Smite a villein and he will bless you; bless a villein and he will smite you.

Charles's old ally Don Enrique, King of Castile, also died before taking sides, and his son, Juan I, though heavily pressed by Charles V to support Clement, preferred to maintain neutrality, saying...

In the same five years three new colleges were founded at Cambridge-Trinity, Corpus Christi, and Clare-although love of learning, like love in marriage, was not always the motive. Corpus Christi was...

According to then current laws of war, the besieged could make terms if they surrendered, but not if they forced a siege to its bitter end, so presumably Charles felt no compunctions.

Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New.

In a long and fiercely argued process, against the strenuous resistance of the peers, he ordered the Sire de Coucy to stand trial. Enguerrand IV was convicted, and although the King intended a death...

The amount the rich could squander on occasions like these in a period of repeated disasters appears inexplicable, not so much with regard to motive as with regard to means.

Money was evil, beauty vain, and both were transitory. Ambition was pride, desire for gain was avarice, desire of the flesh was lust, desire for honor, even for knowledge and beauty, was vainglory....

The feelings of the men who had raised Urban over their own heads probably cannot be adequately described. Some thought that the delirium of power had made the Pope furiosus et melaneholicus-in short,...

Fine dressing could not be suppressed despite ever-renewed sumptuary laws which tried especially and repeatedly to outlaw the pointed shoes.

Because life was collective, it was intensely sociable and dependent on etiquette, hence the emphasis on courteous conduct and clean fingernails.

A reformer exhorted children that they would succeed where he and his colleagues had failed with the charge: Live for that better day.

fireflies were the souls of unbaptized dead infants.

Despised as ineffective, they were ineffective because they were despised.

Contradictory conditions are always present. Evidence

The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the facade holds.

double et louche {a provocative phrase which could mean "double and squinting" or "equivocal" or "shady" in the sense of disreputable}.

The only really detestable character in Chaucer's company of Canterbury pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch's hairless skin, his glaring eyes like a hare's, and his brazen...

What proportion of the peasantry was well off and what poor is judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of...

That the mortality was accepted as God's punishment may explain in part the vacuum of comment that followed the Black Death. An investigator has noticed that in the archives of Périgord references to...

Hours of the day were named for the hours of prayer: matins around midnight; lauds around three A.M.; prime, the first hour of daylight, at sunrise or about six A.M.; vespers at six in the evening;...

Women were considered the snare of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one woman the central object of love and adoration.

the plague was not the kind of calamity that inspired mutual help. Its loathsomeness and deadliness did not herd people together in mutual distress, but only prompted their desire to escape each...

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.

Medieval justice was scrupulous about holding proper trials and careful not to sentence without proof of guilt, but it achieved proof by confession rather than evidence, and confession was routinely...

A terrible worm in an iron cocoon, as he was called in an anonymous poem, the knight rode on a saddle rising in a high ridge above the horse's backbone with his feet resting in very long stirrups so...

In the woe of the century no factor caused more trouble than the persistent lag between the growth of the state and the means of state financing. While centralized government was developing, taxation...

History never repeats itself, said Voltaire; man always does. Thucydides

Bull of September 1348 in which he said that Christians who imputed the pestilence to the Jews had been "seduced by that liar, the Devil," and that the charge of well-poisoning and ensuing massacres...

principle, formulated for the occasion, that "a woman does not succeed to the throne of France." Thus was born the momentous Salic "Law" that was to create a permanent bar to the succession of women...