The Hundred Years’ War between France and England in the fourteenth century was destructive to the prosperity and civilisation which, in spite of many drawbacks, had characterised the thirteenth. There could be no liberty while the country was full of armed bands led by powerful barons; agriculture was not likely to flourish in such a state of things as has been described; the nobles had no leisure to encourage or interest themselves in literary pursuits while their whole lives were spent in warfare. It was in the monasteries that learning was chiefly cultivated and protected, but many of those great religious establishments in the country, though always possessing some sort of fortification, had been sacked and burned by brigands, and others deserted by their inhabitants, who no longer found that security which the cloister had formerly afforded. The towns had become less free, and many of them had lost the liberties and privileges accorded them by the Capétiens Kings. For the Valois and their followers held the traders and unwarlike citizens in the deepest contempt, and so, as time went on, grew and strengthened a bitter hatred of the lower classes for those of gentle blood, making men the deadly enemies of their own countrymen and causing national calamities far more dreadful and disgraceful than any brought about by foreign invaders.
In other countries nobles and people, united in their sentiments and aspirations, developed in peaceful and harmonious progress to the accomplishment of their destinies;[15] whilst in France the deplorable separation that began in the fourteenth century caused the frightful excesses of the Jacquerie, and having produced the Reign of Terror in the days of our great-grandfathers and the Commune in our own, is still so fatal an injury to the power, stability, and prestige of the French nation.
The first child of the Duke and Duchess of Normandy was born in September of this year (1357), a daughter, named Jeanne.
It was on the 28th of May, 1358,[16] that the Jacquerie, or rising of the peasants, broke out at the little town of Saint-Leu, where a number of labourers, joined by small tradesmen, artisans, and other persons of the lower classes, assembled in revolt; and having murdered nine gentlemen who happened to be in the town, spread themselves over the surrounding country, putting to death every man, woman, and child of good blood who came in their way, and plundering and burning the châteaux. They attacked the villages at each end of the forest of Ermenonville, and went to the castle of Beaumont-sur-Oise, where the Duchesse d’Orléans then was. Warned just in time of the approach of the murderers, she fled for her life, was out of the castle before they arrived and set it on fire, and escaped to Meaux, a town on the Marne, where the Duchess of Normandy, the Princess Isabelle de France and more than three hundred ladies had taken refuge, some having escaped in their nightdresses without having had time to dress themselves.