The persecution soon spread to neighbouring lands. At Basle the populace obliged their magistrates to take an oath that they would burn all the Jews in the town, and forbid any of their countrymen to settle in their country for two hundred years to come. In compliance with the order, all the Jews in the place were shut up in a wooden building and burnt alive. At Bennefeld, in Alsace, a diet was held, at which a similar decree was made. At Spires the Jews, driven to despair, shut themselves up, together with their wives and children, in their houses, which they then set on fire, and all perished in the flames. In Mentz and Eslingen similar tragedies were enacted. In the first-named city, when the Flagellants made their entrance, the Jews began by repelling the violence offered them; but, perceiving the impossibility of making any effectual resistance, they too fired their dwellings and destroyed themselves and all belonging to them. In Eslingen it was the synagogue, with the entire Hebrew population of the place, that was consumed; and it is related that mothers were seen to fling their children into the burning pile, to prevent their undergoing compulsory baptism. At Strasburg two thousand Jews were burned on a scaffold erected in their own burial-ground. For months the same cruelties were perpetrated along the Rhine and the contiguous cities. The history of these times is one unvaried repetition of horrors, which it wearies the pen to describe and sickens the heart to peruse. Everywhere there are the same groundless and monstrous charges, the same blind and fanatic fury, the same merciless and exterminating hate. And, worst of all, these atrocities are committed in the name of Christ and His Gospel! If we could conceive that the gates of hell had been broken open, and its inmates had overrun the earth, the deeds we might have expected of them were just what the rabble of these German cities actually performed. They did not, however, wholly escape the consequences of their own lawless cruelty. In many places the Jews, before inflicting death upon themselves, turned their swords against their persecutors, and inflicted severe retribution on them; while in Frankfort their despairing rage caused the destruction of the town-hall and cathedral and a large portion of the city.