Very characteristic is the story of the death of the youthful Vivien, as told in the famous “Chansons de Geste,” composed about this time, though its alleged events belong to an earlier date. Vivien was the nephew of that William of Orange whose name is associated with the rise of knighthood, as that of the later William of Orange is with a nobler patriotism. There had been a fearful fight. Vivien was mortally wounded, and lay dying ere he had partaken of his first sacrament. The older warrior bent over him on the corpse-strewn field: “You must confess to me, because I am your nearest relative and there is no priest here.” The failing lips of the lad began the confession of the sins of his brief lifetime. He could think of but a single offence against God or his own nature; so heinous was his conception of the greatness of this one crime that it blotted out the memory of all else. What was this monstrous iniquity? “I made a vow that I would never retreat one step before an enemy, and this day I have failed to keep my oath.” William raised the head of the dying boy, placed the consecrated wafer, which he was accustomed to carry for such emergencies, between the eager lips of Vivien, and watched the young soul as, without fear or misgiving, it went to the judgment of Him who is preëminently the God of battles. In the wars of this period a common sight was that of bishops and archbishops, clad in coats of mail, riding through the streets of their episcopal towns on fierce chargers, and returning to their palaces clotted with dirt and blood. That was a deserved rebuke, as well as a fine sarcasm, with which Richard Cœur de Lion sent the blood-stained armor of the Bishop of Beauvais to the Pope, as the garment of Joseph to Jacob, asking the Holy Father if he recognized his son’s coat. Even women on occasion put on armor and mingled in the mêlée. Gaita, the wife of Robert Guiscard, fought in the front rank of the Normans in their conflict with the Greeks. When the crusades were in progress many a fair woman adopted the martial costume. The Amazonian Brunhilde is scarcely overdrawn by Scott in “Count Robert of Paris,” and the Moslem heroines of Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” stripped of their supernatural resources, might have figured in the Christian camp. Walter Scott put into the mouth of the Greek Nicephorus a pertinent description of his fellow-Christians of the West: “To whom the strife of combat is as the breath of their nostrils, who, rather than not be engaged in war, will do battle with their nearest neighbors and challenge each other to mortal fight, as much in sport as we would defy a comrade to a chariot-race.”