11. Repeated French Defeats in The Hundred Years War Set the Stage For Violent Unrest
The French defeat in the Battle of Poitiers was particularly humiliating to France’s aristocratic elites, because, in addition to getting decisively defeated in the field of battle, France’s nobles had allowed the French king’s capture. The consequences went far beyond the prestige of the nobility and questions of its honor and shame. Although it was the French nobles who had been defeated and humiliated, it was the French peasantry that ended up paying. The English demanded a huge ransom for the French king’s release, which ransom was ultimately squeezed from the peasants.
France’s nobility failed in their basic function and the raison d’etre that justified their high status, of protecting the populace from enemy depredations. Unchecked by the peasants’ aristocratic overlords and supposed protectors, bands of English and Gascon mercenaries roamed the countryside, pillaging, raping, and murdering at will. The environment was thus ripe for violent unrest. When it came, few could have anticipated just how violent things would get. When the lid finally blew, the uprising found a leader in a well-off peasant from Beauvais, about 50 miles from Paris, named Guillaume Cale.
