Harmed by the first Wars of Religion, the Cotentin region is torn between the need to mend its wounds and the need to put an end to the huguenot threat. Far away from everything and prone to panic, the region believes that it is threatened by a new english invasion or even worse, by the erection of a Protestant Republic in Carentan. However, the nobility is not leading the fight: exhausted by wars, quickly deprived from its leaders, it must deal with a small circle of bailiffs and lower clergymen with their own contacts in Paris, a small world which nurtures a rancor against the Crown and thinks that the aristocracy will not measure up to the issues at stake.This work focuses on the popular components of the rural League. Priests wielding halberds, canons carrying arquebuses, robber lords, pirates and shipwrecks looters, smugglers and farmer-generals taxing salt and beverages, corrupt sergeants, woodcutter-potters and glassmakers from the Brix forest, drapers, fullers and dyers, that make up to a thousand leaders and troublemakers, part of a an unknown, picaresque and often suspicious fauna whose common denominator is not reduced to primary anglophobia and anti-protestantism.This research is also a political story, convinced that at the bottom of the social scale, there is an opinion, even in Normandy. Hence the necessity to find new documents and confront the individual to the group, his words to his actions, his present to his past, in a peninsula where nothing is more complicated than taking a public stance and killing each other among acquaintances, Then forget about it or lie.