an escape for the smoke, dens of physical and moral pollution swarming
with vermin, wisps of straw twisted round the limbs to keep off the
cold, the ague-stricken peasant with no help except shrine-cure," i.e.,
cure by the touching bone of saint, or image of virgin (Draper's
"Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 265). Even among the
wealthy, the life was coarse and rough; carpets were unknown; drainage
never thought of. The Anglo-Saxon "'nobles, devoted to gluttony and
voluptuousness, never visited the church, but the matins and the mass
were read over to them by a hurrying priest in their bed-chambers,
before they rose, themselves not listening. The common people were a
prey to the more powerful; their property was seized, their bodies
dragged away to distant countries; their maidens were either thrown into
a brothel or sold for slaves. Drinking, day and night, was the general
pursuit: vices, the companions of inebriety, followed, effeminating the
manly mind.' The baronial castles were dens of robbers. The Saxon
chronicler [William of Malmesbury, from whom the quotation above]
records how men and women were caught and dragged into those
strongholds, hung up by their thumbs or feet, fire applied to them,
knotted strings twisted round their heads, and many other torments
inflicted to extort ransom" (Ibid, p. 266). When the barons had nearly
finished their evil lives, the church stepped in, claiming her share of
the plunder and the wealth thus amassed, and opening the gates of
paradise to the dying thief. The cities were as wretched as their
inhabitants: no paving, no cleaning, no lighting. In the country the old
Roman roads were unmended, unkept; Europe was slipping backwards into
uttermost barbarism. Meanwhile things were very different where the
blighting power of Christianity was not in the ascendant. "Europe at the
present day does not offer more taste, more refinement, more elegance,
than might have been seen, at the epoch of which we are speaking, in the
capitals of the Spanish Arabs. Their streets were lighted and solidly