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After just a short while, Toustain’s hit-and-run tactics began to pay off and the Baron’s troops were picked off and slowly whittled down in numbers, while his goods wagons were ambushed and destroyed whenever they were found on the roads out of the estate. Then when the Baron began to send his goods out in heavily protected convoys, the mounted ambushes would just happen at even more frequent but random intervals all along the convoy’s route. If the armed escort gave chase, the skirmishers would simply ride off in different directions to make it almost impossible for the Baron’s men to engage them. But if the armed escort persisted in pursuing any of the skirmishers, they would either be met by another band of mounted skirmishers or led into a hail of crossbow bolts. And while the armed escort was off in pursuit, it was then that several more of Toustain’s mounted skirmishers would hit the convoy’s wagons.

Soon the Baron realised that Toustain had gained the upper hand, and so the tyrannical lord switched to reprisals against the peasants, holding them responsible for aiding and abetting Toustain’s raiders. Besides they were easier, softer and altogether defenceless targets against which to vent his rage and frustration. So, Pétois began punishing the peasants by burning their dwellings and villages, and beating and torturing any peasants, even remotely suspected of harbouring or helping the raiders, in an attempt to extract information about where Toustain’s units could be hiding or operating from. The Baron also sent a force to close off the Bretonnian end of the Nuvolone Pass, in case the raiders were coming through from there. However, all that the Baron’s reprisals against the peasant folk accomplished was to create an even greater ground-swell of hatred against him, so that eventually more and more of the common folk began to rise up against the Baron and flock to Toustain’s cause.

Within six months of Toustain’s campaign of coordinated guerrilla warfare against Baron Pétois, he was besieged within the Donjon Briècque by an army of peasant militia and mercenaries numbering nearly six thousand. It only took another two weeks to starve the Baron into submission and to surrender the castle and its estate to its rightful owner, Toustain. The Baron was hanged from the battlements of the castle, so that all could see that justice had been served for his crimes of rape, murder and extortion. Several of his aides and henchmen were also hanged for the murder of Toustain’s six companions and for the brutal treatment and ultimate deaths of the peasants the Baron had had tortured for information.

Toustain took up residence in the Donjon Briècque, installed a garrison comprising a subset of his mercenary units, and had the estate restored back to order and the Pass opened for trade again from Tilean merchants. However, Toustain had unintentionally started an avalanche that now gathered momentum and could not be stopped. Within a short space of time, no more than perhaps seven weeks, Toustain began to receive visits and petitions from other peasants and common folk who were suffering under the harsh or tyrannical regimes of others lords, barons and knights across the southern regions of Carcassonne and Quenelles. The common folk had found a hero and leader who they saw as someone who would help them fight against the unjust treatment they received from the Bretonnian nobility and aristocracy. Toustain had shown these common folk that there was a very effective way of fighting back and winning against Bretonnia’s powerful regional rulers. The peasants’ rebellion had started and was now too big for Toustain to resist its cause.