The great difficulty with the people of Capdenac in time of war must have been the water supply.  When their cisterns were empty, they had the river at the bottom of the valley and a spring that flowed at certain seasons, as it does now, at the foot of the rock on which they had built their little town.  When they were besieged, they could not descend to the Lot to draw water; consequently they laid great store by the stream at the base of the rock.  A long zigzag flight of steps down the side of the precipice was constructed, and it was covered by a wall that protected those who fetched water from arrows and bolts.  Near the spring this wall was built very high and strong, and was pierced with loopholes.  It also served as an outwork.  The steps and much of the wall still exist.  The spring in modern times came to be called Caesar’s Well, because the elder Champollion and others endeavoured to prove that Capdenac was the site of Uxellodunum.  The fact, however, that the spring is dry for several months in the year, and could never have been aught else but the drainage of the rock, is in itself a sufficient refutation of the hypothesis; because, according to Caesar, the fountain at Uxellodunum was so perennially abundant that when he drew off the water by tunnelling, the Gauls recognised in this disaster the intervention of the gods.

Capdenac appears to have given the English a great deal of trouble, which the natural strength of the place fully explains.  It must have been a fortress of the first order in the Middle Ages, and would be so to-day, if the French thought it worth while to use it in a military sense; but, happily for the inhabitants of this part of France, their territory now lies far from the theatre of any war that is likely to occur.  A charter by Philippe le Long, dated 1320, another by King John, and a third by Charles VII., recognise the immunity of the people of Capdenac from all public charges on account of the resistance which they constantly opposed to the English.  The rock must, nevertheless, have fallen into the hands of a company attached to the British cause, for the Count of Armagnac bought the place in 1381 of a band of so-called English routiers.  Sully lived there after the death of Henry IV., and the house that he occupied still exists.

According to a local tradition, Capdenac was on the point of being captured by the English, when it was saved from this fate by a stratagem.  The defenders were starving, and the besiegers were relying upon famine to reduce them.  In order to make the English believe that the place was still well provisioned, a pig was given a very full meal of all the corn that could be scraped together and then pushed over the side of the rock in a cautious manner, so that the animal might appear to be the victim of its own indiscretion.  The pig fulfilled expectations by splitting open when it struck the ground, and thus revealed the corn that was in its body.  When the English saw this, they said:  ’If the men of Capdenac can afford to feed their swine on wheat, they must still have plenty for themselves.’  Discouraged by this reflection, they raised the siege.  When they went away there was not an ounce of bread left to divide amongst the garrison.