teresting accounts extant in
Northern Europe of a journey to Palestine.

To learn something of those living in the world, who were the
inspirers, the helpmates, and the companions of men in everyday life,
we must turn to the poems and romances. These form the key to the
domestic life of the time. Though ordinary life may be somewhat
idealised in them, still it is ordinary life on which they are based.
Moreover, many of the MSS. in which they are written down contain
miniatures--a legacy of exceeding worth to the student. But if we seek
some knowledge of mediaeval life from miniatures, it is not necessary
to confine our researches to MSS. of romances. Transcripts of the
classics, of the moralised Bible, and of other religious works also
supply many pictures of everyday life, adapted quite regardless of
incongruity, for one of the characteristics of the Middle Ages was a
profound incapacity to picture to itself anything _but_ itself, or to
reconstitute in any way, as we do to-day, times and scenes not its
own. This was owing partly to its vitality and its youthfulness, which
grasped at anything and everything without discernment, and partly to
its lack of reliable material. The whole aspect of life, too, was
changed and enlarged, and for the moment over-charged, for the
flood-gates of the East, hitherto only partially opened, had been rent
asunder by the traveller and the crusader.

Before we attempt to arrive at some idea of the manner of life of the
women of the Middle Ages, it will be well, if possible, to modify what
seems to be a general and perhaps a distorted impression of these
women of bygone days, as regards their want of loyalty in their
domestic relations, and all the deceit and cunning such a want led to.
Without attempting to justify what is fundamentally wrong, let us go
if we can into the region of fact, and in that region there is quite
enough romance without introducing it from outside.

In the first place, so much more, as a rule, is heard of vice than of
virtue. "La voix de la beaute parle bas: elle ne s'insinue que dans
les ames les plus eveillees." Then the standard of life in those days
was very different from what it is to-day. Manners and customs which
were accepted facts of everyday life then, would strike us as
strangely rude and repellent now. Take, for instance, the attitude
towards his queen of a king we have all been taught to revere--Arthur,
the semi-saint, and the so-called pattern of c