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why put up with all this evil, and why not get quit of travail?
Are not we men even as they are?
Have we not the same stature, the same limbs, the same strength--for suffering?
Bind we ourselves by oath; swear we to aid one another; and if they be minded to make war on us, have we not for every knight thirty or forty young peasants ready and willing to fight with club, or boar-spear, or arrow, or axe, or stones, if they have not arms?
Learn we to resist the knights, and we shall be free to hew down trees, to hunt game, and to fish after our fashion, and we shall work our will on flood and in field and wood." These two passages have already been quoted in Chapter XIV.

of this history in the course of describing the general condition of France under the Capetians before the crusades, and they are again brought forward here because they express and paint to the life the chief cause which from the end of the tenth century led to so many insurrections amongst the rural as well as urban populations, and brought about the establishment of so many communes.
We say the chief cause only, because oppression and insurrection were not the sole origin of the communes.

Evil, moral and material, abounds in human communities, but it never has the sole dominion there; force never drives justice into utter banishment, and the ruffianly violence of the strong never stifles in all hearts every sympathy for the weak.