Impossible to describe the revulsion of feeling at the universal disappointment. It was an explosion of regret, of remorse, of astonishment, of recrimination and of rage. The devout people who believed themselves cheated out of a Paradise that they had paid for to the Church in advance with hard cash and other property; others, who had squandered their treasures, contemplated their ruin with trembling. The millions of serfs who had relied upon slumbering in the restfulness of an eternal night saw rising anew before their eyes the ghastly dawn of that long day of misery and sufferings, of which their birth was the morning and only their death the evening. It now began to be realized that, left uncultivated in the expectation of the end of the world, the land would not furnish sustenance to the people, and the horrors of famine were foreseen. A towering clamor rose against the clergy; the clergy, however, knew how to bring public opinion back to its side. It did so by a new and fraudulent set of prophecies.
"Oh, these wretched people of little faith," thus now ran the amended prophecy and invocation; "they dare to doubt the word of the All-powerful who spoke to them through the voice of His prophet! Oh, these wretched blind people, who close their eyes to divine light! The prophets have announced the end of time; the Holy Writ foretold that the day of the last judgment would come a thousand years after the Saviour of the world!... But although Christ was born a thousand years before the year 1000, he did not reveal himself as God until his death, that is thirty-two years after his birth. Accordingly it will be in the year 1032 that the end of time will come!"
Such was the general state of besottedness that many of the faithful blissfully accepted the new prediction. Several seigneurs, however, rushed at the "men of God" to take back by force the property they had bequeathed to them. The "men of God," however, well entrenched behind fortified walls, defended themselves stoutly against the dispossessed claimants. Hence a series of bloody wars between the scheming bishops, on the one hand, and the despoiled seigneurs, on the other, to which disasters were now superadded the religious massacres instigated by the clergy. The Church had urged Clovis centuries ago to the extermination of the then Arian heretics; now the Church preached the extermination of the Orleans Manichæans and the Jews. A conception of these abominable excesses may be gathered from the following passages in the account left by Raoul Glaber, a monk and eye-witness. He wrote: