The company was entering the hollow way leading over the summit of the mountain, when suddenly the followers of Frederic, who were ahead, turned on them, and others leaped from hiding, while a shrill whistle sounded, startling the horses. "My lord, mount your war-horse; death is at the door," cried a knight. It was indeed. The archbishop's company made no resistance, except the faithful noble who first had scented danger. The rest fled while the murderers rushed upon Engelbert, unable to turn in the narrow way, and struck at him with swords and daggers. One seized him by the cloak and the two rolled together on the ground; but the strong and active prelate dragged himself and his antagonist out of the roadway into a thicket. There he was again set upon by the mad crew, urged on by the count, and was hacked and stabbed to death. He breathed his last beneath an oak ten paces from the roadway. There is no need to recount the finding of the gashed and stripped body, its solemn interment in the Cathedral Church of St. Peter's at Cologne, the canonization of Engelbert, and the building of a chapel, succeeded by a cloister, to mark the place of his martyrdom. Nor need one follow with Caesar the banning of the murderers, and the unhappy ways in which their deaths made part atonement for the injury which their wicked deed had done the German realm.[1]
The ideals and shortcomings of monasticism were closely connected with popular beliefs. The monastic ideal had its inception in the thought of sin as entailing either purgatorial or everlasting punishment, and in the thought of holiness as ensuring eternal bliss. Whatever other motives participated, the knot of the monastic purpose was held in the jaws of this antithesis, which for itself drew form, colour, picturesqueness, from popular beliefs, and was made tangible in countless stories telling of purity and love and meekness impaired by lust and cruelty and pride, and of retribution
- ↑ The above is drawn from the "Vita Sancti Engelberti," by Caesar of Heisterbach, in Boehmer, Fontes rerum Germanicarum, ii. 294-329 (Stuttgart, 1845). E. Michael, Cultursustände des deutschen Volkes während des 13. Jahrhunderts, ii. 30 sqq. (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1899), has an excellent account drawn mainly from the same source.
