Until then, that formidable thought of equality had not come forth in a very precise and tangible form. We are told, indeed, that the peasants of Normandy revolted in the year 1000, but they were easily put down; a few knights ravaged the country, dispersed the villeins, cut off their feet and hands, and there was an end of the matter. The peasants, in general, were too much isolated from each other; their _jacqueries_ were always unsuccessful throughout the Middle Ages. Unhappily, too, it must be owned, they were too degraded by slavery, too brutalised by the excess of their woes; their triumph would have been that of barbarism. It was especially in the populous boroughs, grouped round the castles, and, above all, round the churches, that ideas of emancipation fermented. The lay, or ecclesiastical lords had encouraged the population of those boroughs by concessions of land, being desirous of augmenting their own strength and the number of their vassals. These towns were not large and commercial cities, like those of the south of France and Italy, but they had some rude branches of trade, some blacksmiths, many weavers, butchers, and innkeepers, in the towns of transit. Sometimes the lords invited skilful workmen to settle in their towns, such, at least, as could embroider a stole, or forge armour; it was absolutely necessary to leave those men a little liberty, for, otherwise, as they carried their all in their hands, they would have left the country. The growth of freedom, then, was destined to commence by the central towns of France, which, obtaining their franchises by fair means or by force, received the name of privileged towns, or communes. The occasion of this result was, generally, the defence made by the inhabitants against the oppression and robbery of the feudal lords, and, in particular, the defence of the Île-de-France against Normandy, the feudal country _par excellence_. “At this period,” says Ordericus Vitalis,[g] “popular communality was established by the bishops in such wise that the priests accompanied the king to siege or battle, with the banners of their parishes and all their parishioners.” According to the same historian, it was a Montfort (an illustrious family, which was, in the following century, to destroy the liberties of the south of France, and to lay the foundation of those of England), it was Amaury de Montfort, who advised Louis the Fat, after his defeat at Brenneville, to employ against the Normans the men of the communes, marching under the banners of their parishes (1119). But when these communes returned within their own walls, they became more urgent in their demands; it was a mortal blow to their humility, to have once seen the great war-steeds and the noble knights flying before their parochial banners; to have put an end, with Louis the Fat, to the highway robberies of the Rocheforts; to have harried the lair of the De Coucys. They said, with the poet of the