Chapter XIX: How he captured Hugh and ruined the castle of Le Puiset  

As the pleasant fruit of a prolific tree recovers its sweet-smelling savour either by the transplantation of a twig or by the grafting of a branch, so the sucker of iniquity and wickedness which ought to be rooted out passes by many wicked men to twine itself round one man, in the same way as a snake among the eels torments men with its native poison as bitter as absinthe. Like these was Hugh de Puiset, a wicked man rich only in his own and his ancestors' tyranny, when he succeeded his uncle Guy in the honour of Le Puiset, his own father having with astonishing conceit taken arms in the first Jerusalem journey. His father's son, Hugh took after him in all wickedness, but 'those whom his father chastised with whips, he chastised with scorpions.' (II Chronicles, 10, v.11). 

            Swollen with pride because he had oppressed most cruelly the poor, the churches and the monasteries and yet been unpunished, he reached the point where 'the evil-doers have fallen; they have been driven forth and cannot stand.' (Psalm XXV,13 ). Since he could not prevail against the King of kings, nor against the king of the French, he attacked the countess of Chartres and her son Thibaud, a handsome young man and skilled in arms. He ravaged their land as far as Chartres, pillaging and burning it. The noble countess and her son sometimes attempted revenge as best they could, though belatedly and inadequately; but they never or almost never got within eight or ten miles of Le Puiset. Such was Hugh's insolence, such the force of his imperious pride that many served him although few loved him. But if many defended him, more hoped for his destruction; for he was more feared than loved. 

When count Thibaud realised that he was achieving little against Hugh on his own, but might achieve much with the king, he hastened to Louis with his most noble mother, who had always served the king faithfully, to try to move him with their prayers, claiming that they had deserved his assistance through many services, and recounting the crimes of Hugh, his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather. 'O king, remember, as royal majesty should, the shameful affront Hugh inflicted upon your father Philip when, in breach of his homage, he wickedly repulsed him from Le Puiset while Philip was attempting to punish his many crimes. Proud of his wicked relations, by criminal conspiracy he drove the king's army back to Orleans, captured the count of Nevers, Lancelin of Beaugency and about a hundred knights, and even in an unprecedented move dishonoured several bishops by keeping them in chains.'  

Thibaud then added a lengthy explanation of how and why the castle had come to be built fairly recently by the venerable queen Constance in the middle of land dedicated to the saints, to protect it, and how afterwards Hugh's family had seized it all and left the king with nothing but injuries. But now, since the sizeable armies of Chartres, Blois and Chateaudun on which he customarily relied not only would not help him but even would fight against him, it would be easy for the king, if he wished, to ruin the castle, disinherit Hugh and avenge his father's injuries. If he did not wish to punish Hugh, either for his own or for his faithful servants' injuries, he ought either to accept the gift for the oppression of churches and the depredations of the poor, the widows and the orphans which Hugh inflicted on the land of the saints and its inhabitants, or he ought to prevent them from occurring. The king was so moved by these and similar complaints that he named a day to take counsel on the affair. I went to Melun, along with many archbishops, bishops, clerks and monks, whose lands had been ravaged by Hugh, more rapacious than a wolf. They cried out and fell at Louis' still unwilling feet, begging him to put an end to the brigand Hugh's limitless rapacity; to seize back from the dragon's maw their prebends established by the munificence of kings in the fertile lands of Beauce for the support of God's servants; to attempt to liberate the lands of the priests which even under the cruel domination of the Pharaohs had been unique in their freedom; they begged that as God's vicar, bearing in his person God's life-giving image, the king should restore the church's goods to liberty.

He received their petition with good grace and in no way took it lightly. Then the prelates, the archbishop of Sens, the bishop of Orleans, and the venerable Ivo, bishop of Chartres, who had been imprisoned by force and held captive for many days in that castle, went home; and the king, with the consent of my predecessor abbot Adam of blessed memory, sent me to Toury, a rich and well-provisioned though unfortified vill in Beauce, belonging to St. Denis, of which I was in charge. He ordered that, while he summoned Hugh to answer these charges, I should provision the town, then attempt to gather as large a force as possible from his men and ours to prevent Hugh from burning it; then the king would fortify it and, like his father, attack the castle from there.  

            With God's help I was able to fill it quite quickly with a force of knights and foot-soldiers. After Hugh had absented himself from the trial and been condemned by default, the king came to me at Toury with a great army to claim from Hugh the castle he had forfeited. When Hugh refused to leave it, the king without delay hastened to attack the castle, using both his knights and his footsoldiers. You might have seen a host of catapults, bows, shields and swords; it was war. And you might have admired the rain of arrows from one side then the other; the sparks which shot out from the helmets under pressure of repeated blows; the amazing suddenness with which shields were broken or holed. As the enemy were pushed through the castle gate, from the inside, high up on the ramparts, a remarkable shower fell on our men, terrifying and almost intolerable to the bravest of men. Hugh's forces began the counter-attack by pulling down beams and throwing stakes, but they could not complete it. The royal soldiers on the other hand fought with the greatest bravery and strength of body and mind; even when their shields were broken they took cover behind planks, doors or any wooden objects they could find, as they pressed against the gate. I organised carts piled high with dry wood mixed with grease, a very inflammable mixture; for the enemy were excommunicated and all given over to the devil. Our men dragged the carts to the gate both to light an inextinguishable fire and to protect themselves behind the piles of wood.  

While they were dangerously attempting some of them to light the fire, others to extinguish it, Count Thibaud at the head of a large army of knights and foot-soldiers assaulted the castle on the other side, that is the side near Chartres. Remembering his injuries he hastened to penetrate it and encouraged his men to climb up the steep slope of the rampart, but he then grieved to see them coming, or rather falling, down even faster; those whom he had forced to creep upwards cautiously and on their stomachs he saw being thrown over on their backs and pushed down carelessly, as he tried to find out whether they had died under the weight of stones thrown after them. The knights who were riding round the keep on their swiftest horses came inopportunely on those who had crawled up the palisade on their hands, struck them, cut off their heads and flung them down from the top of the ditch.  

With broken hands and paralysed knees they had almost halted the assault, when the strong, rather the omnipotent, hand of God intervened to ensure that this great and just vengeance should all be ascribed to him. Since the parish militias of the country were there, God excited the courage of a certain bald priest and made it possible for him, contrary to human opinion, to achieve what the armed count and his men had found impossible. Covering himself with the cheapest of planks and bareheaded, he climbed rapidly upward, came to the palisade and, hiding under the overhang which was well suited to it, he gradually pulled the palisade apart. Pleased that he was working undisturbed, he made a signal to the hesitant and those standing idle in the fields that they should help him. Seeing an unarmed priest bravely throwing down the palisade, the armed men rushed in, applied to it their axes and any iron implements they could find, cut it down and completely broke it. Then, as a miraculous sign of divine judgement, as if they had brought down the walls of a second Jericho, as soon as they had broken down the barriers, the armies of the king and the count entered. Thus a good many of the enemy, unable to avoid hostile attacks on either side, were captured as they rushed hither and thither, and were seriously wounded.  

The rest, including Hugh himself, seeing that the interior of the castle and its surrounding wall could not offer safety, withdrew into the wooden tower that crowned the motte. Almost immediately, terrified by the menacing spears of the pursuing army, Hugh surrendered and was imprisoned in his own home with his men and, wretched in his chains, he recognised how much pride goes before a fall. When the victorious king had led off the noble captives as fit booty for the royal majesty, he ordered that all the castle's furniture and its riches should be publicly sold and the castle itself consumed by fire. The burning of the keep was delayed for several days because count Thibaud, forgetful of the great good fortune which he could never have achieved on his own, was plotting to extend his boundaries by erecting a castle at a place called Allaines within the lordship of Le Puiset which had been held in fief of the king. When the king formally refused to allow this, the count offered to provide proof by his procurator in that part, Andrew of Baudement; the king said he had never agreed to anything of the sort, but offered reason and judicial combat in the person of his steward Anselm, wherever the champions thought safe. Since they were both valiant men they often asked that a court be convened for this battle; but they never obtained one. 

When the castle had been ruined and Hugh shut up in the keep of Chateau-Landon, Count Thibaud, strengthened by the assistance of his uncle Henry the English king, started a war against King Louis with his allies, disturbed the land, seduced the king's barons with promises and gifts, and detestably plotted what evil he could against the state. But the king, an excellent knight, took frequent revenge on him and harassed his lands supported by many other barons, especially his uncle Robert, count of Flanders, a remarkable man, famous among Christians and Saracens for his skill in arms since the first Jerusalem journey.  

One day, as the king was leading an expedition against the count, he saw him in the city of Meaux. In fury Louis attacked him and his men, fearlessly he followed the fugitive across the bridge and with count Robert and the other great men of the kingdom he threw them at sword point into the waves. When they themselves fell in you would have seen this unencumbered hero moving his arms like Hector's, launching gigantic attacks on the trembling bridge, pressing forward to the perilous entrance in order to occupy the city despite its numerous defenders; and not even the great river Marne would have prevented him from doing so, if the gate across the river had not been locked.  

            He enhanced his reputation for valour with an equally brilliant exploit when, leading his army out of Lagny, he met Thibaud's troops in the beautiful plain of meadows beside Pomponne; he attacked them and put them to flight at once under the pressure of his repeated blows. Fearing the narrow entrance of a nearby bridge, some of them, thinking only to save their lives, were not afraid to throw themselves into the water at grave risk of death; others, treading each other under foot in their efforts to get to the bridge, threw off their arms and, more hostile to each other than were their enemies, all tried to go across at once, though only one man at a time could make the journey. And while their tumultuous push plunged them in confusion, the more they hurried the more they were held up, and so it came about that 'the first was last and the last became first.' But as the approach to the bridge was surrounded by a ditch, it offered them some shelter, because the king's knights could only follow them one by one, and even that could not be achieved without great loss since, although many pressed in, only a few could reach the bridge. Whichever way they entered, they were as often as not upset by the milling crowd of both armies, fell on their knees in spite of themselves, and as they hastily got up, pushed others down. The king in hot pursuit with his own men, brought about great carnage; those he struck he demolished he flung into the river Marne, either by sword blow or by a push from his powerful horse. Those who had no arms floated on account of their lightness; but those who were mailed were instantly dragged down by their own weight. Before their third immersion they were saved by their own companions, though after the shame of rebaptism, if one can talk like this. 

By these and other injuries the king exhausted the count; he devastated all his lands, both in Brie and in Chartres, making no distinction between the times when the count was present and those when he was absent. Because the count was apprehensive over the fewness and lack of energy of his men, he tried to draw the king's men away from him, bribing them with gifts and promises and holding out the hope that, before he made peace with Louis, he would obtain satisfaction on their behalf for various grievances. 

Among those he attached to himself were Lancelin of Bulles, lord of Dammartin, and Pagan of Montjay, whose lands, situated at a fork in the road, offered a secure access for the harassment of Paris. For the same reason he seduced Raoul of Beaugency, whose wife, the daughter of Hugh the Great, was the king's first cousin. Preferring expediency to honour and tormented by great anxiety, - need makes the old wife trot, as the proverb runs - Thibaud joined his noble sister in incestuous marriage with Milo de Montlhéry, to whom the king returned the castle as we have previously said.  

This done, he interrupted the lines of communication and restored in the very heart of France the old endless sequence of storms and wars. With Milo he gained his relation Hugh of Crécy, lord of Chateaufort, and Guy of Rochefort, thus exposing the country of Paris and Etampes to the ravages of war, had the knights not prevented it. While access across the Seine to Paris and Senlis lay open to count Thibaud with the men of Brie and to his uncle Hugh with the men of Troyes, Milo had access from this side of the river; thus the inhabitants lost the chance of helping each other. The same was true for the men of Orleans, whom those of Chartres, Chateaudun and Brie kept at a distance with the help of Raoul of Beaugency and with no opposition. The king nevertheless often put them on their backs, although the wealth of England and Normandy was poured forth unsparingly against him. For the famous King Henry attacked Louis' lands with all his strength and all his effort. But he was no more beaten down than if 'all the rivers together threatened to take their waters from the sea,' (Lucan, Pharsalia, V, 366-337.)

This translation © Jean Dunbabin, St. Anne's College, Oxford OX2 6HS, England, from whom all necessary permissions to reproduce must be sought.