The disorganization into which France had been thrown by the capture of its king increased rather than diminished. Among all classes men strove in the absence of a repressive power to gain advantages and privileges. Serious riots occurred in many parts, and the demagogues of Paris, headed by Stephen Marcel, and Robert le Coq, bishop of Leon, set at defiance the Dauphin and the ministers and lieutenant of the king. Massacre and violence stained the streets of Paris with blood. General law, public order, and private security were all lost. Great bodies of brigands devastated the country, and the whole of France was thrown into confusion. So terrible was the disorder that the inhabitants of every village were obliged to fortify the ends of their streets, and keep watch and ward as in the cities. The proprietors of land on the banks of rivers spent the night in boats moored in the middle of the stream, and in every house and castle throughout the land men remained armed as if against instant attack. Then arose the terrible insurrection known as the Jacquerie. For centuries the peasantry of France had suffered under a bondage to which there had never been any approach in England. Their lives and liberties were wholly at the mercy of their feudal lords. Hitherto no attempt at resistance had been possible; but the tremendous defeat of the French at Poitiers by a handful of English aroused the hope among the serfs that the moment for vengeance had come. The movement began among a handful of peasants in the neighbourhood of St. Leu and Claremont. These declared that they would put to death all the gentlemen in the land. The cry spread through the country. The serfs, armed with pikes, poured out from every village, and a number of the lower classes from the towns joined them. Their first success was an attack upon a small castle. They burned down the gates and slew the knight to whom it belonged, with his wife and children of all ages. Their numbers rapidly increased. Castle after castle was taken and stormed, palaces and houses levelled to the ground; fire, plunder, and massacre swept through the fairest provinces of France. The peasants vied with each other in inventing deaths of fiendish cruelty and outrage upon every man, woman, and child of the better classes who fell into their hands. Owing to the number of nobles who had fallen at Cressy and Poitiers, and of those still captives in England, very many of their wives and daughters remained unprotected, and these were the especial victims of the fiendish malignity of the peasantry. Separated in many bands, the insurgents marched through the Beauvoisis, Soissonois, and Vermandois; and as they approached a number of unprotected ladies of the highest families in France fled to Meaux, where they remained under the guard of the young Duke of Orleans and a handful of men-at-arms.