of the king's attendants were furnished at his cost, and made under his roof, and that it was difficult to buy any large quantity of the cloths and furs necessary for the clothing of a numerous retinue, except at the great fairs, it is easy to see that the wardrobes needed ample room. In the wardrobes were also kept the rare productions of the East, which then found their way to England; such as almonds, ginger, the rosy and violet-colored sugars of Alexandria, and other stomachics," as they were called.

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Glass for windows was but little used. The windows were usually simply closed by wooden shutters, iron stanchions being sometimes added for greater safety. Canvas, or some such material, was often used to keep out the weather, and to admit a dim light. Glass for windows was a luxury, barely known to kings; and it seems that no glass was made in this country until much later times. Window-glass was one of the things we got from the Flemings in exchange for our wool; and so scarce was it, even in the next century, that the king ordered as much glass as was needed for the repairs of the windows of one of his chapels, to be searched for in the counties of Norfolk, Northampton, Leicester, and Lincoln. The wooden shutters cannot have afforded much defense against rough weather, and charges were often made for "making the windows shut better than usual." Draughts of cold air were somewhat prevented by putting the windows nearer the roof than the floor of the room.

The entrance to the manor-houses was usually by an outer staircase, shielded from the weather by an overhanging shed or pent-house; but the way from the hall to the first story was sometimes through a trap-door. From this it seems that the chief dwelling-rooms in these manor-houses were on the first story, and the ground floor was probably used only as the hall.

I will now try to give you a sketch of the way in which people lived inside their houses. Let us imagine ourselves

in one of them, as lookers-on, and that we see a lord sitting down to dinner with his guests and his vassals. All are gathered together in the hall. At the upper end, on the dais, where the ground is somewhat raised and boarded over, sit the lord and his chief guests. They are protected by a covering which, as our host is a great man, is made of silk. Below, in "the marsh," sit the vassals, farm-servants, and others. The door, which has lately been widened to let in carts mor easily, is closed, to keep out the wind; a dim light is let in through the canvas windows, and "the marsh" is made tolerably dry and clean by litter and rushes. Fish in plenty is served up; eels and pike, and even whale, grampus, porpoise, and "sea-wolves" may be had. There is plenty of beef, and plenty of mutton, but it is nearly all salted; and the bread is rather black. Vegetables are plentiful enough; there are no potatoes, but there are peas, beans, onions, garlic and leeks, pot-herbs and sweet herbs. There is fruit enough, though not equal to what we now have. There are pears, and particularly one sort grown by the monks of Wardon, in Bedfordshire, which are made into Wardon pies. Then there are apples, particularly of the sort called "costard." These cost one shilling per hundred, or about twelve shillings of our money. Peaches, and cherries, and mulberries, too, are not wanting. If we suppose the entertainment to be given in London, the garden of the earl of Lincoln, in Holborn, would be ready to furnish a good supply, for the fruit out of it was sold for above one hundred pounds of our money in one year alone. There is plenty of claret, or clairets-so called because the wine was sweetened with honey, and afterward strained till it became clear-from our possessions in Gascony, and some sort of sherry from Spain, for those who sit on the dais; and beer and cider enough for those who sit in "the marsh." But the beer is made of a mixture of barley, wheat, and oats, without hops, which have not yet been "found out." The insipidity of the beer is taken off by

spices. There is wine, too, made from English vineyards, but it must be sour stuff, and fit only for "the marsh." Nobody but the king has glass to drink out of, and he has none to spare for his friends; but he has cups made of cocoa-nuts, of gourds, of buffalo horns, and of beautiful agates for his principal guests. The wooden bowl, the earthen jug, and the leathern jack, serve well enough for the great bulk of the assemblage. The tables are pretty firm, for their legs are well stuck into the mud floor. Now that the guests are seated, and ready for their repast, up comes the meat on a spit, served round by the servants, and each man cuts off a bit with his knife, and puts it into his wooden bowl or on his trencher. Most of the people have wooden spoons, but nobody has a fork. The pitchers and jugs are made of earthenware, but the plates or dishes are all of wood.

XVIII.

THE MENDICANT FRIARS.-GEIKIE.

[With the increase of wealth and power corruption crept into the Church, and she lost much of her early purity and influence. At the end of the twelfth century many eminent men recognized the necessity of making some great effort to arrest her downward progress, and recover the lost ground. For this purpose the various orders of mendicant friars were established. Their special mission was to carry the Gospel to the poor. The most important of these orders were the Dominicans, or Black Friars; the Franciscans, or Gray Friars; and the Carmelites, or White Friars. The Dominicans and Franciscans exercised great influence in the social and political development of England.]

THE thirteenth century saw the Church rise to its most extravagant pretensions and sink to its deepest corruption. Its worldly splendor was at its height, but its spiritual condition was appalling. All its institutions had been noble in their first years, but success had ruined them, The vast

cathedrals had once been the pride of the serf, who felt himself on a level with his oppressors when within their walls, and saw the sons of his despised class set above barons and princes as their ministers. But their clergy had gradually secured independence of the bishops, and now transferred their duties to vicars, preferring worldly indulgence for themselves. The appointment of titular bishops had, in the same way, enabled the wealthier prelates to find substitutes, and few of them any longer troubled themselves about their sees, further than to draw the revenues.

The independent episcopal courts, in their early history, had been a bulwark to the weak and oppressed in rough and lawless ages, against civil misrule and injustice. To the Church, Europe had owed the Truce of God, which sought, though vainly, to establish a cessation of private and rational wars, then universal, for three days a week; it had aided emancipation of the slave in many ways in earlier times; the legislation of its courts against piracy, wrecking, incendiarism, usury, false coinage, tournaments, trial by ordeal, and much else, was of benefit to the nation and to morality. But ere long its claims became so excessive, and its tribunals so venal, that they lost all credit, and became a public scandal and oppression.

The efforts to enforce the celibacy of the clergy, which had been made unceasingly since Dunstan's day, through more than three hundred years, had only resulted in wide-spread immorality. The Church laws against married or immoral clergy could not be carried out from the number of offenders. This immorality of the clergy, their worldliness, their avarice, and notorious simony, were by turns rebuked with solemn earnestness by the few faithful men left in the Church, or upbraided with biting sarcasm by the wits of the age. Ecclesiastics, high and low, had, in fact, well-nigh lost the respect of the laity. "You are a worthy man, though you be a priest," says a female speaker in one of the poems of the

time. Nothing could be more bitter than the language in which ecclesiastical persons, as a class, are described by the writers of the day.

The enormous wealth of the Church had, in great measure, led to this state of things. The laity had gradually submitted to the demand for tithes ; wills of all kinds, and all suits respecting them, were ecclesiastical matters; dispensations for marriage were needed, at heavy cost, on every hand, possession of ready money facilitated purchases of land, often at a nominal value; the safety of property held by the Church led many to make over their possessions to it, and rent them again from it, and a thriving trade in mortgages added to the whole.

The monks, also, had gradually become as corrupt as the rest. There was no end of orders-Carthusians, Cistercians, Carmelites, Benedictines, and a host besides. Exemption

from episcopal authority and growth in wealth had done their work. The abbots obtained, in many cases, episcopal privileges, and in many others forged the right to them. Many parishes were united to monasteries to escape the oversight of the bishops. There were convents for both sexes under the same roof, and men, like Bernard in the century before, denounced the pride and luxury of abbots and monks alike. Bernard had, indeed, founded a stricter rule among the Cistercians, which, for a time, gave them great popularity, but they, too, after a while, became as corrupt as the others.

It was under these circumstances that the mendicant orders were founded, to try if the laity, scandalized by the corruption of the monks and clergy, could not be won back to the Church. From the year 1207 Francis of Assisi had first begun to gather round him a society which should reproduce apostolic life and labor, in strict obedience to Rome; and such had been the effect of his saintly life, disinterested love, transparent sincerity, and simple preaching, in an age of hypocrisy and vice, that before his death, in 1226, many