‘War’, it has been said, ‘was the law of the feudal world’, and all over Europe the moat-girt castles of powerful barons, and walled towns and villages sprang up as a witness to the turbulent state of society during these centuries. To some natures this atmosphere of violence of course appealed. I, Sirs, am for war, Peace giveth me pain, No other creed will hold me again. On Monday, on Tuesday,--whenever you will, Day, week, month, or year, are the same to me still. So sang a Provençal baron of the twelfth century, and we find an echo of his spirit in Spain as late as the fifteenth, when a certain noble, sighing for the joys and spoils of civil war, remarked, ‘I would there were many kings in Castile for then I should be one of them.’ [Sidenote: The Truce of God] The Church, endeavouring to cope with the spirit of anarchy, succeeded in establishing on different occasions a ‘Truce of God’, somewhat resembling the ‘Sacred Months’ devised by the Arabs for a like purpose. From Wednesday to Monday, and during certain seasons of the year, such as Advent or Lent, war was completely forbidden under ecclesiastical censure, while at no time were priests, labourers, women, or children to be molested. The defect of such reforms lay in the absence of machinery to enforce them; and feudalism, the system by which in practice the few lived at the expense of the many, continued to flourish until foreign adventure, such as the Crusades, absorbed some of its chief supporters, and civilization and humanity succeeded in building up new foundations of society to take its place. It would seem as if the lessons of good government had to be learned in a hard school, generally through bitter experience on the part of the governed. MONASTICISM If the study of feudalism is necessary to a knowledge of the material life of the Middle Ages, its spirit is equally a closed book without an understanding of monasticism. What induced men and women, not just a few devout souls, but thousands of ordinary people of all nations and classes from the prince to the serf to forsake the world for the cloister; and, far from regretting this sacrifice, to maintain with obvious sincerity that they had chosen the better part? If we would realize the mediaeval mind we must find an answer to this question. Turning to the earliest days of monasticism, when the ‘Fathers of the Church’ sought hermits’ cells, we recall the shrinking of finer natures from the brutality and lust of pagan society; the intense conviction that the way to draw nearer God was to shut out the world; the desire of a Simon Stylites to make the thoughtless mind by the sight of his self-inflicted penance think for a moment at any rate of a future Heaven and Hell.