either sufficient political
peace nor ecclesiastical wealth for elaborate church structures. No
head, either of Church or State, had taste and time enough to inaugurate
such works.

Many causes have combined to destroy such churches as then existed. If
they escaped the rasings and fires of a siege, they were often destroyed
by lightning, or decayed by years; and some of the fragments which
endured to the XIII century were torn down to make room for more
beautiful buildings.

It was the XI and XII centuries which saw the important beginnings of
the great Cathedrals of both North and South. These were the years when
religion was the dominant idea of the western world,--when everything,
even warfare, was pressed into its service. Instead of devastating their
own and their neighbour's country, Christian armies were devastating the
Holy Land; doing to the Infidel in the name of their religion what he,
in the name of his, had formerly done to them. The capture of Jerusalem
had triumphantly ended the First Crusade; the Church was everywhere
victorious, and the Pope in actual fact the mightiest monarch of the
earth. These were the days when Peter the Hermit's cry, "God wills it,"
aroused the world, and aroused it to the most diverse accomplishments.

One form of this activity was church building; but there were other
causes than religion for the general magnificence of the effort. Among
these was communal pride, the interesting, half-forgotten motive of much
that is great in mediaeval building.

The Mediaevalism of the old writers seems an endless pageant, in which
indefinitely gorgeous armies "march up the hill and then march down
again;" in newer histories this has disappeared in the long struggle of
one class with another; and in neither do we reach the individual, nor
see the daily life of the people who are the backbone of a nation. Yet
these are the people we must know if we are to have a right conception
of the Cathedral's place in the living interest of the Middle Ages. For
the Bishop's church was in every sense a popular church. The Abbey was
built primarily for its monks, and the Abbey-church for their meditation
and worship. The French Cathedral was the people's, it was built by
their money, not money from an Abbey-coffer. It did not stand, as the
Cathedral of England, majestic and apart, in a scholarly close; it was
in the open square of the city; markets and fairs were held about it;
the doors to its calm and r