imself well knew that such an army of
men, without women, could only be kept in order by letting them loose
from time to time.

The awful idea of a hell wherein God employs the very guiltiest of the
wicked spirits to torture the less guilty delivered over to them for
their sport,--this lovely dogma of the Middle Ages was exemplified to
the last letter. Men felt that God was not among them. Each new raid
betokened more and more clearly the kingdom of Satan, until men came
to believe that thenceforth their prayers should be offered to him
alone.

Up in the castle there was laughing and joking. "The women-serfs were
too ugly." There is no question raised as to their beauty. The great
pleasure lay in deeds of outrage, in striking and making them weep.
Even in the seventeenth century the great ladies died with laughing,
when the Duke of Lorraine told them how, in peaceful villages, his
people went about harrying and torturing all the women, even to the
old.

These outrages fell most frequently, as we might suppose, on families
well to do and comparatively distinguished among the serfs; the
families, namely, of those serf-born mayors, who already in the
twelfth century appear at the head of the village. By the nobles they
were hated, jeered, cruelly plagued. Their newborn moral dignity was
not to be forgiven. Their wives and daughters were not allowed to be
good and wise: they had no right to be held in any respect. Their
honour was not their own. _Serfs of the body_, such was the cruel
phrase cast for ever in their teeth.

* * * * *

In days to come people will be slow to believe, that the law among
Christian nations went beyond anything decreed concerning the olden
slavery; that it wrote down as an actual right the most grievous
outrage that could ever wound man's heart. The lord spiritual had this
foul privilege no less than the lord temporal. In a parish outside
Bourges, the parson, as being a lord, expressly claimed the
firstfruits of the bride, but was willing to sell his rights to the
husband.[25]

[25] Lauriere, ii. 100 (on the word _Marquette_). Michelet,
_Origines du Droit_, 264.

It has been too readily believed that this wrong was formal, not real.
But the price laid down in certain countries for getting a
dispensation, exceeded the means of almost every peasant. In Scotland,
for instance, the demand was for "several cows:" a price immense,
impossible. So the poor