Pastoureaux

Pastoureaux

(French: “shepherds”) Participants in two outbreaks of mob violence in medieval France. The first Pastoureaux were peasants in northeastern France aroused by news in 1251 of the reverses suffered by King Louis IX while on his Crusade. Accusing the nobles, clergy, and bourgeoisie of indifference to the king's fate, they began pillaging churches and towns and attacking clerics, the rich, and Jews. The second Pastoureaux converged on Paris in 1320 to punish Philip V for failing to undertake a Crusade he had called. They sacked the city, opened the prisons, and marched into the countryside, where they carried out pogroms against Jews and lepers before being suppressed.

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Pastoureaux 

the self-styled “shepherds of God,” who triggered a series of peasant antifeudal and, in part, anti-Catholic uprisings in northeastern France and in Belgium in the 13th and first half of the 14th centuries.

In the Pastoureaux movement, with its mixture of religious fervor and primitive rebellion, the traits of a peasant and plebeian heresy were markedly present. The first uprising of the Pastoureaux occurred in 1214. The most significant uprisings were those of 1251 and 1320, both of which involved the urban poor as well as the peasantry. According to the somewhat inflated figures supplied by chroniclers, more than 100,000 Pastoureaux took part in the uprising of 1251 at its highest point. The 1320 uprising was distinctive in that it was directed against both feudal landlords and urban usurers.