Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/410

396 Thus the capital of France was reduced to the utmost anarchy. The dauphin returned into Picardy and Champagne, where he assembled the states of those provinces, and was aided by them to the best of their ability. But all France was one scene of discord, insurrection, violence, and crime. The mercenary and predatory bands of the Companions, many of whom, or at least their leaders, were English, were engaged by the King of Navarre to carry out his projected republic. The dauphin, on the other side, assembled forces to oppose him; and now broke out one of the most frightful calamities which can afflict a nation—that of a peasants' war. In the reign of Richard II in England, some few years after this time, our own country was on the verge of such a horrible state of things, under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. At the time of the Reformation, Germany experienced its unspeakable atrocities, under the name of the Bauem Krieg, or War of the Peasantry, and France now was doomed to drink deeply of its demon horrors, under the name of the Jaquerie, from the gentry being used to call the peasants Jaques Bonhomme, or Goodman James.

The country people, ground by a long course of exaction, oppression, and insult, treated more as beasts than men by their feudal lords, now seized the moment, when the Government was beset with difficulties and enemies, to take a blind, sweeping, and tremendous vengeance. The nobility and the petty gentry holding fiefs under them had all been accustomed to plunder, tread on, and abuse the peasantry as a race of inferior creatures. The feudal system had rim to seed in unbridled license, and in every species of infuriating wrong. Ignorant and outraged, the people, once broke loose, placed no limits to their cruelties and revenge. They despised the nobles, who, while they had oppressed there, had, in base cowardice, deserted their sovereign at Poietiers. Formerly crushed down into slaves, they were now terrible masters. They burnt and laid waste the country everywhere, plundered the villages, and cut off the supplies of the terrified towns.

They attacked the castles of the nobles, burnt them to the ground, chased their once proud owners like wild beasts into the woods, committed horrors which cannot be named on the helpless women, murdered them and the children without mercy, and, as in Germany afterwards, actually roasted some of their former harsh lords before slow fires.

Of the frightful situation to which the highest ladies of the country were reduced, Froissart gives a striking example. The Duchess of Normandy, the Duchess of Orleans, and nearly 300 ladies, young girls, and children, had fled for refuge to the strong town of Meaux, and were besieged by 9,000 or 10,000 of the furious Jaquerie, when they were threatened with every horror that human nature could endure. Fortunately, two famous knights of the directly opposite parties, the Count of Foix, and the brave Captal de Buche, who made the successful rear assault at the battle of Poietiers, hearing of the alarming situation of these high ladies, forgot their hostility, united their forces, and falling on the Jaquerie, put them to the sword, killing 7,000 of them, and rescuing the terrified women.

The dauphin, on his part, did not spare the insurgents. He cut them down like sheep wherever he could meet with them. In one case he is said to have killed more than 20,000 of them. The Sire de Couci, in Picardy and Artois, mowed them down like grass, and soon cleared that part of the country of them. Everywhere the knight and gentry, roused by the ferocious deeds of the Jaquerie towards their families, collected, and easily overcoming their undisciplined mobs, slaughtered them in heaps like beasts without mercy. At the same time, Marcel, endeavoring to complete his crime by betraying Paris to the King of Navarre and the English, was killed by the exasperated people, and thus the land was eventually reduced to quiet. But it was a quiet like that described by the Roman historian:—"Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant: they make a solitude, and call it peace." No country was ever reduced to a more awful condition of ruin and wide-spread desolation; this frightful Jaquerie pest lasted nearly two years.

Meantime Edward had worked on his captive. King John of France, to make a peace, restoring to England all the provinces which had belonged to Henry II. and his two sons, for ever; but the dauphin and the states rejected the treaty, which would have totally ruined the kingdom. On this Edward once more invaded that devoted country, assembled an army of 100,000 men, with which he overran Picardy and Champagne, besieged Rheims, but without success, advanced into Burgundy, and pillaged Tonnerre, Gaillon, and Avalon, marched into the Nivernois, and laid waste Brie and the Gatinois, and sat down before Paris, where, not being able to draw the dauphin into a battle, he proceeded to devastate the provinces of Maine, Beausse, and the Chartraine. It is said that his desolating career was at length closed by a terrible thunderstorm by which he was overtaken near Chartres in which the terrors of heaven seemed to his awe-struck imagination to be arrayed against him. "Looking towards the church of Notre Dame, at Chartres," says Froissart, "he made a vow to grant peace, which he afterwards humbly repeated in confession in the cathedral of Chartres, and thus took up his lodging in the village of Britigni, near that city."

Here the peace was concluded; and on these conditions: that the King of France should pay three millions of gold crowns for his ransom—about a million and a half of our money; that he should yield up to Edward in full sovereignty, the province of Gascony and other dependencies in Aquitaine, and in the north of France, Calais, Guisnes, Montreuil, and the country of Ponthieu; and Edward, on the other hand, should renounce all other French territory, and all claim to the crown and kingdom of France. The King of Navarre was to be restored to all his honours and possessions, and the alliances of Edward with the Flemings and of John with the Scots were to close. In consequence of this peace of Britigni, signed the 24th of October, 1360, John returned to France; but finding that his Government was unwilling to keep faith with England, and his son the Duke of Anjou having; broken his parole as a hostage, John, with a noble sense of honour, refused to be a party to such dishonesty, and returning voluntarily to his captivity in London, died there on the 8th of April, 1364.

Charles V., the fifty-first monarch of France, succeeded his father John to a kingdom desolate but not dismembered. John had, indeed, added to the realm the provinces of Dauphiny and Burgundy; but the latter he again dissevered from the crown and settled on his favourite son,