Duirants' S o C
Vol. VI The REFORMATION
Pges 67-71
Hoping that this rural revolution would divert the Dauphin from attacking Paris, Marcel sent 800 of his men to aid the peasants. So reinforced, they marched upon Meaux. The Duchesses of Orléans and Normandy, and many more women of lofty pedigree, had sought refuge there; now they saw a mob of serfs and tenants pouring into the town, and gave themselves up as lost in both virtue and life. Then miraculously, as in some Arthurian romance, a knightly band returning from a crusade galloped into Meaux, fell upon the peasants, killed thousands of them, and flung them by heaps into neighbouring streams. The nobles came out of hiding, laid punitive fines upon the villages, and went through the countryside massacring 20,000 rustic s, rebel and innocent ( June 1358).
The forces of the dauphin approached Paris, and cut off its food supply. Despairing of successful resistance by other means, Marcel offered the crown to Charles the Bad, and prepared to admit his forces to the city. Rejecting this plan as treason, Marcel’s aide and friend, Jean Maillart, made a secret agreement with the Dauphin, and on July 31 Jean and others slew Marcel with an axe. The Dauphin entered Paris at the head of the armed nobility. He behaved with moderation and caution, and set himself to ransom his father and to restore the morale and economy of France. The men who had tried to create a sovereign parliament retreated into obscurity and silence; the grateful nobles rallied around the throne; and the States-General became the obedient instrument of a strengthened monarchy.
In November 1359, Edward III landed with a fresh army at Calais. He avoided Paris, respecting the walls recently raised by Marcel, but he subjected the surrounding countryside, from Reims to Chartres, to so systematic a destruction of crops that Paris again starved. Charles pleaded for peace on abject terms; France would yield Gascony and Guinenne to England, free from all feudal bond to the French king; it would also cede (much territory ); and it would pay 3,000,000 crowns for the return of the French king. In return Edward renounced, for himself and his descendants, all claim to the French throne. This peace of Brétigny was signed on May the 8th 1360, and one third of France fretted and fumed under English rule. Two sons of king John were sent to England as hostages for French fidelity to the treaty; John returned to Paris amid the ringing of bells and the joy of the noble and the simple. When one of the sons broke parole and escaped to join his wife, king John returned to England to replace his son as hostage, and in the hope of negotiating a milder peace. Edward received him as a guest, and feted him daily, as the flower of Chivalry. John died in London in 1364, and was buried at St. Paul’s, captive in death. The Dauphin aged twenty-six, became Charles V of France. He deserved the name le Sage, the Wise, which his people gave him, if only because he knew how to win battles without raising his hand. His right hand was perpetually swollen, so he could not lift a lance. Half forced to a sedentary life, he gathered about him prudent councillors, reorganized every department of Government, reformed the judiciary, rebuilt the army, encouraged industry, stabilized the currency, supported literature and art, and collected in the Louvre the royal library that provided classic texts and translations for the French Renaissance, and formed the nucleus of the Bibliothèque Nationale. He yielded to the nobles in restoring feudal tolls, but he went over their heads to appoint as constable-- commander-in-chief of all French armies-- a swarthy, flat nosed, thick-necked, massive-headed Breton , Bertrand Du Guesclin. Faith in the superiority of this “Eagle of Brittany “ to all English generals shared in determining Charles to undertake the redemption of France from English rule. In 1369 he sent Edward III a formal declaration of war.
The Black prince responded by subduing Limoges and massacring 3,000 men, women, and children; this was his conception of political education. It proved inadequate; every city in his path fortified, garrisoned, and provisioned itself to successful defence, and the Prince was reduced to laying waste the open country, burning crops and raising deserted homes of the peasantry. Du Guesclin refrained from giving battle, but harassed the princely rear, capturing foragers, and waited for the English troops to starve. They did, and retreated; Du Guesclin advanced; one by one the ceded provinces were reclaimed; and after two years of remarkable general ship, and the mutual loyalty of commander and king, the English were driven from all France except Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg, and Calais; France for the first time reached to the Pyrenees. Charles and his great constable could die with honours in the same year ( 1380) on the crest of victory.
THE MAD KING: 1380-1422
The gamble of hereditary monarchy now replaced a competent ruler with a lovable idiot. Charles VI was twelve when his father died; his uncles acted as regents till he was twenty, and allowed him to grow up in irresponsible debauchery while half Europe marched to the brink of revolution. In 1359 the workingmen of Bruges, wearing red hats, stormed the historic hotel de ville in transient revolt. In 1366 the lower classes of Ypres rose in rebellion preaching a holy war against the rich. In 1378 the ciompi established in Florence the dictatorship of the proletariat. In1379 the starving peasants of Languedoc -- south central France -- began six years of guerrilla warfare against nobles and priests under a leader who gave orders to “kill all who have soft hands “ Workers revolted in Strasbourg in 1380, in London in 1381, in Cologne in 1396. from 1379 to 1382 a revolutionary government ruled Ghent. In Rouen a stout draper was crowned king by an uprising of town labourers; and in Paris the people killed with leaden mallets the tax collectors of the king.( 1382 )
Charles VI took the reigns of government in 1388 and for four years reigned so well that he won the name Bien-Aime, Well Beloved. But in 1392 he went insane. He could no longer recognize his wife, and begged the strange woman to cease her importunities. For five months he had no change of clothes, and when at last it was decided to bathe him a dozen men were needed to overcome his reluctance. For thirty years the French crown was worn by a pitiful imbecile, while a virlle young king prepared to renew the English attack upon France.
On August 11 1415, Henry V sailed from England with 1300 vessels and 11,000 men. On the fourteenth they landed near Harfleur, at the mouth of the Seine. Harfleur resisted gallantly and in vain. Jubilant with victory and hurried by dysentery, the English marched toward Calais. The chivalry of France met them at Agincourt. The French having learned nothing from Crécy and Poitiers, still relied upon cavalry. Many of the horses were immobilized by mud; those that advanced met the sharp stakes that the English had planted at an angle in the ground around the bowmen. The discouraged horses turned and charged their own army; the English fell upon this chaotic mass with maces, hatchets, and swords; their king Hal led them valiantly, too excited for fear; and their victory was overwhelming. French historians estimated the English loss at 1,600, the French at 10,000.
Henry returned to France in 1417, and besieged Rouen. The citizens ate up their food supply, then their horses, their dogs, their cats. To save food, women, children, and old men were thrust forth beyond the city walls; they sought passage through the English lines, were refused, remained foodless and shelter less between their relatives and their enemies, and starved to death; 50,000 French died of starvation in that merciless siege. When the town surrendered, Henry restrained his army from massacring the survivors, but levied upon them a fine of 300,000 crowns, and kept them in prison till the total was paid. In 1419 he advanced upon a Paris in which nothing remained but corruption, destitution, brutality, and class war. Outdoing the humiliation of 1360, France by the Treaty of Troyes ( 1420 ), surrendered everything, even honour. Charles gave his daughter Katherine to Henry V in marriage, promised to bequeath the French throne, turned over to him the governance of France, and to clear up any ambiguity, disowned the Dauphin as his son. Queen Isabelle, for an annuity of 24,000 francs, made no defence against this charge of adultery; and, indeed, in the royal courts of that age it was not easy for a woman to know who was the father of her children. The Dauphin, holding south France, repudiated the treaty, and organised his Gascon and Armagnac bands to carry on the war. But the King of England reigned in the Louvre.
Two years later Henry V died of dysentery; the germs had not signed the treaty. When Charles VI followed him(1422), Henry VI of England was crowned King of France; but as he was not yet a year old the duke of Bedford ruled as his regent. The Duke governed severely, but as justly as any Englishman could govern France. He suppressed brigandage by hanging 10,000 bandits in a year; judge there from the condition of the land. Demobilized soldiers -- écorcheurs ( skinners ), coquillards (shell men )-- made the highways perilous, and terrorized even large cities like Paris and Dijon. Over Normandy the ravage of war had passed back and forth like an infernal, murderous tide; peasants fled to cities, or hid in caves, or fortified themselves in churches, as armies or feudal factions or robber bands approached. Many peasants never returned to their precarious holdings, but lived by thievery or beggary, died of starvation or plague. Churches, farms, whole towns were abandoned and left to decay. In Paris in 1422 there were 24,000 empty houses, 80,000 beggars in a population of some 300,000. People ate the flesh and entrails of dogs. The cries of hungry children haunted the streets.
