Introduction

SECTION IV .

INTELLECTUAL, ARTISTIC, AND SOCIAL CONDITION OF EUROPE IN THE FIRST QUARTER OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY.

 

In order as far as may be to complete this preliminary sketch, it only remains to say something of the learning, the literature, the arts, the opinions, the feelings, and the habits, that characterized the period under consideration. Unfortunately the information to be gathered upon the latter points, those by which the sovereigns of the Swabian dynasty, their adversaries, their subjects, and their contemporaries in general, must be judged, is very scanty. The annalists, who recorded what they deemed material, could have no presentiment of the curiosity of a later age concerning the manners, sentiments, ideas, and knowledge of their times. They, naturally enough from their very ignorance, conceived that they had reached the culminating point of civilization, refinement, and knowledge; that progress, and, it was to be hoped, change, were over, and posterity had only to preserve what their fathers had gained. Hence, whilst the Academical institutions and the surviving productions of those early ages afford a tolerable basis for estimating their learning, their literature, and their arts, the degree of civilization then existing can only be inferred from the laws, from occasional complaints of increasing luxury, which show what that luxury was, and from actions or anecdotes incidentally mentioned. It will be well, therefore, to begin with that of which most is or can be known.

At no period were letters and the arts actually extinct throughout Europe as they have been represented. In the Constantinopolitan Empire, where Greek was still a living language, both, howmuchsoever degenerated, were, as long as that Empire existed, always, for their own sake, appreciated and cultivated; whilst in western Europe, the preservation of classical literature from utter oblivion appears to have been mainly, if not wholly, owing to the exclusive use of the Latin language in all the rites of the Roman Catholic Church, which rendered some knowledge of that dead language imperative upon the clergy. The language that ecclesiastics in all countries were obliged to learn, naturally became their medium of communication with their supreme Head, at Rome, and with each other. For the acquisition of Latin, schools were necessary; and, accordingly, there is no century in which mention of schools is not found, especially in Italy. There Latin chroniclers and Latin versifiers, historians and poets they are not to be called, are likewise constantly found; and the names of the librarians of the papal library are handed down in an almost unbroken series, as those of important personages. At the schools in question the trivium, as it was denominated, consisting of grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric, appears to have been pretty generally taught, in addition to the Latin language. Not so the quadrivium, which, comprising music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, was long thought to require extraordinary mental powers and energies, both in teachers and in students, for its acquisition, and was attempted only at the superior seats of learning, then termed High  Schools. The objects and merits of this trivium and quadrivium were at once celebrated and impressed upon the pupil’s memory in the following contemporary distich: —

Gramm, loquitur, Dia. vera docet, Rhet. verba collocat,

Mus. canit, Ar. numerat, Geo. ponderat, Ast. colit astra.

There appears, however, to have been an incipient, if not a growing opinion, that, even together, the trivium and quadrivium did not comprise the whole realm of science, since at York Alcuin names jurisprudence, natural history, poetry, chronology, and divinity, as additional studies. In these High Schools were educated the earliest revivers of letters, as the Goth, Jordanes, the Anglo-Saxons, Bede and Alcuin, the Lombard, Paulus Diaconus, the Frank, Eginhart; and, from one of the Italian schools, Charlemagne obtained one of his first, if not his very first, classical instructor. The ninth century produced a prodigy of learning in the Apulian Sergio, who is recorded as, with equal and perfect fluency, reading out, at sight, a Greek book in Latin, and a Latin book in Greek; and who produced two sons, one named Gregorio, as learned as himself; the other, Bishop of Naples, and canonized as St. Atanasio.

If any epoch of actual extinction, or even of complete lethargy there were, it was in Italy, during the tenth century, with which it was confidently believed the world itself was to end. For so brief a remnant of existence, it seems to have been thought scarcely worth while—at least, by the Italians—to earn fame by laborious study. If the French Gerbert, as Pope Sylvester II, showed that in other countries this opinion was less prevalent, so completely was he an exception amongst his Italian contemporaries, that by them he was abhorred as a sorcerer, on account of the learning he had acquired in the schools of the Spanish Arabs. But in the very beginning of the following century, when the universe was found to have survived the fated year 1000, a gleam of light stole over the midnight gloom, brightening as the century advanced. Early in its first half a learned society established a school at Bologna, for grammar and logic; other studies were gradually added to these; and in the second half of this same century, Irnerius, Wernerius, or Guarnerius, as the name is variously given, under the especial protection of the Countess Matilda, founded a Chair of Roman or civil law. For the idea that the civil law had been entirely forgotten, until revived by the discovery of a copy of Justinian’s Pandects at Amalfi, AD 1135, is proved to be erroneous, both by this professorship of civil law at Bologna, and by the occasional reference to the various books bearing Justinian's name, Code, Institutes, Novels, and even to the Pandects themselves, found in older writers. In this study Bologna speedily rose to celebrity.

Gregory VII now commanded every bishop to open a school, in connexion with his Cathedral, in which instruction should be gratuitously given, the remuneration or maintenance of the teachers, of course always priests, being provided for by prebends, or other benefices, appropriated to that purpose. The command was not, indeed, universally obeyed; but still many schools professing to teach the trivium and some even the quadrivium, were opened by chapters and monasteries throughout Italy. Of these, the school appertaining to the abbey of Montecassino, in the duchy of Benevento, was the most distinguished. The monks of Montecassino, who then supplied great part of Europe with prelates, and saw more than one of their abbots seated in St. Peter’s Chair, long retained their pre-eminence in learning, and especially in astronomy. One of their number, a converted African Mussulman, named Constantine, is said to have travelled through Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, and India, studying all sciences, though applying himself more particularly to medicine; to have been master of ten languages, and to have translated many astronomical and medical works out of Arabic into Latin. The profound science of Constantine insured success to the school of medicine that Robert Guiscard founded at Salerno, and which was speedily renowned as the best in Christendom. It was much frequented by Jews, having not unfrequently as many as six hundred students of that nation.

It should seem to be about this century that the copying of MSS. began actually to supersede agriculture, as the occupation of monks, and was equally cultivated by nuns. An Abbot of St. Albans is reported to have always had two or three penmen at work in his own apartment, and to have made the presence of one transcriber at least an indispensable rule of the abbey. One consequence of this new pursuit was, that the habit of writing led to trying original compositions, and monkish chroniclers now appear; another, that cloisters for either sex beginning to pride themselves upon their libraries, a saying became current, that a monastery without a library, was like a castle without an armoury. But the reader will not, it is to be hoped, suffer the word to place before his mind’s eye the vision of a modern library; so understood, it were but the mirage of the sandy desert. The smallest conceivable number of volumes was honoured with the appellation; and Danish annalists of the ninth century, in lamenting the destructive ravages of pirates, designate a beautiful copy of the Bible, which they carried off or burnt, a Bibliotheca. Such as they were, however, libraries were now indispensable in cloisters; and henceforward, amongst the regular monastic posts, are constantly found those of Librarian, of Archivist, or keeper of the conventual archives, deeds, and documents, almost as certainly as that of Cellarer; and occasionally that of Chronicler.

The learning, the intellectual cultivation of the eleventh century, in the highest perfection of which they were susceptible, could hardly be better exemplified than in Lanfranco of Pavia, and his scholar, Anselmo of Aosta, both of whom died Archbishop of Canterbury. Both were skilful jurists, as well as profound metaphysicians and theologians, according to the, then prevalent, scholastic philosophy and theology. Nor let this last clause be understood in a sense depreciatory either of these remarkable men, or of the studies to which their lives were dedicated. If the subtleties of scholasticism, which both originated and resulted in the endeavour to adapt theology to Aristotle’s dialectics, or these to the dogmas of theology, as the reader may please to take it, were unduly admired by our remote ancestors, they have been quite as unduly ridiculed by our more immediate progenitors. They were suited to the mental condition and wants of those times; and well and fairly has the judicious Historian of the Middle Ages described the merits and the evils of this system of philosophy, or scheme of philosophizing. He says, “It gave rise to a great display of address, subtlety, and sagacity, in the explanation and distinction of abstract ideas, but at the same time to many trifling and minute speculations, to a contempt of positive and particular knowledge, and to much unnecessary refinement.” Surely, as such, it was at the very least a good exercise for untrained mental faculties, scantily provided with means of acquiring information—a course of gymnastics, useful in developing and strengthening the human mind, to be laid aside, like other educational processes, in the maturity of that mind. And is it not sufficient justification of scholasticism, in its proper season, to state that Leibnitz held Descartes, in whom France still glories, indebted to the forgotten and disdained Monologion and Prosologion of Anselmo for much of his philosophy, and especially for his celebrated argumentative demonstration of the existence of the Deity.

To return from the philosophy to its professors. Lanfranco, a man of the highest, it is said, of princely birth, was educated at the High School of Bologna, and according to some accounts became a Professor of law there. If he did, it was not for long, since he returned to his native city, Pavia, there to practice with great success and High reputation as a causidico, or jurisconsult. But his passion for learning rendered the business of his profession irksome, and he quitted Pavia for the High School of Paris, though quite as much to teach as to learn, since he is averred to have first introduced there the study of logic, metaphysics, and scholastic philosophy. But he wanted leisure to increase his own stores of knowledge; and impatient of losing that leisure in teaching others, retired to the newly-built abbey of Bec, in Normandy, and there took the monastic vows, in order to study in peace. Again he was disappointed. Thither, those who had studied under him in Paris followed him; again he was obliged to teach, and the school of Bec became famous. Lanfranco was elected Abbot, and resided there, till called thence by William Duke of Normandy, who employed him as statesman and ambassador, and, when seated upon the English throne, made him Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselmo trod in Lanfranco’s every footstep; like him studied at Bologna, studied and taught at Paris, became the scholar of Lanfranco at Bec, succeeded him there as Abbot, and at his death succeeded him as Archbishop of Canterbury. It is worth noticing of this scholastic primate that he was the first high dignitary, spiritual or temporal, who after the conquest protected instead of oppressing the Saxons. The respectful admiration then felt for learning is happily shown by a little incident of Lanfranco’s later career. Having occasion, when Archbishop of Canterbury, to visit Rome, he of course waited upon the Pope, Alexander II, when His Holiness rose to receive him, observing as he did so, that he paid such honours not to the Primate of England, but to the Master of Learning.

After this general survey of the state of learning and literature, a more particular notice of their condition in the different countries of Europe, at the epoch in question, must be taken. In England, throughout the earlier centuries, the learning of the day, with the addition of the Greek language, introduced in the seventh century by Theodore, the papally appointed, Greek Archbishop of Canterbury, continued to be taught at the Schools of Oxford, Cambridge, and, as has been seen, of York. In the eighth century the Anglo-Saxon Alcuin was, if not the first, seemingly the most valued, of the classical preceptors of Charlemagne, and his chief agent in carrying out his designs for the revival of letters. Irish High Schools appear to have been, in these early ages, quite as well reputed as the English. Indeed Moore asserts that classical literature and theology were introduced into northern Anglo-Saxon England from Ireland, by the exiled heir of the kingdom of Northumberland, who, being educated in the sister island, when recalled to ascend the throne, took his Irish preceptor, St. Aidan, home with him, and gave him Lindisfarne or Holy Island, where the Saint founded the celebrated monastery of that name.

Nay such powerful reasoners were these Irish schoolmen, that one of them, Feargil, Latinized into Virgilius, is said to have, in the eighth century, by sheer ratiocination divined the spherical form of the earth. His contemporary, the Anglo-Saxon missionary, Winfried, canonized as St. Boniface, the Apostle of the Germans, was terrified at so new fangled a heresy, till satisfied by Pope Zachary that such notions were not incompatible with the doctrines of Christianity.

But the intellectual peculiarity chiefly distinguishing the British islands is that in them the living languages appear to have been, if not first cultivated, yet first written; that is to say, the then living languages; and the honour of thus taking the lead, does not surely turn upon the survival of the language, but upon those who spoke it having been the first to feel, that the language of life, of thought, and of passion, elsewhere disdained as the vulgar tongue, the name then given to all non-classical languages, was as capable of expressing lofty sentiments and important philosophic truths, as the Latin. Thus whilst science and the classics were taught, after the manner of the day, in their proper places, Anglo-Saxon poetry simultaneously flourished; and in lieu of being, as all other contemporaneous poetry seems to have been, intrusted solely to verbal recitation and the memory, was deemed worthy of the labours of the scribe, to insure its unimpaired preservation. If the original MSS. do not exist to attest this, very early copies are still extant, and Dr. Gervinus, the learned German historian of Teutonic poetry, considers Anglo-Saxon England as the asylum of all northern developed cultivation, consequently as the birth-place of romanticism. Nor was the literary employment of Anglo-Saxon confined to that department of letters, to which the first attempts of the vernacular were usually limited. Chronicles were written in Anglo-Saxon; Alfred translated Latin works into his mother tongue; and, whilst upon the continent all laws were promulgated and compiled in Latin, the code of the Anglo-Saxons, if not, as some writers assert, originally put forth in the mother tongue, understood by those whose conduct it was to govern, was rendered into that language by the orders of Alfred, perhaps by himself.

Of the Celtic languages, Welsh and Irish, which are still as much living languages as the Provencal, one was perhaps written even earlier than Anglo-Saxon. The most recent critical investigations of the literary remains of the Welsh, have proved that the poetical productions of Aneurin, Taliessin, Llywarch Hen, Myrddin—Anglicé Merlin—who all belonged to the sixth century, were very early written; and that some of the earliest transcripts, though not perhaps the original MSS., are still extant. The same may be said of the Anglo-Saxon Caedmon in the seventh century.

It might, upon divers grounds, have been supposed that Irish would have been still earlier cultivated than Welsh. From Ireland it has been seen that learning, according to Irish claims, was first introduced amongst the Anglo-Saxons, and Irish High Schools, whether or not the earliest institutions of the kind for the cultivation of science and classic lore, were assuredly frequented by students from England and the Continent, even in the sixth century. Again Ireland seems first to have supplied missionaries to convert heathen Europe to Christianity, as Columban and Gall, or Gaul, in that sixth century, and Kilian with the Anglo-Saxon Willebrod early in the seventh, who before its close were followed by the compatriot of the latter, Winfried, or St. Boniface. In the eighth, Irish scholars still went forth as missionaries, if of a different character, as missionaries for the diffusion, not of religion but, of knowledge. Two of these, named Oswald and Clement, are said to have landed in Normandy, crying, somewhat after the manner of mediaeval apprentices, “Who’ll buy Wisdom? That is our merchandize. Who’ll buy? Who’ll buy?” whilst another Irishman, named Dungal, was the most celebrated astronomer of the century. But it may be that, owing to this zeal for science and classic lore, the Irish language was disdained. The oldest vernacular MSS. known belong to the tenth century, and the oldest historic poem referred to by Flaherty, is of the eleventh.

But if the British Isles kept pace with Italy during the earliest portion of the middle ages, if up to the tenth century classical learning had been professedly taught in their High Schools, in that century the Anglo-Saxon portion of them shared the night of darkness and barbarism, which Tiraboschi describes as then overspreading his fair native land. The ravages and conquests of the Danes appear to have destroyed the very desire for information, together with the libraries in which it was stored.

In France Charlemagne's endeavours to revive science and literature had been unsuccessful. Even during his life their success was apparently small, Alcuin’s letters, addressed from Tours to his imperial pupil, breathe his annoyance at his destitution in Gaul, of all resources for scientific pursuits, and solicit permission to send scribes to England to copy books for him. The permission was doubtless given, but Alcuin, who died before Charlemagne, could hardly live to profit thereby, and with Charlemagne, his institutions in that country, naturally less interesting to him and his son than their German fatherland, seem to have expired. Immediately after his decease, in the ninth century, when learning was held to be flourishing in Italy and in the British Isles, France was sunk yet deeper in darkness and barbarism, than were those countries in the following tenth century; in the course of which, notwithstanding the expected catastrophe at its close, her death­like lethargy began to be slowly shaken off. The first impulse was probably given by the infusion of new blood, the Scandinavian, in the north-western district; as was a second in the eleventh century, apparently by the teaching of Lanfranco and Anselmo at Paris; ana this seems to have started France in a career, in which her onward course was long nearly uninterrupted, and her success, sufficient to enable her, whether rightfully or wrongfully, to boast her pre-eminence over all other lands in civilization.

Thenceforward the Parisian High School bore away the palm in scholasticism from all rivals. But it was in the first quarter of the twelfth century, when a more enlarged system of study began to supersede the trivium and quadrivium, that the Parisian school really acquired transcendent fame; for which it was indebted to Abelard. This very remarkable individual was long thought of merely as the guilty and unfortunate lover of the gifted as impassioned Eloisa; but it was not in this character that he awakened the admiration of his contemporaries, or provoked a large mass of envy and consequent enmity. He was the profoundest scholar, the acutest and ablest metaphysician of his day, and it is as such that he must here command attention. Pierre Abailard, the eldest son of a Breton nobleman, renounced his birthright, in order to dedicate himself wholly to study. His knowledge of Greek excited general wonder, his abstruse scholasticism, his astute reasoning in defence of the most intelligible indeed of the systems of the day, Nominalism, of which he became the principal expounder and champion, though not the founder his bold theories bordering upon, if not amounting to, heresy, and his eloquent invectives against the unmonastic lives of monks, against the unapostolic wealth and luxury of the clergy in general, filled the hall in which he lectured with hearers, amongst whom are said to have been numbered twenty future cardinals, and fifty future bishops. Against imputations of heresy he strove to guard himself, by alleging that he professed to teach, not the truth, but, his notion respecting it, and by always submitting those notions to papal authority. These precautions were unavailing; and the Parisian High School expelled him for heretical doctrines. He retired to a solitary place, whither his scholars, that they might not lose the benefit of his instructions, following him, constructed huts for shelter, until he had erected a monastery, entitled the Paraclete, as a more suitable asylum. It will be recollected that until the art of printing rendered books generally accessible, public lectures were almost the only means of acquiring knowledge. This appears to have been the position of Abelard and the School of Paris about the year 1125.

Up to the twelfth century, no language appears to have been written in France except Latin, and the only work in that language requiring notice here, is that source of romance, the pseudo-Turpin’s Life of Charlemagne; though some critics have assigned the date to a later period, because the Chronicles of St. Denis, which were only begun in the twelfth century, are therein appealed to as authority. But this citation may easily have been the addition of a late transcriber, by way of confirming the authenticity of the book; whilst the bulk of the evidence, both internal and external, is in favour of the eleventh century. A writer so regardless of the restraints of chronology and geography, had he written after the first crusade, would surely have sent his heroes crusading to Palestine, instead of merely sending Charlemagne a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and if Calixtus II, who died in 1124, pronounced the book to be genuine, the work of the old Archbishop, as he is said to have done, it could hardly have been then a very recent production.

With respect to the vulgar tongue, the decrees, indeed, of two Church Councils, that of Tours AD 813, and of Arles AD 851, order homilies to be translated into either Rustic Latin, the name given to the dialect then spoken by the natives of Gaul, or Frankish, i. e. German, because otherwise the people, who did not understand Classical Latin, could not benefit by them. But the order should seem to mean a verbal translation of a homily as delivered. This Rustic Latin, afterwards called Romane, Walloon or Langue d’oil, was cultivated by the Normans (who quickly exchanged their own language for that of the vanquished, amongst, and with, whom they dwelt) before it had superseded German at Court, and it long continued to be found in its greatest purity at Rouen. The gallicized heirs of the ancient northern Scalds, sang their hereditary lays and legends in French, or this Rustic Latin, and appear to have breathed their own love of this style of poetry, into all around them, whilst, as a consequence of their conversion to Christianity, the mythical heroes of the Edda and their own ancestors, gradually merged in the Paladins of Charlemagne and the Round Table of King Arthur; blending the supernatural of the northern, with that of the oriental imagination, which captivated them in Palestine, and in Moslem Spain. These were the habitual, if not absolutely the only, strains of the Trouveurs or Trouveres of the Langue d'oil. But of those to which the eleventh century gave birth, nothing remains, whence it may be inferred that nothing was written. The earliest known to have been committed to paper are either Abelard’s amorous ditties or a poem upon natural history, presented by an Anglo-Norman, Philippe de Thun or de Thaun to Henry I of England, AD 1120, the Langue d'oil being now one of the literary languages of England, or a Langue d'oil version of an earlier Latin poem, by one Marboduus, upon precious stones.

But if no written French poetry of the eleventh century remains, French prose has been supposed to have been then written. The Anglo-Saxon Ingulphus, who became the Secretary of William the Conqueror, in his Chronicle asserts that the Conqueror had his laws collected and written in French or Langue d’oil. If this were so, the code has disappeared like the legendary lays; and it must be added that modern criticism suspects the work ascribed to Ingulphus to be a forgery of the fourteenth century. The code of laws which Godfrey, upon assuming the government, ordered to be compiled for his crusade-created kingdom, and which is known as Les Assises E BONS USAGES DU ROYAUME DE JERUSALEM, appears to have been certainly written at least as early as the poem above mentioned, and written in the Langue d’oil, which most of the crusaders understood. But in his fully occupied reign of a year, it was really impossible that the work should be completed; and in that of his brother Baldwin it probably appeared. If it did, however, that original MS. is lost; and the earliest copy extant, in which places are named as Estates of the Kingdom, that were not conquered till late in Baldwin I’s reign, is believed to have been made in the twelfth century, under Amalric, Baldwin II’s grandson.

Of southern France, that is to say the Arelat and those other French provinces, where the Langue d’oc, or Provençal was spoken, awkward as the separation may seem, it will for two reasons be more convenient to treat, when the condition of the rest of Europe, relatively to literature and language, shall have been surveyed. These reasons are, that they were later than the north in shaking off the lethargy of ignorance, consequent upon barbaric invasion, overflowing the country with floods of Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Huns, and Arabs, in their onward course; and that their claim to be the birthplace of modern language and literature, may then be better appreciated.

Germany had two schools, existing even before Charlemagne; that of the abbey of Fulda, founded by the Anglo-Saxon St. Boniface, and that of the abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland, founded by the canonized Irish missionary, Gall or Gaul; both were flourishing, though not esteemed by the monarch equal to those of Italy, and of the British Isles. And they continued to flourish, as did several of those he added, especially that, in Lower Lorrain, of Liege, the very cradle of his race, and in Saxony that of Paderborn. Hence Germany, notwithstanding the ravages of the Magyars, did not, like France in the ninth century, and England and Italy in the tenth, sink into utter ignorance during the degeneracy of the Carolingians, of whom indeed she usually had the least degenerate for her rulers. But ere proceeding to the result of Charlemagne's exertions in behalf of classical learning in Germany, it is proper to speak of another simultaneous, and surely kindred effort of his, in another direction.

In the eighth century Germany still abounded in legendary lays or ballads, with some longer poems, that aspired even to the epic character, narrating the adventures, the achievements, and the disasters, of her heroes of yet elder days, transmitted orally from generation to generation, and probably modified and lengthened by each in its turn. Charlemagne, a truly great man, unblinded by prejudices, then the offspring alike of intolerant religious zeal or of ardent admiration of what was thought classicism, determined to rescue these records of the glories of his Heathen forefathers from oblivion. He therefore caused the old lays to be sought out in all parts, and carefully written down from the dictation of living singers, even the rudest and lowliest. This endeavour to perpetuate the earliest productions of the Teutonic Muse, is said to have given birth to the first attempt to write German. Both were unproductive. Charlemagne’s son, Lewis the Pious, in a fit of either half-educated, pseudo-classical contempt for barbarism or of pseudo-Christian abhorrence of Heathenism, gave the whole collection to the flames. And so completely was this attempt at writing German forgotten, that later in the same reign Otfried had to devise anew the orthography, for his German Harmony of the Gospels; written by the monarch’s command.

Lewis’s act of high treason against old Teutonicism did not however quite effect the destruction designed. The old ditties still survived in the memory of those who could not write; and, as will be seen hereafter, became the sources, if not actually the originals, of later, still existing poems. Nay, a fragment of one of those collected by Charlemagne, Hildebrand und Hathubrand, is still extant, it should seem, almost in its earliest form; certainly much older and more epic in character than any other surviving old German relic. The age of the MS. of this fragment, which is conjectured to be about the eighth century, may be doubtful; such may be the case of a contemporary German song, in celebration of the victory gained by Lewis III of France over the Danes, AD 881 or 882; the lays may have been preserved orally for some time before the y were committed to writing, but Otfried’s work assures to the German language the honour of having been written prior to any of those derived from the Latin—a priority which has been ascribed to the fact, of Latin never having superseded the native language of Germany, to her still speaking that spoken in her primeval forests, changed only by maturescence, cultivation, and general refinement.

For a time, however, the manifestation of imperial taste seems to have determined the literary bent of Germany. The genuine breathings of national poetry ceased, and to versify in Latin became the general ambition, whilst those would-be classical effusions were all, equally in consonance with the imperial sentiments, dedicated to religious subjects, consisting of hymns, lives of Saints, legends of miracles, new versions of passages in the Bible, and the like.

One of the most admired Latin poets or poetasters of the tenth century, was an Abbess of Gandersheim, named Hroswitha, who, it may be worth noting, highly eulogizes, as her instructress in classical literature, her predecessor in her dignified office, Gerberga, daughter of the Emperor Henry the Fowler, and widow, first of a Duke of Lothringen, secondly of a King of France. The most esteemed of Hroswitha’s productions were her Miracle Plays, which were inspired, she averred, by the perusal of Terence, were acted by her nuns, and were held to have invested religion with the classical charm of the drama. But these plays are mere dialogues, as destitute of dramatic spirit as of poetry. In fact the drama may be said to have been then unknown, although, as a sort of religious exercise, Priests were in the habit of acting passages of Scripture history, speaking the very words of Holy Writ. The Lady Abbess also wrote a Chronicle in verse, which has long been valued only as an historical authority. Hroswitha had a very superior rival in a monk of St. Gall, named Eckehard, author of a Latin narrative poem, entitled Walter of Aquitaine, a tale of the Court of Attila, whom the recent ravages of the Magyars, the supposed descendants of the Huns, had vividly recalled to the imagination of that day. And so simply antique in character is this poem, so truly German, unmingled with chivalry, that modern critics, Gervinus and the poet Uhland at their head, cannot imagine it to have been conceived in a dead language, and think the monk either blended together and adapted, or found so blended, and then translated, a number of old German ballads. Eckehard’s hymns are still included in the Church service.

The first half of the following eleventh century affords, besides Latin chroniclers in verse and prose, a sort of mediaeval, German, Admirable Crichton, in the son of a Swabian nobleman, Hermann surnamed Contractus, because a cripple from infancy, who died a.d. 1054, at the early age of forty-one. Hermann Contractus was educated at St. Gall, understood all languages, especially Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, wrote history, poetry, and treatises upon ethics and astronomy, calculated eclipses, and expounded Aristotle’s logic; and although his tongue was as crippled as his limbs, crowds thronged his lecture room. He set his own poems to music, he made musical instruments and clocks, and unlike deformed persons in general, is said to have been most amiable, and as much beloved as he was admired. This prodigious scholar likewise condescended to cultivate his mother tongue, and translated the Psalms into German. Another instance of German written in this century has been recently discovered bv the Austrian historical investigator, Hormayr, though whether it be still in existence is at least very doubtful. In an old biography of Altmann, Bishop of Passau, he has found mention of one Ezzo, as the composer of a noble lay of the Miracles of Christ, in his mother tongue, AD 1050. In the last half of the eleventh and the first quarter of the twelfth century, amidst the civil wars and calamities of Henry IV’s reign, and the incessant troubles of his son’s, this fair prospect of increasing cultivation was overcast.

In Italy it has been seen that, when the world was found to have survived the close of the tenth century, the schools began to revive, and at the command of Gregory VII to increase. It does not, indeed, appear that he made any endeavour to enlarge or improve the course of study, though it seems to have been under the patronage of his great ally and support, Countess Matilda, that a school of law was added to the previously existing High School of Bologna. Writers of that century praise the schools of philosophy belonging to the Cathedral of Milan, which were undisturbed by the incessant wars, Milan was even then waging against her neighbours. Parma was named the Golden City, Chrysopolis, in honour of the encouragement she afforded to learning. The Montecassino school has been already mentioned.

Of the pupils formed in these schools, Lanfranco and Anselmo, the real pride of Italy in those times, have been described, and the only point to be added is, that Lanfranco appears to have been the first who thought of endeavouring, by collation of copies and by reasoning, to correct errors in MSS., restore right readings, and the like. Of other pupils there were many; but M. Guizot stands so nearly alone amongst modern critics, in discerning any sort of merit in their productions, that few indeed can it be worth while to particularize. San Pier di Damiano, as he called himself in honour of his brother Damiano, to whom he owed his education, wrote upon religious subjects, was often employed by the Popes as Legate, and was revered, as much for his virtue, as for his ability and learning. Of Italian prose chroniclers the two Landolfos, senior and junior, both Milanese, seem best to deserve mention, inasmuch as Galfridus or Goffredo Malaterra, who wrote the history of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily, was not an Italian but a Norman. Of those who called themselves poets, although William of Apulia seems to have thought he might fairly challenge a comparison with Virgil, it must be admitted that his epic on the Norman Conquest, and Donizo’s Life of Matilda, can command attention, like the versified Chronicle of the German Abbess, only as historical authorities. Tiraboschi bestows some praise upon Laurentius Diaconus as he is usually called, a Veronese, and Deacon or Dean of Pisa, who celebrated in a poem called epic, and divided into seven books, the subjugation of the Balearic isles by Pisa; but the writer most worth remembering seems to be a monk of Montecassino, named Alberico, who died in 1123, not so much for his own merit, as because it is supposed that his extravagant Latin rhapsody, a Vision of Hell, may have suggested the idea of the Commedia Divina to Dante.

The northern and north-eastern portions of Europe had so little influence upon the civilization or the literature of the west and south, that little need be said concerning them. Throughout Scandinavia old Norse poetry was still zealously cultivated. Saemund Sigfusson compiled the Edda in the middle of the eleventh century; and although the Latin, introduced by the service of the church, there likewise was beginning to occupy the domain of science, the native Scalds still appear as the favourite companions and friends, if not as the advisers and ministers, of Scandinavian princes. The Slavonian nations seem to have always had bards whom they highly reverenced and employed as heralds or ambassadors. Two of them are said to have been sent in the latter capacity to Attila, and to have softened his heart by their lays, but as their medium of communication is not explained, it may be conjectured that be was more touched by their music than by their poetry. Little is known of early Slavonian literature, though the language appears to compete with German and Welsh, in the claim to priority amongst written living languages. A hymn to the Virgin, habitually sung by the Poles when preparing for battle, the composition of St. Adalbert, the Bohemian missionary, Archbishop of Prague, martyred in 997, is averred still to exist and a ballad upon the loss of Prague by the Poles, AD 1004, believed to be nearly contemporaneous with the event it records, has been recently discovered. The Russian Monk, Nestor of Kiew, who wrote the history of his country up to within a year of his death in 1116, may claim to be the oldest prose historian in any living language. The Servians are said to boast the possession of a version of the Bible, written in the ninth century, in a cognate Pannonian dialect of the Slavonian, which, however, is now considered by them as a learned rather than a living language. Some old Servian poetry is said to have been recently discovered, certainly belonging to the period of Servian independence, but whether to the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth century may be doubtful.

Amongst the East Romans of Constantinople, to proceed from those less, to those more advanced in civilization than the nations of western Europe, it has been already observed, that letters were still cultivated. Classical Greek was, since the reign of Justinian, their living language; and hence the generally acknowledged superiority of the mediaeval Greek writers, over their Latin contemporaries. The simple fact that an Imperial Princess prided herself upon being the biographer of the Emperor her father, Anna Comnena in her Alexiad, sufficiently marks the honour in which literature was there held. And it is no improbable conjecture, that this high appreciation of learning at the pompous as luxurious first Crusade, may have had no small share in the general revival of learning, science, and literature, throughout Europe. Like other modern tongues Romaic appears to have been about this epoch stealing into existence; inasmuch as Anna Comnena, in her classical Hellenic work, condescends to quote some lines of a popular song, in what was then the mere jargon, probably, of the vulgar, but has now developed itself into the regular language of a nation.

The real seat of learning in Europe, during the period that has been under consideration, was indisputably Arab-Spain. If the first conquerors of the Spanish Goths, if their sons, from whose yoke Charles Martel, by his memorable victory at Poitiers, rescued France, and perhaps the whole continent, were rude as those who are accused of having heated their baths with the choicest treasures of the Alexandrian library, no sooner had the Ommeyade Abderrahman, about the middle of the eighth century, established the independent caliphate of Cordova, than he there introduced the science and literature, already adorning Bagdad. Abderrahman’s patronage of letters preceded Charlemagne’s—the Caliph dying in AD 787—and was more fortunate. His successors, son and grandsons, for generations trod in his footsteps; his and their subjects were eager to profit by the opportunities offered them; and in the course of the ninth and tenth centuries, of which the last was the very golden age of Hispano-Arab genius, science, and prosperity, every town in Moslem Spain had its schools and colleges, its public library—that of Cordova collected by Alhakem II, with utter regardlessness of expense, was estimated at the amount, in ante-printing days well-nigh incredible, of 600,000 volumes—its scientific and literary institutions, or academies. At the Hispano-Arab schools were studied, not the trivium or quadrivium, but all known sciences. There, theology (of course Moslem), history, geography, grammar, metre, rhetoric, mathematics, geometry, astronomy, including astrology, medicine, and magic, were taught; and chemistry, including alchemy, is said to have been invented. To these schools repaired English, French, German, and Italians, who really thirsted for knowledge; and Pope Sylvester, as has been seen, carried thence stores, that earned him the reputation of an abhorred, as dreaded, magician. Notwithstanding the convulsions consequent upon the conquests of the rude Almoravids, these schools continued to flourish throughout the period embraced in this sketch.

From what has been said of the studies pursued there, it follows, as a matter of course, that the Spanish-Arabs had philosophers, historians, geographers, travellers, scientific as well as mercantile, recording what they had seen in other lands; farther, they are the reputed inventors of historic dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Nevertheless, their literature was chiefly poetic. In poetry, academy contended with academy; whilst Caliphs, their Viziers, and the secluded denizens of their harems, as well as all the well-educated amongst their subjects, emulated them and each other. And to these Arab votaries of the Muse, modern poetry was long very generally supposed to owe the use of rhyme, and the substitution of accent for length of syllable, in the construction of metre. This opinion has latterly been rejected; but the discussion were misplaced in a mere preliminary sketch like this.

Of the state of learning and literature in the Christian portion of the Peninsula during these early ages, little is known; probably because there is little to be known. We are indeed told that, in the year 621, a Bishop of Barcelona caused a drama, exemplifying the nonentity of the Heathen Gods, to be acted; and that Alphonso III of Oviedo, who died AD 900, was both a patron of literature, and the author of a still-existing chronicle of his royal predecessors. But there exist thirty lines of Portuguese, which, even disregarding the pretension advanced on their behalf by Lusitanian literati to be the composition of Don Roderic, the Last of the Goths, bear intrinsic and extrinsic evidence of an antiquity equal, if not superior, to any other writing in the languages derived from the Latin. In the year 1187, in a Portuguese castle, a MS. was found so mouldy and worm-eaten, that only these thirty lines could be deciphered; and the language of this fragment, though not more unintelligible to a modern Portuguese than that of Chaucer to us, is not only very decidedly much older than that of a little song written under the reign of Conde Henrique, to whom Alfonso VI gave the county of Portugal, and who died in 1112, but contains scarcely a word derived from the Arabic, which so speedily stamped its character upon the languages of the Peninsula. Indeed, although in Christian Spain, as elsewhere, Latin remained the language of science and of letters, Arabic seems to have come into as general familiar use as the vulgar tongue, having even been selected by Juan de Sevilla as the best, in which to expound the Bible to his Christian flock. As the Christian States increased in size and throve, they began to cultivate the science and literature acquired in the Arab schools.

We now come to the lands speaking the Langue d’oc. Of the intellectual condition of the kingdom of Arles, and the other provinces of the South of France, as distinguished from the North, up to the close of the tenth century, there remains very scanty information; but by the end of the eleventh, they assume an important aspect, from their reputation of having been the birthplace of modern literature,—of the very idea that a vulgar tongue could be written,—could be susceptible of cultivation. And the vernacular of these provinces, whether denominated Langue d’oc, Langue Romane, or Romance, or simply Provencal, has been deemed not only the eldest, but the only child of the Latin, and the mother of all others of Latin parentage. That these assumptions are disputed by recent critics, the reader, without being farther troubled with the controversy, may see, by reference to the few dates that have been, and to those yet to be, given.

Priority amongst the Troubadours, who pass for the earliest modern authors permitted to enjoy the glory of seeing their effusions calligraphically perpetuated, has been alternately assigned to one Bechada, a Limousin, and to William IX, Earl of Poitou, and in right of his wife, Duke of Aquitaine; and has since been claimed by Wachsmuth for a troubadour, whom he does not name, but whose still extant poem, in praise of Boethius, he affirms to be of the tenth century. If this be so, all dispute amongst the Latin family, save, perhaps, with the Portuguese stanzas, as to actual priority, must be at an end; but between Bechada and the Duke, it is, and must be, difficult to decide. Both were members of the first Crusade, which both celebrated, inspired, as they well might be, by the magnitude, the imaginative and devoutly impassioned character, of the enterprise in which they were engaged, by the new sphere of existence it had opened to them, and by the varieties of mankind with whom it brought them in contact. But Bechada’s poem upon the capture of Jerusalem, with everything else he may have written, has perished; and only by contemporaneous mention are his poem and himself known to have existed; whilst if a similar fate befel the 1100 lays, in which Duke William, expressing or embodying their date in their number, sang the exploits of his brother crusaders and himself, other poems of his, more accordant with his licentious temperament still survive to secure him his station on Parnassus. Troubadours now rapidly multiplied, and their language and their poetry spread over the South of France and of Germany, over the North of Spain and of Italy. But little has been preserved of any who wrote prior to the middle of the century; for which reason, the Troubadours will more properly find their place in a later chapter upon the present subjects.

Of science, except amongst the Arabs, it hardly need be said, there was at this epoch little or none. The Arabic numerals, a great help to its progress, appear, however, to have been by tips time introduced into Europe. Maps and globes are mentioned amongst the possessions of the Emperor Henry V, and of Roger II, Earl of Sicily; yet so little was geography advanced, that, late in the eleventh century, Adam of Bremen doubted whether Russia could or could not be approached by sea—Archangel not being yet built—and called Courland and Esthonia islands. The state of surgery may be measured from its practice being committed to barbers; and the only tolerable physicians appear to have been Arabs and Jews, the small portion of medical skill preserved in cloisters being, it may be presumed, chiefly empirical. Of natural history, little was known, and of natural philosophy less. The Arabs, indeed, were acquainted with the properties of the magnet, Edrisi, an Arab geographer, giving a rather con­fused account of them under the date of 1100; but it is very doubtful whether the knowledge extended to Christian Europe, until a later period of the century.

The Fine Arts have been usually considered as yet more completely extinct than literature, during the period that intervenes betwixt the fall of classical antiquity and the eleventh century; that is to say, throughout Western Et rope, for in the East Roman Empire they are allowed to have been still lingering out a decrepid existence. Moreover, when, in the eleventh century, the dim, grey dawn of a new day, began to recall them from this supposed state of suspended animation, to again incipient life, only Greek artists, it has been asserted, were employed, there being, in fact, no others. And this agrees, in some measure, with Rumohr’s persuasion, that the subjugation of Italy to the East Roman Empire under Justinian, was more injurious to Italian art than her conquest by the Goths. Nevertheless, both opinions are disputed, and the laboriously careful Tiraboschi holds the second to be sufficiently confuted by the occasional, and only occasional, naming of Greek artists; whence he argues that, whenever employed, they were named (perhaps in the ordinary vulgar vanity of having been served by a foreigner); and that the unnamed were always compatriots, as such held cheap. In fact, the question of extinction may be held one of degree merely, to wit, of the degree of artistic skill indispensable to constitute a work of art. This degree was certainly very low during those early ages, as the wonders of architecture, painting, and sculpture, reported to have adorned the northern Vinetha, may, it is presumed, be safely ascribed to the combined ignorance and exaggeration of their admirers. In a state such as has been surmised, a few words upon each of the separate Arts will suffice for this sketch; and Architecture, having been the first to revive, must take the lead.

It has been asserted that up to the eleventh century churches were so universally built of wood, that any and every stone church was specifically mentioned, as an object of admiration. The recollection of the many heathen temples converted into churches, at Rome, indeed throughout Italy, of the Basilica St. John Lateran, the very Cathedral of Rome, the Ecclesia urbis et orbis mater et caput, of the Basilicas built, and adorned with Mosaics, as early as the fifth and sixth centuries, especially at Rome and Ravenna; in England, of the Abbey of St. Albans, founded if not completed by Offa, King of Mercia, and containing tombs of Heptarchy Kings; even of the mention of stone churches in Ireland, in the eighth century; of Charlemagne’s cathedral at Aix la Chapelle, and some few others, induces a start at this assertion. Nevertheless, these are but the exceptions; Germany east of the Rhine, of which the assertor perhaps chiefly thought, was all but destitute of such, and certainly during the last half of the tenth century no one thought of building or repairing permanent churches, in a world so soon to perish. In the beginning of the eleventh century, when the dreaded epoch was past, and men rejoiced in an indefinite prolongation of existence, the impassioned religious and patriotic feelings of the age, stimulated by gratitude for the escape “ of this great globe itself,” and “ all that it inherit,” from destruction, took the peculiar turn which gradually decorated so many towns in Italy, Germany, France, England, and Spain, with magnificent cathedrals. Even during the period of despondence the Freemasons, it is averred—whether this mystic fraternity Europe, had carefully preserved their fraternal union and the principles of their art; they were ready therefore to second and to guide the impulse. In Italy, Venice began the marvellous St. Mark’s, in the Byzantine taste, imbibed in her constant intercourse with Constantinople; and so energetically was the work carried on that in the first quarter of the ensuing twelfth century this church was consecrated, though the interior decoration was still incomplete. At Bologna arose the venerable dome of St. Peter’s; at Parma, Modena, and a few more places in that part of the peninsula, their respective cathedrals, with their cavern-like doorways, the front pillars resting upon lions, or nondescript monsters, a mysterious emblem according to Mrs. Jameson, not as yet unriddled. But what may be more interesting to the general reader than a list of cathedrals begun, is the account given of the manner in which the construction of one of them was managed. In 1063, Pisa devoted the booty made in a victory over the Sicilian Arabs, to the erection of a cathedral, to build which she employed an architect, whom Vasari calls a Greek, despite his Italian sounding name of Burchetta. When the booty was exhausted, every family in the city and suburbs, the population of which was then estimated at 31,000 souls, annually contributed a gold piece towards the expense; and so leisurely did it advance, that nearly a century later the voluntary contribution of the Emperor Frederic, was required for its completion. In Germany, in the tenth century, Conrad II. built the Cathedral of Spires. Henry III that of Goslar, Archbishop Adelbert of Bremen invited Italian architects to build one at Bremen after the model of that of Benevento, and some others were begun. In Hungary the canonized King, St. Stephen, built the Cathedral at Raab. In England, Gundulph, a monk of the Abbey of Bee, whom Lanfranco, in 1077, made Bishop of Rochester, and who proved an eminent architect as well as an excellent prelate, built his own cathedral with an adjacent monastery, Rochester Castle, which he gave William Rufus, the abbey churches of Reading and Mailing, and the chapel within the Keep of the Tower of London, nearly by the end of the eleventh century. Winchester. Durham, Gloucester, and two or three more were likewise built, as was Westminster Hall, in the first quarter of the twelfth. In Spain Alfonso VI, excited perhaps by the magnificent Mosque of Cordova, begun by Abderrahman I in the eighth century, finished by his successors in the ninth, and imitated throughout Moslem Spain, invited a German architect to rebuild the Cathedral of Leon, as did his daughter Urraca two, a Roman and a Burgundian, to build one at Avila.

Painting never was so dead that there were not persons, calling themselves artists, who undertook to decorate churches, with pictures of Saints and of Holy Families. These works are still to be seen in some of the very oldest churches, especially in Rome and throughout Italy, as they are in the gallery of the Academy at Florence, and in the Boisseree division of the Pinakothek at Munich, which supply a history of the graphic Art from its infant attempts, in stiff wooden figures upon golden background,—devoid of all idea of drawing, anatomy, perspective, and the like, but not without life, expression, and even character—through all its stages of progress, to the fullness of its perfection. Many of those early pictures betoken pupils of the Byzantine School, whilst others are, by the best Italian judges, held to have been uninfluenced thereby; one certain mark of the Byzantine school being the gold background, and the dark complexion of the Virgin, whom it has been supposed they wished to represent as having risen a mummy from the grave. The characteristic of the nascent Italian school, however faulty, is expression and susceptibility of development. A Menologium of the tenth century in the Vatican, is said by Rumohr, to contain some excellent miniatures. The historical paintings with which Theudelinda, the Bavarian wife, successively, of the Lombard Kings, Authar and Agilulf, decorated her palace at Monza, Charlemagne his at Ingelheim (employing, it is said, Italian artists) and Henry the Fowler the walls of a banqueting room, may be presumed to have been similar in merit to the above­named sacred pieces. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the pictorial representation of the deeds of Alexander the Great, which, at the opening of the twelfth century, adorned the apartments of Matilda, Queen of Henry I of England, was superior to its predecessors, or to the well-known Bayeux tapestry, wrought by her mother-in-law, William the Conqueror’s Queen Matilda, to celebrate her consort’s achievements. Of the native land of any of the artists who produced these works, or of their contemporary brethren, nothing is known, except that Adalbert, Archbishop of Bremen, invited Italian painters to decorate his Italian-built Cathedral, and that in 1070 the Abbot of Montecassino sent for workers in Mosaic from Constantinople, to inlay the pavement of his abbey-church; whence Tiraboschi infers, that Mosaicists were the only foreign artists habitually employed. By the end of the century there appears to have been a Mosaicist school at Rome. At Venice, St. Mark’s is believed to have been entirely committed to Greek artists.

The illumination of MSS., which was one of the chief uses of painting in these ages, was principally practised in cloisters by monks and nuns, so that all countries must have produced their own illuminators. Especially would this be the case in Germany, where St. Boniface, a great patron of illumination, had founded schools expressly to preserve, improve, and teach the Art. The early illuminations display great labour and care, with delicate accuracy of execution, and very brilliant colours, but without disputing Rumohr’s acknowledged taste in regard to the Menologium, it must be admitted that, generally speaking, not until a much later epoch is any sort of artistic merit to be found. The time and skill required thus to complete a volume by illuminating and gilding it, would be one cause of the scarcity and high price of books. A folio volume is calculated to have cost, at the beginning of the twelfth century, a sum equal to twenty pounds sterling.

If any Art could be deemed really dead, it was Sculpture. Except in the form of carving, and that chiefly in wood, it had no existence, arid the beautiful wood carving that adorns so many old churches, particularly in Germany, is more than probably of a later date. Notwithstanding contemporaneous admiration, it is likely that the best carving then known was that in yet older churches, which bears a kindred character to the pictures, and at which therefore no one but a professed artistic antiquary now looks. In Italy certainly good carving was born a century later. The German monks in general, and more particularly those of St. Gall, are  said to have excelled in carving ivory, but as the excellence  must be always estimated by contemporaneous taste and standards, the degree of skill to which they had attained remains doubtful.

Music is spoken of by writers of all ages, but in those now under consideration, seems to have been cultivated and valued chiefly in reference to church service. Its condition as an art throughout these earlier centuries, may be appreciated by the directions that Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Clugny, found it necessary, in the first quarter of the twelfth century, to issue to his Choristers. They were, that the singers should begin together, pause together, resume together, and that no one should sing faster or slower than the rest. And yet, prior to the issuing of these instructions, had the system of musical notation, practised in the school of music, founded by Abderrahman II, at Cordova in the ninth century, been introduced into Christian Europe by Guido d’Arezzo, whom several German bishops invited to visit their sees in order to improve their church music, and the Venerable Abbot's contemporary, Frank of Cologne, was even then occupied in perfecting that system of notation. The very idea of harmony was unknown, the several singers all singing, and the several instruments all playing, simultaneously the same notes. Various musical instruments are however mentioned. Charlemagne received a present of an organ from Constantinople, which he placed in the Cathedral of Aix-la Chapelle. Thenceforward frequent mention of organs occurs, and the Germans became renowned for skill in their construction. Of the many more ordinary instruments, whether peculiar to different nations, or identical amongst such as could not have borrowed them from each other, some appear to have been imperfect prototypes of our own, and some are so obsolete that their names call up no idea. Stringed instruments, wind instruments, drums, and instruments analogous to cymbals, are upon divers occasions mentioned. Yet, notwithstanding this abundance of instruments, the dance was seemingly regulated wholly by the voice.

Ere dismissing the Fine Arts it must be recollected that goldsmiths’ work and embroidery were then included under this title. In the eleventh century, whatever nay have been the earlier condition of these branches contemporary accounts would indicate an advanced state. We read of embossing and inlaying altars with jewellery, as well as with the precious metals, of gold cups thus wrought and jewelled, of gold and silver images for the altar, and the like. Garments and hangings of silk are described as embroidered with figures of all kinds of animals and flowers, even of men and women, and with portions of sacred history, in the style probably of the Bayeux tapestry. In some of these arts England appears to have surpassed the rest of western and Christian Europe, as the gold and silver vessels carried thence to Normandy by William the Conqueror, and the gold embroidered robes worn by the Anglo-Saxon nobles, who attended him upon his return to his native duchy, are said to have astonished the French Court; and upwards of a century later, some species of gold trimming on the dress of English ecclesiastic, will be found to excite the desires of an Italian Pope. The most admired embroidery is however generally called Eastern; and still, the standard by which the taste of the age must have been formed is to be remembered, in reading contemporaneous eulogies.

To proceed to arts of a different character. An art of war there can hardly be said at that time to have been, and mediaeval writers, John of Salisbury one, lament over its decay since the days of the Romans. In fact, essentially military as must be deemed a system, according to which every foot of land was held by military service, and every dispute between fellow-country­men might lawfully be settled by war between the parties, the genius and organization of feudalism were antipathetic alike to foreign conquest, and to an art, or at least to a science, of war. The limited period for which service was due—for landed vassals usually six weeks, whilst townsmen were seldom bound to accompany an expedition to any distance—rendered such strategy as implies an enlarged scheme of operations impossible; and the attachment and duty of the warriors to their respective lords, rather than to the monarch, was equally obstructive of discipline, as dependent upon subordination. Even a plan of a battle, then perhaps the acme of military skill, was often baulked by the capricious enterprise, or as capricious sullenness of an inferior leader, every feudal lord acting independently. Presence of mind, quick judgment to see and seize every advantage that might offer, with tact to gain and maintain an ascendency over vassals and sub-vassals, over “the soldiers hardy heart,” seem to have been the principal qualities required in a general; courage, personal prowess, and skill in horsemanship as well as in the use of his weapons, in a knight. These weapons were the spear, the sword, and the battle axe, in the management of which, and of his charger, lord and vassal, knight and esquire, daily exercised themselves in the tilt-yard. When these well-trained horsemen were summoned to the field, a certain number, whether esquires, mounted men-at-arms, or mounted archers, were expected to attend upon every knight, forming the complement of what, in reckoning the numbers of an army, was called a lance. Six seems to have been the full complement, which in Palestine rarely exceeded four. There is an idea that some infantry likewise belonged to the complement of a lance, if so, it was probably in addition to these six or four.

But even in this very fullness of feudal development lurked the seed of reaction, or rather of change. When such a knightly phalanx became the principal force of every state, the infantry fell into disesteem, and now many of the poorer freemen, who could not afford to serve on horseback, sought to purchase exemption from a despised service; a commutation, in the shape of a species of tax, that would often be equally desirable to shopkeepers and other townsmen. The feudal superiors, mesne lords and sovereigns, who sanctioned the change, had now to seek substitutes for those whom they had allowed thus to commute their service for money; and these too the circumstances of the times gradually provided. To turn, in the first instance, some three-quarters of a century back, the army with which the Duke of Normandy had invaded England was assuredly not a feudal army; but neither was it the army now wanted. The Norman Barons had refused to undertake the enterprise as vassals’ duty; whereupon the Duke, in lieu of hiring soldiers, made separate bargains with his own vassals and with nobles unconnected with him, promising a certain amount of English booty and English land for a certain amount of assistance; an English bishopric is said to have been bargained for as the price of so many vessels freighted with so many warriors. Even this proceeding seems, when the war was over, to have thrown a pack of unemployed ruffians upon the world, ready to fight for whoever would engage them; they called themselves Brabançons, or Ruptuarii; and these Henry I of England found serviceable in his wars with his brother, Duke Robert of Normandy. According to Grose, he hired them of the Earl of Flanders, who for four hundred marks of silver a year, undertook to provide him five hundred Brabançons or Ruptuarii, each man having three horses. But the crusades opened a supply of a more useful description. In these long, non-feudal, wars, poor knights learned to enter the service of wealthy noblemen and princes, whose vassals they were not; and villeins, enfranchised by their participation in the hallowed enter­prise, were glad to earn their bread as foot soldiers. This change was however only beginning, and still, in the first quarter of the twelfth century, the bulk of the infantry consisted of poor freemen and the poorest vassals. Their arms were the long bow, the cross bow, and the sling. In addition to these various weapons, the Milanese are said to have employed scythe-bearing cars, something, it may be, like those of the ancient Britons; and they, or their ambitious and martial Archbishop Eriberto, enjoy the credit of having, in the eleventh century, invented a sort of rallying point, and stimulant in battle, soon afterwards pretty generally adopted. This was the Carroccio, or city stand and, a humble and worldly imitation of the Ark of the Jews. It was a waggon, drawn by eight sleek, richly caparisoned oxen; in its centre was fixed a tall pole or mast, terminating in a gilt globe, surmounted by a crucifix, and from which floated two white flags. Upon platforms in the waggon were stationed priests, to pray for victory and confess the dying, medical men, physicians or surgeons, alias barbers, indifferently, to dress wounds and tend the wounded, and musicians to “rouse the fray.” The defence of the Carroccio was intrusted to a band of select warriors, and its loss esteemed the very lowest depth of ignominy.

The art of the Engineer seems to have been pretty much upon a level with the General’s. The fortifications of towns and castles, consisting of a wall or at most a double wall, with a few projecting towers, whence the line of assailants might be taken in flank, protected by a deep ditch, and an outwork to the gate called a barbican, could hardly be considered as specimens of science; whilst the machinery for the attack was simply copied, with or without improvement, from what had been employed by the Romans; such as battering engines, engines for hurling large stones, and moveable towers, from the top of which the besiegers could aim their darts into the interior of the besieged place, and which were provided with a draw-bridge, to be let down on to the top of the walls when sufficiently near. Occasionally, but very rarely, mines for destroying the foundations of walls, or procuring access within their circumference, are mentioned. But except Greeks and Arabs few persons were capable of constructing even these engines; and when constructed so little effective were they, that unless taken by surprise, a town or castle seldom appears to have fallen, save by famine or treachery. The Greek fire was the secret of the Greeks and Arabs, unknown even by its effects to western Europe prior to the twelfth century, and appears to have overpowered the Pisans and Genoese with astonishment, when first used against them by the Greeks, AD 1103.

Success in war was in so great a degree dependent upon the goodness of the weapons employed and of the armour protecting man and horse, that the Armourer appears to have ranked nearly with the Engineer. Old Scandinavian legends represent kings and heroes as practising his craft, in emulation of the professional artist, and the most distinguished amongst them as often forging each bis own, most trusty sword. Though no longer so extravagantly honoured, the armourer’s was still so decidedly the first of mechanical arts, as to be entitled to take its place here, as belonging to, if not a branch of, the art of war; and here likewise the Arabs claim pre-eminence, a blade of Damascus having long been the only rival of a Toledo blade.

At sea, war appears to have early assumed a character somewhat more approaching to scientific than on land, owing, it is likely, to the impossibility of either constructing the simplest vessel, or performing the shortest voyage, without some degree of training to the business, or of service at sea being quite as much limited in point of time as on shore. But of the progress in ship-building, or in navigation, at the opening of the twelfth century, very little is known. Old Chroniclers speak of sailing vessels as well as of galleys with benches of rowers; and of the numerous fleets with which the piratical Scandinavians bore desolation to every coast; the very numbers carrying conviction to the modern reader of the small size of those Dragons of the sea. They tell of improvements in ship-building devised by Alfred, to enable the English vessels the better to contend with those of the invaders; and incidental mention occurs of the commercial navies, first of Amalfi, and after the Norman Conquest, when her spirit of enterprise fell with her liberty, of Venice, Pisa, and last of Genoa, that rendered those cities formidable enemies and efficient allies to mighty sovereigns. But what their ships were like, and whether they guided their course by the stars, crept along the shore, or possessed the mariner's compass, no one explains. Royal navies appear however to have been furnished, like armies, by feudal service, though, as before observed, the arrangements must perforce have been different, and the fisheries, which were duly fostered, may have formed a nursery for sailors. In Scandinavia it is known that, prior to the introduction of feudalism, the peasants, as the rent of, or a tax upon, their land, furnished timber and labour for building ships, and served on board them by turns, the Captain, called the Steersman, being the only permanent member of the crew, and he was remunerated with land. But how merchants manned their barks, which were always their own property, we are quite in the dark—possibly with purchased slaves. Some sort of laws for regulating these matters there clearly were, since Henry IV, in a charter granted Pisa in 1080, speaks of “consuetudines quas habent mari;” but what they were is again unexplained.

The art of the civil Engineer appears to have made rather more progress than that of his military brother, mention being found of bridges, of mills of various descriptions, as horse-mills, wind-mills, water-mills, of canals projected, and some, if not all, completed. The Arabs, both Spanish and Oriental, possessed sufficient knowledge of Hydraulics, to construct fountains and canals for that irrigation which, in Spain, is indispensable to agriculture; but how imperfect was even their knowledge appears, in the expensive aqueducts that they laboriously built, as the only means of conveying water across the valleys. Mines were, and had for ages been, worked in all countries in which metals were known to exist, but very rudely and imperfectly; only in Moslem Spain, where such science as then existed was habitually employed in improving the useful arts, was any skill in this department exhibited; there, silver and quicksilver were extracted with tolerable success, and some descriptions of precious stones were found. Gold was procured by washing the sand of rivers; in which no one now thinks of seeking it, as the Rhine and the Main. Some degree of engineering skill still lingered at Constantinople; but the Greek civil Engineers were as inferior as the military to their Arab rivals.

Agriculture, horticulture included, had in the South of Europe, at the opening of the twelfth century, fully recovered the character of an Art. Moslem Spain had by the industry and the skill of the Arabs attained to the highest pitch of cultivation. Abderrahman I had formed a botanic garden, for which he employed travellers to collect plants from all parts of the known world, and the fruit of his care was that, throughout the caliphate, corn and the usual produce of the temperate zone, was intermixed with the sugar cane and such other children of hotter regions, as could be there acclimated. Silkworms were carefully reared there. Of the condition of the recovered Christian provinces of the peninsula less is known; but it may be inferred from the admiration expressed of those in the hands of the Arabs, that the Christian conquerors, even if they were capable of maintaining the previous fertility, which may be doubted, knew not how to repair any damage the land might have suffered whilst the theatre of war. Sicily, which had become a province of Egypt in 827, was equally benefited with Spain by Arab skill and diligence. Irrigation there likewise enhanced the natural fruitfulness of the soil; the sugar cane and the silkworm were added to its indigenous riches, and even to the present day the oldest olive trees are called Saracens. Italy also, even after the ravages of barbarians, and notwithstanding the almost incessant internal warfare, Mr. Hallam conceives to have resembled a garden—in comparison probably with the rest of Europe—during the middle ages, and her present pest, Malaria, to have been consequently confined within a much more limited ranged. It appears certain that the productiveness of Lombardy was, early in the twelfth century, very much increased by the system of irrigation, which the Cistercian monks introduced there. To obtain similar results north of the Alps, would have required superior skill and industry, whilst the return they could hope for, was much less. In Germany, with the exception of Lower Lorrain, in many parts of which the fine soil invited tillage, and then as now luxuriantly repaid it, no such agricultural prosperity had ever existed. East of the Rhine husbandry had been in early ages the business of slaves, as it was in later times of villeins, and probably shared the contempt in which those who exercised it were held. A contempt not unlikely to be enhanced by the respect which the hated and despised Slavonians entertained for the art. They practised it zealously if not scientifically, and from them the Germans appear to have learned it, judging from the fact that the oldest German or Gothic names for some of its chief implements and products, as plough loaf, beer, &c. are Slavonian words. Even when the poorer freemen began to pursue this branch of industry, they would rather incur the same contempt than impart respectability to their new occupation, to do which could only be the work of time: nevertheless when bread became a material part of the food of the Germans the importance of agriculture was felt, and laws were made for its protection. Amongst these were a prohibition to hunt in corn fields after the corn should nave put forth the second leaf; and the denouncing severe punishments against whoever should set on fire, or otherwise injure, orchards or vineyards, or rob a peasant of his cattle; Church Councils, apparently with the view of protecting the poor tiller of the soil, forbade the prospective purchase of a growing crop. The very imperfect state of the art in northern Europe may best be estimated from one fact stated by Mr. Hallam, namely that upwards of 150 years later than the period now under consideration, ten bushels of wheat per acre was in England reckoned an excellent crop. Yet in this state of agriculture, William of Malmesbury speaks of vineyards in the vale of Gloucester, producing wines little inferior to those of France, of course meaning the cheap and acid vin ordinaire.

With respect to manufactures, as early as the ninth and even as the eighth centuries, the Flemings seem to have been celebrated as weavers of woollen cloth; and at the beginning of the twelfth century divers cities of Lower Lorrain, with Ghent at their head, were striving to monopolize the business. From the Netherlands the art spread into France, where, according to some writers, for want of liberty, it failed to prosper, and into the Rhenish provinces, where finding cities similarly constituted with those of Lorrain, and fostered by the charters of Henry IV and Henry V, it throve. Thence it extended to other parts of Germany, and Ratisbon is spoken of as rivalling Ghent In Italy the manufacture for domestic use was universal, and the produce of the looms of Milan, Pisa and Florence, is said to have competed, in fineness and in strength of texture, with those of Ratisbon, though they could not in Roman estimation compare with the woollen cloths of Flanders. The dimensions and fineness of these cloths, as well as the process of dyeing them, were strictly regulated by both sumptuary laws and the bye-laws of the guilds; the peasantry being forbidden to make in their cottages w hat they were forbidden to wear, amongst other things to use any dye but black. The linens of Germany appear to have been already, in the eleventh century, highly esteemed, and such was the value set upon flax weaving in Lombardy, that Padua prohibited the exportation of linseed, ordering it to be sown upon the town lands. Italy moreover wove cotton, imported from Egypt. Silk-weaving appears to have been hitherto confined, in Europe, to the Constantinopolitan empire and the Arabs of Spain and Sicily; and of the success of these last in the manufacture a specimen is said still to exist at Nuremburg, where the Emperor Henry VI deposited a silk Chlamys, or coronation mantle, that he carried away from Palermo, and upon which is embroidered an Arabic inscription, stating that it was wrought at Palermo, by command of King Roger, in the year 1123. In Syria, Egypt, and Arab Spain, silk, linen, and cotton weaving flourished. The art of tanning must have attained to some degree of excellence, since gilt and embossed leather is constantly named amongst the costly hangings of state apartments. It is named, together with embroidered silk hangings, in Donizo’s description of the splendour of the Great Countess. Glass is spoken of as a Venetian manufacture, but whether for mirrors, drinking vessels, or windows, is not stated; possibly being a new art, and only used in one way, no explanation was wanted. Paper had long been made of cotton by the Asiatic Arabs, and foreign nations occasionally procured it from them under the name of Charta Damascena or Charta bombycina. Montfaucon avers that he had seen charters of the tenth century written upon this Charta Damascena; a Papal bull of the ninth, upon the same material, is said to be still extant; and the Hon. Mr. Curzon, in his account of the Levant Monasteries, speaks of a charter written upon this charta bombycina in the sixth century, as extant in the Jesuits’ College at Rome. The Spanish Arabs early invented the substitution of linen rags for cotton, and an Arabic version of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, written upon paper made of linen, bears the date of 1100. The Christians did not imitate this invention till long afterwards, and the supply of paper, whether from Asia or from Spain, must have been scanty, since it did not supersede the abominable practice of erasing ancient writing, in order to commit new matter to the parchment thus rendered a second time blank. That metallurgy was understood, has appeared in what has been said of the manufacture of arms and of goldsmiths’ work. In this, as in other arts, the Arabs took the lead. Their mechanical skill, as early as the eighth and ninth centuries, was equal to producing the clock, described as Haroun Al Raschid’s present to Charlemagne, in which a ball falling upon a cymbal struck the hour, and horsemen came forth in the proper number.

All these manufactures, as well as all kinds of mechanical labour, were strictly regulated, as well by the bye­laws of the different German Guilds and Italian Arti, as by more general legislation. Of the latter, the object was a twofold protection, viz., of the consumer against extortion and of the producer against competition. With regard to the first, e.g., not only was the remuneration of the miller for grinding, and the relation of the price of bread to that of wheat fixed by law, but in many places the baker was ordered to make bread of materials sent him, charging a certain sum for the use of his heated oven and his own labour. Butchers were subject to analogous regulations, with others guarding against the sale of unwholesome meat. In many, if not most places, the exportation of corn or other provisions was absolutely prohibited, a few of the most liberal allowing it when the price was low. Prodigious pains were bestowed upon guarding markets against those bugbears of olden times, forestalling and regrating; for instance, no one who intended to retail his purchases, was permitted to make them until a certain length of time had elapsed after the opening of the market, the end of the period of exclusion being announced by ring of bell. In some places traders were forbidden to ask more than a fixed moderate profit upon the cost price of their wares; and in many, holders of corn were, in time of scarcity, compelled to sell it at a very small advance upon the usual price, whatever might be the real value—a compulsion sometimes violently resisted by proprietors of full granaries.

On the other hand, the interests of the producer were as sedulously watched over. Some of the laws for the protection of the husbandman have already been mentioned. Agricultural states laid a duty upon the importation of grain and other provisions. The official oath of the Parma magistrates bound them, not only to protect native weavers, but to punish the importers of foreign manufactures, and burn their importations. Many towns were protected by their charters against the establishment of certain trades, as bakers, butchers, brewers, &c., within such a distance of their gates, as should allow of competition with the citizens following those trades. The most incomprehensible of these prohibitions is that of exporting chalk and stone, in addition to oil, from Verona.

The whole business of commerce, the exchange of the produce of distant countries and its distribution when exchanged, was then conducted in a manner very different from that of modern times. The trade of Europe with Asia and Africa had, since the decline of Amalfi, been solely in the hands of Venice, until the Crusade, drawing Pisa and Genoa to Syria, led them to encroach upon the monopoly. Wherever these proud cities habitually traded, at least in the Levant, they had factories, where their merchants, with their clerks and factors, dwelt as in portions of their native land, under a Venetian Bailo, a Pisan or a Genoese Consul, who acted as Envoys of their respective cities, as Judges, save in cases of capital crime, and, virtually, as joint sovereigns of the portion of town comprised within the factory. In these factories the corn, salt, linen, and metals of Europe, and the furs of her northern realms, procured as it should seem at Bruges, then a sea-port town, and the great emporium of those regions, were exchanged for the richer produce of the East, even of India, brought by the Persian Gulph to Bagdad, and thence by caravans to the sea-coast. To this lawful and useful traffic, Venice superadded the odious trade of furnishing both Christian and Moslem countries with slaves, and that regardless as to whether the slaves were Christians or misbelievers. The Christians thus sold into slavery to the Paynim, were chiefly villeins, either purchased of their lords or kidnapped; and it may be suspected that the last was the more usual mode of procuring them, from its being specifically reprobated in some of the Church Council denunciations, against the crime of selling Christians as slaves to Mohammedans.

Their purchases in the East, amongst which sugar and Tyrian glass are named, the Italian merchants seemingly carried home to their native cities, and thither flocked the merchants of the rest of Europe, to obtain their supplies of those Oriental luxuries, with which they repaired to the various fairs, where the business of distribution was completed. Occasionally however this part of the transaction was varied or extended, by their visiting great towns upon their way, at some of which they were gladly welcomed, whilst at others the native dealers were protected by prohibitions and restrictions against such alien interlopers. For instance, at Vienna, the passage of Swabian and Ratisbon traders to Hungary was positively forbidden, and travelling merchants in general, were not permitted to sojourn longer than a fortnight; at Cologne, the stay of such strangers was limited to six weeks three times a year, and they might not sell spices to any but shopkeepers; in some parts of England they were forbidden to deal at all with any other class of persons. Eastern Germany seems to have been commercially independent of Italy, carrying on a direct intercourse, by caravans and fairs, with Asia, through the Greek empire, and with Hungary, Poland and Russia.

These fairs, of which, as of markets, mention is made in Flanders as early as the tenth century, and of which, perhaps, those of Leipzig and Frankfort in Germany, and of Novgorod in Russia, may still offer some faint reflexion, were the grand objects of desire to cities and to their lords, who regularly received a toll upon every article sold in the fair; whilst the more rapacious claimed it upon all the goods brought thither, sold or unsold, and the more liberal strove to invite merchants, by building public warehouses for the secure stowage of their merchandize. These fairs were scenes of wealth, splendour and pleasure, but like most institutions and customs of that age, were connected with, and sanctioned by, religion, being usually appointed to begin upon a church holiday, and their opening always preceded by the celebration of mass. Their duration was indefinite and various: those of Aix-la-Chapelle, Passau, Ens, Parma and Ferrara each lasted severally a fortnight.

Still less than such pristine fairs can be compared with the ordinary fairs of the present day, can the travelling merchants who frequented them with their splendid wares, be placed upon any sort of level with our hawkers and pedlars. Howmuchsoever disdained, they were the most opulent, and, with the exception of professed scholars, seemingly the best informed individuals of the age. They travelled with a train of loaded waggons or sumpter horses, and of servants of all descriptions; and in consideration of the risks to which they were exposed from the plundering propensities of knights and nobles, not to speak of vulgar banditti, they were allowed to have arms for the defence of their lives and property, though not to wear them like the well-born. The merchant’s sword was attached not to his person but to his saddle; thus clearly showing that it was allowed solely for defence upon the road. By the beginning of the twelfth century the plunder to which wayfarers were subject was, in orderly times and by orderly nobles, commuted for a heavy but fixed toll, Scotice, black-mail, upon receiving which the noble insured the traveller’s safety through his territories. From payment of such toll, as of all lawfully imposed, pilgrims, ecclesiastics, and the property of cloisters intended for home consumption, were exempt, as being upon religious grounds entitled to general respect and gratuitous protection; so were knights and nobles who protected themselves. It was evidently designed to fall mainly upon traders, to whom it was a welcome compromise; but the guarantee did not extend to those who travelled by night. Still, so great was the danger from disorderly nobles and robbers of all grades, that merchants not only continued to carry arms, but, seeking strength in numbers, frequently travelled in large bodies, resembling Oriental caravans. In such associations for mutual protection some modern writers see the origin of guilds and although their probable earlier existence has been shown, that the merchants’ own guild arose hence is pretty certain; and the strength first sought, for security against outrage, speedily gave birth to such arrogance, that no one, not a member of the Merchants’ Guild, was permitted to sell his goods at a fair.

The population of the Holy Roman Empire, it will be recollected, was anything but homogeneous, consisting of Franks, Burgundians, Goths, Saxons, Bavarians, Swabians, Slavonians, Lombards, Italians (and if its claim to comprehend the whole of Italy be admitted), Greeks, Arabs and Normans, each race having brought its own laws and customs to co-exist with those of the old Roman Empire. The laws subsequently enacted by the Emperor and Diet likewise rather co-existed with, than superseded, the others; and these new laws were obliged to be made for every race in its own land, as for the Saxons in Saxony, for the Lombards in Lombardy, for the provinces won from the Greeks in the Exarchate or at Rome, whilst each principality, in its provincial diet, made laws for itself independently of Emperor and Diet. Moreover, every freeman had a right to choose the code of laws by which he would be governed; if he made no choice he was held to be under that of his forefathers. Women had no such choice, but, subject by birth to the law under which their father lived, passed necessarily upon marriage to their husband’s. Even reigning princesses were not exempt, it should seem, from this obligation.

The chief objects of the laws made and making by the Emperor and Diet in the eleventh and at the opening of the twelfth century, were three: the first, the regulation of the rights and duties of holders of fiefs, and of the relations in which the several members of the political feudal hierarchy—if the familiar modern adaptation of a word, specially and etymologically confined to the priesthood, be admissible in history—stood towards each other; the second, the regulation if not the repression of the incessant private wars or feuds; and the third, the substitution of corporal punishments, capital and secondary, inflicted by public authority, for the system of pecuniary compensation and of private revenge, which, being consonant with the disposition of men, in a low state of civilization, to see in crime rather the wrong to the individual than the offence against society, had so long and almost universally prevailed. Even the portion of the wehrgeld, allotted to the lord or king was assigned him, either as Robertson takes it as the price of protection against private revenge, or as compensation for the loss of a vassal, rather than as a penal fine—a view of the matter from which the right of the individual to redress his own wrongs by waging war against his enemy is a natural, it might be said a necessary, corollary.

It were superfluous as tedious here to detail the various attempts to accomplish the first object, to regulate the complication of a system in which land was held in vassalage, not only, in the ordinary course, of a superior, but of an equal, and even by princes of their own ecclesiastical vassals,—to give stability to the condition of sub-vassals or vavasours—to secure fiefs from alienation or division, or to guard against the detention of lapsed fiefs by mesne lord or suzerain. The only point that can be historically important is the solution of the constantly occurring difficulty of holding land of two different lords, who might take opposite sides in civil broils, of two monarchs who might go to war with each other. The position was not rare, as, to mention only two, the Earl of Flanders was a Prince of the Empire and a Peer of France, the French Earl of Toulouse was a vassal of the Emperor for his marquisate of Provence, and of the Kings of England and Aragon for divers parts of his immense principality; yet it is not a little remarkable that scarcely any mention occurs of difficulty felt upon the subject, except indeed in the case of Raymond, one of those very Earls of Toulouse who did homage to so many sovereigns, but in the first Crusade refused, it is said, to do homage to the Constantinopolitan Emperor, alleging, according to some writers, as one reason, that it was wrong to have more than one Liege Lord; and of the Comte d’Evreux, who being summoned to do homage to Robert Duke of Normandy and Henry King of England, refused to render it to both upon the same ground. It appears that in the regular service of a common sovereign, the vassal of two mesne lords obeyed in person the first summons he received, and sent to the second the men of the fief, held of this latest summoner; or if the summonses came simultaneously, chose which lord he would attend in person. When the two lords mesne or paramount were at war with each other, he either formally renounced his homage to the one in order to serve the other, or avoided the necessity of so doing by serving neither, but sending to both pecuniary compensation for the personal service of himself and his men. It might be supposed that such renunciation of homage would have included the surrender of the fief for which it was due; but it does not appear that any Earl, either of Flanders or of Toulouse, ever thus ceased to hold lands of any of their respective liege lords: and in point of fact it is certain that the Plantagenet Kings of England habitually thus renounced their homage to the Kings of France prior to declaring war against them, without for an instant dreaming of the resignation of their half of France.

The second object was twofold; namely, to regulate, and, as far as might be, to repress, the right of private war; for though its exercise was forbidden by Charlemagne, and by several Church Councils, no one seems to have disputed the freeman’s right of redressing his own injuries. To establish this, lawful feuds were distinguished from unlawful, or, in German phraseology, fehderecht from faustrecht, which may be Englished as feud-right, distinguished from the right of the strong hand. To this end, the causes which could justify private war were carefully specified; a certain number of days or of weeks were required to intervene between the commission of the offence and the commencement of hostilities, which commencement was again to be preceded and accompanied by certain prescribed and inviolable forms. Whatever act of violence infringed upon any of these rules, including, of course, all plunder of peaceable individuals, fell under the description of unlawful faustrecht. For further repression, in the eleventh century, certain periods of the year were appointed, during which, upon religious grounds, all private hostilities were ordered to be suspended. These periods of peace in the South of France, where they originated, were called Treuga Dei, or Truce of God; and in Germany, where they were eagerly adopted, Reichsfriede, or Landfriede, Realm’s peace, or Country peace. Different sovereigns, as they found it practicable, lengthened or multiplied these intervals of truce, during which the only exceptions from the prohibition even to bear arms were in the service of the sovereign and at tournaments. In the beginning of the twelfth century the periods of truce were from Advent to Epiphany, both inclusive; from Quinquagesima Sunday to Whitsuntide, again both inclusive, festival and fast days, and every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; a pretty considerable portion of the year, had its pacific character been, which it scarcely need be said it was not, faithfully observed.

To substitute public, corporal punishment for pecuniary compensation and private vengeance, when this last was the generally acknowledged, and pretty nearly the most valued, right of every freeman, was no easy enterprise; nor had it, at the epoch under consideration, made much progress. It was sought to be insinuated rather than informed, and the choice between the two systems was still left to the injured party. It is averred that, up to a very late date, if not  to the present day, in Persia, a murderer is delivered over to the family of the victim, to be dealt with at their pleasure, and cannot be pardoned without their concurrence. The sanguinary, the savage, the insulting character of the punishments denounced and inflicted, may be in some measure indicative of the temper of the times, when the physical suffering of an enemy was thought a pleasurable sight; mediaeval Christians being, in these respects, notwithstanding their chivalrousness, but little more tender­hearted than the Turkman chiefs, who are reported to have had their prisoners of war slaughtered at the door of their tents, as they sat at dinner, with the blood streaming almost to their seats, which Christians are said to have retaliated. But in the present instance, the cruelty may have been induced by the wish to allure the injured party to choose the new course of legal punishment. Thus torture was habitually resorted to, in order, by rendering death more painful to the criminal, to enhance the satisfaction given the prosecutor; even clemency rarely extended to sparing humiliation, and mockery seemed to be an essential element of secondary punishment. Death, with or without torture, was the legal punishment of murder,—how mean soever the condition of the person slain—of kidnapping, of pertinacious wrongful imprisonment, of heresy, of witchcraft, of outrage to female chastity. The mode of inflicting it was various. When the female to whom violence was offered was a virgin, the offender was buried alive; but so strange ilo the notions of mediaeval legislators, respecting this form of execution, appear, that it is hard to say whether this was, or was not, designed to heighten the doom. It is stated that women, sentenced to suffer death, were invariably buried alive, for the honour of the sex, pro honore muliebri. Poisoners, heretics, sorcerers, and, in Bologna, false coiners and clippers of coin, were burnt to death; and amongst other devices for enhancing the pain of death, Robert Earl of Flanders, in the year 1112, ordered a Knight, who had robbed a poor woman of her two cows, to be thrown, in full armour, into a couldron of boiling water. To all these death-dooms, the right of sanctuary in almost every church and chapel offered less alleviation than might be supposed, inasmuch as the Church, that would not suffer the refugee to be torn from the sanctuary she afforded, did not provide for his support there; ana he might lawfully be starved to death in her bosom. Indeed, Charlemagne strictly forbade the giving food to a murderer in sanctuary.

But perhaps the most startling circumstance of all to modern feelings is, that there appears to have been no public executioner to carry out the frequent and fearful sentence of the law. Mr. Kemble finds, indeed, that Hardicanute had an executioner; but this is clearly the exception. In general, it should seem that the prosecutor supplied his place—a compensation, possibly, for the right of waging war upon him; and Grimm expressly states, that, in default of the prosecutor, the tribunal hade some qf its officers, often the highest, execute its sentence. In some places, it would seem that passing strangers were compelled to perform this revolting office, since specific exemption of pilgrims from such compulsion is extant. And amidst all this barbarism, a Magyar legislator, at the close of the eleventh century, Kalmany, or Kolomon, King of Hungary, is found so much in advance of his age, that, in his code of laws, he pronounces, “Of witches, there is nothing to be said, because there are none.”

Corporal punishments, short of death, bore the same character of cruelty, as maiming, whether simply, as in the case of false coiners, whose usual doom was the loss of a hand or an eye, or, in retaliation, as an eye for an eye, &c. And it may well be doubted whether the legislators, in denouncing these latter penalties, had any consciousness of even great severity, when the customary treatment of prisoners of war is considered: as, e.g., Marchese Bonifazio of Tuscany, whose piety was such, that he submitted to be scourged as a penance for simony, cut off the ears and noses of some prisoners of war prior to releasing them, and was not the less highly esteemed. Other secondary punishments implied insult and degradation. One of the latter kind was carrying a dog a certain distance, to which the highest nobles were liable, and which, as will be seen in the course of the history, was sometimes most deeply felt. But in the case of an ecclesiastic, the dog was changed for what seems the most unaccountable of substitutes with a view to degrading the bearer, namely, a book, most likely a breviary or a bible. Thus, early in the eleventh century, Eriberto, Archbishop of Milan, the inventor of the Carroccio, after vanquishing one of his suffragan bishops and the Marchese di Susa, the prelate’s ally, compelled the lay prince to carry a dog, and the Bishop a book, both barefoot, from a certain distant point to his cathedral. Yet, in direct contradiction to this tendency to degrade, a Graf von Eberstein, is said to have been hanged for robbery, and then honourably buried as beseemed his rank.

This is perhaps the fittest place to mention one or two provisions of the law in different places, as both whimsical, and characteristic of the times. At Freiburg, in Swabia, any person who was wounded, or beaten till he bled, was entitled to ring a certain bell, at the sound of which the twenty-four Schoffen assembled, examined, washed, and dressed his hurts, and cut off’ the hand of his assailant, if detected and caught; but if he had rung the bell upon too trifling a hurt, if he did not bleed, they cut off his own hand instead. By the laws of Jerusalem, if a Christian died under the care of a physician—probably a Jew or an Arab, for the Knights Hospitalers, or those they deputed to attend their hospitals, could hardly be included—the unsuccessful practitioner was to be scourged through the streets, carrying the implements of his profession, then hanged, and his property confiscated. How a physician, under such responsibility, was induced to undertake the cure of Christian patients in dangerous maladies, is not explained. Again, Church Councils forbade monks to practice surgery, because it was attended by the shedding of blood! Other Church Councils, indeed, limited the prohibition to practising for pay, that they might not be diverted from their proper duties, adding a similar prohibition with respect to law. Again, in some places, animals are found subjected to the law; by the Coutumes de Beauvais, if a sow killed a child, that sow, or some other sow, was to be hanged. Upon this same principle, probably, of hanging an innocent sow, if the guilty one could not be found, every solvent merchant was habitually made responsible for his insolvent compatriots. But merchants having more power of self-defence than swine, laws to protect them against this injustice was passed; it should seem not very efficiently, for they were frequently repeated throughout the twelfth and even the thirteenth century.

Tribunals for administering this Draconian code of criminal law and for deciding civil disputes, were always at hand. Every prince of the empire, every considerable nobleman had his Court of Justice, every town had its own, the question there being whether it should be held by the feudal lord’s governor, or by the municipal authorities. The Emperor wherever he went was attended by his Chief Justice—the Arch-Palsgrave till he became too great a potentate, then by his substitute—who during the imperial stay in any place superseded the local magistracy. This imperial tribunal was of course the supreme Court of Justice, and when the Emperor was absent from Germany, appears to have still been presided by the Rhine Palsgrave. Offending Princes of the Empire could be tried only by the Imperial Diet, which, upon conviction, pronounced in succession two degrees of outlawry, termed Acht and Reichsacht, including confiscation of fiefs, and the last even of allodial property, but not it should seem death. That appears to have required a separate sentence, by which the offender was pronounced Vogelfrey bird-free), meaning, according to German antiquaries, not, as might be thought, that he was given up as prey for birds, but that he was free as a bird, and therefore unprotected as a bird, which every man was at liberty to destroy. The vassals of princes were in like manner tried by Provincial Diets, which in all points supplied to their respective principalities the place of Imperial Diets to the Empire Women could in no case appeal to a tribunal save through a husband, or male relation, the reason alleged being, lest they should be frightened into renouncing their rights.

In trials for capital offences no one could be required to bear witness against his lord, his kinsman or his house­hold officer; in cases where life was not at stake no such reserve was allowed. And it is not unlikely that this indulgence, greatly increasing the difficulty of proof by evidence, may have been one reason of the long continued practice of trial by wager of battle and by ordeal, though the compiler of the Assises de Jerusalem finds a very different motive. He says, without trial by wager of battle all right heirs would be dispossessed, so easy would it be to bribe witnesses, and hire false witnesses, had they not to risk their lives in maintaining the evidence they give. The use of these modes of trial was indeed limited to specific cases, and Henry I. of England forbade the judicial combat when the property in dispute was small; but so numerous were those cases in which it was allowed, that to serve as proxy in a judicial combat began to be a regular profession; an awkward one indeed, as, probably to guard against collusion between two proxies, the defeated champion forfeited his hand. The efforts of the Church to suppress, as impious, all these self-entitled appeals to the Judgment of God were incessant; but so completely in vain, that the Popes, after all their censures of priests who should in any way participate therein, found it necessary to connive at the religious sanction, implied in the administration of the sacrament to those who were about to combat in the lists or to undergo the ordeal. Nay, even the inflexible Hildebrand sanctioned a trial by ordeal in an ecclesiastical question, under the pontificate of Alexander II. The monastery of Vallombrosa having charged the Bishop of Florence with simony; he, supported by the Marquess or Duke of Tuscany, by one hundred bishops, and by the Pope himself, denied the charge. Cardinal Hildebrand stood alone in support of the monastery, and with his sanction Father Peter, one of the monks, undertook to prove by ordeal the truth of the accusation. Two piles of wood were arranged with just room to pass between them, and set on fire. He walked slowly along that narrow path betwixt the blazing piles, and came forth unharmed, even his clothes unsinged. Hildebrand, upon ascending the papal throne, rewarded his faith and courage with a bishopric and a cardinal's hat.

There now remains only to collect, and as far as may be to methodize, the little that can be readily found touching the habits of life of the various classes of society, at the opening of the twelfth century. Even in the tenth we learn that Theophano, the Greek wife of Otho II, a talented and accomplished princess, introduced Greek arts and learning into Germany; and managed to sur­round herself with such society, that the erudite Pope Sylvester II, then preceptor to her son Otho III, writes, “When I met with these genial countenances, this Socratic conversation, I forgot all sorrows, and no longer suffered from the sense of exile.” But this refinement, which never, it may be presumed, extended beyond the imperial court, appears to have died away with the Othos: it would be little patronized by the sainted Henry II, and certainly did not co-exist with the disorders of Henry IV’s reign.

It is known that the nobility, with the exception of such as had been either induced or constrained to become citizens of towns, or held offices requiring constant attendance upon the Sovereign, resided wholly in their castles, visiting the Court only when summoned to attend a Diet or invited to some especial festival. But their rural life was very unlike that which affords calm and rational occupation and enjoyment to their posterity. The castles were constructed solely with a view to security against external assault, an object little compatible with domestic comfort. The upper story alone was lighted by what could be called windows, and these looked into the interior courts, those in the external walls being little more than loopholes, calculated to admit some small portion of light and air, and to allow the garrison to take aim at besiegers, without exposing their own persons. From the same object of security, the upper stories appear to have been those not only inhabited by the family, but containing the state apartments ; although it is evident that the great hall, named the Palas, must have been upon the ground floor, since old ballads and romances constantly represent knights and damsels as entering it on horseback. Garden, except in the case of the very highest and greatest, there was probably little more than what is to be seen within the cloisters of a monastery.

In these castles all the duties now performed by upper servants, by the denizens of the Steward’s or House­keeper’s room, were then discharged by the sons and daughters of noblemen, whose menial services were repaid by the best education of the day. When this strange custom was first introduced is not apparent, but it may be conjectured to have been after the contempt entertained for the holders of household offices at Court, i.e. the Ministeriales, had disappeared.

The Lord of the Castle with his knights, esquires, male visitors, and men-at-arms, passed the day either in the tilt-yard, amusing and improving themselves amidst all those military exercises which trained man and horse for the battle field, and for the tournament, or else in the chase. This last was at once their chief delight, and a chief dependence of the Lady of the Castle for the supply of the table; and was everywhere protected by laws of considerable severity, though somewhat less cruel than those of the Normans in England. The meals were taken in the great hall, the Lord and his company at the same board with, though separated by a decided line of demarcation from, the men-at-arms, and even the menial attendants. The evenings appear to have been spent in drinking, and listening to the songs or recitations of any wandering minstrel, whom the good fortune of the inhabitants of the castle might have brought to its gates.

A diligent, if perhaps, like many Germans, somewhat visionary inquirer into historical antiquities, Leo, whose opinion is assuredly entitled to respect, has recently started the very novel idea that, in Germany at least, the Lady of the Castle with her female train, noble and menial, did not habitually grace the table, or share in the amusements afforded by minstrels. He asserts that hospitably welcomed and entertained guests often left the castle without having had a sight of their noble hostess, who, with her daughters and handmaidens, remained secluded in her Kemenate, as her separate apartments, her Gynaeceum or Harem, which last literally means sanctuary were denominated. At first sight these notions might be supposed applicable to an earlier state of society, prior to the development of chivalry; but Leo expressly assigns this habitual seclusion of women to the whole period, from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, both inclusive. He supposes it to have been borrowed, through the Catalonian vassals of the Empire in the Arelat, from the Spanish Arabs, amongst whom the seclusion of women was by no means as strict as in Asia and Africa, and seems to have been almost as much a testimony of respect as of jealousy. That in Germany this seclusion, if it ever existed, was not dictated by feelings of either mistrust or contempt towards the secluded sex, appears from their presence being indispensable upon any and every specially festive occasion, and might be inferred from the lofty position in which women are during this period occasionally found in various countries of Europe. As for instance, in the eleventh century in Spain, Sancha Queen of Leon, and Adelmondis Countess of Barcelona appear conjointly with their husbands presiding over assemblies of nobles, prelates, and judges, conjointly with them influencing the reforms of the laws of the kingdom and county respectively, with which those assemblies were engaged. Margaret the sister of Edgar Atheling, and wife of Malcolm, King of Scotland, is found arguing a theological question in an assembly of nobles and prelates, and her husband, translating her Anglo-Saxon speech for the benefit of those Celts who did not understand the language The Great Countess owed to her birth the high station which her abilities dignified, but in the preceding tenth century, the learned Hedwige, niece to the Emperor Otho I, owed a similar station, to which she had no hereditary right, wholly to similar abilities and virtues. Her husband, Burkhardt, Duke of Swabia, having committed the government of the duchy to her during, a somewhat long absence, she acquitted herself so much to the satisfaction of the vassalage, that upon his death (leaving no children) she was allowed to retain possession of the principality for the remainder of her life; and that, although by Swabian or Alleman law women were never out of pupillage. To conclude, in Italy wives and daughters of Professors are, throughout the period in question, said to have occasionally supplied the place of their husbands or fathers in the lecture room of a High School, whilst in Wales, women voted in the public assemblies, and might divorce a husband for many causes, amongst others for any loathsome disease

To return to the German ladies at the opening of the twelfth century. If the inordinate addiction of their male compatriots of all classes to drink in those days be taken into consideration, it may perhaps be thought likely that the seclusion was the desire of the women themselves. To such a length was this devotion to spirituous liquors carried, that not only did they remain many nights and days without moving from the scene of their orgies, but they actually had patron Saints of intoxication; whilst amongst the Slavonians, now blending gradually with their Teutonic conquerors, during their paganism, sobriety had, upon a certain festival been held sacrilege. From such companions women might well fly to the Kemenate; and assuredly, when the utter disregard of decency and morality in the earliest prose tales transmitted to a more refined age is recollected, it is pleasing to think that female ears were, and desired to be, unpolluted by such narratives, that the noble dame and her maidens were content rather to gossip in simple dullness over the distaff, the loom, and the embroidery frame, then the occupation and the pride of the highest of the sex.

Be this as it may, the festive occasions that certainly blended the female with the male portion of the castle household, and assembled visitors of both sexes, were of frequent occurrence. They were sometimes designed to celebrate such incidents of family life as are still usually so celebrated; the knighting of the eldest son of a prince or great lord, well corresponding to the coming of age of the heir in modern times. Church festivals, the founding of a new church or abbey, and the like, gave birth to many, in addition to tournaments, which indeed were oftener given upon such events than independently. The splendid magnificence, the lavish expenditure characterizing such occasions, leave all modern ideas of extravagance far behind, whilst strangely out of keeping with the absence of what, to modern refinement, seem the commonest decencies and conveniences of life. Not less so with the apparent excessive frugality of every day existence amongst wealthy traders, amongst knights, and even nobles, below the highest rank.

Some especial instances of wanton profusion that have been admiringly recorded, occur later in the century, and will be described in their proper place. Here it may suffice to remind the reader of the splendid hangings, plate and jewellery, for the decoration of chapels, oratories, state apartments, and the table, which have been mentioned relatively to the condition of the arts; adding that Countess Matilda’s magnificence in all these. respects is spoken of as actually superlative, and that her contemporary, San Piero di Damiani, complains bitterly of his brother prelates, who hid their walls behind such pompous clothing, i.e, the embroidered silk, or embossed and gilt leather, hangings, and deformed their mitres with profuse jewellery. The banquets given upon all festive occasions are represented as most sumptuous, though it may be suspected that the sumptuosity refers mainly to their profusion. This suspicion rests upon incidental statements, such as, e.g. an account of the foundation of a new abbey, or abbey church, when the business began upon the Sunday, with appropriate religious rites, and lasted with sports of various kinds, through the week. Upon such an occasion, an Abbot of Croyland is said to have sumptuously entertained at dinner five thousand persons of all ranks, from the Earl and Countess down to day labourers, who had assembled to offer contributions to the hallowed work, according to their means, some grants of land, others gratuitous labour, and to celebrate the laying of the first stone with the usual festivity and pastimes. Again, the wedding banquet of the Great Countess at her second marriage is stated to have lasted twelve hours. And at the most sumptuous of these feasts, the company being divided into couples of a lady and a knight, one plate and one cup served each couple, whilst rushes then and long afterwards supplied the place of a carpet. Nor could the rushes really be clean, since the new were strewed over the old, with whatever refuse and dirt they might chance to harbour, just as a fresh layer of straw is thrown over a farm-yard. More akin to the latter than to the former part of the account, or to the portraiture of Matilda’s magnificence, is the performance of a dance by women and bears at her wedding banquet. After naming such an exhibition at the nuptial feast of a mighty princess and patroness of letters, it seems scarcely worth adding that a combat between bears and naked men smeared over with honey, rivalled bear-baiting among the recreations that delighted the highest and gravest, as well as the lowest and rudest, of the male sex.

The progress of chivalry from its birth to its full maturity, to the complete development of the high spirit of honour and courtesy, that, scorning the surprise upon which chiefly or solely the crafty barbarian relied, gave long notice not only of future hostilities, but of time and place, almost of the manner in which it was designed to offer battle, would naturally be unnoticed at the time, and now eludes investigation. In many parts of the world some kind of ceremonial has accompanied the investing the boy with the dignity and responsibility of manhood; and the process by which this rude ceremonial was ultimately converted into the splendidly important solemnity, with all its symbolical and typical rites, by which knighthood was conferred upon the sons of kings, princes, and nobles, would again be too gradual to attract contemporaneous observation. To receiving knighthood in this regular and religious form, noble birth was indispensable. The honour might indeed be conferred by the sovereign upon men of humble origin, in recompense of distinguished merit,—of some brilliant exploit; but it could be thus conferred by none of inferior dignity to the sovereign, was unaccompanied by those rites, and did not place the son of the low born knight upon a level with those of knightly race; whilst passing over that son, it did, whimsically enough, so exalt his children, the grand­children of the individual knighted; perhaps as presumed to be born after the dignity was in the family.

The rise and progress of tournaments it is equally difficult to trace. Some sort of mock fight seems at all times and in all places to have been an indispensable element of the amusements of the stronger, the pugnacious sex. It is found in the games that honoured the obsequies of Patroclus, as in the periodical Olpmpic contests, and in the sanguinary pleasures of the Roman amphitheatre; or, turning from classical antiquity, in the martial sports and exercises that enlivened the Teutonic forests; the development of which afforded the mock fight said to have graced the meeting of the Carolingian brothers, Lewis the German and Charles the Bald, at Strasburg; whilst the mock fight and military exercises by which Henry the Fowler, in the tenth century, trained his newly-formed cavalry to resist and repel the Magyars, may be considered as the immediate parents of the daily practice in the tilt-yard, which in its turn would as naturally give birth to the idea of repeating that practice in larger companies, and. as occasions for festive meetings. Upon the continent tournaments were rapidly increasing in form, splendour and frequency at the opening of the twelfth century, though as yet unknown in England. Banquets and dancing usually closed the day after the contests of the morning. The last day was generally allotted to martial sports and exercises for the lower orders, as cudgel playing, running at the Quintain, contests in archery, wrestling, quoit hurling, running races, and the like; sports that also enlivened fairs, church holidays, &c., at all of which the higher classes were spectators; thus in a manner participating in the pleasures of their inferiors, even as those inferiors were admitted to behold and admire the skill of their Lords in the jousts. The Church denounced tournaments as a wicked, because wanton, risking of human life, and that the denunciation was by no means groundless will appear in course of this history. But ecclesiastical censures, and those Papal thunders which few monarchs attempted, and fewer were able, to resist, proved impotent when opposed to the spirit of the age.

The Church appears to have been equally impotent against the fashions of the day, baffled in its attack alike upon the social dance, the hired rope dancers, and buffoons, that enlivened every such festive meeting—rope dancing especially was denounced as a deadly sin—and upon the whims that governed dress, all of which, unaccountably enough according to the opinions of a later age, were made topics of religious reprobation. Every reader of history is acquainted with the fruitless zeal of the clergy against the shoes of which the pointed toes were turned up and chained to the knees; the inconvenience of which might have been supposed sufficient to render the fashion short-lived, failing to do so, most likely, only because the attacks upon the troublesome points endeared them to the wearers. A similar reason might, considering the probable state of the floors, have induced the ladies to shorten the trains, that, equally with the turned-up shoes, provoked ecclesiastical ire. A Bishop of Thérouanne is reported to have, from the pulpit, thus addressed the obstinate wearers of long trains: “Women, had God intended you to sweep the streets he would have furnished you with the means of so doing.” That the same argument would apply to the use of every implement, and even to the wearing of clothes, does not seem to have occurred either to the reverend prelate or to his refractory flock. For refractory the ladies were, and continued to sweep streets and banquet halls. Equally refractory proved the male wearers of long hair, who were yet more vehemently assailed. A Church Council in 1099 commanded all priests, if a long-haired man should enter church during service, to interrupt the holy rite, and admonish the offender, that he entered the sacred edifice in defiance of the will of God, and therefore entered it to his own damnation: further forbidding them even to officiate at the burial of any individual, pertinaciously retaining locks of such sinful lengths. Even the philosophical Archbishop Anselmo is said to have refused his benediction to such atrocious criminals. Whether similar zeal were displayed against another fashion of the day, pretty much confined to the male sex, and chiefly to the portion born in France, to wit, that of artificially changing the colour of the hair, especially dyeing black locks of a flaxen or golden hue, does not appear. Generally the clergy censured the dress of both sexes, and censured in vain; which, with the remark that the offending fashions were most cultivated in France and England, least in Lombardy, and moderately in Germany, may suffice upon this topic.

In Italy, sumptuary laws were made to repress the luxurious expenditure of the citizens, but seem little called for when it is discovered that the very best non- castellated houses in towns were thatched, that a piece of pine-wood supplied their evening light to the wealthiest of this class, who deemed a single joint, or indeed any form of flesh meat, too wanton a pampering of the appetite to be indulged in more than twice a week. Is it worth adding that trusses of straw formed the seats of the students in the lecture room of colleges? To lessen the expense of funerals, which, with their banquetings and hired mourners, appear to have resembled Irish wakes, interment was ordered to take place within twenty-four hours after death. Another sumptuary law, if it should not rather be called, a police regulation, of which there were many with sanitary objects, forbade both the frequenting of taverns by any except travellers, and gambling generally. But it was powerless as the church efforts to reform dress; the taverns were thronged, and gambling was universal.

Little more can be gathered as to the habits and condition of the non-noble at this period, but much may be inferred from the immense chasm then separating the different classes. In Germany a middle class did not as yet exist, though in the course of this history it will be seen to arise there, and on both sides of the Alps to make considerable progress.

With respect to general character it may be observed that the feudal system and spirit were peculiarly calculated to correct those vices which had branded, and indeed caused, the degeneracy of the Roman Empire; to wit, falsehood, ingratitude, treachery, and the very exaggeration of tyranny. By strongly marking the relative duties of Lord and Vassal, it awoke in the inferior a sense of the dignity of manhood, which, whilst it preserved Europe from Oriental slavery, gave birth to fidelity, and through fidelity to honour. That this honour, even knightly honour, in so far as it implies scrupulous veracity, had not yet attained to the lofty tone of a later age, to which perhaps somewhat more of general enlightenment and refinement may be indispensable, is apparent, not only from the conduct often related without seeming consciousness of its being objectionable, but from that ascribed to heroes of romance. Equivocation, or at least “paltering in a double sense, keeping the word to the ear,” not to or in the spirit, it may be remembered, enables the frail as fair Isolda to pass the ordeal unscathed, and of such paltering a whimsical instance occurred about the time at which this history opens. A conspiracy being formed to murder the King of Denmark, the conspirators laid themselves flat upon the ground to arrange their plot and pledge themselves to each other, in order that, if suspected and questioned, they might conscientiously swear that neither sitting nor standing had they so conspired.

The especial virtue of the age was charity, which was held to extinguish sin, even as water quenches fire. One fruit of this charity was the establishment of hospitals for the relief of “all the ills that flesh is heir to.” Scarcely any town was destitute of such institutions, endowed by monarchs, princes, prelates, nobles, or opulent citizens, often including an eleemosynary inn, also called an hospital, where poor wayfarers were lodged, fed, and clothed. These hospitals were for the most part attached to monasteries, that the souls of the patients might be duly-cared for as well as their bodies. But Lazarettos, or hospitals for lepers, were founded unconnected with cloisters, and served by a lay confraternity, who lived together monastically, under a Master, or Rector, with an officiating priest attached to them.

This preliminary sketch of the state of the Holy Roman Empire at the opening of the present history, cannot perhaps be more fitly terminated, or the character of the age with its ignorance of all refinement, its violence, intense passion, and, notwithstanding some loquacity and unconsciousness of bathos, its poetic spirit, better exemplified, than by an illustrative anecdote or two, and a translation of one of the forms of anathematizing the violators of church rights, recognized or assumed.

In the first quarter of the twelfth century died a Margrave of Misnia without children, but leaving his wife far advanced in pregnancy. The collateral heir denying that she was in a state to authorize hopes of a lineal heir, accused her of intending to impose a spurious child upon the vassalage, and claimed the margraviate. The widowed Margravine thereupon assembled the immediate vassals of the principality, presented herself before them upon an elevated platform where she was seen by all, and there dropped her garments sufficiently to display the enlargement of her person, that supported the truth of her assertion. The collateral pretender was immediately rejected, and the birth of her child patiently awaited.

The other anecdote relates to that Archbishop of Cologne who, by craftily stealing the infant monarch, Henry IV, from his mother’s care, possessed himself of the regency. Archbishop Hanno being visited at Easter by the Bishop of Munster, one afternoon ordered his servants to procure a ship in which he and his guest might take an excursion upon the Rhine. The archiepiscopal servants selecting a vessel, the property of a Cologne merchant, that was loaded and ready to sail as soon as the holidays should permit, arrogantly ordered her to be unloaded for the accommodation of the Prince­Archbishop. The owner’s son, a spirited youth, opposed their proceedings, his friends joined him, and a scuffle ensued, which, the populace taking part with their towns­men, speedily became a serious insurrection. The two prelates fled by a secret passage to the Cathedral, and thence to the house of a favourite Canon, whom Hanno had permitted to make a private postern in the city walls. By this they escaped, whilst the rioters stormed palace and cathedral, broke the neck of an old pretended prophetess by flinging her from the city walls, hung an archiepiscopal officer, and the like, for all of which they claimed the Emperor’s thanks, the prelate being his enemy. At the head of his vassals Hanno recovered the city, scourged, blinded and exiled the known or suspected rioters, and cancelled the city charter, whereupon Cologne, robbed of her rights and liberties, became a desert. Upon his death-bed, impelled as he said by a dream, he restored the charter.

Offences against the Church were in those ages of violence very frequent, whenever the sovereign was not strong enough to compel obedience to the law, and in Italy were mostly accompanied with insult and mockery, too gross as well as too blasphemous to be more than alluded to. The denunciation of a Prince-Bishop of Liege against all persons guilty of such offences runs thus. “Accursed be they within doors, accursed abroad, accursed in every place where they shall stand, or walk, or sit, or lie; accursed eating, accursed drinking; accursed be their food and their liquor; accursed be they sleeping, accursed waking; accursed be the earth they till, accursed their labour, accursed the fruit of their land; accursed be their going in and going out; accursed be they from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot! Be their wives widows and childless! May God strike them with indigence, hunger, fever, frost, heat, foul air and toothache! May God strike them with blindness, idiocy, and raving madness! May they grope at midday as the blind grope in darkness! The Lord persecute them till they perish from the face of the earth! May the. earth swallow them alive like Dathan and Abiram! May they go down alive into Hell, and there suffer with Judas, the betrayer of our Lord, with Pilate, Herod, and other malefactors, unless they repent, and make satisfaction to the Church. So be it! So be it!