TUCHINS AND ‘BRIGANDS DE BOIS’: PEASANT COMMUNITIES AND SELF-DEFENCE MOVEMENTS IN NORMANDY DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR ∗ Vincent Challet From the beginning to the end of the Hundred Years War, many provinces of the realm of France experienced outbreaks of brigandage. These outbreaks can be placed in a broad context of protest: protest against an authority – whether royal or seigneurial – whose legitimacy was continuously in question for peasant communities, as they suffered under the simultaneous burdens of pillaging by men- at-arms and increased fiscal pressure. In this sense, the various peasant commotions of the Anglo-French war form part of the evidence for the so-called ‘crisis of feudalism’: they are simply one of its more striking manifestations, in that they involved the creation, at the level of local communities, of autonomous powers which tended to compete with those of lordship. 1 Fifteenth-century Normandy was by no means excluded from this overall social development, but the presence of the English in the duchy, and their attempts to integrate themselves rather than simply maintaining a military occupation, meant that brigandage there took on a distinctly political character. The Historiographical Debate: Patriots or Criminals? The interpretation of the Norman Brigands has, over time, provoked impassioned controversy between French historians, who have insisted on a patriotic dimension, and British historians, who have seen in their activities nothing more than the delinquency typical of situations of crisis. One of the first historians to look into the Brigands, Germain Lefevre-Pontalis, characterised this struggle of Norman peasants against the English occupation as a ‘war of partisans’, while some years later, Roger Jouet treated them like résistants, casting them more or less as heroes who gave their lives for France, and going so far as to end his book with a kind of ∗ This article is a modified version of a piece which first appeared in French under the title ‘Tuchins et brigands des bois: communautés paysannes et mouvements d’auto-défense en Normandie pendant la guerre de cent Ans’, in Images de la contestation du pouvoir dans le monde normand Xe-XVIIIe siècle, ed. Catherine Bougy and Sophie Poirey (Caen, 2007), 135–46. I warmly thank Dr. John Watts for the translation; his incisive remarks and well-judged suggestions have greatly helped to improve the text. 1 Guy Bois, The Crisis of Feudalism (Cambridge, 1984).