Stramen.

CHAPTER IV

_...Simonis leprosam
Execrate haeresim,
Sacerdotum simul atque
Scelus adulterii,
Laicorum dominatus
Cedat ab ecclesiis._

ST. PETER DAMIAN.

The King of Arles and the missionary rode along without an escort, and
felt none of the fears that the traveller of the times is often made to
entertain for his personal safety. They did not apprehend any violence,
and their only preparation for the expedition had been a recommendation
to God through Our Lady and the Saints. It is as purely imaginative in
historians and novelists--and it is difficult indeed to distinguish the
one from the other--to surround every castle with a wall of banditti, as
to station in Catholic countries of the present day, a robber or an
assassin behind every tree. In the Middle Ages, the stranger could
wander from castle to castle with as little danger as the nature of the
country permitted; even in times of war, the blind, the young, the sick,
and the clergy were privileged from outrage, though found on hostile
territory. And in war, peace, or truce, the pilgrim's shallop was a
passport through Christendom; he was under the special protection of the
Pope, and to thwart his pious designs was to incur excommunication.
Even amid the terrors of invasion, the laborer was free to pursue his
occupation, and his flocks and his herds were secure from molestation;
for it was beneath the dignity of the man-at-arms to trample upon the
person or property of the poor unarmed peasant. Such were the principles
recognized even in the eleventh century; and though we witness frequent
departures from these admirable provisions, we must be careful not to
mistake the exception for the rule, or to impute to the spirit of the
age a violence and contempt of authority common to all times, and found
alike in Norman and Frank, American and Mexican. To balance these
infringements of regular warfare or "blessed peace," we often meet with
instances as beautiful as the march of Duke Louis, the husband of St.
Elizabeth, into Franconia, in 1225, to obtain reparation for injuries
inflicted on a _peddler_.

"I hope the Baron of Stramen has lost none of his vigor," said the duke;
"we were together at Hohenburg, and I may need him at my side again. His
son Henry, too, whom I knighted before the battle, and who won his spurs
so nobly, how is he?"

"They were both well," replied Father Omehr, "when I saw them last, and
were anxiously expect