to the voracity of kites, and crows, and vultures.”
There are certain discrepancies between the two accounts, both contemporaneous, which we possess of this incident in the earliest years of the twelfth century, one in the Life of Louis the Fat, by Suger, and the other in the Life of Guibert of Nogent, by himself. They will be easily recognized on comparing what was said, after Suger, in Chapter XVIII. of this history, with what has just been said here after Guibert. But these discrepancies are of no historical importance, for they make no difference in respect of the essential facts characteristic of social condition at the period, and of the behavior and position of the actors.
Louis the Fat, after his victory over Thomas de Marle and the fugitives from Laon, went to Laon with the Archbishop of Rheims; and the presence of the king, whilst restoring power to the foes of the commune, inspired them, no doubt, with a little of the spirit of moderation, for there was an interval of peace, during which no attention was paid to anything but expiatory ceremonies and the restoration of the churches which had been a prey to the flames. The archbishop celebrated a solemn mass for the repose of the souls of those who had perished during the disturbances, and he preached a sermon exhorting serfs to submit themselves to their masters, and warning them on pain of anathema from resisting by force. The burghers of Laon, however, did not consider every sort of resistance forbidden, and the lords had, no doubt, been taught not to provoke it, for in 1128, sixteen years after the murder of Bishop Gaudri, fear of a fresh insurrection determined his successor to consent to the institution of a new commune, the charter of which was ratified by Louis the Fat in an assembly held at Compiegne. Only the name of commune did not recur in this charter; it was replaced by that of Peace-establishment; the territorial boundaries of the commune were called peace-boundaries, and to designate its members recourse was had to the formula, All those who have signed this peace. The preamble of the charter runs, “In the name of the holy and indivisible Trinity, we Louis, by the grace of God king of the French, do make known to all our lieges present and to come that, with the consent of the barons of our kingdom and the inhabitants of the city of Laon, we have set up in the said city a peace-establishment.” And after having enumerated the limits, forms, and rules of it, the charter concludes with this declaration of amnesty: “All former trespasses and offences committed before the ratification of the present treaty are wholly pardoned. If any one, banished for having trespassed in past time, desire to return to the town, he shall be admitted and shall recover possession of his property. Excepted from pardon, however, are the thirteen whose names do follow;” and then come the names of the thirteen excepted from the amnesty and still under banishment. “Perhaps,” says M. Augustin Thierry, “these thirteen under banishment, shut out forever from their native town at the very moment it became free, had been distinguished amongst all the burghers of Laon by their opposition to the power of the lords; perhaps they had sullied by deeds of violence this patriotic opposition; perhaps they had been taken at haphazard to suffer alone for the crimes of their fellow-citizens.” The second hypothesis appears the most probable; for that deeds of violence and cruelty had been committed alternately by the burghers and their foes is an ascertained fact, and that the charter of 1128 was really a work of liberal pacification is proved by its contents and wording. After such struggles and at the moment of their subsidence some of the most violent actors always bear the burden of the past, and amongst the most violent some are often the most sincere.
For forty-seven years after the charter of Louis the Fat the town of Laon enjoyed the internal peace and the communal liberties it had thus achieved; but in 1175 a new bishop, Roger de Rosoy, a man of high birth, and related to several of the great lords his neighbors, took upon himself to disregard the regimen of freedom established at Laon. The burghers of Laon, taught by experience, applied to the king, Louis the Young, and offered him a sum of money to grant them a charter of commune. Bishop Roger, “by himself and through his friends,” says a chronicler, a canon of Laon, “implored the king to have pity on his Church, and abolish the serfs’ commune; but the king, clinging to the promise he had received of money, would not listen to the bishop or his friends,” and in 1177 gave the burghers of Laon a charter which confirmed their peace-establishment of 1128. Bishop Roger, however, did not hold himself beaten. He claimed the help of the lords his neighbors, and renewed the war against the burghers of Laon, who, on their side, asked and obtained the aid of several communes in the vicinity. In an access of democratic rashness, instead of awaiting within their walls the attack of their enemies, they marched out without cavalry to the encounter, ravaging as they went the lands of the lords whom they suspected of being ill-disposed towards them; but on arriving in front of the bishop’s allies, “all this rustic multitude,” says the canon-chronicler, “terror-stricken at the bare names of the knights they found assembled, took suddenly to flight, and a great number of the burghers were massacred before reaching their city.” Louis the Young then took the field to help them; but Baldwin, Count of Hainault, went to the aid of the Bishop of Laon with seven hundred knights and several thousand infantry. King Louis, after having occupied and for some time held in sequestration the lands of the bishop, thought it advisable to make peace rather than continue so troublesome a war, and at the intercession of the pope and the Count of Hainault he restored to Roger de Rosoy his lands and his bishopric on condition of living in peace with the commune. And so long as Louis VII. lived, the bishop did refrain from attacking the liberties of the burghers of Laon; but at the king’s death, in 1180, he applied to his successor, Philip Augustus, and offered to cede to him the lordship of Fere-sur-Oise, of which he was the possessor, provided that Philip by charter abolished the commune of Laon. Philip yielded to the temptation, and in 1190 published an ordinance to the following purport: “Desiring to avoid for our soul every sort of danger, we do entirely quash the commune established in the town of Laon as being contrary to the rights and liberties of the metropolitan church of St. Mary, in regard for justice and for the sake of a happy issue to the pilgrimage which we be bound to make to Jerusalem.” But next year, upon entreaty and offers from the burghers of Laon, Philip changed his mind, and without giving back the lordship of Fere-sur-Oise to the bishop, guaranteed and confirmed in perpetuity the peace-establishment granted in 1128 to the town of Laon, “on the condition that every year at the feast of All Saints they shall pay to us and our successors two hundred livres of Paris.” For a century all strife of any consequence ceased between the burghers of Laon and their bishop; there was no real accord or good under-standing between them, but the public peace was not troubled, and neither the Kings of France nor the great lords of the neighborhood interfered in its affairs. In 1294 some knights and clergy of the metropolitan chapter of Laon took to quarrelling with some burghers; and on both sides they came to deeds of violence, which caused sanguinary struggles in the streets of the town and even in the precincts of the episcopal palace. The bishop and his chapter applied to the pope, Boniface VIII., who applied to the king, Philip the Handsome, to put an end to these scandalous disturbances. Philip the Handsome, in his turn, applied to the Parliament of Paris, which, after inquiry, “deprived the town of Laon of every right of commune and college, under whatsoever name.” The king did not like to execute this decree in all its rigor. He granted the burghers of Laon a charter which maintained them provisionally in the enjoyment of their political rights, but with this destructive clause: “Said commune and said shrievalty shall be in force only so far as it shall be our pleasure.” For nearly thirty years, from Philip the Handsome to Philip of Valois, the bishops and burghers of Laon were in litigation before the crown of France, the former for the maintenance of the commune of Laon in its precarious condition and at the king’s good pleasure, the latter for the recovery of its independent and durable character. At last, in 1331, Philip of Valois, “considering that the olden commune of Laon, by reason of certain misdeeds and excesses, notorious, enormous, and detestable, had been removed and put down forever by decree of the court of our most clear lord and uncle, King Philip the Handsome, confirmed and approved by our most dear lords, Kings Philip and Charles, whose souls are with God, we, on great deliberation of our council, have ordained that no commune, corporation, college, shrievalty, mayor, jurymen, or any other estate or symbol belonging thereto, be at any time set up or established at Laon.” By the same ordinance the municipal administration of Laon was put under the sole authority of the king and his delegates; and to blot out all remembrance of the olden independence of the commune, a later ordinance forbade that the tower from which the two huge communal bells had been removed should thenceforth be called belfry-tower.