In the year before de Fontenay himself enjoyed the Privilège de St. Romain, it had been extended, at the express wish of several members of the royal family, to four sons of the Baron d'Aunay, the Duke of Orléans being especially urgent in pointing out that these poor fellows had done nothing in his opinion that should debar them from the privilege. They were, as a matter of fact, merely charged with the following peccadilloes, among others. In the course of rescuing a friend from the Communal authorities at Saint-Avon, they used the town-folk so roughly that a man and a woman fell into a well during the dispute, and were drowned. On their way to the wars they met a man with his wife upon the bridge near their home, and annoyed at not having enough room left for their horses, they dismounted, tied up the man's hands and feet, and beat the woman cruelly before her husband's eyes. On the death of their grandmother, who had married twice, they visited her second husband to get possession of certain legal papers, and when he resisted they ran him through the stomach with a rapier. Enlisted for once upon the side of justice, they were clamouring at a house for the surrender of a murderer who had taken refuge there, and when the owner opened the door they killed him with a slash across the body. Pursued themselves by the officers, they waited till they were on their own land, then turned and charged the men, sword in hand, secured their horses, and thrashed one of them with knotted thorns. Before they were finally taken by the sergeants of Rouen they had thrown themselves into the church of Aulnay and defended it against forty armed men, wounding several of them with crossbow-bolts before they surrendered.
Our friend François de Fontenay was acquainted with this gallant band of brothers through the house of Créance, with which both were connected; and their sturdy resistance to the law of the land must have soon created a strong feeling of sympathy and admiration; for the five men are found all joined together to accomplish the murder of one Boullart near Caen. Wherever de Fontenay went it soon became the fashion among the villages to oppose his progress; but this made little difference, for both at Neufbourg and at Fert-Macé, either by his own hand or by his servants, several "common people," who were so ill-advised as to get in the way were killed, and at Dun-le-Roy he was compelled to fight his way out, using the edge of his rapier right and left, "with considerable loss of life among the peasants." They had been the centre (and their swords were never idle) of similar riots, near Bourges, in the streets of Falaise, at Lisieux, and elsewhere. More high-born foes were treated in just as summary a fashion. With his brother Jehan, François attacked his enemy St. Germain (a Côtentin magistrate) on the bridge at Lyons, wounded him four times, and left him dead. His shoemaker was late in delivering some boots, so François visited him, sword-in-hand, carried off two other pairs, and "has not yet been known to pay for them." Other necessities he had not scrupled to provide himself with in a similar way. Oxen and sheep from a farmer called Lemoyne, chickens from a priory near Bayeux, more sheep from the Sieur de Grosparmy, horses from another farmer, flour from a third. A husband who objected to giving up his wife at St. Lô was promptly wounded, so severely that he could only watch her helplessly as she was carried off.