 and
these petty tyrants, no longer amenable to the exercise of the law, perpetrated
with impunity the wildest excesses of fantastic oppression and cruelty. In
Auvergne alone, a report was made of more than three hundred of these
independent nobles, to whom incest, murder, and rapine, were the most ordinary
and familiar actions.
    Besides these evils, another, springing out of the long-continued wars
betwixt the French and English, added no small misery to this distracted
kingdom. Numerous bodies of soldiers, collected into bands, under officers
chosen by themselves, from among the bravest and most successful adventurers,
had been formed in various parts of France out of the refuse of all other
countries. These hireling combatants sold their swords for a time to the best
bidder; and, when such service was not to be had, they made war on their own
account, seizing castles and towers, which they used as the places of their
retreat, - making prisoners, and ransoming them, - exacting tribute from the
open villages, and the country around them, - and acquiring, by every species of
rapine, the appropriate epithets of Tondeurs and Ecorcheurs, that is, Clippers
and Flayers.
    In the midst of the horrors and miseries arising from so distracted a state
of public affairs, reckless and profuse expense distinguished the courts of the
lesser nobles, as well as of the superior princes; and their dependants, in
imitation, expended in rude, but magnificent display, the wealth which they
extorted from the people. A tone of romantic and chivalrous gallantry (which,
however, was often disgraced by unbounded license) characterised the intercourse
between the sexes; and the language of knight-errantry was yet used, and its
observances followed, though the pure spirit of honourable love, and benevolent
enterprise, which it inculcates, had ceased to qualify and atone for its
extravagances. The jousts and tournaments, the entertainments and revels, which
each petty court displayed, invited to France every wandering adventurer; and it
was seldom that, when arrived there, he failed to employ his rash courage, and
headlong spirit of enterprise, in actions for which his happier native country
afforded no free stage.
    At this period, and as if to save this fair realm from the various woes with
which it was menaced, the tottering throne was ascended by Louis XI., whose
character, evil as it was in itself, met, combated, and in a great degree
neutralised, the mischiefs of the time - as poisons of opposing qualities are
said, in ancient books of medicine, to have the power of counteracting each
other.
    Brave
