The prisoners of Albi were still as far as ever from liberation, and Bernard Délicieux urged Pequigny to come to Carcassonne and consider their case on the spot. In the summer of 1303 he did so, and was met by a large number of the people of Albi, men and women, praying him to liberate them. While he was investigating the subject he came upon the instrument of pacification between Nicholas d’Abbeville and the consuls of Carcassonne in 1299. This was communicated to the people by Frère Bernard in a fiery sermon, and a knowledge of its conditions aroused them almost to frenzy. Riots ensued in which the houses of some of the old consuls and of those who were regarded as friends of the Inquisition were destroyed; the Dominican church was assailed, its windows broken, the statues in its porch overthrown, and the friars maltreated. To violate the prisons of the Inquisition was so serious a matter that Pequigny seems to have wished the backing of an enraged populace before he would venture on the step: and when he resolved upon it he anticipated resistance so confidently that with his privity Bernard assembled fourscore men, with skilled mechanics, in the Franciscan convent, ready to break open the jails in case of necessity. Their services were not needed. Geoffroi d’Ablis yielded, and in August, 1303, Pequigny removed the prisoners of Albi. He did not discharge them, however, but merely transferred them to the royal prisons, and refused to carry them to the king as Bernard advised. Possibly their treatment for a while may have been gentler, but they derived no permanent advantage from the movement. The grasp of the Inquisition was unrelaxing. It obtained possession of them again, and we shall see that it held them to the last.[91]