friend of about the same age overheard the father of one of them--both
well brought up and carefully protected, one Catholic and the other
Protestant--referring to "those innocent children." "We did laugh so, WE
and _innocent children_!!! What our fathers really think of us; we
innocent!!! At dinner we did not dare look at one another or we should
have exploded." It need scarcely be added that, at the same time, they
were more innocent than they knew.

It is clear that this kind of education and this attitude towards
children must be regarded as the outcome of the whole mediæval method of
life. In a state of society where roughness and violence, though not, as
we sometimes assume, chronic, were yet always liable to be manifested, it
was necessary for every man and woman to be able to face the crudest facts
of the world and to be able to maintain his or her own rights against
them. The education that best secured that strength and independence was
the best education and it necessarily involved an element of hardness. We
must go back earlier than Montaigne's day, when the conditions were
becoming mitigated, to see the system working in all its vigour.

The lady of the day of the early thirteenth century has been well
described by Luchaire in his scholarly study of French Society in the time
of Philip Augustus. She was, he tells us, as indeed she had been in the
preceding feudal centuries, often what we should nowadays call a virago,
of violent temperament, with vivid passions, broken in from childhood to
all physical exercises, sharing the pleasures and dangers of the knights
around her. Feudal life, fertile in surprises and in risks, demanded even
in women a vigorous temper of soul and body, a masculine air, and habits
also that were almost virile. She accompanied her father or her husband to
the chase, while in war-time, if she became a widow or if her husband was
away at the Crusades, she was ready, if necessary, to direct the defences