Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/501

Rh described a lawyer as "a gentleman who rescues your estate from your enemy and keeps it himself." It was on this principle that these "protectors" acted. They took the entire product of the husbandman's labor as a reward for their friendship and courage in protecting him from spoliation by some one else!

The period was the Golden Age of Might. It was the day of the absolute monarchy of Brawn, and the strong right arm was the court of first resort and tribunal of final appeal. Centuries of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilization had developed the science of jurisprudence into laws and customs which were fairly equitable in securing ownership of person and property. But moral chaos came again when the Gothic cataclysm rolled over Europe. There was no longer any recognition of a man's right to anything to which he could not hold on by main strength.

The gentleman whose factory-plant, office-furniture, and stock in trade consisted of a stone castle, a broad-haunched horse, a business suit of spring-steel, and a twenty-foot lance, held thirteen trumps in the game as it was then played. To propitiate him—to gain even the privilege of living in unutterable wretchedness and squalor—freemen surrendered their lauds to him, gave up all their labor's products, and even yielded to him such of their women as his momentary caprice might demand.

The Men on Horseback divided all the arable lands of Europe among them. Naturally they had hot disagreements as to who should have the monopoly of plundering a given valley or plain, and carried on the dispute with much clamor and fighting. In spite of the ornate descriptions of romancers and ballad-singers, this latter was not of a very sanguinary nature. So completely was armor finally made to answer its intended purpose that there are records of "battles" between imposing arrays of armored horsemen, which lasted all day, but in which not a single life was lost. The worst likely to happen to any combatant was that he be unhorsed, pinned to the ground by the weight of his armor, taken captive, and forced to pay ransom. "The knights of old" were warriors "for revenue only."

The only likelihood of any considerable slaughter was when the wretched serfs—goaded to madness by their wrongs—revolted against their despoilers, and strove against them with pikes, scythes, bills, and similar ineffective weapons. Then the wolf-hounds of murder were let loose. Cavaliers at war with one another would make a truce, to join in slaying "rebellious hinds." The last great battle of this kind was in the "War of the Jacquerie," in 1348, where nine thousand poor serfs were massacred in the French town of Meaux, and in the three weeks that the hunt lasted more than twenty thousand were slain. So fond were the chevaliers of this sport of hind-killing that it was not an uncommon thing for them—before or after one of the great armor-battering matches which they called battles—to turn upon and slaughter the