A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [114]
Their corpses were dragged to the courtyard of the palace and left there for all to see while Marcel hurried to the Place de Grève, where he addressed the crowd from a window of the city hall, asking their endorsement of his deed. It had been done, he said, for the good of the kingdom and the removal of “false, wicked, and traitorous” knights. With one voice the mob shouted its approval and its adherence to the Provost “through life and death.” Marcel promptly returned to the palace to present the Dauphin with that ever-justifying formula: the deed had been done “by the will of the people.” The prince, he said, must show himself at one with the people by ratifying the act and pardoning everyone concerned.
“Grieving and dumbfounded,” the Dauphin could read the warning of the sprawled bodies on the pavement. He prayed to the Provost that the people of Paris might be his good friends as he was theirs, and accepted from Marcel two lengths of red-and-blue cloth to make hoods for himself and his officers.
The terrible assault virtually upon his person had been designed to intimidate the Dauphin into accepting rule by the Council of the Estates. Instead it hardened the will beneath his deceptively feeble exterior. All he could do for the moment was to send his family for safety to the nearby fortress of Meaux on the Marne and remove himself to Senlis outside the capital. Once violence had been used against the monarchy, and against the nobility in the person of the Marshals, the conflict was to turn from political struggle to open strife with a decisive shift in the balance of forces. The murder of the Marshals cost Marcel what remained of support among the nobles for reform. It convinced them that their interests lay with the crown.
In May 1358 an act of the Dauphin-Regent precipitated the ferocious uprising of the peasantry called the Jacquerie, in which Enguerrand de Coucy at eighteen was swept into an active and visible role. Intending to undercut Marcel by blockading Paris, the Regent ordered the nobles along the valleys of waterborne commerce to fortify and provision their castles. According to one version, they seized the goods of their peasants for this purpose, provoking the uprising. According to another chronicler, the Jacques rose at the instigation of Marcel, who stirred them to believe that the Regent’s order was directed against them as a prelude to new oppressions and confiscations. But the Jacques had reason enough of their own.
What was this peasant who supported the three estates on his back, this bent Atlas of the medieval world who now struck terror through the seigneurial class? Snub-nosed and rough in belted tunic and long hose, he can be seen in carved stone medallions and illuminated pages representing the twelve months, sowing from a canvas seed bag around his neck, scything hay bare-legged in summer’s heat in loose blouse and straw hat, trampling grapes in a wooden vat, shearing sheep held between his knees, herding swine in the forest, tramping through the snow in hood and sheepskin mantle with a load of firewood on his back, warming himself before a fire in a low hut in February. Alongside him in the fields the peasant woman binds sheaves wearing a skirt caught up at the belt to free her legs and a cloth head-covering instead of a hat.
Like every other group, peasants were diverse, ranging in economic level from half-savage pauper to the proprietor of fields and