In the fifteenth century so many of the inhabitants of the Quercy had been killed or ruined by the companies that some districts were almost depopulated.  In the town of Gramat there were only seven inhabitants left at the close of the Hundred Years’ War.  In order that the lands should not remain uncultivated, the nobles enfeoffed them to strangers from the Rouergue and other neighbouring provinces.  This circumstance is supposed to account in a large measure for the differences in dialect which are to be observed in adjoining communes.  There is no evidence to-day, so far as I have been able to ascertain, of English words having been introduced into the Languedocian of Guyenne.  The striking resemblance of many patois words to those of the English language bearing the same meaning—­a resemblance that is helped by the Southern pronunciation of vowels and diphthongs—­must be referred to linguistic influences far more remote and obscure than the political fact that Guyenne was intimately connected with English history for three hundred years.  For example, that familiar animal the cat is called in Guyenne lou catou and even lou cat; but the word belongs to the Romance language, and is the same all through Languedoc and Provence.  The fact that the English left no mark upon the language in Guyenne is almost a conclusive proof that such of the Anglo-Saxon stock as followed the Norman leaders into Aquitaine, and who remained in the country any length of time, were not sufficiently numerous to impose their idiom upon others.  They probably did not preserve it long themselves; but, like the English grooms who find occupation in France today, they quickly adopted the language that was generally spoken around them.  Patient investigation might, nevertheless, show that the English did leave some of their words, as well as their blood, in the country.  It would, indeed, be astonishing if this were not so.  Even the Greek colony at Marseilles and Aries, although far removed, must have influenced the dialect of Guyenne; for the peasants of the Quercy use the word hermal to describe a piece of waste land bordering a cultivated field, the origin of which expression was, doubtless, Hermes, the god of boundaries.  This is not the only Greek word that has been corrupted, but nevertheless preserved, in the Quercy patois.

Wherever the English were long established in their fastnesses amidst the rocks which form the rugged sides of the deep-cut gorges of the Quercy, many of the inhabitants have clung, century after century, to the belief that the terrible freebooters buried a prodigious amount of treasure with the intention of returning and fetching it on the first opportunity.  So persistently was this tradition handed down at Brengues that many years ago a cavern, the entrance of which had been covered over with stones and earth, having been accidentally discovered on the plateau just above the Chateau des Anglais, it was eagerly