“so it is you, Master Isengrin, who are hiding here!  “And he took him by the hair, and dragged him out of his cask.  The bishop implored the conspirators to spare his life, offering to swear on the Gospels to abdicate the bishopric, promising them all the money he possessed, and saying that if they pleased he would leave the country.  The reply was insults and blows.  He was immediately despatched; and Teutgaud, seeing the episcopal ring glittering on his finger, cut off the finger to get possession of the ring.  The body, stripped of all covering, was thrust into a corner, where passers-by threw stones or mud at it, accompanying their insults with ribaldry and curses.

[Bishop Gaudri dragged from the Cask——­224]

Murder and arson are contagious.  All the day of the insurrection and all the following night armed bands wandered about the streets of Laon searching everywhere for relatives, friends, or servitors of the bishop, for all whom the angry populace knew or supposed to be such, and wreaking on their persons or their houses a ghastly or a brutal vengeance.  In a fit of terror many poor innocents fled before the blind wrath of the populace; some were caught and cut down pell-mell amongst the guilty; others escaped through the vineyards planted between two hills in the outskirts of the town.  “The progress of the fire, kindled on two sides at once, was so rapid,” says Guibert of Nogent, “and the winds drove the flames so furiously in the direction of the convent of St. Vincent, that the monks were afraid of seeing all they possessed become the fire’s prey, and all the persons who had taken refuge in this monastery trembled as if they had seen swords hanging over their heads.”  Some insurgents stopped a young man who had been body-servant to the bishop, and asked him whether the bishop had been killed or not; they knew nothing about it, nor did he know any more; he helped them to look for the corpse, and when they came upon it, it had been so mutilated that not a feature was recognizable.  “I remember,” said the young man, “that when the prelate was alive he liked to talk of deeds of war, for which to his hurt he always showed too much bent; and he often used to say that one day in a sham-fight, just as he was, all in the way of sport, attacking a certain knight, the latter hit him with his lance, and wounded him under the neck, near the tracheal artery.”  The body of Gaudri was eventually recognized by this mark, and “Archdeacon Anselm went the next day,” says Guibert of Nogent, “to beg of the insurgents permission at least to bury it, if only because it had once borne the title and worn the insignia of bishop.  They consented, but reluctantly.  It were impossible to tell how many threats and insults were launched against those who undertook the obsequies, and what outrageous language was vented against the dead himself.  His corpse was thrown into a half-dug hole, and at church there was none of the prayers