Their first success was an attack upon a small castle.

They burned down the gates and slew the knight to whom it belonged, with his wife and children of all ages.

Their numbers rapidly increased.
Castle after castle was taken and stormed, palaces and houses levelled to the ground; fire, plunder, and massacre swept through the fairest provinces of France.
The peasants vied with each other in inventing deaths of fiendish cruelty and outrage upon every man, woman, and child of the better classes who fell into their hands.

Owing to the number of nobles who had fallen at Cressy and Poitiers, and of those still captives in England, very many of their wives and daughters remained unprotected, and these were the especial victims of the fiendish malignity of the peasantry.
Separated in many bands, the insurgents marched through the Beauvoisis, Soissonois, and Vermandois; and as they approached a number of unprotected ladies of the highest families in France fled to Meaux, where they remained under the guard of the young Duke of Orleans and a handful of men-at-arms.
After the conclusion of the peace at Bordeaux, Sir Walter Somers had been despatched on a mission to some of the German princes, with whom the king was in close relations.

The business was not of an onerous nature, but Walter had been detained for some time over it.