A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [109]
During the summer of 1357 neither the Dauphin nor the Council was able to govern effectively while both sought support from the provinces. By making a royal progress through the country to show kingship still functioning, Charles had more success than Marcel. When the Estates reconvened in April with very few nobles present, it was clear that the nobility, resenting the terms of the Grand Ordinance, was withdrawing support. The reform movement was in trouble. Outside Paris the breakdown of authority was reaching catastrophe.
Its catalyst was the brigandage of military companies spawned by the warfare of the last fifteen years. These were the Free Companies who “write sorrow on the bosom of the earth” and were to become the torment of the age. Composed of English, Welsh, and Gascons released after Poitiers by the Black Prince, as soldiers customarily were to avoid further payment, they had acquired in the Prince’s campaigns a taste for the ease and riches of plunder. Along with German mercenaries and Hainault adventurers, they gathered in groups of twenty to fifty around a captain and moved northward to operate in the area between the Seine and the Loire and between Paris and the coast. After the truce of Bordeaux they were joined by the forces of Philip of Navarre, by leftovers from the Duke of Lancaster’s forces, and by experienced Breton captains and men-at-arms, masters of the art of exploiting a region. The refrain of the chronicles, arser et piller (burning and plundering), follows their kind down the century.
The loss of the King and of so many nobles eased their opportunity. In the year after the truce they swelled, merged, organized, spread, and operated with ever more license. Seizing a castle, they would use it as a stronghold from which to exact tribute from every traveler and raid the countryside. They would spy out a good town at one or two days’ journey “and go by covert ways day and night and so enter the town unknown in the morning and set fire on some house; then they of the town would think it was done by some men of war and so fly away out of the town; and then these brigands would break up coffers and houses and rob and take what they list and fly away when they had done.”
They imposed ransoms on prosperous villages and burned the poor ones, robbed abbeys and monasteries of their stores and valuables, pillaged peasants’ barns, killed and tortured those who hid their goods or resisted ransom, not sparing the clergy or the aged, violated virgins, nuns, and mothers, abducted women as enforced camp-followers and men as servants. As the addiction took hold, they wantonly burned harvests and farm equipment and cut down trees and vines, destroying what they lived by, in actions which seem inexplicable except as a fever of the time or an exaggeration of the chroniclers.
Companies of this kind had existed since the 12th century and proliferated especially in Italy, where the nobility, more urban than elsewhere, left the profession of arms increasingly to mercenaries. Led by professional captains, the companies, sometimes numbering 2,000 to 3,000, were composed of exiles, outlaws, landless or bankrupt adventurers, Germans, Burgundians, Italians, Hungarians, Catalans, Provençals, Flemish, French, and Swiss, often splendidly equipped on horse and foot. In mid-century the outstanding captain was a renegade prior of the Knights of St. John called Fra Monreale, who maintained a council, secretaries, accountants, camp judges, and a gallows, and could command a price of 150,000 gold florins from Venice to fight Milan. In the single year of 1353 he extorted 50,000