A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [119]
Compiègne, on the other hand, which was Cale’s major objective refused to surrender the nobles who had taken refuge there, shut its gates, and strengthened its walls. At Caen in Normandy, where the rising failed to take fire, an agitator for the Jacques, with a miniature plow pinned to his hat, toured the streets crying for sympathizers to follow him, but aroused no recruits and was later killed by three townsmen whom he had insulted.
According to letters of pardon after the event, individual bourgeois—butchers, coopers, carters, sergeants, royal officers, priests and other clerics—made themselves accomplices of the Jacques, especially in the looting of property. Even men of the gentry appear in the pardons, but whether they were moved by belief, opportunity for loot, excitement, or force majeure is uncertain. Knights, squires, and clerks accused of having led peasant bands always claimed afterward that they had been forced into service to save their necks, which may well have been true, for the Jacques felt painfully the lack of military leaders.
Their captains had little control. At Verberie a captain, on returning from a raid with a captured squire and his family, was surrounded by citizens howling death to the squire. “For god’s sake, good sirs,” the captain pleaded, “keep yourselves from such an act or you will be committing a crime.” To this man the killing of a noble was still a fearsome thing, but not to the mob, who sliced off the squire’s head on the spot.
As the rampage spread against all landowners’ estates, the Jacques, when asked why they did these things, replied “that they knew not but they saw others do it and they thought they would thus destroy all the nobles and gentry in the world and there would be none any more.” Whether or not the peasants really envisaged a world without nobles, the gentry assumed they did and felt the hot breath of annihilation. Seized by that terror the mass inspires when it overthrows authority, they sent for help from their fellows in Flanders, Hainault, and Brabant.
At a critical moment for Marcel, the rage of the Jacquerie offered him an added weapon, which he seized in a fatal choice that was to lose him the support of the propertied class. At his instigation, the estates of the hated royal councillors were made the targets of a band of Jacques organized in the environs of Paris under the command of two merchants of the capital. The properties of the King’s chamberlain, Pierre d’Orgement, and of those two inveterate peculators, Simon de Buci and Robert de Lorris, were sacked and destroyed. Breaking into the castle of Ermenonville, one of the many benefits of royal favor bestowed on Robert de Lorris, a combined force of bourgeois and Jacques cornered the owner inside. On his knees before his enemies, he was forced to take an oath to disown the “gentry and nobility” and swear loyalty to the commune of Paris.
Compromised by murder and destruction, Marcel had mounted the tiger. The royal family at Meaux was the next target of the band from Paris. Enlarged as they marched along the Marne by bands of Jacques coming from many places and by many paths, the combined group numbering “9,000” reached Meaux on June 9 “with great will to do evil.” Prospects of rape and death filled the fortress called the Market of Meaux, where the Dauphin’s wife, sister, and infant daughter with some 300 ladies and their children were guarded by a small company of lords and knights. The Mayor and magistrates of Meaux, who had sworn loyalty to the Dauphin and promised to allow no “dishonor” to his family, crumbled before the invaders. Either in fear or in welcome, the citizens opened the gates and set out tables in the streets with napkins and bread, meat and wine. On approaching a town, the marauding Jacques customarily let it be known that they expected such provisions. Pouring into the city, the fearful horde filled the streets with “savage cries” while the ladies in the fortress, say the chroniclers, trembled in anguish.
At that moment, knighthood errant galloped to the rescue in the persons