The three boys, as they grew up, were bred to the stern duties of fighting men, as was the custom of their class. Absalon, indeed, was destined for the church; but in a country so recently won from the old war gods, it was the church militant yet, and he wielded spear and sword with the best of them. When, at eighteen, they sent him to France to be taught, he did not for his theological studies neglect the instruction of his boyhood. There he became the disciple and friend of the Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, more powerful then than prince or Pope, and when the abbot preached the second great crusade, promising eternal salvation to those who took up arms against the unbelievers, whether to wrest from them the Holy Sepulchre or to plant the cross among the wild heathen on the Baltic, his heart burned hot within him. It was a long way to the Holy Land, but with the Baltic robbers his people had a grievous score to settle. Their yells had sounded in his boyish ears as they ravished the shores of his fatherland, penetrating with murder and pillage almost to his peaceful home. And so, while he lent a diligent ear to the teachings of the church, earning the name of the “most learned clerk” in the cloister of Ste. Geneviève in Paris, daily he laid the breviary aside and took up sword and lance, learning the arts of modern warfare with the graces of chivalry. In the old way of fighting, man to man, the men of the North had been the equals of any, if not their betters; but against the new methods of warfare their prowess availed little. Absalon, the monk, kept his body strong while soul and mind matured. When nothing more adventurous befell, he chopped down trees for the cloister hearths. But oftener the clash of arms echoed in the quiet halls, or the peaceful brethren crossed themselves as they watched him break an unruly horse in the cloister fen. Saxo tells us that he swam easily in full armor, and in more than one campaign in later years saved drowning comrades who were not so well taught. The while he watched rising all about some of the finest churches in Christendom. It was the era of cathedral building in Europe. The Romanesque style of architecture had reached its highest development in the very France where he spent his young manhood’s years, and the Gothic, with its stamp of massive strength, was beginning to displace its gentler curve. Ten years of such an environment, in a land teeming with historic traditions, rounded out the man who set his face toward home, bent on redeeming his people from the unjust reproach of being mere “barbarians of the North.”