all this was guaranteed. So
much you were bound to pay the lord, but all the rest he could take if
he chose; and this was very fitly called the _right of seizure_. You
may work and work away, my good fellow! But while you are in the
fields, yon dreaded band from the castle will fall upon your house and
carry off whatever they please "for their lord's service."

Look again at that man standing with his head bowed gloomily over the
furrow! And thus he is always found, his face clouded, his heart
oppressed, as if he were expecting some evil news. Is he meditating
some wrongful deed? No; but there are two ideas haunting him, two
daggers piercing him in turn. The one is, "In what state shall I find
my house this evening?" The other, "Would that the turning up of this
sod might bring some treasure to light! O that the good spirit would
help to buy us free!"

We are assured that, after the fashion of the Etruscan spirit which
one day started up from under the ploughshare in the form of a child,
a dwarf or gnome of the tiniest stature would sometimes on such an
appeal come forth from the ground, and, setting itself on the furrow,
would say, "What wantest thou?" But in his amazement the poor man
would ask for nothing; he would turn pale, cross himself, and
presently go quite away.

Did he never feel sorry afterwards? Said he never to himself, "Fool
that you are, you will always be unlucky?" I readily believe he did;
but I also think that a barrier of dread invincible stopped him short.
I cannot believe with the monks who have told us all things concerning
witchcraft, that the treaty with Satan was the light invention of a
miser or a man in love. On the contrary, nature and good sense alike
inform us that it was only the last resource of an overwhelming
despair, under the weight of dreadful outrages and dreadful
sufferings.

* * * * *

But those great sufferings, we are told, must have been greatly
lightened about the time of St. Louis, who forbade private wars among
the nobles. My own opinion is quite the reverse. During the fourscore
or hundred years that elapsed between his prohibition and the wars
with England (1240-1340), the great lords being debarred from the
accustomed sport of burning and plundering their neighbours' lands,
became a terror to their own vassals. For the latter such a peace was
simply war.

The spiritual, the monkish lords, and others, as shown in the _Journal
of Eud