mourn over the universal decadence and direct the eyes of the faithful towards the spectre of the end of the world and of the Last Judgment.
Let us, however, avoid laying too much stress upon these allusions to the final cataclysm predicted in the Apocalypse for the period when the thousand years should be fulfilled, during which Satan was to remain bound. Historians have long believed that, as the year 1000 drew near, the populations, numb with terror, and, as it were, paralysed, awaited in painful anxiety, crowded together in the churches with their faces to the ground, the catastrophe in which they believed the world was about to founder. A few passages from contemporaries, wrongly interpreted, account for this erroneous impression. As the thousandth year approached, the people small and great, priests and lay folk, continued the same way of life as in the past, without being alarmed by those apocalyptic threats in which, even after the thousandth year was past, certain gloomy spirits continued to indulge. Before as after the year 1000, as the facts brought together throughout the whole of this volume abundantly prove, feudal society, wholly given up to its warlike instincts and its passion for violence, still went on dreaming of smashing blows to be dealt and great conquests to be achieved.
But out of the excess of evil good was to spring. In proportion as the lay world allowed itself to be thus carried away, and as the Bishops and their clergy suffered the feudal spirit and customs to encroach upon them more and more, the ascetic life came to present an ever stronger and deeper attraction for all truly devout minds. The tenth century, which saw the Chair of Peter filled by a succession of the most unworthy of Popes, saw also the foundation of the Order of Cluny, and the great monastic reforms initiated and spread abroad by the monks of this order. We shall treat more at length in a later volume of this history of this fruitful new departure, which was one day to have a mighty influence on the reform of the Church as a whole. It need only be said here that, by procuring for the modest hermitage which he planted in Burgundy in 910 complete enfranchisement from all temporal control and by placing it under that of the Holy See only, the founder of Cluny, Duke William of Aquitaine, was laying the foundation for the future greatness of the Abbey. Firmly attached to the Benedictine Rule in its primitive purity, strictly subjected to the absolute control of its abbot, Cluny, thanks to its independent position, rapidly became the refuge of faith and the model to be followed. Not only did benefactions flow in for the support of these pattern monks, whose prayers were doubtless held to be of greater efficacy than those of their fellows, but a whole series of monasteries, old and new, begged for the favour of placing themselves under its patronage and of being reckoned among the number of its priories, in order to share in its Rule and in its exemption from secular domination. France was soon covered with convents affiliated to it from
