Schwartz: A History by David Christie Murray

Somewhere about the year 1560 this tranquil and beautiful country was devastated by a plague which carried off hundreds of its sparse inhabitants, and left many villages desolate. The legends of the countryside tell of places in which no human life remained.

The people of Janenne, headed by the "doyen", made a pilgrimage in procession to the shrine of Our Lady of Lorette, and offered to strike a bargain. They promised that if Janenne should be spared from the plague they and their descendants for ever would each year repeat that procession in honour of Our Lady of Lorette, and that once in seven years they would appear under arms and fire a salvo. Whether in consequence of this arrangement or not, Janenne escaped the plague, and from that year to this the promised procession has never been forgotten. In course of time it became less the local mode than it had been to carry arms, and nowadays the great septennial procession can only be gone through after a prodigious deal of drilling and preparation.