Military history often has the bad habit of overemphasising the generals and commanders that lead armies to glorious victory or disastrous defeat in climactic battles or sieges. While these stories are interesting and often significant, telling them can come at the cost of neglecting the impact that these campaigns had on the people who happened to have the misfortune of living between the army and its goals. That’s not to say that the existence of the common people is entirely ignored in the study of military history, few modern histories would go that far, but they rarely receive an equal level of attention and what they do receive can often be overly simplistic. Nicholas Wright’s book on the effects of the Hundred Years War on the peasantry and communities in rural France does an excellent job of balancing this narrative, leaving aside the battles and putting the people front and centre.
One of the primary goals of Wright’s book is to challenge the overly simplistic portrayal of the French peasant that has dominated narratives of medieval warfare since the Middle Ages. This book could be seen as something of a rebuttal to the influential works of the nineteenth century French scholar Jules Michelet, who saw in the Hundred Years War the development of a French national identity driven by the peasantry and culminating in the rise of Joan of Arc as the ideal embodiment of the French people. Many medieval clerical writers, and many modern historians such as Michelet, saw in the French peasant an individual who was egregiously exploited, constantly persecuted, and always in a state of great suffering due to the misbehaviour and violence of the military elite of medieval society.
Wright does not deny the violence of medieval society – in fact he devotes significant attention to how medieval soldiers often behaved like persecuting warlords. The description of suffering inflicted upon the common population pulls no punches. Probably the most horrifying section describes the raiding of villages and communities and then forcing the peasants to pay ransoms – when they could not the youngest would be conscripted into military service, often acting as almost slave soldiers having surrendered their freedom in exchange for their lives. These poor souls would then end up continuing the cycles of violence that had led to their situation in the first place.
However, Wright’s book is not solely devoted to descriptions of violence and suffering, and it is in that where the differences between this and many other histories that cover the same subject arise. Wright is also quick to point out the many ways that French peasants had to oppose or resist the violence of social elites. This starts with the most famous method – the peasant revolts that became all too common in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – before moving on to more interesting discussions of how peasants were driven to lives as brigands and the methods of communal defence the peasants could use to endure raids and attacks as well as the controversy those defences could cause.
I saw that these latter two are more interesting because I found the accounts of medieval rebellions to be a little underwhelming. I believe this is primarily due to the book’s age. It is over twenty years old and plenty of new research on French peasant revolts has come about in those intervening years. In particular, Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s history of the Jacquerie provides a much deeper analysis of this phenomenon than can be found in Wright’s book. Of course, Firnhaber-Baker was writing nearly two decades later and devoted an entire book to something that is covered in less than 40 pages in this one, so its superiority should be no surprise. In the areas of brigandage and communal defence I think this book really shines, as well as the discussion in the conclusion of the dichotomy of peasant as victim and peasant as independent actor able to fight and survive on their own terms.
My only real fault with Wright’s book is that the writing can be quite dense and often lacks a clear throughline to help the reader follow the argument. The arguments themselves are well made, but the structure of the book on a page-to-page level leaves a bit to be desired. It just makes this book a harder read than I would like, it has very academic writing, which I don’t mean as a compliment. There isn’t much in the way of complex jargon, instead it’s more how the writing comes together that makes this book less accessible than it could have been. If you’re used to reading dense academic text, then this may not bother you.
Overall, this was an interesting read and I’m glad I read it even if it took me longer than I expected for a book that’s less than a 150 pages long. I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, it definitely requires existing familiarity with the history of the Hundred Years War and the deep dives into historiography, especially the discussions of Michelet’s writings, would not appeal to most readers. Still, for scholars and enthusiasts of the period there’s a lot here that’s worth exploring.