As grace prevailed over the law, a great religious revolution took place. Piety became converted into an enthusiasm of chivalric gallantry; the mystical church of Lyons celebrated a festival of the Immaculate Conception (1134), thus exalting the ideal of maternal purity precisely at the period when Héloïse was expressing the pure disinterestedness of love in her famous letters. Woman reigned in heaven; she reigned also upon earth. We see her interfere, and with authority, in the affairs of this world. Bertrade de Montfort ruled at once over her first husband, Fulk of Anjou, and her second, Philip I, king of France. Louis VII dates his acts from the coronation of his wife Adela. Women, natural judges in poetical contests, and in the courts of love, sat also as judges in grave matters, and upon an equality with their husbands. The king of France expressly recognises this right. In the first half of the twelfth century women were everywhere restored to that right of inheritance from which they had been excluded by feudal barbarism in England, Castile, Aragon, Jerusalem, Burgundy, Flanders, Hainault, Vermandois, Aquitaine, Provence, and Lower Languedoc. The rapid extinction of male heirs, the softening of manners, and the progress of equity, restored the right of inheritance to women. They brought sovereignties with them into foreign houses; they linked and bound the world together, accelerated the agglomeration of states, and prepared the way for the centralisation of the great monarchies. One royal house alone, that of the Capets, did not recognise the right of women; it remained safe from the mutations which transferred the other states from one dynasty to another; it received and it did not give. Foreign queens might come; the female, the movable element, might be renewed, but the male element did not come to it from without, it remained always the same, and with it remained an identity of spirit and a perpetuity of system. This fixity of the dynasty is one of those things which have most contributed to insure the unity and the personality of this mobile country. The common characteristic of the period following the crusade, is an attempt at emancipation. The crusade in its immense movement had been an occasion--an impulse; when the occasion came, the attempt took place, an attempt for the emancipation of the people in the communes, for the emancipation of women, for that of philosophy and of pure thought. This echo of the crusade, like the crusade itself, was to display all its potency and its effect in France, among the most sociable of nations.[f] FOOTNOTES [4] [Contemporaries assign very varied and incoherent numbers for the size of William’s army. One of them, Hugues de Fleury, estimates it at 150,000 men. Modern historians have cut this down to about 60,000, which is still regarded by some as too high.] [5] [The trouble with Robert did not end until 1076, when a treaty was made and the king received the homage of Flanders.]