twelfth century: “We are men as well as they; our hearts are as great; we are as capable of endurance as they.” They all wanted some franchise, some privilege, and for this they offered money--which they contrived to find, indigent and wretched as they were. Poor artisans, blacksmiths, or weavers, allowed, as a matter of favour, to set themselves down at the foot of a castle; fugitive serfs, who had taken refuge round a church, such were the founders of liberty; they stinted themselves of bread to obtain them, and the lords and the king were eager to sell diplomas so well paid for. This revolution was accomplished everywhere, under a thousand forms, and with little noise; it was only prominently remarked in some towns of Oise and Somme, which, being placed in less favourable circumstances, divided between two lords, lay and ecclesiastical, applied to the king to obtain a solemn guarantee for concessions often violated, and which maintained a precarious liberty at the cost of many centuries of civil war. It was upon these towns that the name of “communes” was more particularly bestowed. These wars are a small, but dramatic incident in the great revolution which was taking place silently, and under various forms, in all the towns of the north of France. It was in the valiant and choleric Picardy, the communes of which had so well beaten the Normans; it was in the country of Calvin, and so many other revolutionary spirits, that these explosions took place.[f] Le Mans in 1066, then Cambray in 1076, gave the signal, followed by Noyon, Beauvais, St. Quentin, Laon, Amiens and Soissons. All wrested communal charters from their lords, mostly of the ecclesiastical order. In 1112 the bishop of Laon attempted to repeal the communal charter he had granted, somewhat under compulsion, three years before. His house was surrounded; the nobles who came to his assistance were killed, and the prelate himself fell under the blows of an axe. The king came and the commune was abolished. But before sixteen years had passed the communal party regained the ascendancy. In 1128 the king ratified a new charter granted by the bishop.[c] Great or small, the Picard communes were heroic, and bravely did they fight. They too had their belfry, their tower, not inclined and faced with marble, like the _miranda_ of Italy, but furnished with a sonorous bell, that summoned the citizens, not in vain, to battle against the bishop or the lord. Women went forth to these fights, against men. Eighty women insisted on taking part in the attack upon the castle of Amiens, and were wounded there.