ty. From the first Plantagenet to the last Lancastrian it haunts
the minds of English kings, giving as a background to their battles a
mirage of Palestine. So a devotion like that of Edward I. to his queen
was quite a real motive in the lives of multitudes of his
contemporaries. When crowds of enlightened tourists, setting forth to
sneer at the superstitions of the continent, are taking tickets and
labelling luggage at the large railway station at the west end of the
Strand, I do not know whether they all speak to their wives with a more
flowing courtesy than their fathers in Edward's time, or whether they
pause to meditate on the legend of a husband's sorrow, to be found in
the very name of Charing Cross.

But it is a huge historical error to suppose that the Crusades concerned
only that crust of society for which heraldry was an art and chivalry an
etiquette. The direct contrary is the fact. The First Crusade especially
was much more an unanimous popular rising than most that are called
riots and revolutions. The Guilds, the great democratic systems of the
time, often owed their increasing power to corporate fighting for the
Cross; but I shall deal with such things later. Often it was not so much
a levy of men as a trek of whole families, like new gipsies moving
eastwards. And it has passed into a proverb that children by themselves
often organized a crusade as they now organize a charade. But we shall
best realize the fact by fancying every Crusade as a Children's Crusade.
They were full of all that the modern world worships in children,
because it has crushed it out of men. Their lives were full, as the
rudest remains of their vulgarest arts are full, of something that we
all saw out of the nursery window. It can best be seen later, for
instance, in the lanced and latticed interiors of Memling, but it is
ubiquitous in the older and more unconscious contemporary art; something
that domesticated distant lands and made the horizon at home. They
fitted into the corners of small houses the ends of the earth and the
edges of the sky. Their perspective is rude and crazy, but it is
perspective; it is not the decorative flatness of orientalism. In a
word, their world, like a child's, is full of foreshortening, as of a
short cut to fairyland. Their maps are more provocative than pictures.
Their half-fabulous animals are monsters, and yet are pets. It is
impossible to state verbally this very vivid atmosphere; but it was an
at