ponding improvement in the art of building. Instead of the
old German block-house, plastered with clay, the crevices filled with
reed, and without windows or staircases, in which people and cattle were
stalled together, dwellings fit for human beings were gradually evolved.
The dwellings of unfree people (_Hdrige_) consisted of house, barn, and
stable for cattle, while the estates and houses of landed proprietors
comprised mansion (_Herrenhaus_), cellar house (_cellaria_), bath house,
grange (_picarium_), stables, and a separate house for women (_genitium_
or _screona_) in which the women handled distaff and spindle, spinning
linen and wool, making ornaments, embroidery, figures in cloth, and
other feminine work. There they sat, the distaff between their knees,
the spindle in their hands, beautiful pictures of noble German
womanhood. There they made the linen garments for themselves and their
families, including their husbands. Royal ladies worked not less than
peasant women or unfree maids. Later on, Luitgardis, daughter of Emperor
Otto the Great, was so famed for being an industrious spinner that a
golden spindle was hung over her grave. The tailoring needle and
scissors were handled with skill, as is certified in many a mediaeval
song. The Carlovingian period, therefore, furnishes us with much over
which to lament, but also with much over which to rejoice. Virtue and
vice are there in abundant measure.

The Christian-German civilization founded by Charlemagne was almost
destroyed under his successors. Under Charlemagne we could treat his
vast realm, at least so far as it covered France and the North, as
genuinely Teutonic land; two generations later, under his grandsons,
Charles the Bald and Ludwig the German, we must begin the separation of
France and Germany, by the Treaty of Verdun, A. D. 843, while the middle
land, namely, Burgundy, Alsace, and Lorraine, which fell to Lothaire
with the already shadowy imperial crown, becomes the Eris-apple between
the two. Germany and France, originally one, are separated by a
territorial dispute for more than one thousand years.

Side by side with the heroic figures of Henry I. (919-936), who
refounded the shattered empire, and his still greater son, Otto I., who
rebuilt it, we find spirited princesses, some of them, like Adelheid of
Burgundy, foreigners, with great zeal for culture, who brought an
appreciation of refinement and art to the German court. Otto the Great's
son and