lords, Kings Philip and Charles, whose souls are with God, we, on great deliberation of our council, have ordained that no commune, corporation, college, shrievalty, mayor, jurymen, or any other estate or symbol belonging thereto, be at any time set up or established at Laon.”  By the same ordinance the municipal administration of Laon was put under the sole authority of the king and his delegates; and to blot out all remembrance of the olden independence of the commune, a later ordinance forbade that the tower from which the two huge communal bells had been removed should thenceforth be called belfry-tower.

[Illustration:  The Cathedral of Laon——­233]

The history of the commune of Laon is that of the majority of the towns which, in Northern and Central France, struggled from the eleventh to the fourteenth century to release themselves from feudal oppression and violence.  Cambrai, Beauvais, Amiens, Soissons, Rheims, Vezelay, and several other towns displayed at this period a great deal of energy and perseverance in bringing their lords to recognize the most natural and the most necessary rights of every human creature and community.  But within their walls dissensions were carried to extremity, and existence was ceaselessly tempestuous and troublous; the burghers were hasty, brutal, and barbaric,—­as barbaric as the lords against whom they were defending their liberties.  Amongst those mayors, sheriffs, jurats, and magistrates of different degrees and with different titles, set up in the communes, many came before very long to exercise dominion arbitrarily, violently, and in their own personal interests.  The lower orders were in an habitual state of jealousy and sedition of a ruffianly kind towards the rich, the heads of the labor market, the controllers of capital and of work.  This reciprocal violence, this anarchy, these internal evils and dangers, with their incessant renewals, called incessantly for intervention from without; and when, after releasing themselves from oppression and iniquity coming from above, the burghers fell a prey to pillage and massacre coming from below, they sought for a fresh protector to save them from this fresh evil.  Hence that frequent recourse to the king, the great suzerain whose authority could keep down the bad magistrates of the commune or reduce the mob to order; and hence also, before long, the progressive downfall, or, at any rate, the utter enfeeblement of those communal liberties so painfully won.  France was at that stage of existence and of civilization at which security can hardly be purchased save at the price of liberty.  We have a phenomenon peculiar to modern times in the provident and persistent effort to reconcile security with liberty, and the bold development of individual powers with the regular maintenance of public order.  This admirable solution of the social problem, still so imperfect and unstable in our time, was unknown in the middle ages; liberty was then so stormy and so fearful, that people conceived