Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/510

 474 Readings in European History will give some idea of the general impression produced by reading his book. The count of Arundel, John Fitz-Alain, attacked Mille* and its church with fire. The women, boys, and old men took refuge in the tower of the church, but were soon sur- rounded by flames. The lead of the roof melted and fell in burning drops on the miserable folk below, and even the molten metal of the bells ran down upon them. All but two perished. The fire not only destroyed the church, but all the houses within a wide circuit to the number of more than seven hundred. The wretched inhabitants and the cultivators of the soil were ordered to be hung. Out of one thousand churches in the region of Quercy, when the war with the English was done there were scarce three or four hundred left in which services could be held, so completely was everything devastated and consumed. Certain parishes, for example those of Fraissinet and St. Caprassius, were entirely deserted by their former inhab- itants, so that the bishop of Bourges was forced to give the lands belonging to his temporalities as fiefs to those living at a distance. Charles VI being dead, Charles VII succeeded to his father in the kingdom, in the year of our Lord 1422, when he was about twenty-two years of age. In his time, owing to the long wars which had raged within and without, the leth- argy and cowardliness of the officers and commanders who were under him, the destruction of all military discipline and order, the rapacity of the troopers, and the general dis- solution into which all things had fallen, such destruction had been wrought that from the river Loire to the Seine, even to the Somme, the farmers were dead or had fled, and almost all the fields had for many years lain without cultivation or any one to cultivate them. A few districts might indeed be excepted, where if any agriculture remained, it was because they were far from cities, towns, or castles,