So, likewise, Joan Hachette fought afterwards, at the siege of Beauvais. A sprightly and laughter-loving population it was, of impetuous soldiers and merry story-tellers, a country of light manners, of smutty _fabliaux_, of good songs. It was their delight, in the twelfth century, to see the count of Amiens, mounted upon his big horse, venturing beyond the pont-levis, and caracoling clumsily; thereupon the innkeepers and the butchers planted themselves boldly at their doors, and startled the feudal animal with their loud laughter. It has been said that the king founded the communes, but the reverse is, rather, the fact--it was the communes that founded the king; without them he could not have repulsed the Normans. Those conquerors of England and of the Two Sicilies would, probably, have conquered France; it was the communes, or, to employ a more general and more exact word, it was the _bourgeoisies_ which, under the banner of the parish saint, achieved the security of public peace between the Oise and the Loire; and the king, mounted on horseback, carried the banner of the abbey of St. Denis, at the head of the lords. A vassal, as count of Vexin, abbot of St. Martin de Tours, canon of St. Quentin, defender of the churches, he waged holy war against the brigandage of the lords of Montmorency and Puiset, and against the execrable ferocity of the Coucys. He had upon his side the nascent _bourgeoisie_ and the church; feudalism had had all the rest, all the strength and the glory; the poor helpless king was smothered between the vast dominations of his vassals. _Philosophy and Thought; Abelard and St. Bernard_ [Sidenote: [1079-1115 A.D.]] The chain of free-thinkers, broken, it would seem, after Johannes Scotus, had its links reunited by the great Gerbert, who became pope in the year 1000. Educated at Cordova, and admitted a master at Rheims, Gerbert had for disciple Fulbert of Chartres, whose pupil Bérenger [Berengarius] of Tours affrighted the church by the first doubt cast upon the Eucharist. Soon after, the canon Rosselin of Compiègne dared to touch upon the question of the Trinity. He taught, moreover, that general ideas were but words: “The virtuous man is a reality; virtue is but a sound.” This bold reform gave a violent shock to all poetry, to all religion; it accustomed men to see nothing but personifications in those ideas that had been regarded as real things; it was nothing less than a transition from poetry to prose. This logical heresy inspired the contemporaries of the First Crusade with horror; nominalism, as it was called, was stifled for a while.