When, therefore, crimes like these, and worse, were perpetrated daily under the sanction and authority of feudal law; when they had been endured for years--not, indeed, without feelings of the direst bitterness and rage, but without loud complaint or general resistance, by all the serfs and villeyns of the land--what wonder was it that these miserable, trampled wretches, scarcely human, save in form, from the squalid wretchedness of their condition, and the studious care of their oppressors to prevent their progress or improvement--what wonder, I say, was it, that, seeing at length their opportunity, when their lords were distracted by foreign conquests, by the devastations of robber-bands, and by their own political dissensions or social feuds, they should have sprung to arms everywhere--their cry, “War to the castle, peace to the cottage!”--seeking redress or revenge, and braving death willingly, as less intolerable than the wrongs they had been so long enduring in sullen desperation? What wonder was it, that, when victorious, they, who never had been spared, should have shown themselves unsparing; that they, whose hearths had been to them no safeguards for any sanctity of domestic life, no asylums for any age or sex, should have wreaked upon the dwellers of the castles the wrongs which for ages had been the inheritance of the inmates of the cottages; that they, whose wives and daughters had never found protection from worse than brutish violence in tender years, in innocence of unstained virtue, in the weakness of imploring beauty, should have requited, on the wives and daughters of their tyrants, pollution by pollution, infamy, and death? Such, such, alas! is human nature; and rare it is indeed that suffering at the hands of man teaches man moderation to the sufferers when it becomes his turn to suffer. Injustice hardens, not melts, the heart; and we have it, from no less an authority than the word of Him who can not lie, that “persecution maketh wise men mad”--but, of a surety, the wretched serfs and _Jacquerie_ were far enough removed from wisdom, however they might be deemed mad, nor were many of their actions very far removed from madness. Knights crucified above the altars of their own castle-chapels, while their wives were dishonored, tortured, and slain, with all extremities of cruelty, before their eyes; infants tossed upon pikes, or burnt alive, in the presence of their frantic mothers; women compelled to eat the flesh of their own husbands, roasted at their own kitchen-grates ere yet life was extinct; the whole land filled with blood and ruin, and the smoke of conflagration going up night and day to the indignant and polluted heavens--these were the signs of those dark and awful times, these were the first fruits of the conquered liberty of the emancipated helots of the feudal system!