a society more vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart
fascinate us with their pictures of the artificial
courtesies of chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and
of Tauler show us that spiritual life survived in some rare
souls, but the mass of the population was plunged into the
depths of sensuality and the most brutal oblivion of the
moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the
priesthood were accountable, and that, in comparison with
them, the laity were holy. What was that state of
comparative holiness he proceeds to describe, blushing as he
writes, for the benefit of confessors, giving a terrible
sketch of universal immorality which nothing could purify
but fire and brimstone from heaven. The chroniclers do not
often pause in their narrations to dwell on the moral
aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals of Flanders,
under date of 1379, tells us that it would be impossible to
describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries,
blasphemies, adulteries, hatreds, quarrels, brawls, murder,
rapine, thievery, robbery, gambling, whoredom, debauchery,
avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, drunkenness, and
similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with the
fact that in the territory of Ghent, within the space of ten
months, there occurred no less than fourteen hundred murders
committed in the bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses,
taverns, and other similar places. When, in 1396, Jean sans
Peur led his Crusaders to destruction at Micopolis, their
crimes and cynical debauchery scandalized even the Turks,
and led to the stern rebuke of Bajazet himself, who as the
monk of St. Denis admits was much better than his Christian
foes. The same writer, moralizing over the disaster at
Agincourt, attributes it to the general corruption of the
nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an alternation of
disorderly lust and of incest; commerce was nought but fraud
and treachery; avarice withheld from the Church her tithes,
and ordinary conversation was a succession of blasphemies.
The Church, set up by God as a model and protector of the
people, was false to all its obligations. The bishops,
through the basest and most criminal of motives, were
habitual accepters of pe