"Devil take me, my lord," said Oliver to him, "if ever Englishman shall be my neighbor;" and he went forthwith and attacked the castle, which he completely demolished.
The hatreds of women whose passions have made them heroines of war are more personal and more obstinate than those of the roughest warriors.
Accordingly the war for the duchy of Brittany, in the fourteenth century, has been called, in history, the war of the three Joans.
This war was, on both sides, remarkable for cruelty.

If Joan de Clisson gave to the sword all the people in a castle, belonging to Charles of Blois, to which she had been admitted on a supposition of pacific intentions, Charles of Blois, on his side, finding in another castle thirty knights, partisans of the Count of Montfort, had their heads shot from catapults over the walls of Nantes, which he was besieging, and, at the same time that he saved from pillage the churches of Quimper, which he had just taken, he allowed his troops to massacre fourteen hundred inhabitants, and had his principal prisoners beheaded.

One of them, being a deacon, he caused to be degraded, and then handed over to the populace, who stoned him.

It is characteristic of the middle ages that in them the ferocity of barbaric times existed side by side with the sentiments of chivalry and the fervor of Christianity: so slow is the race of man to eschew evil, even when it has begun to discern and relish good.

War was then the passion and habitual condition of men.