Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/137

cumstances,—a feeling, also, of their own worth, rights, and importance, among the bonders,—and must have raised their habits, character, and ideas to a nearer level to those of the highest. The kings, having no royal residences, were lodged, with their court attendants on the royal progresses, habitually by the bonders, and entertained by them. At the present day there are no royal mansions, or residences of the great, in Norway, different from the ordinary houses of the bonders or peasant-proprietors. His Majesty Carl Johan has to lodge in their houses in travelling through his Norwegian dominions; and no king in Europe could travel through his kingdom, and be lodged so well every night by the same class. In ancient times the kings lived in guest-quarters,—that is, by billet upon the peasant-proprietors in different districts in regular turn; and even this kind of intercourse must have kept alive a high feeling of their own importance in the bonder class, in the times when, from the want of the machinery of a lettered functionary class, civil or clerical, all public business had to be transacted directly with them in their Things. The rise and diffusion of letters, learning, and a learned class, in the middle ages, retarded perhaps rather than advanced just principles of government and legislation. The people were more enslaved by the power which the learning of the middle ages threw into the hands of their rulers, than they were before in the ages of ignorance of letters, when their rude force was in direct contact, face to face, with the rude power of their rulers. This prejudicial effect of the revival of letters on civil, political, and religious liberty, by doing away with all direct vivâ voce communication in assemblies of the people between the rulers and the ruled, may be traced even to the present day in Germany and other countries. The people have no influence in their own concerns, because a