Second, as to the loss of the power to build. That loss was well-nigh complete. Any history of architecture in England will parade before its reader the puny relics of Anglo-Saxon building. Paris has a few such things as the rude tower of St. Germain des Prés and a few doubtful stones in the low little church of St. Julien le Pauvre. In Italy, the “carnivorous” Lombard style which Ruskin so vividly identifies with the handful of seventh century “Lombard” freebooters, is now believed by scholars to belong entirely to the eleventh and twelfth centuries that saw Europe resurgent, the Crusades, and the rediscovered Roman law. Except Charlemagne’s octagon at Aix, it is hard to remember a single considerable monument certainly belonging to the four stagnant centuries between the years 600 and 1000. Everywhere men sheltered in corners of the magnificent structures that had come down from the imperial past, like swallows in the eaves of a building. Usually they could not even keep them from decay. Even repair was beyond them. By what processes of law were civil disputes judged in these diminished cities in which architecture was growing ever ruder, feebler, and more squat? These men, our own ancestors, whose ancestors again had enjoyed the Roman law, decided between litigants by a series of tests or “ordeals” which are a catalogue of trivial stupidity. Merely to give the list will be enough to allow the reader to judge them. There was the “wager of battle,” which was not a duel on the point of honour, but a deliberate judicial test; plaintiff and defendant fought, and the victor won his case. Perhaps the greatest man of the Dark Ages, Charlemagne, is found striving against this custom. In his will he provides that disputes between his heirs as to titles to land are not to be so settled. And for it he substitutes a mild form of ordeal much in favour in settling titles to land, that of the cross. The disputants held out their arms horizontally, and he that endured the longest had the land! There was the ordeal by boiling water, red hot iron, or by fire, all three of which scalded or burned the guilty and spared the innocent. Sometimes lots were drawn, and sometimes the truth or falsity of a statement was tested by whether or not the taking of the consecrated eucharist harmed him who maintained the statement in question. Of course all these tests were accompanied by religious ceremony, and were believed to be especially subject to the direct interposition of God. But the mental stature of those who maintained them:— “Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa.” (We will not speak of them but look and pass on).