CHAPTER 2
THE
PEASANTRY
VOX
POPULI
1358
In
these days all wars are directed against the poor labouring people and against
their goods and chattels[1].
Honoré
Bonet, The Tree of Battles
Although
it lasted just two weeks, the Jacquerie of 1358 is the best-known uprising in
French history before the Revolution of 1789. It was not only the defeat and
capture of Jean II at Poitiers in September 1356 that caused his subjects to
rebel in such numbers and so violently, but the revolt of the Jacquerie certainly
exploded out of the tumult of the Hundred Years War. The failure of the French
nobility in battle, the inability of the government to restrain the
depredations of the mercenary companies and increasing demands for taxation all
played their part in bringing about the rising. So too did the increasing price
of grain, which had been a continual concern since the Great Famine (1317–22)
had devastated much of Europe. The final straw was the behaviour of the royal
troops tasked with blockading Paris and commandeering food and supplies in and
around the city. Requisitioning without payment had been declared illegal in a
royal ordinance of the previous year, and these sorts of exactions were
resented even more than taxation. The revolt was also characterised by a growing
sense of class consciousness. Jean de Venette tells us:
In the
summer of … 1358, the peasants living near Saint-Leu-d’Essérent and Clermont in
the diocese of Beauvais, seeing the wrongs and oppression inflicted on them on
every side and seeing the nobles gave them no protection but rather oppressed
them as heavily as the enemy, rose and took up arms against the nobles of
France.[2]
If the
chronicler was correct, it is not surprising that the peasants rose in anger on
28 May 1358 in the Beauvaisis, Île de France, Picardy, Brie and Champagne.
Although primarily a rural phenomenon, the actions of the Jacques also
galvanised revolts in such cities as Amiens, Caen, Rouen, Montdidier and Meaux.
While the peasants’ demands were not clearly articulated, the rising was,
undoubtedly, a social as well as a political protest. Carefully planned, with
elected village leaders, and shaped by anti-clerical as well as
anti-aristocratic feeling, it reflected the distrust and disgust of many of the
peasantry with the nobility that could not or would not protect them from the
miseries of warfare, and, indeed, perpetrated some of its horrors[3]. In this regard the
Jacquerie has much in common with the English revolts of 1381 (the Peasants’
Revolt) and 1450 (Cade’s Rebellion)[4].
Following
the success of the Crécy–Calais expeditions, the terrible intervention of the
Black Death (1347–50) had prevented the English from taking further action.
Campaigning only recommenced in earnest in 1355 when Edward the Black Prince
led a raid from Bordeaux to Narbonne and back, devastating a great swathe of
southern France. In the following year he marched north into the Valois
heartlands. The political and personal affront to the French monarch had to be
answered and Jean II needed to put an end to the disruption and destruction
that threatened his authority and compromised his tax revenues. On 19 September
1356 he led an army against the Anglo-Gascons in battle outside Poitiers.
There, once again, English military tactics triumphed. Ten years before,
Philippe VI had been humbled at Crécy, but the political capital of this new
victory was far greater for the English since Jean himself was captured.
The
dauphin Charles (later Charles V) struggled to maintain even a vestige of
control as mercenary companies pillaged the countryside, and the political tide
even ran against him in the capital. There, in the Estates General, Etienne
Marcel, the provost of Paris, sought to limit the powers of the monarchy and to
reform the regency council. When King Jean forbade the resulting Great
Ordinance of 1357, Marcel took up arms against the dauphin and allied with
Charles ‘the Bad’ of Navarre, who took the opportunity to exploit the chaos in
France to further his own political ambitions. What developed was little short
of anarchy, and the breakdown of central authority seemed complete when a
peasant revolt known as the Jacquerie (named after Jacques Bonhomme, the
supposed leader of the peasant rebels) broke out in May 1358.
The
two-week revolt was, by all accounts, appallingly violent. Jean Froissart
provides an especially vivid description of the uprising, one that suggests the
peasantry had become so brutal they were barely human:
They
[the peasants] said that the nobility of France, knights and squires, were
disgracing and betraying the realm … They had no leaders [and] pillaged and
burned everything and violated and killed all the ladies and girls without
mercy like mad dogs. Their barbarous acts were worse than anything that ever
took place between Christians and Saracens … They killed a knight, put him on a
spit, and turned him at the fire before the lady and her children. After about
a dozen of them had violated the lady, they tried to force her and the children
to eat the knight’s flesh before putting them cruelly to death[5].
Such
extreme accounts – and there were others – may well have been distorted for
aristocratic and clerical audiences aghast at the implications of social
upheaval. This is something common to many if not all of the revolts that
wracked Europe in the later fourteenth century. As a consequence, it is
difficult to find an authentic ‘voice of the people’ in these periods of acute
social and political tension[6]. The peasants
themselves left few written records and almost all the accounts of revolts such
as the Jacquerie were written by those virulently opposed to the rebels’
objectives. The picture is complicated further because the lot of the peasantry
has been used by successive historians as a cipher for the political concerns
of their own times. This is particularly the case in France. For Jules
Michelet, one of the most celebrated of nineteenth-century French historians,
the leaders of the Jacquerie, like Joan of Arc subsequently, embodied the
innate character of the French people who would eventually seize political
power in the Revolution of 1789 and so give birth to a new nation. Then, in
more recent times, a number of the Annalistes (members of the
Annales School of historians), and others writing during and in the aftermath
of the Second World War, described the raiding and occupation of Mother France
in the Hundred Years War in terms scarred by and deeply reminiscent of more
recent attacks[7]. Descriptions
of the peasantry, therefore, during the war and subsequently, tend to be shaped
by distinctive agendas. Nonetheless, there is much that can be learned about
their experience during the Hundred Years War. The conflict saw this lowliest
section of society undergoing enormous change. While, undoubtedly, a horrific
time for peasants who were deliberately targeted for attack, the war gave the
group a new sense of identity and political awareness, and their position in
the hierarchies of both France and England altered radically.
Even
if the accounts of Froissart and his fellow chroniclers were exaggerated, there
is little doubt that the various peasant revolts that took place during the
Hundred Years War were often terrible (and terribly violent) episodes, and it
is tempting to imagine the French peasantry as completely brutalised by the
experience of such a long conflict. There is no doubt whatsoever that the
French peasant and his fellows suffered greatly after 1337. As the target of
deliberate English raiding tactics (the chevauchée – the
Englishblitzkrieg), and subject to ever-higher levels of taxation, the
war heaped great privations on a group that had barely recovered from the Great
Famine when war began, and its members were soon subjected to the inexplicable
terrors and unprecedented mortality of the Black Death (1347–50, 1360–61, with
further outbreaks thereafter). Unlike accounts of peasant revolts, a number of
authors recorded the impact of these events sympathetically. Writers as diverse
as Jean de Venette, Honoré Bonet, Alain Chartier and Jean Gerson also lamented
the depredations that troops on both sides inflicted in the Hundred Years War.
Christine de Pizan declared furiously:
The
soldiers should not pillage and despoil the country like they do in France
nowadays [c.1406] when in other countries they dare not do so. It is a great
mischief and perversion of law when those who are intended for the defence of
the people, pillage, rob, and so cruelly, that truly short of killing them or
setting their houses on fire, their enemies could do no worse[8].
Their
enemies, of course, could and did do worse; killing and
burning became terrifyingly mundane. Fear, devastation, raiding, looting and
perhaps rape had been and remained commonplace weapons of war, despite
spiritual and chivalric injunctions and those ordinances successive English
kings promulgated to restrain their armies’ excesses. Military decrees of this
sort were issued throughout the Hundred Years War, beginning in Edward III’s
reign, and they took on a detailed form in 1385. They aimed, primarily, to
safeguard church property and stop acts of sacrilege, but some also afforded at
least theoretical protection to certain non-combatants such as clergymen
(unless they had weapons), women, children, and sometimes unarmed male
labourers. Some attempts were also made to regulate the theft of foodstuffs
from the native population and to ban the burning and wasting of an area[9]. In some (rare)
circumstances such efforts did reduce levels of brutality – after all it might
be considered impolitic to devastate the land and property of those whose
loyalty one courted. More often, however, the peasantry suffered, and their
suffering was a matter of policy and planning. The Black Prince, Henry V and
others among the most celebrated examples of English chivalry made their
reputations through just such acts of calculated devastation. The Black Prince,
blooded in the devastation of the raid before Crécy, orchestrated the hugely
effective and calamitous grande chevauchée of 1355. And while
Henry V tried to restrict looting from churches – famously, he had an English
soldier executed for stealing a pyx (a container for the consecrated host) – he
clearly recognised the military value of burning, looting, and the widespread
destruction of property[10].
Given
such circumstances it is not surprising that a French peasant might feel
aggrieved when his lord, to whom he offered service in return for land,
security and justice, could not or would not protect him. The series of revolts
that shook Europe in the fourteenth century show the peasantry’s growing
willingness to take direct action against those they believed to have failed in
their duties. In both France and England, on several occasions throughout the
war, the wrath of the peasantry was directed against those they believed had
failed militarily. The Jacquerie was one such response, while the Peasants’
Revolt was directed at those seen as mismanaging the English war effort in
1381; and Cade’s Rebellion reflected the disgust of some of the peasantry with
the humiliating debacle of the loss of Normandy (1450). Together such revolts
indicate the changing complexion, attitudes and expectations of the peasantry
shaped by more than a century of near constant warfare.
The
impact of the Hundred Years War on the peasantry was direct and often
shattering. The consequences of war, however, were far from uniform.
Inevitably, the peasantry did not all experience the war alike: its members
were so numerous and lived in such diverse circumstances. The French peasantry
bore the brunt of the struggle – sieges, burning, raiding, etc. – although
those in England who lived on the south coast, the Scottish border and, for a
brief time, along the Welsh Marches also suffered. The peasantry’s experience
of war also varied as the struggle unfolded: military pressures increased in
some areas and waned in others, differing widely between regions and nations.
Peasants
comprised the vast majority of the populations of France and England – about 90
per cent in both cases. Accurate population figures are in short supply and
difficult to interpret when available; however, it appears that on the eve of
the Black Death, France was home to about 16–20 million people spread among
some forty thousand rural communities. This is a particularly high total
considering that the number had only returned to a comparable level by the
early nineteenth century (26.5 million souls lived in rural France in 1846),
and it was more than three times the total population of England and Wales in
about 1347 (approximately 4 million people)[11].
Within
France, the experience of war was determined chiefly by one’s location.
Geographically and topographically the country divided into four main zones.
The first and most populous of these (containing approximately 30 per cent of
the population) lay in northern France, between the River Loire and Flanders
(south to north), and upper Normandy and Burgundy (west to east). It was open
country (the Plat Pays), dominated economically by Paris and
agriculturally by wheat production with some viticulture. The second zone, in
the west, consisted of lower Normandy, Brittany, Anjou and Maine – accounting
for about 25 per cent of the population. This was hillier country, less fertile
and dotted with isolated hamlets and small villages. Mediterranean France
(Languedoc, Provence and Gascony) formed the third zone, which was nearly as
heavily populated as the Parisian Basin. The climate with its hot, dry summers
meant grapes, olives and fruit could be grown, but little wheat. The fourth
zone consisted of large areas ill-suited to permanent cultivation and occupation,
including mountainous regions such as the Pyrenees and the Alps, but which
could be used, in some parts, for pasture or forestry. These regions were
populated only temporarily and subject to regular cycles of migration[12].
France
did not only have clear regional distinctions, it was also a country of
astonishing social, cultural and political diversity. Indeed, the striking lack
of uniformity in later medieval France determined Valois policy. The French
monarchy fought the Hundred Years War, in part, to enforce a greater measure of
consistency, governmental and cultural, over its disparate territories.
Internal divisions as well as English territorial interests led to inherent
tensions and conflicting loyalties. Cultural diversity was particularly apparent
with regard to language: there were wide variations in regional dialects and
also a broad distinction between the langue d’oc, spoken in the
south, and the northern langue d’oïl.[13] Legal traditions
also varied widely throughout the country, as did seigneurial rights and
demands. Rents differed considerably, as did the conditions by which land was
held and leased. These conditions shifted over the period of the war, as did
the status of the peasants themselves, many of whom gradually freed themselves
from traditional manorial restrictions.
In
England there were similar disparities: the country was divided between urban
and rural areas, and upland and lowland zones. Upland zones, typically, were
characterised by rough pasture and woodland with dispersed and isolated
settlements. Lowland England was home to nucleated villages surrounded by open
fields. There was also considerable disparity between the people who lived and
farmed in late medieval England: unfree villein tenants who owed labour
services to their lord of two to four days a week worked alongside hired
freemen. In the late thirteenth century unfree villeins constituted about
three-fifths of the rural population. At that time, as in France, when the
population was at its height the most important distinction was not between
free and unfree but simply between those who had sufficient land for
subsistence and those who did not. In England serfdom became increasingly rare
after the Black Death. Endemic plague encouraged its decline, although relations
between lords and peasants remained strained. For much of the period of the
Hundred Years War both sides were locked in a cold and not-so-cold war over
working conditions and tenurial obligations[14].
In
France, serfdom also remained predominantly a rural phenomenon characterised by
the requirement to perform various labour services for a lord who exercised a
high degree of social and legal authority over his peasants. He could, for
example, control his serfs’ marriages, and he had the right to dispose of their
property as he saw fit if no heir existed. To be a serf in France also meant
that one bore a heavy burden of taxation. However, by the time the Hundred
Years War began serfdom had already disappeared from many parts of the country.
Increasingly lords sold charters of freedom to their serfs in an effort to deal
with changing economic conditions and maintain their own diminishing incomes[15].
The
Black Death encouraged this process: alongside the Hundred Years War, plague
caused something of a social and economic revolution that bettered the lot of
many of those peasants who survived it. The structure, economic prospects and
social status of the peasantry were reshaped, improving conditions over the
long term, broadly speaking. In addition, a much keener political awareness
developed among the group, brought about by a closer engagement with national
issues of which war was the most important. Such developments meant that those
who survived war and plague usually found themselves in a somewhat easier
situation than their predecessors. During the war, however, there were more
immediate priorities – military depredations, the breakdown of law and order,
the depopulation of towns and villages, the desecration and desertion of
religious communities. The descriptions of such events fill the pages of French
and English chronicles. Jean de Venette felt deeply for the plight of the
peasantry and was clearly appalled by the horrific impact of the war. In 1358
he described conditions in the following terms:
Losses
and injuries were inflicted by friend and foe alike upon the rural population
and upon monasteries standing in the open country. Everyone robbed them of
their goods and there was no one to defend them. For this reason many men and
women, both secular and religious were compelled on all sides to leave their
abode and seek out the city … there was not a monastery in the neighbourhood of
Paris, however near, that was not driven by fear of freebooters to enter the
city or some other fortification, abandoning their buildings and, ‘Woe is me!’
leaving the divine offices unsung. This tribulation increased in volume, not
only around Paris but also in the neighbourhood of Orléans, Tours, Nantes in
Brittany, Chartres, and Le Mans, in an amazing way. Villages were burned and their
population plundered. Men hastened to the cities with their carts and their
goods, their wives and their children, in lamentable fashion[16].
This
litany of devastation was not mere hyperbole on the author’s part. Petrarch,
Honoré Bonet, Thomas Basin and many others wrote sometimes in anger, sometimes
in despair, about the terrible effects of the war. Letters of remission and
taxation accounts provide stark evidence of a country ravaged by English chevauchées,
mercenary attacks and destroyed by a predatory aristocracy. But the impact of
the war was far from uniform. While chevauchées could be very
wide-ranging, other forms of military action tended to be regional and
restricted. Some parts of France suffered repeated assault, others were
attacked only rarely, and there might be considerable variation within a small
area. Consequently, while the impact of war was felt keenly, for example in the
plains of northern and northwestern France and in the Agenais and Quercy, Béarn
in the Pyrenees and Alsace in the east were virtually unharmed[17]. Nonetheless,
because of the political complexity of the period, which saw disputes not only
between France and England, but also between the houses of Valois, Navarre and
Brittany, Armagnac and Foix, Orléans and Burgundy, few areas were completely
untouched and the results were often horrendous. About eight years after the
war ended, Thomas Basin noted:
From
the Loire to the Seine, and from there to the River Somme, nearly all the
fields were left for a long time, for many years, not merely untended but
without people to cultivate them, except for rare patches of land, because the
peasants had been killed or fled[18].
Such
comprehensive destruction threatened not only the peasantry directly but the
institutional support systems that Church and State traditionally provided and
on which the people relied. At times almsgiving, trade, and the economy almost
completely collapsed and they were often severely compromised. Refugees became
a common sight, seeking protection in towns and cities; others took to
brigandage, preying on their neighbours as they themselves had been preyed upon[19]. This social and
economic dislocation was a chief aim of English military policy in the years
leading to the Jacquerie. A succession of English chevauchées during
Edward III’s reign was designed to undermine the legitimacy of the Valois
monarchy by proving Philippe VI and Jean II could not protect their people,
while at the same time preventing them from doing so by reducing their ability
to raise troops and taxes.
As
this suggests, the peasantry played a direct role in sustaining the war effort,
which was another reason its members were targeted specifically. Because of the
connection between taxation (paid chiefly by the peasantry in France) and
military defence, the status of ‘non-combatants’ became very uncertain. By
attacking taxpayers the English attacked French military resources. In the same
way attacks on the French clergy struck at the spiritual and sometimes material
support they provided for the war effort. Furthermore, as the war became a
consciously ‘national’ struggle there were fewer reasons why non-combatants
should be immune from its effects[20].
This
policy and its brutally sophisticated implementation are clear from a letter
written in 1355 by Sir John Wingfield, who held the office of ‘governor of the
prince’s business’ – he was responsible for the finances of Edward the Black
Prince:
It
seems certain that since the war against the French king began, there has never
been such destruction in a region as in this raid. For the countryside and
towns which have been destroyed … produced more revenue for the king of France
in aid of his war than half his kingdom … as I could prove from authentic
documents found in various towns in the tax-collectors’ houses[21].
Wingfield
wrote in the aftermath of the so-called grande chevauchée. In the
course of a single raid, an army of around 6,000 soldiers destroyed 500
settlements of various sorts – villages, castles, towns, hamlets – and
devastated up to 18,000 square kilometres of territory[22]. The Black Prince
was not content, however, merely to witness the destruction; he wished to
assess the extent of the financial damage precisely, and so he brought
officials such as Wingfield with him to calculate the exact cost to the French
Treasury.
The
psychological cost of this sort of raiding, the fear and insecurity it surely
engendered, is (and was) more difficult to measure. In France as the war drew
on, the ringing of church bells might as easily mean an impending attack as a
call to prayer. The conflict affected daily lives and working practices almost
constantly in some areas. According to Thomas Basin, during the 1430s, when the
mercenaries known as écorcheurs (literally skinners or
flayers) were at their most pernicious, farm labourers had to work in an area
within earshot of a trumpeter placed on a lookout point so they could run to
safety if necessary[23]. Such a measure was
one of many responses to a potential assault. When soldiers of whatever sort
approached a settlement, some communities would flee almost in their entirety.
They might seek refuge in woods or caves, perhaps where a site had been
prepared. These might just involve makeshift huts and were only a short-term
solution. Others were much more substantial dwellings. Some were subterranean,
some extended into quarries; others were tunnelled beneath villages. Many of
these were constructed in the chaotic period after the battle of Poitiers in
1356. Some were extremely extensive and highly defensible. The typical souterrains-refuge consisted
of a long central corridor, approximately two and a half metres high and wide
with chambers radiating from it. The refuge beneath the village of Naours
(Somme) was remarkable and consisted of 2,000 metres of corridor with 300 chambers
and six ventilation shafts running to the surface[24]. Alternatively
one might flee to a royal or seigneurial castle, perhaps bringing along goods
and livestock. This, however, was rarely a viable option for an extended period
of time as refugees placed great pressure on space and supplies. Such actions
also meant abandoning one’s crops, which could prove fatal in the longer term
or when winter arrived.
In
order to stay close to home many communities fortified their villages: some
built walls, others used a monastery, mill or, most commonly, the parish church
as a centre of defence. A church offered various advantages as a defensive
structure. It was, typically, a stout building, and it benefited from
protection by canon law: to attack it was an act of sacrilege, although this
rarely served as an effective deterrent. A church might also have a bell-tower,
which allowed the villagers to keep a look-out and warn of approaching
soldiers. Sometimes churches were fortified with a lord’s assistance, sometimes
villagers acted independently.
The
situation at Vitry is representative of many communities. In August 1354 the
town’s parishioners petitioned the captain-general of Auxerre for the right to
fortify their church. They had, they said, been reduced to ‘wretched poverty by
the wars of the king of England and by the enemies who daily come and go
through [their] village robbing, injuring and laying waste’[25]. They had also been
forced to pay patis(protection money) to one William Starkey, the
captain of Ligny-le-Châtel, and they had been plundered by French garrisons,
including those from Auxerre. When granted permission they fortified the church
with four towers, a curtain-wall and two moats, which allowed them to beat off
a mercenary attack in 1369.
This
sort of community action did, however, acquire dangerous connotations after the
revolt of the Jacquerie in 1358, and it might be opposed, for other reasons, by
ecclesiastical authorities, the local aristocracy and the French Crown, which
sought to maintain a monopoly on the right to construct fortresses. Objections
were raised about the ‘profane’ role churches were required to play as well as
to the diversion of manpower from the protection of seigneurial castles. Few
fortifications were demolished, however, even though fines were often demanded
when they had been constructed without licence[26].
In
some cases the peasantry were given an alternative to flight or assault.
Communities might choose, if given the opportunity, to pay patis to
mercenary forces or regular troops (French, English and Armagnac and Burgundian
during the civil war). This, in theory, allowed daily life and farming to
continue without too much disruption. During the Agincourt campaign, Henry V
demanded ransoms from small villages as he rode from Harfleur to what proved to
be the battlefield: if payment was not forthcoming they were ‘to be set on fire
and utterly destroyed’[27]. The scale of appatisation in
France was very considerable at certain times, especially in those areas, often
near political frontiers, where villages and communities could be paying patis to
several different ‘protectors’ simultaneously. In Brittany in the 1340s and
1350s it has been estimated that revenue from patis paid 85
per cent of the costs of the principal English garrisons[28]. Even large
communities were not safe. The city of Reims was compelled to pay 300livres
tournois to a mercenary company in 1437, ‘so as to be spared the
pillaging and robbery which [Captain Guillaume de Flavy and] his men from
Nesles might have carried out upon this city and the surrounding countryside
during the months of July, August and September 1437’[29].
Those
who did not or could not find shelter or buy off their assailants were
particularly vulnerable to attack and their plight was recounted in various
works. The pastourelle, for example, was a literary form often used
in this period to rail against war by showing its terrible impact on rural
people. Some of these, known as bergerie, focus specifically on
shepherds and shepherdesses often because of their biblical and classical
connotations. One such work, the Pastoralet, written soon after
1422 by an author known only as Bucarius, describes the devastation inflicted
during the Armagnac-Burgundian civil war. In this allegorical and rabidly
anti-Burgundian work, France, which should have been a bucolic paradise,
becomes, instead, reminiscent of Hell – shepherdesses are raped, the
countryside is desecrated and shepherds are slaughtered. ‘There in the dung,
without a bed, were the dead sleeping, one on top of the other, in piles … Many
noble shepherdesses were left alone without their lovers … So many heads cut
off, so many feet, fists, so many arms without hands. I think there never was
so much shedding of human blood nor a slaughter more cruel.’[30]
When
English strategy changed in the fifteenth century and raiding was replaced, in
part at least, by a programme of direct conquest, the French people had to face
different challenges. Sieges, of course, had been far from unknown in earlier
stages of the war; in many ways they serve as a leitmotif of the struggle:
Calais (1346–7), Reims (1359) and Limoges (1370) were particularly noteworthy
for political reasons. The Black Prince’s siege (sack) of Limoges has also
become, in some circles, a byword for violence disproportionate even by the lax
standards of the fourteenth century. The event took place after the resumption
of the war in 1369 when the city renounced its allegiance to England and Edward
III. His response is said to have been excessively brutal, although such a
conclusion depends, almost exclusively, on Froissart’s account of the event. He
wrote that after mining the town walls the Prince’s Anglo-Gascon army entered
the city
in a
mood to wreak havoc and do murder, killing indiscriminately, for those were
their orders. There were pitiful scenes. Men, women and children flung
themselves on their knees before the Prince, crying: ‘Have mercy on us gentle
sir!’ But he was so inflamed with anger [at their ‘treachery’] that he would
not listen. Neither man nor woman was heeded, but all who could be found were
put to the sword[31].
Froissart
suggested that three thousand were killed in the ensuing massacre, but the lack
of comment from local chroniclers implies the sack was not unusually savage[32].
Whatever
really took place at Limoges, the increasing frequency of sieges, brought about
by changes in military strategy and advances in gunpowder artillery, had
terrible implications for non-combatants, both those in a besieged town and
those who lived in its vicinity. During a siege the line differentiating
combatants from non-combatants became even more blurred than usual. If one
assisted by dowsing fires, or bringing food, water or supplies to the garrison,
and so helped to defend a town, was one really a non-combatant? Furthermore,
the ‘laws of war’, based in part on biblical authorities, decreed that if a
town or city resisted attack but eventually fell to a besieging army, then the
defenders had no rights to mercy[33]. Deuteronomy
20:10–154 was unequivocal in its instructions to military commanders:
When
you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they
accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced
labour and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you
in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your
hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the
livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for
yourselves.
Given
this, when Harfleur was captured in September 1415 after a month’s siege, Henry
V could be said to have acted with considerable restraint. As at Caen later, he
merely expelled the inhabitants. Because he claimed to be king of France he
could not treat the French people as if they were his enemy; however, from his
perspective, in resisting their true lord the people of Harfleur were rebels
who had to be punished with the confiscation of property and expulsion from the
city[34]. As one would
expect, English accounts of the event focus on the king’s mercy:
The
king of England entered Harfleur on 21 September [1415] and emptied it of all
women, children and priests of the town, and had each of them given 10 sous
parisis, and had it cried by sound of the trumpet that at the king’s command no
one should do anything to women or to the others under pain of death. But as
soon as the women were some way from the town the French pillaged them and
violated them to a great degree[35].
French
accounts, by contrast, dwell on the humanitarian tragedy:
Also
driven out of the town were a large number of women with their children. They
were left with only five sous and some of their clothing. It was such a piteous
thing to see the sorrow and lamentations … All the priests and men of the
church were also dismissed[36].
If the
situation at Harfleur was piteous, then what unfolded at Rouen during the siege
of 1418–19 was horrific and a clear demonstration of the vile possibilities of
siege warfare. By the time King Henry reached the city it was filled with
refugees who had fled before the advancing English army. Many of these then
tried to escape when it became clear the city would be besieged. Henry,
however, sealed Rouen completely. Partly to keep people in and partly to
protect his army from attack the king had a bank, ditch and other defences
constructed. He barricaded the River Seine to prevent supplies reaching the
city while using it himself to bring in provisions and reinforcements. Within
Rouen the blockade soon began to bite: food became scarce, many died, disease
spread. Then, as supplies became ever more limited, the town’s authorities took
the painful decision to expel the old, infirm and others who could not
contribute to the defence. They were driven out of the city, into the
no-man’s-land between the walls and the English defences. Henry would not let
them pass, the townsfolk would not let them return. The events were described
in verse by an English soldier, John Page:
Thenn
with yn a lytylle space,
The
poore pepylle of that place,
At
every gate they were put oute
Many a
hundryd in a route;
That
hyt was pytte hem to see
Wemme[n]
come knelyng on hyr kne,
With
hyr chyldryn in hyr armys,
To
socoure them from harmys;
Olde
men knelynge them by
And
made a dolfulle cry.
And
alle they sayden at onys thenne,
‘Have
marcy uppon us, ye Englysche men.’
The
people of Rouen could not feed them; nor would the English. Most starved,
slowly.
As the
siege entered the new year, conditions within Rouen deteriorated still further.
Prices had long been exorbitant; now there was hardly anything left to buy and
the people were forced to eat vermin. Page reported: ‘They ate up dogs, they
ate up cats, they ate up mice, horses and rats.’ A cat cost two nobles, a mouse
sixpence, a rat 30 pennies. There was talk of cannibalism:
They
etete doggys, they ete cattys;
They
ete mysse, horse and rattys.
For an
hors quarter, lenc or fatte,
At C
s. hyt was atte.
A
horsse hedde for halfe a pound;
A
dogge for [th]e same mony round;
For
xxxd. went a ratte.
For ij
noblys went a catte.
For vj
d. went a mous.
Henry
V offered the people of Rouen a stark choice – death or surrender. When it
became clear that they could expect no help from outside, the citizens of the
town chose to live; they agreed to pay a fine of £50,000 and handed over 80
hostages. Henry entered the Norman capital on 19 January 1419; when the news
reached England there was singing and dancing in the streets of London[37].
The
atrocities of war were, therefore, brought home to urban and rural communities
in France with horrible regularity. The English peasantry was subjected to far
less frequent assault, but even so, attacks, real or merely threatened,
sometimes engendered almost palpable tension. In 1336, before the war even
began formally, a naval raid on the Isle of Wight raised fears of invasion and
led to the widespread implementation of defensive measures. Coastal attacks by
French vessels then began in earnest: in March 1338 Portsmouth was plundered
and burned – only the parish church remained standing; the Channel Islands were
raided in the same year; then in October, French, Genoese and Castilian galleys
attacked Southampton in a raid that destroyed between 40 and 50 per cent of the
town’s buildings. French and French-allied assaults on English coastal towns
continued throughout much of the fourteenth century: in 1340 the Isle of Wight
and the Dorset coast came under attack; Portsmouth was raided once more in
1342, and again in 1351 and 1370; in 1360 the French turned on Winchelsea; and
in 1377 they besieged Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. Then in 1385–86
terror gripped the country as the French admiral Jean de Vienne mustered an
invasion force: ‘rumours spread … greatly alarming the inhabitants … All over
the country … religious processions were instituted … and observed in a spirit
of deep devotion and contrition. Prayers were offered to God to deliver them
from this peril.’[38] It appeared that
‘there was no hope of safety, all began to be afraid, not only the common
people but also the knights themselves who had been brave, trained soldiers
full of spirit but were now timid, womanly and spiritless. And they began to
talk not about resistance and fighting but about escape and surrender.’[39]
As it
proved, on this occasion the main threat to the peasantry came not from the
French but from their own soldiers. Troops, mustered to protect against the
invasion, plundered the countryside when their pay ran out. Henry Knighton
recounted an event in Leicestershire when a farmer beat a soldier who had tried
to steal one of his horses. The soldier returned, Knighton said, with 140 of
his companions – Cheshire archers – who intended to kill the farmer and burn
the village. The inhabitants were forced to pay them £10 to make them leave. It
was, essentially, a demand for patismade by English soldiers,
exploiting the English peasantry.[40]
The
Hundred Years War was, therefore, generally a dreadful time for the peasantry,
however, the period also witnessed a transformation in the legal and social
status of peasants that was far from negative. War was not the only factor that
brought about this change: natural disasters – climatic, agricultural and
biological – contributed to and compounded earlier and ongoing developments in
social, tenurial, political and seigneurial structures. Somewhat perversely,
misery was the catalyst for an improvement in the peasantry’s way of life. A
series of agricultural crises in the early years of the fourteenth century,
which led to the Great Famine, accelerated the process. Climatic pressures returned
in England in the 1330s and 1340s when flooding seems to have been a constant
problem, and a hugely destructive tidal surge of the Wash took place in 1338.
Marginal land was abandoned, and cereal production declined significantly,
although the reduction in population size meant the price of many agricultural
products fell. After 1337 endemic warfare added new burdens in the form of
assault and taxation. Agricultural decline and the limited success of Edward
III’s first campaign meant that tax collectors in 1340–41 faced a deluge of
complaints.[41] Then,
in an event that seemed to foreshadow the Apocalypse, the Black Death struck,
first in 1347–50 and again at irregular intervals, albeit less virulently for
the rest of the century and beyond.
It is
likely that the populations of England and France fell by about 50 per cent in
the years between 1300 and 1400. However, the consequences of this series of
natural and man-made disasters were not entirely negative. Depopulation meant
that the coercive powers of landlords diminished, villeinage declined further
and the demand for labour services reduced. As traditional seigneurial powers
decayed, wage rates escalated and prices fell. Landlords undertook less direct
management of their land and rented out larger areas to the peasantry[42]. This led to a
redistribution of wealth and what was for some an uncomfortable blurring of
social boundaries. In 1422 Alain Chartier blustered, but with real concern,
that the wealth of the common people
is as
a cistern which hath gathered and still gathers the waters of all the riches of
this realm [France], for the coffers of the nobles and of the clergy are
greatly diminished through the continuing of the war … [Daily] they [the
peasantry] heap up riches and now they have in their possession our chattels
and goods. And yet they cry against us and blame us that we do not fight at any
time, they would not fear to put into hazard without reason and order all the
nobility of the realm. For they would have noble blood given up cheaply, and
when all is lost, then will they weep later.[43]
Similarly,
towards the end of the war, in 1445, Jean Juvénal des Ursins (1388–1473) wrote:
‘No one is poor nowadays except the clergy and the gentlemen.’[44] This, of course, was
a great exaggeration, but those who survived famine, plague and war did gain
something: their scarcity in a new world made them valuable. Legislation
introduced in England in an almost immediate response to the Black Death is
indicative of the ruling class’s fear of the implications of the great
mortality. The Ordinance (1349) and statute (1351) of Labourers were desperate
attempts to buttress the socio-economic status quo, because as early as 1348
peasants were leaving their manors and offering their services to the highest
bidder. The 1351 statute was designed to prevent this wilful disruption of the
proper order and what the Crown described as the ‘malice of servants’.[45] However, at the same
time as the ‘life chances’ of these malicious peasants were being restricted,
they were also being called upon to support king and country perhaps in battle
and certainly with taxation. As the targets of propaganda they became, in a
sense, investors in national policy and, as a result, increasingly
‘politicised’.
Consequently,
as the war evolved so too did the political awareness of the English peasantry.
Peasants became acutely aware of the government’s political failings,
especially its failures in the war, and they demanded redress for these.
Similarly in France, the failure of the nobility in battle caused outrage and
there was considerable opposition to demands for taxation. This continued even
when the political tide had clearly turned in the Valois’ favour: the
obligation to provide money, let alone food and lodging, for soldiers, caused a
great deal of resentment and often violence. Resistance was particularly
virulent in the 1440s to the taxes demanded to support Charles VII’s compagnies
d’ordonnance.[46]
The
combination of growing political awareness, dissatisfaction with the
limitations placed on social mobility, governmental and aristocratic corruption
(or perceived corruption), and, in particular, the growing tax burden, often
led to violence and in some notable cases to outright revolt. In both France
and England the economic pressures brought by military action, especially when
it was unsuccessful, were deeply unpopular. The requisitioning of goods was
particularly loathed. In England purveyance, particularly for the royal
household, had long been a cause of disaffection and it grew to new heights
when the Hundred Years War began. Although peasants could expect to be
compensated for their goods, payment was rarely swift and it tended to be set
at an arbitrarily low level.[47]
As in
France, the Hundred Years War caused the most significant and dangerous peasant
revolt of the Middle Ages in England. When the treaty of Brétigny (1360) failed
and the war reopened in 1369, the English position collapsed and a series of
poll taxes was demanded to raise the revenue needed to defend Gascony and the
English coast. The combination of military humiliation, factionalism at court,
socio-economic disruption – a legacy of endemic plague – the fear of
Franco-Castilian raiding and the political vacuum created by Richard II’s
minority formed a lethal cocktail. The poll tax demands were deeply provocative
but also entirely understandable. Population movement and decline after 1348
meant that few communities could pay the traditional lay subsidy that had last
been assessed in 1334. Consequently, in an attempt to raise money the
chancellor, Lord Scrope instigated the first poll tax in 1377. Initially this
was charged on everyone over the age of 14 at a rate of 4d. Then, in 1379, the
age was raised to 16 and the tax applied on a sliding scale. The tax levied in
1380 (but collected in 1381) demanded 12d. from everyone over 15, but within
each village the rich were encouraged to help the poor. The tax is a clear
indication that the labour legislation had failed to control wage rises and
that it was felt that everyone should contribute to the national war effort:
the tax was bitterly resented, especially by those who had to pay for the first
time.[48]
In
addition to the (perceived) iniquity of the poll taxes, the collectors were
less than gentle in carrying out their duties. The peasants’ response was a
remarkably well coordinated campaign centred on the counties of Kent and Essex.
The rebels marched on London in June 1381, many fewer than the sixty thousand
the Anonimalle chronicler suggested but still in very
considerable numbers. The citizens of the capital who shared their grievances
opened the city gates, and for a few days in 1381 it appeared that the rebels
would take control of the city and the government. The revolt is an indication
not only of the increasing politicisation of the peasantry and their hatred of
certain socio-economic burdens, but also of their greater awareness of whom to
blame for those burdens and for the military and political failures that had
engendered them. The propaganda machine of the English state had, in some ways,
done its job too well. From the beginning of the war, the English Crown had
stressed the threat to the nation’s political and ecclesiastical hierarchy: in
1381 that threat was genuine and it came from within the nation. The rebels’
demands, articulated by their leader, Wat Tyler, were truly revolutionary:
there were, as one would expect, demands concerning wages, rents and land
ownership, but much more remarkable was a call for the disendowment of the
Church – all ecclesiastical property was to be handed over to the people; there
was to be an end to serfdom; and, most extraordinarily, an end to all lordship
save that of the king.[49]
The
revolt failed, mainly because of the actions of the young Richard II who
defused the potentially disastrous tension in a series of famous meetings with
the rebels, and then reneged on his agreements with them. But the rebels did
execute, gruesomely, a number of eminent figures, including Simon Sudbury, the
archbishop of Canterbury. John of Gaunt’s palace, the Savoy, was burned. The
rebels also broke into the Tower of London and, according to Thomas Walsingham,
into the bedchamber of the king’s mother, Joan of Kent. There they were said to
have jumped up and down on her bed and waved what the chronicler coyly described
as ‘their filthy sticks’ at her. Although a minor incident, it shows the
complete breakdown of central authority and of the barriers between social
classes.[50]
There
were similarly egalitarian impulses behind various revolts in France that
followed the Jacquerie. The Tuchinerie, a revolt that began in the late 1360s
in the upper Auvergne, spread throughout the Midi in the early 1380s. (The term
derived from tue-chiensor ‘killers of dogs’, the revolt being
comprised of men brought so low they would kill and eat dogs.) In this instance
‘class’ hatred combined with political instability, brigandage, military
oppression from garrisons and, again, increasing taxation. Groups of peasants,
soldiers and townsmen sought to exploit the situation to their best advantage,
until they were crushed by forces under the command of Jean ‘the Magnificent’,
duke of Berry, in 1384.[51]
The
political awareness of the peasantry is also evident in the Cabochien revolt,
which began in Paris on 28 April 1413. Named after one of the leaders, Simon
Caboche, it started with a mass demonstration outside the Bastille and the
capture and imprisonment of several leading government figures. Although
primarily a rising of the urban peasantry, it was also gently encouraged by
Jean the Fearless of Burgundy as part of his campaign to capture the capital
from the Armagnac faction during the civil war. In Normandy the peasantry took
similar action in 1434–36 when the English regime faced an outbreak of popular
brigandage. And even when the fortunes of war had clearly shifted in Charles
VII’s favour, revolt remained a possibility. The Lyons Rebeyne of
1436 was caused, like so many similar events, by taxation and what was seen as
government corruption and heavy-handedness. Lyons had suffered considerably in
recent years, having experienced rationing, food scarcity, unemployment and a
sharp rise in the cost of living. The Peace of Arras (21 September 1435) had
resulted in renewed mercenary activity (roaming bands of écorcheurs)
and an increasing tax burden, both taille and aides –
the latter was levied on commodities and so affected everyone.[52]
The
final English revolt of the war broke out in May 1450. Cade’s Rebellion took
the form of a protest against Henry VI’s government, unfair taxes and national
and local corruption which, the rebels said, had led to territorial losses in
France. Since the summer of 1449 the French had retaken English-held lands in
northern France with humiliating ease, and by the end of 1450 all Normandy had
capitulated.[53] The
rebellion initially took the form of a mass petition in June called the
‘Proclamation of Jack Cade’ or ‘The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent’. It
declared:
We
believe the king our sovereign lord, by the insatiable, covetous, malicious
persons that daily and nightly are about his highness, and daily inform him
that good is evil and evil is good. They say that at his pleasure our sovereign
is above his laws, and he may make them or break them as he pleases … The
contrary is true … The king’s false council has lost his law, his merchandise
is lost, his common people are destroyed, the sea is lost, France is
lost [my emphasis], the king himself is so placed that he may not pay
for his meat and drink, and he owes more than ever any King of England ought …
We desire that all extortions be laid low; [the Statute of Labourers, be
outlawed as well as the] taking of wheat and other grains, beef, mutton and
other victuals, which is an intolerable burden on the commons …[54]
The
rebels were mostly peasants but their numbers were swelled by members of the
lesser gentry, yeomen and husbandmen, and hundreds if not thousands of defeated
and disillusioned soldiers recently returned from France. These were men who
felt they had lost their livelihoods and property because of corruption or who
feared the possibility of a French attack.[55]
There
was widespread violence in Kent, and demands for the arrest of certain ‘public
traitors’. Henry VI complied – James Fiennes, Lord Saye (c.1390–1450), who had
recently been appointed Lord Treasurer, was placed in the Tower of London. In
early July, Cade crossed London Bridge and in a desperate attempt at
appeasement the king had Saye and another hated figure, William Crowmer,
sheriff of Kent, executed. Negotiations between the rebels and a delegation of
churchmen, the archbishops of Canterbury (John Stafford) and York (John Kempe),
and William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, took place in St Margaret’s
Church, Southwark. They were presented with the rebels’ petitions and offered
free royal charters of pardon in return. As in 1381 this proved sufficient to
mollify the rebels. A week after the forces disbanded, however, Cade learned
that the government still regarded him as a traitor and had issued a reward for
him dead or alive. Soon after he was mortally wounded in a skirmish near
Heathfield, East Sussex (12 July 1450); his body was taken to London and
quartered to be displayed in different cities, his preserved head set up on a
pike on London Bridge (along with those of the other leaders of the rebellion).
Cade’s
Rebellion is a further indication of the increasing politicisation of the
peasantry which the Hundred Years War brought about. The peasant rebel became
an icon of late medieval life, reviled by some, adored by others. It is no
coincidence that this period saw the first written evidence of the Robin Hood
legend. Robin emerged over the course of the Hundred Years War ‘not only as a
new sort of hero but as a hero for a new and large social group, the yeomanry
of England’.[56] Robin,
the yeoman forester, reflected one aspect of a new social order that arose out
of the confusion of war and plague; he stood on the border between the common
folk and the gentry. The changing balance of economic power had narrowed the
boundaries between classes, especially between the upper echelons of the
peasantry and the lowest ranks of the aristocracy.[57] This period of
extraordinary social unrest is reflected in the fact that the years between
1350 and 1500 were the only time before the modern era in English culture that
a commoner, not a nobleman, was a major literary hero[58]. Robin rejected the
traditional hierarchy; he stood outside the law and so represented the
aspirations of many of the 1381 and 1450 rebels. And, of course, he was armed
with a longbow, the weapon that was overturning military hierarchies on the
battlefield.
Cade’s
Rebellion also reflected the fragility of English power in France as well as
the extent to which the nation as a whole had become invested in the Hundred
Years War. Nearly a century earlier, the revolt of the Jacquerie had revealed
similar forces at work across the Channel. That uprising had marked a
particularly low point in Valois fortunes, one on which Edward III sought to
capitalise, but his campaign of 1359–60 failed in its objective to capture
Reims, the French coronation city. Instead, he brokered a truce at Brétigny
that held, in some form, until 1369. But conditions changed in the intervening
years. Charles V acceded to the French throne and proved to be an immensely
shrewd leader. When hostilities resumed, he swiftly oversaw the reconquest of
the lands surrendered in 1360. Pressure began to mount on English Gascony and
raiding resumed on the south coast of England, building towards a proposed
invasion in 1385. But the deaths of Charles the Wise and his constable,
Bertrand du Guesclin, in 1380 slowed then stalled the French advance. A change
of policy followed and the pressure declined. By this time, however, the
Hundred Years War was being fought on yet another battleground.
[1] Bonet, Tree of
Battles, 189.
[2] The Chronicle of
Jean de Venette, ed. and trans. J. Birdsall and R. A. Newhall (New York,
1953), 76.
[3] D. Bessen, ‘The
Jacquerie: Class War or Co-opted Rebellion?’, Journal of Medieval
History, 11 (1985), 43–59.
[4] N. Wright, Knights
and Peasants: The Hundred Years War in the French Countryside (Woodbridge,
1998), 84–5; P. S. Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity (London,
1968), 283–6; S. K. Cohn, Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt
in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425 (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 34–5, 220–1.
[5] Froissart:
Chroniques, ed. and trans. Brereton, 151–2. See further S. K. Cohn, Popular
Protest in Late Medieval Europe: Italy, France and Flanders (Manchester,
2004), 143.
[6] Further evidence can
be found in petitions made to the king or English Parliament (collected chiefly
in TNA SC8), and in lettres des remission which the French
king offered as pardons for a crime or failure to comply with official
instructions (found mainly in AN JJ).
[7] See, for example, R.
Boutruche, ‘The Devastation of Rural Areas during the Hundred Years War and the
Agricultural Recovery of France’, The Recovery of France in the
Fifteenth Century, ed. P. S. Lewis, trans. G. F. Martin (London, 1971),
23–59; J.-M. Tourneur-Aumont, La bataille de Poitiers (1356) et la
construction de la France(Poitiers, 1943). The Annalistes took
their name from the scholarly journal Annales d’histoire économique et
sociale. They stressed the significance of long-term (longue durée)
historical studies and promoted the use of social scientific methods, often
emphasising social rather than political or diplomatic issues.
[8] C. de Pizan, Book
of the Body Politic, 16–17.
[9] For the 1385
ordinances and those of Henry V, usually dated to 1419, see The Black
Book of the Admiralty, ed. T. Twiss, 4 vols (London, 1871), I, 453–8;
459–72. For discussion of these see M. Keen, ‘Richard II’s Ordinances of War of
1385’, Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to
G. L. Harriss, ed. R. E. Archer and S. Walker (London, 1995), esp. 34,
37–8; A. Curry, ‘The Military Ordinances of Henry V: Texts and Contexts’, War,
Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles, ed. Given-Wilson et al.,
esp. 227.
[10] Gesta Henrici
Quinti. The Deeds of Henry the Fifth, ed. and trans. F. Taylor and J. S.
Roskell (Oxford, 1975), 69.
[11] P. Charbonnier, ‘The
Economy and Society of France in the Later Middle Ages: On the Eve of
Crisis’, France in the Later Middle Ages, ed. D. Potter (Oxford,
2003), 55; O. J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete
History (Woodbridge, 2004), 98. According to the 1334 English lay
subsidy, allowing for two exempt counties and leaving the towns aside, about
13,000 villages paid tax. These were communities of 300–400 people; both size
and number fell after the Black Death: C. Dyer, ‘The Political Life of the
Fifteenth-Century English Village’, Political Culture in Late Medieval
Britain, ed. L. Clark and C. Carpenter (Woodbridge, 2004), 139.
[12] J. Dewald and L.
Vardi, ‘The Peasantries of France, 1400–1789’, The Peasantries of
Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, ed. T. Scott
(Harlow, 1998), 22–4.
[13] G. Pépin, ‘Does a
Common Language Mean a Shared Allegiance? Language, Identity, Geography and
their Links with Polities: The Cases of Gascony and Britanny’, Contact
and Exchange in Later Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of Malcolm Vale,
ed. H. Skoda, P. Lantschner and R. L. J. Shaw (Woodbridge, 2012), 79–101.
[14] Charbonnier, ‘The
Economy and Society of France’, 57–8; G. L. Harriss, Shaping the
Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford, 2005), 209–14, 222, 227.
[15] G. Small, Late
Medieval France (Basingstoke, 2009), 59–60.
[16] Chronicle of Jean
de Venette, 75–6.
[17] Boutruche,
‘Devastation of Rural Areas’, 27–31.
[18] T. Basin, Histoire
de Charles VII, ed. C. Samaran, 2 vols (Paris, 1933, 1944), I, 84.
[19] M. Bennett, ‘The
Experience of Civilian Populations during the Hundred Years War in France,
1330–1440’, British Commission for Military History Newsletter (Spring
2009).
[20] C. T. Allmand, ‘War
and the Non-Combatant in the Middle Ages’, Medieval Warfare: A History,
ed. M. Keen (Oxford, 1999), 260–1; D. Green, ‘National Identities and the
Hundred Years War’, Fourteenth-Century England, VI, ed. C.
Given-Wilson (Woodbridge, 2010), 115–29.
[21] R. Barber, The
Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince (Woodbridge, 1979), 52.
[22] C. J. Rogers, ‘By Fire
and Sword: Bellum Hostile and “Civilians” in the Hundred Years
War’, Civilians in the Path of War, ed. M. Grimsley and C. J.
Rogers (Lincoln, NB, 2002), 69 n. 34; H. J. Hewitt, The Black Prince’s
Expedition of 1355–1357(Manchester, 1958), 72–5.
[23] This is also described
in the ‘Bergerie nouvelle, fort joyeuse et morale, de Mieulx que devant, à
quatre personnaiges, c’est assavoir: Mieulx que devant, Plat Pays, Peuple
Pensif, et la Bergière’, Ancien théâtre françois ou Collection des
ouvrages dramatiques les plus remarquables depuis les mystères jusqu’à
Corneille, ed. Viollet le Duc, 10 vols (Paris, 1854–7), III, 213–31.
[24] Wright, Knights
and Peasants, 99–102. See further A. Blanchet, Les
souterrains-refuges de la France: Contribution à l’histoire de l’habitation
humaine (Paris, 1923), 176–7.
[25] Wright, Knights
and Peasants, 106–7.
[26] M. Jones, ‘War and
Fourteenth-Century France’, Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the
Hundred Years War, ed. A. Curry and M. Hughes (Woodbridge, 1994), 108–10;
N. Wright, ‘French Peasants in the Hundred Years War’, History Today,
33 (1983), 39–42.
[27] This appears to be in
spite of the orders of 17 August that ‘under pain of death there should be no
more setting fire to places (as there had been to begin with) and that churches
and sacred buildings along with their property should be preserved intact, and
that no one should lay hands upon a woman or on a priest or servant of a
church, unless he happened to be armed, offered violence or attacked
anyone’: Gesta Henrici Quinti, 27, 61, 71.
[28] Wright, Knights
and Peasants, 77.
[29] P. Champion, Guillaume
de Flavy, capitaine de Compiègne: contribution à l’histoire de Jeanne d’Arc et
à l’étude de la vie militaire et priveée au XVe siècle(Paris, 1906), 205.
[30] Le pastoralet,
ed. J. Blanchard (Paris, 1983), sections of this work are translated in A.
Curry, The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations (Woodbridge,
2000), 351–3. See also H. Cooper, ‘Speaking for the Victim’, Writing
War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare, ed. C. Saunders, F. Le Saux
and N. Thomas (Cambridge, 2004), 213–16, 222–8.
[31] Froissart:
Chronicles, ed. and trans. Brereton, 178.
[32] P. Ducourtieux, Histoire
de Limoges (Limoges, 1925, repr. Marseille, 1975), 53, 59; D.
Green, Edward the Black Prince: Power in Medieval Europe (Harlow,
2007), 91–2; Barber, Edward, Prince of Wales and Aquitaine, 226 and
n. 23; idem, The Knight and Chivalry (Woodbridge, rev. edn,
1995), 240.
[33] S. McGlynn, By
Sword and Fire: Cruelty and Atrocity in Medieval Warfare(London, 2008),
142–3, 151; M. Keen, The Laws of War in the Late Middle Ages(London,
1965), 120–1, 124; J. Bradbury, The Medieval Siege (Woodbridge,
1992), 161.
[34] Allmand, Henry
V, 81–2, 117.
[35] ‘Chronique de
Ruisseauville’: Curry, Battle of Agincourt, 123.
[36] E. de
Monstrelet, La chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet: en deux livres,
avec pièces justificatives: 1400–1444, ed. L. Douët-d’Arcq, 6 vols (Paris,
1857); Curry, Battle of Agincourt,144. See also Gesta
Henrici Quinti, 55.
[37] The Historical
Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, ed. J.
Gairdner (London, 1876), 1–46; McGlynn, By Sword and Fire, 193–4;
Allmand, Henry V, 123–7.
[38] Froissart:
Chronicles, ed. Brereton, 306; M. Hughes, ‘The Fourteenth-Century French
Raids on Hampshire and the Isle of Wight’, Arms, Armies and
Fortifications, ed. Curry and Hughes, 125–7.
[39] Walsingham, Chronica
Maiora, ed. Preest, 226; St Albans Chronicle, I, 753.
[40] Knighton’s
Chronicle, 351.
[41] C. Dyer, Making
a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850–1520(New Haven, CT,
and London, 2002), 236–9.
[42] Boutruche,
‘Devastation of Rural Areas during the Hundred Years War’, 51. R. M. Smith,
‘The English Peasantry’, The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth
to the Eighteenth Centuries, ed. T. Scott (London, 1998), 360–1; Dyer,
‘Political Life of the Fifteenth-Century English Village’, 135–58.
[43] A. Chartier, Le
quadrilogue invectif, ed. E. Droz (Paris, rev. edn, 1950), 33–4;
Curry, Battle of Agincourt, 349.
[44] Lewis, Later
Medieval France, 280.
[45] Statutes of the
Realm, ed. A. Luders et al., 11 vols (London, 1810–28), I, 307.
[46] P. D. Solon, ‘Popular
Response to Standing Military Forces in Fifteenth-Century France’, Studies
in the Renaissance, 19 (1972), 88.
[47] J. Barnie, War
in Medieval Society: Social Values and the Hundred Years War, 1337–99 (London,
1974), 38–40; C. Given-Wilson, ‘Purveyance for the Royal Household,
1362–1413’, BIHR, 56 (1983), 145–63; I. Krug, ‘Purveyance and
Peasants at the Beginning of the Hundred Years War: Maddicott
Reexamined’, The Hundred Years War, II:Different Vistas, ed.
D. Kagay and L. J. A. Villalon (Leiden, 2008), 345–65; W. M. Ormrod, ‘Murmur,
Clamour and Noise: Voicing Complaint and Remedy in Petitions to the English
Crown, c.1300–c.1460’, Medieval Petitions: Grace and
Grievance, ed. W. M. Ormrod, G. Dodd and A. Musson (York, 2009), 149–50.
For a complaint by the ‘king’s liegemen of Devon’ regarding the purveyance of
food by Sir Robert Ashton in preparation for an expedition to Brittany in 1375,
see G. Dodd, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English
Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 2007), 150.
[48] W. M. Ormrod, ‘The
Peasants’ Revolt and the Government of England’, Journal of British Studies,
29 (1990), 1–30; Dyer, Making a Living, 284.
[49] Anonimalle
Chronicle, 144–7; R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381(London,
2nd edn, 1988), 155–211.
[50] St Albans Chronicle,
I, 425; W. M. Ormrod, ‘In Bed with Joan of Kent: The King’s Mother and the
Peasants’ Revolt’, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval
Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al. (Turnhout,
2000), 277–92.
[51] Cohn, Popular
Protest, 89; Wright, Knights and Peasants, 85–7.
[52] Vaughan, John
the Fearless, 99; R. Fédou, ‘A Popular Revolt in Lyon in the Fifteenth
Century: The Rebeyne of 1436’, The Recovery of France
in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Lewis, trans. Martin, 243–6, 254.
[53] I. M. W. Harvey, Jack
Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford, 1991).
[54] The Proclamation of
Jack Cade (June 1450): English Historical Documents, IV, 266–7.
[55] D. Grummitt,
‘Deconstructing Cade’s Rebellion: Discourse and Politics in the Mid-Fifteenth
Century’, Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages, ed. L.
Clark (Woodbridge, 2006), 107.
[56] R. Almond and A. J.
Pollard, ‘The Yeomanry of Robin Hood and Social Terminology in
Fifteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 170 (2001), 52, 77.
[57] See P. R. Coss,
‘Cultural Diffusion and Robin Hood’, Past and Present, 108 (1985),
35–79. The first written reference to Robin occurs in 1377 but the first
surviving ballad, Robin Hood and the Monk, only dates from about
1450, and the Gest of Robyn Hode appears about fifty years
later. Internal evidence suggests that, at the latest, it was put together by
1400 and ‘there are good reasons for thinking … the Gest is …
a product of the first half of the fourteenth century’. J. R. Maddicott, ‘The
Birth and Setting of the Robin Hood Ballads’, EHR, 93 (1978), 276.
Andrew Ayton suggests a date for the Gest in or before the
1330s: ‘Military Service and the Development of the Robin Hood Legend in the
Fourteenth Century’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 36 (1992),
129–30.
[58] C. Richmond, ‘An
Outlaw and Some Peasants: The Possible Significance of Robin Hood’, Nottingham
Medieval Studies, 37 (1993), 92, 96–7.
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