquent champion of les peuples and their miseries in November 1356, included estates in the viscounty of Paris.⁷⁵ The bishop hailed from Montdidier, a major centre of the Jacquerie; its mayor, city councillors, and several individual inhabitants received remissions or were involved in lawsuits for damages done during the Jacquerie.⁷⁶ Jean le Bel’s chronicle reports that the Jacques’ leader, whom it calls Jaque Bonhomme, claimed that le Coq urged him to revolt ‘for he was one of his men’.⁷⁷ The chronicler appears confused or misinformed about Guillaume Calle, but the surname of Calle’s lieutenant Germain de Réveillon is similar to that of the Laonnois village Révillon.⁷⁸ ⁷² AN JJ 90, no. 351, fol. 179v–80, ed. Siméon Luce, ‘Négociations des Anglais avec le roi de Navarre pendant la révolution parisienne de 1358’, Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-deFrance 1 (1875): no. 3, pp. 125–129. One of those implicated in the violence at Rueil, Eudes Martin, shared his surname (AN X1a 19, fol. 353r). ⁷³ AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v–24r; BnF franç. 27501, no. 134; Chron. norm., 135–136; Jean de Noyal, ‘Fragments inédits de la chronique de Jean de Noyal, abbé de Saint-Vincent de Laon (XIVe siècle)’, ed. Auguste Molinier, Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France 20 (1883): 258; Charles V, Lettre inédite, ed. Combes, 5). One Adam de Puiseaux, squire, served Charles of Navarre until deciding he was a traitor (AN JJ 86, no. 376, fol. 128v). ⁷⁴ AN JJ 86, no. 151, fol. 51, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 79–80; Michel Golinelli, ‘Les effrois de 1358 autour de Dammartin’, Bulletin d’information de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de la Goële 5 (1972): 30–37. ⁷⁵ Marcel: Siméon Luce, ‘Pièces inédites’, no. 3, pp. 78–80, Siméon Luce, ‘Documents nouveaux sur Étienne Marcel’, Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 6 (1879): no. 7, pp. 321–323. Choisy-le-Roi: AN X1a 17, fol. 51v–52, ed. Luce, no. 58, pp. 320–322. Le Coq: AN JJ 89, no. 525, fol. 239v–40r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 85–86, confirmed at AN X1c 16a, no. 88. ⁷⁶ AN JJ 86, no. 437, fol. 154, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: 112–114; AN JJ 86, no. 456, fol. 161r; AN X1a 17, fol. 284, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 27, pp. 514–515. See also, Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169v–70r; Jean de Venette, 176; and Chapter 9. ⁷⁷ ‘ung chappitaine qu’on appelloit Jaque Bonhomme, qui . . . vouloit adeviner que l’evesque de Laon l'avoit enhorté à ce faire, car il estoit des ses hommes’ (Jean le Bel, 260). ⁷⁸ AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–62, which states that at the time of his remission he was living in Sacy-le-Grand, a village under the contested lordship of the Count of Clermont and the monks of Saint-Leu (AD Oise H 2517, H 2442, no. 1, and BnF franç. 4663, fol. 7–9). His ties to the area pre-date the Jacquerie for in 1350 he served as the clerk for the prévôt of PontSainte-Maxence (AD Oise H 2439, no. 4). However, the orthography of his surname does not match

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Another possible link between capital and countryside was the petty officers who served in provincial administrations. Key figures in the English Rising two decades later, these kinds of low-level administrators (custodians of seals, sergeants, clerks, etc.) also played a significant role in the Jacquerie, as further discussed in Chapters 6 and 7.⁷⁹ Such men with connections to Saint-Leu among the Jacques included their lieutenant captain, as well as two other prominent rebels, whose role as royal officials is revealed in documents created on behalf of the priory.⁸⁰ At the reformers’ end, Marcel’s duties as prévôt des marchands—an office originally known in the thirteenth century as prévôt de la marchandise de l’eau (provost of water-borne merchandise)—included the oversight of the fluvial communication networks of the Paris Basin.⁸¹ This brief gave him substantial knowledge of the communities along the rivers (villes de la Riviere de Oyze & de Therain) that Philippe Poignant blamed for assembling the rural rebels. There was also the network of tax receivers (gouverneurs et rechepveurs de maletotes), whom Jean le Bel speculated were responsible for the revolt. He thought that their motivation was the fear that peace with England would put them out of a job (qui ne voulsissent pas que la paix se feist ou royaume, par quoy ilz fussent ostez de leurs offices).⁸² Another reason tax collectors might have had sympathy with Paris was that many of them had been put out of work not by peace—at any rate there was still King Jean’s ransom to raise—but by the Estates of Compiègne, which had replaced those tax administrators chosen as a result of the Estates’ ordonnance of March 1357 and cut their pay.⁸³ That earlier ordonnance had specified that local tax administrators were to be men chosen by the Estates (ad ce ordonnez, esleuz & establiz par les Gens des diz trois Estats), and it had authorized them to assemble neighbouring communities and to resist

exactly that of the village near Laon, and his given name is very unusual for that area. Réveillon in western Champagne seems a better candidate. ⁷⁹ Christopher Dyer, ‘The social and economic background to the rural revolt of 1381’ in Hilton and Aston (eds), English Rising, 15–17). ⁸⁰ The citation of the Count of Clermont before Parlement at the request of the priory in 1329 was issued under the seal of a lieutenant of the bailli of Senlis named Henri du Change, who may have been one of the principal attackers at Ermenonville or possibly that man’s father (AD Oise H 2517; AN X1c 13a, no. 14). A Henri du Change was still alive in 1383, when he attended civic assemblies in Senlis alongside other former Jacques (AD Oise Edt 1 BB 1, p. 3, etc.). Fremin de Bernes, recipient of a formulaic Jacquerie remission, is attested in 1366 as custodian of the seal of the prévôtée de Beaumontsur-Oise, the same administrative unit governed by the former Jacquerie captain Simon de Bernes, prévôt of the castellany of Beaumont-sur-Oise belonging to Blanche de France, Duchess of Orléans, whose personal and political situations are discussed in the previous chapter. If the two men were not blood relations, they probably shared the same ancestral village, Bernes-sur-Oise (Fremin: AD Oise Hs 667; AN JJ 90, no. 162, fol. 92; Simon: AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256). ⁸¹ Georges Huisman, La juridiction de la municipalité parisienne de Saint Louis à Charles VII (Paris, 1912), esp. Chapters 3 and 5; Cazelles, Nouvelle histoire, 197-217; Boris Bove, Dominer la ville: Prévôts des marchands et échevins parisiens de 1260 à 1350 (Paris, 2004), 240–256, esp. 244–245. ⁸² Jean le Bel, 258. ⁸³ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 4 and 17.

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interference by royal officers forcibly.⁸⁴ In Laon, all three of the men named as co-conspirators with Robert le Coq, one of whom was accused of stirring up the menus against the gros, had been among the city’s municipal tax collectors in 1356–1358.⁸⁵ Elsewhere, I have been able to identify only two potential linkages between the Jacques and local receivers, though it would make sense that many of the low-level administrative officers identifiable as Jacquerie leaders had also served as fiscal administrators.⁸⁶ Potentially, this sort of man had both motive to aid the Parisian reformers and the ability to do so locally. The exigencies of the past two years had forced the city and its countryside into ever greater contact, as refugees from the ravaged lands to the south and west sought shelter behind its walls and as the reformers in search of resources and power stretched their government well beyond that perimeter. Notably, Marcel’s efforts to make himself master not only of Paris but of the countryside beyond (le plait pays d’environ), had encompassed the armed organization of the countryside, incorporating local troops or organizing independent ventures, efforts they had used for the city’s own purposes in the successful attack on Corbeil in March.⁸⁷ But the interpenetration of Paris and the countryside was a fact of long history. The city’s intensive exchange networks with the villages of its hinterland supplied it with labour, materials, food, and drink.⁸⁸ Many townspeople, like Marcel and le Coq themselves, had country houses for leisure and profit, and country-folk were frequently in the city for the same reasons. The city’s fiscal and judicial reach extended far beyond the city gates.⁸⁹ It is true that burghers thought themselves ⁸⁴ ‘Et se par aventure aucuns des Officiers de nostre dit Seigneur, des nostres ou autres, sur umbre de Mandemens . . . vouloient ou se efforçoient de les prendre, Nous leur donnons povoir & auctorité de assembler & requerir leurs voisins des bonnes Villes et autres . . . pour resister & faire que la force soit leur’ (Ord., III: 121–46, art. 2). ⁸⁵ Jean Boulengier; Robert de Loupsault; Colart de Collegis: AN JJ 86, no. 446, fol. 157, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 103–104; AD Aisne Edt 1 CC 1. ⁸⁶ The Jacques Mathieu d’Abbé/dit Abbé, of Senlis, was one of the city’s collectors for the payment demanded by the Navarrese in 1359–60 (AN X1a 21, fol. 514; AN X1a 22, fol. 47r, 405r; Pierre-Clément Timbal et al. (eds), La guerre de Cent ans vue à travers les registres du Parlement (1337–1369) (Paris, 1961), no. 120, pp. 437–439. One Perrot le Sené, who participated in the Jacquerie around Amiens, may be the same man as or related to the Pierre le Sené, royal sergeant, who appears in 1359 in other documents with one Jean le Sené, fiscal receiver for Amiens (AN JJ 90, no. 243, fol. 130v, ed. Luce, no. 47, pp. 294–295; AN X2a 6, fol. 407r, 426v–30). ⁸⁷ AN JJ 86, no. 240, fol. 79–80r, ed. Ord., IV: 346–348 (language also used in AN JJ 86, no. 214, fol. 69v–70r, confirmed at AN JJ 86, no. 255, fol. 85v–86r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 83–85, and AN JJ 86, no. 282, fol. 94); ‘gentes de patria plata, potissime de vicecomitatu Parisiensi, multum habebant timere dictum prepositum, suos commissarios ac complices’ (AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320). ⁸⁸ Ord., II: 350–380; Guy Fourquin, Les campagnes de la région parisienne à la fin du Moyen Âge (du milieu du XIIIe siècle au début du XVIe siècle) (Paris, 1964), 107–116, 218–220; Cazelles, Nouvelle histoire, 382–391; immigration: Bronislaw Geremek, Le salariat dans l’artisanat parisien aux XIIIe–XVe siècles: Étude sur le marché de la main-d’oeuvre au Moyen Âge, Anna Posner and Christiane KlapischZuber (trans., from Polish), (Paris, 1968), 119–121; Farmer, Surviving poverty, 17–25; Sharon A. Farmer, The silk industries of medieval Paris: Artisanal migration, technological innovation, and gendered experience (Philadelphia, 2017), esp. 22–25. ⁸⁹ Bove, Dominer la ville, 145–171.

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superior to rustics and that the interests of city and countryside were often at odds. Urban–rural tensions were the Jacquerie’s Achilles’ heel, as we will see. Still, the line between town and country was blurry and frequently crossed, and communication was constant. If the villagers did plan their assault on the noblemen at an assembly called on their own initiative, we can be sure that they did so at least with knowledge of the Parisians’ situation if not on their orders.

Provincial Notables and Networks None of this evidence, however, proves definitively that Marcel or his associates masterminded the initial incident at Saint-Leu. Notably, all of the evidence for Marcel giving orders to the rural rebels come from after the revolt’s inception on 28 May. Indeed, the fact that the executions of the maître du pont and the master carpenter took place the day after that incident—rather than before it or on the same day—suggests that the Parisians were reacting to a new development, not carrying out a well-considered plan. The Quatre Valois chronicler reports that it was Guillaume Calle who approached the Parisians after Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, writing a letter to Étienne Marcel to propose an alliance once the revolt had begun and he had become its leader, a moment discussed in the next chapter.⁹⁰ As this indicates, there were rural people with the intellectual ability and political sophistication to conceive a rural–urban alliance on their own initiative. Calle was certainly literate, as the Quatre Valois report that he wrote (escript) the letter to Marcel and other evidence corroborates.⁹¹ The chroniclers who discuss him by name considered him clever and knowledgeable (magis astutum, bien sachant), as well as experienced in war.⁹² He knew enough about Marcel and the situation in Paris to see their objectives as complementary. Likely the subject of Raoul de Clermont-Nesle’s cousin Jean, lord of his home town Mello, Calle was well-placed to have opinions about the political and military situation and to relate those to an armed company headed by a Clermont-Nesle riding toward the Oise. The rural rebels’ most extensive urban links were in fact not with Paris, but with Senlis, a provincial capital some 13 kilometres distant through the Forest of Halatte. Senlis outmatched even Amiens in the strength of its anti-noble policy, the number of castles its citizens attacked, and its successful opposition to the counter-Jacquerie’s forces.⁹³ At least 21 Jacques, many of them in leadership positions, lived in Senlis before or after the Jacquerie.⁹⁴ Two of these 21 were, of ⁹⁰ 4 Valois, 72. ⁹¹ On Calle and literacy among the Jacquerie leadership more generally, see Chapter 6. ⁹² Jean de Venette, 174, and 4 Valois, 71, respectively. ⁹³ See especially Chapters 7 and 9. ⁹⁴ Ten of these men appear in AN X1a 21, fol. 514 and AN X1a 22, fol. 47r, which specify that the men sued for damage to fortification at Fontaine-Chaalis were from Senlis. One of those listed also appears in a suit for damage to Robert de Lorris’s castle at Montépilloy in AN X1a 18, fol. 63, along with

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course, Jean Lespert and Benoît Paingart, who had immigrated to the city from Saint-Leu-d’Esserent. Another individual link was Jean Vaillant, the Navarrese partisan noted previously, who had threatened a monk from Saint-Leu-d’Esserent in 1343 and who went on to serve as prévôt des monnaies for the reform government and as commander of one wing of the forces that attacked Meaux in June. Vaillant was probably not living in Senlis at the time of the Jacquerie, but his conflict with this monk had occurred when he was a royal administrator at Senlis.⁹⁵ Beside these individual ties, there were structural factors that drew city and village together and gave Senlisiens knowledge about and experience of Saint-Leu: one was political geography, for Saint-Leu and its inhabitants were in the jurisdiction of the bailliage of Senlis, the royal administrative district seated in that town. The priory itself had been subject to royal justice as recently as 1349, when in response to numerous abuses and complaints from the inhabitants, two royal officials from Senlis and 100 of their own villagers had taken two monks to prison in Senlis and the bailli had levied a hefty 8,000 l. p. fine against the monastery.⁹⁶ Two of the 21 Senlisien Jacques had served as the bailli’s subordinates prior to the Jacquerie, though neither have documented involvement in this specific case.⁹⁷ A second connection was commerce: many of the city’s supplies passed over the Oise at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent. Conflict over the toll at that passage had arisen between the priory of Saint-Leu and the Augustinian canonry of Saint-Vincent of

another five who can be found as inhabitants of the town in other documents (AN JJ 90, no. 555, fol. 275; AD Oise Edt 1 BB 1; AD Oise H 599; AD Oise H 841; AD Oise Edt 1 CC 10, nos. 1–2, where another Jacques, Oudard Rony, remitted at AN JJ 86, no. 205, fol. 67r, also appears). An agreement regarding damage to Ermenonville, another of de Lorris’s castles, was made with Henri du Change, inhabitant of Senlis, who may be the former lieutenant of the bailli by the same name (AN X1c 13a, no. 14; AD Oise H 2517); and Jean Bernier, discussed below, led the town’s militia as noted in his remission (AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278, and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97). Some of these men can also be found in AD Oise G 2254 (1357) and at Timbal et al. (eds), Guerre de Cent ans, no. 120, pp. 437–439 (1373). I have omitted from this list Jean de Senlis, who may be the ‘certain Hospitaller’ referred to by 4 Valois, 71, 73, as Guillaume Calle’s co-commander (AN MM 28, fol. 81v; and see Chapter 4). ⁹⁵ As mentioned above, Vaillant had been prévôt-fermier of the prévôtée of Senlis, a subdivision of the bailliage of Senlis (AN X1a 9, fol. 396v). This meant that he was responsible for collecting the revenue produced by this subdivision (Bernard Guenée, Tribunaux et gens de justice dans le bailliage de Senlis à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1380—vers 1550) (Paris, 1963), 68–72). Although he appears on the Navarrese pardon roles, this Jean Vaillant may also be the ‘barber-surgeon and valet of the royal chamber’ who was ennobled in 1354 and further rewarded with the ‘sergentarie feodate’ of a forest in Beaumont-le-Roger in 1355 (AN JJ 82, no. 238, fol. 163; AN JJ 84, no. 160, fol. 94r; David M. Bessen, ‘The Jacquerie: Class war or co-opted rebellion?’, JMH 11 (1985): 58, n. 17). Both favours mention his long service to the crown. ⁹⁶ AN JJ 78, no. 247, fol. 133–38r; AN X2a 5, fol. 162v–63r; AD Oise H 2442, no. 1; Cartulaire, ed. Müller, no. CLXXX, p. 156, no. CLXXXIII, p. 157. ⁹⁷ Henri du Change (AD Oise Edt 1 BB 1, p. 3, etc., AD Oise H 2517; AN X1c 13a, no. 14) and Ansot du Chastel, custodian of the seal of the bailliage in 1357 and a named attacker of Fontaines-Chaalis along with numerous other inhabitants of Senlis (AD Oise G 2254, where he witnessed a sale in VillersSaint-Paul, Jean Bernier the Jacques’s home village; AN X1a 21, fol. 514; AN X1a 22, fol. 47r).

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Senlis.⁹⁸ A rent roll of those living in Saint-Vincent’s houses in Senlis from 1367 includes six known Jacques, all of whom participated in one or both of two assaults on nearby castles.⁹⁹ One of these castles was Montépilloy, which belonged to Robert de Lorris, Marcel’s much despised brother-in-law. Of the dozens of monastic foundations in the Oise River valley, the clustering of Jacques around one with a recent dispute with Saint-Leu-d’Esserent is probably more than coincidental, but that clustering does not mean that Saint-Vincent’s dispute motivated the violence there. The relationship between the houses may well have improved in the dozen years between the dispute and the Jacquerie, particularly since Saint-Leu had replaced their prior.¹⁰⁰ In any case, the monks and their property were not the target of the attack, and there is no clear evidence that Senlisiens participated in the events at Saint-Leu. Only two of Senlis’s Jacques demonstrably lived or worked in the city before the Jacquerie.¹⁰¹ At least two of the others had immigrated there from country villages, possibly after the revolt. The six Jacques found living in the canons’ houses in Senlis in 1367 were implicated in attacks elsewhere than at Saint-Leu and later in the revolt.¹⁰² It may be that Saint-Vincent gave refuge to Jacques after things went wrong, when Senlis itself served as a bastion against the Counter-Jacquerie. That the canons may have taken a friendly line toward former Jacques is hinted by a 1369 lease for a farm near Pontoise granted by Saint-Vincent to one Guérin Calle, whose unusual surname could indicate a connection with the Jacques’ executed leader.¹⁰³ Alternatively, Saint-Vincent may simply have taken advantage of the dislocation the revolt had caused to acquire new tenants for holdings left empty after the Black Death. What we can safely conclude is that many people in Senlis had extensive knowledge of Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, its political and judicial situation, and its importance to commerce and communications, and that there were ⁹⁸ AD Oise H 643: agreement of 1342 and sentence of the bailli of Senlis in 1344/45. The latter sentence was rendered by one Jean Pongnant, also attested as prévôt for the bailli at Angy and Compiègne (Gallia regia, no. 20831, 20847), conceivably a relative of Benoît Paingart and/or of the Jacques’ would-be captain Philippe Poignant, a royal sergeant of this baillage (AD Oise, G 21; AN JJ 90, no. 563, fol. 278; AN JJ 90, no. 148, fol. 79v–80r, ed. Brunel, ‘Archives’, no. 3, pp. 71–72). ⁹⁹ Pierre Savare, Pierre de Normandie, Michel le Bouchier, and Mathieu le Chandelier are named in the suit regarding Montépilloy, in which the well-attested Jacquerie captain Arnoul Guenelon also appears (AN X1a 18, fol. 63); Laurent de Loudry and Ansot du Chastel are named in the suit over the fortress at Fontaine-Chaalis, which belonged to Guillaume Cornu (AN X1a 21, fol. 514, AN X1a 22, fol. 47r), in which Mathieu le Chandelier also appears. On the particular role of Senlis in the attacks on Robert de Lorris’s property, see Chapter 8. ¹⁰⁰ Cartulaire, ed. Müller, no. CLXXXII–CLXXXIII, p. 157. ¹⁰¹ Ansot du Chastel, who appears as custodian of the bailli of Senlis’s seal in 1357 (AD Oise G 2254) and, more dubiously, a Jean l’Orfèvre, who paid rent to the monastery in 1337, but who cannot be definitively identified with the Senlisien Jacques by the same name (AD Oise H 598). ¹⁰² Arnoul Guenelon, said to be from Catenoy, the village he captained, in his remission (AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r) and Oudard Rony, said to be from Fontenay-en-Parisis in his (AN JJ 86, no. 205, fol. 67r). Jean Lespert and Benoît Paingart of course also immigrated, but these two were probably in Senlis before the Jacquerie based on their absence from the 1336 agreement between the inhabitants and the priory (AN JJ 90, no. 356, fol. 183v; AD Oise Hs 664). ¹⁰³ AD Oise H 672 and see AD Oise H 669 for the farm’s extent.

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multiple ties between the city and the men who took on prominent roles in the Jacquerie, including in operations dear to Marcel’s heart, as the revolt developed in the days and weeks that followed.

From Saint-Leu-d’Esserent to the Jacquerie That the reformers and their rural and provincial allies had both the reasons and the ability to organize a widespread rural revolt is clear. What is less clear is that any of these actors envisaged the confrontation at Saint-Leu as the opening salvo in the massive, inter-regional movement that the Jacquerie quickly became. It is at least equally possible that the events in Saint-Leu-d’Esserent and environs may have been conceived as a limited operation to accomplish a particular aim, and that it took on a different character afterward. It is true that the hundreds of conflagrations scattered around the northern countryside diverted the Dauphin and his noble supporters’ attentions away from Paris, but it must be said that if the Parisians—or the villagers and townspeople living on the Oise—were worried about the freedom of shipping, setting the Île-de-France aflame was not the best way to guarantee the swift movement of commerce.¹⁰⁴ It is notable that not only did the executions in Paris happen the day after the Saint-Leu incident, but also that at least a week elapsed between the events of 28 May and the departure, likely around 5 June, of Parisian troops headed for Meaux.¹⁰⁵ The Parisians may have been waiting for the Jacques to secure their cordon sanitaire around Paris thereby ensuring their own troops’ safety, but the delay could instead indicate that the movement’s growth and initial success had taken the reform government surprise. For their part, the rural rebels seem to have changed their tactics and their objectives after Saint-Leu. While the fluvial focus of events at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent is congruent with the Jacquerie’s objectives elsewhere, the violence of that initial incident was strikingly different from—and considerably bloodier than—that of the Jacquerie as a whole. As is fully explored in Chapter 5 on the revolt’s violence, the Jacques did relatively little killing overall and never again in such numbers as the massacre at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent. Only once, in a remission relating the formal execution of two noblemen at Pont-Sainte-Maxence, do the judicial sources portray the Jacques killing more than one noble at a time, and like at Pont-Saint-Maxence, many of those whom they did kill appear to have been executed, not ambushed.¹⁰⁶ The nine men killed at Saint-Leu represent almost half of the individual noble victims of the Jacquerie known to us. This probably understates the real death toll, but mass murder was certainly not the Jacques’ modus operandi. Rather, they mainly focused on destroying nobles’ fortresses and ¹⁰⁴ E.g. complaints about the safety of the roads during the Jacquerie at AN X1a 14, fol. 349v. ¹⁰⁵ See Chapter 8. ¹⁰⁶ AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330. See Chapter 5.

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property. These more characteristic actions were absent at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, where neither the comital fortress nor the monks’ priory were attacked. The identity of the victims does provide some connection with the rest of the revolt. Raoul and men who fell with him match the usual profile of the revolt’s victims: usually male, mostly noble, rarely the lords of their aggressors, and almost never clerics. More specifically, the Clermont-Nesles were targeted elsewhere by the Jacques on a number of occasions. Rebel contingents burned Raoul’s houses at Courtemanche and those of his mother Jeanne de Chambly at Montgobert, as well as a manor at Chambly that likely belonged to them.¹⁰⁷ They also attacked a fortress at Bray-sur-Somme held by Raoul’s cousin Jean, the lord of Mello, Guillaume Calle’s probable lord, as well as attacking the homes of two of that lord’s probable vassals.¹⁰⁸ One of Raoul’s mother’s relatives, Louis the bastard of Chambly, fell at the battle of Meaux.¹⁰⁹ Raoul’s maternal cousin, Jean de Dampierre, lord of Saint-Dizier and son of Alix de Clermont-Nesle, was also targeted by Jacques in Champagne.¹¹⁰ The remission for Jean de Clermont-Nesle ties the attacks on his brother and mother’s houses directly to his brother’s murder: not satisfied with killing him (de ce non contens), the Jacques extended the violence to their property.¹¹¹ But many, if not all, of these attacks took place well after 28 May, for all of the buildings attacked except Chambly were far from the original violence. Courtemanche is 60 kilometres from Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, and those who attacked it were from the ¹⁰⁷ The dame de Montgobert: Brigitte Bedos[-Rezak], La châtellenie de Montmorency des origines à 1368: Aspects féodaux, sociaux et économiques (Paris, 1980), no. 45, p. 321, and see William Mendel Newman, Les seigneurs de Nesle en Picardie (XIIe–XIIIe siècle), leurs chartes et leur histoire, 2 vols (Paris, 1971), I: 78–80 and table after 289. Montgobert is not mentioned in the remission, which is focused on retribution for damage done to the house that Jean de Clermont-Nesle inherited near FontaineMontdidier, but Montgobert’s destruction in the revolt is noted in 1377, when it along with the manor of Wirmes in Chambly, also destroyed in the Jacquerie, was held from held from the Duchess of Orléans by a Marguerite de Clermont, possibly Jean de Clermont-Nesle’s daughter (AN P 1893, fol. 150–151; AN P 1893, fol. 211v–12, ed. Douët d’Arcq, Recherches historiques, no. 228, pp. 221–222 and see no. 207, p. 195). ¹⁰⁸ Bray: AN X1a 20, fol. 250. Bray-sur-Somme had been a possession of Guy II de Nesle, Raoul and Jean’s cousin, since 1347 (Timbal et al. (eds), guerre de Cent ans, no. 94, pp. 346–351), whence it passed to his son, Jean de Nesle (Anselme de Sainte-Marie, Histoire généalogique, VI: 55). Mello: AN JJ 86, no. 308–309, fol. 102v–103, ed. Luce, no. 28–29, pp. 260–262. Vassals: The lady of Caillou, who held the fief of Sauveterre (AD Oise H 2502; AD Oise H 2437; Cartulaire, ed. Müller, no. CLXXXVI, p. 159) could be identified with the dame de Chatou, rescued from the Jacques by one of their captains (AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256); Marie de Cressy, Lady of Chelle and Libermont, fiefs held at least in part from the lord of Nesle (AD Oise G 1749; AN X1a 28, fol. 175v–76r; AN X1a 31, fol. 253). In both cases, however, evidence for the seigneurial relationship post-dates the Jacquerie by several decades. ¹⁰⁹ GC, 183, Chron. norm., 131; Luce, ‘Documents nouveaux’, no. 7, p. 321–323. ¹¹⁰ AN JJ 86, no. 142, fol. 49, ed. Luce, no. 21, pp. 247–248; AN JJ 86, no. 355, fol. 121, ed. Luce, no. 33, pp. 268–270; AN JJ 86, no. 578, fol. 209v–10r, confirmed at AN JJ 95, no. 116, fol. 44v; AN JJ 86, no. 596, fol. 217, ed. Luce, no. 41, pp. 283–285; AN JJ 90, no. 292, fol. 149v–50r, ed. Luce, no. 46, pp. 293–294. See Chapter 9. Genealogical information: Anselme de Sainte-Marie, Histoire généalogique, II: 764; VI: 48–49, 51. Like Raoul and Jean de Clermont–Nesle, Jean de Dampierre was the nephew of the murdered marshal Robert de Clermont. ¹¹¹ AN JJ 92, no. 227, fol. 55v, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 29, pp. 516–517.

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neighbouring village of Fontaines-sous-Montdider. Montgobert lies 70 kilometres from Saint-Leu and 80 kilometres from Courtemanche in the other direction. Mello was obviously near the original epicentre, but it was undamaged, while the fortress at Bray was much more distant. The champenois Jacques who targeted Pierre de Dampierre, for their part, likely did not begin organizing until after the assault on Meaux on 10 June brought the disturbances to that area.¹¹² To the extent that these links are not simply a reflection of the Jacquerie’s wide geographic spread and the middling aristocracy’s close ties of kinship and fidelity, they probably tell us less about what the country-folk were planning on 28 May and more about how the movement developed later. The incident at Saint-Leu and the revolt that developed out of it thus seem linked but distinct. Yet even if there were those who had planned the one as the origin of the other—and there may have been a few such individuals as the next chapter discusses—the eruption of a major revolt likely caught many people off guard. Certainly, organizing a large-scale rural uprising would have required a prodigious act of imagination on anyone’s part, for nothing quite like this had taken place before. There had been violence between the priory’s monks and the Saint-Leu’s inhabitants in 1349, which had included their invasion of the priory, but this was an isolated incident and done alongside royal officers.¹¹³ Large-scale rural revolts like the Jacquerie were still rare in late medieval Europe, and the northern French countryside had never seen anything of this scope.¹¹⁴ In 1320, a popular crusade had swept through northern France, carrying its rural protagonists into Paris and then south, but with the exception of Vitry-en-Perthois in Champagne, none of the places involved then was later implicated in the Jacquerie.¹¹⁵ In 1338, the serfs of the cathedral chapter of Laon’s villages had undertaken a ruthlessly suppressed—though apparently non-violent—uprising against servile taxes.¹¹⁶ Robert le Coq would obviously have known about this ¹¹² See Chapter 9. ¹¹³ AN X2a 5, fol. 162v–63r; AN JJ 78, no. 247, fol. 133–38r. Interestingly, Jacques la Vache was one of the royal commissioners called in to investigate the monks’ claims against the inhabitants. He was also in the Dauphin’s entourage in spring 1358 and could have passed on his local knowledge. ¹¹⁴ Peter Bierbrauer, ‘Bäuerliche Revolten im alten Reich: Ein Forschungsbericht’, in Peter Blickle, Renate Blickle, and Claudia Ulbrich (eds), Aufruhr und Empörung? Studien zum bäuerlichen Widerstand im Alten Reich (Munich, 1980), 26–28; Hugues Neveux, Les révoltes paysannes en Europe, XIVe–XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1997), 292–298; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Lust for liberty: The politics of social revolt in medieval Europe, 1200–1450: Italy, France, and Flanders (Cambridge, MA, 2006), ch. 2. Beaumanoir, cap. XXX, §885–86, vol. I: 447–449, reports that communal alliances against lords had taken place mout de fois, but his only example is that of the Lombard Leagues of the twelfth century! ¹¹⁵ Malcolm Barber, ‘The Pastoureaux of 1320’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 32 (1981): 143–166; David Nirenberg, Communities of violence: Persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages, rev. edn (Princeton, 2015 [1996]), ch. 2; Georges Passerat, La croisade des Pastoureaux: Sur la route du Mont Saint-Michel à Narbonne, la tragédie sanglante des Juifs, au début du XIVe siècle (1320) (Cahors, 2006). ¹¹⁶ Ghislain Brunel, ‘Les hommes de corps du chapitre cathédral de Laon (1200–1460): Continuité et crises de la servitude dans une seigneurie ecclésiastique’ in Paul Freedman and Monique Bourin (eds), Forms of servitude in Northern and Central Europe: Decline, resistance, and expansion (Turnhout, 2005), 131–177; Brunel, ‘Archives’; Jean de Noyal, ‘Fragments inédits’, ed. Molinier, 250–251; AD

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incident, and so, too, would have the staunchly pro-Navarrese Picquigny family of Amiens, for Robert de Picquigny, father of the Jean de Picquigny who freed Charles of Navarre in 1357, was one of the royal commissioners responsible for punishing the serfs.¹¹⁷ Another possible but tenuous link is the Jacquerie captain named Germain de Réveillon whose surname might indicate a family origin in the village of Révillon, for this settlement was very near the servile villages, as I discussed in the previous section. Still, none of these villages rose in 1358. There are, furthermore, no parallels in 1358 to the range of interests that impelled those earlier conflicts, including serfdom, taxation, and religious fervour, or to the practices through which they were carried out, including documentary destruction and pogroms. The closest approximate precedent to the Jacquerie’s magnitude and organization was the Flemish Maritime Revolt of 1323–1328. Although the Maritime Revolt was much longer lived and more successful, like the Jacquerie it, too, was characterized by massive rural participation tightly entwined with the interests and actions of the cities in a struggle against their incompetent and ill-loved ruler.¹¹⁸ Marcel must have known something about the Maritime Revolt, for his political and commercial communication with Flanders is well established.¹¹⁹ Likely the country-dwellers of the Île-de-France and Picardy did, too. They lived in a zone of passage between the regions, and there had been rumours of northern French imitation of the Maritime Revolt at the time.¹²⁰ The Flemish countryside

Aisne G 126, no. 2–4. Neither this nor the celebrated ‘revolt’ of the serfs of Orly in 1252 seems to have involved any violence on the serfs’ part (Marc Bloch, ‘Blanche de Castille et les serfs du chapitre de Paris’, Mémoires de la Société d’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 38 (1911): 224–272; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Two kinds of freedom: Language and practice in late medieval rural revolts’, Edad Media: Revista de Historia 21 (2020): 127–128, 132, 135–136). ¹¹⁷ Aubert d’Hangest and the lord of Moreuil, both also involved in the Jacquerie and its suppression, were also part of the commission (AD Aisne G 126, no. 3–4; AN JJ 71, no. 86, fol. 65; AN JJ 75, no. 316, fol. 186–88r; Suzanne Honoré-Duvergé, ‘Des partisans de Charles le Mauvais: Les Picquigny’, BEC 107 (1948): 82–92). The bishop in 1338, who sided with the chapter, was Aubert de Roye, scion of a family targeted by the Jacques and prominent in the Counter-Jacquerie, who died in 1338 (Gallia christiana, IX: 546–547). ¹¹⁸ William H. TeBrake, A plague of insurrection: Popular politics and peasant revolt in Flanders, 1323–1328 (Philadelphia, 1993); Jacques Sabbe, Vlaanderen in opstand, 1323–1328: Nikolaas Zannekin, Zeger Janszone en Willem de Deken (Bruges, 1992). ¹¹⁹ On Marcel’s business connections with Flanders, see Arthur Layton Funk, ‘Robert le Coq and Étienne Marcel’, Speculum 19 (1944): 470; Marcel sent letters in connection with his political situation to Bruges in April (see Chapter 2) and to Ypres in June (see Chapter 9), as well as the letter of July discussed earlier in this chapter and again in Chapter 9, all published in d’Avout, 301–10, after earlier editions. A Geoffroy le Flamenc and a Nicolas le Flamenc, draper, were among Marcel’s partisans, and a Gieffroy le Flamenc also appears on the Navarrese pardon rolls (AN JJ 86, no. 209, fol. 68r; AN JJ 86, no. 271, fol. 91r; Secousse, Recueil, 177–181 at 180, 181–185 at 184). A number of Parisians arrested in October 1358 for suspected conspiracy against the crown bore the surname ‘le Flament’ (GC, 220–221). One of these, Jacques le Flament, had previously been rewarded for loyalty (AN JJ 86, no. 343, fol. 116). ¹²⁰ TeBrake, Plague of insurrection, 2. The suggestion that Guillaume Calle’s surname, spelled Karle in Jean de Venette’s chronicle and Charles in 4 Valois, derives from that of the Flemish Karls seems possible but not likely. The orthography is stable in the documentary sources, and Calle was attributed

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in fact had a tradition of revolt not much less established than that of their more celebrated urban counterparts.¹²¹ But if the undertaking of a previous generation in another region with a different language inspired the Parisians or the Jacques, their own experience and that of their immediate ancestors had encompassed nothing like the Jacquerie. As Jean de Venette said, it was an ‘unheard of thing’ (casus alias inauditus).¹²²

to the man’s widow as a family name (AN X1c 13b, no. 274). A Robin de Flandres was among those who attacked Robert de Lorris’s house at Luzarches (AN X1c 13b, no. 255). ¹²¹ Bas J.P. van Bavel, ‘Rural revolts and structural change in the Low Countries, thirteenth–early fourteenth centuries’ in Richard Goddard, John Langdon, and Miriam Müller (eds), Survival and discord in medieval society: Essays in honour of Christopher Dyer (Turnhout, 2010), 249–268; Jan Dumolyn and Jelle Haemers, ‘Patterns of urban rebellion in medieval Flanders’, JMH 31 (2005): 369–393. ¹²² Jean de Venette, 174.

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4 All Masters From Massacre to Movement

The unprecedented nature of the Jacquerie compels us to ask what drove rural people to undertake this extraordinary action and how they managed to mobilize for it in such a short amount of time. While the massacre at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent had clear connections with Parisian interests, like most rural revolts, the movement that developed out of that incident was not simply an extension of the objectives of their urban allies.¹ Nor did Parisians have any apparent involvement in the early days of the Jacquerie, whatever their connection to those initial actions. In thinking about causes and methods of revolt, it is important to keep in mind that even at its inception, the Jacquerie involved a large and diverse group involved in a series of geographically dispersed events that unfolded over a period of time. Individuals’ interests, motivations, and perceptions were heterogeneous, as potentially as different from one another’s as from those of Marcel’s faction, and fluid, subject to change in reaction to events. The attack at Saint-Leud’Esserent and the Jacquerie that followed were not a discrete ‘thing’ to which we can attribute a single meaning, but rather a constellation of different and overlapping events and processes undertaken and understood differently by different people at different times. Excavating and contextualizing the country-folk’s diverse and changeable experiences, perceptions, and motivations is obviously a difficult task, one made more so because the sources are scant and delicate to interpret. The evidence we do have indicates that while few of the participants initially envisaged the incident at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent as the beginning of a regional uprising against the nobility, it nevertheless became one with remarkable speed. This rapid transformation was the result of both accident and planning. The killing of Raoul de Clermont-Nesle and his companions had profoundly radical effects on the country-folk, much as the murder of his uncle in the Dauphin’s bedchamber had had on the reformers some months prior. This watershed moment enabled the precipitous transformation of latent resentments into social rebellion, a process that sociologists have

¹ On the practical and intellectual independence of rural revolts in other contexts, see, for example, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Creating the Florentine state: Peasants and rebellion, 1348–1434 (Cambridge, 1999) and William H. TeBrake, A plague of insurrection: Popular politics and peasant revolt in Flanders, 1323–1328 (Philadelphia, 1993), 8 et passim.

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0005

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isolated in modern contexts of sudden group violence. Immediate mobilization nevertheless required previous preparation, and it appears that the nascent movement was able to take advantage of pre-existing efforts to ready the countryside’s defences, as well as social and professional networks among commoners in the Beauvaisis.

The Moment of Mobilization A key moment in the revolt’s formation was the institution of formal leadership, when Guillaume Calle became the rebels’ captain. As will be discussed in Chapter 6, the Jacquerie was directed by an identifiable network of village captains, often assisted by a subordinate or two, in a loosely hierarchical relationship with regional captains under Calle’s supreme leadership. But there is no evidence for that leadership’s existence at or prior to the massacre at Saint-Leu. The assembly from neighbouring villages that preceded that confrontation, discussed in the previous chapter, must have required some sort of organization to summon these people to it and to take them thence to attack Raoul and his entourage, but that organization may have been loose and informal. The remission for Jean de Clermont-Nesle has nothing to say about leadership, and in the pardon granted to Philippe Poignant, ‘the captains of the said country’ appear only after the ‘inhabitants of the river towns’ had assembled the country-folk.² The evidence for Calle’s elevation suggests that the Jacquerie’s leadership developed as a result of the attack, rather than the attack occurring at the instigation of the men already leading a rebellion. Of the four chronicles that mention Calle, only that written by the Saint-Denis monk half a century later says that Calle was in charge from the very beginning.³ While the Quatre Valois chronicler places Calle at Saint-Leu—he was among the participants (entre eulx)—his report that ‘the Jacques made him their leader’ (Les Jaquez en firent leur chief), along with a ‘man who was a Hospitaller’ follows that of the rebels’ uprising (s’esmeurent) at Saint-Leu and Clermont. Only then, when ‘they saw themselves so numerously assembled’, did the country-folk decide to attack the

² AN JJ 92, no. 227, fol. 55v, ed. Victor de Beauvillé, Histoire de la ville de Montdidier, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Paris, 1875), I: no. 29, pp. 516–517; AN JJ 90, no. 148, fol. 79v–80r, ed. Ghislain Brunel, ‘Archives de la révolte et lettres de rémission: Des serfs du Laonnais (1338) aux Jacques de Picardie (1358)’ in Pierre Rigault and Patrick Toussaint (eds), La Jacquerie: Entre mémoire et oubli, 1358–1958–2008 (Amiens, 2012), no. 3, pp. 71–72. ³ ‘circa villam sancti Lupi de Ceranis . . . et in dyocesi Belvacensi, sub duce quodam rustico qui Guillelmus Calle vocabatur, insurrexerunt in nobiles’ (Religieux, 126). The passage could be construed to mean that Calle’s leadership was implicated at all of the places he named as the original sites of the revolt, or only in the diocese of Beauvais.

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nobles at large.⁴ Jean de Venette’s version echoes this account: the insurgent rustics first took up arms and gathered together in great number (seipsos in magna multitudine combinantes), before choosing Calle as their captain.⁵ The royal chronicle reports a similar sequence: first they assembled, then they made Calle their leader.⁶ The remission granted to Arnoul Guenelon, a high-ranking Jacques who rode with Calle, confirms that the rebels were already assembled (assemblez) when Calle was chosen leader.⁷ As these accounts demonstrate, there must have been a second assembly of country-folk that gathered in the wake of the Saint-Leu massacre at which it was decided to institute a captain and to bestow the office on Calle. Election of a leader by a pre-existing constituency at an assembly fits the pattern, outlined in Chapter 6, for the Jacquerie’s organization at the village level, where institution of a captain chosen by the community was the norm. Like the meeting that preceded the Saint-Leu attack, the assembly that chose Calle seems to have had no formal organizational structure. At first glance, acephalous assemblies such as this one may seem an unwieldy way to start a revolt to those used to centralized institutions and hierarchical administrations. Jean le Bel and Froissart’s wondering report that the people of country villages assembled without a leader (s’assemblerrent es villages, partout, sans chief) reflects their own scepticism about the mechanics, as well as their disparagement of the rebels’ organizational abilities. Yet, medieval and early modern revolts were almost universally based upon community assemblies. The Anonimalle chronicle reports a similar sequence of events at the origin of the English Rising in Kent in 1381: communities rose acephalously and without leaders (saunz test et saunz chieftayne) and began to engage in violence, only later making Wat Tyler their chieftain.⁸ It was community assemblies above all that made the German Peasants’ War of 1525 possible, and such gatherings were also key to the fifteenth-century revolt of the Catalan serfs (remences), among many others.⁹ ⁴ ‘En cest temps, s’esmurent les Jacques . . . Entre eulx estoit ung homme bien sachant . . . Cestui avoit nom Guillaume Charles. Les Jacquez en firent leur chief . . . . avec ung homme qui estoit hospitalier . . . quant les Jacques se virent grant assemblée, si coururent sus aux nobles hommes’ (4 Valois, 71). ⁵ ‘contra nobiles Franciae insurgentes arma sumpserunt, et seipsos in magna multitudine combinantes, capitaneum quemdam, de villa quae Mello dicitur, rusticum magis astutum, ordinarunt, scilicet Guillelmum dictum Karle’ (Jean de Venette, 174). ⁶ GC, 177–178. ⁷ ‘Guillaume Calle nagaires esleu Capitaine du pueple & commun de Beauvaisiz & de ses adherens & complices assemblez au dit pais’ (AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r). ⁸ The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333 to 1381, from a MS. Written at St Mary’s Abbey, York, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927), 136–137. ⁹ Peter Blickle, ‘Peasant revolts in the German empire in the Late Middle Ages’, Cathleen Catt (trans.), Social History 4 (1979): 235–239; Peter Blickle (ed.), Resistance, representation, and community (Oxford, 1997); Peter Bierbrauer, ‘Bäuerliche Revolten im alten Reich: Ein Forschungsbericht’ in Peter Blickle, Renate Blickle, and Claudia Ulbrich (eds), Aufruhr und Empörung? Studien zum bäuerlichen Widerstand im Alten Reich (Munich, 1980), 1–68; Peter Bierbrauer, ‘Der Aufsteig der Gemeinde und die Entfeudalisierung der Gesellschaft im späten Mittelalter’ in Peter Blickle and Johannes Kunisch (eds), Kommunalisierung und Christianisierung: Voraussetzungen und Folgen der reformation,

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The centrality of assemblies to revolt owes to the normalcy of such gatherings to address matters of general concern in the quotidian communal life of the countryside.¹⁰ We can observe just such a process of acephalous assembly in Saint-Leu-d’Esserent itself a generation prior. When the inhabitants objected to a customary exaction by the priory, they went en masse to the count of Clermont’s bailiff to request the appointment of representatives to pursue a lawsuit against the monks. The documents that report the proceedings list over two hundred residents, who came in person (en leurs propres personnes) before the bailiff to take this action on behalf of the community.¹¹ Among them was a Jean Lespert. This is mostly likely the same Jean Lespert later remitted for participation in the Jacquerie, especially since his name is followed immediately by a man with a surname ‘le Pignart’ similar to that of his future son-in-law, Benoît le Paignart, with whom he was remitted.¹² The incipient movement’s grassroots thus seem to have chosen Calle rather than having him imposed upon them. The accounts of Quatre Valois, Jean de Venette, and the royal chronicle all characterize Calle’s elevation as the rebels’ act: they ‘made’ (firent) or ‘instituted’ (ordinarunt) him as their leader. This is confirmed by Guenelon’s remission and another pardon, both of which speak of Calle as ‘chosen’ (esleu; electi vel deputati) by the Jacques.¹³ This does not, of course, mean that no efforts at persuasion or direction were made. Guenelon’s remission makes a distinction between ‘the people and commune of the

1400–1600 (Berlin, 1989), 29–55; Paul Freedman, The origins of peasant servitude in medieval Catalonia (Cambridge, 1991); Paul Freedman, ‘The German and Catalan peasant revolts’, AHR 98 (1993): 39–154; Douglas James Aiton, ‘ “Shame on him who allows them to live”: The Jacquerie of 1358’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow (Glasgow, 2007), 205–209; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Two kinds of freedom: Language and practice in late medieval rural Revolts’, Edad media: Revista de historia 21 (2020): 113–152. On communal ideals and organization in medieval and early modern French revolt, see Vincent Challet, ‘Political topos or community principle? Res publica as a source of legitimacy in the French Peasants’ revolts of the Late Middle Ages’, in Wim Blockmans, André Holenstein, and Jon Mathieu in collaboration with Daniel Schläppi (eds), Empowering interactions: political cultures and the emergence of the state in Europe, 1300–1900 (Farnham, 2009), 205–218; YvesMarie Bercé, Histoire des Croquants: Étude des soulèvements populaires au XVIIIe siècle dans le sudouest de la France, 2 vols (Geneva, 1974). ¹⁰ On quotidian collective activities, see March Bloch, French rural history: An essay on its basic characteristics, Janet Sondheimer (trans.), (London, 1966), 176–185; Robert Fossier, Paysans d’Occident: XIe–XIVe siècles (Paris, 1984); Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1997), esp. ch. 5; Monique Bourin and Robert Durand, Vivre au village au Moyen Âge: Les solidarités paysannes du XIe au XIIIe siècles (Rennes, 2000). ¹¹ Beauvais, AD Oise H 2441 (vidimus of a composite document from 1325–29); AD Oise Hs 664 (1336); Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The monks and the masses at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent: Rural politics in Northern France before the Jacquerie’ in Miriam Müller (ed.), The Routledge history of rural life (Abingdon, forthcoming 2021). ¹² Both Lespert and Pierre le Pignart are listed only in the 1326 procuration (AD Oise H 2441) from this dispute, probably indicating that by the time the 1336 document (AD Oise Hs 664) was issued, they had left for Senlis, where Lespert and his son-in-law were living in 1358. ¹³ AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r; ‘Capitanei plane seu plate patrie tunc electi vel deputati’ (AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v–24r).

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Beauvaisis’ and Calle’s ‘adherents and accomplices’, a hint that Calle had brought a coterie of supporters to the meeting and may have had some idea of how he wanted things to develop. But notably, this assembly and its decisions had no discernible link with the Parisian faction, save perhaps for the shadowy presence of this Hospitaller mentioned by Quatre Valois.¹⁴ There are some, slight indications of Hospitaller involvement with Marcel’s regime, including a loan to the reform government approved by the Order’s grand prior.¹⁵ Still, the Quatre Valois chronicle’s further report that it was Guillaume Calle who wrote to Étienne Marcel to propose an alliance shows that even if this Hospitaller was connected with Paris, it was the rural rebels’ leadership that took the initiative to establish, or reestablish, the tie with the Parisians.¹⁶ Apparently, the crucial decisions made in the wake of the massacre at Saint-Leu were taken without their input. Why the country-folk decided at this moment to elect a leader and revolt is not a question that can ever be answered to complete satisfaction. Indeed, it flummoxed many observers even at the time. Chroniclers proposed a range of possibilities, ranging from simple wickedness and insanity, to secret political machinations, to criticism of the nobility’s social and military failures, while chancery clerks and court judges often eschewed explanation altogether. Studies of modern social movements, however, suggest that the necessary prelude to collective violence is often the creation and harnessing of a collective identity as an aggrieved group with clear enemies.¹⁷ Something along these lines may have ¹⁴ One Jean de Senlis, removed from his commandery in June 1358 (AN MM 28, fol. 81v), is the best candidate for Calle’s co-commander that I have identified. A Hector de Malaret, who forced villagers to fortify the church of Léré near Bourges in 1358, is another possibility (AN JJ 124, no. 62, fol. 39–40r). ¹⁵ [Antoine-Jean-Victor] Le Roux de Lincy, Histoire de l’hôtel de ville de Paris, suivie d’un essai sur l’ancien gouvernement municipal de cette ville (Paris, 1846), 235. This grand prior, whose identity is uncertain, accepted the son of Pierre de Villiers, captain of Paris’s city guard and a Valois loyalist, into the order just days before his departure from the city for the Chartrain and the likely handover of the city’s captaincy to Pierre Gilles (see Chapter 2; R.A. de Vertot et al., ‘Liste chronologique des frères chevaliers de l’Ordre de Saint Jean de Jerusalem de la Vénérable Langue de France’ in Histoire des chevaliers hospitaliers de S. Jean de Jerusalem, appellez depuis les Chevalier de Rhodes et aujourd’hui les Chevaliers de Malte, 5 vols (Paris, 1692–1776), IV: 60). In March 1359, the Order’s grand-prior-elect was serving in de Villier’s former capacity as captain of Paris (Musée de Paris AE II 376, formerly AN K 948B, no. 40). Possibly, Gilles Crepain and Guillaume Champremy, both commissioners on the reform expedition of late 1357 to inspect castles around Beauvais (see Chapter 1) were related to Guillaume de Crespelaine and Colinet de Campremy, both listed as Hospitallers in the following decade (Vertot, ‘Liste’ in Histoire des chevaliers, IV: 60). Certainly, the northern French Hospitallers’ network of mostly rural commanderies, which, though usually unfortified, were located near major roads and rivers would have made their expertise and infrastructure valuable to reformers and Jacques alike (Valérie Bessey, Les commanderies de l’Hôpital en Picardie au temps des chevaliers de Rhodes, 1309–1522 (Millau, 2005), 24–25, 46). ¹⁶ ‘Donc envoya des plus sages et des plus notables devers le prevost des marchans de Paris et lui escript qu’il estoit en son aide et aussi qu’il lui fut aidant et secourant, se besoing estoit’ (4 Valois, 72). ¹⁷ In particular, see Charles Tilly, The politics of collective violence (Cambridge, 2003) on brokerage and boundary activation. On the helpful concepts of ‘framing’ and ‘frame alignment’: see David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Jr., Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford, ‘Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation’, American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 464–481 and Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, ‘Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment’, Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 611–639. Also useful to think with are

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taken place in the immediate aftermath of Saint-Leu-d’Esserent. An assembly held in the wake of mass murder certainly would have provided a conducive environment for such an appeal to old solidarities and new solutions. Emotions—fear, pride, and anger chief among them—must have been running high among those gathered, for they found themselves in a dangerous and unfamiliar situation.¹⁸ It was not common for non-nobles to kill nobles. Both the Jacquerie’s limited death toll and the hysteria it nonetheless created testify to its rarity. Few such murders are to be found in royal criminal records in the two decades before the Black Death.¹⁹ Those who argue that it was not ‘rare or unspeakable’ for peasants to murder their lords are able to muster little evidence. Only two of the seven cases drawn from a 300-year period that made up the core of Robert Jacob’s well-known study on seigneurial murder were certainly committed by non-nobles against nobles.²⁰ Even that arrogant rustic mentioned in the last chapter who told noblemen to get themselves to Paris ‘where they kill nobles’ did not threaten to do the killing himself. Indeed, he ended up dead at noble hands. By the nobleman’s own account, it was his desire for vengeance at the memory of these insulting words, rather than any physical assault, that led to the rustic’s murder.²¹ Peasants were not supposed to fight, but to be workers (laboratores), who left the fighting to the warrior aristocrats (bellatores), just as they left the praying to

Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The social space and the genesis of groups’, Theory and Society 14 (1985): 723–744 and Nick Crossley’s reformulation of Smesler’s classic ‘value added’ model with reference to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: Nick Crossley, Making sense of social movements (Buckingham, 2002), ch. 9; Neil J. Smelser, Theory of collective behavior (New Orleans, 2011 [1962]). ¹⁸ On emotions and the mobilization of medieval revolt, see Jelle Haemers, ‘A moody community? Emotion and ritual in late medieval urban revolts’ in Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne Van Bruaene (eds), Emotions in the heart of the city (14th–16th Century) (Turnhout, 2005), 63–81 and Damien Bouquet and Piroska Nagy, Sensible Moyen Âge: Une histoire des émotions dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 2015), esp. 225–255. From a sociological perspective, see Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate politics: Emotions and social movements (Chicago, 2001). ¹⁹ Three or four possible cases in which a non-noble was accused of a noble’s death in Actes du Parlement de Paris: Parlement criminel, règne de Philippe VI de Valois: Inventaire analytique des registres X2a 2 à 5, ed. Brigitte Labat-Poussin, Monique Langlois, Yvonne Lanhers (Paris, 1987) at 3114A and 3151vA; 4001A and 4002D, and 2008vB, as well as 3171vB in which a lady’s serving woman was accused of her son’s death. See also AD Oise H 531, where a subject of Saint-Vincent de Senlis was accused of killing a knight. For the reign of Charles VI, see Claude Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’: Crime, état et société en France à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols (Paris, 1991), I: 423–427, demonstrating that nonnobles rarely physically attacked nobles. ²⁰ Robert Jacob, ‘Le meurtre du seigneur dans la société féodale: La mémoire, le rite, la fonction’, Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales 45 (1990): 247–263, quote at 250. Eight such murders are discussed for the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries in Carlos Barros, ‘Violencia y muerte del señor en Galicia a finales de la Edad Media’, Studia historica: Historia medieval 9 (1991): 134–157, those killed being almost exclusively ecclesiastics. To my knowledge, there have been no studies dedicated to nonnoble murders of nobles with whom the attacker did not have a seigneurial relationship. ²¹ ‘nequiens ob predicta suum animum Refrenare propriamque compescere voluntatem taliter predictum feriit Aymericum’ (AN JJ 86, no. 109, fol. 39v).

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the clerics (oratores).²² Peasants who sought martial glory were ridiculed, just as the common-born troops in Jean II’s army were when the nobles called them Jacques Bonhommes. The rarity of non-noble violence against nobles made the killings at Saint-Leu all the more meaningful, not only to its observers but also to its participants.²³ In killing Raoul de Clermont-Nesle and his companions, the country-folk had crossed a line, perhaps even broken a taboo. This required explanation and justification, much as had the murder of Raoul’s uncle and his companions three months before. Indeed, despite the justificatory speeches given afterward, Marcel himself evidently continued to feel nervous about that deed, minimizing the number slaughtered as ‘really quite small’ (très bien petit de nombre) in the letter he sent to Ypres in July.²⁴ As had been the case in Paris, once the first step had been taken, there was no turning back.

Immediate Grievances In February, Marcel had argued that the marshals and d’Acy should be killed because they had failed to deliver the countryside from the ravages of freebooting soldiers and had treacherously blocked any effort to improve the situation.²⁵ The deed had been done ‘for the good of the realm’, he said afterward, ‘and because those killed were false, wicked, and traitors’.²⁶ An argument along these lines would seem apposite for speeches at the original Jacquerie assemblies. Certainly, several chroniclers told the story that way. They pointed to an abrogation of aristocratic military responsibility articulated by the Jacques at the inception of the revolt. In Froissart’s chronicle, here closely tracking Jean le Bel’s account, the revolt began with a speech given to an assembly of villagers: They said that all the nobles of the realm, knights and squires, were betraying the realm, and that it would be a good thing if they were all destroyed. Some of them said, ‘He speaks the truth! He speaks the truth! Anyone who hinders the gentlemen’s annihilation should be ashamed!’²⁷

²² Georges Duby, Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris, 1978); Paul Freedman, Images of the medieval peasant (Stanford, 1999), ch. 8. ²³ Vincent Challet and Patricia Victorin, ‘Introduction’ to Vincent Challet and Patricia Victorin (eds), Du meurtre en politique: Regards croisés sur l’utilisation de la violence en contexte populaire, special issue of Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes/Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 34 (2017): 13–21, esp. 15; Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, ‘De Fuenteovejuna à la Guerre des Communautés: Sur la violence populaire en Castille à la fin du Moyen Âge’ in Challet and Victorin (eds), Du meurtre en politique, 87–106, esp. 89, 105–106. ²⁴ d’Avout, 306. ²⁵ Jean de Venette, 154, 156; see Chapter 2. ²⁶ ‘leur dist que le fait qui avoit esté fait avoit esté fait pour le bien du royaume, et que ceulz qui avoient esté tuez estoient faulx, mauvais et traistre’ (GC, 150). ²⁷ ‘Car aucunes gens des villes champestres, sans chief, s’assamblèrent en Biauvoisis. Et ne furent mies cent hommes li premier, et disent que tout li noble dou royalme de France, chevalier et escuier,

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The Chronique normande also reports that the peasants said that ‘the knights— who ought to have protected them—had decided to take all their property. For this reason, they revolted’.²⁸ These justifications are similar to the explanation given by Jean de Venette, who reported that the peasants revolted upon ‘seeing the wrongs done to them from every side and that they were not being protected by their nobles (nobilibus suis) but rather they oppressed them more heavily than enemies’.²⁹ The Saint-Denis monk reported that a similar rationale was employed later in the revolt, when the combined troops of the Jacques and their urban allies encouraged themselves onward by saying, ‘Let’s attack these noble traitors who, failing to defend the realm are instead focusing all their energy on devouring the people’s sustenance’.³⁰ One of the plenary remissions issued by the Dauphin upon his return to Paris agrees that communal self-defence efforts lay behind the revolt. This remission, issued specifically for the inhabitants of Paris and its hinterlands and those of the Meaucian, Brie, La Ferté-Alais, and the County of Étampes, opens with the statement that the assemblies preceding the Jacques’ violence were held: in order to decide how each region could properly resist the deeds of the English and other enemies of the French kingdom, who, by means of the castles and fortresses that they had taken and were holding, had devastated, destroyed, and pillaged many bonnes villes and subjects of the realm, and are still doing this on a daily basis.³¹

A few accounts of how particular communities became—or were thought to have become—involved in the Jacquerie as it developed over the next month echo this account and support the chroniclers’ claims that it was specifically aristocratic failure to provide military protection that catalysed rural revolt. An assembly of Picard villagers gathered near Poix seems to have segued seamlessly from a discussion of ‘how best to resist the English and other enemies who were destroying the countryside from the castles they held’ into a decision to join the Jacquerie in attacking noble fortifications: trahissoient le royaume, et que ce seroit grans biens, qui tous les destruiroit. Cescuns d’yaus dist: “Il dist voir, il dist voir; honnis soit [celi] par qui il demorra que tout li gentil home ne soient destruit” ’ (Froissart, SHF, §413, p. 99; Jean le Bel, 256, where the speech ends at ‘demorra’). ²⁸ ‘les paisans distrent que les chevaliers, qui les devoient garder, avoient prins conseil de leur oster touz leurs biens. Pour ce fait s’esmeurent’ (Chron. norm., 127–128). See also Chron. reg., 270. ²⁹ ‘videntes mala et oppressiones quae ab omni parte eis inferebantur, nec a nobilibus suis tuebantur, imo potius ipsos sicut inimici gravius opprimebant’ (Jean de Venette, 174). ³⁰ Religieux, 127. ³¹ ‘pour avoir avis et deliberacion comment chascun païs en droit soy pourroit mieulx resister au fait des Engloys et autres ennemis du royaume de France, qui par les chastiaux et forteresses que il ont pris et tiennent en ycelui, ont gasté, destruit et pillié, et encores font de jour en jour, moult grant quantité de bonnes villes et subgiez du dit royaume, avec leur biens’ (AN JJ 86, no. 241, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 23, pp. 251–253). For this remission, see Chapter 10.

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. . . assembled in arms in the fields . . . [the inhabitants] by common consent elected Simon Doublet of Grandvillers to be their captain and commanded him [to go] where they wished him to lead, to go to destroy some castles, houses, and fortresses of some local nobles³²

More evidence along these lines comes from Champagne, where similar assemblies for organizing local protection were the pretext for Jacquerie. At least, that was how local nobles interpreted them: in the villages of Bailly-aux-Forges, Thiéblemont, and Favresse, assemblies called to address communities’ worry about the prospect of military pillage were the prelude to confrontations with local nobles, though the villagers returned home without striking a blow.³³ To the south, when brigands threatened the village of Moret, just west of Montereau, one Thomas le Chaucier shouted to the assembled community that ‘the nobles were false traitors’ (nobiles essent falsi proditores), which the local captain, a knight, took for sedition.³⁴ If these documentary sources seem to confirm some chroniclers’ accounts, we should neither collapse them into one another nor believe them uncritically. With the exception of the remission involving Poix, all of them relate to southern and eastern communities, which probably became involved in the revolt later than those of the Beauvaisis, as is argued in Chapters 8 and 9. As those chapters discuss, even the incident at Poix may postdate the Jacques’ defeat at Mello-Clermont on 10 June. Moreover, the failure of aristocrats to hold up their end of the bargain with peasants was so common a justification attributed to peasant rebels across later medieval Europe that it might be considered a trope.³⁵ These glimpses of peasant motivation are refracted through the glass of noble interpretation, revealing aristocratic insecurities as much as peasant motives.³⁶ It is important to note

³² This remission uses the general remission’s wording verbatim: ‘pour avoir avis & deliberacion comment chascun pais en droit soy pourroit mieux resister au fait des Anglois & autres ennemis du Royaume de France, que par les chasteaulx et forteresses qu’il ont pris & tiennent en yceluy, ont gaste, destuit & pille & encores font de Jour en Jour moult grant quantite de bonne villes & subgiez du dit Royaume avecques leurs biens, les habitans des villes de Grantvillier, de Poys & de Linieres se feussent nagaires assemblez sur les champs en armes en certain lieu d’icelles marches & pais, et de commun assentement eussent esleu & fait Symon Doublet de Grantvillier leur capitaine, et ayceluy fait commandement, que avec eulx, la ou il le vouldroient mener pour aler abatre aucuns chasteaux, maisons, lieux & forteresses d’aucuns nobles des marches & pais dessusdiz’ (AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136). ³³ AN JJ 86, no. 355, fol. 121, ed. Luce, no. 33, pp. 268–270; AN JJ 86, no. 465, fol. 164, ed. Luce, no. 40, pp. 281–283; AN JJ 90, no. 292, fol. 149v–50r, ed. Luce, no. 46, pp. 293–294. Further discussion of these episodes in Chapter 9, below. ³⁴ ‘premissis causis motus & perterritus in certo loco dicte ville ubi tunc cum quibusdam aliis ipsius ville habitatoribus accessit, dixisset tantummodo quod nobiles essent falsi proditores’ (AN JJ 86, no. 585, fol. 212). ³⁵ Freedman, Images, 20–24, 295–300. ³⁶ See also Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Murdering peasants: Status, genre, and the representation of rebellion’, Representations 1 (1983): 1–29 and Paul Strohm, ‘ “A revelle!”: Chronicle evidence and the rebel voice’ in Hochon’s arrow: The social imagination of fourteenth-century texts (Princeton, 1992), 33–56.

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that none of the documentary cases came from the area in which the Jacquerie began. Indeed, Quatre Valois, the chronicle with the most detail about the revolt’s beginning, does not mention any kind of speech or even motivation along these lines. Furthermore, with the exception of the incident at Poix, none of them resulted in actual violence. The champenois villagers had gone no further than to have assembled to decide what to do if they were threatened. When presented with an actual noble, they quickly backed down. Nor was there violence in Moret, where the knight serving as the village’s captain threw Thomas le Chaucier into prison despite the fact that ‘no commotion was made on account of these words’.³⁷ In these cases, the connection between community efforts at protection and Jacquerie was one made by the nobles rather than the villagers. It reflected what nobles thought was happening or what they were afraid might happen, and they considered words alone to be dangerously seditious, even in the absence of violent deeds. We can see this process in detail in a series of exchanges between noblemen and an inhabitant of the champenois village of Arcy-Sainte-Restitue, which is recounted in a letter of remission. The village apparently did not violently participate in the Jacquerie nor even hold an assembly. But at the time of the revolt, when a knight heard of a certain conversation that had passed between one Robert de Jardin and his lord, he assumed rebellion: de Jardin had reportedly begged his lord to protect the village from enemies (ab inimicis conservare), observing that if he did not do so, the villagers would have to ‘all become masters’ lest they lose all they owned (sic opportet quod omnia reliquamus, aut quod omnes simus magistri). Enraged at this report, the knight came to the village, found de Jardin, and accused him of wishing to be ‘lord of the nobles’ (dominus nobilium). Then he summarily executed him.³⁸ There was a considerable difference between what the villager had actually said—i.e. ‘we must protect ourselves if you will not do so’—and what the homicidal nobleman heard—i.e. ‘I want to be lord of the nobles’. The remission, written on behalf of de Jardin’s relatives, seems intended to highlight that difference and to point out how the knight had misinterpreted what he had heard. The knight’s re-phrasing of de Jardin’s words, a sort of cultural calque, reminds us to be wary of how those who wrote the sources (mis)interpreted and (mis)represented the motives of those lower down the social scale. ³⁷ ‘absque eo quo dictorum verborum occasione aliqua commotio per dicte ville habitatores vel aliter contra dictum Capitaneum vel aliquem alium factam’ (AN JJ 86, no. 585, fol. 212). ³⁸ ‘tempore commocionis . . . inter nobiles dicti regni, ex una parte, et innobiles ejusdem regni, ex altera . . . eidem domino dixisset quod pro Deo ab ipsa villa cujus erat dominus non recederet, sed cum ejusdem ville habitatoribus ejusdem domini subdictis vellet remanere, et ipsos pro sua possibilitate ab inimicis conservare . . . dictusque dominus eidem Roberto respondisset quod cum aliis nobilibus adire et se servare intendebat et volebat; dictusque Robertus . . . dixisset, Deum ajurando, “Sic opportet quod omnia relinquamus, aut quod omnes simus magistri” . . . que ad audienciam cujusdam militis devenerunt, ipse miles, pluribus gentibus armorum associatus, ad dictam villam de Arciaco accedens, domum dicti defuncti Roberti intraverit de facto et . . . eidem Roberto dixerit: “Tu es ille qui eris dominus nobilium!” ’ (AN JJ 86, no. 267, fol. 89v–90r, ed. Luce, no. 36, pp. 274–276).

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Justice in an Age of War and Plague Crises of the moral economy, the implicit bargain over resources and responsibilities that a society’s constituents make with one another and according to which they measure its ‘justice’, often come at moments of political or economic change, when the bargain breaks down and rebellion follows.³⁹ Constituents of different social groupings may view the bargain differently or disagree about whether or how it has been broken. The sources discussed in the previous section suggest that nobles and villagers in 1358 were not entirely in agreement about the social order, its abrogation, or the potential consequences thereof. What is—and was— undeniable is that important historical changes had preceded the Jacquerie and that these changes had profound implications for and effects on social relationships, particularly in the countryside. While late medieval peasants were supposed to have ‘good and true obedience and reverence to their lord’, as the agreement between the inhabitants and the priory of Saint-Leu-d’Esserent had put it 30 years earlier, the socio-economic structures that depended upon and reproduced reverent rustics had become increasingly fragile in recent decades.⁴⁰ Recent events, including military developments but also economic and political ones, had weakened those bonds yet further. Not for nothing did Jean de Venette report that the rebellion began with a ‘thirst for justice’.⁴¹ The violence of war had contributed a great deal to the social crisis. It is true that the security situation along the Oise in late May 1358 was not as desperate as Siméon Luce and other later observers have claimed.⁴² The original theatre of revolt in the northern Île-de-France and Picardy had been spared the AngloNavarrese and freebooting military activity that had victimized country-folk to Paris’s west and south-west in the winter and spring of 1357–1358, violence that had sent refugees streaming into Paris and that had created the fateful dissension

³⁹ E.P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, P&P 50 (1971): 76–136>; James C. Scott, The moral economy of the peasant: Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976); William James Booth, ‘On the idea of moral economy’, The American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 653–667. The idea of moral economy, though a recent scholarly coinage, seems a more appropriately holistic concept for fourteenth-century social relations than the Enlightenment idea of ‘social contract’, but on medieval forerunners of the latter in political practices and legal thought, see Antony Black, ‘The juristic origin of social contract theory’, History of Political Thought 14 (1993): 57–76. ⁴⁰ ‘bonne & vraie obeissance & reverence que subget doit avoir a son seigneur’ (AD Oise Hs 664). ⁴¹ ‘zelo justitiae hoc inchoaverant’ (Jean de Venette, 176). ⁴² Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Soldiers, villagers, and politics: Military violence and the Jacquerie of 1358’ in Guilhem Pépin, Françoise Lainé, and Frédéric Boutoulle (eds), Routiers et mercenaires pendant la guerre de Cent ans: Hommage à Jonathan Sumption. Actes du colloque de Berbiguières (13–14 septembre 2013) (Bordeaux, 2016), 101–114. Cf. Luce, ch. 1; d’Avout, 190–192; Nicholas Wright, Knights and peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French countryside (Woodbridge, 1998), 84–88; Aiton, ‘ “Shame” ’, 200; David Green, The Hundred Years War: A people’s history (New Haven, 2014), ch. 2.

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between the reformers and the nobles about how best to respond.⁴³ In Champagne, too, the extent of military violence was limited to a few minor fortifications (maisons fors) near Provins, rather distant from the epicentres of champenois Jacquerie in Brie and the Perthois.⁴⁴ Those gathered after the murders at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent would nevertheless have known what had been happening in the Chartrain and across the Seine and that they were not immune. The Beauvaisis and Picardy had borne the brunt of Edward III’s 1346 campaign, and Senlis and its suburbs would remember that French soldiers were not necessarily preferable to enemy ones, for troops under Philippe VI’s command had destroyed their crops in 1338.⁴⁵ A truce with England was of little comfort while the Navarrese were securing their fortresses in Normandy and the Regent was gathering his troops south-east of Paris. The Beauvaisis lay directly in the path between them. If war was to come, that was where the violence would happen. Even if it never got to that point, rumours were circulating that the Dauphin planned to allow his soldiers to pillage the countryside in lieu of wages. Marcel was later blamed for inciting these rumours to stir up the country-folk: ‘giving them to understand that we wished them to be destroyed and pillaged by our soldiers and that we had abandoned [Paris] and the other towns and countryside to these soldiers’.⁴⁶ But the truth was not far off. Two weeks earlier, the Estates of Compiègne had ordered even the little manors and strong houses to be put in a state of readiness.⁴⁷ This order was not ‘the direct cause’ of the Jacquerie, as Luce claimed, for the Compiègne assembly had also reiterated the reformers’ prohibitions against forcible seizures.⁴⁸ Still, some such seizures probably took place in the Beauvaisis and the Île-de-France, as the Norman chronicle reports.⁴⁹ Elsewhere, the Dauphin had explicitly blessed military requisitioning, granting permission to the garrison at Étampes to pillage in lieu of wages and to that at

⁴³ Only at Poix is there even equivocal indication of more recent violence: A Parlement decision of 1362 relates the English capture of the castle of Poix because its lord had been serving in the royal army ‘ab anno Domini millesimo CCC LVII’ but does not specify when exactly the castle was taken (PierreClément Timbal et al. (eds), La guerre de Cent ans vue à travers les registres du Parlement (1337–1369) (Paris, 1961), no. 81, pp. 286–296). 4 Valois, 87, lists Poix among the castles taken by the AngloNavarrese in the autumn of 1358, in other words, after the Jacquerie. ⁴⁴ BnF franç. 25701, no. 121. ⁴⁵ HYW, I: 520–523. Edward’s troops were probably responsible for the destruction of the castle Houdenc-l’Évêque near Beauvais, which ‘est ou a este tout gaste & ars par les ennemis’ according to the commissioners of 1357 (AD Oise G 21; AN JJ 90, no. 563, fol. 278); Senlis: AD Oise Edt 1 EE 1. ⁴⁶ ‘audit peuple donnoient à entendre que Nous les voullions destruire & faire pillier par nos Gensd’armes; que abandonnée avions ladite Ville avec les autres Citez & plat Pays du Royaume de France, à iceulx Gens-d’armes’ (AN JJ 86, no. 240, fol. 79–80r, ed. Ord., IV: 346–348; language also used in AN JJ 86, no. 214, fol. 69v–70r, confirmed at AN JJ 86, no. 255, fol. 85v–86r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 83–85, and AN JJ 86, no. 282, fol. 94). ⁴⁷ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 5. ⁴⁸ Luce, 54; cf. Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols (Paris, 1909–1931), I: 400–401; Chapter 2. ⁴⁹ Chron. norm., 127, followed by Chron. reg. 270.

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Montereau to seize victuals as needed.⁵⁰ He was also, as the champenois villagers feared, employing soldiers from the Empire (les Lorrains et Alemans), and these men were, as one Bohemian squire put it, accustomed to seizing what they wished in the countryside (il peussent pillier sur le champs sanz offense comme il ont acoustume a faire en leur pais).⁵¹ The possibility that such tactics would also be employed north of Paris could have been invoked to oppose Raoul de ClermontNesle and his entourage’s passage over the Oise. The logic was then naturally extendable to the northern nobility as a whole, whether by those sympathetic toward or even acting for the reformers, or by independent parties with their own programmes of whatever scope or ambition. The social dynamics of Valois military affairs made the nobility particularly vulnerable to such criticism from non-nobles. It was not just the absence of the protection—not to mention the glory of victory—that non-nobles supposedly paid for with their produce and their subservience. It was also that non-nobles had themselves taken on an increasingly important role in the actual fighting, both in the royal army and in the protection of their own communities. As was noised after Poitiers, non-nobles’ own experience and that of their neighbours had convinced them that they could do the job as well or better. The Parisians’ recent exploits at Corbeil would only have added to their confidence. Not only had Guillaume Calle himself ‘seen some wars’ just like his Hospitaller companion, whose lineage was presumably more illustrious, but many of the Jacques’ lesser leaders also had military experience, as is demonstrated in Chapter 6.⁵² Non-nobles’ military role was one that commoners might take up not just by necessity but also with pride, as evidenced by the rustics’ proud appropriation of the sobriquet Jacques Bonhommes reported by Jean de Venette.⁵³ In the long view of history, the magnitude of this change may not have been revolutionary; numerous references to military service in seigneurial agreements with village communities from across medieval Europe indicate that non-nobles, including ⁵⁰ Étampes: ‘le dit Capitaine ne ses genz n’avoient nuls gaiges de nous nous leur eussions donne par noz dites lettres licence & auctorite de prendre sur le pais & ailleurs ou Royaume toutes manieres de vivres neccessaires pour genz d’armes’ (AN JJ 86, no. 395 (mis-numbered 385), fol. 137v, excerpted by Luce, 193). Montereau: ‘proclamatum fuisse quod omnia bona extra fortilalicia existencia et specialiter victualia in fortaliciis retraherentur’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 503v–504r, a judgement against the garrison’s soldiers for theft against wine merchants). See also AN P 2293, pp. 453–456, a remission granted to their captain for ‘ayent fait plusieurs prinses . . . tant sur et des marchans comme sur et des bonnes gens du plat pais et autres plusieurs vivres deniers et autres biens lesquiex ils ont convertis et apliqués tant en leurs vivres et garnisons comme autrement en leur singulier profit’. ⁵¹ AN JJ 86, no. 406, fol. 141. The remission, for stealing from two Parisian spicers near Châlons-enChampagne, was issued in December 1358, possibly for offenses committed after the Jacquerie, but attests to the behaviour one might expect from such men. The squire had come to France under the command of the Lord of Rosenberg (Rožmberk in Czech spelling). On the employment of men-at-arms from the Empire, see most recently Chris Given-Wilson and Françoise Lainé, ‘Les Allemands à la Bataille de Poitiers (1356)’, Francia: Forschungen zur Westeuropäischen Geschichte 43 (2016): 353–365. ⁵² See also Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The social constituency of the Jacquerie revolt of 1358’, Speculum 95 (2020): 689–715. ⁵³ Jean de Venette, 144.

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peasants, were never absent from medieval armies.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, non-nobles’ military role in mid-fourteenth-century France seems to have felt novel and controversial to people at the time. Non-noble ‘interference’ in the marshals’ business had engendered their fatal conflict with the Parisian reformers four months earlier. While the Estates’ ordonnances of 1355 and 1357 had required that everyone in the kingdom be armed according to their estate (toutes Gens soient armés selon leur estat), the Estates held at Compiègne just before the Jacquerie had restricted participation in the host to skilled townsmen with arms and horses (Genz des bonnes villes abiles pour les armes . . . souffisament armez & Montez).⁵⁵ Country-dwelling men of the sort gathered at or near Saint-Leud’Esserent had been thus excluded. These developments in the military sphere and the social conflict which they engendered were deeply connected to and exacerbated by long-term processes of economic and demographic change. While recent writing on medieval revolt has emphasized political motivations, we should not lose sight of an older tradition emphasizing the role of economic crisis.⁵⁶ The peasants of the Beauvaisis were the unlucky denizens of a period of chronic economic insecurity and decline, a crisis first signalled by the Great Famine of 1314–1322, and transformed mid-century by the arrival of plague, which reached northern France in 1348.⁵⁷ The Black ⁵⁴ Reynolds, Kingdoms and communities, 148–149; John France, ‘Armies and bands in medieval Europe’ in Matthew S. Gordon, Richard W. Kaeuper, and Harriet Zurndorfer (eds), 500–1500 CE, vol. 2 of Philip Dwyer and Jouy Damousi (eds), The Cambridge world history of violence, 4 vols (Cambridge, 2020), 81–82, 84–85; Monique Bourin, Villages médiévaux en Bas-Languedoc: Genèse d’une sociabilité, Xe–XIVe siècles, 2 vols (Paris, 1987), II: 149–150. Beaumont-sur-Oise and Asnières, both villages involved in the Jacquerie, owed the crown exercitum et equitationem in the thirteenth century and owned weapons, included iron helmets, bows, and swords (Louis Douët d’Arcq, Recherches historiques et critiques sur les anciens comtes de Beaumont-sur-Oise, du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Amiens, 1855), no. 199, pp. 170–174, art. 19 and 31, and no. 200, pp. 174–177, art. 16–17). See also Beaumanoir, cap. XXXII, §976, vol. I: 492–493. ⁵⁵ Ord., III: 19–37, art. 32; 121–46, art. 40; 218–32, art. 24. ⁵⁶ Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, The popular revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, A. LyttonSells (trans.), (London, 1973), esp. ch. 3; Guy Fourquin, Les campagnes de la région parisienne à la fin du Moyen Âge (du milieu du XIIIe siècle au début du XVIe siècle) (Paris, 1964), 191–233; Brigitte Bedos[Rezak], La châtellenie de Montmorency des origines à 1368: Aspects féodaux, sociaux et économiques (Paris, 1980), 217–218. ⁵⁷ There is a long-running and contentious debate about how population, land use, and sociopolitical practices contributed to the contraction. New technology and interests have recently pointed to a significant role for climate change in this transition, demonstrating that the end of the medieval warm period ca. 1270 was followed by decades of profound climatic instability. Bruce M.S. Campbell, The great transition: Climate, disease and society in the late-medieval world (Cambridge, 2016) is a good survey, if spare on France. See also T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds), The Brenner debate: Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985) and John L. Brooke, Climate change and the course of global history: A rough journey (Cambridge, 2014), 372–384; Martin Bauch and Gerrit Jasper Schenk (eds), The crisis of the 14th century: Teleconnections between environmental and societal change? (Berlin, 2020). On the famine, William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the early fourteenth century (Princeton, 1996). On the plague: Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, 2 vols (Paris, 1975–1976); Monica H. Green (ed.), Pandemic disease in the medieval world: Rethinking the Black Death, inaugural issue of The Medieval Globe (2015); Monica H. Green, ‘The four Black Deaths’, AHR 125 (2020): 1600–1631.

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Death upended socio-economic relations, as wages rose or in some cases fell, prices increased for some things and decreased for others, land became more available and tax revenue more scarce.⁵⁸ Over the long term, as epidemics recurred and the disease perhaps became endemic, plague reshaped European society utterly, ushering in the socio-economic order of early modern Europe.⁵⁹ On the eve of the Jacquerie, people in the Beauvaisis may have perceived their own fortunes more favourably. The plague may have been less deadly there than elsewhere, and a baby boom was replacing lost population.⁶⁰ Even the weather had been mild lately; Étienne Marcel reported that it was shaping up to be a bumper year for crops.⁶¹ A seismic shift had nevertheless taken place. There was labour legislation in France as in England and elsewhere. We have no records for France analogous to the English manor rolls to show whether this legislation was enforced, but Jean de Venette complained about the survivors’ avarice and the legislation itself communicates a strong sense of elite exasperation at workers’ effrontery.⁶² Some of those empty fortresses that served as potential redoubts for bandits and enemy soldiers were in such a state because plague had led to the abandonment of many buildings, as the same chronicler reported.⁶³ Nor should we underestimate the traumatic impact on the social and emotional life of those who survived the plague, who had lived through the unthinkable, and for whom perhaps nothing was impossible. Samuel Cohn has argued that in the wake of the Black Death, belief in an ‘implicit social equality’ and a ‘new spirit of liberty’ enflamed people who would previously have born their lot in silence.⁶⁴ Liberty was ⁵⁸ Campbell, Great transition, 308–13, 352–363. ⁵⁹ Biraben, Les hommes et la peste, II; David Herlihy, The Black Death and the transformation of the West, ed. with introduction by Samuel K. Cohn, Jr (Cambridge, MA, 1997). ⁶⁰ Biraben, Les hommes et la peste, I: 176, 182–184; Bernard Guenée, Tribunaux et gens de justice dans le bailliage de Senlis à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1380—vers 1550) (Paris, 1963), 48–50 estimates light mortality for the 1348–52 plague based on hearth counts while the evidence in Fourquin, Les campagnes, 227–229, suggests mortality of 25 per cent to 30 per cent in Parisian environs, but both express reservations about their numbers. Joris Roosen and Daniel R. Curtis, ‘The “light touch” of the Black Death in the Southern Netherlands: An Urban Trick?’ The Economic History Review 72 (2019): 32–56, have shown that mortality has been greatly underestimated for the neighbouring Low Countries. On the period of recovery after the 1347–1352 epidemic, see Campbell, Great transition, 313–316, 319, 351–353 and Jean de Venette, 114 on marriages and natality in France. ⁶¹ Ice core data indicates that 1357–1359 were among the warmest and driest years of the cold, wet fourteenth century (A.G. Dawson, K. Hickey, P.A. Mayewski, and A. Nesje, ‘Greenland (GISP2) ice core and historical indicators of complex North Atlantic climate changes during the fourteenth century’, Holocene 17 (2007): 427–434). Marcel: ‘ceste année qui es dis paiis estoit très fertile de blez et de vins’ (d’Avout, 307). ⁶² Ord., II: 350–80, 563–66, III: 19–37, art. 23; Jean de Venette, 114, 116; Bronislaw Geremek, Le salariat dans l’artisanat parisien aux XIIIe–XVe siècles: Étude sur le marché de la main-d’oeuvre au moyen âge, Anna Posner and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (trans. from Polish) (Paris, 1968), 132–137; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, ‘After the Black Death: Labour legislation and attitudes towards labour in latemedieval Western Europe’, The Economic History Review 60 (2007): 462–463. ⁶³ ‘multis villis campestribus et domibus in bonis villis quasi vacuis remanentibus et orbatis. Et tunc ceciderunt domus multae satis cito, et tales, et ita solemnes’ (Jean de Venette, 114). ⁶⁴ Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, Lust for liberty: The politics of social revolt in medieval Europe, 1200–1450: Italy, France, and Flanders (Cambridge, MA, 2006), esp. ch. 10.

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secondary to security in Robert de Jardin’s observation that the villagers might have become ‘all masters’, but his cryptic statement does imply a certain scepticism toward the social hierarchy. The Jacquerie was certainly not a revolt of economic desperation. There were few instances of crimes that might indicate hunger, like theft of livestock or grain, during the revolt.⁶⁵ Many Jacques were in fact well off, and the peasants of northern France were generally comfortable.⁶⁶ But inequality may have had something to do with it. As in the Flemish Revolt of 1323–1328 and the English Rising of 1381—and similar to patterns identified in many modern uprisings— burdens unfairly distributed and rewards unequally shared rankled deeply, perhaps especially among the better off and the more ambitious.⁶⁷ The plague had had uneven effects in the Jacquerie’s heartlands. While overall mortality had probably been lower than in other regions, the poor had died at much higher rates than the rich, and they were largely denied the opportunities that demographic contraction might have afforded.⁶⁸ Wages may have risen overall, especially for agricultural workers, but grain prices remained low.⁶⁹ Worse, prices for land, that commodity most sought by medieval people for security and investment, stayed high, perhaps artificially so.⁷⁰ Mills and ovens, necessary for turning raw produce into finished commodities, mostly remained seigneurial monopolies.⁷¹ In other words, common men and women might amass money by the sweat of their brows, but their ability to move up the socio-economic ladder was blocked by seigneurial privileges, sticky prices for land that was disproportionately in the hands of nobles, and a mismatch between agricultural prices and wages that disadvantaged small and middling producers.⁷² The war’s political and economic consequences exacerbated this inequality and its social effects. The currency manipulations that so exercised the reformers were

⁶⁵ There are nine cases of livestock theft, five of which comprised stealing a horse for transport. Cows, sheep, pigs, poultry, and other consumable livestock stolen are mentioned at Garges-en-Gonesse (AN X1a 18, fol. 204r), Reuil-Malmaison (AN X1a 19, fol. 353r), and at the devastation in conjunction with Parisian troops of country houses belonging to the Dauphin’s councillors, Jean de Charny and Pierre d’Orgemont (AN X1a 14, fol. 391, ed. Luce, no. 55, pp. 306–309 and AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320). In other cases, stolen food seems connected to victualing Jacques on the road rather than desperate hunger (see Chapter 6). Cf. The pauper homo who took advantage of the disorder to steal grain from a squire in Pont-Sainte-Maxence (AN JJ 101, no. 55, fol. 30v–31r). ⁶⁶ Siméon Luce, Histoire de Bertrand Du Guesclin et de son époque: La jeunesse de Bertrand (1320–1364), 1st edn (Paris, 1876), 55–83; Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Social constituency’. ⁶⁷ Ted Robert Gurr, Why men rebel (Princeton, 1970). ⁶⁸ Mollat and Wolff, Popular revolutions, 111–115; Raymond Cazelles, ‘La peste de 1348–1349 en langue d’oïl: Epidémie prolétarienne et enfantine’, Bulletin philologique et historique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (jusqu’à 1610), année 1962 (Paris, 1965), 293–305. ⁶⁹ E.g. Pierre Desportes, Reims et les Rémois aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Paris, 1979), 542–549; Geremek, Le salariat, 122–126. ⁷⁰ Bedos[-Rezak], Châtellenie, 217. ⁷¹ Bedos[-Rezak], Châtellenie, 252–253. ⁷² The last was particularly the case for vineyards, which were the most profitable of northern French agrarian ventures but which required a great deal of labour to cultivate (Bedos[-Rezak], Châtellenie, 247–248).

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particularly disadvantageous to the common people, and taxation had been met with substantial resistance, at least in towns and cities. While the reform assemblies had taxed the nobility more heavily than the people, the recent Estates at Compiègne had reversed this policy, as well as re-valuing the money.⁷³ The Parisians refused to obey the latter, and mint personnel themselves thought it liable to create trouble among les peuples.⁷⁴ More subtly, the decision-making process in the Estates’ assemblies had served to reinforce the social distinctions between the three estates, particularly over the winter and spring of 1358, when the nobility was meeting separately from the others. The way that the Jacques directed their violence especially toward nobles’ homes and possessions demonstrates resentment toward wealth and status that might have been connected to aristocrats’ recent military failures, as Jean de Venette and other chroniclers indicate, but that resentment was also deeply rooted in an economic crisis caused by long-term, large-scale forces beyond the recent misfortunes of war. In the febrile atmosphere that followed Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, country-folk with blood on their hands might well have pointed to aristocratic pusillanimity both as a justification of the unusual violence just committed and as a spur to further action. They might also—or alternatively—have harboured social resentments and economic ambitions, perhaps imagining an alternative social order, one in which they might be ‘all masters’.

Planning Behind the Scenes Many of those present must have experienced 28 May 1358 as a transformational moment, when kaleidoscopic feelings of anger, disappointment, pride, and fear were focused and channelled into a project of physical destruction justified by social solidarity. In the sociologist Charles Tilly’s terms, this was a moment when a pre-existing marker of social difference, in this case the quality of nobility or its absence, gained critical salience. Studying eruptions of collective violence ranging from cowboy shoot-outs to the Rwandan genocide, Tilly argued that increasing a social marker’s salience, a process he termed ‘boundary activation’, makes possible the rapid transformation of previously coexistent relationships into collective, coordinated violence against the differentiated group.⁷⁵ The process is sudden and often takes observers and sometimes even participants by surprise, but in the case of large-scale ‘coordinated destruction’ like the Jacquerie, it is not a process that happens by chance even if it is made possible by opportunity. Individuals— ⁷³ John Bell Henneman, Royal taxation in fourteenth-century France: The captivity and ransom of John II, 1356–1370 (Philadelphia, 1976), 49, 73; see Chapter 2. ⁷⁴ AN JJ 86, no. 240, fol. 79–80r, ed. Ord., IV: 346–348; AN Z1b 56. ⁷⁵ Tilly, Politics of collective violence, particularly 20–22 and his Chapter 5 on ‘coordinated destruction’.

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‘brokers’ or ‘political entrepreneurs’ in Tilly’s terms—work to activate the boundaries between groups, to remove the middle ground between them, and to consolidate the ties among those poised to wreak destruction on the targeted group. Alongside this ‘cognitive’ work of polarization, which we might call propaganda in some cases, brokers facilitate relationships, build or strengthen networks, and recruit participants. Those who urged the country-folk to action may have done so spontaneously; brokers need not characterize their behaviour as calculated or manipulative. But speaking or acting ‘from the heart’ does not mean that no one had a plan. As Tilly wrote: people tell different stories about their programs before, during, and after violent episodes, and they often modify these programs in the course of interaction. Nevertheless, the prior existence of a destructive program is usually detectable and an important facilitator of coordinated destruction.⁷⁶

Again, one wonders about these ‘adherents and accomplices’ already supporting Calle at the time of his election. Given the speed with which the revolt erupted at the end of May, some organizational scaffolding must already have been in place: as we learn from two remissions, by ‘the end of May’, Calle had already apprehended a traitor named Jean Bernier and had sent him to be judged in Bernier’s hometown of Montataire by that town’s captain, a man named Étienne Wés.⁷⁷ ‘Around the feast of Corpus Christi’, which fell on 31 May that year, Wés had him executed. Mostly likely, since Bernier was returning from Meaux to the Beauvaisis and ‘the region between Senlis and Creil’, he was arrested in or near the Forest of Halatte, where ‘all the country-folk were in rebellion’ (touz esmeuz).⁷⁸ In other words, by 31 May, Calle had had time to capture a traitor and to transfer his custody to his executioners in another location, where a local captain, subordinate to Calle’s authority, was already in place.⁷⁹ Indeed, it may have been ⁷⁶ Tilly, Politics of collective violence, 110. ⁷⁷ AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97; ‘en l’an LVIII, environ la feste du Saint-Sacrement . . . fu mené par devers Guillaume Calle, lors capitainne dez dictes gens du plat pays, pour en ordener et faire justice, lequel Guillaume le bailla et livra à Estienne du Wés, pour le dit temps capitain de la ville de Montathère’ (AN JJ 98, no. 252, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 63, pp. 333–335). ⁷⁸ ‘du païs de Beauvoisin et d’environ Senliz et Creil . . . en retournant ès dictes parties trouvèrent les genz du plait païs touz esmeuz’ (AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97). On the Forest of Halatte as a gathering place of the Jacques, see AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–30, which recounts the capture of two squires in this wood, who were taken to Pont-Sainte-Maxence for execution at an unspecified time (‘plures innobiles erant in foresta de Halate, qui sua tunc temeraria voluntate in ipsis nemoribus ceperant et secum ad[d]uxerant Johannem de Rommescampis et Reginaldum de Beaurepaire, domicellos’). ⁷⁹ See also Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, ‘Enigmas of communication: Jacques, Ciompi, and the English’ in Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, Vincent Challet, Jan Dumolyn, and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz (eds), La comunidad medieval como esfera pública (Seville, 2014), 234.

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earlier, since ‘around Corpus Christi’ could mean that this had transpired before the feast.⁸⁰ It is not impossible that all of this might have occurred in a very short space of time: the places involved are walking distance from one another, and the timing of the revolt around the feast of Corpus Christi meant that people were already prepared for public events involving travelling and assembly.⁸¹ But details about the execution itself suggest a longer time frame. A Mahieu de Leurel, who participated in the execution, recounted what happened after Calle sent Bernier to Montataire to be executed ‘if it seemed to the captain and people of the town and country around it that he deserved it’ (se il lui sambloit, et auxi aux habitants de la dicte ville et du pays d’environ, que il eust desservi).⁸² According to Leurel: Étienne [Montataire’s captain], informed about the life and reputation of Bernier, in the presence of 200 or 300 people from the town and its surrounding countryside, led him barefoot and dressed only in a shirt to the Place of the Cross, before the townhouse of the monks of Beaulieu, and commanded Jean le Charon to kill him. Obeying this commandment, [Jean le Charon] struck Bernier such that he fell to earth and death followed. Since [Mahieu de Leurel] was there, holding a mason’s rule in his hand, Étienne ordered him to strike Bernier when he saw him thus fallen to earth and breathing his last . . .

This was a formal—perhaps even ritual—occasion, which had been preceded by an investigation and a judgement. The hundreds of people who came from both within and without the town to witness it had to be told beforehand that it was going to happen so that they could attend. A designated executioner did the deed.⁸³ Despite Mahieu de Leurel’s attempts to paint his attendance as happenstance (coincidentally in possession of his mason’s rule!), he, too, played a scripted part, his appearance arranged in advance. There is no whiff of accidental or unrestrained mob frenzy here. The two remissions that mention Bernier’s execution also contain some contextual information indicating how and why leadership and organization could

⁸⁰ On the speed of later English revolts, see Nicholas Brooks, ‘The organization and achievements of the peasants of Kent and Essex in 1381’ in Henry Mayr-Harting and R.I. Moore (eds), Studies in medieval history presented to R.H.C. Davis (London, 1985), 257–258, 268–270. ⁸¹ Montataire is only six kilometres along the Oise River from Saint-Leu-d’Esserent and Calle’s hometown of Mello is not much further distant on the Thérain. The close edge Forest of Halatte, in which Senlis is located and where the Berniers were apprehended, is 15 kilometres from Saint-Leud’Esserent. The coincidence of the revolt with Corpus Christi has a parallel with the English Rising of 1381, which also began just before the feast. As Margaret Aston has argued, the day was useful for organizational purposes: ‘Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni: Heresy and the Peasants’ Revolt’, P&P 143 (1994): 3–47. See also John Arnold, Belief and unbelief in medieval Europe (London, 2005), 125–134, 210–211. ⁸² AN JJ 98, no. 252, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 63, pp. 333–335. ⁸³ The executioner, Jean [le] Charon of Montataire, received a formulaic remission in 1370 (AN JJ 100, no. 643, fol. 190v).

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have coalesced so quickly: it seems there was already a plan, or perhaps even competing plans, to put the region under the leadership of a captain or captains. The pardon issued to Bernier’s travelling companion, a likely relative also named Jean Bernier from Villers-Saint-Paul, a village near Senlis, states that the two men were returning from a mission to obtain the approval of the Dauphin, then at Meaux, to name the Lord of Saint-Sauflieu as ‘captain of the Beauvaisis and the region between Senlis and Creil’.⁸⁴ The letter does not say who sent them on this mission, but the ordonnance promulgated after the Estates General assembly at Compiègne on 14 May had envisaged ‘captains . . . in the regions (pais) where they would be deputed and sent’ by the crown.⁸⁵ These local captains were not a new phenomenon: the 1357 ordonnance had mandated that local captains (Capitaines des lieux) guard local fortresses.⁸⁶ But the Compiègne ordonnance had revised the practice to ensure that such captains were instituted with the agreement of both the royal council and the region to which they were sent.⁸⁷ Bernier from VillersSaint-Paul, a wealthy, mature man with experience of military leadership, was exactly the sort of person who could represent local society and convey its approval.⁸⁸ The institution of Saint-Sauflieu as ‘captain’ of the Beauvaisis and the area between Creil and Senlis—exactly the area over which Guillaume Calle was also instituted ‘captain’ at almost exactly the same moment—suggests that there was a struggle for leadership of the Beauvaisis. Mahieu de Leurel’s remission, which reports that Jean Bernier of Montataire was found in possession of some letters from Charles of Navarre, might indicate that Saint-Sauflieu was the Navarrese party’s choice and that the Berniers were playing a double game by obtaining the Dauphin’s approval.⁸⁹ But the Lord of Saint-Sauflieu, a man of mature years named Herpin, had played little role in political society to date and was not a Navarrese partisan.⁹⁰ He had received a 100 écu reward for his service to the crown ⁸⁴ ‘pour la seurté et deffense du païs de Beauvoisin et d’environ Senliz et Creeil, eussent empetré de nous nostre ami et feal chevalier et conseillier le sire de Saint Sauflieu, capitaine, pour garder le dit païs’ (AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97). ⁸⁵ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 5–6, 26, 28. ⁸⁶ Ord., III: 121–46, art. 58. ⁸⁷ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 6: ‘Nous avons ordené & ordenons que ès pays de frontier où il sera necessité de envoyer & ordener Capitaines, Nous les ordenerons par bonne & meure deliberacion de Conseil, bons & souffisans . . . agreables aus pays où Nous les envoierons’. ⁸⁸ ‘pour ce que le dit Bernier . . . n’a peu avoir les gaiges de la dicte ville de Senliz . . . il avec pluseurs personnes de deffense s’est transportez en la ville de Noyon, en laquelle il et ses compaignons ont esté receuz aus gaiges de la ville et du païs d’environ, pour resister a la male voulente de noz ennemis’ (AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97). The remission also mentions that he had a wife and children and had lost multiple houses (maisons). ⁸⁹ ‘qu’il avoit receu certaines lettres du roy de Navarre, qui furent trouvées sur lui, et en fu pour lors ou dit pays voix et commune renommée’ (AN JJ 98, no. 252, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 63, pp. 333–335). The lands of a Jean Bernier appear on several occasions in land transactions from Villers-Saint-Paul between 1330 and 1380 (AD Oise G 2254). ⁹⁰ [R. de Belleval], Trésor généalogique de la Picardie, ou Recueil de documents inédits sur la noblesse de cette province par un gentilhomme picard, 2 vols (Amiens, 1859–1860) gives the only information I have located on Saint-Sauflieu, a minor lordship outside Amiens. Amiens was a Navarrese bastion,

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in 1354, and the remission issued to Jean Bernier in September 1358, at a moment of open war with Navarre, refers to him as the Dauphin’s ‘beloved and loyal counsellor’.⁹¹ Leurel’s report, which was based on his remembrance of what was rumoured (voix et commune renommée) seven years before, probably conflated two different episodes involving the two different Jean Berniers. In his own remission, Jean Bernier of Villers-Saint-Paul admitted to receiving letters from Navarre which nominated him captain of the countryside and that this was a fact well publicized, but this happened after Calle’s execution and during the CounterJacquerie.⁹² Bernier thus received that nomination in mid-June, at the earliest. Any letters found on a Jean Bernier in late May were therefore probably from the Dauphin at Meaux, whence he was returning. In the Berniers’ failed mission for ‘the protection of the countryside’, we may rather glimpse an effort by non-noble elites to chart an independent path through the Valois/Paris/Navarre morass being defeated by another such effort. The mission of the Jean Berniers might be seen as part of a wider family strategy to navigate treacherous political waters.⁹³ A possible relative, Hugues Bernier had lent money to Marcel in the spring of 1358, but as he later argued, he did so with the understanding shared by many that Marcel and the échevins of Paris were acting on behalf of the Dauphin and with his approval.⁹⁴ It was not, as he understood it at the time, a partisan move. The nomination of Saint-Sauflieu, a man who had played no discernible role in the politics of the past two years, was similarly non-partisan. But the outbreak of the Jacquerie made neutrality impossible. The country-folk forced the Jean Berniers to choose a side. He of Montataire refused to join and was killed, while he of Villers-Saint-Paul plumped for the Jacques and lived.⁹⁵

and Herpin rode under Navarre’s command in 1352 (no. 670, II: 208–209) while in 1367 his (likely) son Jean rode under the command of Raoul de Renneval (no. 617, II: 189–190), whose wife was a member of the strongly Navarrese Picquigny family (François-Irénée Darsy, Picquigny et ses seigneurs: Vidames d’Amiens (Abbeville, 1860), 49; AN X1c 15a, no. 108). These tenuous connections are, however, outweighed by evidence of his loyalty to Jean II and the Dauphin (next note). ⁹¹ AN JJ 100, no. 643, fol. 190v; 100 écus: [de Belleval], Trésor généalogique, no. 671, II: 209. ⁹² ‘plusieurs personnes du dit païs, tant de Senliz comme de Villers . . . obtenissent de li certaines lettres de commission par lesquelles le dit Jehan Bernier, de Villers, fu commis de par lui capitaine et garde du dit païs, lui absent’ (AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97). See Chapter 9 for Bernier’s captaincy and its timing. ⁹³ The name was, of course, fairly common, as it still is. On surnames and the likelihood of family relation see Karl Michaëlsson, Études sur les noms de personne français d’après les rôles de taille Parisiens (rôles de 1292, 1296–1300, 1313), 2 vols (Uppsala, 1927–1936); Caroline Bourlet, ‘L’anthroponymie à Paris à la fin du XIIIème siècle d’après les rôles de la taille du règne de Philippe le bel’ in Monique Bourin and Pascal Chareille (eds), Persistances du nom unique, vol. 2.2 of Samuel Leturcq (ed.), Genèse médiévale de l’anthroponymie moderne, 6 vols in 8 (Tours, 1992), 9–44. ⁹⁴ ‘au temps du contract, le roy, qui lors estoit regent, toleroit le dit prevost et les eschevins qui lors estoient, et avoient toute administracion, et estoient notoirement et publiquement tenuz et reputez pour tiex’ (Siméon Luce, ‘Documents nouveaux sur Étienne Marcel’, Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 6 (1879): no. 8, pp. 323–324). ⁹⁵ Other Berniers (or Barniers) who joined the revolt include two innkeepers from Chambly named Guerin and Philippot (AN JJ 90, no. 235–36, fol. 126) and a Jacques Bernier, sued for helping to destroy the castle of Moreuil (AN X1a 19, fol. 407v).

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Jean Bernier of Villers-Saint-Paul was perhaps never fully convinced. As his remission relates, he went to Senlis after the Jacques’ defeat at Clermont-Mello and accepted the title of captain of the countryside from Charles of Navarre. Having tried to organize the protection of the country villages against the Counter-Jacquerie in June and July, he then went to Noyon in August, where his role as city captain entailed defence against the Navarrese, then openly at war with France. This may have helped to ensure his remission, which was issued in September as the military crisis with Navarre deepened. Another point in Bernier’s favour may have been a sympathetic relative among the commissioners charged with investigating the revolt, one of whom was also named Jean Bernier.⁹⁶ This Jean Bernier, a knight and Master of the Chambre de Requêtes, also appears in a marginal mention next to a remission issued in August 1358 to one Jean Richard ‘aliter de Paris’, possibly the same Jean Richard who had refused to lend Marcel money in 1357, who had a long-standing lawsuit with the Marcels, and who was from Chambly, the same village as the Bernier inn-keepers.⁹⁷ If Sir Jean Bernier was related to Jean Bernier the Jacques, he would not have been alone among these commissioners in having a relative in need of remission; a president of the Parlement, Pierre Demainville (d’Émeville), served on alongside him in the same capacity, possibly in exchange for remission of his brother’s participation in the Jacquerie, which was issued at the same time and appears just before Jean Bernier the Jacques’s remission in the chancery register.⁹⁸ The adventures of these men, however they were connected, are indicative of the web of relationships that brought rebels together and facilitated the rapid communication for the revolt’s almost instantaneous mobilization. They also ⁹⁶ AN JJ 86, no. 431, fol. 151–52, partially ed. Secousse, Recueil, 80–81: ‘conseilliers & commissaires par nous deputez sur le fait des traisons & rebellions nagaires faites & perpetrees contre monsire & nous tant en la ville et viconte de Paris comme ailleurs ou Royaume de France’. As mentioned in the introduction, Jean Bernier the Jacques cannot be the same man as Jean Bernier the commissioner, for the latter already held the high office of Maître des Requêtes in August 1358, when Jean Bernier the Jacques was serving as captain of Noyon, a very different sort of job. Moreover, Jean Bernier the commissioner is usually referred to as a chevalier of the king. Sir Jean Bernier also later served as bailli of Senlis and prévôt de Paris, as well as in other high provincial offices (Gallia regia, no. 16476, 17970, 20771, etc.; Timbal et al. (eds), La guerre de Cent ans, no. 32, pp. 109–12; no. 40, pp. 206–208; Françoise Autrand, Naissance d’un grand corps de l’État: Les gens du Parlement de Paris, 1345–1454 (Paris, 1981), 192). Sir Jean Bernier may have been the seneschal of Beaucaire whose company was attacked by the villagers of Cravant on suspicion of being foreign mercenaries (AN JJ 86, no. 425, fol. 148, ed. Luce, no 42, pp. 286–288; Gallia regia, no. 2946–2952). Interestingly, Autrand identifies sir Jean Bernier as part of a pro-Navarrese faction in Parlement (Naissance, 126, n. 129), and he was involved in adjudicating Guillaume Calle’s widow’s lawsuit (AN X1c 13b, no. 273). ⁹⁷ AN JJ 86, no. 225, fol. 73v–74r; Luce, ‘Documents nouveaux’, no. 7, pp. 321–323; Léon Le Grand, ‘La veuve d’Étienne Marcel’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 24 (1897 [reprinted as a pamphlet), no. 2, p. 13. ⁹⁸ AN JJ 86, no. 384, fol. 132v. This remission is followed by one issued at the same time also on d’Émeville’s behalf for a Denisot Rebours, Jacquerie captain of Fresnoy, whose relation to d’Émeville is unspecified (AN JJ 86, no. 385, fol. 132v–33r). It is notable that an individual with the same toponymic surname, one master Guillaume de Demainville, canon of the cathedral chapter of Laon, was instrumental in raising money for the defence of that city from 1357 to 1358, when it was in more or less open revolt against the Dauphin (Laon, AD Aisne Edt 1 CC 1).

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demonstrate the individual and contingent trajectories that led people to join or to eschew the Jacquerie and how those trajectories might change over time. At the end of May 1358, a range of possibilities was still open. That range quickly narrowed as the revolt took its initial shape under Calle, but as we will see in the next chapters, the movement’s spectacular growth over the next few weeks opened up new opportunities for individuals and communities to pursue their own objectives, not always in ways that complemented those of the revolt’s leaders or of their urban allies.

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5 Noisy Terrors The Violence of the Jacquerie

Over the next two months, thousands of people from more than 150 places joined the rebellion, inflicting violence at nearly a hundred sites, killing dozens of people, and terrorizing hundreds or thousands more. Following Jean Bernier of Montataire’s execution around 31 May, the next datable incident in the Jacquerie occurred on 3 June, when a squire was killed at Verberie, 30 kilometres north-east of Saint-Leu-d’Esserent.¹ Nearly a week then passes before the joint muster of Parisian and Jacquerie troops on the eve of their attack on the Marché de Meaux, which the royal chronicler dated to 9 June, around which time Jacquerie troops under Guillaume Calle and the Hospitaller were facing off against Charles of Navarre’s noble army.² Once the Parisians, Navarre, and then the Dauphin himself became visibly involved with the revolt, more exact dates are available. Few of these, however, relate to the Jacques’ own movements and actions, but rather record those of their opponents or urban actors charting their own paths. It is therefore not possible to take a chronological approach to events during the Jacquerie itself except in the broad terms outlined in the introduction. This chapter and the two that follow are consequently devoted to thematic issues central to understanding why and how the revolt unfolded as it did. Violence is a central question. Because we possess very little in the way of verbal statements from the Jacques about their aims, their violence has been considered their ‘method of communication’.³ Conveyed to us through the sources’ distorting filters, their message can be only partially received, but their methods and targets suggest a variety of aims, rather than a unified programme. While the Parisians and their allies in the Jacques’ leadership were focused on liberating the city from the Dauphin’s fluvial blockade and punishing his supporters, many Jacques were undertaking a general attack on the nobles. For anyone paying attention to politics

¹ ‘le dymenche après le Saint Sacrement’ (AN JJ 86, no. 444, fol. 156, ed. Luce, no. 39, pp. 280–281). ² ‘Celui samedy meismes, qui estoit le IXe jour de juing . . . assemblez à Cilli-en-Meucian’ (GC, 181–182). See Chapter 8. ³ Raymond Cazelles, ‘La Jacquerie fut-elle un mouvement paysan?’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 122 (1978): 654–666; Bettina Bommersbach, ‘Gewalt in der Jacquerie von 1358’ in Neithard Bulst, Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (eds), Gewalt im politischen Raum: Fallanalysen vom Spätmittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 2008), 46–81.

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0006

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in 1358, these aims were complementary. Les nobles were not just a social class but the constituency of the Second Estate, whose conflict with the bourgeois and ecclesiastical reformers, especially over military matters in the countryside, had led to their withdrawal from full meetings of the Estates General and the recruitment of the Dauphin to their cause. The Jacques’ leaders—petty officials, wealthy farmers, minor clerics, and the like—were well placed to know such things and to have opinions about them.⁴ Of course, not all Jacques had been paying attention to politics or shared the logistical goals of their commanders. Indeed, many may have been purposefully kept in ignorance of them. The Jacques’ leaders sought to support the reformers’ objectives by destroying the infrastructural advantage of the Dauphin’s noble supporters and diverting his forces away from an assault on Paris. But there was also a dimension of social conflict to the Jacques’ actions distinct from the struggle between the Dauphin and the reformers, one that was critical of noble violence, noble excess, and the iniquities of the socio-economic order. If, for the most part, the Jacques’ violence was focused and purposeful, avarice and a lust for violence did move some Jacques to action. The most common term for the revolt in the remissions, ‘the noisy terrors against nobles’ (les effroiz contre les nobles), evocatively conveys its victims’ fear and confusion in the face of the non-nobles’ violent onslaught. They were not always exaggerating.

Targets: Les nobles The sources are uniform in identifying the victims of the Jacqueries’ violence as the nobles. ‘Against the nobles’ or, more rarely, ‘between the nobles and nonnobles’ is the phrase used in the remissions. Seventy-five per cent of the documentary sources for the Jacquerie identify its victims as the nobles, and over 85 per cent of the identifiable victims were noble. Those non-nobles who fell victim to the revolt were those, like Jean Bernier de Montataire, who opposed it, or those who were attacked in petty disputes with other Jacques, like Robin de l’Annoy killed for a horse he had stolen from a gentleman, or Michel Wastel, knifed ‘in self-defence’ during a rowdy assembly at which one Jean des Murs and his nephews were also attacked.⁵ A few non-noble victims, like Pierre d’Orgemont, were enemies of the reformers, but the Jacques’ motivation against nobility was so integral a feature of

⁴ Cazelles, ‘La Jacquerie’; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The social constituency of the Jacquerie Revolt of 1358’, Speculum 95 (2020): 689–715; see Chapter 6. ⁵ Jean Bernier of Montataire: see Chapter 4; Robin de l’Annoy: AN JJ 90, no. 161, fol. 91v–92r; Michel Wastel: AN JJ 88, no. 89, fol. 56v–57r. Cf. AN X1a 19, fol. 353r for the apparently random damage to a Parisian burgher’s country house.

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the uprising that country-folk were hesitant to participate in the Parisian-directed attacks against them because, as they said, the targets ‘were not noble’.⁶ The term ‘noble’ denotes a social category grouping together the men, women, and children who shared this quality by right of blood, marriage, or special grant of royal favour. Nobility sometimes overlapped with—but was distinct from—the political category of lordship, to which attached fiscal, judicial, and territorial rights.⁷ The Jacquerie was an anti-noble revolt, not an anti-seigneurial one. Less than half of the Jacques’ noble victims were lords.⁸ Jean de Venette and the Norman chronicler related with shock that the peasants killed or attacked ‘even (etiam; mesme) their own lords’, but as their syntax indicates, this was the scandalous exception, not the rule.⁹ Few of those lords who suffered in the revolt were the victims of their own subjects. The rebels’ violence was largely directed outward, for under 15 per cent of the Jacques’ own home towns suffered violence during the rebellion. As this suggests, many Jacques travelled to commit attacks. Because of the Jacques’ mobility, discussed more fully in the next two chapters, even in the cases where the rebellion touched the local lord, his or her subjects were often acting in concert with or even under the compulsion of ‘outsider’ Jacques, who came to the village to carry out attacks. Many lords interceded to procure remissions for their subjects after the revolt, indicating that they did not feel that the revolt had abrogated those ties of protection and dependence.¹⁰ Another indication that the revolt was not directed against seigneurial dominance is that, unlike the later English Rising, in which lordship was a major grievance and there was ‘a precise targeting of legal instruments’,¹¹ I have found only three instances in which the Jacques destroyed lords’ charters or other documents that might have detailed seigneurial rights.¹² In all ⁶ Pierre d’Orgemont: AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320. Jacques reportedly ceased their attacks on Robert de Lorris after he renounced his gentility: Chron. norm., 130. See discussion in Chapter 8. ⁷ Philippe Contamine, La noblesse au royaume de France de Philippe le Bel à Louis XII: Essai de synthèse (Paris, 1997), esp. 85–135. ⁸ 32 of the 94 victims are identified as seigneur, dame, or dominus/a. Of the 74 noble victims, 32 were lords, or 43%. ⁹ ‘etiam dominos suos proprios, occidebant’ (Jean de Venette, 174); ‘coururent . . . mesme sur leurs seigneurs’ (Chron. norm., 128). ¹⁰ Most examples are from Champagne: AN JJ 86, no. 346, fol. 117v–18r, ed. Luce, no. 32, pp. 266–268; AN JJ 86, no. 357, fol. 122, ed. Luce, no. 31, pp. 264–66, vidimus at AN JJ 95, no. 19, fol. 9v–10r; AN JJ 86, no. 377–79, fol. 129r–30r; AN JJ 95, no. 22, fol. 10v–11r, but Picard lords also intervened: AN JJ 90, no. 564, fol. 279r; AN JJ 107, no. 185, fol. 87. ¹¹ Steven Justice, Writing and rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994), 41. ¹² AN X1c 11, no. 61–62 (burning of Thomas de Braye’s ‘lettres, arres, obligations, lettres de fief & de heritages, de quittances & autres’); AN X1a 19, fol. 410r (destruction of the lord of Fouqerolles’s ‘litteris atque cartis’; AN X1c 32, no. 31 (destruction of the lord of Vez’s ‘lettres de ses heritages, obligations, quittances, pappiers & Rooles de ses Rentes, denombrements de ses fiez & arrierefiez’). AN JJ 90, no. 151, fol. 81 relates the destruction of non-seigneurial documents: the receipts and letters of sir Pierre de Saint-Jean royal master of the waters and woods, regarding payment to workers. At Chaumont-enVexin, the royal and municipal registers were said to be destroyed not by the ‘commotion’ but by the Anglo-Navarrese violence that came after (AN J 737, no. 36, ed. Henri Gravier, Les prévôts royaux du

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three cases, the violence was committed by, with, or under the instruction of people from outside the village and its lord’s domain. Despite the importance of religious distinctions such as those between lay and clerical or between gentile and Jew to other fourteenth-century revolts in France and elsewhere, these attributions had no apparent resonance in the Jacquerie. There is no evidence whatsoever of confessional animus, and anti-clerical impulses had as little role in the revolt as anti-seigneurial ones. The only exception to this apparent indifference is in Champagne, where four, related remissions state that the revolt was directed against the clergy, as well as the nobles (contre les nobles & clerge du dit pais).¹³ Only two identifiable victims of the Jacquerie were clerics, neither of whom were targeted because of their vocation.¹⁴ The apparent immunity of ecclesiastical lords to the revolt’s violence is another indication that the Jacques were not targeting seigneurial power. Similar to lay lords, abbeys and bishoprics possessed judicial and fiscal rights over the lands and peoples in their temporalities, and their subjects probably bore a heavier fiscal burden than did those under the dominion of a hereditary aristocrat.¹⁵ Some ecclesiastical lords also had castles, with similar administrative and military capacities to those of their lay counterparts. One of the Bishop of Beauvais’s castles, Thiers-sur-Thève, was destroyed in 1358 by the Jacques.¹⁶ There were also three monasteries affected, but only one, the priory of Saint-Gervaise whose Rouennais attackers had long-standing legal quarrels with the monks, was specifically targeted for harm.¹⁷ The Abbot of Froidmont feared that his house would fall victim, and he and his monks fled to Beauvais, but it was the Anglo-Navarrese later on who did them actual harm.¹⁸ In the third case, two Jacques were caught

XIe au XIVe siècle (Paris, 1904), no. 25, pp. 130–136). The serfs of Laon’s cathedral chapter had tried to destroy the letters of royal commission held by the officers sent to put down their rebellion in 1338: ‘firent leur povoir de oster a noz dictes Genz noz dites lettres de commission et de les romper et depecier’ (AN JJ 71, no. 86, fol. 65). ¹³ AN JJ 86, no. 357, fol. 122, ed. Luce, no. 31, pp. 264–266 (village of Heiltz-le-Maurupt, vidimus at AN JJ 95, no. 19, fol. 9v–10r); AN JJ 90, no. 271, fol. 139v–140r (Bussy-le-Repos); AN JJ 95, no. 22, fol. 10v–11r (Blacy); AN JJ 95, no. 78, fol. 28 (parish of Changy). All of these relate to the Count of Vaudémont’s investigation into the uprising in Champagne, for which see Chapter 10. ¹⁴ The curate of Blacy (AN JJ 86, no. 265, fol. 89r, ed. Luce, no. 34, pp. 270–272) and Guillaume ‘Testard’ de Picquigny, secular canon of Notre-Dame d’Amiens (AN JJ 86, no. 165, fol. 54v, ed. Luce, no. 20, pp. 245–247; Chron. norm., 129; Suzanne Honoré-Duvergé, ‘Des partisans de Charles le Mauvais: Les Picquigny’, BEC 107 (1948): 83). ¹⁵ On the burden of ecclesiastical lordship, see especially Guy Fourquin, Les campagnes de la région parisienne à la fin du Moyen Âge (du milieu du XIIIe siècle au début du XVIe siècle) (Paris, 1964), which draws primarily on the records of the Abbey of Saint-Denis. ¹⁶ Beauvais, AD Oise G 21 (registry copy at AN JJ 90, no. 563, fol. 278); see Chapter 1. Jean Mesqui, ‘Thiers-sur-Thève’ in Île-de-France gothique 2: Les demeures seigneuriales (Paris, 1988), 310–315. ¹⁷ Adolphe Chéreul, Histoire de Rouen pendant l’époque communale, 1150–1382, suivie de pièces justificatives publiées pour la première fois d’après les archives départementales et municipales de cette ville, 2 vols (Rouen, 1843–1844), II: 199. ¹⁸ See Luce, no. 68, p. 350 for the Abbot’s account, also edited in Denis de Sainte-Marthe et al. (eds), Gallia christiana in provincias ecclesiasticas distributa . . . , 16 vols (Paris, 1715–1865), IX: col. 832–833.

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skulking about the monastery of Beaupré, allegedly hoping ‘to kill or rob someone’, but they ‘left without doing anything’.¹⁹ Most of those victimized numbered among the lesser nobility. They were minor gentlemen (écuyers, damoiseaux, armigeri), like Renaud Tacherius, whose manor was burned and his livestock and clothes stolen, or Jean de Saint-Martin and Guillaume de la Chambre, whose gardens were damaged and poultry purloined, or Pierre de Gressy, also a victim of arson and pillage, or Jean de Romescamps and Renaud de Beaurepaire, who were drowned at Pont-Sainte-Maxence.²⁰ These men were socially distinguished as nobles rather than as holders of political power. About a fifth of them (20 of 94) were identifiable Valois loyalists, like the Clermont-Nesles, and, as discussed later in this chapter, a specific pattern of violence against their houses and castles for military and political purposes can be identified. Half that many (10 of 94), were identifiable Navarrese partisans like Guillaume de Picquigny.²¹ The majority, however, seem undistinguished by their politics, if indeed they had any. It was their social status, with its odour of military failure, material excess, unearned privilege, and moral treachery, that made them targets.

Interpersonal Violence The violence inflicted on the bodies of these nobles has been a subject of long fascination, for the Jacques’ reputation as rapists and murderers is the stuff of legend, inscribed into the European imagination by Froissart’s masterful telling. Froissart’s stories came mainly from Jean le Bel, who probably heard them from noblemen returning from the Counter-Jacquerie, and he reported that the Jacques killed whole families, including pregnant women and little children, and that they engaged in gruesome gang-rapes and even cannibalism. Only the English Anonimalle chronicle surpasses the horrors of the chivalric chronicles, claiming not only that the Jacques raped noble women and killed their husbands, but that Jak Bonehomme ripped infants from their mothers’ wombs and bathed in (or

¹⁹ ‘Jaquet de Fransures et Jehan Petit Caraine . . . vindrent en l’abbaye du Pré en Beauvoisin, assise à Contres, où le dit abbé a haute justice et où ledit Colart d’Estrées demeure, qui garde la dicte justice, pour lui murtrir ou rober . . . et lors s’en departirent sans plus faire’ (AN JJ 86, no. 165, fol. 54v, ed. Luce, no. 20, pp. 245–247). ²⁰ ‘Renardum Tacherii armigerum’ (AN X1a 18, fol. 204r); ‘Jehan de Saint-Martin, escuier . . . et aussi Guillaume de la Chambre, escuier’, but also ‘messire Gautier, sire de Doues, chevalier’ (AN JJ 86, no. 291, fol. 97v, ed. Luce, no. 26, pp. 256–257); ‘Pierre de Gresy escuier’ (AN JJ 86, no. 313, fol. 104v–105r, partially excerpted at Luce, p. 212); ‘Johannem de Roinestampis et Reginaldum de Beaurepaire, domicellos’ (AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330). ²¹ Navarrese partisans are more easily identified than Valois loyalists because of the lists of Navarrese partisans given on the two pardon rolls granted as part of the Franco-Navarrese peace (Secousse, Recueil, 177–181, 181–185).

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perhaps drank) their blood.²² Other chroniclers, however, are more circumspect, and the judicial documents provide little or no evidence of the depraved excesses for which Froissart made the Jacques famous. It is not easy, however, to choose which account to believe about what the Jacques did to whom. Writing in England many years later, the Anonimalle chronicler had clearly heard some awful rumours, but his outlandish allegations have no external support. Jean le Bel and Froissart were better informed, though their chivalric aesthetic and didactic programmes demonstrably shaped their choice and presentation of what they knew, just as eschatological expectations colour Jean de Venette’s chronicle. Still, we should not reflexively dismiss even the more outrageous stories as mere literary licence. Froissart told a shocking story derived from Jean le Bel in which the Jacques kill a knight and roast him on a spit before the eyes of his wife and children and then gang-rape his wife and try to make her eat some of her late husband’s flesh (mengier par force), before finally killing the rest of the family in a horrible way (de male mort).²³ Save perhaps for the Anonimalle chronicler’s foetal blood bath, this is probably the worst tale anyone told about the revolt. Yet it is also one with possible corroboration: as Luce discovered, a Burgundian register of expenses from 1377 notes alms given to a lady whose son had been ‘roasted (rosti) by the Jacques’.²⁴ Rosti need not mean literally roasted like meat, as there are examples of the word used to mean ‘tortured’ more generally, but this scrap of evidence does remind us that we cannot dismiss stories out of hand just because they seem too awful to be true.²⁵ In any case, the supposedly more sober sources are no less rife with interpretative difficulties when it comes to interpersonal violence. The royal chronicler’s laconic style and the military focus of the Quatre Valois and Norman chroniclers do not lend themselves to expansive or titillating description. They also drew from different sources of information. The judicial documents’ trustworthiness, although often taken for granted at least relative to the chronicles, is nonetheless illusory:²⁶ litigants make false claims; supplicants for pardon gloss over the worst of their misdeeds; and not all victims, especially of rape, want to report the crimes committed against them. The objectives and generic conventions of remissions, lawsuits, and settlements also tended to influence what was included or omitted, and the latter actions were more focused on things than people. It must be

²² V.H. Galbraith (ed.), The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333 to 1381, from a MS. Written at St Mary’s Abbey, York (Manchester, 1927), 42. ²³ Jean le Bel, 257; Froissart, SHF, §413, p. 100. ²⁴ ‘une povre dame de Peronne qui eust son filz Rosti par les Jaques’ (Dijon, AD Côte d’Or B 1451, fol. 85v); Luce, 209. ²⁵ E.g. ‘fu rosti le corps Jhesucrist en la croix’ (Dictionnaire du moyen français: [accessed 1 July 2020]). AN X1c 32, no. 31 calls the Jacques’ burning of a castle a rotee. ²⁶ Andrew Prescott, ‘Writing about rebellion: Using the records of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381’, History Workshop Journal 45 (1998): 1–27.

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remembered, too, that because the general remission forbade criminal prosecutions, there is almost no evidence from the venues in which most claims of interpersonal violence would have been made.

Rape These considerations make it especially difficult to assess whether or how much the Jacques committed sexual violence. Jean le Bel, Froissart, Jean de Venette, and the monk of Saint-Denis (who partly depended upon Jean de Venette) all state that the Jacques committed sexual violence. The chivalric chroniclers, however, are the most insistent about it. Jean le Bel’s included a statement that many Jacques admitted to raping (enforcer) ‘six or seven or eight or nine or ten or twelve’ ladies and ‘to have killed even the pregnant ones’.²⁷ Froissart left out this line in his retelling, but otherwise follows the earlier chronicler in graphically relating that after the Jacques killed a noble family in their house, they broke into a castle, tied up the knight who lived there and gang-raped his pregnant wife and their daughter in front of him, before killing everyone and burning the place down. The intensifying violence in these chronicles reaches its apex with the story of the spit-roasted knight and the horrors that befell his family. Other chronicles emphasize rape less or omit it altogether. While Jean de Venette accused the Jacques of ‘subjecting noble women to their vile lusts’, he also distanced himself from the statement, noting that the information was hearsay (ut fertur).²⁸ Rape does not appear at all in the royal chronicle, Quatre Valois, or the Norman chronicle and its derivatives, nor does any chronicle name any of the perpetrators or victims of sexual violence.²⁹ Rape is not mentioned in the general remission for the Jacquerie issued in August, and while one might expect some accusations of rape—malicious or otherwise—to have made it into the remissions or court records, only two judicial documents allege that any individual Jacques committed a crime that might be construed as rape.³⁰ In

²⁷ ‘Si y en avoit de telz qui confessoient avoir aidié à enforcer, les ungs VI dames, les aultres VII, les autres VIII et IX et X et XII, et les avoient tué mesmement, elles enchaintes’ (Jean le Bel, 259). ²⁸ ‘ut fertur, dominas nobiles suas vili libidine opprimebat’ (Jean de Venette, 176). By contrast, the religieux, writing much later, dropped the cautious ‘ut fertur’ from the material he drew from Jean de Venette and emphasized outrageous sexual violence: ‘Pluries etiam ingenuas dominas et domicellas construprantes (sic), eas postmodum inhumaniter occiderunt etiam cum ipsas percipiebant pregnantes’ (Religieux, 126; Marie-Thérèse de Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs: Une étude comparée de récits contemporains relatant la Jacquerie de 1358 (Paris, 1979), 96–98). ²⁹ In a story found only in the Chicago MS, Froissart does relate the fear that Lady of Roye and her daughter would be ‘raped and destroyed’ by the Jacques besieging the castle of Guerbigny, but they were saved before this befell them (Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 168v–69r.) ³⁰ ‘raptus’ (AN JJ 89, no. 609, fol. 281v); ‘pro suspicione plurium & diversorum homicidiorum, incendiorum, raptorum . . . que & quas . . . fecisse dicuntur in persones plurium & diversorum nobilium utriusque sexus’ (AN JJ 88, no. 1, fol. 1–2). On the (near) absence of rape in the remissions, see Douglas

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neither case is a specific victim indicated, and the word used in both these documents is raptus, which might mean rape in the modern sense but which often signalled abduction or even a consensual elopement.³¹ No non-narrative source accuses the Jacques of rape in explicitly sexual terms, such as carnaliter cognoscere, femme efforcer, stupro, defloratio/despuceler, or adulterare (for married women), all terms commonly used by Parlement and the royal chancery at the time.³² One possible interpretation of this contradictory evidence is that the Jacques were falsely accused of crimes that were only rumoured or even imaginary. The lurid descriptions by some chroniclers, which go far beyond mere factual reportage, seem intended to illustrate the Jacques’ depraved alterity. The extreme violence found in Froissart and Jean le Bel leads to, but also justifies, the chroniclers’ characterization of the Jacques as less than human: ‘rabid dogs’ (chiens esragiés) in Froissart’s telling, who commit deeds that ‘no human creature ought even dare to think of ’ (telz fais que creature humainne ne deveroit oser penser).³³ The rustics’ inhumanity extends to the killing of pregnant women, a crime that was considered the most odious possible delict in medieval French society.³⁴ Marie-Thérèse de Medieros argued that Jean le Bel and Froissart’s stories of noblewomen menaced by peasant rape were intended to warn their noble audiences about the failure of chivalric virtue.³⁵ Its consequence was the violation (brisement) of the noble household and the bodies of those it sheltered. In a similar

James Aiton, ‘ “Shame on him who allows them to live”: The Jacquerie of 1358’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow (Glasgow, 2007), 180–183. ³¹ On the meaning of raptus and the semantics of rape, see James A. Brundage, ‘Rape and marriage in the medieval canon law’, Revue de droit canonique 28 (1978): 62–75; Annik Porteau-Bitker, ‘La justice laïque et le viol au Moyen Âge’, RHDFE 66 (1988): 492–496; Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing maidens: Writing rape in medieval French literature and law (Philadelphia, 1991), 2–11; Kim M. Philips, ‘Written on the body: Reading rape from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries’ in Noël James Menuge (ed.), Medieval women and the law (Woodbridge, 2000), 125–144; Caroline Dunn, ‘The language of ravishment in medieval England’, Speculum 86 (2011): 79–116. ³² E.g. ‘raptus et strupri’ (AN X2a 5, fol. 118r, 1348 mandate); ‘quamplurima adulteria et deflorationes virginum’ (AN JJ 91, no. 144, fol. 68v–69r, 1362 remission); ‘mulieres autem virgines & alias contra eorum voluntatem rapuerant secumque in dicto castro & alibi quo voluerant duxerant & eas vi ac violencia carnaliter cognoverant’ (AN X2a 8, fol. 24v–29r, 1368 arrêt); ‘raviez & efforces pluseurs femmes’ (AN JJ 99, no. 288, fol. 98v, 1369 remission). For Beaumanoir’s definition of rape (fame esforcier) see cap. XXX, §829, vol., I: 430 and more colloquially at §926, I: 467–468: ‘L’en apele rat fame esforcier’. ³³ Froissart, SHF, §413, p. 100. ³⁴ Vincent Challet, ‘Violence as a political language: The uses and misuses of violence in late medieval French and English popular rebellions’ in Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (eds), The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt (Abingdon, 2017), 282; Sophie CassagnesBrouquet, ‘L’intervention du genre dans l’événement: Les massacres parisiens de 1418 et le meurtre d’une femme’ in Marc Bergère and Luc Capdevilla (eds), Genre et événement: Du masculin et du féminin en histoire des crises et des conflits (Rennes, 2006), 53–67. ³⁵ De Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs, 48–50, 63–64. On how ‘rape and abduction . . . function as emblems of villany’ in chivalric writing, see Corinne Saunders, ‘A matter of consent: Middle English romance and the law of Raptus’ in Menuge (ed.), Medieval women, 105–124, quote at 119. For a different interpretation of the rape topos, see Challet, ‘Violence as a political language’, 284.

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vein, Jean de Venette’s account of the Jacques’ ‘vile lusts’ is followed by a further gendered inversion in which the countryfolk dress themselves and their wives up in strange clothes, another ‘new marvel’, signalling the apocalypse’s approach. Yet, as the tale of the roasted knight shows, stories that further an aesthetic or moral programme are not necessarily untrue. Certainly, it would be rash to assume that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, especially when it comes to rape, an under-reported crime and a difficult one to prosecute in our own society.³⁶ It was even more so in late medieval France, where in addition to the public shame, a victim unable to prove her case might be liable to a charge of calumny or false appeal.³⁷ Nor did even convicted rapists always (or even often) suffer harsh penalties.³⁸ While some scholars have claimed that rape was omnipresent in late medieval society, Claude Gauvard has argued that the low incidence of rape that she found in late fourteenth-century letters of remissions reflects not resistance to reporting or prosecution but rather a surprising degree of social respect accorded to women which discouraged the crime in the first place.³⁹ Gauvard’s claim is hard to square with the profound misogyny of medieval culture, but there may have been some dissuasive effect from the fact that a woman’s rape harmed the rights and honour of her male kin as much as her own—as Kim Philips observes, ‘the raped body was the body absent from male familial control’—and such kin might take vengeance.⁴⁰ It is also worth remembering that, like most human behaviours, rape was socially and historically specific and that historical context conditioned whatever the Jacques did or writers said about it. Expectations about sexuality were shaped by the intersection of class and gender. While the myth of the ‘lord’s first night’ or droit de seigneur has been thoroughly debunked, rape by noblemen of peasant women was a literary commonplace.⁴¹ In his manual on ‘courtly love’, Andreas Capellanus advised his knightly audience that: ³⁶ In 2015, less than 20% of rapes in England and Wales were reported. Of those, only 7.5% led to a criminal conviction: Vikram Dodd and Helena Bengtsson, ‘Reported rapes in England and Wales double in four years’, The Guardian, 13 October 2016. ³⁷ Porteau-Bitker, ‘Justice laïque’, 491–526; Nicole Gonthier, ‘Les victimes de viol devant les tribunaux à la fin du Moyen Âge d’après les sources dijonnaises et lyonnaises’, Criminologie 27 (1994): 12–14. ³⁸ Porteau-Bitker, ‘La justice laïque’, 522–525; Gravdal, Ravishing maidens, ch. 5, but cf. Gonthier, ‘Les victimes’, 30–32. On light penalties in other medieval contexts, see Barbara A. Hanawalt, ‘Whose story was this? Rape narratives in medieval English courts’ in ‘Of good and ill repute’: Gender and social control in medieval England (New York, 1998), 124–141, and Guido Ruggiero, The boundaries of Eros: Sex crime and sexuality in renaissance Venice (New York, 1985), 93. ³⁹ Claude Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’: Crime, État et société en France à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols (Paris, 1991), I: 339. Cf. Gonthier, ‘Victimes’, 10–11. ⁴⁰ Philips, ‘Written on the body’, 142. ⁴¹ Alain Boureau, The lord’s first night: The myth of the droit de cuissage, Lydia G. Cochrane (trans.), (Chicago, 1998); Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, ch. 4; Paul Freedman, Images of the medieval peasant (Stanford, 1999), 163–165. This myth was, however, sufficiently commonplace that the servile peasants of Catalonia demanded an end to this right in 1452, even though their lords claimed never to have exacted it (Paul Freedman, ‘The German and Catalan peasants revolts’, AHR 98 (1993): 48).

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if the love even of peasant women chances to entice you . . . should you find a suitable spot you should not delay in taking what you seek, gaining it by rough embraces (violento potiri amplexu). You will find it hard so to soften their outwardly brusque attitude as to make them quietly agree to grant you embraces, or permit you to have the consolations you seek, unless the remedy of at least some compulsion is first applied . . . ⁴²

If peasant women’s bodies were subject to sexual victimization by noblemen, the bodies of peasant men were characterized as sexually ridiculous and bestial, but rarely as threatening.⁴³ Indeed, they were often depicted as effeminate or emasculated. In real life, accused rapists in fourteenth-century France hailed from every echelon of the social scale, but just as non-noble men, especially peasant men, rarely murdered noblemen, those who raped seem to have been similarly chary of crossing social boundaries.⁴⁴ I have not been able to locate any instance in which a peasant man allegedly raped a noblewoman. By contrast, rapes of local, non-noble women by noblemen are relatively easy to find. In fact, rape may have been becoming more common in late medieval France, partly due to the Hundred Years War, for rapes—including gang rapes—by noblemen or by those in their employ were part of a widespread military tactic in this period of inflicting terror on rural commoners for political and economic ends.⁴⁵ In a corpus of over 500 documents relating to large-scale seigneurial violence from the mid-thirteenth to the early fifteenth century mostly in southern France, there are 24 such accusations of rape, 19 of which cluster in the period from 1340 to 1370.⁴⁶ The Jacquerie may thus have taken place during a crisis of sexual violence. It is notable that the only specific, named woman we know to have suffered raptus in connection with the Jacquerie, one ‘Tassone, widow of Massi’, was a victim of noblemen from the Dauphin’s army, who were ravaging villages in retribution for the revolt.⁴⁷ Without insisting on the point, given the scarcity of evidence and the delicacy of its interpretation, I think it is possible that the absence of rape in the Jacquerie reflects the endurance of prohibitive mores among rural commoners, perhaps even in conscious contrast to the increasing incidence of rape in other military contexts.

⁴² Andreas Capellanus, Andreas Capellanus on love, P.G. Walsh (ed. and trans.), (London, 1982), I. xi, pp. 222–223. ⁴³ Freedman, Images, 157–163. ⁴⁴ Porteau-Bitker, ‘La justice laïque’, 501–502; on the relative rarity of such murders, see Chapter 4. ⁴⁵ Gonthier, ‘Victimes’, 9–10; Nicholas Wright, Knights and peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French countryside (Woodbridge, 1998), 73–74; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Techniques of seigneurial war in the fourteenth century’, JMH 36 (2010): 98–99. ⁴⁶ These data are from the records relating to my book, Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Violence and the state in Languedoc, 1250–1400 (Cambridge, 2014). They fit with the dates of soldier-rape cited in Wright, Knights and peasants, 73. ⁴⁷ ‘in raptu Tassone quondam uxoris Massi’ (AN JJ 91, no. 333, fol. 173v).

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Murder There is considerably more and better evidence that the Jacques killed people than that they raped anyone. The chronicles are unanimous that the Jacques committed murder. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the massacre of Raoul de Clermont-Nesle and eight other noblemen that took place at Saint-Leud’Esserent has no parallel, but at least 18 other identifiable individuals were murdered during the revolt. Of those, three were non-nobles killed incidentally or for opposition to the revolt. The noble body-count was certainly higher than this; a papal dispensation for the marriage of a couple from Beauvais, which speaks of the murders committed against a knight’s brother, sister-in-law ‘and not a few knights and squires related to him’ during the Jacquerie—all of whom are otherwise unknown to us—suggests a higher death toll, as does the evidence of noble flight and terror in the narrative sources.⁴⁸ But it may not have been a great deal higher. The standard formula from the remissions says that the Jacques put ‘some’ (aucuns) nobles to death, which implies that murder was an occasional recourse rather than the usual one. Notably, the English Rising a quarter century later also seems to have had a relatively restrained death toll, despite the horrific tales that John Gower and others told about it.⁴⁹ The sources for most of the noble murders simply note that the victims were killed (interfecti, mis à mort, tuez) or that the Jacques ‘put them to death’ (morti tradiderant), but where we do have specific information, mob violence and irrational bloodlust can be ruled out.⁵⁰ Military circumstances account for three of the deaths. Two of these occurred in battle: Guillaume ‘Testard’ de Picquigny was ambushed at a confrontation with a Navarrese-noble army near Poix and Lignières, while Louis, bastard of Chambly, died defending the Marché during the combined Parisian–Jacques assault at Meaux on 10 June.⁵¹ A knight and royal councillor named Jean Rose was ‘killed by the people’, possibly at Gonesse, where his houses were destroyed by country-folk obeying orders from the Parisian commanders Pierre des Barres and Pierre Gilles who were leading their troops toward Meaux.⁵²

⁴⁸ ‘frater, et ejus uxor ac nonnulli ipsorum consanguinei milites et scutiferi per eosdem populares . . . inhumaniter interfecti’ (ed. in Henri Denifle, La guerre de Cent ans et la désolation des églises, monastères & hôpitaux en France, 2 vols (Paris, 1897–1899), II: 216–217, n. 6). ⁴⁹ Chris Fletcher, ‘Justice, meurtre et leadership politique dans la révolte anglaise de 1381’ in Vincent Challet and Patricia Victorin (eds), Du meurtre en politique: Regards croisés sur l’utilisation de la violence en contexte populaire, special issue of Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes/Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 34 (2017): 72–85. ⁵⁰ AN JJ 95, no. 140, fol. 55v; AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256; AN JJ 90, no. 419, fol. 211; AN X1a 23, fol. 491v–93r. ⁵¹ See Chapter 8. ⁵² AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320.

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Other victims were killed in cold blood after deliberations or even some sort of judicial decision.⁵³ On orders from the revolt’s command at Beauvais, the Jacques at Pont-Sainte-Maxence killed two squires whom they had captured hiding in the Forest of Halatte.⁵⁴ Having transported the men to the town, which lay on the forest’s edge, they held off on the executions until the Great Captain’s lieutenant threatened the village captain with a ‘capital sentence’ if he did not carry them out. When at last they killed the squires, drowning them in the Oise, they located someone with professional experience, choosing (or forcing) one Jean Oursel to do the job, ‘because he had exercised jurisdiction before’.⁵⁵ This execution resembles that of Jean Bernier, professionally executed in his home town of Montataire to which he was transported after capture and sentencing by the Great Captain in Beauvais, as recounted in the previous chapter. The execution of an unnamed squire on 3 June at Verberie, mentioned at the start of this chapter, also involved capture and transport. There is no indication of a judicial process at Verberie, a village lying just up the Oise from Pont-Sainte-Maxence and Montataire, but it is clear that the squire was not killed in the heat of the moment, and here, again, there was time for the village captain to make numerous objections.⁵⁶ The squire killed at Verberie was taken with ‘his wife and step-son (filastre)’. We do not know their fate, but they are among the few victimized women and children (if the step-son was still a child) who are locatable in the documentary sources. The narrative portion of the general remission for the Jacquerie issued upon the Dauphin’s return to Paris in August says that the Jacques ‘killed the gens d’armes, women, children and other people’ whom they found in the nobles’ homes, and the chronicles unanimously agree that the Jacques killed women and children. The victimization—but not actual killing—of women and children is also emphasized in the miniature depicting the Jacquerie in Charles V’s manuscript of the Grandes chroniques, where Jacques in full armour lead away bound

⁵³ This, too, has parallels in the later English rebellion: Fletcher, ‘Justice, meurtre’, esp. 78, and see Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, ‘De Fuenteovejuna à la Guerre des Communautés: Sur la violence populaire en Castille à la fin du Moyen Âge’ in Challet and Victorin (eds), Du meurtre en politique, 87–106. ⁵⁴ AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330. The Forest of Halatte was likely also the hiding place of the aged squire Rénaud de Bruyères of Crouy-en-Thelle, who was captured and then killed ‘de nemore in quo se absconderat redeuntem’ (AN X1a 23, fol. 491v–93r). ⁵⁵ ‘qui alias jurisdictionem exercuerat’ (AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330). The remission that relates all of this was issued in 1363 to Oursel, who also received a formulaic remission five years earlier in the Jacquerie’s immediate aftermath (AN JJ 86, no. 224, fol. 73v, ed. Ghislain Brunel, ‘Archives de la révolte et lettres de rémission: Des serfs du Laonnais (1338) aux Jacques de Picardie (1358)’ in Pierre Rigault and Patrick Toussaint (eds), La Jacquerie: Entre mémoire et oubli, 1358–1958– 2008 (Amiens, 2012), no. 1, pp. 69–70). ⁵⁶ ‘le dit Jehan et un escuier, avec plusieurs autres, s’en venoient en la dicte ville de Verbrie, et feu le dit escuier, sa fame et son fillastre pris en la compaignie d’icelui Jehan, des habitans d’icelle ville . . . plusieurs foiz leur dit le dit Jehan: “Pour Dieu, beaux seigneurs, gardés que vous faites, car c’est trop mal fait” ’ (AN JJ 86, no. 444, fol. 156, ed. Luce, no. 39, pp. 280–281).

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men and women and children follow.⁵⁷ Still, less than 5 per cent of individual remissions report that women or children suffered violence, not all of which was interpersonal.⁵⁸ Assuming the squire’s wife and step-son survived the encounter at Verberie, there are no known instances of child murder during the Jacquerie and only two homicides committed against specific women. One of these women is the unnamed sister-in-law in the papal dispensation from Beauvais mentioned earlier. The other female victim, who may not have been noble, was called Perrote de la Sengle. She was drowned at Bruyères-sur-Oise when the Jacques attacked her stepnephews’ house.⁵⁹ The Lady of Chatou’s life was threatened along with those of her children and nephews, though one of the Jacques’ captains saved them in yet another instance of the leadership’s opposition to killing nobles.⁶⁰ Eight other women and one child are named individually as suffering property damage, but all remained physically unharmed.⁶¹ As the general remission indicates in speaking of attacks against the nobles’ gens d’armes, there was also some violence against members of household familia, including the varlets of the Lady of Gaillournel and the Lord of Fouencamps.⁶²

⁵⁷ BnF franç. 2813, fol. 414r. As Christiane Raynaud has emphasized, this artist usually shied from depicting violence explicitly, but cf. his depiction of the marshals’ wounds in Chapter 2, Figure 2.1, (Christiane Raynaud, ‘Le langage de la violence dans les enluminures des Grandes chroniques de la France’, JMH 17 (1991): 191–209). ⁵⁸ ‘alèrent en pluseurs lieux, forteresses, chasteaux et maisons d’aucuns nobles es diz païs, et ceulx combatirent, prindrent et destruèrent, et, qui pis est, les genz d’armes, femmes, enfens et autres genz que dedens trouvèrent et estoient, occirent et mirent à mort’ (AN JJ 86, no. 241, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 23, pp. 251–253). ⁵⁹ ‘en l’ostel des diz freres ou quelle estoit Perrote de la Sengle belante diceulx, la quelle il nayerent ou firent nayer’ (AN JJ 90, no. 556, fol. 275v–76r). ⁶⁰ ‘sauvée et gardée de morir la dame de Chatou, ses enfanz, neveux et pluseurs autres nobles’ (AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256). ⁶¹ Lady Isabelle de Boulemonte, though the violent rebellion of her subjects may have predated the Jacquerie (AN JJ 86, no. 596, fol. 217, ed. Luce, no. 41, pp. 283–285); Sir Bechys de Rivery’s sister (AN JJ 97, no. 358, fol. 94); Egide de ‘Pailhaco’, damoiselle (AN X1a 21, fol. 9v); Catherine d’Artois, Lady of Aumalle (AN JJ 88, no. 1, fol. 1–2); Blanche, Duchesse of Orléans (GC, 178); Marie de Cressy, Lady of Chelle and Libermont (AN X1a 28, fol. 175v–76r; AN X1a 31, fol. 253); Jeanne de Chambly, Lady of Montgobert (AN JJ 92, no. 227, fol. 55v, ed. Victor de Beauvillé, Histoire de la ville de Montdidier, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Paris, 1875), I: no. 29, pp. 516–517). I have included her daughter and successor as Lady of Montgobert, Marguerite de Clermont, whose castle at Montgobert and a manor called Wirmes in Chambly, were destroyed by the ‘commocions’, though her victimization may have been ‘inherited’ from her mother (AN P 1893, fol. 150–51r; AN P 1893, fol. 211v–12, ed. Louis Douët d’Arcq, Recherches historiques et critiques sur les anciens comtes de Beaumont-sur-Oise, du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Amiens, 1855), no. 228, pp. 221–222; Anselme de Sainte-Marie et al., Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la maison royale de France, des pairs, grands officiers de la couronne & de la maison du roy & des anciens barons du royaume, 3rd edn, 12 vols (Paris, 1726–1879), VI: 55). The last three women were connected to the Clermont-Nesles, see Chapter 4. Child: ‘domum Johannis de Hemevillari tunc etatis nouem annorum vel circiter existentis . . . destruxisset’ (AN JJ 89, no. 583, fol. 267r, ed. [Amédée] Vicomte de Caix de Saint-Aymour, Notes et documents pour servir à l’histoire d’une famille Picarde au Moyen-Âge (XIe–XVIe siècles): La maison de Caix, rameau mâle des Boves-Coucy (Paris, 1895), no. 69, pp. cxix–cxxi). ⁶² AN JJ 100, no. 478, fol. 148r; AN JJ 108, no. 60, fol. 37v–38r, ed. Luce, no. 64, pp. 335–338. See also AN JJ 145, no. 498, fol. 229v–30r.

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We are very far here from a mindless massacre of noblemen and their dependants, but it is easy to imagine that even a few murders would be every bit as terrifying to nobles as the chivalric chroniclers make out. Like the probably unfounded fears of rape, such anxieties would have been especially heightened if the young and able-bodied noblemen were mostly away in the Dauphin’s gathering army or intended soon to depart. The Italian chronicler Matteo Villani remarked that the castles near Paris were unguarded.⁶³ As Froissart relates, it was when ‘the Lord of Roye was with the Duke of Normandy’ at Pont-deCharenton that ‘the Jacques besieged his wife and his daughter in the castle of Guerbigny and tried hard to take it in order to rape and destroy them.’⁶⁴ The absence of many noblemen returns our attention to Paris’s military circumstances. Whether by accident, planning, or a combination thereof, the Jacquerie served as a diversionary tactic, which drew the Dauphin’s noble supporters away from his bastions in the south and east. The noble deaths for which we have specific information are tightly clustered in the Jacquerie’s heartlands north of Paris, exactly where the Dauphin’s forces were not. Not all of the noblemen were absent, of course. The Lord of Roye’s son, Mahieu de Roye, was with his wife and children in the castle of Plessis when the Jacques besieged it, but the threat did occupy his attention, forcing him to make a desperate journey to Hainaut and the Cambrésis in search of help.⁶⁵

Castles and Houses The chroniclers’ emphasis on interpersonal violence, especially directed against women and children, reflects their anxiety about the Jacquerie’s primary objective, which was to destroy noble castles and houses. These were private spaces, a fact not lost on the rebels, but some of these buildings also had important military functions, vital to the strategic aims of Paris and their rural allies. Destroying these structures was the purpose given for electing leaders in the village of Bessancourt north of Paris, and at Puisieux, where the villagers were initially commanded by the ‘captain of the countryside’ to destroy the nobles’ houses and fortresses.⁶⁶ Over 40 per cent of the judicial documents speak of the destruction of nobles’ castles, and a quarter mention houses and manors destroyed. The boilerplate formula ⁶³ ‘non prendendo guardia’ (Matteo Villani, Cronica: Con la continuazione di Filippo Villani, Giuseppe Porta (ed.), 2 vols (Parma, 1995), II: 215). ⁶⁴ ‘Li sires de Roye estoit au Pont a Carenton avoecquez le duch de Normendie et li Jacque avoient enclos sa femme et sa fille ens ou castiel de Garmegni et rendoient grant painne a l’avoir pour elles violler et destruire’ (Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 168v–69r). ⁶⁵ Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 168; a briefer version, also noting nobles leaving the realm, at Chron. norm., 128. Roye’s journey is discussed in Chapter 9. ⁶⁶ ‘capitaneum elegerant . . . pro demoliendo domos nobilium’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r); ‘destruendum domos & fortalicia nobilium’ (AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v–24r).

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used in almost half the remissions lists the tearing down of noble fortresses and houses first among the purposes of the Jacquerie (a abatre en plusieurs lieux fortresses [et] maisons). Jean le Bel claimed that the Jacques ‘burned and tore down’ more than 60 ‘good houses and strong castles’ in the Beauvaisis, and over 80 elsewhere.⁶⁷ Thirty-two specific castles, two ‘fortresses’, one tower, and over twenty-seven manor houses can be identified as targets of the revolt, but given that the records are incomplete and that many victims spoke of their damaged houses in the plural without giving further information, the chronicler’s tally of 140 buildings destroyed seems like a reasonable estimate.⁶⁸ One of the words most frequently used to describe the Jacques’ actions— abatre—means to tear down or raze, as at Villiers-près-La Ferté-Alais south of Paris, where the villagers of Mennency, Saint-Fargeau, and Ballancourt-surEssone combined forces ‘to tear down the castle’.⁶⁹ ‘Demolish’ is used in a number of cases, such as the castle at Jouy-sous-Thelle, in western Picardy, where, as at Villiers, contingents of Jacques came together for that purpose.⁷⁰ While some of these incidents also involved arson, as was apparently the case at Villiers, some such demolitions were careful and deliberate operations that took place over a relatively extended period.⁷¹ In a village outside Paris, the demolition of a local noble’s house went on over a period of days while their captain was absent for a meeting at Gonesse. When he returned, he congratulated them on having the house ‘almost fully demolished’ and encouraged them to finish the rest.⁷² At Gonesse itself, a Parisian commander ordered skilled professionals to dismantle the houses of the reformers’ enemies, and the notable participation of masons and other building professionals in the revolt suggests that this may not have been an

⁶⁷ ‘en Byauvoisis plus de LX bonnes maisons et forts chasteaulx . . . ou pays de Normendye et entre Paris et Noyon, et entre Paris et Soissons, par devers la terre du seigneur de Coussy; et en ces deux pays exillerrent plus de LXXX chasteaux, bonnes, maisons et notable manoirs de chevaliers et d’escuiers’ (Jean le Bel, 257–258). Froissart, SHF, §413, p. 101 gives a total of 160. Neither the narrative nor the judicial sources make any clear distinction between a castle and a fortress (e.g. n. 109, below, cf. Beaumanoir, cap. XIII, §453, vol. I: 217). ⁶⁸ A rare enumeration comes from the Lord of Crèvecoeur and his son Jean, who note that seven of their maisons had been burned down, in addition to the five fors maisons that the English destroyed (AN JJ 86, no. 173, fol. 56r). In addition to several castles for which I have found documentation, de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: 110 also named Le Cardonnois, Essertaux, La Faloise, Rainneval, Coivrel, and Tricot as castles that disappeared during this period, but he gave no references, so there is no way to know whether they were destroyed by the Jacques, during the Navarrese war later in 1358/59, or through some other incident. I have not included those castles in my count. ⁶⁹ ‘a abatre le chastel de Villers empres la Ferte Aalays’ (AN JJ 86, no. 363–64, fol. 123v–24; AN JJ 86, no. 393, fol. 137r). A third of records use abatre or a variant. ⁷⁰ ‘demolir le chastel de Jouy et autres hostelz & maisons’ (AN JJ 100, no. 478, fol. 148r). ⁷¹ A royal sergeant recalled the Villiers incident as ‘le feu que pluseurs gens du pais avoient mis au chastel de Villiers’ (AN JJ 86, no. 429, fol. 150v). Arson was a very serious matter in medieval law, so it is possible that the villagers’ remissions purposefully omitted this aspect. ⁷² ‘dicta domus penitus fuisset demolita et quod predictis habitantibus dictam domum demolientibus dixerant quod bene fecerant et hoc ratificabant et residuum oportebat demoliri’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r).

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isolated case.⁷³ Arson (bouter feux, ardoir), which is mentioned by a quarter of the judicial documents, often appears in connection with the houses and fortresses of nobles, either on its own or with words meaning to raze or to destroy. Montépilloy, one of Robert de Lorris’s castles, was said to have been combustum, as well as devastatum, while Jean de Nesle’s fortresses were ‘destroyed and made to burn with fire’.⁷⁴ The various manors and houses (maneria & hospicia) belonging to the Lord of Thiex and his wife had been ‘pulled down to the ground, burned with fire and totally destroyed’.⁷⁵ The Jacques did not attack all of the castles, nor even the most seemingly obvious ones. If preventing the occupation of Creil was the purpose of the attack at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, it is perhaps curious that there was no subsequent effort to tear it down. Similarly, the seat of the seigneurial administration and power in the County of Valois, the large and strong castle of Pierrefonds, was apparently untouched. With the exception of the expedition against the Marché at Meaux, where they combined forces with the Parisians and Meaux’s citizens, the Jacques never attacked the great fortifications. Their utter defeat at Meaux—at the hands of a very small number of defenders—demonstrates the wisdom of avoiding such confrontations. These castles were probably just too large and strong for the Jacques’ forces. In general, fourteenth-century castles easily withstood attack, their defensive advantages far outstripping the offensive technology that was then available.⁷⁶ Not all of these structures were militarily useful, but the defensive superiority of even smaller, under-garrisoned castles may help to explain why almost without exception, the Jacques tried to destroy them, rather than occupy them for their own strategic advantage. There is only one, very late remission that reports that the Jacques tried to take a castle ‘for their uses’.⁷⁷ Jean le Bel’s chronicle does mention that some nobles believed the Jacques had occupied Creil, but it neither says that

⁷³ AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320. See Chapter 3. Jacques la Vache, another of the reformers’ particular enemies, had his houses demoliti during the revolt (AN X1a 17, fol. 51v–52, ed. Luce, no. 58, pp. 320–322). ⁷⁴ AN X1a 18, fol. 63; ‘destruxerant & igne comburi fecerant fortalicia’ (AN X1a 20, fol. 250). Recent archeology confirms that part of Montépilloy was burned in the mid-fourteenth century (Les tablettes de la Société de l’histoire et de l’archéologie de Senlis 56 (2018): 1–2). ⁷⁵ ‘maneria & hospicia . . . dirruerant ad terramque prostraverant incendio concremarant ac totaliter destruxerant’ (AN X2a 7, fol. 213r). The village of Thiex and the manors in question, Courtry, Messy, Villeparisis and Villeroy, are situated south-east of Paris in the direction of Meaux. ⁷⁶ As one fourteenth-century military treatise noted, ‘A castle can hardly be taken within a year, and even if it does fall, it means more expenses for the king’s purse and for his subjects than the conquest is worth’ (Pierre Dubois, quoted in Clifford J. Rogers, ‘The military revolutions of the Hundred Years’ War’, Journal of Military History 57 (1993): 273; See also Philippe Contamine, War in the Middle Ages, Michael Jones (trans.), (Oxford, 1984), 106–115). ⁷⁷ ‘assaillairent le fort ou chastel dicelle ville a fin de le prendre et avoir en leur commandement pour eulx enforcier & plus grever les diz nobles’ (AN JJ 145, no. 498, fol. 229v–30r). The castle was that of Plainville near Montdidier.

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they were right nor does it explicitly mention the castle there.⁷⁸ In fact, the rebels were headquartered a couple of miles to the west, on the escarpment of Montataire, where, again, there is no indication that they used the place’s castle.⁷⁹ The impregnability of fourteenth-century fortresses may have meant that destruction was simply easier than capture. Yet it is also true that not occupying castles fits in with the overall character of the Jacques’ violence, which, as with their possible abstention from rape, may have diverged from the usual way that nobles waged war.⁸⁰ As I discussed in the previous chapter, the long-standing explanation that the fortresses’ destruction was intended to prevent occupation by ravaging soldiers or to avoid seizures undertaken for their fortification does not fit well with the sources or with the geography of recent military violence. But it does makes sense that local people would have been worried about the potential violence from fortresses, especially if they had heard that the Dauphin planned to victual and recompense his troops by allowing them to pillage the countryside.⁸¹ The crown later claimed that these rumours had been propagated by Étienne Marcel, and as I mentioned, there are some indications—if only from the revolt’s peripheries—that the Jacquerie’s leaders played on these fears. Prophylactic demolition is also consonant with the reformers’ efforts from the previous November to destroy superfluous fortifications, which the Dauphin had endorsed and which would still be royal policy in 1359.⁸² Indeed, the castle of Thiers, which the Jacques destroyed, had been inspected for possible demolition by the November 1357 commission. The focus on castles may thus be partly explained as efforts to limit military violence, perhaps incited by propaganda on behalf of the reformers and the Jacques’ leadership. But there was probably no single agreed objective. Rather, the destructions fulfilled a few different, sometimes overlapping, purposes.

Objectives I: Valois Loyalists Much of this destruction served the immediate strategic interests of the reform party. Where we have information about owners of damaged manors or houses, ⁷⁸ ‘Si alerent ces gens d’armes . . . jusques à Creel, dont ilz pensoient que ces meschans gens fussent’ (Jean le Bel, 259). ⁷⁹ AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262. ⁸⁰ See also the refusal of the villagers, whom Jean de Venette called ‘Jacques Bonhommes’, at Longueil to ransom their English prisoners ‘the way that nobles do’ (Jean de Venette, 212). ⁸¹ Rumours: AN JJ 86, no. 240, fol. 79–80r, ed. Ord., IV: 346–348; AN JJ 86, no. 214, fol. 69v–70r, confirmed at AN JJ 86, no. 255, fol. 85v–86r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 83–85; AN JJ 86, no. 282, fol. 94. Dauphin’s policy: AN JJ 86, no. 395 (mis-numbered 385), fol. 137v; AN X1a 19, fol. 503v–504r; AN P 2293, pp. 453–456. ⁸² Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols (Paris, 1909–1931), I: 379, n. 4; Musée de Paris AE II 376 (formerly AN K 948B, no. 40); AN JJ 90, no. 518, fol. 258v–59, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 143–147, from July 1359, in which local villagers from two leagues around were to be convoked to tear down numerous fortresses in the Parisis.

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over half belonged to the Dauphin’s partisans or the reformers’ enemies.⁸³ If we look specifically at those 35 structures destroyed or damaged during the Jacquerie that are identified as ‘castles’ or ‘fortresses’ in the sources, of which 30 have identifiable holders, the same proportion holds; over half belonged to prominent Valois loyalists or their immediate vassals. Robert de Lorris, the reformers’ bête noire, suffered damage to his castles at Ermenonville, Luzarches, and Montépilloy, as is more fully detailed in Chapter 8. All three of the men who had engineered the Prince’s break with the reformers in Provins in April—the Lord of Roucy, the Count of Étampes, and the Dauphin’s uncle, Duke of Orléans and Count of Valois—had major fortresses targeted: Roucy’s castle at Eppes, was allegedly occupied by ‘one of the prévôt de marchands’ people’, who ‘wished to burn it down’, and his son-in-law, Charles, Lord of Montmorency, saw his castles attacked by ‘different mobs’ (diverse flotes) of Jacques.⁸⁴ In the county of Étampes, the peuple et commun joined the Jacquerie and attacked the castle.⁸⁵ The Duke of Orléans saw his most important fortresses at Beaumont-sur-Oise and Villiers-près-la Ferté-Alais attacked and damaged.⁸⁶ Lesser Valois loyalists also suffered: the crown’s staunch defenders, the Clermont-Nesles, sustained damage to fortresses or manors at Montgobert, Chambly, and Bray-sur-Somme.⁸⁷ Mahieu de Roye, royal diplomat, master of the archers, and direct vassal of the Valois, was besieged by Jacques at the castle of Plessis-du-Roye, and his mother and sister had a similar experience at Guerbigny, as noted above.⁸⁸ Like the Clermont-Nesles, the Royes had been loyal servants of the crown since the reign of Philip Augustus, but a more recent contribution to the reformers’ ire may have been that Mahieu de Roye, along with Jean de Clermont (brother of the murdered marshal), had been among the seigneurial judges who acquitted one Rogier Chippe, prévôt of Soissons, whom the reformateurs generaux

⁸³ Of 31 manors/houses attacked by the Jacques, 20 had identifiable possessors, 12 of whom were either closely associated with the Dauphin or known enemies of the reformers. ⁸⁴ ‘esse de gentibus quondam prepositi mercatorum et quod ipse voluerat incendere dictum castrum’ (AN JJ 86, no. 433, fol. 152v–53r). GC, 180. For the relationship with Roucy, see André Duchesne, Histoire généalogique de la maison de Montmorency et de Laval iustifiée par chartes, lettres, tiltres, arrests, & autres bonnes & certaines preuues, enrichie de plusieurs figures & divisée en XII livres (New York, 1624), preuves de livre III, pp. 145–146 (second numeration). ⁸⁵ AN JJ 86, no. 241, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 23, pp. 251–253; AN JJ 86, no. 395 (mis-numbered 385), fol. 137v. ⁸⁶ For the castles, see Jean Mesqui, ‘La fortification dans le Valois du XIe au XVe siècle et le rôle de Louis d’Orléans’, Bulletin Monumental 135 (1977): 109–149, esp. 109–111. ⁸⁷ ‘C’est le denombrement du fie que Je Marguerite de Cleront dame de Montgoubert tien & adveut a tenir en foy & hommage a cause du chastel & chastellenie de Pierreffons de tres haulte, noble, & puissant dame Madame la Duchesse d’Orleans Contesse de Valoiz & de Beaumont. Premierement le chastel de Montgoubert, le jardin & bassecourt, ainsi comme il se comportent presens par an pour ce qu’il fu ars par la commosion lx s.’ (AN P 1893, fol. 150–51r); Chambly: ‘mon manoir de Chambly que on appelle l’hostel de Wirmes . . . qui vault par an à présent, pour ce qu’il fu destruit ou temps des commocions, LX s. p. ou environ (ed. Douët d’Arcq, Recherches historiques, no. 228, pp. 221–222); Bray: AN X1a 20, fol. 250. See Chapter 3. ⁸⁸ Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 168–69r.

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nominated by the Estates of 1357 later sentenced to death.⁸⁹ They were joined in this action by the Lord of Muret (possibly Mahieu de Roye’s father, here given his most territorially relevant title) and by the Lord of Moreuil, scion of another venerable Picard family often associated with the Royes.⁹⁰ Both lords’ castles were targeted by the Jacques.⁹¹ The castle at Vez, a fortified Valois fief held by a loyal vassal, was also destroyed, and there was the execution at or near Verberie, also a fortification held from the Valois.⁹² The destruction wreaked against Valois loyalists’ castles and houses may have been intended as vengeance or even as quasi-judicial punishment. Burning or tearing down traitors’ or public enemies’ houses was a common sentence in Flanders, and incorporated municipalities in northern France often possessed the right to carry out such sentences by the terms of their charters.⁹³ Indeed, the privilege of Beauvais’s commune to undertake ‘vengeance’ (vindicta) against a lord whose fortress sheltered evildoers, initially granted in 1182, was confirmed as late as 1394.⁹⁴ The royal councillor Jean de Charny certainly felt that the Jacques had treated him like a traitor; he remarked that around 400 villagers tore down his manors ‘as if he had been an enemy of the crown and the realm of France’.⁹⁵ The parlementaire Mathieu de Pommolain, lord of Thieux, and his wife (probably the daughter of Philippe des Essars, another of Marcel’s relatives by marriage) recounted something similar about the destruction of their manors, which were ⁸⁹ AN JJ 86, no. 483, fol. 171. The lords and other nobles are referred to as ‘les hommes de fie jugans’ and represented by their procurators, who were assisted by a professional judge (‘avecques le Juge qui pronuncia la dite sentence’). The sentence must have been passed no later than 1350 because it was confirmed by Philippe VI. ⁹⁰ Mahieu de Roye gave homage to Blanche of France, Duchess of Orléans and countess of Valois and Beaumont, in 1376 for numerous holdings, including the fortress of Muret, but he may not have held it yet in 1358 (AN P 1893, fol. 164v–65). ⁹¹ Muret-en-Crottes: AN JJ 86, no. 368, fol. 125v–26r; Moreuil: AN JJ 108, no. 86, fol. 55, partly excerpted at Luce, 207; AN X1a 19, fol. 407v; Chron. reg., 272. Moreuil was later used as a noble refuge and a base of the Counter-Jacquerie (AN JJ 108, no. 60, fol. 37v–38r, ed. Luce, no. 64, pp. 335–338; see Chapter 9). ⁹² Vez: AN X1c 32, no. 30–31; Jean Mesqui, ‘Vez’ in Île-de-France gothique 2: Les demeures seigneuriales (Paris, 1988), 316–326. Verberie: AN JJ 86, no. 444, fol. 156, ed. Luce, no. 39, pp. 280–281. ⁹³ André Delcourt, La vengeance de la commune: L’arsin et l’abattis de maison en Flandre et en Hainaut (Lille, 1930); Jan Dumolyn, ‘The vengeance of the commune: Sign systems of popular politics in medieval Bruges’ in Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, Vincent Challet, Jan Dumolyn, and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz (eds), La comunidad medieval como esfera pública (Seville, 2014), 251–289. Communal charters issued in Picardy often included this right up to about 1230: Robert Fossier (ed.), Chartes de coutumes en Picardie, XIe—XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1974). There are fourteenth-century instances of the practice: Châlons-en-Champagne, AD Marne H 825; Augustin Thierry, Recueil des monuments inédits de l’histoire du Tiers-État, Première série: Chartes, coutumes, actes municipaux, statuts . . . région du Nord, 4 vols (Paris, 1850–1870), IV: no. 43, pp. 195–203. Religieux, 129, reports that the reformers had the Dauphin’s supporters’ houses torn down in Paris in July ‘for public justice’ (ad justiciam publicam). ⁹⁴ Ord., VII: 621–25, art. 4. There is no indication of whether the privilege was operative earlier in the century. ⁹⁵ ‘domos, grangias et alia hospicia . . . si idem consiliarius noster inimicus corone et regni Francie esset, disruperant, demolierant et ad terram prostraverant’ (AN X1a 14, fol. 391, ed. Luce, no. 55, pp. 306–309).

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thrown down and burned ‘as if they were our [the crown’s] enemies’ (ut nostri fuissent inimici).⁹⁶ While both this attack and that against Charny were focused on the reformers’ personal and political enemies, as were the very similar operations effected against Pierre d’Orgemont’s manors at Gonesse, all were carried out by local villagers.⁹⁷ The punishment of Valois loyalists was not the only rational for destruction. Five of the damaged castles belonged to partisans of Charles of Navarre. The Jacques attacked castles at Poix, Thoix, Pierrepont-sur-Avre, and Aumale which were held by people who later appeared on the pardon rolls issued for Navarre’s supporters, as well as Auffay, which was part of the County of Longueville and must have been held by either Charles’s brother Philippe or an immediate vassal.⁹⁸ Yet while these attacks seem at odds with the animus toward the reformers’ enemies visible elsewhere in the revolt, they probably reflect the Jacques’ objectives as they developed at a fairly late point in the revolt, after Charles of Navarre had agreed to join the nobles in suppressing the Jacquerie and the attack on Meaux had failed, a point to which I will return in Chapter 8. According to the Norman chronicler, the attacks at Poix and Aumale came around the same time as a battle near Poix between the Jacques and AngloNavarrese/noble forces.⁹⁹ This battle occurred after the Jacques’ defeat at Clermont-Mello and may have been intended to draw Navarre’s forces back toward Normandy and away from the Jacques strongholds along the Oise.¹⁰⁰ The attack on Auffay, which was located near Longueville, where Navarre had been from mid-May, was the ultimate objective of a long-range expedition ordered by the ‘captain of the country-folk of the Beauvaisis’. This expedition also burned the castles at Le Mesnil and Thoix, before reaching Auffay, 98 kilometres from its origin in Catheux, where the contingent’s leader had burned the local castle before setting out.¹⁰¹ This command post-dated Calle’s execution at Clermont and thus the battle with Navarre around 10 June that preceded it, ⁹⁶ AN X2a 7, fol. 213r, issued March 1366. Philippe des Essars was the Dauphin’s Maître de hôtel in 1358–59 and died in 1365, which means that he may have been the actual target of the attack about which Pommolain and his wife complained. For Thieux and Philippe des Essars, see Raymond Cazelles, Société politique, noblesse et couronne sous Jean le bon et Charles V (Geneva, 1982), 257. For the career of Pommolain, referred to as ‘dilectus & fidelis consiliarius noster’ in AN X2a 7, fol. 213r see Ord., IV: 418, where he is called Mattheo de Tilio. See also Gustaf Holmér, ‘Jean de Brie et son traité de l’art de bergerie’, Studia neophilologica 39 (1967): 128–149. ⁹⁷ AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320. ⁹⁸ Poix (held by Renaud, Viscount of Poix and Lord of Kesnes) and Aumale (held by Catherine d’Artois): Chron. norm., 129; AN JJ 86, no. 165, fol. 54v, ed. Luce, no. 20, pp. 245–247; AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136; AN JJ 88, no. 1, fol. 1–2. Thoix (held by Jean de Crèvecoeur): AN JJ 86, no. 173, fol. 56r. Pardon rolls: Secousse, Recueil, 177–181, 181–185, and see 136, n. 2 for the Lady of Aumale. Auffay: Philippe Charon, Princes et principautés au Moyen Âge: L’exemple de la principauté d’Évreux, 1298–1412 (Paris, 2014), 112–113. See Chapter 9. ⁹⁹ Chron. norm., 129. ¹⁰⁰ See Chapter 9. ¹⁰¹ AN JJ 90, no. 294, fol. 150, ed. Luce, no. 48, pp. 296–297. I have not been able to identify the holders of Catheux or ‘Le Mesnil’, identified by Luce as Le Mesnil-Saint-Firmin. An alternative identification is Le Mesnil-Conteville.

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because it was given by the ‘captain of the country-folk of the Beauvaisis’, a title usually attributed to Calle, but here given to one Achart de Bulles, who was ‘at that point’ (lors) serving in this position, likely as Calle’s successor.¹⁰²

Objectives II: Nobility and Status Many other instances of property damage are less easily assimilated to a centralized strategy—however fluid—focused on the immediate military and political context. Many of those victimized by the rebels had no discernible political position. It is likely that some of the attacks blamed on the Jacquerie were not part of the revolt at all. Four of the damaged castles were located far away from the main theatre of revolt and from one another. In these cases, people may have taken advantage of the confusion caused by the revolt or drawn inspiration from it to pursue old grievances.¹⁰³ Alternatively, their association with the Jacquerie may reflect confusion in the sources, all attacks against noble castles that occurred during the summer of 1358 being assimilated to it. Some individuals no doubt found it convenient to sue local ‘Jacques’ for property damage committed by others, such as the Anglo-Navarrese soldiers who ravaged widely in the autumn and winter of 1358–1359 but from whom there was no hope of compensation, or in the hope of profiting from the confusion. But as such confusion or opportunism indicates, the Jacquerie encompassed more generalized violence by non-nobles against nobles alongside the strategically focused property damage for specific military and political purposes. Indeed, most property damage probably fell into this category, for while half of the identifiable buildings damaged by the Jacques belonged to Valois partisans, most structures are unidentified. Raymond Cazelles argued that the Jacques attacked the fortresses because the revolt was intended to forge a new urban–rural partnership in which there was no place for the old ‘feudal’ power of the nobility, power that their castles both symbolized and propagated.¹⁰⁴ Yet, as previously discussed attacks on lordship, as distinct from nobility, were not a major feature of the revolt. Nor does Cazelles’ thesis of anti-seigneurial de-castellation explain why the Jacques attacked manors and country houses, as well as castles. Most of the buildings the Jacques sought to destroy did not primarily have a defensive purpose, but were showpieces for noble pretensions.¹⁰⁵ Indeed, not even all of these ‘castles’, especially those held by petty ¹⁰² Achart and the possible succession of command is discussed below in Chapter 6. ¹⁰³ Vivier, burned (ars et brullé) by citizens from Rouen; La Cour at Ligny-le-Ribault, attacked by citizens from Orléans; Dracy, 40 kilometres west of Dijon, damaged by local villagers; Pleinpinard, 80 kilometres east of Poitiers, nearly burned down by two brothers. These incidents are described in more detail in Chapter 9. ¹⁰⁴ Cazelles, ‘La Jacquerie’, 665–666. ¹⁰⁵ Fourquin, Campagnes, 137–139. See also the map of aristocratic fortifications in Robert Fossier, La terre et les hommes en Picardie jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe siècle, 2 vols (Paris, 1968), between II: 678–679.

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lords and lesser aristocrats, were imposing stone structures; some of the castra of which minor nobles pretentiously boasted were in fact only ‘tile covered houses surrounded by ditches’.¹⁰⁶ As the architectural historian Jean Mesqui has observed, most ‘castles’ primarily served as projections of status and authority, their rôle psychologique overshadowing their capacité défensive dérisoire.¹⁰⁷ The aesthetic value that owners placed on some of the Jacques’ targets, such as the Lord of Moreuil’s ‘well-built and really beautiful noble castle’ (nobilem castrum valde pulcrum & bene edificatum), and careful descriptions of their architectural features (windows, great rooms, tiling) indicate that these structures had considerable value apart from potential military utility.¹⁰⁸ Irritation at the way these buildings projected claims to social superiority and flaunted their owners’ wealth may explain why the Jacques attacked Guillaume de Cornu’s ‘principal manor’— for example, though it was ‘not at all fortified’ (nullatenus fortificata)— or why they burned the domicile of the Lord of Fourquerolles, which he was unsure whether to characterize as a ‘house or a castle’.¹⁰⁹

Pillage, Play, and Performance Social resentment also helps to explain the widespread reports of both theft and destruction committed against the nobles’ property. The chronicles are evenly split as to whether the emphasis should be placed on robbery or destruction. While sometimes Jacques ‘carried off what they found’ (rapiebant reperta), as Jean de Venette put it, sometimes they ‘destroyed what they could’, as the Norman chronicler said. In the remissions, the word used is usually dissiper, which means to destroy, not to take, but it might be accompanied by words like pris (take) or phrases like ‘pillaged and carried away their things’ (pillie et emporte leurs biens).¹¹⁰ The Jacquerie certainly involved some theft, petty and grand. The captain of Verberie complained that his profits from pillage were small (and that he paid them back), but others reaped greater advantage.¹¹¹ The Lords of Moreuil and Fouqerelles both complained that their attackers divided up their

¹⁰⁶ Jacques Gardelles, Le château, expression du monde féodal, vol. 4 of Châteaux et guerriers de la France au Moyen Âge (Strasbourg, 1980), 209. ¹⁰⁷ Mesqui, ‘Fortification dans le Valois’, 136, and quote at 140. ¹⁰⁸ AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320; AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r; AN X1a 19, fol. 353r; AN X1a 19, fol. 410r; AN X1a 21, fol. 514; Quote at AN X1a 19, fol. 407v. ¹⁰⁹ AN X1a 19, fol. 191v–92r. Fouqerolles: ‘domum seu castrum’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 410r). See also AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r (‘pulchram domum . . . non fortem’). ¹¹⁰ E.g. ‘dissipe leurs biens et aucuns mis a mort pillie et emporte leurs biens’ (AN JJ 86, no. 510, fol. 184r). ¹¹¹ ‘aucun prouffit de pillage qui monte à plus de la somme de trois escuz, et les quelx desja sont par le dit Jehan restituez’ (AN JJ 86, no. 444, fol. 156, ed. Luce, no. 39, pp. 280–281). Two Jacquerie couples in Vez allegedly profited by 180–200 l.p. (AN X1c 32, no. 31).

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haul among themselves, a clear indication of profiting.¹¹² At Dracy in Burgundy, the attackers stole the fortified doors and windows, which suggests an organized plan, rather than individual initiative.¹¹³ Prior planning is definitely in evidence at Gonesse, where the destruction of Pierre d’Orgemont’s manor and the ensuing theft of its ‘beams, doors, windows, trellises, window panes, and other furnishings’ was ordered and overseen by the Parisian commander Pierre Gilles.¹¹⁴ On the other hand, at Pont-Sainte-Maxence, a poor man and his friends took advantage of an unlocked house, hurriedly abandoned during the revolt, to steal copper mugs, bronze plates, and a silver-gilt belt.¹¹⁵ The distinction between taking and destroying was not necessarily one that mattered much to the victims since they were unlikely to see the objects again either way, but for us, it speaks to motive and meaning. Wholesale destruction, without profit, suggests a symbolic objective, as with the systematic destruction of John of Gaunt’s Savoy palace in the 1381 English Rising, a political act, during which the rebels forbade stealing on pain of death.¹¹⁶ There are some specific cases in which destruction seems intended to send a message. At Gien, for example, the non-nobles not only killed the animals and destroyed the houses of two local squires, they also tore apart their soft furnishings and melted their dishes and did other things ‘too disgusting to recount’.¹¹⁷ At the manor of Busy, they ‘totally annihilated’ (totaliter adnichilaverant) its contents.¹¹⁸ In Bessancourt, the counsellor of the village captain reportedly sequestered the contents of a local knight’s manor, telling the villagers that it was for him and the captain to decide what to do with it.¹¹⁹ ¹¹² ‘castrum depredaverant & robaverant, bona mobilia in dicto castro existencia inter ipsos dividendo’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 407v, Moreuil); ‘bonaque in dicta domo existentia acceperant atque inter se distribuerant’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 410r, Fouqerolles). See also AN X1a 19, fol. 353r: ‘pluraque bona mobilia . . . secum detulerant, et inter se diviserant ad eorum utilitatem et ordinacionem convertendo’; AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320: ‘omnia bona, summam mille regalium auri et plus valencia, acceperant, diviserant et apportaverant pro suo libito voluntatis’. ¹¹³ ‘ferraturas portarum et fenestrarum dicti castri de facto levaverunt ac rapuerunt et ad usus suos proprios applicaverunt’ (AN JJ 91, no. 71, fol. 32r, ed. Luce, no. 59, pp. 322–323). ¹¹⁴ ‘disruperant tigna, hostia, fenestras, treilleias, verrerias, et alia estoramenta seu utensilia dicte domus acceperant et ubi voluerant portaverant’ (AN X1a 14, fol. 476–477, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320). ¹¹⁵ ‘in domum . . . intrassent in qua erant plura bona sine custodia non serrata ymo dicta domus, propter dictam commotionem de novo transactam, aperta erat, ex quibus bonis ipse Reginaldus . . . & ipsi sociis (sic) aliquos potos, cupreos et patellas ereas una cum quadam zona ferrata argentea levaverunt’ (AN JJ 101, no. 55, fol. 30v–31r). ¹¹⁶ André Réville, Le soulèvement des travailleurs d’Angleterre en 1381 (Paris, 1898), lxxxv, although here, too, there was some private pillaging and profit (Réville, Soulèvement, nos. 13–15, 22, pp. 199–200, 202); Caroline M. Barron, Revolt in London: 11th to 15th June 1381 (London, 1981), 3–4. ¹¹⁷ ‘rompirent et depecièrent leurs coustes, coussins, couvertois, fondirent & ardirent leurs vaisselle d’estain & de cuivre et leurs firent pluseurs autres grans villenies & dommages irréperables, laiz et detestables a raconter’ (AN JJ 115, no. 298, fol. 146v–47r, excerpted in Luce, 196–197). ¹¹⁸ AN X1a 26, fol. 270. ¹¹⁹ ‘pluribus gentibus que bona dicte domus congregaverant dixerat dictus Philippus, ‘ea bona non habebitis quia ad nos pertinent equitantes super campos qui de eisdem ordinabimus’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r).

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Theft and appropriation might also have symbolic or performative functions. Jean de Venette mentioned that during the revolt the Jacques and their wives were ‘rather strangely (curiosius) dressed’.¹²⁰ Since this observation immediately follows his report of pillage and theft, it has usually been taken to mean that the countryfolk dressed themselves up in clothes they stole from the nobles.¹²¹ Another possible interpretation is that they wore disguises or costumes while they were committing the violence, disguises which might, of course, have incorporated pilfered items. Fancy dress makes sense as an effort to evade identification, but it also suggests a carnivalesque gesture and the momentary suspension or inversion of normal social rules.¹²² It is true that, as I discussed earlier regarding rape, this story of Jean de Venette’s has an obvious literary function within the chronicle; the vestiary inversion fits neatly into. his recurring motif of a world turned upside down, and the evil of luxury is a trope traceable from Antiquity.¹²³ The device appears earlier in the chronicle with the report that after Poitiers the nobles had spent war taxes on luxurious clothes and frivolous pursuits. In fact, the passages echo each other: the unusual adverb curiosius was applied both to the nobles’ sartorial excess in 1356 and to the rebel costumes in 1358.¹²⁴ But again, that the chronicler knew his art does not mean that the incident did not take place. Nor should we assume that the country-folk themselves would have disagreed with his carnivalesque characterization or its implications of social criticism. An otherwise hidden ludic element to the revolt is further suggested by a remission’s story that at one assembly in Champagne, the countryfolk danced and ‘made good cheer’ as their local priest accompanied them and beat time.¹²⁵ Dressing up, whether in disguises or stolen finery, and dancing with the neighbours sounds more like a festival than a revolt, but that costumed rebels might

¹²⁰ ‘se ipsos et uxores rusticanas curiosius vestientes’ (Jean de Venette, 176). ¹²¹ Both translations require adding information and changing the grammatical structure of the phrase: ‘eux et leurs femmes revêtirent avec une curiosité indue l’habit des nobles’ (Jean de Venette, trans. Beaune, 177); ‘wherewith they clothed themselves and their peasant wives luxuriously’ (Jean de Venette, The chronicle of Jean de Venette, Jean Birdsall (trans.), Richard A. Newhall (ed.) (New York, 1953), 77). ¹²² On dress and festival in late medieval rural France, see Roger Vaultier, Le folklore pendant la guerre de Cent ans d’après les lettres de rémission du Trésor des chartes (Paris, 1965), ch. 5. Another possible interpretation is that some Jacques disguised themselves as women as happened in some early modern revolts, where female dress was sometimes combined with blackface: Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on top’ in Society and culture in early modern France: Eight essays (Stanford, 1975), 136–142, 147–150; Thomas Pettit, ‘ “Here comes I, Jack Straw”: English folk drama and social revolt’, Folklore 95 (1984): 14–15. ¹²³ Christopher Fletcher, ‘Corruption at court? Crisis and the theme of luxuria in England and France, c.1340–1422’ in Steven Gunn and Antheun Janse (eds), The court as a stage: England and the Low Countries in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2006), 28–38. ¹²⁴ ‘se per totum curiosius adornare; et in tantum se curiose omnes . . . cooperiebant’ (Jean de Venette, 144); see Chapter 1. ¹²⁵ ‘et là dansa avec ses diz parrochiens, et yceulx ordena à la dense, en faisant les rens du dit baton, et eulx continuelment exortant à faire bonne chiere’ (AN JJ 86, no. 265, fol. 89r, ed. Luce, no. 34, pp. 270–272).

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have danced and that this might have been fun does not void the politically or sociallycritical elements of the uprising.¹²⁶ In an age of heraldry and sumptuary law, the consequences of sartorial choices went far beyond the merely practical or aesthetic, as was highlighted when the Dauphin donned the Parisian chaperon. Grave significance might also attach to apparently frivolous songs and dances. The politically charged communicative uses of songs in late medieval Europe is well known. In the first chapter, I discussed it apropos of the Complainte sur la bataille de Poitiers, whose contents echo Jean de Venette’s criticism of the nobles’ sartorial excesses. Dance, too, communicated ideas, both through the words of the accompanying song and through the ‘somatic experience . . . associated with group movement’.¹²⁷ If some Jacques and ‘Jacquelines’ did parade around in the nobles’ stolen finery, singing and dancing as they went, such displays might have felt just as socially dangerous to elites as other, more physically forceful violations.

¹²⁶ Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The reasons of misrule’ and ‘Women on top’ in Society and culture, 97–151; Pettit, ‘ “Here Comes I” ’; Paul Strohm, ‘ “A Revelle!”: Chronicle evidence and the rebel voice’ in Hochon’s arrow: The social imagination of fourteenth-century texts (Princeton, 1992), 46–56. ¹²⁷ Jessica Herdman, ‘Songs danced in anger: Music and violent emotions in late sixteenth-century Lyon’, French History 32 (2018): 151–181, quote at 164.

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6 Captains and Assemblies The Organization of the Jacquerie

Jean le Bel and Froissart emphasized the leaderless-ness of the revolt: ‘everywhere they revolted sans chief’. In part, this reflects the reality of the revolt’s acephalous inception, but as with the remissions’ characterization of the revolt as ‘noisy terrors’, their denial of leadership also conveys how chaotic and irrational the revolt must have appeared to its victims and to the authorities charged with reestablishing order. As we have seen, those participants who took advantage of the disorder and further propagated it for their own profit or pleasure might have agreed with this tumultuous portrayal of the revolt. But as we have also seen, disorderly violence was only part of the story. Much of the Jacques’ violence was carefully targeted and enacted in considered—sometimes even judicial—fashion, even when the targets were ‘the nobles’ rather than the specific political enemies of reform. This was possible because the Jacques did have leaders, and those leaders presided over a supra-regional organization that coordinated the actions of local people through a network of village captains and through messages delivered individually, locally, and at massive assemblies. This organization was hierarchical and coercive. Threats, both made and carried out, played a major role in the Jacquerie’s organization because there was conflict between leaders’ systematic objectives and their disciplined methods, on one hand, and the wishes and actions of the local people who made up the movement’s rank and file, on the other. But it is vital to understand that coercion did not only come from the top down. Locals, for their part, exercised considerable constraint from below, as leaders were forced, or so they later claimed, to assent to targets and methods selected by those whom they supposedly commanded. Claims of constraint are ubiquitous in the letters of remission, partly because such claims strengthened the chances of pardon, but their exculpatory aims do not vitiate their evidence of a movement that was not only fractured in its objectives but also riven by disagreement about the possession and exercise of authority.

Guillaume Calle and his Circle At the apex of the Jacques’ organization was their supreme commander Guillaume Calle. Chosen at an assembly in the wake of the massacre at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0007

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Calle served as Jacques’ general until his execution at Clermont following the Battle of Mello-Clermont on 10 June. Jean de Venette, the royal chronicler, the Quatre Valois chronicler, and five remissions mention Calle by name as the Jacques’ main leader.¹ In the remissions, his office is variously styled as the captain of the Beauvaisis or of the people/people and commune of the Beauvais, general captain of the countryside (plat pays), or captain of the people of the countryside.² There are also several remissions for Jacques active in the Beauvaisis that allude to a captain, or in one case, a Great Captain, of the region or of the country-folk without specifically naming him, as well as a number that speak of the captain of the people of the Beauvaisis specifically.³ We have only fragmentary knowledge about Calle. The Quatre Valois chronicler gives the fullest picture, describing him as ‘a knowledgeable and eloquent man, with a fine face and body’, who, like his companion the Hospitaller, had ‘seen some wars’.⁴ Jean de Venette also offers some information, noting that Calle hailed from the village of Mello near Clermont, where Froissart locates the Jacques’ ‘king’ at the start of the revolt.⁵ This fits with information provided by the settlement agreed between his widow and one of the Count of Clermont’s familiars that most of the couple’s property was ‘in the County of Clermont’.⁶ Jean de Venette called Calle ‘a very clever peasant’ (rusticum magis astutum).⁷ Other evidence shows that he was literate. Remissions speak of written messages passing between the Great Captain and the localities, and Quatre Valois reports that Calle wrote his message

¹ The chronicles vary the spelling of his surname. 4 Valois has Charles. Jean de Venette gives Karle, and the royal chronicler Cale. The remissions use Calle or Cale (next note). In the records related to his wife’s marital property, he is referred to as ‘Guillaumi Calli’ in Latin and ‘Willem/Willaume Calle’ in French (AN X1c 13b, no. 272 and 274). The eighteenth-century compilation of documents from Beauvais known as the Collection Bucquet-aux-Cousteaux used Caillet in its account of the revolt but did not identify its sources (Beauvais, mediathèques du Beauvaisis, Collection Bucquet-auxCousteaux, 95 vols, IV: 242, http://bucquet.beauvaisis.fr [last accessed 22 November 2020]). ² ‘Guillaume Cale, soy portant capitaine du dit païs de Beauvoisin’ (AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97); ‘feu Guillaume Calle nagaires esleu Capitaine du pueple & commun de Beauvaisiz’ (AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r); ‘pueple du pais de Beauvoisiz, du quel Guill[aum]e Calle estoit capitaine’ (AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136); ‘Guillaume Cale, soi portant general capitaine dudit plat païs’ (AN JJ 86, no. 365, fol. 124v–25r, ed. Luce, no. 35, pp. 272–274); ‘Guillaume Calle, lors capitainne dez dictes gens du plat pays’ (AN JJ 98, no. 252, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 63, pp. 333–335). ³ ‘Capitaine lors & genz du pais de Beauvoisin’ (AN JJ 86, no. 250, fol. 83v); ‘du peuple du pais de Beauvoisins . . . et de leur capitaine’ (AN JJ 86, no. 308, fol. 102v–103r, ed. Luce, no. 28, p. 260; AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262); ‘du peuple du plat pais de Beauvoisins . . . & de leur capitaine’ (AN JJ 86, no. 310, fol. 103v, excerpted in Luce, p. 178; AN JJ 86, no. 320, fol. 107); ‘Capitanei plane seu plate patrie’ (AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v–24r); ‘le capitaine de Beauvoisins’ (AN JJ 90, no. 288, fol. 148r, ed. Luce, no. 24, pp. 253–254); ‘le capitaine de Beauvoisis’ (AN JJ 90, no. 354, fol. 182, ed. Luce, no. 49, pp. 297–299); ‘magno capitaneo dictorum innobilium’ (AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330). ⁴ ‘ung home bien sachant et bien parlant, de belle figure et fourme . . . hospitalier, qui avoit veu des guerres. Aussi en avoit veu Guillaume Charles’ (4 Valois, 71). ⁵ ‘avoient fait un roy entre yaus, que on appelloit Jake Bonhomme, qui estoit si com on disoit adonc, de Clermont en Biauvoisis’ (Froissart, SHF, §413, p. 100). ⁶ AN X1c 13b, no. 274. ⁷ Jean de Venette, 174.

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to the Parisians proposing cooperation and that he received a written message in return.⁸ A now lost inventory of the property belonging to ‘the captain of the peasants called Jacques decapitated at Clermont’ listed a private seal, another indication of literacy.⁹ Further information comes from three newly discovered documents related to a lawsuit pursued by Calle’s widow, Isabelle (Ysabelle uxoris defuncti Guillaumi Calli), a woman whose existence was previously unknown.¹⁰ In 1361, Isabelle sued in Parlement for her dower and half the marital property, which the Count of Clermont had seized after Guillaume Calle’s death and given to his familiar Robert Garitel, a squire and royal falconer.¹¹ In 1363, the parties came to an agreement, giving the requested property to Isabelle and her new husband, Hernilg the mason.¹² Guillaume Calle’s previously unknown marriage suggests that he was a man of substance, possessing sufficient means and maturity to support a household.¹³ Since the agreement mentions multiple properties (heritages) in the county of Clermont and elsewhere, his wealth was probably fairly extensive. Isabelle’s use of Parlement indicates that she herself was from a background of sufficient intellectual, social, and financial capital to navigate the legal system. That her second husband was a mason suggests that Calle was also a mason. The likelihood that Calle had a seal strengthens this hypothesis: while it was not uncommon for ⁸ AN JJ 86, no. 365, fol. 124v–25r, ed. Luce, no. 35, pp. 272–274; ‘magno capitaneo dictorum innobilium scripsisset’ (AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330); ‘lui escript qu’il estoit en son aide . . . escriprent à Guillaume Charles’ (4 Valois, 72). ⁹ Luce, 77–78, citing Charles du Fresne, sire du Cange, et al., Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, new edn Léopold Favre, 10 vols (Niort, 1883–87 [first edn 1678]), IV: 275, vid. Iacobi: ‘Sigillum Capitanei Rusticorum vocatorum Jacoborum decapitati apud Claromontem in Belvacino, fuit traditum Camerae per Thomam Brochardi Receptorum Silvanect. 11 Dec 1356 (sic)’. This document, cited as found in Register 3, fol. 218 of the Chambres des comptes by du Cange, would have been destroyed in the fire of 1737. This document does not appear in AN P 2293, the eighteenth-century effort to reconstruct this register which was then known as Memorial C. The reconstructed register does, however, contain a letter addressed to the Chambre des comptes and dated 10 December 1358, noted as formerly found at Memorial C, fol. 218, regarding confiscations and forfeitures for lèsemajesté and other crimes (AN P 2293, pp. 163–164). The sentence noted by du Cange may thus have been part of a list of confiscations that the eighteenth-century clerk did not bother to include. ¹⁰ AN X1C 13b, nos. 272–274. ¹¹ For Garitel ‘escuier & fauconerier du Roy nostre dit seigneur & de monsieur de Bourbon’, see AN X1c 13b, no. 273. Olivier Troubat, La guerre de Cent ans et le prince chevalier le ‘bon duc’ Louis II de Bourbon, 1337–1410, 2 vols (Montluçon, 2001–2003), II: 715 lists two men with this surname, a Guillaume and a Jean, serving in Clermont’s household in the 1390s and 1400s. BnF franç. 27766 (pièces originales 1282), no. 28866 (Garitel). ¹² ‘le dite Ysabel en & seur tous les heritages dont le dit deffunt jaissoit au jour des espousailles de il et de ycelle Ysabel ou qui per sussession li sont venus le dit mariage a venu le dit Ysabel si aura son douaire selonc la comstume (sic) du pais et aussint aura elle la moitie comme son propre heritage quant adce en tous les acques que le dit deffunt & elle acquirrent & firent en semble en quelconques lieu que il soient scitues en Conte de Clermont ou ailleurs’ (AN X1c 13b, no. 274). The unusual name Hernilg, very clearly written in the MS, makes sense as a Picard spelling of the more common Arnoul or Ernoul. A ‘Hernilz li Macon’ worked on the fortifications of Laon in October–November 1358 (Laon, AD Aisne Edt 1 CC 1, fol. 43v, 47r, 47v, 48v, 49v). On the dower and inheritance customs of Clermont, see Beaumanoir, cap. XIII–XIV, vol. I: 208–243. ¹³ Another member of this household may have been Guérin Calle, to whom the Augustinians of Saint-Vincent of Senlis leased a large farm in 1369 (Beauvais, AD Oise H 672, see Chapter 3).

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non-nobles and even peasants to possess seals elsewhere in north-western Europe, Beaumanoir reported that they were forbidden to do so in the County of Clermont. However, masons and carpenters required seals to certify the adequate completion of building works.¹⁴ Calle must have been the sort of man to inspire confidence, for the sources agree that he was chosen or elected by the Jacques, rather than imposed upon them. But the weight of command did not rest on his shoulders alone. He relied upon a circle of high commanders, whom Samuel Cohn has called his ‘top brass’.¹⁵ In one remission, some of these men are referred to as the countryside’s ‘sovereign captains’ to whom local captains were ‘subject’.¹⁶ These may have been the same as the ‘captains of the countryside’ at whose behest Philippe Poignant, the mayor and councillors of Montdidier, and one Étienne Champion reportedly participated in the movement.¹⁷ Likely, they included some of the unnamed leaders whom Étienne Marcel reported as executed alongside Calle at Clermont.¹⁸ There are some identifiable individuals among this upper echelon. According to Quatre Valois, Calle shared command with an unnamed Hospitaller, whose identity is uncertain, though a connection with those of his order who helped finance and defend Marcel’s Paris seems likely. An interesting candidate is one Jean de Senlis, whose surname indicates ties to the Jacquerie’s strongest urban bastion. A member of the order since at least 1351, he was removed as commander on 20 June 1358 for unspecified ‘faults’.¹⁹ Other men who probably had some ¹⁴ The custom of Beauvais was that ‘hons de poosté . . . ne doit mie avoir seel’ (Beaumanoir, cap. IV, §145, vol. I: 78). A number of late medieval masons’ seals from Picardy can be found on Sigilla: base numérique des sceaux conserves en France, www.sigilla.org [last accessed 22 November 2020]. The Flemish rebel leader, Lambert Bonin, had a seal: (William H. TeBrake, A plague of insurrection: Popular politics and peasant revolt in Flanders, 1323–1328 (Philadelphia, 1993), 146). Such seals were particularly common in Normandy (Yves Metman, ‘L’énigme des sceaux de “paysans normands” ’, Annales de Normandie 41 (1991): 354–355) and are well known in later medieval England (Michael T. Clanchy, From memory to written record: England, 1066–1307, 3rd edn (Chichester, 2013), 52–53). ¹⁵ Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, ‘Enigmas of communication: Jacques, Ciompi, and the English’ in Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, Vincent Challet, Jan Dumolyn, and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz (eds), La comunidad medieval como esfera pública (Seville, 2014), 227–247. ¹⁶ ‘Colart le Mannier . . . ait este Capitaine subget des souverains capitaines du plat pais d’environ’ (AN JJ 86, no. 344, fol. 116v–17r). ¹⁷ Poignant: AN JJ 90, no. 148, fol. 79v–80r, ed. Ghislain Brunel, ‘Archives de la révolte et lettres de rémission: Des serfs du Laonnais (1338) aux Jacques de Picardie (1358)’ in Pierre Rigault and Patrick Toussaint (eds), La Jacquerie: Entre mémoire et oubli, 1358–1958–2008 (Amiens, 2012)no. 3, pp. 71–72; Montdidier: AN JJ 86, no. 437, fol. 154, ed. Victor de Beauvillé, Histoire de la ville de Montdidier, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Paris, 1875), I: 112–114; Champion: AN JJ 86, no. 345, fol. 117. ¹⁸ Marcel’s 2nd letter to Ypres in d’Avout, 308–309: ‘leurs capitaines prist et copa les testes’. See also Chron. norm., 129–130, n. 6 ‘manda I des cappitaines des villains . . . li fist copper le teste’. ¹⁹ AN MM 28, fol. 81v. A terse ‘pour ses demerites’ contrasts with more expansive language justifying the revocation of a different commander on fol. 82r. Grandselve is in the Toulousain, but Jean de Senlis’s earlier career took place in the heart of Jacquerie country (Valérie Bessey, Les commanderies de l’Hôpital en Picardie au temps des chevaliers de Rhodes, 1309–1522 (Millau, 2005), 144, 392). Another possibility is Hector de Malaret, who had villagers fortify a church and attacked the houses of a royal officer in Berry in the summer of 1358 (AN JJ 124, no. 62, fol. 39–40r). The Hospitallers’ property at Moisy suffered ‘damages from the nobles and non-nobles’ in 1358 (AN MM 28, fol. 83v). That at Meaux was harmed by ‘les guerres & fortunes’ (AN MM 28, fol. 81r).

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superior role in the organization are Jean Rose, who rode with Calle and carried messages from him asking the citizens of Compiègne to join the Jacquerie, and Fremy Houdrier, nicknamed ‘the Butcher’, who paid the bill for one dinner with the Great Captain and his men and hosted them at his house for another.²⁰ Another trusted officer was Germain de Réveillon, who took command of the Jacques at Montataire and marched them to Mello while Calle oversaw the siege of Ermenonville.²¹ In the same remission that reports those activities, Germain also admitted to being with the Jacques at Pont-Sainte-Maxence and so is likely the self-styled ‘Great Captain’s lieutenant’ who came to the town to ensure the execution of two squires.²² As discussed in Chapter 3, there is a possibility that Germain was Robert le Coq’s man ‘Jaque Bonhomme’, whom Jean le Bel claimed was leading the revolt. Germain left the Jacques after Mello, and with Calle dead, the command passed to one Achart de Bulles, who was given the same title of ‘captain of the countryfolk of the Beauvaisis’ that Calle had borne.²³ Achart responded to the debacle at Clermont with a campaign of destruction against the castles of Navarrese supporters, a mission entrusted to one Jean le Fréron.²⁴ All that we know about Achart de Bulles and Jean le Fréron is that the former was probably from the village of Bulles near Beauvais and the other—possibly a smith or farrier to judge by his surname—was from Catheux, a village a little further north.²⁵ Fuller information available for the other men associated with Calle indicates that, like the Great Captain himself, they had education, experience, and some wealth. The Hospitaller, whoever he might have been, was certainly a literate veteran by vocational requirement. Germain de Réveillon, a wealthy man worth 3,000 moutons, was a sworn notary of Pont-Sainte-Maxence and therefore not merely literate but professionally educated.²⁶ He may also have had some experience or knowledge of military affairs because he was a familiar of Jean de Boulogne, Count of Montfort, whose ultimately successful claim to the ²⁰ AN JJ 86, no. 365, fol. 124v–25r, ed. Luce, no. 35, pp. 272–274; AN JJ 90, no. 476, fol. 238v–39r, ed. Luce, no. 52, pp. 301–302. There is one other mention of a meeting of Jacques within a house, as opposed to gathering at presumably open-air assemblies, at AN JJ 108, no. 60, fol. 37v–38r, ed. Luce, no. 64, pp. 335–338, in which a lord’s valet discovered Jean and Robert, brothers from Braches, meeting in a house in Villers-aux-Érables with ‘pluseurs autres de la dicte ville et d’environ’. The meeting was presumably to do with the attack staged against the castle of Moreuil by the inhabitants of Amiens and many nearby villages (see Chapters 5 and 9). ²¹ AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262. ²² ‘dicens se esse locum tenentem dicti magni capitanei’ (AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330). ²³ ‘Achart de Bulles, lors capitaine des genz du plat païs de Beauvoisiz’ (AN JJ 90, no. 294, fol. 150, ed. Luce, no. 48, pp. 296–297); AN JJ 86, no. 250, fol. 83v also uses lors in relation to the ‘captain of the Beauvaisis’. See Chapter 8 for timing. ²⁴ AN JJ 90, no. 294, fol. 150, ed. Luce, no. 48, pp. 296–297. ²⁵ There was, however, a royal receiver in Senlis in 1359 named Jean le Ferron, known from a vidimus of his approval of a sale of some land to one Robert Malet (AN JJ 90, no. 555, fol. 275). Malet was implicated in the attack on Robert de Lorris’s castle at Montépilloy, along with the Jacquerie captain Arnoul Guenelon and several other inhabitants of Senlis (AN X1a 18, fol. 63). ²⁶ ‘Germain de Riveillon, tabellion jure’ (AD Oise H 2439, no. 4).

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Duchy of Brittany had engulfed the region in a civil war.²⁷ Germain might also have had some experience in high politics, for the Count was a Navarrese partisan. If Germain did have ties to Robert le Coq, the Count’s leanings would have sat comfortably with that bishop’s sympathies.²⁸ Such sympathies might help explain why he left the Jacques at Mello-Clermont, rather than succeed Calle as would have been logical given his recent lieutenancy. Fremy Houdrier and Jean Rose seem to have lacked these men’s military experience, but they were both well-off family men. Houdrier was married to a noblewoman, with whom he had children, and he possessed numerous houses, some of them by virtue of this marriage.²⁹ Rose’s substantial wealth amounted to over 100 florins and was given to a royal favourite after his execution, though like Isabelle Calle, his widow fought for its return. In addition to being relatively wealthy, Rose was educated and reasonably cosmopolitan. He was a cleric, sporting habit and tonsure, and therefore must have been literate, though his marriage, which produced three children, indicates that he was in only minor orders.³⁰ Hailing from the little village of La Prêle about 25 kilometres from Compiègne, he was nonetheless well known (bien cogneu) in that city, with sufficient contacts to send his family there for safety. In common with the Hospitaller and Germain de Réveillon, Rose may also have had some ties to the urban nexus of reform: as is more fully discussed in Chapter 8, the prominent Rose family of Meaux orchestrated that city’s rebellion against the crown’s

²⁷ ‘familier du conte de Montfort’ (AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262). Jean de Boulogne had been on campaign in Brittany as recently as 1357 (Michael Jones, Ducal Brittany, 1364–1399: Relations with England and France during the reign of Duke John IV (Oxford, 1970), 16, and see 40–42 on Boulogne’s household. Jean de Boulogne could conceivably tie Germain to one Pierre de Montfort, allegedly ‘one of the principal ringleaders’ (un des facteurs principaulz) of the Jacques in Caen (AN JJ 87, no. 321, fol. 204v–205, partially ed. Luce, no. 45, pp. 291–292). ²⁸ Raymond Cazelles, ‘Le parti navarrais jusqu’à la mort d’Étienne Marcel’, Bulletin philologique et historique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (jusqu’à 1610), année 1960 (Paris, 1961), 839–869. ²⁹ AN JJ 90, no. 476, fol. 238v–39r, ed. Luce, no. 52, pp. 301–302. ³⁰ ‘touz les biens meubles immeubles chatieux & heritages que tenoit naguieres & possidoit ou bailliage de Senliz & ou Ressort Jehan Rose (or Roser) qui en la congregation et compaignie des diz adversaires ennemis et Rebelles a este et pour occasion de ce & de ses demerites a naguieres este Justiciez & mis a mort . . . En contraignant viguereusement les seigneurs de qui sont tenuz les diz heritages a en baillir la possession & saisine audit chevalier’ (AN JJ 86, no. 153, fol. 51v). ‘Jehan, clerc et de veu et de sceu pris en habit et tonsure . . . a la dite Jehanne degarpie de feu Jehan Rouse & a ses diz enfanz avons remis quitte donne & delaisse . . . touz les biens quelconques, meubles, et heritages que tenoient & possessoient les diz conjoinz avant la mort du dit Jehan et tout le droit qui en yceulx biens puet ou pourroit competer et appertenir a monsire & nous a cause de la dite confiscacion’ (AN JJ 86, no. 365, fol. 124v–25r, ed. Luce, no. 35, pp. 272–274, omitting the latter and other clauses). There may have been more children, but the remission only invokes the ‘trois petiz enfanz . . . touz meneurs d’aage’ whom his widow could not support. On French clergy in minor orders, see Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘ “Clercs marchands” et “clercs méchaniques” dans la France du XIIIe siècle’, Comptes rendus des scéances de l’Academie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 125 (1981): 209–242. This Jean Rose may be the same as Jean Rose ‘called the writer’ who gave 5 écus to the Abbey of Saint-Corneille in 1358 (noted in Colette Beaune, Le Grand Ferré: Premier héros paysan (Paris, 2013), 195).

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garrison in the Marché, and they coordinated its actions with Étienne Marcel and the other Parisian reformers.³¹

Local Leaders Calle, his successor, and their associates worked with a network of lesser leaders at the local level. We know of a few such men whose command covered several settlements or a region, such as the captains of the counties of Montmorency and Beaumont-sur-Oise and the captain of Poix, Lignières, and Grandvilliers in western Picardy.³² The rest, numbering about 35, were captains of a single small town or village. While Calle, Archat de Bulles, and all of the men closely associated with them were from the Beauvaisis, village captains are in evidence from every area significantly touched by the Jacquerie, with the possible exception of the region south of Paris, where the incitement to revolt was late and probably not local, as I argue in Chapter 9. Both tiny villages, like Rhuis-lès-Verberie, and larger towns, such as Montataire, had such captains, but it may not be the case that every community had a captain, for captains are attested in less than a quarter of the settlements involved in the revolt. Villagers were capable of acting in concerted fashion without a preordained leader, as indeed seems to have initially been the case at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent. On the other hand, the number of those Jacques who served as leaders may be under-reported by the sources, ironically because the sources may have a more pronounced bias toward those with a leadership role than is immediately apparent. Because the general remission granted by the Dauphin in August covered all ordinary participation, the ‘rank and file’ probably had less incentive to acquire an individual pardon than those who had played an organizational role, not least because the civil suits allowed by the general remission tended to be directed at those considered the ‘principal actors’ in the revolt.³³ That is, some of the individuals named in the sources may have had leadership roles, the details of which are left unspecified, but are only named because they were leaders and

³¹ Jean Rose, Calle’s messenger to Compiègne, should not, however, be identified with either the pater familias of the Meldois clan or that man’s son, both named Jean, who were instrumental in the non-noble assault on the Marché, discussed in Chapter 8. Not only was Jean Rose the Jacques from La Prêle rather than Meaux, but he was likely dead in August 1358, when Master Jean Rose of Meaux received a remission (AN JJ 86, no. 312, fol. 104, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 90–91). These men must also be disambiguated from a Sir Jean Rose whose houses were attacked at Gonesse, who in turn is probably not the Master Jean Rosier, royal councillor, ‘allegedly killed by the country people’ (AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320; AN JJ 95, no. 140, fol. 55v; see Chapter 8). ³² AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256; AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136. See also AN JJ 90, no. 292, fol. 149v–50r, ed. Luce, no. 46, pp. 293–294; AN JJ 90, no. 148, fol. 79v–80r, ed. Brunel, ‘Archives’, no. 3, pp. 71–72. ³³ E.g. The pursuit of Jean Boulangier because he was allegedly a ‘principalis actor & capitaneus’ (AN X1a 17, fol. 284, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 27, pp. 514–515).

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therefore especially exposed to retribution or prosecution. One communal remission explicitly excludes an inhabitant from its remit because he was a ‘great rebel’, and another remission indicates that those who acted in a leadership role (Capitaine, faiseur, conseilleur & complice) were considered especially guilty by the authorities.³⁴ The recipient of the latter remission was explicitly named as a captain, but we can observe a silent selection of leaders at work elsewhere in the sources. For example, a collective remission issued to several villages in Champagne names one Michel Martin individually without further elaboration, but a remission issued to the same Martin a year later reveals that he had been ‘elected captain by the inhabitants of the village of Saint-Amand’, a village located near those remitted together in the first remission.³⁵ Likewise, in a civil suit naming Arnoul Guenelon and eight other men responsible for damage to Robert de Lorris’s château at Montépilloy, neither Guenelon nor the others are given the title ‘captain’.³⁶ An earlier remission granted to Guenelon, however, admits that Calle had made him the captain of the village of Catenoy (north of Senlis), and that he had ridden with Calle and participated in the attack on another of de Lorris’s châteaux at Ermenonville, where Calle and Parisian forces were also present.³⁷ The name of another man mentioned in this suit, Mathieu le Chandelier, is also mentioned in a lawsuit brought against multiple Jacques from Senlis for damage at the manor of Fontaine-Chaalis, a village located equidistant from Ermenonville and Montépilloy.³⁸ For many of those explicitly mentioned as captains or leaders of their communities, what we know about them is limited to the information that N. was a captain in the village of X. Where we have more information, it seems that a captain might be instituted by his local community, by Jacquerie leaders external to the community, or locally but in response to contact with Jacquerie leaders or ³⁴ ‘Toutevoie ce n’a este ne n’est nostre entente ne ne voulons que Colin le Faverel de la dite ville de Loisiee qui est un des grans rebelles et le quel est pour ce prisionier ou chastellet de Paris soit de Riens compris en ceste presente grace’ (AN JJ 86, no. 524, fol. 189v); AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256. ³⁵ AN JJ 86, no. 377, fol. 129r; AN JJ 90, no. 293, fol. 150r. This may also be the case with Jean du Four and Jacquet de Saux, who are separately named in the communal remission for Cormeilles-enParisis (AN JJ 86, no. 247, fol. 82v), and Jean Charroit, separately named in a remission for Boissy and Egly (AN JJ 86, no. 215, fol. 70). ³⁶ ‘Petrum Savare, Petrum Normannii, Lambertum Carnificis, Robertum Maleti, Arnulphum Guenelon, Guillelmum de Rivo, Michaelem Carnificis, Matheum Candelarii, ac Petrum Ferrici’ (AN X1a 18, fol. 63). ³⁷ ‘par la force & contrainte de feu Guillaume Calle . . . Arnoul Guenelon de Castenoy . . . se feust consentu d’estre Capitaine de la dite ville de Castenoy et de chevauchier & aler avecques les habitanz dicelle par aucunes Journees en la compaignie des diz Guillaume Calle & de ses adherens . . . au Retourner qu’il firent du chastel d’Ermonville s’en departi’ (AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r). All of these men were or became inhabitants of Senlis, and some of them can be found on a rent roll of SaintVincent de Senlis (AD Oise 599). ³⁸ AN X1a 21, fol. 514; AN X1a 22, fol. 47r. A Mathieu le Chandelier also appears on the SaintVincent roll cited in the previous note.

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others from other villages as part of a coordinated effort at mobilization. We can see entirely local processes at Angicourt in the Beauvaisis where Hue de Sailleville was ‘made captain’ (le firent leur capitaine) by those of the village and its environs, and at Rhuis near Verberie, where Jean des Hayes was chosen captain ‘under constraint from the people’ (par contrainte du pueple, esleu capitaine).³⁹ At the other end of the spectrum, in the case of Arnoul Guenelon, it was Calle himself who named him to the role. Sometimes, it was not just the captain but also the people who accompanied him who chose a local leader, as at the village of Remy near Compiègne where one Jean de Vignet was ‘made and chosen captain’ of that village by the ‘captains and many people of the Beauvaisis’.⁴⁰ At Chambly, it was after the ‘captain of the Beauvaisis’ had ordered the villagers to come to him that the villagers chose Gilles le Haguez to take an armed village contingent to the rendezvous.⁴¹ The institution of captains in response to a supra-local plan of mobilization, though perhaps without the direct influence of external movement leaders, can also be seen at the edges of the revolt in Champagne and Picardy. In the Perthois villages of Champagne, it was reported that orders had gone out to many villages to assemble to elect captains in order to ensure their safety against foreign mercenaries and French nobles.⁴² Similarly, near Poix in Picardy, an assembly about self-defence against English soldiers led villagers from three settlements to ‘choose Simon Doublet as their captain unanimously’.⁴³ There may be echoes here of ordonnances issued by the Estates General. In Champagne, where one remission claims that these assemblies were ordained by royal orders issued around Easter, this likely referred to Marcel’s sainte ordonnance of 1357, particularly as the letter also mentions signalling by bells in the same manner outlined in that ³⁹ AN JJ 90, no. 288, fol. 148r, ed. Luce, no. 24, pp. 253–254; AN JJ 86, no. 444, fol. 156, ed. Luce, no. 39, pp. 280–281. ⁴⁰ ‘Johannes prefatus fuisset per capitaneos & magnam quantitatem pllebis (sic) Belvacini et . . . factus vel electus capitaneus gentium de Remino’ (AN JJ 89, no. 609, fol. 281v). Similarly, see AN JJ 86, no. 437, fol. 154, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: 112–114. ⁴¹ ‘les diz habitanz esleurent, constituèrent et establirent le dit Giles à aler droit à Jouy en Teles, où le dit capitaine de Beauvoisis avoit mandés les diz habitanz’ (AN JJ 90, no. 354, fol. 182, ed. Luce, no. 49, pp. 297–299). ⁴² ‘les habitans de plusieurs villes du païs de Pertois se feussent assemblés pour ordonner comment il pourroient resister à la male volenté d’aucuns de hors du royaume dont il se doubtoient, et aussi contre les nobles du royaume, ou cas que aucune chose leur vouldroient mesfaire, et pour ce faire, ordener et gouverner eussent esleu le dit suppliant pour leur capitaine’ (AN JJ 90, no. 292, fol. 149v–50r, ed. Luce, no. 46, pp. 293–294); ‘eust esté ordené . . . en chascune des villes du dit païs, auroit une personne de la ville establie . . . à la seureté, garde, tuicion et defense du dit païs . . . Et lors fu establi le dit Jehan pour la dite ville de Thiebemont . . . [il] avecques pluseurs autres, ainsi esleus des autres villes du dit païs’ (AN JJ 86, no. 355, fol. 121, ed. Luce, no. 33, pp. 268–270). ⁴³ ‘Hue, par contraite des genz de la ville d’Angicourt, où il demouroit lors, et du païs d’environ . . . et contre sa volenté le firent leur capitaine (AN JJ 90, no. 288, fol. 148r, ed. Luce, no. 24, pp. 253–254); ‘pour avoir avis & deliberacion comment chascun pais en droit soy pourroit mieux resister au fait des anglois & autres ennemis du Royaume de france . . . les habitans des villes de Grantvillier, de poys & de ; inieres se feussent nagaires assemblez sur les champs en armes . . . et de commun assentement eussent esleu & fait Symon doublet de grantvillier leur capitaine’ (AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136).

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decree, though the more recent ordonnance issued at Compiègne had also ordered the institution of local captains chosen by their communities to organize defence.⁴⁴ But as I emphasized in Chapter 4, the importance of such gatherings to the Jacquerie also simply reflects the centrality of such assemblies—whether for rebellion or for the quotidian business of the community—to the basic fabric of non-noble social organization in the Middle Ages and beyond. There were other officers serving below or alongside these captains, and here, too, there may be a trace of the Estates’ stipulations, for the Compiègne ordonnance had required locally chosen captains to be assisted by counsellors, without whose advice they were not to make decisions nor spend money.⁴⁵ Bessancourt’s captain, Laufred le Goupilh, had a ‘counsellor’ (consiliarius) named Philippe le Bouchier, while the captain of river town Jaux was assisted by his lieutenant Étienne Nelon, as well as at least one dizinier (a commander of 10 men), called Jean le Grant.⁴⁶ Étienne du Wès, captain of Montataire, was assisted in the execution of Jean Bernier by Jean le Charon, who carried it out, and Mathieu de Leurel, who hit the lifeless body with his mason’s rule.⁴⁷ At Pont-Sainte-Maxence, the town’s captain also had an executioner, albeit an ostensibly unwilling one, in Jean Oursel, who was made to tie the ropes binding the squires sentenced to drown in the Oise.⁴⁸ At Jaux and Bessancourt, where we have the only explicit information about selection and institution, the villagers themselves chose their respective captains’ lieutenant and counsellor, though at Jaux, the dizinier reported simply that he was ‘made and named’ to hold that office.⁴⁹ It is not clear that all captains had subordinates, and some local leaders may have served together as equals in the role, such as at Chavanages where the villagers named the soldiers (hommes d’armes) Girart Sapience and Colot d’Uyron together as their armed representatives to a regional assembly.⁵⁰ But again, there may be more subordinate local leaders in the sources than are explicitly described as such. At Puisieux near Meaux, for example, the village’s leader was accompanied and assisted by his sister’s husband (eius sororius) Simon Franquet.⁵¹ In some instances, two or three men appear together as the only ⁴⁴ Ord., III: 121–46, art. 17, 218–32, art. 28. ⁴⁵ Ord., III: 218–32, art. 28. ⁴⁶ AN JJ 86, no. 361–362, fol. 123. In Paris and perhaps elsewhere, diziniers had surveillance over the inhabitants of their dixaine, a subdivision of a town’s quarters (Georges Picot, ‘Recherches sur les quartiniers, cinquanteniers et dixainiers de la ville de Paris’, Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 1 (1875): 158–165). ⁴⁷ AN JJ 98, no. 252, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 63, pp. 333–335. Jean Charon of Montataire received an individual, formulaic remission that does not mention this act in 1370 (AN JJ 100, no. 643, fol. 190v). ⁴⁸ AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330. ⁴⁹ ‘habitantes dicte ville de Bessencuria adinvicem congregati capitaneum elegerant Laufredum le Goupilh & Philipum le Bochier eius consiliarium (AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r); ‘esleu contre son gre & volunte par les habitanz de la dite ville lieu tenant du Capitaine dicelle’ (AN JJ 86, no. 361, fol. 123r); ‘eust este fait & nomme disinier dessoubz le Capitaine de la dite ville de Jaux’ (AN JJ 86, no. 362, fol. 123). ⁵⁰ AN JJ 86, no. 596, fol. 217, ed. Luce, no. 41, pp. 283–285. ⁵¹ AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v–24r.

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named individuals in a collective remission for a community, such as in the case of Jean du Four and Jacquet de Saux, named in the remission for Cormeilles-enParisis, and in the case of the champenois villages’ remission that names Michel Martin (who admitted being a captain in another remission), where another man, Guillaume Mansone, also appears.⁵² There are also a few cases, in which individual men were remitted in pairs, as with the case of Jean Lespert and his son-in-law, both originally from Saint-Leu-d’Esserent, now living in Senlis.⁵³ In one such case, the remission also tells us that the pair were travelling with numerous, unnamed ‘companions’.⁵⁴ Chosen by some combination of internal and external pressure to be their communities’ leaders, captains and their assistants were favoured (or burdened) with command because they were trustworthy men of standing within their communities.⁵⁵ The captain of Chambly’s objection to serving as captain because he was ‘not someone with the necessary physical strength or power or wealth for the job, nor was he from the village’ gives a sense of what the proper qualifications must have been.⁵⁶ While a few had connections to provincial cities or originated elsewhere, most captains were natives or at least long-time residents of the villages that they led.⁵⁷ They tended to be relatively wealthy: several mentioned having owned multiple houses (now destroyed in the Counter-Jacquerie), and some were capable of paying large fines or ransoms.⁵⁸ Like the ‘captain and principal actor’ Jean Boulangier, who (prior to his death) had supported a wife, minor children, ⁵² AN JJ 86, no. 247, fol. 82v; AN JJ 86, no. 377, fol. 129r. Mansone’s appearance may also or alternatively be due to his status as a serf of the villages’ lord, on whose behalf the remission was issued: ‘Guillaume Mansone, homme de corps du dit chevalier’. A person might be a serf of an individual or institution other than his/her lord. For example, see the villagers of Dompremy, seigneurial subjects of Saint-Memmie, where at least 20 inhabitants were serfs of seven other individuals or institutions (Châlons-en-Champagne, AD Marne H 82). See also AN JJ 90, no. 419, fol. 211 for three individuals remitted along with the community of Plessis-Bouchard. ⁵³ AN JJ 90, no. 356, fol. 183v. See also AN JJ 86, no. 250, fol. 83v (Enguerran and Guillemet de la Mare, brothers); AN JJ 86, no. 320, fol. 107 (Symon le Choine and his son, Lorin); AN JJ 86, no. 235, fol. 77 (Thomas Coureusse and Thenevoit Paupain of Chilly-Mazarin). See also the case of two brothers, Jean and Robert de Braches, killed in the Counter-Jacquerie while meeting with other villagers in a house (AN JJ 108, no. 60, fol. 37v–38r, ed. Luce, no. 64, pp. 335–338). ⁵⁴ AN JJ 86, no. 291, fol. 97v, ed. Luce, no. 26, pp. 256–257: Colin François and Nicaise Fremy ‘le jeune’, whose company must have been large, given that they consumed 20 fowls and 80 carp. ⁵⁵ On such ‘very local elites’ see Ian Forrest, Trustworthy men: How inequality and faith made the medieval church (Princeton, 2018), ch. 6. ⁵⁶ ‘il n’estoit de corps, de puissance ne de biens personne à ce habile ne convenable, ne de la dicte ville’ (AN JJ 90, no. 354, fol. 182, ed. Luce, no. 49, pp. 297–299). ⁵⁷ E.g. Arnoul Guenelon of Catenoy, who made his home in Senlis, and the multi-village captain Jean Flageolet of Favresse in Champagne, who had goods in the city of Châlons-en-Champagne: ‘saisi & arreste touz ses biens partout ou il les out peu trouver tant en la ville de Chaalons comme ailleurs’ (AN JJ 90, no. 292, fol. 149v–50r, ed. Luce, no. 46, pp. 293–94, omitting this and the latter part of the letter). ⁵⁸ Simon Doublet had maisons (AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136), as did Arnoul Guenelon (AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r); Eudin le Charon was able to come up with 200 écus in good money with which to ransom himself when captured by Counter-Jacques (AN JJ 90, no. 556, fol. 275v–76r). Other examples in Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The social constituency of the Jacquerie revolt of 1358’, Speculum 95 (2020): 689–715.

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and a deaf-mute sister, some local leaders had wives, children, and other dependants.⁵⁹ In other words, similar to Calle and other top leaders, these were men of sufficient means to start a family and they must have been of a reasonably mature age to have had the time to do so. The only Jacques whose age we know for certain is Arnoul Guenelon. Married at least once, he was 30 at the time of the revolt.⁶⁰ Also similar to the top leadership, some local leaders held positions of local power. Nearly 20 per cent of local captains were minor officials, and in some places, the Jacques simply co-opted leaders who were already in place.⁶¹ When the Jacques approached Philippe Poignant about taking on a leadership role, for example, he had already served as a seigneurial and royal sergeant and as guardian for the bishop of Beauvais and the abbey of Saint-Denis, positions that entailed relaying commands and keeping order.⁶² Like Poignant, Jean du Four, remitted along with his village, was also an officer of Saint-Denis, serving as prévôt for his community, which was under the abbey’s lordship.⁶³ Jacquin de Chennevières, captain of the castellany of Montmorency, noted service to the crown in his remission, and he also served as seigneurial prévôt of the same castellany in 1362–1368, a position for which he must have had some earlier administrative experience.⁶⁴ The captain of Beaumont-sur-Oise, at whose suggestion the Montmorencians chose Jacquin, was himself the seigneurial prévôt of that county.⁶⁵ Jean Oursel was chosen to take part in the execution of squires at Pont-Sainte-Maxence because his prior experience of ‘exercising jurisdiction’ meant that he knew how to tie ropes so that drowning men could not slip them.⁶⁶ Other prominent Jacques came from a family tradition of serving in ⁵⁹ ‘Johanna, relicta deffuncti Johannis Boulengarii burgensis quondam de Montedesiderio, suo nomine et ut habens ballum gardiam seu administrationem Johannis et Johanete ipsius & dicti deffuncti liberorum annis minorum . . . Marote la Boulengiere sorori deffuncti mute & surde’ (AN X1a 17, fol. 284, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 27, pp. 514–515). See also AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v– 24r; AN JJ 89, no. 481, fol. 217v. ⁶⁰ In a 1398 donation (in exchange for elder care at Saint-Maurice de Senlis) he said himself to be 70 years old (AD Oise H 841: ‘Arnoul Guennelon demourant a Senlis aagie de soixante dix ans ou environ’). His wife, Genviève, was mentioned in the deed from 1388 for the property being donated, but we do not know when the marriage took place (ibid.). ⁶¹ For parallels with England in 1381, see Christopher Dyer, ‘The social and economic background to the revolt of 1381’ in R.H. Hilton and T.H. Aston (eds), The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984), 15–17. ⁶² ‘sergent de nostre dit seigneur et le nostre en la prévosté de Senlis . . . gardien de nostre chier et amé cousin et conseiller . . . l’evesque de Bauvais et des seigneurs de Saint-Denis’ (AN JJ 90, no. 148, fol. 79v–80r, ed. Brunel, ‘Archives’, no. 3, pp. 71–72); AD Oise, G 21; AN JJ 90, no. 563, fol. 278. On sergeants, see Bernard Guenée, Tribunaux et gens de justice dans le bailliage de Senlis à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1380—vers 1550) (Paris, 1963), 213–216. ⁶³ AN JJ 86, no. 247, fol. 82v; Guy Fourquin, Les campagnes de la région parisienne à la fin du Moyen Âge (du milieu du XIIIe siècle au début du XVIe siècle) (Paris, 1964), 134–135. ⁶⁴ AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256; Brigitte Bedos[-Rezak], La châtellenie de Montmorency des origines à 1368: Aspects féodaux, sociaux et économiques (Paris, 1980), 172, for his later career. Since his service was to Philippe VI, who died in 1350, Jacquin was probably middle aged in 1358. ⁶⁵ AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256. ⁶⁶ AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330.

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such administrative roles, even if we cannot confidently say that they did so themselves.⁶⁷ All of these men were literate. It may have been this sort of person that Jean le Bel was thinking of when he wondered whether it was not at the ‘encouragement and advice of some governors and tax-receivers’ that the far-flung Jacques were able to coordinate their efforts.⁶⁸ The similarities of social profile shared by local leaders and those from the higher echelons associated with Calle belie the hierarchical nature of the revolt’s organization. The Great Captain and his sovereign captains gave orders to these local men and were not to be gainsaid. But while this was a hierarchical organization, it was also a relatively small one, with few links in the chain of command. There is evidence of some lateral ties and interactions among leaders of different ranks. Arnoul Guenelon, although captain of a very small village, nevertheless seems to have had direct access to Calle, riding with him, as well as spending time with him at the siege of Ermenonville.⁶⁹ Guenelon also seems to have had some ties to Simon Doublet, regional captain of the Jacques at Poix, Lignières, and Aumale, for the dispositive language of their remissions is exactly the same. Doublet’s letter appears immediately after Guenelon’s in the register, and, like Guenelon’s it, too, refers to Calle by name.⁷⁰ Doublet, who says he was convinced by his relatives to accept the office, probably did so at the behest of Jean and Guilbert Doublet, whose alleged roles played out in the area of Simon’s captaincy.⁷¹ The sources connect four of the local leaders to Étienne Marcel, whose collaboration with Calle is demonstrated above. In two of these cases, the connection might be doubted because it was alleged by the individuals’ opponents.⁷² But both Jacquin de Chennevières, who had a commission from Étienne Marcel to ⁶⁷ Jean and Guilbert Doublet, probably sons of the bailli of Milly (AN JJ 88, no. 1, fol. 1–2; AN X2a 6, fol. 7v–8r). Guilbert himself is described as an avocat in 1377 (AD Oise G 872); Robert, Colin, and Ademin Manessier, prominent in destruction at Gonesse, were likely descendants of Robert Menessier, prévôt of Gonesse in 1275, and in 1365 a Robert Manessier, probably the same man as the rebel Robert Manecier, served as captain of the village’s fortified church (Luce, no. 18, p. 240 erroneously citing AN X1a 14, fol. 249; AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320; Pierre-Clément Timbal et al. (eds), La guerre de Cent ans vue à travers les registres du Parlement (1337–1369) (Paris, 1961), no. 50, pp. 166–167; Pierre d’Éméville, royal councillor and president of Parlement, intervened on behalf of the captain of Fresnoy, as well as his own brother (AN JJ 86, no. 384–85, fol. 132v–33r). ⁶⁸ ‘se ce ne fut par le pourchas et conseil d’aucun de ces gouverneurs et rechepveurs de maletotes’ (Jean le Bel, 258; see Chapter 3). ⁶⁹ ‘AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r. ⁷⁰ AN JJ 86, no. 391–92, fol. 136. See also the serial entries of remissions for Germain de Réveillon, Colart du Four, and Philippe le Bouquillon, which use identical language and which all recount journeys to Mello/Clermont (AN JJ 86, no. 308–10, fol. 102v–103; no. 308–309, ed. Luce, no. 28–29, pp. 260–262, no. 310, excerpted in Luce, p. 178). ⁷¹ ‘par aucuns de ses amis charnelz fu avisie’ (AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136); ‘in dicta diocesi Belvacensis & alibi & specialiter in diocesi Ambianensis de castris de Albamalla & de Pisteyo’ (AN JJ 88, no. 1, fol. 1–2). ⁷² The captain and counsellor of Bessancourt allegedly went to Gonesse in order to hear about ‘certis ordinationibus prepositi mercatorum Parisiensis’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r). Jean le Jaqueminart of the Perthois claimed that he went to Paris to speak with Jacques la Vache rather than to receive a commission from Étienne Marcel (‘aucuns nobles maintiennent que . . . [il] estoit venuz en nostre host devant Paris parler au prevost des marchanz, qui lors estoit, afin d’avoir une commission de lui,

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destroy castles, and Hue de Sailleville, who beseeched him to restrain the rank and file’s violence, admitted the connection, even if in exculpatory fashion.⁷³ Although Hue captained a tiny village, his letter mentions Clermont’s betrayal of the Captain of the Beauvaisis and his accomplices to Charles of Navarre and their subsequent execution, indicating detailed knowledge about the fate of the top leadership.⁷⁴ So while there was certainly a hierarchy, the chain of command was not a strict one nor was it strictly obeyed.

Communications and Logistics Within the organization, local leaders’ primary function was communication and coordination. They served as the link between the local people who made up the revolt’s rank-and-file forces, on one hand, and the higher commanders, on the other. Much of their job, as they tended to present it later, was to use the former to implement the commands of the latter. Among these commands were the execution of particular nobles or enemies of the revolt, as occurred at Montataire, Rhuis, and Pont-Sainte-Maxence.⁷⁵ Those executions occurred within the local settlements as did some of the property damage committed by the rebels. Local captains also directed their village’s inhabitants about where to go and what to do, as at Puisieux where Jean Raie announced (proclamasset) on behalf of the Captain of the Countryside that everyone was to arm themselves to pillage and destroy noble houses and fortresses. Raie may have received these instructions from Jacques coming to the village from elsewhere, for he is described as having made the proclamation upon their arrival.⁷⁶ When orders directed villagers to undertake action outside the village, the captains led the village’s forces to the fray, as at Chambly, whence Gilles le Haugez conducted armed villagers to an attack at Jouysous-Thelle on the Great Captain’s orders.⁷⁷

combien que en verité il y fust venuz pour parler à nostre amé et feal conseillier, messire Jaques la Vache’ (AN JJ 86, no. 355, fol. 121, ed. Luce, no. 33, pp. 268–270). ⁷³ ‘Jaquin eust eu en ce temps du feu prevost des marcheans de Paris certaine commission, contenant que toutes forteresses et maisons . . . feussent mises à terre et arrasées, en telle manière que personne n’y peust habiter, neantmoins il ne executa point ycelle commission’ (AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256). ⁷⁴ ‘fust venuz pardevant le prevost des marchanz, qui lors estoit à Paris, lui monstrer et requerre qui’l vousist conseil à ce que les choses desus dites cessassent’ (AN JJ 90, no. 288, fol. 148r, ed. Luce, no. 24, pp. 253–254); see Chapter 8. ⁷⁵ Montataire: AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97; AN JJ 98, no. 252, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 63, pp. 333–335. Rhuis: AN JJ 86, no. 444, fol. 156, ed. Luce, no. 39, pp. 280–281. Pont-Sainte-Maxence: AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330. ⁷⁶ ‘Johannes dictus Raie apud villam de Puseolis seu de Puisieux tunc commorans . . . nonnulli alii Innobiles, eius complices, venissent apud dictam villam de Puiseux & ibidem prefatus Johannes . . . de consensu unanimi dictorum suorum complicum proclamasset’ (AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v–24r). ⁷⁷ See also AN JJ 90, no. 292, fol. 149v–50r, ed. Luce, no. 46, pp. 293–294; AN JJ 86, no. 391–92, fol. 136.

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If the village with its captain was the basic building block of the revolt, the Jacques did not remain in tightly defined village groups. Sources speak of Jacques from many villages (pluseurs autres de pluseurs villes) combining forces and travelling to other settlements where they invited or compelled the locals’ participation.⁷⁸ Local captains had a role in coordinating these multi-origin groups, but large, multi-village assemblies were also important to communication and organization. The Jacquerie had taken its initial shape at such an assembly. Indeed, the term ‘assembly’ was frequently used as a byword for the revolt itself. At Goyencourt, for example, Pierre le Debonnaire and his brother went to find ‘a commotion or assembly’ during the Jacquerie, which itself was described in their letter of remission as a ‘commotion and assembly’.⁷⁹ The assimilation of assembly to revolt resembles a widely held perception (at least among lords) that unincorporated communities could not assemble without the permission of their lord—in 1347, Philippe VI’s chancery described this as the custom throughout the realm— but it also reveals the importance of such meetings to the revolt.⁸⁰ Different from the local meetings called to determine the community’s response to the Jacquerie, these large assemblies held in customary meeting places were attended by top leaders or their lieutenants and served as musters as well as opportunities for consultation and communication. It was to such an assembly called by the Great Captain that the villagers of Chambly were told to send armed men, on account of which they instituted their captain and gave him an armed company.⁸¹ Commands from Étienne Marcel were also conveyed at assemblies: the captain and counsellor of Bessancourt went to hear such commands at Gonesse, a village north of Paris where public proclamations were customarily made, and south of Paris, able-bodied men capable of bearing arms were summoned to Chilly-Mazarin, used by the Parisians as a mustering place, where Marcel’s deputies were to give orders.⁸² In Champagne, village captains and their troops assembled at Saint-Vrain to decide on a course of military action.⁸³ ⁷⁸ Quote at AN X1c 11, no. 61–62. See also AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262; AN JJ 87, no. 117, fol. 80v–81r; AN JJ 145, no. 498, fol. 229v–30r; and AN X1c 32, no. 31, among many others. ⁷⁹ ‘commotion & assemblee estoit entre les genz du plat pays d’une part et les nobles d’autre part . . . en une commotion ou assemblee qui lors estoit en la ville de Goiencourt’ (AN JJ 88, no. 89, fol. 56v–57r). ⁸⁰ ‘ne pevent faire assemblees ne taille sans le congie de leur seigneur selon Raison Usaige & coustume en nostre royaume, Mesmement comme ilz n’ayent corps ne commune Nientmoin les dis habitans ont fait pluseurs assemblees et tailles ou emprans pour et en nom de commun par mainiere de conspiracion’ (AD Aisne G 253, fol. 87v). Cf. a less restrictive interpretation in Beaumanoir, cap. IV, §§154, 169, vol. I: 80–81, 86–87, albeit almost 70 years earlier. ⁸¹ AN JJ 90, no. 354, fol. 182, ed. Luce, no. 49, pp. 297–299. ⁸² Gonesse: AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r; ‘locum consuetum pro proclamacionibus ex parte nostra faciendis’ (AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320). It was at Gonesse that Charles of Navarre mustered the villagers of the Île-de-France on 22 June (GC, 187–188, and Chapter 9). ChillyMazarin: AN JJ 86, no. 231, fol. 75v–76r, ed. Luce, no. 30, pp. 263–264; Parisian municipal troops had mustered there in the winter (AN JJ 86, no. 350, fol. 119v; see Chapter 1). Both places were on major roads leading from Paris. ⁸³ AN JJ 86, no. 265, fol. 89r, ed. Luce, no. 34, pp. 270–272; AN JJ 86, no. 465, fol. 164, ed. Luce, no. 40, pp. 281–283; AN JJ 86, no. 578, fol. 209v–10r, confirmed at AN JJ 95, no. 116, fol. 44v; AN JJ 86, no. 596, fol. 217, ed. Luce, no. 41, pp. 283–285.

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These extra-village assemblies served other functions than those linked to the aims and organization of the revolt’s leadership. The assembly at Saint-Vrain’s purpose was to stage a response to the expected violence of the lord of Saint-Dizier and his mercenaries against the Perthois villagers, but it was there that the curate of Blacy’s parishioners did their dancing.⁸⁴ The account of the assembly a Goyencourt attended by the Debonnaire brothers, which is excerpted in the Introduction, gives no hint of leadership or a plan, though the village lies close to the castle of Plessis-de-Roye, where large numbers of rebels besieged Mahieu de Roye’s family and the nobles taking refuge with them.⁸⁵ The Debonnaires in fact claimed that they only went out of youthful stupidity (jeunesse), implying that they had no idea about the gathering’s purpose. No doubt, it was better to lay one’s actions at the feet of imprudent immaturity than to admit complicity with conspiracy. Nonetheless, the remission’s tale illustrates the exciting attraction that such an assembly might provide to young men in need of amusement. Perhaps there was dancing at Goyencourt, too. In any case, the Debonnaires did not get in trouble for attacking the nobles. Rather, Jean le Debonnaire clubbed another attendee to death after members of the noisy crowd became rough and attacked them in a scene reminiscent of a tavern brawl, if patrons regularly brought cudgels and maces to the pub.⁸⁶ Once on the road, organization became more military, if not always more disciplined. We can observe some Jacques travelling individually or in pairs in the wake of the major defeats, but most Jacques travelled together in larger groups.⁸⁷ Some were constituted of men from the same village. This was true of the 8 men on horse and 16 on foot whom Gilles le Haguez led from their home in Chambly to Ivry-le-Temple and Jouy-sous-Thelle and probably also true of some or most of Jean le Fréron’s ‘company’, which he led from his hometown of Catheux in the Beauvaisis to Le Mesnil, Thoix, and Auffay in Normandy.⁸⁸ There were also much larger groups that must have involved people from multiple villages, and these groups were combined from village contingents like that commanded by Gilles le Haguez, just as communal levies joined together into larger companies in royal or seigneurial armies.⁸⁹ Jean de Charny claimed that his ⁸⁴ AN JJ 86, no. 265, fol. 89r, ed. Luce, no. 34, pp. 270–272. ⁸⁵ Goyencourt: AN JJ 88, no. 89, fol. 56v–57r; Plessis-de-Roye: Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 168–69r; Chron. norm., 128. ⁸⁶ ‘alerent par leur Jeunece’ (AN JJ 88, no. 89, fol. 56v–57r). ⁸⁷ E.g. an inhabitant of Beaupuits, caught 53 kilometres away between Meaux and Lizy-sur-Ourcq (AN JJ 86, no. 152, fol. 51v); Aliames de Maresquiel or le Maresquel (AN JJ 89, no. 377, fol. 159); Jacquet de Fransures and Pierre Cardaine (AN JJ 86, no. 165, fol. 54v, ed. Luce, no. 20, pp. 245–247); Perrin Baudin (AN JJ 100, no. 478, fol. 148r). ⁸⁸ ‘huit personnes de cheval et seise de pié de la dicte ville, les quiex se mirent à chemin ensemble’ (AN JJ 90, no. 354, fol. 182, ed. Luce, no. 49, pp. 297–299); AN JJ 90, no. 294, fol. 150, ed. Luce, no. 48, pp. 296–297. ⁸⁹ Philippe Contamine, Guerre, État et sociéte à la fin du Moyen Âge: Études sur les armées des rois de France, 1337–1494 (Paris, 1972), 26–38, 139–150; Bertrand Schnerb, ‘Vassals, allies and mercenaries:

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property was attacked by ‘up to 400 people or more’ from ‘many villages’ in both the vicecounty of Paris and the bailliage of Meaux.⁹⁰ The sources mention large companies of Jacques at battles near Clermont, where their (reportedly) 4,600 men were arranged in three battalions: near Poix, where noblemen confronted a company (une route) of over 300 Jacques ‘in good order’ (en belle ordonnance); between Gerberoy and Roye, where another route of 800 men was destroyed; and on the road near Saché in Normandy, where Counter-Jacques attacked 600 of them.⁹¹ In the Chicago redaction of his chronicle, Froissart spoke of the military encampment (logeis) of the Jacques’ army (hoost) at Plessis-de-Roye, and a seigneurial court described the rebels as the ‘army and battalion of those troublemakers called Jacques Bonhommes’.⁹² Lacking the radios and satellites that coordinate modern armies, the Jacques used the same cues that guided all medieval troops. They blew horns or trumpets to signal battle and they cried Montjoie, the customary battle cry of the French, to encourage and identify themselves on the field.⁹³ A frantic pealing of bells calling villagers to arms has been evoked by the Jacquerie’s historians dating back to Siméon Luce. Jacques d’Avout, for example, imagined les cloches sonnent à la volée across the valleys of the Oise, Thérain and Brèche.⁹⁴ Bells were certainly rung often during revolts, including at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent less than a decade earlier, when the villagers rang one of the priory’s bells for a long time while making ‘maximum tumult’ against the priory, and near Laon in 1338 when the serfs assembled à son des cloches against royal commissioners sent to investigate their disobedience to a cathedral chapter.⁹⁵ There is, however, only a little evidence for the ringing of bells during the Jacquerie, all of which comes from the Perthois The French army before and after 1346’ in Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston (eds), The Battle of Crécy, 1346 (Woodbridge, 2005), 265–272 and see AD Aisne H 1508, fol. 356v–57 for the summons of Picard villagers to a royal muster in Compiègne in 1355 on pain of having their wives and children turned out of house. ⁹⁰ ‘habitatores plurium villarum in vicecomitatu Parisiensi et baillivia Meldensi commorantes, usque ad numerum quatuor centum personarum et amplius’ (AN X1a 14, fol. 391, ed. Luce, no. 55, pp. 306–309). ⁹¹ Clermont: 4 Valois, 73. Poix: 4 Valois, 76; Chron. norm., 129. Gerberoy/Roye: 4 Valois, 76; Saché: ‘trouva en chemin Jusques au nombre de viC personnes ou environ des diz nonnobles’ (AN JJ 109, no. 434, fol. 214). ⁹² Froissart, MS Chicago, fol. 168v; AN JJ 89, no. 377, fol. 159. ⁹³ 4 Valois, 74. ⁹⁴ d’Avout, 187. ⁹⁵ Saint-Leu-d’Esserent: ‘[cam]panam dicti claustri ad pulsandam horam comedendi ordinatam per longum temporis spacium pulsarunt . . . maximum tumultum ibidem faciendo’ (AN X2a 5, fol. 162v– 63r; the choice of this particular bell, which called the monks to the refectory, reflects that one of the villagers’ grievances against the monks was their unbecoming and expensive gluttony, a complaint also at issue in their earlier lawsuit against the priory: Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The monks and the masses at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent: Rural politics in Northern France before the Jacquerie’ in Miriam Müller (ed.), The Routledge history of rural life (Abingdon, forthcoming 2021); Laon: ‘a son des cloches se assemblerent et armerent et assailirent et en chacerent, crient a hautes voiz sur euls a mort a mort aus murtriers aus larrons’ (AN JJ 71, no. 86, fol. 65). For bells in Flemish revolts, see Jelle Haemers, ‘A moody community? Emotion and ritual in late medieval urban revolts’ in Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (eds), Emotions in the heart of the city (14th–16th century)/Les émotions au coeur de la ville (XIVe–XVIe siècle) (Turnhout, 2005), 72–73.

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where villagers assembled à son de cloche, supposedly conforming to orders from the government.⁹⁶ This was clearly thought seditious, and the curate of Blacy was accused by his parishioners of having sold the village’s bells to the region’s nobles (il avoit venduz les cloches de la dite ville de Blacey aus nobles du dit païs).⁹⁷ Bells may have been part of the ‘noisy terrors’ elsewhere, an aspect perhaps so expected as to go unremarked. The word effroiz with its connotations of chaotic noise indicates, at any rate, that the Jacquerie was an inordinate and disturbing auditory experience.⁹⁸ Visually, the Jacques may have identified themselves with matching clothing. In the English Rising, the rebels commissioned 60 matching doublets for those in London, and there is a report from Scarborough that the rebels there wore matching hoods as a sign of their fellowship.⁹⁹ In the Ghent War of the same period, the rebel militia were known for the white hoods they wore, a fashion later adopted by rebels elsewhere in sympathy.¹⁰⁰ The only textual hint that the Jacques might have worn matching garments is a mention in Germain de Réveillon’s remission that he was seized by his hood (chaperon), when made to lead the Jacques from Montataire to Mello-Clermont, but it does not specify of what design or whether anyone else was wearing the same sort.¹⁰¹ An illumination in an early fifteenth-century manuscript of Froissart’s chronicle now at the Morgan Library does show the rebels in red, as well as wearing the quilted jackets typical of common foot-soldiers from which it has been speculated that the name Jacques Bonhommes derived (Figure 6.1). These too are red, though an illumination on the facing folio shows the rebels variously in red and black. As is also depicted in the illumination in Figure 6.1, the Jacques flew flags. Jean de Venette’s chronicle evokes the Jacques’ ‘flags flying ahead of them’ (vexillis procedentes) as they overran the countryside.¹⁰² Quatre Valois reports that at the

⁹⁶ Cohn, ‘Enigmas’, 235–236; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘À son de cloche: The interpretation of public order and legitimate authority in northern France, 1355–58’ in Herrer, Challet, Dumolyn, and Ruiz (eds), Comunidad, 357–376. ⁹⁷ AN JJ 86, no. 265, fol. 89r, ed. Luce, no. 34, pp. 270–272. ⁹⁸ The ‘soundscape’ of revolt has been considered by a number of scholars, not least because of the sources insistence on the noisiness of rebels: Michael Sizer, ‘Murmur, clamor, and tumult: The soundscape of revolt and oral culture in the Middle Ages’, Radical History Review 121 (2015): 9–31; Philippe Hamon, ‘Le tocsin de la révolte: Comment l’entendre? (France, XIVe–début XIXe siècle)’ in Vincent Challet and Héloïse Hermant (eds), Des mots et des gestes: Le corps et la voix dans l’univers de la révolte (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles), special issue of Histoire, Économie & Société 38 (2019): 101–117, and other articles in that issue. ⁹⁹ Doublets: Froissart, SHF, X: §222, p. 119; Scarborough: ‘they rose in various fellowships and bands against the king and his liegemen, making and wearing a livery of hoods for that purpose’ (R.B. Dobson (ed. and trans.), The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, 2nd edn (Manchester, 1984), 291). ¹⁰⁰ Christiane Raynaud, ‘L’assassinat de Roger d’Autrerive (Wouter van Outrive): Le 6 septembre 1379, dans quelques manuscrits des Chroniques de Froissart du début du XVe siècle et leur illustration’ in Vincent Challet and Patricia Victorin (eds), Du meurtre en politique: Regards croisés sur l’utilisation de la violence en contexte populaire, special issue of Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes/ Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 34 (2017): 50–59. ¹⁰¹ AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262. ¹⁰² Jean de Venette, 174.

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Figure 6.1 Jacques carry flags into battle with Navarre (pictured with crown on middle right), Froissart’s chroniques, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.804, fol. 138v, reproduced by permission

battle of Mello-Clermont they carried many banners, and that these were painted with the lilies of France (moult d’enseignes paintes à fleur de liz).¹⁰³ One Jacques, a certain Drieu de Houdenville, admitted carrying one of these banners (portoit une banniere) during the revolt, and the Parisian troops, acting with the Jacques, are said to have attacked the Marché at Meaux with ‘banners unfurled’ (à bannières desploiées).¹⁰⁴ Municipalities, including even small villages, commonly carried banners on military expeditions, so some of these flags may have been communal ensigns.¹⁰⁵ Indeed, in 1358, the city government of Beauvais commissioned 25 painted pennants, including one of silk or taffeta, for its citizens to carry into battle.¹⁰⁶ Notably, the illuminator of the Morgan Library manuscript painted the Jacques as flying rather humble uncoloured pennants, which are marked with

¹⁰³ 4 Valois, 74. Much has been made of this apparently ‘royalist’ manifestation, as well as the battle cry Montjoie, but these signifiers were not monopolized by the Valois crown. Indeed, Edward III and Charles of Navarre also carried the lilies. They were more broadly French, and they were also simply what a northern French man with any experience or knowledge of battles would have been used to. On the lilies, see Colette Beaune, The birth of an ideology: Myths and symbols of nation in late-medieval France, Frederic L. Cheyette (ed.), Susan Ross Hutton (trans.), (Berkeley, 1991), 201–225. ¹⁰⁴ AN JJ 89, no. 481, fol. 217v; AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244. ¹⁰⁵ For examples, see Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Violence and the State in Languedoc, 1250–1400 (Cambridge, 2014), 70–71, 93. ¹⁰⁶ ‘a Gille du Quesnel peintre pour une targe et un pennonchel de chendail et pour 24 pennonchiaux de bougueren pour mettre l’auroy de le ville’ (Mediathèques du Beauvaisis, Collection Bucquetaux-Cousteaux, LXIX: 24, transcription of a now destroyed text).

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what appear to be a boot and pot and which contrast markedly with Navarre’s grand ensign. These may be guild flags, of the sort we know to have been carried in the Ciompi Revolt in Florence and in Flemish revolts.¹⁰⁷ These standards communicated the identity and movements of particular contingents, but they also served to signal the Jacques’ militaristic intent to observers: a raised banner was both a legal indication of war and a common sign of rebellion.¹⁰⁸ Such activities were not always wholly distinct in contemporary practice or imagination, as the Jacquerie itself demonstrates.¹⁰⁹ Like any army on the move, the Jacques’ troops required logistical support. Although many Jacques reported periods of travel, they did not mention where they slept. If ‘in the open air’ is probably the answer for most of them, there must have been at least some Jacques with tents or who were quartered in local houses, for the heavy rain falling at Plessis-de-Roye did not dislodge the rebel encampment besieging it.¹¹⁰ There is more evidence for how the Jacques were victualed. The Quatre Valois chronicler noted that the inhabitants of cities and waystations put tables out in the streets for the passing rebels, and a remission relates that the citizens of Meaux gave ‘wine and other foodstuff and necessities and had tables put out in the streets for their refreshment’.¹¹¹ Providing food is one of the very few places where we can see women participating in the Jacquerie, for the Quatre Valois chronicler remarks that the food was put out by women, as well as men (gens, femmes ou hommes), a useful reminder that the revolt could not have taken place without considerable, if often invisible, domestic support. The Jacques also relied on the hospitality (often coerced) of individuals. Here, too, we have a woman, the countess of Valois, who provided them with food near Gaillefontaines, a deed, ostensibly motivated by fear, that nonetheless caused her ¹⁰⁷ Richard C. Trexler, ‘Follow the flag: The Ciompi Revolt seen from the streets’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 46 (1984): 357–392; Peter Arnade, ‘Crowds, banners, and the market place: Symbols of defiance and defeat during the Ghent War of 1452–1453’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 471–497; Haemers, ‘A moody community?’ 73–74; Patrick Lantschner, ‘Revolts and the political order of cities in the Late Middle Ages’, P&P 225 (2014): 16, 40–41. Cf. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, Lust for liberty: The politics of social revolt in medieval Europe, 1200–1450: Italy, France, and Flanders (Cambridge, MA, 2006), ch. 8. ¹⁰⁸ On battlefield communication, see Robert W. Jones, Bloodied banners: Martial display on the medieval battlefield (Woodbridge, 2010), ch. 2. On legality: Maurice H. Keen, ‘Treason trials under the law of arms: The Alexander Prize essay’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 12 (1962): 93–95. ¹⁰⁹ Lantschner, ‘Revolts and the political order’, 38–42. The Jacquerie was occasionally referred to as a war: AN JJ 86, no. 152, fol. 51v; AN X1a 17, fol. 51v–52, ed. Luce, no. 58, pp. 320–322 (in which Luce mis-transcribed ‘guerre’ as ‘guede’); AN X2a 7, fol. 213r; possibly AN JJ 95, no. 60, fol. 22. ¹¹⁰ Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 168–69r. Beauvais’s municipal accounts from the 1350s, including 1358, also show expenses for tents (Mediathèques du Beauvaisis, Collection Bucquet-aux-Cousteaux, LXIX: 21, 24). ¹¹¹ 4 Valois, 72; ‘administrèrent vins et autres vivres et neccessitez, et leur feirent mettre les tables parmi les rues pour les raffreschir’ (AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244). This remission, granted in 1373, may have been the source for the royal chronicler’s account, written a few years later: ‘firent mettre par les rues les tables et les nappes, et le pain, le vin et la viande sus; et burent et mangierent, se ilz vouldrent, et se raffreschirent’ (GC, 182).

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much difficulty during the Counter-Jacquerie.¹¹² Individual help seems particularly characteristic of the revolt in western Picardy, for it was there that Fremy Houdrier hosted dinners for the Jacques’ top brass, and that one Aliames de Maresquel of Airiannes gave the Jacques bread, as well as armour and equipment.¹¹³ Seizures also played a role in keeping the rebels fed. The appropriation of the curate of Blacy’s grain stores suggests organized acquisition for distribution, and the theft of 20 fowls and 80 fish from Bézu-les-Fèves east of Meaux, which were immediately consumed by Jacques eating ‘in company’, suggests a version of living off the land.¹¹⁴ Of course, a lot of individual and ad hoc pilfering must also have taken place along the way, for if the Jacques were organized, they were no more disciplined than any other medieval army.

Constraint and Conflict To the extent that discipline was possible, force and fear played major roles in ensuring obedience within the movement. Many participants claimed that they only joined the Jacques because they had been threatened. At Vez, the inhabitants related that ‘the Jacques’ put swords to their throats to make them destroy the local lord’s castle.¹¹⁵ At Chambly, the inhabitants reported that the Captain of the Beauvaisis threatened that if they did not send him a number of armed men then ‘he and his company would come set the town on fire [and] kill the men, women, and children’.¹¹⁶ At Pont-Sainte-Maxence, Jean Oursel’s letter to the Great Captain, seeking mercy for two captured squires, allegedly led the captain’s lieutenant to come there with his posse in search of Oursel, shouting, ‘By God’s

¹¹² 4 Valois, 72, 76. This woman was the dowager-countess, Isabelle de Valois, mother of Louis de Bourbon, Count of Clermont. She held Gaillefontaines, though with some difficulty, particularly after June 1358 (Titres de l’ancienne maison ducale de Bourbon, ed. Alphonse Huillard-Bréholles and Albert Lecoy de La Marche, 2 vols (Paris, 1867–1874), I: no. 2768, 2769, p. 483, no. 2783, p. 486, no. 2800, p. 489, no. 2821, p. 493). ¹¹³ For Houdrier, AN JJ 90, no. 476, fol. 238v–39r, ed. Luce, no. 52, pp. 301–302. Maresquel: ‘avoir fait fournier du pain a aucunez pour les diz hurons . . . & aux baillie harnas & armeures pour grever les diz nobles’ (AN JJ 89, no. 377, fol. 159). ¹¹⁴ The curate claimed that the grain had been seized from him; the nobles alleged he had given it freely: ‘prinrent et à eulx appliquèrent, senz le gré et consentement du dit suppliant, certaine quantité de grains à lui appartenans . . . imposanz au dit suppliant qu’il avoit abandonné touz ses grains qu’il avoit en sa maison aus dites communes en les aidant et confortant’ (AN JJ 86, no. 265, fol. 89r, ed. Luce, no. 34, pp. 270–272). Bézu-les-Fèves: ‘eussent pris environ vint chiefs de poullaille, et avec ce en une fosse . . . prindrent environ quatre vin menuz carpiaux . . . lesquiex Colin et Nicaise dessus diz, avec leurs diz compaignons, mengèrent en compagnie’ (AN JJ 86, no. 291, fol. 97v, ed. Luce, no. 26, pp. 256–257). ¹¹⁵ ‘lesquels Jacques malfaicteurs estoient alez par les maisons desdiz defendans & autres bonnes genz de Vez & leur avoient commande qu’ils alassent avec euls & leur aidassent a demolir abattre & despecier ledit hostel . . . & leur avoient pluseurs fois mis lesdiz malefaicteurs leurs espees sur leur colls’ (AN X1c 32, no. 31). ¹¹⁶ ‘se ce non, il et sa compaignie iroient en la dicte ville de Chambliz bouter le feu, mettre à mort hommes, fames et enfanz’ (AN JJ 90, no. 354, fol. 182, ed. Luce, no. 49, pp. 297–299).

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Death, he would be killed if he could be found!’¹¹⁷ At Puisieux, the village ringleader announced that anyone who did not muster in arms to destroy the nobles’ houses were to be considered ‘traitors to the Captain and beheaded’.¹¹⁸ There were also stories of constraint from below and from within the community. Captains were as apt to blame their position on threats from the people electing them as from on coercion from outsiders: of 11 captains alleging constraint, five said it came from the villagers, five from the rebel leadership, and one pour soul reported getting it from both directions. While it was the Great Captain who threatened Chambly with fire and death, it was ‘the people’ who told Philippe Poignant that if he did not accompany them they would kill him and burn his house down, ‘or so it seemed to him’.¹¹⁹ Simon Doublet’s relatives advised him to accept his election because they thought that otherwise the people would put him to death, burn his houses, and pillage all his possessions.¹²⁰ And when Germain de Réveillon expressed reluctance about leading the Jacques from Montataire to Mello, they not only grabbed him by his hood, but tried to pull him off his horse and threatened to cut his head off.¹²¹ These stories, and dozens of others like them, served obvious exculpatory purposes. The claim that one acted criminally through fear did not only make for a more sympathetic story, it was also legal grounds for acquittal or remission. But these stories also indicate the conflicts among the Jacques and between the rebels and local communities that occasioned the threats. The movement was rife with ambivalence and dissension. Captains sometimes found themselves trapped between the orders of their superiors and the demands of their own communities, not to mention—as they often did in pleas for remission—the dictates of conscience or common sense. Calle himself had to accede to his troops’ desire to attack at Mello-Clermont, though he and the Hospitaller thought better of it.¹²² Communities like Chambly debated whether to participate, and not all agreed to

¹¹⁷ ‘magno capitaneo dictorum innobilium scripsisset ut super hoc providere vellet sic quod iidem domicelli morti non traderentur, quidam tamen dicens se locum tenentem dicti magni Capitanei pluribus aliis innobilibus secum associatis in odium hujus scripture et prosecucionis, ad domum dicti Johannis Ourcel accessissent, ensibusque evaginatis unanimiter altis vocibus clamantes “Per mortem Dei, morietur, si possit inveniri!” ’ (AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330). ¹¹⁸ ‘sub pena reputandi proditores erga dictum Capitaneum ac cuiuslibet eorumdem capitis amputandi’ (AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v–24r). ¹¹⁹ AN JJ 90, no. 148, fol. 79v–80r, ed. Brunel, ‘Archives’, no. 3, pp. 71–72. ¹²⁰ ‘s’il ne l’aceptoit & feist ce qu’il vouldroient, il le mettroient a mort & arderoient ses maisons & touz ses biens gasteroient & pilleroient . . . pour doubte de morir & pour la salvation de ses maisons & biens comme contraint a ce, & non pas que de voulente, si consentist accepta le dit office’ (AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136). ¹²¹ ‘pour ce qu’il ne vouloit obéir à leur requeste et à leur voulenté, le pristrent par son chaperon injurieusement, en disant qu’il seroit leur capitaine pour demi jour et une nuit, vousist ou non, et le vouldrent sachier jus dessus son cheval, et avec ce sachèrent plusieurs espées sur lui pour li coper la teste s’il n’eust obéy à eulx’ (AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262). ¹²² 4 Valois, 73.

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do so. Some, like Dormans, were uniformly hostile to the revolt.¹²³ Others were divided internally. There were individual non-nobles who opposed the revolt, like the villager who first ‘verbally corrected’ but ultimately killed a Jacques for his misdeeds, a couple who hid their noble neighbours’ jewels (or at least claimed that they did so), and a villager imprisoned for disobeying his community’s captain.¹²⁴ Non-nobles even joined the Counter-Jacquerie, especially in its early days.¹²⁵ A significant area of disagreement within the movement was violence. Captains complained that the men that they had been chosen to lead were excessively brutal and that they were afraid of them. Gilles le Haguez recounted that his men from Chambly joined other, unruly village contingents in deeds of arson, murder, and pillage, and that while this saddened his heart and conscience, he did not dare countermand these excesses (il ne eust peu ne osé contredire).¹²⁶ Arnoul Guenelon also reported disquiet of heart and mind when ‘disorderly people’ in his company engaged in murder and arson, and he, too, would have restrained them ‘if he had dared’.¹²⁷ Jacquin de Chenevières, regional captain of Montmorency, claimed that he told his men not to set any fires and tried to prevent them from killing people by advising them to wait a little longer, but that they called him a traitor and wanted to cut off his head.¹²⁸ Jean Oursel reported that Pont-Sainte-Maxence’s captain was almost as reluctant as Oursel himself to drown the gentlemen. Oursel and his captain failed in their efforts, though Oursel’s remission offered an affecting report of the gentlemen’s plea that they might be executed so that the people would spare Oursel their wrath.¹²⁹ But other captains, like Gilles le Haguez of Chambly who ‘did everything in his power’ to rescue noble women and children, claimed that they had succeeded in saving nobles from death or pillage.¹³⁰

¹²³ Dormans: ‘yceulx habitanz se sont portez bien & loyaument et empeschie & destorbe pluseurs villes voisines du pays d’environ a faire pluseurs entreprises contre les nobles’ (AN JJ 86, no. 130, fol. 46v–47r). ¹²⁴ ‘reprenoit et corrigoit de paroles le dit Jehan Cachonet en luy disant qu’il faisoit mal’ (AN JJ 109, no. 173, fol. 81, another version at AN JJ 145, no. 498, fol. 229v–30r, and see AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v–24r for killing); jewels: AN X1a 23, fol. 491v–93r; imprisonment: AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r (‘quia Petrus de Persaut eis obedire noluerat, dictus le Bouchier eum capi ac incarcerari fecerat’). ¹²⁵ AN JJ 86, no. 142, fol. 49, ed. Luce, no. 21, pp. 247–248. ¹²⁶ AN JJ 90, no. 354, fol. 182, ed. Luce, no. 49, pp. 297–299. ¹²⁷ ‘aucuns desordenez de la dite compaignie furent pluseurs personnes mises a mort pluseurs pillages arsines de maisons et pluseurs autres maux faiz lui estanz en la dite compagnie sanz ce que ycelui Arnoul en feust oncques consentans en cuer ny en volente mais eust volentiers empesche tout leur male voulente se il eust ose’ (AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r). ¹²⁸ ‘leur disoit: Ne boutez nulz feux; et, pour les plus tost faire cesser, leur disoit: Attendez à une autre foiz; et pour ce l’appelloient traytre, et li vouloient couper la teste’ (AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256). ¹²⁹ ‘auditis verbis dictorum domicellorum tunc dicentium eidem, “Johannes, amice carissime, pro Dei misericordia non habeatis, pro nobis faciatis quod requirunt quia aliter nec vos nec nos mortem evademus” ’ (AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330). ¹³⁰ ‘de tout son pouvoir il mist à sauveté et sauva en corps et en biens, non obstant la male erreur qui pour le temps couroit, dames, damoiselles et enfans, tant comme il peust veniràa sa cognoissance, et avecques ce fist rendre tout ce qui peut savoir qui lors avoit esté pillé’ (AN JJ 90, no. 354, fol. 182, ed. Luce, no. 49, pp. 297–299). See also AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256 and AN JJ 90, no. 476, fol. 238v–39r, ed. Luce, no. 52, pp. 301–302.

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Members of the rank and file raised different concerns about violence. Villagers did not always agree with the Jacques who came to their settlements about the need to destroy the local nobles’ residence. At Vez, the inhabitants did burn down the local lord’s manor, if allegedly at swordpoint, but they managed to save the house of a local squire.¹³¹ At Épiais, the villagers recounted that it was only because of constraint that they burned a local knight’s house and muniments and that the act ‘displeased them very much’.¹³² Villagers also objected to attacking some of the reformers’ enemies because they were not noble. The villagers of Gonesse ‘feared [Étienne Marcel] and his people’, but they met the Parisians commander’s orders to burn down Pierre d’Orgemont’s house with the puzzled protest that d’Orgemont was not noble.¹³³ Marcel’s detested brother-in-law Robert de Lorris was noble, but those attacking him at Ermenonville agreed to leave him and his family alone once he ‘renounced his gentility’ (regnia gentillesse).¹³⁴ The fact that Blanche of France’s castle at Beaumont-sur-Oise became a target during the revolt, forcing the Duchess to flee to Paris, although her prévôt had initially encouraged the Jacques to choose a captain, suggests a growing divergence between the rank-and-file’s social concerns and the leadership’s strategic and political objectives.¹³⁵ The Jacques also disagreed about the basis for their leaders’ authority and the legitimacy of their actions. Titles reportedly borne by the upper officers were rubbished as pretentious self-attributions. Jean Bernier’s remission refers to Calle as the self-proclaimed (soy portant) Captain of the Beauvaisis, while Jean Oursel’s says that the man who came to threaten him was ‘calling himself ’ (dicens se) the Great Captain’s lieutenant.¹³⁶ Simon Doublet also worried that the movement’s authority was arrogated illicitly rather than legitimately delegated. He told those assembled at Poix that such gatherings and appointments of captains ought not be done without royal authority and permission.¹³⁷ His concerns were echoed by a villager in Puisieux, who demanded to know ‘what power’ the Jacques’ leaders had and whether their proclamations were royally licensed or otherwise, for which

¹³¹ ‘par leurs pourchas, requeste & defense pour ledit temps des commotions Ils avoient escheue de demolir & ardoir l’ostel feu Guiot de Giry escuier . . . & pareillement avoient . . . cuidie garder & defendre ledit hostel dudit chevalier mais il n’en avoit pas este a leur voulente’ (AN X1c 32, no. 31). ¹³² AN X1c 11, no. 61–62. ¹³³ ‘multum habebant timere dictum prepositum, suos commissarios ac complices . . . dicebant dictum magistrum Petrum non esse nobilem’ (AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320). ¹³⁴ Chron. norm., 130. This chronicle indicates that only Parisians were involved in this interaction, but in addition to Calle’s presence, the evidence that Ermenonville was a joint action is substantial. See Chapter 8. ¹³⁵ GC, 178; AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256. ¹³⁶ AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97; AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330. ¹³⁷ ‘tels congregacions & assemblees & faire capitaine de pais ou Royaume de France senz l’auctorite & licence de nostre dit seigneur ou de nous ne se pouvoie[nt] bonnement faire’ (AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136).

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temerity he was threatened with death.¹³⁸ The villagers of Chambly wrote collectively to the royal bailiff of Senlis to ask whether the Great Captain’s summons was legitimate, again occasioning death threats.¹³⁹ Montdidier’s mayor and aldermen sent troops to the Jacques, but they had to admit later that they had done so without royal permission (senz licence de nostre dit seigneur ou de nous).¹⁴⁰ The movement’s leaders tried to circumvent such compunctions by cloaking themselves in the mantle of royal authority. The royal sergeant Philippe Poignant was asked to ‘give orders to many people on [royal] behalf ’ to join the Jacquerie.¹⁴¹ Both at Gonesse and Chilly-Mazarin, royal officers were used to issue commands ‘in the usual place for royal proclamations’ (locum consuetum pro proclamacionibus ex parte nostra faciendis), though the people of Gonesse ‘refused to believe the crier’.¹⁴² Leaders, often appointed by their communities, also had to contend with a sense among their supposed followers that a captain’s authority derived from and depended upon popular will. The assembly at Poix who chose Simon Doublet, for example, elected him to ‘lead them where they wished to go’ (la ou il le vouldroient mener pour aler), not to make those decisions on their behalf, while the Jacques assembled at Montataire said that they expected Germain de Réveillion to ‘obey them’ (obéy à eulx).¹⁴³ Acephalous at its origins, the Jacquerie remained a movement whose impetus came as much from grassroots anger at the nobility as from its leaders’ strategic partnership with the urban reformers. Its methods reflected the participatory norms of rural communities as much as the hierarchical discipline that leaders like Calle tried to impose upon it. This made the revolt useful and attractive to different kinds of people and communities, enabling them to act together as part of a mass movement, but a coalition’s heterogeneity often causes conflict, as it did for the Jacques, even if it does not ultimately lead to failure.

¹³⁸ ‘interrogavit eos qualem potestatem ispi ad hoc habebant & an illud de nostra licencia vel mandato aut aliter’ (AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v–24r). ¹³⁹ ‘envoièrent à Compiegne par devers le bailli de Senliz, pour savoir se il savoit à quelle cause le dit capitaine faisoit tiex mandemenz’ (AN JJ 90, no. 354, fol. 182, ed. Luce, no. 49, pp. 297–299). ¹⁴⁰ ‘du mandement de plusieurs capitaines du plat pais ou autrement, senz licence de nostre dit seigneur ou de nous, aient envoié et plusieurs d’iceulx esté en leurs personnes aus effroiz . . . en commettant plusieurs crimes tant de leze magesté ou premier chief comme autrement . . . excepté toutevoies le crime de la grant traison, avons quitté, remis et pardonné’ (AN JJ 86, no. 437, fol. 154, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: 112–114). ¹⁴¹ ‘a faire commandement de par nostre dit seigneur & de par nous a plusieurs personnes que il allassent avec les dessus diz’ (AN JJ 90, no. 148, fol. 79v–80r, ed. Brunel, ‘Archives’, no. 3, pp. 71–72). ¹⁴² Gonesse: ‘querendo uno serviente regis . . . ipsum fecerat duci ad locum consuetum pro proclamacionibus ex parte nostra faciendis, et per ipsum fecerat proclamari, ex parte nostra et dicti prepositi mercatorum . . . ipsum credentes refrenare’ (AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320); Chilly: ‘pour ce que il faisoit les criz et banz qui estoient à faire en la dicte ville de Chastres’ (AN JJ 86, no. 231, fol. 75v–76r, ed. Luce, no. 30, pp. 263–264). ¹⁴³ AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136; AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262.

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7 The Non-Nobles Rebels and their Communities

The rebels’ social diversity has impressed contemporaries and historians alike. The royal chronicler remarked that ‘there were mostly labourers (gens de labour) in these assembles’ but also ‘rich men, townsmen, and others’.¹ Both Raymond Cazelles and I have written articles on the rebels’ social identity. Although we came to somewhat different conclusions, especially about the importance of peasants in the uprising, we agree that the rebels’ backgrounds spanned a broad social and economic spectrum.² While I will draw upon my previous discussion here, this chapter’s focus is rather on the related question of how the relationships among different social groups—men and women and young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural—helped to shape the revolt. Previous discussions of the Jacques’ social background have tried to divine their motives from their identity, a task that I believe futile and wrong-headed. People often behave in ways discordant with their background or perceived self-interest. To the extent that we can isolate motives for the revolt, rebels’ words and actions are a better guide, as I discussed in Chapters 3 through 5. Instead of extrapolating objectives on the basis of identity, this chapter focuses on how the discernible relationships among the rebels’ households and communities made the revolt possible, as well as how social differences and tensions contributed to its eventual failure. Another problem to be faced is that in as much as we can know a beguiling amount about a small number of Jacques, we really know very little about the vast majority of those who participated in the revolt. A central difficulty to keep in mind is that while I have been able to identify 498 individuals and 51 communities implicated in the revolt, these represent only a small fraction of those actually involved. Froissart was probably exaggerating when he claimed that if the Jacques had all been in one place they would have numbered over 100,000, but accounts like those mentioned in the previous chapter of 4,600 Jacques at a particular battle or encounters with companies of several hundred at various places show that the

¹ ‘Et en ces assemblées avoit gens de labour le plus, et si y avoit de riches homes, bourgeois et autres’ (GC, 180). ² Raymond Cazelles, ‘La Jacquerie fut-elle un mouvement paysan?’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 122 (1978): 654–666; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The social constituency of the Jacquerie revolt of 1358’, Speculum 95 (2020): 689–715.

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0008

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identifiable individuals represent only the small tip of a very large iceberg.³ Moreover, these individuals are not necessarily representative of the rebels as a whole. As I stressed in the Introduction, the sources we have tended to be produced for relatively well-off people with good connections in whom royal justice was particularly interested, either because of who they were or where they lived. Those who did not fit this description or who were otherwise somewhat sheltered from royal justice, such as the young, the female, and the clerical, are much less visible to us. Understanding the factors that made solidarity possible between social groups and how such differences could endanger rebel coalitions thus requires focusing not only on the corpus of Jacquerie sources but also on the evidence for the social situations inhabited by those the sources simply call ‘the non-nobles’. Nobles seem generally to have viewed these people as a homogenous group, much as some Jacques viewed the nobles themselves. The most salient social distinction in the Jacquerie for both its participants and opponents was clearly that of nobility or its absence. This stark opposition, however, elides a great deal of variation and stratification among both groups, but particularly among the 90–99 per cent of the population that was non-noble. The distinctions on which this chapter primarily focuses are those of gender and age, those of socio-economic status, and those between rural and urban dwellers. The revolt was not an everyday occurrence, but it occurred in the way that it did because of the everyday relationships among the individuals belonging to these social categories.

Men and Women, Young and Old Almost all the known participants in the Jacquerie were men. Of the 498 individuals that I have identified, only 11 were female, and 6 were, if not children, then at least young enough to be named in relation to their father.⁴ Although Thomas Walsingham claimed that elderly people participated alongside those in the prime ³ Froissart, SHF, §414, p. 102; 4 Valois, 72–73, 76; Chron. norm., 129; AN X1a 14, fol. 391, ed. Luce, no. 55, pp. 306–309; AN JJ 109, no. 434, fol. 214. ⁴ Women: Margot, widow of Perrenet le Brief (AN JJ 86, no. 326, fol. 109v); Tassone, once wife of Massi (AN JJ 91, no. 333, fol. 173v); Jacquette, daughter of the late Jean de Aucart (AN X1a 19, fol. 407v); Égide de Longpré (AN X1a 23, fol. 491v–93r); Jeanne Doucet, widow of Eudes Doucet and wife of Jean Petit (AN X1a 28, fol. 175v–76r, AN X1a 31, fol. 253); Wife of Perrin le Sellier (AN X1c 13a, no. 56–57); Wife of Renier du Brueil and Perrote, wife of the late Thomas Harare (AN X1c 13b, no. 255); Widow of Denisot Gigaut now wife of Pasquier Barat and Widow of Jean de Bergny now wife of Henri Barat (AN X1c 32, no. 30–31); Jeanne, wife of Nicolas Boivin (AN X2a 7, fol. 213r). Children: Jehannot, son of Pierre Troussel (AN JJ 90, no. 413, fol. 209r); Jehannot, son of Jean le Jehannot, son of Thierry le Maçon (AN JJ 86, no. 326, fol. 109v); Jehannot and Perrot, sons of the late Jean de Bergny (AN X1c 32, no. 30–31); Jacquette, daughter of the late Jean de Aucart, listed among the women. Despite the universality of diminutive forenames in this small sample, diminutives are not good indicators of immaturity, as is demonstrated by the names of several of the married men and women listed above. Widowhood was not an indicator of advanced age in this period.

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of life in the English Rising, no Jacques is characterized as being notably aged.⁵ The scant evidence for individual female participants has been used to argue that the Jacquerie in particular and medieval revolts in general were almost exclusively masculine enterprises, though for the English Rising, Sylvia Federico has located dozens of female participants.⁶ Proportionally, the number of women in the Jacquerie’s sources is similar to that found in the much better documented Rising, and certainly, the Jacquerie must have included some sort of participation by women, children, and the elderly. Because late medieval social and economic structures were built around the cooperative work of the family and household, it would not have been possible for men—especially the mature householders we know to have been prominent in the uprising—to have revolted without the supporting activities of the women, children, and elderly people in their lives.⁷ While the Jacquerie was mobilized through the cooperation of villages, those villages were made up of households, and those households consisted not only of the able-bodied adult men relatively visible to us, but also of women, children, the elderly, and other dependents who are much less so. While it is thus indubitable that non-adult males were involved in the revolt, we have limited information about what they might have done during it. The Jacquerie sources usually offer no more information on women linked to the revolt beyond their name. A few of the adult women, however, can be linked to particular actions in the revolt: Margot, identified as the widow of Perrenet the short, was among those remitted for the effroiz near Château-Thierry; Égide de Longpré was accused of stealing the jewellery entrusted to her by a noble woman, whose husband Égide’s husband allegedly killed; the new wives of Henry and Pasquier Barat, both widows of deceased Jacques, were said to have enriched themselves with the goods taken from a local noble’s manor; the wife of Perrin le Sellier (the Saddler) was considered as culpable as her husband for the theft of a noble’s horse; the wife of Renier du Brueil was among those accused of attacking Luzarches; and Jeanne, wife of Nicolas Boivin was listed among those who attacked manors near Villeparisis. More information is available if we move from focusing on individuals to representations of rebels in the aggregate. These suggest more extensive female participation. Jean de Venette’s chronicle, which notes that men and their wives

⁵ ‘omnes, tam senes quam florentes etate’ (Thomas Walsingham, The St Albans Chronicle: The chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham, John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss (eds and trans.), 2 vols (Oxford, 2003–2011), I: 410). ⁶ Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, Lust for liberty: The politics of social revolt in medieval Europe, 1200–1450: Italy, France, and Flanders (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 130–135; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, ‘Women in revolt in medieval and early modern Europe’ in Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (eds), The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt (Abingdon, 2017), 208–219; Sylvia Federico, ‘The imaginary society: Women in 1381’, Journal of British Studies 40 (2001): 159–183. ⁷ Classically, see Barbara A. Hanawalt, The ties that bound: Peasant families in medieval England (Oxford, 1986).

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(feminas/uxores rusticanas) dressed up during the Jacquerie as discussed in Chapter 5, also relates that the women of Senlis helped to defend that city from Counter-Jacques by pouring boiling water on them from their house windows, an incident discussed in Chapter 9.⁸ The Quatre Valois chronicle mentions urban women’s role in the victualing of the movement, as discussed in the previous chapter.⁹ It is also notable that the judicial sources overwhelmingly speak of rebels in the aggregate without reference to their gender or to their age. As is the case for many late medieval uprisings, Jacquerie participants are usually simply described in gender-neutral terms as ‘the people’ (gens) or ‘the non-nobles’.¹⁰ The incidence of these neutral terms far outnumbers the 10 or so instances in which the rebels were referred to with the explicitly masculine term ‘Jacques’, a usage often employed specifically for those rebels traveling among villages.¹¹ I know of no instance in which rebels were referred to only as men (hommes, homines, viri), but the document in which Jeanne wife of Nicolas Boivin is listed speaks of the Jacquerie as an uprising perpetrated by both ‘men and women’ (homines & mulieres).¹² That all of the individual women associated with the revolt are named in relation to a man and that all of the female actions described by the chroniclers were undertaken in association with men does demonstrate the importance of men in the revolt. But it also demonstrates the importance of the medieval family and household. While that household was (ideally) patriarchal, couples and families functioned cooperatively in everyday life and can thus be seen acting alongside one another in the revolt. There is notable participation of male relations—of brothers, like that of Jean and Baudot le Bergier, and of fathers and sons, such as with Symon le Choine and his son, Lorin and Thierry le Maçon and his son Jehannot—but women were integral to these family ties.¹³ We can see instances in the Jacquerie of husband/wife participation, a pattern noted by historians of crime more generally, though some women, like Nicolas Boivin and Renier du Breuil’s wives seem to have acted on their own.¹⁴ There are also in-law relationships between men bound by their relationships with a woman, as with Jean Lespert and his son-in-law Benoît Paingart from Saint-Leu-d’Esserent ⁸ Jean de Venette, 176, 180. ⁹ 4 Valois, 72. ¹⁰ Cohn, Lust for liberty, 135. ¹¹ Jacques: Dijon AD Côte d’Or B 1451, fol. 85v; AN JJ 86, no. 430, fol. 151r; AN JJ 87, no. 117, fol. 80v–81r; AN JJ 87, no. 321, fol. 204v–205, partially ed. Luce, no. 45, pp. 291–292; AN JJ 88, no. 9, fol. 7r; AN JJ 89, no. 377, fol. 159; AN JJ 90, no. 354, fol. 182, ed. Luce, no. 49, pp. 297–299; AN JJ 90, no. 488, fol. 244r, ed. Luce, no. 50, pp. 299–300; AN JJ 145, no. 498, fol. 229v–30r; AN X1c 32a, no. 31. ¹² AN X2a 7, fol. 213r. ¹³ AN X1c 13b, no. 255; AN JJ 86, no. 320, fol. 107; AN JJ 86, no. 326, fol. 109v. ¹⁴ Women in late medieval France generally committed violent crimes in the company of their husbands, and crime was often a family affair: Annik Porteau-Bitker, ‘Criminalité et délinquance féminines dans le droit pénal des XIIIe et XIVe siècles’, RHDFE, 4th ser., 58 (1980): 13–56; Claude Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’: Crime, État et société en France à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols (Paris, 1991), I: 314. See also Barbara A. Hanawalt, Crime and conflict in English communities, 1300–1348 (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 190–194; Federico, ‘Imaginary society’, 159–160.

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and Jean Raie and his brother-in-law (sororius—that is, sister’s husband) Simon Franquet, leaders of the revolt at Puisieux near Meaux.¹⁵ Women could also connect rebel men by marrying them successively. Two women from the village of Vez, widows of men implicated in the Jacquerie, remarried two other men implicated in the Jacquerie. These men, who bore the same surname, may have been brothers, which would link these women not only twice over to Jacquerie men, but also connect them to one another as sisters-in-law.¹⁶ We cannot be certain that the subsequent husband of Guillaume Calle’s widow Isabelle was a rebel, but Laon’s municipal accounts show him slipping rather suspiciously in and out of the city during the autumn of 1358.¹⁷ Here again there is a hint of a familial rebel network. The sources’ insistent presentation of women in relation to men reflects the importance of the patriarchal household not only in daily life, but also in law. With the exception of one remission that includes Margot the widow of Perrenet le bref, among its recipients, all of the documents naming women and children are from civil suits, in which these individuals appear as defendants in cases brought years or more after the revolt. The combination of civil pursuit and andronymic identification suggests that these individuals may appear in the documents not because they were themselves actors in the revolt, but rather because they were legally liable as the heirs to the estate of a deceased man for his actions. This is probably not the case for Jeanne, wife of Nicolas Boivin, whose husband seems still to have been alive when she was named liable alongside 10 men for damages to several manors, nor for the wife of Renier du Brueil, also still alive when she appeared in the settlement for damages to one of Robert de Lorris’s castles.¹⁸ On the other hand, civil liability without personal culpability is certainly the case with the only immature female in the corpus, Jacquette, daughter of the late Jean Aucart, for she was still a minor in 1370, when she was named in a judgement about the burning of the castle of Moreuil. Her guardian is named along with her, and she may not even have been born at the time of the Jacquerie.¹⁹ Yet, if the judicial sources show us some women and children because of their relationships with men rather than for their own actions, they may also hide other women and children for the same reason. In the social and legal regime of late medieval France, adult men were responsible for their household’s members’ behaviour. The law saw married couple as a unit and children as subsumed to their father’s authority.²⁰ Feminine incapacity was sometimes used to argue that ¹⁵ AN JJ 90, no. 356, fol. 183v; AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v–24r. ¹⁶ AN X1c 32, no. 30–31. ¹⁷ Hernilz li Macon: Laon, AD Aisne Edt 1 CC 1, fol. fol. 43v, 47r, 47v, 48v, 49v. ¹⁸ AN X2a 7, fol. 213r; AN X1c 13b, no. 255. ¹⁹ AN X1a 19, fol. 407v. The age of female majority was usually 12 (e.g. Beaumanoir, cap. XIV, §522, vol. I: 251), but as Beaumanoir notes here, it was possible to remain in tutelage for some time afterward. ²⁰ Beaumanoir, cap. XXI, §622, vol. I: 308–309, cap. XXX, §§930–933, vol. I: 470–473; François Olivier-Martin, Histoire de la coutume de la prévôté et vicomté de Paris, 2 vols in 3 (Paris, 1922–1930), II.1: 183–206. Comparatively, see Miriam Müller, ‘Peasant women, agency, and status in

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women were less culpable for moral transgressions, such as bigamy or even Eve’s original sin.²¹ In later centuries, such considerations seem ironically to have shielded many female rebels from prosecution.²² In the fourteenth century, the law did not wholly excuse women, but it did sometimes come down more lightly upon them. While a married woman could certainly be criminally prosecuted in the Beauvaisis, only half of the household’s goods were to be seized upon her conviction, as opposed to the total forfeiture entailed by a husband’s guilty sentence. (Although this rule potentially incentivized couples to expose the female partner to prosecution, it would also have encouraged pursuit of the more lucrative, masculine target.)²³ Lighter punishment is observable in action after the revolt of the Laon serfs in 1338, when women, both married and single, were punished with branding while the men were executed.²⁴ Children were even less liable and often exempted from prosecution altogether. As Beaumanoir said, more gently than many a modern judge, ‘ses aages l’escuseroit’.²⁵ The excuse of youth was one frequently used by criminal defendants, as in the case of Pierre and Jean Debonnaire, who blamed their youth (leur Jeunece) for their attendance at the Jacquerie assembly where they accidentally killed a man.²⁶ Most women and children were not, however, killing people during the Jacquerie (even by ‘accident’), and with the possible exception of Jeanne Boivin mid-thirteenth to late fourteenth-century England: Some reconsiderations’ in Cordelia Beattie and Matthew Frank Stevens (eds), Women and the law in premodern northwest Europe (Woodbridge, 2013), 91–113, and other contributions in that volume. ²¹ Sara McDougall, Bigamy and Christian identity in late medieval Champagne (Philadelphia, 2012), 49–74. For Eve, see Isotta Nogarola, ‘Of the equal or unequal sin of Adam and Eve’ in Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. (eds and trans.), Her immaculate hand: Selected works by and about the women humanists of quattrocento Italy, 2nd edn (Binghamton, NY, 1992), 57–69; cf. the punishment solely of female adulterers and their lovers in Languedoc, Jean-Marie Carbasse, ‘Currant nudi: La repression de l’adultère dans le Midi médiéval, XIIe–XVe siècles’ in Jacques Poumarède and Jean-Pierre Royer (eds), Droit, histoire et sexualité: Colloque, 1985, Toulouse, organisé par l’Université des sciences sociales de Toulouse (Lille, 1987), 83–102. ²² Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on top’ in Society and culture in early modern France: Eight essays (Stanford, 1975), 146, 314, nn. 38–39; Vincent Challet, ‘Un village sans histoire? La communauté de Villeveyrac en Languedoc’ in Jan Dumolyn, Jelle Haemers, Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, and Vincent Challet (eds), The voices of the people in late medieval Europe: Communication and popular politics (Turnhout, 2014), 133. See also, Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’, I: 306. ²³ Beaumanoir, cap. XXX, §931, vol. I: 470–471. ²⁴ AD Aisne G 126, no. 4; AN JJ 71, no. 86, fol. 65; AN JJ 75, no. 316, fol. 186–88r; Jean de Noyal, ‘Fragments inédits de la chronique de Jean de Noyal, abbé de Saint-Vincent de Laon (XIVe siècle)’ in Auguste Molinier (ed.), Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France 20 (Paris, 1883): 250; Ghislain Brunel, ‘Les hommes de corps du chapitre cathédral de Laon (1200–1460): Continuité et crises de la servitude dans une seigneurie ecclésiastique’ in Paul Freedman and Monique Bourin (eds), Forms of servitude in Northern and Central Europe: Decline, resistance, and expansion (Turnhout, 2005), 171–175. ²⁵ Beaumanoir, cap. XIV, §560, vol. I: 268–269, see also cap. XXI, §640, vol. I: 318–319, cap. XXXI, §947, vol. I: 480, and cap. LXIII, §1810, vol. II: 416–417); Yvonne Bongert, ‘Rétribution et réparation dans l’ancien droit français’, Mémoires de la Société pour l’histoire du droit et des institutions des anciens pays bourguignons, comtois et romands 45 (1988): 87–91; Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’, I: 347–367. ²⁶ AN JJ 88, no. 89, fol. 56v–57r. This remission is notable for employing a laundry list of wellknown legal excuses for the Debonnaires’ crimes. See also, Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’, I: 360–363.

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and Renier de Brueil’s wife, most of them were probably not even out burning castles. Evidence for criminal activity clusters around the classically feminine crime of theft, especially of jewels and clothing, mentioned in connection with Égide de Longpré, the Barats’ new wives, and in Jean de Venette.²⁷ There are some accounts of women playing prominent roles in other medieval rebellions, such as the female standard-bearer of the Ghent rebels in 1382 and a number of women whom Sylvia Federico located in the English Rising.²⁸ Most of the actions carried out during the Jacquerie by women, children, and perhaps other dependents were probably not very different from their normal tasks: making and delivering food, as in the Quatre Valois chronicle, or carrying water, as in Jean de Venette.²⁹ They must also have been occupied caring for livestock, crops, and merchandise, as well as taking care of very young children, the elderly, and the disabled.³⁰ We do not have much evidence for these supporting activities in the Jacquerie, but during the brigans de bois guerrilla movement in fifteenth-century Normandy, where female participation is more visible, most women acted in supportive roles like these.³¹ These supporting actions produced (almost) no sources because they gave rise to no legal pursuit, but whether historians call those who carried out these support roles ‘rebels’ or not depends very much on what we privilege as ‘rebellion’.³² If the key criterion is directly inflicting violence, then the rebellion was almost exclusively the business of adult males in the prime of life, just as until recently the Hundred Years War has been seen as entirely the business of soldiers and their commanders. Yet just as women, children, and the old participated in the War— albeit differently from younger men—such people were also integral to the

²⁷ Theft constituted almost half of the crimes committed by women in later fourteenth-century France (Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’, I: 316). See also Porteau-Bitker, ‘Criminalité’, 43–48; Trevor Dean, ‘Theft and gender in late medieval Bologna’, Gender & History 20 (2008): 399–415. ²⁸ ‘une femme portoit la banière des Flamans’ (Chronique du Mont-Saint Michel (1343–1468), publiée avec notes et pièces diverses relatives au Mont-Saint-Michel et à la défense nationale en basse Normandie pendant l’occupation anglaise, ed. Siméon Luce, 2 vols (Paris, 1879–1883), I: 14); Federico, ‘Imaginary society’. ²⁹ On village women in the later Middle Ages, better studied for England than France, see Rodney H. Hilton, ‘Women in the village’ in The English peasantry in the Later Middle Ages: The Ford Lectures for 1973 and related studies (Oxford, 1975), 95–110; Judith M. Bennett, Women in the medieval English countryside: Gender and household in Brigstock before the plague (Oxford, 1987); Sherri Olson, A mute gospel: The people and culture of the medieval English common fields (Toronto, 2009); Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Gendering demographic change in the Middle Ages’ in Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (eds), The Oxford handbook of women and gender in medieval Europe (Oxford, 2013), 181–192. ³⁰ A deaf-mute sister of one Jacques is mentioned at AN X1a 17, fol. 284, ed. Victor de Beauvillé, Histoire de la ville de Montdidier, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Paris 1875), I: no. 27, pp. 514–515. ³¹ Vincent Challet, ‘Tuchins and “brigands de bois”: Peasant communities and self-defence movements in Normandy during the Hundred Years War’ in Linda Clark (ed.), English and continental perspectives (Woodbridge, 2010), 94, which notes, however, that a woman was buried alive in 1435 for providing aid and comfort to the brigans. ³² See Jelle Haemers and Chanelle Delameillieure, ‘Women and contentious speech in fifteenthcentury Brabant’, Continuity and Change 32 (2017): 323–347.

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Jacquerie.³³ No rural rebellion could have taken place without someone milking the cows, nursing the babies, and weeding the kitchen gardens. If the law was unconcerned by these quotidian labours, the nobles’ reaction demonstrates an understanding of their contribution to the uprising. Considering responsibility to have been corporate and universal, they punished whole villages, without apparent regard to innocence or guilt, age or gender. Étienne Marcel recounted their torture of women and children, and their rapes of maidens and matrons alike.³⁴ Surely, he exaggerated somewhat, but it is notable that the only case of rape against an individual, named woman connected with the revolt is that of a villager, Tassone widow of Massi, by noblemen during the Counter-Jacquerie.³⁵ Working together, if not always side by side, women and men, young and old made the Jacquerie happen. A rebellion of this size and duration could not conceivably have happened if the Jacques Bonhommes’ families and households did not act in support of them, even if those actions left little in the way of a parchment trail. We should, however, be careful not to assume that any of what women, children, and the elderly did or might have done was necessarily an expression of their own desires or interests. If the power differentials between noble and non-noble were stark, those between men and women, adults and children, patriarchs and dependents were at least as pronounced. There is no discernible sign of domestic rebellion within Jacquerie, but nor is there any reason to believe that all rebel families were happy ones.

Rich and Poor Another fault line that cut across rebel society was that of wealth and status, for as the royal chronicler said the rebellion was made up not only of rustics but also of the rich and urbane. Raymond Cazelles long since corrected Jules Flammermont’s view of the Jacquerie as a revolt of impoverished marginals. He also argued that the Jacquerie could not even be characterized as a ‘peasants’ revolt’ because the majority of Jacques were men of wealth, standing, and education. They were artisans and petty officials, not poor, illiterate rustics.³⁶ Similar observations ³³ Adrien Dubois, ‘Femmes dans la guerre (XIVe–XVe siècles): Un rôle caché par les sources?’, Tabularia: Sources écrites des mondes normands médiévaux 4 (2004): 39–51; James E. Gilbert, ‘A medieval “Rosie the Riveter”? Women in France and Southern England during the Hundred Years War’ in L.J. Andrew Villalon and Donald J. Kagay (eds), The Hundred Years War: A wider focus (Leiden, 2005), 333–363; David Green, The Hundred Years War: A people’s history (New Haven, 2014), 194–200. See also Jean de Venette, 196, who notes boys acting as lookouts during the war with Navarre. ³⁴ d’Avout, 306. ³⁵ AN JJ 91, no. 333, fol. 173v. ³⁶ Cazelles, ‘La Jacquerie’. Cf. Jules Flammermont, ‘La Jacquerie en Beauvaisis’, RH 9 (1879): 123–143, as well as Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, The popular revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, A.L. Lytton-Sells (trans.), (London, 1973), which lists the Jacquerie among their revolts driven by poverty.

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have been made about the participants in the 1381 English Rising and in Flemish revolts.³⁷ But while these are helpful revisions to the images of mobs of uneducated brutes conjured up by Flammermont, they do not do justice to the whole social panoply of rural participation. In fact, they skew the picture considerably. Cazelles’s analysis focused only on those named in the documents, especially the remissions, particularly those published by Luce. He thus privileged the richer participants, who were attractive objects for lawsuits and who could bear the cost of pardons, especially the bespoke pardons that tend to offer the juiciest details. The details available about the 498 identified rebels show a more rural, less wellheeled rebel constituency than Cazelles claimed. Overall, the professional backgrounds of identifiable Jacques were rather humble. Notably, they were more likely to be engaged in agriculture than Cazelles allowed for. As Figure 7.1 shows, over a quarter of identifiable participants received remissions that included a formula in the disposition to ‘allow [the recipient] to collect and store his crops, work and cultivate his lands and vineyards, and to take care of his needs and commerce’ (li laissent cueillir et mettre a sauvete ses biens qui sont ou seront aus

All (498)

Captains (41)

Rank & File (457)

Agricultural formula

27.9%

24.4% (10)

28.2% (129)

Artisan/Artisanal surname

15.5%

14.6% (6)

15.5% (71)

Homme de labour

12%

7.3% (3)

12.5% (57)

Cleric

1.8%

7.3% (3)

1.3% (6)

Officer*

6.2%

19.5% (8)

5% (23)

* Excludes the mayor and échevins of Montdidier, remitted along with the entire community of the town, and counted among the 51 community participants (AN JJ 86, no. 437, fol. 154).

Figure 7.1 Socio-economic attributes of Jacques

³⁷ In addition to works cited in the Introduction, see Andrew Prescott, ‘London in the Peasants’ Revolt: A portrait gallery’, London Journal 7 (1981): 125–143; Christopher Dyer, ‘The social and economic background to the revolt of 1381’ in R.H. Hilton and T.H. Aston (eds), The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984), 9–42; Herbert Eiden, ‘Joint action against “bad” lordship: The Peasants’ Revolt in Essex and Norfolk’, History 83 (1998): 24–28; Martha Howell, ‘Credit networks and political actors in thirteenth-century Ypres’, P&P 242 (2019): 3–36.

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champs labourer & cultivier ses terres & vignes & faire ses besoignes & marchandises). A similar proportion (27.4 per cent) of the 51 communities that received communal remissions also had this formula incorporated in their pardons. Some might not consider the Jacquerie a ‘peasants’ revolt’ on this basis, but clearly, rural participation from people engaged in agriculture was important to it. It is true that there were artisans among the rebels, including surgeons, smiths, butchers, millers, carpenters, coopers, cobblers, cutlers, cordwains, a goldsmith, a tiler, and many others. Such men, however, make up only about 15 per cent of the participants. This proportion is somewhat lower than that found in a study of fifteenth-century Poitevin villages, suggesting the number of artisans in the revolt simply reflects the normal composition of rural populations.³⁸ Indeed, the number of artisans in the figure above might overstate their presence, for it includes both those like ‘Jean Die, dit Arnoul, le coustelier’ (the cutler), who certainly practised that trade, and those like ‘Mathieu le Chandlier’ (the chandler) who may just have borne artisanal surnames, no assurance of their real livelihoods.³⁹ The proportion of artisans is nearly matched by the percentage of those termed manual labourers (homme de labour). In neither case were these workers necessarily free from agricultural labour. It has been thoroughly demonstrated that medieval people often combined wage labour and artisanal trades with agricultural production, and the Jacquerie sources bear this out. Almost all of the hommes de labour have the agricultural formula in their remissions, suggesting that the term may even have been synonymous with a farm or vineyard worker, and nearly a third of those Jacques identified as artisans also had the agricultural formula in their pardon (Figure 7.2). Cazelles’s analysis did not make any distinction between leaders, who are probably over-represented in the sources as discussed in the previous chapter, and those without an organizational role. There were significant differences in social background between those who can be identified as serving as captains or in other leadership positions and those who were merely members of the ‘rank and file’.⁴⁰ While, as I outlined in the last chapter, the revolt’s leaders were notably well-off, well-established men, removing those Jacques known to have been leaders from the data presents a more rural and even less literate constituency (Figure 7.1). Those who played a leadership role in the revolt were often literate, and many had careers as petty officials. But few rank-and-file Jacques can be found in professions demanding literacy. Among non-leaders, only 5 per cent of participants can be identified as officers serving in communal, seigneurial/

³⁸ Alain Champagne, L’artisanat rural en Haut-Poitou, milieu XIVe–fin XVIe (Rennes, 2007), 58–66. ³⁹ Jean Die: AN JJ 115, no. 298, fol. 146v–47r, excerpted in Luce, 196–197; Mathieu le Chandelier (along with two le Bouchiers and a le Fèvre): AN X1a 18, fol. 63. ⁴⁰ See also Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Social constituency’.

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Captains

Rank and file

Artisans with agricultural formula

27.3% (21 of 77)

33.3% (2 of 6)

26.8% (19 of 71)

Artisans also identified as Homme de labour

15.6% (12 of 77)

--(0 of 6)

16.9% (12 of 71)

Homme de labour also identified as artisans

20% (12 of 60)

--(0 of 3)

21% (12 of 57)

Homme de labour with agricultural formula

90% (54 of 60)

66.7% (2 of 3)

91.2% (52 of 57)

9

---

9

All three identifiers

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Figure 7.2 Overlapping socio-economic attributes

ecclesiastical, or royal administrations, compared with nearly 20 per cent of the leaders.⁴¹ While clerics made up 7 per cent of the leadership’s constituency, they made up only 1 per cent of its followers. So, despite the importance of written communication to the movement’s logistics, it is doubtful that literacy characterized the movement’s participants as a whole. Rank-and-file Jacques were about as likely as leaders to be artisans or to bear artisanal surnames, but the captains’ professions—two smiths, a baker, a possible butcher, a cartwright, and a miller—required capital and were relatively high status. The same vocations can be found among multiple non-leaders, where we find an additional seventeen butchers, six smiths, four cartwrights, three millers, and one baker, perhaps indicating some coordination among certain professions.⁴² But the rank and file also included such lower status jobs as tanning, woodcutting, and ferrying. Followers were also somewhat more likely to be engaged in agriculture than leaders, for the formula about harvesting crops and

⁴¹ A sizeable minority of the officials among the rank and file were royal sergeants: AN JJ 86, no. 223, fol. 73; AN JJ 86, no. 429, fol. 150v; AN JJ 86, no. 456, fol. 161r; AN X2a 6, fol. 407r (if he was the same man as the Jacques remitted at AN JJ 90, no. 243, fol. 130v, ed. Luce, no. 47, pp. 294–295) or later took up the profession: AN JJ 102, no. 9, fol. 9v. Sergeantry was not necessarily a vocation requiring literacy (Bernard Guenée, Tribunaux et gens de justice dans le bailliage de Senlis à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers 1380—vers 1550) (Paris, 1963), 213). ⁴² Butchers and their guilds played important roles in many late medieval revolts (Mollat and Wolff, Popular revolutions, 173, 209, 229 and David Nicholas, The later medieval city, 1300–1500 (London, 1997), 134, 139–140). The large number of butchers, who make up nearly a quarter of the artisan Jacques, may reflect this revolutionary predeliction, but six of these ‘le Bouchiers’ hailed from the village of Luzarches, suggesting that it was a family name there (AN X1c 13b, no. 255).

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vines appears a little more often in their remissions. Non-leaders were, however, nearly twice as likely to be termed homme de labour as leaders were. So, even if the two constituencies were about as likely to be engaged in agriculture, non-leaders may have been more often farm workers than farm owners. All of the captains appear to have been free men, but two rank-and-file Jacques were identified as serfs (homme de corps).⁴³ Instructive as these numbers are, their starkness belies the fuzziness of most Jacques’ social attributes and backgrounds. Some Jacques had overlapping attributes, such as Chenevot le Bouchier, who was also his village’s leader (chief de ville), or Colin de Soissy, who was a serf but also a cobbler.⁴⁴ Some agriculturalists may have been rich farmers rather than poor peasants, and not all hommes de labour were unskilled workers of little substance: 12 men with artisanal identifiers, ranging from cobblers to cartwrights to foresters, are also termed homme de labour, and the captain Germain de Réveillon, although called homme de labour in his remission, was also a literate and relatively wealthy familiar of a great prince.⁴⁵ As I mentioned, it is likely that not all men with artisanal surnames practised that profession or perhaps any profession at all. Moreover, it is rare to find even these scant and ambiguous details about the participants. Most of the time, the sources give us only the Jacques’s name and place of residence. If we knew more about them, the picture painted by the figures might change considerably. Still more problematic is the fact that even those whose names we know represent only a small fraction of the thousands or tens of thousands of people who were involved. Literate professionals probably did not make up the majority of Jacques, as Cazelles maintained, for they do not even make up a majority of those Jacques about whom we have information. Furthermore, such men are probably over-represented in the sources. The Chronique normande’s use of the word peasants (paysans) to describe the rebels or Froissart’s portrayal of them as stunted and sunburnt hayseeds (villains noir et petits) from country towns (villes champestres) certainly does not describe all of the Jacques, but it probably describes more of them than we have specific evidence for.⁴⁶ Such low status men (let alone their wives and children) are exactly the kind of people who were less likely to have been able to obtain a pardon.

⁴³ AN JJ 86, no. 377, fol. 129r; next note. This may understate the number of serfs involved, for there were still many unfree people in the fourteenth century, even in the Île-de-France and Picardy, and especially in Champagne. See, for example, AN KK 896, fol. 247r, 264v–68r, 280v; AN P 1893, fol. 150–51; BnF franç. 20082, fol. 141v–47. ⁴⁴ AN X1c 13b, no. 255. ‘Colin de Soisy cordonnier demourans a Lymones sur Marne lez Nonteuil homme de corps et de l’abbasse de Juerre & subget en partie de nostre treschier dame la Royne Jehanne’ (AN JJ 86, unnumbered mention after no. 329, fol. 110v). ⁴⁵ Germain de Réveillon: AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262 and see Chapter 6. ⁴⁶ Froissart, SHF, §416, p. 105, §413, p. 99.

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What can be said with confidence is that the Jacquerie’s participants hailed from a wide spectrum of social statuses and backgrounds, much as might be found in any medieval village.⁴⁷ We can well imagine that many of the differences of agreement about violence and authority outlined in the previous chapter stemmed from these differences in social status. The Quatre Valois chronicler’s remark that Guillaume Calle despaired of his troops as ‘people of little account’ (gens de petit fait) and was made to lead them against his will gives us some sense of how these social distinctions must have grated.⁴⁸ Yet the Jacquerie’s success—however fleeting—was due in great part to its appeal to a broad and varied constituency, enabling massive mobilization across a broad social spectrum as well as a wide geographic expanse. The range of social backgrounds among participants and the difference between leaders and non-leaders no doubt contributed to the ambivalence that I discussed in the previous chapter about hierarchical leadership among the Jacques, who insisted on having leaders while often resisting their authority. That ambivalence thus grew out of an integral aspect of the Jacquerie, without which the revolt probably could not have taken place, but it certainly also contributed to the revolt’s eventual collapse.

Urban and Rural In the previous chapter, I emphasized the importance of inter-village cooperation and the movement of individual Jacques between communities in facilitating the revolt, as well as the ways in which these encounters produced conflict. As in all medieval rural revolts, towns and cities also played a considerable role in buttressing the rebellion. Townspeople, including women, in these places contributed to the Jacquerie by supplying the troops, as discussed in the previous chapter. They also joined forces with the Jacques in attacking some fortifications. Along with Paris, provincial capitals and small towns were key to the revolt’s functioning. Froissart listed Beauvais, Montdidier, Bray-sur-Somme, Corbie, Nesle, Lihons, and Péronne as fortified towns where the Jacques had alliances.⁴⁹ To ⁴⁷ Among others, see Henri Sée, Les classes rurales et le régime domanial en France au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1901); Marc Bloch, French rural history: An essay on its basic characteristics, Janet Sondheimer (trans.), (London, 1966); Robert Fossier, Paysans d’Occident: XIe–XIVe siècles (Paris, 1984); Monique Bourin, Villages médiévaux en bas-Languedoc: Genèse d’une socialibilité, Xe–XIVe siècle, 2 vols (Paris, 1987); François Menant and Jean-Pierre Jessenne (eds), Les élites rurales dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne: Actes des XXVIIes Journées internationales d’histoire de l’Abbaye de Flaran, 9, 10, 11 septembre 2005 (Toulouse, 2007). Even among servile communities, there was considerable social stratification: Léo Verriest, Le servage dans le comté de Hainaut: Les sainteurs—le meilleur catel (Brussels, 1910);; William Chester Jordan, From servitude to freedom: Manumission in the Sénonais in the thirteenth century (Philadelphia, 1986); Brunel, ‘Hommes de corps’. ⁴⁸ 4 Valois, 71. ⁴⁹ ‘ens es villez fremeez il avoient asséz d’alianches, en Biauvais, a Montdidier, a Bray sus Somme, a Corbie, a Neelle, a Lihons et a Pieronne’ (Froissart, Chicago MS, 169v).

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those we can add the cities of Senlis, Amiens, Meaux, Soissons, Laon, Abbeville, Rouen, and Caen, most of which had clear alliances with the Parisian reformers, as well as many smaller towns like Jaux, Pont-Sainte-Maxence, Clermont, Montataire, and Poix.⁵⁰ Urban support for the Jacquerie grew out of and reflected the close ties between town and country. Economically, their fates were intertwined: towns could not live without what the country produced, and the country-folk needed those markets for their produce and labour and for their own consumption of city crafts and imports. Nor was the line between burgher and rustic always a clear one. Many Jacques were comfortable in the towns and did business and owned property there. City-folk, in turn, knew and respected many country-folk. When Jean Rose, from the village of La Presle, came to ask the citizens of Compiègne to support the Jacquerie, they listened to him because ‘he was well known in the city’ (estoit bien cogneu en la dite ville), and at least initially, they trusted him when he promised his support to the city if the Jacques came to endanger it.⁵¹ Men like Rose knew that if the revolt were to have a chance of success, it would need the cities, not just for their wealth but also for their strategic military importance. Often sited on high ground, fourteenth-century cities were enclosed within high walls. Fortified and guarded, these walls distinguished them from the ‘open countryside’ (plat pays) whence most of the Jacques hailed, and enabled them to fend off attack with even greater success than many castles.⁵² They could thus be defended and used as offensive bases in much the same way that castles could, with the advantage (from the standpoint of popular rebellion) that they could house a much larger body of troops than all but the most imposing of fortresses. Because the Jacques destroyed rather than occupied castles, towns were the revolt’s only available defensive infrastructure, as the rebel leadership was fully aware. Before the battle at Mello-Clermont, Calle and the Hospitaller advised their troops that it would be best to fall back to Paris.⁵³ This advice unheeded, they then sought shelter after the defeat in ‘some walled town, like Beaumont or Montdidier’, which would give them the leverage to negotiate with Navarre, as Froissart’s chronicle reports.⁵⁴

⁵⁰ Of the cities listed by the Dauphin to Laon’s envoy in July 1358 as allies of Paris—Rouen, Beauvais, Senlis, Amiens, Noyon, Soissons, Laon, Reims and Châlons—only the last two do not have documented links to the Jacquerie (AD Aisne 1 Edt 1 CC, fol. 65r). ⁵¹ ‘dist le dit Jehan aus diz bourgeois & habitanz que, ja soit ce que il fust avec les diz du plat païs et en leur compaignie, toutevoies, se il vouloient avoir à faire (sic, probably ‘mefaire’) en aucune maniere à la dite ville et ycelle assaillir, il les lairoit et venroit vivre & mourir avec les habitanz d’icelle’ (AN JJ 86, no. 365, fol. 124v–25r, ed. Luce, no. 35, pp. 272–274). For Compiègne’s commercial importance in the fourteenth century, see Louis Carolus-Barré, ‘Une foire internationale au Moyen Âge: “Le MiKaresme”, ou foire de la mi-Carême à Compiègne’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 106 (1962): 74–77. ⁵² See Chapter 2. ⁵³ 4 Valois, 73. ⁵⁴ ‘ “se nous poons entrer en nulle bonne ville fremee se le tenons de fait, soit Biaumont sus Oise ou Mondidier, nous averons bien l’accort et veu dou roy de Navare car il fait guerre contre le duch de Normendie” ’ (Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169v).

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It would be easy to imagine that the cities, particularly those with close relationships with the Parisian reformers, played the dominant role in this alliance, co-opting the Jacques’ services for their own purposes. A pattern of municipal armies going out during the Jacquerie to attack particular castles is observable, and the towns involved, such as Rouen, Amiens, Gien, and Orléans, may have taken advantage of the revolt to settle scores with neighbouring nobles.⁵⁵ But in Compiègne, at least, the Jacques approached the city for its support and seemed to wish to direct the city, rather than to be directed by it. Jean Rose came to the city under Calle’s orders, bearing letters that requested that the city ‘be allied with the countryfolk and sustain them, support them, and aid them in their acts’.⁵⁶ Compiègne’s initial response was positive—Calle and his people might come before the city as it pleased them—though it later reneged on the agreement. Perhaps moved by their city’s reputation as ‘the most faithful’ of royal cities, the citizens ultimately refused to hand their nobles over to the Jacques’ mercy.⁵⁷ Rose was arrested by a city official and summarily beheaded when the Counter-Jacques entered the city, his goods seized by the royal bailli of Senlis, and the city became a bastion of the Counter-Jacquerie.⁵⁸ In other cities, propaganda and provocation were employed to incite popular sympathy with the hope of marshalling the city’s resources to the rebel cause. While in the countryside, the Jacques’ propagandists played to the feeling that the nobles had abandoned the country-dwellers, in the cities, representatives of the rebels spoke to internal socio-economic divisions. In Caen, Pierre de Montfort, who seems to have been an established popular leader, sowed dissension between the town’s little people (le menu commun) and its rich inhabitants (les gros) in opposition to war taxation. During the Jacquerie, Montfort wore a wooden plough in his hat in place of a feather and said that he supported the Jacques so that the common people would do likewise.⁵⁹ Similar incitements to rebellion are ⁵⁵ In addition to discussion of those cities’ enmities discussed in Chapter 9, see AN JJ 86, no. 433, fol. 152v–53r, remission for an inhabitant of Laon, accused of holding the castle of Eppes in sympathy with Marcel and wishing to burn it down. ⁵⁶ ‘porter lettres aus bourgeois et habitanz d’icelle ville de Compiengne, afin qu’il vousissent estre aliez avec les genz du dit plat païs, et eulx soustenir, conforter et aider en leur faiz’ (AN JJ 86, no. 365, fol. 124v–25r, ed. Luce, no. 35, pp. 272–274). ⁵⁷ Chron. norm., 128; Chron. reg., 271. On Compiègne as ‘fidelissima’ and protector of nobles, see Colette Beaune, Le Grand Ferré: Premier héros paysan (Paris, 2013), Ch. 4, esp. 94–96, and 199. ⁵⁸ This bailli, Guillaume le Boutellier, lord of Chantilly, was married to the sister of Jean and Raoul de Clermont-Nesle, the revolt’s first victims (Gallia regia, no. 20770, 2114; Anselme de Sainte-Marie et al., Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la maison royale de France, des pairs, grands officiers de la couronne & de la maison du roy & des anciens barons du royaume, 3rd edn, 12 vols (Paris, 1726–1879), VI: 55). Rose’s goods were given to his successor in the post, Jean de Caponval (AN JJ 86, no. 153, fol. 51v; AD Oise G 2223). Le Boutellier, scion of an ancient Senlisien family, apparently spent the Jacquerie period in Compiègne, for the villagers of Chambly wrote to him there (AN JJ 90, no. 354, fol. 182, ed. Luce, no. 49, pp. 297–299), a fact which may reflect unease with Senlis’s attitude toward nobles from an early date. ⁵⁹ ‘ou temps que le commun de Beauvoisin s’esmut contre les nobles du pays, il prist et portoit sur son chapel, en lieu de plum, une charue de bois, et à fin de mettre, si comme il sembloit, le commun de

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attributed to one Jean Boulengier, procurator of Laon, a city also allied with Paris and Navarre.⁶⁰ Boulengier’s role was said to be the accomplice of two other municipal officials, Colard de Collegis and Robert de Loupsault, executed for these crimes, as well as for encouraging the adoption of the Parisian chaperons and for supporting Robert le Coq and Charles of Navarre.⁶¹ The royal prévôt of Laon, Regnaut de Paris, during whose tenure Boulengier allegedly made these remarks, should probably be identified with the delegate to the Estates of October 1356 of the same name, who fled Laon for Soissons and whose goods were confiscated for lèse-majesté.⁶² Incitement to rebel against the rich also occurred at Abbeville, where Jean de la Mare was executed in early July 1358 for attempting to cause an uprising in the city through harelles, compilations, et mauvaises paroles. He claimed that he need only lift a finger to eliminate the rich men and women of the town, and that if only the mayor and seven or eight others were killed, everyone in the town would be equal.⁶³ Unlike the Caen and Laon cases which had direct links to the Jacques or Parisians, de la Mare had no explicit connection with those rebels, but the timing of his execution makes such an association—at least by sympathy or inspiration— inescapable. Abbeville was later granted protection from nobles whose castles and strong-houses they had destroyed, though the citizens claimed that this violence occurred later, under orders from the Dauphin and during the war against the English.⁶⁴ The reasoning advanced for the castle destruction—to keep empty fortresses out of enemy hands—is the same as that which underpinned some of the explanations advanced for the Jacquerie’s destruction of castles. Certainly, the timing is suspicious. Also suspicious is a disturbance in Arras, in which a nobleman and a number of burghers were murdered when the people were ‘irrationally stirred up’, for which crimes the city was remitted in June 1358.⁶⁵ Acquired by such means or others, the extensive benefits that urban allies could provide to rural rebels are exemplified by the Jacques’ most unequivocal urban la dite ville et du pays en semblable erreur, disoit q’uil se tenoit de la partie des Jaques’ (AN JJ 87, no. 321, fol. 204v–205, partially ed. Luce, no. 45, pp. 291–292). ⁶⁰ ‘il avoit enduit le menu pueple de Laon afin de faire conspiration, en machinant la mort des gros de la Ville’ (AN JJ 86, no. 446, fol. 157, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 103–104). Boulengier denied it, even under threat of torture, and was remitted, but criminal prosecution was still on-going over a year later (AN X2a 6, fol. 403–404r). ⁶¹ Royal grace to bury their bodies at AN JJ 90, no. 14, fol. 8r; AN JJ 86, no. 559, fol. 203v. See also Jean de Noyal, ‘Fragments inédits’, ed. Molinier, 257–258 and AN JJ 90, no. 35, fol. 16v. They and Boulengier served as municipal tax collectors in Laon (AD Aisne Edt 1 CC 1). ⁶² AN X2a 6, fol. 389–391r; AN JJ 86, no. 328, fol. 110. ⁶³ ‘en disant que il ne li faloit que lever le doit, que il ne demoureroit rike homme ne rike femme en le ville d’Abbevile, et que, se li maire et sept ou huict des gens de le ville heussent esté mort, on heust esté tout yeugal en le ville’ (Bnf Picardie 91, fol. 147, ed. Augustin Thierry, Recueil des monuments inédits de l’histoire du Tiers-État, Première série: Chartes, coutumes, actes municipaux, statuts . . . région du Nord, 4 vols (Paris, 1850–1870), IV: no. 43.x, p. 200). ⁶⁴ AN JJ 89, no. 351, fol. 147v, ed. Thierry, Recueil, IV: no. 26, pp. 141–144; AN JJ 89, no. 353, fol. 148; HYW, II: 391. ⁶⁵ AN JJ 86, no. 140, fol. 48v.

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supporter, the city of Senlis, whose connection with the revolt’s inception is detailed in Chapter 3. During the Jacquerie, the city’s inhabitants engaged in numerous attacks at the side of the Jacques, and during the Counter-Jacquerie, the city served as a refuge for country-folk, who met there to plan their defence.⁶⁶ The city was the only place where the nobles’ onslaught was rebuffed, as discussed in Chapter 9. While in other rebel cities, like Meaux, Amiens, and Beauvais, there were personal connections between major bourgeois families and the Paris faction or obvious Navarrese sympathies, these considerations seem to have been less important in Senlis. Senlisiens attacked Ermenonville alongside Parisian troops, as well as Jacques, and it was among those cities that the Dauphin considered allied to the Parisian rebels in July, but the only individual who connects Senlis to the Parisian–Navarrese faction was Jean Vaillant, mentioned in Chapter 3. Senlis’s actions may be explained by some ideological sympathy for the reform programme: it had hosted the meeting of the Second Estate held in March, and during the Jacquerie, the citizens destroyed the records of the king’s warden of the rivers and forests, perhaps in keeping with the efforts of the 1355 and 1357 to return oversight of these resources to local hands.⁶⁷ But the citizens of Senlis apparently never donned the red and blue hoods in sympathy with Paris as did those of other cities. Senlis seems to have been an independent player whose closest allies were the Jacques themselves. After Senlis, Beauvais was probably the next most sympathetic city to the Jacquerie. Many royal grants specify that the rebels were from the countryside around Beauvais (du plat pais de Beauvoisin), and every chronicle mentions the Beauvaisis as the centre of the revolt. Froissart called it ‘their own country’ (lor droite marce).⁶⁸ The city itself was remitted for participation in the revolt and may even have served as its administrative headquarters, since nobles were judged and executed there ‘with the town’s consent’.⁶⁹ Beauvais may have had some Navarrese sympathies, for it welcomed King Charles sometime in 1358.⁷⁰ Within the city, the rebellion was connected with the episcopal see: Philippe Poignant, who was asked to play an organizing role in the revolt, served as guardian to the Bishop of Beauvais and had been part of the reform government’s commission to destroy ⁶⁶ AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97; AN JJ 90, no. 356, fol. 183v. ⁶⁷ AN JJ 90, no. 151, fol. 81. ⁶⁸ Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169v. ⁶⁹ Quote at Jean de Noyal, ‘Fragments inédits’, ed. Molinier, 257 and Chron. reg., 271–272. Judgment (for the execution of two gentlemen, then carried out in Pont-Sainte-Maxence): AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330; executions: Chron. norm., 129; Remission: AN JJ 90, no. 564, fol. 279r. ⁷⁰ The communal archives of Beauvais were destroyed in 1940 and the official inventory, Inventaires sommaires des archives communales antérieures à 1790: Département de l’Oise, ville de Beauvais, ed. Renaud Rose (Beauvais, 1887), is disappointing. For the city’s preparations and relations with Charles of Navarre, see Beauvais, mediathèques du Beauvaisis, Collection Bucquet-aux-Cousteaux, 95 vols, LXIX: 23–26, http://bucquet.beauvaisis.fr [last accessed 22 November 2020]. See also, Jean le Bel, 253.

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defunct episcopal fortifications in 1357.⁷¹ Guilbert Doublet, a cleric who also served as an episcopal counsellor and lawyer, was prosecuted with his brother Jean, also a cleric, for acting as the country-folks’ ‘captains, allies, accomplices, and leaders’ (capitaneos, alligatos, complices ac ductores), though they were not convicted for want of witnesses willing to testify.⁷² These men bear the same surname as Simon Doublet, who commanded the Jacques during a major assault in Picardy at Poix, an incident that is also mentioned in the accusation against Guilbert and Jean Doublet.⁷³ The see’s bailiff later imprisoned, tortured, and condemned to death a noble participant in the Counter-Jacquerie, who escaped execution only through a royal remission.⁷⁴ The young bishop-elect of Beauvais, Philippe d’Alençon, had not yet taken up residence, and the curia itself may have been divided, but that there was a proJacquerie group associated with the chapter may help to explain the curious fact that, despite the sources’ insistence on the Beauvaisis as the nest of rebellion, there are very few remissions for inhabitants of the countryside around Beauvais.⁷⁵ Plotting the pardons on a map leaves a large blank circle around the city, running from Gerberoy and Marseille-en-Beauvaisis in the north-west, Breteuil and Bonvilliers in the north-east, Bulles in the east, to Ponchon and Jouy-sur-Thelle in the south, roughly matching the see of Beauvais’s extensive temporal jurisdiction.⁷⁶ In the first instance, many country-folk in the area would have been justiciable by the bishop’s or chapter’s court, or even that of the municipality, whose jurisdictional reach extended to some villages. Consequently, these people would have come under royal jurisdiction only in unusual circumstances, such as the successful effort to overturn the episcopal sentence against the CounterJacquerie participant mentioned above.⁷⁷ That remission and the remission granted to Beauvais’s citizens are both mindful of episcopal prerogatives, granting ⁷¹ See Chapters 1 and 6. ⁷² AN JJ 88, no. 1, fol. 1–2. For Guilbert’s role, see AN X1c 32a, no. 65. ⁷³ AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136. ⁷⁴ AN JJ 86, no. 419, fol. 146v. The bailiff in question was probably Étienne de Creil, who was among those responsible for investigating and ultimately dropping the charges against the Doublet brothers (‘Stephano de Credulio tunc custodi baillivie Belavacensis’, AN JJ 88, no. 1, fol. 1–2). ⁷⁵ Gallia christiana in provincias ecclesiasticas distributa . . . , ed. Denis de Sainte-Marthe et al., 16 vols (Paris, 1715–1865), IX: col. 751–752. AN X1c 32a, no. 65 suggests that Guilbert Doublet had enemies among the cathedral canons. ⁷⁶ Louis Eudore Deladreue, Carte du diocèse de Beauvais et du comté de Clermont au XIVe siècle (Beauvais, s.d.); Léon-Honoré Labande, Histoire de Beauvais et de ses institutions communales jusqu’au commencement du XVe siècle (Paris, 1892 [repr. 1978]), 140–142, 164–165, 170–200; Olivier Guyotjeannin, Episcopus et comes: Affirmation et déclin de la seigneurie épiscopale au nord du royaume de France (Beauvais-Noyon, Xe–début XIIIe siècle) (Geneva, 1987), 162–164 for an earlier period; Beaumanoir, cap. XI, §322, vol. I: 158–159: ‘la justice laie qu’il on ten icès lieus soit tenue du conte de Clermont des lieus qui sieent en la conteé de Clermont, ou de l’evesque, se li lieu sieent en la conteé de Beauvais’. Inventaires sommaires des archives départmentales antérieures à 1790: Oise, Série G, ed. Émile Coüard, Gustave Desjardins, and Armand Rendu, 2 vols (Beauvais, 1878–1895) unfortunately indicates no relevant episcopal judicial records from this period. ⁷⁷ This was probably rare because the crown generally resisted subjects’ efforts to invoke its jurisdiction over that of the bishop within the city (Labande, Histoire de Beauvais, 252–256).

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the bishop the right to issue his own pardons without any prejudice to his temporal or spiritual jurisdictions.⁷⁸ If there were elements sympathetic to the Jacques within the absent bishop’s curia, then the episcopal subjects of the Beauvaisis may have lived relatively untroubled by legal pursuit. Beauvais was not, however, wholly undivided in its sympathies. It served as a refuge to nobles like one Jean le Maire, a squire who fled from Chaumont because ‘the uprising was such that neither he nor any other honourable person dared remain in that country’, and to the Abbot of Froidmont, who took refuge in the monastery’s townhouse ‘because of the cruel and lamentable sedition between the common people and the nobles and then between the nobles and the people’.⁷⁹ Beauvais’s ambivalence was more typical of urban cooperation with the Jacques than Senlis’s solid support. Most cities that supported the Jacques did so only halfheartedly or temporarily. Given the sociologically complex and politically fractious nature of late medieval cities, it is perhaps not surprising that few towns were sufficiently unified as to take a position that was uniformly pro- or anti-Jacques.⁸⁰ The country-folks’ propagandists may have tried to exploit these divisions, but such fractures might also work against them. The ambivalence of urban support for the Jacques is well demonstrated by the example of Amiens. The Picard city was an enthusiastic supporter of both Charles of Navarre and the Parisian reform programme, and its representatives were active at the Estates General meetings. Its governors mistrusted the Dauphin’s noble supporters and had refused him entry to the town on that account.⁸¹ The letter that Marcel sent seeking help against the Dauphin from Ypres in July was accompanied by now lost letters from Amiens, as well as from Charles of Navarre.⁸² The city’s hinterland was home to a number of Jacques, and there were attacks near Amiens on manors or castles at Rivery, Bray-sur-Somme, and Pierrepont-sur-Avre.⁸³ During the Jacquerie, some townspeople joined the ⁷⁸ ‘sanz ce que par ce puisse estre porte preiudice a lui ne a sa jurisdicion temporelle ou espirituelle’ (AN JJ 90, no. 564, fol. 279r); ‘ampliant nostre dite grace nous voulons & donnons licence a nostre dit cousin & a son dit bailli que au dit Thomas puissent faire sur ce semblable grace . . . sanz ce que a nostre dit cousin ou a sa jurisdiction il tourne a prejudice’ (AN JJ 86, no. 419, fol. 146v). ⁷⁹ Chaumont: ‘il venoit demourer au dit Beauvez et qu’il n’oseroit demourer au dit Chaumont pour doubte de la dicte commocion qui lors estoit telle que lui qui parle ne nuls autres bonne personne n’osoit demourer ou pais’ (AN J 737, no. 36, ed. Henri Gravier, Les prévôts royaux du XIe au XIVe siècle (Paris, 1904), no. 25, pp. 130–136, at p. 135). Froidmont: ‘occasione acerbe seditionis et dolorose inter populares et nobiles, et statim inter nobiles et populares, dominus abbas recessit a monasterio, et ivit Belvacum’ (Luce, no. 68, p. 350; Gallia christiana, ed. Denis de Sainte-Marthe, IX: col. 832–833). ⁸⁰ Nicholas, The later medieval city. ⁸¹ AN JJ 86, no. 239, fol. 78v–79r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 97–99; see Chapter 2. ⁸² The dos of the surviving letters reads ‘les leters et les briefz du roy de Navarre, de la ville de Paris et de la ville de Amiens’ (Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols (Paris, 1909–1931), I: 427, n. 2; 431, n. 3). ⁸³ Hometowns: Daours: AN X1a 19, fol. 407v; Cachy: AN JJ 97, no. 358, fol. 94; Hangesten-Santerre: AN JJ 107, no. 185, fol. 87 regarding several of the men in AN X1a 26, fol. 270; Grattepanche: AN JJ 90, no. 423, fol. 212, AN JJ 90, no. 424bis, fol. 212v; Dury: AN X1a 19, fol. 407v; AN JJ 88, no. 43, fol. 29v; possibly Querrieu: AN JJ 86, no. 534, fol. 193v. Rivery: AN JJ 97, no. 358,

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Jacques, referred to as les genz des communes de Beauvoisis or as rustici, distinguishing them from these urban participants. The remission for the city of Amiens states that although some of these people went on their own account (alez solement de leur volenté), others were sent by the mayor and town councillors on behalf of the commune and at the request of the common people of the Beauvaisis.⁸⁴ Some or all of these townspeople went south to attack the castle of Moreuil, where a number of nobles had taken refuge from the Jacques and where the townspeople were joined by country-folk from Dury, Daours, Bray-surSomme, and possibly elsewhere.⁸⁵ But Amiens quickly withdrew its support from the rural rebellion. The Chronique normande suggests that the volte-face was due to dissension among the city governors. Although the city’s remission portrays the decision to send men as one made by the city governors as a whole, the chronicle reports that the mayor alone chose to send troops and that the city councillors were not happy about it.⁸⁶ The men were thus recalled. Having gone ‘only about five or six leagues from the city’—which is about the distance to Moreuil—they returned without harming any nobles. ‘Except’, adds one chronicle, ‘in the town and castle of Moreuil’.⁸⁷ The city government hunted down those who had gone on their own, either killing them upon apprehension or decapitating them after a trial, and returned any pillaged goods to their rightful owners.⁸⁸ Elsewhere, too, civic sympathies rose and fell with the fortunes of the uprising. Compiègne’s dalliance with the Jacques has been discussed. Nearby, Pont-SainteMaxence played host to the Jacques and, like Beauvais, it served as an execution site for nobles whom the Jacquerie’s leaders had sentenced to death.⁸⁹ It later changed hands and became a headquarters for the Counter-Jacquerie whence

fol. 94; Bray-sur-Somme: Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169v, AN X1a 19, fol. 407v; Pierrepont-sur-Avre: AN X1a 17, fol. 284, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 27, pp. 514–515. There was also a CounterJacquerie attack at Villers-aux-Érables: AN JJ 108, no. 60, fol. 37v–38r, ed. Luce, no. 64, pp. 335–338. ⁸⁴ ‘à la requeste du commun people de Beauvoisis, yceuls Majeur, Esquevins & commun avoient envoié senz licence de nous, de leurs genz avec les genz des Communes de Beauvoisis’ (AN JJ 86, no. 239, fol. 78v–79r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 97–99). ⁸⁵ Chron. reg., 272; Istore et croniques de Flandres d’après les textes de divers manuscrits, ed. Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, 2 vols (Brussels, 1879–80), II: 86, n. 6; AN JJ 108, no. 60, fol. 37v–38r, ed. Luce, no. 64, pp. 335–338; AN JJ 108, no. 86, fol. 55, partly excerpted at Luce, 207; AN X1a 19, fol. 407v. ⁸⁶ ‘le maire d’Amiens y envoya C hommes du commun de la ville [en l’aide des villains], mais il en despleut au conseil de la ville et s’en retournerent assez brief [sans riens meffaire as nobles]’ (Chron. norm., 129 with addition from the BnF franç. 5610 in notes). ⁸⁷ ‘ne alerent jusques à quatre, cinq ou six lieues loin de ladite Ville, ou environ’ (AN JJ 86, no. 239, fol. 78v–79r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 97–99); ‘reversi sunt antequam cuiquam nobili nocerent, excepto in villa et castello de Morolio’ (Chron. reg., 272). ⁸⁸ ‘pour ce que aucuns autres de ladite Ville estoient yssus hors d’icelle, senz leur gré & licence, & avoient pillié & robé, si tost que il le sorent, il les fuirent, & en prindrent les aucuns, auxquelz prendre, les aucuns furent occis, & les autres eurent par voie & maniere de justice, copées les testes, & firent rendre les biens que ilceulx avoient robez & pilliez, à ceulx à qui il estoient & appartenoient’ (AN JJ 86, no. 239, fol. 78v–79r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 97–99). See also, AN JJ 90, no. 243, fol. 130v, ed. Luce, no. 47, pp. 294–295 for Perrot le Sené. ⁸⁹ AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262; AN JJ 86, no. 224, fol. 73v, ed. Brunel, ‘Archives’, no. 1, pp. 69–70. Executions at AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330.

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scouts were sent to ferret out country-folk in hiding.⁹⁰ Clermont, which was possibly Guillaume Calle’s home, seems to have been a place where Jacquerie leaders congregated, and it may have served as a staging point for their confrontation with Charles of Navarre, as discussed in the next chapter, but after the Jacques’ defeat at that battle, Calle and other leaders were executed in the city. Clermont may even have betrayed Calle and his associates into Navarre’s hands in exchange for a letter of protection from that King.⁹¹ As discussed in Chapter 9, such a guarantee was instrumental in closing Montdidier’s gates to the Jacques during the Counter-Jacquerie, despite the mayor and aldermen’s earlier cooperation with the rebels. Other towns sought similar promises. The Navarrese dominance along the Seine estuary was probably an important consideration: towns that relied upon the Seine for their exports needed King Charles on their side, and rich urban merchants would have felt that keenly.⁹² Navarre’s intervention against the Jacques at the battle of Mello-Clermont battle discussed in the next chapter was thus a turning point in the rebellion, fatally weakening the alliance between city- and country-folk. But that alliance was brief and easily broken because it was always precarious. For a while, in particular circumstances and with particular objectives, the inhabitants of villages like Mello and of provincial towns like Senlis could act together in a non-noble collective effort blessed by the proud capital of Paris, in a manner ironically similar to the undifferentiated way that nobles sometimes spoke about them. City and countryside were not, however, homogeneous, and their interests were correspondingly diverse. Even during the revolt’s ascendency, in the period between Calle’s election and the twin disasters of Meaux-Mello, the Jacques and their allies could not wholly paper over their differences. If neither city nor countryside could flourish without the other, their interdependence nevertheless rested on major inequalities and belied mutual suspicion.⁹³ If nobles might lump all non-nobles together, the common people were well aware of their differences. Bridging those differences proved illusory, leaving the Jacques with no defensive architecture to rely upon when the Counter-Jacquerie began. This may have been the single most important factor in ensuring the rebellion’s failure.

⁹⁰ ‘à Pont Sainte Maxence & à Pompoing, où les gentils hommes estoient’ (AN JJ 96, no. 425, fol. 145, ed. Luce, no. 62, pp. 331–332). ⁹¹ AN JJ 90, no. 288, fol. 148r, ed. Luce, no. 24, pp. 253–254; see Chapter 8. ⁹² Raymond Cazelles, ‘Le parti navarrais jusqu’à la mort d’Étienne Marcel’, Bulletin philologique et historique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (jusqu’à 1610), année 1960 (Paris, 1961), 853–854. ⁹³ David Nicholas, Town and countryside: Social, economic and political tensions in fourteenthcentury Flanders (Bruges, 1971); Alexis Wilkin and John Naylor, ‘Introduction’ to Alexis Wilkin, John Naylor, Derek Keene, and Arnoud-Jan Bijsterveld (eds), Town and country in medieval north western Europe: Dynamic interactions (Turnhout, 2015), 1–34; see Chapter 3.

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8 Slaughtered like Pigs The Battles of Meaux and Mello-Clermont

As the Jacquerie unfolded over the month of June, the main theatre of action remained Picardy and the northern Île-de-France. These regions were home to more than half of the nearly 170 communities whose members participated, and they saw over 70 per cent of the violent incidents perpetrated during the revolt. The Jacquerie spread at least as far west as Caen in Normandy, but it primarily expanded eastward, 80 per cent of it occurring east of Beauvais.¹ Although we can date very few of the incidents involved, Sunday 10 June was clearly a turning point in the revolt’s fortunes. Almost simultaneously, non-noble forces suffered crushing defeats at Meaux, where a small contingent of nobles sallied from the Marché to defeat non-noble forces led by Parisian commanders, and in the Beauvaisis between Clermont and Mello, where Charles of Navarre commanded an ad hoc army of Anglo-Navarrese soldiers and French nobles against country-folk led by Guillaume Calle. These events are the best-known incidents of the Jacquerie, but why these armies came to be where they were, how they related to one another, and how their movements and choices fit into the contemporary political and military context are questions that have never been fully answered. Whether the assault on the Marché should even be considered part of the Jacquerie at all has been questioned.² Doubts on this front can be allayed. Although it is true that Siméon Luce skewed the picture by publishing a disproportionate number of documents related to Meaux in his Histoire de la Jacquerie, a range of sources convincingly shows that this was a joint operation in which Jacques and other country-folk participated alongside Parisians. That such an operation was envisaged from the beginning of the Jacquerie, on the other hand, is less clear. Again, it must be remembered that the revolt developed over time; what seemed possible or desirable on 27 May was not necessarily what was expected or intended on 9 June.

¹ Caen: AN JJ 87, no. 321, fol. 204v–205, partially ed. Luce, no. 45, pp. 291–292. Involvement extended as far as east as Reims, but excluding a few isolated incidents and the rebel communities in Champagne (about 13 per cent of the settlements involved in the revolt), it implicated few communities beyond Laon and the Soissonais. ² Douglas James Aiton, ‘ “Shame on him who allows them to live”: The Jacquerie of 1358’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow (Glasgow, 2007), 84–96.

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0009

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This caveat applies all the more to the Jacques’ confrontation with Charles of Navarre. The vexed problem of why the Parisians’ ally annihilated a Jacquerie army at the same time that other Jacques were with the Parisians at Meaux cannot be definitively resolved. Speculation that Navarre’s class consciousness trumped his strategic interests do not jibe with the evidence. David Bessen’s hypothesis that Navarre’s attitude toward the Jacquerie changed during the revolt seems more plausible, especially since an alliance with French nobles served his purposes admirably, but even contemporaries were unsure of why the Navarrese king acted as he did.³ What we do know for certain is that the events of 10 June overturned the board, changing the complexion of the revolt and giving the advantage back to the nobles, if not yet to the Dauphin.

The Road to Meaux It was probably less than a week earlier that 500 men had left Paris by the road through Saint-Denis under the command of the prominent reformers Pierre Gilles and Pierre des Barres. They were ultimately headed for Meaux and its island fortress, known as Le Marché (the Market), which guarded both the Marne River and the Dauphin’s wife and child. According to the royal chronicler, the battle at Meaux took place on the morrow of a muster of troops assembled at the village of Silly-le-Long on 9 June.⁴ Since sources indicate that this army passed at least two days in other places and must have spent at least two days marching, they probably left Paris around 5 June, a week after the confrontation at Saint-Leud’Esserent with which the Jacquerie began. As discussed in Chapter 3, that it may have taken the Parisians a week to mobilize their own troops suggests that they may not have expected how the Jacquerie would develop and had not foreseen the opportunity to launch an offensive campaign of their own. Alternatively, the delay may indicate that they were waiting for the Jacques to clear a path for their own troops. Either way, the movement toward Meaux was clearly undertaken in response to the Jacquerie. The defendants to a lawsuit brought by the royal counsellor Pierre d’Orgemont painted Gilles and des Barres’ mission as the reformers’ joining in the Jacquerie’s characteristic violence. The Parisian commanders had been ‘commissioned by Étienne Marcel and his accomplices’, they claimed, ‘to ride through the countryside (plata patria) for the particular purpose of hurting nobles and other disobedient people, either subjecting them to the prévôt [des marchands] or

³ David M. Bessen, ‘The Jacquerie: Class war or co-opted rebellion?’, JMH 11 (1985): 43–59. ⁴ GC, 181–183.

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executing them’.⁵ These defendants, of course, were trying to lessen their guilt by blaming Marcel, but Marcel himself admitted in his letter to Ypres in July that he and his associates had sent hundreds of men out to the Jacques and that they only left them when the country-folk refused to curb their excesses.⁶ Marcel cast this move as an effort to restrain the Jacques’ violence, and this may, in fact, have been part of their purpose, for orders from Marcel were noted in various places, including plura precepta given at Saint-Denis and certis ordinationibus at Gonesse, the second stop made by Gilles and des Barres’ army on the road to Meaux.⁷ The Jacquerie captain Hue de Sailleville’s account that he went to Paris to ask Marcel to restrain the Jacques would fit both with the Quatre Valois chronicle’s account of Calle sending some of his best men to Paris along with his letter asking for an alliance and Marcel’s claim about his purpose in sending troops to the countryside.⁸ Although these accounts differ in their emphasis of the operation’s objectives, they nevertheless all agree that Marcel took a role in at least trying to direct the Jacquerie’s violence. It should not, however, be assumed that the initiative for cooperation came from the Parisians alone. Not only does the Quatre Valois account of Calle’s proposal of an alliance suggest otherwise, but the remission for some inhabitants of the village of Puisieux, near Meaux, also demonstrates an evolution of objectives on his part. These men, who opposed the revolt, recalled that there were two separate occasions on which representatives of the Captain of the Countryside issued commands to the villagers: the first time, ‘at the beginning and during the horrible and hateful suffering and conflict that many non-nobles of the Beauvaisis and elsewhere made’, these men ordered the villagers to destroy the nobles’ houses and fortresses. On the second, ‘at the time of the scandalous and rash attack and assault by those from Paris and those from that region and elsewhere in the city of Meaux’, they ordered them—again on behalf of the Captain of the Countryside— to go to Meaux in order to help the non-nobles there.⁹ Conceivably, Calle and his

⁵ ‘tempore Petrus Egidii et Petrus de Barris fuerant commissi seu deputati per dictos prepositum et suos complices pro equitando per platam patriam et specialiter pro dampnificando, nobiles et alios inobedientes subjiciendo dicto preposito vel eos ponendo ad mortem’ (AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320). ⁶ ‘Envoiasmes bien trois cens combatans de noz gens et lettres de creance pour euls faire desister des grans mauls qu’il faisoient, et pour ce qu’il ne voudrent desister des choses qu’il faisoient . . . noz gens se departirent d’euls’ (d’Avout, 308). ⁷ AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320; AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r; see Chapter 9. ⁸ 4 Valois, 72; AN JJ 90, no. 288, fol. 148r, ed. Luce, no. 24, pp. 253–254. ⁹ ‘invalescente & durante horrido & detestabili supplicio & debato quod quamplurimum Innobiles tam de Belvacinis quam aliunde . . . tempore immensi & impetuosi incursus & insultus quem eodem anno nonnulli innobiles tam de villa Parisiensis quam de dicta patria & aliunde in Civitate Meldensis . . . fecerunt . . . quamplures alii Innobiles, eorum complices, fecissent in predicta villa de Puiseux iterum proclamari quod omnes homines dicte ville velociter accederent ad civitatem predictam pro succurrendo ibidem dictis Innobilibus in predicto insultu contra nobiles antedictos & specaliter precepissent ex parte dicti Capitanei [plane seu plate patrie tunc electi vel deputati]’ (AN JJ 86, no. 606, fol. 223v–24r). One of Pierre Gilles’s associates was a Pierre de Puisieux, executed along with other leading

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associates could have agreed to organize a brigade of rural troops for the Meaux assault in exchange for Parisian support. For their part, the Parisians had long had their eyes on Meaux. They had been in contact for several months with Meaux’s leading citizens who objected to the Dauphin’s garrison’s behaviour and asked the capital for help. The Dauphin, who had been at the Marché as recently as late May when the Jean Berniers encountered him there, had moved thence to Montereau and then further south to Sens, where he was on the eve of the attack.¹⁰ Likely, he took a good number of the Marché’s garrison with him, including the Count of Joigny, who was named captain of the garrison in April, but who had been replaced in June by the Lord of Hangest.¹¹ With the castle’s guard weakened and the Jacques having encountered no real opposition, the non-nobles could increase the scope of their ambitions. The Oise was secured while the Yonne-Seine was under increased guard, so it was natural that their attention would turn to the Marne. At the same time that Gilles and des Barres left Paris from the north, another contingent may have left from the south, as implied by the monk of Saint-Denis.¹² Remembering the city’s recapture of Corbeil earlier that spring, the Regent and his officers may have been betting on an attack at Montereau. Before departing Saint-Denis, the Parisian commanders had issued some orders from Marcel—the details of which we are unfortunately ignorant—and picked up another 50 men. The army’s numbers swelled to 600 as they marched to Gonesse, a ‘country town’ (villa campestris), about 10 kilometres away. At Gonesse, Pierre Gilles had the royal crier proclaim the destruction of estates belonging to Pierre d’Orgemont and a Sir Jean Rose.¹³ The local inhabitants, who considered themselves country-folk (gentes de patria plata), later claimed that they did not believe reformers when the Dauphin retook Paris. An Adam de Puisieux was in Navarrese service (see Chapter 3). ¹⁰ GC, 181; AN JJ 86, no. 128, fol. 46v, dated Montereau on 7 June; BnF franç. 27501, no. 140, dated Noyon-lez-Sens on 9 June. It is likely that he was aware of the revolt in the Beauvaisis by then, for the Pope in far-off Avignon was sufficiently well informed by 14 June to send letters to major Parisian clerics, asking them to exhort the common folk to peace (Charles Jourdain, L’Université de Paris au temps d’Étienne Marcel (Paris, 1878), 20–21; Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, sub auspiciis consilii generalis Facultatum Parisiensium, ex diversis bibliothecis tabulariisque collegit et cum authenticis chartis contulit, ed. Henri Denifle and Émile Chatelain, 4 vols (Paris, 1889–97), IV: no. 1239). ¹¹ GC, 169, 183; AN JJ 95, no. 6, fol. 2v–3r: ‘dominum de Hangesto dicti Mercati capitaneum’. ¹² Religieux, 128; see C8.P14. ¹³ AN X1a 14, fol. 476–477, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320; Luce, no. 18, p. 240 erroneously citing AN X1a 14, fol. 249; AN X1c 11, no. 92. AN X1a 17, fol. 140v–41r, cited in Léon Mirot, Une grande famille parlementaire aux XIVe et XVe siècles: Les d’Orgemont, leur origine, leur fortune, le Boiteux d’Orgemont (Paris, 1913), 12, n. 4 has no obvious connection to the violence at Gonesse. Sir Jean Rose is not mentioned again in this judgement and is no apparent relation to either the Jacques by the same name executed at Compiègne, nor the Roses of Meaux (see Chapter 6, n. 31). It is possible, though I think unlikely, that he should be identified with Master Jean Rosier, royal councillor, ‘allegedly killed by the country people’ who is mentioned in a royal grant of nobility for his widow: ‘defunctus magister Johannes Rosarii de Dijione quondam noster consiliarius gessisse dum viveret cognovimus & per quasque partem & honorem nostras confovendo per populares patrie fuisse dicitur interfectus’ (AN JJ 95, no. 140, fol. 55v).

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the proclamation and objected to it. Nevertheless, whether motivated by fear of the Parisians or for their own reasons, the villagers tore down d’Orgemont’s houses, set them on fire, and seized or destroyed the contents, as well as taking the animals, foodstuff, and equipment on the estates. The most substantial source for this attack, the Parlement judgement from 1361, blames the destruction on Pierre Gilles’s insane personal hatred for Pierre d’Orgemont. It memorably describes him madly rushing about the village with an unsheathed sword (ense nudo et quasi furibundus).¹⁴ Their story suggests that the destruction was unplanned; Pierre Gilles just happened to realize that the estates of his mortal enemy Pierre d’Orgemont were situated there. That scenario is, however, very unlikely since the d’Orgemont family’s seat had been at Gonesse for two or three generations and Gilles knew d’Orgemont well.¹⁵ In fact, the Parisians were pursuing a strategy of destroying estates belonging to the Dauphin’s councillors. In addition to Pierre d’Orgemont, Simon de Bucy, Jacques le Vache, and Jean de Charny also saw their manors and houses destroyed, as did Robert de Lorris whose difficulties are discussed below.¹⁶ De Bucy, who like d’Orgemont and de Lorris had been removed from office by the Estates of 1357, suffered extensive damages to his houses at Vaugirard, Issy, and Viroflay south of Paris.¹⁷ Jacques la Vache’s house was destroyed and pillaged at Choisy-le-Roi, an operation that might be connected to a campaign west of Paris that also saw destruction at Chevereuse, Trappes, Palaiseau, La Queue, and Garancières, though these attacks may have occurred somewhat later.¹⁸ Further east and notably along the southern route toward Meaux, Jean de Charny’s manors at Pomponne and Thorigny, as well as at Charny along the northern route, were torn down by hundreds of villagers from the vicomté of Paris and bailliage of Meaux, who also

¹⁴ AN X1a 14, fol. 476–477, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320, which also contains a long description of the items stolen or destroyed and of Pierre d’Orgemont’s main house, which boasted leaded glass windows. ¹⁵ Léopold Delisle, ‘Fragments de l’histoire de Gonesse, principalement tirés des archives hospitalières de cette commune’, BEC 20 (1859): 113–152; Mirot, Une grande famille, 1–20. ¹⁶ If Jean Rose of Gonesse was the same as the councillor reported killed by the Jacques, then his name could be added to this list (above, n. 13). ¹⁷ ‘occasione plurium devolucionum, incendiorum, depredacionum et aliorum maleficiorum per ipsos in hospiciis suis de Valle Girardi, de Yciaco et Villofloy’ (AN X1a 14, fol. 312r, ed. Luce, no. 54, pp. 304–306). ¹⁸ ‘plures persone . . . ad domum et locum ad dictum militem et consiliarium nostrum spectantes, in villa de Choisiaco, una cum pluribus aliis coadunate . . . cum diversis armorum generibus, accesserant ac eandem domum destruxerant et demoliti fuerant, bonaque dicti militis in ipsa existencia rapuerant’ (AN X1a 17, fol. 51v–52, ed. Luce, no. 58, pp. 320–322). On the other western attacks, see Chron. norm., 128; Chron. reg., 270–271. The motivation behind most of these attacks is not clear, though Henri Moranvillé thought they might be meant to clear the road to Dreux and Chartres (‘Note sur un fait d’armes des Parisiens en 1358’, BEC 60 (1899): 564–566). The damaged party at Chevereuse had been captured at the Battle of Poitiers (Raymond Cazelles, Société politique, noblesse et couronne sous Jean le bon et Charles V (Geneva, 1982), 399). See also John Bell Henneman, Royal taxation in fourteenthcentury France: The captivity and ransom of John II, 1356–1370 (Philadelphia, 1976), 75–77.

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stole his horses and other livestock.¹⁹ It is not always clear in the sources for these attacks whether the perpetrators were Parisians, country-folk (either previously associated with the Jacquerie or newly recruited), or a combination thereof. Using country-folk to carry out these operations posed a potential conflict because not all of the targeted councillors were noblemen. Indeed, the inhabitants of Gonesse objected to the destruction of Pierre d’Orgemont’s property because ‘he wasn’t noble’ (non esse nobilem).²⁰ In addition to overseeing the chastisement of d’Orgemont and Rose, Pierre Gilles and Pierre des Barres may have given orders to the country-folk about the next stage of the revolt, as communal captains were summoned there for the purpose.²¹ Gonesse was ideal for this use because it was a public space; on the road from Paris to Senlis, it was the seat of a royal prévôtée and possessed a ‘customary place for royal proclamations’.²² If Gilles and des Barres relayed orders at Gonesse, they probably echoed those given at Puisieux to head to Meaux, for that was the direction the army headed after leaving the smoking ruins of Pierre d’Orgemont’s estates. On the way, it passed through the village of Tremblay where it pressed some new recruits into service and took them to the gathering on 9 June at Silly-leLong.²³ Those of Puisieux who had been swayed by Calle’s representatives would have been there, as would have a Robert Manecier, scion of a prominent family at Gonesse, who headed to Meaux on a horse that he stole from Pierre d’Orgemont’s stables.²⁴ Some of their forces may have doubled back to the road from Paris to Senlis and joined in a major attack taking place against the castle of Ermenonville, which lay only a short distance to the north of Silly-le-Long. This siege must have been ongoing at least as late as 7 or 8 June because Germain de Réveillon’s remission recounts that Guillaume Calle was still at Ermenonville when other Jacquerie forces departed Montataire for Mello in his absence.²⁵ There were Parisians (ceulz ¹⁹ AN X1a 14, fol. 391, ed. Luce, no. 55, pp. 306–309. Pomponne and Thorigny lie about 10 kilometres east of Gournay-sur-Marne, which Chron. norm. 128 followed by Chron. reg., 270 identify as destroyed by the Parisians. Charles Estienne, La guide des chemins de France (Paris, 1552), 42 lists it on the route from Paris to Meaux, which to the west ran to Dreux and Chartes (previous note). ²⁰ AN X1a 14, fol. 476–477, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320. ²¹ ‘auditis de certis ordinationibus prepositi mercatorum Parisiensis apud Gonesse missis . . . predicti capitaneus & Philipus eius consiliarius apud Gonesse accedere pro dictis ordinationibus audiendis’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r). ²² AN X1a 14, fol. 476–477, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320. ²³ ‘quant Pierre Giles et ses complices alèrent à Meaulx, il commanda aus dessus diz, en passant par le dit Tramblay, qu’il allassent avecques lui’ (AN JJ 86, no. 286, fol. 95v, ed. Luce, no. 27, pp. 258–259); GC, 181–182. ²⁴ Luce, no. 18, p. 240 erroneously citing AN X1a 14, fol. 249. Robert shares a surname with Colin Manessier, one of the defendants to d’Orgemont’s suit, and he later served as captain of Gonesse’s fortified church, where he was accused of levying an illegal tax for maintenance of its fortifications (Pierre-Clément Timbal et al. (eds), La guerre de Cent ans vue à travers les registres du Parlement (1337–1369) (Paris, 1961), no. 50, pp. 166–167). ²⁵ ‘leur capitaine général, qui lors estoit devant Ermenonville’ (AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262). His movements are further discussed below.

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de Paris) at this attack, as the chronique normande recounts. Gilles and des Barres may have sent some of their troops toward Ermenonville because although the Parlement lawsuit has them leaving from Saint-Denis with 500 men, the royal chronicle reports that they arrived for the assembly at Silly-le-Long with only 300.²⁶ If so, this contingent did not re-join those attacking the Marché, for the chronique normande says that the Parisians at Ermenonville returned to Paris.²⁷ These forces were joined by some inhabitants of Senlis, one of the Jacques’ closest urban allies, who also participated alongside the rural rebels in attacks on Thierssur-Thève, the castle at Beaumont-sur-Oise, and Fontaines-Chaalis.²⁸ Like the property destroyed at Gonesse and elsewhere, Ermenonville belonged to one of the Dauphin’s favourites, Robert de Lorris. As I outlined in Chapter 1, de Lorris was Marcel’s brother-in-law, but also one of his particular enemies, for he had profited shamefully from family problems that had cost Marcel a good deal of money. The attack seems to have been part of a systematic programme of destruction against his property in which the Jacques were particularly complicit. In addition to Ermenonville, another castle at Montépilloy and a motte and granges at Luzarches were also targeted.²⁹ But Ermenonville was de Lorris’s prized possession. Though not of the order of a great fortress like Montereau, it was a substantial castle with centuries of history behind it. The Jacques devoted major resources to the Ermenonville operation. Not only was Guillaume Calle present, but so was one of the Jacques’ communal captains, Arnoul Guenelon of Catenoy. Guenelon, who was closely associated with Senlisiens and lived in the city after the Jacquerie, also participated—or perhaps even led—the attack at Montépilloy, situated just 9 kilometres down a road that ran ‘straight from Senlis’.³⁰ Montépilloy lay between Ermenonville and the seat of Guenelon’s captaincy at Catenoy, so it would make sense for him and his men to have started there and moved south. The aims of the Jacques, the Senlisiens, and the Parisians at Ermenonville may not have been exactly congruent. Some tension between the Parisian political programme against the Dauphin’s favourites and the Jacques’ social aims had surfaced at Gonesse when the non-nobles objected to destroying d’Orgemont’s property because he was not noble. Jean de Venette’s account implies that the Jacques’ attack on Ermenonville was intended to wipe out a refuge of fleeing noblemen and women, whom the Jacques beat to death (lethaliter ferierunt). He ²⁶ GC, 181. ²⁷ Chron. norm., 130. ²⁸ GC, 178; AN X1a 21, fol. 514; AN X1a 22, fol. 47r, fol. 405r; AN X1c 13a, no. 14. For Senlis’s connections with the Jacquerie, see Chapters 3, 7, and 9, below. ²⁹ Montépilloy: AN X1a 18, fol. 63, in which Mathieu le Chandelier, also named in the FontaineChaalis attacks, appear; Luzarches: AN X1c 13b, no. 255. It is notable that Ermenonville, Montépilloy, and Luzarches had been the patrimony of the prominent Boutellier family from Senlis (Raymond Cazelles, ‘Jean II le Bon: Quelle homme? Quelle roi?’, RH 251 (1974): 12–13). ³⁰ AN X1a 18, fol. 63 and see AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r for his presence at Ermenonville. Road: Beauvais, AD Oise H 531.

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says nothing about Robert de Lorris or Parisian interests.³¹ According to the chronique normande, on the other hand, de Lorris and his family were in the castle and fell into the hands of their besiegers, but the attackers dropped their homicidal intentions toward him and his family when he both ‘renounced his gentility’ and swore that ‘he loved the citizens and the commons (les bourgois et le commun) of Paris better than the nobles’.³² Here, at least, the aims of rank-and-file Jacques and those of the Parisians may have been complementary.

Chivalry at the Market At Silly-le-Long, only 6 kilometres from this scene, Gilles and des Barres’ forces joined another 500 troops assembled under Jean Vaillant, royal prévôt of the coinage.³³ Vaillant’s group may have been among those who travelled via the most direct road between Paris and Meaux that passed through Gournay-surMarne, where the Parisians are said to have destroyed a fortress.³⁴ The Saint-Denis monk indicates that there may have been another contingent that assembled before the attack at Couilly-Pont-aux-Dames, which is near this road to Meaux’s south.³⁵ The next day, they marched to Meaux to attack the Marché, some 17 kilometres from Silly and 8 from Couilly. A fortified complex, situated on an island in the Marne river, only a single bridge connected it to the city. Since April, it had been occupied by the Dauphin’s loyalists, allowing them to at least threaten to cut off supplies to Paris from the Marne. The Dauphin had also sent his sisters, wife, and infant daughter there for safety, which made it an attractive political target as well as strategically advantageous.³⁶ The hundreds gathered on the eve of battle were of varied provenance. Many of Vaillant’s troops must have come from Paris. They probably represent another front in the reformers’ efforts to attack royal councillors and perhaps to divert the ³¹ Jean de Venette, 176. ³² Chron. norm., 130. ³³ GC, 181–182. One Pierre Baiart, who lived at Silly and was later ransomed during the CounterJacquerie, may have been instrumental in the arrangements. His kidnapper was one of the squires of Louis de Chambly, the only nobleman known to have fallen at the attack on the Marché (AN JJ 86, no. 315, fol. 105v). ³⁴ AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320. ³⁵ Religieux, 128 which has Pierre Gilles joining with this group, but this seems geographically unlikely. Étienne Marcel’s estates at Ferrières-en-Brie lay between Gournay and Couilly (Siméon Luce, ‘Pièces inédites relatives à Étienne Marcel et à quelques-uns de ses principaux adhérents’, BEC 21 (1860): no. 3, pp. 78–80), providing a potential stopping point. Chron. norm., 131 estimates the number of those sent from Paris at 1400, which suggest another group in addition to the Silly assembly. ³⁶ GC, 182 only places one sister, Isabelle, in the Marché, but the Dauphin’s letter uses the plural (Charles V, Lettre inédite du dauphin Charles sur la conjuration d’Étienne Marcel et du roi de Navarre, adressée aux comtes de Savoie (31 août 1358), ed. François Combes (Paris, 1869), 6). A late remission reports that the Dauphin had sent them there to protect them from the Jacques as well as the Parisians (‘tant pour eschiever la fureur et tirannie du dit prevost . . . comme pour la commocion et sedicion des non nobles qui lors se esmurent contre les nobles’, AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244).

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Dauphin’s attention elsewhere. Others were gens du plat pays. Numerous witnesses state that the Parisians and country-folk, including Jacques Bonhommes, attacked the Marché together. Those who joined at Tremblay were Jacques, for their remission first describes their crimes with the Jacquerie formula before mentioning the Parisian army. In addition to their remission and that which relates the announcement made at Puisieux (and undoubtedly other villages), both the Norman chronicler and Froissart placed country-folk at Meaux. The former chronicle puts the Jacques in the town beforehand, while Froissart’s has the movement of the jakes, along with other villains from Brie and the county of Valois (the direction of Silly-le-Long), toward Meaux converge with that of the Parisians, who left the capital with 9,000 troops and then picked up ‘people from various places and from various roads’ along the way.³⁷ We also have the testimony of some inhabitants of the Marché itself, who reported that the fortress was attacked by ‘many Parisians in association with many inhabitants of the countryside’.³⁸ Froissart’s figure of 9,000 Parisians alone exaggerates their numbers—the Norman chronicler’s estimate of 1,400 might be closer to the mark—but the effort was certainly going to require considerable manpower. The Marché’s position on an island behind high walls was almost unassailable. Although the garrison of 60 men whom the Dauphin had sent there in April had probably been reduced when he went south to Montereau and Sens, it was still guarded by redoubtable men-atarms, including the Lord of Hangest, the Lord of Revel, the Lord of Trocy-enMultien, Philippe d’Aunoy, le Bègue de Villaines, Heron de Mail, Louis de Chambly, the Duke of Orléans, and possibly the Count of Foix, though the latter may only have arrived somewhat later.³⁹ Their numbers had been further swelled by nobles fleeing the Jacquerie, to whom the non-noble residents of the complex offered shelter during the emergency.⁴⁰ The commoners massed as Silly and Couilly were counting on support from the citizens of Meaux, many of whom, including the mayor Jean Soulas, were in sympathy with the Parisians. The townspeople had objected to the royal garrison’s installation in April, and the garrison’s behaviour since then had not improved ³⁷ Above, nn. 9, 23; ‘Jaques ceulz qui par avant estoient en la ville’ (Chron. norm., 131); ‘estoient manecies des jakes et des villains de Brie, et meismement de chiaus de la ville . . . gens de divers lieus et de plusieurs chemins qui se racordoient à Miaus’ (Froissart, SHF, §415, p. 104). ³⁸ ‘plures habitantes ville parisiensis predicte, associatis secum pluribus plane patrie habitantibus, in villa & Civitate meldensis Recepti per nonnullos habitantes eiusdem, Invasissent prefatum mercatum’ (AN JJ 95, no. 6, fol. 2v–3r). See also AN JJ 95, no. 11, fol. 4 and AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244 which link the Jacquerie narrative to the Meaux attack. Cf. Mickaël Wilmart, Meaux au Moyen Âge: Une ville et ses hommes du XIIe au XVe siècle (Montceaux-lès-Meaux, 2013), 161. ³⁹ Chron. norm., 130–131; AN JJ 95, no. 6, fol. 2v–3r; AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244. Jean le Bel, 260–261 claims there were 200 men-at-arms, among them the Count of Foix and Duke of Orléans. ⁴⁰ ‘se similiter retraxerant seu etiam morabantur qui etiam plures ex dictis nobilibus in suis domibus susceperunt’ (AN JJ 95, no. 6, fol. 2v–3r).

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relations. Many citizens were hopeful of aid from Paris.⁴¹ Collaboration with the Parisians was facilitated by some of the city’s leading citizens, later omitted from the general remission granted to the town in July.⁴² Among them was Jean de Congi, with the resources to buy a remission for 400 écus, Thibaud Picaut, who possessed annual rents of 120 livres from land at Paris, and Thibaud Fourcaut (or Fourquaut), whose property was also substantial.⁴³ Also omitted were a secular canon and the male members of the prominent Rose family.⁴⁴ The Roses, headed by the grain merchant and civic patron Jean Rose, must have been at the heart of the conspiracy.⁴⁵ Rose’s eldest son, also named Jean, a lawyer in the Parlement court and a royal councillor at the Châtelet, had lived in Paris since 1350 and had close relations with Marcel’s regime. In July, when the reformers caught a messenger sent by the Dauphin messenger to Parisian loyalists, Rose was among those who interrogated and tortured him in the Châtelet.⁴⁶ Another conspirator, Jean Chandelier, who despite the surname was actually a draper, might also have had professional connections with Étienne Marcel.⁴⁷ Thus, when the combined Parisian–Jacques army arrived on 10 June by the Saint-Remy gate (where the Roses’ charitable foundations were situated), many of the inhabitants of Meaux were happy to see them.⁴⁸ They opened their doors to ⁴¹ Wilmart, Meaux, ch. 7; GC, 169–170; ‘mota est controversia inter nobiles . . . et inter majorem civitatis Meldensis et concives. Nam, prout fertur, aliqui de Parisius armati accesserunt Meldis, quia cives Meldenses, qui nobiles . . . odiebant, libenter eos bellicis ictibus, ut dicitur, invasissent, si subsidium bonum a Parisius habuissent, quod et factum est’ (Jean de Venette, 178). The remission for several nobles involved in the Marché’s defense claims that they in no way challenged the inhabitants of the town (AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244). See also, 4 Valois, 69–70, which has the inhabitants attacking on their own once before the Parisian assault was organized. ⁴² ‘Que comme nagnaires (sic) ayons remis et pardonne generalment a tous les habitans de la ville et marche de meaulx . . . Excepte toutesvoies certain nombre de personnes’ (AN JJ 86, no. 341, fol. 115v and those cited in the next two notes, excepting Jean Cogni, whose remission was purchased in July prior to the general remission issued in August for Meaux, and Picaut, whose goods were donated in July and who was probably dead by August. ⁴³ Cogni: ‘parmi la somme de quatre Cenz escus d’or que par composicion nous avons euz & Recuz dudit Jehan’ (AN JJ 86 no. 148, fol. 50v, partially ed. Luce, no. 3, p. 228, omitting these and other phrases); Picaut: AN JJ 86 no. 124, fol. 45v, partially ed. Luce, no. 5, p. 229; Fourcaut: AN JJ 86, no. 290, fol. 97r, paraphrased in Luce, no. 10, p. 233 and AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244. ⁴⁴ Guillaume de Chevenoil, priest and canon of Meaux: AN JJ 86, no. 274, fol. 91v–92r, ed. Luce, no. 4, pp. 228–229; Roses: AN JJ 86, no. 212, fol. 69, partially ed. Luce, no. 8, p. 232; AN JJ 86, no. 288, fol. 96, excerpted in Luce, no. 9, p. 233; AN JJ 86, no. 312, fol. 104, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 90–91. ⁴⁵ For the Roses of Meaux, see Georges Gassies, Histoire de Meaux, 2 vols (Meaux, 1982–1983), I: ch. 14; Wilmart, Meaux, 155–156, 212–216. Jean Rose had a close relationship with Thibault Fourcaut, who was named to oversee the hospital he founded in Meaux in 1356: Michel Tousaint Chrétien du Plessis, Histoire de l’Église de Meaux, avec des notes ou dissertations et les pièces justificiatives, 2 vols (Paris, 1731), II: 230; Olivier Estournet, L’hôpital Jean-Rose et le Grand-Séminaire de Meaux, notes pour servir à leur histoire (Lagny, 1905). ⁴⁶ AN JJ 86, no. 312, fol. 104, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 90–91. This episode is recounted from other angles in Chron. norm., 134 and AN X1a 17, fol. 77, quoted at length in Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols (Paris, 1909–1931), I: 444–445, n. 2. ⁴⁷ AN JJ 86, no. 211, fol. 68v–69r, ed. Luce, no. 7, pp. 230–231 and Secousse, Recueil, 92–93. ⁴⁸ The gate and/or date are mentioned in AN JJ 86, no. 211, fol. 68v–69r, ed. Luce, no. 7, pp. 230–231 and Secousse, Recueil, 92–93. See also AN JJ 86, no. 212, fol. 69; AN JJ 86, no. 274, fol. 91v–92r; AN JJ

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troops, provided refreshments for them on tables set up in the streets, and then went to attack the Marché alongside them.⁴⁹ But the city was not undivided, and not everyone was in on the plot. One inhabitant said that he and others in the city armed themselves when the Parisians came because they thought they were enemies. He was shocked, so he said, to see the gates opened to them.⁵⁰ The regular inhabitants dwelling within the Marché itself may have been particularly opposed. Some of them were sheltering noble refugees, and standardized text in several remissions relating to Meaux states that the attack was directed at both the nobles and the non-nobles inside the fortress.⁵¹ It would hardly have been unusual for two geographically distinct areas of a medieval city to develop a rivalry or even a hatred of one another, and this sort of intramural feud may have contributed to the citizens’ different attitudes toward the royal party inside the Marché. Despite the combination of Jacques and Parisians and the mobilization of the city, the attack was a failure. The commoners’ army ‘arrayed itself in order to invade it’, but it got no further than the tall stone wall that surrounded the island.⁵² By most accounts, the defenders were greatly outnumbered. As few as 25 men may have sallied to repulse 2,000 attackers.⁵³ But it was sufficient. The non-noble forces had to approach the Marché by the narrow bridge that connected the city and the island, as the famous miniature in a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Froissart’s chronicle shows (Figure 8.1). This meant that it could be successfully defended by a much smaller force. According to Froissart, the sally was led by the Count of Foix Gaston Fébus and the Captal de Buch Jean de Grailly, who happened to hear of the ladies’ plight while travelling back from a crusade in the Baltics.⁵⁴ Froissart turned this story into a set piece for the display of chivalric virtue, particularly that of his hero Gaston Fébus. His chronicle dramatically juxtaposes 86, no. 288, fol. 96; AN JJ 86, no. 290, fol. 97r. Highly truncated editions of all of these are at Luce, no. 4, 8–10, pp. 228–229, 232–233. ⁴⁹ Refreshments: GC, 182; AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244; see Chapter 6. ⁵⁰ ‘quant ceulx de Paris vindrent en la ville de Meaulz, ycelui suppliant, cuidant que ce fussent les ennemis du dit royaume, se arma et ala avec plusieurs autres en la dicte ville de Meaulz, et lors quant il vit et sceut la traïson que aucun de la dicte ville de Meaulz vouloient faire à ceulx du dit Marchié, et que il ouvrirent les portes à ceulx de Paris pour estre en leur aide’ (AN JJ 86, no. 300, fol. 100, ed. Luce, no. 13, p. 236). ⁵¹ ‘domagier & villaner nobles & non nobles qui dedanz estoient’ (AN JJ 86, no. 211, fol. 68v–69r, ed. Luce, no. 7, pp. 230–231 and Secousse, Recueil, 92–93). See also this or similar phrases in AN JJ 86, no. 212, fol. 69; AN JJ 86, no. 274, fol. 91v–92r; AN JJ 86, no. 288, fol. 96; AN JJ 86, no. 290, fol. 97r. All of these are partially edited in truncated versions in Luce, no. 4, 8–10, pp. 228–229, 232–233. ⁵² AN JJ 86, no. 236, fol. 77v, ed. Luce, no. 12, p. 235; AN JJ 86, no. 281, fol. 93v–94r; AN JJ 86, no. 283, fol. 94v; AN JJ 86, no. 340, fol. 115; ‘assaillirent si fort que à la barrière et oultre se convint combatre à l’encontre d’eulx’ (AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244). ⁵³ Jean le Bel, 260–261; GC, 183. ⁵⁴ See Pierre Tucoo-Chala, Gaston Fébus et la vicomté de Béarn (1343–1391) (Bordeaux, 1959), 75–79; Pierre Tucoo-Chala, Gaston Fébus: Un grand prince d’Occident au XIVe siècle (Pau, 1976), 28–31; Richard Vernier, Lord of Pyrenees: Gaston Fébus, Count of Foix (1331–1391) (Woodbridge, 2008), 48–51.

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Figure 8.1 Battle for the Marché de Meaux, Froissart’s Chroniques, BnF franç. 2643, fol. 226v, reproduced by permission

the wretched and badly armed ‘villains’ and the noblemen, who were ‘well outfitted to defend the Marché with their banners and lances and swords’.⁵⁵ Froissart’s famous story, however, is the only source to assign such an important role to the Count and the Captal.⁵⁶ Foix’s presence, though mentioned in passing by most of the chronicles—some of which state that he was there well before the Jacquerie—does not figure in any of the remissions, and Froissart is the only

⁵⁵ ‘ces villains noirs et petis et mal armés, et le banière le conte de Fois et ceste dou duch d’Orliiens et le pennon le captal et les glaves et les espées en leurs mains, et bien apparilliés d’yaus defender et de garder le marciet’ (Froissart, SHF, §416, p. 105). ⁵⁶ Written in 1445, the Fuxian chronicle of Michel de Bernis features a long but very inventive passage on Gaston Fébus’s gallantry at Meaux. This Occitan chronicler’s use of the French word honnis to describe the ladies’ peril and his comparison of the defeated Jacques to pigs (porcs) suggests that he adopted some of his story from Jean le Bel. See Michel de Bernis, [Chronicle of the Counts of Foix], in Hélène Biu (ed.), ‘Du panégyrique à l’histoire: L’archiviste Michel de Bernis, chroniqueur des comtes de Foix (1445)’, BEC 160 (2002): §49–57, pp. 430–432.

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witness for Grailly.⁵⁷ It is possible that Froissart got this story from the Bascot de Mauléon, who accompanied the Captal on the crusade and was with him at Meaux, and whose adventures feature in Book 3 of the chronicle. According to Froissart, the Bascot reminisced that on his return from Prussia with the Count and Captal, they rescued the noble ladies in the Marché from 6,000 Jaques de Beauvoisis.⁵⁸ We cannot know the truth of the Bascot’s tale—or, rather, Froissart’s retelling of it—but the prominence it gives to the Gascon noblemen is certainly overblown relative to other contemporary reports. The defenders did sustain some casualties—Louis de Chambly was shot through the eye by a lucky arrow and there may have been other deaths—but the battle was quickly won.⁵⁹ The attackers fled to the fields outside the city, where they were hunted down and slaughtered ‘like pigs’.⁶⁰ The Marché’s defenders were permitted to pillage the city, seizing whatever they wished for themselves, including people, who were then forced to ransom themselves.⁶¹ The city itself was burned.⁶² In July, the dean and cathedral chapter of Meaux told the Dauphin that their usual houses were uninhabitable due to the destruction his troops had wrought in the town.⁶³ Thanks to the intervention of this dean and chapter and the intercession of some of the other bonnes villes, Meaux was soon granted a remission for its deeds, but it was stripped of its corporate privileges and the Dauphin remembered the citizens’ perfidy long after.⁶⁴ In 1373, the crown recalled ⁵⁷ Jean le Bel, 260; GC, 183; 4 Valois, 69–70. Chron. norm., 131 though Foix does not appear in the BnF franç. 5610 version given at Chron. norm., 131, n. 3. Froissart also mentioned the Captal in relation to the Meaux episode again in Book 3 (below, n. 66). ⁵⁸ See Jean Froissart, Oeuvres de Froissart: Chroniques, Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove (ed.), 25 vols in 26 (Brussels, 1867–1877), XI: 109. For the Bascot (the name means bastard), see Guilhem Pépin, ‘Towards a rehabilitation of Froissart’s credibility: The non fictitious Bascot de Mauléon’ in Adrian R. Bell and Anne Curry (eds), The soldier experience in the fourteenth century (Woodbridge, 2011), 175–190. ⁵⁹ AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244 claims that many nobles died. Louis de Chambly: GC, 183; Chron. reg., 274; Chron. norm., 131. ⁶⁰ Jean le Bel, 262; Froissart, SHF, §416, p. 106. ⁶¹ ‘ex parte dicti primogenti nostri ac dominum de hangesto dicti mercati capitaneum quod quilibet vel quicumque vellet ireccapturi (?) in dicta civitate bona tunc ibidem existentia . . . ipse una cum aliis nobilibus & habitantibus dicti mercati ad dictam civitatem accendentes ibidem plura bona mobilia ceperunt & sibi applicarunt nonnullosque habitantes dicte civitatis prisionaros ceperunt & ad redemptionem posuerunt’ (AN JJ 95, no. 6, fol. 2v–3r). ⁶² ‘fuitque propter hoc dicta civitatas vel pars eius incensa depredata & consumpta’ (AN JJ 95, no. 6, fol. 2v–3r); Wilmart, Meaux, 165–169. The immolation of the city also affected the royal castle (GC, 184), for which see Chapter 2. ⁶³ AN JJ 86, no. 150, fol. 51r. Cf. GC, 184, which says that neither the church nor the canons’ houses were burnt. One of the canons was initially excluded from the general remission for Meaux, but later proved innocent. Guillaume de Chevenoil, priest and canon of Meaux: AN JJ 86, no. 274, fol. 91v–92r, ed. Luce, no. 4, pp. 228–229; Roses: AN JJ 86, no. 212, fol. 69, partially ed. Luce, no. 8, p. 232; AN JJ 86, no. 288, fol. 96, excerpted in Luce, no. 9, p. 233; AN JJ 86, no. 312, fol. 104, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 90–91. ⁶⁴ ‘Et pour contemplation de noz bien amez le doyen & chapitre de l’eglise de meaulx Et mesmement que aucunes autres bonne villes du dit Royaume nous ont humblement fait supplier que aus diz bourgeois & habitanz vousissions faire grace afin que la dite cite & ville se puisse plustost reffaire reffortier & retourner en bon estat . . . Exccepte que la dite ville n’aura corps ne commune’ (AN JJ 86, no. 288, fol. 96 and see also AN JJ 86, no. 290, fol. 97r, paraphrased in Luce, no. 9–10).

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the vengeance it had exacted and forbade the citizens from bringing suit to recover damages from the nobles who pillaged them in the aftermath.⁶⁵ When the Captal died in 1377, King Charles reminisced fondly about the time Grailly and Foix had done ‘such courtesy’ to his wife and the ladies at Meaux when they ‘by their good chivalry’ saved them from the commoners.⁶⁶

The Battle of Mello-Clermont As the armies of Jean de Vaillant, Pierre Gilles, and Pierre des Barres assembled on 9 June, a large army of country-folk—perhaps numbering over 4,000 men—was camped between Mello and Clermont, preparing for a battle of its own.⁶⁷ The enemy here was not the Dauphin or local nobles, but rather Charles of Navarre and a heterogeneous army made up of Norman and Picard noblemen, English soldiers, and Navarrese troops. Navarre and his forces had come to the Beauvaisis from the castle of Longueville-sur-Scie in Normandy at the behest of the French nobility, interrupting their efforts to defend the Évreux heritage there.⁶⁸ At MelloClermont, the King and his forces faced a combined force of Jacques who had come from Ermenonville with Calle and from Montataire under the leadership of Germain de Réveillon.⁶⁹ While the date is not certain, it was probably on or just after 10 June, as the nobles were defending the Marché, that Navarre’s army

⁶⁵ AN JJ 105, no. 91, fol. 57–58r, ed. Luce, no. 19, pp. 240–244. ⁶⁶ ‘Et ossi par I aultre membre moult raisonnable dont il ala souvenir le roy. Chou fu de dou tamps que il estoit dus de Normendiie, la royne sa femme, qui pour che tamps estoit duchoise de Normendiie, pour le doubtanche des Jacques qui firent chou que il durerent en Franche moult de mauls, elle estoit affuiie a sauvetet ens ou marchiet a Miaus en Briie avecques aultres dames. Mais nonobstant tout chou li Jaque de Paris et d’aillieurs vinrent la tout foursenet et euissent efforchiet le marchiet et violet les dames, se li contes Gastons de Fois et messires Jehans de Graili, captans de Beus, n’euissent estet, qui en che tamps retournoiient dou voiage de Prusse par leur bonne chevaleriie, il delivrerent les dames de tous perils et dangiers. Si souvint le roy de Franche de le courtoisiie que il avoit fait a se femme’ (Froissart, Chicago MS, II: fol. 51r). ⁶⁷ 4 Valois, 73 states that the Jacques were ‘prez de Cleremont’ when they faced Navarre. One remission reports that the Jacques went to Mello, which is near Clermont, in order to face Charles of Navarre: ‘au dit lieu de Mellou encontre les genz du roy de Navarre’ (AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262 and see AN JJ 86, no. 308, fol. 102v–103r, ed. Luce, no. 28, p. 260). Jean de Venette’s report that Charles of Navarre defeated them at Montdidier has been interpreted as meaning that this battle took place there, but the Chicago redaction of Froissart suggests that a battle near Montdidier occurred after Mello-Clermont, as discussed in the next chapter. Luce, 151, n. 1 endorsed the proposition in Louis Graves, Précis statistique sur le canton de Liancourt, arrondissement de Clermont (Oise) (s.l., 1837), 49 that the battle took place outside of Catenoy, but Graves cited no evidence for this besides the claim that the place was still known as the ‘champ de bataille’. See also Maurice Dommaget, La Jacquerie (Paris, 1971), 74, who develops the place name evidence somewhat further. ⁶⁸ 4 Valois, 71, 73; see Chapter 2. ⁶⁹ AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262; AN JJ 90, no. 288, fol. 148r, ed. Luce, no. 24, pp. 253–254.

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decisively routed the Jacques and killed Calle.⁷⁰ Nearly every major chronicle mentions this confrontation, but the most detailed narrative comes from the Quatre Valois chronicle in an account compatible with those of other sources, including several remissions.⁷¹ According to the Quatre Valois account and a letter of remission for a Jacquerie captain, the Jacques had had advance warning that Charles of Navarre was approaching with an army of nobles. In the chronicle, Guillaume Calle suggests that the Jacques should fall back to Paris and look for support there, but his troops overrule him, shouting that they were strong enough to fight the nobles (crierent les Jacques que jà ne fuiront et qu’ilz sont assez fors pour combater les gentilz hommes). The remission for Calle’s lieutenant Germain de Réveillon, however, shows that in fact the decision to fight had already been taken before the Jacques came to meeting and that they were there for the express purpose of opposing Navarre. It recounts that while the Jacques’ General Captain was at Ermenonville, Germain was forcibly elected as the captain’s lieutenant to lead them from Montataire to Mello near Clermont ‘against the King of Navarre’s people, who were then trying to enter the Beauvaisis in order to destroy it’ (qui lors s’efforçoient d’entrer ou dit païs de Beauvoisins pour ycelui grever et gaster).⁷² It may be that the Jacques, or even Calle himself, chose the meeting place. Several sources name Clermont among the initial sites of the uprising,⁷³ and the area was Calle’s home territory. According to Jean de Venette, Calle was a native of Mello, and Froissart’s chronicle domiciles the Jacques’ ‘king’ in Clermont.⁷⁴ Whether the Jacques’ army reached the 4,600 men that the Valois chronicler reported it to number seems unlikely, but it was probably big, for it incorporated both the Jacques who had been headquartered at Montataire and at least some of those who had been at Ermenonville. The Jacques may have intended that it be even larger. Following its account of Mello-Clermont, the Quatre Valois chronicle says that Norman nobles intercepted and destroyed a company (route) of Jacques near Poix who had been on their way to join ‘the great company that Guillaume Calle was leading’ (aloient à la grant route que Guillaume Charles gouvernoit), an incident discussed in the next chapter.⁷⁵ Most of the troops seem to have been on foot, but there were also some men on horseback. The Valois chronicler observed that 600 of the men were horsed, and several recipients of remissions in addition to Germain de Réveillon also report having ridden (chevauchié) to Mello or Clermont.⁷⁶ ⁷⁰ No source gives an exact date, but the timing worked out by Jules Flammermont, ‘La Jacquerie en Beauvaisis’, RH 9 (1879): 139, n. 3, seems likely enough and has been adopted here. ⁷¹ 4 Valois, 72–75. ⁷² AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262. ⁷³ Chapter 3. ⁷⁴ Jean de Venette, 174; Froissart, SHF, §413, p. 100. See discussion of Calle in Chapter 6. ⁷⁵ 4 Valois, 76. ⁷⁶ ‘eust chevauchié en leur compaignie devant Mellou’ (AN JJ 86, no. 308, fol. 102v–103r, ed. Luce, no. 28, p. 260); ‘ait chevauchié en la compaignie deulx & de leur capitaine un jour tant seulement, c’est a

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During the two days that the Jacques’ army waited for Navarre and the nobles, their leaders arranged them in battle formation. In the Valois chronicler’s telling, these leaders were Guillaume Calle and the Hospitaller. The 4,000 foot soldiers were divided into two battalions, with the archers (ceulx qui avoient arcz et arbalestes) in front, protected by their baggage wagons (charroy). Following a common military practice, these served as a sort of rampart.⁷⁷ The 600 men on horse, ‘of whom most were armed’, or perhaps even ‘armored’ (dont le plus estoient armés) made up a third battalion.⁷⁸ Like any good army on the eve of battle, they put on a brave face, kept themselves in good order, made a lot of noise—blowing horns and trumpets, shouting the French battle cry ‘Mont-joie!’— and waved their flags and banners spangled with the lilies of France.⁷⁹ The army they faced under Navarre’s command was reportedly about a quarter of the size of their own, numbering only about 1000 men according to the Valois chronicler. They were, however, seasoned soldiers; some of the 37 noblemen whom that chronicler lists among the troops boasted distinguished military careers. Some of them were Englishmen who had likely been fighting in Normandy and western France for several years. Still, they do not seem to have fancied their chances in a straightforward assault. They instead resorted to a ruse to break the Jacques’ lines, an incident mentioned by nearly every source that treats Mello-Clermont at any length and discussed further below. According to the Valois chronicler’s account, Navarre invited Guillaume Calle to parlay and he went ‘naively’ (simplement), without demanding any hostages to guarantee his safety.⁸⁰ With Calle out of the way, English troops led by Robert Sercot broke through one of their battalions of foot-soldiers. Leaderless, the Jacques were unable to regroup. The French noblemen destroyed their other battalion of footsoldiers, while the Jacques on horses mostly escaped (s’en sauva la greigneur partie). Charles of Navarre and his men rode down those fleeing on foot, many savoir en la ville de Montathère & de Clermont’ (AN JJ 86, no. 310, fol. 103v, excerpted in Luce, p. 178). See also AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97. ⁷⁷ ‘Guillaume Charles et l’ospitallier rengerent les Jacquez et firent deux batailles et en chacune mistrent deux mille hommes. Et ceulx qui avoient arcz et arbalestes mistrent en front devant, et par devant eulx mistrent leur charroy’ (4 Valois, 73). The Dictionnaire du Moyen Français gives multiple examples of fourteenth-century armies in France and the Near East using their charrois in this fashion: www.atilf.fr/dmf/definition/charroi [last accessed 22 November 2020]. ⁷⁸ Luce, 150 imagined that these troops were very badly armed and mounted, but the chronicler passed no judgment on their horses or horsemanship and, given the many mentions of weapons ranging from clubs to axes, knives, crossbows, and swords in other Jacquerie sources, it seems unlikely that they were weaponless. The Jacques are depicted wearing armour in the manuscript illumination in BnF franç. 2813, fol. 414r, though, as Christiane Raynaud argues, this may represent criticism of the Jacques’ usurpation of the trappings of nobility (‘Le langage de la violence dans les enluminures des Grandes chroniques de la France’, JMH 17 (1991): 198). ⁷⁹ ‘vindrent en la compaignie du roy de Navarre par devant les Jacques, lesquelz de grant visaige et maniere se tenoient en ordonnance et cornoient et businoient et haultement cryoient Mont Joye, et portoient moult d’enseignes paintes à fleur de liz’ (4 Valois, 74). On these signals, see Chapter 6. ⁸⁰ ‘Le roy de Navarre manda à trevez au chief d’eulx qu’il veusist parler à lui. Guillaume Charles y alas simplement, car il ne demanda nulz hostages’ (4 Valois, 74–75).

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Figure 8.2 Decapitation of a Jacquerie captain, Grandes chroniques, BL Royal 20 C VII, fol. 134v, reproduced by permission of the British Library

of whom escaped by hiding in a field until nightfall. Afterward, Navarre had Calle and other captains executed in Clermont (là fit decapiter).⁸¹ The Anonimalle chronicler’s fanciful story that Jak Bonehomme was tortured to death on a burning trestle with another such trestle on his head in place of a crown notwithstanding, all other sources for Calle’s execution also say that he was decapitated, as an illumination from a late fourteenth-century manuscript of the Grandes chroniques illustrates (Figure 8.2). Calle’s death was a hard blow for the movement. Guy Fourquin considered it as much the cause of the Jacquerie’s failure as the CounterJacquerie itself.⁸²

Charles of Navarre and the Jacques Whether the Jacques expected Charles of Navarre’s aggression and how he fitted into the uprising has never been a subject on which historians agree. The confusion is partly due to the chronique normande’s report that the Jacques were

⁸¹ ‘couper la teste au dit Guillaume Cale, à Clermont-en-Biauvoisins’ (GC, 184); ‘fist copper la teste teste à leur cappitaine’ (Chron. norm., 130). Marcel’s second letter to Ypres reports that Navarre ‘leurs capitaines prist et copa les testes’, (d’Avout, 308–309). Cf. ‘Et le dit Jak pristrent et mistrent a sa penaunce pur sa mauveite et luy fierent sere tute new sour une treschaude et ardaunt tresde de ferre; et une autre chaude et ardaunt tresde mystrent sur soun test en lieu de coroune’ (The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333 to 1381, from a MS. Written at St Mary’s Abbey, York, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927), 42). ⁸² Guy Fourquin, The anatomy of popular rebellion in the Middle Ages, Anne Chesters (trans.) (New York, 1978), 79.

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surprised at Navarre’s opposition: ‘some people said that the Jacques expected that the king of Navarre ought to have helped them because of the alliance that he had with the prévôt des marchands, by whom the Jacquerie had arisen, as was said’.⁸³ Navarre had certainly been an ally of the Parisian reformers, whose ties to the Jacques were close, and he also had friends in many of the bonnes villes allied with Paris where the Jacques also found help.⁸⁴ Jean le Bel reported that some people thought that Charles of Navarre might even have been behind the Jacquerie, and the Chicago redaction of Froissart’s chronicle also suggests that the Jacques hoped to make an alliance with Charles of Navarre ‘because he was at war with the Dauphin’.⁸⁵ But beyond the speculations of these chroniclers, there is no direct evidence of Navarre’s involvement in the Jacquerie on either side prior to the confrontation at Mello-Clermont. Connections between the Jacques and the Navarrese partisans are, at best, ‘scant, tenuous and . . . difficult to make’, as even their most optimistic advocate had to admit, and far harder to locate than links between the Jacques and the Parisians.⁸⁶ None of the men and women listed on the royal pardon rolls for Navarrese partisans issued in 1360 was a Jacques, though a man with the same surname as Jean Oursel, the reluctant executioner of Pont-Sainte-Maxence, does appear on one of the rolls. It is also possible that the Jacques Simon Doublet and/ or the accused Beauvais clerics Guilbert Doublet and Jean Doublet were related to a Jean Doublet, also on the roll.⁸⁷ Navarre’s long-standing alliance with Paris is, of course, incontrovertible, but it seems to have been on the back-burner while he dealt with the assault that the Dauphin had launched on his Évreux heritage in ⁸³ ‘dient aucuns que les Jaques s’attendoient que le roy de Navarre leur deust aidier pour l’aliance, que il avoit au prevost des marchans, par lequel prevost la Jaquerie s’esmut, si comme on dit’ (Chron. norm., 130). ⁸⁴ Bessen, ‘The Jacquerie’, 46–47. As discussed in the next chapter, Senlis’s inhabitants do not seem to have been as enthusiastic about Navarre as those of other cities. ⁸⁵ Jean le Bel, 258; ‘ “nous averons bien l’accort et veu dou roy de Navare car il fait guerre contre le duch de Normendie” ’ (Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169v). ⁸⁶ Bessen, ‘The Jacquerie’, 52–53. Neither of Bessen’s proposed ‘Navarrese Jacques’ is convincing, though Germain de Réveillon’s service to the Navarrese partisan Jean de Montfort is interesting if inconclusive. There are three remission not noted by Bessen—AN JJ 89, no. 481, fol. 217v, AN JJ 90, no. 161, fol. 91v–92r, and AN JJ 90, no. 351, fol. 179v–80, ed. Siméon Luce, ‘Négociations des Anglais avec le roi de Navarre pendant la révolution parisienne de 1358’, Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Île-de-France 1 (1875): no. 3, pp. 125–129—for men who were involved with both the Jacquerie and Navarre. Only the third document suggests connections with Navarre prior to involvement with the Jacques, however. ⁸⁷ The rolls are published at Secousse, Recueil, 177–181, 181–185. For the Doublets, AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136; AN JJ 88, no. 1, fol. 1–2; for Oursel, AN JJ 86, no. 224, fol. 73v, ed. Ghislain Brunel, ‘Archives de la révolte et lettres de rémission: Des serfs du Laonnais (1338) aux Jacques de Picardie (1358)’ in Pierre Rigault and Patrick Toussaint (eds), La Jacquerie: Entre mémoire et oubli, 1358–1958– 2008 (Amiens, 2012), no. 1, pp. 69–70, and AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330. Raymond Cazelles, ‘Le parti navarrais jusqu’à la mort d’Étienne Marcel’, Bulletin philologique et historique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (jusqu’à 1610), année 1960 (Paris, 1961), 839–869). The surname of Navarre’s squire Colin, who was executed alongside the Harcourts, was sometimes spelled ‘Doublet’ in contemporary sources, although the modern consensus is that his surname was ‘Doublel’.

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May. The King of Navarre only returned to the scene just before Mello-Clermont and only at the entreaty of the French nobles. In many tellings, the nobles made their appeal on the basis of social solidarity between noblemen. The Valois chronicle reports that the gentlemen of the Beauvaisis came before Charles of Navarre and convinced him to help them against the Jacques by saying ‘Sire, you are the most gentlemanly man (le plus gentil homme) in the world. Do not allow gentility (gentillesse) to be destroyed’.⁸⁸ The Chicago redaction of Froissart’s chronicle tells a similar story of Navarre compelled to intervene because of his class-consciousness as a noble.⁸⁹ Étienne Marcel, a good witness for Navarre since he likely spoke with him on the matter, also provides some evidence for this interpretation of that king’s reasons for intervening on the nobles’ behalf, though, as discussed in the next chapter, his report is of a second appeal made to Navarre after Mello-Clermont, probably by a different group of noblemen. Writing to the city council of Ypres for help on 28 June, Marcel said that when those nobles approached Navarre they said that they did so ‘because he was noble’ and that the nobles were fighting a war against the non-nobles of the realm (guerre . . . contre les non nobles du roiaume).⁹⁰ With the notable exceptions of Navarre’s first biographer Denis-François Secousse and the acute Françoise Autrand, many historians have agreed that Navarre accepted leadership of the nobles because ‘he was too much a noble to desert his class’.⁹¹ But it is striking that none of the sources for the nobleNavarrese alliance, either before or after Mello-Clermont, actually says that the King’s decision to join was based on his sense of nobility. They only claim that this was the grounds on which the nobles made their appeals. Indeed, Marcel himself denied that Navarre had acceded on the basis of class reasons. Marcel stated that the King’s response to those nobles was that ‘he did not want to be the enemy of the three estates nor of any one of them’ and would join them only because he wished to punish bad people, regardless of their status (seulement des malvais de quelque estat qu’ils fussent).⁹² These admirable sentiments aside, Navarre’s decision to support the nobles was probably based more on political opportunism than morality or class solidarity. ⁸⁸ 4 Valois, 72. ⁸⁹ Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169v. ⁹⁰ ‘monseigneur de Navarre a eu requeste des nobles du Royaume, comme il soit noble et de l’estat des nobles qu’il se veulle trahe par devers eulx pour les conseiller et aider à mettre et à mener afin la guerre qu’ils ont emprise. Lequel monseigneur de Navarre leur requist que il lui deissent quelle guerre il avoient emprise. et sur ce lui respondirent que cestoit contre les non nobles du roiaume’ (d’Avout, 303). As discussed in the next chapter, this events in this letter must post-date 15 June, when the Dauphin, who is said in the letter to be leading the nobles against the non-nobles, left Sens to lead one group of Counter-Jacques. ⁹¹ Luce, 73–74, 147–148; quote at Henneman, Royal taxation . . . John, 75. Cf. Denis-François Secousse, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Charles II, roi de Navarre et comte d’Évreux, surnommé le Mauvais (Paris, 1758), 239–240; Françoise Autrand, Charles V le sage (Paris, 1994), 325–326. ⁹² ‘monseigneur de Navarre respondist qu’il n’estoit ne n’entendoit estre ennemy des trois estats du Royaume, ne daucun diceux, fors seulement des malvais de quelque estat qu’ils fussent, lesquiex il entendoit à aidier à punir de tout sa puissance selon leur demerites (d’Avout, 303, and see discussion in Cazelles, Société politique . . . sous Jean, 334).

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The Quatre Valois chronicler noted that Navarre made the nobles promise that they would not oppose him in the future (lui promistrent les gentilz hommes que contre luy jà ne seroient) and that he did not leave Longueville until they had sworn that they would not intervene in his affairs.⁹³ Only days earlier, Edward III had ordered the return of some fortresses occupied by English adventurers as part of a treaty of alliance between England and Navarre.⁹⁴ With the Évreux heritage more secure and having renewed his war with the French crown, Navarre was beginning to envisage the major assault to come in the autumn. These grateful nobles could be his army or, at least, leave his army unmolested. If Froissart’s chronicle and Quatre Valois are right, the nobles’ ‘gratitude’ would help to explain why Picard regions—particularly the Beauvaisis—fell so easily to Navarre in the coming months and perhaps why the doughty peasants of Longueil-Sainte-Marie had to fend for themselves in 1359.⁹⁵ It is notable that while the Quatre Valois chronicler’s list of nobles in Navarre’s army for Mello includes 11 long-standing Navarrese supporters who had accompanied the King’s entry to Paris in November 1357, the other 26 names were new.⁹⁶ The Jacques, for their part, were at least wary of Navarre before the battle, but he and his supporters were not originally the Jacques’ primary target. Evidence of their hostility to Navarre prior to Mello-Clermont is as scant and problematic as evidence for positive connections. The only explicit evidence is one of the two remissions that report the execution of Jean Bernier at Montataire. That remission alleges that he was carrying letters from Navarre (certaines lettres du roy de Navarre, qui furent trouvées sur lui), but as discussed in Chapter 4, another remission shows that Bernier had recently come from a meeting with the Dauphin at Meaux.⁹⁷ The letters he was carrying were probably from that meeting rather than from Navarre, the remission’s recipient thinking it more expedient to paint the dead man as a Navarrese partisan than a Valois loyalist. We might consider an expedition of Jacques to the castle of Auffay, very near to Longuevillesur-Scie in Normandy, as inciting Navarre’s ire before Mello-Clermont, but it may rather have been an effort to draw Navarre back to Normandy and away from the Beauvaisis after that confrontation.⁹⁸ This expedition was authorized by the captain of the plat pays, identified not as Guillaume Calle but as one Achart de Bulles, perhaps Calle’s successor, chosen after his execution at Clermont.⁹⁹ As I discussed in Chapter 5, only a relatively small number of noble Navarrese partisans or their family members were demonstrably victimized by the Jacques. ⁹³ 4 Valois, 72–73. A similar promise of gratitude was made later in the month by another group of nobles (Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169v; Chapter 9). ⁹⁴ Luce, ‘Négociations’, 120. ⁹⁵ Colette Beaune, Le Grand Ferré: Premier héros paysan (Paris, 2013). ⁹⁶ 4 Valois, 64, 74. ⁹⁷ Letter: AN JJ 98, no. 252, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 63, pp. 333–335; AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97. ⁹⁸ AN JJ 90, no. 294, fol. 150, ed. Luce, no. 48, pp. 296–297. This expedition also attacked a castle at Thoix, which belonged to Jean de Crèvecoeur. ⁹⁹ See Chapter 6.

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The only death among this cohort was that of Guillaume ‘Testard’ de Picquigny at the battle near Poix, which is discussed in the next chapter. Moreover, the only anti-Navarrese actions taken by the Jacques for which we have any inference about timing are Picquigny’s death and Auffay, both of which most likely happened after Mello-Clermont, when Navarre and his party had declared themselves against the Jacques. Most Navarrese supporters were untouched by the Jacquerie. The Quiéret family, for example, had long supported Navarre, but suffered no damage in the Jacquerie though they did join the Counter-Jacquerie.¹⁰⁰ Navarre’s entry into the Beauvaisis with troops, however, seems to have been understood as at least a potentially hostile incursion, for the Jacques moved swiftly to counter it. As the remission for Germain de Réveillon shows, the Jacques had come to Mello-Clermont for the express purpose of opposing him.¹⁰¹ The confrontation with Navarre appears to have been a reflexive defensive action against an immediate threat. Even if the remission’s statement that Navarre had come ‘in order to destroy the countryside’ reflects the later experience of what Navarre did do in the Beauvaisis, rather than de Réveillon’s assessment of Navarre’s intentions at the time when he accepted command at Montataire, the Jacques clearly viewed the matter as sufficiently urgent that they were unwilling to wait for Calle to return from Ermenonville. Up to this point, the Jacques’ activity seems to have been moving progressively south-eastward. The dated or roughly datable events move from Saint-Leu-d’Esserent to Montataire to Verberie to Ermenonville to Meaux. The movement of these troops north-west toward Mello-Clermont thus seems to indicate a change of plans. Still, the Jacques may have thought that there was room for negotiation. This would help to explain some of the ambiguity that surrounds the meeting and why a number of sources say that the Jacques were not just defeated but actually betrayed at Mello-Clermont. In one remission, it is the citizens of Clermont who betray the Jacques’ captain and his fellows into Navarre’s hands: ‘The King of Navarre had come to Clermont and the Captain of the Beauvaisis and his accomplices were handed over to the King of Navarre [and] were put to death’.¹⁰² The others make Navarre the author of the betrayal. In Jean de Venette, Navarre induced some of their captains to come to him with promises or compliments (blanditiis) and they carelessly (non credentes aut cogitantes) went to him and were killed.¹⁰³ The

¹⁰⁰ Quiéret: AN JJ 108, no. 86, fol. 55, partly excerpted at Luce, 207. ¹⁰¹ 4 Valois, 72–75. ¹⁰² ‘le roy de Navarre estoit venus à Clarmont, et que le capitaine de Beauvoisins et ses complices estoient bailliés et mis ès mains du roy de Navarre par ceulx de Clarmont et qu’il estoient mis à mort’ (AN JJ 90, no. 288, fol. 148r, ed. Luce, no. 24, pp. 253–254). The recipient, Hue de Sailleville who served as captain of Angicourt, was in communication with Étienne Marcel, whom he asked for orders curbing the Jacques’ excesses, according to the remission. His remission also bears some similarities to that of Jean Bernier of Villers-Saint-Paul, and both men received assurances from Charles of Navarre after Clermont. ¹⁰³ ‘rex Navarrae, qui aliquos de eorum capitaneis blanditiis advocavit, et non credentes aut cogitantes interfecit’ (Jean de Venette, 176).

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abridged chronique normande, here more verbose than the original, says that Navarre ordered one of the captains of the villains to come speak to him at the castle of Clermont because he wished to be on their side (qu’il voloit ester de leur partie) and then killed him, an account which the Chronographia regum francorum adopts wholesale.¹⁰⁴ Such claims and compliments may have been believable not because the rebel leaders were stupid, but because Navarre was allied with the Parisians, as the Norman chronicler noted, and at war with the Dauphin, as the Chicago Froissart says. That the very area between Mello and Clermont in which the battle took place had hosted the stormy meeting between Navarre and the Dauphin only six weeks earlier, when King Charles was intervening on Paris’s behalf, may have made local Jacques all the more susceptible to trickery.¹⁰⁵ Nor were the Jacques entirely wrong about Navarre’s willingness to serve as a broker between them and the nobles. According to Étienne Marcel, after defeating the Jacques a few times, Navarre arbitrated an agreement between the nobles and the rural rebels, arranging for the latter to pay the damages to the former in exchange for a cessation of violence.¹⁰⁶ Several Jacques sought out Navarre in the second half of June for letters of remission or safeguard, suggesting that they saw him as a potential intermediary rather than a partisan of the nobles.¹⁰⁷ The Battle of Mello-Clermont has often been treated as the end of the Jacquerie, any further incidents being minor or unconnected to the revolt proper. It should be very clear by now, though, that the revolt was much larger and more widespread than has been usually understood. As Froissart observed, although ‘the King of Navarre put an end to 3,000 of them one day near Clermont, they had by then multiplied so much that if they were all together they would easily have numbered 100,000 men’.¹⁰⁸ Froissart numbers are exaggerated, but his proportions may not be far off. There were many more Jacques still at large and they were not, as the chronicler noted, all together. The Beauvaisis and the Oise valley had become the site of a social war that would endure for the rest of the summer and beyond. Elsewhere in northern France—in Normandy, Champagne, and the southern Paris basin—the Jacquerie continued or was even just getting started. ¹⁰⁴ ‘en alerent au castel de Clermont et là manda I des cappitaines des villains, qu’il allast parler à luy et qu’il voloit estre de leur partie. Lors y alla chis, mais tantost qu’il y fu venus, li roy li fist copper le teste’ (Chron. norm. 129–130, n. 6); ‘rex Navarre . . . veniens ad castrum Clarimontis mandavit ad se unum de capitaneis rusticorum, fingens se illum auxilium collaturum; quem statim ut vidit, jussit decollari’ (Chron. reg., 272). See also Pierre Cochon, Chronique normande de Pierre Cochon, notaire apostolique à Rouen, Charles de Robillard de Beaurepaire (ed.), (Rouen, 1870), 100. ¹⁰⁵ See Chapter 2. ¹⁰⁶ d’Avout, 308–309; see Chapter 9. ¹⁰⁷ AN JJ 90, no. 161, fol. 91v–92r. See also AN JJ 90, no. 288, fol. 148r, ed. Luce, no. 24, pp. 253–254 and AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97. ¹⁰⁸ ‘Meismement li rois de Navare en mist un jour à fin plus de trois mil, assés priès de Clermont en Biauvoisis. Mès il estoient jà tant montepliiet que, se il fuissent tout ensamble, il euissent bien esté cent mil hommes’ (Froissart, SHF, §414, p. 102).

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9 Hatred and Malevolence The Counter-Jacquerie

Doubly defeated and with Calle and other leaders dead or soon to be executed in Clermont, the remaining Jacques searched for safety. While some scattered immediately, large bodies of rebels remain assembled and organized for weeks afterward. ‘ “We will never leave one another’ ”, Froissart reported them saying, ‘ “that way we will be stronger and more feared.” ’¹ But those who had perpetrated effroiz no longer held a monopoly on terror. Meaux and Mello had given the nobles back their courage. Bands of noblemen and their entourages emerged from their hiding places in the castles and forests and began to wreak ferocious vengeance upon non-nobles. The ‘Counter-Jacquerie’, as Luce termed it, went on for months. Continuing even beyond Marcel’s death on 31 July, it cemented the hatreds that had become evident in the past few weeks and created new ones to last into the years and decades to come. The stories that came out of the Counter-Jacquerie are no less hair-raising than those told about the Jacquerie. In his letter to the city council of Ypres in July, Étienne Marcel recounted that the nobles made no distinction between the guilty and the innocent or the good and the evil, that they burned towns and killed respectable people without pity or mercy, that they tortured people, including women, children, and priests, in order to rob them, that they defiled churches and raped virgins and wives in front of their husbands, that they robbed merchants on the road, and that they behaved ‘more cruelly and inhumanely than pagans or Saracens’.² Marcel hoped that Ypres would send him an army, and his laundry list of misdeeds is a stereotypical inventory of medieval war crimes; indeed he called the nobles ‘enemies of God’ and promised those coming to his aid ‘greater merit in God’s eyes than they would acquire if they went on crusade’. But those contemporaries writing with less urgent agendas also reported that the nobles acted with cruelty and killed indiscriminately. Jean de Venette lamented the many fires that they set and the many peasants, including those they knew to be innocent, whom

¹ ‘Ne nous departons jamais l’un de l’autre, sy serons plus fort et plus doubté’ (Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169v). ² d’Avout, 306. The word Marcel used, Wandres, probably means Wends, the pagans of the Baltic north, but cf. Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols (Paris, 1909–1931), I: 414, who preferred Vandals.

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0010

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they killed at home or in their fields and vineyards.³ Even Jean le Bel remarked that the nobles arbitrarily burned and robbed everyone, hanging suspects from the trees ‘because they had no leisure to investigate’ individual guilt.⁴ Other sources, too, bear witness to women raped and churches despoiled, and to a hasty disregard for due process, or at least, to instances in which such things happened.⁵ It was during the Counter-Jacquerie that a passing noble summarily executed Robert de Jardin—hanging him from a tree—just on the hearsay that he said he wished to be lord of the nobles.⁶ More than one widow sought compensation for excessive violence, or even just permission to bury a body ‘if it could be found’.⁷ Marcel reported that the nobles spoke of themselves as waging a war against the non-nobles (guerre . . . contre les non nobles du roiaume), and it seems many nobles also thought about it this way. Still, the Counter-Jacquerie was no more a monolithic movement than the Jacquerie itself. It is somewhat easier to determine dates for the events associated with the Counter-Jacquerie. It is also easier to discern the objectives pursued by contingents led variously by the Dauphin, Charles of Navarre, or individual nobles like the Lord of Saint-Dizier in different regions. But like the revolt it sought to suppress, the Counter-Jacquerie, too, was waged by diverse groups of people, not all of whom were in communication or even fully in sympathy with one another. Not all of them were even noble, and not all nobles were on their side. Nor was the Counter-Jacquerie just the mirror image of the Jacquerie, for the Jacques did not simply turn from aggressors to victims. They fought back, which is why some documents speak of the conflict between nobles and non-nobles in the summer of 1358.⁸ What began as a social revolt in May developed over June and July into a social war.

Early Days: Poix, Senlis, the Marne Valley To the north of Paris, Counter-Jacquerie actions eventually came under Charles of Navarre’s leadership, but this did not coalesce until the end of June. After the

³ Jean de Venette, 176, 178. ⁴ ‘ilz n’avoient point loisir de faire enqueste’ (Jean le Bel, 259). ⁵ AN JJ 90, no. 436, fol. 219, very partially ed. Secousse, Recueil, 165–166 (robbery of the church of Chavenières-sur-Marne); 4 Valois, 76 (burning of 300 Jacques inside a church); AN JJ 91, no. 333, fol. 173v (raptus of the widow Tassone); AN JJ 86, no. 267, fol. 89v–90r, ed. Luce, no. 36, pp. 274–276 (summary execution); AN JJ 86, no. 534, fol. 193v (hanging of three Jacques by their erstwhile companion in the absence of an official executioner). ⁶ ‘pretextu tamen predictorum verborum . . . ipsum Robertum, non via justicie nec juris ordine servato, ad quamdam arborem fecit suspendi’ (AN JJ 86, no. 267, fol. 89v–90r, ed. Luce, no. 36, pp. 274–276, discussed in Chapter 4). ⁷ Widows include: AN X1a 17, fol. 284, ed. Victor de Beauvillé, Histoire de la ville de Montdidier, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Paris, 1875), I: no. 27, pp. 514–515; AN JJ 86, no. 365, fol. 124v–25r, ed. Luce, no. 35, pp. 272–274; AN JJ 86, no. 267, fol. 89v–90r, ed. Luce, no. 36, pp. 274–276; quote from AN JJ 86, no. 352, fol. 120. ⁸ Eight per cent of the documentary sources use a phrase denoting mutual aggression.

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battle at Mello-Clermont, the King headed for Paris, where he arrived on 14 June and where he remained until the 22nd.⁹ Initially, the Counter-Jacquerie north of Paris was undertaken by a loose coalition of noblemen and their followers, who acted simultaneously and largely independently across the Beauvaisis and Picardy, with operations stretching into the Vexin and northern Champagne. Counter-Jacquerie activity in Upper Normandy and Western Picardy can be dated to immediately after Mello-Clermont, when a group of nobles came across a contingent of Jacques near Poix, where they had gone to burn the place’s castle. Simon Doublet, elected captain at an assembly of the villages of Poix, Lignières, and Grandvilliers, was likely at their head. Among his troops were Aliames de Maresquel from Airaines in north-eastern Picardy, and Jacquet de Fransures, a village in the Beauvaisis to the south-east, which suggests that this gathering was the result of a prior assignation, rather than a spontaneously assembled crowd.¹⁰ According to the Quatre Valois chronicle, both groups were headed toward the confrontation at Mello. The nobles had already heard of the Jacques’ defeat, but the Jacques, still intending to join up with ‘the great army that Guillaume Charles was leading’, apparently had not.¹¹ The two groups thus encountered one another on the 11th or 12th, after which date the news surely would have reached these Jacques, only 50 kilometres from Clermont. Somewhere between Poix and Lignières, the Jacques prepared themselves for a battle, arranging themselves, as the Norman chronicle reports, in an orderly fashion (se mistrent les Jaques en belle ordonnance), just as their fellow rebels had done a few days earlier near Mello. The battle probably took place the following day.¹² The Counter-Jacques whom they faced were led by Baudrain de la Heuse, a knight who had preceded Robert de Clermont as marshal of Normandy, and his brother Jean Sonnain, royal castellan at Rouen and bailli of Caux, as well as their relative Guillaume Martel and one Jean le Bigot.¹³ These men habitually fought together; indeed they were captured together near Harfleur in

⁹ GC, 184–185, 187. ¹⁰ AN JJ 86, no. 392, fol. 136; AN JJ 89, no. 377, fol. 159; AN JJ 86, no. 165, fol. 54v, ed. Luce, no. 20, pp. 245–247. ¹¹ ‘ourent ouyez nouvelles que les Jacques estoient desconfiz . . . une route de Jacques, lesquelz aloient à la grant route que Guillaume Charles gouvernoit’ (4 Valois, 76). ¹² Chron. norm., 129. This chronicler, whose chronology is loose, narrates this battle before Navarre’s actions at Clermont but makes it clear that these events occurred near the same time (En ce temps). AN JJ 86, no. 165, fol. 54v, ed. Luce, no. 20, pp. 245–247 indicates that the opponents faced off between Poix, where 4 Valois places the nobles, and Lignières, where Chron. norm. places the Jacques. ¹³ 4 Valois, 75, which mistakenly presents the bailli of Caux and Jean Sonnain as different individuals. See instead AN JJ 87, no. 71, fol. 53, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 95; Gallia regia, no. 5866, 19615, 19672. For Baudrain de la Heuse, see Gallia regia, no. 19539, 19679; François de Beaurepaire with Michel Nortier, ‘Les sources de l’histoire du Moyen Âge à la bibliothèque de la ville de Rouen’, Cahiers Léopold Delisle 13 (1964): 33, no. 97.2, 100.2 (the latter specifying that his marshalsy was not yet confirmed); HYW, II: 220–221, 513; a Guillaume le Bigot was a royal castellan in the bailliage of Rouen (Gallia regia, no. 19526, 19600).

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1360.¹⁴ They had 300 troops under their command, and they were joined by noblemen from the region of Bray and Amiens, chief among them Guillaume ‘Testard’ de Picquigny. Picquigny was one of the few, perhaps only, noble casualties of the meeting. He was killed treacherously while under a safe conduct during a parley before the battle.¹⁵ This ruse, which victimized one of Navarre’s prominent supporters, so closely mirrors that which Navarre had used to trap Guillaume Calle only a few days earlier that we may justly wonder whether, having just learned of their Great Captain’s fate, these Jacques decided to send a pointed message of revenge.¹⁶ If so, it gave them only small satisfaction, for the battle was another miserable defeat for the rebels, hundreds or even thousands of whom were killed.¹⁷ For the third time in as many days, the Jacques’ inability to overcome skilled and experienced opponents was demonstrated. Again, their troops scattered. Two squires tracked down the murderers of Picquigny, who were hiding in a monastery near Beauvais; while the squires fruitlessly chased one of them into the woods, the other strangled himself to death ‘in despair’.¹⁸ At Poix-Lignières, as at MelloClermont, the Jacques had been routed while fighting in pitched battle on open ground. Behind city walls, however, the non-nobles were much more redoubtable, as the citizens of Senlis were demonstrating. On 13 June, as Baudrain de la Heuse’s troops crushed the Jacques in Picardy and Navarre was riding toward Paris, nobles from Meaux arrived before Senlis, hot on the trail of those fleeing that debacle. Led by le Bègue de Villaines, sworn enemy of Paris, the nobles demanded that the city open its gates.¹⁹ Senlis housed refugees from Meaux, and these were joined by others, like Arnoul Guenelon, who were falling back from Ermenonville, and probably some of those Jacques who

¹⁴ Chronicon anonymi cantuariensis: The chronicle of anonymous of Canterbury, 1346–1365, Charity Scott-Stokes and Chris Given-Wilson (ed. and trans.), (Oxford, 2008), cap. 63, p. 56. ¹⁵ ‘un chevalier, nommé Testart de Pinquigny, que les Jaques tuerent en parlant à eulz à leur seurté, avant que on combatist’ (Chron. norm., 129); ‘monseigneur Guillaume de Pinquigny, chevalier, fust venuz parlementer entre Poys et Linière . . . les quex en parlementant mistrent à mort en traïson ledit monseigneur Guillaume de Pinquigny (AN JJ 86, no. 165, fol. 54v, ed. Luce, no. 20, pp. 245–247); ‘tuer, pillier & desrober mesire Tesart de Pinterenguy chevalier’ (AN JJ 89, no. 377, fol. 159). David Bessen, ‘The Jacquerie: Class war or co-opted rebellion?’, JMH 11 (1985): 54, 58, n. 22 followed Luce, 148 in thinking that Guillaume and Testard, a nickname that means ‘the hard headed’ or ‘tough’, were two different men. Delachenal, Histoire, I: 410 noted that they were one and the same. ¹⁶ Bessen, ‘Jacquerie’, 54 speculated that it was this murder that convinced Navarre to attack the Jacques at Mello-Clermont, but except for the ambiguous statement about timing at Chron. norm., 129, the evidence indicates that de Picquigny died afterward. ¹⁷ 4 Valois estimates 300 killed; Chron. norm. gives 2,200. ¹⁸ ‘se murtri en desesperance’ (AN JJ 86, no. 165, fol. 54v, ed. Luce, no. 20, pp. 245–247). ¹⁹ ‘Hoc excidium non suffecit dictis nobilibus; sed in magna multitudine armatorum ad civitatem Silvanectensem, venientes de Meldis’ (Jean de Venette, 180). Religieux, 128 gives the detail about le Bègue de Villaines. See also AN JJ 86, no. 421–422, fol. 147, ed. Luce, no. 43, pp. 288–289. On the date, given as ‘le jour de la Beneïsçon’, meaning the opening of the Lendit fair at Saint-Denis on the second Wednesday of June, see Luce, 145, n. 1. Delachenal, Histoire, I: 401, n. 2 corrects Jules Flammermont, ‘La Jacquerie en Beauvaisis’, RH 9 (1879): 140–141 but erroneously gives the 14th.

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escaped Mello-Clermont.²⁰ The Senlisiens may also have had some local nobles at their side. One remission claims that when the nobles from Meaux arrived, Senlis expelled all nobles from within its walls.²¹ Contradictorily, Jean de Venette’s chronicle mentions that the citizens had with them ‘some nobles other than those whom they had summoned previously’ when the invaders arrived.²² It may be that some nobles were allowed to stay in the city if they agreed to help defend it. This would make sense of Jean de Venette’s comment, but also of the curious incident related in the remission that two townsmen killed a squire, Jean des Près, because he and another squire had just killed the Lord of Hardencourt. This happened at the moment when all three nobles were being thrown out of the house where they had been staying together. The squire’s killers claimed that ‘no one knew the reason’ that he and his companion ‘suddenly’ turned on Hardencourt, but dissension over whether to stay or go might explain the outburst.²³ In the story as told by Jean de Venette, the inhabitants had prepared themselves well for the nobles’ arrival.²⁴ Armed men were hiding in the houses, and women stood by upstairs windows, ready to pour boiling water onto the invaders. With deceptive amity, the Senlisiens welcomed the nobles into the city, handing over the keys without a murmur. The noblemen entered through the Meaux Gate, probably the city’s most defensible point, where they would have been crowded onto a bridge beneath its fortress and hemmed in by walls and ditches, as well as the Nonette River below.²⁵ (If they had looked about them, they might have considered their position’s resemblance to that of the non-nobles at the Marché only days before.) Oblivious to this peril and forgetful that pride goeth before a fall, the knights and squires swaggered up the hill toward the city centre, waving their swords about. On the hilltop, the citizens had positioned a load of carts, and as the nobles began noisily to proclaim their victory, these carts were released down the steep slope, picking up speed as they clattered down toward the invaders. Knocked to the ground, the nobles and their supporters were finished off by the townsmen, who rushed with drawn swords from the houses. Those attackers still near the gate ²⁰ AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r. ²¹ AN JJ 86, no. 421–422, fol. 147, ed. Luce, no. 43, pp. 288–289. ²² ‘aliquos nobiles alios quos antea vocaverant’ (Jean de Venette, 180). ²³ AN JJ 86, no. 421–422, fol. 147, ed. Luce, no. 43, pp. 288–289. Jean des Prés was from Creil (Auguste Boursier, Histoire de la ville et châtellenie de Creil: Topographie, domaine, institutions civiles et religieuses, Chapitre de Saint-Évremond (Paris, 1883), 282. Hardencourt lay north of Creil (Siméon Luce, Histoire de Bertrand Du Guesclin et de son époque: La jeunesse de Bertrand (1320–1364), 1st edn (Paris, 1876), 492). ²⁴ Jean de Venette, 180. ²⁵ ‘entre le pont de la porte de Meaulx appelle le pont perrin dedenz la forteresce & les murs neufs qui sont entre la dite porte & la tournelle Saint-Vincent jusques a l’eaue des foussez neufs qui sont audessoubz des diz murs’ (incidental information in AN JJ 90, no. 555, fol. 275, confirmation by a Jean le Ferron, perhaps the same as a rebel captain by that name, of a sale to Robert Malet; a Robert Malet is implicated along with Arnoul Guenelon and other Senlisiens in the Jacquerie attack on Montépilloy at AN X1a 18, fol. 63).

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were scalded by the townswomen from above. Soggy and humiliated, the survivors beat a hasty retreat to Meaux, where they were received with due ridicule. The nobles at Meaux were soon able to pursue their ire elsewhere. The Dauphin, who had been at Sens during the attack on Meaux, would have received word of the rescue of his wife, daughter, and sister around the 11th or 12th. On the 15th, he launched a campaign of reprisals against the non-nobles of the Marne Valley. As the royal chronicle relates, from Sens, he went to Provins, ChâteauThierry, Gandelu, and La Ferté-Milon, eventually heading to the ancient nunnery at Chelles. The gentlemen of the realm flocked to him as he rode through the countryside, destroying many groups of Jacques and ‘burning and devastating the whole country between the Marne and the Seine’.²⁶ On the 28th or 29th, his large army made camp at Charenton, at the confluence of the Seine and the Marne near Vincennes, making a base from which to retake Paris. Evidently, Charles of France had had enough. The Regent’s role in the counter-Jacquerie has been mostly overlooked, historians tending to concentrate on Charles of Navarre or on the mass of vengeful nobles, but the Prince and his followers were key to the revolt’s violent repression in June and July.²⁷ The royal chronicler had reasons for portraying him as the restorer of order, but it is not only he who painted him in this light.²⁸ Marcel’s letter to Ypres on 28 June characterizes him as the Counter-Jacques’ leader, reporting that the nobles who entreated Charles of Navarre’s help said that in their war against the non-nobles ‘Monseigneur the Duke [of Normandy] was the leader and of one mind with them and they with him’.²⁹ In August, when Marcel was dead and the countryside subdued, the Dauphin would present himself as a magnanimous prince, graciously offering royal forgiveness to all his subjects, noble and non-noble alike, as he sat comfortably and majestically above the fray, but earlier in the summer, he displayed none of this sagacious benevolence. In fact, the Dauphin allowed and possibly encouraged the nobles with their entourages camped at Charenton to ravage the surrounding villages. Jean le Bel tallied 500 villages thus burned and despoiled, and a remission lays the ruination of 17 at the feet of just 2 valets.³⁰ Some of the worst excesses of the CounterJacquerie, including a rape and a theft from a church, were committed by the troops camped at Charenton and the assembly of noblemen which gathered for

²⁶ GC, 188. The army (host/exercitus) had already coalesced by the time he got to Chelles and must have been riding with him in the fourth week of June according to dating clauses in AN JJ 86, no. 139–140, fol. 48v. ²⁷ Delachenal, Histoire, I: 413; cf. HYW, II: 336. ²⁸ Marie-Thérèse de Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs: Une étude comparée de récits contemporains relatant la Jacquerie de 1358 (Paris, 1979), 164–169. ²⁹ ‘de laquelle emprise monseigneur le duc estoit chief et une meisme chose avec eulx et eulx avec lui’ (d’Avout, 303). ³⁰ Jean le Bel, 264; AN JJ 90, no. 436, fol. 219, very partially ed. Secousse, Recueil, 165–166. See also, GC, 195.

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this purpose at nearby Lagny.³¹ Many of these men saw it as vengeance for the Jacquerie, and some, like one Perceval de Pommeure, used the whole thing as cover to get even with non-nobles with whom they had had previous conflicts.³² But there was also a political side to their violence. As a worried report to the city of Laon in July relayed, the nobles at Charenton were as angry about the interurban alliances as the Dauphin was, and according to Jean le Bel and Froissart, the violence around Vincennes was aimed squarely at those of Paris, whom these villages were thought to be supporting.³³ News of the army’s violence, along with the smoke and the refugees, drifted into a fearful and increasingly fractious Paris, but the food and drink those villages produced did not.³⁴ Much of it was eaten by the army. A remission for one of its members stationed at Corbeil, down river from Charenton, relates that during the effroiz between the nobles and non-nobles, ‘when [the Dauphin] was camped near the bridge of Charenton’, he not only participated in attacks against country-folk, but he also ‘a few times, under specific orders addressed to him from royal officers, seized and made to be seized quantities of grain, wine, fruits, oats, and other goods from these people and then brought them back to the army at Corbeil and other places’ in order to support his and his men’s expenses.³⁵ Fear of these kinds of seizures, which were customary for the imperial nobles and soldiers who now swelled the Prince’s ranks, had helped to fuel the Jacquerie’s outbreak.³⁶ The still penurious crown had no other way to sustain the army for the month it waited outside Paris—as Marcel wrote in July in his second letter to Ypres, the Dauphin had abandoned the countryside and its goods to the nobles, for ‘they had no other wages from him than that which they could steal’³⁷—but taking such measures contributed to rural sentiments of oppression and victimization in the aftermath of the revolt, perhaps even more than before it.

³¹ Cited above at n. 5; Denis-François Secousse, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Charles II, roi de Navarre et comte d’Évreux, surnommé le Mauvais (Paris, 1758), 271. ³² Pommeure killed several people in the village of Brie-Comte-Robert with whom he had had a war (guerra) in the summer of 1358 (AN JJ 95, no. 60, fol. 22). He also killed a tabellion at Meaux, with whom he had had a pre-existing quarrel (AN JJ 95, no. 70, fol. 25v). ³³ ‘monseigneur le Regent estoit trop esmerveilliez de la ville de Laon et aussi estoient li gentil homme dou paiz’ (Laon, AD Aisne Edt 1 CC 1, fol. 65r); ‘pensans qu’elles fussent de l’acord de ces meschantes gens’ (Jean le Bel, 264; followed by Froissart, SHF, §417, pp. 106–107, who adds ‘ardirent ses gens autour de Paris tous les villages qui n’estoient fremés, pour mieulz castiier chiaus de Paris’). ³⁴ Marcel assured Ypres in July that Paris was, thank God, still fully provisioned with food (d’Avout, 309), but Jean le Bel/Froissart emphasized that the city was cut off and increasingly restive. ³⁵ ‘lors que nous avons este derrienment a siege delez le pont de Charenton . . . yceluy Guy aucunes foiz par certain commissions de noz genz & officiers aluy adrecee ait prins & fait prendre ou temps dessus dit pluseurs bliez, vins, fruiz, avoines & autres biens sur les dites genz et les amenez puys en nostre dite host puis a Corbueil & en divers autres lieux pour la depense de luy & de noz genz d’armes’ (AN JJ 86, no. 372, fol. 127r). That this individual was stationed at Corbeil, whence came much of the Parisian grain supplies, suggests that victualing was a significant part of his responsibilities. ³⁶ Froissart, SHF, §417, 106 who adds that there were non-Christian mercenaries (‘saudées paians’) among them; d’Avout, 221–222; see Chapter 4. ³⁷ d’Avout, 307.

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Champagne and the Southern Parisis These feelings were particularly acute near Saint-Dizier in the Perthois region of Champagne, where over 20 villages became involved in the revolt (Figure 9.1). Here, we hear most urgently the kinds of concerns about armed men, pillage, and communal self-defence that were once supposed to have sparked the uprising in the Beauvaisis. The village of Saint-Lumier’s remission is representative of the way that many of these communities characterized their actions afterward: because of the terrors [and] cavalcades (effrois chevauchies) made by some people from this region and elsewhere in parts of Champagne, these supplicants assembled several times in arms and conspired together to protect themselves and to defend against some nobles and some others from this region and from outside the realm.³⁸

Figure 9.1 The Jacquerie in the Perthois

³⁸ ‘pour cause des effrois [et] chevauchies qui ont este faites par aucuns du pais et autres es parties de champaigne yceulx suppliants se soient par pluseurs foiz assemblez, armez & fait conspiraciones ensemble deulx garder & deffendre contre aucuns nobles & aucuns autres du pais & d’ailleurs’ (AN JJ 86, no. 578, fol. 209v–10r, confirmed at AN JJ 95, no. 116, fol. 44v).

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Remissions for individuals from other communities add more details, such as that bells were rung in alarm or to call people to assemble, that foreigners, including imperial soldiers (Lorrains et Alemans), were particularly feared, and that each village sent armed representatives to regional assemblies to prepare their response.³⁹ The remissions that record these incidents often characterize them as part of the effroiz and commotions undertaken by the non-nobles against the nobles—that is, the Jacquerie.⁴⁰ Jean le Bel and Froissart thought this, too. They described those of Champagne as following the example of the Beauvaisis Jacques.⁴¹ Like the northern Jacques, these champenois rebels elected captains and attended assemblies. In fact, the organizational structure built around two elected representatives from each village, discernible elsewhere and discussed in Chapter 6, is most clearly visible for this cluster. Still, the Jacquerie in Champagne differed significantly from that of the distant Beauvaisis. In the Perthois, the Jacques targeted not only the nobles, but also the clergy whom they suspected of aiding the nobles.⁴² The curate of Blacy—he who roused his dancing parishioners to ‘good cheer’ at an assembly—reported that the rebels particularly singled out the local clergy, curés des villes like him, because they believed that they were sympathetic to the nobles. He himself was suspected of selling the community’s bells, which were key to the coordination of assemblies, to the nobility.⁴³ Another difference is that these Jacques had no urban support; they had no cities like Senlis, Beauvais, or Amiens to lend their resources to the fight. Indeed, Froissart reported that the Jacques were kept out of the most important nearby town, Châlons-en-Champagne.⁴⁴ There also seems to have been relatively more non-noble opposition to the revolt in the Perthois, as the main CounterJacquerie contingent stressed that their own numbers included non-nobles, as well

³⁹ AN JJ 86, no. 265, fol. 89r, ed. Luce, no. 34, pp. 270–272; quote at AN JJ 86, no. 355, fol. 121, ed. Luce, no. 33, pp. 268–270; AN JJ 86, no. 465, fol. 164, ed. Luce, no. 40, pp. 281–283; AN JJ 90, no. 292, fol. 149v–50r, ed. Luce, no. 46, pp. 293–294. See also AN JJ 86, no. 142, fol. 49, ed. Luce, no. 21, pp. 247–248. ⁴⁰ The Jacquerie formula is used in remissions granted to five Perthois villages and two individuals at AN JJ 86, no. 377, fol. 129r; to Maisons-en-Champagne at AN JJ 86, no. 388, fol. 134; to Loisy-surMarne at AN JJ 86, no. 524, fol. 189v. Eleven remissions for individuals or communities in this region mention the general remission issued in August for the Jacquerie and Counter-Jacquerie. ⁴¹ ‘en celle maniere faisoient celles gens ou pays de Brye et de Partoys, sur la riviere de Marne (Jean le Bel, 257); ‘en outel manière si faites . . . ou pays de Brie et de Partois’ (Froissart, SHF, §413, p. 101). ⁴² AN JJ 86, no. 357, fol. 122, ed. Luce, no. 31, pp. 264–266, vidimus at AN JJ 95, no. 19, fol. 9v–10r (village of Heiltz-le-Maurupt); AN JJ 90, no. 271, fol. 139v–140r (Bussy-le-Repos); AN JJ 95, no. 22, fol. 10v–11r (Blacy); AN JJ 95, no. 78, fol. 28 (parish of Changy). ⁴³ ‘cuidans que les curés des villes du dit plait païs, et especialement le dit suppliant fussent favorablement et obéissent aus diz nobles d’icelui païs, les tenoient touz pour traistres, et par especial le dit suppliant auquel il dirent par pluseurs foiz qu’il avoit venduz les cloches de la dite ville de Blacey aus nobles du dit païs’ (AN JJ 86, no. 265, fol. 89r, ed. Luce, no. 34, pp. 270–272). On the dancing, see Chapter 5. ⁴⁴ Froissart, SHF, §415, p. 103.

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as nobles.⁴⁵ The champenois Jacques also committed much less violence than their northern counterparts. They burned no castles, stole no property, and laid not a finger on anyone. What violence there was, was enacted by nobles and their followers against the non-nobles suspected of participation. The villagers’ rebellion seems to have consisted wholly of assembling in a way that made the local nobles nervous. It may be that the Counter-Jacquerie itself incited rebellion in this region. We have only a little, circumstantial information on chronology, but where specific information is given about these incidents (usually in the context of a remission for a village captain), it appears there was a series of events in which each community assembled individually or with a neighbouring settlement and chose two armed men to go to a regional assembly at Saint-Vrain. This assembly was organized to counter a perceived threat from the nobles, especially the Lord of Saint-Dizier, the region’s most important local lay lord.⁴⁶ One of those village representatives, Jean Flageolet, recounted in his remission that when this gathering actually encountered Saint-Dizier, the nobleman assured them that he meant no harm and the villagers went home.⁴⁷ Flageolet, however, also reported that this lord’s people had threatened to burn their villages down (ses genz les avoient menaciez d’eulx ardoir), and Saint-Dizier’s own remission contradicts his soothing words. It reports that he was, in fact, on the road with his companion in arms Eudes de Grancey in order to enact indiscriminate reprisals for the ‘disloyal and detestable enterprises and disordered desire of the communities of the Perthois and rural Champagne’.⁴⁸ They were burning houses (of nobles and non-nobles alike), stealing or destroying the property (of the innocent along with the guilty), and executing suspects at will. The village of Dompremy, whose mostly servile inhabitants denied all involvement in these assemblies, was only spared their depredations through the intervention of their lord, the Abbey of SaintMemmie in Châlons.⁴⁹ Saint-Dizier, Grancey, and their troops may have split off from the nobles taking vengeance with the Dauphin further west, returning to Saint-Dizier’s lands ⁴⁵ AN JJ 86, no. 142, fol. 49, ed. Luce, no. 21, pp. 247–248. ⁴⁶ AN JJ 86, no. 265, fol. 89r, ed. Luce, no. 34, pp. 270–272; AN JJ 86, no. 311, fol. 103v–104r; AN JJ 86, no. 355, fol. 121, ed. Luce, no. 33, pp. 268–270; AN JJ 86, no. 465, fol. 164, ed. Luce, no. 40, pp. 281–283; AN JJ 86, no. 578, fol. 209v–10r, confirmed at AN JJ 95, no. 116, fol. 44v; AN JJ 86, no. 596, fol. 217, ed. Luce, no. 41, pp. 283–285; AN JJ 90, no. 292, fol. 149v–50r, ed. Luce, no. 46, pp. 293–294; possibly AN JJ 90, no. 293, fol. 150r (simple mention). ⁴⁷ ‘ycelui suppliant et autres alèrent pardevers le dit seigneur, pour savoir se aucune chose leur vouloit mesfaire . . . il leur respondi que il n’avoit volenté ne entencion d’eulx mesfaire’ (AN JJ 90, no. 292, fol. 149v–50r, ed. Luce, no. 46, pp. 293–294). ⁴⁸ ‘desloyaux et detestables enterprises et volenté desordenée des communes du pays de Pertoys et du plat pays des parties de Champaigne’ (AN JJ 86, no. 142, fol. 49, ed. Luce, no. 21, pp. 247–248). ⁴⁹ ‘monsire de saint disier, monsire de grancy, monsire de Blaumont et autres qui ont ars et boute les feux ou pais de pertois et environ la dite ville de donremy pour cause des assambleez unions et conspiraciones faites faites (sic) par les communes dou pais de pertois et d’environ que on dit estre faites contres les nobles’ (Châlons-en-Champagne, AD Marne H 82).

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to take specific measures in his region of influence; they admitted that they had claimed royal authority (usé de office de magesté) during their expedition.⁵⁰ But geographically speaking, it seems more likely that they were heading west from Saint-Dizier toward the army at Charenton, perhaps bringing foreign mercenaries with them. The concurrence of the Perthois assemblies with the Dauphin’s muster is confirmed by a remission to one Jacques le Jacqueminart from Thiéblemont, who travelled to Charenton while the Dauphin’s troops were there, allegedly to receive orders from Marcel. (He himself claimed that he actually wanted to speak with the royal counsellor Jacques la Vache).⁵¹ The villagers may have already been mobilizing in response to mercenaries crossing from imperial lands to join the Dauphin’s army, these Lorrainers and Germans reported in one remission. This mobilization then intensified in response to the movements of Saint-Dizier and Grancey and was perhaps given more urgency by reports about the Dauphin and other Counter-Jacques’ actions further west. A simple misunderstanding, as Jean Flageolet would have it, is thus one possible interpretation. Probably for many Perthois villagers it is the right one, however little that might have comforted those with burned houses or dead fathers. But as the accusation that Jean le Jaqueminart sought orders from Marcel indicates, there is whiff of a conspiracy here, one with links to the faction in Paris. Over 150 kilometres to the west, the reformers were trying to raise some sort of help south of the capital, for ‘around the Feast of John the Baptist’ (24 June), a royal crier announced orders from Paris that ‘everyone able to bear arms should present themselves in arms before certain officers deputized by Marcel and carry out their orders’.⁵² This assembly was to take place at Chilly-Mazarin, a traditional mustering place, on the following Sunday. Likely, Marcel had learned of the army about to arrive on his doorstep and was working to assemble a rural militia to counteract, or at least to distract, the troops at Charenton. What Jacquerie—or Jacquerie-like—activity there was south-west of Paris was much less organized than that which took place to its north and indeed than the Perthois assemblies. There is only one individual who might possibly have served as his community’s leader in the manner of the revolt’s village captains elsewhere.⁵³ The Parisian militia perhaps took on that organizational role, for it was much more active here and almost all of the violent incidents in this area were ⁵⁰ AN JJ 86, no. 142, fol. 49, ed. Luce, no. 21, pp. 247–248. ⁵¹ AN JJ 86, no. 355, fol. 121, ed. Luce, no. 33, pp. 268–270. ⁵² ‘toutes manières de genz qui armes pourroient porter, feussent à un certain jour de dimenche à Chailli-lez-Loncjumel, pour eulx presenter et veoir l’armée et monstre par devant certains commissaires deputez et commis à ce de par le dit prevost des marchanz, et pour faire ce que les diz commissaires commanderoient’ (AN JJ 86, no. 231, fol. 75v–76r, ed. Luce, no. 30, pp. 263–264). The Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist fell on a Sunday in 1358, so the assembly may have been called to coincide with it. ⁵³ A Jean Charroit, remitted individually in a communal pardon for the villages of Boissy and Egly, may appear thusly because he had some leadership role (AN JJ 86, no. 215, fol. 70; see discussion in Chapter 6), but the remission is not explicit on that point. It specifies that he was from the

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committed either by Parisian troops acting with villagers, as at Palaiseau which was attacked by the gens d’armes de Paris and the commun du pais, or, much more often, by Parisians acting alone.⁵⁴ Only at Villiers near La Ferté-Alais, where inhabitants from multiple nearby villages came together to burn down the castle, do we see the kinds of violence and patterns of mobilization that marked the revolt north of the capital, and the castle’s garrison considered the deed one of treason authored by Marcel.⁵⁵ In Champagne, considerably more distant from Paris than Villiers or Chilly, the links with the reformers are more circumstantial, but they are surprisingly numerous. First of all, there is the importance of Saint-Dizier and Grancey as targets in this region. Eudes de Grancey was the holder of the strategically important castle of Creil by right of his wife, Béatrix de Bourbon, while the Lord of Saint-Dizier, Jean III de Dampierre, was a member of the Clermont-Nesle family.⁵⁶ They were, therefore, men closely linked to the Parisian interests in the Beauvaisis that played a role in the Jacquerie’s inception at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent. Saint-Dizier and Grancey’s remission states that they had been targeted before they began any violence of their own: the Perthois villages had ‘conspired to kill [them] and all other nobles, along with their wives and children, and in order to put this false and evil purpose into action had already (desja) assembled in arms at the sound of the bells of the countryside’.⁵⁷ Of course, Saint-Dizier and Grancey had an interest in portraying themselves as victims, responding in self-defence, just as the allegation that Jean le Jacqueminart went to speak with Marcel outside of Paris may be scurrilous, as Jean claimed. There are, however, further connections. One of these is a man named Gilet, dit d’Espernay, whose sobriquet indicates that he was from the town of Épernay, about 50 kilometres north of the Perthois. Gilet had moved to Paris in July 1357 and lived there until just before Easter 1358, when he left to collect an inheritance at Bar-sur-Aube, about 60 kilometres south of the Perthois. (This meant that he neighbouring village of Marolles, which apparently did not receive remission, so he may just have been an external participant. ⁵⁴ Palaiseu: AN JJ 86, no. 252, fol. 84v; Chron. norm., 128. No Parisian participation is explicitly alleged for the 46 individuals who destroyed a manor at Choisy-le-Roi, but its owner was the royal councillor Jacques la Vache: AN X1a 17, fol. 51v–52, ed. Luce, no. 58, pp. 320–322. The Hospitallers’ grange at Moissy was subject to ‘damages made by the nobles and non-nobles’ (AN MM 28, fol. 83v, dated 29 August 1358). ⁵⁵ Villiers: AN JJ 86, no. 363–364, fol. 123v–24; AN JJ 86, no. 393, fol. 137r; AN JJ 86, no. 429, fol. 150v. ⁵⁶ Olivier Troubat, ‘Béatrix de Bourbon, reine de Bohême’, Annales de l’Est 40 (1988): 266–268; Anselme de Sainte-Marie et al., Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la maison royale de France, des pairs, grands officiers de la couronne & de la maison du roy & des anciens barons du royaume, 3rd edn, 12 vols (Paris, 1726–1879), II: 764, VI: 49. Saint-Dizier was the son of Alix of Nesle and successor to Jean de Nesle, lord of Offemont, in the royal office of Queux de France. See Chapters 2 and 3. ⁵⁷ ‘avoient empris, conspiré et ordené de mettre à mort les diz seigneurs de Grancy et de Saint Disier et touz autres nobles du dit pays, ensemble leurs femmes et leurs enffans, et pour mettre à execucion leur faux et mauvais propos qu’il ont conceu, desja s’estoient assemblez à armes au son des cloches du païs’ (AN JJ 86, no. 142, fol. 49, ed. Luce, no. 21, pp. 247–248).

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was conveniently far from Paris when the break between the Regent and the reformers became evident.) That spring at Bar-sur-Aube and in ‘many other places’, Gilet had worn the red-and-blue hood of Paris, though he took it off immediately, he said, when he learned of the conflict between the Dauphin and the city. Gilet, for reasons unstated in the remission, spent the next few months in the Dauphin’s entourage, especially during the encampment at Charenton, but by August, he was being pursued by the Count of Vaudémont and Joinville, who had been entrusted with the legal punishment of the rebellion in Champagne.⁵⁸ Gilet may have found himself in Jacquerie-type trouble incidentally, Vaudémont arrogating to himself jurisdiction over any suspicious activity in the region, but his prosecution does suggest a link, at least in that Count’s mind, between what happened in Paris and what happened in Champagne. The Dauphin himself also thought that there was a connection between Paris and Champagne, for in a letter to his relatives he reported that Marcel had ‘stirred up (esmeu) the country-folk’ not only in the Île-de-France, and the Beauvaisis, but also in ‘Champagne and other places’.⁵⁹ Another possible agent of this stirring, in addition to Jean le Jacqueminart and Gilet d’Épernay, is one Colin le Faverel, who could not be remitted along with his community, for he was one of the grans rebelles who, as the remission relates, had been sent to the Châtelet in Paris.⁶⁰ We do not know anything more about these ‘great rebels’—presumably they were executed—but the plural is notable, as is the fact that what they did seemed too serious to be handled provincially. For the grans rebelles, anyway, this was more than a simple misunderstanding. There are also indications of political and ideological connections. The remissions for the villages of Blacy and Heilitz-le-Marupt, issued on the same day in September, both excluded the act of ‘high treason’ (grande traison) from pardon.⁶¹ As discussed in the next chapter, this crime specifically designated efforts to put Navarre on the French throne, and it is almost exclusively mentioned in

⁵⁸ ‘le dit suppliant en la dite ville de Bar sur aube porta le chaperon de paris miparti de Rouge & de pers & ailleurs en pluseurs lieux jusques a tant que il vint a sa cognoissance que nous avions descort a ceulx de Paris et tantost le lessa senz plus porter et pendant la dissencion il ait este en la dite ville de Bar ou en nostre compaignie la plus grant partie du temps en nostre ost devant Paris. Pour achoison des quelles choses nostre ame & feal le Conte de Vaudémont soi disant lieutenant de Monsire & de nous es parties de champaigne s’est efforciez de faire prendre & emprisonner & li empescher en ses biens (AN JJ 86, no. 302, fol. 101r). On Vaudémont-Joinville, see Chapter 10. ⁵⁹ Charles V, Lettre inédite du dauphin Charles sur la conjuration d’Étienne Marcel et du roi de Navarre, adressée aux comtes de Savoie (31 août 1358), François Combes (ed.), (Paris, 1869), 2–3. ⁶⁰ ‘ne voulons que Colin le Faverel de la dite ville de Loisiee qui est un des grans rebelles et le quel est pour ce prisonier ou chastellet de Paris soit de Riens compris en ceste presente grace’ (AN JJ 86, no. 524, fol. 189v). As Faverel’s surname (Smith) and the names for some of the implicated communities, like Bailly-aux-Forges or Favresse, indicate, this was an important iron-working area. ⁶¹ ‘pourveu qu’il n’aient este consentans ne coupables de la grant traison machinee par aucuns mauvais traitres encontre nostre dit seigneur et nous’ (AN JJ 86, no. 357, fol. 122, ed. Luce, no. 31, pp. 264–266, omitting this and other phrases, vidimus at AN JJ 95, no. 19, fol. 9v–10r; AN JJ 95, no. 22, fol. 10v–11r, vidimus of an unlocated 1358 remission).

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connection with the Parisian rebellion, where it is similarly excluded from grace. That what happened in the Perthois was a matter of royal politics is also indicated in the remission for the village of Chavanages, accused of conspiring against the King, the Dauphin, and the crown of France, again an unusual charge outside of the Parisian context.⁶² It is rather surprising, too, how some of these villagers knew stipulations from the March 1357 Estates’ ordonnance which authorized communal defence against unjust military seizures by ringing bells to summon help from neighbouring villages.⁶³ Jean le Jaqueminart of Thiéblemont, the one accused of trying to speak with Marcel, recounted in his remission that royal judges had ordered the villages to signal the alarm against pillaging soldiers by ringing two bells.⁶⁴ Thirty kilometres to the south, Colin le Barbier of Bailly-aux-Forges remembered something very similar: the royal baillis had ordered two bells to be rung to signal incursion from the ‘enemies of the realm’ so that ‘armed men might be sent to the village whence the sound came’.⁶⁵ Bells may have been rung elsewhere, as discussed in Chapter 6, but it is only in Champagne that they are mentioned and only in connection with ordonnances. These hints of a Parisian connection are interesting, but even were they more substantial, they would not entirely explain why and how the Jacquerie came to Champagne. Along with those who may have believed wholeheartedly that they were preparing to defend their communities and those who may have been in communication with Paris, there were also those who took enthusiastic advantage of an opportunity to punish hated local figures. Isabelle de Boulemont and her son Jean de Thorette, lords of several villages on the southern edge of this cluster, were among the latter. They believed themselves to have been the objects of particular attack. Indeed, they presented themselves has having been attacked by the villagers

⁶² ‘fait conspiracions et monopoles contre monseigneur, nous et la couronne de France’ (AN JJ 86, no. 596, fol. 217, ed. Luce, no. 41, pp. 283–285). ⁶³ Ord., III: 121–146, art. 2, 17, 37, 57; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘À son de cloche: The interpretation of public order and legitimate authority in northern France, 1355–58’ in Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, Vincent Challet, Jan Dumolyn, and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz (eds), La comunidad medieval como esfera pública (Seville, 2014), esp. 368–370. ⁶⁴ ‘eust esté ordené, de nostre licence, ou dit païs, par les juges royaulx d’icellui, que, en chascune ville du dit païs, on ne sonneroit que à une cloche, se n’estoit pour effroy de genz d’armes et feu commandé, que, pour ycelui effroy, on sonnast à deux cloches, en chascune des dites villes, afin que les pilleurs et ennemis du dit royaume, qui s’embateroient ou dit pais, feussent siviz par les genz des dites villes au son des dites cloches’ (AN JJ 86, no. 355, fol. 121, ed. Luce, no. 33, pp. 268–270). ⁶⁵ ‘par baillivos bailliviarum de Calvomonte et de Vittriaco fuisset ordinatum quod in qualibet villarum ipsarum bailliviarum . . . propter timorem et streptium inimicorum regni, in quo cavere liceret cuicumque, ad parrochie tuiccionem et defencionem ac inimicorum resistanciam, cum duabus pulsare campanis, ad finem quod gentes armorum, secundum cujuslibet facultatem, ad villam ubi sonus seu pulsacio dictarum campanarum inciperet, mitterentur, ad resistendum inimicis et ad eorum potenciam deprimendam’ (AN JJ 86, no. 465, fol. 164, ed. Luce, no. 40, pp. 281–283). Colin, whose surname may indicate a profession as a barber-surgeon, had vasa muscarum, possibly nutmeg, among his possessions, giving him a tenuous connection to the Parisian reformer Pierre Gilles, one of the leaders of the Meaux attack.

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of Chavanges before (par avant) Saint-Dizier and Grancey became targets.⁶⁶ Among their subjects was Colin le Barbier, who had purchased lands from Boulemont in Bailly-aux-Forges, lands which she and her son took back in reprisal for his armed participation in these assemblies.⁶⁷ Just as in the Beauvaisis, people were driven to revolt and repression not only by political, ideological, and structural factors but also because of individual circumstances and personal relationships.

Charles of Navarre in the Beauvaisis As the villagers were ringing their bells in Champagne, the reformers in Paris were again making efforts to secure the north. Charles of Navarre was the key to this effort. His relationship with the reformers had perhaps cooled somewhat during May as he turned his attention to Normandy, but Meaux and Mello seem to have changed the landscape.⁶⁸ However Marcel and his associates may have felt about the battle at Mello and Calle’s execution, they needed Navarre now more than ever. Immediately upon hearing the news of the battle, Marcel sent for the Navarrese King. He arrived in Paris on 14 June, and after a long conversation, they decided on a new strategy, one that put Navarre firmly in the driver’s seat.⁶⁹ The next morning, as the Regent was leaving Sens to rampage across the Marne Valley, Charles of Navarre gave one of his rousing speeches in the centre of Paris. He spoke not only of how much he loved France but also of his unique duty to do so, for, as he noted, he was descended from the lilies—emblem of the royal house—on both sides. Indeed, he reminded the audience, had his mother but been a man, she would have been king of France. The reformers’ spokesman Charles Toussac followed this performance with one of his own, dwelling upon the poor governance to which the kingdom was subject. They should have a captain, he said, who would govern them well, and he could think of none better than the King of Navarre. As if on cue, the crowd began shouting ‘Navarre! Navarre!’⁷⁰

⁶⁶ ‘par avant, s’estoient yceulx habitanz rebellez et assemblez tant en fait d’armes comme autrement contre nostre amé et feal chevalier Jehan de Thorette et contre dame Ysabeau de Bouelmont, sa mère, dame de la dicte ville de Chavenges’ (AN JJ 86, no. 596, fol. 217, ed. Luce, no. 41, pp. 283–285). In addition to Chavanges and Bailly-aux-Forges, they also held Maisons-en-Champagne, which received a formulaic remission (AN JJ 86, no. 388, fol. 134). ⁶⁷ ‘terragiis dicte ville de Balleio, que ab eadem domina emptionis titulo receperat, necnon blada in suis campis tunc existencia’ (AN JJ 86, no. 465, fol. 164, ed. Luce, no. 40, pp. 281–283, omitting ‘titulo’). ⁶⁸ Jean de Venette, 170, 172 reports a rift between the Parisians and Navarre immediately before the Jacquerie, but the events it relates seem those more securely located in July. See Birdsall’s comments in Jean de Venette, The Chronicle of Jean de Venette, trans. Jean Birdsall, ed. Richard A. Newhall (New York, 1953), 239–240, n. 39. ⁶⁹ cf. d’Avout, 218–220. ⁷⁰ GC, 184–185.

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Making Navarre captain of Paris was envisaged as the first step toward making him the ‘universal’ captain of the French towns and putting the commoners’ military strength under the reformers’ control. Letters were immediately sent out to other cities, inviting their endorsement. The response, however, was muted. Only Amiens definitely accepted, but not until after Navarre and the Dauphin made peace in July, or so they later claimed.⁷¹ Senlis, too, seems to have held out and to have been of particular concern. A week after the Parisian proclamation, Navarre headed to the city, riding north from Paris with 600 troops.⁷² At the assembly grounds of Gonesse, where the Parisian commanders had so recently pressed villagers into their service, he took command of ‘many from the villages of the vicomté of Paris who awaited him there’.⁷³ Likely at this assembly, and probably also at the slightly later one at Chilly-Mazarin to the south, criers announced (or reiterated) Marcel’s orders forbidding the countryfolk from killing nobles or damaging their things, so long as they ‘were not enemies of Paris’.⁷⁴ This time, things would not get out of hand. Navarre and his army would have reached Senlis, about 25 kilometres up the road from Gonesse, around 24 June. They did not receive a warm welcome. The city’s recent success against the attackers from Meaux had encouraged it to act independently, and the inhabitants refused to allow Navarre within their walls. Camped below the city with a great army, Navarre may have begun preparations for a siege, but he did not immediately attack.⁷⁵ Perhaps he was dissuaded by the nobles’ humiliation less than a fortnight before. In any case, a compromise was reached that instituted Jean Bernier of Villers-Saint-Paul as Captain of the Beauvaisis. Bernier may not have been in Senlis for its defence on 13–14 June, but shortly afterward, people from Senlis and Bernier’s own neighbouring village had approached Charles of Navarre to obtain a commission instituting Bernier as captain for the region (capitaine et garde du dit païs) in his absence.⁷⁶ That would ⁷¹ ‘il s’estoient acordez que ledit Roy feust leur Capitaine, pour que ladite Ville de Paris leur avoit escript que ainsi avoit-il esté acordé & traictié entre les autres choses entre nous & ledit Roy’ (AN JJ 86, no. 239, fol. 78v–79r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 97–99). ⁷² Chron. norm., 132 and its derivative Chron. reg., 275 erroneously report that Navarre headed first to Compiègne in order to besiege the Regent there. ⁷³ GC, 188. ⁷⁴ Marcel claimed in his letter to Ypres that he had had these orders cried to 60 villages (d’Avout, 308). This may have been the assembly at Gonesse that the Jacquerie captain of Bessancourt and his councillor attended to hear ‘certis ordinationibus prepositi mercatorum Parisiensis apud Gonesse missis’ (AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r), but the earlier arrival in Gonesse of the Parisian militia under Pierre des Barres and Pierre Gilles in early June is also a possibility (Chapter 8). ⁷⁵ ‘le Roy de Navarre vint nagaires a grant host & compainie de genz d’armes & de pié devant ladite Ville pour icelle assaillir’ (AN JJ 86, no. 460, fol. 162v, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 99–100 and similarly AN JJ 102, no. 276, fol. 91r). See also AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r; Beauvais, AD Oise G 2223; AD Oise Edt 1 DD 10, no. 8–9. This incident cannot always be distinguished in the sources from the attack by AngloNavarrese troops in August or September, during the war between Navarre and France. ⁷⁶ ‘plusieurs personnes du dit païs, tant de Senliz comme de Villers, voisins d’environ Clermont en Beauvoisin, venissent à present par devers le roy de Navarre . . . obtenissent de li certaines lettres de commission par lesquelles le dit Jehan Bernier, de Villers, fu commis de par lui capitaine et garde du dit

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have occurred on or just after 15 June when Navarre was proclaimed captain of Paris and of France by the reform regime. Bernier’s remission relates that he only reluctantly accepted the commission after eight days, at which point he entered the city: that is to say, probably around the 24th, as or soon after Navarre arrived before Senlis.⁷⁷ Bernier’s captaincy allowed him to serve as Navarre’s surrogate among people who knew well the King’s role in putting down the Jacquerie and who remained suspicious of him but who also still hoped to effect a rapprochement with him. These were men like the Navarrese partisan Jean Vaillant, a commander of the attack on the Marché with a connection to Senlis, and Arnoul Guenelon, who went to Senlis rather than join the battle at Mello after the attack on Ermenonville was abandoned.⁷⁸ As discussed in Chapter 4, Bernier, who was a local landholder and military man, had sought to institute Saint-Sauflieu as Captain of the Beauvaisis before the Jacquerie but was then co-opted into the rebellion, only leaving the Jacques after Calle’s execution at Clermont. He was therefore well placed to represent the interests of moderate country-folk and provincial townspeople. Under his leadership, Senlis took no further offensive action but it did serve as a bastion against the Counter-Jacquerie. That summer, Bernier sent letters to the country villages summoning their inhabitants to a meeting to organize defences against the nobles so that the population could return to farming in peace. This effort was still ongoing in early August, when the Regent at last reconciled with Paris and issued the general remission that halted the nobles’ retribution.⁷⁹ Other moderate rebels also found themselves looking to Navarre. The captain of Angicourt, Hue de Sailleville, whose remission bears some similarity to Bernier’s, had gone to Marcel during the Jacquerie, begging him to curb the non-nobles’ violence (venuz pardevant le prevost des marchans qui lors estoit à Paris, lui monstrer et requerre qu’il vousist conseil à ce que les choses dessus dites cessassent). In the aftermath of Mello-Clermont, he and his community also sought out a letter of safeguard from Navarre. This turned out, he said, to have païs, lui absent’ (AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97). The remission is, perhaps purposefully, unclear as to whether the captaincy was obtained for Bernier in his absence or whether the captaincy was a lieutenancy, exercised in Navarre’s absence. ⁷⁷ Cf. Flammeront, ‘Jacquerie’, 142–143 n. 6, which corrects some errors in Luce, 153 but also introduces the mistaken idea that the Senlis-Saint-Paul mission had approached Navarre at Clermont. The title of captain given to Navarre in Bernier’s remission indicates that this interview happened after the 15th. ⁷⁸ Jean Vaillant had been a royal officer in Senlis in the 1340s (AN X1a 9, fol. 396v, a document in which he issued guarantees to a monk of Saint-Leu-d’Esserent); GC, 182; Secousse, Recueil, 177–181 at 180, 181–185 at 184. Guenelon: AN JJ 86, no. 391, fol. 136r. ⁷⁹ ‘il escript à plusieurs villes du dit plat païs que il venissent à lui en la dicte ville pour veoir et ordener comment ou pourroit mectre remède et resister aus diz courreux, afin que on peust cueillir et mettre à sauveté les diz biens, comme dit est, pendant la quelle chose nous feusmes en bon acort envers les habitanz de la dicte ville de Paris’ (AN JJ 86, no. 387, fol. 133v–34r, ed. Luce, no. 37, pp. 276–278 and Secousse, Recueil, 95–97).

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been of little or no protection against the nobles’ reprisals, but many other settlements, including Clermont itself, had turned to Navarre for the same purpose that summer.⁸⁰ It was hoped that Navarre would act like the king he was and bring peace, settling the civil strife and reconciling its partisans. These were royal duties and a Capetian legacy. When Navarre accepted the captaincy of Paris, he had promised to ‘heal the sickness’ so deeply engrained in France, a thaumaturgical reference that could not have been lost on his audience, standing so near to where the kings of old had healed scrofula with their very touch.⁸¹ One Jacques sought out the Navarrese king because he thought Navarre might have the regalian power to grant him remission for his crimes.⁸² Navarre, this Jacques reported, was at this point calling himself ‘the Defender of the Realm’. Navarre was not only able to project the moral force of benevolent kingship; he also had the physical force to back it up. As a villager near Pontoise put it that summer, Navarre may have been at war with the crown, but he ‘could better protect people than the Dauphin’.⁸³ To many, Navarre presented himself as a neutral party, interested only in ‘punishing the wicked’ as Étienne Marcel, Froissart and the Chronique normande reported. His promises of protection from the nobles to the villagers and townspeople were matched with a programme of punishment and restitution, but it is notable that the latter efforts were focused exclusively on commoners. He never directed violence toward the Counter-Jacques but instead acted in concert with them to end the non-noble uprising militarily. In his letter to Ypres of 11 July, Marcel said that Charles had by then defeated the Jacques on four occasions.⁸⁴ One of these occasions was Mello-Clermont, where Navarre made common cause with the nobles for tactical and moral reasons. Another might be the battle near Poix and Lignières, though Navarre himself was not there. Only one other incident can be identified, a battle outside of Montdidier, which Jean de Venette mentions but whose only extended witness is an account unique to the Chicago

⁸⁰ ‘la dite ville de Clermont estoit mise en la sauve garde du dit roy de Navarre, les dites genz d’Angicourt firent aler le dit Hue pardevers ycelui roy de Navarre, pour avoir une sauve garde de lui, aussi comme avoient pluseurs autres villes du païs environ, afin que il ne fussent ars ne gastez, la quelle sauve garde leur fu de petite ou nulle value’ (AN JJ 90, no. 288, fol. 148r, ed. Luce, no. 24, pp. 253–254). ⁸¹ GC, 186. Marc Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges: Étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale, particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Strasbourg, 1924). ⁸² ‘Il se feust trait par devers le Roy de Navarre a Saint Denis en France qui lors se disoit deffenseur du Royaume pour savoir se il avoit povoir de remettre & quitter ce que il avoit este quant le dit Robin fu feru et les autres faiz dessus diz’ (AN JJ 90, no. 161, fol. 91v–92r). Since this interview occurred in SaintDenis, it must have occurred after Mello-Clermont. ⁸³ ‘pourroit mieux garder les subgés de nostre dit seigneur et de nous que ne ferions’ (AN JJ 90, no. 206, fol. 112r, quoted by Philippe Charon, Princes et principautés au Moyen Âge: L’exemple de la principauté d’Évreux, 1298–1412 (Paris, 2014), 246, n. 109). ⁸⁴ ‘depuis les choses avenues en Beauvoisis, Mons. de Navarre, qui ou dit paiis estoit à gens d’armes, auquel il vindrent courre sus et lesquels il desconfit par quatre fois, et leurs capitaines prist et copa les testes’ (d’Avout, 308).

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redaction of Froissart’s chronicle.⁸⁵ This story, which may have come from Mahieu de Roye or someone close to him, again presents Navarre as acting on moral grounds, rather than out of social solidarity or political gain. His avowed aim was to restore peace to the countryside and to reconcile the nobles and the Jacques, though the strategic advantages accruing to his cause also appear obvious. The Chicago redaction reports that after the battles of Mello-Clermont and Meaux, many Jacques sought safety behind the walls of a fortified town, like Beaumont-sur-Oise, whose castle the royal chronicle says that Senlis attacked, or Montdidier.⁸⁶ They plumped for the latter. This was a reasonable choice, for as Froissart relates, the rebels had many sympathizers in the city. It was Robert le Coq’s home town, and the mayor and aldermen later had to petition for remission lèse-majesté, as well as for aiding the Jacques.⁸⁷ These facts suggest entanglements with the reformers’ plots. But unlike at Senlis, where the Jacques made the city their bastion, Montdidier did not support the contingent of Jacques that arrived outside its walls. The gates remained closed, its citizens united in promising to expel any Jacques who set foot in their city.⁸⁸ Outside the city, the rebels made camp and began a siege, hoping to claim their refuge by force. They were joined by some of those Parisians who escaped from Meaux (aucuns Parisiens qui avoient esté a Miaus en Brie et qui de la bataille escaperent). Other Jacques swelled their ranks. The burning and sacking of noble manors commenced once more. The nearby castles of noblemen who fought at Mello-Clermont, like that of Raoul de Renneval at Pierrepont-sur-Avre and the Royes’ at Guerbigny, were attacked.⁸⁹ In Pont-Sainte-Maxence, the revolt, which had ‘nearly settled down’, re-erupted; its richer citizens left in haste, their houses open, their valuables unsecured.⁹⁰ The deteriorating situation led a delegation of nobles to appeal to Charles of Navarre, probably while he was still before Senlis. ‘ “Sire,” ’ they told him, ‘ “these people, who rebelled and attacked the gentlemen in order to destroy them totally

⁸⁵ Jean de Venette, 176 places this battle after the execution of the rebel captains, implicitly agreeing with the Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 168–169v which places it after Mello-Clermont, as well as Meaux. ⁸⁶ GC, 178. ⁸⁷ AN JJ 86, no. 456, fol. 161r; AN JJ 86, no. 437, fol. 154, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: 112–114; AN X1a 17, fol. 284, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 27, pp. 514–515. ⁸⁸ ‘Cil de Mondidier avoient respondu que de euls en lor ville il n’enteront ja piet, se on ne les y ruoit a I engien’ (Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169v). ⁸⁹ Pierrepont: AN X1a 17, fol. 284, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 27, pp. 514–515, suit against de Renneval by the widow of a burgher of Montdidier. Guerbigny (‘Garmegni’): Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169r. Other nearby incidents dating to this period may include the destruction of the Nesle manor at Courtemanche (AN JJ 92, no. 227, fol. 55v, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 29, pp. 516–517); of SainsMorainvillers (mentioned by de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: 110); and the effort to occupy the castle at Plainville (AN JJ 145, no. 498, fol. 229v–30r). ⁹⁰ ‘ipsis commotionibus sedatis vel quasi . . . in predicta villa intrassent in qua erant plura bona sine custodia . . . propter dictam commotionem de novo transactam’ (AN JJ 101, no. 55, fol. 30v–31r).

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are intolerable. For pity’s sake, you must help.’ ”⁹¹ This group of nobles may have included those who had initially headed to Creil, where they (probably erroneously) believed the Jacques to have been based, as well as those at and around Compiègne, where the citizens had refused Calle’s invitation and killed his messenger.⁹² From their base at Compiègne, this group of Counter-Jacques terrorized villages along the Oise. It was likely they who were responsible for burning the nearby villages of Verberie, Lacroix-Saint-Ouen, and Resson-surMatz, places that Jean de Venette named as ruins he had seen with his own eyes.⁹³ They pillaged as well as burned, for Marcel wrote to Ypres that the Counter-Jacques were using Compiègne to store much of what they stole from the non-nobles.⁹⁴ Just downstream on the Oise at Jaux, some Compiègnois and royal officers were refused passage by the ferryman, who had himself served as sub-officer in the Jacquerie, ‘for fear that they were accompanied by nobles’.⁹⁵ One of the nobles from Compiègne had made his way down to the village of Pontpoint, where he and his companion, posing as refugees from the Counter-Jacquerie, discovered some villagers hiding themselves in a nearby quarry or cave. When the dubious villagers removed the men’s bucklers and swords, it was discovered that one of them was hiding a ‘striped hood’ under his mantle, marking him as a noble partisan and spy.⁹⁶ ⁹¹ ‘Sire, chils peuplez rebelles et ahers sus les gentilshommes a euls tous destruire ne fait pas a souffrir ne a soustenir. Il faut que par pité vous y pourvees et se che faittes vous averés grandement la grasce de tous gentilshommez et gentilz femmez dou royaume de France’ (Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169v). ⁹² Creil: Jean le Bel, 259. Compiègne: see Chapter 7. Jean de Venette also places the Count of SaintPol, Guy V de Châtillon, at Montdidier with Navarre (Jean de Venette, 176). Beaune (ed.), Chronique dite de Jean de Venette, 417, n. 71 asserts that the chronicler has here confused him with his relative, Hue de Châtillon. She gives no evidence but perhaps reasoned that Hue’s presence is more likely since 4 Valois, 74 places Hue at Clermont. However, a remission confirms that the Count was involved in the Counter-Jacquerie in the Beauvaisis, as well near Reims: ‘le conte de Saint pol que dieux pardonist pour contrester et obvier a la mauvaise & dure volente dessusdis non nobles & aidier as nobles du dit pais de Beauvesis fust venus acompaignier les gens d’armes a l’encontre d’iceulx non nobles’ (AN JJ 96, no. 393, fol. 138r). See also Birdsall, Jean de Venette, 242, n. 54. ⁹³ As opposed to ‘multae aliae . . . quas non vidi nec hic noto’ (Jean de Venette, 178). ⁹⁴ d’Avout, 306. There is a marginal note in the cartulary of Saint-Corneille: ‘l’an 1358, lorsque toute la noblesse de Picardie se retiroit en foule à Compiègne devers le dauphin’ (Cartulaire de l’Abbaye de Saint-Corneille de Compiègne, ed. Emile-Éphiphanius Morel, 3 vols (Paris, 1894–1977), III: 401 n. 1, cited in Colette Beaune, Le Grand Ferré: Premier héros paysan (Paris, 2013), 199, n. 75). ⁹⁵ ‘ou temps que les nobles chevauchoient & aucuns officiers de monsire et de nous & pluseurs autres de la ville de Compaigne feussent alez sur la Riviere d’Oise du coste devers la forest de Compaigne et eussent volu passer oultre la dite Riviere en la dite ville de Jaux . . . Jehan doubtans que il ne feussent acompaignez de nobles leur reffusa du tout amener la dite nacelle’ (AN JJ 86, no. 362, fol. 123). ⁹⁶ ‘aucuns d’icelle quarrière leur ostèrent leurs dis boucliers et espées, et en les leur ostant trouvèrent que l’un d’eulx avoit pendu à sa sainture souz son mantel un chap[er]on my parti, par quoy il cuidièrent estre trahis, et qu’il fussent des espies des gentils hommes’ (AN JJ 96, no. 425, fol. 145, ed. Luce, no. 62, pp. 331–332). The man who slew one of these unmasked gentlemen was named Watier Thullier (Wat Tyler). On subterranean refuges, see Nicholas Wright, Knights and peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French countryside (Woodbridge, 1998), 101–102. Creil and Montataire, as well as Gouvieux, have a particularly commodious and well-used network of natural caves called tufs (Boursier, Histoire de la ville, 28–30).

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Another concentration of Counter-Jacques was located a bit further north, in the Picard area between Amiens and the castle of Roye. Many nobles had taken refuge from the Jacques in the castle of Moreuil, 18 kilometres south of Amiens, and some Amiénois had joined local villagers in attempting to burn the castle down.⁹⁷ Hungry for vengeance, these noblemen now left the castle and killed locals known to have committed particularly upsetting deeds.⁹⁸ Some of them, including the Lord of Moreuil himself, rode to Mahieu de Roye’s castle at Plessis, where they again found themselves besieged, a story told below. Another contingent of Counter-Jacques converged on the Roye lands from the west. Baudrain de la Heuse and his troops, fresh from their victory at Poix, had ridden first toward Gerberoy, site of an episcopal castle in the Beauvaisis, and then east toward the castle of Roye, where they probably joined those nobles assembled to help its eponymous family against the Jacques.⁹⁹ Along the way they had met with another 800 troops under the command of the Lord of Beausault and other local nobles. Together, they burned alive several hundred Jacques hiding in a church near Breteuil.¹⁰⁰ In another tale unique to the Chicago redaction, Froissart recounted that Mahieu de Roye had had to make a daring escape from the castle of Plessis-deRoye, where legions of Jacques besieged his family, riding desperately for the Empire where he sought the help of the knights of the Cambrensis and Hainaut.¹⁰¹ Two hundred lances strong, the foreign knights joined with Mahieu’s father the Lord of Roye, Raoul de Coucy, and the Lords of Renneval and Moreuil to rout the Jacques’ siege.¹⁰² Since the Quatre Valois chronicle reports Mahieu de Roye’s presence at the battle of Mello-Clermont, the Plessis incident would have occurred immediately afterward, perhaps early in the third week of June.¹⁰³ If both Froissart and the Quatre Valois chronicle are correct, Mahieu de Roye must have ridden immediately for Plessis, found himself besieged, made his escape, secured help, and returned to break the siege in the space of a fortnight. It would have been fast and frantic, but it is possible. The foreign knights then helped the Royes again at ⁹⁷ See Chapter 5, n. 91. ⁹⁸ AN JJ 108, no. 60, fol. 37v–38r, ed. Luce, no. 64, pp. 335–338; AN JJ 108, no. 86, fol. 55, partly excerpted at Luce, 207. ⁹⁹ 4 Valois, 76; Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 168 for the assembly. ¹⁰⁰ 4 Valois, 76. ¹⁰¹ Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 168v. Mahieu de Roye had served as Philip VI’s deputy on the Flemish frontier in 1347 to reconcile his rebellious subjects, during which commission he remitted two men living in Bethune for their treasonous activities, a grant confirmed by the Dauphin in September 1358 (AN JJ 86, no. 330, fol. 111). Perhaps these men had been of some recent service to him? ¹⁰² Jean de Noyal, ‘Fragments inédits de la chronique de Jean de Noyal, abbé de Saint-Vincent de Laon (XIVe siècle)’ in Auguste Molinier (ed.), Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France 20 (1883): 257. Chron. norm., 128 and the derivative Chron. reg., 271 and Istore et croniques de Flandres d’après les textes de diverse manuscrits, Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove, (ed.), 2 vols (Brussels, 1879–1880), II: 86 also report peasants besieging Plessis, where Mahieu de Roye and other nobles had taken refuge. ¹⁰³ 4 Valois, 74. More support for this timing comes from a remission implicating the Lord of Moreuil’s son in a Counter-Jacquerie reprisal around 23 June in the Parisis, quite far from his home near Amiens (AN JJ 86, no. 314, fol. 105).

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the castle of Guerbigny, where Jacques sexually menaced Mahieu de Roye’s mother and sister because the Lord of Roye had absented himself to join the Dauphin’s muster at Charenton, assembling as June came to a close.¹⁰⁴ Victorious and having heard that Navarre wanted to attack the Jacques, these nobles sent their herald before King Charles to offer their services to the project. Fortuitously, he arrived just as the King was mulling over the Beauvaisis’s nobles’ plea.¹⁰⁵ As at Longueville the previous month, Navarre considered his position carefully before joining forces with these nobles. According to Froissart, in exchange for his aid, the nobles promised him “ ‘the great gratitude from all the gentlemen and women of France.” ’ Like the Jacques who hoped to use the support of a walled town as leverage to win the King to their side, the nobles knew that Navarre’s aid depended on Navarre’s interests. Navarre’s agreement to help the nobles, though reportedly couched in moral terms, was again probably motivated primarily by the opportunity to neutralize a major threat to his war with the Dauphin. Many of the nobles who had been with Navarre at Clermont had abandoned him on 19 and 20 June, leery of the near usurpatory position he had staked out in his speech in Paris, so the King was probably especially eager for new alliances.¹⁰⁶ Composed of at least two groups of nobles, it was thus an even larger army that confronted the Jacques at Montdidier than had done at Mello-Clermont, and as at that battle, the Jacques were completely routed. The nobles had the advantage of surprise. The Chicago Froissart mentions that Navarre was about a day’s ride from Montdidier when the nobles implored his intervention. Travelling at speed, the nobles and Navarre fell upon the Jacques without warning. The non-nobles found themselves caught between this onslaught and the city walls that they had hoped would protect them. The gates of Montdidier remained closed. With nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide, as at Meaux, Mello-Clermont, and Poix-Lignières— indeed everywhere that nobles and Jacques clashed in open battle—the Jacques were handily defeated. For Froissart, Montdidier at last marked the end of the rebellion. With palpable satisfaction, he related that the surviving rebels skulked back to their villages,

¹⁰⁴ See Chapter 5 for the Royes at Guerbigny. 4 Valois also places the Lord of Roye at the battle of Mello-Clermont. ¹⁰⁵ ‘ly chevalier se tinrent ensamble environ Garmegni et Roie car il entendirent que li rois de Navare voloit aler combattre lez Jacquez, qui se requelloient ensamble, et envoiierent un hiraut deviers lui en remonstrant que il estoient tout appareilliet de li faire service en destruisant celle jacquerie’ (Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 169r). ¹⁰⁶ GC, 187–188; Delachenal, Histoire, I: 418–420. It is difficult to imagine Mahieu de Roye, among the most staunchly loyal of Valois supporters, seeking rapprochement with Navarre in the period between his speech in June vaunting his right to the throne and 19–20 July, when he made peace with the Dauphin, but perhaps he knew of the arrangements for the interview scheduled to take place on 8 July between the Dauphin and Navarre, at which an abortive peace was made.

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where they were hanged by their lords.¹⁰⁷ Marcel’s letter to Ypres, written perhaps a week or so after this battle, suggests a different story. It reports that Navarre had instituted a programme of reconciliation. He required each village to give up its four most guilty men and he appointed a committee of ten country-dwellers from the Beauvaisis to determine the damages owed to the nobles. He did this so that the countryside could return to ‘safety and peace’, but, as Marcel observed, the project failed. After Navarre returned to Paris around 7 July, the CounterJacquerie continued on without him: ‘once Monseigneur of Navarre had left, the gentlemen of the Beauvaisis and the Vexin, as well as the other [imperial] nobles, who had been entirely unharmed, gathered together and destroyed and pillaged the whole of the Beauvaisis and the Vexin’.¹⁰⁸ Nor was the rebellion completely annihilated even now. Aside from those Jacques or former Jacques sheltering in Senlis, non-nobles were continuing to mass, march, and destroy.

Far Echoes: Normandy, the Loire, and Beyond Violence between non-nobles and nobles and their supporters continued through the end of July and beyond. This was due in no small part to developments between Navarre and the Dauphin. Upon his return to the Paris environs, Navarre reconciled with the Dauphin on 8 July, though further violence meant that a more lasting (though ultimately also illusory) agreement was not agreed until the 19th. The Dauphin’s host at Charenton broke up immediately thereafter.¹⁰⁹ The Prince had ordered his troops not to pillage, burn or rape as they made their way home, but their reputation preceded them, making villagers quick to sound the alarm and take up arms in their own defence.¹¹⁰ Returning from that assembly, the valets of a squire called Renier la Pipi got into a fight with some of the inhabitants of Conflans-sur-Seine and were run out of town by villagers who had rung their

¹⁰⁷ ‘onquez puis ne se rasamblerent car encores quant il revenenoient ens es villages dont il estoient parti et lez coses furent apaisiés, li chevalier et li escuier desoubz qui il demoroient, lez prendoient et pendoient sans merchi. Telle en fu la conclusion: par mal conmenchierent et tout a mal fin il vinrent’ (Froissart, Chicago MS, fol. 170r). ¹⁰⁸ ‘ordonne que de chascune ville quatre des plus principauls de ceuls qui avoient fais les excès seroient pris et justicié, et dix du paiis de Beauvoisis seroient pris qui sauroient les domages qui avoient esté fais aux gentilz homes, les villes et les personnes par qui ce auroit esté fait et seroit rapporté à Mons. de Navarre et il feroit faire restitucion convenable des domages aus dis gentils homes et parmi ce, les bonnes gens du plat paiis de Beauvoisis, les villes et le paiis devoient demourer en seurté et en pais. Ce ne obstant, les gentils homes du paiis de Beauvoisin et de Veccin, monseigneur de Navarre parti, et aussi li autre noble des paiis desuss dis, à qui rien ne touchoit, se assemblèrent et tout le paiis de Beauvoisis et de Veccin destruirent et pillèrent’ (d’Avout, 309). ¹⁰⁹ GC, 199–200; Delachenal, Histoire, I: 435–437. ¹¹⁰ ‘par vertu de noz lettres donnees au departement de nostre derrien host devant paris que aucuns ne pillast, Boutast feux ne efforcast fammes’ (AN JJ 86, no. 380, fol. 130).

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bells to signal assault by men-at-arms.¹¹¹ La Pipi and his associates later returned to the village, revenging themselves by ransoming several of the inhabitants and stealing their livestock.¹¹² Around Laon, those returning from the host brought more widespread noblenon-noble conflict to northern Champagne. As in the Perthois further south, there is little to indicate that the non-nobles of this region had been previously involved in the uprising. As late as 11 July, Marcel reported that the Laonnais remained free of the Counter-Jacquerie.¹¹³ It was only when nobles returning from the host massed at Loivre near Reims and attacked the confederated villages of SaintThierry that this sort of activity is recorded.¹¹⁴ These villagers, with a long tradition of organized opposition to external threats, had heard rumours of the nobles’ pillaging (fut rapporte que les diz nobles s’efforcoient de pillier ou dit pais). They set up a line of defence, but 50 of them were slaughtered by the nobles, who screamed ‘death to these peasants!’ (ala mort as villains) as the battle was joined.¹¹⁵ It is probably at this point that Enguerrand, Lord of Coucy, became prominently involved in the Counter-Jacquerie, burning the fortress of his old foe Robert le Coq at ‘Aisy’.¹¹⁶ These attacks continued into August, leading the villagers to flee, their houses left empty and their crops rotting in the fields.¹¹⁷ The latest definitely datable incident in this region happened in mid-August ‘around the feast of the Assumption’, when the squire Anceau la Pippe and his servant kidnapped people and seized animals and goods in the village of Acy, near Soissons, in vengeance for the damage done to la Pippe’s manor.¹¹⁸ ¹¹¹ ‘riote & noise de paroles feust mehue entre aucuns de leurs vallez & pluseurs habitanz de la dite ville qui estoient ou dit chastel pour la quelle Riote & noise les dessus diz habitanz esmurent toute la ville ou la plus grant partie et tant que il vindrent & se assemblerent par cry & a cloche sonnee environ le dit hostel pour assaillir le dit complaignant & ses diz compaignons’ (AN JJ 86, no. 373, fol. 127). ¹¹² Other violent incidents involving nobles who had been with the army at Charenton occurred at Genonville (AN JJ 89, no. 440, fol. 193), at Sompuis (AN JJ 86, no. 258, fol. 86v–87r), and at Conches near Lagny (AN JJ 86, no. 244, fol. 81). The Sompuis and Conches letters, the former copied after the latter’s example, date these incidents to ‘environ Saint Jehan’ (24 June), but this is probably a mistake for Saint Jacques (25 July). The incident south of Auxerre recorded at AN JJ 86, no. 424, fol. 148, ed. Luce, no. 42, pp. 286–288 may also date from this period. ¹¹³ d’Avout, 307; cf. AN JJ 86, no. 433, fol. 152v–53r, which says that the castle of Eppes was threatened. ¹¹⁴ AN JJ 86, no. 380, fol. 130; AN JJ 96, no. 393, fol. 138r. ¹¹⁵ Gaston Robert, ‘L’abbaye de Saint-Thierry et les communautés populaires au Moyen Âge’, Travaux de l’Académie nationale de Reims (année 1927–1928) 142 (1930): 87–174. ¹¹⁶ Jean de Noyal, ‘Fragments inédits’, ed. Molinier, 257. Molinier identified this as Azy-sur-Marne, near Château-Thierry, but Aizy, much closer to Laon seems more likely. Jean le Bel, 259–260 names the Lord of Coucy as a major leader of the Counter-Jacquerie, though I can find little other evidence for his role. The chronicler may have confused him with his paternal uncle, Raoul, whom the Chron. norm., 128–129 and Jean de Noyal place among important Counter-Jacques (GC, 187–188; Delachenal, Histoire, I: 418–420.). Raoul had led a violent attack on le Coq’s subjects in 1357 (AD Aisne G 69). ¹¹⁷ ‘s’efforcent encores de Jour en Jour de chevauchier & chevauchent continuelment es dites villes de mettre a mort & peurs (?) genz & chevaux de harnois & autres, a Ranconner villes & genz, pour les quelles choses il a convient touz lesdiz habitanz des dites villes aler demourer hors d’icelles sanz ce que aucun y soit demoure mais sont les maisons demourees vagues et les biens qui sont ou pais perissent aus champs’ (AN JJ 86, no. 380, fol. 130). ¹¹⁸ AN JJ 90, no. 174, fol. 97v–98r; AN JJ 90, no. 530, fol. 264v–65r. Anceau may have been related to Renier la Pipi, mentioned earlier.

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Far to the west, a company of Norman Counter-Jacques who had been fighting alongside Baudrain de la Heuse and the Roye contingent marched back toward Normandy, stopping at Gaillefontaines, where they upbraided the Lady of Valois for providing comfort to the enemy and killed another thousand peasants.¹¹⁹ Continuing on, they stopped at the village of Buchy, where, it being a market day, news was circulating. They heard that la Heuse and his brother Jean Sonnain were now battling the citizens of Rouen, who suspected Sonnain, captain of the city’s royal castle, and his garrison of intending to pillage them.¹²⁰ While Sonnain had been absent harrying the Jacques, the citizens had taken over the castle, partly because of ‘the disturbances (effroy) then affecting the region’.¹²¹ During July and extending well into August, the Rouen conflict became a war (guerre) between the Rouennais and some of the region’s gentlemen. Like a Jacquerie and CounterJacquerie writ small, it involved thousands of people and the burning of the plat pays and the nobles’ manors. Among those manors destroyed was that of Viviers, belonging to Jean Lord of Biville. The city likely had pre-existing conflicts with him, as they certainly did with the priory of Saint-Gervaise, which the citizens also destroyed as a potential enemy redoubt.¹²² Recent events may have given civic resentment towards Biville a new salience, for he had fought with Navarre alongside another of the citizens’ enemies, the Lord of Préaux, in the noble army at Mello-Clermont.¹²³ Although Rouen had

¹¹⁹ 4 Valois, 76. ¹²⁰ 4 Valois, 77–80. De Beaurepaire and Nortier’s calendared catalogue of medieval acts in Rouen’s bibliothèque municipale lists only one act between July 1357 and January 1359, though the years before and after are well attested (‘sources de l’histoire’, 37). To my knowledge, the fullest account of these events remains that of Adolphe Chéreul, Histoire de Rouen pendant l’époque communale, 1150–1382, suivie de pièces justificatives publiées pour la première fois d’après les archives départementales et municipales de cette ville, 2 vols (Rouen, 1843–1844), II: 198–207. See also Philippe Cailleux, Trois paroisses de Rouen, XIIIe–XVe siècle, Saint-Lô, Notre-Dame-la-Ronde et Saint-Herbland: Étude de topographie et d’urbanisme (Caen, 2011), 38–39, who places these events in February 1358 because in the fifteenth-century chronicle of Pierre Cochon they are narrated directly after the murder of the marshals (Pierre Cochon, Chronique normande de Pierre Cochon, notaire apostolique à Rouen, Charles de Robillard de Beaurepaire (ed.), (Rouen, 1870), 95–98). However, like Quatre Valois, Cochon states that these events took place during the mayoralty of the celebrated Jacques le Lieur, whose time in office likely began at Easter 1358 (AN JJ 91, no. 71, fol. 32r, ed. Luce, no. 59, pp. 322–323; de Belleval, Trésor généalogique). Cochon’s narrative erroneously places these events, as well as the murder of the marshals, a year earlier than they took place. ¹²¹ AN JJ 87, no. 71, fol. 53, partially ed. Secousse, Recueil, 95, confirmed AN JJ 89, no. 432, fol. 130v–31r, paraphrased at Chéreul, Histoire de Rouen, II: 203. ¹²² Chéreul, Histoire de Rouen, II: 199–201; Rouen, AD Seine-Maritime 3E1 (Rouen) A 38bis, fol. 231v–32. I am most thankful to Christèle Potvin at AD Seine-Maritime for digital images of this item. The manuscript cited in Bessen, ‘Jacquerie’, 50, 57, n. 10 regarding these events, [Bibliothèque municipale de] Rouen MS Y 99, fol. 50–52, which I was not able to consult, appears to be another copy of the document at AD Seine-Maritime 3E1 A 38bis, fol. 231v–32. Both MSS are early modern. Saint-Gervaise was a priory of the Benedictine monastery of Fécamp. ¹²³ Chéreul, Histoire de Rouen, II: 144–146, 199–200; 4 Valois, 74.

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fêted Navarre’s release in January, its then mayor seated beside King Charles at dinner, by the summer of 1358, the city had a new mayor, one Jacques le Lieur, who appears to have been considerably less well disposed to the Évreux cause.¹²⁴ Sonnain and de la Heuse seem to have been staunchly pro-Valois, but the final split between Navarre and the Dauphin did not come until August. It was at the end of August that the Rouen war was brought to an end, when le Lieur sent a delegation to request the Dauphin’s intervention, receiving both remission and the removal of Sonnain’s captaincy on 4 September.¹²⁵ In exchange, the crown enacted a drastic weakening of the coinage in Rouen, enabling Baudrain de la Heuse to pay the foreign soldiers he was bringing to the region.¹²⁶ In the Rouennais conflict, violent confrontation between nobles and non-nobles occasioned by the Jacquerie and its suppression developed into a small war driven by local circumstances. Moving outward from the revolt’s Francilien epicentre, the local concerns and particular enmities behind incidents labelled as ‘Jacquerie’ become increasingly evident. The castle of La Cour at Ligny-le-Ribault was partially torn down by citizens from Orléans who were described by its holder, Jean de Melun, as his ‘capital enemies’. This situation deteriorated into one of open war (guerra) over the next two years after Melun garrisoned the castle with rapacious Breton mercenaries who repeatedly attacked the Orléanais.¹²⁷ Eighty kilometres up the Loire, the Jacquerie also provided the inhabitants of Gien, a prosperous river port, with an opportunity to pursue enmity with extramural noble neighbours. Because of their ‘discord and conflict’ with the squires Jean and Jehannot du Martroy, a large number of Giennois went to the Martroys’ houses seven leagues outside the city. Frustrated in their intention to kill the brothers ‘as others of their condition were killing nobles’, they turned their violence against the squires’ livestock and furnishings and vented their spleen by doing other things ‘too ugly and detestable to recount’.¹²⁸ In retaliation, the squires called upon their noble friends, asking ¹²⁴ Rouen had sympathized with the Parisian reformers, despite the long-standing commercial rivalries between the Seine towns (AD Aisne Edt 1 CC 1, fol. 65r; Chéreul, Histoire de Rouen, II: 188–190). Chéreul’s suspicions (Histoire de Rouen, II: 195–196) that the mayor at the feast in January 1358 was not the same as the mayor in June 1358 are borne out by AD Seine-Maritime 3E1 A 38bis, unnumbered initial folios, which shows that the office changed holders yearly, probably at Easter. According to that register, le Lieur’s predecessor was Guillaume de Ciervisse. ¹²⁵ 4 Valois, 79–80. ¹²⁶ Ord., III: 252. 4 Valois, 86–87, 90–93 reports that de la Heuse led noblemen and the Rouennais in an expedition against the Navarrese at Longueville in August or September and then later at SaintValery, where he was accompanied by Jacques le Lieur. War taxes had led Rouen to revolt several times over the past decade; in 1351, 23 drapers had been hanged in reprisal (Cailleux, Trois paroisses, 38). ¹²⁷ AN JJ 91, no. 277, fol. 140, ed. Luce, no. 60, pp. 324–327. See also AN JJ 91, no. 374, fol. 195v–96r. ¹²⁸ ‘ou temps que les commotions furent entre les les nonnobles & nobles les habitans de la ville de Gien sur Loire, ou grant partie d’iceulx, eurent descort et controversie contre Jehan et Jehannot du Martroy, ecuiers, frères, demouranz à sept lieues loing ou environ de la dite ville de Gien, et que ilz vindrent armez à grant nombre de personne ès hebergements et hostelx des diz escuiers, en l’absence des quelx en hayne et pour ce que il ne les trouvèrent pour les mettre à mort comme mettoient les autres de leur condition non nobles les nobles, ils tuerent leurs bestes, rompirent et depecierent leurs coustes,

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that they help them ‘as at that time other nobles were doing in such circumstances’ (comme en tel cas faisoient lors les autres nobles), and a raid was made on the town to capture and imprison some of the perpetrators. Such opportunistic pursuit of old enmities was not confined to the non-nobles, as shown for example by the Norman knight ‘moved by old hatred’ (meu . . . de vielle haine), who imprisoned one Garnot Bellehere of Buchy (the town where Baudrain de la Heuses’s erstwhile companions heard of his difficulties) on the excuse that he had ridden with the Jacques.¹²⁹ Two other incidents—efforts by local people to tear down that of Dracy, 40 kilometres west of Dijon, and to burn the castle of Pleinpinard, 80 kilometres east of Poitiers—have less clear motivations but may also stem from previous antagonisms.¹³⁰ The lord of Dracy recounted at length the theft of his property from the castles, so cupidity may have been the main motivation there, though a more direct connection with the Counter-Jacquerie is possible since Raoul de Renneval’s men had been in the area in the second week of June.¹³¹ The destruction of Pleinpinard, on the other hand, is given no explanation at all. It may have to do with the wars (guerres) its lord later had with a neighbouring priory and its people at Saint-Gaultier.¹³² Alternatively or additionally, it may be connected with the south-eastern-most mass of attested Jacques, 600 of whom were found marching near Saché in the Touraine. The remission that mentions that encounter dates it to the period when the English occupied the fortress of Comery in the Touraine, an incident that occurred in 1359.¹³³ That remission is a late one, issued in 1376, so the recipient may have misremembered events that happened a long ago, perhaps conveniently conflating his service against the English with his murdering

coussins, couvertois, fondirent & ardirent leurs vaisselle d’estain & de cuivre et leurs firent pluseurs autres grans villenies & dommages irréperables, laiz et detestables a raconter’ (AN JJ 115, no. 298, fol. 146v–47r, excerpted in Luce, 196–197). ¹²⁹ AN JJ 87, no. 117, fol. 80v–81r. ¹³⁰ Pleinpinard (belonging to Lord Pierre Couraut) and attacked by Lotard de Slignace and his brother Mauguet: AN JJ 99, no. 88, fol. 29r. Dracy: ‘vigentibus commocionibus nequissimis que inter nonnullos populares regni nostri a tribus annis citra viguerunt, nonnulli habitatores ville de Viteau, inter quos erat Johannes dictus Turelin, de Salvoloco, ad castrum de Draceyo nuncupatum . . . hostiliter invaserunt, ac eciam vi et violencia quandam partem dicti castri ad terram postraverunt’ (AN JJ 91, no. 71, fol. 32r, ed. Luce, no. 59, pp. 322–323). ¹³¹ [R. de Belleval], Trésor généalogique de la Picardie, ou Recueil de documents inédits sur la noblesse de cette province par un gentilhomme picard, 2 vols (Amiens, 1859–1860), no. 582, II: 179. ¹³² ‘ou temps . . . que furent les commotions de entre les nobles & nonnobles par Lotart de Salignace & Mauguet son frere, tous deux de la parroche de Riveraines, bouterent le feu ou dit lieu de Plaispinart . . . Item environ a deux ans & demy . . . les genz du prieur de Saint Gauthier & des habitans dudit lieu, tous ses subges & justicables, avoient pris, robe & pillie son lieu qu’il avoit a Saint Gautier . . . apres ce, qui pis est, ycelli lieu depecierent, demolirent, fondirent & arraserent du tout . . . et fu par ce qu’il avoit guerres audit prieur’ (AN JJ 99, no. 88, fol. 29r). ¹³³ ‘ou temps que les nonnobles s’esmurent contre les nobles . . . les anglois & enemis de nostre Royaume qui lors estes sur le pais de Touraine & environ a cormery, a langes & autres forteresses dudit pais’ (AN JJ 109, no. 434, fol. 214). Comery: HYW, II: 423.

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of non-nobles. On the other hand, it may be that echoes of the revolt reverberated for some time in places far distant from the uprising’s epicentre. Along with these conflicts there remained discernible efforts, especially in major towns to revive or build upon the Jacques’ social war. In Laon, the city’s procureur, in contact with Robert le Coq, was accused of encouraging the city’s poorer people (menus) to conspire to murder its rich citizens (gros).¹³⁴ An explicit link with the Jacques is found in the Norman city of Caen, where one Pierre de Montfort had induced the city’s poorer inhabitants to resist the taxes that had been decreed for the payment of soldiers, a similar situation to that which had upset people at Rouen, and had ‘sown discord between the menus and the gros’ inhabitants. Many Jacques had already been publicly executed in Caen, which was a strongly Navarrese city. Yet, Montfort, who ‘was one of the principal actors’ in the Jacquerie and even wore ‘a wooden plough on his cap in place of a feather and said that he supported the party of the Jacques’, continued to hold sway in the city until he was killed in January 1359.¹³⁵ The intertwining of personal or civic hatred with the political or military aims of the rebellion and its suppression reflects the multiplicity of actors and their varied and overlapping motivations. It also reflects the way that the summer of 1358’s violence bled into other conflicts that emerged out of it. Navarre’s occupation of the northern Paris basin, which tormented the crown and its subjects alike over the next year, was made possible by and was in some ways an extension of the rebellion’s suppression in this region under his command. Even if the nobles were not standing down as part of a prior understanding with Navarre, they provided nothing in protection. As Jean le Bel reported, the cities and the nobles suspected one another too much to come to each other’s aid. Those of the countryside were left, like the peasants led by Guillaume l’Aloue and Grand Ferré at Longueil-Sainte-Marie, to fend for themselves.¹³⁶ Some of the foreign—and French—men who formed the ‘free companies’ that terrorized rural folk well into the 1360s got their first taste of this lucrative activity while punishing rebels in the summer of 1358.¹³⁷ As people remembered that summer and the months that ¹³⁴ AN JJ 86, no. 446, fol. 157, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 103–104. ‘Menus’ does not mean destitute, just those who were not rich and powerful. ¹³⁵ ‘gens de Picardie qui furent mis à mort et perilliez sur le marchié’ (AN JJ 87, no. 321, fol. 204v–205, partially ed. Luce, no. 45, pp. 291–292). I have not been able to establish any links between this man and the Count of Montfort or that Count’s familiar and Calle’s lieutenant Germain de Réveillon. ¹³⁶ Jean le Bel, 270–272; Jean de Venette, 192–202, 206–218; Beaune, Grand Ferré. ¹³⁷ For example, Robert Knolles and Robin Lescot (Jean le Bel, 275–879; Henri Denifle, La guerre de Cent ans et la désolation des églises, monastères et hôpitaux en France, 2 vols (Paris, 1897–1899), II: 228–236). On the companies, see Georges Guigue, Récits de la guerre de Cent ans: Les Tard-venus en Lyonnais, Forez et Beaujolais, 1356–1369 (Lyon, 1886); Jacques Monicat, Histoire du Velay pendant la guerre de Cent ans: Les grandes compagnies en Velay, 1358–1392, 2nd edn (Paris, 1928); Wright, Knights and peasants; Kenneth Fowler, The Great Companies, vol. 1 of Medieval Mercenaries (Oxford, 2001); Guilhem Pépin, Françoise Lainé, and Frédéric Boutoulle (eds), Routiers et mercenaires pendant la guerre de Cent ans: Hommage à Jonathan Sumption. Actes du colloque de Berbiguières (13–14 septembre 2013) (Bordeaux, 2016).

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followed, they connected, confused, and conflated disparate actions and actors. Some of this was the unconscious or semi-concious construction of intelligible narratives about a chaotic and frightening time. Some of it was the knowing manipulation of facts to escape or to ensure punishment. Out of such memories were created the documents, judicial and narrative, through which we remember the Jacquerie and Counter-Jacquerie today.

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10 Good Love and Hard Words The Legacy of Revolt

With the Dauphin’s return to Paris in August, the Jacquerie’s legacy began to take shape. On 31 July, a mob of Parisians had murdered Marcel, allegedly to stop him from handing the city over to Charles of Navarre, whose violent and avaricious English soldiers had clashed repeatedly and fatally with the Parisian citizens.¹ The Anglo-Navarrese had also continued to pillage the northern countryside, just as the end of the Dauphin’s siege made their presence in the city less necessary or explicable. A brawl had broken out between citizens and soldiers on 21 July, leaving several dozen of the latter dead. Their comrades then revenged themselves on the Parisian militia, possibly with Marcel’s connivance, in an ambush west of the city that reportedly massacred 600 Parisians. The mob was led by the reformers’ erstwhile ally Jean de Maillart and several of Marcel’s Essars in-laws who rode through the city with fleur-de-lys banners, shouting the royal battle cry, ‘Montjoie Saint-Denis!’² Marcel’s protests of good intentions were met with an axe blow to the head. His companions fell alongside him. With their naked corpses splayed on the paving stones, ‘just as they had done to the Marshals of Champagne and Clermont’, those whom they had terrorized at last rejoiced.³ Englishmen were murdered in the street.⁴ Those who had proudly worn the Parisian hoods quickly tidied them away, and messengers were dispatched to the Regent at Meaux.⁵ They

¹ Widely reported by the chroniclers, the best modern account of the rising tensions in July and Marcel’s downfall is d’Avout, ch. 11. See also Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols (Paris, 1909–1931), I: 437–460, II: 22–23 and Françoise Autrand, Charles V le Sage (Paris, 1994), ch. 15. Religieux, 130–131 recounts how the abbey of Saint-Denis had to sell off its jewels to buy food because of these troops. ² Marcel’s downfall is narrated in GC, 205–210; Chron. norm., 134–135; Jean de Venette, 184, 186; Jean le Bel, 266–267; Froissart, SHF, §421, pp. 115–118; 4 Valois, 85; Religieux, 132–133; Chron. reg., 279–280; as well as in a remission for a royal huissier who joined the mob: AN JJ 99, no. 598, fol. 182v, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 296–297. Maillart and the Essars’ counter-insurgent use of flags resembles that of Michel di Lando when suppressing the Florentine Ciompi in 1378 (Richard C. Trexler, ‘Follow the flag: The Ciompi revolt seen from the streets’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 46 (1984): esp. 384). ³ ‘si comme ilz y avoient fait mettre le mareschal de Champaigne et celui de Clermont; forment esmeu en cuer’ (GC, 210, 205). ⁴ AN JJ 86, no. 277, fol. 92v. In this case, the supposed Englishman turned out to be a Lombard. ⁵ ‘illa rubra capucia, quae antea pompose gerebantur, deinceps abscondita sunt et dimissa’ (Jean de Venette, 186).

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0011

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must have arrived that very day, for on 1 August at Meaux the Dauphin gave Jacques des Essars one of the houses confiscated from Charles Toussac.⁶ To Charles of France, Marcel’s fall appeared as the work of Providence (quasi divino miraculo).⁷ Having abandoned any hope of regaining Paris, he was planning to depart the next day for his own lands in the Dauphiné, where perhaps his subjects might love him better.⁸ Instead, he entered Paris in triumph on 2 August. The Quatre Valois chronicler reported rapturous scenes as grateful subjects filled the city, crying ‘Montjoie! Saint-Denis to the Duke of Normandy, our rightful lord!’ The Regent himself wrote to family that he was ‘as honourably, grandly, and good-heartedly received as a prince could ever be’. Other reports are more circumspect.⁹ Indeed, not everyone was so pleased or even resigned. One spectator loudly voiced his disappointment and disapproval just as the Regent rode past. Restraining his noble companion from killing the man, Charles graciously replied, ‘We won’t believe that about you, good sir.’¹⁰ This story of the Prince’s merciful benevolence, related by Christine de Pisan decades later, may well be apocryphal, but it does evocatively capture the crown’s conciliatory approach to its oncerebellious and still-restive subjects. Jean de Venette recounted that the Prince was so pleased with the city’s reception that he ‘dropped all his previous anger and was peacefully reconciled with the citizens’.¹¹ The Regent’s reconciliation was, however, somewhat less immediate than Christine or the chronicler implied. Charles might have availed himself of the tradition of joyeuses entrées, commonly an occasion upon which a prince displayed his magnanimity by granting pardons.¹² Instead, he first made examples. On 4 August, the castellan of the Louvre had his tongue torn out for insulting the royal family. He was then publicly decapitated at Les Halles alongside Pierre Gilles, who had led the Parisian army to Meaux.¹³ Every other day, a pair of

⁶ ‘Donne a Meauls le premier jour d’aoust . . . par monsire le regent’ (AN JJ 86, no. 192, fol. 63v). ⁷ AN JJ 86, no. 203, fol. 66v. ⁸ Religieux, 131 is the source for the Dauphin’s plans. ⁹ 4 Valois, 86; Charles V, Lettre inédite du dauphin Charles sur la conjuration d’Étienne Marcel et du roi de Navarre, adressée aux comtes de Savoie (31 août 1358), François Combes (ed.), (Paris, 1869), 5; ‘tres grant joie’ (GC, 210); ‘grande solemnité’ (Jean le Bel, 267); ‘honorifice susceptus est’ (Chron. reg., 280–281); ‘ingressum gloriosum’ (Religieux, 134). ¹⁰ Christine de Pisan, Le livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, Suzanne Solente (ed.), 2 vols (Paris, 1936–1940), I: 66–67. ¹¹ ‘sciens punitiones factas, omnem indignationem deposuit quam prius habebat, et reconciliatus est pacifice civitati’ (Jean de Venette, 188). ¹² In fact, the chancery did refer to the general remission he later issued as having occurred at this moment: ‘en nostre joieux advenement pieca a Paris apres les diz efroiz nous ordenasmes en nostre conseil . . . ’ (AN JJ 90, no. 271, fol. 139v–140r). On the practice, see Bernard Guenée and Françoise Lehoux (eds), Les entrées royales françaises de 1328 à 1515: Choix de textes (Paris, 1968); Joël Blanchard, ‘Le spectacle du rite: Les entrées royales’, RH 305 (2003): 475–519; Vincent Challet, ‘Les entrées dans la ville: Genèse et développement d’un rite urbain (Montpellier, XIVe–XVe siècles)’, RH 317 (2014): 267–293. ¹³ GC, 211, which says only the castellan’s tongue was taken; 4 Valois, 85 notes the same fate for both. Religieux, 134 omits this detail.

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conspirators suffered similarly gruesome fates.¹⁴ Rebels’ properties were seized and parcelled out to royal favourites. Similar scenes were enacted some weeks later in Amiens, where the Count of Saint-Pol punished the city for its Navarrese sympathies, and at Laon, where Robert le Coq’s associates had their decapitated heads displayed on pikes. The bishop himself escaped Paris disguised as a Premonstratensian monk and made his way to safety with Navarre, though not perhaps without considering resistance: among the Laonnois conspirators’ crimes was planning to welcome le Coq with armed men in order to make Navarre king, and they had begun collecting an extensive tax for defence on 4 August.¹⁵ But once the point was made, retribution ceased and a programme of reconciliation began. On 10 August, Charles of France assembled ‘all the people or the greater part of Paris’, and ‘for the good of peace’ he issued plenary pardons for all those involved in the Parisian revolt, the rural uprisings, and their suppression.¹⁶ This assembly resulted in one written act issued to ‘the good people and true commons of the city of Paris’ (bon peuple & loyal commun de ladite Ville de Paris), and another for ‘all the nobles and non-nobles’ implicated in the recent violence who hailed from Paris, its immediate hinterlands, and rural areas to its south and east, including the area around Meaux.¹⁷ We have no such document for those from the Jacquerie heartlands in the Beauvaisis and Picardy, but a ‘general pardon issued upon our return to Paris’ is often mentioned in remissions for Jacques from those areas, including in the remission issued to the city of Beauvais itself.¹⁸ So, either a general pardon covering those areas was issued but never copied into the chancery’s registers, or it only ever existed as an oral decree, or it was just widely

¹⁴ GC, 211–212; Chron. norm., 135–136 lists six well-known reformers, as well as ‘pluseurs autres’, and says that they were killed ‘two by two’ each day; d’Avout, 248. Josseran de Mâcon and Charles Toussac were executed on 2 August before the Dauphin entered the city. Earlier executions also included those of Philippe Giffart, Simon le Paonnier, Jean de Lille le jeune, Gilles Marcel, and Jean Porret le jeune who were killed with Marcel or shortly thereafter (GC, 209–210). Chron. reg., 280 places the executions ‘duo in una die et duos in alia’ before the Regent’s arrival. ¹⁵ Amiens and Laon: Jean le Bel, 271. Executions and escape: Jean de Noyal, ‘Fragments inédits de la chronique de Jean de Noyal, abbé de Saint-Vincent de Laon (XIVe siècle)’ in Auguste Molinier (ed.), Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France 20 (1883): 257–258; AN JJ 86, no. 446, fol. 157, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 103–104; AN JJ 86, no. 559, fol. 203v; AN JJ 90, no. 14, fol. 8r; AN JJ 90, no. 35, fol. 16v. Taxes: beginning 4 August, intensifying on 17 August and 7 September, last date 7 October: Laon, AD Aisne Edt 1 CC 1. The abbot of Prémontré, situated near Laon, was living in the city that autumn in the same quarter as the conspirators (AD Aisne Edt 1 CC 1, fol. 30v). ¹⁶ Quote at AN JJ 86, no. 241, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 23, pp. 251–253; AN JJ 86, no. 240, fol. 79–80r, ed. Ord., IV: 346–348, excerpted Luce, no. 6, pp. 29–30, discussed below. ¹⁷ ‘peuple et commun de la bonne ville de Paris, de la prevosté et viconté d’icelle et de leurs ressors nouvaus et anciens, du plait païs de Brie et de Mussian, de la Ferté Aalès et de la conté d’Estampes . . . avonz à touz nobles et nonnobles des diz païs qui coulpables en sont pardonné, remis et quitté’ (AN JJ 86, no. 241, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 23, pp. 251–253). ¹⁸ Beauvais: AN JJ 90, no. 564, fol. 279r. Beauvaisis: AN JJ 86, no. 250, fol. 83v; AN JJ 86, no. 308, fol. 102v–103r, ed. Luce, no. 28, p. 260; AN JJ 88, no. 2, fol. 2v–3r; AN JJ 90, no. 294, fol. 150, ed. Luce, no. 48, pp. 296–297, among many others.

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assumed by the crown’s officers and subjects that the more rurally focused pardon was meant to be universal.¹⁹ By issuing these pardons, the crown drew a line under the events of the past two years. There remained scattered pockets of ongoing violence in the countryside, as I discussed in the previous chapter, and conspiracies still simmered in Paris and other cities, but from the crown’s perspective those crises were over. It wished them forgotten, not least because its attention was called elsewhere: there was still the problem of King Jean’s ransom, and on 3 August Charles of Navarre had declared war on France.²⁰ Still, the Regent’s subjects—and perhaps the Regent himself—were less ready to move on. While the government sought to control the legacy of the Jacquerie, it was able to monopolize neither the story nor its consequences for the social and emotional lives of its subjects.²¹ They could not imagine forgetting the Jacquerie.

Mercy and its Benefits Given the events of the past few months, the decision to pardon rather than to punish may seem surprisingly generous. It was in some ways an admission of weakness. The crown simply did not have the resources to prosecute and punish all those who had been involved, especially in the countryside. In Paris, the situation was somewhat different due to the nature of the crimes and the relative ease of policing: the pardon issued to the city excluded crimes of high treason (grande trahison), a crime defined specifically as having tried to put Navarre on the throne, and on 2 August the Dauphin had instituted a commission to ¹⁹ The general remission for the Parisians and the one for those of Paris, the Parisis, and southeastern countryside appear one after the other in the register AN JJ 86. They follow immediately after a general remission for Amiens, which was issued in September (AN JJ 86, no. 239, fol. 78v–79r, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 97–99). Also missing is the general pardon that the Dauphin made to the city of Meaux and that is referred to in an individual remission for a priest and canon of that city issued on 9 August for Guillaume de Chevenoil, priest and canon of Meaux, clearing him of misdoing related to the conspiracy that arranged for the militia from Paris to come to Meaux (AN JJ 86, no. 274, fol. 91v–92r, partially ed. Luce, no. 4, pp. 228–229), as well as in pardons for the Roses of Meaux and Thibaud Fourcuat (AN JJ 86, no. 212, fol. 69, partially ed. Luce, no. 8, p. 232; AN JJ 86, no. 288, fol. 96, paraphrased in Luce, no. 9, p. 233; AN JJ 86, no. 312, fol. 104, ed. Secousse, Recueil, 90–91; AN JJ 86, no. 290, fol. 97r). ²⁰ GC, 211. On the relegation to oblivion of medieval rebellions, see Vincent Challet, ‘Peasants’ revolts memories: Damnatio memoriae or hidden memories?’ in Lucie Doležalová (ed.), The making of memory in the Middle Ages (Leiden, 2010), 399–402. ²¹ On affective language and emotional experiences in the post-rebellion period, see my essay ‘The heart of rebellion: Law, language, and emotion after the French revolts of 1356–58’ in Jesús Ángel Solórzano Telechea, Jelle Haemers, and Roman Czaja (eds), Exclusión y disciplina social en la ciudad medieval europea (Logroño, 2018), 281–296. Another recent consideration of the legal aftermath of the revolt, whose conclusions complement some of those offered here, is Gaëtan Bonnot, ‘Dynamiques de la rémission et détours de la résolution de la conflictualité: Le règlement de la Jacquerie de 1358’ in Contester au Moyen Âge: De la désobéissance à la révolte, XLIXe Congrès de la Société des Historiens Médiévistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur Public (Rennes, 2018) (Paris, 2019), 363–377.

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investigate and judge ‘treasons and rebellions against Monseigneur and us’.²² The villagers of Champagne’s Perthois region also came in for special treatment, for some of them had been implicated in Paris’s grande trahison.²³ Brutally investigated by the Count of Vaudémont-Joinville, many champenois communities were heavily fined, and those individuals who actually went to the assemblies themselves were singled out for special punishment.²⁴ Everywhere else, it seems, rural rebels were too numerous and too spread out for the crown to pursue them all. But pursuing this policy of reconciliation offered other advantages to the crown besides saving face. One was money, for reconciliation preserved resources that the ever-penurious crown needed.²⁵ The productive wealth of Paris was vital to the crown’s hopes of solving its military quandaries. Not to put too fine a point on it, Paris granted the crown substantial new taxes on the same day that the plenary remissions were issued.²⁶ In the countryside, the nobles’ vengeance was proving expensive. People had fled their farms just as the harvest was coming. Colart du Four and his wife, for example, said that they ‘did not dare to remain on their properties, cultivating their lands, but found it necessary to hide in the woods and other places in great poverty’.²⁷ Whole villages were said to be ‘completely empty, deserted, and uninhabited’ (villes toutes vuides, desertes et non habitées).²⁸ Moreover, except in Champagne, where Vaudémont imposed his own heavy fines, the individual remissions that many people and communities thought it prudent to acquire also came at a price, equivalent to about a third of an unskilled worker’s annual income.²⁹ This fee could be waived, but I have not seen a single

²² Excerpted in AN JJ 86, no. 431, fol. 151–152, partially ed. Secousse, Recueil, 80–81. ²³ See Chapter 9. ²⁴ ‘en exceptant . . . certaines personnes des diz habitanz qui on dit avoir esté aus dictes assemblés à faire les dictes aliances, conspiracions et monpolles, des quelles personnes . . . nostre dit cousin et lieutenant a reservé la punicion’ (AN JJ 86, no. 357, fol. 122, ed. Luce, no. 31, pp. 264–266, vidimus at AN JJ 95, no. 19, fol. 9v–10r). See also AN JJ 86, no. 346, fol. 117v–18r, ed. Luce, no. 32, pp. 266–268; AN JJ 95, no. 22, fol. 10v–11r. ²⁵ Comparatively, see Marc Boone, ‘Destroying and reconstructing the city: The inculcation and arrogation of princely power in the Burgundian-Hasburg Netherlands (14th–16th century)’ in Martin Gosman, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Jan Veenstra (eds), The Propagation of power in the medieval West: Selected roceedings of the International Conference, Groningen, 20–23 November 1996 (Groningen, 1997), 1–33. ²⁶ AN P 2292, p. 765. In 1381, Richard II withheld his approval for a plenary pardon for the English rebels until the Commons extended the wool subsidy (Helen Lacey, ‘ “Grace for the rebels”: The role of the royal pardon in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381’, JMH 34 (2008): 55). ²⁷ ‘lequel Colart et sa fame n’osent encores demourer ou dit païs sur leurs héritages, pour yceulx faire labourer et coultiver, mais convient qu’il se démeusent et tapissent à grant misère et pouvreté, par boys et autres liex divers, pour doubte des diz nobles’ (AN JJ 86, no. 308, fol. 102v–103r, ed. Luce, no. 28, p. 260). ²⁸ AN JJ 86, no. 346, fol. 117v–18r, ed. Luce, no. 32, pp. 266–268. On fugitives, see Justine FirnhaberBaker, ‘The social constituency of the Jacquerie revolt of 1358’, Speculum 95 (2020): 696. ²⁹ On fees, see Claude Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’: Crime, État et société en France à la fin du Moyen Âge, 2 vols (Paris, 1991), I: 68 and Yves-Bernard Brissaud, ‘Le droit de grâce à la fin du Moyen-Âge (XIVe–XVe siècles): Contribution à l’étude de la restauration de la souveraineté monarchique’, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de Poitiers, Faculté de droit et des sciences sociales

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remission for either urban or rural rebels that bears the indicative mention sine financia. Pardoning also offered legal advantages to the crown and its officers. As Peter Blickle has observed for a later period, revolts provided opportunities for central authorities to strengthen their own power by inserting themselves as arbiters between the rebels and their enemies through judicial means.³⁰ In this case, the plenary remission for the rural rebellion not only foreclosed criminal prosecution, it also reserved all civil cases to royal jurisdiction, specifying that they could only come before the king, the regent or his officers.³¹ This was agreeable to many nobles, who found it difficult to pin down Jacques ‘who lived in so many different jurisdictions and travelled from place to place’, and probably also to many nonnobles, who might otherwise have found themselves in a seigneurial court pursuing a case against their lord’s friend or relative, or even the lord him or herself.³² Certainly, the crown was pleased to find a way to penetrate the seigneurial jurisdictions that normally fell outside its purview. And this, too, was lucrative: the crown bore the cost of criminal prosecutions, but civil claimants had to pay their own way.³³ Another advantage, as Blickle also suggests, was political and ideological. Forgiveness of crimes was a regalian prerogative, much as the remission of sins was an ecclesiastical one. The granting of remission was always accomplished, as a ubiquitous formula insisted, through the extension to the culpable party of the crown’s ‘particular grace’ (de grace especial). Up to 1372, lords were permitted to issue their own remissions in France, but even in 1358, royal remissions mentioning the possibility of seigneurial remission portrayed it as a special favour granted by the crown to the recipient’s lord. It was an ‘amplification’ of the crown’s own grace.³⁴ Remission was thus an act of near divine majesty, which

(Poitiers, 1971), 242–249. The champenois remissions usually reduced the fine that had been assigned by the Count of Vaudémont-Joinville. Comparatively, see Lacey, ‘ “Grace” ’, 54. ³⁰ Peter Blickle, ‘Einführung: Mit den Gemeinden Staat machen’ in Peter Blickle with Rosi Fuhrmann (eds), Gemeinde und Staat im Alten Europa (Munich, 1998), 1–22. ³¹ ‘par Voie de Justice tant seulement pardevant nous et noz genz’ (AN JJ 86, no. 241, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 23, pp. 251–253, omitting this and other passages). ³² ‘lesdiz malfaicteurs sont demourans en pluseurs lieux & diverses Jurisdictions & se transportent de lieux en autres’ (AN X1c 32, no. 31). On seigneurial jurisdiction, see the Introduction, nn. 51–53. ³³ Yvonne Bongert, ‘Rétribution et réparation dans l’ancien droit français’, Mémoires de la Société pour l’histoire du droit et des institutions des anciens pays bourguignons, comtois et romands 45 (1988): 68–69. ³⁴ e.g. ‘en ampliant nostre dite grace nous voulons & octroions que nostre nostre (sic) dit ame & feal conseiller l’abbe de Saint Denys ou ses genz puissent faire au dit Pierre semblable grace’ (AN JJ 86, no. 299, fol. 100r). I know of 21 remissions in the Jacquerie corpus permitting seigneurial remission. 1372 prohibition: Pierre Flandin-Bléty, ‘Lettres de rémission des vicomtes de Turenne aux XIVème et XVème siècles’, Mémoires de la Société pour l’histoire du droit et des institutions des anciens pays bourguignons, comtois et romands 45 (1988): 125–143; Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’, II: 895–896.

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highlighted the king’s ability to pardon, as well as to condemn.³⁵ Opting for reconciliation over retribution allowed the crown to portray itself as above the fray, like God serenely looking down in judgment and mercy.³⁶ As was the case in many other medieval rebellions, the aftermath thus provided an opportunity to reaffirm the relationship between subjects and sovereign.³⁷ As Helen Lacey notes of the plenary pardon Richard II granted to the English rebels of 1381, Richard ‘issued the pardon to reaffirm his commitment to the reciprocal relationship between the Crown and the commons’.³⁸ Reciprocal, of course, does not always mean equal.³⁹ This conciliatory strategy amplified royal authority by enabling the crown to shape the narrative of the revolt and its aftermath to its advantage. It was not that the Prince or his officers were incurious about events or that they made things up. In fact, the Regent’s administration consolidated its conciliatory approach to the rebellions’ aftermath in parallel with its increasing knowledge about the events of the past few months. Remissions were issued not only by the crown’s ‘special grace’ but also through its ‘certain knowledge’ (certaine science). From his first contact with the Jacquerie, the Dauphin had wanted to be fully informed (plenarie informati).⁴⁰ The investigative committee inaugurated on 2 August was focused on Paris, but it included the royal councillor and president of the Parlement Pierre Demainville, whose brother had been among the Jacques, and Jean Bernier, who may have had some relation to the Jacquerie leader by the same name.⁴¹ In Champagne, the Count of Vaudémont-Joinville was holding

³⁵ Classically, Gauvard, ‘De grace especial’, II: 895–934; Claude Gauvard, ‘Grâce et exécution capitale: Les deux visages de la justice royale française à la fin du Moyen Âge’, BEC 153 (1995): 275–290. ³⁶ Navarre had tried to position himself similarly earlier that summer in his efforts to mediate the noble/non-noble conflict north of Paris (see Chapter 9). Notably, one of his first actions upon escape from his own prison had been to release all the prisoners in Amiens (see Chapter 1). ³⁷ Olivier Touati, ‘Révolte et société: L’exemple du Moyen Âge’ in Violence et contestation au Moyen Âge: Actes du 114e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris, 1989), Section d’histoire médiévale et de philologie (Paris, 1990), esp. 12–13; Boone, ‘Destroying and reconstructing’; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, Lust for liberty: The politics of social revolt in medieval Europe, 1200–1450: Italy, France, and Flanders (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 149–153. ³⁸ Lacey, ‘ “Grace” ’, 58. ³⁹ On reciprocity between medieval rulers and subjects see Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Sensible Moyen Âge: Une histoire des émotions dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris, 2015), ch. 7. ⁴⁰ AN JJ 86, no. 152, fol. 51v, June donation of a Jacques’s property, discussed below. See also the July remission for an inhabitant of Meaux, about whose conduct the Dauphin ‘sought to know the truth from trustworthy people’ (‘nous voussisiens enfourmer de la verite . . . par plusieurs personnes digne de foy’, AN JJ 86 no. 148, fol. 50v, partially ed. Luce, no. 3, p. 228, omitting these and other phrases). ⁴¹ AN JJ 86, no. 431, fol. 151–152, partially ed. Secousse, Recueil, 80–81; AN JJ 86, no. 384, fol. 132v, see Chapter 4. This commission started work immediately. Over the next week, several rebels had been cited before its deputies and had secured individual remissions: AN JJ 86, no. 185, fol. 61v; AN JJ 86, no. 203, fol. 66v; AN JJ 86, no. 274, fol. 91v–92r, ed. Luce, no. 4, pp. 228–229. See especially AN JJ 86, no. 255, fol. 85v–86r, partially ed. Secousse, Recueil, 83–85, confirmation of AN JJ 86, no. 214, fol. 69v–70r, for Guillaume le Fèvre, fishmonger, who had already been cited three times and had fled by 10 August. Remitted in light of the general remission, he was then immediately imprisoned because of ‘certaines paroles de reproche & diffame de sa personne’ and had to come before the general commissioners, who then wrote a report on their investigation which testified to his good character and that he was not

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hearings and pursuing suspects. These investigations, and perhaps others which escaped documentation, helped the Regent and his administrators to develop a different understanding of what had come to pass over the past few months, and with each supplication for remission they learned more about what had gone on. At the same time and in dialogue with these efforts, the chancery elaborated a generic narrative account that presented the Jacquerie as distinct from the Parisian movement and of only ancillary danger to the Valois crown.

A Story Takes Shape This narrative represented a significant shift in the way the crown portrayed the rural revolt. Earlier in the summer, the Regent had believed the Jacquerie more perilous to the crown and his own interests more deeply entwined with those of the nobles. Acts from his administration from June and much of July speak of the Jacquerie as directed against the crown as much as it was directed against the nobles. The first extant royal document stemming from the Jacquerie was issued in the third week of June, when the Dauphin was ‘in the fields between Meaux and Lizy-sur-Ourcq’. A donation of an inhabitant of Beaupuits’s belongings to a loyalist, it described the destruction and killing carried out against nobles and other ‘faithful people’, and it characterized the Jacquerie as a ‘war, conflict or conspiracy against the royal majesty, the nobles, and faithful of the realm’.⁴² A few weeks later, when the army was camped outside of Paris, the crown again depicted itself and the nobles as equally targeted by the country-folk’s violence; it spoke of the Jacques near Aumale in Picardy as ‘enemies and rebels against our lord King and us, who had assembled there to murder and kill gentlemen and destroy and burn their manors’.⁴³ This understanding of the Jacquerie also appears in market franchises granted at Charenton to prominent victims of the Jacquerie: Mahieu de Roye, Raoul de Renneval, and the Crèvecoeurs.⁴⁴ That granted to the Crèvecoeurs describes the Jacques as rebels and enemies of the King and Regent as well as all

guilty of the excluded crimes, allowing his remission to be confirmed and take full effect once more on 25 August. ⁴² ‘cum pluribus habitatoribus patrie Belvacensis & nonullorum aliorum qui guerram, controversiam seu monopolium contra regis maiestatem, nobiles & fideles dicti Regni machinaverant & etiam inceperant’ (AN JJ 86, no. 152, fol. 51v). The next document following, which is the donation of Jean Rose’s goods, characterizes the Jacques as ‘adversaires des nobles dudit Royaume et Rebelles de la coronne de France’ (AN JJ 86, no. 153, fol. 51v). ⁴³ ‘ennemis et rebelles de nostre dit seigneur et de nous, qui illecques s’estoient assemblez pour murtrir et tuer les gentilz hommes et abattres et ardoir les maisons et manoirs’ (AN JJ 86, no. 165, fol. 54v, ed. Luce, no. 20, pp. 245–247). ⁴⁴ AN JJ 86, no. 131, fol. 47r; AN JJ 86, no. 155, fol. 52v; next note. A franchise was also granted in July to one sir Jean Paste of Chalevagues, who is otherwise unknown (AN JJ 86, no. 125, fol. 45v). The village of Dormans received one in August 1358 for its inhabitants’ resistance to the Jacquerie (AN JJ 86, no. 130, fol. 46v–47r).

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the nobles (Rebelles a nostre dit seigneur & a nous & ennemis de touz nobles du dit Royaume).⁴⁵ Mahieu de Roye’s privilege for a market to be held at Plessis, the site of his recent, daring escape from the Jacques, recognized his services to ‘the crown of France, the estate of the King and Dauphin and all nobility (toute noblesce)’.⁴⁶ This pairing of royal and noble interests lasted no longer than the encampment at Charenton. It was already absent from the remission issued at Meaux in late July to the Lord of Saint-Dizier and Eudes de Grancey, which granted them pardon for usurping the ‘office of [royal] majesty’ in their pursuit of the champenois Jacques. This phrase suggests the Dauphin’s growing unease with the nobles’ liberal use of violence after the army’s dispersal and a distancing of his interests from theirs.⁴⁷ In the plenary remissions of 10 August, this divide became clearer: the crown presented much of what the rural people did as directed at the nobles qua nobles, not as supporters of the Dauphin or Valois. Crucially, the rurally focused pardon also remitted the nobles’ violence against the non-nobles in ‘avenging themselves’ (pour eulx contrevengier) on the non-nobles, as well as for those injuries that they had committed as an act of war (par fait de guerre) against those Parisians who had joined the rural assemblies.⁴⁸ This remission thus placed the nobles’ violence on par with that of the Parisians and the country-folk. As that text concluded, both the acts committed by the non-nobles and those committed by the nobles constituted a major affront to the King, to the Dauphin, and to the King’s royal majesty (grant offense et vitupère ont fait à nostre dit seigneur, à nous et à sa majesté royal). Both required the crown’s saving grace. The plenary remissions also evince knowledge that some of the rural violence had nothing to do with Paris. Both documents pardon the destruction of nobles’ fortresses and houses of nobles, but while the Paris-focused one says that the city incited rural people to do this in the belief that they were going to be pillaged, the rurally focused remission goes on to enumerate ‘what is worse’ (qui pis est): the crimes of killing those fortresses’ and houses’ inhabitants, including women and children, and stealing their contents. This notably jibes with Étienne Marcel’s own protests in his letter to Ypres that he told the Jacques not to kill or steal.⁴⁹ Both remissions mention the murder of the Marshals and Regnaut d’Acy, but the rurally focused one presents this as a circumstance of the nobles’ retribution, rather than a crime remitted therein. This presentation, which distanced the crown from the summer’s rural violence and which differentiated Parisian and rural actions, was reflected in and strengthened by the generic formulae that the chancery began to use in letters of individual ⁴⁵ AN JJ 86, no. 173, fol. 56r. ⁴⁶ AN JJ 86, no. 131, fol. 47r. ⁴⁷ ‘ont usé de office de magesté’ (AN JJ 86, no. 142, fol. 49, ed. Luce, no. 21). This remission, issued in July 1358, must have been issued at the end of that month because it is dated from the Marché de Meaux, where Charles went after disbanding his army on 19–20 July. ⁴⁸ AN JJ 86, no. 241, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 23, pp. 251–253, omitting this and other passages. ⁴⁹ d’Avout, 308.

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remission. These were granted to those who sought pardons issued in their own names (en especial) or as a community after the plenary remissions. The core component of this formula used for the Jacquerie, which I discussed in the Introduction, encapsulates the Jacquerie as an irrational and emotionally laden rustic outburst directed against nobles. The formula first appears in a remission issued in August for two Francilien villagers.⁵⁰ In contrast, distinctive language employed for those Parisians implicated in the reformers’ rebellion describes their crimes in political terms, such as treason, rebellion, and lèse-majesté, and in military ones, such as making mounted raids (chevauchée) and assembling armies.⁵¹ These were crimes aimed squarely at the crown (contre nostre dit seigneur nous & la couronne de France) in which the nobles were not implicated. Indeed, almost no Parisian remission mention crimes against nobles, save those in the Marché at Meaux. Conversely, very few Jacquerie remissions implicate the crown as an object of revolt.⁵² Counter-Jacques also procured individual remissions, though they did so later and in much smaller numbers than did the Jacques overall, as Figure 10.1 below indicates.⁵³ These remissions are much more varied in their language than those for the Jacquerie, or indeed for the Parisian rebels. They do usually label the Jacquerie with the standard words effroiz or commotions, terms which first appear in the sources in August 1358, and sometimes they use longer contextual phrases also employed in the Jacquerie formula, but they do not use formulaic language to describe their recipients’ own crimes.⁵⁴ Counter-Jacquerie remissions do, ⁵⁰ AN JJ 86, no. 205, fol. 67r. While it appears 13 folios before the plenary pardons in the JJ 86 register, it must post-date them because it already includes the formulaic reference to the Dauphin’s general pardon given after his return to Paris (‘depuis que nous venismes en nostre bonne ville de Paris’). Chancery register entries are in mixed chronological order. ⁵¹ E.g. ‘pour cause des grans traisons, Rebellions, conspiracions armees, chevauchees, Invaisons & dessobeissances que feu Estienne Marcel, nagaires prevost des marchans de la dite ville de paris & plusieurs autres bourgoys & habitanz d’icelle, ses adherens complices & de sa mauvaise aliances & voulente, ont faites & commises & perpetrees, en commettant force publique, et crime de lese mageste envers & contre nostre dit seigneur, nous & la couronne de france’ (AN JJ 86, no. 216, fol. 70v–71r). On distinctive language, see also Douglas James Aiton, ‘ “Shame on him who allows them to live”: The Jacquerie of 1358’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow (Glasgow, 2007), 38–40 and Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The eponymous Jacquerie: Making revolt mean some things’, in Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (eds), The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt (Abingdon, 2017), 58–59. ⁵² One Parisian exception is the incompletely dated remission issued after Étienne Marcel’s death for his brother Jean, which mentions that commotions were incited by the reformers and says that actions were directed against both the crown and its subject, nobles, as well as non-nobles (AN JJ 86, no. 195, fol. 64, ed. Luce, ‘Pièces inédites’, no. 5, pp. 81–83 and Secousse, Recueil, 139). ⁵³ Only six remissions for Counter-Jacquerie (18% of the total) were issued between August and December 1358. See the figures and discussion, below. The numbers in this discussion exclude confirmations and vidimus copies of remissions (of which there are six) and the one line ‘simple mention’ entries that note the granting of a remission to an individual without giving the text, of which there are at least 19. The numbers discussed here should be understood as indicative. ⁵⁴ The first use of effroiz to describe the Jacquerie is also the first remission to employ the Jacquerie formula (AN JJ 86, no. 205, fol. 67r); the first appearance of commotions, the other common word for the Jacquerie, appears very early in the corpus, at AN JJ 86, no. 223, fol. 73, where it is used in

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Figure 10.1 Total Remissions Granted

however, often use the same formulaic language as Jacquerie remissions to describe the Dauphin’s plenary grace and its consequences for the future: We have ordered that all the nobles remit and pardon the country-folk and also the country-folk [remit and pardon] the nobles for all the misdeeds they might have done to one another and that no physical reprisals (voie de fait) or criminal pursuit may be undertaken, but everyone may seek redress for their damages and injuries judicially (par voie de justice) in civil court before the King, the Dauphin, or royal agents.⁵⁵

As these clauses indicate, the plenary remission and those that followed it only obviated criminal pursuit; civil lawsuits for damages incurred during the revolt and its suppression were still possible. The stipulation that these were to be pursued only in royal courts (par devant monsire ou nous ou noz genz), as opposed

conjunction with effrois. The only remission related to Counter-Jacquerie activities that I have identified to have employed the formula is for a Jacques who was captured by nobles and forced to hang his non-noble companions (AN JJ 86, no. 534, fol. 193v). ⁵⁵ ‘avons ordene que touz les diz nobles remettent & pardonnent aus dites genz du plat pais et aussi les dites genz aus diz nobles tout ce qu’il pourroient avoir meffait les uns envers les autres et que toute voie de fait & poursuite criminelle soit forclose aus dites parties sauf tant que chascun puisse poursuir ses domages & iniures par voie de justice & civilement par devant monsire ou nous ou noz genz’. Almost 40 per cent of remissions for Counter-Jacquerie use this or similar language; nearly 80 per cent of Jacquerie remissions do so, a difference that likely reflects the habitual employment of a generic form for Jacquerie pardons.

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to seigneurial or municipal ones, retained for the crown a controlling role in negotiating the revolt’s aftermath, even as the forgiveness of criminal penalties removed the possibility that it could play an adversarial role in the proceedings. The crown thus extricated itself from the conflict between the nobles and nonnobles while it simultaneously imposed itself as the arbiter of all future disputes which might arise because of that conflict. In this way, it took control of the revolts’ aftermath, rhetorically and judicially, while distancing itself from any role in the summer’s events. The plenary pardons and the individual ones which followed them schematized the messy and overlapping events of 1358: rustics had made effroiz against the nobles; Parisians had committed lèse-majesté or rebellion against the crown; the nobles had made war against them. The Dauphin, using the royal power invested in him as regent, graciously forgave everyone their trespasses, except, of course, those who had connived at dynastic replacement. Such was the crown’s story, and it meant to stick to it. As another standard formula for remission ran, the crown ‘imposed silence’ on those who might want to say anything more or different about what had happened.⁵⁶ This stipulation, however, only applied to the crown’s own officers. Other people had their own stories to tell.

Subjects’ Stories Those stories began to multiply almost immediately, and they became increasingly varied as time went on. In August 1358, the preponderance of Jacquerie remissions was formulaic (35 of 49), but this is nearly half of the formulaic remissions ever granted.⁵⁷ In subsequent months and years, the proportion of Jacquerie pardons employing the generic formula steadily decreased (Figure 10.2).⁵⁸ Of those remissions issued after 1358, only 12 include this formula, meaning that the vast majority (83 per cent) of formulaic Jacquerie remissions had been issued before that remarkable year came to an end. In the years to follow, most Jacques seeking pardon told their own stories. Over the same period, the proportion of remissions for Counter-Jacquerie grew greater relative to those issued for Jacquerie (Figure 10.1). While never being very numerous, Counter-Jacquerie remissions made up most of the pardons issued after 1360 for the events of the ⁵⁶ ‘au quel procureur & quelconques noz autres officiers nous imposons perpetuele silence’ (this example from AN JJ 90, no. 296, fol. 151r). Both extant plenary pardons had imposed silence upon all royal judicial officers. See also Challet, ‘Peasants’ revolts memories’, 402. ⁵⁷ Seventy-two remissions employ the formula. The first non-formulaic remission, for Jacquin de Chenevières, captain of the lands of Montmorency, appears immediately after the first formulaic one (AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256). ⁵⁸ Of the 33 remissions issued in September, 16 contain the formula. Fifty-two per cent of nonformulaic remissions were issued between August and December 1358; 45 per cent were issued after it (3 per cent were issued before August 1358).

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Figure 10.2 Use of the Jacquerie Formula

summer of 1358. And, as noted earlier, every Counter-Jacquerie remission was non-formulaic. These non-formulaic pardons give us the kind of stories that suggest how the revolt was experienced by individual people. They agree with the formulaic version on many points: about 80 per cent of them identify the revolt’s targets as the nobles, and about half that many say that the rebels were country-folk (gens du plat pays). Over 20 per cent use the term effroiz. Some, however, stray far from the formulaic version. Over 12 per cent speak of that summer’s disturbances as a conflict ‘between’ non-nobles and nobles, rather than as an uprising of one against the other, and nearly 15 per cent mention Calle or an unnamed Great Captain, contradicting the formula’s implied narrative of disorganization and spontaneity. Just under 10 per cent report attacks or murders of women and/or children, a charge included in the plenary remission, but which does not feature in the formula. Seven mention Étienne Marcel or Paris, four Charles of Navarre, and four include the King or Dauphin among the rebels’ targets. These ‘minority reports’ are important to consider, but they are not necessarily any truer than the stereotyped version of the formula. In fact, since non-formulaic remissions become more common as time went on, the degradation of memory and the influence of received versions may make some of them less reliable witnesses. For example, when requesting remission in 1376 for killing someone during the Counter-Jacquerie, Robert Rogois, Lord of Fouencamps near Amiens, conflated what happened in the Jacquerie with the damage done by the AngloNavarrese later. Rogois recalled hiding out with other nobles in the castle of

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Moreuil not only from the Jacques, but also from ‘many enemies of the crown, whose reach extended to many places in the Beauvaisis and Picardy’. Indeed, Rogois thought that both the Jacquerie and this enemy threat had happened in 1359.⁵⁹ Likewise, the letter ‘from Charles of Navarre’ supposedly discovered on Jean Bernier of Montataire in a remission from 1365 seems likely to be either a misremembering or an invention, as discussed toward the end of Chapter 4.⁶⁰ Nor should we think of these apparently alternative stories as less ‘official’ than the formulaic remissions or in intentional competition with their narrative: they, too, were granted by the crown and entered into its registers. What they are is evidence of different ways of thinking about and presenting the revolt in which individuals’ interests and experiences played a larger role. They show that for some people this heterogeneity became more pronounced, not less, as time went by. The growing variation may reflect that guiltier people put off seeking a remission for longer than those more confident of forgiveness. Or they may have found that a generic account was insufficient, since appearing not to have confessed the particularly incriminating aspects of one’s deeds could put the remission’s approval in jeopardy before a local judge, as happened with the letter granted to the Dudelanges that is discussed in the Introduction.⁶¹ Another example is Jean Oursel, who had received a formulaic remission in August 1358 but who came back in 1363 for a tailored pardon that spoke at length about his vehement opposition to executing two squires at Pont-Sainte-Maxence.⁶² Another inducement to acquire a personal pardon was legal pursuit, for it is not clear that all local justiciars knew about the plenary pardon. The Dauphin had ordered the rural plenary remission to be published by criers ‘so that no one could claim ignorance’,⁶³ but prosecutions and reprisals continued on nevertheless. In 1361, the Lord of Berzy defended trying one of his subjects because he claimed the general remission had never been published in his area, and in 1370, the Lady of Beausault and Breteuil claimed that a case brought against a Counter-Jacques ought to be

⁵⁹ ‘environ l’an MCCLIX . . . tant pour doubte des non nobles dessus diz comme de pluseurs de noz ennemis, qui jà estoient espandu en pluseurs lieux du païs de Beauvoisiz et de Picardie’ (AN JJ 108, no. 60, fol. 37v–38r, ed. Luce, no. 64, pp. 335–338). ⁶⁰ AN JJ 98, no. 252, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 63, pp. 333–335. ⁶¹ AN JJ 102, no. 96, fol. 35; original letter at AN JJ 100, no. 683, fol. 202r. ⁶² AN JJ 86, no. 224, fol. 73v, ed. Ghislain Brunel, ‘Archives de la révolte et lettres de rémission: Des serfs du Laonnais (1338) aux Jacques de Picardie (1358)’ in Pierre Rigault and Patrick Toussaint (eds), La Jacquerie: Entre mémoire et oubli, 1358–1958–2008 (Amiens, 2012), no. 1, pp. 69–70; AN JJ 94, no. 4, fol. 3v, ed. Luce, no. 61, pp. 328–330. See also the two, slightly different remissions issued to Jean de la Barre in 1358 (AN JJ 86, no. 495, fol. 175r, ed. Brunel, ‘Archives’,no. 2, pp. 70–71; AN JJ 86, no. 597, fol. 217v–18r, ed. Lucien Vuilhorgne, ‘La Jacquerie à Gerberoy, Songeons et Thérines, 1358–1368’, Mémoires de la Société académique d’archéologie, sciences et arts du département de l’Oise 16 (1895): no. 1, pp. 334–336), and the case of Michel Martin’s pardons (AN JJ 86, no. 377, fol. 129r; AN JJ 90, no. 293, fol. 150r, see Chapter 6). ⁶³ ‘noz dites lettres et le contenu d’icelles facent crier et publier sollempnelment . . . par touz leurs Jurisdictions, lieux et forteresces a fin que aucun ne puisse pretender ignorance’ (AN JJ 86, no. 241, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 23, pp. 251–253, omitting this and other final passages).

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remanded to her court because she possessed jurisdiction over the nobles of her lands.⁶⁴ The ignorance of these seigneurial justiciars may have been conveniently feigned, but the amnesty’s terms may not have been well known even at the highest levels, as is suggested by a suit initiated by Pierre d’Orgemont, one of the presidents of Parlement. In 1361, d’Orgemont asked that the royal prosecutor join his suit against those accused of destroying his houses. The accused answered that the crown could not prosecute them because of ‘the general remission made by [the Dauphin] for all crimes, remitting all criminal penalties and dismissing all civil prosecution except for the repayment of damages’.⁶⁵ They noted, too, that the crown’s prosecutor had already had numerous cases dismissed for that reason (in pluribus aliis causis similibus dictus procurator non fuerat admissus nec erat admittendus). Given this evident confusion, one can also easily imagine that some supplicants for grace did not themselves know about the general pardon until their request was granted and the boilerplate about the general pardon appeared in their remission. Unresolved conflict with victims also played a part in the proliferation of different narratives. As d’Orgemont’s suit indicates, the death and destruction inflicted on all sides had not just offended the crown, but had also harmed individuals, families, and communities. They wanted compensation. The plenary pardon had tried to channel such conflicts into court, generating numerous civil lawsuits brought by non-nobles and nobles alike. These suits would have turned up new information, which had to be accommodated in the remission’s narrative and which may have implicated some individuals who had previously escaped detection. Not all such conflicts would have reached the stage where they produced documents. Many, perhaps most, would have been settled before they reached the court at all. But even these preliminary steps would have stirred up memories and moved people to strengthen their legal position. That judicial pursuit might cause variation in the remissions is demonstrated by those issued to the Champagne communities stemming from the Count of

⁶⁴ ‘nulla tamen publicatio facta fuerat de premissis specialiter ad castellanias seu loca sub quibus dictus miles et dictus Johannes habitabant et sic habebat dictus miles justam causam ignorancie’ (AN X1a 17, fol. 272v–74). In 1370, the court ruled against the lady, stating that ‘commotione facta inter nonnobiles & nobiles Regni nostri de quibus congitio ad nos solum & insolidum et non ad alios nostitur pertinere’ (AN X1a 22, fol. 21r). ⁶⁵ ‘procurator noster non debebat persequi dictos defensores, attentis . . . remissione generali facta per carissimum primogenitum nostrum, de omnibus criminibus qualitercunque perpetratis, remittente omnem penam criminalem, et civilem persecucionem partis, solum quantum ad restauracionem sui dampni’ (AN X1a 14, fol. 476–477, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320. D’Orgemont did, however, receive full damages and legal expenses). See also AN JJ 90, no. 419, fol. 211, a remission of 1360 for some Jacques, which complains that despite the general remission, a demoiselle has brought a criminal suit (‘nous depuis que nous venisimes en la ville de Paris apres les diz effroiz aions ordene que touz les diz nobles . . . neantmoins damoiselle Mahaut . . . elle s’efforce de faire poursuite criminele’). On d’Orgemont’s houses, see Chapter 8.

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Vaudémont’s investigations and sentences, almost all of which are nonformulaic.⁶⁶ Another indication is that, aside from the Champagne cases, nonformulaic remissions are much more likely to have been granted in the Hôtel des Requêtes (es Requestes de l’ostel/in requestis hospicii) than are formulaic ones. Formulaic remissions were almost exclusively granted by the Dauphin (par monsire le Regent), usually with the aid of his council (en son conseil or a la relation du conseil). Of the 106 non-formulaic remissions (including both Jacquerie and Counter-Jacquerie pardons), 15 mention the Requêtes, but of the 72 formulaic ones, only two—the last two formulaic pardons issued—do.⁶⁷ This is interesting because while supplication to Masters of the Requêtes was the usual route to obtaining a remission, their court was also one in which many civil suits were initiated.⁶⁸ The Requêtes’ archives disappeared in the fire of 1618 that consumed so many royal records, but more than a third of the extant Parlement documents relating to the Jacquerie note that the case had come to that court in appeal from an earlier decision made by the court of the Requêtes. A case handled by the Requêtes in 1375 suggests that the court was actually a preferred venue for cases stemming from the rebellion: the plaintiff noted that many people had had recourse to it for Jacquerie business, especially non-nobles trying to escape pursuit in lower jurisdiction because the court had dealt with ‘many similar cases against many other nobles’ and because they could get better legal advice in Paris.⁶⁹ In Parlement’s own registers, I have located 22 documents relating to 18 suits, five of which were brought by non-nobles against nobles. These 22 entries likely represent only a small fraction of post-Jacquerie judicial activity, the documentation for which no longer exists or was never produced in the first place. Not all of Parlement’s decisions, let alone its daily business, were entered into the registers we have.⁷⁰ In addition to the Requêtes’ lost records, we must also add

⁶⁶ The exception is AN JJ 86, no. 377, fol. 129r in which Vaudémont is not named and there is only a general reference to possible investigations. ⁶⁷ AN JJ 89, no. 481, fol. 217v; AN JJ 98, no. 252, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 63, pp. 333–335. These were issued in in 1361 and 1365, respectively. ⁶⁸ On the Requêtes, see Suzanne Clémencet, ‘Requêtes de l’Hôtel’ in Guide des recherches dans les fonds judiciaires de l’Ancien Régime (Paris, 1958), 19–25; Félix Aubert, ‘Les requêtes du palais (XIIIe– XVIe siècle): Style des requêtes du palais au XVe siècle’, BEC 69 (1908): 581–600. ⁶⁹ ‘quant aucuns en sont pour ce poursuiz pardevant leurs juges ordinaires au paiz, ilz empetrent estre removez pardevant nos amez & feaulz Genz tenans les Requestes en nostre palais Roial a Paris car il y ont a faire pour cas semblable contre pluseurs autres nobles & aussi les parties y peuent mielx recouvrir de conseil que ailleurs’ (AN X1c 32, no. 31). The Requêtes’ jurisdiction primarily covered royal officers, as a 1364 regulation for the court makes clear, but that regulation also notes that ‘povres et miserables personnes’ came frequently to plead before it (Ord., IV: 506–509; cf. Ord., II: 238–241, art. 6, III: 135, art. 23). Only one party to a Jacquerie-related suit initiated in Requêtes is known to have been in royal employ: Jean le Clerc, plaintiff at AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r for damages to the fief that had belonged to Philippe de Bessencourt, who is noted in Brigitte Bedos[-Rezak], La châtellenie de Montmorency des origines à 1368: Aspects féodaux, sociaux et économiques (Paris, 1980), no. 19c, p. 314 as a royal notary holding a fief that had belonged to Robert de Bessancourt. ⁷⁰ See Monique Langlois, ‘Parlement de Paris’ in Guide des recherches dans les fonds judiciaires de l’ancien régime (Paris, 1958), 84.

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the disappearance of records from the courts of local and regional royal officers. It is only Parlement’s registers, for example, that alert us to the suit brought by the squires Gilot and Jean Dudelange, against one Jean called ‘the Golden’, in the court of the bailli of Chaumont-en-Vexin, whose decision Jean the Golden appealed to the bailli of Senlis, whose decision Gilot appealed to Parlement.⁷¹ Furthermore, there was probably a great deal of judicial activity at the seigneurial and municipal level. Again, the survival of documents from such cases is negligible. In addition to those noted earlier in which the general remission blocked seigneurial prosecution, cases from these local courts are known only because their outcomes were later confirmed by the crown and registered by the chancery.⁷² The documents that we do have from lawsuits show great variety in their presentation of the revolt. They never feature the formulaic language of the remissions. This is unsurprising, for by their nature, lawsuits were based on individual stories. Indeed, they usually resulted from contradictory stories. So, while they were the only avenue of redress allowed by the general remissions, they nevertheless had effects contrary to those acts’ conciliatory ethos. Lawsuits always meant adversarial testimony: parties giving their account of what had happened and who was to blame. And they often entailed investigations: outsiders asking questions about people and actions that might otherwise have been left unremembered. They were the opposite of letting sleeping dogs lie. They dredged up matters that might otherwise be forgotten, and they could easily fan the flames of further conflict. Jean de Busy’s suit against 14 individuals from the village of Hangest, for example, led to charges that de Busy had bribed a local priest and other villagers for false testimony, as well as an unfortunate incident in which a royal officer terrified the village women by running in front of the parish church with an unsheathed sword while arresting one of the accused.⁷³ The slow grind of justice was another aspect of legal pursuit hardly conducive to closure. The first case in Parlement dates from March 1359, but given the ponderous workings of royal justice, that case had certainly begun some months before.⁷⁴ Most suits dragged on for years. Some even lasted decades. The judicial documents cluster in the 1360s, but many cases could not be decided until the 1370s or even ⁷¹ AN X1a 21, fol. 417v. In this Latin document, Jean was referred to as Johannes dictus Benesus, but in the French remissions for the Dudelanges, he was styled Jean dit d’oré. ⁷² Confirmations of seigneurial/municipal decisions: AN JJ 88, no. 1, fol. 1–2 (Bishop of Beauvais); AN JJ 89, no. 377, fol. 159 (Jacques de Bourbon, Count of Ponthieu); AN JJ 95, no. 121, fol. 47–48r (Compiègne). The consequences for commoners of unsuccessfully appealing their lord’s decision might be drastic (see, for example, Beaumanoir, cap. X, §295, vol. I: 146–147), another reason we may see few of them. ⁷³ AN JJ 107, no. 185, fol. 87, also discussed by Bonnot, ‘Dynamiques’, 375–376. Related Parlement judgment at AN X1a 26, fol. 270. Notably, Busy had given these witnesses livery and jacks (cotes hardies). ⁷⁴ X1c 11, no. 61–62, an accord between sir Thomas de Braye and several men, which notes that de Braye had cited the latter before Parlement (‘eust fait adjourner pardevant nossires les presidens [de Parlement]’).

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later (Figure 10.3). This was because those cases required not just audiences to receive the parties’ pleadings, but also investigations which had to be meticulously carried out by the court’s commissioners before a decision could be made. These processes took months or even years, and they had to be repeated if the results were inconclusive or if further questions came to lights. Decisions resulting from the parties’ pleadings alone, which occurred in Parlement’s Grand’ Chambre, were called arrêts from the Latin phrase arrestum est with which such decisions began, while the latter, overseen by the Chambre des Enquêtes, were known as jugés because they begin judicatum est.⁷⁵ Most arrêts were issued in the 1360s, while most jugés date from the 1370s, and the latest document I have located, a jugé, dates to 1383. These long delays meant that in many cases the parties to suits were no longer the alleged perpetrators and their victims but were instead their widows, children, siblings, or even more distant relations. Many of these people had probably taken 7

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Figure 10.3 Parlement Suits and Settlements

⁷⁵ On the processual and diplomatic distinction, see Pierre Guilhiermoz, Enquêtes et procès: Étude sur la procédure et le fonctionnement du Parlement au XIVe siècle, suivie du Style de la Chambre des Enquêtes, du Styles des commissaires du Parlement et de plusieurs autres textes et documents (Paris, 1892), esp. 153–154, n. 5; Langlois, ‘Parlement de Paris’, 81–82, 84; Philippe Paschel, ‘L’élaboration des décisions du Parlement dans la deuxième moitié du XIVe siècle: De la plaidoirie à l’arrêt’, Histoire et archives 12 (2002): 27–60. As Guilhiermoz points out, initially both kinds of decisions were referred to by the broader term sententia. Both kinds of decisions were pronounced in the Grand’ Chambre. The Masters of the Requêtes could also order investigations (e.g. AN X1a 31, fol. 253 and AN X1c 32, no. 31).

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part in the revolt themselves or at least profited from or been damaged by it, but the fact that civil liability—unlike criminal guilt—could be inherited meant that these suits expanded the number of people who were touched by the revolt and kept wounds open for generations.⁷⁶ The nobles who had lived next to the aged Égide de Longpré in 1358, for example, had long since died by the time their heir, a distant relation, appeared in the village. Accusing Longpré of helping her late husband to fleece these late neighbours and even to murder one of them in her cellar, this heir frightened her and her new husband into giving him a considerable amount of money before Parlement judged in her favour in 1374.⁷⁷ The next year, when the Requêtes heard the suit over damage to the castle of Vez, not only was the original claimant dead and replaced in the suit by his son, but several of the defendants were the widows or sons of the alleged perpetrators.⁷⁸ Over the years they had told their stories many times, but never could they agree on what had really happened or who was to blame. As the officers of the Requêtes remarked with some frustration, the parties were en faiz contraires.⁷⁹

Making and Breaking Peace Justice being what it was, many people opted to settle their differences by making an agreement (accord or compromissus) between themselves, sometimes with the help of representatives and third-party mediators instead of, or in addition to, going to court.⁸⁰ Such agreements were as common a feature in the medieval legal landscape as out-of-court settlements are today.⁸¹ In Parlement’s archives, I was able to locate 19 accords or documents related to accords. These agreements stemmed from 13 conflicts. Although only four of the accords we have relate to lawsuits for which we have other judicial documents, this does not mean that the

⁷⁶ Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Social constituency’, 708–710; see Chapter 7. See also the case discussed by Bonnot, ‘Dynamiques’, 372–373. ⁷⁷ AN X1a 23, fol. 491v–93r. ⁷⁸ As was also the case in the suit of Jean de Busy, originally pursued by his father Solart (AN X1a 26, fol. 270), and that of Pierre de Précy (AN X1c 20, no. 117–119, discussed by Bonnot, ‘Dynamiques’, 373–374, who also discusses the Vez case). ⁷⁹ AN X1c 32, no. 31. ‘En faits contraires’ was the formulaic phrase used by the Grand’ Chambre to indicate the need to perform an investigation (Guilhiermoz, Enquêtes, 6–9), which is how it was used here, too. As Parlement had done with Égide de Longpré, the Requêtes judged in the defendants’ favour, possibly because, as with de Longpré, money had already changed hands. ⁸⁰ Most of the agreements discussed in this section seem to have been bilateral, though parties sometimes used procurators (e.g. AN X1c 13b, no. 273–274). In two cases, the involvement of thirdparty mediators or arbiters was requested (AN JJ 100, no. 683, fol. 202r; AN X1a 23, fol. 491v–93r). ⁸¹ Accords are a seriously overlooked part of legal procedure in late medieval France. See Claude Gauvard, ‘Les juges jugent-ils?’ in Violence et ordre public au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2005 [2000]), 116–130, esp. 118–119; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Jura in medio: The settlement of seigneurial disputes in later medieval Languedoc’, French History 26 (2012): 441–459. See n. 103 below for historiography on dispute resolution in an earlier period.

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parties to the other agreements had sought no relief in Requêtes or in Parlement.⁸² I have found no record of the suit made by Guillaume Calle’s widow Isabelle for the recovery of her marital property, for example, but the accord she made notes that she had initiated this suit in Parlement against the man to whom the estate was given.⁸³ Rather, these sources should be understood as emanating from processes parallel to those of the courts. The accords themselves were preserved as individual sheets submitted by the parties and kept in sacks in Parlement’s archives, while the licences to accord are often found in Parlement’s civil registers.⁸⁴ These documents are only an indicative measure of the importance of such settlements to the way that people negotiated the Jacquerie and CounterJacquerie’s aftermath. Most such agreements would have been privately made and held, if they were ever written down at all, and are now lost. Our only evidence for them is mentions in remissions or in cases when they failed and the parties ended up before Parlement.⁸⁵ The documents that we do have demonstrate that while the king’s court might be an attractive venue for bringing a dispute, it was not always the best place to resolve it. Its processes were expensive: damages sustained in the era’s interminable wars forced some parties to abandon their suits on account of the cost.⁸⁶ Suits were also arduous and time-consuming, requiring personal appearances in Paris and wrangling with lawyers, investigators, and witnesses. As one group of defendants said in 1368 when requesting a licence to accord, they were withdrawing their suit because ‘they preferred earning a living to going to court’ (ont plus grant volente de gaaignier leur chevance & leur vivre que de plaidier).⁸⁷ The risky, all-ornothing nature of a judicial sentence was also dissuasive: as Gilot Dudelange and Jean the Golden explained when they sought to withdraw their suit in order to make an accord, they feared a judgment that might be so drastic as to reduce one

⁸² Guillaume Cornu’s suits and accords (AN X1a 19, fol. 191v–92r; AN X1a 21, fol. 13v–14r, 514; AN X1a 22, fol. 47r, 405r); Vez’s suit against some inhabitants of the village, for which the Requêtes’ absolution and Vez’s appeal to Parlement are in AN X1c 32, no. 31 and the subsequent accord at X1c 32, no. 30; Robert de Lorris’s cases, for which we have accords regarding Ermenonville and Luzarches (AN X1c 13a, no. 14; AN X1c 13b, no. 255) and a suit about Montépilloy (AN X1a 18, fol. 63), though the parties in these affairs do not overlap. ⁸³ ‘sievoit & approuchoit en parlement’ (AN X1c 13b, no. 274). ⁸⁴ The accords, classed as subseries AN X1c, are thus a collection of loose documents produced in individual circumstances, not registers kept by the court’s clerks. There is no inventory or finding aid, save for a nineteenth-century card catalogue of names at the AN’s section ancienne. See Alexandre Grün, ‘Notice sur les archives du Parlement de Paris’ in Edgard Boutaric (ed.), Actes du Parlement de Paris, 2 vols (Paris, 1863–1867), I: cx–cxiv; Langlois, ‘Parlement de Paris’, 93. ⁸⁵ Remissions mentioning prior or tangential settlements include AN JJ 86, no. 258, fol. 86v–87r; AN JJ 86, no. 291, fol. 97v, ed. Luce, no. 26, pp. 256–257; AN JJ 86, no. 585, fol. 212; AN JJ 92, no. 227, fol. 55v, ed. Victor de Beauvillé, Histoire de la ville de Montdidier, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Paris, 1875), I: no. 29, pp. 516–517; AN JJ 100, no. 683, fol. 202r; AN JJ 108, no. 86, fol. 55, partly excerpted at Luce, 207; AN JJ 109, no. 173, fol. 81. Lawsuits include AN X1a 17, fol. 272v–74; AN X1a 17, fol. 284, ed. Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 27, pp. 514–515; AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r; AN X1a 20, fol. 250; AN X1a 23, fol. 491v– 93r; AN X1a 26, fol. 270; AN X1c 32, no. 31; AN X2a 7, fol. 213r. ⁸⁶ AN X1a 21, fol. 13v–14r and AN X1a 22, fol. 47r. ⁸⁷ AN X1a 21, fol. 211v–12r.

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or the other of them to poverty.⁸⁸ Sentences might nevertheless be subject to further negotiations between the parties, not least because the administrative provisions for executing them were rudimentary or non-existent, but also because an unfavourable verdict might seriously reduce the unfortunate party’s room for manoeuvre.⁸⁹ Accords not only ameliorated these dangers and difficulties but might also provide a more satisfying result. Ideally the product of negotiated compromise, such para- or extra-judicial settlements potentially offered parties a ‘win-win’ outcome. They thus held out the possibility of closing the social and affective rifts opened by the Jacquerie and its brutal suppression. Peace and amity were sometimes evoked as objectives of the according process. The Lord of Vez, for example, sought a settlement not only to avoid expense but also ‘for the good of peace and to nourish love’ (pour bien de paix & nourir amour) with his subjects.⁹⁰ These sentiments, of course, agreed nicely with the crown’s own rhetoric of reconciliation. In the plenary pardon, the Dauphin had ordered the people and the nobles to bear no grudges against one another and to act toward one another with ‘good peace and agreement’ from now on.⁹¹ Individual remissions reiterated this imperative, commanding the people and the nobles to pardon one another, just as the crown had pardoned them.⁹² The purpose of remission itself was said to be not only to restore peace and accord between parties in conflict, but also to do so in order that ‘henceforth they have good affection and love for one another’.⁹³ As Charles of France, now king in his own right, told two squires and their opponents in 1368, ‘we always desire good peace and concord (bonne pais & concorde) among our subjects’.⁹⁴ The affective language of the documents should be understood as reflecting rhetorical and legal strategies as much as or more than the subjective emotions of parties. Like ‘hatred’ and ‘enmity’, the vocabulary of love and friendship were often employed to describe legal positioning rather than (or in addition to) personal feelings.⁹⁵ Yet, such sentiments mattered a great deal, and they could thwart the ⁸⁸ ‘propter dubiam sentenciarum quarum quelibet partes habent pro se unam et etiam quod, si una dictarum partium pro se summam obtineret, altera in periculo essendi (sic) omnino ad inopiam deducta’ (AN X1a 21, fol. 417v). ⁸⁹ Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Jura in medio’, 450–452. ⁹⁰ AN X1c 32, no. 30. See also AN JJ 109, no. 173, fol. 81; AN X1a 21, fol. 9v and13v–14r; AN X1c 11, no. 61 and 62; AN X1c 13, no. 56 and 57. ⁹¹ ‘Il ne meffacent ou facent meffaire ou portent male volente ou rancune aucune l’un contre l’autre . . . que ne bonne pais et union demourent et conversent ensemble doresenavant’ (AN JJ 86, no. 241, fol. 80, ed. Luce, no. 23, pp. 251–253, omitting this and other passages). ⁹² ‘postquam ad bona[m] villam nostrum Parisis venimus ordinaverimus quod omnes nobiles popularibus et ipsi etiam populares nobilibus remittant totaliter’ (AN JJ 86, no. 465, fol. 164, omitted in ed. Luce, no. 40, pp. 281–283). ⁹³ ‘pour les dessusdiz mettre & ramener a bone paiz & acorde & a fin que dorezenavant Il eussent bonne affection & amour les uns aut (sic) les autres nous eussions Remis, quittie & pardonne’ (AN JJ 96, no. 393, fol. 138r). ⁹⁴ AN X1a 21, fol. 211v–12r. ⁹⁵ Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Hatred as a social institution in late-medieval society’, Speculum 76 (2001): 90–126; Robert J. Bartlett, ‘ “Mortal enmities”: The legal aspects of hostility in the Middle Ages’ in Belle

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peace and accord the crown so desired. Some people simply refused to make an agreement. Jean de Chauny, for example, steadfastly resisted the lord of Berzy’s entreaties to ‘settle this in a friendly fashion’ (amicabiliter componere), despite being held in prison for eight months, and Jean de Blagny was similarly deaf to Hanet d’Hangest’s pleas that he pay restitution to the latter’s relatives.⁹⁶ Nor were all accords mutually acceptable compromises. Égide de Longpré said her old neighbours’ heir had carried her a league and a half from her house and threatened her into making an agreement with him.⁹⁷ Imprisonment, as used against Jean de Chauny, seems to have been a particularly common inducement.⁹⁸ For example, while Raoul de Renneval claimed that Jean Boulangier had freely made a settlement with him of his own free will (non coactus sed sua mera spontanea voluntate), Boulangier’s widow said he only paid up in order to escape de Renneval’s ‘cruel and horrible prisons’, a payment that left him a pauper (inopiam).⁹⁹ The line between accord and ransom could be thin. It was perhaps becoming even thinner in this period when the imprisonment of peasants to extort ransom was a common tactic, one used to particularly harsh effect by the Anglo-Navarrese in their occupation of the Beauvaisis.¹⁰⁰ Indeed, Colin François and Nicaise Fremy the younger actually spoke of their accord as an ‘agreement in the manner of ransom’ (composicion par une maniere de raençon). They agreed to pay 60 florins each for stealing from Jean de Saint-Martin, ‘even though what they had stolen was not worth four florins’, and they, too, went to prison until they had paid a substantial amount of it.¹⁰¹ In almost all of those cases mentioned above, royal officers found these ‘agreements’ abusive and overturned or ameliorated them.¹⁰² They nevertheless highlight the limits of negotiation for solving problems in asymmetrical relationships of power. This is a context not usually considered by the scholarship on ‘dispute resolution’, which focuses almost exclusively on conflicts between social S. Tuten and Tracey L. Billado, (eds), Feud, violence, and practice: Essays in medieval studies in honor of Stephen D. White (Farnham, 2010), 197–212; Frédéric Chauvaud and Pierre Prétou (eds) Clameur publique et émotions judiciaires, de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Rennes, 2013). ⁹⁶ AN X1a 17, fol. 272v–74; AN JJ 97, no. 358, fol. 94. ⁹⁷ ‘Egidiam predictam vi et contra eius voluntatem acceperat ipsamque quasi per leucam cum dimidia extra domum suam duxerat pluries minando eadem . . . nisi redderet eidem bona dicti scutiferi per eum petita aut compositem faceret . . . Egidia timore predictorum erga dictum militem in summa centum mutonum auri certis terminis solvendorum se obligaverat’ (AN X1a 23, fol. 491v–93r). ⁹⁸ In addition to the examples mentioned earlier, see AN X1c 13a, no. 56–57 (Perrin le Sellier and his wife, imprisoned until they paid 15 écus to Regnaut de Trie); AN X1a 20, fol. 250 (Clement Vinier, imprisoned and threatened with torture); AN JJ 90, no. 556, fol. 275v–76r (Eudin le Charon, ambushed and imprisoned); AN JJ 86, no. 585, fol. 212 (Thomas le Chaucier, interned in royal prisons, who gave in when threatened with being delivered into his noble enemy’s own prison). See also Julie Claustre, ‘La dette, la haine et la force: Les débuts de la prison pour dette à la fin du Moyen Âge’, RH 309 (2007): 797–821; Guy Geltner, The medieval prison: A social history (Princeton, 2008), esp. 51. ⁹⁹ AN X1a 17, fol. 284, ed. Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 27, pp. 514–515. ¹⁰⁰ Nicholas Wright, ‘Ransoms of non-combatants during the Hundred Years War’, JMH 17 (1991): 323–332. ¹⁰¹ AN JJ 86, no. 291, fol. 97v, ed. Luce, no. 26, pp. 256–257. See also AN JJ 86, no. 380, fol. 130. ¹⁰² The exception is de Renneval and Boulengier, where we do not know the outcome of the case, though the interlocutory arrêt granted Boulengier’s widow’s motion.

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elites in an earlier period.¹⁰³ Agreements made with people able to employ coercion might be or feel no less unfriendly—and considerably more arbitrary— than a judicial sentence. To the less powerful party, the distinction between settlement and judgment could be as blurry as that between accord and ransom. This was especially the case if the more powerful party was a lord accustomed to carrying out justice, even if he or she was not one’s own lord. In the cases involving the Perthois villages that came before the Count of Vaudémont, the vocabulary of ‘condemnation’ and ‘compromise’ was used interchangeably (condempnacion ou composition), but these fines were agreed under constraint and experienced by the villagers less as agreements than as judgments, and severe ones at that.¹⁰⁴ In several cases, communities’ own lords intervened to reduce the amounts, though perhaps more out of concern for their own tax receipts than for the inhabitants’ well-being.¹⁰⁵ Some communities spoke, too, of how they dared not appeal Vaudémont’s decision, a salutary reminder that we do not know how many people were too frightened to ask for royal review of such ‘agreements’.¹⁰⁶ Even accords made without apparent constraint might later fail. For instance, Guillaume Cornu and his adversaries, who had sought permission to accord together because war had exhausted their resources, received their licence to accord toward the end of 1369. They came to a settlement, and Cornu even received money for the demolition of his castle.¹⁰⁷ Nevertheless, in May 1372, the parties were once more locked in dispute, the affair so complex that there were at least 98 articles of argumentation lodged against Cornu and an investigation ¹⁰³ Frederic Cheyette, ‘Suum cuique tribuere’, French Historical Studies 6 (1970): 287–299; Stephen D. White, ‘ “Pactum . . . legem vincit et amor judicium”: The settlement of disputes by compromise in eleventh-century western France’, American Journal of Legal History 22 (1978): 281–308; Stephen D. White, ‘Feuding and peace-making in the Touraine around the year 1100’, Traditio 42 (1986): 195–263; ; Patrick Geary, ‘Living with conflicts in stateless France: A typology of conflict management mechanism, 1050–1200’ in Living with the dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994 [1986]), 125–160; Gerd Althoff, ‘Satisfaction: Peculiarities of the amicable settlement of conflicts in the Middle Ages’ in Bernhard Jussen (ed.), Pamela Selwyn (trans.), Ordering medieval society: Perspectives on intellectual and practical modes of shaping social relations (Philadelphia, 2001), 270–284. ¹⁰⁴ Quote at AN JJ 95, no. 22, fol. 10v–11r; ‘condempnez ou traiz à composicions à la somme de mil escuz (AN JJ 86, no. 357, fol. 122, ed. Luce, no. 31, pp. 264–266, vidimus at AN JJ 95, no. 19, fol. 9v–10r); ‘condempnes ou sont cheus ou trais a composicion a la somme de deux cens florins d’or a l’escu . . . pour les quelles choses nostre dit Cousin & autres de noz genz & officiers se sont efforciez & efforcent de contraindre les diz suppliants a paier’ (AN JJ 90, no. 271, fol. 139v–140r). The communities of Bignicourt and Drouilly were remitted ‘fors que tant que il n’ont point compose’ (AN JJ 86, no. 360, fol. 122v). ¹⁰⁵ ‘Car autrement les diz habitanz ne les porroient paier des rentes et redevances que il prennont en la dite ville’ (AN JJ 95, no. 22, fol. 10v–11r). See also AN JJ 86, no. 346, fol. 117v–18r, ed. Luce, no. 32, pp. 266–268; AN JJ 86, no. 357, fol. 122, ed. Luce, no. 31, pp. 264–266, vidimus at AN JJ 95, no. 19, fol. 9v–10r; AN JJ 86, no. 377, fol. 129r. ¹⁰⁶ ‘pour la doubte et paour qu’il avoient de leurs corps, n’osèrent appeller’ (AN JJ 86, no. 346, fol. 117v–18r, ed. Luce, no. 32, pp. 266–268); ‘de laqeuelle sentence ne fu appelle ne reclame en aucune maniere pour doubte d’ancourrir l’indignation de nostre dit cousin’ (AN JJ 86, no. 578, fol. 209v–10r, confirmed at AN JJ 95, no. 116, fol. 44v). ¹⁰⁷ ‘ipseque partes seu earum alique que ob factum guerrarum nostrarum quamplurimum fuerunt dampnificate in & super dicta causa libenter inter se concordarent’ (AN X1a 22, fol. 47r).

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had to be ordered.¹⁰⁸ The Lord of Vez, too, had already come to a prior agreement with his opponents. He turned to the court because he wanted still more. No doubt difficulty ensuring the fulfilment of a settlement made them fragile things. Mathieu de Pommolain and his wife were able to requisition a sergeant from Parlement’s criminal division to execute their settlement with those who had destroyed their manors, but Pommolain was a royal favourite.¹⁰⁹ Most people were apparently left to their own devices to collect what it was agreed was owed to them. Unsurprisingly, some people were unwilling to pay up. Sometimes, failed efforts at reconciliation even had fatal consequences. In the case of Jean the Golden and the Dudelanges squires, although they had agreed in 1369 that Jean would give the Dudelanges 10 francs, he never handed over the money. What is more, when the Dudelanges happened to meet him on the road and asked him about it, he answered them with ‘wounding words’ (injurieusez paroles) and threatened them with his axe. In self-defence (as they reported), the squires slew him.¹¹⁰ Jean de Blagny’s refusal to settle at all with Hanet d’Hangest’s relatives led to his death in similar circumstances: ‘Accidentally’ encountering Jean on the road, Hangest asked him again to agree to compensation. Jean refused and ‘hard words’ (parolez dures) passed between them, which the knight ‘felt as an injury’ (ledit suppliant sentit pour injurie).¹¹¹ Since Hangest, as he explained, habitually went around armed on account of the wars, it was all too natural that he angrily killed Jean during the exchange. Jean de Clermont-Nesle was also driven to murder by mouthy commoners refusing him satisfaction. After several attempts to make the villagers of Fontaines-sous-Montdidier repair his manor, he gathered a posse and went to the village where they beat and hamstrung Jean Henniquet and his father for the ‘great injuries and villainies which they had done and said to him’ (grans injures & villenies qu’il lui avoient faites & dites).¹¹² The pair later died of their wounds, and it was probably only the service of his family, including his uncle the murdered marshal, that secured remittance for Clermont-Nesle and his companions. These stories of mulish peasants and murderous aristocrats recall those recounted in earlier chapters about the rustic Aimeri Bourgeois, killed by the noble whom he directed to Paris ‘where they kill nobles’, and Robert de Jardin, ¹⁰⁸ ‘dictus actor nonagesimo octavo articulo articulorum dictorum . . . latius & plenius respondere teneretur et ad tradendem per declarationem certas magnas florenorum summas per compositiones per eundem actorem cum pluribus personis factas ratione demolitionis & destructionis domus sue seu fortalicii de Fontanis Cornutis’ (AN X1a 22, fol. 405r). Cornu was ordered to return the money and respond to the article. I have not been able to locate the final outcome, if there was one. ¹⁰⁹ AN X2a 7, fol. 213r, which refers to Pommolain as ‘dilectus & fidelis consiliarius noster’. Mathieu de Pommolain was confirmed as a royal councillor upon Charles V’s accession in 1364 (Ord., IV: 418, where he is called Mattheo de Tilio), and is listed elsewhere as one of the king’s councillors in Parlement. See Gustaf Holmér, ‘Jean de Brie et son traité de l’art de bergerie’, Studia neophilologica 39 (1967): 128–149. ¹¹⁰ AN JJ 100, no. 683, fol. 202r, confirmed at AN JJ 102, no. 96, fol. 35. ¹¹¹ AN JJ 97, no. 358, fol. 94. ¹¹² AN JJ 92, no. 227, fol. 55v, ed. de Beauvillé, Histoire, I: no. 29, pp. 516–517.

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hanged for the rumour that he had said he wanted to be the ‘lord of the nobles’.¹¹³ Aside from demonstrating the well-known power of the spoken word, they suggest that neither the Jacquerie nor efforts to resolve it had changed much in the social landscape of northern France. No doubt, the predominantly judicial sources left by the Jacquerie tend to exaggerate the impression of unresolved anger and hatred. After all, no one goes to court to celebrate their friendships of long standing. It was mainly the most contentious, least solvable situations involving the most obdurate people that produced documents, especially documents that anyone bothered to keep. In a case that Parlement decided in 1369, for example, Philippe le Bouchier explained that Jean Clerc was always going around demanding money from people even though a settlement for damages had already been made with the house’s previous owners. As that arrêt also details at some length, Clerc was not just in dispute over damages to the house, but was also in conflict over the house’s ownership itself.¹¹⁴ This was not an easy man. Similar problems of personality and circumstance are detectable in many other cases. These hard cases testify to the fact that, even if most people had probably found a way to live with their neighbours and move on with their lives, there remained enduring difficulties to reconciling people to the past, as well as to one another. Here and there, too, we catch glimpses of a wider uneasiness that time did not lessen. A decade after the revolt, when the noble Pierre Damsomier and the nonnoble Alice Lesac celebrated their nuptials in Beauvais, they married not in ignorance or disregard of the murders committed against his family by the Jacques, but rather in the hopes that their union would ‘avert the dangers that might arise [from the Jacquerie] and secure peace and love hereafter’ (ad obviandum periculis que exinde possent versimiliter provenire ac pacem et caritatem hinc inde . . . procurandam).¹¹⁵ The revolt’s memory was not so raw as to prevent the marriage of these young people, but it was dangerous enough to encourage it. Not far from Beauvais that same year, some youths got into a fight while playing the rugby-like game called choule because the non-noble Martin le Tanneur battered and humiliated a young squire, citing ‘the revolt of the rural non-nobles against the nobles’.¹¹⁶ If the Jacquerie reference was meant to be funny, the squire missed the humour. He came back and killed le Tanneur.

¹¹³ AN JJ 86, no. 109, fol. 39v; AN JJ 86, no. 267, fol. 89v–90r, ed. Luce, no. 36, pp. 274–276. ¹¹⁴ AN X1a 19, fol. 348v–50r. ¹¹⁵ Or so it was put to the papal curia as a reason for overlooking the impediment that Damsomier had slept with Lesac’s cousin (Henri Denifle, La guerre de Cent ans et la désolation des églises, monastères & hôpitaux en France, 2 vols (Paris, 1897–1899), II: 216–217), n. 6. ¹¹⁶ ‘sous umbre des commotions des nonnobles du plat paiz contre les nobles’ (AN JJ 99, no. 480, fol. 149v–50r, ed. Vuilhorgne, ‘Jacquerie’, no. 2, pp. 336–338). Interestingly, le Tanneur and his friends ‘covered [the squire] in his hood’ (chaperon)’. On choule or soule, see Roger Vaultier, Le folklore pendant la guerre de Cent ans d’après les lettres de rémission du Trésor des chartes (Paris, 1965), 191–195.

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Conclusion Forgetting and Remembering the Jacquerie

Memories of revolt marked people for a generation afterward. When he came into his kingdom, Charles V built a miniature fortress at Vincennes. Walled around with defences and impossible to enter at speed or in number, this was not the old hunting-lodge of his Capetian forebears but a testament to his need for security. From his study window, he could see anything coming from Paris a long way off. In the countryside, some manors and castles lay in ruins for decades, still described as ‘destroyed at the time of the commotions’ nearly 20 years later.¹ Even those who had been absent carried the scars. Louis II de Bourbon, Count of Clermont, had been in southern France during the Jacquerie and then went to England as a hostage to guarantee King Jean’s ransom. On his return to the Bourbonnais some years later, one of his stewards, a certain Huguenin Chauveau, presented him with a book in which he had recorded all of the misdeeds done by Louis’s nobles in his absence. The nobles feared punishment, but Louis threw the book into the fire. It contained, he said, only evidence of Chauveau’s great hatred toward nobles, ‘such as all people of [his] status have’.² Nor were all the non-nobles as proud of the Jacques exploits as the late Martin le Tanneur and his companions. An exchange of insults in a Vexin tavern turned violent when one charged the other with being un villain Jaques who ought ‘get to his Jaquerie’.³ That squabble took place at the turn of the fifteenth century, when the revolt’s details had become fuzzier but were not yet forgotten. A similar insult made around the same time was met with the accurate (if pedantic) objection, ‘We are not Jacques, nor are we the right age to have been so’.⁴ But as decades passed, the

¹ AN P 1893, fol. 150–151r; AN P 1893, fol. 211v–12, ed. Louis Douët d’Arcq, Recherches historiques et critiques sur les anciens comtes de Beaumont-sur-Oise, du XIe au XIIIe siècle (Amiens, 1855), no. 228, pp. 221–222. ² Jean dit Caberet d’Orronville, La chronique du bon duc Loys de Bourbon, Martial-Alphonse Chazaud (ed.), (Paris, 1876), 10–12. ³ AN JJ 156, no. 397, fol. 241, extract in Charles du Fresne, sire du Cange, et al., Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, new edn by Léopold Favre, 10 vols (Niort, 1883–1887 [first edn 1678]), IV: 279, vid. Jaquei. ⁴ Extract in du Fresne et al., Glossarium, IV: 279, vid. Jaquei, citing AN JJ 157, no. 261, apparently erroneously.

The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021). © Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0012

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Jacquerie seems to have faded from popular memory in the countryside. In more elite circles, the enduring popularity of Froissart’s chronicle and, to a lesser extent, that of the Grandes chroniques ensured the revolt a place in history. Some later fifteenth-century chroniclers, such as Pierre Cochon and Michel de Bernis, included the revolt in their histories, but others, such as the writer of an incunabulum Chroniques de Normandie, did not.⁵ A century later, a historian of Compiègne seems to have had no knowledge of the rural uprising that his city had helped so much to suppress.⁶ There was not much reason to remember the Jacquerie for a long time, for the northern countryside remained placid. Paris rose again and again in the next decades, drawing not only inspiration but experience and infrastructure from the revolt of 1357–1358. Some of those who participated in the Maillotin Revolt of 1382 had participated in the earlier revolt, while the ordonnance cabochienne promulgated in the wake of the revolt of 1413 incorporated passages that drew directly from Marcel’s saintes ordonnances of March 1357.⁷ Yet, these uprisings were unaccompanied by any rural disturbances. This is all the more remarkable because the Tuchinat revolts in the Auvergne in the 1360s and in Languedoc in 1380–1383 were strongly marked by urban–rural cooperation, as was the contemporary revolt of the White Hoods in Flanders.⁸ Indeed, while rural revolts became increasingly common in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century France, none of them touched the Jacquerie’s heartlands.⁹ When early modern Frenchmen and women spoke of rural rebels, they called them not Jacques but Croquants, the nickname of participants in a much more recent uprising.¹⁰ It is only from the end of the eighteenth century that the historical memory of the Jacquerie stirred once more. The Age of Revolution turned the eyes of many ⁵ Pierre Cochon, Chronique normande de Pierre Cochon, notaire apostolique à Rouen, Charles de Robillard de Beaurepaire (ed.), (Rouen, 1870), 100; Michel de Bernis, [Chronicle of the Counts of Foix], ed. in Hélène Biu, ‘Du panégyrique à l’histoire: L’archiviste Michel de Bernis, chroniqueur des comtes de Foix (1445)’, BEC 160 (2002): §49–57, pp. 430–432; Les Croniques de Normandie (Rouen, 1487). ⁶ Dom Bertheau, manuscript history of Compiègne, BnF Picardie 19. ⁷ Nicolas le Flament, executed in 1383 for his participation in both the Maillotin uprising and in the marshals’ murder in 1358 (GC, 221, n. 1); L’ordonnance cabochienne (26–27 mai 1413), Alfred Coville (ed.), (Paris, 1891), 172–178, art. 250–255. As noted in Chapter 1, n. 39, one of the manuscripts that contains this promulgation, BnF franç. 5273, also contains the earliest surviving copies of Robert le Coq’s speech to the Estates in November 1356. ⁸ Pierre Charbonnier, ‘Qui furent les Tuchins’ in Violence et contestation au Moyen Âge: Actes du 114e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris, 1989), Section d’histoire médiévale et de philologie (Paris, 1990), 235–247; Vincent Challet, ‘Le Tuchinat en Toulousain et dans le Rouergue (1381–1393): D’une émeute urbaine à une guérilla rurale?’, Annales du Midi 118 (2006): 513–525. ⁹ Yves-Marie Bercé, Histoire des croquants: Étude des soulèvements populaires au XVIIe siècle dans le sud-ouest de la France, 2 vols (Geneva, 1974); Hugues Neveux, Les révoltes paysannes en Europe, XIVe–XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1997); Penny Roberts, ‘Riot and religion in sixteenth-century France’ in Michael T. Davis (ed.), Crowd actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the modern world (Basingstoke, 2015), 31–42 and William Beik, ‘Protest and rebellion in seventeenth-century France’ in Davis (ed.), Crowd actions, 43–57. ¹⁰ Guy Fourquin, The anatomy of popular rebellion in the Middle Ages, Anne Chester (trans.), (New York, 1978), 135.

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historians back toward medieval revolts and the humbler sort of people who participated in them.¹¹ It is from this period that the term jacquerie seems to come into use in both French and English as a general term for a violent peasant uprising.¹² The Jacquerie and, to a much greater extent, the figure of Étienne Marcel served as convenient vessels into which contemporaries could pour their fears or hopes about the political changes through which they themselves were living. Literary and dramatic works recounted the heroic or envious or visionary or bloodthirsty deeds of Étienne Marcel and Guillaume Calle.¹³ The nineteenth-century professionalization of historical and archival training enabled Siméon Luce to embark upon what was almost a project of recovery. His Histoire de la Jacquerie, which made the Jacquerie into a touchstone event for medieval historiography of the next century, began life as his doctoral thesis at the newly established École des chartes. With expanded evidence and improved methodology came a more dispassionate interpretation, but the Jacquerie has always spoken to its observers’ innate sympathies and immediate contexts. This was no less true of Luce’s sympathy for the common folk than of Jules Flammermont’s disdain for them. It remained true through another upsurge of interest in revolt in the later twentieth century when the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s moved Marxist and liberal historians to offer their own contrasting views of how we ought to understand the Jacquerie and other medieval uprisings.¹⁴ Historians over the past decade have focused intensively on the political aspects of medieval revolts.¹⁵ When I began researching this book, I was most interested in the answering the question of why the Jacques revolted, a question I approached primarily from the vantage of political events and ideas. Politics in ¹¹ Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Introduction: Medieval revolt in context’ in Justine Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (eds), The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt (Abingdon, 2017), 5–7 and citations therein. See also Nicholas Wright, Knights and peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French countryside (Woodbridge, 1998), 62–63. ¹² Le Robert Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 1998 edn, vid. Jacques dates the first French usage in a general sense to 1821. ¹³ Christian Almavi, ‘L’érudition française face à la révolution d’Étienne Marcel: Une histoire mythologique? (1814–1914)’, BEC 142 (1984): 287–311; Christian Almavi, ‘La Jacquerie de 1358 dans la littérature dramatique, historique et politique en France: 1814–1914’ in De l’art et la manière d’accommoder les héros de l’histoire de France: Essais de mythologie nationale (Paris, 1988), 311–327; Christian Almavi, ‘Le mythe d’Étienne Marcel: Les interprétations controversées du meurtre d’Étienne Marcel le 31 juillet 1358, de la fin du XVIIIe siècle au début du XXIe siècle’ in Vincent Challet and Patricia Victorin (eds), Du meurtre en politique: Regards croisés sur l’utilisation de la violence en contexte populaire, special issue of Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes/Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 34 (2017): 107–128. ¹⁴ Fourquin, Anatomy; Rodney Hilton, Bond men made free: Medieval peasant movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London, 1973); Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, The popular revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, A.L. Lytton-Sells (trans.), (London, 1973). ¹⁵ Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, Lust for liberty: The politics of social revolt in medieval Europe, 1200–1450: Italy, France, and Flanders (Cambridge, MA, 2006); John Watts, The making of polities: Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge, 2009), 273–280; Firnhaber-Baker and Schoenaers (eds), Routledge history handbook.

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both narrow and broad senses clearly played a role. But the revolt was made possible and set in motion by a variety of motives and contexts. These ranged from dynastic questions and military manoeuvres to demographic developments to personal grudges. As I have emphasized throughout this book, the revolt cannot be reduced to a single cause or objective. It was heterogenous and fluid, its outbreak and course as dependent upon chance as upon planning. So, as interesting as the question of ‘why’ became the question of ‘why then?’, which is really a variation of ‘how?’ Here, too, politics were important, but more so in terms of the practices of mobilization and coalition-building than ideas about society and government or the objectives of change. The social relationships that wove people and communities together or that tore them apart were at least as important in creating the revolt and ensuring its suppression as were opinions on governance, war, or even taxation. At this present moment of populism, plague, and political disintegration, more than one audience has asked me to consider the Jacquerie as a prefiguration of our own society’s problems. When I talk about the Jacquerie and other medieval revolts with my students, too, several contemporary topics recur. Loss of faith in political elites, inequality, and outright corruption come up frequently, as do the tensions and compromises involved in building and maintaining coalitions. Some of the same critical tools are needed to separate truth from fiction in the modern media (traditional and social) that they learn to apply to our medieval sources. But there are differences, too. Beneficiaries of democratic revolution, post-colonialism, anti-racism, and feminism, among other currents, our range of social ideas and political rhetoric is much wider than that available to either rebels or their enemies, though arguably, as Rodney Hilton felt, some of those developments have roots in medieval uprisings.¹⁶ Modern protesters also have a much larger arsenal of tactics to express discontent and to enact reform, which have been honed by three centuries of both revolutionary advances toward a more just and equal world and resistance to those and other changes. Perhaps it is more fruitful to acknowledge that the present casts its shadow onto every interpretation of the past, shaping what questions we ask and what answers we find. The interpretation of the Jacquerie that I have offered here is one that emphasizes long-term context and structural connectivity but also unforeseen contingency and individual agency. The revolt would not have happened without the Black Death, the Battle of Poitiers, the reform movement, or the murder of the marshals. It probably would not have happened without that conversation in a garden in Provins or if Raoul de Clermont-Nesle had not come riding through Saint-Leu-d’Esserent on that day in May. When the country-folk rose, though, they rose as individuals and as members of particular households and

¹⁶ Hilton, Bond Men, esp. 235.

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communities, not simply as constituents of a socio-economic group or as victims of history. What moved—and in many cases forced—them to undertake violent action was a specific opportunity created by a combination of accident and planning. Individual reactions to those circumstances and to events as they unfolded shaped the revolt at least as much as—and probably more than—longterm trends in land prices or propaganda from Paris. Their choices, as well as their personal and historical circumstances, continued to shape how the revolt was remembered afterward as people told their stories to gain recompense or remission. The revolt’s story was never entirely fixed. It probably never will be.

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Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic “f ”, respectively, following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abbeville 66, 182, 184 Acy, Regnaut d’ 35, 49–52, 57–8, 102, 249 accords 7, 12, 16, 258f, 259–65 age 154–5, 170–6, see also child, children, youth, youths agricultural formula 177–80, 177f, 179f Alençon, Philippe de, Bishop of Beauvais 186–7 Aloue, Guillaume l’ 239–40, see also LongueilSainte-Marie Amiens 5–6, 19–20, 38–9, 41–2, 53n.25, 65–6, 87n.86, 88–9, 93–4, 115n.90, 148n.20, 182–5, 187–8, 214–15, 220–1, 227, 232, 232n.103, 242–3, 244n.19, 247n.36, 253–4 Angicourt 151–2, 228–9, see also Sailleville, Hue de Anglo-Navarrese 19–20, 44, 61–2, 81n.50, 84–5, 106–7, 121n.12, 122–3, 138–9, 190, 227–8, 241–2, 254–5, 261–2 armour 130–1, 163–4, 205n.78 arrière-ban 27–8, 159n.89 Arras 25–6, 66, 184 arson 1, 42, 44, 67, 92, 123, 125, 132–40, 139n.103, 165, 167, 173–5, 183n.55, 202–3, 212–14, 217–18, 221–3, 230–2, 234–6, 238–9, 248–9 artisan 24–5, 176–81, 177f, 179f, see also butcher; carpenter; mason assemblies 41, 46–7, 51, 53–4, 243–4 in the Jacquerie 14–15, 71–2, 77, 82–8, 97–105, 113–14, 120–1, 142–4, 148n.20, 152–4, 158–61, 167–9, 173–4, 195–7, 214, 220–3, 225–7, 244–5, 248–9 municipal 18 of the Estates 5, 29–38, 45, 47, 49–51, 56–62, 67–9, 78, 86–7, 107–9, 111–12, 114–15, 119–20, 136–7, 152–3, 183–4, 187–8, 194–5, 225–6, see also, Compiègne, Estates of; Ordonnance of March 1357, Provins, Estates of village 36, 73–4, 152–3 Auffay 138–9, 159–60, 209–10 Aumale 138–9, 156–7, 248–9

Autrand, Françoise 82, 208 Avignon 69, 193n.10 Bailly-aux-Forges 104, 224–6 banner, see flags Bar-sur-Aube 42n.109, 53n.25, 223–4 Barres, Pierre des 129, 191–3, 195–7, 203–4 Bascot de Mauleon 200–2 Beaumanoir, Philippe de 17, 75–6, 146–7, 173–4 Beaumont-sur-Oise 18–19, 62–4, 135–6, 150, 155–6, 167, 182, 195–6, 230, see also, Blanche Capet, Duchess of Orléans Beausault Lady of 254–5 Lord of 232 Beauvais 17–18, 65, 122–3, 129, 137–8, 148–9, 161–3, 181–2, 182n.50, 184–90, 207–8, 215, 220–1, 243–4, 265 bishop of 122–3, 130–1, 155–6, 185–6, 257n.72, see also Alençon, Philippe de, Bishop of Beauvais diocese of 47 Beauvaisis 13, 17–18, 47–8, 59, 62, 71–7, 82–3, 96–7, 99–100, 104–11, 113, 132–3, 138--9, 144–5, 147–8, 150–2, 159–60, 173–4, 185–90, 192–3, 203–4, 208–11, 213–14, 219–20, 223–34, 243–4, 253–4, 261–2 Captain of 13, 78–9, 114–16, 151–2, 156–7, 164–5, 167–8, 227–8, see also Bernier, Jean of Villers-Saint-Paul; Bulles, Achart de; Calle, Guillaume; Great Captain bells 153, 160–1, 220–1, 223–6, 234–5 Bernier Jean de from Montataire 113–16, 119–21, 130, 153, 193, 209, 253–4 Jean de from Villers-Saint-Paul 19, 88n.94, 114–17, 167–8, 193, 210n.102, 247–8 named Captain of the Beauvais 227–9 Jean de, royal councillor 19–20, 247–8 Bernis, Michel de 201n.56, 267–8 Berzy-le-Sec, Lord of 17, 254–5, 261–2 Bessancourt 132–3, 141, 153, 158

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Biville, Jean, Lord of 236–7 Black Death, see plague blackface 142n.122 Blacy 224–5 curate of 122n.14, 142–3, 159–61, 163–4, 220–1 Blanche Capet, Duchess of Orléans 10, 25f, 63–4, 76–7, 86n.80, 131n.61, 137n.90, 167 bonnes villes 29, 32, 35, 41–2, 44, 56, 67n.91, 87n.84, 103, 109–10, 202–3, 206–7, see also Estate, Third; towns, townspeople Bouchier, Philippe le 83n.66, 153, 264–5 Boulemont, Isabelle de 131n.61, 225–6 Boulangier, Jean 150n.33, 154–5, 261–2 Boulengier, Jean, procurator of Laon 87n.85, 183–4 Boulogne, Jean de, Count of Montfort, Duke of Brittany 31, 148–9 Bourbon Béatrix de 64–5, 74–5, 223 Jean de, Count of Clermont 23–4 Jeanne de, Dauphine, Queen of France 1, 59–60, 64–5, 74–5, 191, 197, 202–3, 217 Louis II de, Count of Clermont 19–20, 64–5, 85n.78, 86n.80, 145–7, 164n.112, 267 Bray-sur-Somme 92–3, 136–7, 181–2, 187–8, 214–15 Breteuil 42, 186–7, 232, 254–5 Bretons 46–7, 237–8 bridge 59–60, 73–7, 197, 200, 216–18 bridge-master 79–80 Buch, Captal de, see Grailly, Jean de, Captal de Buch Buchy 236–8 Bucy, Simon de 30n.36, 31, 194–5 Bulles 186–7 Achart de 138–9, 147–50, 209 Burgundy 41–2, 62n.72, 140–1 Marshal of 45 butcher 147–8, 178–80 Caen 66, 149n.27, 181–4, 190, 239 Calle Guérin 19–20, 90–1 Guillaume 13, 19–20, 45n.129, 75–6, 78–9, 85, 88, 95n.121, 97–100, 108, 113–19, 138–9, 144–52, 154–7, 165–8, 172–3, 181–3, 188–93, 195–6, 203–6, 209–10, 212, 214–15, 226, 228, 230–1, 253, 259–60, see also Beauvaisis, Captain of; Great Captain Isabel 19–20, 78–9, 172–3, 259–60, see also Maçon, Hernilg le Cambrensis 132, 232–3 canon 17, 26, 117n.98, 186n.75, 198–9, 202n.63, 244n.19, see also, Picquigny, Guillaume ‘Testard’ de

cannon 60–1 Capetian dynasty 23–5, 25f, 39, 63–4, 228–9, 267 Capellanus, Andreas 128 carpenter 79–80, 88, 146–7, 178 castles 30–1, 42–8, 50–1, 56–7, 59–65, 67, 73–5, 78–81, 103–4, 122–3, 132, 139–40, 182, 212 as objects of rebel attacks 1, 5, 32–3, 74–5, 88–90, 123, 125, 132–9, 147–8, 156–7, 164–5, 174–5, 183–4, 267 see also Auffay, Aumale; Creil, Eppes, Épernon; Ermenonville, Gerberoy; Guerbigny, Jouy-sous-Thelle, Louvre; Meaux, le Marché de; Montereau-fautYonne; Longueville-sur-Scie; Louvre; Luzarches; Montépilloy; Moreuil; Pierrepont-sur-Avre; Pleinpinard; Plessisdu-Roye; Poix; Thiers-sur-Thève; Thoix; Vez; Vincennes Catenoy 13, 90n.102, 151, 196, 203n.67 Catheux 138–9, 148–9, 159–60 Cazelles, Raymond 2–3, 5, 72–4, 139–40, 169, 176–80 Chambly 92–3, 117, 131n.61, 136–7, 151–2, 154–5, 157–60, 164–8 Jeanne de 92, 131n.61 Louis, bastard of 92, 129, 197n.33, 198, 202–3 Châlons-en-Champagne 18, 65, 108n.51, 154n.57, 182n.50, 220–1 Champagne 1, 5–6, 21–2, 36, 41–4, 54, 58–60, 62, 83, 92–4, 104, 106–7, 121n.10, 122, 142–3, 151–3, 158, 180n.43, 190n.1, 211, 214, 219–26, 226, 235–6, 244–6, 247–8, 255–6, see also Conflans, Jean de, Marshal of Champagne; Perthois; VaudémontJoinville, Henri V, Count of Chandelier, Jean 199–200 Chandelier, Mathieu le 90n.99, 151, 178n.39, 196n.29 chaperons, see hoods Charenton 132, 217–18, 221–4, 232–5, 248–9 Charles II, King of Navarre, Count of Évreux 1, 5–7, 9–11, 21–2, 24–6, 25f, 30–1, 33–4, 37–47, 40f, 49–59, 62–4, 66–70, 76–7, 84–5, 93–4, 115–17, 119, 129, 138–9, 147–8, 156–7, 161–3, 162f, 162n.103, 182, 184, 187–91, 203–211, 213–17, 224–37, 239–45, 253–254, see also Anglo-Navarrese; Évreux; Charles IV, King of France 23, 25–6, 25f, 39 Charles V, Dauphin, Duke of Normandy, Regent, King of France 1, 5–6, 8–9, 12–13, 15, 21–2, 24–5, 25f, 28–34, 36–9, 42, 45–7, 49, 73–83, 91, 96–7, 103, 106–8, 114–16, 119–20, 128, 130–2, 135–6, 142–3, 150–1, 184–5, 187–8, 191, 193–200, 202–4, 206–9, 211, 213, 217–18, 221–6, 228–9, 232–7, 241–56, 261, 267

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 Charny Geoffrey de 23–4 Jean de 111n.65, 137–8, 159–60, 194–5 Charon, Jean le 114, 153 Chaucier, Thomas le 104–5, 262n.98 Chaumont-en-Vexin 71n.3, 121n.12, 187, 256–7 Chauny, Jean de 17, 261–2 Château-Thierry 171, 217, 235n.116 Châtillon, Guy V de, Count of Saint-Pol 31, 231n.92, 242–3 Chavanages 153–4, 224–5 Chelles 217 Chennevières, Jacquin de 83n.66, 155–7 chevauchée 249–50, see also raiding child, children 1, 28n.24, 32–3, 42–4, 115n.88, 121, 123–4, 130–3, 149–50, 154–5, 164–6, 170–6, 180, 191, 212–13, 223, 249, 253, 258–9, see also youth, youths Chilly-Mazarin 46n.139, 158, 167–8, 222–3, 227 Chippe, Rogier, prévôt of Soissons 136–7 chivalry 7–10, 124, 126–7, 200–3 Choisy-le-Roi 85, 194–5 choule 265 cities, see bonnes villes; Estate, Third; towns, townspeople clergy 29, 67–8, 84–5, 122, 220–1, see also bishop; Blacy, curate of; canon; Estate, First; minor orders Clermont-en-Beauvaisis 66–7, 69, 71–2, 75–6, 80–1, 97–8, 144–7, 156–7, 159–60, 181–2, 188–9, 204–6, 209–12, 214–15, 228–9 castle of 210–11 Count of 64–5, 74n.16, 80–1, 99, see also Bourbon, Jean de, Count of Clermont; Bourbon, Louis II de, Count of Clermont County of 17–18 Jean de 136–7 Raoul de, Constable of France 81–2 Robert de, Marshal of Normandy 49–50, 57–8, 81–2, 92n.110, 136–7, 214–15, 241–2, 264 Clermont-Nesle 123, 131n.61, 136–7, 183n.58, 223 Alix de 92–3 Jean de 69–72, 81–2, 82n.59, 92–3, 97, 264 Raoul de 71–6, 79–83, 88, 92–3, 96–7, 101–2, 107–8, 129, 270–1 clothing 26–7, 33, 52–3, 142–3, 161, 174–5, see also hoods coinage 33–5, 67, 111–12, 197, 236–7, see also Oresme, Nicolas

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Compiègne 62–3, 65, 69, 71, 73, 76–7, 147–52, 159n.89, 182–3, 188–9, 193n.13, 227n.72, 230–1, 267–8 Estates of 65–9, 73n.13, 78, 86–7, 107–9, 111–12, 114–15, 152–3 Complainte sur la bataille de Poitiers 26–8, 49, 142–3 Conflans, Jean de, Marshal of Champagne 31, 45–6, 49–52, 54, 55f, 58–9, 241–2 Conflans-sur-Seine 234–5 Coq, Robert le, Bishop of Laon 5, 10–11, 26n.19, 30–2, 34n.71, 36n.80, 37–8, 41n.108, 49, 56, 58, 66–7, 82, 84–8, 93–4, 147–9, 183–4, 230, 235–6, 239, 242–3, 268n.7 Corbeil 43f, 58–60, 87–8, 108, 193, 218 Corbie 66, 181–2 Corbie, Robert de 34n.71, 41n.108, 50n.4, 58–9, 84–5 Cornu, Guillaume de 90n.99, 140, 263–4 Coucy Enguerrand, Lord of 10–11, 31–2, 235–6, 235n.116 Raoul de 232–3, 235n.116 Couilly-Pont-aux-Dames 197–9 Count of Saint-Pol, see Châtillon, Guy V de, Count of Saint-Pol Courtemanche 92–3, 230n.89 Coutumes de Beauvaisis, see Beaumanoir, Philippe de Cramoisy 71–2, 75–6, 78, 82n.59 Creil 62–5, 64f, 69–70, 73–7, 81n.50, 113–16, 134–5, 216n.23, 223, 230–1, 231n.96 crier 83n.66, 167–8, 193–4, 222, 227, 254–5 Croquants 268 crusade 200–2, 212–13, see also Pastoureaux, Revolt of; Saracens; Wends Dampierre, Jean III de, Lord of Saint-Dizier 92–3, 159, 213, 219–26, 249 dancing 142–3, 159, 220–1 Dauphin, see Charles V, Dauphin, Duke of Normandy, Regent, King of France Dauphine, see Bourbon, Jeanne de, Dauphine, Queen of France Debonnaire brothers 14–15, 158–9, 173–4 Demainville, Pierre 117, 247–8 demolition 47–8, 50–1, 77–9, 132–5, 137–8, 167, 263–4, see also castles, as object of rebel attack disability 154–5, 174–5 dizinier 153 documents, destruction of 79, 93–4, 121–2 Dompremy 221

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Doublet Guilbert 156–7, 186–7, 207–8 Jean 156–7, 186–7, 207–8 Simon 104, 152–3, 154n.58, 156–7, 165, 167–8, 186–7, 207–8, 214 doublets, see clothing Dracy 140–1, 238–9 Dudelange brothers 15, 254–7, 260–1, 264 Edward III, King of England 23, 25f, 39–41, 56, 69n.106, 106–7, 162n.103, 208–9 Edward, Prince of Wales 23–4 effrois/effroiz, used as name for the revolt 1–2, 13, 120, 160–1, 220, 250–3 Éméville, Pierre d’, see Demainville, Pierre English Rising of 1381 2–3, 6, 98, 111, 141, 176–7, 245n.26, 246–7 see also Savoy Palace; Tyler, Wat Épernay 223–4 Gilet d’ 223–4 Épernon 42–7, 57, 66–7 Eppes 135–6, 183n.55, 235n.113 equality 110–12, 270 Ermenonville 13, 15, 18, 37–8, 86n.80, 88n.94, 135–6, 147–8, 151, 156–7, 167, 184–5, 195–7, 203–4, 210, 215–16, 228, 229n.82 Espagne, Charles d’ 44–5 Essars Jacques des 241–2 Marguerite des 32–3, 37–8 Philippe des 137–8 Pierre des 37–8 Estate First 30–2, 67, see also clergy Second 36–7, 42, 54, 59n.57, 62, 119–20, 184–5, see also nobility Third 56, 67, see also bonnes villes; towns, townspeople Estates General, see Assemblies, of the Estates; Compiègne, Estates of, Provins, Estates of Étampes, castle of 43f, 44–5, 107–8, 135–6 count of, see Évreux, Louis d’, Count of Étampes county of 103, 135–6 États généraux, see Assemblies, of the Estates Eu, Count of 44–5 Évreux 42, 43f, 67–9, 203–4, 207–9 Blanche d’, Queen of France 25–6, 63–4 Charles II d’, see Charles II, King of Navarre, Count of Évreux Jeanne d’, Queen of France 10, 25–6, 25f, 63–4, 76–7 Louis d’, Count of Étampes 44–5, 53, 58–9

Louis d’, Count of Évreux 25f, 39 Philippe d’, Count of Évreux 25f, 40–1 Philippe d’, Count of Longueville 38, 56, 63n.77, 138 execution 1, 14–15, 25–6, 44–5, 47n.145, 49–50, 58, 76–80, 85, 88, 90–2, 105, 113–16, 119, 123, 130–1, 136–9, 144–50, 153, 155–7, 166, 173–4, 183–9, 191–2, 193n.13, 205–6, 206f, 207–9, 207n.87, 212–13, 221, 223–4, 226, 230n.85, 233–4, 237n.126, 239, 242–3, 254–5, 264–5, 268n.7, see also killing; marshals, murder of faction Navarrese 6–7, 42, 44–5, 47, 49–53, 84–5, 88–9, 94n.117, 117n.96, 123, 138, 148–9, 184–5, 207–10, 228, 236–7 noble/Valois 18, 21–2, 58–9, 67, 74–5, 100n.15, 123, 135–9, 197, 209, 230–1, 248–9 Parisian/reform 5–7, 21–2, 24–5, 28–38, 41–2, 44, 46–7, 49–54, 57–9, 62–4, 67–70, 72–3, 79–91, 94n.120, 96–7, 99–100, 106–9, 111–12, 119–21, 133–6, 144, 149–50, 167–8, 181–2, 184–8, 191–2, 197–200, 206–7, 222–4, 226–8, 230, 241–3, 249–50, 270–1 Faverel, Colin le 151n.34, 224 Favresse 104, 154n.57, 224n.60 Flageolet, Jean 154n.57, 221–2 flags 33, 161–3, 162f, 174–5, 200–2, 205, 241–2 Flammermont, Jules 72–3, 176–7, 268–70 Flanders 23, 62–3, 94–5, 137–8, 268, see also Flemish Maritime Revolt (1323–1328); White Hoods Yolande de 63n.77 Flemish Maritime Revolt (1323–1328) 2–3, 25n.14, 94–5 fleur-de-lys 161–3, 205, 226, 241–2 Foix 56 Gaston Fébus de 198, 200–3, see also Bernis, Michel de Fontaine-Chaalis 88n.94, 151, 195–6, 209n.99 Fontaines-sous-Montdidier 92–3, 264 Forêt, Pierre de la 30n.36, 31 formula, in remissions 246–7 for Jacquerie 12–13, 18–19, 71–2, 129, 132–3, 197–8, 220n.40, 249–51, 253f, 255–7 for Parisian faction 249–50 see also agricultural formula Fouencamps, see Rogois, Robert, Lord of Fouencamps Fourquin, Guy 3–4, 205–6 Franquet, Simon 153–4, 172–3 free companies 42–4, 239–40, see also mercenaries

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 Fréron, Jean le 147–9, 159–60 Froidmont, Abbot of 122–3, 187 Gaillefontaines 163–4, 236 Garitel, Robert 146–7 Gauvard, Claude 14–15, 53–4, 127 Gerberoy 159–60, 186–7, 232 German Peasants’ War of 1525 98 Germans 221–2 Ghent, see Flanders; Flemish Maritime Revolt (1323–1328); White Hoods Gien 141, 183, 237–8 Gilles, Pierre 38, 47, 85, 100n.15, 129, 140–1, 191–7, 203–4, 225n.64, 227n.74, 242–3 Gonesse 16, 79, 129, 133–4, 137–8, 140–1, 150n.31, 156nn.67,72, 158, 167–8, 191–7, 227–8 Gournay-sur-Marne 195n.19, 197 Goyencourt 14–15, 158–9 Grailly, Jean de, Captal de Buch 200–3 Grancey, Eudes de 64–5, 221–6, 249 Grand Ferré, le 239–40, see also Longueil-SainteMarie Grandvilliers 104, 150, 214 Great Captain 130, 144–6, 147–9, 156–7, 158, 164–5, 167–8, 214–15, 253, see also Beauvaisis, Captain of; Calle, Guillaume; Bulles, Achart de Guenelon, Arnoul 13–15, 18–19, 97–100, 148n.25, 151–2, 154–7, 166, 196, 215–16, 216n.25, 228 Guerbigny 125n.29, 132, 136–7, 230, 232–3 Haguez, Gilles le 151–2, 159–60, 166 Hainaut 132, 232–3 Halatte, Forest of 88–9, 113, 114n.81, 130 Halles, Les 45–6, 58, 242–3 Hangest – 257 Aubert d’, Lord of Moreuil 94n.117 Hanet d’ 261–2, 264 Jean, Lord of 193, 198 Harcourt, Godefroy 49–50, 57n.47 Hardencourt, Lord of 215–16 Heuse, Baudrain de la 214–16, 232, 236–8 homme de corps – see serf, serfdom hoods 27, 42n.110, 52–4, 58–9, 66, 161, 165, 184–5, 223–4, 230–1, 241–2, 265n.116, see also White Hoods Hospitaller 67n.98, 88n.94, 97–100, 108, 119, 145–50, 165–6, 182, 206–7, 223n.54 Houdrier, Fremy 147–50, 163–4 inequality, see equality

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Jacqueminart, Jacques le 221–4 Jacquerie, revolt called 1–2, 267–9 Jacques Bonhomme 1–2, 10–11, 27–8, 49, 85, 101–2, 108–9, 135n.80, 145n.5, 147–8, 159–61, 267–8 Jardin, Robert de 105, 110–11, 213, 264–5 Jaux 76–7, 153, 181–2, 230–1 Jean I, King of France 39 Jean II, King of France 5, 8–9, 18–19, 23–5, 25f, 27–31, 34–9, 40f, 44–5, 56–9, 68–9, 86–7, 101–2, 244, 267, see also, ransom, of King Jean II Jean the Golden 15, 256–7, 260–1, 264 Joigny, Count of 59–60, 193, 198n.39 Joinville, see Vaudémont-Joinville, Henri V, Count of Jouy-sous-Thelle 133–4, 152n.41, 157, 159–60, 186–7 jurisdiction 7, 17–18, 130, 155–6, 186–7, 224, 246, 254–6 killing 15, 24–5, 33, 42–4, 71, 84–5, 91–3, 96–7, 100–2, 106–7, 119, 123–32, 166, 174–5, 184, 187–8, 215, 227, 237–9, 241–2, 247–9, 253–4, 258–9, 264–5, see also execution; marshals, murder of Laon 8–9, 18, 31–2, 37, 65–6, 85–7, 117n.98, 146n.12, 172–3, 181–4, 183n.55, 217–18, 235–6, 239, 242–3 revolt of the serfs of 25n.14, 93–4, 121n.12, 160–1, 173–4 see also Coq, Robert le, Bishop of Laon lèse-majesté 146n.9, 171–2, 230, 249–52, see also treason Lespert, Jean 71–2, 82–3, 89–90, 90n.102, 99, 153–4, 172–3 Leurel, Mathieu de 77n.31, 113–16, 153 Lieur, Jacques le 236–7 Lignières 129, 150, 156–7, 214–15, 229–30, 233 Lihons 181–2 lilies, see fleur-de-lys literacy 1–2, 26–7, 52–3, 88, 145–6, 148–50, 155–6, 176–80 London 42, 161, see also Savoy Palace draft Treaty of 39, 49–50, 57 Longpré, Égide de 171, 174–5, 258–9, 261–2 Longueil-Sainte-Marie 135n.80, 208–9, 239–40 Longueville-sur-Scie 43f, 56, 68–9, 138–9, 208–9, 233, 237n.126 lordship 2–3, 17–18, 23, 25–6, 31–2, 67–8, 80–1, 92, 93n.114, 101, 105–6, 121–3, 127, 137–40, 155–6, 158, 212–13, 233–4, 246–7, 257n.72, 262–5

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Lorrainers 107–8, 220–2 Lorris, Robert de 30n.36, 31n.44, 32–3, 37–8, 88n.94, 89–90, 95n.121, 120–1, 133–6, 148n.25, 151, 167, 173, 194–7, 260n.82 Louvre 60–1, 242–3 Luce, Siméon 2–7, 106–7, 190, 269 Luzarches 95n.121, 136–7, 171, 179n.42, 196, 260n.82 Maçon, Hernilg le 79n.40, 146–7, 172–3 Maillart, Jean de 39n.97, 85, 241–2 Maillotin uprising 268 Manecier/ Manessier, Robert 155–6, 195 Marcel, Étienne 2–6, 11, 15, 21–2, 31–9, 45–64, 67, 77–91, 94–6, 99–102, 107–8, 110–11, 116–17, 135, 137–8, 147–50, 152–3, 156–8, 167, 175–6, 183n.55, 187–8, 191–4, 196, 199–200, 208, 211–13, 217–18, 221–31, 233–6, 241–2, 243n.14, 249, 253, 268–9 market 26–7, 236, 248–9 Marne River 1, 5, 59–60, 62–5, 69–70, 73–4, 77, 191, 193, 197, 217 marshals, murder of 49–59, 55f, 102, 108–9, 131n.57, 136–7, 236n.120, 241–2, 249, 264, 268n.7, 270–1 Martin, Michel 151, 153–4 mason 78–80, 114, 133–4, 146–7, 153 see also Leurel, Mathieu de; Maçon, Hernilg de Maysel 71–2, 75–6, 75f, 78 Meaux 1, 5, 21–2, 42n.109, 47, 52–3, 58–65, 62n.72, 64f, 69–70, 78n.38, 84–5, 88–9, 91–3, 113–16, 119, 129, 134, 138, 147n.19, 149–50, 153–4, 159n.87, 161–4, 172–3, 181–2, 184–5, 189–95, 197–203, 201f, 209–10, 212, 215–17, 218n.32, 226–8, 230, 233, 241–4, 247n.40, 248–50 Meaux, le Marché 57–60, 85, 119, 129, 134, 149–50, 161–3, 190–1, 193, 195–204, 201f, 216–17, 228, 249–50, 249n.47 Mello 45n.129, 66–7, 75–6, 78–81, 88, 92–3, 114n.81, 145–6, 148–9, 165, 189–90, 195–6, 204, 214–15 see also Nesle, Jean de, Lord of Offemont and Mello Mello-Clermont, Battle of 1, 5, 21–2, 80–1, 104–5, 117, 144–5, 147–9, 161–3, 165–6, 182, 189–90, 203–11, 213–16, 228–30, 232–3, 236–7 Melun 43f Jean de 237–8 mercenaries 42–4, 69, 117n.96, 152–3, 159, 218n.36, 221–2, 237–8 see also, Bretons; free companies; Germans; Lorrainers; Pipe, James; soldiers

minor orders 149–50 Montataire 113–14, 130, 134–5, 147–8, 150, 153, 157, 161, 165, 168, 181–2, 195–6, 203–4, 209–10, 231n.96 see also Bernier, Jean from Montataire Montdidier 31, 85, 134n.77, 147, 167–8, 177f, 181–2, 188–9, 203n.67, 229–30, 231n.92, 233–4 Montépilloy 37–8, 88n.94, 89–90, 133–6, 148n.25, 151, 196, 216n.25, 260n.82 Montereau-fault-Yonne 57–61, 62n.72, 63–5, 64f, 104, 107–8, 193, 196, 198 Montfort Jean de, see Boulogne, Jean de, Count of Montfort, Duke of Brittany Pierre de 149n.27, 183–4, 239 Montgobert 92–3, 131n.61, 136–7 Montmorency 17–18, 77–8, 83n.66, 136–7, 150, 155–6, 166, 252n.57 Moreuil 94n.117, 116n.95, 136–7, 140–1, 148n.20, 173, 187–8, 232–3, 253–4, see also Hangest, Aubert d’, Lord of Moreuil murder, see execution; killing; marshals, murder of Muret, Lord of 136–7, 137 narrative 6–16, 239–40, 247–55, 257 Navarrese, see Anglo-Navarrese; faction, Navarrese Nesle 181–2, see also Clermont-Nesle Jean de, Lord of Offemont and Mello 80–1, 88, 92, 133–4, 223n.56 nobility 1–3, 5–6, 25–9, 48, 54, 58, 62, 81–2, 84–5, 96–7, 100–1, 107–8, 111–13, 120–3, 139–40, 168, 170, 203–4, 205n.78, 208, 220–1, 248–9, see also Estate, Second; lordship Nointel 71–2, 78 Normandy 1, 19–20, 24–5, 30–1, 33–4, 40–5, 49–50, 62, 106–7, 138–9, 147n.14, 159–60, 175–6, 190, 203–4, 205–6, 209, 211, 214, 226, 236–7, see also Caen; Clermont, Robert de, Marshal of Normandy; Rouen Oise River 5, 19–20, 62–5, 69–78, 82, 88–91, 106–8, 114n.81, 130–1, 138–9, 153, 160–1, 193, 230–1 Ordonnance of March 1357 33–8, 50–1, 56–9, 68, 86–7, 108–9, 114–15, 152–3, 224–5, 268 Oresme, Nicolas de 34–5 Orgement, Pierre d’ 9n.26, 16, 35, 111n.65, 120–1, 137–8, 140–1, 167, 191–7, 255

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 Orléans 36n.80, 139n.103, 183, 237–8 Duchess of, see Blanche Capet, Duchess of Orléans Duke of, see Valois, Philippe de, Duke of Orléans, Count of Valois Oursel, Jean 130, 153, 155–6, 164–8, 207–8, 254–5 Palaiseau 194–5, 222–3 Paris, see faction, Parisian/reform; Halles, Les; Louvre Parisian militia 46–7, 57–8, 222–3, 227n.74, 241–2, 244n.19, see also Barres, Pierre des; Gilles, Pierre Parlement de Paris 7, 16–18, 31, 35, 53, 56, 117, 125–6, 137–8, 146–7, 193–6, 199–200, 247–8, 255–61, 258f, 263–5, see also Requêtes, Chambre de Pastoureaux, Revolt of 93n.114 Peasants’ Revolt, see English Rising of 1381 Péronne 124n.24, 181–2 Perthois 106–7, 152–3, 159–61, 219–26, 219f, 235–6, 244–5, 262–3 Philippe IV, King of France 23, 25f, 29, 35 Philippe VI, King of France 23–5, 25f, 37–8, 40–1, 107–8, 137n.89, 155n.64 Picardy 1, 59, 62–3, 94–5, 106–7, 133–4, 137n.93, 147n.14, 150, 152–3, 163–4, 180n.43, 185–6, 190, 213–16, 243–4, 248–9, 253–4 Picquigny, family 41–2, 51n.13, 66, 93–4, 115n.90 Guillaume ‘Testard’ de 122n.14, 123, 129, 209–10, 214–15 Jean de 38, 93–4 Pierrefonds 134 Pierrepont-sur-Avre 138, 187–8, 230 pillage 42–6, 60–1, 66–7, 103–4, 107–8, 123, 135, 140–3, 157, 165–6, 187–8, 194–5, 202–3, 219, 230–1, 233–6, 241–2, 249, see also, theft Pipe, James 42–5, 57, 66–7 Pisan, Christine de 242–3 plague 1–2, 21–4, 34–5, 90–1, 109–11, 270–1 Pleinpinard 139n.103, 238–9 Plessis-du-Roye 132, 136–7, 159–60, 163, 232–3, 248–9 Poignant, Philippe 47–8, 82, 84–6, 90n.98, 97, 147, 155–6, 165, 167–8, 185–6 Poillevillain, Jean de 30n.36, 32–3 Poitiers 139n.103, 238–9 Battle of 5, 21–8, 48, 54, 72–3, 108, 142, 270–1, see also Complainte sur la bataille de Poitiers Count of 69

305

Poix 103–5, 107n.43, 129, 138–9, 150, 152–3, 156–7, 159–60, 167–8, 181–2, 185–6, 204, 209–10, 214–15, 229–30, 232–3 Pommolain, Mathieu de, Lord of Thiex 137–8, 263–4 Pont-de-Charenton, see Charenton Pont-Sainte-Maxence 18–19, 77, 85n.78, 91–2, 111n.65, 113n.78, 123, 130, 140–1, 147–9, 153, 155–7, 164–6, 181–2, 185n.69, 188–9, 207–8, 230, 254–5 Pontpoint 230–1 Pontoise 20n.68, 62–3, 63n.75, 71, 76–7, 90–1, 228–9 poverty 3–4, 16–18, 66–8, 111, 140–1, 169, 176–7, 180, 239, 245–6, 260–1, see also, equality prison 17, 23–5, 38–9, 42n.112, 89–90, 104–5, 135n.80, 165–6, 185–6, 237–8, 247n.36, 247n.41, 261–2, see also, ransom propaganda 26–7, 46n.134, 48, 61–2, 112–13, 135, 183–4, 187, 270–1 Provins 106–7, 217 Estates of 58–62, 136–7, 270–1 Puisieux 85, 132–3, 153–4, 157, 164–5, 167–8, 172–3, 192–3, 195, 197–8 Pierre de 85, 192n.9 quarry 78–9 Quiéret family 209–10 raiding 23–4, 33–4, 219, 237–8, 249–50 Raie, Jean 157, 172–3 ransom 23–4, 26n.17, 42–4, 135n.80, 154–5, 197n.33, 202–3, 234–5, 261–3 of King Jean II 23–4, 86–7, 244, 267 rape 1, 10, 42–4, 123–9, 132, 134–5, 142, 175–6, 212–13, 217–18, 234–5 reform, see faction, Parisian/reform; Ordonnance of March 1357 reformateurs generaux 136–7 refugees 42–4, 46–7, 63–4, 87–8, 106–7, 200, 215–16, 218, 230–1 regency 57–9 Reims 42n.109, 65, 182n.50, 190n.1, 231n.92, 235–6 Archbishop of 31–2 Renneval, Raoul de 115n.90, 230, 232–3, 238–9, 248–9, 261–2 Requêtes Chambre de 117, 255–61 Maître de, see Bernier, Jean de, royal councillor Réveillon, Germain de 18–19, 85, 93–4, 147–50, 156n.70, 161, 165, 168, 180, 195–6, 203–4, 207n.86, 210, 239n.135

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306

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Rhuis-lès-Verberie 150, 152–3, 157 Richard II, King of England 53–4, 245n.26, 246–7 Rogois, Robert, Lord of Fouencamps 130–1, 253–4 Roquetaillade, Jean de 10 Rose family of Meaux 149–50, 193n.13, 198–200 Jean, of La Prêle 147–50, 182–3, 193n.13 Jean, of Meaux 199–200 Sir Jean, of Gonesse 129, 193–5, 194n.16 Roucy, Simon de, Count of Braine 58–60 Rouen 8–9, 42, 53n.25, 122–3, 139n.103, 181–3, 214–15, 236–7, 239 Roye 159–60, 232 Aubert de, Bishop of Laon 94n.117 Mahieu de 132, 136–7, 229–30, 232, 233n.106, 236, 248–9 ladies of 125n.29, 136–7 Lord of 132, 232 see also Guerbigny, Plessis-du-Roye ‘Ruffin’ 42–4 Saché 159–60, 238–9 Sailleville, Hue de 83n.66, 151–2, 156–7, 191–2, 210n.102, 228–9 Saint-Denis 8–9, 155–6, 191–6, 215n.19, 241n.1 battle cry 241–2 Saint-Dizier, see Dampierre, Jean III de, Lord of Saint-Dizier Saint-Gervaise 122–3, 236 Saint-Leu-d’Esserent 5, 21–2, 69–86, 88–94, 96–102, 106–9, 112, 114n.81, 119, 129, 134, 144–5, 150, 153–4, 160–1, 172–3, 191, 210, 223, 228n.78, 270–1 Saint-Leu-la-Forêt 84–5 Saint-Pol, Count of, see Châtillon, Guy V de, Count of Saint-Pol Saint-Sauflieu, Herpin, Lord of 114–16, 228 Saint-Thierry 235–6 Saint-Vincent of Senlis 89–91, 101n.19, 146n.13, 151 Saint-Vrain 158–9, 221 Saintes ordonnances, see Ordonnance of March 1357 Saracens 1–2, 212–13 Savoy Palace 141 Seine River 5, 33–4, 37, 41–2, 57–60, 60n.63, 62–5, 68–70, 73–4, 77–80, 106–7, 188–9, 193, 217, 237n.124 Senlis 13, 15, 18–19, 53n.25, 59n.57, 62, 65, 71–2, 79, 82–5, 86n.80, 87n.86, 88–91, 99n.12, 101n.19, 106–7, 113–16, 114n.81, 117, 146n.13, 148n.25, 151, 153–4, 154n.57,

155nn.60,62, 167–8, 171–2, 181–7, 189, 195–7, 196n.27, 215–17, 220–1, 227–8, 230–1, 233–4, 256–7 Jean de 100n.14, 147–8 Sens 193, 198, 217, 226 Archbishop of 36–7 Sercot, Robert 205–6 serf, serfdom 93–4, 127n.41, 154n.52, 180, 181n.47, 221, see also Laon, revolt of the serfs of sergeant 47–8, 82, 84–5, 87n.86, 90n.98, 133n.71, 155–6, 167–8, 179n.41, 263–4 settlement, see accords Shepherds’ Crusade, see Pastoureaux, Revolt of Silly-le-Long 191, 195–9 Soissons 17, 27–8, 31n.42, 65, 136–7, 181–4, 235–6 soldiers 9–10, 23–4, 27–8, 35, 38, 42–7, 49–50, 65n.80, 67–70, 72–3, 79–80, 102, 106–8, 108n.50, 110–11, 135, 139, 152–4, 161–3, 175–6, 190, 203–6, 218, 220, 224–5, 237–9, 241–2, see also Anglo-Navarrese; Bretons, mercenaries song 6, 142–3, see also Complainte sur la bataille de Poitiers Sonnain, Jean 214–15, 236–7 Soulas, Jean 198–9 Tassone 128, 170n.4, 175–6, 213n.5 tax collectors 11, 52n.17, 86–7, 155–6, 184n.61 taxation 29–31, 65, 67–8, 109–10, 195n.24, 242–3, 262–3 theft 108n.50, 111, 140–2, 163–4, 171, 174–5, 217–18, 238–9, see also pillage Thiéblemont 104, 221–2, 224–5 Thiers-sur-Thève 122–3, 135, 195–6 Thiex, Lord of, see Pommolain, Mathieu de, Lord of Thiex Thoix 138–9, 159–60, 209n.98 Tilly, Charles 112–13 torture 66, 124, 175–6, 184n.60, 185–6, 199–200, 205–6, 212–13, 262n.98 Touraine 238–9 Toussac, Charles 226, 241–2, 243n.14 towns, townspeople 5–6, 25–6, 29, 41–2, 52–3, 61–3, 65–8, 77, 83, 87–8, 94–5, 97, 111–12, 150, 154–5, 161, 169, 181–9, 198–9, 212–13, 220–1, 227–30, 239–40, 244, see also Abbeville; Amiens; Beauvais; bonnes villes; Caen; Châlons-en-Champagne; Clermonten-Beauvaisis; Estate, Third; Laon; Montdidier; Orléans; Rouen; Senlis Trappes 42–4, 43f, 194–5 treason 26, 30–1, 36–7, 61–2, 222–5, 232n.101, 244–5, 249–50, see also lèse-majesté

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 19/3/2021, SPi

 Tremblay 195, 197–8 Tuchins 15n.42, 268 Tyler, Wat 53–4, 98, 231n.96 University of Paris 34–5, 49–50, 69n.108, see also Corbie, Robert de; Oresme, Nicolas Vache, Jacques la 93n.113, 134n.73, 156n.72, 194–5, 221–2, 223n.54 Vaillant, Jean 84–5, 88–9, 184–5, 197–8, 203–4, 228 valet 148n.20, 217–18, 234–5 Valois county 17–18, 134, 197–8 dynasty 8–9, 23, 25–6, 25f, 41, 56–7, 62, 108, 247–8 Isabelle de, Dowager-Countess, ‘Lady of Valois’ 163–4, 236 Philippe de, Duke of Orléans, Count of Valois 31, 53, 58–9, 63–4, 135–6, 198 see also Charles V, Dauphin, Duke of Normandy, Regent, King of France; faction, noble/Valois; Jean II, King of France; Philippe VI, King of France Vaudémont-Joinville, Henri V, Count of 223–4, 244–8, 255–6, 262–3 Verberie 119, 130–1, 136–7, 140–1, 151–2, 210, 230–1 Vermandois 62, 67n.91 Vexin 213–14, 233–4, 267, see also Chaumonten-Vexin

307

Vez 16, 77n.33, 121n.12, 136–7, 140n.111, 164–5, 167, 172–3, 258–9, 260n.82, 261, 263–4 victualing 107–8, 111n.65, 135, 163–4, 171–2, 174–5, 218n.35 Villaines, Pierre ‘le Bègue’ de 57–60, 198, 215–16 Villers-Saint-Paul, see Bernier, Jean from VillersSaint-Paul Villiers, Pierre 57, 57n.47, 100n.15 Villiers-près-La Ferté-Alais 133–4, 136–7, 222–3 Vincennes 217–18, 267 Wends 212n.2 White Hoods 161, 174–5, 268 widow 19–20, 25–6, 67–8, 78–9, 128, 145–7, 149–50, 170n.4, 171–3, 175–6, 212–13, 258–62 wife, wives 1, 18–20, 28n.24, 32–3, 37–8, 42–4, 46n.139, 54n.29, 59–60, 63–5, 115n.88, 115n.90, 124–7, 130–4, 137–8, 142, 149–50, 154–5, 170–6, 180, 191, 197, 202–3, 212–13, 217, 223, 245–6, 262n.98, 263–4 women, see rape; widow; wife, wives Yonne River 59–60, 193, see also Montereaufaut-Yonne youth, youths 14–15, 159, 173–4, 265, see also child, children Ypres, Étienne Marcel’s letters to 36, 83, 101–2, 187–8, 191–2, 208, 212–13, 217–18, 229–31, 233–4, 249