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.

This mob marched against the military discipline of the Moslems
and was massacred; or, might I so mystically express it, martyred.
Many of the great kings and knights who followed in their tracks
did not so clearly deserve any haloes for the simplicity and purity
of their motives. The canonisation of such a crowd might be impossible,
and would certainly be resisted in modern opinion; chiefly because they
indulged their democratic violence on the way by killing various usurers;
a course which naturally fills modern society with an anger verging
on alarm. A perversity leads me to weep rather more over the many
slaughtered peasants than over the few slaughtered usurers;
but in any case the peasants certainly were not slaughtered in vain.
The common conscience of all classes, in a time when all had
a common creed, was aroused, and a new army followed of a very
different type of skill and training; led by most of the