d hanged, our Lady put her 'mains blanches' under his feet, and
supported him invisibly for a whole day, till the executioner, finding it
impossible to kill him, was forced to let him retire peaceably into a
monastery, where he lived and died devoutly. We may laugh at such
fancies; or express, if we will, our abhorrence of their immorality: but
it will be more useful to examine into the causes which produced them.
They seem to have been twofold. In the first place, the Church did not
look on the Teutonic laws, whether Frank, Burgund, Goth or Lombard, as
law at all. Her law, whether ecclesiastical or civil, was formed on the
Roman model; and by it alone she wished herself, and those who were under
her protection, to be judged. Next--and this count is altogether to her
honour--law, such as it was, was too often administered, especially by
the Franks, capriciously and brutally; while the servile population,
always the great majority, can hardly be said to have been under the
protection of law at all. No one can read the pages of Fredegarius, or
Gregory of Tours, without seeing that there must have been cases weekly,
even daily, which called on the clergy, in the name of justice and
humanity, to deliver if possible, the poor from him that spoiled him;
which excused fully the rise of the right of sanctuary, and of benefit of
clergy, afterwards so much abused; which made it a pious duty in prelates
to work themselves into power at court, and there, as the 'Chancellors'
of princes, try to get something like regular justice done; and naturally
enough, to remodel the laws of each nation on the time-honoured and
scientific Roman form. Nevertheless, the antagonism of the Church to the
national and secular law remained for centuries. It died out first
perhaps, in England, after the signature of Magna Charta. For then the
English prelates began to take up that truly Protestant and national
attitude which issued in the great Reformation: but it lingers still in
Ireland and in Italy. It lingered in France up to the French revolution,
as may be seen notably in the account of the execution of the Marquise de
Brinvilliers, by the priest who attended her. Horror at her atrocious
crimes is quite swallowed up, in the mind of the good father, by sympathy
with her suffering; and the mob snatch her bones from the funeral pile,
and keep them as the relics of a saint.

But more. While the Roman clergy did real good to Europe, in preserv