Dynamite was unknown in Picardy a century and a half ago. And the Picard has very little, except his religion, in common with the Irish Celt. But the sentiment of this simple and pleasing little ditty glowed deep in the Picard heart long before the Revolution of 1789. The 'earth hunger,' which has given the act of 'land-grabbing' the first place in the category of human crimes, invented, long ago in Picardy, and especially in that part of Picardy now known as the Department of the Somme, a custom called the _coutume de mauvais gre_ or the _droit de marche_. Under this custom a tenant-farmer in Picardy considered himself entitled to sell the right to till his landlord's fields to anybody he liked, to give it as a dowry to his daughter, or to leave it to be divided among his heirs; and all this without reference to the expiration of his lease. If the landlord objected and went so far as to lease his land to another person, the previous tenant was regarded by his friends and by other farmers as a _depointe_, entitled to take summary vengeance upon the 'land-grabber.' He might kill off his cattle, burn his crops and his buildings, and, if occasion served, shoot or knock him in the head. As the whole country was in a conspiracy, either of terror or of sympathy, to protect the _depointe_ against the vengeance of the law, this cheerful 'custom' had a liberalising effect upon the Picard landholders. Rents fell, and if the value of landed property rose the landed proprietor got no advantage from that. The torch and the musket kept down the demand, which was equivalent practically to increasing the supply. The results of this 'custom' were such that in 1764, a quarter of a century before the Revolution of 1789, the king intervened, but in vain, to put a stop to it. The 'oppressed and downtrodden peasant' of Picardy under the _ancien regime_ did what he liked with his neighbour's property--that neighbour being a landlord--as cheerily as the manacled Celt of Mayo or Tipperary in our own times. Two years before the Revolution, in 1787, the assembly of the Generality of Amiens, by its president the Duc d'Havre, vainly urged the royal government to take resolute action in this matter. With the Revolution, of course, things grew worse very rapidly. The _depointes_ became ardent lovers of liberty, equality, and fraternity; tore up all their leases, sent their landlords and the land-grabbers to the guillotine, or into emigration as traitors, and made themselves proprietors, in fee simple. There seems to be no doubt that the traditions of this _coutume de mauvais gre_ (which obviously had much more to do with the politics of Picardy a century ago than either Voltaire or Rousseau) still survive in the Department of the Somme, and every now and then break out in agrarian outrages, rick-burnings, and general incendiarism, whenever leases fall in and landlords try to raise their rents on the shallow pretext that land has risen in value.