These trifling matters are faithful samples of the dominant and fundamental characteristic of French society during the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, the true epoch of the middle ages.  It was chaos, and fermentation within the chaos the slow and rough but powerful and productive fermentation of unruly life.  In ideas, events, and persons there was a blending of the strongest contrasts:  manners were rude and even savage, yet souls were filled with lofty and tender aspirations; the authority of religious creeds at one time was on the point of extinction, yet at another shone forth gloriously in opposition to the arrogance and brutality of mundane passions; ignorance was profound, and yet here and there, in the very heart of the mental darkness, gleamed bright centres of movement and intellectual labor.  It was the period when Abelard, anticipating freedom of thought and of instruction, drew together upon Mount St. Genevieve thousands of hearers anxious to follow him in the study of the great problems of Nature and of the destiny of man and the world.  And far away from this throng, in the solitude of the abbey of Bee, St. Anselm was offering to his monks a Christian and philosophical demonstration of the existence of God—­“faith seeking understanding” (fides quoerens intellectuan), as he himself used to say.  It was the period, too, when, distressed at the licentiousness which was spreading throughout the Church as well as lay society, two illustrious monks, St. Bernard and St. Norbert, not only went preaching everywhere reformation of morals, but labored at and succeeded in establishing for monastic life a system of strict discipline and severe austerity.  Lastly, it was the period when, in the laic world, was created and developed the most splendid fact of the middle ages, knighthood, that noble soaring of imaginations and souls towards the ideal of Christian virtue and soldierly honor.  It is impossible to trace in detail the origin and history of that grand fact which was so prominent in the days to which it belonged, and which is so prominent still in the memories of men; but a clear notion ought to be obtained of its moral character and its practical worth.  To this end a few pages shall be borrowed from Guizot’s History of Civilization in France.  Let us first look on at the admission of a knight, such as took place in the twelfth century.  We will afterwards see what rules of conduct were imposed upon him, not only according to the oaths which he had to take on becoming knight, but according to the idea formed of knighthood by the poets of the day, those interpreters not only of actual life, but of men’s sentiments also.  We shall then understand, without difficulty, what influence must have been exercised, in the souls and lives of men, by such sentiments and such rules, however great may have been the discrepancy between the knightly ideal and the general actions and passions of contemporaries.

“The young man, the esquire who aspired to the title of knight, was first stripped of his clothes and placed in a bath, which was symbolical of purification.  On leaving the bath, he was clothed in a white tunic, which was symbolical of purity, and a red robe, which was symbolical of the blood he was bound to shed in the service of the faith, and a black sagum or close-fitting coat, which was symbolical of the death which awaited him as well as all men.