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The leudes distribute themselves promiscuously among the outside female slaves. These vast structures, together with a garden and a spacious tree-girt yard intended for the military exercises of the leudes and of the foot soldiers, all of whom were freemen and Franks, are surrounded by a fosse and earthworks, the ancient vestiges of the Roman camp which dates from the conquest of Julius Caesar.
But the count, who, with both his hands upon his paunch swollen with food and drink, was roaring with laughter and, like the rest of the leudes, shook with mirth, again smote the table violently with the handle of his scramasax. The slave understood the signal.
The altercation between the half tipsy Franks had started at one end of the table; at first it was conducted in a low voice, but it soon reached such a pitch of loudness and exasperation that Chram, the bishop and the count hastened to interpose and restore peace among the table companions. It was with an ill grace and exchanging wild looks of hatred that the intoxicated leudes subsided.
The Frankish leudes, with their Saxon and Bavarian auxiliaries, routed the Avars in battle after battle, and drove them back beyond the Raab and the Theiss. The "eastern marches" became, and have remained to this day, the bulwark of Christendom. Carl's successors in Germany, the Saxon and Franconian emperors, continued the work.
"All on your knees, pagans that you are!" proceeded the voice in still more threatening accents. "All down on your knees! Accursed pillagers of the Church!" The last of the leudes who still remained on their feet dropped distractedly on their knees, and with them the rest of the troop that followed on foot and were now upon the scene.
Women and children, all of whom had at first fled with fear into their hovels, now emerged again, and one of the mothers said to Ronan: "Do you want to know the road? I shall show it to you." "Are you running away from the leudes of the seigneurs?" said another. "None has passed this way; you can march on in safety."
He comes, a signal favor, with his three favorites, a goodly number of leudes in the train of his antrustions, as the royal favorites proudly style themselves. Awake, Neroweg! Awake, seigneur count! There is Chram, coming to pay you a visit. Brilliant and numerous is the cavalcade of his suite.
"Are we, the King's men, to be chaffed for what we eat and drink at this burg?" "That would be the height of impudence! As to me, I was surfeited before I touched a mouthful of these mountains of cold provisions." "Moreover, it is an insult," cried another of the guests. "We members of the royal bodyguard will brook no insult." "Do you think yourselves above us, because we are leudes of a count?
You will cultivate for me the fields that belong to you; I shall join several new parcels to them; you will be my colonist and your laborers my slaves; all of you will work for me and my leudes; you will furnish them as well as myself with all that we shall need. You shall help my mason and carpenter slaves in the building of a new burg that I shall have erected after the Germanic fashion.
She needs a young girl for her service and I promised her that one. The sooner she has her, all the better pleased will she be." "And so, bishop," said the count scratching himself behind his ear, "you must have that blonde slave?" "Will you dare to break your engagement?" "Oh, no! No, father! One of my leudes shall take horse, ride to my burg, and bring the slave to you on the crupper."
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