A MS. account of this invasion, by a priest of Hiermont, named Claude Goddé, leaves this in no manner of doubt. He says: "The Spaniards committed great outrages in Picardy, as they did later in 1658. These wars compelled the inhabitants of Hiermont in 1647 to construct the quarry which we now see. This quarry or cavern, which is a great masterpiece, was first undertaken by five or six of the inhabitants "-- he gave their names. "They first of all dug out the entrance in 1647, but owing to its having given way several times, had to be repaired, and was not completed till 1648. The other inhabitants, seeing its great utility, wanted also to have their chambers, but they were not admitted unless they contributed to the cost of the undertaking, and to this they willingly agreed. This quarry was of great service to the inhabitants in the Wars of Louis XIV. against England, Holland, and the Empire during the years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711, which were the days of Marlborough. It was accordingly made by the inhabitants of Hiermont, to hide themselves, their cattle, their grain and their furniture, to preserve them from pillage by the soldiers, whether of the enemy or French. Each family had its own chamber." In a procès of 1638, one of those interrogated, a nun named Martha Tondu, stated that at Reneval and the neighbouring villages "the peasants are on the look out, and if alarmed, retire and conceal their cattle in ditches and quarries, without abandoning their houses or neglecting their agricultural work." Some, accordingly, of these subterranean refuges are of comparatively late date; but this does not apply to all. At every period of danger, instinctively the peasants would take advantage of the nature of the chalk to form in it suitable hiding-places, and although some of the finds in these labyrinths are of recent date, others go back to the Gallo-Roman period. In the Arras and Cambrai Chronicle of Balderic (1051), we are told that in the fifth century in those parts a persecution of the Christians occurred, on the invasion of the barbarians, and that the priests celebrated the Divine Mysteries in secret hiding-places. "Many," he adds, "were suffocated in caves and in subterranean passages." There is, in fact, evidence both from archaeology and from history that these refuges were taken advantage of, and doubtless extended from a remote antiquity down to the eighteenth century.