chalk to form in it suitable hiding-places, and although some of the
finds in these labyrinths are of recent date, others go back to the
Gallo-Roman period. In the Arras and Cambrai Chronicle of Balderic
(1051), we are told that in the fifth century in those parts a
persecution of the Christians occurred, on the invasion of the
barbarians, and that the priests celebrated the Divine Mysteries in
secret hiding-places. "Many," he adds, "were suffocated in caves and in
subterranean passages."

There is, in fact, evidence both from archaeology and from history that
these refuges were taken advantage of, and doubtless extended from a
remote antiquity down to the eighteenth century.

It was not against the foreign foe only that the peasants excavated
their underground retreats. Froissart paints the chivalry of his time
in the brightest colours, and only here and there by a few touches lets
us see what dark shadows set them off. Who paid for the gay
accoutrements of the knights? Who were the real victims of the
incessant wars? From whom came the ransom of King John and of the
nobles taken at Crecy and Poitiers? From the peasant. The prisoners
allowed to return on parole came to their territories to collect the
sums demanded for their release, and the peasant had to find them. He
had his cattle, his plough and tumbril. They were taken from him; no
more corn was left him than enough to sow his field. He knew how he
would be exploited, and he hid his precious grain that was to make
bread for his wife and children. The seigneur endeavoured to extort
from him the secret as to where it was concealed. He exposed the man's
bare feet before the fire; he loaded him with chains. But the peasant
bore fire and iron rather than reveal the hiding-place. Here is
Michelet's account of the seigneur in the first half of the fifteenth