Oh, seigneur Count Neroweg! How sweet it is to you to thus enjoy the delights of this land that your kings conquered with their own and the swords of their leudes! You and your fellows, the new masters of this soil that our fathers' labors fecundated, live in idleness and sloth. To drink, eat, hunt, play at dice with your leudes, outrage our wives, sisters and daughters, and then attend church every week--such is the life of the Franks who now possess the vast domains that they plundered us of! Oh, Count Neroweg! How good it feels to inhabit that burg, built by Gallic slaves who were carried away from their own fields, homes and families, and who were made to carry on their backs, under the threat of the clubs of your warriors, the timber from the woods, the stones from the mountain, the sand from the river and the lime from the bowels of the earth--after which, streaming with sweat, broken with fatigue, dying with hunger, receiving for their only pittance a handful of beans, they lay down upon the damp ground, their heads barely sheltered with a roof of rushes! At early dawn the bites of dogs woke up the sluggards--aye, and those selfsame keepers with sharp fangs, and trained for their office by the Franks, accompanied the slaves when they were led to their work, hastened their heavy steps when they returned at night bending under their heavy loads, and, if ever driven by despair, the Gaul assayed flight, the intelligent mastiff quickly drove him with its teeth back to the human flock, just as the butcher's dog drives back to the fold a recalcitrant ox or ram.
And did those slaves all belong, perchance, to the class of laborers and artisans, strong, rough men, broken from infancy to hard labor? No, no! Among those captives, more than one had been accustomed to comforts, often to wealth, and were carried away from their cities or fields with wives, daughters and sons, either at the time of the Frankish conquest, or later during the civil wars between the sons of Clovis; the women were consigned to the lodgings of the female slaves, there to attend to the female work of the household and furnish the Franks with subjects for debauchery; the men were assigned to hard out-of-door work, to the building of houses, making of roads or tending the fields. Other slaves, once teachers, merchants and even poets, were captured on the roads as they traveled in troops from one city to another in pursuit of their respective occupations, imagining themselves safe against any attack in these days of war, pillage and general devastation.
