same vicissitudes that Cambrai and Laon had experienced, and finally attained, after similar trials, a similar position. Perhaps Cambrai, of all the French communes, was the most exacting towards the feudal power that it was trampling under foot. “Ni l’évêque, ni l’Empereur, ne peuvent mia asseoir ne taxe, ne tribut, et n’en peult issir la malice, fors que pour la bonne garde et défense de la ville, et ce depuis coq chantant jusques à la nuit.”[1] No vassal had ever claimed or obtained more in the exercise of his feudal rights (Fig. 18). [Illustration: Fig. 17.--Seal of the Commune of Soissons, representing the Mayor of Soissons, armed at all points, in the midst of the Sheriffs of the Town (1228).--National Archives of France.] The inauguration of the communal system had taken place without a struggle, and almost without opposition, as a useful and necessary reform at Metz, at Rheims, in a few midland towns, such as Bourges, Moulins, Lyons, Périgeux, and in most of the southern cities, such as Arles, Aigues-Mortes (Fig. 19), Marseilles, Narbonne, Cahors (Fig. 20), Carcassonne (Fig. 21), Nîmes, and Bordeaux. This was explained by the fact that this independent action of the people had been prepared by the system adopted by the Franks, who allowed no difference to exist between the condition of the conquered and of the conquerors. The rights they might enjoy and the duties they were to perform had been equally shared amongst all the freedmen of the monarchy without any distinction as to nationality; the Franks would have feared, had they acted differently, that they were reserving for the sovereign the possibility of using the oppressed nations as a weapon to overcome the conquerors themselves, and that in this way they might be leaving a loophole through which the monarchy might degenerate into despotism. [Illustration: Fig. 18.--Thomas of Savoy, Count of Flanders, and Joan his Wife, grant to the Town of Cambrai the Charter of Peace made between the Counts of Hainaut and the Chapter of Cambrai in 1240.--Miniature from the “Chroniques de Hainaut,” Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (Burgundian Library, Brussels).]