This insensibility to the needs of others was accompanied by a positive gratification in scenes of cruelty. The popular stories which mothers taught their children were in praise of heroes whom we would regard as butchers and bruisers. A favorite legend was of Renoart, the flower of early Chivalry—he of the ugly visage and gigantic frame, whose mace laid open the brains of his antagonists, and who broke the skull of the monk who refused to indulge his whim of exchanging clothes with him. What child of that age had not heard of Roland, the hero of Roncesvalles, whose unstinted praises went far to form the manly habits of many generations? He was an _enfant terrible_, who tore his swaddling-clothes in pieces, belabored his mother furiously, and gave early promise of his prowess by beating lifeless the porter of the castle who would not let him go out to play. And how charming Roland’s love-making to the fair Aude! He saw her for the first time amid the galaxy of beauties assembled to witness his combat with Oliver. Unable to restrain his passion, he rushed from the lists, threw himself upon her, and would have carried her off bodily had not Oliver given him one of those blows the echo of which has rung the praises of this mediæval prize-fighter down the ages. But the people of the eleventh century did not need to go back to an earlier era for examples of this sort of manliness. Foulques the Black, the greatest of the counts of Anjou (987-1040), was pious enough to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but not sufficiently humane to refrain from burning his young wife at the stake, decked for her doom in her gayest attire. He was so humble that he paraded the streets of the Holy City with a halter about his neck, while the blood streamed from the scourge-wounds on his shoulders, yet he forced his own son to be bridled and saddled like an ass and to crouch on all fours at his feet. Of the whole line of Anjou at this period the historian Green remarks that “their shameless wickedness degraded them below the level of man.” The house of Normandy contested the palm of greatness with the Angevins, but were equally rude. When William of Normandy, afterwards the Conqueror of England, learned that Baldwin of Flanders had refused him his daughter Matilda in marriage, the chronicle says “he forced his way into the countess’s chamber, found the daughter, took her by her tresses, dragged her about the room, and trampled her under his feet.” The young lady does not seem to have been grieved by the violence of the wooing, but rather to have acquired a better appreciation of the lordly qualities of her future husband. We may be permitted to doubt the accuracy of this story, but the fact that it was so early chronicled and generally believed attests the popular taste. William Rufus (1056-1100) is thus described by one who knew him: “The outrager of humanity, of law, and of nature; beastly in his pleasures, a murderer and blasphemous scoffer.” Henry I.