century. "The seigneur only revisited his lands at the head of his
soldiery to extort money by violence. He came down on them as a storm
of hail. All hid at his approach. Throughout his lands alarm resounded
--it was a _sauve-qui-peut_. The seigneur is no longer a true
seigneur; he is a rude captain, a barbarian, hardly even a Christian.
_Ecorcheur_ is the true name for such, ruining what was already
ruined, snatching the shirt off the back of him who had one; if he had
but his skin, of that he was flayed. It would be a mistake to suppose
that it was only the captains of the _ecorcheurs_--the bastards,
the seigneurs without a seigneurie, who showed themselves so ferocious.
The grandees, the princes in these hideous wars, had acquired a strange
taste for blood. What can one say when one sees Jean de Ligny, of the
house of Luxembourg, exercise his nephew, the Count of Saint-Pol, a
child of fifteen, in massacring those who fled? They treated their
kinsfolk in the same manner as their enemies. For safety--better be a
foe than a relation. The Count d'Harcourt kept his father prisoner all
his life. The Countess of Foix poisoned her sister; the Sire de Gial
his wife. The Duke of Brittany made his brother die of starvation, and
that publicly; passers-by heard with a shudder the lamentable voice
pleading piteously for a little bread. One evening, the 10th of
January, the Count Adolphus of Gueldres dragged his old father out of
bed, drew him on foot, unshod, through the snow for five leagues to
cast him finally into a moat. It was the same in all the great families
of the period--in those of the Low Countries, in those of Bar, Verdun,
Armagnac, &c. The English had gone, but France was exterminating
herself. The terrible miseries of the time find expression, feeble as
yet, in the 'Complaint of the poor Commoner; and of the poor
Labourers.' It comprises a mixture of lamentations and threats; the
starving wretches warn the Church, the King, the Burgesses, the
Merchants, the Seigneurs above all, that 'fire is drawing nigh to their