een any approach in England. Their lives and liberties
were wholly at the mercy of their feudal lords. Hitherto no attempt at
resistance had been possible; but the tremendous defeat of the French at
Poitiers by a handful of English aroused the hope among the serfs that
the moment for vengeance had come. The movement began among a handful of
peasants in the neighbourhood of St. Leu and Claremont. These declared
that they would put to death all the gentlemen in the land. The cry
spread through the country. The serfs, armed with pikes, poured out from
every village, and a number of the lower classes from the towns joined
them. Their first success was an attack upon a small castle. They burned
down the gates and slew the knight to whom it belonged, with his wife
and children of all ages. Their numbers rapidly increased.

Castle after castle was taken and stormed, palaces and houses levelled
to the ground; fire, plunder, and massacre swept through the fairest
provinces of France.

The peasants vied with each other in inventing deaths of fiendish
cruelty and outrage upon every man, woman, and child of the better
classes who fell into their hands. Owing to the number of nobles who had
fallen at Cressy and Poitiers, and of those still captives in England,
very many of their wives and daughters remained unprotected, and these
were the especial victims of the fiendish malignity of the peasantry.
Separated in many bands, the insurgents marched through the Beauvoisis,
Soissonois, and Vermandois; and as they approached a number of
unprotected ladies of the highest families in France fled to Meaux,
where they remained under the guard of the young Duke of Orleans and a
handful of men-at-arms.

After the conclusion of the peace at Bordeaux, Sir Walter Somers had
been despatched on a mission to some of the German princes, with whom
the king was in close relations. The business was not of an onerous
nature, but Walter had been detained for some time over it. He spent a
pleasant time in Germany, where, as an emissary of the king and one of
the victors of Poitiers, the young English knight was made much of.
When he set out on his return he joined the Captal De Buch, who, ever
thirsting for adventure, had on the conclusion of the truce gone to
serve in a campaign in Germany; with him was the French Count de Foix,
who had been also serving throughout the campaign.

On entering France from the Rhine the three knights were shocked at
the m