clerical lord.  His house had grown to be a castle, and his brothers-in-arms were now the scum of adventurers, always ready to plunder the peasants.  In addition to three days a week which the peasants had to work for the lord, they had also to bear all sorts of exactions for the right to sow and to crop, to be gay or sad, to live, to marry, or to die.  And, worst of all, they were continually plundered by the armed robbers of some neighbouring lord, who chose to consider them as their master’s kin, and to take upon them, and upon their cattle and crops, the revenge for a feud he was fighting against their owner.  Every meadow, every field, every river, and road around the city, and every man upon the land was under some lord.

The hatred of the burghers towards the feudal barons has found a most characteristic expression in the wording of the different charters which they compelled them to sign.  Heinrich V. is made to sign in the charter granted to Speier in 1111, that he frees the burghers from “the horrible and execrable law of mortmain, through which the town has been sunk into deepest poverty” (von dem scheusslichen und nichtswurdigen Gesetze, welches gemein Budel genannt wird, Kallsen, i. 307).  The coutume of Bayonne, written about 1273, contains such passages as these:  “The people is anterior to the lords.  It is the people, more numerous than all others, who, desirous of peace, has made the lords for bridling and knocking down the powerful ones, “and so on (Giry, Etablissements de Rouen, i. 117, Quoted by Luchaire, p. 24).  A charter submitted for King Robert’s signature is equally characteristic.  He is made to say in it:  “I shall rob no oxen nor other animals.  I shall seize no merchants, nor take their moneys, nor impose ransom.  From Lady Day to the All Saints’ Day I shall seize no horse, nor mare, nor foals, in the meadows.  I shall not burn the mills, nor rob the flour...  I shall offer no protection to thieves,” etc. (Pfister has published that document, reproduced by Luchaire).  The charter “granted” by the Besancon Archbishop Hugues, in which he has been compelled to enumerate all the mischiefs due to his mortmain rights, is equally characteristic.(16) And so on.

Freedom could not be maintained in such surroundings, and the cities were compelled to carry on the war outside their walls.  The burghers sent out emissaries to lead revolt in the villages; they received villages into their corporations, and they waged direct war against the nobles.  It Italy, where the land was thickly sprinkled with feudal castles, the war assumed heroic proportions, and was fought with a stern acrimony on both sides.  Florence sustained for seventy-seven years a succession of bloody wars, in order to free its contado from the nobles; but when the conquest had been accomplished (in 1181) all had to begin anew.  The nobles rallied; they constituted their own leagues in opposition to the leagues of the towns, and, receiving fresh support from either the Emperor or the Pope, they made the war last for another 130 years.  The same took place in Rome, in Lombardy, all over Italy.