There is much that is picturesque and brilliant in the times, but much more that is terrible.  The nobles and knights, who lived sword in hand behind their battlements and massive walls, were the rulers of the country.  Their ungoverned passions and their love of fighting for its own sake or for that of revenge, were perpetual dangers to internal peace.  There was no power sufficient to keep them in check.  The lawlessness and anarchy caused by the ceaseless quarrels between baron and baron, found but a feeble remedy in the laws of King or Church.  Of the darkness of the earlier Middle Ages Von Sybel[2] gives a graphic picture:  “Monarchies sank into impotence; petty lawless tyrants trampled all social order under foot, and all attempts after scientific instruction and artistic pleasures were as effectually crushed by this state of general insecurity as the external well-being and material life of the people.  This was a dark and stormy period for Europe, merciless, arbitrary, and violent.  It was a sign of the prevailing feeling of misery and hopelessness that, when the first thousand years of our era were drawing to their close, the people in every country in Europe looked with certainty for the destruction of the world.  Some squandered their wealth in riotous living, others bestowed it, for the good of their souls, on churches and convents; weeping multitudes lay day and night about the altars; some looked forward with dread, but most with secret hope, toward the burning of the earth and the falling in of heaven.”  Gradually some order and security succeeded this chaos.  The church exerted all her strength in subduing violence, and the character of her remedies are illustrative of the evils they were intended to abate.  The truce of God set apart the days between Thursday and Monday of each week as a time of peace, when private quarrels should be suspended.  The peace of the king forbade the avenging of an alleged injury until forty days after its commission.  The Council of Clermont ordered that every noble youth on attaining the age of twelve years should take an oath to defend the oppressed, the widows, and the orphans.[3] Much superfluous energy was exhausted in the crusades.  In England the growth of the universities and the study and development of law aided the establishment of social order, while the spread of commerce and the improvements in husbandry brought with wealth some refinement and luxury.  The baronage wrested from the crown those liberties which finally became the common property of all.  Trade pushed the inhabitants of the towns into prominence as an important class whose influence was thrown entirely into the scale of peace and quiet, on which its prosperity depended.  No element of change was more essential, and none was greater in its civilizing effects than the development of the chivalric spirit into an institution of which the laws and customs were observed from England to Sicily.  Its influence worked directly upon