rulers of the
country. Their ungoverned passions and their love of fighting for its
own sake or for that of revenge, were perpetual dangers to internal
peace. There was no power sufficient to keep them in check. The
lawlessness and anarchy caused by the ceaseless quarrels between baron
and baron, found but a feeble remedy in the laws of King or Church. Of
the darkness of the earlier Middle Ages Von Sybel[2] gives a graphic
picture: "Monarchies sank into impotence; petty lawless tyrants
trampled all social order under foot, and all attempts after scientific
instruction and artistic pleasures were as effectually crushed by this
state of general insecurity as the external well-being and material
life of the people. This was a dark and stormy period for Europe,
merciless, arbitrary, and violent. It was a sign of the prevailing
feeling of misery and hopelessness that, when the first thousand years
of our era were drawing to their close, the people in every country in
Europe looked with certainty for the destruction of the world. Some
squandered their wealth in riotous living, others bestowed it, for the
good of their souls, on churches and convents; weeping multitudes lay
day and night about the altars; some looked forward with dread, but
most with secret hope, toward the burning of the earth and the falling
in of heaven." Gradually some order and security succeeded this chaos.
The church exerted all her strength in subduing violence, and the
character of her remedies are illustrative of the evils they were
intended to abate. The truce of God set apart the days between Thursday
and Monday of each week as a time of peace, when private quarrels
should be suspended. The peace of the king forbade the avenging of an
alleged injury until forty days after its commission. The Council of
Clermont ordered that every noble youth on attaining the age of twelve
years should take an oath to defend the oppressed, the widows, and the
orphans.[3] Much superfluous energy was exhausted in the crusades. In
England the growth of the universities and the study and development of
law aided the establishment of social order, while the spread of
commerce and the improvements in husbandry brought with wealth some
refinement and luxury. The baronage wrested from the crown those
liberties which finally became the common property of all. Trade pushed
the inhabitants of the towns into prominence as an important class
whose influence was thrown entirely i