on those who were stricken and left helpless by
the hardness of the times.

CHAPTER V

THE WOMEN OF THE MIDDLE AGES

There was an almost total lack of central authority or of legal
restraint throughout the land during the long conflict between Stephen
and Matilda, wife of the Count of Anjou, whom the feudal party, in
violation of their vows to Henry I., refused to accept as queen; and
to the other terrors of war were added the depredations of a host
of mercenary soldiers brought over from the continent. To quote the
chronicler William of Newburgh: "In the olden days there was no king
in Israel, and everyone did that which was right in his own eyes;
but in England now it was worse; for there was a king, but impotent,
and every man did what was wrong in his own eyes." The Petersborough
continuation of the _English Chronicle_ gives as dark a picture of the
state of affairs: "They filled the land full of castles and filled the
castles full of devils. They took all those they deemed had any goods,
men and women, and tortured them with tortures unspeakable; many
thousands they slew with hunger--they robbed and burned all the
villages, so that thou mightest fare a day's journey nor ever find
a man dwelling in a village nor land tilled. Corn, flesh, and cheese
there was none in the land. The bishops were ever cursing them, but
they cared naught therefor, for they were all forcursed and forsworn
and forlorn.... Men said openly that Christ slept and His saints.
Such and more than we can say we suffered for our sins," Such grim
experiences of unlicensed feudalism did much for the social education
of the English people, and similar lawlessness was never repeated in
the history of the country. Out of the furnace through which England
passed, the English character emerged, purified of some of its
dross of Anglo-Saxon sluggishness and Norman arrogance, and finely
representative of the tempered elements of both peoples. A sense of
solidarity was awakened.

The feudal system found its expression in various forms of homage and
of fealty, upon which it was founded. It embraced, among many services
and liabilities, some that related to women. On the death of a tenant
leaving an heiress under fourteen years of age, the lord upon whose
lands the tenant had dwelt, and to whom he owed the military and other
services of his lower position, became the guardian in chivalry to
the maiden, and had charge of her person and her lands unt