A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Chosen by the leading citizens, the Provost of Merchants and his fellow magistrates administered all the usual municipal functions and assigned daily duty to the police force, which was manned by the obligatory service of citizens in units of ten, forty, and fifty.

They imposed ransoms on prosperous villages and burned the poor ones, robbed abbeys and monasteries of their stores and valuables, pillaged peasants’ barns, killed and tortured those who hid their goods or resisted ransom, not sparing the clergy or the aged, violated virgins, nuns, and mothers, abducted women as enforced camp-followers and men as servants.

In the course of a raid Cervole launched through Provence in 1357, Pope Innocent VI felt so insecure in Avignon that he negotiated for immunity in advance.

A sympathizer of the Third Estate, Jean de Venette was a Carmelite prior and head of the Order in the 1360s at the time he was writing his chronicle.

“A sympathizer of the Third Estate, Jean de Venette was a Carmelite prior and head of the Order in the 1360s at the time he was writing his chronicle. He blamed the Regent, who “applied no remedy,” and the nobles, who “despised and hated all others and took no thought for the mutual usefulness of lord and men. They subjected and despoiled the peasants and villagers. In no wise did they defend their country from its enemies. Rather did they trample it underfoot, robbing and pillaging the peasants’ goods” while the Regent “gave no thought to their plight.””

King Jean’s release was still unsettled. While treating the royal captive with elaborate honor, Edward was determined to squeeze from his triumph every last inch of territory and ounce of money that France could be made to yield.

In May 1358 an act of the Dauphin-Regent precipitated the ferocious uprising of the peasantry called the Jacquerie, in which Enguerrand de Coucy at eighteen was swept into an active and visible role.

The common people “groaned,” wrote Jean de Venette, “to see dissipated in games and ornaments the sums they had so painfully furnished for the needs of war.”

Soon thousands—ultimately, it was said, 100,000—were engaged in attacks covering the Oise valley, the Ile de France, and closer regions of Picardy and Champagne, and raging “throughout the seigneurie of Coucy, where there were great outrages.”

One group of Jacques made straight for the poultry yard, seized all the chickens they could lay hold of, fished carp out of the pond, took wine from the cellars and cherries from the orchard, and gave themselves a feast at the nobles’ expense.

At a critical moment for Marcel, the rage of the Jacquerie offered him an added weapon, which he seized in a fatal choice that was to lose him the support of the propertied class.

Compromised by murder and destruction, Marcel had mounted the tiger. The royal family at Meaux was the next target of the band from Paris. Enlarged as they marched along the Marne by bands of Jacques coming from many places and by many paths, the combined group numbering “9,000” reached Meaux on June 9 “with great will to do evil.”

Meaux was the turning point. Gaining courage from the conquest, French nobles of the area joined in desolating the surrounding country, wreaking more damage on France, said Jean de Venette, than had the English. From there, the suppression of the Jacquerie followed, and in its train the fall of Marcel.

To consummate his victory, Charles of Navarre beheaded Guillaume Cale after reportedly crowning him, in wicked mockery, King of the Jacques with a circlet of red-hot iron.

By June 24, 1358, “20,000” Jacques had been killed and the countryside converted to a wasteland.

Within the next month the struggle in Paris came to a climax and an end.

“Within the next month the struggle in Paris came to a climax and an end. Since the day after Poitiers, Marcel had kept men at work extending the walls, strengthening the gates, building moats and barriers. Now fully enclosed and fortified, the capital was the key to power. From Vincennes on the outskirts, the Regent with assembled nobles was probing for an entry; Marcel, who had lost sight of every purpose but overpowering the Regent, was planning to deliver the capital to Charles of Navarre; the eel-like Navarre was negotiating with both sides and was in contact with Navarrese and English forces outside the walls.”

Meanwhile the prosperous bourgeois feared that if the Regent succeeded in taking the city by force instead of surrender, all citizens alike would be subjected to punishment and plunder.

In a rush upon the Provost, the guards of St. Antoine struck him down, and when the bloodstained weapons had lifted and the melee had cleared, the body of Etienne Marcel lay trampled and dead in the street.

On August 10 the Regent issued a general amnesty and ordered nobles and peasantry to pardon each other so that the fields might be cultivated and the harvest brought in. The extermination of the Jacques was making itself felt.

With Marcel’s death the reform movement was aborted; the glimpse of “Good Government” was to remain only a glimpse.

“With Marcel’s death the reform movement was aborted; the glimpse of “Good Government” was to remain only a glimpse. After Artevelde and Rienzi, Marcel was the third leader of a bourgeois rising within a dozen years to be killed by his own followers. The people of France on the whole were not ready for an effort to limit the monarchy. They blamed all their troubles—heavy taxes, dishonest government, debased coinage, military defeats, banditry of the companies, the fallen condition of the realm—on the crown’s evil councillors and the caitiff nobles, not on the King, who had fought bravely at Poitiers, or even on the Dauphin. No political movement sprang from Marcel’s bones. The right of the Estates General to convene at will was lost, the provisions of the Grand Ordinance largely, though not entirely, discarded. The crown was left free for the period of royal absolutism that history held in waiting.”

Enguerrand’s own feat was to destroy the castle of Bishop Robert le Coq, who was attempting to carry Laon over to the camp of Charles of Navarre.

ISABELLA OF ENGLAND, second child and eldest daughter of King Edward and Queen Philippa, was the favorite of her father, whose marriage diplomacy on her behalf had five times failed to produce results.

“ISABELLA OF ENGLAND, second child and eldest daughter of King Edward and Queen Philippa, was the favorite of her father, whose marriage diplomacy on her behalf had five times failed to produce results. Since the last failure, when she was nineteen, she had been allowed to live independently, an over-indulged, willful, and wildly extravagant princess who was 33 in 1365, eight years older than Enguerrand de Coucy.”

COUCY ARRIVED IN ENGLAND in April 1376 just at the moment when English discontent came to a head in the first impeachment by Parliament of ministers of the crown.

“COUCY ARRIVED IN ENGLAND in April 1376 just at the moment when English discontent came to a head in the first impeachment by Parliament of ministers of the crown. In the historic session called the Good Parliament the monarchy discovered that it had drained the cup of public confidence in a government that could neither win the war nor end it.”

Seventy-four knights of the shire and sixty town burgesses made up the Commons of the Good Parliament.

The strenuous and jubilant England Coucy had known in the aftermath of Poitiers had grown sadly disgruntled.

A fifty-year reign of incessant warring was coming to a close in a rising sense of wasted effort and misrule.

In the Vision of Piers Plowman, which first appeared in 1377, the figure of Peace petitioning against Wrong, in the person of a King’s officer who has carried off his horses and grain and left a tally on the King’s Exchequer in payment, complains that he cannot bring him to law because “he maintaineth his men to murder mine own.”

It was now that Robin Hood’s legend took on its great popularity with the people, if not with the country gentlemen and solid merchants of the Commons.

“It was now that Robin Hood’s legend took on its great popularity with the people, if not with the country gentlemen and solid merchants of the Commons. They complained bitterly how “out of great malice” laborers and servants leave at will, and how “if their masters reprove them for bad service or offer to pay them according to the said statutes, they fly and run suddenly away out of their service and out of their country … and live wicked lives and rob the poor in simple villages in bodies of two and three together.””

Joining with villeins and artisans, they learned the tactics of association and strikes, combined against employers, subscribed money for “mutual defense,” and “gather together in great routs and agree by such Confederacy that everyone shall aid the other to resist their Lords with a strong hand.” A generation ready to revolt against oppression was taking shape.

Return of the Black Death in 1374–75 in the same epidemic that had hastened Coucy’s departure from Lombardy thinned more hearths and reduced the tax yield.

“Return of the Black Death in 1374–75 in the same epidemic that had hastened Coucy’s departure from Lombardy thinned more hearths and reduced the tax yield. The recurring outbreaks were beginning to have a cumulative effect on population decline as they did on the deepening gloom of the century. In the poll tax of 1379 four villages of Gloucestershire were recorded as making no returns; in Norfolk six centuries later, five small churches within a day’s visit of each other still stood in deserted silence on the sites of villages abandoned in the 14th century. As before, however, mortality was erratic and there was no lack of land-hungry younger sons, poor relations, and landless tenants ready to take over ownerless property and keep land in cultivation.”

Religious unrest was also disturbing the public mind and found its voice in an Oxford theologian and preacher, John Wyclif.

“Religious unrest was also disturbing the public mind and found its voice in an Oxford theologian and preacher, John Wyclif. Seen through the telescope of history, he was the most significant Englishman of his time. The materialism of the Church and the worldliness of its representatives were old complaints common to all Europe, but they were sharpened in England by antagonism to a foreign papacy. As elsewhere in Europe, there was a deep craving to detemporalize the Church and clear the way to God of all the money and fees and donations and oblations that cluttered it. In Wyclif the political and spiritual strains of English protestantism met and were fused into a philosophy and a program. Master of Balliol when he was 36, he stimulated anti-clericalism and gained attention by his stirring sermons. On the issue of secular versus spiritual authority, he carried further the dangerous thoughts of Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham and found himself champion of the English struggle against the supremacy of papal law over the King’s courts and against the payment of revenues to the papacy. As King’s chaplain in the 1360s he formulated ideas very attractive to the government on the relationship of church and state. In 1374 he served as the King’s envoy in the effort to reach a settlement with the Pope.”

In the year of Coucy’s visit Wyclif metaphorically nailed his thesis to the door in the form of a treatise, De Civili Dominio (On Civil Authority), which proposed nothing less than the disendowment of the temporal property of the Church and the exclusion of the clergy from temporal government.

“In the year of Coucy’s visit Wyclif metaphorically nailed his thesis to the door in the form of a treatise, De Civili Dominio (On Civil Authority), which proposed nothing less than the disendowment of the temporal property of the Church and the exclusion of the clergy from temporal government. All authority, he argued, derived from God, and in earthly matters belonged to the civil powers alone. By logical progression and in harsh polemic filled with references to the “stinking orders” of the friars and “horned fiends” of the hierarchy, his theories were soon to lead him to the radical proposition that the priesthood should be disestablished as the necessary mediator between man and God.”

Wyclif’s peculiar achievement was to express both national interest and popular feeling.

Most of all, people minded the unfitness of priests.

“Most of all, people minded the unfitness of priests. When a priest could purchase from diocesan authority a license to keep a concubine, how should he have better access to God than the ordinary sinner? Priestly susceptibility was such that when a man confessed adultery, the confessor was not allowed to ask the name of the partner lest he be inclined to take personal advantage of her frailty.”

The venality if not lechery of the parish priest was usually a result of his being underpaid, which led to the necessity of selling his services; even the Eucharist might be withheld unless the communicant produced an offering, which made a mockery of the ritual. Judas, it was said, sold the body of Christ for thirty pieces of silver; now priests did it daily for a penny.

Worldly clerics were censured in 1367 for wearing short tight doublets with long fur- or silk-lined sleeves, costly rings and girdles, embroidered purses, knives resembling swords, colored boots, and even that mark of the Devil, slashed and curling pointed shoes.

Charity was once found “in a friar’s frock, but that was afar back in St. Francis’s lifetime.”

“Charity was gone from them, wrote Langland; bishops of the Holy Church once apportioned Christ’s patrimony among the poor and needy “but now Avarice keeps the key”; Charity was once found “in a friar’s frock, but that was afar back in St. Francis’s lifetime.””

From there the rest followed—the non-necessity of the Pope, rejection of excommunication, confession, pilgrimages, worship of relics and saints, indulgences, treasury of merit. All were to be swept away under Wyclif’s broom.

What had been a nuisance was raised in wartime to economic tyranny.

“The people’s loyalty was severely tried, too, by purveyance—that is, the King’s right when traveling to commandeer supplies for a number of miles on either side of the road, and also for the provisioning of the army. Purveyors “seize on men and horses in the midst of their field work … on the very bullocks at the plough” so that “men make dole and murmur” at the King’s approach. What had been a nuisance was raised in wartime to economic tyranny.”

When Parliament met in 1376, the Commons, which existed only as an ad hoc body for purposes of consenting to taxes, gathered itself for political action.

“When Parliament met in 1376, the Commons, which existed only as an ad hoc body for purposes of consenting to taxes, gathered itself for political action. First it sought strength by association with the Lords, who represented the permanent Parliament and contained a strong anti-Lancaster faction prepared to challenge the Duke. A council of twelve, consisting of four bishops, four earls, and four barons, was drawn from the Lords to act in concert with the Commons.”

Taking the offensive, the Commons for the first time in its history elected a Speaker in the person of a knight of Herefordshire, Sir Peter de la Mare, who not accidentally was seneschal of the Earl of March. Critical moments often produce men to match the need; Sir Peter proved to be a man of courage, perseverance, and, in Walsingham’s partisan judgment, a “spirit lifted up by God.”

The people were too poor and feeble to endure further taxation. Let Parliament discuss instead how the King might maintain the war out of his own resources.

When all the evidence had been heard, the Commons cried with one voice, “Lord Duke, now you can see and hear that Lord Latimer and Richard Lyons have acted falsely for their own advantage for which we demand remedy and redress!”

The petitions of reform were accepted in the King’s name by John of Gaunt, who for the time being considered that he had insufficient support in the Lords to do otherwise.

To contain John of Gaunt—or “bell the cat,” as it appeared in Langland’s fable—and to maintain the reforms once Parliament had dispersed, a new Council was named of nine lords and prelates including the ex-Chancellor, William of Wykeham, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, a rather pedestrian character of non-noble birth.

Such as thou art, so once was I, As I am now, so shalt thou be.

Although Walsingham reproached “thou untimely too-eager Death,” death may not have been untimely, for, unlike his father, the Prince died while he still reflected the image of a hero.

What was it in the Black Prince that everyone admired? Comrades in chivalry felt pride in him because he represented their image of themselves; the massacre of Limoges was nothing to them.

“What was it in the Black Prince that everyone admired? Comrades in chivalry felt pride in him because he represented their image of themselves; the massacre of Limoges was nothing to them. The people of England mourned him because his marvelous capture of a king at Poitiers and his other conquests had dressed them in greatness. Though his famous victory in Spain had proved ephemeral, his empire in Aquitaine had collapsed, and his prowess faded in disease, yet he represented that emotional choice a people makes to satisfy its craving for a leader.”

With no permanent organization or autonomous means of reassembly, the Commons ceased to exist as a body as soon as members scattered to shire and town.

“With no permanent organization or autonomous means of reassembly, the Commons ceased to exist as a body as soon as members scattered to shire and town. Its reforms had not been enacted as statutes and, like the reforms of the French Grand Ordinance, were simply rendered null by the hand that regained effective power. By favors or threats, Lancaster won over or neutralized the leading lords of the opposition, except for the Earl of March, who was compelled to resign as Marshal.”

He is reported by Froissart to have advised Charles V not to wait for the King of England to offer combat when the truce should end, but to seek him out in his own territory because “the English are never so weak or so easy to defeat as at home.”

“[Coucy] is reported by Froissart to have advised Charles V not to wait for the King of England to offer combat when the truce should end, but to seek him out in his own territory because “the English are never so weak or so easy to defeat as at home.””

Recently appointed to the well-paid and important post of Comptroller of the Wool Customs for the port of London, Chaucer was a successful civil servant whose other life as a poet had bloomed in an astonishing break with precedent: in 1369 he had written a long poem of courtly love, The Book of the Duchess, not in French appropriate to its subject and audience, but in unliterary and still unstable English. Though he was well acquainted with French, from which he had translated the Roman de la Rose, something in the ambience of his time prompted Chaucer to work in the same language as his gaunt and penniless contemporary, the street cleric Langland, who called himself “Long Will.”