About two leagues from the village of Cramoisy, and in the thickest of the seigniorial forest of Nointel, is a vast subterranean grotto, cut into the chalky rock that offers little resistance to the pick and the mattock. The cavern dates from the far-back troubled days when the Norman pirates were in the habit of rowing up the Somme, the Seine and the Oise and raiding the surrounding lands. Such of the serfs whose dire misery did not reach the pitch of constraining them to join the Normans, and who sought to escape the flood of pillage and massacre, had dug the underground place of refuge. Carrying thither their little havings, and even cattle, they remained hidden until the pirates left the country. Similar places were in later years contrived in almost all parts of Gaul by the vassals of the nobility for the purpose of escaping the brigandage of the English, of the robber bands and of the bands of mercenaries who devastated the provinces, finally also to escape the extortions of the seigneurs that now became intolerable, seeing that Jacques Bonhomme was forced to pay the ransom of their masters who had been taken prisoners at the battle of Poitiers. In other regions of Gaul the peasants withdrew with their families upon rafts which they anchored midstreams of rivers, and which frequently were either submerged or carried away by the floods to be finally swamped with the wretched mass of humanity that they bore. Never before had desolation and panic reached such a pitch in the unfortunate country; the huts were almost all abandoned, the fields uncultivated and a famine was apprehended similar to that which desolated Gaul in the year 1000.