murder some royal councilors and take control of Paris. But the presence of some
Free Company troops in Paris led to disorder there, and some of Marcel’s erstwhile
supporters blamed him for the riots, assassinating him in 1358.
Meanwhile, outside Paris, the Free Companies harried the countryside. In 1358 a
peasant movement formed to resist them. Called the Jacquerie by dismissive
chroniclers (probably after their derisive name for its leader, Jacques Bonhomme—
Jack Goodfellow), it soon turned into an uprising against the nobility, failures as
knights (in the eyes of the peasants) because of their loss at Poitiers and their inability
to defend the rural peace. The revolt was depicted in sensationally gory detail:
“Those evil men,” wrote Froissart, “pillaged and burned everything and violated and
killed all the ladies and girls without mercy, like mad dogs.”^8 Perhaps. But the
repression of the Jacquerie was at least equally brutal and, in most places, quicker.
More permanent in their consequences were peasant movements in England; Wat
Tyler’s Rebellion of 1381 is the most famous. During this revolt, groups of
“commons” (in this case mainly country folk from southeast England) converged on
London to demand an end to serfdom: “And they required that for the future no man
should be in serfdom, nor make any manner of homage or suit to any lord, but
should give a rent of 4 pennies an acre for his land.”^9 Most immediately, the revolt
was a response to a poll tax of one shilling per person, the third fiscal imposition in
four years passed by Parliament to recoup the expenses of war. More profoundly, it
was a clash between new expectations of freedom (in the wake of the Black Death,
labor was worth much more) and old obligations of servitude. The egalitarian chant
of the rebels signaled a growing sense of their own power:
When Adam delved [dug] and Eve span [spun],
Who then was the gentleman?
Although Tyler, the leader of the revolt, was soon killed and the rest of the commons
dispersed, the death knell of serfdom in England had in fact been sounded, as the
rebels went home to bargain with their landlords for new-style leases.
In the decades just before this in a number of Italian cities, cloth workers chafed
under regimes that gave them no say in government. At Florence in 1378, matters
came to a head as a coalition of wool workers (most of whom were barred from any
guild), small businessmen, and some disaffected guild members challenged the ruling
elites. The ciompi (wool-carders) rebellion, as the movement was called, succeeded
