When the war was over, the men who had fought in it could not vanish into air. The nobles rode home to their castles, the peasants to their farms; but the bulk of the army, these bands of mercenaries, remained hovering with the vultures round the battlefield of yesterday. They were hungry and must eat; they must find a lodging somewhere; and their habit was to plunder. So east and west, north and south, the Companies went, riding as to a tourney; but chiefly they made their way to the rich unravaged Centre; there they soon took thirteen towns, with many fortresses and castles.... Readers who remember the terrible chapters in which Froissart describes the depredations of the Captains of Adventure throughout the centre of France, and down through Gascony to Provence, must very often have dissented from my cheerful picture of the life of fourteenth-century villagers. They remember the despair of the Jacques of Brie, and their extermination; they count up the villages marked in some Royal ordnance as having disappeared; they recall the ballads of Eustache Deschamps describing the sack of Vertus, and think how many a flourishing little town and what innumerable hamlets shared its fate:
“If you wish to see poverty, a ruined country-side, a deserted town, tottering walls where the fire has been, miserable homes, and a more miserable population—go to Vertus! The English have left everything in flames. There you can have at your good pleasure a horse all skin and bone, a broken bed with foul sheets, and, when you take your walks abroad, the amusement of the ruined housetops tumbling round your ears.
“Henceforth the farms round Vertus shall be abandoned; the vineyards are neglected and no man tends the plants. This first year after the sack there will be few wages paid and those uncertain. The man who was wont to speak loud will learn to speak low. Our town exists no more, and ’twill be long before her walls are built again.”[48]
All this is true; and we shall never know in how many villages the sleeping peasants awoke one night to the dreaded tramp of armed horsemen, to the blare of trump and fife, to the sheen of moonlit armour, and the presence of the redoubtable Company in their midst.... Bretons axe in hand, Gascons armed with lances, the Genoese crossbow-men, the English with their bows and arrows, the Lombards with their knives; they were all as well known as the French—all prayed against and watched for throughout the land of France. The sharpest-sighted villager would stand for days in the steeple on the look-out, in order to alarm his fellows when the first of the horsemen should ride up from the horizon. In a moment, women, children, men, would throng to the appointed hiding-place in the brake, bringing with them such treasure as still was left unburied. Happy those who could thus escape in time, and for whom no crueller fate was in store than to find on the morrow a heap of red ashes where once their village stood!
Yet, how shall we believe it? Though all this was true, the countrysides retained their astonishing vitality. Although in many districts most of the young men went off to the wars (“Nous aymons mieux faire le gallin-gallant que labourer sans rien avoir,” as Gerson heard them say), with a natural preference for plundering over being plundered, yet they only pushed a little further the work begun by the Great Plague. The wages of the few remaining labourers became so high that it was easy for them to recover in a little while more than their old well-being. True, the wattled cottage was razed to the ground, but the paved yard remained. The peasant knew that his treasure was safe in the keeping of some man of trust—some merchant of the walled city—when it was not buried in a box or a glove some three feet to the west of the wild cherry-tree, far enough from home to remain unsuspected by the Company. If most of the harvest was destroyed, the remainder sold for an extravagant price; and the hunger of the poor in town was at least the farmers’ gain.[49] Then Charles V., the unparalleled king, sent off the Companies to Spain, to Lombardy, well out of the way. In 1375 our good Master Eustache takes heart and makes an ironical ballad, in which the Companies are supposed to lament the prosperity and good order of the kingdom.
“Le plat pays s’en sent déjà bien
Car on n’y ose piller rien;
. . . . . .
Nul n’y va courrer sur les champs,
Ne n’y rançonne par puissance.
L’on n’y prend chevaux ni juments
Linges, draps, robes, ni finance,
Poulaille, moutons ... violence
Ne s’y fait....
... et le commun bien
Y règne en grande autorité.
On fait labours en abondance.
Honorés sont les anciens....
Chacun dist quz c’est grand pitié.”[50]
So the wars ended.
But the rate of wage remained fairly high throughout all the fifteenth century. The peasants ate more and of better food, drank more freely of wine and cider (a good deal too freely, and they have not lost the habit), wore more costly and more comfortable garments, afforded their wives and daughters richer ornaments and trinkets than, in the same rank and class, they can afford to-day. In all times, in France, the poorest have contrived to hoard; mediæval accounts and registers reveal the amount of saving effected by all classes, and record the lands and herds constantly acquired by farm labourers and domestic servants. They and their kind prospered, laid by their savings, and bought, rood by rood, the lands of the diminished noble, whom the long wars had left penniless and threadbare. The lords were glad to sell here a croft and there a spinny, for in very many cases they could no longer afford to work their immense estates. And thus the rise in the rate of wages, brought about by battle and plague, not only retrieved the ravage of the English wars, but even prepared insidiously the final ruin of the Feudal system.