. Every
day they take from us our work animals for feudal services. And then
there are the laws, old and new, and pleas and lawsuits without end,
about coinage, about forest rights, about roads, about milling our
grain, about _hommage_. There are so many constables and bailiffs that
we have not one hour of peace; every day they are pouncing down on us,
seizing our goods, chasing us away from our land. There is no guarantee
for us against the seigneurs and their men, and no contract holds good
with them. Why do we allow ourselves to be treated thus, instead of
trying to right our wrongs? Are we not men as they are? Courage is all
we need. Let us therefore bind ourselves together by an oath, swearing
to sustain each other. And if they make war upon us, have we not, for
one knight, thirty or even forty young peasants, active, and fit to
fight with clubs, with pikes, with bows and arrows, yea, with stones if
there be no better weapons? Let us learn how to resist the knights, and
we shall be free to cut the trees, to hunt, to fish at our own sweet
will; and we will do as we please upon the water, in the fields, and in
the forests." They held secret meetings, and finally formed some sort of
an organization. But the seigneurs got wind of their designs. The young
Duke Richard sent for his uncle, Raoul, Count of Evreux. "Sire," said
Raoul, "do not you stir a foot, but leave it all to me." He collected a
force of knights and men at arms, and, informed by a spy of the meeting
place of the peasants, bore down upon them suddenly and arrested all the
ringleaders. Then came the punishment, the like of which was not
uncommon, though the victims were more numerous than usual. Some were
empaled outright; some were cooked before a slow fire; some were
sprinkled with molten lead. Others had their eyes torn out, their hands
cut off, their legs scorched; and of these victims the few who survived
were sent back among their fellows to inspire terror.

One can well believe that these horrors and the ever present sight of
those who had suffered from them kept the peasants in awe, as the old
chroniclers exultantly tell us. The account as given in Wace's _Roman de
Rou_ has in our eyes a pathos and a poetic grandeur far greater than the
chronicler's enthusiastic record of the deeds of the great Norman dukes.
With us the democratic spirit, or mere humanity, is so much stronger
than with him that we read his lines with feelings of pity and
indignatio