Here we have no longer the short account and severe estimate of an indifferent spectator; it is the cry of popular rage and vengeance reproduced by the lively imagination of an angered poet. Undoubtedly the Norman peasants of the twelfth century did not speak of their miseries with such descriptive ability and philosophical feeling as were lent to them by Robert Wace; they did not meditate the democratic revolution of which he attributes to them the idea and almost the plan; but the deeds of violence and oppression against which they rose were very real, and they exerted themselves to escape by reciprocal violence from intolerable suffering. Thence date those alternations of demagogic revolt and tyrannical suppression which have so often ensanguined the land and put in peril the very foundations of social order. Insurrections became of so atrocious a kind that the atrocious chastisements with which they were visited seemed equally natural and necessary. It needed long ages, a repetition of civil wars and terrible political shocks, to put an end to this brutal chaos which gave birth to so many evils and reciprocal crimes, and to bring about, amongst the different classes of the French population, equitable and truly human relations. So quick-spreading and contagious is evil amongst men, and so difficult to extirpate in the name of justice and truth! However, even in the midst of this cruel egotism and this gross unreason of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the necessity, from a moral and social point of view, of struggling against such disgusting irregularities, made itself felt, and found zealous advocates. From this epoch are to be dated the first efforts to establish, in different parts of France, what was called God’s peace, God’s truce. The words were well chosen for prohibiting at the same time oppression and revolt, for it needed nothing less than law and the voice of God to put some restraint upon the barbarous manners and passions of men, great or small, lord or peasant. It is the peculiar and glorious characteristic of Christianity to have so well understood the primitive and permanent evil in human nature that it fought against all the great iniquities of mankind and exposed them in principle, even when, in point of general practice, it neither hoped nor attempted to sweep them away. Bishops, priests, and monks were, in their personal lives and in the councils of the Church, the first propagators of God’s peace or truce, and in more than one locality they induced the laic lords to follow their lead. In 1164, Hugh II., count of Rodez, in concert with his brother Hugh, bishop of Rodez, and the notables of the district, established the peace in the diocese of Rodez; “and this it is,” said the learned Benedictines of the eighteenth century, in the Art of Verifying Dates, “which gave rise to the toll of _commune paix_ or _pesade,_ which is still collected in Rouergue.” King