banishment, shut out forever from their native town at the very moment it became free, had been distinguished amongst all the burghers of Laon by their opposition to the power of the lords; perhaps they had sullied by deeds of violence this patriotic opposition; perhaps they had been taken at haphazard to suffer alone for the crimes of their fellow-citizens.”  The second hypothesis appears the most probable; for that deeds of violence and cruelty had been committed alternately by the burghers and their foes is an ascertained fact, and that the charter of 1128 was really a work of liberal pacification is proved by its contents and wording.  After such struggles and at the moment of their subsidence some of the most violent actors always bear the burden of the past, and amongst the most violent some are often the most sincere.

For forty-seven years after the charter of Louis the Fat the town of Laon enjoyed the internal peace and the communal liberties it had thus achieved; but in 1175 a new bishop, Roger de Rosoy, a man of high birth, and related to several of the great lords his neighbors, took upon himself to disregard the regimen of freedom established at Laon.  The burghers of Laon, taught by experience, applied to the king, Louis the Young, and offered him a sum of money to grant them a charter of commune.  Bishop Roger, “by himself and through his friends,” says a chronicler, a canon of Laon, “implored the king to have pity on his Church, and abolish the serfs’ commune; but the king, clinging to the promise he had received of money, would not listen to the bishop or his friends,” and in 1177 gave the burghers of Laon a charter which confirmed their peace-establishment of 1128.  Bishop Roger, however, did not hold himself beaten.  He claimed the help of the lords his neighbors, and renewed the war against the burghers of Laon, who, on their side, asked and obtained the aid of several communes in the vicinity.  In an access of democratic rashness, instead of awaiting within their walls the attack of their enemies, they marched out without cavalry to the encounter, ravaging as they went the lands of the lords whom they suspected of being ill-disposed towards them; but on arriving in front of the bishop’s allies, “all this rustic multitude,” says the canon-chronicler, “terror-stricken at the bare names of the knights they found assembled, took suddenly to flight, and a great number of the burghers were massacred before reaching their city.”  Louis the Young then took the field to help them; but Baldwin, Count of Hainault, went to the aid of the Bishop of Laon with seven hundred knights and several thousand infantry.  King Louis, after having occupied and for some time held in sequestration the lands of the bishop, thought it advisable to make peace rather than continue so troublesome a war, and at the intercession of the pope and the Count of Hainault he restored to Roger de Rosoy his lands and his bishopric on condition of living in peace with the commune.