made the truce of a traitor.  Probably Raymond was not a traitor, since the military advice he gave up to the very instant of catastrophe was entirely loyal and sound, and worthy of so wise a veteran.  And very likely Renaud was not merely a robber, especially in his own eyes; and there seems to be a much better case for him than many modern writers allow.  But the very fact of such charges being bandied among the factions shows a certain fall from the first days under the headship of the house of Bouillon.  No slanderer ever suggested that Godfrey was a traitor; no enemy ever asserted that Godfrey was only a thief.  It is fairly clear that there had been a degeneration; but most people hardly realise sufficiently that there had been a very great thing from which to degenerate.

The first Crusades had really had some notion of Jerusalem as a New Jerusalem.  I mean they had really had a vision of the place being not only a promised land but a Utopia or even an Earthly Paradise.  The outstanding fact and feature which is seldom seized is this:  that the social experiment in Palestine was rather in advance of the social experiments in the rest of Christendom.  Having to begin at the beginning, they really began with what they considered the best ideas of their time; like any group of Socialists founding an ideal Commonwealth in a modern colony.  A specialist on this period, Colonel Conder of the Palestine Exploration, has written that the core of the Code was founded on the recommendations of Godfrey himself in his “Letters of the Sepulchre”; and he observes concerning it:  “The basis of these laws was found in Justinian’s code, and they presented features as yet quite unknown in Europe, especially in their careful provision of justice for the bourgeois and the peasant, and for the trading communes whose fleets were so necessary to the king.  Not only were free men judged by juries of their equals, but the same applied to those who were technically serfs and actually aborigines.”  The original arrangements of the Native Court seem to me singularly liberal, even by modern standards of the treatment of natives.  That in many such medieval codes citizens were still called serfs is no more final than the fact that in many modern capitalist newspapers serfs are still called citizens.  The whole point about the villein was that he was a tenant at least as permanent as a peasant.  He “went with the land”; and there are a good many hopeless tramps starving in streets, or sleeping in ditches, who might not be sorry if they could go with a little land.  It would not be very much worse than homelessness and hunger to go with a good kitchen garden of which you could always eat most of the beans and turnips; or to go with a good cornfield of which you could take a considerable proportion of the corn.  There has been many a modern man would have been none the worse for “going” about burdened with such a green island, or dragging the chains of such a tangle