12. The Jacquerie: Medieval France’s Biggest Peasant Uprising
In 1358, France was rocked by the Jacquerie, a peasant revolt that terrified the kingdom’s aristocracy and threatened to overthrow the social order. The violent unrest got its name from the nobility’s habit of contemptuously referring to all peasants as Jacques or Jacques Bonhomme (“Good Man Jacques”), after a padded over-garment worn by them called a “jacque”. France at the time was undergoing a rough patch following the outbreak of the Hundred Years War.
The peasantry, upon whose labor all rested and through whose fields the armies marched, looting and pillaging, 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 fourteenth century, France’s aristocrats had turned tail and fled at the Battle of the Spurs, leaving the commoners in the infantry to be slaughtered. More recently, they had suffered catastrophic defeats at the hands of the English in the Battles of Crecy and Poitiers.
