pons. Absorbed in pillage, they paid no heed to defending
themselves and were surprised by the enemy, who in great force had
hastened to the place. They fled pursued by the English who slew many.
On that day the town resounded with the lamentations of women weeping
for a father, a husband, a brother, kinsmen.[851]

[Footnote 851: _Journal du siege_, p. 70.]

Within those walls, in a space where there was room for not more than
fifteen thousand inhabitants, forty thousand[852] were huddled
together, one vast multitude agonised by all manner of suffering;
depressed by domestic sorrow; racked with anxiety; maddened by
constant danger and perpetual panic. Although the wars of those days
were not so sanguinary as they became later, the sallies of the
inhabitants of Orleans were the occasion of constant and considerable
loss of life. Since the middle of March the English bullets had fallen
more into the centre of the town; and they were not always harmless.
On the eve of Palm Sunday one stone, fired from a mortar, killed or
wounded five persons; another, seven.[853] Many of the inhabitants,
like the provost, Alain Du Bey, died of fatigue or of the infected
air.[854]

[Footnote 852: Jollois, _Histoire du siege_, part vi, ch. i. Abbe
Dubois, _Histoire du siege_, dissertation ix. Loiseleur, _Compte des
depenses de Charles VII_, ch. v. Lottin, _Recherches historiques sur
la ville d'Orleans_, vol. ii, p. 205. Morosini, vol. iii, p. 25, note
2.]

[Footnote 853: _Journal du siege_, p. 64.]

[Footnote 854: _Ibid._, p. 59.]

In the Christendom of those days all men were taught to believe that
earthquakes, wars, famine, pestilence are punishments for wrong-doing.
Charles, the Fair Duke of Orleans, good Christian that he was, held
that great sorrows had come upon France as chastisement for her sins,
to wit: swelling pride, gluttony, sloth, covetousness, lust, and
neglect of justice, which were rife in the realm; and in a ballad he
discoursed of the evil and its remedy.[855] The people of Orleans
firmly believed that this war was sent to them of God to punish
sinners, who had worn out his patience. They were aware both of the
cause of their sorrows and of the means of remedying them. Such was
the teaching of the good friars preachers; and, as Duke Charles put it
in his ballad, the remedy was to live well, to amend one's life, to
have masses said and sung for the souls of those who had suffered
death in the service of the realm, t