A Distant Mirror (69 page)

For the moment, the crown’s need of money dictated an effort through Hugues Aubriot, Provost of Paris, to take the Jews under royal protection. Aubriot, a contentious figure and notorious libertine, sent out heralds ordering restoration of everything stolen from the Jews including the kidnapped children. “Very few obeyed the order,” and the Provost’s snatching of souls from Christian baptism was to be a charge against him in his coming downfall.

By edict of November 16, the government, as promised, abolished “henceforth and forever all taxes, tithes,
gabelles
, by which our subjects are much grieved, quitting and remitting all aids and subsidies which have been imposed for the said wars since our predecessor, King Philip, until today.” This stroke of fiscal suicide reflected momentary panic rather than serious intention. Aside from Charles V, most rulers governed by impulse in the 14th century.

In search of other money, the government immediately appealed to the provincial Estates for voluntary aids, with generally meager results. At the Estates of Normandy, when one member proposed to vote a grant, the assembly cried with one voice, “Nothing! Nothing!” At Rouen and Amiens, the people “were all of one will” against it. “By God’s blood, it shall never pass!” shouted a bourgeois orator to a protest meeting in the pig market of Sens. Opinion was general that the King’s treasure was enough for his needs and that more money would only go into greater extravagances by the nobles. While some districts voted aids, the major result of summoning the provincial Estates was to spread discussion and excite resistance.

Divided interests in the Third Estate complicated the struggle. The petty bourgeois were seeking to wrest control from the ruling oligarchy of merchants and masters of guilds, and both parties used the rising agitation of the working class for their own ends. They had inflammable tinder in the unhappy ranks of the unskilled and in dispossessed peasants, driven into the cities by the wars, who created a reservoir of anger and misery.

The late King’s ministerial structure, like the financial, was soon riddled by the uncles’ efforts to remove his councillors. Bureau de la Rivière, whom Charles V had loved and wished to have buried at his feet, was accused of treason by a spokesman of the Dukes but was
saved when Clisson threw down his glove in the presence of the whole court and no one dared take up the awful challenge. In fear of reprisals, Rivière afterward left office, d’Orgement and Mercier were eventually pushed out, and another of the former councillors, Jean de La Grange, Cardinal of Amiens, found good reason to depart.

La Grange was disliked by the young King, who had been led by the Cardinal’s enemies to believe that he kept a familiar demon. On one occasion when Charles was ten, he had crossed himself at the Cardinal’s approach, crying, “Flee from the Devil! Throw out the Devil!”—to the considerable annoyance of that prince of the Church. On learning that the young King, on his accession, had said to a friend, “This is the moment to revenge ourselves on this priest,” Cardinal La Grange put his treasure in safekeeping and fled to Avignon, never to return.

The sensational fall of the Provost of Paris added to the sense of crumbling authority. Hugues Aubriot was a man in his sixties who had won the favor of Philip of Burgundy by extravagant banquets and gifts, and the favor of the bourgeois by construction of the first sewers and by vigorous repair of walls and bridges. But he was marked for destruction by the clergy, whom he openly insulted, and by the University, which he scorned as that “nursery of priests” and whose privileges he combatted and members he arrested on any pretext. It was said that he reserved two dungeons in the Châtelet expressly for scholars and clerics. At the funeral of Charles V, when Aubriot refused to allow the University to take precedence in the procession, a furious fracas broke out between the Provost’s sergeants and the scholars, ending with many of the University wounded and 36 thrown in jail. “Ha, that rabble!” Aubriot exclaimed. “I am sorry that nothing worse happened to them.”

Aubriot’s intervention in the case of the Jews gave the University its handle for revenge. Accused of heresy, sodomy, and being a false Christian, and, specifically, of “profaning the sanctity of baptism” by returning the Jewish children, he was brought to trial before the Bishop of Paris in May 1381. Besides charges of voicing contempt for the Eucharist, failure to take communion at Easter, and public disrespect of the clergy, he was accused of neglect of a virtuous wife, of buying virgins, and having “recourse to sorcery that his passions might triumph,” of imprisoning husbands to have freedom with their wives, of cohabiting bestially with women against nature and having carnal relations with Jews.

Convicted, but spared a death sentence by Burgundy’s influence, he was exposed on a wooden platform in front of the cathedral, where, on his knees and hatless, he was obliged to beg for absolution and vow an
offering of candles for the baptized Jews he had returned to their parents. Absolved by the Bishop and Rector of the University, he was then condemned to perpetual penitence in prison on bread and water. His removal, contributing to the weakening of government, left the people of Paris readier to rise.

Coucy during these uneasy happenings remained in the Royal Council on good terms with the Dukes, each of whom desired his support. One of Anjou’s first acts as Regent, on September 27, had been to confirm Coucy in lifetime possession of Mortaigne on the Channel, bestowed on him by the late King. In addition to grand estate, Coucy clearly possessed a personal power of attraction and a faculty for not making enemies. In the great game of “who’s in, who’s out,” he was always able to work with whoever held power, perhaps owing to political sophistication gained from the circumstances of his marriage. After accomplishing the treaty of peace with the Duke of Brittany in January 1381, he was sent once more as ambassador to the English at Montreuil to negotiate a dispute over terms of the truce. Later in the year, documents show him paying spies for information on Calais, Guînes, and other English fortresses. While charged with defense of the frontier, he was recalled to Paris in May to advise Anjou on his projects in Italy.

Spoiling for a kingdom, Anjou needed money. Informed of the treasure stored by Charles V at Melun for the use of his son, Anjou laid hold of it by the direct expedient of threatening to execute the guardian of the fund. The Monk of St. Denis, however, does not vouch for this story because “one never knows the truth about these things that take place in the shadow.” Whatever Anjou obtained, it was not enough. He continued pressing for aids through 1381, winning a few grants here and there, but generally meeting sullen resistance.

While France smoldered, true revolt erupted in June 1381 in England, not of the urban class but of the peasants. In a country whose economy was largely rural, they were the working class that mattered. The third poll tax in four years, to include everyone over the age of fifteen, was the precipitant. Voted in November 1380 by a subservient Parliament to finance Lancaster’s ambitions in Spain, the collection brought in only two thirds of the expected sum, not least because tax commissioners were easily bribed to overlook families or falsify their numbers. A second round of collecting became necessary, which could have been foreseen as an invitation to trouble if the lords and prelates and royal uncles of Richard’s government had paid attention to the
constant complaints of rural insubordination. They did not, and brought upon themselves the most fearful challenge of the century.

At the end of May, villages in Essex on the east coast just above London refused payment; the resistance spread with some evidence of planning, and burst into violence in Kent, the adjoining county south of the Thames. Peasants mingled with yeomen from the French wars armed themselves with rusty swords, scythes, axes, and longbows blackened by age, and triumphantly stormed a castle where a runaway villein had been imprisoned. Electing Wat Tyler, an eloquent demagogue and veteran of the wars, as their commander-in-chief, they seized Canterbury, forced the mayor to swear fealty to “King Richard and the Commons,” and liberated from the Archbishop’s prison the idealogue of the movement, John Ball. He was a vagrant priest, scholar, and zealot who had been wandering the country for twenty years, frequently hauled in by the authorities for prophesying against Church and state and preaching radical doctrines of equality.

Although the poll tax was the igniting spark, the fundamental grievance was the bonds of villeinage and the lack of legal and political rights. Villeins could not plead in court against their lord, no one spoke for them in Parliament, they were bound by duties of servitude which they had no way to break except by forcibly obtaining a change of the rules. That was the object of the insurrection, and of the march on the capital that began from Canterbury.

As the Kentishmen swept forward to London, covering the seventy miles in two days, the Essex rebels marched southward to meet them. Abbeys and monasteries on the way were a special object of animosity because they were the last to allow commutation of servile labor. In the towns, artisans and small tradesmen, sharing the quarrel of the little against the great, gave aid and food to the peasants. As the sound of the rising spread to other counties, riots and outbreaks widened.

The “mad multitude” on its march from Kent and Essex opened prisons, sacked manors, and burned records. Some personally hated landlords and officials were murdered and their heads carried around on poles. Others, in fear of death, fled to hide in the same woods where villein outlaws frequently hid from them. Certain lords were forced by the rebels to accompany them “whether they would or not,” either to supply needed elements of command or the appearance of participation by the gentry.

At the same time, peasant spokesmen swore to kill “all lawyers and servants of the King they could find.” Short of the King, their imagined champion, all officialdom was their foe—sheriffs, foresters, tax-collectors, judges, abbots, lords, bishops, and dukes—but most
especially men of the law because the law was the villeins’ prison. Not accidentally, the Chief Justice of England, Sir John Cavendish, was among their first victims, along with many clerks and jurors. Every attorney’s house on the line of march reportedly was destroyed.

If the Jacquerie 23 years earlier had been an explosion without a program, the Peasants’ Revolt arose out of a developing idea of freedom. Though theoretically free, villeins wanted abolition of the old bonds, the right to commute services to rent, a riddance of all the restrictions heaped up by the Statute of Laborers over the past thirty years in the effort to clamp labor in place. They had listened to Lollard priests, and to secular preachers moved by the evils of the time, and to John Ball’s theories of leveling. “Matters cannot go well in England,” was his theme, “until all things shall be held in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.… Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?”

Wyclif’s spirit, which had dared deny the most pervasive authority of the time, was abroad. What had happened in the last thirty years, as a result of plague, war, oppression, and incompetence, was a weakened acceptance of the system, a mistrust of government and governors, lay and ecclesiastical, an awakening sense that authority could be challenged—that change was in fact possible. Moral authority can be no stronger than its acknowledgment. When officials were venal—as even the poor could see they were in the bribing of tax commissioners—and warriors a curse and the Church oppressive, the push for change gained strength.

It was encouraged by the preachers’ castigation of the powerful. “The tournaments of the rich,” they said, “are the torments of the poor.” They regularly denounced “evil princes,” “false executors who increase the sorrows of widows,” “wicked ecclesiastics who show the worst example to the people,” and, above all, nobles who empty the purses of the poor by their extravagance, and disdain them for “lowness of blod or foulenesse of body,” for deformed shape of body or limb, for dullness of wit and uncunning of craft, and deign not to speak to them, and who are themselves stuffed with pride—of ancestry, fortune, gentility, possessions, power, comeliness, strength, children, treasure—“prowde in lokynge, prowde in spekyng,… prowde in goinge, standynge and sytting.” All would be drawn by fiends to Hell on the Day of Judgment.

On that day of wrath, said the Dominican John Bromyard in terms that spoke directly to the peasant, the rich would have hung around
their necks the oxen and sheep and beasts of the field that they had seized without paying for. The “righteous poor,” promised a Franciscan friar, “will stand up against the cruel rich at the Day of Judgment and will accuse them of their works and severity on earth. ‘Ha, ha!’ will say the others, horribly frightened, ‘These are the folk formerly in contempt. See how they are honored—they are among the sons of God! What are riches and pomp to us now who are abased?’ ”

If the meek were indeed the sons of God (even if they too were scolded by the preachers for greed, cheating, and irreverence), why should they wait for their rights until the Day of Judgment? If all men had a common origin in Adam and Eve, how should some be held in hereditary servitude? If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?

At its climax on the outskirts of London, the Peasants’ Revolt came to the edge of overpowering the government. No measures had been taken against the oncoming horde, partly from contempt for all Wills and Cobbs and Jacks and black-nailed louts, partly from mediocre leadership and lack of ready resources. Lancaster was away on the Scottish border, Buckingham was in Wales, and the only organized armed forces were already embarking at Plymouth for Spain under the command of the third brother, Edmund of Cambridge. Except for 500 or 600 men-at-arms in the King’s retinue, the crown controlled no police or militia; London’s citizens were unreliable because many were in sympathy and some in active connivance with the rebels.