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It was a sad time; there is hardly another in which one would have lived so unwillingly. Poetry was imbecile, chivalry was falling into brigandage, religion suffered degradation, the State, disjointed, was crumbling away; the nation, ground down by king, by nobles and by Englishmen, struggled for a hundred years in a slough, between the dying middle-age and the modern era which was not yet opened. And yet a man like Ernauton must have experienced a unique and splendid joy when, planted like a Hercules upon his two feet, feeling his shirt of mail upon his breast, he pierced through a hedge of pikes, and wielded his great sword in the sunlight.
