That such things were coeval is not so astonishing as it may seem. Life was still at that time so fragile and so often threatened, that the notion of its being suddenly cut off was a familiar one even from childhood. Wars, plagues, and massacres never took one unawares; they were in the due course of things, and were expected; the possibility of such misfortunes saddened less in prospective than it does now that they have become less frequent. People were then always ready to fight, to kill, and to be killed. Games resembled battles, and battles games: the favourite exercises were tournaments; life was risked for nothing, as an amusement. Innumerable decrees[434] forbade those pastimes on account of the deaths they caused, and the troubles they occasioned; but the amusement was the best available, and the decrees were left unobserved. Edward starts on his war to France, and his knights, following his example, take their falconers and their hounds along with them, as though they were going to a hunt.[435] Never was felt to a greater degree what Rabelais terms "the scorn of fortuitous things." Times have changed, and until we go back to a similar state of affairs, which is not impossible, we come into the world with ideas of peace and order, and of a life likely to be a long one. We are indignant if it is threatened, very sad when the end draws near; with more lasting happinesses we smile less often. Froissart paints in radiant colours, and the subject of his pictures is the France of the Hundred Years' War. The "merry England" of the "Cursor Mundi" and after is the England of the great plagues, and of the rising of the peasants, which had two kings assassinated out of four. It is also the England whose Madonnas smile. In architecture the English favour the development of that kind of special Gothic of which they are the inventors, the Perpendicular, a rich and well-ordered style, terrestrial, practical, pleasant to look upon. No one did more to secure it a lasting fame than the Chancellor of Edward III. and of Richard II., William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, the restorer of Windsor, founder of New College at Oxford, the greatest builder of the century.[436] The walls and vaulted roofs of chapels are thick inlaid with ornaments; broad windows let in different coloured lights through their stained-glass panes; golden-haired angels start from the cornices; architecture smiles too, and its smile, like that of the Madonnas, is half religious and half mundane. Less care is taken to raise strong houses than formerly; among the numerous castles with which the land bristles may be seen, in the distant valley where the ancient town of St. David's lies screened, a bishop's palace that would have suited neither William de Longchamp nor Hugh de Puiset, a magnificent dwelling, without towers of defence, or moats, or drawbridges, an exceptional dwelling, built as though the inhabitants were already secure of the morrow.[437]