Be sure we see him at his worst, for his chronicler, Froissart, was
somewhat intolerant of the common sort, and ever at heart a contemptor
of the mob. He thought it “_grand’ pitié et dommage quand méchantes gens
sont au-dessus des vaillants hommes_” (translate: “when the lower
classes are set above their betters”), nor deemed that any provocation
could warrant open mutiny. Yet even Froissart owns that the peasants’
rising was not without some sort of an excuse, while the Monk of St.
Denis (a liberal soul) writes: “They could no longer support the ills
which oppressed them, and seeing that their lords, far from defending
them, used them worse than their enemies, the peasants thought they had
a right to rebel, taking their vengeance into their own hands.” Here, as
nearly always in the history of France, a tacit breach of contract is
the root of revolution. Let the nobles live on their lands, defend them
in wartime, cultivate them in time of peace, and the peasants will
submit to tax, and _corvée_, to insult and injury, and scarcely murmur.
But woe to the coward, and ’ware the absentee.
After the victory of the English at Poitiers, an outburst of patriotic
anger and revolt (such as in our own days produced the Commune) brought
about the Jacquerie. The peasant was born to plough and reap, he
ploughed and reaped; the noble was made to fight and conquer; if he
fought and could not conquer--worse still if he could not fight--he was
a tare in the wheat, useless, noxious, to be cast to the burning. While
the nobles of France were captive in the English camp, the defenceless
country-sides of the North were pillaged and ruined. And the farmers
and labourers rose in their wrath, declaring that their masters
“honnissoient et trahissoient le royaume de France;” and so, says
Froissart, they passed sentence of death upon them. A certain Guillaume
Caillet led the mob; his nickname, Jacques Bonhomme, has stuck to the
French peasant ever since. Soon he had a following of a hundred thousand
men as fierce, ignorant, untrained as a hundred thousand gorillas, and
great were their excesses. Froissart can scarce contain his horror, and
still more his wonder, at the exploits of “les vilains, noirs and
petits, et très mal armés.” It is true that, at the time, most of the
men of the ruling class, of an age to fight, were absent. The Jacques
made bonfires of more than sixty castles. Three hundred ladies and
damsels--as pitiable as our own grandmothers at Delhi--escaped their
loathly embraces, and fled across country into the town of Meaux, where
they took refuge in the market. How the King of Navarre and the Count of
Foix rode across France to their relief; killing the villainous Jacques
“in great heaps, like beasts;” hunting them down, in a battue; driving
them into the Marne to drown; burning wholesale them and their villages;
and finally setting free unharmed the hapless, happy dames of
Meaux:--All this, is it not written in the chronicles of Froissart?