A Distant Mirror (68 page)

The King received extreme unction, commended to his brothers his twelve-year-old son, and urged on them with his last breath the lifting of taxes: “Take them off as speedily as you can.” Bureau de la Rivière, kneeling in tears at the bedside, embraced the King; the room was emptied of the sobbing crowd so that his last moments should be in peace. He died on September 16, 1380, and his last ordinance was proclaimed the next day. Between public rejoicing and the conflicting sentiments of the late King’s brothers, an explosive situation was created.

In Brittany in the same month Buckingham received an ambiguous welcome. Montfort, whose whole life was spent balancing enemies, intriguing, fighting, quarreling, and making treaties with everyone, was a habitual double-dealer. Charles being dead, he was prepared to make peace with the new King, and opened negotiations with the French while at the same time signing a compact of many oaths with Buckingham to jointly besiege Nantes. But the reluctance of Breton nobles to support an attack on their countrymen decided their lord to choose France. Coucy, warmly in favor of a reconciliation with Brittany, was one of the negotiators who concluded a treaty with Montfort in January 1381. Buckingham, who was not kept informed by his ally, found towns and castles closed to him and provisions withdrawn inside their walls. Through the winter months his wasted army wandered from place to place, often lacking food and shelter. Finally told by Montfort that he must leave, he and his companions took ship for England in March 1381. Except for individual knighthoods and ransoms and some fruits of pillage collected en route, Buckingham and his fellows had accomplished no military purpose, “
to their great discomfort and the discomfort of the whole English nation.”

Both nations under boy kings now suffered the rule of ambitious and contending uncles who, wearing no crown, exercised power without responsibility. War receded; internal stress reached the bursting point.

Chapter 18

L
et him go to the Devil! He lived long enough,” cried a workingman on the death of the King. “It would have been better for us if he had died ten years ago!” Within a few months of the King’s death, France experienced the explosion of working-class revolt that had already swept through Florence and Flanders. In addition to oppressive taxes, a rising rancor of the poor against the rich and a conscious demand by the lowest class for greater rights in the system supplied the impulse. Concentration of wealth was moving upward in the 14th century and enlarging the proportion of the poor, while the catastrophes of the century reduced large numbers to misery and want. The poor had remained manageable as long as their minimum subsistence could be maintained by charity, but the situation changed when urban populations were swelled by the flotsam of war and plague and infused by a new aggressiveness in the plague’s wake.

As the masters became richer, the workers sank to the level of day labor, with little prospect of advancement. Membership in the guilds was shut off to the ordinary journeyman and reserved under complicated requirements and fees for sons and relatives of the master class. In many trades, work was farmed out to workers in their homes, often at lower wages to their wives and children, whose employment was forbidden in the guilds. Obligatory religious holidays, which numbered 120 to 150 a year, kept earnings down. Although forbidden to strike and, in some towns, to assemble, workers formed associations of their own to press for higher wages. They had their own dues and treasuries and connections across frontiers through which jobs and lodgings could be secured for members, and which doubtless served as channels of agitation.

Self-consciousness as a class—the “people”—was growing. Christ was often portrayed as a man of the people and shown in frescoes and carvings surrounded by an artisan’s or peasant’s tools—hammer, knife, ax, and wool-carder’s comb—instead of by the instruments of the Crucifixion. In Florence, the workers called themselves
il popolo di Dio. “Viva il popolo!”
was the cry of the revolt of the Ciompi in 1378. As the greatest industrial center of the day, Florence was the natural starting place of insurrection.

The Ciompi were the lowest class of workers unaffiliated with any guild, but while the revolt came to be called after them, artisans of all levels and degrees below the major craft guilds were involved in the rising. They worked at fixed wages, often below subsistence level, for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, and their wages might be withheld to cover waste or damage to raw materials. The alliance of the Church with the great was plain enough in a bishop’s pastoral letter declaring that spinners could be excommunicated for wasting their wool. Workers could be flogged or imprisoned or suffer removal from the list of employables or have a hand cut off for resistance to employers. Agitators for the right to organize could be hung, and in 1345 ten wool-carders had been put to death on this charge.

In the outbreak of 1378, after a storm of violence throughout the city, the workers rushed up the steps of the Signoria’s palazzo to present their demands. They wanted open access to the guilds, the right to organize their own unions, reform of the system of fines and punishments, and, most significantly, the right “to participate in the government of the City.” In an era without guns or tear gas, mobs inspired immediate terror. Although the city hall was well supplied with means of defense, the Signoria were “frightened men,” and capitulated. The workers installed a new government based on labor’s representation in the guilds. It lasted 41 days before it began to crumble under internal stress and the counter-offensives of the magnates. Reforms gained in the revolt slowly eroded, and by 1382 the major guilds had reasserted their control, if not their confidence. Thereafter the fear of another proletarian outbreak contributed to the decline of republican government and the rise of the Medici as the dominant ruling family.

The weavers of Ghent had greater staying power. At Ypres and Bruges the original revolt had been suppressed by the Count of Flanders with fearful vengeance of burning and hanging. But the Gantois, through sieges, truces, treacheries, and brutal retaliations on both sides, had maintained their war despite blockade and near starvation. Ghent’s struggle was not in fact class war, though it came to be perceived
as such. Rather it was a stubborn defense of town autonomy against the Count, crisscrossed by the strife of social and religious factions. It was a complex of rivalries between towns, between trades, and among different levels within a trade. The weavers oppressed the lower-class fullers with as much animus as they directed against the Count.

In France, the King’s deathbed promise of abolition of taxes aroused a fever of impatience for its fulfillment. Anger at taxes continually levied in the name of fighting the English had reached outrage when Buckingham raided the countryside unopposed and the people saw their money go, as it seemed, for nothing. In fact, as a result of funds spent by Charles V on improved defenses, towns and castles were better able to withstand the enemy than in the miserable years after Poitiers. But this did not lessen the burden on the lowest taxable class nor the resentment of the independent towns at having to pay for what was considered to be the King’s business. Such, was this feeling that Laon refused to open its gates to Coucy as Captain-General of Picardy and refused also to send him a company of thirty archers he had demanded. The towns of Picardy balked at further payments. At St. Quentin and Compiègne, crowds rioted, burned tax offices, assaulted tax-collectors and chased them out of town.

In Paris, the government was half paralyzed by the scramble for power around the throne. As eldest uncle, Anjou held the title of Regent, and used it to seize as much of the Treasury as he could for the purpose of pursuing the kingdom that beckoned him in Italy. Aware of his brothers’ predatory habits, the late King had arranged for the Regency to end when his son was fourteen, but he had died two years too soon. He had named his brother Burgundy and his wife’s brother Bourbon as guardians of his son. With Anjou as Regent, they were to rule with a Council of Twelve. Bourbon, who had no ambitions and held aloof from cabals, was known as “the Good Duke” in nice distinction to the paternal uncles, but he had less influence than they because he was not of the blood royal.

Pulled apart by their separate interests—Burgundy in Flanders, Anjou in Italy, Berry in a passion for collecting—the paternal uncles had no common interest in the integrity of the realm. Their only cohesion was in desire to remove the hands of the late King’s ministers from the controls. Meanwhile, amid their discords, they found time to divide up his magnificent library of a thousand volumes. Anjou took 32 carefully chosen books with silk and enameled bindings and golden clasps, among the most beautiful in the collection, including one entitled
The Government of Princes
.

Clisson was named Constable and the coronation was hastened to strengthen the authority of the regime. A disgraceful scene marred the monarchy’s sacred ceremony on November 4. At the banquet table, Anjou and Burgundy, who detested each other, engaged in a physical scramble for the seat of honor next to the new King. Amid tumult of partisans’ and prelates’ dismay, a Council was hastily convened which decided in favor of Burgundy as premier peer of France, whereupon Anjou seized the seat anyway, only to be shoved out of it by Philip the Bold, who sat down in his place. In this sorry exhibition, the reign began.

Its sovereign, twelve-year-old Charles VI, was a handsome, well-built boy, tall and fair like his grandfather, with an inexpressive face, mirror of a shallow soul. “Shining and polished arms pleased him more than all the jewels in the world,” and he adored the rituals of chivalry. These were never more fittingly displayed than at the coronation banquet when Coucy, Clisson, and Admiral de Vienne, magnificently mounted on horses caparisoned in cloth of gold down to the ground, served the King’s dishes from horseback. To give the King’s entry into Paris the greatest possible
éclat
, three days of splendid festivities with music by minstrels were held in squares hung with tapestries. “New marvels,” in the form of artificial fountains running with milk, wine, and clear water, were constructed to amaze the people.

They did not suffice. The summoning of an Estates General for November 14 to provide a substitute for the hearth tax intensified public anxiety at the prospect of a new levy. Excited clusters of artisans discussed their grievances in the streets, secret meetings were held at night, assemblies gathered to denounce the government, the people were “inflamed and agitated by an ardent desire to enjoy liberty and free themselves from the yoke of subsidies.”

When the Chancellor, Miles de Dormans, Bishop of Beauvais, informed the Estates that the King needed aids from the people, the predictable explosion came. A crowd of commoners rushed upon a meeting of merchants, who, though opposed to the aids, were not prepared to force the issue.

“Know, citizens, how you are despised!” cried a cobbler in passionate oratory to his followers. All the bitterness of the little against the great was expressed in his denunciation of the “endless greed of seigneurs” who “would take from you, if they could, even your share of daylight.” They crush the people with their exactions, more each year. “They do not wish us to breathe or to speak or to have human faces or mix with them in public places.… These men to whom we render forced homage and who feed on our substance have no other
thought but to glitter with gold and jewels, to build superb palaces and invent new taxes to oppress the city.” He poured scorn on the cowardice of the merchants, citing in comparison the stalwart citizens of Ghent who at that very moment were in arms against their Count because of taxes.

If the cobbler’s eloquence was owed in part to embellishment by the Monk of St. Denis, who recorded it, that only serves to indicate the sympathy of many monastic chroniclers with the plight of the people. In his famous prophecy, the friar Jean de Roquetaillade had seen the day coming when “the worms of the earth will most cruelly devour the lions, leopards and wolves … and the little and common folk will destroy all tyrants and traitors.”

For the cobbler and his 300 companions, that day was at hand. Screaming and brandishing knives, they forced the Provost of Merchants to carry their demand for tax abolition to Anjou and the Chancellor. At the Marble Table in the palace courtyard, the Provost pleaded for a lifting of the “intolerable burden.” With “terrible shouts” the crowd confirmed his words, swearing they would pay no more but die a thousand times rather than suffer “such dishonor and shame.” These unexpected words appear frequently in the protests, as if to add the dignity of knightly formula. The poor no less than the great needed to feel themselves acting nobly.

Anjou, in smooth and soothing words of pity for the poor, promised to obtain by the next day the King’s assent to abolition of taxes. During the night the people listened to dangerous counsels about challenging the sovereignty of nobles and churchmen. They believed, according to the chronicler of St. Denis, “that the government would be better directed by them than by their natural lords.” Whether this revolutionary sentiment was in fact in the minds of the people or only feared to be by the chronicler, it was certainly in the air.

When the frightened government confirmed abolition next day, the relief was all too quick. In a frenzy of triumph and unspent wrath, the people rushed to rob and assault the Jews, the one section of society upon whom the poor could safely vent their aggression. The assault was instigated, it was said, by certain nobles in the crowd who saw a way of wiping out their debts. While some of the crowd raced through the city to seize tax coffers and destroy the registers, the main body, with nobles participating, rampaged through the Jewish quarter to cries of
“Noël! Noël!”
(referring to the birthday of Christ). They broke down doors, looted goods and documents, carried off valuables, pursued Jews through the streets to throw those they could catch into the river, and seized numbers of children for forced baptism. Most of
the Jews fled for refuge to the dungeons of the Châtelet, but ten bodies, including a rabbi’s, were recovered after the carnage. The pogroms spread to Chartres, Senlis, and other cities. As the symptom of a disturbed society, the persecutions continued off and on over the next decade until the crown was forced to decree yet another expulsion of the Jews in 1394.