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Murder Holes, Machicolations, and Other Medieval Warfare Facts

Khalid Elhassan March 6, 2020 34 min

Pike and shot - Pike and Shot : Campaigns — A pike and short formation, with pikemen protecting those wielding firearms while they reloaded. Pintrest

13. Medieval France’s Greatest Peasant Uprising

French peasants bursting into a nobleman’s manor during The Jacquerie. Liberal Dictionary

In 1358, French peasants in northern France rose up in a rebellion that came to be known as The Jacquerie. The name was derived from the French nobility’s habit of contemptuously referring to all peasants as Jacques or Jacques Bonhomme, after a padded over-garment worn by them called a “Jacque”. The uprising was led by a well-off peasant named Guillaume Cale, from Beauvais, about 50 miles from Paris.

France at the time was undergoing a rough patch following the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War. The peasantry, upon whose toil all rested and through whose fields the armies marched and pillaged, enduring the roughest patch of all. Their French noble overlords were not doing well, either, and their prestige had sunk to a low ebb after decades of humiliating defeats. Early in the century, France’s aristocrats had turned tail and fled at the Battle of the Spurs, leaving the infantry commoners to be slaughtered. More recently, the English had routed them in the Battles of Crecy and Poitiers.

Also Read: 12 of History’s Greatest Peasant Revolts.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.