Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/352

 258 General History of Europe people besides clergymen began to learn how to read and write. As early as the fourteenth century many of the books appear to have been written with a view of meeting the tastes and needs of the business class. Representatives of the towns were summoned to the councils of the kings into the English Parliament and the French Estates General about the year 1300, for the monarch was obliged to ask their advice when he needed their money to carry on his government and his wars. The rise of the business class alongside the older orders of the clergy and nobility is one of the most momentous changes of the thirteenth century. IV. GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE 427. Medieval Buildings. Almost all the medieval buildings have disappeared in the ancient towns of Europe. The stone town walls, no longer adequate in our times, have been removed, and their place has been taken by broad and handsome avenues. The old houses have been torn down in order to widen and straighten the streets and permit the construction of modern dwell- ings. Here and there one can still find a walled town, but they are few in number and are merely curiosities. Of the buildings erected in towns during the Middle Ages only the churches remain, but these fill the beholder with wonder and admiration. It seems impossible that the cities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which were neither very large nor very rich, could possibly find money enough to pay for them. No modern buildings equal them in beauty and grandeur, and they are the most striking memorial of the religious spirit and the town pride of the Middle Ages. The construction of a cathedral sometimes extended over two or three centuries, and much of the money for it must have been gathered penny by penny. It should be remembered that every- body belonged in those days to the one great Catholic Church, so that the building of a new church was a matter of interest to the whole community to men of every rank, from the bishop him- self to the workman and the peasant.