The Jacquerie and Late Medieval Revolts

In late May of 1358, the people of the rural hinterlands around Paris rose up, killing many nobles and destroying a number of their castles and fortifications. The Jacquerie - as this revolt was known after the 'Jack Goodmen' (Jacques bonhommes) who made up its rank and file - continues to be as infamous today as it was seven centuries ago. At the time, royal clerks in France and chroniclers as far afield as England and Italy produced voluminous records and accounts of the uprising. Yet, despite these ample records and the episode's lasting celebrity, historians have hardly written about it at all. The only book-length study, Siméon Luce's La Jacquerie, dates from the nineteenth century, and only a very few articles have been published since then. To some extent, this omission mirrors that of scholarship on medieval revolt more generally: Although the later Middle Ages have been characterised as an 'age of revolt' - by one scholar's estimates the period saw over 1000 uprisings of various sorts - there are fewer than a handful of works devoted to the synthetic and comparative study of these movements. Among younger scholars, there is now a growing attention to later medieval revolts, one perhaps encouraged by recent events such as the London Riots, the Occupy Movement, and the 'Arab Spring'. But as yet, there is little coordination between individual efforts. My project is intended to address both the lack of scholarship on the Jacquerie in particular and the lack of historiographical coherence on revolt more generally.

A major product of my Fellowship will be a new book on the Jacquerie, which will look at three main areas. First, it will explore the relationship between royal politics and non-elite ideas about the socio-political order, showing what the Jacquerie and the related bourgeois coup in Paris reveal about expectations of government and authority during a key period in the development of the French state. A second area of investigation is the construction and negotiation of social identity: Although some modern critics have portrayed the Jacquerie as a proto-class war, in fact the social consciousness of the nobility was much more highly developed than that of the commoners, and the Jacquerie may have done more to reinforce the nobility's self-identity than to express that of the lower order(s). A final field of investigation is how people at the time gave meaning to the chaotic events of the uprising through writing, a process of interpretation that continues today through historiography and memorialization.

These issues raised by the Jacquerie are characteristic of late medieval European developments more generally. Thus, a second important objective of my project is to help create a more robust historiographical context for medieval revolts through collaborative exchange with scholars working on other such incidents. Through workshops with about a dozen scholars working on other revolts, we will develop our analyses in comparative perspective, outlining a collaborative research agenda and creating consensus around some broad areas that have been problematic in the historiography. For example, although there is general agreement that the later Middle Ages saw a marked increase in 'revolt', there is much variation in terms of what sorts of political/social activities qualify for the sobriquet. There is also a great need to discuss methodological issues, including such approaches as gender analysis, or the use of literary and visual sources. The presentations given at these workshops will be developed into essays for a volume on medieval revolt in comparative perspective than I will co-edit with a postdoctoral researcher.

By looking at both the Jacquerie in particular and revolts in general, this project will significantly advance the scholarship on a topic that has increasing resonance outside the academy.

Those who may benefit from this research outside of academia include organisations and individuals involved in public policy and government. Recent events like the London Riots, the Occupy movement, and the so-called Arab Spring suggest that popular protest is again becoming a major feature of the political and social landscape. In my undergraduate seminars on medieval revolt last year, I was struck by the extent to which historicising the phenomenon of revolt helped my students not only to understand medieval uprisings but also to begin to analyse more recent ones, including the London Riots, which some of them had observed at close range.

Drawing on recent work in the social sciences, an analysis of the unfolding of one of the first large-scale political uprisings in Western Europe will provide useful perspectives on the relationship between revolt and state power. For example, the causes of the Jacquerie and the motivations of participants may help to illuminate some of the reasons why, to quote Ted Gurr's famous title, men [and women] rebel, as well as what can be done to alleviate those pressures and channel them into less violent forms of political activity. This could also be useful to the media in their efforts to communicate news and analyses of contemporary uprisings by providing a point of comparison and historical background.

I also anticipate that the third sector and the creative arts will benefit from my work because the Jacquerie is a celebrated episode frequently referred to in popular accounts of the Middle Ages. Almost any museum exhibition or television programme related to the Hundred Years War includes a section on the Jacquerie. My work will make information much more accessible, as well as more accurate.

This project may also be useful to commercial organisations because of the popularity of medieval video games, re-enactment fayres, and other recreational activities for which authenticity and accuracy are often a major selling point.