"A short time after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in the year 1010, it was learned from unquestionable sources that the calamity had to be charged to the perverseness of Jews of all countries. When the secret leaked out throughout the world, the Christians decided with a common accord that they would expel all the Jews, down to the last, from their territories and towns. The Jews thereby became the objects of universal execration. Some were chased from the towns, others massacred with iron, or thrown into the rivers, or put to death in some other manner. This drove many to voluntary death. And thus, after the just vengeance wreaked upon them, there were but very few of them left in the Roman Catholic world."
Accordingly, the wretched Jews of Gaul were persecuted and slaughtered at the order of the clergy because the Saracens of Judea destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem! As to the Manichæans of Orleans, another passage from the same chronicle expresses itself in these words:
"In 1017, the King and all his loyal subjects, seeing the folly of these miserable heretics of Orleans, caused a large pyre to be lighted near the town, in the hope that fear, produced by the sight, would overcome their stubbornness; but seeing that they persisted, thirteen of them were cast into the flames ... and all those that could not be convinced to abandon their perverse ways met the same fate, whereupon the venerable cult of the Catholic faith, having triumphed over the foolish presumption of its enemies, shone with all the greater luster on earth."
What with the wars that the ecclesiastical seigneurs plunged Gaul into in their efforts to retain possession of the property of the lay seigneurs whom they had despoiled by the jugglery of the "End of the World," and what with these religious persecutions, Gaul continued to be desolated down to the year 1033, the new term that had been fixed for the last day of judgment. The belief in the approaching dissolution of the world, which the clergy now again zealously preached, although not so universally entertained as that of the year 1000, was accompanied with results that were no less horrible. In 999, the expectation of the end of the world had put a stop to work; all the fields except those belonging to the ecclesiastical seigneurs, lay fallow. The formidable famine of the year 1000 was then the immediate result, and that was followed by a wide-spread mortality. Agriculture pined for laborers; every successive scarcity engendered an increased mortality; Gaul was being rapidly depopulated; famine set in almost in permanence during thirty years in succession, the more disastrous periods being those of the years 1003, 1008, 1010, 1014, 1027, 1029 and 1031; finally the famine of 1033 surpassed all previous ones in its murderous effects. The serfs, the villeins and the town plebs were almost alone the victims of the scourge. The little that they produced met the needs of their masters--the seigneurs, counts, dukes, bishops or abbots; the producers themselves, however, expired under the tortures of starvation. The corpses of the wretches who died of inanition strewed the fields, roads and highways; the decomposing bodies poisoned the air, engendered illnesses and even pestilential epidemics until then unknown; the population was decimated. Within thirty-three years, Gaul lost more than one-half its inhabitants--the new-born babies died vainly pressing their mother's breasts for nourishment.