MEDIEVAL HISTORY LIBRARY

BOOK III.

HENRY VI—PHILIP—OTHO IV.

CHAPTER V.

Political, Intellectual and Social State of the Holy Roman Empire and Countries therewith connected, at the close of the Twelfth Century.

The death of Henry VI falls so near the end of the twelfth century, and many reasons, that will appear as the history proceeds, make the interruption of the narrative at the year 1200 so inconvenient, that a retrospective survey of the progress, political, intellectual, and social, which the last three quarters of that century had produced, may best find its place here,—a survey that need not now occupy the time which was indispensable to presenting the condition of the world, or of the Holy Roman Empire, at the commencement of the period.

The general position of the European states has been so apparent in the course of the narrative, that a very few words will suffice for this topic. In the western peninsula, Mussulman Spain, though much diminished, was united and powerful under the already mentioned Almohades; whilst the Christian portion was split into five kingdoms—Castile, ruled by Alphonso VIII, Leon, by Alphonso IX, Navarre by Sancho VII, Aragon, including the county of Barcelona, by Pedro II, and Portugal, by Sancho I; all at war with each other and with the Almohades. France was gaining strength and importance under the politic Philip Augustus, although her western provinces were subject to the English crown, and most of her southern owed homage to the Emperor and the King of Aragon, as their respective suzerains. England, at the epoch of Henry VI’s death, still gloried in her lion-hearted monarch, however burthened and oppressed by his ransom and his subsequent wars; and, although she lost him before the end of the century, John had not as yet had time to weaken or disgrace her. In Denmark, Canute VI had taken advantage of the Crusade, and Henry VI’s Sicilian affairs, following upon Frederic Barbarossa’s Italian wars, fully to emancipate himself from vassalage to the Emperor.

Scandinavia was still unfelt in European concerns, save as the heathenism still lingering there, and confirming a general refractoriness in regard to Church discipline, troubled the Popes. Russia, under her Grand-Prince, was gradually assuming the form of a more regular monarchy; whilst Poland grew daily weaker from division amongst brother Dukes. In Hungary, Bela III had conquered Bosnia and part of Bulgaria. At Constantinople the usurper Alexius III revelled and trembled; whilst Servia became independent. With the condition and position of the Syro-Frank states and of the most important of their Mussulman neighbours, the reader of the preceding narrative is already acquainted.

The progressive development of the reciprocal relations of the emperor, the princes of the Empire, the towns, German and Italian, and the pope, having been traced in the narrative, a few words will bring the actual state of those relations before the reader. The complication, through the Intermixture of feudal relations, resulting from princes seeking to increase their private possessions, by taking fiefs in vassalage of their equals and even of their own vassals, was gaining ground. Not only had the Duke of Saxony and Bavaria held the stewardship of a Tyrolese cloister under his own Bavarian vassal, the Bishop of Brixen, but the Emperor held, personally, the office of Truchsess or Sewer to the Prince-Bishop of Bamberg, with the fiefs attached to it, and hereditarily in vassalage under the Prince-Archbishop of Maine, Selegenstadt, which he transmitted to his lineal successors. In France this was carried still further, Philip Augustus actually holding lands of his lay vassal, the Comte de Sancerre.

Still more had the hereditary principle, which all sought to establish for themselves, whilst refusing, to the utmost of their power, to admit it for either superiors or inferiors, gained ground, and, in proportion as it did, had the institutions of the Empire acquired stability. The emperors had established it in regard to the subvassals, in order to strengthen them against the oppression of their mesne lords, and thus secure in them an efficient support against the great vassals who aspired to independence. The great vassals had, practically, so well established the right in regard to their own principalities, that they set little value upon Henry VI’s offer to legalize it, if to be simultaneously recognised as legal in regard to the crown. Whilst usually willing to gratify a sovereign, against whom they were not in rebellion, by electing his heir, even the baby heir of an Emperor in the prime of manhood, as in the case of Henry VI, they desired to retain the power of giving or refusing the Empire. Nevertheless, it should seem that they would in the end have acceded to Henry’s proposal of admitting this principle as the law of the Empire, but for the determined opposition of the spiritual princes, none of whom had anything to gain thereby, whilst the three predominant Archbishops of Mainz, Treves, and Cologne had much to lose. Regardless of all such considerations, the Pope imperatively commanded the whole body of the clergy to oppose an innovation, that would be fatal to the papal pretension of giving the Empire, and the inferred supremacy.

In Italy but few great vassals remained, and these, though Guelphs might be found amongst them, were, generally speaking, more disposed to support the habitually absent emperor, than the habitually present pope, or the cities. But of the few still fewer were influential. The Italian bishops had, with scarcely any exception, lost all feudal authority over their dioceses, or rather over the respective cities that gave name to, and really governed, each several diocese.

The progress of the cities has in like manner been apparent, as well the actual republican independence attained by most Lombard and Tuscan cities, as the growing importance of the German, marked by the partial admission of their representatives into the Diets. The progress of the latter, if slow, was gradual, and as a whole nearly uninterrupted. The emperors, it has been seen, valued and favoured them, both as sources of prosperity and as their assured support against the troublesome great vassals. That some princes had likewise become sensible of the pecuniary benefit to be derived from wealthy cities, has been seen in the conduct of the Dukes of Zäringen, as in the chartered rights and privileges which the Earl of Holstein and Henry the Lion vied with each other, and with Frederic Barbarossa, in showering upon Lubeck, according as each, in turn, was master of that seaport town. But none were more steadily diligent than the archbishops of Cologne in seeking to promote the trade and prosperity of their respective cities. And if some towns throve under the fostering care of great princes, others again were benefited by the very disgust their turbulent ambition excited in their mesne lords; many of whom, shrinking from the annoyance, forsook their urban fortresses, and retired to their country castles, leaving a burgrave or a steward to occupy the castle and rule the city as he best could; and with him it was of course easier to contend than with the still honoured Lord. Under these circumstances almost all large German towns, in Lower Lorrain even villages, had obtained some portion of self-government, often including the administration of civil, and sometimes of criminal justice; for those most highly favoured, even in capital cases, then the grand object of civic ambition. But all this authority was hitherto wholly confined to the city patricians, whom the landed nobility esteemed but little superior to the shopkeepers and artisans, whom they, on their part, as thoroughly disdained. The democratic element had in Germany hardly appeared, even in those provinces which ever took the lead in democracy as in industry, to wit, the Lotharingian. A revolt of the Flemish operatives against their masters had indeed occurred in 1164, but its motives are not clearly known, and it w as quickly appeased through the reconciliation of the adverse parties, as mediated by Earl Theodore—known to German history as Graf Dietrich, and to French as Comte Thierry—the indefatigable Crusader, who in that character has been introduced to the reader. His son Philip was, like him, a great patron of his cities; but in very few, even of these, had an inferior class as yet attempted to intrude into municipal offices. The organization that afterwards afforded them the means of so doing, that of guilds, was however daily becoming more general.

The progress of the Italian cities, if less permanent, had been far more rapid. The moral action of a southern climate upon society would seem to be, if not similar, yet in some sort akin, to its physical action upon the animal frame. If it “mar” the woman by making the school-girl “a happy mother”, it also mars society by committing its guidance to the unbridled impetuosity of juvenile inconsiderate impulse, instead of to the calmly vigorous judgment of ripe—there perhaps it might be all the better were it over-ripe—manhood. The Italian cities, in lieu of seeking the redress of specific abuses and grievances, the grant, or recognition of specific rights, endeavoured at once to throw off all authority of the emperor, whilst most fully acknowledging his sovereignty, which they continued to own near a century longer. In this seemingly anomalous attempt, however, after a hard and sanguinary struggle, they had succeeded. The Peace of Constance left them really vassal republics, that, in one way or another, exempted themselves from all the services and duties of vassalage, but were very loyal to the Emperor if he sought not to inforce his rights. One main source of heart-burning was done away with in the sate of the royalties, of which various Lombard cities, and especially Milan, had been wont so vehemently to complain: but which now, submitting to the sentence of the Doctors of law, they recognised as lawfully belonging to the Emperor, and purchased of him as they could best make their several bargains; generally for a fixed annual payment, but occasionally by a sort of barter. Thus Milan, for instance, seems to have obtained the right of electing her Podesta in return for the promise of men, money, and influence to assist the Emperor in retaining possession of the Matildan heritage—a happy exemplification, by the way, of the nature of the friendship between the Popes and the Lombard cities. It is somewhat curious that the Podesta, when thus elected by herself, as the municipal substitute for the Archbishop, —still ex officio Conte di Milano—thence entitled for his year Conte di Milano, and signing every sentence of death in the prelate’s name, was still considered and treated by the Milanese as an Imperial Officer.

The election or nomination of this Podestà was now the chief, if not the only, bone of contention, betwixt the Emperor and the Lombard cities; and the position of this temporary despot was one of the strange peculiarities of the age and country. He was, it will be remembered, necessarily an alien, that is to say, the native of another city or district, debarred from bringing with him wife, child, or any near relation, as likewise from marrying, or contracting any familiar acquaintance, in the town that he well-nigh arbitrarily governed. Even the possibility that the messenger, sent to invite the chosen Podesta to this despotism of a year, should thereby gain his good will, was guarded against by commonly employing a monk in that capacity. In some places the Podestà was required to bring with him secretaries, or whatever instruments of government he preferred, judge and gaoler inclusive, paying them out of his own salary, and in this case they were all insulated like himself. In other towns he was expected to choose his subordinates, from amongst his temporary subjects, and in many was obliged to content himself with those whom he found in office. The insulation was universal; other precautions against the Podestà’s using his brief despotism disagreeably to his temporary subjects, varied in different places. Many towns required him to deposit a sum of money as security for his good behaviour, and to remain some certain time after the expiration of his year’s reign, to await, either the preferring of private complaints against him, or the sanction of his government by one of the city Councils—which do not appear to have immediately gained any other increase of authority—ere he received back his own deposited money with his salary, or was permitted to return home. In other places the citizens contented themselves with the remedy of ill-treating a Podestà who rightfully or wrongfully, displeased them; and though the Ferrarese do not appear to have inflicted anything beyond a severe flogging upon their offending Podesta, the length to which this ill-treatment occasionally went has been seen in the loss of his teeth by a Podestà of Bologna. Yet, notwithstanding the certain annoyances and the contingent evils attached to the post, the greatest Italian noblemen were eager to fill it, the more prudent often demanding hostages for their safety. The salary was commonly high; besides which, a furnished palace with a well supplied cellar and kitchen, was provided for the use of this ephemeral monarch. Dependent towns, if allowed to elect their Podestà, were obliged to choose him from amongst the natives of the sovereign city; but in general the Podesta of that sovereign city named all the magistrates, this the highest included, of her dependent allies: thus, as an imperfect sort of mesne superior, assuming the right hardly conceded to the acknowledged Lord Paramount, the Emperor. Almost everywhere, it will be observed, had Podestas by this time superseded Consuls, as Municipal Chiefs, the latter title being now mostly confined to heads of trades, and the like. Elections of all public officers were becoming more and more complicated; but as the nature of that complication has been seen in the election of the Grand-Master of the Knights Templars, and it attained to almost ideal perfection in its fulness of intricacy at Venice in the course of the next century, any further description may be reserved until the time for developing the Venetian form of election shall arrive.

Even in Italy, democracy, though now becoming turbulently impatient of a subordinate position, had not hitherto materially encroached, save in a few places, upon the privileges of the higher classes. The associations of the different trades, severally, as Arti, under their respective Consuls, were, however, daily becoming more general, and everywhere offered the democracy the means of inforcing its pretensions. At Florence, where from the moment the feudal yoke was broken the democratic principle prevailed, this organization had already established a very popular constitution; the whole government being in the hands of the Consuls of the five Arti maggiori or principal trades, conjointly with three Consuls of Justice and two of War, all elective. At Milan, associations amongst the lower classes, for military purposes, every trade having its own Gonfalone or banner, under which to assemble for war or for revolt, were evidently tending the same way.

The contest between the Emperors and the Popes appeared in some respects to have changed its character, because the subjects in dispute were different, but showed itself, when viewed under a larger aspect, unaltered in spirit. The aggression was still on the Papal side; the pontiffs, who now found the papacy emancipated from all dependence upon the Empire, striving to consummate the triumph of their predecessors, by subjecting the Imperial crown to the Tiara: the monarchs now, as before, strug­gling to retain prerogatives, habitually enjoyed by their predecessors. This is allowed by many modern writers of the liberal school, at least by such as aspire to the epithet of unprejudiced.

Gregory VII first disputed the Emperor’s right of participation, at least, in the election of a Pope, and attempted to explain the oath taken by the Emperor at his coronation as implying temporal subjection. An analogous aggressive character marked the latter conduct of Adrian IV, and nearly the whole of Alexander III’s, to Frederic I. The Emperors, on the contrary, appear to have gradually and reluctantly, but entirely, abandoned all idea of direct interference in papal elections. If Frederic supported anti-popes against the pontiff recognised by the Church as the legitimate successor of St. Peter, he neither took part in the double election that began the schism, nor did he even presume to choose between the rival popes, objectionable to him as one of them must have been. He respectfully summoned a Church Council to decide which of the two was lawfully elected. In like manner was Celestin III the aggressor—through his adoption of his predecessor Clement III’s measures—in his dissensions with Henry VI; inasmuch as Clement sanctioned, if he did not promote, Tancred’s usurpation of the recognised birth­right of the Empress Constance; although Henry’s rapacity, cruelty, and sacrilegious injustice towards the Crusader Richard, ere long transferring the blame to him, has saved Celestin from censure. No pretension ever advanced, had the Popes abandoned. They still asserted that the empire was their free gift; because it was only after his coronation as emperor by the Pope, that the German monarch was entitled to call himself the Head of Christendom. Towards the close of the twelfth century this pretension was so far suffered to slumber, that the aged Celestin did not advance it against the formidable Henry VI; but it was to guard against the slumber’s becoming extinction, that he opposed and thwarted that Emperor’s endeavours to render the crown hereditary. But the supposition that Celestin excommunicated Henry in resentment of his having assumed an Imperial sovereignty over other monarchs, in bringing Richard before the Diet, rests upon a misunderstanding of the nature of the Papal claim, chronologically at least. These Popes wished the Emperor to be sovereign of kings, but subject to them. This view did not change much before the middle of the following century. In the twelfth it was the Crusader, as such under especial Church protection, not the independent king, that Henry sinned by imprisoning.

The original ground of dissension between the temporal and spiritual authorities, the Emperor’s long-undisputed right to appoint prelates, seemed to be forgotten. No Emperor, not even the despotic Henry VI, attempted to interfere with episcopal election, save as authorized by the Calixtine Concordat, though he, and all of his race, resisted the papal interpretation of that treaty, to which, as the price of his crown, Lothar had submitted. Other monarchs, unbound by that treaty, admitted or rejected the papal pretensions according to the relative positions and tempers of pope and king. So, for instance, Henry I of England ended, temporarily at least, his long contests with Pascal II, Calixtus II, and his own Primate Anselmo, upon this subject, by a compromise not dissimilar to that Concordat. So William the Lion, King of Scotland, on the other hand, after an obstinate struggle with the obsti­nate Alexander III, carried his point, virtually, though not formally, under the feebler Lucius III. The King had appointed his Chaplain to the vacant archbishopric of St. Andrew’s; the Chapter rejected his nominee, electing a different person; and Alexander supported the Chapter. William banished whoever should obey the Papal Bull; and Alexander, besides excommunicating him individually, laid the whole kingdom under an interdict. Lucius III put an end to the fierce quarrel, by claiming the nomination under such circumstances, and conferring the see, by his Papal authority, upon the royal Chaplain. Whilst in Sicily, the usurper Tancred was forced to pay for the Papal protection he enjoyed, by surrendering to Celestin III many of the privileges granted to his Norman ancestors, and very inconveniently enlarging the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Palermo, to which he was obliged, upon the plausible ground of marriage being a sacrament, to assign, exclusively, all questions relative to marriage. Again, as if to mark the ever-varying balance of power between the antagonist forces, in the year 1153, at Ulm, the first provincial Diet held in Swabia after the election of Frederic I decreed that excommunication should be wholly devoid of temporal action, save as corroborated or confirmed by an Imperial Diet.

This was the actual result of Gregory VII’s schemes for Papal emancipation and Imperial subjugation; and he might, probably, have deemed it tolerably satisfactory. The same could hardly be said of the fruit of his exertions to reform the discipline of the Church. If his measures had very much freed the clergy from lay control, thus rendering the body a more useful instrument in the hands of the sovereign pontiff, they had by no means wrought the internal, moral amelioration, which he had unquestionably anticipated. The before-mentioned extraordinary relaxation in the discipline of Chapters, drew the attention of Innocent II, and he commanded all, without exception, to conform to the Rule of St. Augustin, which injoined a claustral life. The majority, perforce, obeyed the papal mandate; but such monastic restraint—including common refectories and common, dormitories—proved distasteful alike to men accustomed to full, even to licentious freedom, and to those who hoped to be their successors in their stalls. Hence, monks now began to insinuate themselves amongst the Canons of Cathedrals, and soon obtained actual possession of very many Chapters; when, if some of their early elections shewed this, innovation in an advantageous light, they ere long appeared to be quite as open to corruption and influence as their more worldly predecessors. But a Chapter, thus virtually transformed into a monastery, derived such strength from its concentration of energy, as enabled it to resist, and frequently to overpower, the will of the Bishop. Such an inversion of their relative positions soon became intolerable to the pi elates, many of whom willingly connived at their Chapter’s disobedience to the papal orders, and continued enjoyment of their former easy life. Where this was the case, such objects of desire for all younger branches of noble, and even of princely families, had canonries become, that, in the year 1145, the Chapter of Liege consisted, as before said, wholly of sons of kings, dukes, earls, and inferior nobles. So satisfactory was this arrangement felt, that Chapters of Canons unconnected with any Cathedral were presently founded and endowed, professedly as works of piety conducive to salvation, but really as asylums for the posterity of the founders; even .Chapters for noble ladies were among the number. Of course such Chapters as that of Liege, chose the prelates they were called upon to elect from amongst themselves or their kindred, save when the Popes, who had appropriated to themselves most of the rights they had wrested from the Emperors, forced some client or favourite of their own upon them.

Nor was this change in the composition of Chapters the only cause of the relapse of the higher clergy into all the disorders that Gregory VII and Henry III had endeavoured, and for a while successfully, to correct. The same sort of antagonism necessarily existed betwixt a Pope who aspired to absolute authority, and the Prelacy which constituted the Aristocracy of the Church, as betwixt a lay Sovereign and his great vassals. Hence the Popes were constantly encroaching upon the rights, the duties, and the dignity of bishops and archbishops. They deprived them of all control over almost all cloisters, over many churches with their ecclesiastical establishments, of the privilege of granting ordinary dispensations, and the like. Thus, prelates, not selected for their apostolic virtues, finding little episcopal superintendence—their peculiar business—to occupy them, their remaining humbler ecclesiastical duties became distasteful to them. Feeling themselves robbed of their proper spiritual dignity and importance, they neglected the religious duties still incumbent upon them, to think only of wealth, temporal power, and sensual indulgence. It will be remembered that those who have been deemed worthy of a special introduction to the reader, have appeared in the character rather of statesmen and warriors than of churchmen. And this will continue to be the case. At the close of the twelfth century simony was more prevalent than ever, the prelates selling everything, not only livings, canonries, and ordination, but illegal dispensations of all kinds, including a dispensation from the clerical vow of chastity. Such irregular dispensations had indeed always been con­sidered as an abuse, although the practice of commuting the penances enjoined by the Church for any sin, for a money payment to some ecclesiastical fund, was early admitted as lawful. It may, perhaps, be esteemed a natural consequence of the legal establishment, in lay tribunals, of a fixed, pecuniary compensation for every possible personal injury. And it is to be noted that repentance, and renunciation of the sin for which the penance had been enjoined, were never so commuted.

Gregory had been more successful in his endeavours to enforce celibacy upon the clergy, than in those directed against simony and clerical ignorance; yet not completely. The great body of ecclesiastics submitted to this law; but even in countries the most advanced in civilization, as France, England, and Germany, married priests were still to be found, were not only tolerated, but it should seem as much respected by their flocks as their bachelor compeers. In England, Anselmo’s successor in the see of Canterbury held a mot or synod, for the express purpose of compelling all English priests and archdeacons to part from their wives, but was himself compelled to renounce the attempt; and Henry I, who had but recently compromised his ow n quarrel with the Pope, gladly sanctioned wedlock amongst his clergy. Whilst in Scandinavia and in Slavonian districts, the rule of discipline relative to celibacy was openly or tacitly rejected. In Norway it was declared to be inadmissible; not only were the priests avowedly married men, but a priest’s wife held, as such, an established, and highly respectable, position in society. In Poland and Bohemia, the rule seems to have been rather evaded, than thus openly defied ; but in both countries married priests abounded until long after the period under consideration in these volumes.

Gregory’s efforts to educate the clergy appear, in like manner, to have been but partially successful. The constantly recurring decrees of Church Councils to oblige the clergy to acquire, at least, the portion of knowledge indispensable to the due performance of Church service, prove the frequent—should it not be said the general?—ignorance. Such a decree was enacted by the Council which Alexander III held in 1163.

As another unfortunately downward step in ecclesiastical discipline, it must be repeated that the dangers, threatening the kingdom of Jerusalem from the mighty Saladin, led to a measure which must ever rank amongst those most deleterious, in every conceivable way, to the Church of Rome. This was the sale of indulgences, unheard of until the year 1184, when it was authorized by Lucius III, in order to raise money towards a crusade. Thus, at the close of the twelfth century, church discipline could hardly be said to exist, even under able and conscientious Popes, who strove in vain to repel or to stem the accumulating flood of evil; whilst, with some few splendid exceptions, the great body of the clergy, from the highest to the lowest, were licentious, ignorant, pugnacious, and rapacious, almost to rivalry with the robber­knights.

The annoyances suffered by Cloisters, and even by Sees, from their Vogts or Stewards, now very generally holding the office hereditarily, have been seen in the course of the narrative, as also the remedy attempted, by transferring the stewardship, whenever feasible, to the crown.

Perhaps the most material political feature of the three quarters of a century now under review is the laying the foundation, if it may be so expressed, of that essential portion of modern society, a middle class. This foundation was laid in more than one direction. Trade was gaining importance in the eyes of monarchs and states, if not of the feudal nobility of Germany, France, and England—so much so, that regular commercial treaties were negotiated. One such has been mentioned between Frederic I and Henry II of England, who, independently of this treaty, by charter freely secured many privileges to German traders in his dominions. Another treaty w as concluded between Philip Archbishop of Cologne and Philip Earl of Flanders, securing the free navigation of the Rhine to the Flemings; and another, between the King of Sicily and Genoa, by which the former bound himself to exclude Provencal ships from his ports in favour of this virtually republican city, that had treaties o analogous character with the King of Aragon, the Moslem King of Valentia, and the Emperors of Constantinople and Morocco;—and one yet more remarkable with the city of Narbonne, which assured to the Narbonnese certain privileges at Genoa, upon condition of their limiting their intercourse with Syria to a single ship annually, that should carry pilgrims but not merchandize. All this, added to the riches, and the consequence inseparable from riches, everywhere acquired by merchants, especially in the powerful vassal states of Pisa and Genoa, did more than lead the way to a great change in their position. The merchants of Venice were hardly as yet merchant-princes:—but Venice was so really independent as to lessen her influence within the Empire, save as an evidence of mercantile wealth and consequence. In the south of France such progress had this change made, that the opulent traders of some towns, dwelling in their turrified and battlemented mansions, were held capable of knighthood. Thus was the character of a merchant so raised, that the chivalrous Frederic Barbarossa permitted the sword, of which former Emperors had granted travelling merchants the use, exclusively for self-defence, and attached to the saddle, to be thenceforth worn like a knights. And yet more; in a question referred to him, he decided that the nobles of Asti might engage in traffic without derogating from their nobility.

Another, and more intrinsic, element of respectability was supplied to the nascent middle class, in the impulse which the invasion of Imperial rights and prerogatives by the Popes and by the Lombard cities gave to the study of the law. The Bolognese Professors of the Civil, or old Roman law, by their sentence, not only confirmed, as has been seen, Frederic’s right to all the royalties he claimed, but assigned him yet greater prerogatives: inasmuch as the Roman Emperors, from whose decisions the civil law emanated, were far more despotic than any feudal sovereign. Jurists, henceforth, naturally became frequent counsellors of the monarch. The Italian cities, nevertheless, vaguely knowing that Rome had been a republic, and that from the Roman republic they derived their municipal organization, still hoped to find in the civil law a sanction to their pretensions; and as eagerly consulted, as highly valued jurists, as did the Emperors. The Popes could not, indeed, look with kindly eye upon a code necessarily inimical to their pretensions, concocted, as it was, when those pretensions were unthought of, and as necessarily favourable to the only power, the Imperial, of which they entertained any apprehension. But, far from attempting to impugn or depreciate it, they merely defended themselves with a rival code; and Alexander III expressly pronounced the Civil law supreme, save when contrary to the Canon law. This Canon law consisted of Papal instead of Imperial decisions, of edicts promulgated, and of sentences pronounced, upon appeals of princes and prelates, by preceding Popes; first collected about the middle of the twelfth century, by a Benedictine monk named Gratian. His compilation bore the title of Decretali, and was sanctioned by Alexander III, although it comprises, amidst authentic decrees of various kinds, many very little entitled to that character, as, e. g. those bearing the name of Isidro, and since designated as the False Decretals. Of course the Professors of Canon law, i. e., the High-School or College expounders and teachers of these Decretals, ranked as high in the favour of the Popes, as did the Professors of Civil law in that of monarchs and cities. And in what class of society arose these various Doctors of Law, to whose decision the interests of nations were submitted, who gradually introduced themselves into the cabinet and council of sovereigns. The nobility still held learning of all descriptions, except the gai Saber (poetry), derogatory to their knighthood. The monks, who were long the chief lawyers as well as the chief medical practitioners amongst Christians, but had, as before stated, been forbidden, upon grounds that were a sheer substitution of the sound of words for their sense, to exercise the surgical department of leechcraft, had latterly been equally debarred from their other non-clerical occupation. In the Council of a.d. 1163, Alexander III had prohibited the practice of law or physic by monks; more reasonably, because by such occupations they were diverted from their own especial duties; and employed their skill, not in Christian charity, but as means of escaping from their monasteries. Legal science, thus driven from the cloister, was indeed still in the hands of clerks, that is to say of men educated for the Church and in Holy Orders; but, as ambition awoke in the non-noble amongst the laity, the study of the law presented itself as the means of gratifying that ambition: and thus, in course of time, under the form of jurists or lawyers, arose one really respectable and cultivated middle order of society. Not yet, however, had laymen been deemed fit for the profession.

Another class, now beginning to acquire consistency and weight, was that of mercenary soldiers, who, making a trade of war, were ready to fight in any cause whatsoever, for aggressor or aggrieved, for whoever was able and willing adequately to reward their services. Such heartless, professional shedders of human blood, at first little better than half-legalized banditti, then, in progressive civilization, assuming a less brutal, though still odious character, as the trained and disciplined bands of noted Condottieri form perhaps the natural transition-state through which the military force provided by feudal service must needs pass, to become the regular national standing-army of later times. The demand and the supply were simultaneously increasing. The Norman Kings of England, during the last half of the century, habitually employed these Brabançons, Ruptuarii, or Coterels, as they were variously styled, in their French wars, where English feudal service was of little avail; whilst the double fealty of many of their French vassals, as well as the undoubted suzerainty of the King of France over all, and their own foreign character as Kings of England might considerably embarrass their operations. Henry II is said to have composed the bulk of his armies of these adventurers. In like manner the Emperors Frederic I and Henry VI found it impossible efficiently to wage war in Italy, with mere feudal service. Archbishop Christian’s army has been seen to consist almost entirely of Brabaçons, and prior to that prelate’s appearance in the field, Frederic himself is said to have discovered the necessity of employing them. The smallness of the Pope’s dominions rendered it impossible they should supply him with troops; whilst, in Lombardy, the rich, the elderly, and even the middle-aged citizens of towns, soon disco­vered that it was more convenient to hire others to fight for them, than to be always neglecting their own affairs in order either to resist the imperial authority, or to gratify their hatred of a neighbour; also, perhaps, that it was safer for themselves, than to make good warriors of their rustic villeins and their urban operatives. Of these bands the subaltern officers must, in part at least, have been non-noble. As yet, however, this change likewise was only beginning. The great vassals still attended the Emperor feudally; in Lombard towns the citizen was still disgraced, who, when war was declared, did not passthrough the city gate in arms, ere a candle placed on it burnt out; and his martial labours, against neighbours at least, were light, as long as coining money, or riding at the ring under the walls of the hostile city, was the sufficiently glorious termination of a campaign. As a necessary part of the change, the custom of purchasing exemption from service, by vassals who found even their six weeks upon a distant expedition onerous, became more and more general; and, in England, Thomas & Becket regularized such a commutation under the name of scutage.

The rise of a purely belligerent class of men, as a sort of connecting link between the warlike nobles and the nascent middle class, prodigiously raising the latter in mediaeval estimation, was probably fostered by the concomitant changes in Chivalry; which about this time was becoming, not a profession certainly, but a distinct, self­dependent institution. Stimulated by the crusades, by the example of the military monastic Orders, Chivalry had become so intimately connected with religion, as to be no longer conceived capable of separation from the Church. St. Bernard had pronounced, that only a Christian could be a knight, and Richard was apparently blamed for knighting a Moslem. Thus, self-existent Chivalry appears to have very nearly reached its real zenith about the close of the twelfth century. In this, its palmy state, when all knights were equal amongst themselves, the poorest of them looked down upon the mightiest earl, if unknighted, whilst a sultan was deemed undeserving of so high an honour. The self-willed Lion-heart indeed broke through the rule; perhaps thinking the case analogous to a sovereign’s knighting a low-born, but highly deserving warrior upon the battle-field: a knighthood which, as has been said, gave, after all, but an imperfect equality. In Italy, the Podestàs and city nobles conferred knighthood without regard to birth; and it has been seen that, upon such an emergency as the siege of Jerusalem in its defenceless condition, Sir Balian of Ibelin took upon himself to knight the sons of citizens. None of these w ere perhaps held to be perfect knights; certainly not to be equals of those more regularly created, with the religious rites and ceremonies, never properly dispensed with, except upon the field of battle. But these rites and ceremonies, with the concomitant pompous celebration, had by this time become so oppressively expensive, that unwarlike or economical nobles often shrank from the costly honour; and this to so hurtful a degree, that in the year 1200, Baldwin Earl of Flanders and Hainault published a law for his own dominions, degrading to the condition of peasants all sons of knights who at the age of twenty-five should be still unknighted. But, if it was found necessary thus to spur some of those who should have been eager candidates for admission into this proud fraternity, that its dignity was not therefore the less valued may be inferred from the adoption of the same title, Sire, our English Sir, for addressing a king and a knight; and it seems natural, that this select, if numerous, body of vowed redressors of wrongs and protectors of the weak, should have chosen to feel themselves so far unbound by feudal ties, as to be at liberty to offer their swords at their pleasure to a sovereign to crush rebellion or repulse invasion, or to a city to defend it from oppression by a tyrant.

Such was assuredly the pleasure of the military Orders of the Temple and the Hospital, still flourishing, though with respect to their pure ideal, somewhat past their zenith. They were still the first of warriors, and powerful even through the opulence that had tarnished their original simple virtues. Their Serving-Brothers and Turcopoles formed an actual army. The rules of frugality, or abstinence rather, in dress, life, &c., were now habitually violated. No longer confining their hostilities solely to misbelievers, they took part in every quarrel of Christian princes: and the two Orders almost always embracing opposite sides, were constantly at war with each other, when not temporarily united against some such formidable foe to the kingdom of Jerusalem, as Noureddin or Saladin. Against such an enemy they were still its best bulwarks; and, when unswayed by individual, or by Order jealousies or interests, the two Grand-Masters appear to have been the trustiest, as the ablest counsellors of the monarch and of the crusaders. The Knights Hospitalers are accused of having, in the course of this century, wholly discarded the distinguishing character of their institution, its blending their original feminine office of tending the sick, with that purely masculine, of the ever active warrior; transferring the humbler duties to an inferior class of brothers of their Order, exclusively dedicated to them.

The high reputation and wealth of these Orders naturally produced imitation. The rise of the Marian or Teutonic Knights has been described, and was the most permanent consequence of the siege of Acre. Another of those which appeared in Palestine deserves especial notice: this was the Order of St. Lazarus, founded at Jerusalem by rational and truly Christian charity for the exclusive service of lepers; but of which it was whimsically ordained that the Grand-Master must himself be a leper. The Lazarites are said to have been, like the Hospitalers, knights as well as nurses, and highly favoured by the Kings of Jerusalem; but being confined to Palestine, to have perished with the Christian kingdom. That no chronicle records the military exploits of the Lazarites, would seem to prove this double character, of service in arms as well as beside the sick-bed, the mere embroidery of excited mediaeval imagination upon a regular Lazarite establishment, known only by its care of those outcasts of humanity, lepers. Yet the silence of chroniclers upon the subject might, if the malady of the Grand-Master were actually indispensable, be thereby explained. When the degree to which lepers, whether through disgust or fear of infection, were excluded and secluded from all intercourse with their fellow-creatures—they might not cross a road to pick up alms dropped for them, till the giver should have reached a prescribed distance—it becomes self-evident that a leper could not appear in an army as one of its generals. The Lazarites could not therefore be arrayed under their own Superior, and would probably fight in the ranks of the Knights Hospitalers, with whom they, like the Marians, might easily be confounded, by Europeans. In the Spanish Peninsula, where, as in Syria, war with the Mohammedans was the very condition of existence, several orders of chivalry, mostly modelled upon that of the Knights Templars, arose. Of these the greater number early died away; but the Orders of St. Jago, Alcantara and Calatrava, in Spain, with that of Avis, in Portugal, survived to do good service against the misbelievers. Ere long, however, they divested themselves of the monastic character of their prototypes, the Templars and Hospitalers, transforming the vow of celibacy into one of nuptial fidelity.

If new classes of society were in course of formation, one of the most valuable of the original German classes seemed fast approaching its extinction; namely, that of non-noble freeholders. In a few favoured situations, indeed, as the Swiss and Tyrolese mountains, and some of the districts dismembered from the erst too powerful duchy of Saxony, as the marshes of East Frieseland and Ditmarsen, they still existed, almost as of yore. Elsewhere, the sturdy preference of independence, to the pro­tection and the strength derivable from vassalage, was rapidly disappearing, as might be inferred from the acceptance of a fief by the seemingly sturdy free Lord of Keukingen; and these freeholders were now very generally either absorbed into the lowest class of noble vassals, or pressed down to form the highest class of the imperfectly free, or even the unfree. The number of the lowest class of the unfree, the eigenleute, answering to the English villeins in gros or regardant, was daily diminishing by the mere fact of the prosperity of the towns. All articles of dress, furniture, and the like, were to be procured in them at a less cost than the permanent maintenance of the mechanic thralls and their families, besides being of better quality than what was manufactured at home, by less practised workmen. Hence a change in the condition, if not the manumission, of numbers of these eigenleute.

The Jews had in the course of the century pretty nearly recovered their precrusade condition. They were now, as then, alternately tolerated and persecuted, according to the degree in which bigotry, rapacity, good sense, right feeling, or need of pecuniary assistance, prevailed amongst monarchs and their vassals. By Conrad III, Frederic I, and Henry VI, they were steadily protected. In France, where they had been allowed to hold landed property, Philip Augustus—who neglected no means of supplying his exchequer—seized that property and united it to. his private domains; whilst at Beziers, where the Bishop on Palm Sunday regularly exhorted his flock to avenge their Saviour, they, in the year 1160, purchased at a high price exemption from being annually driven out of the town with stones during Passion week. In England it has been seen that the royal authority, if unable to protect them from horrible persecutions, duly punished their persecutors, at least under Richard Coeur-de-Lion. Some degree of stability their condition probably derived from the progressive changes in the forms, almost in the spirit of feudal government. The sale of royalties and of exemption from military service seldom proving sufficient to defray the cost of hired troops, the need of a regular system of taxation was felt. The idea of such a system had been caught in the East, where the Crusaders had seen it established in Palestine, and developed amongst the Saracens, even to the extent of making the vices of mankind contribute to the expenses of government; as, e.g, the virtuous Noureddin levied a tax upon the courtesans of Damascus, by obliging them to take out a sort licence to trade in their own infamy. In those days, need of financiers was, in Europe at least, really need of Jews; who, already the creditors of princes, prelates, and nobles, gradually drew the whole management of the finances of many countries into their own hands; and thus, being considered as a necessary evil, were, as such, officially protected, and in Germany called the Emperor’s Exchequer servants (Kammerknechte). Even the powerful Archbishop, Philip of Cologne, had been heavily fined for oppressing these Exchequer servants of the Emperor, which was one cause of his ill-will towards Frederic I and Henry VI.

In the twelfth century, the very idea of a financial system was, however, still in its infancy; and as the topic did not interest the old chroniclers, they afford little information concerning it, beyond the occasional mention of a detached fact, as of a duty being laid upon the exportation or importation of some article, in some town or state. In Italy, more progress had, during the last half of the century, been made towards the development of this new science, than in other parts of Europe. Venice is known to have then had a property tax, custom-duties upon imports and exports, taxes upon consumption, and a public debt: for the principal of which, she, in 1172, declared that her creditors must wait, till she could conveniently reimburse them, but for which she would in the meantime pay them interest at the rate of five per cent.:—the ordinary rate of interest being somewhere between twenty and sixty per cent., one would fain hope she said quarterly, instead of annually, to creditors whom confidence in her honesty had thrown into her power. It is also known, that, at Sienna, all property was about the same time officially valued, in order to be proportionately taxed; and that the Lombard cities taxed their clergy for the expense of their civil war against the Emperor:—Alexander III, in his need of the League’s friendship, shutting his eyes to a course which it was the Popes’ custom to denounce as most sacrilegious. The sale of the right of coinage, amongst other royalties, to cities, seems to have prodigiously extended that right; thus, in the last quarter of the century, producing an inundation of bad coin of all descriptions, which the Emperor, though aided by many cities, found it impossible to check or to remedy.

The business of legislation continued, throughout the century, to be what it had previously been; i. e. the repression of private feuds, by transferring the decision of disputes from the battlefield to a court of justice; and where that proved impossible, the diminution of the evils such intestine warfare entailed, by an increasing strictness of regulation. Thus, Frederic forbade the destruction of vineyards and orchards in the prosecution of private feuds, and denounced the ban of the Empire against incendiarism upon such occasions. This Emperor’s constantly recurring proclamations of a Landfriede, or period of peace within the realm, shew both how earnestly he was bent upon accomplishing this object, and how difficult he found success. A similar motive appears to have dictated his prohibition of confederation amongst themselves to the chartered German cities, whose martial propensities might, he probably feared, be aroused by sympathy with the members of the Lombard League. Nevertheless, even the Italian cities, fond as they were of war amongst themselves, appear to have frankly co-operated with the Emperor, in his endeavours to regulate private feuds that could not be prevented; in proof of which a course of proceeding, prescribed by Lombard law to aggrieved parties, may be here cited. Some citizens of Modena, having been plundered by a party of Bolognese, were directed to apply for redress, in the first instance, to the Magistrates of Bologna. If they, as was their duty, granted it, the affair was well ended; but if they, as was to be expected, refused to condemn or fine their own townsmen, the next application was to be to the Modenese Magistracy; who, in the discharge of theirs, authorized the plundered individuals to wage war upon any or all Bolognese, until their booty should be sufficient to indemnify them for their losses, but not a moment longer. Still, the character of the punishments which it was desired to substitute for this self-redress, was more than sanguinary, was savage; but occasionally relieved by a species of good nature, at times incredibly absurd. As, for instance, the Danish law of this epoch required a considerable length of time to intervene betwixt the passing of sentence of death upon a convicted criminal and its execution, in order to afford the doomed man a chance— the reader probably supposes of making his peace with Heaven by no means—of breaking prison and effecting his escape.

A spirit of legislative improvement was, however, stealing into existence, which, though more developed in the following century, was already apparent. Frederic has been seen to sacrifice objectionable prerogatives. Richard Coeur-de-Lion did the same; by a charter given under his own hand whilst in Sicily, he renounced for himself and his successors the odious right of wrecking, or taking the property found in wrecks; except in cases where, not only no living creature remained on board, but no natural heirs of the dead could be found. He likewise, in many places, resigned his right of disposing of single women in marriage. Other princes took a different step in the same direction, endeavouring to make themselves and their subjects acquainted with the laws by which they were to regulate their conduct. Baldwin Earl of Flanders and Hainault commissioned learned clerks to collect and compile the laws of his two counties; in England, Glanvil published his Tractatue de legibus et consuetudinibus Anglia, a.d. 1181; and in Poland, Casimir, the able younger brother of the idly ambitious Boleslas IV, held in 1180 the first legislative diet ever known there, summoning the clergy to attend, that they might assist in concocting laws. Iceland, a sort of aristocratic republic, had a regular code of laws early in the century; and, before its close, the Italian cities, upon the conclusion of the Peace of Constance, began to make and arrange laws, by which to govern themselves.

International law was a later production, and could as yet scarcely be said to exist, even in imagination. Nevertheless, its conception, if not its birth, was approaching, as the result, partly, of the intercourse induced between the princes and subjects of different countries by the crusades, and partly of the progress of civilization. Popes were beginning to denounce spiritual penalties against pirates and wreckers, as common enemies; and kings granted what would now be called letters of marque against the former. But the navigation laws, which should properly be international, appear to be merely the rules and customs of different states for the government of their own merchants and sailors, and although many writers ascribe the celebrated code, known as the laws of Oleron, to Richard Coeur-de-Lion, and consequently to the close of the twelfth century, in which he died, the better opinion seems to be that, not only has he no claim to this honour, but that no international maritime code existed until a later period.

Letters had made wondrous progress during the century, a progress mainly owing to the now general cultivation of the previously disdained vulgar tongues of Europe. Latin was indeed still the language of science of every description, of the law, and of the Church; that is to say not only the language in which divine service was performed, but in which the pope held intercourse with clergy and laity, throughout Christendom. Yet more; it was still the most approved language of history and poetry: but there were now almost everywhere, if not yet prose chroniclers, many rhymers—though few indeed who could aspire to the title of poet—who wrote lays in their respective mother tongues, in those in which the daily business of life was transacted, which all understood, in which the Latinists themselves probably thought.

In all this cultivation of modern languages and literature, the Troubadours of the Langue d'oc have been generally supposed to have taken the lead, although it has been shown that their precedency is disputed, and by none more keenly than by their northern compatriots the Trouveurs of the Langue d'oil. The discussion, though a marked feature of the times, belongs not to their general history, but it may be observed that the assumption possibly originated in the extensive prevalence of this elder, if not eldest born of Latin, which was understood and, it would seem, habitually spoken, in the northern districts of Spain and Italy; and, in its poetic form, was carried yet further by accidental circumstances. Some of the chief princes of the native land of the Langue d’oc were vassals of the Empire: whence it might be one of the languages in use at the Imperial court, when Frederic Barbarossa, in emulation of his Provençal vassal visitors, selected it for his attempt in verse. Early in the century, Adelaide, daughter of a Marquess of Montferrat, marrying Roger Earl of Sicily, carried troubadours, with their language and spirit, to Palermo, in her train. A little later the heiress of Aquitaine, Elinor, grandchild and representative of him who passes for the first Troubadour, hereditarily a patroness of “his tuneful brethren,” and herself it is said at least a dabbler in their art carried her own poetic court and tastes with her to the court of France, first; and, upon her divorce and second marriage, to that of England, in both of which the Troubadour seems to have associated and coexisted with the Trouveur of Normandy and northern France. To enumerate the Troubadours who delighted the twelfth century, belongs to the historian of poetry, or to the poetic antiquary; but a few words relative to their literary, intellectual, and social position, are requisite to illustrate the character and progress of their age.

And here two points especially command attention; the one, the high station of a great number of the troubadours, the other, the peculiar character of their poems. It will be recollected that the troubadour just referred to, as long enjoying the fame of having first committed his vernacular poetic effusions to writing, was a Duke of Aquitaine and Earl of Poitou; a Duke of a very different class from a Duke of Choiseul or Lauzun of later times, being less a subject than a vassal-sovereign of something like a fifth or sixth of France. In this same century are found, in the ranks of his emulators, his grand-daughter Queen Elinor and her son Richard I, Alphonso II King Aragon, who, as the son of Queen Petronilla by Raymond Earl of Barcelona, first permanently united Catalonia—where the language was nearly identical with Provençal—to Aragon; his son Pedro, who however belongs more to the next century, and the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, whose verses strongly mark that the Gai Saber of the troubadour was then esteemed a right kingly accomplishment. But the Emperor’s value for this Art is perhaps as much proved by his constituting Orange in the Arelat, a princi­pality for the Troubadour Bertrand de Baux—the first Prince of Orange, and so really founder of that great house—as by his own production. Of enthroned votaries of the Muse there are, necessarily few; but, in looking through the list of names of princes, and of princely nobles preserved by the historians of Troubadours, it is matter of no little surprise to see the number of the rude and ever-warring feudal lords of those ages who figure there; for a while, at least, those of humbler condition really are the exception. Not less striking, perhaps, in proof of the lofty position assigned to the Art, than the ex­alted station of these high-born professors of the Gai Saber, is the political use it served that most pugnacious of the class, Bertrand de Born, Seigneur de Hautefortin Poitou. His passionate Sirventes were the instrument of the crime, for which Dante places his head, lantern-like, in his hand: the crime, not of robbing his brother of their joint patrimony, but of so killing the filial sense in il Ré Giovanni the son of Henry II and of Elinor, the poet’s own liege lady, as, severing son from father, to make him a parricidal rebel. De Born’s object in thus misleading his royal friend appears to have been to rid himself and France of his English suzerains, by their destroying each other. His success ended in Henry II taking his rebel vassal prisoner. Whether it is to be considered evidence of the Troubadour’s really poetic powers, or only of the King’s parental feelings, that a lay declaring he, Bertrand, had been crazed by the death of Henry the Younger, procured him the restoration of his forfeited estate, may be a question.

The strain of the troubadours was almost exclusively lyric; the character usually erotic, and far too often licentious. When not inspired by Venus or Bacchus, the lay was either martial or satiric, though the penalty occasionally incurred by the satirist was calculated to deter from that style. It is recorded that a troubadour knight, Luc de Barre, who had lampooned Henry I, of England, being taken in battle, that monarch, in a mood little accordant with his surname of Beauclerc, ordered his eyes to be put out; and so savagely was the mandate obeyed that the lampooner died of the operation. The effusions of the earliest troubadours, who wrote from genuine impulse, are generally allowed to be the best, as the simplest, the truest to nature, the most impassioned of this class of poetry. When it became a fashion to write, and to write love songs, because a poet must be in love, and that most properly with a lady who ought to be unattainable, verses were produced, rather fantastical than imaginative, rather gallant than passionate; difficulties of rhyme and metre were devised as substitutes for the deep spirit of poesy, and for genuine sensibility. Can true feeling be looked for in the outpourings of such factitious passion as that of the noble troubadour, Geoffroi Rudel Vicomte de Blaye, who, in the south of France, wanting an object of his poetic flame, fixed his affections upon the reported beauty of the Tripolitan princess who had lost an Imperial crown through sea-sickness. He sang her charms and his own adoration of them, till throughout Europe his amorous sighs resounded. He then embarked for Tripoli to look upon the hitherto unknown, unseen, idol of his fancy. But, upon his voyage he was seized with a malady, which, even if originating in sympathy with the worshipped Melusina, incapacitated him for landing when he reached the goal. Countess Melusina, touched by the tuneful sighs that had spread her fame so widely, hastened on board to reward and cheer him with a sight of the beauty he had celebrated, and with a soft smile. But even her smile proved inefficient to revive the exhausted lover, and he expired during the interview. The adventure was one to touch woman's heart, and the lady is said to have immediately taken the veil. Ere leaving this part of the subject, Petrarch’s praises of his “Famoso Arnaldo” seem to claim the specific mention of Arnauld de Marveil, as one of the most admired troubadours of this century.

It has been supposed that no narrative poem was written by any troubadour, and reasons for the fact were found. Was it not natural that poetic princes and knights should pour forth their emotions in song, without bestowing upon their art the time, labour, and study required by the rudest attempt at the epos? But a principal German poet of the next century, Wolfram von Eschenbach, expressly says that he translated or imitated his Parcifal from the poem of a Provençal troubadour, Guyot or Kyot, of whom nothing more is known. Besides which, Sharon Turner asserts that three narrative poems, written in the Langue d'oc during this century, still exist, and respectively celebrate the cycles of Arthur and of Charlemagne, and a war waged between Charles Martel and Gerard de Roussillon. It has also been supposed that troubadour genius was wholly undramatic; but more accurate research has show n this to be a similar mistake. More of this presently. Another point to be remarked is that, of Latin chroniclers and versifiers in the south of France, little or no mention now occurs.

It should be added that the train of high-born troubadours regularly comprised musical attendants, who sang the compositions of their Lords. These indispensable auxiliaries were called ministeriales, to distinguish them from menial attendants; and thence comes our “ Minstrel”. So established was this custom, that before the end of the century the singing of other men5s compositions appears to have become a sort of profession, in which jugglery or sleight of hand was blended with music and recitation. Geoffroi Gaimar, an Anglo-Norman, in his history of the Anglo-Saxon Kings, published early in the century, represents the minstrel Taillefer as performing jugglers’ tricks; of course painting the manners of his own times, if not of Taillefer’s. Inferior troubadours sang their lays themselves as they wandered from court to court, from castle to castle, meting out fame or ignominy to their hosts, in proportion to the liberality or parsimony of their own treatment. Indeed it is a fact which must, however reluctantly, be confessed, that all troubadours reprobate economy, as the most detestable of vices, eulogizing extravagance as one of the chief virtues.

In the catalogue of the authors who wrote in the language of the northern provinces, the Langue d’oil, no royal or princely, and not many noble Trouveurs or Trouvères are found. Even Richard Coeur-de-Lion, to whom the vernacular of Normandy and of Aquitaine must have been equally familiar, confined his poetic attempts to the strain of the troubadour. The Scandinavians had brought their professional Scalds with them; their new neighbours, the Armoricans of Britany, had, like the Welsh, their distinct caste of Bards; the business of whose lives, as of the Scalds, was weaving the poetic record of the glories of their ancestors; and these Normans—who naturally marrying French wives, speedily forgot the old Norse, unintelligible to their families—appear, as before intimated, to have breathed their own spirit into all around them; even into their French neighbours. They breathed it even into those who still disdained to write in any language but Latin. The first of these trouveurs, whose narrative poems have survived was Wace, Gace, or Eustace, as the name is variously given, a native of Jersey, who, about the middle of the century translated into French verse the Latin history which Geoffrey of Monmouth, at the desire of Robert Earl of Gloucester, the Maecenas of the age, had written some quarter of a century earlier, thus to embody and, by translating, preserve both the traditions and the volume, brought by Walter Calenius, a learned archdeacon of Oxford, from Armorica; where he had zealously and diligently collected the whole. Besides this translated chronicle, called in its new form Le Brut, and the Roman du Rou, the tale of Rollo or Hrolf, the first Scandinavian Duke of Normandy, Wace wrote romances to the number of eight. A contemporary rival, Maistre Benoit, in addition to a rhymed chronicle of the Dukes of Normandy, written at the desire of Henry II, produced a Trojan War, professedly taken from Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis. Rhymed chronicles, and rhymed romances of Arthur and his Round Table, of Charlemagne and his Paladins followed: and such was the passion for what was called poetry that Justinian’s Institutes, and Les Coustumes de Normandie, were, it is positively asserted, versified.

But as the lyrics of the troubadours did not absolutely exclude narrative poetry, so the more epic genius of the north was not intolerant of lyrics. The lost love lays of Abelard appear to have preceded the rhymed chronicles; and the hymns of St. Bernard were at least contemporary with them; those hymns, together with his sermons, still existing in MS., are held to have much contributed to the formation and development of the French language. The moral tone of the trouveurs is held to be superior to that of the troubadours, though still far from unobjectionable; the love upon which the interest turns being often such as it is criminal to indulge, and the language, to modern ears, offensively coarse. Later in the century, prose romances began to be written by trouveurs, whose powers of versification did not keep pace with their inventive faculties. To these were added the short stories or anecdotes, real or fictitious, almost invariably as well gross as licentious, bearing the title of Fabliaux. It is not a little remarkable that these Fabliaux are found, well-nigh identical, in French, German, Latin, and Greek stories, and in the East, whilst the kind is unknown to Scandinavian and to Welsh literature.

French history in French is as yet not found; but the idea of it is. We are told that Baldwin Earl of Flanders and Hainault—already mentioned as a collector of laws—ordered Latin histories to be collected, abridged, and the abridgment translated. The result of the command is unknown, very probably its execution interrupted by the Earl’s departure upon his crusade.

But, amidst this torrent of French, authors of higher pretensions still wrote Latin, not only historians but poets. Gaultier de Chatillon produced a Latin Alexandreid, or Life of Alexander the Great in the disguise of a noble knight of the twelfth century; rivalled by Guilleaume le Breton’s epic upon the exploits of Philip Augustus; which, however, must be considered as more properly belonging to the thirteenth century, the protagonista’s life being prolonged far into that century, and his most successful operations belonging to his later years.

In England, Norman-French was as yet so exclusively the language of the higher orders, and Elinor and Richard I had so surrounded themselves with troubadours, that the state of letters in this country has been half depicted in speaking of their condition in France. Wace wrote wholly for the English court, and native Englishmen emulated him in his own language; into which Anglo-Normans translated whatever they deemed interesting in Anglo-Saxon. King Horn is supposed to have been so translated about the middle of the century. A life of Thomas a Becket, in French stanzas of five ten-syllable lines, is ascribed to one Guernes de Pont St. Maxence, and the close of this century. Anglo-Saxon, was not, however, altogether neglected. According to Marie de France, an Anglo Norman poetess of the next century, Henry I translated Aesop’s fables from Latin into English or Anglo-Saxon, from which she, a century later, retranslated them into French verse. From an early period of the century Anglo-Saxon (which up to that time had continued pure) declined, remaining in what maybe called a progressive transition state towards English; and it was really into English verse that the Lives of the Saints were translated late enough in the century for Thomas a Becket, already canonized, to take his place amongst them, and that before its close Layamon made the Brut of Wace accessible to his non-Norman countrymen. But Latin composition still flourished in England—as might be expected when Cicero and Quintilian were studied in the London schools—beyond French or English literature. It was especially patronized by Henry I, who was the personal friend of the Latin historian, William of Malmesbury; who conversed with every man of letters, however mean or poor, and suffered no press of business to prevent him from reading for some hours every day. Thus, under him and his successors within the century,—besides William of Malmesbury, and many of inferior reputation—Henry of Huntingdon, Roger de Hoveden, Gyraldus Cambrensis, and John of Salisbury, who in purity of classical diction is held to have far surpassed all contemporaries, wrote history or chronicles in Latin. Geoffroi de Vinisauf, an Anglo-Norman, whilst he sang love and war, in the Langue d'oc with his master Richard I, chronicled that master’s crusading exploits—in which he shared—in Latin, and in the same language composed a metrical Art of Poetry. Joseph of Exeter emulated Maistre Benoit in an Epic upon the Trojan War, but written in Latin; whilst the English satirist, Walter Mapes, in his De Nugis Curialium, laughed at scholastic subtleties and Aristotle.

In Germany, as in France, the South produced lyric, the North narrative, vernacular poetry : but both arose so much later in the century than the first strains of the troubadours and trouveurs, that the Teutonic poets must needs have been much influenced by their more advanced contemporaries. The generally received opinion is that Frederick’s great Mainz festival, in the year 1184, with its unprecedented magnificence, its agglomeration of half the magnates of Europe, acted as a potent stimulus upon the German imagination, calling a sudden burst of poetry into existence. The lyrists of the South entitled themselves Minnesinger, literally, singers of love; Minne being an old German word for pure or sentimental love. These Minnesinger were mostly Swabians, who, by their Alsatian and Swiss frontiers, were in immediate contact with the Arelat, the very cradle of troubadourism; and they appear to have borrowed from their poetic neighbours the form and manner of their lays, with their artificial structure and complication of rhyme, whilst happily avoiding their licentiousness and occasional infidelity—if the word be applicable to what seems merely dislike of the priesthood. Their effusions offer less variety of topic, being more exclusively devoted to the love of the noble knights who wrote them for their chosen ladies, and breathe genuine passion in simple language. Some hymns written by priests are among the few exceptions to the amatory strain. If at times it appears that the Minnesinger’s flame burns, like the troubadour’s, unlawfully, for one whose nuptial vow makes such homage insult; their lays are allowed generally to place woman in a sphere of ideal sanctity, incompatible with the light, as illicit, amours celebrated by their Provençal masters and rivals, and even when the attachment is immoral, it at least appears to be genuine and sincere. Their strains are likewise less witty and less fanciful than those in the Langue d’oc. Need the reader be reminded that Henry VI once enrolled himself amongst the Minnesingers who, in this century at least, appear to have been almost invariably high-born.

Narrative poems, the Germans, it has already been stated, had in the earliest times; and the demand for novelty in this department of literature appears to have constantly produced an adequate supply, if of inferior quality. Ballads commemorating contemporaneous feats they never seem to have been without. The extravagant exploit and death of Earl Egbert and his comrades, before Milan, for instance, is said to have called forth many such. Nor was Germany without longer works, original or translated; one of these, Herzog Ernst, being proved to have existed prior to the Mainz festival, by the circumstance of Berthold von Andechs having, in 1180, asked the Abbot of Tegernsee for a copy of it. This work, half dull history, half adventures in the style of the ‘Arabian Nights,’ speaks of a Latin original. But such long tales were few; and the ballads were now apparently somewhat slighted, as mere popular ditties, unworthy to be classed with the epics, and the lyrics that burst into existence at the close of the century,—known under the general title of Kunst-poesie, or artistic poetry,—and were designed for the recreation of the educated portion of society. But these narrative poems, of superior pretensions, if the offspring of the Mainz festival, had not time to acquire their full development in the short remainder of the 12th century; and may therefore more fitly come before the reader with their maturer, immediate successors of the 13th. For the present it may be enough to say that the German poets chiefly occupied themselves in translating Norman and Breton romances, although one, Albert von Halberstadt, more ambitiously devoted his labours to presenting Ovid in German attire. Heinrich von Veldeke, or Waldeck, however, must, upon the very first mention of the rise of Germany poetry, be specifically named. He was at once a minnesinger and an epic poet—if the high title may be used as descriptive of the species, regardless of the success or failure of the attempt—and was highly admired for his introduction of proper minne, i.e., love scenes between Eneas and Lavinia, into an Eneis that he at the close of the century was translating, or imitating, from the French, rather than from Latin; but, yet more, he was the writer who regulated and systematized German verse, with respect both to metre and to rhyme; who taught the distinction between perfect and imperfect rhymes, the consonancias and asonancias of the Spaniards.

Early in this century a peculiar, comic style of popular satiric poetry, called by the Germans the Thier-epos, or Animal-epic, arose. In it animals are endowed with human faculties, qualities, and passions—in accordance with their own respective natures, and without deviating from their own appropriate habits—and represented as acting their parts, wittily and naturally in a long and somewhat complicated story; and this German critics hold to be quite a dis­tinct species of poem from the short didactic fables of the ancients and the moderns, in which animals are the actors. Of the peculiar style in question, Reynard the Fox is believed to be the oldest, as it is by far the best specimen, and perhaps the only one that has survived. It is believed, by the best critics, to have arisen in the Netherlands, though early overlaid there, together with poetry of a higher strain, by the commercial character of the country. In Germany, where that character could never quite smother the love of mental as well as of sensual enjoyment, it was much cultivated; and Reynard the Fox was translated from Flemish into high and low German; as it was also into French and English. Richard Coeur-de-Lion in a Sirvente, speaks of the wolf by the name he bears in that poem, Isengrim, and in the oldest portion of the beautiful Freyburg Cathedral, built prior to 1150, is carved a wolf in a monk’s cowl, evidently an allusion to the poem—an extraordinary place in which to find such a solid lampoon upon monks.

But in Germany, yet longer than in France or England, the authors most esteemed were those who wrote in Latin. Historians would have deemed it an insult to Clio, to employ in her service any humbler form of speech; and many chroniclers there, as the writers flattered themselves, classically recorded the events of their own and of preceding times. The names of some of them have been cited when contradictory accounts of any occurrence were mentioned, and two only of this century appear to merit distinct specification here. These are Lambert of Aschaffenburg, who ranks amongst the best writers of his day, and Otho Bishop of Freising, one of the sons of Princess Agnes by her second marriage, uncle and biographer of the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa. This princely historian, revered by his contemporaries alike for his talents, his virtues, and his learning, was esteemed the ornament of his order and of his country. One merit, however, which has frequently been assigned him, to wit, the having, upon his return from the Crusade, in which he accompanied his half-brother Conrad III, introduced Aristotle to Western Europe, has latterly, upon good grounds, been denied him; ample proof existing in the writings of authors who lived earlier in the century, that the Stagyrite was known and admired, whether understood or not, prior to that Crusade. Of Latin poets it will suffice to name Gunther, an Alsatian monk, who had been secretary to Frederic I, and, at the end of the twelfth century, produced a poem, entitled Ligurinus, upon that Emperor’s Lombard wars. This bold attempt at an epic, in a genuine spirit of emulation, perhaps, in its turn, produced the lately mentioned Philipheis of Gulielmus Brito.

Italy was the last of all the countries under consideration, to cultivate her vernacular with its “syllables that breathe of the sweet South”, and, at the earliest, it was very late in this century before any one thought it capable of being written. For this there might be two reasons. The one, that Latin would naturally linger longest in its native country, where it must, when elsewhere a sort of cypher of the learned, have remained to the people a living lan­guage, as well as a living monument of those glories of their ancestors, in which, as well classical as political and military, they took pride. In proof of the degree to which mediaeval Italians clung to the classical past, it may be told that, late in this century, Mantua assumed the title of the Virgilian city; and a statue of her venerated poetic son, in Parian marble, adorning the market-place, was annually, upon the loth of October, which tradition calls his birth­day, crowned with laurel by the youth of both sexes, as they sang and danced around it.(264) Hence whoever did write, wrote in Latin. The other, that the similarity of the Langue d’oc to the dialect spoken in Lombardy, rendering it generally understood there, naturally led, in leaving Latin, to writing in the neighbouring already Cultivated language. Even in southern Italy this similarity, though much fainter, aided by Countess Adelaide’s importation of troubadours as well as of troubadour tastes, may not have been uninfluential; less powerful, however, than in Lombardy; and, accord­ingly, in the South is the first Italian found. Attempts have, indeed, been made to claim for Italian poetry precedence to that of the troubadours, upon the strength of two inscriptions in a cathedral; but critical investigation, even by Italians who would have rejoiced in substantiating the claim, has discovered irrefragable internal evidence that these inscriptions are of a very much later date. This pretension being abandoned, Italian poetry was supposed to have owed its birth to the thirteenth century; thus making it as decidedly too young: for a fragment exists, written by Vincenzo Ciullo di Alcama, or del Cama, a Sicilian, bearing internal evidence of having been composed before the year 1194; since it speaks of Saladin as alive, and threatening Christendom. One solitary exception, however, being insufficient to render Italian poetry a sub­ject for the present chapter, it must be reserved for the review of the thirteenth century; with the single remark that not only was this Ciullo a Sicilian, but so decidedly did Sicily take the lead of Italy in verse, that Sicilian was long the comprehensive designation of Italian poetry.

With this single exception the historians and poets abounding in Italy throughout the century, and fostered by Frederic I, as a patron of letters and learning, wrote Latin or Provençal; and the chief praise awarded the first is that they, like their contemporaries elsewhere, wrote it better than their predecessors. Of these it may be enough to name the prose historians, Arnolfo, the two Landolfos, Ser Raul, Ottone and Acerbo Morena (the last of whom Frederic named Podesta of Como) in the north; and in the south, the very learned Romoaldo Archbishop of Salerno, who has been introduced as a princely-born prelate, statesman, and physician, Falcone da Benevento, and Ugo Falcando, a Sicilian, long called the Sicilian Tacitus. Another contemporary writer, Goffredo di Viterbo,—chaplain to the Emperors Conrad III, Frederic I, and Henry VI—presented to Urban III, in the year 1186, a history, partly in prose, partly metrical, entitled Pantheon, recording all the transactions of the human race from the creation to the marriage of Henry VI. In addition to his fame as an historian and a poet, he was celebrated as a great traveller and linguist, being master of Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldaic. Italian antiquaries have hesitated to claim Goffredo as a compatriot; but Muratori explains and positively rejects their doubts. A Venetian monk about this time translated Aristotle’s Topics and Analytics into Latin. But the glory of Italy, in the twelfth century, was Pietro Lombardo, surnamed The Master of Sentences; a native of Novarra, and disciple of Abelard, who died Bishop of Paris in 1160. His four Books of Sentences, in which he discusses and decides questions beyond the reach of human reason, at once superseded the writings of Lanfranco and Anselmo, as the text book of scholastic theology, being esteemed both more methodical and fuller of matter. It must be added that the Norman Kings of Sicily favoured Arab literature, or at least Arab authors, and Edrisi Escheriff either wrote, or translated into Latin, his Arabic Geografia Nubica, by King Roger’s desire : and that Genoa marked her value for literature, historical at least, by appointing a regular historiographer.

The remainder of Europe may be briefly despatched. In Arab Spain, under the lenient sway of the Almohades, more civilized and cultivated than the Almoravides, Arab literature and philosophy revived. But, even under the savage Almoravides, had arisen one of the brightest intellectual stars of that country, Averrhoes of Cordova, who, banished by them, taught chiefly in Morocco under the victorious Almohades. He translated several of Aristotle’s works into Arabic, and devoted his life to expounding them, whence his surname of the Commentator. Moslem Spain then contained seventy public libraries. In Christian Spain it has been seen that the language and poetry of the troubadour were cultivated, but not every where alike. In Castile, least; and there, during the first half of the century, a secretary of the Cid’s wrote a Spanish poem upon the life of the admired champion, with as much, if not more, genuine poetry, and of the really epic character than any mediaeval production that had previously appeared could boast. Alfonso II of Aragon is said to have written verses in Aragonese; and, as early as 1135, the vulgar tongue of Castile was introduced into political life, by its employment in a municipal charter, granted to Avila, in the Asturias.

In the north of Europe, Denmark boasted her Latin historian, Saxo Grammaticus, one of the most esteemed of the age, and her Latin poet Helmhold, whilst Scalds, it is said, still sang at court in the old Norse tongue. The most remarkable Dane of the twelfth century was, however, Absalom, Archbishop of Lund. But, although it was professedly for his great learning, that, at his royal foster-brother Waldemar’s recommendation, he was elected Bishop of Roeskild before attaining the canonical age, he is distinguished rather as a patron of learning than as a writer, and yet more as a statesman, a general, and an admiral, than as either. In republican Iceland, Snorre Sturleson was writing history and compiling the prose Edda. By his labours he acquired fame and such wealth as provoked the enmity or excited the cupidity of his own family, and he was murdered by the husband of one of his daughters. In Norway, feudalism gained a footing during this century; but neither that kingdom nor Sweden yet aspired to much literature beyond the singing the feats of reigning Kings, by Icelandic and native Scalds. Russia, where Moscow had now succeeded to Vladimir, as the Grand-Principality, is said to have had chroniclers during the twelfth century; but little seems known of them, the Mongol desolation of the thirteenth having temporarily swept away all progressive civilization in the eastern Slavonian states, and more completely as more lastingly in Russia than in Poland and Hungary. It is said that Servian MSS. of the twelfth century are still in existence, and the names of the canonized Servian Archbishop St. Sabbas, of Archbishop Daniel, and of the Benedic­tine Dometian, are recorded as Servian chroniclers and legists

In the Eastern Empire letters were still cultivated; but their decline, the degeneracy of the fruits of human intellect, does not and cannot attract attention like their development out of non-existence, in younger countries. The Syro-Frank states produced one only writer whose name has any claim to the respect of posterity; to wit, William Archbishop of Tyre, whose virtues equalled his abilities. He was the preceptor of Baldwin IV, and historian of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Throughout the century, Persia, Egypt, and most of the Saracen states abounded in poets, historians, and philosophers; but so slightly are they connected with the Holy Roman Empire or with Christendom, save as the enemies of the kingdom of Jerusalem, that this brief notice of their decline not having yet begun, may suffice.

In the course of this century the drama showed symptoms of germination, which, how faint soever, promised future blossoms and fruits, and this in divers places. In Spain, Autos Sacramentales, i.e., Mysteries, are said to have been performed during this century. At Paris, returned palmers frequently gave representations in the open air of scenes and events of the Crusades in which they had participated, for the edification, rather than for the amusement, of the non-crusading spectators, and partly, it may be suspected, for their own glorification. In England, a Mystery of Antichrist appears to have been performed before Queen Elinor; and a letter from Pierre de Blois, then Archdeacon of Bath and Secretary of Henry II, to his brother, Abbot William, Master of the Revels, congratulates him upon the success of his tragedy of Flaura and Marcus, when performed before the same enlightened patroness of letters. In Germany, another Mystery of Antichrist was played, probably before Frederic I, certainly during his reign; as appears from an old MS. found in the Tegernsee monastery; which describes it as an Easter pastime of the Advent and Destruction of Antichrist, in which Popes and Emperors conversed with Antichrist and with Lady Heresy. Both the tragedy and the mysteries, may be presumed to have been Latin compositions. But, as before said, the troubadour genius produced one drama, if no more. This one, a comedy, entitled Heregia de los Preyres, was written by Anselmo Faidit, a Provençal troubadour of inferior condition, who, marrying a beautiful courtesan, led with her a vagrant histrionic life. The comedy was performed at the Court of the Marquess of Montferrat, chiefly, it seems, by the husband and wife.

The Crusades did more for science than for literature; inasmuch as Western Europe received less of Greek philosophy from the degenerate children of ancient Hellas, subjects of the Eastern Empire, than from the Arabs. If much of this came from Arab Spain, that much also came from Asia may be inferred, even from the erroneous belief that Bishop Otho first made Aristotle known in Western or Latin Europe. He must have brought home new Greek copies of some of his works, and very possibly some that were scarcely known, save through Arabic versions. Both in Italy and in England monks are said to  have been occupied early in the century in translating Euclid from an Arabic version. Original Arabic treatises upon physics and geometry were brought to Europe from the East, chiefly by Englishmen. Individual Italians appear to have been acquainted with Algebra, as far as quadratic equations, but to have kept their knowledge a profound secret—possibly lest they should be burnt as sorcerers. Geography was still so little advanced that much doubt prevailed touching the shape of the earth; and although the Blessed Alpais de Credot in a vision beheld it as a spheroid, the general opinion still inclined to hold it a square, surrounded by the sea, and so suspended or floating in the air. This science was, nevertheless, advancing, and that from its legitimate source of information, travel. To the crusades, some knowledge of eastern countries was due, which would naturally awaken a desire to know more, besides giving the missionary tendencies of the age an impulse towards the land of the morning; and the missionary monks were amongst the most judiciously observant travellers of those days. Again, the great fairs, drawing together merchants from the most remote regions, would, by the intercourse of these strangers with one another, give rise to so much knowledge of each other’s remote homes, as might excite the curiosity of Europeans respecting the countries, whence costly wares were brought, and half a wish to visit them. Thus it is averred, that, towards the close of the twelfth century, at the fair held at Kiew upon the Dnieper, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, and other Orientals met the natives of every European state. Thus, perhaps, might the Spanish Jew, Benjamin of Tudela, be induced to undertake the long and adventurous peregrination of which he has left the record to posterity: a record not to be rashly rejected, because he speaks of vessels from Cracow—vessels which, having to descend the Vistula, must have been adapted to river navigation—meeting those of England and Russia, in the port of Alexandria. Another traveller, Leonardo Fibonacci, a Pisan, confined his researches to the Greek empire and northern Africa, and gave his contemporaries the result of his journeyings in a treatise on arithmetic or the Italian Abaco, from which treatise Italy is supposed to have obtained the first idea of Algebra. Goffredo di Viterbo’s travels have been mentioned; and from all this actual observation, geography improved. In the year 1200, Guyot de Provins, a French poet, speaks of the mariner’s compass as in familiar use and in an inventory, dated 1138, of the property of a German convent, is a distinct description of a burning glass.

In the course of this century, High-Schools and Colleges began to assume the title of Universities, although some difference of opinion still exists, as to what, in those times, was held to constitute an university. Those, who give the title early in the century think that, in schools one or two sciences only were taught, or at most the trivium, and that where the quadrivium was superadded, the universal character of the instruction afforded, impressing itself upon the school, converted it into an university. Others, arguing from the description, Universitas Doctorum et Scholarium, think that the association of professors and students, natives of different countries, gave the seat of learning that dignity; and others again contend, that authority to grant the degree of Doctor constituted, or was the distinctive mark of an university.

The last theory, which agrees with Savigny’s opinion, that not the school but the constituted school-corporation was the university, seems every way the most plausible : the others leaving a title, that appears to have been much valued, really open to occupancy; inasmuch as, whenever a school was celebrated for any one science, students would resort thither from all parts; as would teachers of other sciences, to profit by the concourse of students; since professors, depending for remuneration wholly upon, payment by those who attended their lectures, required no appointment by brother professors. This theory, moreover, presupposes a charter by a Sovereign; and although the immediate connexion may not be easily traced, it is certain that the title of University appears much about the time, when Frederic granted various privileges by charter to the schools of Bologna, whose jurists had emitted opinions so consonant to his own views. The most important of these privileges was the exemption of students from the jurisdiction of the city magistrates,  subjecting them solely to a tribunal formed of the Professors and Heads of the University—but, when it is recollected that the students were then mostly preparing to take, or already in, Holy Orders, and that to be able to read was long sufficient proof of the clerical character, this privilege, strange as it seems, becomes little more than a recognition of the clerical claim to exemption from lay jurisdiction. The name of university was not borne by any Moslem Colleges, universal as they were in tuition.

Universities, as well as High-Schools, were arising throughout France, England, and Italy; in Germany, only the latter. Cities, that were ambitious of the higher institution, endeavoured to seduce professors and their scholars from established universities; whilst, upon the slightest offence given by a municipality, or even upon a quarrel amongst themselves, a party of professors with their respective students would migrate in a body to plant an infant university elsewhere, as in both cases they seem to have believed that they carried their share of the charter, or of the corporate character, with them. It was through such a quarrel that the Paduan grew out of the Bolognese University. Bologna sought to prevent the recurrence of such desertions by requiring all professors and students to take an oath, the former never to teach, the latter never to study, elsewhere. But the Popes steadily prohibited the demanding or taking of so illiberal an oath; and professors and scholars continued to desert and return at their pleasure. Bologna had no need to resort to such arbitrary measures, for her University bore the highest of characters, being held supreme in civil law, second, probably in canon law and all other sciences; it was frequented accordingly. There the statesman-prelate, Thomas-a-Becket studied; there the troubadour chronicler of Richard Coeur-de-Lion’s Crusade, Geoffrey de Vinisauf, had been Professor of Grammar, equivalent to Belles Lettres, in modern phraseology; and thence Theobald Archbishop of Canterbury invited Vacarius, to establish a Chair of Civil Law at Oxford. By the end of the century Bologna boasted 10,000 students. Oxford, that had declined under the early Normans, revived under Henry II, and though Vacarius could not quite raise it to the first rank in Civil law, or Pulleyne, in the Scholasticism which he had learned at Paris, it had its distinction; becoming pre-eminent in Canon law, for which students from all parts of Europe repaired thither. Cambridge had been favoured by Henry I, but does not appear to have as early acquired great celebrity. The Parisian University, retaining the direction given it by Lanfranco, Anselmo, and Abelard, excelled all others in Scholasticism; before which the trivium and quadrivium speedily disappeared. This did not satisfy the popes, who strove to make scholastic theology not only the principal but well-nigh the exclusive study there. Alexander III actually forbade the perusal and expounding of the pagan poets of classical antiquity within its walls. In this, however, he was not obeyed. To the University of Paris the sons of German princes were now sent for education, notwithstanding the merited reputation of the German High Schools—not universities —of Corvey, Fulda, and St. Gall, and at Paris Archbishop Absalom acquired his far-famed learning. At the close of the century, Philip Augustus granted the University of Paris privileges and exemptions similar to those granted by Frederic Barbarossa to that of Bologna. Without further particularising, it may be stated that, in this century, the Jews established, for their own race solely, a High-School at Lunel, in France, where medicine and the Talmud were chiefly taught; and which, in medicine, speedily rivalled the Salernitan institution. At all universities and high-schools, the course of study required from six to ten years’ attendance.

Of the fine arts, Architecture only can be said to have made any progress during these three quarters of a century. The passion for building churches, the rise of which was related in the Introduction, stimulated, it should seem, by the impression that Oriental magnificence and Oriental fautasticalness, made upon the imagination of the Crusaders, had continued to develop itself, and produced the Gothic style. Grand religious edifices everywhere sprang up to embellish the land, whilst testifying to the piety of its inhabitants. In Italy the Pisan Cathedral was completed, the Baptistery and Campanile, otherwise the leaning tower, were built, the fashion of detaching campaniles or belfries, from the church to which they belong, being then introduced. Cremona and Mantua had begun their cathedrals, Verona had completed hers, which Urban III consecrated whilst accidentally resident in this city. The Siculo-Norman kings mostly contented themselves with converting the splendid Arab mosque at Palermo into a cathedral, and building a few churches in Apulia. William II, however, deviating from this parsimonious course, built the magnificent church dedicated to the Virgin at Monreale. In Germany many cathedrals previously begun were finished; and, amongst others of less celebrity, Freyburg Cathedral was built, Strasburg Minster begun; but nowhere perhaps was the feeling, that impelled what maybe termed patriotic piety, to the erection of such costly edifices, dedicated to religious purposes more vividly exemplified than at Vienna. There, St. Stephen’s Cathedral was, in the year 1140 or 1144, begun by Henry Jasomir, who is said to have invited from Cracow a Polish architect, named Octavian Wolzner, a name that sounds, it must be owned, somewhat German, to plan and construct it. But such was the general zeal for the combined sanctification and adornment of the. city by this magnificent pile, dedicated to prayer and thanksgiving, that persons of all ranks and both sexes not only carried food to the workmen employed upon the building, but, for the purpose of sharing in the holy labour, harnessed themselves to the wraggons conveying stone, lime, or other of the materials required. So efficient w as this ardour, that, in 1147, the cathedral was actually completed, opened, and consecrated by the Bishop of Passau, then, as before said, virtually the Metropolitan of Austria.

In France, ecclesiastical architecture had not yet taken much hold of the public mind; but the Abbé Suger, prime minister of Lewis VI and Lew is VII, began the Abbey and Church of St. Denys; Alexander III, whilst sheltered in France, laid the first stone of Notre Dame at Paris, at the solicitation of the Bishop of Paris, its founder. This prelate was Maurice de Sully, whose name must not be mentioned without the addition of an anecdote, characteristic of the man and in some measure of the times. He was the son of peasants, and raised to the prelacy by his talents, learning, and virtues. After his elevation, his mother walked to Paris to visit him some women, of whom she asked her way to the episcopal palace, with maternal pride explaining her errand, were shocked at the idea of their prelate’s mother in so poor a garb, and dressed her better. Thus attired, she entered her son’s presence, crying, “My child !’my child!” but he coldly answered, “My mother wore only linsey-wolsey. You fine lady, cannot be her.” She went out, resumed her russet garb, and he received her with filial reverence as well as affection. The Order of Clugny built the magnificent church of the Mother Abbey. In Spain, England, Scotland, and Ireland, cathedrals everywhere started into existence; and in every country the Templars built churches, which, when, as in Spain, within reach of misbelievers, were distinguished by combining the character of a fortress with that of a place of worship. Even to Russia this devotional architectural impulse extended; and Andrei, Grand-Prince of Vladimir, whilst Vladimir was the sovereign principality, applied to Frederic Barbarossa for an architect, capable of building him a cathedral in his capital.

The taste for architecture did not, however, quite limit itself to churches. If, again, at Palermo, the Norman kings contented themselves with inheriting the splendours and luxuries, in the shape of palace and gardens, of their Arab predecessors, at Naples they built the fortress-palaces of Castello Capuano, and Castel dell’ Uovo, whence to control the turbulent population. The Doge completed the ducal palace at Venice; the Pope commenced what must rather be termed re-building than repairing the Vatican, so thoroughly was the old palace in ruins. In Germany, Frederic Barbarossa, about the year 1140, before he was even Duke of Swabia, built a small palace upon the banks of the Kinzig, a stream but little known; his choice of the site is believed to have been determined by a passion for a beautiful damsel there resident, from whose name, Gela, he named the edifice Gelnhausen. Of this palace, situated nearly at the foot of a hill, there remains, amidst the town that grew up around it, just enough to show that the architecture was chastely decorative. The chief fragment now to be seen is part of a sort of colonnade screen, apparently the separation between the Hall of Justice and some other hall; “simple, grand, well-planned, and proportioned, and, as far as the ruins afford means of judging, well adapted for habitation”. It must be presumed that the Emperor enlarged what the young Prince built for a hunting-lodge, Gelnhausen being frequently mentioned as his favourite residence, when, as sovereign, he would need very different accommodation. In France, Philip Augustus began the Louvre.

Painting, sculpture, and mosaic work seem to have remained throughout the century much what they were at its opening. Cultivated, or rather practised, they indisputably were; of this there are various proofs. The consecration of the Cathedral of Verona by Urban III, was portrayed, with likenesses, it is believed, of the Pope and of all the Cardinals present. The Abbe Suger invited an artist from Lorrain, to paint the leading incident of his sovereign’s Crusade, upon the windows of St. Denys, which he was then building; and the German painters formed themselves into a guild, choosing St. Luke for their patron. But, amidst all this zeal, those Galleries, that profess to exhibit the history of Painting from its infancy to the fulness of its mature perfection, as those of the Academy at Florence and of the Pinakothek at Munich, show that in these seventy-five years the graphic Art had not advanced. Of Sculpture much the same may be said, as far as means exist of judging for ourselves, and appreciating contemporary praise by the eulogist’s standard of comparison. Statues of distinguished persons were prepared to adorn their monuments. Thus an effigy of the Empress Beatrice was placed upon her tomb at Wulzheim in Franconia, and one of Frederic Barbarossa by her side, far distant as w ere the Imperial veteran’s ashes. The art of the humbler Carver, if not actually preferred to the Statuary’s, appears to have been throughout the century in more general request—perhaps as easier—for the decoration of churches, whether the subject upon which it was exercised were men, animals, flowers, or unmeaning ornaments. The carved lampoon of the wolf in a monk’s cowl in Freyburg Cathedral has been already mentioned, and St. Bernard’s earnest objection to disturbing the absorption of prayer by the introduction of the Arts into churches, will hardly have been forgotten. The date of the carved altar at Parma is fixed by a Latin distich to the year 1178; and that of 1200, assigned to the carved doors of Sta. Sabina at Rome, shows them to be the work of the same century with which we are occupied. Figures of Saints and Martyrs in Mosaic are to be seen in the principal churches built during the century; and even in the Venetian St. Mark’s, though already consecrated, Byzantine Mosaicists were still at work upon the internal decoration. The Art that appears to have made most progress is that of casting in metal. Towards the end of the century the custom of casting church doors, covered with historical groups from the Bible, began and gradually became prevalent; and if there were little merit in the execution of the figures, this was, at least, a bold conception. The doors of the Pisan Cathedral date from 1180. The coins appear unimproved, but Frederic’s bear witness to his admiration of Charlemagne, whose head adorns one side of his gold pieces, his own the other. But stationary as the Arts may seem, a very decided promise of future progress is discoverable, in a nascent sense of the superiority of classic art, and the high value of its remains. At Rome, before the close of the century, the Popes had positively forbidden the removing, or in any way damaging, any of these remains of whatsoever description: and a Cardinal Orsini had even begun, it is affirmed, to collect antique busts and statues.

Of the progress, or no progress, of music it is more difficult to form an opinion, there being no means of testing the praises of contemporaries. It was to be conjectured that, after the invention or general adoption of musical notation, improvement would be rapid; and some advance from the state, needing such directions, as, that all persons performing one piece should begin together, &c. there certainly must have been; or the holy Abbot of Clairvaux could hardly have found it necessary to protest against church music, so elaborate and ornamental as to divert attention from the rites of worship.

In the art of war changes were preparing by the mere existence of a military profession and mercenary troops. But this novelty being as yet in its infancy, the consequent changes were barely in embryo. In military engineering mention is occasionally made of more skilfully constructed mangonels and other stone-hurling or battering machines; but still they are only improvements of the former engines, no new invention, or real innovation appears. The Greek fire, till near the close of the century, was scarcely known to the warriors of Western Europe, and by them looked upon as magic, the gift of the fiend to those enemies of God, the idolatrous worshippers of Mahound and Termagaunt, for such they deemed the rigidly monotheistic Moslems. This Greek fire, never employed, seemingly, by the nations of Western Europe, is described as one of many combinations of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal, devised by the Chinese; and that from them the Arabs received their knowledge upon the subject, appears from the names of Chinese flower, Chinese arrow, &c., given to some of the projectile forms in use amongst them. The chief difference between these compositions and gunpowder, with which the latest investigators of the subject, Reinaud and Fave, hold the Arabs in the 12th and 13th centuries to have been altogether unacquainted, is the absence of detonation, and of consequent intense projectile force, even when explosion there was; and this they ascribe to the defective preparation of saltpetre. The vessels containing the mixture were thrown by hand, or, like stones, from machines; their destructive power lay in the certainty of their setting whatever they touched on fire, in the rapidity of the combustion they produced, and in the difficulty of extinguishing the conflagration.

In the science of navigation, the familiar use of the mariner’s compass must necessarily have produced much improvement, though it is not recorded; and the size and character of the vessels then employed is left to be inferred from such incidentally occurring statements as these: that, at the close of the century, Norway possessed a fleet of 292 ships, manned by 12,790 sailors; that Venice, upon a sudden quarrel with one of the Constantinopolitan usurpers, equipped, and provided for 100 days, a fleet of 100 ships ; and the like.

The progress of the useful arts comes next under consideration. In civil engineering, the only very perceptible advance is that one of the above-mentioned explosive preparations, or one analogous to them, supposed to have been a sort of bad gunpowder, is said to have been used for blasting rocks in Saxony, f292) In agriculture, horticulture, and manufactures, it is yet more difficult to learn anything. The before-mentioned disdain of the old chroniclers, for all such matters, leaving us to seek scanty information from the most casual notice or intimation bearing thereon. In agriculture, improvement can be but slow, and none is discoverable; although, if the culture of the vine be included, England must be said to have retrograded since the twelfth century, when William of Malmesbury describes the Vale of Gloucester as abounding in vineyards, the grapes of which were good, yielding wine little inferior to French. But vines should perhaps come under the head of horticulture, which was evidently attracting attention. The poems of the day speak much of gardens; and as it may be conjectured that the gardens of Damascus would excite the fancy of the Crusaders, as much as other branches of enjoyable Oriental luxury, it may be further conjectured that princes and great nobles now had gardens for fruit and flowers (known in England under the name of Pleasaunce) attached to their castles, although, where defence was the main object, such gardens must evidently have been either within the walls, and therefore very confined, or sacrificed at the first siege.

As to manufactures, Falcando speaks of making sugar from the cane, in Sicily, by boiling. Queen Elinor is said to have introduced the rearing of the silkworm and silk-weaving, into her duchy of Aquitaine. But, whilst in the south of Spain every branch of the silk manufacture appears to have flourished, under the Christians, as it had under the Arabs, it does not seem as yet to have extended much into Italy, either from Sicily or from Provence. The poets of the century describe great magnificence in hangings, dress, goldsmith’s work, and the like; but it were hard to discriminate between these, and the similar splendours described by Donizo a century earlier. And, with these slight exceptions, all that is known is that manufactures were spreading, that more and more towns were acquiring wealth and reputation by their industry, and that more and more laws were enacted for the protection of trade, internal and external. It may be added that copying and illuminating MSS. were occupations no longer confined to the cloister, but had become a distinct business, or rather a branch of the bookseller’s.

The habits and feelings of social life change so slowly, that three-quarters of a century hardly suffice to produce any very perceptible alteration. The character of the age was still exaggeration and contrast, both rather increasing than otherwise. Whilst the houses of the wealthiest merchants in the arrogant Italian cities still knew not the luxury of lamps or candles,—being lighted as before with flakes of fir wood,—and glass windows were a yet greater and rarer luxury, sumptuary laws were required to restrain the expenditure of the merchants themselves, as of their wives and daughters, in dress. In regard to the nobility, their occasional profusion is hardly explicable, even by the homely saying, that the money burnt in their pockets, for want of everyday comforts and luxuries upon which to expend it. This excess appears to have reached its climax in the south of France, where a Baron de Martel caused his meals to be regularly cooked by the heat of wax candles. Are the absurdities of extravagance committed at a tournament given by the King of England, with the object of reconciling the King of Aragon to the Duke of Narbonne, worth adding? Both Kings failed at the appointed time, and the intended scene of political business turned to one solely of pomp and pleasure. There, Bertrand Rambaud sowed a field, ploughed for that express purpose, with 600 marks of silver, in the shape of small coins; and Raymond de Venours gratified or shocked the whole assembly, with the spectacle of thirty of his own finest horses offered up as a holocaust to his vanity,—literally burnt before them.

These last really insane instances of extravagance were not resorted to as compensation for the paucity of occasions upon which publicly to display senseless profusion, tournaments, now in their glory, being every year more frequent. Earnest had been the remonstrances of the sainted Abbot of Clairvaux against so idly risking human life, risking yet more, the eternal salvation of those who, in pursuit of amusement, might be thus unexpectedly sent, “unhouseled, unanointed, unannealed,” to their account; and Alexander III, weary of fruitless denunciations to the same effect, at length forbade giving Christian burial to any man so dying. Nor were these few, since, as though to give weight to the Church’s condemnation of this favourite pastime, at one tournament, held in Saxony, in the year 1177, sixteen knights were slain. The question had been fairly contested with the Pope two years before, when, a.d. 1175, a brother of the Margrave of Misnia died of a wound received in a tournament. Wichmann, Archbishop of Magdeburg, forbade the interment of the corpse with church rites, or in consecrated ground, and excommunicated all who had taken any part in the tournament. The Margrave was obliged to send an embassy to Rome, and there make oath that his deceased brother had both confessed and received absolution, and, further, to pledge himself never to suffer another tournament to be held in his dominions, ere he could obtain papal permission to bury the dead body. And so little did all this check the passion for the dangerous, and, even therefore, exciting amusement, that, within ten years, a.d. 1185, Geoffrey, third son of Henry II of England, and Duke of Britany in right of his wife, being unhorsed in the melee of a tournament, was trampled to death by the charging steeds before he could be extricated. This accident occurred at Paris, tournaments being little known in England until introduced in their splendour by Richard Coeur-de-Lion. The papal throne was, at the moment of this last catastrophe, occupied, not by Alexander III, but by the dying Lucius III, or by Urban III, just elected, and it does not appear that any difficulty touching the Duke of Britany’s interment occurred. The splendour and expense of tournaments increased with their frequency. Mimes, joculatores and minstrels, though treated as vagrants by the law, were now deemed indispensable at every, the poorest, tournament; and at one that had any pretensions to be esteemed first-rate, a tenzon, or poetical jousting, of troubadours was expected. But these pleasures did not supersede gambling, which was a decidedly prevalent vice, as appears from the laws made against it. Some were mentioned in the Introduction; Richard, in his code of discipline for his Crusade, forbade games of chance to all under knightly rank, limiting the amount to be risked by all under princely station. Grand festivals, as e.g. the nuptials of Henry the Proud with the Imperial Princess Gertrude, were celebrated in the open air, no house being sufficient to contain the number of guests.

Progressive change was most apparent in the extraordinary exaltation of woman. The troubadours set the fashion both of being always in love and of professing devotion to the whole sex, as such, indiscriminately. This devotion the minnesinger, it has been seen, idealized as well as purified, and woman took her station accordingly. It is to be regretted, that the effect upon society of her enthronement, was, in the first instance, either so trifling as to be scarcely discerned, or, where considerable, not productive of unmixed good. In France, where she assumed most sovereignty, mentally intoxicated with the homage she received, she forgot that there are two essentially feminine virtues or qualities, the absence of which renders the loftiest virtues, the most powerful and most cultivated intellect, in her valueless namely, chastity, and its attendant, modesty. Thus, if she softened the ferocity of manners, she can hardly be said to have refined them, when she made no effort to guard them from the taint of licentiousness, and even encouraged tasteless luxury. The tenor of the amorous elegies, addressed by troubadours to the lady of their heart or of their fancy, shows that conjugal fidelity was seldom an obstacle to the success of an enamoured poet; and did this proof want corroboration, it might be found in the verdicts of the Cours d’Amour or Love’s Tribunals, that fantastic Provençal creation of the twelfth century. The ladies, who sat as Judges in those regularly constituted tribunals, for deciding with all legal formalities, the, as regularly pleaded, quarrels and complaints of lovers, and the reciprocal duties of couples of lovers, married or unmarried, towards each other, the claims and rights of the latter were almost invariably esteemed superior to those of the former, whilst the questions they discussed were not unfrequently of a description to which hardly could an allusion at the present day be borne. These Cours d’ Amour were pretty much confined to the South of France; and of all this over­exaltation of woman there was far less in Germany. Her seclusion, if secluded she w ere, being the offspring of the respect rather than of the jealousy of the stronger sex, had been free from slavery; and when she calmly issued from it, the chaster sentiments breathed by minnesingers and narrative poets did not quite turn her brain, like the lighter gallantry of the troubadour, or at least the intoxication was of a more ethereal kind. Veldeke represents the intercourse of the two sexes as unstained by immorality, being consonant to pure minus:—the sentimentality of later German poetry, the evil influence of which appertains to a very different state of society.

But, on the other hand, woman seems to have been unable here to exercise either refining or softening influence upon manners. Whilst the boy pages in noble households were taught to profess respectful passion, and practise innocent gallantry as a tribute due from the strong to the weak, a lesson which it was judged best to teach prior to the awakening of instinctive feelings, the Lord of the castle with his male guests, would still sit days and nights immoveable at a table, until they should have swallowed some certain, predetermined, fearful as unimaginable quantity of liquor, or till all but one, the victor in the drinking contest, were laid prostrate.

To these remarks upon the over-exaltation of the female sex, connected, whether as cause, or as effect, with the mystically enthusiastic devotion of the age to the Virgin, may be added, in illustration of mediaeval contradictions, that the evidence of women was inadmissible in some courts of law, especially those of Bavaria, where it still was so two centuries later, except in reference to dying bequests, to matrimonial questions, and to accusations of violence offered to one of their own sex.

Coarseness of manners was not the only, nor yet the most crying social evil, which needed reform in the twelfth century. The sanguinary character of legal punishments might still be conceived to be designed as a lure, by which private vengeance should be tempted to rest content with public redress. But the utter want of humanity still displayed towards prisoners of war—fellow creatures not even accused of any offence, and who might be supposed to command the sympathy of brother warriors—shows more than recklessness of the physical suffering of human beings; shews an actual pleasure in it, when the sufferer was an enemy. This barbarous treatment of such prisoners is averred to have been worst in Lombardy, where, from the mercantile character of the cities, there was little of the chivalrousness that could alone counteract the blended insolence and cruelty of the savage, brought into civilized life. Iron cages for prisons, are said to have been there invented in the course of the century. Of the nature of the feelings that victory engendered, instead of allaying, the mode in which the Milanese shewed mercy to their Pavian captives, in actually dismissing them, will afford a sufficient exemplification. Having stripped them of their nether garments, they sup­plied the place of the hinder portion by a quantity of straw, to which, after so securing the hand of the victims that no one could help either himself or his neighbour, they set fire, and so drove them blazing away.

But more painfully revolting to modern feelings than even this insolent cruelty, is it to find equivocation, if not something worse, still deemed compatible with the knightly character; at least, when it could be considered in the light of military stratagem. Something of this may have been observed in the conduct of the admired Henry the Lion: but two anecdotes of Lewis VII will more strongly illustrate the degrading view, not from any peculiar chivalrousness in this monarch, but because they do not appear to have exposed him to contemporary censure. In 1173, Lewis, being at war with Henry of England, besieged Verneuil; which, upon his swearing, together with his great vassals, that the inhabitants, if they surrendered, should be unharmed in liberty, person, or purse, capitulated, to surrender if not relieved in three days. Upon the morning of the fatal third day, Henry II arrived within easy reach of the besiegers, at the head of an army so superior to theirs, that their defeat and the relief of Verneuil seemed inevitable. But Henry knew not of the capitulation, and Lewis deluded him through the day with negotiations for peace; whilst Verneuil, unconscious that the covenanted relief was at hand, need­ing but a summons, opened its gates according to agreement. Possession being by this stratagem obtained, the town, in violation of the oaths of King and Nobles, was sacked and burnt, the inhabitants being dragged away prisoners. But the excess of the perjury foiled its success. A retreat thus encumbered could not be expeditious, and Henry, discovering that he had been duped, pursued the triumphant French King, defeated him, and recovered all the prisoners, with all the plunder taken at Verneuil. The following year Lewis laid siege to Rouen, made a truce to allow of the celebration of St. Lawrence’s festival; and, when he judged the townspeople to be absorbed in either their devotions or their subsequent merrymaking, was proceeding to storm the walls. But a Rouen priest, who fortunately preferred a solitary walk to festivity, had espied the movement in the hostile camp, and warned the intended victims. Again the hopes built upon treachery were disappointed.

Of these follies, faults, and crimes, piety and charity, blended as they are most especially in the injunctions of the Roman Catholic Church, were the redeeming concomitants. Churches, it has been seen, were everywhere built. Convents were simultaneously everywhere founded; and an anecdote relative to the manner in which one of these last acquired its name, may illustrate the forms of endowing such hallowed edifices. Henry the Bearded, Duke of Lower Silesia, grandson of the despoiled Vladislas, Grand-Duke of Cracow, and husband of the canonized Hedwig von Andechs, built a nunnery, endowing it largely with lands; part of which, that the whole might lie conveniently to the convent, he obtained by purchase, or barter, from neighbouring proprietors. This  arranged, he, with his great vassals, rode the boundaries of the convent-estate, then still the only way of insuring the general recognition of the nuns’ right of possession; and having so done, he publicly and formally asked the Abbess whether she wished for anything more. The Silesians were at this time still Poles, speaking Polish; and in that language the Abbess answered, “Trzebanyez,” signifying “Nothing more”; whence the nunnery received and retained the name of Trzebanyez.

But works of devotion that were likewise works of charity were yet more esteemed; and hospitals of all imaginable descriptions, for all imaginable wants, everywhere arose in emulation of, and in connexion with, the churches. Beghards and Beguines or monks and nuns only half bound by monastic vows, but wholly devoted to the care of the indigent sick, and to attendance upon hospitals, were instituted. In 1198, an Order of Regular Augustinian Canons of the Holy Trinity was founded, whose sole business and duty was the redemption of Christians from Paynim slavery. They were called Mathurins, after their founder Jean de Matha; and, in token of humility, designated themselves not Canons but servants, i. e. Ministri, and their houses not cloisters but hospitals. As an act of merely worldly charity, the rich in times of scarcity opened their granaries, either gratuitously or at the ordinary price of plentiful seasons, to the poor; not only the lord so relieving the vassals and the villeins whose existence and well-being, constituted his wealth and power; but even the city noble and patrician, thus opening his stores to his distressed fellow-townsmen. It seems, indeed, that, when a compassionate spirit and obedience to the dictates of the ministers of religion proved an insufficient counter­poise to self-interest, charity became compulsory under the control of the sovereign; a control, however, sometimes fearfully resisted or resented. By such a benevo­lently-intended exertion of authority, Charles the Good, Earl of Flanders, one of the four candidates for the Empire at the election of Lothar, incurred the murderously vindic­tive hatred of some of his vassals. His principality was suffering, in the year 1127, under a scarcity, which, for the lower orders, presently became famine. This he, in the first instance, endeavoured to relieve by easy measures, such as a prohibition of brewing, and of all unnecessary consumption of corn; including an order to kill all dogs, and accompanied by the distribution of bread in vast quantities to the poor. But, when all such means proved ineffectual, he commanded a search to be made upon the premises of the rich for accumulations of corn, beyond what was needful provision for their own families, and all such superabundant stores to be sold at ,a moderate price. The largest stock was found in the warehouses of the van Straaten family, to whom the Earl had previously given other cause of offence. A nobleman, with whom one of the members of this family had quarrelled, having refused his challenge because van Straaten was not his equal by birth, the challenger appealed to the Earl, who of course required the parties to prove each the nobility of his race. But to van Straaten this was impossible; the founder of the family having been a menial who, finding illicit favour in the eyes of his lady, in concert with her, murdered her husband, his lord; when she married him The van Straatens could not forgive the disgrace of being compelled to own their origin (how they had ever passed for noble is the enigma, possibly the lady had been an heiress), and the whole family now conspired with other compelled sellers of corn, against Charles, whom they stabbed in church, at the very altar where he was kneeling in prayer. The assassins fled, but were all seized and put to death, with tortures, the most ingenious of which was the doom of the Earl’s Chancellor, and as such the most criminal; he was hung by the feet with an unoffending dog, as at once partner of his fate and his executioner; being so situated that in agony, rage, or hunger, he would naturally gnaw his human fellow­victim’s face.

That the religion, graced by active charity should still be disfigured by intolerance and superstition, cannot be matter of surprise, how much soever of regret. The intolerance has been abundantly shown, and will continue to be so; of it, therefore, nothing more need here be said; and the nature of the superstition may best be exemplified by an anecdote or two, which, even if one of them should be thought better adapted to a ballad than to sober history, are too characteristic of the times to be omitted. In the first half of the century a Grafinn von Berg, upon a calumnious accusation of adultery, was beheaded, and her two sons, being pronounced the offspring of her guilt, were, as spurious, disinherited. After her death her innocence was irrefragably demonstrated, according to tradition, by her headless ghost; whereupon her sons were reinstated in their birthright. Like most of their contemporaries, they were at war with their neighbours, and it should seem upon a grand scale, since one victory that they gained cost the lives of 924 men. Graf Eberhard, the youngest brother, had been dangerously wounded in the battle, and, during his tedious convalescence, became so sensible of the sinfulness of thus sacrificing human life, that, upon his recovery, he undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; and there, concealing his name, entered a monastery, apparently as a lay brother. He seems to have been as yet unbound by the irrevocable vow, when some Crusaders, formerly his comrades, chanced to seek hospitality in the monastery, and as he, in a menial capacity, waited upon them, they recognised him by a scar. He, more devout than veracious, denied his identity ; but they satisfied the Abbot that he really was Graf Eberhard von Berg, and the Abbot sent him home to his family. Possibly he might yet be a minor, unauthorized thus to dispose of himself.

The adventures of the Countess of Berg and her son rest upon local tradition, but the strange incidents now to be related are avouched by legal documents, preserved in the archives of Bologna. In the year 1160, a Greek hermit, named Theocles Kmnia being at his devotions, felt himself divinely impelled to visit the renowned church of St. Sophia, at Constantinople. He repaired thither, and amongst other sacred objects beheld a picture of the Virgin and child, with an inscription, stating it to be the work of St. Luke, Chancellor to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and destined to be placed over the high altar of the church dedicated to St. Luke, upon the summit of Monte della Guardia, The much-admiring Hermit asked the attendant ecclesiastics, why this sacred portraiture was, in their church, and not in that for which it was painted; he was answered, “Because no one knows where Monte della Guardia is.” The Hermit undertook to find the place; and the picture was solemnly committed to his charge, to be by him conveyed to its destination. After long and fruitless wanderings in search of the unknown hill, Theocles Kmnia determined to visit Rome, in order to consult the successor of St. Peter as to the means of executing his sacred task. As he traversed the streets of Rome, he attracted the attention of the Bolognese embassador, as the Bolognese narrator entitles the city envoy to the Papal Court, who chanced to be looking out of his window; and his Excellency’s curiosity being excited, he sent for the Hermit to inquire what it might be, that so holy a man could be so carefully carrying. The Hermit told his tale, and the Embassador exclaimed “Monte della Guardia overlooks Bologna.” He accordingly despatched the reverend picture-carrier, with his hallowed burthen, well escorted, to Bologna; the work of the Evangelist was delivered over to the nuns of a convent situated upon the summit of Monte della Guardia, and its possession secured to them by legal documents; a procts verbal or protocol, of the whole transaction being drawn up, authenticated by the' signature of the magis­trates then governing the city. A very handsome church was subsequently built there, to contain and do honour to the sacred picture; and since, that no weather may interfere with pilgrimages to its shrine, a covered colonnade, Italice loggia, has been constructed from the town gate, up the hill, to the church, each affluent Bolognese family undertaking a portion of the pious work.

The last circumstance to be noticed relative to this subject, might almost encourage a hope, that, as the century advanced, superstition had slowly diminished. The end of the world not having occurred, as predicted, at the close of the year 1000, had been again fixed for the month of September, 1185, when it was to be preceded by terrific tempests, and the Advent of Antichrist! “But,” observes an old Chronicler, “as though to shame the wisdom of man, God then sent especially fine weather.”

A word concerning dress, followed by another or two of kindred nature, may not inaptly conclude this chapter. Although Lewis VII perhaps lost Aquitaine by submitting his curls to clerical shears, in emulation, it may be, of Henry I of England, who, however, guarded himself against ridicule by inducing or compelling his vassals to follow his example; these were but temporary and individual triumphs of the Church, the exceptions, not the rule. If she conquered powerful monarchs, against fashion itself she found herself impotent. She continued to thunder against the long hair of men, the trains of women, the points of shoes turned up to the knee, &c. &c.; and to thunder in vain: alike in vain against such idle follies, as against the idle dangers incurred at tournaments. Equally in vain, did John of Salisbury denounce the indecency of the fashion requiring the silks and satins, which in masculine attire had superseded the woollen garments of Charlemagne, to fit so tightly that a knight in his garb of peace seemed to wear only a second skin; denouncing also the ruinous expense of the materials in which both sexes were clothed. The gorgeousness of festal apparel rivalled the other splendours of the tournaments. The armour and weapons of the tilters shone as dazzlingly with gold and jewellery, as did the brilliant array of fair spectatresses, who anxiously watched the exploits of their favoured servants. A more permanent change was, that each gilded shield now displayed, in lieu of a fanciful emblem, the coat of arms of the bearer.

The concluding points are, that some attention was beginning to be paid to sanitary police regulations, as e. g., Philip Augustus paved Paris, and issued some laws touching cleanliness; examples that were happily, though slowly followed; and the last that even the stern Henry VI kept a Fool or Jester.