The stories written by such men as these are racy of their soil, and give the very form and pressure of their times. I have tried to make my little selection representative, and have included in this book not only romances of love and chivalry, but legends of devotion and moralities. Greatly daring, I have translated a specimen of their humour even--not too characteristic, I hope, of the robust merriment of the feudal period. These stories will be found illustrative of some of the ideas with which the mind of the Middle Ages was concerned. The devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and to Our Lady; the languid and overwrought sentiment of love; the mystical ceremonies of knighthood; all these things are illuminated by the tales which follow this Introduction. Bound up with them are customs and ideas which to the modern mind are, perhaps, less happy. It seems odd, for instance, that the feudal knight should see nothing repugnant in accepting money and clothing from the lady who had given him already the supreme favour of her love. It is possible to entertain a high ideal of friendship without being prepared to cut the throats of your children for the sake of your friend. Yet this is what Amile did for Amis in the great epic of friendship of the Middle Ages. In its stark adherence to a superhuman standard, it puts one in mind of the animal-like patience of Griselda--which story (not included here) may perhaps be regarded as the modest ideal of the mediæval husband. It is strange, too, to find in stories so concerned with the knightly exercises of the tourney and the joust, no hint of the singular disfavour in which these games (or, perhaps, pursuits) were held by the Church. Popes prohibited them; St. Louis forbade them. Those slain therein were refused burial in consecrated ground. The Church testified, "Of those who fell in tournament there is no question but that they go down to hell, unless they are aided by the great benefit of absolution." At Cologne sixty knights and squires were killed, and the cries were heard all about of demons carrying off their souls to perdition. Apparently all this tremendous machinery failed utterly in its purpose. The most pious knights strove in tournaments equally with the most reckless, and--according to Miss Knox, to whose admirable _Court of a Saint_ I am indebted--a son of St. Louis himself was thrown at a tourney, and was afterwards weak in intellect as a consequence.