The Fed Up French Peasants of the Jacquerie
As seen in a earlier entry, Jack Cade’s Rebellion was vicious and violent. However, bad as things got, Cade’s rebels never went so far as to actually eat their oppressors. Not so the rebels of the Jacquerie, a medieval peasant revolt in northern France in 1358. It got its name from the 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 revolt was led by a well off peasant named Guillaume Cale, from Beauvais, about 50 miles from Paris.
France had gone through a rough patch after the outbreak of the Hundred Years War. The peasantry, upon whose toil all rested and through whose fields the armies marched and pillaged, endured the roughest patch of all. Their overlords, the French nobility, 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. They left the infantry commoners to be slaughtered. More recently, they had suffered catastrophic defeats at the hands of the English in the Battles of Crecy and Poitiers.
