Justice & Law Quote by Jean Froissart

Labor here isn’t romanticized as “the dignity of work”; it’s itemized like a bill. Froissart’s piling up of verbs - plough, harvest, gather, thresh, winnow, mow, carry, cut, collect - does more than describe peasant life. It mimics it: repetitive, exhaustive, without a single opening for choice. The sentence becomes a treadmill, and that formal feeling is the point. You can almost hear the bureaucratic satisfaction in the list, the way a system justifies itself by turning human time into a predictable inventory of outputs.

The key phrase is “bound by law and custom.” Froissart isn’t saying these people are simply poor; he’s marking their condition as engineered and defended. “Law” gives coercion a clean, official face. “Custom” makes it feel ancient, natural, and therefore harder to challenge. Together, they describe a feudal logic that doesn’t need constant violence to function; it can lean on habit and legitimacy until exploitation reads as order.

Context matters: Froissart writes in the long shadow of the Black Death and in the century of the Jacquerie and the English Peasants’ Revolt, moments when labor suddenly understood its leverage and elites panicked. The subtext is anxiety management. By cataloging obligations so thoroughly, the passage reassures its audience - likely noble and clerical readers - that the world still has rules, that the “masters” still have hands to work their land. It’s history as maintenance: recording the social contract not to question it, but to keep it intelligible, even defensible, when it’s beginning to crack.