Editing Jacquerie (section)

==Suppression==
[[Image:Jacquerie meaux.jpg |right|thumb|350px|Defeat of the Jacquerie in [[Meaux]] on 9 June 1358]]
{{main|Battle of Mello}}
The revolt was suppressed by French nobles and gentry led by the Dauphin and [[Charles II of Navarre|Charles of Navarre]], cousin, brother-in-law, and mortal enemy of the Regent, whose throne he was attempting to usurp. His army and the peasant force opposed each other near [[Mello, Oise|Mello]] on 10 June 1358, when [[Guillaume Cale]], the leader of the rebellion, was invited to truce talks by Charles. He went to the enemy camp, where he was seized by the French nobles, who considered that the conventions and standards of [[chivalry]] did not apply to him; he was tortured and decapitated.<ref name=Tuchman/>

The now leaderless army, which Froisart claimed to be 100,000 strong in his narrative heavily influenced by [[chivalric romance]], was ridden down by divisions of mounted knights. In the ensuing [[Battle of Mello]] and in a campaign of terror throughout [[Beauvais]], knights, squires, men-at-arms and mercenaries roamed the countryside [[lynching]] peasants.

Another major battle transpired at [[Meaux]], where the fortified citadel was crowded with knights and their dependents. On 9 June, a band of some 800 armed commoners (not the 10,000 Jacques of Froissart's account) came out of Paris under the leadership of Etienne Marcel to support the rising. When the band from Paris appeared before Meaux, they were taken in hospitably by the disaffected townspeople and fed. The fortress, somewhat apart from the town, remained unassailable.

Two captain adventurers, returning from the [[Prussian Crusade]], were at Châlons: [[Gaston III, Count of Foix]] and his noble [[Gascony|Gascon]] cousin, [[Jean III de Grailly]]. The approach of their well-armed lancers encouraged the besieged nobles in the fortress, and a general rout of the Parisian force ensued. The nobles then set fire to the suburb nearest the fortress, entrapping the burghers in the flames. The mayor of Meaux and other prominent men of the city were hanged. There was a pause, and then the force led by the nobles and gentry plundered the city and churches and set fire to Meaux, which burned for two weeks. They then overran the countryside, burning cottages and barns and slaughtering all the peasants they could find.

The reprisals continued through July and August. [[Senlis]] defended itself. Knights of [[County of Hainaut]], [[County of Flanders]], and [[Duchy of Brabant]] joined in the carnage. Following the declaration of [[amnesty]] issued by the Regent on 10 August 1358, such heavy fines were assessed upon the regions that had supported the Jacquerie that a general flight ensued.<ref>Vericourt 1872:309.</ref> Historian [[Barbara Tuchman]] says: "Like every insurrection of the century, it was smashed, as soon as the rulers recovered their nerve, by weight of steel, and the advantages of the man on horseback, and the psychological inferiority of the insurgents".<ref name=Tuchman/>

The slanted but vivid account of Froissart can be balanced by the Regent's letter of general amnesty, a document that comments as severely on the nobles' reaction as on the peasants' rising and omits the atrocities detailed by Froissart: "it represents the men of the open country assembling spontaneously in various localities, in order to deliberate on the means of resisting the English, and suddenly, as with a mutual agreement, turning fiercely on the nobles".<ref name="vericour304" />

The Jacquerie traumatized the aristocracy. In 1872 Louis Raymond de Vericour remarked to the Royal Historical Society:
{{blockquote|To this very day the word "Jacquerie" does not generally give rise to any other idea than that of a bloodthirsty, iniquitous, groundless revolt of a mass of savages. Whenever, on the Continent, any agitation takes place, however slight and legitimate it may be, among the humbler classes, innumerable voices, in higher, privileged, wealthy classes, proclaim that society is threatened with a Jacquerie.<ref>Vericour 1872:296; see, for example Philippe Gabriel Eidelberg, ''The Great Rumanian Peasant Revolt of 1907. Origins of a Modern Jacquerie'' (Leiden, 1974); John T. Alexander, ''Emperor of the Cossacks: Pugachev and the Frontier Jacquerie of 1773–1775'' (Lawrence, Kansas, 1973); Serge Aberdam and Marcel Dorigny, eds. ''Paysans en Révolution: Terre, Pouvoir, et Jacquerie, 1789–1794'' (Paris, 1996) etc.</ref>}}