There was one among them who, under this gross insult, fell into so
deep a rage that he could not bring up a single word. It was like
Roland betrayed. His blood all rushed upwards into his throat. His
flaming eyes, his mouth so dumb, yet so fearfully eloquent, turned all
the assembly pale. They started back. He was dead: his veins had
burst. His arteries spurted the red blood over the faces of his
murderers.[17]

[17] This befell the Count of Avesnes when his freehold was
declared a mere fief, himself a mere vassal, a serf of the
Earl of Hainault. Read, too, the dreadful story of the Great
Chancellor of Flanders, the first magistrate of Bruges, who
also was claimed as a serf.--Gualterius, _Scriptores Rerum
Francicarum_, viii. 334.

* * * * *

The doubtful state of men's affairs, the frightfully slippery descent
by which the freeman becomes a vassal, the vassal a servant, and the
servant a serf,--in these things lie the great terror of the Middle
Ages, and the depth of their despair. There is no way of escape
therefrom; for he who takes one step is lost. He is an _alien_, a
_stray_, a _wild beast of the chase_. The ground grows slimy to catch
his feet, roots him, as he passes, to the spot. The contagion in the
air kills him; he becomes a thing _in mortmain_, a dead creature, a
mere nothing, a beast, a soul worth twopence-halfpenny, whose murder
can be atoned for by twopence-halfpenny.

These are outwardly the two great leading traits in the wretchedness
of the Middle Ages, through which they came to give themselves up to
the Devil. Meanwhile let us look within, and sound the innermost
depths of their moral life.

CHAPTER III.

THE LITTLE DEVIL OF THE FIRESIDE.

There is an air of dreaming about those earlier centuries of the
Middle Ages, in which the legends were self-conceived. Among
countryfolk so gently submissive, as these legends show them, to the
Church, you would readily suppose that very great innocence might be
found. This is surely the temple of God the Father. And yet the
_penitentiaries_, wherein reference is made to ordinary sins, speak of
strange defilements, of things afterwards rare enough under the rule
of Satan.

These sprang from two causes, from the utter ignorance of the times,
and from the close intermingling of near kindred under one roof. They
seem to have had but a slight acquaintance with our modern ethics.
Those of the