In

account of its material and superstitious character. earlier and more enlightened days that had been the accusation brought against it. 'Our miracles,' Augustine had said, 'are worked by simple faith and the assurance which comes of trust in God, not by auguries or sacrilegious enchantments.'' But this was not the feeling of a later age. The real distinction between the witch. and the priest was that the one was the practiser of a black art, the other of a white one; one was the votary of Satan, the other of Christ. This was quite well understood on both sides; the sorcerer introduced into his cult of Satan 2 a ritual the distinct antithesis of the Catholic ritual; a black mass was opposed to the white mass. In this way witchcraft grew to be distinctly a craft. It became, that is to say, a social body, and had a mystery (of the religious sort) uniting its members. This cult was, in all probability, originally a mere survival of heathenism, and the mystery, like all other mysteries, at first of a simple kind, developing afterwards into more elaborate rites..

This mystery is known to us as the Witches' Sabbath. It would be a mistake to think of the celebration as a purely imaginary one created by popular superstition, and existing only in the minds of brain-sick old women who fancied they had attended it. The Walpurgis-nacht meeting on the Brocken may have been fancy, but, if so, it was only the imaginary consummation of a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand Sabbaths which were really celebrated in different parts of Europe. They were not confined to a few, nor were they everywhere regarded with the horror which priestly chroniclers feel and would have

1 De Civ. Dei, viii. 9.

2 Some popular tales witness in a curious way to the affection which the peasantry felt for Satan, i.e. for Satan-Odhinn. They try to save him by making him turn Christian. Compare, for example, the stories in Kuhn's collection (No. 220), The Devil's Longing for God, Weking becomes a Christian, Weking's Baptism, &c. (294, &c.)

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us feel. In some places they were openly practised and commonly recognised. In the Basque province, for instance, all went, nobles included. 'Once none but the insensate were seen there; now people of position openly attend,' exclaims an inquisitor. Priests even went, celebrating the white mass in the morning and the black mass at night. No doubt but that the celebration of the Sabbath -whatever name it might first have received-had at one time a more innocent guise than under the pressure of persecution it afterwards wore. But there was always in it a certain protest in favour of the old times, a protest both against Catholicism and against the twin brother of Catholicism, the social system of feudalism. It expressed a kind of communism; nobles, burghers, peasants, shepherds, were mingled in the feast with which the evening began; contributions were exacted by force, and fines were imposed for non-attendance. Such a strange inverted system of Catholicism would be especially likely to arise among a people who were in a degree alienated from their neighbours, the dwellers in some corner of a country, such as the inhabitants of the Jura, the Bretons, the men of the Basque Provinces. I imagine this initiatory feast to have been the earliest and most essential part of the Sabbath celebrations; afterwards followed other ceremonials, copied from the ritual of the Churchthat ritual which in the tenth and eleventh centuries, from the final disappearance of spoken Latin, had become unmeaning to all; and in darker days of persecution the Sabbath ended in blasphemous defiance of the Head and Founder of Christianity.2

In the darkness which hides from our eyes the mediæval practice of witchcraft the last remains of the cult of the

Lancre, quoted by Michelet, Sorcière.

2 For a detailed description of the rites of the Sabbath see Michelet's Sorcière, ch. x,

heathen gods disappear. Long before witchcraft had reached its culminating point' a rumour of change made itself heard. In the midst of the intense stillness of the Middle Ages a faint movement began, a gentle rustling which betokened rather a coming than an actual wind. The first apostle of change was Peter the Hermit, who, in preaching the deliverance of Jerusalem, preached too the deliverance of many from the ennui which stifled them, and in pointing the way to the Holy Land showed men likewise a way to escape from the monotony of life. Immense must have been the relief to thousands. A road was opened to them to the unknown East; an impulse was imparted to them strong enough to break through the stifling laws of custom, and to give play again to the nomadic instincts which can never be killed in human nature. All the better that this new expedition was blessed by the Pope and approved of Holy Church. In thousands and tens of thousands men joined the standard of Walter the Penniless, careless many of them about the differences between Saracen and Christian, but longing only for some relief from the ennui of their dreary existence.

It was this mere transition from stillness to movement which awoke the world and heralded the Renaissance. In the train of this one great motive power followed other lesser ones, which are more easily distinguishable as the immediate forerunners of the Renaissance era. One of these was the growth of the burgher spirit, incidental partly to the absence of the seigneurs. The nobles flocked to the Holy Land; some few settled and many more died there. At home there followed an age of regencies or of weak younger princes sitting in a brother's seat, such as was our John. To obtain the means to emigrate the king and the nobleman alike needed money, and for the first time. since the fall of the Roman Empire the want of a medium

This we must take to have been at the beginning of the fourteenth century. See Lecky, Rationalism, p. 47.

of exchange came to be strongly felt. Now money is a kind of demon of change, inherently and for ever opposed to a slow, fixed, conservative life, such as was that of feudalism. Money, like writing, brings far things near and suggests thoughts of another kind of life from that which at the moment we are leading. It was easier to raise the subtle demon than to lay it again. Literature has up to this time little to tell us of the burgher class, to which money was the very arms and armour, or was like the familiar who in the peasant tale puts into the hands of a lowborn swain the means to conquer all the champions of Christendom. Still less has it to tell us of those elf forgers underground, the very miners and diggers-up of the treasure, who were hidden beneath the surface of knightly and literary society, but who now set themselves to their old task of throwing discord into the world in the shape of coined gold. The hoards of Fafnir, the Rhine gold of the Nibelungen, were now replaced by the Hardi d'or.1

With money the burghers bought their charters and the cities arose to rival the seigneurs. And presently another novelty appeared, the very child of the new currency, of portentous significance to these same feudal knights I mean the mercenary soldier. With him came a new sort of military science, a new kind of military honour and courage, born of a new discipline which is the instinct of communalism.

Perhaps it was during this time that the old peasant legend of the Reineke Fuchs' took a form which better expressed the feelings of the burgher class. The satire became more pointed and more conspicuous, and Reinhart,

1 Struck by Philip le Hardi, son of St. Louis and father of Philip the Fair. The issue of this coin may be reckoned the beginning of a gold currency in Europe north of the Alps. St. Louis did indeed himself mint gold coins, but probably very few only, as they are of great rarity (Hoffmann, Monnaies royales de France, p. 19). The reigns of Philip the Fair and of our Edward III are the eras of a large gold currency.

instead of being a representative of the lower people, became a knight, and as such a living satire upon the knightly class. At this time too sprang up the form of literature which was especially created for the burgher class. That was the fabliau. What the Chansons de Geste' at first, and later on the romances of chivalry or the love songs of the troubadours, were for the highest class, what the original forms of the Beast Epic and the Legend of the Saints were for the lowest, such were the fabliaux for the burgher middle class.

It was in deference to the same spirit of change, the love of movement which was passing over Europe, that Francis and Dominic instituted in the thirteenth century their orders of begging friars. The rule of this new class of monk was the exact converse of the rule of Benedict of Nursia, the organiser and almost the founder of western monasticism, and of the great revivers of that monasticism, Columba and Bernard. In the ordinances of all these strictest measures were taken to prevent the monk from wandering from his home. He was absolutely forbidden to partake of food outside the walls of the monastery; and if a brother were obliged to be absent from it for a whole day he was enjoined to fast. The Dominicans and Franciscans, on the contrary, were to have no fixed home and were never to rest for long in one place. One cannot but see that the rise of the begging friars was a direct outcome of the spirit of the age, and unconsciously one of the death blows to that very Catholicism which it sought to revive. This is perhaps why these orders degenerated sooner than did any other. What they had become in the course of a century and a half from the time of their institution we may judge from the pages of Chaucer.

It is not our business here to trace the decline of the

This at least was the original institution. It was not long observed.