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CHAPTER XXII
FEUDALISM AND KNIGHTHOOD
Feudal and Christian Origin of Knightly Virtue; the Order of the Temple; Godfrey of Bouillon; St. Louis; Froissart's Chronicles
The world is evil! the clergy corrupt, the laity depraved! none denounces them! Awake! arise! be mindful! Such ceaseless cry rises more shrilly in times of reform and progress. It was the cry of the preacher in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when preaching was reviving with the general advance of life.[1]
Satire and pious invective struck at all classes: kings, counts and knights, merchants, tradesmen, artisans, even villain-serfs, came under its lash.[2] And properly, since every class is touched with universal human vices, besides those which are more peculiar to its special way of life. All men fall below the standards of the time; and each
- ↑ See Bourgain, La Chaire française au XIIᵉ siècle; Lecoy de la Marche, La Chaire française au XIIIᵉ siècle.
- ↑ Certain kinds of literature, in nature satirical or merely gross, portray, doubtless with grotesque exaggeration, the ways and manners of clerks and merchants, craftsmen and vile serfs, as well as those of monks and bishops, lords and ladies. A notable example is offered by the old French fabliaux, which with coarse and heartless laughter, rather than with any definite satirical intent, display the harshness, brutality, the degradation and hardship of the ways of living coming within their range of interest. In them we see the brutal and deceived husband, the wily clerk, the merchant with his tricks of trade, the vilain, raised above the brute, not by a better way of life as much as by a certain native wit. The women were reviled as coarsely as in monkish writings; but a Rabelaisian quality takes the place of doctrinal prurience. In weighing the evidence of these fabliaux their satirical nature should be allowed for. Cf. Langlois, La Vie en France au moyen âge d'après quelques moralistes du temps (Paris, 1908); also the Sermons of Jacques de Vitry; Pitra, Analecta novissima spicilegii Solesmensis, t. ii., and Haurèau upon the same in Journal des savants, 1888, p. 410 sqq.
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