They were dark and dismal days in the fair land of France. Foreign invasion was triumphant, domestic insurrection was rife.
The terrible and fatal field of Poictiers, the field of the Black Prince, had stricken down at a single stroke the might of a great, a glorious nation; her king a captive in a foreign dungeon; one third of the best and bravest nobles dead on the field of honor, or languishing in English fetters; a weak and nerveless regent on her throne; and Charles, the bad king of Navarre, the counsellor, the nearest to his ear.
Half of the realm at least was held directly under English sway, with garrisons of English archers in the towns, and the red-cross banner of St. George floating above her vanquished towers; and in the provinces, still nominally French, armies of free companions sweeping the fields of their harvests far and near, plundering the cottage, pillaging the castle, levying contributions on open towns, storming by force strongholds—English, Gascons, and Normans—led for the most part by men of name and renown—bastards, in many cases, of great and noble houses, such as the bourg de Maulion, and the bourg de Keranlouet, and a hundred others of scarcely inferior fame—had subjected the country scarcely less effectually than it had been done elsewhere by open, honorable warfare.
To this appalling state of things a fresh horror was now added, where horror was least needed—and that the most tremendous of all horrors, a servile insurrection—the sudden, and spontaneous, and victorious outbreak of ignorant, down-trodden, vicious, cruel, frenzied, and brutal slaves!
206 The nobles themselves—who, had they been combined, and acted promptly and in unison, could have crushed the life out of the insurrection in a week—divided into hostile parties, dispirited by the wonderful successes of the victorious English, intimidated and crest-fallen—held themselves aloof the one from the other; and, attempting to defend their isolated fortresses singly, without either concert or system, allowed themselves to be surprised in detail, and butchered upon their own hearth-stones, by the infuriated serfs.
All horrors, all atrocities that can be conceived, were perpetrated by the victors, maddened by long years of servitude and suffering, by deprivation of all the rights and decencies which belong of nature to every living man, and by the enforcement of droits so infamous and unnatural, that it is only wonderful how men should have so long endured them! Not the least galling of these was that feudal right which permitted the seigneur to compel the virgin bride on her wedding-day to his own bed, and then return her dishonored to the arms of her impassive husband—a right which not merely existed in abeyance, or, as in latter days, was compounded by a fine, but which was an every-day occurrence, a usage of the land—to enforce which was no more considered cruel or tyrannical than to collect rents, or tithes, or any other feudal dues—and which was not finally abolished until the reign of Louis XIV., when it was at length suppressed in those memorable assizes, known as the grands jours d’Auvergne, when many of the noblest of the land died by the hands of the common executioner for tyranny and persecution.
When, therefore, crimes like these, and worse, were perpetrated daily under the sanction and authority of feudal law; when they had been endured for years—not, indeed, without feelings of the direst bitterness and rage, but without loud complaint or general resistance, by all the serfs and villeyns of the land—what wonder was it that these miserable, trampled207 wretches, scarcely human, save in form, from the squalid wretchedness of their condition, and the studious care of their oppressors to prevent their progress or improvement—what wonder, I say, was it, that, seeing at length their opportunity, when their lords were distracted by foreign conquests, by the devastations of robber-bands, and by their own political dissensions or social feuds, they should have sprung to arms everywhere—their cry, “War to the castle, peace to the cottage!”—seeking redress or revenge, and braving death willingly, as less intolerable than the wrongs they had been so long enduring in sullen desperation? What wonder was it, that, when victorious, they, who never had been spared, should have shown themselves unsparing; that they, whose hearths had been to them no safeguards for any sanctity of domestic life, no asylums for any age or sex, should have wreaked upon the dwellers of the castles the wrongs which for ages had been the inheritance of the inmates of the cottages; that they, whose wives and daughters had never found protection from worse than brutish violence in tender years, in innocence of unstained virtue, in the weakness of imploring beauty, should have requited, on the wives and daughters of their tyrants, pollution by pollution, infamy, and death?
Such, such, alas! is human nature; and rare it is indeed that suffering at the hands of man teaches man moderation to the sufferers when it becomes his turn to suffer. Injustice hardens, not melts, the heart; and we have it, from no less an authority than the word of Him who can not lie, that “persecution maketh wise men mad”—but, of a surety, the wretched serfs and Jacquerie were far enough removed from wisdom, however they might be deemed mad, nor were many of their actions very far removed from madness. Knights crucified above the altars of their own castle-chapels, while their wives were dishonored, tortured, and slain, with all extremities of cruelty, before their208 eyes; infants tossed upon pikes, or burnt alive, in the presence of their frantic mothers; women compelled to eat the flesh of their own husbands, roasted at their own kitchen-grates ere yet life was extinct; the whole land filled with blood and ruin, and the smoke of conflagration going up night and day to the indignant and polluted heavens—these were the signs of those dark and awful times, these were the first fruits of the conquered liberty of the emancipated helots of the feudal system!
And when, nerved at length by the very extremity of peril, the nobles took up arms to make common cause against the common enemy, they found themselves isolated and hemmed in on all sides, unable to draw together so as to make head against the countless numbers of the enemy, which, like the waters of an inundation, increased hourly, and waxed wider, deeper, stronger, as it rolled onward. Large bodies could not be collected; small bodies were cut off; till at length so completely were the proud and warlike nobles of the most warlike land in Europe cowed and disheartened by the triumph of their despised and degraded slaves, that fifty men, armed cap-à-pie, and mounted on their puissant destriers, who would, six months before, have couched their lances confidently, and ridden scatheless through thousands of the skinclad Jacquery—trampling them at leisure under the hoofs of their barded horses, and, invulnerable themselves, spearing them at their will from their lofty demipiques—now felt their proud hearts tremble at the mere blast of a peasant’s horn, and fled ingloriously before an equal number of undisciplined and half-armed serfs!
About the period, however, of which I write, several encounters had taken place, especially in Touraine, in the Beauvoisis, and the country about the Seine, between the chivalry and their insurgent villeyns, in which the former had been worsted, not so much by superior forces as by superior courage, discipline, and skill. And it came to be rumored far and near that there209 was one band, and that the fiercest and most cruel of all—consisting of above a thousand foot, spears, and crossbow-men, and led by a powerful man-at-arms, before whose lance everything was said to go down—at the head of nearly a hundred fully equipped lances, which was in no respect unequal to the best arrays of the nobility with their feudal vassals.
What was at first mere rumor, soon came to be accredited—soon came to be undoubted truth; for, emboldened by their successes from attacking the parties of chivalry in detail, as they fell upon them traversing the country in the vain hope of combinations, this great band now began to sit down before strong towns and fortified holds, to besiege them in due form of war, and were in every instance successful.
Their numbers, too, increased with their success, for every knight or man-at-arms who fell, or was taken prisoner, mounted and armed a peasant; and it was singular to observe with what skill and judgment the leader apportioned his best spoils to his best men: so that, developing his resources slowly—never admitting any man to enter his cavalry who had not approved himself a soldier, who could not ride well, and charge a lance fearlessly, nor enrolling any one among his footmen who was not well armed with a corslet or shirt-of-mail, and steel cap or sallet, with sword, dagger, and pike, or crossbow—he was soon at the head of two thousand excellent foot, and above three hundred lances, admirably mounted, who fought under his own immediate orders.
Who he was, no one knew, or conjectured. It was reported that his own men were unacquainted with his name, and that his face, when the vizor of his helmet was raised, was covered by a sable mask. How much of truth or falsehood there might be in these vague rumors, no man seemed to know; but it is certain that a mysterious and almost supernatural terror attached to the “Black Rider,” as he was universally termed,210 whenever he was spoken of—a terror which perhaps he took a secret pleasure in augmenting, either from motives of policy or of pride.
The strong suit of knight’s armor which he wore, of the best Milan steel, was black as night from the crest to the spur, without relief of any kind, or device on the shield, or heraldric crest on the burgonet. The plume which he wore on his casque was similar to those affixed in modern days to hearses; and another, its counterpart, towered between the ears of his charger, which was a coal-black barb, without one white hair in its glossy hide, barded with chamfront, poitrel, neck-plates, and bard proper, all of black steel, with funeral-housings of black cloth.
Such was the man who alone of the leaders of the Jacquerie seemed to make war on a system, acting according to the dictates of the soundest judgment rather than, like the others, by wantonness or whim; permitting no license, nor promiscuous individual pillaging, but causing all plunder to be brought together for the common weal—thus making war support war, according to the prescribed plan of the greatest of modern conquerors—and subsisting his men on the spoils of the powerful and rich, without trespassing in any wise on the property of the poor, whose favor it was his object to conciliate.
It came, too, to be understood, ere long, that his cruelty was no less systematic than his plundering. No wanton barbarity, no torturing, roast, crucifying, or the like, was ever perpetrated by his band; and of himself, it was notorious that, except in open warfare or in the heat of battle, he had never dealt a blow against a man, or laid a rude hand on a woman, of the hated caste of nobles. Still, neither man nor woman ever escaped his rancorous and premeditated vengeance.
Every male noble, of whatever age—gray-haired, or full-grown man, stripling, or child, or infant in the cradle—no sooner was he taken than he was hanged on the next tree if in211 the open field, or from the pinnacles of his own castle if within stone walls.
Every female of noble birth—and to these, though he never looked on them himself, nor was tempted by the charms of the fairest—was delivered at once to the mercies of his men, subjected to the last dishonor; and then, when life was intolerable to them, and death welcome, they were drowned in the nearest stream or lake, if in the open country, or cast from the battlements into the moat, if captured within the precincts of a fortalice.
So rigidly did he adhere to this last mode of execution, often carrying his victims along with the band for several days until he could find a suitable place for drowning them, that it was soon determined that he must have some secret motive, or strong vow, binding him to this strange course—the rather that there were many reasons for believing him to be a man naturally of a feeling and generous temper, hardened by circumstances into this vein of cold and adamantine cruelty.
Though he had never been known to relent, tears had been known to fall fast through the bars of his avantaille, as he repulsed the outstretched arms and rejected the passionate entreaties of some lovely, innocent maiden, imploring death itself as a boon, so she might save her honor.
At such times, it was affirmed—and they were of no unusual occurrence—when he seemed on the point of relenting, he needed only to clasp in his mailed fingers a long, heavy tress of female hair—once of the loveliest shade of dark brown, verging almost upon black, but now bleached by exposure to the summer sun and the wintry storm—which he wore among the black plumes of his casque, when he became on the instant cold, iron, and impenetrable, as the proof-harness which he wore; and the words would come from his lips slow, stern, irrevocable, speaking the miserable creature’s doom, so that212 even she would plead no longer!—
“Away with her! away! For she, too, was beautiful, and innocent, and good; and which of these availed her, that she should not perish? Away with her, I say, and do your will with her; but let me not look on her any more!”
Up to this time, the insurrection had been confined to the northeast of France, and more especially to the Beauvoisis and the regions adjacent to the capital, the armed commons of which appeared ready to encourage and assist, if not openly to join them; but, at the period when my tale commences, it began to spread like a conflagration, and rapidly extended itself in all directions.
Auvergne still continued, however, free from disturbance, and the knights and nobles whose demesnes lay within that fair province went about their ordinary avocations and amusements, unmolested and unsuspicious of danger, without any more display of military force than was usual in those dark and dangerous times, and with no more than ordinary trains of feudal dependants and retainers.
This, however, was now brought to a sudden and alarming conclusion by the occurrence of an incident so terrible and hideous in its character, that it struck a panic-terror into every heart that heard tell of it, and that it still survives, though centuries have elapsed, as clear and distinct as if it had but just occurred, in the memories of the peasantry of Auvergne.
It was a beautiful morning in the latter part of June, when the whole face of the country was overspread by a garb of the richest summer greenery, when the skies were glowing with perfect and cloudless azure, and when the atmosphere was perfumed with the breath of flowers and vocal w............