ent they received additions, for all of their rank in
life followed them, while everyone else fled, carrying off with them
their ladies, damsels, and children ten or twenty leagues distant, where
they thought they could place them in security, leaving their houses,
with all their riches in them.

These wicked people, without leader and without arms, plundered and
burned all the houses they came to, murdered every gentleman, and
violated every lady and damsel they could find. He who committed the
most atrocious actions, and such as no human creature would have
imagined, was the most applauded and considered as the greatest man
among them. I dare not write the horrible and inconceivable atrocities
they committed on the persons of the ladies.

Among other infamous acts they murdered a knight, and, having fastened
him to a spit, roasted him before the eyes of his wife and his children,
and forced her to eat some of her husband's flesh, and then knocked her
brains out. They had chosen a king among them, who came from Clermont in
Beauvoisis. He was elected as the worst of the bad, and they denominated
him "Jacques Bonhomme."[57]

These wretches burned and destroyed in the county of Beauvoisis, and at
Corbie, Amiens, and Montdidier, upward of sixty good houses and strong
castles. By the acts of such traitors in the country of Brie and
thereabout, it behooved every lady, knight, and squire, having the means
of escape, to fly to Meaux, if they wished to preserve themselves from
being insulted and afterward murdered. The Duchess of Normandy, the
Duchess of Orleans, and many other ladies had adopted this course. These
cursed people thus supported themselves in the countries between Paris,
Noyon, and Soissons, and in all the territory of Coucy, in the County of
Valois. In the bishoprics of Noyon, Laon, and Soissons there were upward
of one hundred castles and good houses of knights and squires destroyed.

When the gentlemen of Beauvoisis, Corbie, Vermandois, and of the lands
where these wretches were associated, saw to what lengths their madness
had extended, they sent for succor to their friends in Flanders,
Hainault, and Bohemia; from which places numbers soon came and united
themselves with the gentlemen of the country. They began therefore to
kill and destroy these wretches wherever they met them, and hung them up
by troops on the nearest trees. The King of Navarre even destroyed in
one day, near Clermont in Beauvoisis, upwa