With refinement in manners we come to our first sharp contrast with that which had been. William the Conqueror, annoyed at having his bastardy continually thrown in his face by his wife, is said to have relieved his feelings by tying her by the hair to his horse’s tail and dragging her out to a neighbouring suburb. Now we find William’s great grandson’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the foremost figure in a totally new sort of “high society” among the governing class of the time in which it was becoming the fashion to concern oneself with an elaborately courteous worship of idealized woman. Not that the eleventh century woman had been nobody. Countess Matilda of Tuscany had been a tower of strength to Hildebrand in his tireless political struggles. But now we find noblewomen taking the lead in social observance (and in literary appreciation) somewhat as they do in the United States to-day. It is true that the lay part of the movement had its centre, as we shall see in the next chapter, in Southern France. But it was general throughout the society of the time, and along with the lay movement went the new cult of the Virgin. This new religious feeling came as abruptly as the corresponding change in lay society. Whereas Roland had prayed to God the Father, now everyone, even the knight in battle and the austere religious reformer like Saint Bernard, preferred to pray to the Mother of God. What they saw in her, those brought up in the Protestant tradition can scarcely feel. She stood for the illogical, affectionate side of religion. She loved all sorts of flattery and attention and everyone loved her and paid her the court she loved. She loved beautiful and pretty things too, and, womanlike, all the decorative side of life, so that her cult played a great part in the cathedral building. In poems and tales of her it is possible to feel, at least faintly, the tremendous outpouring of devotion she inspired. It was the twelfth century that placed her among the gods of our West European stock.