The Jacquerie

The Jacquerie (French: [ʒakʁi]) was a popular revolt by peasants that took place in northern France in the early summer of 1358 during the Hundred Years' War. The revolt was centred in the valley of the Oise north of Paris and was suppressed after a few weeks of violence. This rebellion became known as "the Jacquerie" because the nobles derided peasants as "Jacques" or "Jacques Bonhomme" for their padded surplice, called a "jacque". The aristocratic chronicler Jean Froissart and his source, the chronicle of Jean le Bel, referred to the leader of the revolt as Jacque Bonhomme ("Jack Goodfellow"), though in fact the Jacquerie 'great captain' was named Guillaume Cale. The word jacquerie became a synonym of peasant uprisings in general in both English and French.

After the capture of the French king (John II, Froissart's bon roi Jean "good king John") by the English during the Battle of Poitiers in September 1356, power in France devolved fruitlessly among the Estates-General, King Charles II of Navarre and John's son, the Dauphin, later Charles V.

The Estates-General was too divided to provide effective government, however, and the disputes between the two rulers provoked disunity amongst the nobles. Consequently, the prestige of the French nobility had sunk to a new low. The century had begun poorly for the nobles at Courtrai (the "Battle of the Golden Spurs"), where they fled the field and left their infantry to be hacked to pieces; they had also given up their king at the Battle of Poitiers. To secure their rights, the French privileged classes — the nobility, the merchant elite, and the clergy — forced the peasantry to pay ever-increasing taxes (for example, the taille) and to repair their war-damaged properties under corvée — without compensation. The passage of a law that required the peasants to defend the châteaux that were emblems of their oppression was the immediate cause of the spontaneous uprising. The law was particularly onerous as many commoners already blamed the nobility for the defeat at Poitiers. The chronicle of Jean de Venette articulates the perceived problems between the nobility and the peasants, yet some historians, such as Samuel K. Cohn, see the Jacquerie revolts as a reaction to a combination of short- and long-term effects dating from as early as the grain crisis and famine of 1315.

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