Dissertation

'shame on him who allows them to live': the jacquerie of 1358

Aiton, Douglas James

2007

Overview

In the eyes of the chroniclers, the Jacquerie of 1358 was the most important peasant revolt in late medieval France. Yet, despite this, the uprising has not generated the quality of scholarship that other revolts from the late medieval period have encouraged, such as the Ciompi of 1378 in Florence or the English Peasant’s Revolt of 1381. In popular perception, the Jacquerie remains a violent spasmodic riot typical of the so-called ‘pre-industrial revolt’, itself a model forwarded thirty years ago and never rigorously examined. Rather than focussing on the complexity within the uprising, recent work has concentrated on whether the rebellion was co-opted by elites (a theory that this thesis will debunk); indeed, the last substantial monograph on the subject was Siméon Luce’s Histoire de la Jacquerie in 1896. Luce’s work made use of letters of remission, paid pardons issues by the French crown, to forward a more sympathetic view of the rebels. However, Luce never exploited the documents fully and quoted only occasionally from their narratives. By surveying the remissions systematically, and returning to the full population of documents available, this thesis offers a wholly new view of the revolt – its leadership, its geographical dimensions, duration, organisation and ideology. Moreover, it challenges many old theories about the medieval ‘crowd’ as mindless, doomed to failure and dominated by the clergy and other elites. In their place, it constructs a new model around communal ties in the medieval village, sophisticated organisation within the revolt itself and participants’ identities as the defining factor of the crowd’s ideology.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: European history