The common recreation of the lordly classes was hunting and hawking, bear-baiting and fighting. Men rode with sword and spear, the ubiquitous falcon on arm, and hounds in leash. So universal were such pastimes that, in lack of more intellectual and refined resources, the highest dignitaries of the church displayed the weapons of the chase together with the insignia of their sacred office. So much of life was wasted in these amusements that the Council of the Lateran, in 1180, forbade the bishops indulging in these sports while on their pastoral journeys. Previously Pope Alexander III. (1159-64), by special edict, relieved the common clergy from the necessity of keeping the archdeacons in hounds and falcons during their visits to the churches. Such a limitation of the more generous and worthy interests of mankind, which stimulate and enlarge the mind, left the common intelligence in an almost infantile condition. Sismondi says that even the nobles came to count it a duty not to think. One can readily believe this on recalling the titles given at court to the various royal personages who graced it: Pepin the Short, Charles the Bald, William the Red, Louis the Fat, etc. Fancy, however, will generally survive the failure of the logical and æsthetic faculties, and thus men become the easy prey of superstition. All sorts of stories of things supernatural, the invention of designing priests or born of the surprise of ignorance at the unusual in nature, were believed without question. The winds that rustled the leaves of the forest were supposed to be the voices of saintly ghosts, and when with wintry weight they moaned through the branches or screeched along the icy rocks, it was believed that the damned were groaning in their pains or that demons were threatening men. Every flash or shadow that could not readily be explained was regarded as a hopeful or vengeful apparition from the unseen world. This credulity was not confined to the illiterate and boorish. The chroniclers of that age, upon whose learning we depend for the facts of our history, relate with equal gravity the deeds of demons and men, connect the doings of courts and the course of comets, and intermingle in relation of cause and effect the storms of nature and the wars of nations. Thus superstition completed the work of mental inoccupancy, as vermin and bats inhabit an unfurnished cell. Such a condition of the mental faculties could have only a deleterious influence on the moral sense. We are not, therefore, surprised to find the conscience of the age correspondingly crude.