e of builders,
of reformers, of scholars, and of poets. If troubadours did not exactly
"touch guitars," at least songsters tackled verse-making and helped to
refine the table manners of barons and retainers by singing at dinner
time. The voice of law too was not silent amid arms. Our constitutional
government, already begotten, was being born and swaddled. The races
were being blended. Though England was still but a northern province of
a kingdom, whose metropolis was Rouen, yet that kingdom was becoming
rather top-heavy, and inclined to shift its centre of gravity
northwards. So from any point of view the time is interesting. It is
essentially an age of monks and of monasteries; perhaps one should say
the end of the age of monastic influence. Pope Eugenius III., the great
Suger and St. Bernard, all died when Hugh was a young man. The great
enthusiasm for founding monasteries was just beginning to ebb. Yet a
hundred and fifteen English houses were founded in Stephen's reign, and
a hundred and thirteen in the reign of Henry II., and the power of the
monastic bodies was still almost paramount in the church. It was to the
monasteries that men still looked for learning and peace, and the
monasteries were the natural harbours of refuge for valiant men of
action, who grew sick of the life of everlasting turmoil in a brutal and
anarchic world. Indeed, the very tumults and disorders of the state gave
the monasteries their hold over the best of the men of action. As the
civil life grew more quiet and ordered, the enthusiasm for the cloister
waned, and with it the standard of zeal perceptibly fell to a lower
level, not without grand protest and immense effort of holy men to keep
the divine fire from sinking.

Hugh of Avalon was born in Avalon Castle in 1140, a year in which the
great tempest of Stephen's misrule was raging. In France, Louis VII. has
already succeeded his father, Louis VI.; the Moors are in Spain, and
Arnold of Brescia is the centre of controversy. Avalon Castle lies near
Pontcharra, which is a small town on the Bredo, which flows into the
Isere and thence into the Rhone. It is not to be confused with Avallon
of Yonne. The Alpine valleys about Pontcharra are lovely with flowers
and waters, and have in them the "foot-prints of lost Paradise."
Burgundy here owed some loyalty to the empire rather than to France, and
its dukes tried to keep up a semi-independent kingdom by a balanced
submission to their more powerful