legends of saints as wonderful as any of the heathen fables for the use of the itinerant story-teller. But the monks in Southern Europe had to deal with a lively people who demanded more than this. Aquitaine and Provence had been free in the time of the Merovingians, and they fought afterwards on their northern border against Franks for maintenance of freedom, while they were contending also with the Arabs who flocked to them through Spain and over sea. A few fragments remain from the eighth and ninth centuries of an heroic strain bred of these conflicts.

The crusading spirit which broke out soon after the Conquest was yet more powerful than the influence of Provençal song upon the Normans, in bringing Influence of home to England the benefit of contact with the Crusades. the learning and the lively fancy of the Arabs. From the time of Haroun al Raschid the Saracens had softened greatly, by the refinements of literature, arts, and science, the fierceness of their one-ideaed fanaticism. But Christendom was becoming, with the narrowing and hardening of the monastic system, less simply religious, more theological, and fiercely propagandist. Not only did Charlemagne profess to convert the Saxons by carrying fire and sword into the land, and enforce in his empire orthodox opinions with all the power of the state. In the north there was the Scandinavian Olave, whom the Roman Church immediately after his death canonised for his zeal, summoning the chiefs of unconverted districts to meet in assembly, and offering to their deliberation in region after region the choice between Christianity and massacre. As men approached the year 1000 the belief spread, especially in Latin Europe, that with that year the world would end. There were political distractions and convulsions preparing the way, as we now know, to great and wholesome issues, which, seen by those who were nearest to them, looked like the foretold signs that the last day was near. Men therefore forsook the

world in terror, flocked in crowds to the great abbeys of Cluny or Monte Casino, to Rome or to Jerusalem; and at Jerusalem they found unbelievers in possession of the Holy Places. The dangerous year came and went, the world survived it, but the Roman Church retained its hold on Christendom and cherished the fanaticism that enlarged its power. A spirit like that which had been their own was raised to band the Christian world against the Saracens ; and in the year 1073 the great Hildebrand, the carpenter's son, in whose eyes the world was for the Church, came, as Pope Gregory VII., to a throne which he made the throne of Christendom. Gregory's ambition aimed necessarily at a reunion of the Greek and Roman churches; so that when the seat of the Moslem power was shaken by the outbreak of wild tribes from among the Kabyles of the African desert, who passed through Africa as fierce invaders of the old stamp into Spain, when also from the steppes of Bulgaria the wild Turkish tribes swept over the caliphate of Bagdad, advanced on Asia Minor, and drove the Greek Emperor across the Hellespont-Gregory obtained from the French aid for the Spaniards, and proposed himself to lead an army of Christians to the relief of Constantinople and destruction of the Turks. Thus he would bind again Greeks and Armenians to the unity of the Church, and afterwards he would lead the Christian conquerors to the possession of the Holy Sepulchre. The quarrel with the German Emperor, Henry IV., brought Gregory's life to its end in disappointment, but his successor, Urban II., who eased himself of his imperial antagonist by stirring up the son of Henry IV. to strife against his father, was strong enough in 1095-substituting for all Gregory's political schemes a pure fanaticism—at the end of a council held at Clermont upon French affairs, to call upon all Europe to aid him in delivering the Holy Sepulchre. Since the year 1076 it had been recovered to themselves by the rude Turkish hordes, who first wrested

it, in 935, from the tolerant and civilised rule of the Caliphs of Bagdad. For a time it had been wrested from them; but now, coming with overwhelming force, they had seized. Mecca and Jerusalem, and threatened the Greek empire with ruin. Over all Europe the enthusiasm spread. The afflictions of the world were to be healed by conquest of the earthly Jerusalem. Three hundred thousand men fastened the badge of the cross on their shoulders. Duke Godfrey of Bouillon collected an army in Lorraine; Duke Robert of Normandy mortgaged his whole territory to raise a troop of French and English knights. The time was thought to be come of which it was written, "Whoso will go with me, let him take up his cross and follow me." Our Lord himself was regarded as the commander-in-chief of the crusade ; the Papal legate who went with the army was his representative, but, as he was no soldier, military affairs were directed and commanders appointed by a war committee. Long-bearded Peter the Hermit, who had stood by the Pope's side at Clermont, and as a missionary for the war rode abroad on his ass, and told how he had been in Jerusalem, and seen there a vision of Christ, commanding him to summon the Christian Church to his help, saying, "I have longed for her; I shall rejoice in her; and paradise is open to her"-this Peter was the spiritual leader of the poor and ignorant, glad to escape from home oppression. These were a wild body by themselves, who called their chief Tafur, which was Turkish for King of the Beggars. The Turks were then divided among themselves, and were old enemies of the more civilised Mahometans. The Christians had, therefore, the Caliph of Egypt for an ally in their first attack on the Emir of Nicæa, though, finding that friendly pagan become master of Jerusalem, they attacked him as an enemy when, after the siege of Antioch, overbearing delay caused by the quarrels of the princes, they pressed in an eager crowd towards the Holy

C-VOL. III.

City. Jerusalem was taken by storm on the 13th of July, 1099, in the days of Eadmer, during Anselm's archbishopric of Canterbury, and a year before the death in this country of William Rufus—or, to compare great things with small, the year in which the building of Westminster Hall was finished. There was soon afterwards a rush home of the surviving Christians who had fulfilled their vow; Godfrey of Bouillon and Tancred being left at Jerusalem with about two hundred knights and two thousand men at arms.

By this crusade it concerns all literature of the following time to remember how many men of almost all countries in Europe, who had scarcely been beyond the acres they tilled, had their imaginations stirred with ideal expectations and visionary tales of miracle; their wit sharpened on their travel eastward and back. Always among the press and stir of human life, with attrition of minds and experience of many moods of many nations, their eyes were sated with changing Oriental scenes, their ears accustomed to the songs and brisk tales of the camp-fire. Thus from the religious enthusiasm there was bred a sense of the romance of chivalry; the flow of wit and fancy, and the taste for stories of adventure that had other than saints of the Church for their heroes, became quickened; and so there was a way made through the Church out of the Church, even by one of its narrowest and darkest passages, into the open world.

From the South we trace also the beginning of endeavour towards an independent search into Nature. The far search made by Athelard-though it was to derive knowledge not from Nature, but from the more cultivated intellect of Saracen unbelievers-was the first breaking of conventional bounds that followed quickly upon Gerland's course of homebred study.

Gerland, after the Conquest the earliest English writer on mathematical science, observed an eclipse of Gerland. the sun in 1086, and produced, soon after the

year 1082, a treatise on the Computus, and a treatise on the Abacus, a system of calculation which Pope Gerbert had brought into fashion.

Athelard of

Bath.

Athelard—or, in his own Latin form, Adelard—of Bath, born when Gerland was writing, studied in the schools of Tours and Laon. At Laon he taught till he pressed onward in search of knowledge to Salerno; thence, as he himself incidentally tells us, to Greece and Asia Minor, and, perhaps, as we may infer from his manner of speaking of his travels, to Bagdad itself. He returned to England in the reign of Henry I., and published before the year 1116 an allegory, "De Eodem et Diverso." In this work he represents Philosophy and Philocosmia, or love of worldly enjoyment, as having, when he was a student at Tours, appeared to him on the banks of the Loire in the form of two women, and disputed for his affections, until he threw himself into the arms of Philosophy, drove away her rival with disgrace, and sought the object of his choice with an ardour that carried him in search of knowledge even to the distant Arabs. The persistent taste for allegory, and the form of the taste, should here be noticed.

Athelard opened a school on his way home to England, and taught the Arabian sciences, which seemed but doctrine of the heathen to his nephew and old pupil, for whom, therefore, he professes to have written his book of Questions in Nature("Quæstiones Naturales"). He begins this book by telling with a pleasant ease how, after a long absence from his country for the sake of study, he came home, and, being welcomed by his friends, at their first meeting asked them for home news; upon which they complained heavily of "violent princes, vinolent chiefs, mercenary judges, inconstant patrons, private flatterers, lying promises, envious friends, and almost everybody ambitious." He replied that he should not trouble about these matters. How could he