The mediaeval mind turned centrally upon the pivot of Free Will.  In their social system the mediaevals were too much parti-per-pale, as their heralds would say, too rigidly cut up by fences and quarterings of guild or degree.  But in their moral philosophy they always thought of man as standing free and doubtful at the cross-roads in a forest.  While they clad and bound the body and (to some extent) the mind too stiffly and quaintly for our taste, they had a much stronger sense than we have of the freedom of the soul.  For them the soul always hung poised like an eagle in the heavens of liberty.  Many of the things that strike a modern as most fantastic came from their keen sense of the power of choice.

For instance, the greatest of the Schoolmen devotes folios to the minute description of what the world would have been like if Adam had refused the apple; what kings, laws, babies, animals, planets would have been in an unfallen world.  So intensely does he feel that Adam might have decided the other way that he sees a complete and complex vision of another world, a world that now can never be.

This sense of the stream of life in a man that may turn either way can be felt through all their popular ethics in legend, chronicle, and ballad.  It is a feeling which has been weakened among us by two heavy intellectual forces.  The Calvinism of the seventeenth century and the physical science of the nineteenth, whatever other truths they may have taught, have darkened this liberty with a sense of doom.  We think of bad men as something like black men, a separate and incurable kind of people.  The Byronic spirit was really a sort of operatic Calvinism.  It brought the villain upon the stage; the lost soul; the modern version of King John.  But the contemporaries of King John did not feel like that about him, even when they detested him.  They instinctively felt him to be a man of mixed passions like themselves, who was allowing his evil passions to have much too good a time of it.  They might have spoken of him as a man in considerable danger of going to hell; but they would have not talked of him as if he had come from there.  In the ballads of Percy or Robin Hood it frequently happens that the King comes upon the scene, and his ultimate decision makes the climax of the tale.  But we do not feel, as we do in the Byronic or modern romance, that there is a definite stage direction “Enter Tyrant.”  Nor do we behold a deus ex machina who is certain to do all that is mild and just.  The King in the ballad is in a state of virile indecision.  Sometimes he will pass from a towering passion to the most sweeping magnanimity and friendliness; sometimes he will begin an act of vengeance and be turned from it by a jest.  Yet this august levity is not moral indifference; it is moral freedom.  It is the strong sense in the writer that the King, being the type of man with power, will probably sometimes use it badly and sometimes well.  In this sense John is certainly misrepresented, for he is pictured as something that none of his own friends or enemies saw.  In that sense he was certainly not so black as he is painted, for he lived in a world where every one was piebald.