Chapter II: The Foundation of the Capetian Dynasty (2)

“The disturbers of the public peace,” he wrote, “have returned, whilst you, under bond to defend your subjects, remain as it were captive in a foreign land. Of what are you thinking, sire, thus to leave the flock intrusted to you at the mercy of the wolves? How can you disguise from yourself the perils with which the robbers who have outstripped you menace the state? No, it is not permissible for you to remain any longer so far away from us. Everything here craves your presence. Therefore we pray your highness, we exhort your piety, we call upon your goodness of heart, finally we conjure you by the faith which binds reciprocally prince and subject, not to prolong beyond Easter your sojourn in Syria, lest a longer delay render you guilty in the eyes of the Lord of disregarding the oath which you swore on assuming the crown. You will, I think, find cause for contentment in our conduct. We have placed in the hands of the knights Templar the money which we had intended to send you. We have further repaid to the count of Vermandois the £3,000 which he had lent us for your use. At the present time your land and your people enjoy a happy peace. We lay in store against your return the broken victuals for the fiefs dependent on you, the tallage and victuals which we levy from your domains. You will find your houses and palaces in good preservation owing to the care we have taken in doing repairs. I have now reached the decline of life, but I dare venture to say that the works I engaged to do from love to God and devotion to your person have hastened my old age. With regard to the queen, your wife, I advise that you conceal the dissatisfaction she causes you till such time as, restored to your realm, you can quietly deliberate over that and other matters.”

Louis kept them waiting for him yet a long time. Suger had to fight against the pretensions and plottings of Robert de Dreux and his party. He realised that single-handed he would not be able to hold his own, and boldly summoned to Soissons an assembly of the bishops and principal barons of the realm. This generous appeal to the opinions and the liberties of the times had the result he anticipated: the assembly sided with him and strengthened him against his enemies. Defeated in their purpose in France, they made an attack on him in Palestine, this time within the mind of the king himself, who, frivolous and credulous, at first believed all their accusations. But on passing through Italy on his return to his dominions Louis received through Pope Eugenius III, friend and admirer of Suger, a completely different impression, in which he was fully confirmed on arriving in France by the good order which he there found established, the resources husbanded for him by Suger, and the eagerness shown by the regent to hand over to the king his rightful authority.

Other ideas were at work in the old man’s brain. He had disapproved of his master’s crusade as fatal to the interests of the kingdom; but the misfortunes to the Christians in the East, and regret at seeing the Holy Land on the point of once more falling into the hands of the infidels, preoccupied his mind continually. He conceived the idea of himself attempting a fresh expedition to Palestine, of raising an army at his own expense, of devoting all his wealth and influence to the cause, of inducing the leading bishops to follow his example, and of personally heading an undertaking by which he hoped Jerusalem would be saved without imperilling France and his king. In the narrative of William, his biographer, we can see with what ardour and perseverance he threw himself into this project, even after illness forbade him to hope for the glory resulting from it. He had already chosen the leader whom he deemed most competent to replace him and had presented him with the sums of money collected for carrying out the scheme, when death overtook him, January 12th, 1151, at the age of seventy.[h]

EMANCIPATORY MOVEMENTS AFTER THE CRUSADES

[Sidenote: [1000-1151 A.D.]]

The grand movement of the crusade having for a while withdrawn men from local servitude, and led them abroad through Europe and Asia, they sought Jerusalem and found freedom. That liberating trumpet of the archangel, which was thought to have been heard in the year 1000, sounded a century later in the preaching of the crusade. The village awoke at the foot of the feudal castle, whose shade hung heavy over it. The pitiless man who descended from his vulture’s eyrie only to despoil his vassals, now himself armed them, led them, lived with them, suffered with them. Communion in misery softened his heart. Many a serf could say to the baron, “My lord, I found you a draft of water in the desert; I shielded you with my body at the siege of Antioch, or Jerusalem.”

_The Communes_

Humanity, then, began again to honour itself, even in its most miserable conditions. The first communal revolutions preceded, or closely followed, the year 1100. They began to think that every man was entitled to dispose of the fruits of his own labour, and to give away his own children in marriage; they emboldened themselves to think that they had a right to come and go, to buy and sell, and they suspected, in their presumption, that it might very possibly be that men were equal.

Until then, that formidable thought of equality had not come forth in a very precise and tangible form. We are told, indeed, that the peasants of Normandy revolted in the year 1000, but they were easily put down; a few knights ravaged the country, dispersed the villeins, cut off their feet and hands, and there was an end of the matter. The peasants, in general, were too much isolated from each other; their _jacqueries_ were always unsuccessful throughout the Middle Ages. Unhappily, too, it must be owned, they were too degraded by slavery, too brutalised by the excess of their woes; their triumph would have been that of barbarism. It was especially in the populous boroughs, grouped round the castles, and, above all, round the churches, that ideas of emancipation fermented. The lay, or ecclesiastical lords had encouraged the population of those boroughs by concessions of land, being desirous of augmenting their own strength and the number of their vassals. These towns were not large and commercial cities, like those of the south of France and Italy, but they had some rude branches of trade, some blacksmiths, many weavers, butchers, and innkeepers, in the towns of transit. Sometimes the lords invited skilful workmen to settle in their towns, such, at least, as could embroider a stole, or forge armour; it was absolutely necessary to leave those men a little liberty, for, otherwise, as they carried their all in their hands, they would have left the country.

The growth of freedom, then, was destined to commence by the central towns of France, which, obtaining their franchises by fair means or by force, received the name of privileged towns, or communes. The occasion of this result was, generally, the defence made by the inhabitants against the oppression and robbery of the feudal lords, and, in particular, the defence of the Île-de-France against Normandy, the feudal country _par excellence_. “At this period,” says Ordericus Vitalis,[g] “popular communality was established by the bishops in such wise that the priests accompanied the king to siege or battle, with the banners of their parishes and all their parishioners.” According to the same historian, it was a Montfort (an illustrious family, which was, in the following century, to destroy the liberties of the south of France, and to lay the foundation of those of England), it was Amaury de Montfort, who advised Louis the Fat, after his defeat at Brenneville, to employ against the Normans the men of the communes, marching under the banners of their parishes (1119). But when these communes returned within their own walls, they became more urgent in their demands; it was a mortal blow to their humility, to have once seen the great war-steeds and the noble knights flying before their parochial banners; to have put an end, with Louis the Fat, to the highway robberies of the Rocheforts; to have harried the lair of the De Coucys. They said, with the poet of the twelfth century: “We are men as well as they; our hearts are as great; we are as capable of endurance as they.” They all wanted some franchise, some privilege, and for this they offered money--which they contrived to find, indigent and wretched as they were. Poor artisans, blacksmiths, or weavers, allowed, as a matter of favour, to set themselves down at the foot of a castle; fugitive serfs, who had taken refuge round a church, such were the founders of liberty; they stinted themselves of bread to obtain them, and the lords and the king were eager to sell diplomas so well paid for.

This revolution was accomplished everywhere, under a thousand forms, and with little noise; it was only prominently remarked in some towns of Oise and Somme, which, being placed in less favourable circumstances, divided between two lords, lay and ecclesiastical, applied to the king to obtain a solemn guarantee for concessions often violated, and which maintained a precarious liberty at the cost of many centuries of civil war. It was upon these towns that the name of “communes” was more particularly bestowed. These wars are a small, but dramatic incident in the great revolution which was taking place silently, and under various forms, in all the towns of the north of France.

It was in the valiant and choleric Picardy, the communes of which had so well beaten the Normans; it was in the country of Calvin, and so many other revolutionary spirits, that these explosions took place.[f] Le Mans in 1066, then Cambray in 1076, gave the signal, followed by Noyon, Beauvais, St. Quentin, Laon, Amiens and Soissons. All wrested communal charters from their lords, mostly of the ecclesiastical order. In 1112 the bishop of Laon attempted to repeal the communal charter he had granted, somewhat under compulsion, three years before. His house was surrounded; the nobles who came to his assistance were killed, and the prelate himself fell under the blows of an axe. The king came and the commune was abolished. But before sixteen years had passed the communal party regained the ascendancy. In 1128 the king ratified a new charter granted by the bishop.[c] Great or small, the Picard communes were heroic, and bravely did they fight. They too had their belfry, their tower, not inclined and faced with marble, like the _miranda_ of Italy, but furnished with a sonorous bell, that summoned the citizens, not in vain, to battle against the bishop or the lord. Women went forth to these fights, against men. Eighty women insisted on taking part in the attack upon the castle of Amiens, and were wounded there.

So, likewise, Joan Hachette fought afterwards, at the siege of Beauvais. A sprightly and laughter-loving population it was, of impetuous soldiers and merry story-tellers, a country of light manners, of smutty _fabliaux_, of good songs. It was their delight, in the twelfth century, to see the count of Amiens, mounted upon his big horse, venturing beyond the pont-levis, and caracoling clumsily; thereupon the innkeepers and the butchers planted themselves boldly at their doors, and startled the feudal animal with their loud laughter.

It has been said that the king founded the communes, but the reverse is, rather, the fact--it was the communes that founded the king; without them he could not have repulsed the Normans. Those conquerors of England and of the Two Sicilies would, probably, have conquered France; it was the communes, or, to employ a more general and more exact word, it was the _bourgeoisies_ which, under the banner of the parish saint, achieved the security of public peace between the Oise and the Loire; and the king, mounted on horseback, carried the banner of the abbey of St. Denis, at the head of the lords. A vassal, as count of Vexin, abbot of St. Martin de Tours, canon of St. Quentin, defender of the churches, he waged holy war against the brigandage of the lords of Montmorency and Puiset, and against the execrable ferocity of the Coucys. He had upon his side the nascent _bourgeoisie_ and the church; feudalism had had all the rest, all the strength and the glory; the poor helpless king was smothered between the vast dominations of his vassals.

_Philosophy and Thought; Abelard and St. Bernard_

[Sidenote: [1079-1115 A.D.]]

The chain of free-thinkers, broken, it would seem, after Johannes Scotus, had its links reunited by the great Gerbert, who became pope in the year 1000. Educated at Cordova, and admitted a master at Rheims, Gerbert had for disciple Fulbert of Chartres, whose pupil Bérenger [Berengarius] of Tours affrighted the church by the first doubt cast upon the Eucharist. Soon after, the canon Rosselin of Compiègne dared to touch upon the question of the Trinity. He taught, moreover, that general ideas were but words: “The virtuous man is a reality; virtue is but a sound.” This bold reform gave a violent shock to all poetry, to all religion; it accustomed men to see nothing but personifications in those ideas that had been regarded as real things; it was nothing less than a transition from poetry to prose. This logical heresy inspired the contemporaries of the First Crusade with horror; nominalism, as it was called, was stifled for a while.

Champions were not wanting to the church against the innovators. The Lombards, Lanfranc and St. Anselm, both of them archbishops of Canterbury, combated Bérenger and Rosselin. St. Anselm, an original genius, anticipated the famous argument of Descartes, for the existence of God: “If God did not exist, I could not conceive him.” It was a great delight for him to have made this discovery, after a long fit of sleeplessness. Another conflict of an intellectual kind, and one of a much graver nature, was about to begin, so soon as the question should have come down from politics to theology and morals, and the very morality of Christianity should have been brought in question. Thus, Pelagius came after Arius, and Abelard after Bérenger.

The church seemed at peace; the school of Laon and that of Paris were occupied by two pupils of St. Anselm of Canterbury, Anselm of Laon, and William of Champeaux. Great signs and tokens, however, were appearing; the Vaudois had translated the Bible into the vulgar tongue; the _Institutes_ were also translated, and law was taught, simultaneously with theology, at Orleans and at Angers. The mere existence of the school of Paris was an immense innovation and danger. The ideas which, till then, had been dispersed, and exposed to close inspection in the various ecclesiastical schools, were about to converge to a centre. The conquests of the Normans and the First Crusade had carried that potent philosophic idiom everywhere--into England, into Sicily, into Jerusalem. This circumstance alone gave France, especially central France and Paris, an immense attractive force. The French of Paris became gradually proverbial; feudalism had found its political centre in the royal city, and that city was now about to become the capital of human thought.

He who began this revolution was not a priest; he was a handsome young man, of brilliant and engaging qualities, and of noble race. No one, like him, could write love verses in the vulgar tongue, and he sang them himself; then his erudition was extraordinary for the times--he was the only man who knew Greek and Hebrew.[6] Perhaps he had frequented the Jewish schools (there were many of them in the south), or the rabbis of Troyes, Vitry, or Orleans. There were then two principal schools in Paris; the old episcopal school of Notre Dame, and that of St. Geneviève, on the mountain, where William of Champeaux was in the zenith of his fame. Abelard became one of his pupils, laid his doubts before him, puzzled his master, made sport of him, and put him to silence. He would have done the same with Anselm of Laon, had not the professor, who was a bishop, expelled him from his diocese. Thus did the knight-errant of dialectics go about unhorsing the most famous champions. He says himself that he renounced the other kind of tilting, that of the tournaments, only from his love for the war of words. Thenceforth, victorious and unrivalled, he taught at Paris and at Melun, where Louis the Fat resided, and where the lords were beginning to gather in great numbers. These knights encouraged a man of their own order, who had beaten the priests upon their own ground, and who put the most self-sufficient of the clerks to silence.

The whole body of Christianity was at stake; it was attacked at its base. If original sin, as Abelard said, was not a sin, but a penalty, that penalty was unjust, and redemption was useless. Abelard defended himself from such a conclusion; but he justified Christianity by means of such feeble arguments, that he rather did it more damage by declaring that he had no better answer to give. He suffered himself to be brought to a stand by means of the _argumentum ad absurdum_, and then he appealed to authority and faith. And so, then, man was no longer guilty; the flesh was justified and restored to honour; all the sufferings with which men had immolated themselves were superfluous. What became of so many voluntary martyrs, so many fastings and mortifications--the vigils of monks, the tribulations of hermits, the countless tears shed before God? All was vanity--mockery. God was an amiable and easy God, who had nothing to do with all this.

The church was then under the sway of a monk, a simple abbot of Clairvaux, St. Bernard. He was of noble birth, like Abelard, a native of Upper Burgundy. He had been brought up in the puissant house of Cîteaux, the sister and rival of Cluny, which sent forth so many illustrious preachers, and which, half a century afterwards, made the crusade against the Albigenses. But St. Bernard thought Cîteaux too splendid and too rich: he went into needy Champagne, and founded the monastery of Clairvaux in the “Valley of Wormwood.” There he was free to lead that life of sorrows that was needful to him: nothing could win him from it; never would he hear of being anything else than a monk, though he might have become archbishop and pope. Constrained to reply to all the kings who consulted him, he found himself all-potent in spite of himself, and condemned to govern Europe. A letter from St. Bernard made the army of the king of France withdraw from Champagne. When schism broke out, by the simultaneous elevation of Innocent II and of Anacletus, St. Bernard was appointed by the church of France to choose between them, and he chose Innocent. But these were not his greatest affairs, as his letters inform us; he lent, not gave, himself to the world; his love and his treasure were elsewhere. Living in the inward life, in prayer and sacrifice, no one could make himself more alone in the midst of bustle; the senses no longer spoke to him of the world. He walked a whole day, says his biographer, along the Lake of Lausanne, and in the evening he asked where the lake was. He drank oil for water, and took clotted blood for butter. He could hardly support himself erect, and yet he found strength to preach the crusade to a hundred thousand men. The multitude thought it was a spirit, rather than a man they saw, when he appeared thus before them, with his red and white beard, his fair and hoary hair; meagre and weak, with but a scarcely visible indication of life upon his cheeks. His sermons were terrible; mothers kept their sons away from them, and wives their husbands; they would else have all followed him to the monasteries. As for him, when he had sent forth the breath of life over the multitude, he returned with speed to Clairvaux, reconstructed his little hut of boughs and foliage near the convent, and assuaged a little his love-sick soul in writing the exposition of the “Song of Songs” which employed his whole life.

Imagine with what grief such a man must have heard of Abelard’s success--of the usurpations of logic over religion; the prosaic victory of reasoning over faith; the flame of the sacrifice becoming stifled and extinguished in the world. It was robbing him of his God. St. Bernard was not to be compared with his rival as a logician; but the latter himself wrought his own downfall. He undertook to deduce its consequences from his doctrine, and he applied it to his conduct in life. He had reached that excess of prosperity in which the infatuation common to our nature plunges us into some great fault. Everything succeeded with him; men held their peace before him; women all regarded with looks of love an engaging, invincible young man, beautiful in face and all-powerful in mind, who had a whole people for his followers. “I had reached such a pass,” he says, “that honour what woman I would with my love, I had no refusal to fear.” Rousseau says precisely the same thing in his _Confessions_ in relating the success of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_.

[Sidenote: [1115-1140 A.D.]]

The Héloïse of the twelfth century was the niece of the canon Fulbert, very young, beautiful, learned, and already celebrated; she was intrusted by her uncle to the teaching of Abelard, who seduced her. This fault had not even love for its excuse; it was deliberately, in cold blood, by way of pastime, that Abelard betrayed the confidence of Fulbert. We know that he was cruelly punished by mutilation for his crime; he renounced the world, and became a Benedictine at St. Denis, about the year 1119. Thither he was pursued by ecclesiastical persecutions, and he found no rest there. The archbishop of Rheims, the friend of St. Bernard, assembled a council against him at Soissons; Abelard was like to have been stoned by the people; he was frightened, shed many tears, burned his books, and said whatever they pleased. He was condemned without inquiry, his enemies alleging that it was enough that he had taught without the authority of the church.

Shut up at St. Médard de Soissons, and afterwards a refugee at St. Denis, he was obliged to fly from that asylum. He had presumed to doubt that St. Denis, the Areopagite, had ever visited France.[7] To impugn that legend was to attack the religion of the monarchy; and from that moment the court withdrew its protection from him. He fled to the dominions of the count of Champagne, and hid himself in a desert place on the Ardusson, two leagues from Nogent. Reduced now to poverty, and having but one clerk with him, he built a hut of reeds and an oratory in honour of that Trinity he was accused of denying, and named his hermitage the Comforter, the Paraclet. But his disciples, having learned where he was, flocked round him; they built them huts, and a town rose in the desert, dedicated to science and to liberty. A little more, and he would once more have appeared as a public teacher; but he was compelled again to hold his peace, and to accept the priory of St. Gildas de Ruys in Brittany, the language of which he did not understand. It was his fate to find no rest; his Breton monks, whose habits he endeavoured to reform, endeavoured to give him poison in the chalice. Thenceforth, the unfortunate man led a wandering life, and even thought, it is said, of taking refuge in some land of the infidels; but first he would once measure his strength against that of the terrible adversary who everywhere pursued him with his zeal and his sanctity. At the instigation of Arnold of Brescia, he challenged St. Bernard to a logical duel before the Council of Sens. The king, the counts of Champagne and Nevers, and a host of bishops were to be present, and to judge of the hits. St. Bernard repaired to the rendezvous reluctantly, conscious as he was of his inferiority. But the threats of the people and the timidity of his rival relieved him from all embarrassment. Abelard durst not defend himself, but contented himself with appealing to the pope. Innocent II owed everything to St. Bernard, and hated Abelard for the sake of his disciple, Arnold of Brescia, who was then roaming over Italy, and summoning the towns to freedom. He ordered Abelard to be shut up; but the latter had anticipated him by voluntarily taking refuge in the monastery of Cluny. The abbot, Peter the Venerable, answered for Abelard, who died there two years afterwards. Such was the end of the restorer of philosophy in the Middle Ages--the son of Pelagius, the father of Descartes, and a Breton like them. From another point of view, he may be regarded as a precursor of the humane and sentimental school, which was revived in the persons of Fénelon and Rousseau.

[Sidenote: [1140-1142 A.D.]]

There is no memory more popular in France than that of Abelard’s mistress. The fall of the man made the grandeur of the woman; but for Abelard’s misfortune, Héloïse would have been unknown; she would have remained obscure and in the shade, she would have desired no other glory than that of her spouse. At the period of their separation, he made her take the veil, and built for her the Paraclet, of which she became the abbess. There she held a great school of theology, Greek, and Hebrew. Many similar monasteries rose around the Paraclet, and some years after the death of Abelard, Héloïse was declared head of an order by the pope. But her glory consists in her love, so constant and so disinterested--a love to which Abelard’s coldness and hardness of heart give a new lustre. Let us compare the language of the two lovers:

“Fulbert,” says Abelard, “gave her up, without reserve, to my control, so that, upon my return from the schools, I should apply myself to her instruction, and, if I found her negligent, should chastise her severely. Was not this giving full license to my desires, so that, if I did not succeed by caresses, I might compass my end by threats and blows?”

This dastardly brutality of a pedant of the twelfth century is in strange contrast with the exalted and disinterested sentiments expressed by Héloïse. “God knows, in thee, I sought but thee; nothing of thee but thyself; such was the sole object of my desire. I was ambitious of no advantage, not even of the bond of wedlock; I thought not, thou well knowest, of satisfying either my own wishes or my own pleasure, but thine. If the name of spouse is more holy, sweeter to me seemed that of thy mistress, that (be not angry) of thy concubine (_concubinæ vel seorti_). The more I humbled myself for thee, the more I hoped to gain in thy heart. Yes, though the master of the world, though the emperor had been willing to honour me with the name of his spouse, I would rather have been called thy mistress than his wife and his empress (_tua dici meretrix, quàm illius imperatrix_).” She accounts in a singular manner for her having long refused to be the wife of Abelard: “Would it not have been an unseemly, a deplorable thing, that one woman should appropriate and take for herself alone, him whom nature had created for all mankind? What mind, intent upon the meditations of philosophy or of sacred things, could endure the crying of children, the prating of nurses, the disturbance and tumult of serving-men and women?”

The mere form of the letters that passed between Abelard and Héloïse shows how little the passion of the latter was returned. Abelard divides and subdivides his mistress’s letters; he replies to them methodically, and by chapters. He heads his own: “To the spouse of Christ, the slave of Christ”; or “To his dear sister in Christ, Abelard her brother in Christ.” Héloïse’s tone is very different: “To her master, nay, father; to her husband, nay, brother; his handmaid, his spouse, nay, his daughter, his sister; Héloïse to Abelard.”[f]

_Abelard and the University_

[Sidenote: [1100-1150 A.D.]]

Hasting Rashdall describes the relations between Abelard’s influence in Paris and the ultimate development of the University of Paris as follows:

“The less imaginative historians of the University of Paris have generally been contented with tracing its origin to the teaching of Abelard. And it was undoubtedly to the intellectual movement of which Abelard is the most conspicuous representative that the rise of the university must ultimately be ascribed. But there was nothing in the organisation of the schools wherein Abelard taught to distinguish them from any other cathedral schools which might for a time be rendered famous by the teaching of some illustrious master. In the age of Abelard there were three great churches at Paris more or less famous for their schools. In the first place there was the cathedral (Notre Dame), whose schools were presided over by William of Champeaux. Then, on the left bank of the Seine, there was the collegiate church of St. Geneviève; and there was the church of the Canons Regular of St. Victor’s, where a school for external scholars was started by William after his retirement from the world. St. Victor’s became the head-quarters of the old traditional or positive theology, and it had ceased to exist, or ceased to attract secular students, before the first traces of a university organisation begin to appear. With both the secular schools of Paris, Abelard was at one time or other connected. Denifle’s repudiation of the old view that the university arose from a junction between the arts schools of St. Geneviève and the theological schools of Notre Dame goes slightly beyond the evidence, but in the main he is unquestionably right in contending that it was the cathedral schools which eventually developed into the university.

“It was the fame of Abelard which first drew to the streets of Paris the hordes of students whose presence involved that multiplication of masters by whom the university was ultimately formed. In that sense, and in that sense only the origin of the University of Paris may be connected with the name and age of Abelard. Of a university or a recognised society of masters we hear nothing; nay, the existence of such an institution was impossible at a time when the single master of the cloister school seems to have been as a rule the only recognised master in or around each particular church.”[m]

_The Position of Woman_

Abelard had propounded the ideal of pure and disinterested love in his writings, as the consummation of the religious soul. Woman rose up to it, for the first time, in the writings of Héloïse; but still indeed referring it to man, to her spouse, to her visible God.

The restoration of woman, which had begun with Christianity, took place chiefly in the twelfth century. A slave in the East, even in the Greek gynæceum a recluse, emancipated by imperial jurisprudence, she was recognised by the new religion as man’s equal. Still Christianity, but just liberated from pagan sensuality, continued to fear and distrust woman; men knew themselves to be weak and fond, and they repudiated her all the more strongly, the more they felt how they sympathised with her in their hearts. Hence, the harsh, and even contemptuous expressions with which they labour to fortify themselves. Woman is usually designated by the ecclesiastical writers, and in the Capitularies, by that degrading, but most expressive phrase, “the weaker vessel” (_vas infirmius_). When Gregory VII wished to free the clergy from its double bond, woman and land, there was a new outburst of invective against that dangerous Eve whose seduction wrought Adam’s ruin, and who evermore pursues him in his sons.

A quite opposite movement began in the twelfth century. Free mysticism undertook to raise up what sacerdotal harshness had trampled under foot. It was especially a Breton, Robert d’Arbrissel, who fulfilled this mission of love. He reopened the bosom of Christ to women, founded asylums for them, built them Fontevrault, and there were soon Fontevraults all over Christendom. The enterprising charity of Robert applied itself, by preference, to great sinners of the female sex. He taught the clemency of God, and his immeasurable mercy in the vilest haunts. It was a curious thing to see the blessed Robert d’Arbrissel holding forth day and night amidst a crowd of disciples of both sexes, all resting together around him. The bitter sarcasms of his enemies had no effect upon the charitable and courageous Breton, nor even the scandals to which these meetings gave occasion; he covered all with the wide mantle of grace.

As grace prevailed over the law, a great religious revolution took place. Piety became converted into an enthusiasm of chivalric gallantry; the mystical church of Lyons celebrated a festival of the Immaculate Conception (1134), thus exalting the ideal of maternal purity precisely at the period when Héloïse was expressing the pure disinterestedness of love in her famous letters. Woman reigned in heaven; she reigned also upon earth. We see her interfere, and with authority, in the affairs of this world. Bertrade de Montfort ruled at once over her first husband, Fulk of Anjou, and her second, Philip I, king of France. Louis VII dates his acts from the coronation of his wife Adela. Women, natural judges in poetical contests, and in the courts of love, sat also as judges in grave matters, and upon an equality with their husbands. The king of France expressly recognises this right.

In the first half of the twelfth century women were everywhere restored to that right of inheritance from which they had been excluded by feudal barbarism in England, Castile, Aragon, Jerusalem, Burgundy, Flanders, Hainault, Vermandois, Aquitaine, Provence, and Lower Languedoc. The rapid extinction of male heirs, the softening of manners, and the progress of equity, restored the right of inheritance to women. They brought sovereignties with them into foreign houses; they linked and bound the world together, accelerated the agglomeration of states, and prepared the way for the centralisation of the great monarchies.

One royal house alone, that of the Capets, did not recognise the right of women; it remained safe from the mutations which transferred the other states from one dynasty to another; it received and it did not give. Foreign queens might come; the female, the movable element, might be renewed, but the male element did not come to it from without, it remained always the same, and with it remained an identity of spirit and a perpetuity of system. This fixity of the dynasty is one of those things which have most contributed to insure the unity and the personality of this mobile country. The common characteristic of the period following the crusade, is an attempt at emancipation. The crusade in its immense movement had been an occasion--an impulse; when the occasion came, the attempt took place, an attempt for the emancipation of the people in the communes, for the emancipation of women, for that of philosophy and of pure thought. This echo of the crusade, like the crusade itself, was to display all its potency and its effect in France, among the most sociable of nations.[f]

FOOTNOTES

[4] [Contemporaries assign very varied and incoherent numbers for the size of William’s army. One of them, Hugues de Fleury, estimates it at 150,000 men. Modern historians have cut this down to about 60,000, which is still regarded by some as too high.]

[5] [The trouble with Robert did not end until 1076, when a treaty was made and the king received the homage of Flanders.]

[6] [She (Héloïse) was perfect mistress of Latin and knew enough Greek and Hebrew to form the basis of her future proficiency. He (Abelard) knew nothing of Greek or Hebrew, although all his biographers except M. Rémusat assume that he knew them both.--G. W. LEWES.[l]]

[7] [A legend had identified St. Denis who flourished in the third century with Dionysius the Areopagite who was converted by St. Paul.]