Those desperate ruffians received the name sometimes of Brabancons, sometimes of Routiers or Cottereaux; but for what reason is not agreed by historians; and they formed a kind of society or government among themselves, which set at defiance the rest of mankind.

Besides this, the country was incessantly overrun by gangs of plunderers, who called themselves écorcheurs, routiers, tardvenus, &c., and who were more dreaded by the country people even than the English had been.

The religious confraternities in Aquitaine date from the appearance of the routiers at the close of the twelfth century.

These routiers were then chiefly Brabançons, Aragonese, and Germans.

A canon of Le Puy in Auvergne, much distressed by the desertion of the sanctuary of Notre Dame de Puy, which rivals that of Roc-Amadour in antiquity, formed the design of instituting a confraternity to wage war against the routiers and destroy them.

The confraternity spread into Aquitaine, and the routiers were defeated in pitched battles with great slaughter; but the chaperons in course of time became lawless fanatics, and were almost as great a nuisance to society as those whom they had undertaken to exterminate.

It is probable, however, that the gateway already mentioned, and the one that corresponded to it on the other side of the cavern, but of which few vestiges can now be seen, were constructed subsequently, when the science of fortification was better understood by the routiers.

I have found no record in the Quercy of the captain of a company of routiers having borne an Anglo-Saxon name.

The routiers, still going by the name of the English companies, continued to hold the least accessible places in Guyenne, fortified in the main by nature, until long after the British sovereigns had abandoned their ambitious designs in France.

Romans, Romanised Gauls, Visigoths, Saracens and English; the Raymonds with their Albigenses, the Montforts with their Crusaders from the north, the wild and sanguinary pastoiureux and the lawless routiers, the religious fanatics, Huguenots and Catholics of the sixteenth century, and the revolutionists of the eighteenth.

The rock must, nevertheless, have fallen into the hands of a company attached to the British cause, for the Count of Armagnac bought the place in 1381 of a band of so-called English routiers.

By Jerome K. Jerome, translator: Maurice Beerblock, illustrator: Jean Routier.

By Jerome K. Jerome, translator: Maurice Beerblock, illustrator: Jean Routier.

They had at their head the Emperor Otho IV., who had already won the reputation of a brave and able soldier; and they numbered in their ranks several of the greatest lords, German, Flemish, and Dutch, and Hugh de Boves, the most dreaded of those adventurers in the pay of wealthy princes who were known at that time by the name of roadsters (routiers, mercenaries).