On the 2d of December, 1355, the three orders, the clergy, the nobility, and the deputies from the towns assembled at Paris in the great hall of the Parliament.  Peter de la Forest, Archbishop of Rouen and Chancellor of France, asked them in the king’s name “to consult together about making him a subvention which should suffice for the expenses of the war,” and the king offered to “make a sound and durable coinage.”  The tampering with the coinage was the most pressing of the grievances for which the three orders solicited a remedy.  They declared that “they were ready to live and die with the king, and to put their bodies and what they had at his service;” and they demanded authority to deliberate together—­which was granted them.  John de Craon, Archbishop of Rheims; Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens; and Stephen Marcel, provost of the tradesmen of Paris, were to report the result, as presidents, each of his own order.  The session of the states lasted not more than a week.  They replied to the king “that they would give him a subvention of thirty thousand men-at-arms every year,” and, for their pay, they voted an impost of fifty hundred thousand livres (five millions of livres), which was to be levied “on all folks, of whatever condition they might be, Church folks, nobles, or others,” and the gabel or tax on salt “over the whole kingdom of France.”  On separating, the states appointed beforehand two fresh sessions at which they would assemble, one, in the month of March, to estimate the sufficiency of the impost, and to hear, on that subject, the report of the nine superintendents charged with the execution of their decision; the other, in the month of November following, to examine into the condition of the kingdom.”

They assembled, in fact, on the 1st of March, and on the 8th of May, 1356 [N.  B. As the year at that time began with Easter, the 24th of April was the first day of the year 1356:  the new style, however, is here in every case adopted]; but they had not the satisfaction of finding their authority generally recognized and their patriotic purpose effectually accomplished.  The impost they had voted, notably the salt-tax, had met with violent opposition.  “When the news thereof reached Normandy,” says Froissart, “the country was very much astounded at it, for they had not learned to pay any such thing.  The Count d’Harcourt told the folks of Rouen, where he was puissant, that they would be very serfs and very wicked if they agreed to this tax, and that, by God’s help, it should never be current in his country.”  The King of Navarre used much the same language in his countship of Evreux.  At other spots the mischief was still more serious.  Close to Paris itself, at Malun, payment was peremptorily refused; and at Arras, on the 5th of March, 1356, “the commonalty of the town,” says Froissart, “rose upon the rich burghers and slew fourteen of the most substantial, which was a pity and loss; and so it is when wicked folk have the upper hand of valiant men.  However, the people of Arras paid for it afterwards, for the king sent thither his cousin, my lord James of Bourbon, who gave orders to take all them by whom the sedition had been caused, and, on the spot, had their heads cut off.”