It is an interesting fact that the same period that established the supremacy of the king of France was marked in England by the check to the royal domination administered to John Lackland when the barons wrested from him the Magna Charta. Historians of other countries are apt to speak of the French as volatile, capricious, delighting in revolutions, of which the troubled fourscore years from 1789 to 1871 are examples. It might be well to remember that the English, who pride themselves on being neither volatile nor capricious, were less patient than the men across the Channel. They, too, made their stand against aristocratic privilege, and they did it five hundred years before the long-suffering French; they, too, cut off their monarch’s head, and Charles went to the block a hundred and fifty years before Louis mounted the guillotine. Action and reaction are equal, prolonged repression must result in corresponding expression. The evils of five centuries are quickly cured if less than one century is devoted to the healing. After the battle of Bouvines the victorious army marched to Paris in a triumph which was participated in by every village along the way. Every parish church held a service of thanksgiving, every crossroads was packed with shouting peasants doing homage to the king, admiring the nobles, and, above all, wonderstruck at the new military force whose possible value they could see, even if it was not yet entirely clear how great would be the weight of the “mailed fist” of the _bourgeois_. At the very time when the power of the king was becoming dominant, however, democracy showed itself even with impudence in the _fabliaux_, the popular tales which betrayed the jealous spirit of the populace toward the nobles and the clergy. These verses, marked by the _esprit gaulois_ were characteristic of the period of the early middle ages as were also the _chansons de geste_ which stirred the crusaders by their recital of the valorous deeds of accredited heroes. “Renard the Fox,” a long epic of three centuries’ growth, burlesques every aspect of the social life of the middle ages, and its delicious fooling paints a more vivid and more intimate picture than does the pen of any chronicler. These lighter forms were not representative of all the thought of the period, for Abélard’s thesis, ancient and ever new, that we should not believe what we do not understand, and Saint Bernard’s refutation of such a lack of faith were the most prominent instances of a mental activity that found lodgment in schools and expression in pulpit controversy and rostrum argument. Now, too, the professions and the arts no longer were confined to the monasteries, but laymen became teachers and writers and artists and craftsmen.