None of them had knowledge enough, or insight enough, to conceive or sympathize with the humanity of the thirteenth century, to shudder at its cruelties and hardnesses and persecutions, or to comprehend the spiritual elevation and insight of its rarest minds.

"It was art," said William Morris, "art in which all men shared, that made life romantic as people called it in those days.

That and not robber barons, and inaccessible kings, with their hierarchy of serving nobles, and other rubbish." Morris belonged to a time which knew its middle ages better.

To the eighteenth century the robber barons and the "other rubbish" were the essence of romance.

For Percy and his followers, medievalism was a collection of what actors call "properties" gargoyles, and odds and ends of armour and castle keeps with secret passages, banners and gay colours, and gay shimmering obsolete words.