It is easy to find illustrations in every country.

Here it may suffice to refer to France, Germany, and England.
In France in the thirteenth century the Church was so impressed by the prevalence of homosexuality that it reasserted the death penalty for sodomy at the Councils of Paris (1212) and Rouen (1214), while we are told that even by rejecting a woman's advances (as illustrated in Marie de France's _Lai de Lanval_) a man fell under suspicion as a sodomist, which was also held to involve heresy.[68] At the end of this century (about 1294) Alain de Lille was impelled to write a book, _De Planctu Naturae_, in order to call attention to the prevalence of homosexual feeling; he also associated the neglect of women with sodomy.

"Man is made woman," he writes; "he blackens the honor of his sex, the craft of magic Venus makes him of double gender"; nobly beautiful youths have "turned their hammers of love to the office of anvils," and "many kisses lie untouched on maiden lips." The result is that "the natural anvils," that is to say the neglected maidens, "bewail the absence of their hammers and are seen sadly to demand them." Alain de Lille makes himself the voice of this demand.[69] A few years later, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, sodomy was still regarded as very prevalent.

At that time it was especially associated with the Templars who, it has been supposed, brought it from the East.

Such a supposition, however, is not required to account for the existence of homosexuality in France.