During the last three hundred years of our period it is clear that there was a great diminution of the status of servitude and a great increase in the privileges extended to corporate towns.  Private warfare was checked and lawless robbery to a considerable extent restrained.  It is tolerably clear that the rise of heretical sects were both the cause and the result of moral dissatisfaction, tending to the adoption of higher moral standards.  Some of these sects were cruelly crushed by merciless persecution, as in the case of the Albigenses.  The doctrines of Wickliffe, however, were never stamped out in England; and the form which they took in Bohemia among the followers of the martyred John Huss had little about them that was beneficial.

The great moral school of the Middle Ages was the institution of chivalry, which existed to animate and cherish the principle of honour.  To this a strong religious flavor was superadded, perhaps by the Crusades.  To valour and devotion was added the law of service to womanhood, and chivalry may fairly claim to have developed generally the three virtues essential to it, of loyalty, courtesy, and liberality.  Resting, however, as it did on the personal prowess and skill of the individual in single combat, the whole system of chivalry was destroyed by the introduction on an extensive scale of the use of firearms.

We turn lastly to the intellectual improvement which may be referred to four points:  the study of civil laws the institution of universities; the application of modern languages to literature, and especially to poetry; and the revival of ancient learning.  Education may almost be said to have begun with the establishment of the great schools by Charlemagne out of which sprang the European universities.  For a long time of course all studies were dominated by that of theology, and the scholastic philosophy which pertained to it.  Barren as these pursuits were, they kept alive an intellectual activity which ultimately found fresh channels.  The Romance languages developed a new literature first on the tongues of the troubadours and then in Italy—­the Italy which gave birth to Dante and Petrarch.  It was about the fourteenth century that a new enthusiasm was born for the study of classical authors, though Greek was still unknown.  And the final and decisive impulse was given when the invention of printing made the great multiplication of books possible.

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STANLEY LANE-POOLE

Egypt in the Middle Ages

Stanley Lane-Poole, born on December 18, 1845, studied Arabic under his great-uncle, Lane, the Orientalist, and, before going up to Oxford for his degree, began his “Catalogue of Oriental Coins in the British Museum,” which appeared in fourteen volumes between 1875 and 1892, and founded his reputation as the first living authority on Arabic numismatics.