The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

These wicked people, without leader and without arms, plundered and burned all the houses they came to, murdered every gentleman, and violated every lady and damsel they could find. He who committed the most atrocious actions, and such as no human creature would have imagined, was the most applauded and considered as the greatest man among them. I dare not write the horrible and inconceivable atrocities they committed on the persons of the ladies.

Among other infamous acts they murdered a knight, and, having fastened him to a spit, roasted him before the eyes of his wife and his children, and forced her to eat some of her husband's flesh, and then knocked her brains out. They had chosen a king among them, who came from Clermont in Beauvoisis. He was elected as the worst of the bad, and they denominated him "Jacques Bonhomme."57

These wretches burned and destroyed in the county of Beauvoisis, and at Corbie, Amiens, and Montdidier, upward of sixty good houses and strong castles. By the acts of such traitors in the country of Brie and thereabout, it behooved every lady, knight, and squire, having the means of escape, to fly to Meaux, if they wished to preserve themselves from being insulted and afterward murdered. The Duchess of Normandy, the Duchess of Orleans, and many other ladies had adopted this course. These cursed people thus supported themselves in the countries between Paris, Noyon, and Soissons, and in all the territory of Coucy, in the County of Valois. In the bishoprics of Noyon, Laon, and Soissons there were upward of one hundred castles and good houses of knights and squires destroyed.

When the gentlemen of Beauvoisis, Corbie, Vermandois, and of the lands where these wretches were associated, saw to what lengths their madness had extended, they sent for succor to their friends in Flanders, Hainault, and Bohemia; from which places numbers soon came and united themselves with the gentlemen of the country. They began therefore to kill and destroy these wretches wherever they met them, and hung them up by troops on the nearest trees. The King of Navarre even destroyed in one day, near Clermont in Beauvoisis, upward of three thousand; but they were by this time so much increased in numbers that, had they been all together, they would have amounted to more than one hundred thousand. When they were asked for what reason they acted so wickedly, they replied, they knew not, but they did so because they saw others do it, and they thought that by this means they should destroy all the nobles and gentlemen in the world.

At this period the Duke of Normandy, suspecting the King of Navarre, the provost of merchants and those of his faction—for they were always unanimous in their sentiments—set out from Paris, and went to the bridge at Charenton-upon-Marne, where he issued a special summons for the attendance of the crown vassals, and sent a defiance to the provost of merchants and to all those who should support him. The provost, being fearful he would return in the night-time to Paris—which was then unenclosed—collected as many workmen as possible from all parts, and employed them to make ditches all around Paris. He also surrounded it by a wall with strong gates. For the space of one year there were three hundred workmen daily employed; the expense of which was equal to maintaining an army. I must say that to surround with a sufficient defence such a city as Paris was an act of greater utility than any provost of merchants had ever done before; for otherwise it would have been plundered and destroyed several times by the different factions.