The winter of 1517-18 was spent by the Black Band in Friesland.  Three thousand men who are prepared to take by force what is not given to them, do not lie hungry in the cold.  We may be sure that under them the land had no rest.  At Easter they began to move southwards in quest of other victims and other employ.  But as they halted between Venlo and Roermond, resistance confronted them.  Nassau had arrayed by his side the Archbishop of Cologne and the Dukes of Juliers and Cleves:  the gates of the cities were closed and the ferry-boats that would have carried them across the Maas had been kept on the other side.  Caught in a trap, the freebooters promised to lay down their weapons and disperse.  The disarmament proceeded quietly till one of the company-leaders refused to part with a bombard, the new invention, of which he was very proud.  A trumpeter, seeing the man hesitate, sounded a warning, and the containing troops stood on the alert.  Readiness led to action.  Suddenly they fell on the helpless horde, for whom there was no safety but in flight.  A thousand were massacred before Nassau and his confederates could check their men.

Erasmus was about to set out from Louvain to Basle, to work at a new edition of the New Testament.  Bands such as these were, of course, a peril to travellers.  Half exultant, half disgusted, he wrote to More:  ’These fellows were stripped before disbandment:  so they will have all the more excuse for fresh plundering.  This is consideration for the people!  They were so hemmed in that not one of them could have escaped:  yet the Dukes were for letting them go scot-free.  It was mere chance that any of them were killed.  Fortunately, a man blew his trumpet:  there was at once an uproar, and more than a thousand were cut down.  The Archbishop alone was sound.  He said that, priest though he was, if the matter were left to him, he would see that such things should never occur again.  The people understand the position, but are obliged to acquiesce.’  To Colet he exclaimed more bitterly:  ’It is cruel!  The nobles care more for these ruffians than for their own subjects.  The fact is, they count on them to keep the people down.’  Let us be thankful that Europe to-day has no experience of such mercenaries.

A sign of the troubles of the times was the existence of the French order of Trinitarians for the redemption of prisoners.  This need had been known even when Rome’s power was at its height, for Cicero[25] specifies the redemption of men captured by pirates as one of the ways in which the generously minded were wont to spend their money.  The practice lasted down continuously through the Middle Ages.  Gaguin, the historian of France, Erasmus’ first patron in Paris, was for many years General of the Trinitarians, and made a journey to Granada to redeem prisoners who had been taken fighting against the Moors.  Even in the eighteenth century, church offertories in England were asked and given to loose captives out of prison.