The life of the early Middle Ages was barbaric beyond all our powers of conception. Might was right in those days in a sense perhaps more absolute than under conditions of primitive savagery.
In fact, there existed a sort of official savagery of Church and State. Tolerance was undreamt of; there was no refuge for the oppressed, no rights for the weak, no honour, no fair play. Such rights and qualities belong to the ideals of chivalry. They had no nook or corner in the preceding era, no niche in the Christian Church; and the heart in which such outlandish feelings were untimely born must either have hardened or broken--as surely many a heart did break for sheer loneliness, divided by centuries from its brother spirits.
An extravagant picture? Only in the sense in which all rough sketches are extravagant.
[Illustration: AT THE PORT OF AIGUES MORTES. _By E. M. Synge._]
As for the tide in the affairs of women, it was at the neap. Lecky traces to Jewish sources a good deal of the contempt in which they were universally held. The tenth commandment, we may remember, enjoins that a man shall not covet his neighbour's house, nor his wife, nor his servant, nor his maid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his; a fairly plain and unvarnished way of expressing by inference the general view of marital relations.
"A woman," says this author, "was regarded as the origin of human ills"; and he quotes the saying of a Jewish writer that "the badness of men is better than the goodness of women." Our great-great-great-grandmothers, we may remember, used to be sold by their feudal lords to the highest bidder. That counts for something in a people's destiny. "Marriage," says M. Fauriel in his work on Provençal Poetry,[6] "was nothing more than a treaty of peace or alliance between two seigneurs, of whom the one took the daughter of the other as his wife."
Repudiation, the same author says, was a common device: in the case, for instance, of a married noble covetous of new territory, he would become conscience-stricken on reflecting that he was perhaps fourth cousin of his wife, and he hurried to the Church to release him from the burden of sin, the Church being complaisant towards a wealthy penitent.