A Distant Mirror (71 page)

Following so closely on events in Rouen, the uprising in Paris deepened fears of a conspiracy of revolt. The court decided to parley. Coucy, known for his tact and persuasiveness, was sent with the Duke of Burgundy and the Chancellor to the Porte St. Antoine to hear the insurgents’ demands. Jean de Marès acted as mediator. The Parisians insisted on an abolition of all levies since the coronation, plus amnesty for all acts of riot, and the release of four bourgeois arrested earlier for having advised against Anjou’s tax. The royal negotiators, until they could return with an answer, granted release of the four prisoners as a gesture of appeasement—with contradictory results. Without waiting to hear more, the mob stormed the Châtelet and other prisons, opening every cell and dungeon, releasing inmates so broken or emaciated that they had to be carried to the hospital wards of the Hôtel Dieu. All records of trials and convictions were destroyed in bonfires.

The most celebrated prisoner of Paris, Hugues Aubriot, was among the liberated. Mounted on a “little horse,” the former Provost was escorted to his home by the Maillotins, who begged him to become their leader. In every rising, the same need was felt and the same effort made to persuade or force someone of the governing class to take charge and give orders. Aubriot wanted no part of it. During the night, while the insurgents caroused “in eating, drinking and debauches,” he managed to leave Paris, and when in the morning they found him gone, a great cry was raised that the city was betrayed.

The bourgeois pressed for a solution, anxious that “the hot imprudence of the lowest people should not be turned to the detriment of men of substance.” Ready to subdue Paris by whatever means, the crown agreed to everything except pardon for those guilty of breaking into the Châtelet—but its intent was no more honest than Richard II’s. On receiving the royal letters confirming the agreement, the bourgeois leaders alertly noted that the language of the remittance was ambiguous
and the document, instead of being sealed in green wax on silk, was sealed in red wax on parchment, denying it the quality of perpetuity.

Despite popular rage at this duplicity, the court was stiffening. Other towns where protest had erupted were found to have been acting not in concert but independently, thus subject to local suppression. Armed force was gathering at Vincennes and fear of punishment spreading in Paris. The court was able to force the city’s leaders to yield forty fomenters of the revolt, of whom fourteen were publicly executed to the great indignation of the populace. According to the Monk of St. Denis, others were secretly drowned in the river by royal order. Gaining security, the Dukes sent the King back to Rouen on March 29 to impose reprisals held in abeyance. In a miserable exhibition of ritual joy at the royal approach, the people, in festival clothes of blue and green, were lined up in organized plea for clemency, crying
“Noël, Noël, Vive le Roi!
” which did not suit the Duke of Burgundy. To induce the proper mood for heavy fines, he ordered his men-at-arms to ride among the people with drawn swords telling them “to cry rather for Mercy,
la hart au col”
(with a rope around the neck), signifying the right of the King to hang or spare them at will.

For a gift of money to the King and the Duke, all the silver and gold plate of the
confréries
and their candlesticks and incense boxes were sold. Royalty was not mollified. Despite the original pardon, twelve of the rioters were executed, the tocsin bell taken down, the chains for closing streets removed, fines imposed, Rouen’s charter of liberties revoked, and its administration turned over from the independent guilds to a royal bailiff. Cowed by the example, the Estates of Normandy voted a sales and a salt tax and a tax on income. In suppression of revolt, the crown was finding a way to fill its treasury and, more significantly, an opportunity to cancel town charters and extend royal power.

The wrath of Paris was still far from subdued, and dangerous events in Ghent augmented the fear that a general rising, if not yet concerted, might become so. The cry of solidarity,
“Vive Gant! Vive Paris no’ mere!”
was being heard in towns from the Flemish border to the Loire.

In Ghent, the White Hoods of Jacob van Artevelde’s day reappeared. A people’s militia was organized and a captain found in Artevelde’s son Philip, a small, sharp-eyed man of aggressive energy and “insinuating eloquence,” chosen largely for the aura of his name. Forced by circumstance, if not preference, to depend on the common people, he ordered that all classes would be heard in counsel, “the poor
like the rich,” and all would be fed alike. When 30,000 had eaten no bread for two weeks, he forced abbeys to distribute their stores of grain and merchants to sell at fixed prices. Traditionally, the turmoils of Flanders had divided the Count, the nobility, the urban magnates and guilds in shifting alignments against each other, but this time they began to see in the sustained rebellion of Ghent the red vision of revolution and closed ranks under the Count to suppress it.

Reduced by hunger, the city agreed to a parley in April 1382. The Count, confident of mastery, demanded that all the Gantois from fifteen to sixty should come bareheaded in their shirts with halters around their necks halfway to Bruges, where he would determine how many would be pardoned and how many put to death. At a meeting in the market place, the starving townsmen were told these terms by their deputies and offered three courses of action—to submit, to starve, or to fight. The third was chosen: an army of 5,000 of those best fit to fight was mobilized and launched against Bruges, headquarters of the Count’s party. The result was one of the stunning upsets of the century.

The militia of Bruges, no less confident against their old rivals than the Count, caroused through the night and staggered forth on the morrow, May 5, shouting and singing in drunken disorder. In vain the Count and his knights endeavored to hold them back for orderly advance. A blast of stone and iron cannonballs followed by an assault of the Gantois mowed them down. Panic and flight could not be stemmed and seem rather easily to have swept the Flemish knights into the retreat. Louis de Male, the Count, was unhorsed and, despite efforts to rally his forces after dark by lantern light, avoided capture only by changing clothes with his valet and escaping on foot to refuge in a poor woman’s hut. “Do you know me?” he asked. “Oh yes, Monseigneur, I have often begged at your gates.” Found by one of his knights, he called for a horse and, provided with the indignity of a peasant’s mare, rode bareback into Lille, a less happy journey than when long ago he had galloped briskly away from marriage with Isabella.

Ghent was provisioned and joined in her triumph by other cities under the cry
“Tout un!
(All one).” Having taken possession of Bruges and 500 of its most notable bourgeois as hostages, Philip van Artevelde declared himself Regent of Flanders. All the towns surrendered to his rule, “and there he made new mayors and aldermen and new laws.” He adopted a noble’s trappings of command: trumpets heralded his approach, a pennon displaying three silver hats preceded him in the streets, minstrels played at his door. He wore scarlet and miniver and dined off the Count’s silver plate, seized as booty.

Once again, as in the days of his father, the interests of England and France were at stake. Louis de Male appealed for French aid to his son-in-law and heir, the Duke of Burgundy. Artevelde offered alliance to England. The English Commons favored it for the sake of the wool trade, and because the Flemish, like themselves, were Urbanist in the schism. Pope Urban declared an expedition in aid of Flanders to be a crusade, which meant that clerical tithes could be used toward the cost. Despite this advantage, the English nobility hesitated to ally themselves with rebels, and while they hesitated, their opportunity was lost.

In April the Duc d’Anjou had departed for Italy, having amassed, by whatever means, enough money to recruit 9,000 men and furnish himself with pavilions and equipment “the most sumptuous that any lord had ever commanded.” The crown had less success in a renewed demand for aids from Paris. The King at this time was at Meaux on the Marne. Hoping that a settlement might be reached if he placated Paris by his presence, the Council decided to send Coucy to negotiate with the Parisians, “for he knew better how to manage them than any other.”

Accompanied by no other lords but only by members of his household, Coucy entered the hostile city, where he appears to have been well regarded and well received. He went to his own residence, recently acquired, a
hôtel
called the Cloître St. Jean off the Place de Grève.
^*
Summoning certain leaders for a conference, he reproved them “wisely and prudently” for their wickedness in killing officials of the King and breaking open his prisons. For this the King could make them pay dearly if he wished, but he did not desire to do so because he loved Paris as his birthplace and because, it being the capital of the kingdom, he was “unwilling to destroy its well-intentioned inhabitants.” Coucy said he had come to make up the quarrel between the citizens and their sovereign and would entreat the King and his uncles “mercifully to pardon them for their evil deeds.”

The citizens answered that they had no wish to make war against the King but that the taxes must be repealed, at least as regards Paris. When exempted, they would be ready to assist the King “in any other manner.” Pouncing on this, Coucy asked, “In what manner?” They said they would pay certain sums into the hands of a chosen receiver
every week for support of the soldiers. When Coucy asked how much they would pay, they replied, “Such a sum as we shall agree upon.”

Coucy managed smoothly by “handsome speeches” to obtain a preliminary offer of 12,000 francs on condition of a pardon. This was accepted by the King, but the conditions for his re-entering Paris testified to the court’s nervousness: the people were to lay down their arms, open the gates, leave the street chains down at night so long as the King was in the city, and send six or seven notables to Meaux as hostages. Submitted to an Assembly in Paris, the conditions were angrily rejected by the Maillotins, who demanded with threats and curses that the merchants join in their opinion. With greatest reluctance, six bourgeois carried this refusal to Meaux, under the pressure, as they told the court, of the great fury of the people. The government decided on force. Men-at-arms were sent to occupy the bridges upstream to cut off the supply of food to the city, while others were let loose to pillage the
faubourgs
, committing such excesses “as by an enemy upon an enemy.” Preparing for assault of Paris, nobles collected empty wagons “to carry away plunder from the said city if occasion offers.” The Parisians fastened the street chains, distributed arms, and mounted a watch on the walls.

Moderate parties on both sides, led by Coucy for the crown and Jean de Marès for the city, still worked for a settlement. Their combined eloquence and influence gained the people’s consent to a tax of 80,000 francs to be collected by their own receivers and distributed directly to troops on active service, untouched by royal uncles or treasurers. Paris was to receive in exchange a general pardon and the King’s written promise that the aids would not be used as a precedent for new taxes, and that he would hold no malice against Paris in the future. If any trust in a royal pardon still remained, it was because of a quality of sacredness in an anointed king and a profound need to perceive him—as opposed to the lords—as the people’s protector.

At this moment Ghent’s startling victory over the Count of Flanders intervened, frightening the propertied class and giving the court urgent reason to settle with Paris. With Anjou gone to Italy and Berry dispatched as Governor of Languedoc, the Duke of Burgundy was in control, and his dominant purpose now was to employ French force for the retrieval of his heritage in Flanders. Terms with Paris were hastily concluded.

The King re-entered the capital only for a day, to the great displeasure of the citizens. Rouen erupted again when tax-collectors set up their tables in the Cloth Hall but the rising was quickly suppressed by
the royal governor with the aid of an armed galley in the river. Southern France too was in turmoil, spread by bands of dispossessed peasants and vagabond poor. The Monk of St. Denis called them the
désespérés
and
crève-de-faim
(the hopeless and starving), but locally they were called the Tuchins. Some say the name derives from
tuechien
(kill-dog), meaning people reduced to such misery that they ate dogs as in times of famine; others, that it derived from
touche
, meaning, in the local patois, the
maquis
or brush where the dispossessed took refuge.

Through the uplands of Auvergne, as well as in the south, the Tuchins, in bands of 20, 60, or 100, organized a guerrilla warfare against established society. They preyed upon the clergy—hated for their tax exemptions—ambushed travelers, held lords for ransom, attacking all, it was said, who did not have callused hands. Like the Mafia of Sicily, they originated out of misery to prey upon the rich, but, on becoming organized, were used by the rich in local feuds and brigandage. Towns and seigneurs hired them in their war against the crown’s officers, who were called the “eaters.” The unrest in Languedoc was to reach the force of insurrection in the following year.

In all these evils, the upper class felt the rising tide of subversion. The rioters of Béziers in Languedoc were reported in a plot to murder all citizens having more than 100 livres, while forty of the plotters planned to kill their own wives and marry the richest and most beautiful widows of their victims. The English peasants seemed to one chronicler “like mad dogs … like Bacchantes dancing through the country.” The Ciompi were “ruffians, evil-doers, thieves … useless men of low condition … dirty and shabby,” and the Maillotins were viewed as their brothers. The weavers of Ghent were credited with intent to exterminate all good folk down to the age of six.

The source of all subversion, the focus of danger, was seen to lie in Ghent.