What is peculiar about the First Crusade is that it was in quite a new and abnormal sense a popular movement.  I might almost say it was the only popular movement there ever was in the world.  For it was not a thing which the populace followed; it was actually a thing which the populace led.  It was not only essentially a revolution, but it was the only revolution I know of in which the masses began by acting alone, and practically without any support from any of the classes.  When they had acted, the classes came in; and it is perfectly true, and indeed only natural, that the masses alone failed where the two together succeeded.  But it was the uneducated who educated the educated.  The case of the Crusade is emphatically not a case in which certain ideas were first suggested by a few philosophers, and then preached by demagogues to the democracy.  This was to a great extent true of the French Revolution; it was probably yet more true of the Russian Revolution; and we need not here pause upon the fine shade of difference that Rousseau was right and Karl Marx was wrong.  In the First Crusade it was the ordinary man who was right or wrong.  He came out in a fury at the insult to his own little images or private prayers, as if he had come out to fight with his own domestic poker or private carving-knife.  He was not armed with new weapons of wit and logic served round from the arsenal of an academy.  There was any amount of wit and logic in the academies of the Middle Ages; but the typical leader of the Crusade was not Abelard or Aquinas but Peter the Hermit, who can hardly be called even a popular leader, but rather a popular flag.  And it was his army, or rather his enormous rabble, that first marched across the world to die for the deliverance of Jerusalem.

Historians say that in that huge host of thousands there were only nine knights.  To any one who knows even a little of medieval war the fact seems astounding.  It is indeed a long exploded fallacy to regard medievalism as identical with feudalism.  There were countless democratic institutions, such as the guilds; sometimes as many as twenty guilds in one small town.  But it is really true that the military organization of the Middle Ages was almost entirely feudal; indeed we might rather say that feudalism was the name of their military organisation.  That so vast a military mass should have attempted to move at all, with only nine of the natural military leaders, seems to me a prodigy of popular initiative.  It is as if a parliament were elected at the next general election, in which only two men could afford to read a daily newspaper.