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1095, where Pope Urban II proclaimed the Crusade which fired the imagination of die whole of Europę - not the noble classes alone - and sent knights, burghers, and peasants off, aflame with holy zeal, to rescue Jerusalem from the hands of the Heatlien.

So the Church found a job for the unemployed brigandage of Europę. At the same time, Urban issued a generał injunction that every person of noble birth, on attaining the age of twelve, should take a solemn oath before a bishop that

"be would defend to the uttermost the oppressed, the widów and the orphan, and that women of noble birth should enjoy his espeeial care."

The Papai injunction fell upon ears well attuned to receive it, for such a stock as the French nobility was favourable for the growth of the chivalric ideał; it is not surprising that it first appeared in France and came to its finest flower there, for it belongs to the same civilization which illuminated Western Europę with its learning -even during the otherwise rather des-perate eleventh century— and won for the French the name of "God's chosen people," like Judah of old. It was a product in its finished form of the period 1080-1130, the period of William of Poitiers and his troubadours, of Abelard and William of Champeaux, when Suger was making St. Denis the centre of European art.

The fullest expression of the chivalric ideał in its early stages is found in the Chansons de Geste, in which it is closely connected with the land which gave it birth. The Chamon de Roland, the Gęsta Francorum, the Chamon d'Antioche - all have as their dominant motif God's choice of Charlemagne and his Franks to be his champions in a perpetual Holy War against the Infidel. Loyalty was its keynote.

The knight must give unstinted loyalty to God, his liege lord, and his chivalry. The ideał was harsh and bloody, but magnificent, a consumma-tion blessed by the Church of the old Teutonic warrior virtues wedded to the impetuous, gener-

Figure 54. Funeral brass of a wealthy merchant and alderman of Ghent, c. 1330, Willom Wenemayer. His sword bears the legend "HOllREBANT DUDUM REPROBI ME CERNERE NUDUM" (Thc wicked have quakcd to look at mc naked), a fine knightly sentiment adopted by ono of the "ncw men" of the 14th centurv.