The palliatives with which men tried to meet the evils of the times indicate the greatness of the evils, but also the moral feeling which was the promise of better things. Such was the so-called ‘Peace of the King,’ by which private wars were not to be entered on till forty days after the committal of the alleged crime which was to be avenged; and the ‘Truce of God,’ by which all these acts of private hostility were suspended from Thursday to Monday in each week. And at the Council of Cleremont, held by Urban II in November, 1095, a severe censure was pronounced against the licence of private war; the Truce of God was confirmed; women and priests were placed under the safeguard of the Church; and a protection of three years was extended to husbandmen and merchants, the defenceless victims of military rapine. We are reminded of the law of Moses, which provided Cities of Refuge for the man who accidentally and without malice killed his neighbour, but who could not look for protection from the vengeance of the family of the slain man except within those special safeguards. In each case there is the same unreasoning rage of the half-civilised man brought face to face with the demands of religion and civil law: and each is obliged to yield something to the other till the better cause has had time to prepare and strengthen itself for a more complete triumph. Chivalry, then, was the offspring of the same spirit which dictated the Peace of the King, the Truce of God, and the decrees of the Council of Cleremont. Chivalry has another name—Knighthood—and the two are wanted to express all that we mean by either[40]. The chevalier was the soldier who rode the war-horse: he whose birth entitled him, and whose wealth gave him the means, to ride at the head of his vassals and retainers to the war: all ideas of lordship, and mastery, and outward dignity and power, are here embodied before us. But this ‘chevalier,’ this ‘ritter,’ or rider of the war-horse, was also to be a ‘knecht,’ or servant: ‘He that will be chief among you, let him be your servant.’ The knight was to obey, no less than to command; he was to exert his strength and power, not for selfish ends, but in the service of others; and especially in the service of the poor, the weak, and the oppressed, who could not help or defend themselves. It was, indeed, no new discovery in the world, that such are the duties of him who possesses power, and above all the power of the sword; and they who have tried to trace the origin of chivalry to some particular place and time have had to go to the Germans of Tacitus, to the Crusaders, to the Saracens, to the Romans, the Greeks, the Trojans, the Hebrews, only to come to the conclusion that chivalry belongs in its spirit to man as man; though the form in which that spirit was clothed in Europe in the Middle Ages has an individuality of which some of the sources may be ascertained, and though from that time forward its power has been established, and