gabellers

The local authorities in vain attempted to repress the rising; the insurgent peasants scoured the country in strong bodies, giving free rein not only to their desires, but also to their revengeful feelings; the most atrocious excesses of which a mob is capable were committed; the director-general of the gabel was massacred cruelly; and two of his officers, at Angouleme, were strapped down stark naked on a table, beaten to death, and had their bodies cast into the river with the insulting remark, "Go, wicked gabellers, and salt the fish of the Charente."

A Popular History of France from the Earliest Times, Volume 4 1830