Late Middle Ages

Peasant uprisings after the Black Death

The second half of the fourteenth century saw an unprecedented wave of social conflict in Europe. Peasants, artisans, and the urban poor rose in revolt against their lords, their employers, and the established authorities in a series of uprisings that included the Jacquerie in northern France, the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and the ciompi revolt in Florence. The common thread was the Black Death. The depopulation caused by the plague had inverted the labour market, and the lower orders, suddenly aware of their value, demanded a share in the new abundance that the death of half the population had made possible. The revolts were, in the end, suppressed, and the medieval order was, in the longer run, reasserted. Yet the long-term effect of the revolts was significant, and the memory of the uprisings lived on in popular culture and in the political imagination of the early modern period.

The wider context is set out in the overview of the Black Death. The labour crisis that the revolts responded to is examined in How the Black Death changed the labor economy. The persecution of minorities in the same period is treated in Jewish persecution and the spread of plague. The political context of the Hundred Years’ War is set out in The Hundred Years’ War.

A Generation of Rebels

The first half of the fourteenth century had been a period of unusual social peace in much of Europe. The labour surplus of the thirteenth century had kept the wages of the rural poor low, and the high cost of military equipment had kept the peasantry effectively disarmed. The Black Death changed both. The labour shortage gave the survivors bargaining power that they had never had before, and the long wars of the late fourteenth century — particularly the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, which had begun in 1337 — produced a stock of demobilised soldiers who knew how to fight and were not afraid to do so. The result was a generation of rebels.

The generation of the 1350s, 1360s, 1370s, and 1380s was, in the standard account of the period, the most rebellious in the history of the medieval West. The revolts of the period included the Jacquerie of 1358, the Tuchin revolt in southern France in 1363–1384, the White Hoods in Ghent in 1379, the ciompi revolt in Florence in 1378, the Harelle in Rouen in 1382, the Maillotins in Paris in 1382, the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Catalan Remences revolts of the 1460s and 1470s, and a long list of smaller risings in towns and countryside across the continent. The pattern was the same everywhere: a depopulated countryside, a labour market that had been turned upside down, an attempt by the lordly class to maintain the old order through force and legislation, and a popular response that ranged from petitions to outright revolt.

The standard work on the revolts is the Mouvements populaires de la fin du Moyen Âge of Michel Molénat and the contributors to the work edited by Jean-Pierre Molénat (1974), and the more recent contributions to the comparative study of late medieval popular revolts. The English work is represented by Rodney Hilton’s Bond Men Made Free (1973), and by Samuel K. Cohn’s Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns (2013). Cohn’s The Black Death Transformed (2002) developed a comparative account of the revolts in terms of a long-term transformation of European popular culture.

The Jacquerie of 1358

The Jacquerie was the first great peasant revolt of the Black Death era. It broke out in May 1358 in the Beauvaisis region north of Paris, the area that had been most heavily depopulated by the plague. The immediate cause was a dispute over ransom money between a group of peasants and a band of noble brigands — the routiers or tard-venus, demobilised soldiers from the wars of Edward III of England and of the King of Navarre — who were demanding protection money from the villages. When the peasants refused, the routiers attacked, and the peasants fought back. The fighting spread rapidly across northern France.

The chronicler Jean Froissart, who was not a sympathetic witness, described the outbreak in his Chroniques: “The evil-disposed persons of several towns and villages rose, and without pity or mercy they laid hands on the knights and the ladies, and slew them, and cut their throats with great cruelty. They ravished and abused the ladies and the maidens, and did all manner of evils. They burned the houses of the knights and stripped them of all their goods.” Froissart’s account is, of course, exaggerated, but it is not invented. The rebels did attack the châteaux and estates of the local nobility, and they did murder the inhabitants. The rebels also articulated a set of demands, including the abolition of serfdom, the remission of feudal dues, and the establishment of a kind of rural commonwealth. The demands were, for the time, revolutionary.

The Jacquerie was eventually suppressed with terrible brutality by the French royal army under the command of the Constable Charles of Spain, who massacred the rebels without mercy. Within a few weeks of its outbreak, the Jacquerie was over, and the noble class reasserted its control over the countryside. The memory of the Jacquerie lived on, however, in the literature of the late Middle Ages. The chronicler Jean le Bel, the Chronique Normande of Pierre Cochon, and the Vigiles de Charles VII of Martial d’Auvergne all preserved accounts of the events, and the name “Jacques Bonhomme” — the typical peasant — became a permanent feature of the French vocabulary of class.

1381: Wat Tyler, John Ball, and the London Crowd

The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was the largest and most dramatic popular uprising in English history. It was triggered by the operation of the poll tax — a flat tax imposed on every adult in 1377, 1379, and 1381 — but the underlying causes were the same as those of the Jacquerie: the labour crisis produced by the Black Death, the attempt of the lordly class to hold down wages through the Statutes of Labourers, and the resentment of the lower orders at the inequalities of the medieval order.

The revolt began in Essex and Kent in late May 1381. Within days it had brought tens of thousands of rebels to the gates of London. The rebels were led by a series of charismatic figures. The preacher John Ball, a radical priest who had been excommunicated three times by the archbishop of Canterbury for his seditious sermons, was one of the most important. Ball’s most famous sermon, preached at Blackheath on the eve of the entry into London, began with the question “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” The sermon is preserved in the Chronicon Henrici Knighton and in the Annales Henrici Quinti, and it became one of the most famous pieces of English social criticism of the Middle Ages. The mysterious Wat Tyler, whose true identity is still debated, was another of the leaders. The rebels also included Jack Straw, John Wrawe, and a number of other local leaders.

The rebels marched on London, burned the Savoy Palace (the residence of John of Gaunt, the king’s uncle), and entered the city on 13 June 1381. The young king Richard II, then only fourteen years old, agreed to meet the rebels at Mile End, and he made a series of concessions: the abolition of serfdom, the remission of feudal dues, a general amnesty for the rebels, and the commutation of all labour services into a money rent of fourpence an acre. The concessions were, of course, designed to be revoked, and they were revoked at a second meeting at Smithfield on 15 June, where Wat Tyler was cut down by the Lord Mayor of London, William Walworth. The revolt collapsed. The leaders were executed, and the concessions were formally annulled by Parliament later that year.

The memory of the revolt lived on, however, in English popular culture. John Ball’s couplet — “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” — became a permanent part of the English radical tradition, and it was quoted in the radical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The revolt was also remembered in the chronicle tradition. The Anonimalle Chronicle, the Chronicon Henrici Knighton, the Annales Henrici Quinti, the Chronicle of Henry Knighton, and the Historia Anglicana of Thomas Walsingham all contain detailed accounts of the revolt, and the accounts are a major source for the social history of the period.

The Ciompi of Florence

The ciompi revolt in Florence in 1378 was the most ambitious popular uprising in Renaissance Italy. The ciompi were the lowest class of wool workers in Florence, employed in the great textile industry that was the foundation of the city’s wealth. They were paid very low wages, were excluded from the political life of the commune, were not members of any of the major guilds, and were subject to fines and penalties imposed by the guild system.

The revolt broke out in June 1378, triggered by a dispute over the regulation of the wool industry. The ciompi, joined by other groups of urban poor — the popolo minuto, the small shopkeepers, and the day-labourers — seized the Palazzo della Signoria and forced the government to grant them the right to form their own guilds and to share in the political life of the city. For several years, the ciompi were able to exercise political power: three new guilds, the Arte dei Ciompi, were created in 1378, and the ciompi were able to elect their own representatives to the signoria, the ruling body of the republic.

The experiment was short-lived. By 1382, the more conservative elements in Florence — the major guilds, the popolo grasso, the older families — had reasserted control, and the new guilds were abolished. The ciompi were excluded from political life once again, and the revolt was over. The chronicler Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, who was himself a member of one of the major guilds, recorded the events in his Cronaca fiorentina. Stefani’s account is particularly detailed, and it is one of the most important sources for the social history of the late medieval Italian city. The historian Gene Brucker, in Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1378 (1962) and in The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (1977), has reconstructed the revolt in detail, and his work is the standard account in English.

What the Revolts Asked For

The Jacquerie, the English Peasants’ Revolt, and the ciompi revolt were three very different events, in three very different societies, but they shared a number of common features. All three were triggered by the attempt of the lordly class to maintain the old order in the face of a transformed labour market. All three involved the participation of a wide range of social groups — peasants, artisans, day-labourers, journeymen, the urban poor. All three articulated a set of demands that went beyond the immediate grievances: the abolition of serfdom, the remission of feudal dues, the right of workers to organise, the right of the urban poor to participate in the political life of the city.

Read in their modern equivalents, the demands of the revolts point forward to the demands of the labour movement. The abolition of serfdom is the demand for free labour. The remission of feudal dues is the demand for a higher share of the product. The right to organise is the right to form a trade union. The right to participate in the political life of the city is the right to vote. The fact that the demands were articulated in the language of the fourteenth century, in the terms of biblical exegesis and natural law, does not diminish their modernity.

The revolts were, in the end, suppressed. The Jacquerie was put down by the French royal army. The English revolt was put down by the king and the lords. The ciompi revolt was put down by the major guilds. Yet the long-term effect of the revolts was significant. The memory of the uprisings, and especially of the radical demands articulated by leaders like John Ball and the ciompi, lived on in popular culture and in the political imagination. The great medieval peace between lord and peasant, which had rested on the assumption of a stable social order, was broken, and the long process of negotiation, accommodation, and reform that followed laid the foundations for the early modern state.

The historian Samuel K. Cohn Jr., in The Black Death Transformed (2002), has argued that the revolts of the late fourteenth century were not a passing phenomenon, but a permanent feature of European popular politics. The revolts of 1358, 1378, and 1381 were the first of a long series that included the German Peasants’ War of 1525, the English Revolution of the 1640s, and the French Revolution of 1789. The lineage is a long one, and the revolts of the late medieval period are its first chapter.

References

  • Hilton, Rodney. Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381. Maurice Temple Smith, 1973.
  • Cohn, Samuel K. Jr. The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. Oxford University Press, 2002.
  • Cohn, Samuel K. Jr. Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  • Brucker, Gene. Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1378. Princeton University Press, 1962.
  • Fourquin, Guy. Les soulèvements populaires au Moyen Âge. Payot, 1972.