As soon as the duke (Richard II.) was informed thereof, he sent a large body of men-at-arms to repress this audaciousness of the country districts and to scatter this rustic assemblage.

In execution of his orders, the deputies of the peasants and many other rebels were forthwith arrested, their feet and hands were cut off, and they were sent away thus mutilated to their homes, in order to deter their like from such enterprises, and to make them wiser, for fear of worse.

After this experience the peasants left off their meetings and returned to their ploughs." [Illustration: The Peasants resolved to Live according to their own Inclinations and their own Laws----209] It was about eighty years after the event when the monk William of Jumiege told the story of this insurrection of peasants so long anterior, and yet so similar to that which more than three centuries afterwards broke out in nearly the whole of Northern.

France, and which was called the Jacquery.

Less than a century after William of Jumiege, a Norman poet, Robert Wace, told the same story in his Romance of Rou, a history in verse of Rollo and the first dukes of Normandy: "The lords do us nought but ill," he makes the Norman peasants say: with them we have nor gain nor profit from our labors; every day is for us a day of suffering, of travail, and of fatigue; every day our beasts are taken from us for forced labor and services.