A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [117]
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