nought of any established right. To
carry out this purpose these mobs of madmen chose each two deputies, who
were to form at some central point an assembly charged to see to the
execution of their decrees. As soon as the duke (Richard II.) was
informed thereof, he sent a large body of men-at-arms to repress this
audaciousness of the country districts and to scatter this rustic
assemblage. In execution of his orders, the deputies of the peasants and
many other rebels were forthwith arrested, their feet and hands were cut
off, and they were sent away thus mutilated to their homes, in order to
deter their like from such enterprises, and to make them wiser, for fear
of worse. After this experience the peasants left off their meetings and
returned to their ploughs."

[Illustration: The Peasants resolved to Live according to their own
Inclinations and their own Laws----209]

It was about eighty years after the event when the monk William of
Jumiege told the story of this insurrection of peasants so long anterior,
and yet so similar to that which more than three centuries afterwards
broke out in nearly the whole of Northern. France, and which was called
the Jacquery. Less than a century after William of Jumiege, a Norman
poet, Robert Wace, told the same story in his Romance of Rou, a history
in verse of Rollo and the first dukes of Normandy: "The lords do us
nought but ill," he makes the Norman peasants say: with them we have nor
gain nor profit from our labors; every day is for us a day of suffering,
of travail, and of fatigue; every day our beasts are taken from us for
forced labor and services . . . why put up with all this evil, and why
not get quit of travail? Are not we men even as they are? Have we not
the same stature, the same limbs, the same strength--for suffering? Bind
we ourselves by oath; swear we to aid one another; and if they be minded
to make war on us, have we not for every knight thirty or forty young
peasants ready and willing to fight with club, or boar-spear, or arrow,
or axe, or stones, if they have not arms? Learn we to resist the
knights, and we shall be free to hew down trees, to hunt game, and to
fish after our fashion, and we shall work our will on flood and in field
and wood."

These two passages have already been quoted in Chapter XIV. of this
history in the course of describing the general condition of France under
the Capetians before the crusades, and they are again brought forw