A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [239]
When the Chancellor, Miles de Dormans, Bishop of Beauvais, informed the Estates that the King needed aids from the people, the predictable explosion came. A crowd of commoners rushed upon a meeting of merchants, who, though opposed to the aids, were not prepared to force the issue.
“Know, citizens, how you are despised!” cried a cobbler in passionate oratory to his followers. All the bitterness of the little against the great was expressed in his denunciation of the “endless greed of seigneurs” who “would take from you, if they could, even your share of daylight.” They crush the people with their exactions, more each year. “They do not wish us to breathe or to speak or to have human faces or mix with them in public places.… These men to whom we render forced homage and who feed on our substance have no other thought but to glitter with gold and jewels, to build superb palaces and invent new taxes to oppress the city.” He poured scorn on the cowardice of the merchants, citing in comparison the stalwart citizens of Ghent who at that very moment were in arms against their Count because of taxes.
If the cobbler’s eloquence was owed in part to embellishment by the Monk of St. Denis, who recorded it, that only serves to indicate the sympathy of many monastic chroniclers with the plight of the people. In his famous prophecy, the friar Jean de Roquetaillade had seen the day coming when “the worms of the earth will most cruelly devour the lions, leopards and wolves … and the little and common folk will destroy all tyrants and traitors.”
For the cobbler and his 300 companions, that day was at hand. Screaming and brandishing knives, they forced the Provost of Merchants to carry their demand for tax abolition to Anjou and the Chancellor. At the Marble Table in the palace courtyard, the Provost pleaded for a lifting of the “intolerable burden.” With “terrible shouts” the crowd confirmed his words, swearing they would pay no more but die a thousand times rather than suffer “such dishonor and shame.” These unexpected words appear frequently in the protests, as if to add the dignity of knightly formula. The poor no less than the great needed to feel themselves acting nobly.
Anjou, in smooth and soothing words of pity for the poor, promised to obtain by the next day the King’s assent to abolition of taxes. During the night the people listened to dangerous counsels about challenging the sovereignty of nobles and churchmen. They believed, according to the chronicler of St. Denis, “that the government would be better directed by them than by their natural lords.” Whether this revolutionary sentiment was in fact in the minds of the people or only feared to be by the chronicler, it was certainly in the air.
When the frightened government confirmed abolition next day, the relief was all too quick. In a frenzy of triumph and unspent wrath, the people rushed to rob and assault the Jews, the one section of society upon whom the poor could safely vent their aggression. The assault was instigated, it was said, by certain nobles in the crowd who saw a way of wiping out their debts. While some of the crowd raced through the city to seize tax coffers and destroy the registers, the main body, with nobles participating, rampaged through the Jewish quarter to cries of “Noël! Noël!” (referring to the birthday of Christ). They broke down doors, looted goods and documents, carried off valuables, pursued Jews through the streets to throw those they could catch into the river, and seized numbers of children for forced baptism. Most of the Jews fled for refuge to the dungeons of the Châtelet, but ten bodies, including a rabbi’s, were recovered after the carnage. The pogroms spread to Chartres, Senlis, and other cities. As the symptom of a disturbed society, the persecutions continued off and on over the next decade until the crown was forced to decree yet another expulsion of the Jews in 1394.
For the moment, the crown