A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [31]
When the confréries donated church windows or commissioned murals, choir stalls, or illuminated books, the members could take pride in being patrons of art just like the nobles and rich magnates. Through their association they could buy merit as benefactors, adopting a hospital, distributing alms and food to the poor, or undertaking the charge of certain categories—as when the grocers of Paris supported the blind and the drapers supported prisoners in the city jail. The confréries provided a context of life that was intensely sociable, with the solace and sometimes the abrasions that sociability implies.
In 1320 the misery of the rural poor in the wake of the famines burst out in a strange hysterical mass movement called the Pastoureaux, for the shepherds who started it. Though less uprooted than the urban poor, the peasant too felt oppressed by the rich and was forever struggling against the lord’s effort to grasp by one means or another more of the peasant’s product or more of his services. Cases in manor courts going back to 1250 show peasants in concerted deliberate refusal to plow the lord’s field, thresh his grain, turn his hay, or grind at his mill. Persisting year after year, despite fines and punishment, they denied bondage, disposed of land without consent, joined in bands to assault the bailiff or to rescue a fellow peasant from the stocks.
Oppression of the peasant by the landowner troubled the conscience of the time and evoked warnings. “Ye nobles are like ravening wolves,” wrote Jacques de Vitry, a 13th century author of sermons and moral tales. “Therefore shall ye howl in hell … who despoil your subjects and live on the blood and sweat of the poor.” Whatever the peasant amasses in a year, “the knight, the noble devours in an hour.” He imposes illicit taxes and heavy exactions. De Vitry warned the great not to scorn the humble or inspire their hate for “if they can aid us, they can also do us harm. You know that many serfs have killed their masters or have burned their houses.”
A prophecy current in the time of the famine foretold that the poor would rise against the powerful, overthrow the Church and an unspecified great monarchy, and after much bloodshed a new age of unity under one cross would dawn. Combining with vague talk of a new crusade and preached among the poor by an apostate monk and an unfrocked priest, the prophecy “as suddenly and unexpectedly as a storm” swept the peasants and rootless poor of northern France into a mass marching southward toward an imagined embarkation for the Holy Land. Gathering adherents and arms as they went, they stormed castles and abbeys, burned town halls and tax records, opened prisons, and when they reached the south threw themselves in concentrated assault upon the Jews.
Peasant indebtedness to Jews for loans to tide over bad times or enable the purchase of tools or a plow was of long standing. The peasants had thought the debt wiped out when Philip the Fair expelled the Jews in 1306, but his son Louis X brought them back on terms that made him a partner with a two-thirds share in the recovery of their debts. Exacerbating an old grudge, this drove the Pastoureaux, enthusiastically aided by the populace, to the slaughter of almost every Jew from Bordeaux to Albi. Despite the King’s order that the Jews be protected, local authorities could not restrain the attacks and in some cases joined them.
That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis. If the Jews were unholy, then killing and looting them was holy work. Lepers too were targets of the Pastoureaux