Preachers of the holy war went everywhere. Over western Europe the enthusiasm passed like a forest fire. During the winter of 1095 there seemed to be but one occupation of men in palace, monastery, and cottage throughout northern France and along the Lower Rhine—that of preparing arms and enrolling bands for the mighty exodus, which should take place as soon as the roads became passable in the spring. The rich sold or mortgaged their estates to raise the means of fitting out themselves and their retainers. Knights and esquires drilled incessantly for feats of arms against a foe whom they honored for his rumored prowess in fight as much as they detested him for impiety. Recluses left their religious retreats, their minds overwrought with anticipations of miracles to be performed as in old Bible days, when waters divided and city walls fell down at the approach of God’s people. Robbers emerged from their hiding-places or were delivered from jails, that they might expiate the crimes already committed against their fellow-Christians by atrocities to be practised upon the unbeliever. Doubtless many were influenced by a genuine religious emotion, as the proclamation of the crusade was accompanied by the preaching of the “terrors of the Lord” against the prevalent sins of the people. To the persuasion of Peter the Hermit many of the most notorious sinners attributed their reformation. Young men who were inclined to the monastic habit to escape the temptations of the world were easily led to substitute the helmet for the cowl, as offering a life more congenial to youthful enterprise and at the same time more acceptable to God. Multitudes of the ignorant were animated by the new and popular enthusiasm without understanding its motive, and were drawn as by a freshet into the common channel. That no one might be deterred by domestic anxieties from engaging in the crusades, the church guaranteed the protection of the families and property of absentees; and that no one might be tempted, in the subsidence of the first fervor, to reconsider his purpose, excommunication was threatened on those who did not fulfil their vows. Thus western Europe in the spring of 1096 was not unlike a beehive, on the outside of which the insects are gathered preparatory to swarming. Guibert, a contemporary, says: “Although the French alone had heard the preaching of the crusade, what Christian people did not supply soldiers as well?... You might have seen the Scotch [who represented to the continental mind the ends of the earth], covered with shaggy cloaks, hasten from the heart of their marshes.... I take God to witness that there landed in our ports barbarians from nations I wist not of; no one understood their tongues, but placing their fingers in the form of a cross, they made sign that they desired to proceed to the defence of the Christian faith.”