This independence of spirit, this impatience of ecclesiastical control, was not peculiar to the patrician class. Outcome of the national love of liberty, it manifested itself in various ways in all classes of the urban population: the trade companies provided themselves with private chapels, and seem to have claimed the right of naming their own chaplains; a host of religious confraternities were formed, more or less free from ecclesiastical control, and, for those who were inclined to be more devout, numerous lay communities of both sexes, as we shall presently see, and, in at least two cities of Brabant--Tirlemont and Léau--there were regularly constituted chapters of canons composed exclusively of married laymen. The influence of these lay institutions--of these, so to speak, half-way houses between the world and the cloister, was far-reaching and profound. Their members were held in higher esteem than either the monks or the secular clergy; hand in hand with the mendicant orders they directed the current of religious thought. Curiously enough, too, there seems to have been something in the temperament of these people which, in spite of their anti-clericalism, their phlegm, their commercial pursuits, rendered them strangely susceptible to the fascination of the interior life: in the spiritual complexion of the towns there was an undercurrent of mysticism which waxed and waned intermittently all through the Middle Age. Now it would flow so deep down and so sluggishly that it seemed almost to die away, and then it would suddenly swirl to the surface and become a rushing stream, which sometimes surged over the bounds of orthodoxy and produced the wildest extravagancies. Its normal _rôle_ was to do for the foolish things of the Gospel--for poverty, for purity, for meekness, what chivalry did for the pride of life and the pride of the eye, and what minstrelsy did for the pride of the flesh: surround them with a halo of romance; but it acted differently on different temperaments, and in divers times manifested itself in divers ways, according to the circumstances which called forth its energy and the various kinds of material with which it came in contact. Thus it peopled the forests with hermits, humble, harmless, prayerful folk, who, working out their own salvation as best they could alone with nature and with God, saw visions and dreamed dreams, always marvellous, often beautiful, sometimes grotesque--if they did nothing else for their fellow-men they at least put a little poetry into their lives--and it raised up too, false prophets, or, by assuring them a following, made false prophets possible--fiery zealots, some of them, who before they deceived others had first made dupes of themselves, and some of them mere impostors with one object--pelf.