• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1635 0

of that glittering pair, the Captal de Buch and Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. Although one owed fealty to England and the other to France, they were cousins who were riding home together from a “crusade” in Prussia, where they had gone to keep themselves occupied during the truce after Poitiers. Neither was a friend of the Valois, but noble ladies in danger were every knight’s cause, and these two from the south did not share the initial paralysis of the northerners under the onslaught of the Jacques. Nor had either been involved in the shame of Poitiers. Learning of the peril at Meaux, they hastened to the relief with a company of forty lances (120 men), reaching the Market of Meaux on the same day the commoners entered the city. Connected by a bridge to the city, the fortress, surrounded by walls and towers, was situated on a strip of land between the river and a canal.

At the head of twenty-five knights in bright armor with pennants of argent and azure displaying stars and lilies and couchant lions, the Captal and the Count rode through the portcullis onto the bridge. In its narrow confines where superiority of numbers could not be mustered, the commoners unwisely chose to fight. Wielding weapons from horseback, the knights cut down their opponents, trampling them, toppling bodies into the river, forcing the rest back across the bridge, and opening the way to carnage. Despite some hard hand-to-hand fighting, the “small dark villeins poorly armed” recoiled before the lances and axes of the mailed warriors and, succumbing to terrorized retreat, were butchered. The knights charged, hacking furiously, killing the commoners like beasts, until exhausted from the slaughter.

“Several thousand” were slain, according to the chroniclers’ impossible figures, which testify nevertheless to an appalling toll. Fleeing remnants were chased through the countryside and exterminated. The knights lost but a few, one with an arrow through his eye. Their fury, growing by what it fed on, was unleashed in vengeance upon the town, which was put to pillage and flames. Houses and even churches were sacked, leaving nothing of value behind; the Mayor was hanged, many of the citizens massacred, others imprisoned, others burned inside their houses. Meaux burned for two weeks and was afterward condemned for lèse majesté and suppressed as an independent commune.

Meaux was the turning point. Gaining courage from the conquest, French nobles of the area joined in desolating the surrounding country, wreaking more damage on France, said Jean de Venette, than had the English. From there, the suppression of the Jacquerie followed, and in its train the fall of Marcel.

Charles of Navarre led the counter-action in Picardy and the Beauvais region, pushed thereto by the nobles of his party. They went to him saying that “if those who are called Jacques continue for long they will bring the gentry to nothing and destroy everything.” As one of the great nobles of the world, he must not suffer his own kind to be so reduced. Knowing that he could gain the crown, or the power he wanted, only with the support of the nobility, Charles was persuaded. With a force of several hundred including the “baron de Coussi,” he marched against the Jacques gathered at Clermont under Guillaume Cale. Cale sensibly ordered his army of several thousand to fall back upon Paris for the support and aid of the city, but the Jacques, eager for a fight, refused to obey. Cale then deployed them in the traditional three battalions, of which two, led by archers and crossbowmen, were stationed behind a line of baggage wagons. The third, of 600 horsemen poorly mounted and many without arms, was held in support.

Sounding trumpets and shouting battle cries, with tattered banners flying, the peasants faced the enemy. Surprised by this organized resistance, Navarre preferred guile and treachery. He invited Cale to parley, and upon this invitation from a king, Cale’s common sense apparently deserted him. Considering himself an opponent in war to whom the laws of chivalry applied, he went to the parley