A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [118]
Instantly the outbreak spread, gathering adherents each day to join with torches and burning brushwood in the assault upon castles and manors. They came with scythes, pitchforks, hatchets, and any kind of implement that could be made a weapon. Soon thousands—ultimately, it was said, 100,000—were engaged in attacks covering the Oise valley, the Ile de France, and closer regions of Picardy and Champagne, and raging “throughout the seigneurie of Coucy, where there were great outrages.” Before it was over more than “100” castles and manors in the territories of Coucy and Valois and the dioceses of Laon, Soissons, and Senlis were sacked and burned and more than “60” in the districts of Beauvais and Amiens.
Forming no concerted defense, the nobles at the outset panicked and fled with their families to the walled towns, leaving their homes and all their goods. The Jacques continued killing and burning “without pity or mercy like enraged dogs.” Surely, says Froissart, “never among Christians or even Saracens were such outrages committed as by these wicked people, such things as no human creature should dare think or see.” The example he cites, taken from the antecedent chronicle of Jean le Bel, tells of a knight whom the Jacques “killed and roasted on a spit before the eyes of his wife and children. Then after ten or twelve of them violated the lady they forced her to eat some of her husband’s flesh and then killed her.” Repeated over and over in subsequent accounts, this one story became the mainstay of the atrocity tales.
In registered accusations after the event, the killings amount to a total of thirty (not including the roasted knight and lady), including one “spy” who had a trial before his execution. Destruction and looting were more practiced than murder. One group of Jacques made straight for the poultry yard, seized all the chickens they could lay hold of, fished carp out of the pond, took wine from the cellars and cherries from the orchard, and gave themselves a feast at the nobles’ expense. As the insurgents organized, they supplied themselves from the castles’ stores, burning furniture and buildings when they moved on. In districts where hatred for the clergy equaled that for the nobles, the Jacques warred on the Church; the cloistered trembled in their monasteries, the secular clergy fled to refuge in the towns.
A peasant leader arose in the person of one Guillaume Karle or Cale, described as a strong, handsome Picard of natural eloquence and experience in war, which was what the Jacques most needed. He organized a council which issued orders stamped by an official seal, and appointed captains elected by each locality, and lieutenants for squads of ten. His men fashioned swords out of scythes and billhooks and improvised armor of boiled leather. Cale adopted “Montjoie!” as his battle cry and ordered banners made with the fleur-de-lys, by which the Jacques wished to show they were rising against the nobles, not the King.
Cale’s hope was to win the alliance of the towns in a joint action against the nobles; it was here that the two movements, peasant and bourgeois, came together. Few towns of the north “were not against the gentilhommes,” according to the monk of St. Denis who wrote the Chronicle of the Reigns of Jean II and Charles V, while at the same time many feared and despised the Jacques. Lesser bourgeois, however, saw the peasant rising as a common war of non-nobles against nobles and clergy. Towns like Senlis and Beauvais where the party of the red-and-blue hoods was dominant and radical, acted in solidarity with the Jacques, supplied food and opened their gates to them. Many of their citizens joined the peasant ranks. Beauvais, with the consent of mayor and magistrates, executed several nobles whom the Jacques had sent to them as prisoners. Amiens held trials condemning nobles to death in absentia.