[Illustration:  Knights returning from Foray——­311]

This is a literal translation of the monkish chronicler, who was far from favorable to the insurgent peasants, and was more for applauding the suppression than justifying the insurrection.  The suppression, though undoubtedly effectual for the moment, and in the particular spots it reached, produced no general or lasting effect.  About a century after the cold recital of William of Jumieges, a poet-chronicler, Robert Wace, in his Romance of Rou, a history in verse of Rollo and the first dukes of Normandy, related the same facts with far more sympathetic feeling and poetical coloring.  “The lords do us nought but ill,” he makes the Norman peasants say; “with them we have nor gain nor profit from our labors; every day is, for us, a day of suffering, toil, and weariness; every day we have our cattle taken from us for road-work and forced service.  We have plaints and grievances, old and new exactions, pleas and processes without end, money-pleas, market-pleas, road-pleas, forest-pleas, mill-pleas, black-mail-pleas, watch-and-ward-pleas.  There are so many provosts, bailiffs, and sergeants, that we have not one hour’s peace; day by day they run us down, seize our movables, and drive us from our lands.  There is no security for us against the lords; and no pact is binding with them.  Why suffer all this evil to be done to us and not get out of our plight?  Are we not men even as they are?  Have we not the same stature, the same limbs, the same strength—­for suffering?  All we need is courage.  Let us, then, bind ourselves together by an oath:  let us swear to support one another; and if they will make war on us, have we not, for one knight, thirty or forty young peasants, nimble and ready to fight with club, with boar-spear, with arrow, with axe, and even with stones if they have not weapons?  Let us learn to resist the knights, and we shall be free to cut down trees, to hunt and fish after our fashion, and we shall work our will in flood and field and wood.”

[Illustration:  Knights and Peasants——­312]

Here we have no longer the short account and severe estimate of an indifferent spectator; it is the cry of popular rage and vengeance reproduced by the lively imagination of an angered poet.  Undoubtedly the Norman peasants of the twelfth century did not speak of their miseries with such descriptive ability and philosophical feeling as were lent to them by Robert Wace; they did not meditate the democratic revolution of which he attributes to them the idea and almost the plan; but the deeds of violence and oppression against which they rose were very real, and they exerted themselves to escape by reciprocal violence from intolerable suffering.  Thence date those alternations of demagogic revolt and tyrannical suppression which have so often ensanguined the land and put in peril the very foundations of social order.  Insurrections became of so atrocious a kind that the atrocious chastisements with which they were visited seemed equally natural and necessary.  It needed long ages, a repetition of civil wars and terrible political shocks, to put an end to this brutal chaos which gave birth to so many evils and reciprocal crimes, and to bring about, amongst the different classes of the French population, equitable and truly human relations.