and to come that,
with the consent of the barons of our kingdom and the inhabitants of the
city of Laon, we have set up in the said city a peace-establishment."
And after having enumerated the limits, forms, and rules of it, the
charter concludes with this declaration of amnesty: "All former
trespasses and offences committed before the ratification of the present
treaty are wholly pardoned. If any one, banished for having trespassed
in past time, desire to return to the town, he shall be admitted and
shall recover possession of his property. Excepted from pardon, however,
are the thirteen whose names do follow; "and then come the names of the
thirteen excepted from the amnesty and still under banishment.
"Perhaps," says M. Augustin Thierry, "these thirteen under banishment,
shut out forever from their native town at the very moment it became
free, had been distinguished amongst all the burghers of Laon by their
opposition to the power of the lords; perhaps they had sullied by deeds
of violence this patriotic opposition; perhaps they had been taken at
haphazard to suffer alone for the crimes of their fellow-citizens." The
second hypothesis appears the most probable; for that deeds of violence
and cruelty had been committed alternately by the burghers and their foes
is an ascertained fact, and that the charter of 1128 was really a work of
liberal pacification is proved by its contents and wording. After such
struggles and at the moment of their subsidence some of the most violent
actors always bear the burden of the past, and amongst the most violent
some are often the most sincere.

For forty-seven years after the charter of Louis the Fat the town of Laon
enjoyed the internal peace and the communal liberties it had thus
achieved; but in 1175 a new bishop, Roger de Rosoy, a man of high birth,
and related to several of the great lords his neighbors, took upon
himself to disregard the regimen of freedom established at Laon. The
burghers of Laon, taught by experience, applied to the king, Louis the
Young, and offered him a sum of money to grant them a charter of commune.
Bishop Roger, "by himself and through his friends," says a chronicler, a
canon of Laon, "implored the king to have pity on his Church, and abolish
the serfs' commune; but the king, clinging to the promise he had received
of money, would not listen to the bishop or his friends," and in 1177
gave the burghers of Laon a charter which confirmed their peace-