stately palaces, kept elegant tables, and a splendid equipage. As there were no good inns in those times, travelers were obliged to carry their own bedding and provisions, as they still are in Spain. A nobleman or a prelate, when he traveled, was attended with a train of servants and attendants; knights, esquires, pages, clerks, cooks, confectioners, gamesters, dancers, barbers, wagons loaded with furniture, provisions, and plate. To each wagon was chained a huge mastif, and on each pack-horse sat an ape or a monkey. Such was the retinue of Thomas Becket, chancellor of England.

81. Surnames. In early ages, men had no surnames. Among the Saxons, it was customary to distinguish men by some descriptive epithet, as John, the black; Thomas, the white; Richard, the strong. Afterwards, it was the practice to designate particular persons by their occupations; as John, the smith; William, the saddler; David, the tailor, &c.; and in time the name of the occupation became the surname of the family. After the conquest, the Norman barons introduced the practice of taking their surnames from their castles or estates; a practice which was formerly common in France, and from which many names of families have been derived.

82. Religion. The state of religion under the first Norman kings was miserably low, consisting chiefly in building churches and monasteries, and enriching them with donations; or in a round of insignificant ceremonies. Then flourished school divinity, which consisted in discussing minutely nice abstruse questions in logic and morals. Two methods of preaching were in use; one was to expound the scripture, sentence after sentence, in regular order. This was called postillating, and the preachers postillators. The other method was for the preacher to declare, at first, what subject he intended to preach on, without naming a passage of scripture as a text. This was called declaring. About the beginning of the thirteenth century, the method of naming a text was introduced, and the preacher divided the subject into a great number of particulars. This was severely

4

censured at first, particularly by Roger Bacon; but it finally became universal.

The scriptures were divided into chapters and verses by cardinal Langton, in the beginning of the thirteenth century.

83. Gunpowder and guns. The discovery of gunpowder is ascribed to Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century; but that philosopher concealed the discovery, by transposing the letters of the words which were intended to express charcoal or the dust of charcoal, in his mention of the substance. It was, therefore, a long time before the manufacture of this article became

common.

The precise time when guns or cannon were first used is not ascertained. It is said that Edward III. had cannon in his campaign against the Scots, A. D. 1327. They were called crakys. It is certain, cannon were used in Scotland in 1339; and Edward III. used them in France, in the famous battle of Cressy, and at the siege of Calais, A. D. 1346. The first cannon were elumsy, and wider at the mouth than at the other end. Small guns were called hand-cannon, carried by two men, and fired from a rest fixed in the ground.

84. Vices and miseries. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, astrology was in vogue among all classes of people. No prince would engage in an enterprise, till he had consulted the position of the stars. The belief in miracles was common. Pope Innocent VI. believed Petrarch to be a magician, because he could read Virgil. Judges of courts were almost universally corrupt; justice was every where perverted by bribes; some judges were found guilty, and fined in enormous sums; one judge was condemned to be banged, for exciting his followers to commit a murder. Robbery was so common that no person could travel in safety. Robbers in Hampshire were so numerous, that juries would not find any of them guilty. They formed companies under powerful barons, who shared with them the booty. Princes, cardinals, and bishops, were robbed, as they were traveling, and sometimes imprisoned, till they paid large sums for their ransom.

The

common people were every where oppressed, ignorant, and wretched.

85. Dress. Never were wantonness, pride, vanity, folly, and false taste, carried to a greater excess, than in the richness, extravagance, and variety of the dresses of the nobles in this period. The love of finery, the passion of weak and silly people, infected all the higher orders, kings, barons, and knights. At the marriage of Alexander III. of Scotland, to Margaret, eldest daughter of Henry III. king of England, the king of England was attended by a thousand knights, dressed in silk robes; and these were, the next day, exchanged for other dresses equally expensive and splendid. Furred garments, fine linens, jewels, gold and silver plate, rich furniture and utensils, the spoils of Caen and Calais, were brought into England, and every woman of rank had her share. King Richard II. had a coat which cost him thirty thousand marks; and Sir John Arundel had no fewer than fifty suits of cloth of cold. This love of finery infected the common people; and a sumptuary law was passed, A. D. 1363, to restrain this extravagance; but with little effect.

86. Fashions. Fashion had, in this period, a no less despotic influence, than it has in modern times. The men wore pointed shoes, in which they could not walk, without fastening the points to their knees with chains. The upper part of the shoe was cut in the shape of a church window. These shoes, called crackows, continued in fashion three hundred years. The men of fashion wore hose of one color on one leg, and of another color on the other; a coat, half white, and half black or blue; a long beard; a silk hood buttoned under the chin, embroidered with odd figures. Fashionable ladies wore party-colored tunics, half of one color and half of another; and small caps wrapped about the head with cords; girdles ornamented with gold and silver, and short swords, called daggers, fastened a little below the navel. Sometimes their head-dresses rose like pyramids nearly three feet high, with streamers of fine silk flowing and reaching to the ground.

87. Manners. The manners of the English, by

their intercourse with foreign countries, gradually improved. But even in the reign of Henry VII, they were rude. When Catharine of Arragon arrived in England, Henry was informed the princess had arrived and had retired to rest; yet Henry was so uncourteous that he obliged her to rise and dress herself; and he that night affianced her to his son Arthur.

In the reign of Henry VIII. so rigorous and tyrannical was the discipline of families; so formal, reserved, and haughty were parents, that sons, arrived to manhood, were obliged to stand uncovered and silent, in presence of their parents; and daughters of adult years, were compelled to stand by the cupboard, not being permitted to sit or repose, otherwise than by kneeling on a cushion till their mothers had left the room.

88. Furniture of houses. The apartinents at Hampton Court were on one occasion, furnished each with a candlestick, a basin, a goblet and ewer of silver; yet the king's chamber, except the bed and cupboard, contained no furniture except a joint-stool, a pair of andirons, and a small mirror. The walls of the wealthy were adorned with hanging or arras, and furnished with a eupboard, long tables, or rather loose boards placed on trestles; also, with forms, chairs, and a few joint-stools. The rich had comfortable beds; but the common people slept on mats or straw pallets, under a rug, with a log for a pillow. Glass windows were seen only in churches or the mansions of the rich; and the floor was clay, covered with sand and rushes. Such was the condition of the English in the reign of Henry VIII. or beginning of the sixteenth century.

89. State of the church. From the time when Chris tianity was introduced into England, the pope of Rome had been gradually gaining power and ascendancy in all parts of Europe. The rights and privileges of the English clergy, under the first Norman princes, had been surrendered to the Roman pontif, and by means of various taxes, immense sums of money were extorted from them, to enrich the coffers of his holiness, who advanced foreigners to the richest bishoprics in England, and even sold to Italians livings before they became

void. This exercise of his power was prohibited by statutes of parliament in the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II.

90. Beginning of the Reformation. The first effort to reform the errors of popery in England was made by John Wiclif, in the reign of Edward III. and Richard II. He was born about the year 1324, and advanced to a professorship in Oxford, where he was educated. He rejected many of the popish doctrines; many of the rites and traditions of the church; and boldly asserted that in the apostolic age the bishop and priest were of the same order. He opposed the doctrine of transubstantiation and the infallibility of the pope; he declared the church of Rome not to be the head of other churches; that Peter had not the power of the keys, any more than the rest of the apostles; and that the gospel being a perfect rule of life and manners, ought to be read by the people. His opinions were, in many particulars, the same as those now entertained by Protestants.

91. Wiclif's opinions condemned. Wiclif's doctrines reached Rome, and were condemned by pope Gregory XI. His successor, Urban, wrote to king Richard and to the archbishop of Canterbury, to suppress his doctrine. Accordingly, his doctrines were condemned in a convocation of bishops; he was deprived of his professorship; his books and writings were burnt, and he himself was sentenced to imprisonment. But he retired and escaped. He declared himself willing to defend his opinions in Rome, but for his sickness and infirmities. He was the first to translate the New Testament into English. But although his doctrines were condemned and his books, nearly two hundred volumes, were burnt; he left many disciples, who were called Lollards.

92. Laws to oppose Reformation. In the year 1215, it was decreed by the Council of Lateran, that all hereties should be delivered over to the civil magistrate to be burned. In the reign of Henry IV. it was enacted by parliament that persons convicted of heresy, and refusing to abjure their errors, should be delivered over to the secular power, and mayors, sherifs, and bailifs, were to receive them and burn them before the people. Even