And between campaigns, a good part of those demobilized troops, composed of mercenaries, were wandering, looting, and extorting money from towns, villages, and castles.
Agitation in rural areas was almost constant during the conflict, but the peasant uprisings multiplied in the 1590s, as in Champagne, in the North and East of Paris, in Lower Normandy, Dauphine, Vivare, and Provence.
Historian Henri Heller concludes from the document that the heavy taxation undoubtedly played an important role; looting, extortion, and the duty to accommodate and feed the soldiers of hosts were no less relevant.
But the most relevant is the oppression exercised by the nobles, who were illegally demanding the payment of higher rents and manorial rights, and arbitrarily imposing new taxes and duties.
The texts drawn up by the croquants of the Périgord region corroborate this analysis and add that they struggled against the tax collectors and their agents, who enriched themselves by taking advantage of their misery.
The movement expanded with extreme rapidity throughout Limousin and Poitou, reaching in the west to Angoumois and Saintonge, and in the south to Toulouse and the Comminges region.
On the other hand, although the King had decreed an end to the movement, he also had expressed a certain benevolence toward the rebels and had promised to hear their complaints, and so for months the nobles felt indecisive about the degree of violence to employ in the repression, and their answer was due soon.
As the reinforcements that the governor of Bourdeille had asked the King for were slow in coming, the nobility and the wealthy classes of the cities organised their own armed League.
Meanwhile, the croquantes asked the King to recognize their official representative (a syndic) and delegated lawyers to the Parliaments (as in Périgueux in February, 1595) in the name of the "Third Estate of the low lands" (Tiers-Etat du pays plat), the name with which they called themselves.
They asserted that the "thieves" they denounced were attacking not only them but also the royal power, and they proclaimed their respect for the established social hierarchy and that they only hoped that justice would be done.
As the available sources from the time usually collect highly geographically-localized data, this has led historians to diverge on this point according to the characteristics of the movement in the regions studied: while the French authors (Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Yves-Marie Bercé, and Roland Mousnier) lean toward a fundamentally anti-tax movement, the English-speaking authors (Henry Heller, Pérez Zagorín) argue that the fight against the nobility as a whole had equal relevance.