x and let them in.
Robert of Normandy, father of William the Conqueror, who, in common with
many other nobles of the highest rank, undertook the pilgrimage, found on
his arrival scores of pilgrims at the gate, anxiously expecting his coming
to pay the tax for them. Upon no occasion was such a boon refused.

The sums drawn from this source were a mine of wealth to the Moslem
governors of Palestine, imposed as the tax had been at a time when
pilgrimages had become more numerous than ever. A strange idea had taken
possession of the popular mind at the close of the tenth and commencement
of the eleventh century. It was universally believed that the end of the
world was at hand; that the thousand years of the Apocalypse were near
completion, and that Jesus Christ would descend upon Jerusalem to judge
mankind. All Christendom was in commotion. A panic terror seized upon the
weak, the credulous, and the guilty, who in those days formed more than
nineteen-twentieths of the population. Forsaking their homes, kindred, and
occupation, they crowded to Jerusalem to await the coming of the Lord,
lightened, as they imagined, of a load of sin by their weary pilgrimage.
To increase the panic, the stars were observed to fall from heaven,
earthquakes to shake the land, and violent hurricanes to blow down the
forests. All these, and more especially the meteoric phenomena, were
looked upon as the forerunners of the approaching judgments. Not a meteor
shot athwart the horizon that did not fill a district with alarm, and send
away to Jerusalem a score of pilgrims, with staff in hand and wallet on
their back, praying as they went for the remission of their sins. Men,
women, and even children, trudged in droves to the holy city, in
expectation of the day when the heavens would open, and the Son of God
descend in his glory. This extraordinary delusion, while it augmented the
numbers, increased also the hardships of the pilgrims. Beggars became so
numerous on all the highways between the west of Europe and
Constantinople, that the monks, the great almsgivers upon these occasions,
would have brought starvation within sight of their own doors, if they had
not economised their resources, and left the devotees to shift for
themselves as they could. Hundreds of them were glad to subsist upon the
berries that ripened by the road, who, before this great flux, might have
shared the bread and flesh of the monasteries.

But this was not the greatest of the