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JUSTINE FIRNHABER-BAKER
1
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3
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Acknowledgements
This book was researched and written with the support of a British Arts and
Humanities Research Council Early Career Fellowship (grant reference AH/
K006843/1) and a Research Grant from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities
of Scotland, for which I am profoundly grateful. I also thank the School of History
at St Andrews for two terms of institutional leave.
Colleagues, students, and friends have helped shape my thinking and provided
valuable feedback. I would particularly like to thank Frances Andrews, John
Arnold, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Warren Brown, Frederik Buylaert, Vincent
Challet, Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Jan Dumolyn, Sylvia Federico, Paul Freedman,
Chris Given-Wilson, Erika Graham-Goering, Jelle Haemers, Rafael Oliva
Herrer, Helen Lacey, Patrick Lantschner, James Palmer, Andrew Prescott,
Teofilo Ruiz, Graeme Small, Alice Taylor, Craig Taylor, John Watts, and Chris
Wickham. All Souls College and its Fellows offered a welcome refuge and witty
conversation. My colleagues at St Andrews are especially to be thanked for
creating an environment conducive to research and writing. My students, espe-
cially those in ME3425 ‘The Age of Revolt’, also have my gratitude for a decade’s
worth of their insights and enthusiasm. The University of St Andrews is truly one
of the best places in the world to be a mediaeval historian.
A number of librarians and archivists went out of their way for me. The staff at
the Archives nationales, the Bibliothèque nationale, and the Archives
départementales of the Aisne, the Marne, and the Oise were all very helpful. My
particular thanks to Jean-Christophe Dumain at the AD Aisne, to Christèle Potvin
at the AD Seine-Maritime, and to Michel Ollion at the Archives nationales for
providing particular documents. The staff of the Library of the University of St
Andrews were indispensable and very efficient, and those at the Bodeleian also
came through in a pinch or two. I appreciate it.
My greatest debts of gratitude are owed to my family, including those both near
and far. Thank you especially to Jan and Trevor Palmer and to Caroline and David
Blackler for taking such good care of my children and my cats. Above all, thank
you to James, Adryan, Sophie, and Hayden for your love and support, and for
understanding when I disappear into the archives. Coming home is always the
best part.
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Contents
List of Figures xi
Abbreviations xiii
A Note on Names and Spelling xv
A Note on Money xvii
Maps xix
Timeline of Events in the Jacquerie and Counter-Jacquerie xxi
Introduction: Telling Stories 1
The Stories in the Sources 6
The Chronicles 7
Judicial Sources: Remissions, Lawsuits, and Accords 12
Local Documents 18
The Stories in This Book 20
1. Complaints: The Aftermath of Poitiers 23
Defeat and its Discontents 24
The Triumph of Reform 29
The Great Ordonnance of 1357 33
The Navarrese Alliance 38
Soldiers and Refugees 44
2. New Marvels: Turning the World Upside Down 49
Murdering the Marshals 49
Reactions: Paris and Provins 56
The Blockade of Paris 59
The Northern Towns and the Estates of Compiègne 65
The Silence before the Storm 68
3. An Unheard of Thing: The Massacre at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent 71
Strategic Objectives: Rivers, Roads, and Rocks 73
Communicative Violence 79
Contacts and Communication 82
Provincial Notables and Networks 88
From Saint-Leu-d’Esserent to the Jacquerie 91
4 All Masters: From Massacre to Movement 96
The Moment of Mobilization 97
Immediate Grievances 102
Justice in an Age of War and Plague 106
Planning Behind the Scenes 112
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x
List of Figures
Abbreviations
xiv
I have used modern, standard French spelling for most of the common names
used here: thus, Jean not Jehan and Jacques not Jaques, but I have not changed
diminutives, such as Jehannot and Jaquemin. I have retained the French spelling
of the names of the French and Navarrese royalty. Regarding medieval authors,
my practice has varied according to custom. Thus, I speak of Philippe de
Beaumanoir as Beaumanoir but Christine de Pisan as Christine.
I have followed Anglophone usage in not adding diacritical marks to my own
transcriptions from manuscripts in Middle French, but I have retained those in
printed sources by French editors. I have added apostrophes according to modern
usage in order to improve readability.
One particular choice to note is my decision to call King Jean II’s eldest son and
heir Charles ‘the Dauphin’. The Dauphiné had only recently become part of the
French royal domain, and Jean had been the first French prince to hold it. Charles
and others gave precedence to his position as the Duke of Normandy, which was a
grander and more venerable title than that of Dauphin. Nevertheless, for most
readers, ‘the Dauphin’ is as readily identifiable as the heir to the French crown as
‘the Prince of Wales’ is to that of England. My apologies to anyone whose
sensibilities I have offended.
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A Note on Money
The money supply was one of the most important political and economic issues
facing the people of France in the mid-fourteenth century. It is also one of the
most confusing to understand and explain now. For a full explanation, see John
Bell Henneman, Royal Taxation in Fourteenth-Century France: The Development
of War Financing, 1322–1356 (Princeton, 1971), 331–353.
Prices, fines, tax receipts, etc. were often expressed in terms of money of
account, livres, sous, and deniers tournois (abbreviated l.t., s.t., d.t.) or livres,
sous, deniers parisis (l.p., etc.). One l.t. was worth 4/5th of one l.p. One livre was
worth 20 sous. One sou was worth 12 deniers. To give some sense of value, a male
labourer might earn as little as 4 d. or as much as 12 s. per day, while the annual
revenues of a modest lordship averaged about 200 l. A basic pair of men’s shoes
cost 6 d., and a good warhorse might go for upwards of 500 l.
The main gold coins in circulation included the mouton (so-called because of its
angus dei device), worth around 30 s.t./24 s.p., with the demi-mouton or denier de
l’aignel worth half that, and the écu or florin à l’écu worth 16–30 s.p. When King
Jean returned to France in 1360 he had minted a new coin, the franc à cheval, so-
called because he was free (franc) and the coin showed him on a horse. Silver coins
included the gros tournois, worth variously 10–12 d.t. and the double tournois,
worth 2 d.t., as well as the petit paris and the petit tournois worth 1 d. each. The
denier blanc was worth 8 d.t. until being revalued at 3 d.t. in November 1356.
As is obvious from the remarks above, the value of these coins fluctuated
frequently over the period covered by this book. The royal mint pocketed the
difference between a coin’s bullion content (measured in marcs) and its face value
(its cours), a difference called the monnayage. The monnayage could be manipu-
lated through reducing the bullion content of the coin, minting more coins, or
decreeing a change in their value. Manipulation of the monnayage was a major
financial expedient for the crown in the period of this book but also a major source
of political dissension as changes in the value of coins played havoc with prices,
consumption, debts, and business.
When money is discussed in this book, I have kept the terminology used by the
source, which is variously expressed in terms of coins, monies of account, or both.
Peter Spufford with Wendy Wilkinson and Sarah Tolley, A Handbook of Medieval
Exchange (London, 1986) can be consulted for conversions.
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Maps
12 July – Dauphin’s troops cross the Seine to begin attacking villages, including at Vitry-
sur-Seine.
19–20 July – Truce agreed with Parisians; Dauphin’s host at Charenton breaks up.
22 July – Anglo-Navarrese troops massacre Parisian militiamen at Saint Cloud; further
west, ‘Jacques Bonhommes’ attack the house of a squire at Bailly.
c. 25 July – The Lord of Portieux attacks Pierre Baudin, who had been attacking a noble’s
valet, in Normandy.
Late July/early August – Jean Bernier writes to Beauvaisis villages, asking them to come
to Senlis to plan a response to the Counter-Jacquerie.
31 July – Death of Étienne Marcel and end of the Parisian revolt
2 August – Dauphin enters Paris.
10 August – Issuance of the general remissions for participation in the Parisian revolt,
the Jacquerie, and the Counter-Jacquerie
c. 15 August – Anceau la Pippe and his servant kidnap people and seize animals and
goods in the village of Acy near Soissons in reprisal for damages to la Pippe’s manor.
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Introduction
Telling Stories
At the end of May 1358, as summer approached and people prepared to celebrate
the Feast of Corpus Christi, thousands of French villagers revolted. In the Île-de-
France north of Paris, Normandy to its west, Picardy and Champagne to its east,
and further afield, they attacked the nobility’s castles and manor houses, burning
them down and destroying or stealing their contents. They killed noblemen and
assaulted their families. According to some reports, they even killed noble children
and gang-raped noblewomen, murdering some pregnant ones. On 10 June at the
eastern city of Meaux, they allied with urban commoners and troops from Paris,
itself in rebellion against the crown, in order to attack a castle on the Marne River
that was sheltering nobles, among them the Dauphin’s wife and baby. But there,
they were defeated. The castle’s noble garrison chased down those who managed
to flee and slaughtered them ‘like pigs’ in the city’s outskirts.¹ At the same
moment, 70 kilometres to the north-east, a noble army led by King Charles II of
Navarre, himself a great French prince, had captured the rebels’ general and was
obliterating their forces in a battle near Clermont-en-Beauvaisis. Bands of enraged
nobles, their fear of the peasants mastered and their natural advantage regained,
took it in their turn to overrun the countryside, carrying out executions of
suspected rebels wherever they found them and burning villages wholesale. The
rebels tried to regroup, but July saw their efforts definitively extinguished and the
Parisian rebellion crushed.
The revolt was soon called ‘the Jacquerie’, a term first attested in 1360 and
derived from the sobriquet ‘Jacques Bonhomme’ (James Goodman) borne by its
participants.² Along with the Black Death (from 1348) and the Hundred Years
War (1337–1453), the Jacquerie is one of the headline events of the ‘calamitous’
fourteenth century. In French and even in English, its name is still used to connote
The Jacquerie of 1358: A French Peasants’ Revolt. Justine Firnhaber-Baker, Oxford University Press (2021).
© Justine Firnhaber-Baker. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198856412.003.0001
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a violent uprising. At the time, royal documents more usually spoke of it as les
effroiz—that is, the ‘noise’ or ‘terrors’—or les commotions, which country people
(gens du plat pays) had unleashed against the nobility.³ Echoing these sentiments
in more colourful terms, contemporary chroniclers offered their own versions,
calling the rebels ‘rabid dogs’ and ‘crueller than Saracens’.⁴ Evoking fear, chaos,
and the rural mob’s rage against its social superiors, such language eloquently
testifies to the uprising’s emotional effects on its victims, but it does little to
elucidate the Jacquerie’s causes or mechanics. Nor does its homogeneity reflect
the varieties of individual experience that lay behind and together constituted the
rebellion for its participants. The language chosen by elite, literate contemporaries
reveals how they understood the revolt, but it also shows us how little they wished
to understand it.
Modern historians have sometimes done better. The first and until now the
only scholarly book devoted to the rebellion, Siméon Luce’s 1859 Histoire de la
Jacquerie, placed the revolt in its specific historical context and paid attention to
the particular people and places it implicated. Luce highlighted evidence connect-
ing the Jacquerie with the Parisian rebellion led by the merchant Étienne Marcel
and argued that he probably orchestrated it for political ends.⁵ A century later,
Raymond Cazelles went further, arguing that the Jacques themselves were mostly
well-off professionals; that the revolt’s inception had clear military utility to the
Parisian rebellion; and that rustics’ cooperation with the Parisians and other
urban allies evinced a pioneering social vision, one dominated by the town and
the countryside’s economic relationships to the exclusion of the outmoded ‘feudal’
nobility.⁶ Luce’s and Cazelles’s explanations jibe with a slew of recent work on late
medieval uprisings that emphasizes their rationality, organization, and political
motivations.⁷ Rural–urban cooperation of the type they posited now seems more
³ In other contexts, the chancery used effroiz in the sense of ‘terrors’ or ‘confusion’ of war, e.g. ‘les
effroiz des ennemiz estoient sur le pays’ (AN JJ 118, no. 276, fol. 148r). Its etymology is the same as that
of the English word ‘affray’.
⁴ Jean le Bel, 255–257; Froissart, SHF, §413, p. 100.
⁵ Luce, 53–55, 93–104. The second edition of this book, published posthumously in 1894 and 1895,
slightly revised the text but also included an expanded appendix of edited documents.
⁶ Raymond Cazelles, ‘La Jacquerie fut-elle un mouvement paysan?’, Comptes rendus des séances de
l’Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres 122 (1978): 654–666; Raymond Cazelles, Société politique,
noblesse et couronne sous Jean le bon et Charles V (Geneva, 1982), 321–329; Raymond Cazelles, Étienne
Marcel, champion de l’unité française (Paris, 1984), 296–303. See also David M. Bessen, ‘The Jacquerie:
Class war or co-opted rebellion?’, JMH 11 (1985): 43–59, whose arguments on the relationships
between the Jacques, Paris, and Charles of Navarre are discussed in Chapter 8.
⁷ Violence et contestation au Moyen Âge: Actes du 114e Congrès national des sociétés savantes (Paris,
1989), Section d’histoire médiévale et de philologie (Paris, 1990); Ghislain Brunel and Serge Brunet (eds),
Haro sur le seigneur! Les luttes anti-seigneuriales dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne: Actes des XXIXes
Journées internationales d’histoire de l’Abbaye de Flaran, 5 et 6 octobre 2007 (Toulouse, 2009); Samuel
K. Cohn, Jr, Lust for liberty: The politics of social revolt in medieval Europe, 1200–1450: Italy, France,
and Flanders (Cambridge, MA, 2006), esp. 135–147, 236–242; Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, Vincent
Challet, Jan Dumolyn, and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz (eds), La comunidad medieval como esfera
pública (Seville, 2014); Jan Dumolyn, Jelle Haemers, Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, and Vincent Challet
(eds), The voices of the people in late medieval Europe: Communication and popular politics (Turnhout,
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3
likely than not, for such partnerships have been documented in revolts ranging
from the Flemish Maritime Revolt of 1323–1328 and the English Rising of 1381 to
the Comuneros movement in sixteenth-century Spain.⁸
Yet, the tradition of seeing the Jacques Bonhommes as beastly louts and their
actions as irrationally vicious is a strong one. In 1879, Jules Flammermont
attacked Luce’s argument in an article that described the Jacquerie in terms not
that different from those of the chronicles. According to Flammermont, the
Jacquerie was a spontaneous ‘explosion’ of instinctive hatreds nourished for
centuries by ‘rude peasants, without education or direction, dazed by poverty
and drink’, who lacked the basic intellectual capacity for plotting.⁹ This is almost
an anti-explanation, one notably at odds with newer scholarship demonstrating
the intellectual range and political consciousness of rural people, but it has
remained surprisingly central to the scholarship.¹⁰ Although Guy Fourquin and
Rodney Hilton viewed the Jacquerie as having some organization and rational
features, Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff ’s classic book on late medieval revolts
called the Jacquerie ‘as incoherent as it was spontaneous’, an interpretation shared
2014); Patrick Lantschner, The logic of political conflict in medieval cities: Italy and the southern Low
Countries, 1370–1440 (Oxford, 2015); Fabrizio Titone (ed.), Disciplined dissent: Strategies of non-
confrontational protest in Europe from the twelfth to the early sixteenth century (Rome, 2016); Justine
Firnhaber-Baker and Dirk Schoenaers (eds), The Routledge history handbook of medieval revolt
(Abingdon, 2017); Vincent Challet and Héloïse Hermant (eds), Des mots et des gestes: Le corps et la
voix dans l’univers de la révolte (XIVe–XVIIIe siècles), special issue of Histoire, économie & société 38
(2019).
⁸ Rodney Hilton, Bond men made free: Medieval peasant movements and the English rising of 1381
(London, 1973), 214–232; A.F. Butcher, ‘English urban society and the revolt of 1381’ and R.B. Dobson,
‘The risings in York, Beverley, and Scarborough, 1380–1381’ in R.H. Hilton and T.H. Aston (eds), The
English rising of 1381 (Cambridge, 1984), 84–111, 112–142; William H. TeBrake, A plague of
insurrection: Popular politics and peasant revolt in Flanders, 1323–1328 (Philadelphia, 1993) esp.
Appendix 2; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434
(Cambridge, 1999); Vincent Challet, ‘Le Tuchinat en Toulousain et dans le Rouergue (1381–1393):
D’une émeute urbaine à une guérilla rurale?’, Annales du Midi 118 (2006): 513–525; Andrew Prescott,
‘ “Great and horrible rumour”: Shaping the English revolt of 1381’ in Firnhaber-Baker and Schoenaers
(eds), Handbook of medieval revolt, 78–79; Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, ‘Popular voices and revolt:
Exploring anti-noble uprisings on the eve of the war of the communities of Castile’ in Dumolyn,
Haemers, Herrer, and Challet (eds), Voices of the people, 49–61.
⁹ Jules Flammermont, ‘La Jacquerie en Beauvaisis’, RH 9 (1879): 123–143, quotes at 127 and 129.
¹⁰ Bessen, ‘Jacquerie’, 44–46; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (ed. and trans.), Popular protest in late medieval
Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders (Manchester, 2004), 149–150. For rural political consciousness, see
Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, 1999); Pierre Boglioni, Robert Delort, and
Claude Gauvard (eds), Le petit peuple dans l’Occident médiéval: Terminologies, perceptions, réalitiés.
Actes du Congrès international tenu à l’Université de Montréal 18–23 octobre 1999 (Paris, 2002);
François Menant and Jean-Pierre Jessenne (eds), Les élites rurales dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne:
Actes des XXVIIes Journées internationales d’histoire de l’Abbaye de Flaran (Toulouse, 2007); Richard
Goddard, John Langdon, and Miriam Müller (eds), Survival and discord in medieval society: Essays in
honour of Christopher Dyer (Turnhout, 2010); Vincent Challet and Ian Forrest, ‘The Masses’ in
Christopher Fletcher, Jean-Philippe Genet, and John Watts (eds), Government and political life in
England and France, c.1300–c.1500 (Cambridge, 2015), 279–316; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘Two kinds
of freedom: Language and practice in late medieval rural revolts’, Edad media: Revista de historia 21
(2020): 113–152.
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¹¹ Guy Fourquin, The anatomy of popular rebellion in the Middle Ages, Anne Chesters (trans.) (New
York, 1978), 24, 78, 134–139; Hilton, Bond men made free, 116–117; Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff,
The popular revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, A. L. Lytton-Sells (trans.) (London, 1973), 123; André
Leguai, ‘Les révoltes rurales dans le royaume de France, du milieu du XIVe siècle à la fin du XVe’, Le
Moyen Âge 88 (1982): 49–76.
¹² d’Avout, 186, 195–196; Hugues Neveux, Les révoltes paysannes en Europe, XIVe–XVIIe siècle
(Paris, 1997).
¹³ Roland Delachenal, Histoire de Charles V, 5 vols (Paris, 1909–1931), I: 394–416; Jean Favier, La
guerre de Cent ans (Paris, 1980), 247–256; HYW, II: 327–336, quote at 328; Georges Minois, La guerre
de Cent ans: Naissance de deux nations (Paris, 2008), 156–159. Cf. Françoise Autrand, Charles V le sage
(Paris, 1994), 327–330; David Green, The Hundred Years War: A people’s history (New Haven, 2014),
42–47, quote at 44.
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5
both planned and accidental altered their course, and what and how they chose to
remember (or to forget) in its aftermath.
The story that I will tell in this book goes roughly like this: the first episode in
the Jacquerie, an attack on some noblemen in the Oise River village of Saint-Leu-
d’Esserent on 28 May, was undertaken as a quasi-military response to a specific
crisis in royal politics. It was brought about through cooperation between a
Parisian faction opposed to the crown and a cohort of rural individuals, much
as Luce and Cazelles argued, although there is as much reason to believe that the
impetus for this attack came from the country-folk as from the Parisians. The
political crisis had originated in the French defeat at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356
when the English captured King Jean II. The government of France had devolved
upon the adolescent Dauphin Charles (later King Charles V) and to the assemblies
of the Three Estates of northern France, which were dominated by the head of the
Parisian merchants, Étienne Marcel, and the bishop of Laon, Robert le Coq. These
men and their followers favoured a thoroughly reforming governmental agenda.
They were friendly with King Charles II of Navarre, who was a potential rival to
the Dauphin, and they were critical of the Dauphin’s close counsellors. In early
1358, they fell out with the Dauphin, murdering two of his familiars in front of
him, and he decided to expel their party from Paris by force. In April, he occupied
castles on the Marne and the Seine rivers, threatening Paris’s supply lines, and he
began assembling an army from his noble supporters.
The first incident in what became the Jacquerie was intended to counter these
efforts by keeping the Oise River traffic flowing, but it is not clear that all the
parties involved had meant the incident to spark the massive movement that
quickly followed. Rather, large-scale rural revolt seems to have coalesced in its
aftermath and to have developed in ways that many of its participants and allies
had not foreseen. Primarily targeting noble castles and property, the Jacquerie as it
evolved over the next two weeks was nevertheless very useful to the Parisian
faction because it diverted the nobles’ attention away from Paris. In early June, the
Parisians were able to move from defence to offence, culminating in an unsuc-
cessful joint assault with the Jacques on Meaux. The nobles’ victory at Meaux,
combined with the Jacques’ betrayal and subsequent defeat by Charles of Navarre
near Clermont, turned the tide against the rebels. The Parisian faction tried to re-
ignite the revolt, especially in the south and the south-west, but, in the north and
east where it had begun, nobles were already taking sanguinary vengeance.
This ‘Counter-Jacquerie’ gave the movement a more pronounced character of
social war than it had at first possessed, and it may have actually served to incite an
uprising in Champagne where there was none before. But many rural rebels had
understood what they were doing as a social war from the beginning. They
opposed their leaders’ efforts to limit and focus their violence, and pressed them
to take riskier actions. For their part, the Jacques’ allies in Paris and in provincial
cities like Amiens were more cautious and considered themselves to be distinct
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from the country-folk, as well as from the nobility. The conflicting visions among
the Jacques and the latent socio-economic and cultural differences between the
country-folk and their urban allies were never resolved. Those fissures constituted
a major weakness and contributed a great deal to the movement’s ultimate failure.
As the last pockets of rural rebellion were defeated in July, the Dauphin and the
nobles returned their attention to Paris. The city fell at the end of the month, when
Marcel was killed in a riot by unknown hands. After 10 days of spectacular
reprisals, the Dauphin turned to reconciliation, granting a general pardon (lettre
de rémission) for all the crimes committed during the Parisian rebellion, the
Jacquerie, and the Counter-Jacquerie. Individual pardons—dozens and eventually
hundreds of them—followed in a flood of bureaucratic mercy into the autumn and
well beyond. Requesting these pardons and writing them required imposing a
narrative on the summer’s events. (In some cases, a little invention was also
required.) Alternative versions nonetheless proliferated, due to both long-running
lawsuits for damages and simmering resentments that sometimes boiled over into
homicidal rage.
Along with about a dozen chronicle accounts, these narratives created the
Jacquerie as an event with meaning for its contemporaries and their successors,
including us. There are no documents dating from the time of the revolt itself: no
rebel letters or petitions, no communications from authorities, no poetry or songs
or pamphlets such as exist for other uprisings like the English Rising of 1381 or the
fifteenth-century revolt of the Catalan Remenses.¹⁴ That means we have almost no
window onto what people thought was happening at the time. Such things did
once exist—the sources mention that the Jacques sometimes sent written
messages—but by accident or design they have not survived.¹⁵ All the textual
evidence that we possess either pre-dates the revolt or is coloured by its failure, the
nobles’ revenge, and the fall of Paris. One of the basic arguments of this book is
thus that the sources tell us at least as much about the acts of narrative creation
and imagination that were committed in the wake of the revolt as they do about
what actually happened out in the countryside in the summer of 1358.
Retrospection is a fundamental characteristic of the Jacquerie sources that affects
interpretation at every turn.
Partiality, in the senses both of incompleteness and of bias, is another. The
main corpus of sources for the Jacquerie is made up of two types of documents:
¹⁴ E.g. Steven Justice, Writing and rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, 1994); Paul Freedman, The
origins of peasant servitude in medieval Catalonia (Cambridge, 1991).
¹⁵ For literacy in the Jacquerie, see Chapters 6 and 7.
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7
narrative accounts in over a dozen chronicles written between 1358 and 1410, and
judicial or quasi-judicial sources. Most of the judicial sources are letters of
remission, about 180 of which were issued to individuals or, less often, to
communities implicated in the revolt or its suppression. The chronicles have all
been published in scholarly editions. The remissions, on the other hand, are
mostly unedited and exist only in registry copy manuscripts that were kept by
the royal chancery, now housed at the French Archives nationales. (Luce was
familiar with most of these and published a somewhat unrepresentative sample as
an appendix to his Histoire de la Jacquerie.) In addition to Jacques or Counter-
Jacques, dozens of members of the Parisian faction and partisans of King Charles
of Navarre also received remissions, which help to flesh out the wider political
context.
While chronicles and remissions form the backbone of the source material for
the study of the Jacquerie, I have found a variety of other complementary sources.
Many of these are legal documents. The revolt produced several dozen or so
records from lawsuits that were heard by the supreme royal court known as the
Parlement de Paris. This was France’s court of final appeal, as well as the court
with jurisdiction over many nobles and the venue of choice for some elites. Some
of these suits have been known for a long time and some of them have been newly
identified.¹⁶ All these documents come from civil suits between parties claiming
damages inflicted during the Jacquerie or the Counter-Jacquerie.¹⁷ I was also able
to exploit the records of quasi-judicial settlements made between parties and
known as accords, which Parlement validated and stored.¹⁸ In addition to the
strictly legal documents, a range of sources from local archives gives insight into
the identities, relationships, and possible motives of many of the people involved
in the Jacquerie.
The Chronicles
Of the two main genres of sources, historians have often privileged the narrative
accounts. Although it is generally recognized that chronicles tell us as much about
their authors and audiences as they do about the events they report, in pleasant
contrast to the fragmentary, atomized accounts in the judicial records, chronicles
¹⁶ I was able to find legal suits overlooked by Luce through keyword databases of the Parlement
registers maintained by the Institut d’Histoire du Droit. See www.ihd.cnrs.fr [last accessed 21
November 2020].
¹⁷ One of these documents, AN X2a 7, fol. 213r, appears in a register from Parlement’s criminal
section, but it is a mandate to a royal sergeant to execute a civil settlement.
¹⁸ On accords, see Chapter 10. My survey of this uncatalogued and probably incomplete series, AN
X1c, was extensive but not exhaustive.
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offer a holistic picture.¹⁹ This is especially true of the chronicle that has had the
greatest influence on the reception and memory of the Jacquerie, that of Jean
Froissart. Froissart took nearly all of his Jacquerie stories from the much less
popular chronicle of Jean le Bel, who wrote his chapters on the Jacquerie between
autumn 1358 and 1359.²⁰ Froissart’s chronicle exists in over a hundred contem-
porary manuscripts that can be grouped into four successive redactions, the first
three of which include the Jacquerie episodes.²¹ The third redaction, composed
between 1395 and 1399 and extant only in a recently relocated manuscript at
Chicago’s Newberry Library, contains some stories unknown from other
sources.²² The tales in Jean le Bel/Froissart are particularly notable for their
chivalric ethos and the window that they thus provide onto noble perceptions of
the revolt, but also because Jean le Bel’s chronicle is the earliest narrative account.
Of the other chronicles composed in the half century or so after the revolt, the
earliest after Jean le Bel’s is a Latin chronicle written in Paris by a Jean de Venette,
possibly the same Jean de Venette as a Carmelite monk by whom we have other,
very different writing.²³ The Jacquerie section, probably written between 1359 and
1360, may give us the closest thing to a perspective from country-folk, for its
author hailed from a Picard village and is certainly the most sympathetic chron-
icler of the revolt.²⁴ Around the turn of the fifteenth century, this chronicle served
as a source for a monk (religieux) of Saint-Denis, the grand seat of French
historical writing in the Middle Ages, who abridged some of it in his continuation
¹⁹ Neithard Bulst, ‘ “Jacquerie” und “Peasants’ Revolt” in der französischen und englischen
Chronistik’, Vorträge und Forschungen 31 (1987): 791–819.
²⁰ Marie-Thérèse de Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs: Une étude comparée de récits contemporains
relatant la Jacquerie de 1358 (Paris, 1979), 27.
²¹ On the chronology of the chronicle’s various redactions, including the Chicago MS or ‘version C’,
see Godfried Croenen, ‘La guerre en Normandie au XIVe siècle et le problème de l’évolution textuelle
des Chroniques de Jean Froissart’ in Anne Curry and Véronique Gazeau (eds), La guerre en Normandie
(XIe–XVe siècle), Colloque international de Cerisy, 30 septembre–3 octobre 2015 (Caen, 2018), 111–147,
esp. 141–142. The extant redactions were based upon earlier drafts which do not survive. De Medieros,
Jacques et chroniqueurs, 47 suggests the Jacquerie section was initially composed between 1369 and
1376. The newly discovered manuscript of the fourth redaction does not contain the Jacquerie sections
(personal communication from Godfried Croenen).
²² Paul Saenger, ‘A lost manuscript of Froissart refound’, Manuscripta 19 (1975): 15–26; Godfried
Croenen, ‘A “re-found” manuscript of Froissart revisited: Newberry MS F.37’, French Studies Bulletin
31 (2010): 56–60. A transcription is available from the online Froissart project edited by Peter
Ainsworth and Godfried Croenen at www.dhi.ac.uk/onlinefroissart[last accessed 21 November
2020].
²³ The authorship debates are outlined in Colette Beaune, ‘Introduction’ to Chronique dite de Jean de
Venette, Colette Beaune (ed.), (Paris, 2011), 10–16.
²⁴ Richard A. Newhall, ‘Introduction’ to The chronicle of Jean de Venette, Jean Birdsall (trans.),
Richard A. Newhall (ed.), (New York, 1953); de Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs, 70–73. This
chronicle is sometimes known as the second continuator of Guillaume de Nangis because it was
given that title in the nineteenth-century SHF edition, Chronique latine de Guillaume de Nangis de 1113
à 1300, avec les continuations de cette chronique de 1300 à 1368, Hércule Géraud (ed.), 2 vols (Paris,
1843), but this is based on a codicological relationship not a textual one. Géraud used BnF lat. 11729
(formerly Saint-Germain 435) for his edition. Beaune’s edition and Birdsall’s English translation are
based on BL (formerly British Museum) Arundel 28, an earlier and better manuscript.
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9
of a chronicle by Richard Lescot. The religieux, who was much less sympathetic to
the rustics than his primary source, also drew upon a vernacular chronicle (or its
sources) that continued the Grandes chroniques tradition for the reigns of Jean II
and Charles V.²⁵ This chronicle, lavishly illustrated in a manuscript destined for
the royal library, was composed at Charles’s direction, the passages on the
Jacquerie being completed in the mid-1370s, and both text and decoration
articulate a strongly Valois ideological bias.²⁶ Around the same time, an anonym-
ous author wrote a narrative known as the Chronique normande, upon which was
based a redaction known as the version non-normande (BnF franç. 5610), later
adapted for the Istore et croniques de Flandres; Jean de Noyal’s ‘Miroir historial’,
written at Laon and also drawing material from Jean de Venette and other
chronicles; and the fifteenth-century Chronographia regum Francorum, composed
at Saint-Denis.²⁷ The Chronique des quatre premiers Valois, compiled in the 1390s,
possibly in Rouen, is independent of these others. It exists in only one, fifteenth-
century manuscript copy (BnF franç. 10468, fol. 113–190). In addition to these
French chronicles, the Jacquerie also appears in several foreign chronicles, includ-
ing the English Anonimalle Chronicle, Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica, and Matteo
Villani’s Cronica.²⁸
These diverse narratives do not always agree, not least because their authors
had access to different sources of information: what the royal counsellor saw was
not what the Norman soldier experienced, and what the chivalrous Froissart
valorized or deplored, the humble monk passed over in silence. None of the
writers was himself among the rebels. Only the Norman chronicler may have
been an eyewitness to the Jacquerie, but only on the side of its suppressors,
possibly while serving in the noble army led by Charles of Navarre. The chronicle
of Jean de Venette alone shows any familiarity with the country-folk. None of the
²⁹ Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles: The writing of history in medieval England (London, 2004), ch. 1.
On Jean le Bel, cf. Diana B. Tyson, ‘Jean le Bel: Portrait of a chronicler’, JMH 12 (1986): 315–332 and
Nicole Chareyron, Jean le Bel: Le maître de Froissart, grand imagier de la guerre de Cent ans (Brussels,
1996). On Froissart, see J. J. N. Palmer (ed.), Froissart: Historian (Woodbridge, 1981); George T. Diller,
Attitudes chevaleresques et réalités politiques chez Froissart (Geneva, 1984); Peter F. Ainsworth, Jean
Froissart and the fabric of history: Truth, myth, and fiction in the chroniques (Oxford, 1990).
³⁰ See also de Medeiros, Jacques et chroniqueurs, 32–36, 48–49, 63–64.
³¹ Newhall, ‘Introduction’, 9–10. Quote at Jean de Venette, 162. Jean le Bel was interested in the
same prophecies as Jean de Venette, but considered the Battle of Poitiers and the ravages of the Free
Companies to be their manifestation (Jean le Bel, 273–275).
³² Raymond Cazelles, ‘Le parti navarrais jusqu’à la mort d’Étienne Marcel’, Bulletin philologique et
historique du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques (jusqu’à 1610), année 1960 (Paris, 1961):
860; Anne-Hélène Allirot, ‘L’entourage et l’Hôtel de Jeanne d’Évreux, reine de France (1324–1371)’,
Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 116 (2009): 169–180. For Blanche, see Chapter 2.
³³ Literary scholars working on the 1381 English Rising have led the way: Derek Pearsall,
‘Interpretative models for the Peasants’ Revolt’ in Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen Damico (eds),
Hermeneutics and medieval culture (Albany, 1989), 63–70; Paul Strohm, ‘ “A revelle!”: Chronicle
evidence and the rebel voice’ in Hochon’s arrow: The social imagination of fourteenth-century texts
(Princeton, 1992), 33–56; Justice, Writing and rebellion.
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11
One can hardly believe that such people would have dared to undertake such
devilry without the help of some others, especially in the kingdom of France.
In the same manner [as nobles discussed in the previous passage], the Lord of
Coucy summoned people from wherever he could get them; thus he attacked
his neighbours and destroyed them, hanging and having them killed in such a
horrible way as it would be terrible to remember; and these bad people had a
captain called Jacques Bonhomme, who was a real hick/terrible person (parfait
vilain) and who tried to claim that the bishop of Laon had urged him to do
this, for he was one of his men. The Lord of Coucy also did not like that
bishop.³⁴
Here, for a moment, we see behind the neat narrative to its messy details.
When Froissart retold this story some decades later, he smoothed out the
wrinkles that Jean le Bel, writing only months after the revolt, was not sure how
to straighten. Except for briefly mentioning Jake Bonhomme and the Lord of
Coucy in other parts of his narrative, Froissart completely omitted this passage.
He also passed over speculations found earlier in his source text about the possible
role of tax collectors, Robert le Coq, Étienne Marcel, and even Charles of Navarre
in inciting the uprising.³⁵ Froissart’s narrative neatening of Jean le Bel’s rough
edges throws the process of composition into relief: Jean le Bel told what he knew
about the Jacquerie, but it is clear that he did not know all he thought there might
be to tell about it. Later, when Froissart came to write his more artful tale of
vicious peasants, distressed damsels, and dashing knights, these logistical and
political considerations seemed less important to the story that he wanted to
tell. How and why the chroniclers told a story, or did not tell a story, often tells
us as much as the story itself.
³⁴ Jean le Bel, 259–260. The passage is smoothed out in Jean le Bel, The true chronicles of Jean le Bel,
1290–1360, Nigel Bryant (trans.), (Woodbridge, 2011), 237.
³⁵ Jean le Bel, 258; Gerald Nachtwey, ‘Scapegoats and conspirators in the chronicles of Jean Froissart
and Jean le Bel’, Fifteenth-Century Studies 36 (2011): 103–125; Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The eponym-
ous Jacquerie: Making revolt mean some things’ in Firnhaber-Baker and Schoenaers (eds), Handbook of
medieval revolt, 59–60; see Chapter 3.
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Story-telling (or not-telling) was also a process that shaped the information
available in the judicial sources. It is true that the pardons, lawsuits, and accords
are not stories in the same sense that the chronicles are. They are not structured as
continuous narratives, and they were composed for quite different purposes,
including discovery of what might be considered ‘the facts’, a process that
Chapter 10 discusses in depth. One might be tempted to trust such sources
more, despite (or even because of) the fact that they are less entertaining and
more labour intensive than chronicles. Produced for individuals and bearing on
their actual situation and experience, they offer different opportunities for inves-
tigation and discovery, and a sense of getting closer to real people. They never-
theless pose problems of partialness and partiality that are at least as serious as
those presented by the chronicles.
Like the chronicles, the judicial texts required creating a storyline for an
inchoate and incomplete jumble of experiences and information. A messy col-
lection of news, rumours, fears, and lies had to be moulded into a story that
served both men (and some women) in need of justice or mercy and a crown in
search of authority and reconciliation. Just as Froissart had to decide what he
believed and what served the purposes of his story, when the Dauphin extended
his pardon to the rebels and their persecutors after his return to Paris, he and his
bureaucrats had to decide what it was, exactly, that was to be forgiven or
punished, and what it was, exactly, that had happened. The judicial sources do
not provide all the pieces of the puzzle, and the information that they do offer
has been intensively managed and manipulated by a variety of ‘authors’, each
with their own agenda.
These considerations are particularly acute for the letters of remission, which
make up the bulk of the judicial sources.³⁶ Issued upon the recipient’s humble
supplication to the crown, remissions are made up of not only the grant of pardon,
but also a narrative section of varying length that explained what the recipient had
done to need pardon. In over 40 per cent of the Jacquerie remissions, this narrative
portion simply repeats a standard formula:
³⁶ See Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the archive: Pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century
France (Stanford, 1987); Claude Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’: Crime, état et société en France à la fin du
Moyen Âge, 2 vols (Paris, 1991); Peter Arnade and Walter Prevenier, Honor, vengeance, and social
trouble: Pardon letters in the Burgundian Low Countries (Ithaca, 2015). On the pardoning procedure,
see Ord., III: 219–232, art. 11–13, and 385–89, art. 21; Yves-Bernard Brissaud, ‘Le droit de grâce à la fin
du Moyen-Âge (XIVe–XVe siècles): Contribution à l’étude de la restauration de la souveraineté
monarchique’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Université de Poitiers, Faculté de droit et des sciences
sociales (Poitiers, 1971); Louis de Carbonnières, ‘Les lettres de rémission entre Parlement de Paris et
chancellerie royale dans la seconde moitié du XIVe siècle’, RHDFE 79 (2001): 179–195.
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13
N. was with many others of the surrounding countryside in the noisy terrors
(effrois) that were recently committed by the country-folk against the nobles of
the kingdom for tearing down fortresses in many places, destroying their belong-
ings, and setting fires, and on account of this, some of these nobles could bear
malevolence and hate toward N. and hurt him in body or goods . . .³⁷
This formula is instructive in its own right as evidence for how the crown
standardized its account of the revolt, its participants, their opponents, and the
Dauphin’s role in reconciling them, as I discuss in Chapter 10.³⁸ The remissions
that do not employ this formula are often far richer in detail, offering longer,
individual accounts of their recipients’ deeds, sometimes even ascribing motiv-
ations or attempting explanations. For example, one issued to Arnoul Guenelon,
who served as a village captain in the Jacquerie, explains that he:
agreed under fear of death and of losing all his houses and goods to be captain of
Catenoy and to ride and accompany its inhabitants for several days in the
company of Guillaume Calle, who had been chosen Captain of the people and
commune of the Beauvaisis, during which time a few ‘disorderlies’ of the
company killed some people, did some pillaging, set some houses on fire, and
committed many other crimes, while Arnoul was with the company but not at all
in agreement with these things in his heart or his will and would gladly have
impeded all their wickedness if he had dared. And when they returned from the
castle of Ermenonville, he left their company and went to Senlis, where he has
since comported himself well and honestly, as he says, in the defence of the town
against the enemies of the realm . . .³⁹
³⁷ ‘ait este avec pluseurs autres du pais d’environ aus effrois qui derrainement & nagaires ont este
faiz par les genz du plat pais contre les nobles du dit Royaume a abatre en pluseurs lieux forteresses
disciper (sic) leurs biens & bouter feux Et pour ce que aucuns des diz nobles pourroient avoir
malivolence & haine aus dessusdit . . . pour occasion des choses dessusdites et le grever en corps & en
biens’ (This example from AN JJ 86, no. 222, fol. 73r).
³⁸ See also Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The heart of rebellion: Law, language, and emotion after the
French revolts of 1356–58’ in Jesús Ángel Solórzano Telechea, Jelle Haemers, and Roman Czaja (eds),
Exclusión y disciplina social en la ciudad medieval europea (Logroño, 2018), 281–296.
³⁹ ‘par la force & contrainte de feu Guillaume Calle nagaires esleu Capitaine du pueple & commun
de Beauvaisiz . . . Arnoul Guenelon de Castenoy pour paour de mourir & de perdre toutes ses maisons &
autres biens se feust consentu d’estre Capitaine de la dite ville de Castenoy et de chevauchier & aler
avecques les habitanz d’icelle par aucunes Journees en la compaignie des diz Guillaume Calle & de ses
adherens ou quel temps par aucuns desordenez de la dite compaignie furent pluseurs personnes mises a
mort pluseurs pillages arsines de maisons et pluseurs autres maux faiz lui estanz en la dite compagnie
sanz ce que ycelui Arnoul en feust oncques consentans en cuer ny en volente mais eust volentiers
empesche toute leur male voulente se il eust ose Et au Retourner qu’il firent du chastel d’Ermenonville
s’en departi et s’en ala hors de leur compaignie mettre en la ville de Senliz ou il s’est depuis bien portez
& loyaulment si comme il dit a la defense d’icelle contre les ennemis du Royaume de France’ (AN JJ 86,
no. 391, fol. 136r). Luce referred to this man as Arnoul Génelon, but there seems no justification for
that orthography.
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Another remission, for one Pierre le Debonnaire, recounts his experience at one of
the big assemblies of villagers that characterized the revolt:
Around the feast of Jean the Baptist (24 June) two years ago, at the time of the
commotion and assembly between the country-folk on one hand and the nobles
on the other, Pierre le Debonnaire and Jean le Debonnaire, his brother, [who
were] nephews and family members of Jean des Murs, their uncle, went to this
assembly on account of youthful folly, without the permission or knowledge of
their uncle, and so as soon as he found out about it, out of good and true love for
them, their uncle went to find them at a commotion or assembly taking place in
the village of Goyencourt. In that village, this uncle took Pierre by the hand and
led him far away from the said assembly. And a lot of fellows (compaignons) then
at the assembly, shouted and cried to Jean des Murs, saying ‘Jean, come to your
nephew, who is being beaten up!’ At this shout, Jean des Murs came [back] and
Pierre returned with him, and took his nephew [Jean le Debonnaire] by the hand
and tried to pull him out of the crowd . . . Michel Wastel, accompanied by many
other accomplices, hit Jean des Murs in the head with a cudgel called ‘Cormiel’
(sweetheart) so hard that a lot of blood came out, which a lot of people saw, but
Pierre le Debonnaire, induced by good and true love in avenging his uncle, with
hot anger (chaude melee), and, indeed, in self-defence and repelling force with
force, fearing that he and his uncle might die and wishing to avoid this with all
his power, hit Michel with a small club (macelotte) in such a way that Michel’s
death followed pretty soon afterward⁴⁰
Such stories have obvious appeal to a historian trying to find out ‘what happened’:
the role of captain, the existence, name and title of a greater captain, the descrip-
tion of the crowded assembly, its violent, emotional character and appeal to hot-
headed young men, the relative wealth of Arnoul, who had more than one house,
the inference that some Jacques rode horses, the kinds of weapons they had on
⁴⁰ ‘environ la saint Jehan baptiste derrein passe ot ii ans ou temps que la commotion & assemblee
estoit entre les genz du plat pays d’une part et les nobles d’autre part ala quelle commotion ou
assemblee le dit Pierre le Debonnaire & Jehan le Debonnaire son frere neveuz & amis de char [de]
Jehan des Murs leur oncle alerent par leur Jeunece senz le congie ou sceu de leur dit oncle et pour ce
leur dit oncle meu de vraye & bonne amour vers eulz sitost qu’il vint a sa cognoissance les ala querre en
une commotion ou assemblee qui lors estoit en la ville de Goiencourt a la quelle ville ycelluy oncle prist
par la main le dit Pierre & le mena bien long de la dite assemblee. Et pluseurs compaignons lors estans a
la dite assemblee hucherent & appellerent le dit Jehan des Murs en disant ‘Jehan venez a vestre neveu
que l’en bat!’ Au quel appel ycelluy Jehan des Murs ala et le dit Pierre retourna avecques luy et prist son
nepveu par la main & le voult tirer hors de la presse & assemblee ou il estoit et en le tirant ainsi Michiel
Wastel acompaigne de pluseurs autres complices fery d’un baston appelle Cormiel le dit Jehan des
Murs en la teste et telement que sanc en yssi grandement et que pluseurs genz le virent, toutevoies le dit
Pierre le Debonnaire meu de bonne & vraie amour en Revenchant son dit oncle de chaude melee et luy
mesme defendant et Reppellant force par force doubtans le peril de la mort de son dit oncle & de luy et
le voulans eschiver a son pouvoir, fery le dit Michiel d’une macellote par tele maniere que mort s’en
ensuy assez tost apres en la personne dudit Michel’ (AN JJ 88, no. 89, fol. 56v–57r).
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15
hand, the mention of particular places, and so on. But remissions cannot be simply
mined for ‘the facts’, as work by Natalie Zemon Davis, Claude Gauvard, and
others has made amply clear.⁴¹ Social conventions, as well as narrative and generic
ones, shaped the pardon tales’ stories. The family relationship and the ‘good and
true love’ that Jean des Murs had for his nephews covers over any other reason he
might have gone to Goyencourt, and the nephews’ own presence there is excused
by their youth, a conventional source of medieval imprudence, again eliding any
other motives. Pardon-tale tellers sought to incite sympathy and deflect blame—
for example, by reporting the mortal fear that had kept Arnoul Guenelon from
following the better intentions of his heart—and it is well to remember that the
alternative to remission was usually execution or impoverishment.
For all that, remission stories were not necessarily untrue. Indeed, some
reliability is assured because remissions were investigated and overly mendacious
ones could be challenged and overturned.⁴² The importance of this subsequent
investigation is demonstrated by the hesitancy that two noblemen named Gilot
and Jean Dudelange expressed about a remission granted to them for killing one
Jean ‘called the Golden’ (dit d’oré). The only witnesses to their claim that the latter
had insulted them and threatened them with an axe were unfortunately either
dead or had fled, so they had not tried to have the letter verified nor dared to use it
(n’ont encores verifie le contenu en nos dites lettres & ne s’en sont osez aidier).
Rather than risk it, they decided to go through the expense and trouble of
procuring a second remission confirming the first and affirming its validity
‘regardless of words or axe’.⁴³
Problems of partiality nevertheless remain. From Guenelon’s story, for
example, we might never guess that Ermenonville was the site of an important
siege against one of the Dauphin’s counsellor’s castles or that Senlis was the
Jacques’ most loyal urban ally. How the Debonnaire brothers came to know
about the Goyencourt assembly, and why that assembly was being held, play no
part in the story. These are omissions by design, not accident. We know from
other sources that the Jacques’ leaders sent messengers to call villagers to central
assemblies where they received their marching orders from higher-ups, including
from Étienne Marcel himself. Some such assemblies were only attended by those
Jacques with leadership responsibilities, a role that would make the Debonnaire
brothers especially culpable.⁴⁴ There were good reasons to tell the truth, but
maybe not the whole truth.
By contrast, the records from Parlement cases often give us two sides of the
story. While for this period we do not have the transcriptions of testimony that are
preserved for lawsuits from later decades, the arguments made are epitomized in
the decisions Parlement handed down. Sometimes this was done at length, as in the
extensive and competing descriptions of what happened at Pierre d’Orgemont’s
houses in Gonesse.⁴⁵ Contradictory claims pose their own problems, but it is also
important to remember that the stories in lawsuits were shaped by what the court
thought was relevant and the diplomatic form into which its clerks had to fit the
material. The accords made between parties are much less formal and do not
even have a uniform diplomatic structure. This looseness can lend itself to
revelation, as in the long tale that opens an agreement made between the Lord
of Vez and his subjects, but most accords are too short to reveal much.⁴⁶ We
often get considerably less detail—perhaps only a brief mention of the matter
requiring settlement—than in the lawsuit records.
Less visible, but possibly even more important than the self-interest and generic
conventions that constrain the stories in the documents we possess, are the social
and procedural factors that limit the kinds and numbers of these documents. It is
impossible to measure the actual effect of these kinds of factors, but they may be
profound. The social and economic cost of justice in late medieval France means
that these sources predominantly concern those able to bear it. Because obtaining
a remission cost money and required some legal knowledge, only the relatively
well off and reasonably sophisticated were usually able to procure one.⁴⁷ The same
sorts of constraints applied to fighting a lawsuit. Those too poor to be worth
pursuing for damages might not appear, and a prohibition in the general remis-
sion forbidding criminal prosecution against Jacques and Counter-Jacques meant
that civil complaints could not be jointly prosecuted with a criminal case. This
removed an avenue that allowed claimants to pursue their causes at crown
expense.⁴⁸ That men—they were almost exclusively men, as I discuss in
Chapter 7—who were comfortable and cosmopolitan enough to navigate royal
justice were implicated in the Jacquerie gives us valuable insight into the uprising’s
constituency and appeal, but the poor, the ill-connected, and the female may all be
significantly under-represented.⁴⁹
⁴⁵ AN X1a 14, fol. 476–77, ed. Luce, no. 57, pp. 313–320, discussed in Chapter 8.
⁴⁶ AN X1c 32, no. 31.
⁴⁷ The average price of a lettre de rémission was 32 s. (Gauvard, ‘De grâce especial’, I: 68), equal to
nearly 100 days of an unskilled male labourer’s 4 d. average daily wage. Associated costs, such as the
notary’s fee and the (optional) chancery registration might push the total up considerably (Brissaud,
‘droit de grâce’, 246).
⁴⁸ Yvonne Bongert, ‘Rétribution et réparation dans l’ancien droit français’, Mémoires de la Société
pour l’histoire du droit et des institutions des anciens pays bourguignons, comtois et romands 45 (1988):
64–69.
⁴⁹ See also Justine Firnhaber-Baker, ‘The social constituency of the Jacquerie revolt of 1358’,
Speculum 95 (2020): 689–715.
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⁵⁰ Bernard Guenée, Tribunaux et gens de justice dans le bailliage de Senlis à la fin du Moyen Âge (vers
1380—vers 1550) (Paris, 1963), 19–21.
⁵¹ Ferdinand Lot and Robert Fawtier, Histoire des institutions françaises au Moyen Âge, 3 vols (Paris,
1957–1962), II: 153–156; Guenée, Tribunaux, 64–67.
⁵² Beaumanoir, cap. X, LVIII, vol. I: 146–152, vol. II: 340–353, quote at cap. LVIII, §1653, vol.
II: 345.
⁵³ AN X1a 17, fol. 272v–74.
⁵⁴ Louis de Carbonnières, La procédure devant la chambre criminelle du Parlement de Paris au XIVe
siècle (Paris, 2004), 60–64 and see Beaumanoir, cap. X, §295, vol. I: 146–147.
⁵⁵ Quote taken from AN JJ 90, no. 82, fol. 40v. See also Chapter 10, n. 34.
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degrees of justice over their subjects.⁵⁶ In the case of Montmorency, the count had
remitted all his subjects who had been involved in the revolt.⁵⁷ Who they were and
what exactly they may have done are unknown.
Local Documents
I have been able to round out the picture of the rebellion and the rebels given by
the chronicles and royal judicial sources with documents drawn from France’s
provincial archives, particularly those of the Archives départmentales de l’Oise in
Beauvais, de la Marne in Châlons-en-Champagne, and de l’Aisne in Laon, as well
as the fonds Picardie at the Bibliothèque nationale and the Collection Bucquet-
aux-Cousteaux at Beauvais. Some municipal records for the cities of Laon and
Senlis are still extant, although for Senlis they begin only in 1383. Whether by
chance or design, some significant losses took place around the time of the
Jacquerie. The cartulary of Laon’s cathedral chapter, for example, skips from
1351 to 1370.⁵⁸ This is not the fault of the revolt because, unlike their later
English counterparts, the Jacques did not target documents. Likely, this war-
filled period of history was simply not kind to parchment.
There are only a very few local sources that bear directly on the Jacquerie’s
events, but many more that reveal those involved in more quotidian contexts. The
rebel leader Arnoul Guenelon, for example, can be found attending municipal
assemblies in Senlis alongside a number of men with whom he had attacked
Ermenonville a quarter century before.⁵⁹ Lay seigneurial documents are scarce on
the ground, but records from clerical sources, especially monastic ones, are
overwhelmingly ample. Much of this material has not been sufficiently catalogued,
if catalogued at all.⁶⁰ There can be no question of exhaustively examining these
records, but with patience it is possible to find Jacques and their opponents in
them, especially in land transactions, rent and tithe lists, and lawsuits.
From local documents, information emerges about Jacques’ and Jacques’
enemies’ property, family relationships, social networks, and sometime even a
little bit about their personality. In 1398, we once more find Arnoul Guenelon in
Senlis: now 70, he is ‘a frail, old man of great age’, donating the vineyard he had
bought with his wife Geneviève to the monks of Saint-Maurice in exchange for
19
their caretaking while he lived and for their masses after he died.⁶¹ Sometimes,
rebels appear among the petty officials under whose authority such acts were
issued. For instance, the Jacques’ lieutenant Germain de Réveillon can be found in
1350 serving as the sworn clerk (tabellion juré) of Pont-Sainte-Maxence, a town in
which he also acted on behalf of the rebellion.⁶² Fremin de Berne, recipient of a
formulaic remission for Jacquerie at Beaumont-sur-Oise, later served as the
warden of the seal for the same village’s provost.⁶³
Identifying the right people and understanding their relationships presents
some challenges beyond the sheer mass of material. Arnoul de Guenelon,
Germain de Réveillon, and Fremin de Berne all had distinctive names and the
documents in which they appear offer further information corroborating their
identities, but not every case is as clear-cut as these.⁶⁴ For example, the rebel
named Jean Bernier, whose adventures in the Jacquerie are discussed in Chapter 4
is demonstrably not the same man as the royal counsellor Jean Bernier, for the
latter already held the high office of Maître des Requêtes in August 1358, when
Jean Bernier the Jacques was leading Noyon’s city guard.⁶⁵
Tracing family adds another layer of difficulty. Fremin de Berne worked for the
same authority as one Simon de Berne, the latter also serving as a captain of the
Jacques in that area, but their surname ‘from Berne’, a nearby village, may indicate
a relationship of past (and perhaps distant) proximity rather than a familial one.⁶⁶
⁶¹ ‘homme faible ancient et de grant aage par quoy desormais il ne peut traveiller souffrir ne endurer
aucune peine de corps ne a ses besoignes entendre en maniere que aucun prouffit lui en peust venir’
(AD Oise H 841).
⁶² AD Oise H 2439, no. 4; AN JJ 86, no. 309, fol. 103, ed. Luce, no. 29, pp. 261–262.
⁶³ AD Oise Hs 667; AN JJ 90, no. 162, fol. 92.
⁶⁴ See the critical cautions of Zvi Razi, ‘The Toronto School’s reconstitution of medieval peasant
society: A critical view’, P&P 85 (1979): 142–145 apropos of the prosopography of English medieval
villages. For naming and proposopgraphy in France, see Karl Michaëlsson, Études sur les noms de
personne français d’après les rôles de taille parisiens (rôles de 1292, 1296–1300, 1313), 2 vols (Uppsala,
1927–1936) I: 118–142; Karl Michaëlsson, ‘Les noms d’origine dans le rôle de la taille parisien de 1313’,
Symbolae Philologicae Gotoburgenses 56 (1950): 355–400; Marie-Thérèse Morlet, Étude
d’anthroponymie picarde: Les noms de personne en Haute Picardie aux XIIIe, XIVe, XVe siècle
(Amiens, 1967), 135–137; Albert Dauzat, Les noms de famille de France: Traité d’anthroponymie
française, 3rd edn by Marie-Thérèse Morlet (Paris, 1977), 45–47, 163–175; Caroline Bourlet,
‘L’anthroponymie à Paris à la fin du XIIIème siècle d’après les rôles de la taille du règne de Philippe
le bel’ in Monique Bourin and Pascal Chareille (eds), Persistances du nom unique, vol. 2.2 of Samuel
Leturcq (ed.), Genèse médiévale de l’anthroponymie moderne, 6 vols in 8 (Tours, 1992), 9–44; François
Menant, ‘L’anthroponymie du monde rural’ in Monique Bourin, Jean-Marie Martin, and François
Menant (eds), L’Anthroponymie: Document de l’histoire sociale des mondes méditerraneéns médiévaux.
Actes du colloque international organisé par l’École française de Rome avec le concours du GDR 955 du
C.N.R.S. ‘Genèse médiévale de l’anthroponymie moderne’ (Rome, 6–8 octobre 1994) (Rome, 1996),
349–363; Patrice Beck, ‘Personal naming among the rural populations in northern France at the end
of the Middle Ages’ in George T. Beech, Monique Bourin, and Pascal Chareille (eds), Personal names
studies of medieval Europe: Social identity and familial structures (Kalamazoo, 2002), 143–156. For the
thirteenth-century Oise, the names and surnames of serfs are discussed in Louis Carolus-Barré,
‘L’affranchissement des serfs de la châtellenie de Pierrefonds par Blanche de Castille (v. 1252) et sa
confirmation par Saint Louis (septembre 1255)’ in Violence et contestation, 66–69.
⁶⁵ See further discussion and Chapter 4, n. 96.
⁶⁶ AN JJ 86, no. 207, fol. 67v, ed. Luce, no. 25, pp. 254–256.
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His given name ‘Fremin’, by contrast, is typical of the region around Amiens,
rather distant from the Oise banks. The surname Calle (or Cale), borne by the
Jacques’ general captain Guillaume Calle, was quite uncommon, as it remains in
France today. It seems certain that an Isabelle ‘widow of Guillaume Calle’ who
sued in 1361 for return of her dowry, given to a favourite of the count of Clermont,
was his wife.⁶⁷ But, without corroborative information, we cannot be sure that a
Thibaut Cale, who fought against the Anglo-Navarrese in 1359, or a Guérin Calle,
who leased some farmland in 1369, were his relatives, let alone that William and
John Calle, archers in the fifteenth-century English army and active in Normandy,
were his descendants.⁶⁸ The new information gleaned from these sources some-
times raises more questions than it answers.
The stories that I tell in this book are thus constructed out of a mass of incomplete
and unruly evidence. Like crown’s judges and the chroniclers, I have had to
determine what had happened and what it meant from sources that could not,
or did not want to, tell me everything I wanted to know. Unlike them, I have access
to mapping and relational database software that facilitates the collection and
analysis of a relatively large amount of geographical and prosopographical detail.⁶⁹
This made possible the visualization, organization, and retrieval of information
required to navigate a very complex event that occurred in many places over an
extended period of time. While textual analysis is the bedrock of this book, I have
set that analysis within the context of a larger picture aggregated from less
textually-bound information. Pictures are worth a thousand words, and some-
times numbers tell a story clearer than, or different from, the texts themselves.
The relationship between the analysis of collective data and the close reading of
individual texts is necessarily a complementary one. Neither approach trumps the
other. Every point on a map or entry in a database represents multiple interpretive
decisions made through close reading. It is also imperative to remember that the
collective picture drawn from the aggregated stories is not always a better guide to
events than an individual story. Given that the sources are mendacious, generic,
stereotyped, and incomplete, to ignore minority reports would be to miss some of
⁶⁷ AN X1c 13b, no. 272, 274. Calle’s name and identity are discussed in Chapter 6.
⁶⁸ AN JJ 90, no. 549, fol. 272v–73r; AD Oise H 672. Both Thibaut and Guérin were located near
Pontoise. Archers: Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry, Andy King, David Simpkin, Adam Chapman, and
Aleksandr Lobanov, ‘The soldier in later medieval England online database’ (Reading and
Southampton, 2006–2016) at www.medievalsoldier.org [last accessed 21 November 2020].
⁶⁹ An open-access version of the map that I created for this project can be found at http://worldmap.
harvard.edu/maps/Jacquerie_1358 [accessed 21 November 2020].
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