To any one who knows even a little of medieval war the fact seems astounding.

It is indeed a long exploded fallacy to regard medievalism as identical with feudalism.
There were countless democratic institutions, such as the guilds; sometimes as many as twenty guilds in one small town.
But it is really true that the military organization of the Middle Ages was almost entirely feudal; indeed we might rather say that feudalism was the name of their military organisation.

That so vast a military mass should have attempted to move at all, with only nine of the natural military leaders, seems to me a prodigy of popular initiative.
It is as if a parliament were elected at the next general election, in which only two men could afford to read a daily newspaper.
This mob marched against the military discipline of the Moslems and was massacred; or, might I so mystically express it, martyred.
Many of the great kings and knights who followed in their tracks did not so clearly deserve any haloes for the simplicity and purity of their motives.

The canonisation of such a crowd might be impossible, and would certainly be resisted in modern opinion; chiefly because they indulged their democratic violence on the way by killing various usurers; a course which naturally fills modern society with an anger verging on alarm.

A perversity leads me to weep rather more over the many slaughtered peasants than over the few slaughtered usurers; but in any case the peasants certainly were not slaughtered in vain.
The common conscience of all classes, in a time when all had a common creed, was aroused, and a new army followed of a very different type of skill and training; led by most of the ablest captains and by some of the most chivalrous gentlemen of the age.
For curiously enough, the host contained more than one cultured gentleman who was as simple a Christian as any peasant, and as recklessly ready to be butchered or tortured for the mere name of Christ.
It is a tag of the materialists that the truth about history rubs away the romance of history.