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 widow of Alain de Bretagne and had had her son, the heir to the estate, drowned in a bath. In reparation for this crime he went to Jerusalem, accompanied by two servants, one of whom led him by a rope which was fastened round his neck like a victim for the gallows, dragging him thus to the Holy Sepulchre, while the other continually flogged him with a bundle of rods.

A rarely consulted source of documentation is the collection of letters of remission. Among other prerogatives, the French kings enjoyed the right of pardon. They exercised this right by divers acts, known under different names: letters of grace, of remission, of abolition, of pardon, repeal of bans, and so on.

Among these letters of remission there are two which have particularly held our attention: one dates from the end of the fourteenth, and the other from the first half of the fifteenth centuries. The first concerns a man named Durand Tontif, a schoolmaster at Brienon. It was this teachers custom at the end of the class, to have his pupils recite, each in his turn, a De profundis and a Paternoster for the dead of the