acuteness
that characterized it, seized on the pretty tales, and adding to them
the moralizing which a crude system of ethics enjoined, carried its
spoils to the pulpit. Even the fables of pagan AEsop were thus employed.

In the twelfth century the ecclesiastical forces were appropriating to
their use whatever secular rights and possessions came within their
grasp. A common ardor permitted and sustained this aggrandizement, and
the devotion that founded and swelled the mendicant orders of Francis
and Dominic, and led the populace to carry with prayers and
psalm-singing the stones of which great cathedrals were built, readily
gave their hearth-tales to illustrate texts and inculcate doctrines. A
habit of interpreting moral and religious precepts by allegory led to
the far-fetched, sometimes droll, and always naive "moralities" which
commonly follow each one of the 'Gesta.' The more popular the tale, the
more easily it held the attention; and the priests with telling
directness brought home the moral to the simple-minded. The innocent
joys and sad offenses of humanity interpreted the Church's whole system
of theology, and the stories, committed to writing by the priests, were
thus preserved.

The secular tales must have been used in the pulpit for some time before
their systematic collection was undertaken. The zeal for compiling
probably reached its height in the age of Pierre Bercheure, who died in
1362. To Bercheure, prior of the Benedictine Convent of St. Eloi at
Paris, the collection of 'Gesta Romanorum' has been ascribed. A German
scholar, however, Herr Oesterley, who published in 1872 the result of an
investigation of one hundred and sixty-five manuscripts, asserts that
the 'Gesta' were originally compiled towards the end of the thirteenth
century in England, from which country they were taken to the Continent,
there undergoing various alterations. "The popularity of the original
'Gesta,'" says Sir F. Madden, "not only on the Continent but among the
English clergy, appears to have induced some person, apparently in the
reign of Richard the Second, to undertake a similar compilation in this
country." The 'Anglo-Latin Gesta' is the immediate original of the early
English translation from which the following stories are taken, with
slight verbal changes.

The word _Gesta_, in mediaeval Latin, means notable or historic act or
exploit. The Church, drawing all power, consequence, and grace from
Rome, naturally looked