ition and hypocrisy among the laity, and prepared the road for a
tyranny not less oppressive than that of India or ancient Egypt. Indeed
the two earliest instances of ecclesiastical interference with the
rights of sovereigns--namely, the deposition of Wamba in Spain and that
of Louis the Debonair--were founded upon this austere system of
penitence. But it is true that a repentance redeemed by money or
performed by a substitute could have no salutary effect on the sinner;
and some of the modes of atonement which the church most approved were
particularly hostile to public morals. None was so usual as pilgrimage,
whether to Jerusalem or Rome, which were the great objects of devotion;
or to the shrine of some national saint--a James of Compostella, a
David, or a Thomas a Becket. This licensed vagrancy was naturally
productive of dissoluteness, especially among the women. Our English
ladies, in their zeal to obtain the spiritual treasures of Rome, are
said to have relaxed the necessary caution about one that was in their
own custody.[543] There is a capitulary of Charlemagne directed against
itinerant penitents, who probably considered the iron chain around their
necks an expiation of future as well as past offences.[544]

The crusades may be considered as martial pilgrimages on an enormous
scale, and their influence upon general morality seems to have been
altogether pernicious. Those who served under the cross would not indeed
have lived very virtuously at home; but the confidence in their own
merits, which the principle of such expeditions inspired, must have
aggravated the ferocity and dissoluteness of their ancient habits.
Several historians attest the depravation of morals which existed both
among the crusaders and in the states formed out of their
conquests.[545]

[Sidenote: Want of law.]

While religion had thus lost almost every quality that renders it
conducive to the good order of society, the control of human law was
still less efficacious. But this part of my subject has been anticipated
in other passages of the present work; and I shall only glance at the
want of regular subordination, which rendered legislative and judicial
edicts a dead letter, and at the incessant private warfare, rendered
legitimate by the usages of most continental nations. Such hostilities,
conducted as they must usually have been with injustice and cruelty,
could not fail to produce a degree of rapacious ferocity in the general
dispo