The eponymous Jacquerie : making revolt mean some things

Abstract

Labelling an activity makes it mean something. The decision to term a group of actions a ‘revolt’ or an ‘uprising’ today has profound implications for interpretation, just as calling them ‘rumours’ or ‘takehan’ went to the very heart of the perception and reception of contentious political acts 600 years ago. The word ‘jacquerie’ is no exception. In English, as in French, the word has meant ‘a peasant revolt, especially a very bloody one’ since the nineteenth century.2 But what the modern term’s medieval eponym, the French Jacquerie of May-June 1358, actually meant to its observers and participants is a curiously underexplored subject. Only one scholarly monograph, published in the nineteenth century, has ever been written, and since then fewer than a dozen articles have appeared, the most cogent of them written by Raymond Cazelles over 30 years ago