PART I. PEASANT REVOLTS

Chapter 1. Late Medieval Uprisings

The view that history can be summed up as “the history of class struggle,” most famously expressed by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, has become increasingly problematical among historians and social theoriests over the past half-century. Although antagonistic class interests undoubtedly played a role of enormous importance in the social conflicts discussed in this book, in many of these struggles different hierarchical strata staked out claims to traditional rights and duties that were cultural, religious, and political as well as economic in nature. Often, in fact, it was not only classes in the economistic sense that were embattled with each other but also various culturally privileged and underprivileged status groups. The tendency of historians, liberal no less than Marxian, to reduce all social conflicts to class conflicts has placed a heavy veil over our understanding of conflicts involving hierarchies that were structured more around status than around material wealth and property ownership. Historically, in fact, the emergence of hierarchies long preceded that of classes, and persisting oppressions by privileged genders, ethnic groups, nationalities, and bureaucracies might well continue to exist in society even if economic classes were abolished.

That is not to ignore the fact that major social conflicts in history had a patently class-oriented dimension. Accounts of major class struggles appear in the hieroglyphic records of ancient Egypt, the cuneiform records of Mesopotamia, and the pictographic records of Asia and even Indian America long before Europeans invaded the continent. In some ancient Egyptian records upper-class scribes bluntly portrayed revolts in their midst as mere looting expeditions of the rich by the poor, in which ordinary people ransacked warehouses to redistribute grain and plundered manors of their wealth. To be sure, civil conflicts as described in ancient Greek and Roman accounts clearly had a component of class conflict, such as the Solonic “revolution” of the sixth century bce, and the efforts of the Gracchi brothers in republican Rome not only to eliminate the oligarchic powers of the Senate but to remove the debt burden that weighed heavily on the shoulders of the Latin yeomanry.

But the role of class conflict in these eruptions must be carefully qualified and nuanced. Many ancient conflicts were essentially popular explosions that aimed to regain rights that were being lost and that properly belonged to an era that was no more, notably the era of tribalism, or what the Marxist literature calls “primitive communism.” In Mesopotamia and Egypt, popular uprisings seem to have essentially demanded the restoration of tribal egalitarianism—a demand that went well beyond mere resentment of economic exploitation by ruling classes. And if the Gracchi brothers of republican Rome gained their popular support largely because they demanded an equitable distribution of land on behalf of nonaristocratic strata, they also tried to transform their city-state into a Hellenic-type democracy.

With the possible exception of the democratic poleis (cities) of ancient Greece, which even ancient writers (not only modern historians) disdained as “mobocracies,” these explosions failed to create a democratic polity for humanity. Not even the Athenians of antiquity regarded their democracy as a universal ideal that would capture the hearts of so-called “barbarians.” It was only Greeks as an ethnos or “race,” in the view of thinkers like Aristotle, who were suited for living in a polis (much less in a democracy), not non-Hellenic peoples. Few if any Athenian democrats would have differed with him on this score. The Gracchi brothers, in their attempt to establish the sovereignty of the plebeian assembly over the Senate, were concerned only with the fate of republican Rome, not with society generally. Their essentially local conflict had no impact beyond the environs of Rome and its satellite communities on the Italian peninsula. More universal demands for freedom—that is, for freedom of humanity as a whole—were to come later, over the course of centuries of social transition and changes in popular consciousness.

FEUDAL SOCIETY

The late medieval and early modern periods, too—as well as the conflicts that occurred within them—should be understood in noneconomic as well as economic terms, and their aims were often very limited in space and time. The great nomadic invasions from the east and the north greatly unsettled life on the continent, virtually reducing many of its communities to armed fortresses and defensive enclaves, after which lifeways based on hierarchical as well as class structures froze into static pyramidal forms that remained basically unaltered for centuries. Social life was organized around fairly self-sufficient manors in which local lords, endowed with many social as well as economic privileges, held the land as vassals of still higher lords, to whom they owed not only material support but personal fealty and military service.

Initially, the burden of the material obligations was borne by serfs, who were neither slaves nor strictly freemen but families grouped in villages that were tied to the land in an elaborate system of rights as well as duties. In addition to giving over a sizable part of their crop to their local lord, they were required to perform a host of persona] as well as labor services, provide gifts to the manor house on special occasions, and when necessary, bear arms. In return, they could claim their lord’s protection from invaders, robber bands, and military marauders (the “knights errant” and mercenaries who abounded everywhere). They could also expect a modest amount of care during times of infirmity and old age.

Time-honored custom had created a basically corporate and parochial society in Europe, one based on a clear-cut hierarchy of rank and of reciprocal rights and duties. The serf, boxed into his own locality, could feel relatively secure in receiving protection and a modicum of care from the local lord; the local lord, in turn, staked out his own claims on the serf for food and various services to the community as well as the manor.

Each community was a world unto itself. It had its own common land on which serfs and peasants pastured cattle, gathered wood for Ere and shelter, and found herbs for condiments and medicinal purposes. Draft animals, plows, and many farm implements were commonly shared, not privately owned, and the cultivation of land was usually a communal affair that fostered not only cooperation but collective self-discipline. Essentials such as coarse cloth, simple metal artifacts, building materials, and agricultural implements were ordinarily made entirely on the manorial estate, its villages, and its towns. This selfenclosed world had very little need for money; barter in one form or another was the rule in many parts of Europe. Serf, peasant, artisan, and local merchant were enmeshed with one another in a carefully knit, highly localized world at the base of feudal society. And as in antiquity, social conflicts rarely extended beyond isolated localities until well into medieval times.

From the fourteenth century onward, however, commerce greatly revived in Europe with the growth of town life, the clearing of forests, and the end of the great nomadic invasions. Caravans from Italian cities laden with spices, fine cloth, artistically wrought weapons, armor, and the like were passing along the earthen roads of the continent protected from robbers not only by armed guards but by their very numbers. Their wares were not destined for consumption by the overwhelming majority of the population—the ordinary people at the base of feudal society. Materially well-endowed lords took their pickings from the caravans, often paying for luxury goods with what limited coinage was available—especially money they had gained from tolls imposed on the merchants who crossed their manorial borders. Some nobles, the “robber barons” of the era, gained further wealth through surreptitious raids on the caravans themselves. These raids, to be sure, were not without risk: robbers invited reprisals for their interference with long-distance trade, not only from nearby lords who benefited from the trade and wanted to foster it but especially from the emerging national monarchs, the growth of whose royal juridical authority over the nobility (the “king’s peace”) provided them with revenue in the form of taxes.

Still, the development of long-distance trade did not appreciably alter life at the base of feudal society. If local lords, peasants, or even serfs had the means, they usually purchased the commodities they could not make on their manors, or make well, from local towns, whose artisans, organized in tightly knit guilds, crafted items that met most of their needs. The guilds, in turn, carefully policed the workmanship, output, and training of their members, including master craftsmen, their apprentices, and journeymen. In time, the guilds were to differentiate themselves into well-to-do ones and poorer ones, and sharply distinguish masters from journeymen, who were increasingly excluded from guild membership and reduced to ordinary workmen. But on the whole, extremes in wealth were comparatively uncommon in the early Middle Ages: material needs were comparatively few, and trade itself was fairly simple. For a time at least, a basically harmonious relationship existed between town and country, albeit one that should not be overly romanticized, if only because the towns were obliged, often by force of arms, to assert their autonomy over their rapacious territorial lords.

AN EGALITARIAN LEGACY

In addition to a growing continental trade, another phenomenon slowly eroded the parochialism that marked the medieval landscape, namely the Catholic Church. The rise of Christianity had been an unparalleled ideological revolution for Europe. Over the centuries, the papacy and its hierarchy came to function as Europe’s most important unifying and universalizing agent. After the demise of the Roman Empire, the Vatican became a pivotal center that prevented Europe’s collapse into an agglomeration of quasi-tribal societies that a fatalistic Islamic world from the south and Asian barbarian nomads from the east could easily have overrun.

In the absence of the Church as a source of ideological and institutional coherence, the unique history of the European continent and its potential for a visionary dynamism might well have been suffocated by invaders who had little to offer it beyond the social stagnation that prevailed in the Asian world. Militant Christianity, with its emphasis on individual self-worth and its belief in human free will, played a major role in preventing Europe from becoming a historic backwater and in keeping alive the classical heritage of the ancient Western tradition.

But the Church was also a source of discord, as was Christian doctrine itself. Much as armies commonly reflect the conflicting social forces that exist in civil society, the Church came to reflect in exaggerated form the conflicts that emerged when feudal society began to wane in the late Middle Ages. Just as serfs and peasants began to stand at odds with barons, and barons with princes and monarchs, so poverty-stricken parish priests stood sharply at odds with their overfed bishops; monks with the well-to-do clergy; and national churches with the papacy, which filled its coffers with wealth drained from its various bishoprics throughout the continent. In the thirteenth century, England alone had paid the Vatican a thousand pounds of silver annually, a quantity that exceeded the British monarchy’s tax collections fivefold.

Ironically, despite the close integration of the higher clergy with the landed aristocracy, the egalitarian ideals of Christianity set a social whirlwind into furious motion by the high Middle Ages. The idea that all people are equal in the eyes of God, at least when they enter the heavenly world, raised major ideological problems for the privileged strata in the earthly world, where Christian visions began to take a highly radical and heretical turn. Errant preachers such as the English Lollards proclaimed a fiery message of social equality, validating peasant discontent with biblical precept. Perhaps the most fecund source of these egalitarian precepts, apart from the Bible, was the writings of Joachim di Fiore. This monk’s historical interpretation of the Trinity envisioned the Holy Spirit as a utopia in which the poor would eventually be freed of their material and mortal burdens. Joachimite ideas, some fairly tame but others implicitly revolutionary, abounded throughout Europe during the high and late Middle Ages and provided in their more fiery interpretations an ideological underpinning for growing discontent among peasants, serfs, and urban plebeians. By the fourteenth century, movements or extensive networks of conventicles began openly to demand a radical redistribution of wealth, often involving its outright expropriation in the name of Christian egalitarianism and communal living as described in the Acts of the Apostles in Christian Scripture. Many of these conventicles directly challenged the higher clergy for their violations of basic Christian precept, their clearly visible appetite for wealth and high living, and their oppressive hierarchical structure as a whole.

The Brethren of the Free Spirit, a widespread radical network of heretical Christian dissenters, not only abandoned themselves to a free-living, often lascivious lifestyle within their own groups, but regarded themselves as beyond the reach of the Church, the state, and even conventional Christian precepts of morality. In so doing, they advanced an ideal of communism as well as freedom, a striking advance beyond the radical movements of the ancient world and early Middle Ages, staking out a claim to privileged status based on their own special knowledge or gnosis —a gnosis that they felt endowed them with the right to act with no constraints upon their personal wishes and desires. Although the Brethren, like the adherents of many other heresies, viewed their communities as members of the “elect,” their exclusivity did not keep their ideas from infecting masses of artisans, peasants, and even serfs, who tended to adopt the egalitarian aspect of their beliefs for themselves.

The fourteenth century thus saw popular attacks on the privileges of the Church that often exploded into outright insurrections, which were difficult to suppress. The Black Death, by reducing the availability of labor, gave rise to chronic peasant uprisings for better material rewards. These began to converge against local lords and bishops in England, Bohemia, Germany, and France in major civil wars that swept over entire regions, eventually reaching a scope that was virtually unprecedented in any previous period of history.

By the same token, the Vatican’s role as an inspirational force began to wane significantly. Schisms within the papacy gave rise to two and even three rival popes, profoundly lowering the prestige of the Church in the eyes of its communicants, while the corruption of endowed bishops and monastic orders earned the established clergy the outright contempt of all classes in Europe, particularly the oppressed strata of the population.

As early as the twelfth century, the Waldenses (so named after the devout merchant Peter Waldo of Lyon), a sect that spread in influence among the artisans of southern France and northern Italy, militantly challenged the Church’s departure from the gospel. The Waldenses’ agitation eventually became a redemptive popular movement that threw itself into direct conflict with the papacy. Concurrently, the Albigensian movement, with its enlightened views and practices which challenged key precepts of Church doctrine, was suppressed by a long and brutal crusade that ended in widespread destruction in southern France—a chapter in the history of the South that aborted its development for centuries. Like darkening clouds before a storm, these movements, although invariably defeated, heralded major bloody conflicts that were to explode throughout Europe and the British Isles.

Nor can we ignore the academic critics of the Catholic Church, the scholarly precursors of the Reformation, who propounded messages that earned them widespread support not only from their militant acolytes but even from the temporal powers, which were slowly entering into conflict with the papacy. Although Pierre Abelard’s rationalism and his call for intellectual freedom were relatively restrained, he left behind a disturbing body of condemnatory criticism that the Church tried cannily to assimilate, so that he managed to survive, dying in bed with adoring acolytes at his door. Similarly, John Wydif challenged such basic notions of Catholic doctrine as transubstantiation from his enclave in Oxford University and abjured the Church to yield to the temporal powers. Although he too died in bed, his doctrines and his emphasis on scriptural authority fed into the views of the emerging Lollard radicals in England and their dreams of a nation-state free of noble burdens and authority.

Arnold of Brescia, who also challenged the clergy’s privileges, shared a less happy fate. Advocating as early as the twelfth century an apostolic Christianity and a simple life free of worldly authority, Arnold, who had studied under Abelard, extended his views into an outright physical confrontation with the papacy and personally participated in plebeian revolts in Rome against papal rule. Unlike in the cases of Abelard and Wyclif, Arnold’s activism cost him his life when he was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1155. Jan Hus, who brought Wyclif’s message to Bohemia, was also burned at the stake in 1415, as much for his commitment to Bohemian nationalism as his challenge to ecclesiastical precepts, and Wydif’s Lollard followers, of whom John Ball was one, were hunted down by the authorities and often murdered ruthlessly. Abelard, Wyclif, and even Hus were academicians; they might even have been personally shocked by the radicals who reinterpretated their teachings. But John Ball and later the Bohemian Taborites, who regarded Hus as a heroic martyr, were insurrectionaries who challenged not only ecclesiastical authority but feudalism— indeed, in some cases, the entire system of social hierarchy and private property. And in their own way and time, they spoke for the third revolution that the Reformation had churned up, breaking not only with official Catholicism but with their more reticent predecessors, some of whom were protected by the selfseeking temporal powers of their day.

THE ENGLISH PEASANT REVOLT

Perhaps the earliest major explosion to be produced by the ferment that marked the late Middle Ages was the English Peasant Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler and John Ball, a revolt that challenged not only the injustices of the time but privilege as such and the hierarchical core of feudal society.

The fourteenth century in England saw the emergence of a free yeomanry demanding the dissolution of feudal bonds and noble prerogatives, the right to tender service in rent, use of the forests, and higher returns for their work. Radical Lollard preachers, particularly Ball, who were roaming the English countryside, openly directed their appeal to this stratum, inveighing against privilege and expressly voicing egalitarian, even communistic, views. “Matters cannot go well in England until all things shall be held in common,” Ball cried out; “when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.... Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?”[3] More pointedly, radical clerics popularized the jingle: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” Such talk found ready ears among masses who were eager to believe that social inequality was contradicted by Scripture and that a new social dispensation was in the offing. Typically, driven by their need for cheap labor because of the plague, the English nobility, with the usual myopia of arrogant feudal lords, turned this unrest into an open rebellion by trying to restore serfdom—much of which had already been abolished in England.

Eventually, in May 1381, the villages north of London rose up in revolt. Peasants and yeomen from East Anglia, arming themselves with axes and longbows and soon followed by militant peasants in Kent, elected Wat Tyler (a roof tiler as his name suggests) to be their commander and captured Canterbury, liberating Ball from imprisonment in the cathedral city. The Essex and Kentish rebels then converged in great numbers on London, pillaging manors and emptying prisons along the way. Unfortunately, they formed no organized army, so that a self-assured, disdainful London mounted no defense against them. In fact, its leading nobles were occupied with conflicts elsewhere, leaving the city’s artisanal townspeople free to sympathize with the rebels. On June 12, some twenty thousand peasants assembled outside the city walls, and demanded negotiations with the king—fourteen-year-old Richard II—whom they naively viewed as their protector against the feudal lords. Apparently with a view toward getting the rebels to quietly disperse, Richard appeared among them astride his horse and flippantly granted all their demands. As was to occur repeatedly in future peasant insurrections, many of the rebels were satisfied and departed, while those who remained gratefully voiced their allegiance to the king.

Meanwhile, Wat Tyler, perhaps the most resolute of the peasant leaders, captured the Tower of London on June 14 and destroyed the Savoy, the residence of the hated Duke of Lancaster, calling upon his followers to take over the city. As Tyler seems to have realized, the king’s promises were worthless. Once again, the king’s nobles offered further negotiations, but Tyler persisted in his demand that all rank and status be abolished and social equality established for everyone, apart from the king. Although the young king pleasantly agreed, his aides mortally wounded Tyler in a scuffle. Upon seeing Tyler’s head on a lance and Ball’s corpse hanging from a gallows, the peasants and yeomen fled homeward, only to be butchered by the nobles and their supporters—a scenario, as we will see, that was to be repeated again and again as nobles were able to defeat trusting peasant rebels through fraud and finally through callous murder.

THE TABORITE REVOLT

The teachings of religious mystics went far beyond reform of the Church and sometimes stepped outside the boundaries even of Christianity itself, advancing visions whose origins lay in the pre-Christian radical movements that had been suppressed in the early days of the Church. Catholicism had transformed the dream of Christ’s return to earth into a distant vision, often centered on a remote Day of Judgment that would fell the wicked, and reward the virtuous with immortality. On the margins of the Church, mystical visionaries competed with seers of supernatural signs and portents, and both voiced calls for miraculous changes that would culminate in a universal brotherhood of love. These dreamers were not free of major divisions among themselves. Some advanced visions that were more messianic than activistic, bringing a pacifist, often sectarian and parochial, element into their images of the millennium. Still others, by contrast, saw the millennium as a bloody purge of the wicked—and it was precisely this embattled strain that found its sharpest expression in the Taborite movement.

The Taborite commune of 1420 in Bohemia essentially began as part of a quasi-national and religious war that Jan Hus’s followers had waged against German and papal sovereignty for some two decades. Violent and extremely millenarian Anabaptists, the Taborites—so named after their city of Tabor (itself named after the mountain where Christ’s transfiguration supposedly occurred)—were explicitly communistic in outlook. Their community completely abolished private property. They were a movement less of peasants than of small artisans and dispossessed urban plebeians, their communistic attitudes toward property and their essentially libertarian views toward authority were intertwined with the religious conviction that they were a chosen “elect,” like the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who asserted their right freely to indulge their senses and desires. The Second Coming, they maintained, would lead to the abolition of all laws and all social differences of class and caste, and confer immortality and material abundance on all believers.

To gain more popular support against the military forces that the emperor, nobles, clergy, and moderate dissenters were amassing against them, the Taborites appealed to the peasantry for aid, declaring that Christ, disguised as a brigand, would soon appear in their midst and preside over the destruction of the existing evil world. These appeals met with very little response. For better or worse, the very isolation of the Taborite “warrior communists” assured their ultimate defeat. “If socialism in one country is doomed to become deformed and crippled, communism in one city is impossible for any length of time,” Kenneth Rexroth acerbically observes in his account of the movement.

Sooner or later the garrison society will weaken, but the outside world does not. It is always there waiting, strongest perhaps in times of peace. Tabor was never able to balance its popular communism of consumption with an organized and planned communism of production, nor the exchange of goods between city communes and peasant communes.[4]

In time, the Taborites were defeated in a series of battles with the Emperor Sigismund. The mystical and religious fervor that permeated the movement’s outlook brought neither a Second Coming nor a new social dispensation. In the end, the rational calculations of Sigismund and, more importantly, the power of cold steel in the hands of well-organized armies triumphed over the millenarians, who were poorly armed, poorly commanded, and sharply divided between moderates and radicals, despite their shared mystical zeal.

Typically, the ruling classes were merciless in suppressing popular uprisings. Given the times, the monarchs, princes, and nobles of the era literally butchered the rebels, dismembering the captives they left alive and brutally torturing their leaders. Later peasant wars, too, normally ended in bloody slaughters, often preceded by truces in which the nobles rallied their forces before mercilessly turning upon and massacring the rebels.

Those on the pacifist wing of the chiliastic movement, it is worth noting, fared no better at the hands of the ruling classes. Indeed, not only did their passivity expose them to violent onslaughts by nobles and Catholics, it rendered them psychologically vulnerable to strong, demagogic leaders who often turned their “communes” into personal fiefdoms, regaled by chosen “elders” who ossified them along authoritarian lines. Custom, in effect, played as much of a debilitating role as did physical coercion, and the “elders” proved to be no less exacting in dealing with their congregations than the conventional clergy.

THE FRENCH JACQUERIE AND ETIENNE MARCEL

By far the most remarkable event of the era was Etienne Marcel’s revolt in the 1350s, a Parisian uprising that swept in other French towns against the growing power of the monarchy. As provost of the merchants, Marcel was the equivalent of the mayor of the capital, and by all rights he can well be regarded as the popular leader of what would become the “Third Estate”: the ordinary people who lacked noble or ecclesiastical status. Indeed, his principal goal was to strengthen the authority of the Estates General at the expense of the monarchy. More immediately, he tried to diminish the tax burden that the king had placed on the middle classes, much as the French Estates General were to do five centuries later, and, like most modern French revolutionaries, Marcel was ultimately driven by the logic of events to challenge the whole structure of oligarchical power in France. As Perez Zagorin observes, he “wanted to build an alliance of towns” against the monarchy and “also established some slight ties with the Jacquerie, the big peasant revolt that had broken out at the same time in the Ile-de-France and the surrounding region.”[5] Over several stages, Marcel’s insurrection in Paris nearly combined with a well-organized peasant war ably led by one Guillaume Cale. Had the revolt been successful, its consequences would have anticipated those of the French Revolution of a later era.

By 1358, Cale, a peasant of Picard origin, had united a diffuse agrarian uprising into a coherent and able fighting force that threatened the very structure of French feudal society. Hardly a naive country bumpkin or “Jacques,” as nobles and arrogant town dwellers disdainfully called the French peasant, Cale was in fact a highly astute and experienced military leader as well as an able political strategist. Not only did he turn a loose and scattered peasant rebellion into a well-organized peasant war, but, with rare political insight, he tried to ally it with plebeian and middle-class elements in the towns. Together, he reckoned, they could form an effective common front against the nobility and their urban patrician supporters. For a time, this exceptional strategy met with surprising success. Radical townsmen took over towns like Senlis and Beauvais, opening their gates to the approaching well-organized peasant battalions under Cale’s command; indeed, even a major city like Amiens rallied to Cale’s forces, imposing death sentences on its nobles in absentia.

A crucial turning point of the revolt was reached when Marcel linked his Parisian supporters (clad in red and blue, the colors of the capital city) with Cale’s peasant armies. Even more provocatively, the Parisian provost openly offered to his “Jacques” allies the estates of his royalist opponents, notably the properties of the king’s councilors near the city. To the panic of the nobility and the urban patricians, the peasants lost no time in looting the estates. The revolt of the towns now lost its fairly moderate middle-class character and assumed an increasingly radical plebeian one that pitted Marcel not only against the monarchy and its noble supporters but against the well-to-do Parisian burghers.

The uprising’s success depended heavily on the ability of Cale and his peasant armies to defeat the monarchy at the city of Meaux. Peasant prospects for successfully seizing the city seemed unusually propitious, but precisely at this strategic moment, poor strategy on the part of individual peasant commanders, combined with the nobility’s cavalry, threw the invading peasants into a headlong retreat. The nobility, encouraged by their victory, proceeded to rally their forces in earnest, throwing back the peasants, who fled toward Paris, where they hoped to stand their ground outside the city walls with the aid of the radical Parisians.

But Cale and Marcel’s hopes for joining forces came to naught when the peasant leader, lured into negotiations with his enemies with promises for his personal safety, was imprisoned and brutally executed. What followed was essentially an anticipation of the English Peasant War. The leaderless peasants were easily scattered, hunted down, and massacred by the thousands, while in Paris, well-to-do royalist burghers killed Marcel and slaughtered his supporters. Once the gates of the capital were opened to the king, the shrewdly forgiving monarch was free to lay the basis for royal despotism in the centuries that followed.

By no means is it clear that the defeat of Cale and Marcel was historically inevitable. Indeed, the history of France, perhaps even that of Western Europe, might well have taken a very different institutional turn—a turn toward urban and peasant confederations rather than centralized nation-states, even toward a vibrant village life rather than an egoistic peasantry—had Cale’s peasant army captured Meaux and routed the local nobility. The peasant armies could have easily taken the city had they attacked it from a different vantage point or else fallen back directly upon Paris instead of trying to hold their ground at some distance from the capital’s walls. Had they deployed their forces more effectively and resolutely, Marcel and Cale might very well have joined forces and established a plebeian confederation, possibly in an alliance with other French towns.

The French Jacquerie and Marcel’s urban uprising more than amply demonstrate that there are turning points in history in which constellations of events based on able leadership and political decisiveness might very well alter the long-range course of events. A more rational social dispensation far in advance of the one that actually followed upon their defeat might very well have emerged had the two men prevailed over the forces that opposed them, as seemed very likely for a time. The historian who is concerned only with what did occur at a given moment and not with what could have occurred, given the potentialities that exist at any given period, abdicates all ethical judgment and interpretative insights. History, as a rational dispensation of liberatory potentialities, is reduced to a random chronicle of events that have neither direction nor meaning, or even an instructive function—or, to put this thought more colloquially, the possibility of “learning from events.”

A MIXED ECONOMY

Nor is it certain, still less inevitable, that the international links forged by commercial capital in Europe and the world during the late Middle Ages had to radically alter the village and even urban life along capitalistic lines. That commercial and so-called “manufacturing” towns emerged, based on longdistance trade and, by medieval standards, advanced methods of production, is hardly arguable, but the word manufacturing must be applied very advisedly to this complex period. Apart from mining, which employed complex gearing systems made of wood, most work was done by hand and, in this literal sense, remained within the orbit of traditional “manufacture” or handwork. Throughout most of the late medieval period, work rarely involved the use of the sophisticated machines we associate with industrial manufacturing.

Even the towns that were conspicuous “manufacturing” centers employed a technology that was surprisingly simple. Spinning, weaving, and dyeing were still performed with tools and hand-operated “machines” whose character was more ancient than modern, as were the technologies involved in the forging of metals and the building of homes. The famous arsenal of Venice, which employed several thousand workers, consisted mainly of a series of small enclaves in which artisans used traditional tools and methods to make arms. Much of this work, in fact, was done at home. Florence’s late medieval textile “industry” was structured around small shops that used traditional techniques and skills, in which it was not so much the technologies that had undergone change as it was the organization of labor and the tempo at which artisans were expected to work. In towns and cities where guilds and local rules did not impede their efforts, many of these laborers went on to establish businesses for themselves and become “masters” who hired a number of proto-proletarian workers of their own.

Rationalized or industrial production was generally organized to support long-distance trade, which had grown considerably by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Italian, Flemish, Provencal, and northern German merchants now carried “manufactured” wares from towns and seaports into central Europe as well as the East, exchanging domestic goods for more exotic ones. Their profits were commonly enormous. Moreover, they demanded coinage in exchange for the exotic goods they sold, so that their customers were limited to moneyed nobles, wealthy clerics, and other rich merchants. In reality, a very small part of European society was involved in this capitalistic nexus. Only well-to-do people, the possessors of currency, could buy the silks, furs, fine woolens, delicately wrought artifacts, and expensive spices that caravans and ships carried into the heartland of Europe. Notably lacking was sufficient money and an open market unrestricted by guilds, local tariffs, customs, and feudal forms of mutual vassalage that alone could foster an authentic development of capitalism on the continent.

From the fourteenth century onward, in fact, we encounter a highly mixed economy whose foci in some cases were capitalistic, in others, largely feudal, and in still others, peasant and artisanal. The widespread existence of capitalistic elements who reinvested their profits primarily into industry rather than ownership of land and acquisition of titles is largely the product of historical hindsight rather than factual reality. That capitalism eventually emerged—not only as an economy but also as a society —and colonized every aspect of life was not the result of any “inexorable laws” of social development; indeed, well into the eighteenth century, this mixed economy was the rule rather than the exception, even after feudal obligations had given way to status based on wealth rather than ancestry. As late as the early nineteenth century, in an era that was increasingly invaded by factories, mills, railroads, and heavy machinery, a thinker such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon could still work out the bulk of his social theories and political views primarily in artisanal terms, indeed, from a small-town perspective, while in the early 1840s the size of London, which by present-day standards would be regarded as modest, awed Friedrich Engels when he first visited the city.

Any description of prerevolutionary Europe must thus take into account the fortunes of this highly mixed economy and society if it is to give a satisfactory account of the popular movements of the era. Peasants, even serfs, tended to resist attempts to subvert the time-honored customs of rights and duties that gave them access to village common lands; tenants, in turn, viewed their rented plots essentially as hereditary endowments, not as tracts of real estate that could be taken away from them at will. At the same time, their landlords—noble as well as bourgeois—were beginning to discard their sense of obligation to the food cultivators whom their families had inherited over countless generations together with their estates. In the course of doing so, they reduced serfs to mere renters whom, in time, they could displace with sheep or with gang labor, guided by the needs of the international market for wool and food staples.

As the monarchy, in turn, expanded its authority to national proportions, it exacted taxes that often violated traditional exemptions, heavily burdening the farmer, artisan, merchant, and emerging capitalist alike. The growing bureaucracies that monarchies were obliged to support created the need for public financing and a royal debt. With the sophistication of weapons and fortifications, wars became more costly, the need for revenues grew, and conflicts became increasingly oriented toward commercial hegemony as well as the acquisition of territory. Not only did peasants rise up against the upper strata of society as they passed these growing exactions on to them, but nobles too rose up against monarchs who increasingly encroached upon their authority.

In the towns, guilds began to close their doors to everyone but the sons of craft masters, creating an excluded and chronically restless plebeian stratum. These privileged guilds, in turn, were challenged not only by the excluded workers but by weaker, less provident guilds, whose powers were steadily waning before the authority of the higher guilds. Chronic conflicts now arose between peasants and nobles, nobles and merchants, merchants and artisans, rich masters and poor journeymen, commercial cities, the various estates of a kingdom, and the monarchy, giving rise to centuries of tumult in Europe that left the continent insecure and deeply uncertain about its future.

FLEMISH TOWN REVOLTS

By the early fourteenth century, in fact, the Flemish textile communes of Ghent, Brabant, and Hainault became battlegrounds between a large body of dispossessed plebeians and an entrenched, usually closed elite of privileged craft guild masters. The guilds in turn were themselves divided between “lesser” and “greater,” collectively generating riots as an ongoing feature of social life throughout the area. After many conflicts, victory came to the plebeian elements in Ghent in 1336, when the lesser guilds, led by the weaver Jacob van Artevelde, unseated the patrician guildsmen of the city and established a magistracy composed of the weavers, fullers, and lesser guildsmen, largely excluding the well-to-do stratum of the city.

The commercial interests of the textile towns were intimately tied to the fortunes of England, which supplied them with much-needed wool, rather than to those of France, whose monarchy ruled them through its representative, the Count of Flanders. The common hostility these lowland communes shared toward French rule cut across class lines, with the result that their resistance to the French often led to tentative alliances between plebeian workers and rich and poor guilds in an uneasy common front against an external enemy.

The Flemish towns seemed to tilt toward civic autonomy, albeit not without protection from local nobles in the countryside, and toward a growing sense of intercity commonality, despite the economic competition between them. Facing a conflict with France, Ghent chose Philip Artevelde, the son of Jacob, who had been killed in a fracas, as the chief captain of the city. He was placed in command of the joint forces of Ghent and other Flemish towns against an invasion by the Count of Flanders. In 1382 the massed Flemish citizen militia faced the highly trained knights and troops of the count. In the face of the count’s cavalry charges, the militiamen, linked together arm-in-arm, were crushed under the weight of their own bodies. The body of Philip was found on the field, trodden over by the flight of his own men. With his death, “Flanders was to give up the dream of government by a league of independent towns,” observes Ephraim Emerton,“and submit to the ever more and more centralized rule of power territorial lords, whose model was naturally the aggressive monarchy of France”[6] —again foreclosing the possibility of a Swiss-like confederal political structure as distinguished from a nation-state.

It is worth emphasizing that the resistance of the Flemish burghers—or “bourgeois”—to French monarchical centralization was almost entirely an urban struggle; we find little, if any, evidence of significant peasant support. It is also worth emphasizing that these burghers were not committed to the rule of nation-states, despite the proclivity of many historians to portray medieval cities as early supporters of nationalism. Quite to the contrary, the Flemish burghers were deeply devoted to their communes, and on general regional matters, when the need arose, they were often able to work with their neighbors in leagues. Proud and independent men, fairly literate artisans who lived with their weapons by their sides so as to be able to meet any military emergency that faced their communes, they were a special human type who would play leading roles as militant revolutionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often under the misleading latter-day rubric of “proletarians.”