Within those walls, in a space where there was room for not more than fifteen thousand inhabitants, forty thousand[852] were huddled together, one vast multitude agonised by all manner of suffering; depressed by domestic sorrow; racked with anxiety; maddened by constant danger and perpetual panic. Although the wars of those days were not so sanguinary as they became later, the sallies of the inhabitants of Orleans were the occasion of constant and considerable loss of life. Since the middle of March the English bullets had fallen more into the centre of the town; and they were not always harmless. On the eve of Palm Sunday one stone, fired from a mortar, killed or wounded five persons; another, seven.[853] Many of the inhabitants, like the provost, Alain Du Bey, died of fatigue or of the infected air.[854] [Footnote 852: Jollois, _Histoire du siege_, part vi, ch. i. Abbe Dubois, _Histoire du siege_, dissertation ix. Loiseleur, _Compte des depenses de Charles VII_, ch. v. Lottin, _Recherches historiques sur la ville d'Orleans_, vol. ii, p. 205. Morosini, vol. iii, p. 25, note 2.] [Footnote 853: _Journal du siege_, p. 64.] [Footnote 854: _Ibid._, p. 59.] In the Christendom of those days all men were taught to believe that earthquakes, wars, famine, pestilence are punishments for wrong-doing. Charles, the Fair Duke of Orleans, good Christian that he was, held that great sorrows had come upon France as chastisement for her sins, to wit: swelling pride, gluttony, sloth, covetousness, lust, and neglect of justice, which were rife in the realm; and in a ballad he discoursed of the evil and its remedy.[855] The people of Orleans firmly believed that this war was sent to them of God to punish sinners, who had worn out his patience. They were aware both of the cause of their sorrows and of the means of remedying them. Such was the teaching of the good friars preachers; and, as Duke Charles put it in his ballad, the remedy was to live well, to amend one's life, to have masses said and sung for the souls of those who had suffered death in the service of the realm, to renounce the sinful life, and to ask forgiveness of Our Lady and the saints.[856] This remedy had been adopted by the people of Orleans. They had had masses said in the Church of Sainte-Croix for the souls of nobles, captains, and men-at-arms killed in their service, and especially for those who had died a piteous death in the Battle of the Herrings. They had offered candles to Our Lady and to the patron saints of the town, and had carried the shrine of Saint-Aignan round the walls.[857] [Footnote 855: Charles d'Orleans, _Poesies_, edited by A. Champollion-Figeac, Paris, 1842, in 8vo, p. 176.] [Footnote 856: Miniature in the MS. of the poems of Charles d'Orleans, in the British Museum, Royal 16 F. ii, fol. 73 v'o.] [Footnote 857: _Journal du siege_, p. 43. Symphorien Guyon, _Histoire de la ville d'Orleans_, vol. ii, p. 43.]