Times were indeed bad for the peaceful vine-dressers in the tenth century, when castles were springing up in every direction; when might made right, and the rule of the strong hand alone prevailed; and when the firm belief that the end of the world was to come in the year 1000 led men to live only for the present, and seek to get as much out of their fellow-creatures as they possibly could. Such natural calamities as that of 919, when the wine-crop entirely failed in the neighbourhood of Reims, were bad enough; but the continual incursions of the Hungarians, whose arrows struck down the peasant at the plough and the priest at the altar, and the memory of whose pitiless deeds yet survives in the term 'ogre;' the desperate contest waged for ten years by Heribert of Vermandois to secure the bishopric of Reims for his infant son, during which hardly a foot of the disputed territory remained unstained by blood; the repeated invasions of Otho of Germany; and the struggle between Hugh Capet and Charles of Lorraine for the titular crown of France,--left traces harder to be effaced. Reims underwent four sieges in about sixty years; and Epernay, that most hapless of towns, was sacked at least half a score of times, and twice burnt, one of the most conscientiously executed pillagings being that performed in 947 by Hugh the Great, who, as it was vintage-time, completely ravaged the whole country, and carried off all the wine.[11] Under the rule of the Capetian race matters improved as regarded foreign foes, though the archbishops had in the early part of the eleventh century to abandon Epernay, Vertus, Fismes, and their dependencies to the family of Robert of Vermandois, who had assumed the title of Counts of Champagne, to be held by them as fiefs. The fame of the schools of Reims, where future popes and embryo emperors met as class-mates; the festive gatherings which marked the coronation of Henry I. and Philip I.; the great ecclesiastical council held by Leo IX., which procured for the city the nickname of 'little Rome;' and the growing importance of the Champagne fairs, the great meeting-places throughout the Middle Ages of the merchants of Spain, Italy, and the Low Countries,--favoured the prosperity of the district and the production of its wine. Urban II., a native of Châtillon, who wore the triple crown from 1088 to the close of the century, was, prior to his elevation to the chair of St. Peter, a canon of Reims, under the name of Eudes or Odo, and, tippling there in company with his fellow-clerics, acquired a taste for the wine of Ay, which he preferred to all others in the world.[12] Pilgrims to Rome found penance light and pardon easily obtained when they bore with them across the Alps, in addition to staff and scrip, a huge 'leathern bottel' of that beloved vintage which warmed the pontiff's heart and whetted his wit for the delivery of those soul-stirring orations at Placentia and Clermont,