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.