Feudality, initially protective, had become oppressive.

In the campaigns the peasants were dispersed too much to succeed in their revolts, but in much of cities the middle-class men and the people formed an association which one called a commune and tore off with their lord of the concessions.

The first communes were those of Cambric (1076), of Boundary-line, of Beauvais, of Saint-Quentin, of Laon, Soissons.

In Laon the lord of the city was the Gaudry bishop: besieged in its palate, it was taken and massacred (1112).

Louis VI initially undertook to pacify the surroundings of his capital.

The lord de Montlhéry, with a few miles of Paris, afflicted all the region by his armed robberies; Louis VI walked against him, but the royal army was so weak still, and the castle defended so well that the king could not force the brigand in his den.

Several attempts failed, and it was only after the death of the lord that the fortress fell to the hands from the king: he made it dismantle, and only the proud keep preserved any which one sees still today.

Louis VI, called at the same time the Large one and Waked up, was a very other king that its predecessors: supported by the clergy, which saw in him the dispenser of justice of God, and by the communes, of which he was the natural guard against the feudal brigands, he was made the chief of public defense and paid his person bravely: the helmet at the head and always ways, it was, so to speak, the gendarme of its kingdom.

The clergy helped much Louis VI to punish the feudal brigands, and more than one priest ran with his parishioners under the royal banner.

Between Paris and Orleans, the castle of Puiset, surrounded of ditches and palisades, had defied ten attacks, and besieging them lost courage, when a poor priest raised all the hearts, sprang ahead under a hail of features, and cleared the passage to the royal army (1111).