Third
Estate. In the growing conflict between the two other
estates--nobles and clergy--and the third, Marcel armed the
bourgeois and began an open revolution, thus organizing the
commune for carrying out his designs. The nobles were
meanwhile laying heavier miseries upon the peasantry, and in
the spring of 1358 occurred the rising of the Jacquerie,
here described by Froissart, whose brilliant narrative is to
be read in the light of modern critical judgment, which
regards it as an exaggeration both of the numbers of the
insurgents and their atrocities, while Froissart had no
capacity for understanding the conditions which explain, if
they do not also justify, the present revolt.

This outbreak, to which Marcel gave his support, was enough
to ruin his cause, and he died in a massacre, July 31, 1358,
having failed "because the time was not yet ripe," and
because the violence to which he lent his sanction was
overcome by stronger violence.

A marvellous and great tribulation befell the kingdom of France, in
Beauvoisis, Brie, upon the river Marne, in the Laonnois, and in the
neighborhood of Soissons. Some of the inhabitants of the country towns
assembled together in Beauvoisis, without any leader; they were not at
first more than one hundred men. They said that the nobles of the
kingdom of France, knights and squires, were a disgrace to it, and that
it would be a very meritorious act to destroy them all; to which
proposition everyone assented, and added, shame befall him that should
be the means of preventing the gentlemen from being wholly destroyed.
They then, without further counsel, collected themselves in a body, and
with no other arms than the staves shod with iron which some had, and
others with knives, marched to the house of a knight who lived near,
and, breaking it open, murdered the knight, his lady, and all the
children, both great and small; they then burned the house.

After this, their second expedition was to the strong castle of another
knight, which they took, and, having tied him to a stake, many of them
violated his wife and daughter before his eyes; they then murdered the
lady, her daughter, and the other children, and last of all the knight
himself, with much cruelty. They destroyed and burned his castle. They
did the like to many castles and handsome houses; and their numbers
increased so much that they were in a short time upward of six thousand.
Wherever they w