joy of combat; they fought also, we must remember, for the horses and armor and ransoms of the captives. In a Norman tournament the Marshal captured ten knights and twelve horses. Between Pentecost and Lent of one year their clerks calculated that he and his companion had taken prisoners three hundred knights, without counting horses and harness; yet he seems to have preserved the golden mean between the careless _largesse_ of the Young King and the merely mercenary motives of the large number who frequented tournaments for the sake of gain. * * * * * Concerning the great agricultural class upon which the whole social system rested, our information is of a scattered and uneven sort. The man with the hoe did not interest the mediæval chronicler, and he did not gain a voice of his own in the period which we have under review. The annals of the time are indeed careful to record the drouths and floods, the seasons of plague, pestilence, and famine of which Normandy seems to have had its share, but they tell us nothing of the effects of these evils upon the class which they most directly concerned; while the charters, leases, and manorial records from which our knowledge of the peasants must be built up give us in this period isolated and unrelated facts. Moreover our information is confined almost entirely to the lands of churches and monasteries, where agriculture was likely to be more progressive because of their closer relations to the world outside. Normandy was a fertile country, and, so far as we can judge, its agricultural population fared well as compared with that of other regions. Certainly there is here, after the eleventh century, no trace of serfdom or the freeing of serfs, and the free position of its farming class distinguished the duchy from most of the lands of northern France. In other respects it is hard to discern important differences between the Norman peasants and those of other regions. After the suppression of an insurrection at the beginning of this century, we do not hear of any general rising of the Norman peasants, parallel to those risings which make a sad and futile chapter in the annals of many parts of Europe in the Middle Ages. It was, however, a local revolt of the thirteenth century on the lands of the monks of Mont-Saint-Michel that brought out one of the best descriptions of life on a Norman manor, the _Conte des Vilains de Verson_,[51] and, while it is a bit late for our purpose, it is confirmed by documentary evidence, and may well serve as an illustration of the obligations of the agricultural class:--