After the victory of the English at Poitiers, an outburst of patriotic anger and revolt (such as in our own days produced the Commune) brought about the Jacquerie. The peasant was born to plough and reap, he ploughed and reaped; the noble was made to fight and conquer; if he fought and could not conquer--worse still if he could not fight--he was a tare in the wheat, useless, noxious, to be cast to the burning. While the nobles of France were captive in the English camp, the defenceless country-sides of the North were pillaged and ruined. And the farmers and labourers rose in their wrath, declaring that their masters “honnissoient et trahissoient le royaume de France;” and so, says Froissart, they passed sentence of death upon them. A certain Guillaume Caillet led the mob; his nickname, Jacques Bonhomme, has stuck to the French peasant ever since. Soon he had a following of a hundred thousand men as fierce, ignorant, untrained as a hundred thousand gorillas, and great were their excesses. Froissart can scarce contain his horror, and still more his wonder, at the exploits of “les vilains, noirs and petits, et très mal armés.” It is true that, at the time, most of the men of the ruling class, of an age to fight, were absent. The Jacques made bonfires of more than sixty castles. Three hundred ladies and damsels--as pitiable as our own grandmothers at Delhi--escaped their loathly embraces, and fled across country into the town of Meaux, where they took refuge in the market. How the King of Navarre and the Count of Foix rode across France to their relief; killing the villainous Jacques “in great heaps, like beasts;” hunting them down, in a battue; driving them into the Marne to drown; burning wholesale them and their villages; and finally setting free unharmed the hapless, happy dames of Meaux:--All this, is it not written in the chronicles of Froissart? III Despite this direful vengeance at the end of it, the Jacquerie had left the French peasant conscious of his force. He had learned that nobles are mortal men and can perish by fire, scythe-cut, or blow of club as certainly as Jacques himself. Henceforth, let them respect his women and his horned cattle! Jacques Bonhomme is, on the whole, a patient fellow. Let the nobles do their duty, and keep their hands off his wife, his daughter and his herds, and it is astounding what he will submit to: exactions growing year by year, and _corvées_ such as a decadent fancy may invent. He will beat the moats all night when my lady is lying in, lest the croaking of the frogs disturb her delicate slumbers. Only let my lord keep to his part of the bargain, and respect Jacques Bonhomme’s womankind and those two white oxen in his stall, those-- “Deux grands bœufs blancs marqués de roux,”