The poverty of the Scots proceeded from a cause of which they need not have been ashamed; yet, with the reserve and pride ever peculiar to them, they hated that it should be seen by their allies, and when these showed any indications of contempt or derision, the natives were stung to madness. Froissart renders very picturesquely the common talk about the strangers, thus:—“What devil has brought them here? or, who has sent for them? Cannot we carry on our wars with England without their assistance? We shall never do any good as long as they are with us. Let them be told to go back again, for we are sufficient in Scotland to fight our own battles, and need not their aid. We neither understand their language nor they ours, so that we cannot converse together. They will very soon cut up and destroy all we have in this country, and will do more harm if we allow them to remain among us than the English could in battle. If the English do burn our houses, what great matter is it to us? We can rebuild them at little cost, for we require only three days to do so, so that we but have five or six poles, with boughs to cover them.” The French knights, accustomed to abject submission among their own peasantry, were loth to comprehend the fierce independence of the Scots common people, and were ever irritating them into bloody reprisals. A short sentence of Froissart’s conveys a world of meaning on this specialty: “Besides, whenever their servants went out to forage, they were indeed permitted to load their horses with as much as they could pack up and carry, but they were waylaid on their return, and villanously beaten, robbed, and sometimes slain, insomuch that no varlet dare go out foraging for fear of death. In one month the French lost upwards of a hundred varlets; for when three or four went out foraging, not one returned, in such a hideous manner were they treated.” As we have seen, a not unusual incident of purveying in France was, that the husbandman was hung up by the heels and roasted before his own fire until he disgorged his property. The Scots peasantry had a decided prejudice against such a process, and, being accustomed to defend themselves from all oppression, resisted even that of their allies, to the extreme astonishment and wrath of those magnificent gentlemen. There is a sweet unconsciousness in Froissart’s indignant denunciation of the robbing of the purveyors, which meant the pillaged peasantry recovering their own goods. But the chronicler was of a thorough knightly nature, and deemed the peasantry of a country good for nothing but to be used up. Hence, in his wrath, he says: “In Scotland you will never find a man of worth; they are like savages, who wish not to be acquainted with any one, and are too envious of the good fortune of others, and suspicious of losing anything themselves, for their country is very poor. When the English make inroads thither, as they have very frequently done, they