chase, or the
battle, or the feast, the menaces of the prelate began to stir in his
guilty soul,--aided, perhaps, by the reproaches or the advice of his
wife or his concubine; he hesitated to violate the sanctuary lest he
should fall dead with a broken neck on the threshold; if he had been
carried away by his passions, and committed murder or robbery, he
repented and made reparation, sometimes a hundred-fold. The cloister
offered a refuge to those who fled aghast from the world and sought
meditation and solitude; the abbey was not only an asylum, but a haunt
of learning and practical industry, a seat of instruction for the
farmer, the workman, the student. "Thus the most evil centuries of the
Middle Ages," says Duruy, "were acquainted with virtues of which the
finest ages of paganism were ignorant; and thus, thanks to a few souls
of the elect, animated by the pure spirit of Christianity, humanity was
arrested on the edge of the abyss in which it seemed about to
precipitate itself."

Nevertheless, this historian admits that Christianity, which had not
modified the manners of Roman society, was itself an element in the
dissolution of the Empire, and that the Church itself acquired some of
the rudeness of the barbarians with which it came into such intimate
contact. "Germans and Franks aspired to the honor of the episcopate, and
carried into the basilicas customs and manners which were strange there.
The great intellectual movement which had formerly animated religious
society slackened, then ceased; the shadows descended upon the Church
itself."

[Illustration: CAROCHE, COVERED WITH LEATHER, STUDDED WITH GOLD-HEADED
NAILS, PERCHERONS; PERIOD, END OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

From a drawing by Adrien Moreau.]

After Charlemagne's short-lived empire, the universal dissolution set in
again. Against the bands of brigands, four or five hundred strong each,
that traversed the country, any defender was welcome, and a second
upholder of society arose,--the stout warrior, skilled in arms, who
gathered retainers around him, secured a hold or a castle, and offered
protection in return for service rendered. His title or his lineage
mattered but little in the tenth century, his defence was much too
welcome for any carping about his arms or his ancestry,--he was an
ancestor himself. The original source of many noble houses is more than
doubtful,--Tertulle, the founder of the Plantagenets; Rollo, Duke of
Normandy; the ancestors of Robert