A Distant Mirror (33 page)

Rents were generally reckoned in pennies earned by paid labor and sale of produce in the market. At harvest-time, men and women flocked to the grape-picking for extra cash and a few weeks’ fun. Women were paid at half the rate of the men. The worst fear was famine, and local shortages were common because transportation was poor and yield, owing to inadequate fertilizer, low.

Possession of a plow which cost 10 to 12 livres and of a plow horse at 8 to 10 livres was the line between a peasant who prospered and one who just survived. Those too poor to afford a plow rented a communal one or turned the earth with hoe and spade. Perhaps 75 to 80 percent were below the plow line, of whom half had a few acres and some economic security while the rest lived on the edge of subsistence, cultivating tiny plots supplemented by paid work for the lord or for richer neighbors. The lowest 10 percent existed in misery on a diet of bread, onions, and a little fruit, sleeping on straw, living without furniture in a cabin with a hole in the roof to let out the smoke. Without even the tenure of serfs, they were a new agricultural proletariat created as the old manorial system was changing to a money basis.

What proportion of the peasantry was well off and what poor is judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of the historian,
wie es wirklich war
(how it really was), so elusive. For every statement on peasant life there is another that contradicts it. It has been said that “
bathing was common among the lower classes … even small villages had their public bath houses,” yet the French peasant’s contemporaries incessantly complained of his filth and foul smell. While the English of the time seem to agree that the French peasant was worse off than their own and frequently comment on his meatless diet, he is elsewhere recorded as regularly eating pork and fowl roasted
on a spit. He also had access to eggs, salt fish, cheese, lard, peas, beans, shallots, onions, garlic, and some leaf vegetables grown in his kitchen garden, fruits cooked in juice or dried for winter, rye bread, honey, and beer or cider.

The middle group would own a bed for the whole family, a trestle table with benches, a chest, cupboard, wardrobe, iron and tin cooking pots, clay bowls and jugs, homemade baskets, wooden buckets and washtubs, in addition to farming tools. They lived in one-story, wood-framed houses with thatched roof and plaster walls made of various mixtures of clay, straw, and pebbles. Most such houses had Dutch doors to let light and air in and smoke out, some had tiny windows, the best had walled chimneys. Life expectancy was short owing to overwork, overexposure, and the afflictions of dysentery, tuberculosis, pneumonia, asthma, tooth decay, and the terrible rash called St. Anthony’s Fire, which by constriction of the blood vessels (not then understood) could consume a limb as by “some hidden fire” and sever it from the body. In modern times the disease has been identified in some cases as erysipelas and in others as ergot poisoning caused by a fungus on rye flour kept too long over the winter.

The affluent few might own sixty to eighty acres, plow-horses and rope harness, sheep, pigs, cattle, stores of wool, hides, and hemp, and of wheat, oats, and corn, a boat and net for fishing in the river, a vineyard, a woodpile, and vessels of copper, glass, and silver. Their homes contained, in the case of one
comfortable peasant of Normandy, two featherbeds, one wooden bed, three tables, four skillets, two pots and other cooking utensils, eight sheets, two tablecloths, one towel or napkin, a lantern, two vats for trampling grapes, two barrels and two casks, a cart, a plow, two harrows, two hoes, two scythes, one spade, one sickle, three horse collars, and a pack saddle. Rich peasants are recorded who employed a dozen field hands and gave their daughters dowries of 50 gold florins plus a fur-trimmed mantle and fur bedcover.

Truer to the mass is the peasant who cries, in the French tale
Merlin Merlot
, “Alas, what will become of me who never has a single day’s rest? I do not think I shall ever know repose or ease.… Hard is the hour when the villein is born. When he is born, suffering is born with him.” His children go hungry, holding out their hands to him for food; his wife assails him as a poor provider. “And I, unhappy one, I am like a rooster soaked in the rain, head hanging and bedraggled, or like a beaten dog.”

A deep grievance of the peasant was the contempt in which he was held by the other classes. Aside from the rare note of compassion, most tales and ballads depict him as aggressive, insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious,
tricky, unshaved, unwashed, ugly, stupid and credulous or sometimes shrewd and witty, incessantly discontented, usually cuckolded. In satiric tales it was said the villein’s soul would find no place in Paradise or anywhere else because the demons refused to carry it owing to the foul smell. In the
chansons de geste
he is scorned as inept in combat and poorly armed, mocked for his manners, his morals, even his misery. The name Jacques or Jacques Bonhomme to designate a peasant was used by nobles as a term of derision derived from the padded surplice called
“jacque”
which the peasant wore for protective armor in war. The knights saw him as a person of ignoble instincts who could have no understanding of “honor” and was therefore capable of every kind of deceit and incapable of trust. Ideally he should be treated decently, yet the accepted proverb ran, “Smite a villein and he will bless you; bless a villein and he will smite you.”

An extraordinary passage from the tale
Le Despit au Vilain
breathes hatred with an intensity that seems more than mere storytelling. “Tell me, Lord, if you please, by what right or title does a villein eat beef?… And goose, of which they have plenty? And this troubles God. God suffers from it and I too. For they are a sorry lot, these villeins who eat fat goose! Should they eat fish? Rather let them eat thistles and briars, thorns and straw and hay on Sunday and pea-pods on weekdays. They should keep watch without sleep and have trouble always; that is how villeins should live. Yet each day they are full and drunk on the best wines, and in fine clothes. The great expenditures of villeins comes at a high cost, for it is this that destroys and ruins the world. It is they who spoil the common welfare. From the villein comes all unhappiness. Should they eat meat? Rather should they chew grass on the heath with the horned cattle and go naked on all fours.…” These tales were addressed to an upper-class audience. Was this what they wanted to hear, or was it a satire of their attitude?

In theory, the tiller of the soil and his livestock were immune from pillage and the sword. No reality of medieval life more harshly mocked the theory. Chivalry did not apply outside the knights’ own class. The records tell of peasants crucified, roasted, dragged behind horses by the brigands to extort money. There were preachers who pointed out that the peasant worked unceasingly for all, often overwhelmed by his tasks, and who pleaded for more kindness, but all they could advise the victim was patience, obedience, and resignation.

In 1358 his misery had reached a peak. Brigands seized the seed grain out of his hand, stole his animals for their food, his carts for their loot, his tools and plowshares to forge their weapons. Yet the lords continued to demand fees and taxes and extra aids for their heavy
ransoms, “and even for that hardly put themselves out to protect their vassals from attack.” The common people “groaned,” wrote Jean de Venette, “to see dissipated in games and ornaments the sums they had so painfully furnished for the needs of war.” They resented the nobles’ failure to use them in the fight against the enemy and felt less fear of them as the knights lost prestige in the defeats since Crécy and in the cowardice at Poitiers. Above all, they saw the complicity in lawlessness of the knight who, if he could not pay a brigand’s demand for ransom, took service with his company for a year or two, “so easy it was to make out of a gentleman a brigand.” No plan of revolution, but simple hate ignited the
Jacquerie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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