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                           CHAPTER XXI

                          The Dark Ages

  The Making of the Middle Ages -- The Morals of the New Europe
              -- The iron Age -- The Blight of Life

                  THE MAKING OF THE MIDDLE AGES

     ONE Sunday morning in the year 1922 I stood for an hour
closely packed in a crowd of Bulgar peasants. We were at the
frontier railway depot, at six in the morning. It was the festival
of some ancient saint as well as a Sunday; and from the Serb side
hundreds of peasants were crossing into their native Bulgaria for
a day. They were mostly women, in spotless white linen and gaudily
embroidered vests and skirts. Even the few men were sober, at that
hour. But ... I looked into the scores of pairs of eyes all round
me and wondered. They were the eyes of their cattle, lit by a dull
gleam, a dawn, of human kindliness and intelligence; and in their
depths one could see or surmise slumbering passions which cattle
never know.

     From depot to depot along the slow route the train emptied and
refilled with such crowds. As the hours passed, the gait of men
grew unsteadier and their raucous voices louder, and laughter of
the women rang out over the idle fields.

     For lunch I had to pass through their third-class coach. A
burly assistant literally rammed a narrow way for me through the
swelting mass. They were too happy to grumble. One man had a big
drum on the train. They were packed four to the square yard. the
aroma of strong native wine clung like a mist. The bovine eyes now
shown with animal vitality. The gaping, roaring mouths of the men,
the faint pretense of reserve in the women's laughter, the mutual
glances of the little girls, told the nature of the jokes that were
thundered above the babel.

     On the previous Sunday I had been in Vienna: one of the
loveliest, most captivating, most urbane and refined cities on the
globe. In a week I had passed back from 1922 to 922 or thereabouts:
from modern times to the Middle Ages.

     There has been a queer movement of civilization in the course
of time. Once all civilization flourished round the Mediterranean
Sea. The "Mediterranean Race" was the great race. Beyond the Alps,
beyond the Danube, were mere barbarians. They seemed as unlikely as
the Negroes south of the Sahara ever to build cities and write
philosophies. But civilization passed to "the great white race,"
and round the Mediterranean were only beggarly remnants of the
ancient peoples, as idly contemplating the ruins of their former
greatness as the sheep and goats that browsed amongst the marble
columns.

     Worn-out stocks, you may say: exhausted national germ-plasms,
and so on. Those are words: "wind of words and nothing more," as
the realistic old Romans used to say. The outstanding
characteristic of those masses of peasants of southern Europe is
their immense vitality. They work from sun-up to sun-down. The orgy
of a festival is an orgy of vitality bursting loose on rare
holidays from the year's slavery. Their sex-virility is stupendous.

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Their anger, slumbering under an habitual kindliness, flames like
an explosive. They love war. Shake out the old flag, let the bugle
peal, and they will leap to the ranks.

     And it is not mere animal vitality. No country now is wholly
medieval. The Serbs have myriads of schools. The Bulgars and Greeks
reduce the illiteracy of their people. Spain has to move and drag
its priests with it. Italy is being modernized even in the south.
And the people are apt pupils.

     I would rather consider them here as nearly all of them were
the Middle Ages lingering in the nineteenth century.

     Here it is enough to remind the reader of two facts. The first
is that the happiness of these ignorant peasants, these survivors
of the Middle Ages, is but a momentary burst of laughter in a long
and mirthless day. They are happy -- happy in this robust way -- on
a few days in the year. It is so long before the next festival
comes. Let us crowd what we can into the day. Twelve hours for the
heart to rejoice in, and then ... You see them next day emerge from
the stinking cottages in the gray dawn, the girl of twelve spinning
with the distaff as she goes to guard the cows all day, the young
mother, perhaps yoked with the ass to a plow such as Mayas used in
Yucatan two thousand years ago.

     But there is a second and more precise test. Let us take, as
I proposed, the Europe of the middle of the nineteenth century,
when, the chief cities apart, the Middle Ages still lingered in the
south and the modern spirit ruled in central and northern parts.
And, remember, it is in the south that nature makes her most
generous contributions to human happiness. There the roses bloom
and grow all the year, and the skies have a glorious azure, and the
sun rarely hides.

     Well, look back on this contrast of modern and medieval in the
Europe of the last century. South of parallel 45, the rough
dividing line of the modern and the medieval, you have enormously
more disease, suffering, crime, bloodshed, poverty, utter ignorance
of the art of living, and insecurity of life and health than north
of it. The statistics of mortality, especially infant mortality, in
the south are ghastly. Mothers hear their eight or ten children,
meanwhile performing the work of three servants, and bury four or
five. Disease is like a legion of devils that God cannot, or will
not, check. The knife flies from its sheath daily, and the widow
and children mourn. Happy, are they?

     That is the Middle Ages: a stretch of a thousand years during
which crime, vice, violence, drunkenness, disease, mortality,
brutality, exploitation, and injustice were immeasurably worse than
in the preceding or in our own time. Hourly we repeat the division
of time into two parts, B.C, and A.D., and millions still think
that B.C. means Benighted Chaos and A.D. means Age of Delight. In
history we divide time into three parts, Ancient Times, the Middle
Ages, and Modern Times; and we consider the Middle Ages (as we
ought to say) a period of dark and turbulent semi-barbarism lying
between two phases of civilization, ancient paganism and modern
paganism.


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     What redeeming features will even the apologist find in the
Middle Ages? First -- and almost last -- medieval art: those
glorious cathedrals that you go to Europe to see, those illuminated
missals, those wonderful tapestries, those exquisite paintings,
those feats of color and form. These artistic achievements are very
real and important. They make one hesitate to call the second half
of the Middle Ages barbaric: in the first half they did not yet
exist. To understand aright their relation to medieval life in
general and Christianity in particular we have to devote a special
chapter to them. And we find that they must certainly not be put to
the credit of religion.

     What is there besides the art? The guilds of craftsmen? These
affected only a tiny minority of the workers, were pagan in origin,
and were fiercely resisted by the Church until it found them
irrepressible. What else is there? Nothing. The rest is misery,
suffering, exploitation by priest and noble, appalling
superstition, utter lawlessness, dense ignorance.

     Moreover, let us be quite clear what we mean by the Middle
Ages. Roughly we mean from about 500 A.D. when paganism and the
Roman Empire were extinct, to about 1500 or 1600 A.D. The first
half of this period, say from about 500 to 1100, we call the Dark
Ages.

     We have, however, first to decide very conscientiously whether
the Church was responsible for the Dark Ages, and the question at
once arises if the degradation of Europe was not due to a force,
the downpour of northern barbarians, the action of which it took
the Church several centuries to correct.

     Now it is quite true that these Goths, Vandals, and other
Teutonic tribes destroyed the Roman civilization. It may seem to
the inexpert an extraordinary thing that barbarians from the
forests of Germany could thus overrun the mightiest empire of
antiquity, but it is not surprising. For centuries these tribes had
been multiplying and pressing against the northern barriers. Rome
was now too weak to hold the barriers. The Huns from Asia had
fallen upon the Germans and driven them furiously south. Then the
news spread over the north of the sunny lands and glorious loot of
the south, and fresh tribes came down. One must not imagine the
onset of the Teutons as an event of the year, or even of a few
decades, There were centuries of migration.

     In the fifth century they completely wrecked the fabric of the
Roman Empire. It is one of the greater ironies of life that this
coincided with the general enforcement of Christianity. The naive
young person, of any age, preacher or listener, who dreams of
Europe rising in the moral scale when it "embraced Christianity,"
knows as much about history as the New Zealand young lady I once
heard explaining Relativity to her husband and saying that "Euclid
had based his system on Newton." The general acceptance (under
pressure) of Christianity was inevitably followed by moral chaos,
because it coincided with the downfall of civilization.

     Then you find no fault with Christianity, the apologist will
say, completely reversing his position, because it was not the
cause of the degradation of Europe, the rise of serfdom, the
destruction of the schools, the subjection of woman, etc.
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     Broad views are often good, and often dangerous. You must at
least know the details. The first detail is that these "barbarians"
were not so barbaric as some imagine. At the beginning of the
second century, when the Romans were sober under the excellent
Stoic emperors, the great historian Tacitus wrote a work on "The
Morals of the Germans": meaning the Teutonic tribes of the north
generally. The purpose of that book was to shame the Romans by
holding up to them the superior idealism of the Teutons! It is, of
course, exaggerated; but there is truth in it. The northerners had
law and some fine ideals.

     The second detail is that they were Christians. The chief
Germanic tribes which poured over Italy, Gaul, and Spain in the
fifth century had already accepted Christianity; and few Christians
have such superstitious awe of the power of priests and bishops as
converted barbarians.

     And the third and most important detail is that these
"barbarians" gave proof after proof that they were ready to accept
civilization. Numbers of them had risen to the highest positions in
the Roman army and state even before the fifth century. Tradition
has given the Vandals, who overran Spain and Africa, so terrible a
reputation that we use their name still for destroyers or semi-
barbarians. In most respects they were as bad as their reputation,
but the leading authority on the Teutonic peoples, Dr. Hodgkin
("Italy and Her Invaders," an eight-volume work which the reader
should consult for details), calls them "an army of Puritans." In
fact, the fifth-century priest Salvianus represents both Goths and
Vandals as stern Puritans shocked by the immorality of the
Christians of the empire. He tells us that when the Vandals took
Christian Carthage, they set about a purification of morals which
disturbed the inhabitants far more than the loss of political
freedom did. ... And within two centuries of their adoption of
Christianity these Germanic peoples, whose pagan ideals had kept
them chaste for ages, were more flagrantly immoral than the Romans
had been.

     Lastly, the Teutons, the new masters of Europe and pupils of
the Church, in several places inaugurated a new civilization by
blending their old law and ideals with the Roman; and in every
single case they had no assistance from the Church, but were
hampered and ultimately thwarted by the clergy.

     No, the barbarians are not responsible for the Dark Ages. They
brought with them an appreciation of law and some high ideals. They
required only direction. A strong king such as Theodoric or
Charlemagne (both deaf to the clergy) could civilize them in a few
years. The Church, which controlled them all, gave them no lead
whatever in the direction of civilization. It was not a civilizing
force. It was a fairy tale about another world blended with money-
loving priestcraft. The Church is deeply and terribly responsible
for the Dark Ages, for the suspension of the evolution of
civilization for a thousand years. Today there would be -- as will
be the condition in a few centuries -- no war, little or no
poverty, no ignorance, no crime, and infinitely more happiness, if
the Christian church had been a civilizing force.



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                  THE MORALS OF THE NEW EUROPE

     By the end of the fourth century Christianity was established.
The world was now Christian, and I would advise any serious
inquirer to find for himself what happened. If he cannot read the
original Latin authorities, he has two learned works, which cover
the period: the Protestant historian Dean Milman's "History of
Latin Christianity," and the "History of European Morals" of Mr.
Lecky: a Rationalist, but a man who says all that can justly be
said, and much more, in favor of Christianity.

     These two historians agree entirely that Europe passed into a
state of moral chaos. The Dean is at first disturbed when he
approaches the period, and he piously reflects that "the evil was
too profoundly stated in the habits of the Roman world to submit to
the control of religion." But Milman was too candid a scholar to
maintain that insincere position. The evil was new, not inherited
from the pagans, and it grew worse and worse as the world moved
farther away from paganism.

     For the fifth century our one authority is the priest
Salvianus. In a Latin work "On the Providence of God" he very
frankly describes the morals of the Christian world in which he
lives, and he explicitly says that there has been a very
considerable deterioration of morals since pagan days. He writes,
for instance (iii, 9): "Besides a very few who avoid evil, what is
almost the whole body of Christians but a sink of iniquity? How
many in the Church will you find that are not drunkards or
adulterers or fornicators or gamblers or robbers or murderers -- or
all together?" Rhetorical exaggeration, you will say: we know what
these censors of morals are. But if Seneca or some other Stoic had
written about the pagans of his time, you would ask me to take it
literally. In any case, please understand the situation. You tell
me that the morals of Europe improved after the triumph of
Christianity, and the only authority, a Christian authority, that
you can quote as to the general morals of Europe in the fifth
century says precisely the opposite. The letters of the
contemporary Pope Leo I support Salvianus.

     Well, you may say, at least Christianity abolished the brutal
games of the amphitheater. Does not Lecky say: "There is scarcely
any other single reform important in the moral history of mankind
as the suppression of the gladiatorial shows, and this feat must be
almost exclusively ascribed to the Christian Church"? It is another
lamentable instance of Lecky's habit of presenting bouquets that
are not merited. It is quite absurd to magnify the suppression of
the games into one of the greatest of moral reforms, and it is
wholly misleading to say that "the Christian Church" suppressed
them.

     From about the year 380 the Church ruled the consciences of
the Roman emperors, and got mighty privileges and wealth for
itself; but it never suggested to them to suppress the games. No
Christian emperor had the courage or even the inclination to frown
on the games as Marcus Aurelius had done. The new generation of
Christian Romans had exactly the same passion for these brutal
shows as the pagan Romans had had. The Emperor Constantine had


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given an obscure decree against the games in one province of his
empire, and it was never enforced even there. The fanatically
Christian Emperor Theodosius, docile to every whisper from the
bishops, compelled his prisoners to fight as gladiators.

     In the year 404, long after the complete triumph of
Christianity, the gladiatorial games were proceeding as usual in
the Roman amphitheater when the monk Telemachus flung himself into
the arena to protest. All honor to the monk -- he was stoned to
death by the Christian spectators -- but he is not "the Christian
Church." Until then the Church had made no protest, nor do we find
any ecclesiastical assembly or prominent ecclesiastic condemning
the games, until the end of the seventh century. The combats of man
against man were abandoned -- of Church pressure there is no trace
-- but fights with beasts long continued; and Lecky quaintly
confesses that "the difficulty of procuring wild animals" had much
to do with the abandonment of these. But as the Church of the
Middle Ages blessed and smiled upon the almost equally deadly
combats of knights, and allowed the duel to survive to modern
times, its apologists would do well to talk less about the
gladiatorial games.

                          THE IRON AGE

     Europe sank steadily into the deepest and foulest bog of the
Dark Ages, the tenth century, which historians call the Iron Age:
largely, one imagines, on account of the appallingly free use of
the knife and the sword.

     For the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries we have a very
scanty literature. Gregory of Tours, who throws such lurid light on
the fifth and sixth centuries, died in 594. For the next half
century we have only a very thin and meager monkish chronicle,
which tells the same dark story, and then there is not a scrap of
reliable history for a hundred years. Europe was sunk in the
crassest ignorance and superstition. Our only indications of the
moral condition are Papal documents (written in such barbarous
Latin that one can scarcely read them), acts of councils, letters
of bishops, and scraps of monastic chronicles. These all tell a
consistent story. Take the letters to Rome from Germany of St.
Boniface. He writes to the Pope (ep. xlix): "Today for the most
part in our episcopal cities the seats are assigned to greedy
laymen or adulterous clerics or wenchers, to enjoy the material
benefits of them." All the contemporary information we have tells
the same story of gluttonous, drunken, and corrupt clergy and
monks, of murders and mutilations, of a densely ignorant and coarse
population.

     And just here the reader will find a useful illustration of
the two ways of writing history, the Catholic and the historical.
The seventh century, the most ignorant and one of the grossest of
all, has supplied more than eight hundred saints to the Roman
calendar! Writing the life of one of these, Cardinal Pitra says:

          The finest title of the seventh century to vindication is
     the great number of saints it produced -- no other century was
     so glorified except the age of the martyrs, the number of whom


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     is known to God alone. Each year has its harvest, each day its
     group. ... If, then, it pleases God and Christ to scatter
     these splendors of the saints so bountifully upon a century,
     what does it matter that history and human glory think so
     little of it?

     That is, of course, all that the Catholic reads about the
early Middle Ages. On these eight hundred "self-tormenters" of a
century which is too gross to write its own history he bases his
claim that Christianity purified the world.

     But if we have no work adequately reflecting the life of the
clergy and the people in this seventh century, we have ample
evidence (in Gregory of Tours and the letters of Gregory the Great)
that it opened with as dark, violent, and vicious a population as
had ever existed in Europe: we have the chronicle of Fredigarius
extending that picture as far as 642: and, when the literary blank
ends in the eighth century, we find Christendom in exactly the same
condition of universal vice and violence. It is grimly significant
that the chair of Peter itself was filled by no less than twenty-
one Popes in succession in the one hundred years after the death of
Gregory.

     In the year 896 there was witnessed in Rome a scene which
fitly inaugurated one hundred and fifty years of such degradation
as has never fallen upon any other religious organization in
history. Stephen VI became Pope, after a bloody contest of the
various factions. He ordered the body of one of his predecessors,
Formosus, who had been several weeks buried, to be brought to the
Papal palace. The stinking corpse was clothed in the pontifical
garments and propped in the throne. The august representative of
Christ and the Holy Ghost, the channel of God's mercy to the human
race, gathered his "cardinals" (the name was already in use) and
bishops round the ghastly object, and they vented upon it a fury
such as one would hardly expect savages to show to a corpse. In the
end they cut three fingers from the right hand of the putrid body,
and flung it into the Tiber.

     If paganism, if any pagan civilization, can show the remotest
parallel to that trial of the corpse of Pope Formosus, it has,
apparently, not yet been discovered by any Catholic apologist.
Here, moreover, we have the highest and most official
representatives of what was understood to be the highest thing in
Christendom, quite openly and officially perpetrating this orgy of
barbarism. If that was Rome and the Papacy at the end of the ninth
century, what was likely to be the condition of Europe in general?

     And it was only the beginning. In the very next year Pope
Stephen quarreled with his own supporters. They thrust him into a
dungeon and strangled him. Six Popes succeeded each other in the
next eight years, and, while history has no record of the end of
most of them, we can surmise it. In 904 the most turbulent of all
the fighting bishops cut his way, literally, to the chair of Peter,
and the "Church of God," as the Catholic calls it, became for
thirty years a Pornocracy, or "government by whores." My Catholic
reader will shrink from the word, but it is from the most respected
and most learned of Catholic historians that I borrow it.


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     Cardinal Baronius, who uses it placidly, notes in his
"Annals," of the year 912, that Pope Sergius III, who had been the
moving spirit in the trial of the body of Formosus and had murdered
two Popes at least to get the "holy see" for himself, was the lover
of that most powerful, most noble, and most shameless whore,
Theodora." Father Pagi, Mansi, the Benedictine editors of the
Pope's letters, and even recent Catholic writers like Mgr. Duchesne
and Canon W. Barry ("The Papal Monarchy") admit that the evidence
is irresistible; and I have shown in my "Crises in the History of
the Papacy" that the difficulties raised by one or two more recent
Catholic writers are frivolous.

     Theodora, wife of one of the highest nobles of Rome, was of
such loose morals that the chief writers of her time call her "a
whore," and two Popes, Sergius III and John X, were amongst her
lovers. Her equally beautiful and equally unscrupulous daughter
Marozia also is called "a whore," and Pope Sergius III was so
notoriously the lover of the daughter as well as of the mother that
the "Pontifical Book" itself, the official Papal chronicle,
describes Pope John XI as "son of Sergius III" (by Marozia). These
whores" governed the Papacy and Rome for thirty years. Our chief
source of information about them is the contemporary Bishop
Liutprand, whose outspoken statements are sufficiently supported by
two monkish chroniclers and the official Papal calendar.

     Rome was more generally corrupt than it had been in the days
of the insane Nero or the feeble-minded Elagabal; and this
corruption was intimately connected with the general illiteracy. It
is on record that at this time some of these members of the highest
Roman nobility could not write their own names; how many could we
do not know. It is useless to ask us to consider these vices as
relics of paganism, when we know that from being a generally
literate city, and in its higher class a very refined and
cultivated city, Rome under the Popes had sunk to an illiteracy
that has no parallel elsewhere in the history of civilization.

     The history of European morals has still to be written.
Lecky's work is not a systematic chronological exposition, and it
ends with the appearance of Charlemagne. But in this and other
books I give sufficient evidence for the reader to form an opinion;
and I show that all the great historians agree in that opinion.
Pagan Greece and Rome had been comparable with ourselves in
character and conduct. With the triumph of Christianity and the
fall of Rome, Europe sank steadily age by age until it reached the
unprecedented degradation of the Iron Age.

                       THE BLIGHT OF LIFE

     By the twelfth century Europe was slightly reducing its
ignorance. "The Church had given it schools," the apologist says;
which really means that the few schools which a few bishops (not
the Church) gave it had been expanded by the rising tide of the
secular life of the time. Civic and economic development was
beginning to re-civilize Europe. Exactly, says my friend the
apologist. At last the Church had mastered the chaos which the
barbarians had caused, and law, order, education, art, civic life,
guilds ... oh, everything good was springing up under its
beneficent influence.

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     But let us look at the facts. What was the Church actually
doing at this time to enlighten the people? At Laon the chief
treasures shown to the public were some milk and hair of the Virgin
Mary. There was a crystal lid to the golden case and you could --
for a consideration -- see the precious whitish fluid and the hair
with your own eyes. This was Laon's set-off to the rival attraction
at Soissons, a neighboring town, which had secured one of the milk-
teeth shed by the infant Jesus.

     There seems to have been enough milk of the Virgin -- some of
it was still exhibited in Spanish churches in the nineteenth
century -- preserved in Europe to feed a few calves. There was hair
enough to make a mattress. There were sufficient pieces of "the
true cross" to make a boat. There were teeth of Christ enough to
outfit a dentist (one monastery, at Charroux, had the complete
set.) There were so many sets of baby-linen of the infant Jesus, in
Italy, France and Spain, that one could have opened a shop with
them. One of the greatest churches in Rome had Christ's manger-
cradle. Seven churches had his authentic umbilical cord, and a
number of churches had his foreskin (removed at circumcision and
kept as a souvenir by Mary). One church had the miraculous imprint
of his little bottom on a stone on which he had sat. Mary herself
had left enough wedding rings, shoes, stockings, shirts, girdles,
etc., to fill a museum. You can, if you are good, see one of her
shifts still in Chartres cathedral; though in this coarser age of
ours it is called a "veil." One church had Aaron's rod. Six
churches had the six heads cut off John the Baptist ... Every one
of these things was, remember, in its origin, a cynical,
blasphemous swindle; and Rome was the great trading center. All the
wriggling of all the G.K. Chestertons and all the Jesuits and
Paulists in America will not obscure that. Each of those objects
was at first launched upon the world with deliberate mendacity.
Honor and honesty were as rare as chastity in Christianized Europe
and as rare in the Church as in the "world." To talk of those ages
as "spiritual" and ours as "materialistic" ... One is almost
disposed to ask for an application to the clergy of the law about
obtaining money under false pretenses.

     The overwhelming majority of the population of Christendom
were serfs. One must bear in mind always that there was in those
ages nothing remotely like the industrial population of modern
times. Craftsmen were few. Home-labor supplied most of a family's
wants, and they were very modest. There are no statistics, of
course, but I would hazard the statement that about ninety percent
of the people of Christendom were serfs.

     It is by these that we must judge the Middle Ages; not by the
nobles (unscrupulous exploiters, most of them), or velvet-clad
burghers and merchants, or even the guildsmen. And their life was
horrible. The most optimistic of expert works on them is Rogers'
"Six Centuries of Work and Wages," but I have shown from his own
learned pages that the life of the enormous mass of the people was
filthy, miserable, and vile. He rightly speaks of "the
inconceivably filthy habits of the people" and their "very few
holidays." They worked, from dawn to sunset, on three hundred and
eight days a year. Their meat was salt -- and the salt was
poisonous -- during half the year. Their hovels were bare, dismal,


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disease-breeding kennels. Their daughters, or plump young wives,
were free to any abbot or lord or servant of such. They were tied
to the soil, in monotonous small villages, and had to risk their
lives at any moment in the lord's quarrels or the king's wars.

     There were not three million people in England during the
beautiful thirteenth century, and it took four centuries for this
population to double. With modern conditions of health a
population, not restrained by birth control, would double in much
less than fifty years. The carnage in the ages of faith was
appalling, and the suffering of those who survived was beyond our
comprehension. One epidemic, the Black Death, killed twenty-five
million in two years. Such epidemics swept mercilessly from one end
to the other of helpless Europe. Naturally, at the end of such a
pestilence of famine, labor was scarce and was better paid -- those
are the periods which the optimist quotes -- which meant more money
for the church, the lords, the brigands, and the quacks and
impostors and exploiters generally.

     That was the wonderful thirteenth century, the flower of the
Middle Ages. Try to picture to yourself the life of nine people out
of ten in Christendom at that time. Cut out those pictures of
occasional saints or scholars, or silk-robed merchants and gay
tournaments. Follow the life of the man working from dawn to
sunset, then returning to a sty, the floor unpaved, the cesspool
and mud-heap at the door, the filthy interior without the cheapest
comfort or adornment. Imagine the woman bearing her seven or eight
children in it, doing twice the work of the poorest modern woman,
brutally treated by most husbands; a cow ... And the same gossipy
and crassly superstitious little village round her from cradle to
grave, the scold's bridle or the ducking-stool if she dare assert
herself, the suspicion of witchcraft if she wondered if the gentle
Jesus did really arrange all this, the sudden departure of the man
for war, the famine drawing on with fiendish slowness, the plague
spreading over the countryside. And there you have a true picture
of the thirteenth century.


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
                               by
                          Joseph McCabe

                              1929


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