The Knights of England, France, and Scotland

by Henry William Herbert

CHAPTER II.

They were dark and dismal days in the fair land of France. Foreign invasion was triumphant, domestic insurrection was rife.

The terrible and fatal field of Poictiers, the field of the Black Prince, had stricken down at a single stroke the might of a great, a glorious nation; her king a captive in a foreign dungeon; one third of the best and bravest nobles dead on the field of honor, or languishing in English fetters; a weak and nerveless regent on her throne; and Charles, the bad king of Navarre, the counsellor, the nearest to his ear.

Half of the realm at least was held directly under English sway, with garrisons of English archers in the towns, and the red-cross banner of St. George floating above her vanquished towers; and in the provinces, still nominally French, armies of free companions sweeping the fields of their harvests far and near, plundering the cottage, pillaging the castle, levying contributions on open towns, storming by force strongholds—English, Gascons, and Normans—led for the most part by men of name and renown—bastards, in many cases, of great and noble houses, such as the bourg de Maulion, and the bourg de Keranlouet, and a hundred others of scarcely inferior fame—had subjected the country scarcely less effectually than it had been done elsewhere by open, honorable warfare.

To this appalling state of things a fresh horror was now added, where horror was least needed—and that the most tremendous of all horrors, a servile insurrection—the sudden, and spontaneous, and victorious outbreak of ignorant, down-trodden, vicious, cruel, frenzied, and brutal slaves!

The nobles themselves—who, had they been combined, and acted promptly and in unison, could have crushed the life out of the insurrection in a week—divided into hostile parties, dispirited by the wonderful successes of the victorious English, intimidated and crest-fallen—held themselves aloof the one from the other; and, attempting to defend their isolated fortresses singly, without either concert or system, allowed themselves to be surprised in detail, and butchered upon their own hearth-stones, by the infuriated serfs.

All horrors, all atrocities that can be conceived, were perpetrated by the victors, maddened by long years of servitude and suffering, by deprivation of all the rights and decencies which belong of nature to every living man, and by the enforcement of droits so infamous and unnatural, that it is only wonderful how men should have so long endured them! Not the least galling of these was that feudal right which permitted the seigneur to compel the virgin bride on her wedding-day to his own bed, and then return her dishonored to the arms of her impassive husband—a right which not merely existed in abeyance, or, as in latter days, was compounded by a fine, but which was an every-day occurrence, a usage of the land—to enforce which was no more considered cruel or tyrannical than to collect rents, or tithes, or any other feudal dues—and which was not finally abolished until the reign of Louis XIV., when it was at length suppressed in those memorable assizes, known as the grands jours d’Auvergne, when many of the noblest of the land died by the hands of the common executioner for tyranny and persecution.

When, therefore, crimes like these, and worse, were perpetrated daily under the sanction and authority of feudal law; when they had been endured for years—not, indeed, without feelings of the direst bitterness and rage, but without loud complaint or general resistance, by all the serfs and villeyns of the land—what wonder was it that these miserable, trampled wretches, scarcely human, save in form, from the squalid wretchedness of their condition, and the studious care of their oppressors to prevent their progress or improvement—what wonder, I say, was it, that, seeing at length their opportunity, when their lords were distracted by foreign conquests, by the devastations of robber-bands, and by their own political dissensions or social feuds, they should have sprung to arms everywhere—their cry, “War to the castle, peace to the cottage!”—seeking redress or revenge, and braving death willingly, as less intolerable than the wrongs they had been so long enduring in sullen desperation? What wonder was it, that, when victorious, they, who never had been spared, should have shown themselves unsparing; that they, whose hearths had been to them no safeguards for any sanctity of domestic life, no asylums for any age or sex, should have wreaked upon the dwellers of the castles the wrongs which for ages had been the inheritance of the inmates of the cottages; that they, whose wives and daughters had never found protection from worse than brutish violence in tender years, in innocence of unstained virtue, in the weakness of imploring beauty, should have requited, on the wives and daughters of their tyrants, pollution by pollution, infamy, and death?

Such, such, alas! is human nature; and rare it is indeed that suffering at the hands of man teaches man moderation to the sufferers when it becomes his turn to suffer. Injustice hardens, not melts, the heart; and we have it, from no less an authority than the word of Him who can not lie, that “persecution maketh wise men mad”—but, of a surety, the wretched serfs and Jacquerie were far enough removed from wisdom, however they might be deemed mad, nor were many of their actions very far removed from madness. Knights crucified above the altars of their own castle-chapels, while their wives were dishonored, tortured, and slain, with all extremities of cruelty, before their eyes; infants tossed upon pikes, or burnt alive, in the presence of their frantic mothers; women compelled to eat the flesh of their own husbands, roasted at their own kitchen-grates ere yet life was extinct; the whole land filled with blood and ruin, and the smoke of conflagration going up night and day to the indignant and polluted heavens—these were the signs of those dark and awful times, these were the first fruits of the conquered liberty of the emancipated helots of the feudal system!

And when, nerved at length by the very extremity of peril, the nobles took up arms to make common cause against the common enemy, they found themselves isolated and hemmed in on all sides, unable to draw together so as to make head against the countless numbers of the enemy, which, like the waters of an inundation, increased hourly, and waxed wider, deeper, stronger, as it rolled onward. Large bodies could not be collected; small bodies were cut off; till at length so completely were the proud and warlike nobles of the most warlike land in Europe cowed and disheartened by the triumph of their despised and degraded slaves, that fifty men, armed cap-à-pie, and mounted on their puissant destriers, who would, six months before, have couched their lances confidently, and ridden scatheless through thousands of the skinclad Jacquery—trampling them at leisure under the hoofs of their barded horses, and, invulnerable themselves, spearing them at their will from their lofty demipiques—now felt their proud hearts tremble at the mere blast of a peasant’s horn, and fled ingloriously before an equal number of undisciplined and half-armed serfs!