conclusive as to the general corruption of morals among the clergy as
among the laity. The common diversion of the upper classes, lay and
clerical, when not engaged in actual war, was hunting. An extended
commerce was impossible when robbery was a normal occupation of the
great.

Gradually, however, a more orderly society emerged. Maritime commerce
developed in two separate areas, the northern and western, and the
Mediterranean. The first great commerce in the north arises from the
manufacture in Flanders of the wool exported from England. And in the
fourteenth century England herself began to compete in the woollen
manufacture. The German free manufacturing towns established the Great
Hanseatic League; but maritime commerce between the Northern and
Southern areas was practically non-existent till the fifteenth century,
by which time English ships were carrying on a fairly extensive traffic
in the Mediterranean. In that area the great seaports of Italy, and in a
less degree, of Catalonia and the French Mediterranean seaboard,
developed a large commerce. Naturally, however, the law which it was
sufficiently difficult to enforce by land was even more easily defied on
the sea, and piracy was extremely prevalent.

Governments as well as private persons were under a frequent necessity
of borrowing, and for a long time the great money lenders were the Jews.
They, however, were later to a great extent displaced by the merchants
of Lombardy, and the fifteenth century witnesses the rise of the great
bankers, Italian and German.

The structure and furniture of all buildings for private purposes made
exceedingly little provision for comfort, offering an extreme contrast
to the dignity of the public buildings and the sublimity of
ecclesiastical architecture.

During the last three hundred years of our period it is clear that there
was a great diminution of the status of servitude and a great increase
in the privileges extended to corporate towns. Private warfare was
checked and lawless robbery to a considerable extent restrained. It is
tolerably clear that the rise of heretical sects were both the cause and
the result of moral dissatisfaction, tending to the adoption of higher
moral standards. Some of these sects were cruelly crushed by merciless
persecution, as in the case of the Albigenses. The doctrines of
Wickliffe, however, were never stamped out in England; and the form
which they took in Bohemia among the followers of th