penances, offerings, absolutions, all the forms of invocation and repentance multiplied rapidly; a multitude of souls, in submission or terror, prepared to appear before their Judge.  And after what catastrophes?  In the midst of what gloom or of what light?  These were fearful questions, of which men’s imaginations were exhausted in forestalling the solution.  When the last day of the tenth and the first of the eleventh centuries were past, it was like a general regeneration; it might have been said that time was beginning over again; and the work was commenced of rendering the Christian world worthy of the future.  “Especially in Italy and in Gaul,” says the chronicler Raoul Glaber, “men took in hand the reconstruction of the basilicas, although the greater part had no need thereof.  Christian peoples seemed to vie one with another which should erect the most beautiful.  It was as if the world, shaking itself together and casting off its old garments, would have decked itself with the white robes of Christ.”  Christian art, in its earliest form of the Gothic style, dates from this epoch; the power and riches of the Christian Church, in its different institutions, received, at this crisis of the human imagination, a fresh impulse.

Other facts, some lamentable and some salutary, began, about this epoch, to assume in French history a place which was destined before long to become an important one.  Piles of fagots were set up, first at Orleans and then at Toulouse, for the punishment of heretics.  The heretics of the day were Manicheans.  King Robert and Queen Constance sanctioned by their presence this return to human sacrifices offered to God as a penalty inflicted on mental offenders against His word.  At the same time a double portion of ire blazed forth against the Jews.  “What have we to do,” it was said, “with going abroad to make war on Mussulmans?  Have we not in the very midst of us the greatest enemies of Jesus Christ?” Amongst Christians acts of oppression and violence on the part of the great against the small became so excessive and so frequent that they excited in country parts, particularly in Normandy, insurrections which the insurgents tried to organize into permanent resistance.  “In several counties of Normandy,” says William of Jumieges, “all the peasants, meeting in conventicles, resolved to live according to their own wills and their own laws, not only in the heart of the forests, but also on the borders of the rivers, and without care for any established rights.  To accomplish this design, these mobs of madmen elected each two deputies, who were to form, at the central point, an assembly charged with the execution of their decrees.  So soon as the duke (Richard II.) was informed thereof, he sent a large body of armed men to suppress this audacity in the country parts, and to disperse this rustic assembly.  In execution of his orders, the deputies of the peasantry and many other rebels were forthwith arrested; their feet and hands were cut off, and they were sent home thus mutilated to deter their fellows from such enterprises, and to render them more prudent, for fear of worse.  After this experience, the peasants gave up their meetings and returned to their ploughs.”