have one; for if you let her know it, you will repent of it the first time you displease her.” The estimate of the female character at this period, even when given in the romances of chivalry, is by no means flattering. With these counsels of a father, we may compare those of a mother to her son. In the romance of Huon de Bordeaux (p. 18), when the youthful hero leaves his home to repair to the court of Charlemagne, the duchess addresses her son as follows: “My child,” she said, “you are going to be a courtier; I require you, for God’s love, have nothing to do with a treacherous flatterer; make the acquaintance of wise men. Attend regularly at the service of holy church, and show honour and love to the clergy. Give your goods willingly to the poor; be courteous, and spend freely, and you will be the more loved and cherished.” On the whole, higher sentiments are placed in the mouth of the lady than in that of the baron. We must, however, return to the outward, and therefore more apparent, characteristics of social life during the Norman period. The in-door amusements of the ordinary classes of society appear not to have undergone much change during the earlier Norman period, but the higher classes lived more splendidly and more riotously; and, as far as we can judge, they seem to have been coarser in manners and feelings. The writer of the life of Hereward has left us a curious picture of Norman revelry. When the Saxon hero returned to Brunne, to the home of his fathers, and found that it had been taken possession of by a Norman intruder, he secretly took his lodging in the cottage of a villager close by. In the night he was roused from his pillow by loud sounds of minstrelsy, accompanied with boisterous indications of merriment, which issued from his father’s hall, and he was told that the new occupants were at their evening cups. He proceeded to the hall, and entered the doorstead unobserved, from whence he obtained a view of the interior of the hall. The new lord of Brunne was surrounded by his knights, who were scattered about helpless from the extent of their potations, and reclining in the laps of their women. In the midst of them stood a jougleur, or minstrel, alternately singing and exciting their mirth with coarse and brutal jests. It is a first rough sketch of a part of mediæval manners, which we shall find more fully developed at a somewhat later period. The brutality of manners exhibited in the scene which I have but imperfectly described, and which is confirmed by the statements of writers of the following century, soon degenerated into heartless ferocity, and when we reach the period of the civil wars of Stephen’s reign, we find the amusements of the hall varied with the torture of captive enemies.