* A source for Aquinas’ doctrine of matter as the “principle of individuation”?
* In 669 the army of the Orient “theme” demanded that the Empire should have three simultaneous emperors, to accord with the Trinity.33
* A time-ingrown mistranslation of phis, which means reverent, faithful, kind, gentle, and much besides.
* Many English towns have kept Anglo-Saxon suffixes—tun (town), ham (home), wick (house or creek), thorp (village), burh (borough, burg).
* Leofric, in the legend, agreed to relieve the town of a burdensome tax if she would ride naked through the streets. All the world knows the rest of the story.
* Viking is from Old Norse vik, a creek or fjord; vik appears in this sense in Narvik, Schleswig, Reykjavik, Berwick, Wicklow, etc. Vikingr meant one who raided the country adjoining the fjords. “Viking civilization” will here be used as meaning the culture of the Scandinavian peoples in the “Viking Age”—A.D. 700-1100.
* The word first occurs in a tenth-century fragment, where it means a great-grandmother; by some prank of time it came to mean the technical laws of Norwegian prosody, and was so used by Snorri Sturluson when (1222) he wrote under that title a treatise on Norse mythology and the poetic art; this we know as the Prose or Younger Edda.
* Lorenzo Valla, in 1440, so definitely exposed the frauds in the “False Decretals” that all parties now agree that the disputed documents arc forgeries.26
* The Roman Catholic Church regards Leo VIII as antipope, and attributes no validity to his actions or decrees.
* Yellow, white, blue, red, green, black, and violet received respectively the names of or (gold), argent (silver), azure, gules, vert, sable, and purpure. Azure blue was a color adopted from the East, hence one of its names, ultramarine; gules were trimmings of fur—usually dyed red—worn by Crusaders around the wrists and neck (Latin gula, throat). In the thirteenth century these heraldic emblems or blazons (i.e., shields) were used by abbeys, towns, and nations as well as by families. Over their heraldic emblems or banners old families usually placed a laconic motto—En bonne foi, Ni plus ni moins, etc.38
* Fief, Latin feudum, is from the old German or Gothic faihu, cattle; it is kin to the Latin pecus, and, like it, acquired the secondary meaning of goods or money.
* Gold spurs were the sign of a knight, silver spurs of a squire; to “win his spurs” (of gold) meant to attain to knighthood.
* From the Spanish cruzada—“marked with the cross.”
* Some feudal mansions hung their shields, or displayed their coats of arms, above their portals as a sign of readiness to provide hospitality; hence such later roadhouse signs as “The Red Eagle,” “The Golden Lion,” “The Gray Bear.”
* It may have originated in Europe; cf. Speculum, April, 1940, p. 146.
* This may be taken as the birth date of the Hanseatic League, though that name was not used till 1370.
* “In this year,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1125, “King Henry bade that all the mint-men” (counterfeiters) “in England … should lose each of them the right hand, and their testicles beneath.”31
* Coulton, the leading English medievalist, reckoned English currency in 1200 as worth forty times its value in 1930.35 Ignoring fluctuations during the Middle Ages, this volume calculates medieval monetary values at approximately fifty times the values of corresponding units of currency or precious metal in 1948.
* “Ghibelline” was a variant of Waiblingen, a village owned by the Hohenstaufens. This family took its name—“High Staufen”—from a mountain castle and village in Swabia.
* Robin Hood, famous in legend but obscure in history, may have been one of the Anglo-Saxons who continued for over a century a guerrilla resistance against the Norman conquerors. The English poor celebrated his memory as an unbeaten rebel who lived in Sherwood Forest, acknowledged no Norman law, robbed the lords, helped the serfs, and worshiped the saints.
* Geoffrey of Anjou, father of Henry II, had worn a sprig (planta) of the broom plant (Fr. genêt) in his hat.
* Nicknamed Lackland because, unlike his elder brothers, he had not received from his father any appanage on the Continent.
* The five groups here named became later the House of Lords.
* The counts had previously used the place as a hunting rendezvous; hence its name,’s Graven Haag, the Count’s Lodge, now den Haag.
* There appears to be no historical warrant for the existence of William Tell.58
* This title, applied to him by his chaplain, found no medieval currency, but was applied to him by modern French historians.
* Milman, History of Latin Christianity, VI, 119. The edict is generally accepted as genuine;80 but it may have been forged by the lawyers of Philip IV as a weapon against Boniface VIII; cf. The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. Louis IX.
* From the seaport town called Portus Cale by the Romans, and Oporto (“the port”) today.
* So called from its display center, a “Wicked Lane” formerly devoted to courtesans.
* The early Christian theory that all judgment of the dead would be postponed till the “doomsday” of the end of the world had been replaced by the doctrine that every person would be judged immediately after his death.2
† Cf. General William Booth (1829–1912) on the methods of his Salvation Army preachers: “Nothing moves the people like the terrific. They must have hell-fire flashed before their faces, or they will not move.”3
* From these words cynics formed the phrase “hocus-pocus.”
† For the music of the Mass, see below. Chapter XXXIII.
* On May 20, 1918, the revised Corpus iuris canonici became the official law of the Church.
* The general celibacy of monks, priests, and nuns after 1215 presents a problem in genetics. It may be that Europe suffered some biological loss by the abstention of so many able persons from parentage, but we do not know to what extent superior ability is inherited. Less theoretical were the effects of the numerical disbalance caused between the sexes in the lay population by the withdrawal of monks and priests from marriage. As commercial and other travel, war and Crusades, feuds and other hazards raised the death rate of men above that of women, a substantial percentage of the female sex was left to spinsterhood or promiscuity. The Church welcomed into nunneries such qualified women as cared to enter, but monks and priests combined far outnumbered nuns. The unmarried daughters of the nobility were often dowered to a convent; but in other classes surplus women resigned themselves to the spinning wheel, or lived as tolerated aunts with their relatives, or devoted themselves, in shame and terror, to satisfying the demands of respectable men.
* James Westfall Thompson, Economic and Social History of the Middle Agesy N. Y., 1928, p. 601. Cf. Voltaire: “The Roman Church has always had the advantage of giving that to merit which in other governments is given only to birth” (Essay on the Manners and Morals of Europe, in Works, N. Y., 1927, XIII b, 30). This, said Hitler, “is the origin of the incredibly vigorous power that inhabits this age-old institution. This gigantic host of clerical dignitaries, by uninterruptedly supplementing itself from the lowest layers of the nations, preserves not only its instinctive bond with the people’s world of sentiment, but it also assures itself of a sum of energy and active force which in such a form will forever be present only in the broad masses of the people” (Mein Kampf, N. Y., 1939, p. 643).