Half of the realm at least was held directly under English sway, with garrisons of English archers in the towns, and the red-cross banner of St. George floating above her vanquished towers; and in the provinces, still nominally French, armies of free companions sweeping the fields of their harvests far and near, plundering the cottage, pillaging the castle, levying contributions on open towns, storming by force strongholds--English, Gascons, and Normans--led for the most part by men of name and renown--bastards, in many cases, of great and noble houses, such as the bourg de Maulion, and the bourg de Keranlouet, and a hundred others of scarcely inferior fame--had subjected the country scarcely less effectually than it had been done elsewhere by open, honorable warfare. To this appalling state of things a fresh horror was now added, where horror was least needed--and that the most tremendous of all horrors, a servile insurrection--the sudden, and spontaneous, and victorious outbreak of ignorant, down-trodden, vicious, cruel, frenzied, and brutal slaves! The nobles themselves--who, had they been combined, and acted promptly and in unison, could have crushed the life out of the insurrection in a week--divided into hostile parties, dispirited by the wonderful successes of the victorious English, intimidated and crest-fallen--held themselves aloof the one from the other; and, attempting to defend their isolated fortresses singly, without either concert or system, allowed themselves to be surprised in detail, and butchered upon their own hearth-stones, by the infuriated serfs. All horrors, all atrocities that can be conceived, were perpetrated by the victors, maddened by long years of servitude and suffering, by deprivation of all the rights and decencies which belong of nature to every living man, and by the enforcement of droits so infamous and unnatural, that it is only wonderful how men should have so long endured them! Not the least galling of these was that feudal right which permitted the seigneur to compel the virgin bride on her wedding-day to his own bed, and then return her dishonored to the arms of her impassive husband--a right which not merely existed in abeyance, or, as in latter days, was compounded by a fine, but which was an every-day occurrence, a usage of the land--to enforce which was no more considered cruel or tyrannical than to collect rents, or tithes, or any other feudal dues--and which was not finally abolished until the reign of Louis XIV., when it was at length suppressed in those memorable assizes, known as the _grands jours d’Auvergne_, when many of the noblest of the land died by the hands of the common executioner for tyranny and persecution.