ommunity the deepest sunk in ignorance and
superstition, both kings and people fortified themselves against the
renewal of aristocratic tyranny, and in proportion as they became free,
became civilized. It was during this period that in France, the grand
centre of the crusading madness, the communes began to acquire
strength, and the monarch to possess a tangible and not a merely
theoretic authority. Order and comfort began to take root, and, when
the second Crusade was preached, men were in consequence much less
willing to abandon their homes than they had been during the first.
Such pilgrims as had returned from the Holy Land came back with minds
more liberal and expanded than when they set out. They had come in
contact with a people more civilized than themselves; they had seen
something more of the world, and had lost some portion, however small,
of the prejudice and bigotry of ignorance. The institution of chivalry
had also exercised its humanizing influence, and coming bright and
fresh through the ordeal of the Crusades, had softened the character
and improved the hearts of the aristocratic order. The Trouveres and
Troubadours, singing of love and war in strains pleasing to every class
of society, helped to root out the gloomy superstitions which, at the
first Crusade, filled the minds of all those who were able to think.
Men became in consequence less exclusively under the mental thraldom of
the priesthood, and lost much of the credulity which formerly
distinguished them.

The Crusades appear never to have excited so much attention in England
as on the continent of Europe; not because the people were less
fanatical than their neighbours, but because they were occupied in
matters of graver interest. The English were suffering too severely
from the recent successful invasion of their soil, to have much
sympathy to bestow upon the distresses of people so far away as the
Christians of Palestine; and we find that they took no part in the
first Crusade, and very little in the second. Even then those who
engaged in it were chiefly Norman knights and their vassals, and not
the Saxon franklins and population, who no doubt thought, in their
sorrow, as many wise men have thought since, that charity should begin
at home.

Germany was productive of more zeal in the cause, and her raw,
uncivilized hordes continued to issue forth under the banners of the
Cross in numbers apparently undiminished, when the enthusiasm had long
b