n quite unforeseen by him. Is it not pitiful, this cry of the
peasants?

"Nus sumes homes cum il sunt,
Tex membres avum cum il unt,
Et altresi grant cors avum,
Et altretant sofrir poum."

(We are men even as they are, we have limbs and bodies like theirs, and
can suffer as much.) One hears the echo of Shy lock's "Hath not a Jew
eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections,
passions?" The feudal ages would have answered Jew and peasant alike
with an emphatic "No!"

The barbarism in the suppression of this revolt is merely a typical
instance of the prevailing cruelty of manners. It was not the peasant
alone, regarded as hardly the same flesh and blood, to whom the seigneur
was cruel. Let us look at a few of these famous knights, and first at
the deeds of one notoriously wicked even in his own day. This was
Foulques, surnamed Nerra, the black, Count of Anjou, and ancestor of the
Plantagenet line. This same Foulques was twice married. His first wife,
Elizabeth, accused of adultery--probably because he wished to get rid of
her,--he disposed of by violent methods. One account reports that he had
her burned alive; another, that he had her thrown over a precipice; and
as she survived this, he, scandalized by her refusal to die in this more
picturesque fashion, stabbed her himself. One is reminded of Nero, that
most cheerful of the Roman murderer-emperors, who contrived an elaborate
machine to drown his mother, and, when she swam ashore, was so irritated
by the failure of his scheme that he had her summarily decapitated.
Foulques's second wife was so ill used that she fled to the Holy Land.
The pious count once burned down the church of Saint-Florent at Saumur,
calling out to the saint: "Let me burn your old church here, and I'll
build you a far finer one in Angers." And later he did build a huge
abbey, which no one of the neighboring bishops would consecrate; but a
judicious application to Rome, backed by a present, brought a cardinal
to consecrate it; and the wrath of Heaven was shown, says the
chronicler, for the new church was destroyed by lightning. At length the
devout Foulques, who had made two previous pilgrimages to the Holy Land,
was so smitten by remorse that he undertook a third. When he arrived at
Jerusalem he had himself tied to a hurdle and dragged through the
streets, while two of his servants flogged him, and he cried out at
every blow: "Have mercy, O Lor