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 were 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 run to seed in unbridled licence, and in every species of infuriating wrong. Ignorant and outraged, the people, once broken loose, placed no limits to their cruelties and revenge. They despised the nobles who, while they had oppressed them, had, in base cowardice, deserted their sovereign at Poitiers. 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 the 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 Jacquerie, 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 Buch, who made the successful rear assault at the battle of Poitiers, hearing of the alarming situation of these high ladies, forgot their hostility, united their forces, and, falling on the Jacquerie, 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 nobles, in Picardy and Artois, mowed them down like grass, and soon cleared that part of the country of them. Everywhere the knights and gentry, roused by the ferocious deeds of the Jacquerie towards their families, collected and, easily overcoming the undisciplined mobs, slaughtered them in heaps, like beasts. At the same time, Marcel, endeavouring 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 Jacquerie pest lasted nearly two years.

THE CATHEDRAL, COUTANCES.

[[See larger version]]

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, marched into Nivernais, and laid waste Brie and Gatinais, and sat down before Paris, where, not being able to draw the dauphin into a battle, he proceeded to devastate the province of Maine. 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 awestruck 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 Bretigny, near that city."

MARCEL AND THE DAUPHIN OF FRANCE. (See p. [435.])