through changes amounting in their sum-total to a revolution. But the
changes which endured, whether they affected political boundaries or
constitutions, came about by slow instalments. At no stage of the
development was there any general cataclysm such as had followed the
dissolution of the Frankish Empire, and was to follow the advent of
Napoleon. New ideas matured slowly in the medieval mind; by the twelfth
century the forces making for social stability had grown until they
balanced those of disruption; and it was only in the age of the
Renaissance that the equilibrium was again destroyed. In the interim the
vested interests of property and privilege, of religious and secular
authority, presented a firm front to the anarchists and radicals. The
Jacquerie in France and Wat Tyler's followers in England, the Albigeois
of Languedoc and the Hussites of Bohemia, were overwhelmed by armies of
conservatives spontaneously banded together in defence of the
established order;--while this spirit prevailed among the ruling
classes, there was little fear that a revolution of any kind would be
effected by a sudden stroke. As in domestic politics, so too in
international relations, these solidly established states were
habitually inert, strong in defence, but irresolute and sluggish in
attack. The age produced no conqueror to sweep through Europe like a
whirlwind, because the implements of conquest on the grand scale had
either been destroyed or had not yet come into existence. The peoples of
Europe had emerged from the nomadic stage of culture, and they were not
yet organised as so many armed camps. The feudal host was hard to
mobilise, harder still to keep in the field, and at the best an
unmanageable weapon; a standing army of mercenary soldiers would have
called for taxation heavier and more regular than any ruler dared to
demand, or any people could afford to pay. The wars of the Middle Ages
have therefore, with few exceptions, a stamp of futility and pettiness.
Ambitious enterprises were foredoomed to failure, and powers apparently
annihilated by an invading host recovered strength as soon as it had
rolled away. In short, on the European and on the national stage alike,
medieval politics meant the eternal recurrence of the same problems and
disputes, the eternal repetition of the same palliatives and the same
plan of campaign. It is true that political science made more progress
than the art of war. But substantial reforms of institutions were
effected only in a few exceptional communities--in Sicily under the
Normans and Frederic II, in England under Henry II and Edward I, in
France under Philip Augustus and his successors. Even in these cases the
progress usually consists in elaborating some primitive expedient, in
developing some accepted principal to the logical conclusion. The more
audacious innovators, a Montfort, an Artevelde, a Frederic II, were
tripped up and overthrown as soon as they stepped beyond the circle of
conventional ideas. It will therefore suffice for our present purpose to
state in the barest outline the leading events of international
politics, and the chief advances in the theory of government, which
signalised the Middle Ages.
Extensive diplomatic combinations, though continually planned, seldom
came to the birth and very rarely led to any notable result. The
existence of some common interests was recognised; no power viewed with
indifference any movement threatening the existence of the Papacy, which
represented religious unity, or of the crusading principalities which
formed the outer bulwark of Western Christendom; the principle of the
Balance of Power, though not yet crystallised into a dogma, was so far
understood that the inordinate growth of any single power alarmed the
rest, even though they stood in no imminent danger of absorption.
Therefore whenever the Empire gained the upper hand over the Church,
whenever a new horde of Asiatics appeared on the horizon, whenever
France seemed about to become a province of England, or Italy a province
of France, the alarm was sounded by the publicists, and there ensued a
general interchange of views between the monarchies; treaty was piled on
treaty, alliance parried with alliance, as industriously as at any time
in modern history. But the peoples seldom moved, and the agitation of
the ruling classes effervesced in words. It is altogether exceptional to
find two of the greater states uniting for the humiliation of a third,
as England and the Empire united against Philip Augustus of France. Few
medieval battles were so far-reaching in their consequences as Bouvines
(1214), to which England owes her Magna Carta, Germany the magnificent
and stormy autumn of the Hohenstauffen dynasty, France the consolidation
of her long-divided provinces under an absolutist monarchy.
At ordinary times there were in medieval Europe two groups of states
with separate interests and types of polity. They were divided from one
another by a broad belt of debatable territory, extending from Holland
to the coast of Provence--the northern lands of the Carolingian Middle
Kingdom.
To the west lay the monarchies of the Iberian peninsula, of France,
England, and Scotland; connected by their interest in the trade of the
Atlantic seaboard, by a common civilisation in which the best elements
were of French origin, but most of all by their preoccupation with the
political questions arising out of England's claim to a good half of the
territory of France. The rivalry of these two great powers, which dated
in a rudimentary form from the Norman Conquest of England, became acute
when Henry II, heir in his mother's right to England and Normandy, in
that of his father to Anjou and Touraine, married Eleanor the duchess of
Aquitaine and the divorced wife of Louis VII (1152). Developing from one
stage to another, it alternately made and unmade the fortunes of either
nation for four hundred years, until Charles VII of France brought his
wars of reconquest to a triumphant conclusion by crushing, in Guyenne,
the last remnants of the English garrison and of the party which clung
to the English allegiance (1453). In the interval there had been sharp
vicissitudes of failure and success: the expulsion of the English by
Philip Augustus from Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, and Poitou; the
capture of Calais and recovery of Aquitaine by Edward III and the Black
Prince; the almost complete undoing of their work by Charles V and
Bertrand Duguesclin; the union of the French and English crowns (1420),
resulting from the victories of Henry V and the murderous feud of the
Burgundian and Armagnac factions; the apparition of Jeanne d'Arc as the
prophetess of French nationalism, and the regeneration of the French
monarchy by a new race of scientific statesmen. All the West had been
shaken by this secular duel. For Scotland it spelled independence, for
Navarre the loss of independence; in Castile it set on the throne the
new dynasty of Trastamare; to Aragon the result was the appearance of a
new rival in Mediterranean commerce, the frustration of hopes which had
centred round Provence and Languedoc, the imperilling of others which
were fixed on Italy. With each successive triumph of French over English
arms, the influence of France penetrated farther to the south and east;
and by the marriages or military successes of princes of the French
blood-royal, new territories were joined to the sphere of the western
nations. Under St. Louis the counties of Toulouse and Provence became
French appanages; his brother, Charles of Anjou, added to Provence the
derelict kingdom of Naples; and Sicily only escaped from the rule of the
Angevins by submission to the House of Aragon. After the victories of
Charles V the Valois dukes of Burgundy, supported by the influence now
of France and now of England, sketched the outlines of a new Middle
Kingdom, stretching from the Jura to the Zuyder Zee, and chiefly
composed of lands which had hitherto been attached to the Empire.
[Illustration: France]
The eastern group of nations is widely different in character. It
includes a greater number of states, even if we omit from the reckoning
the great German principalities which were, by the end of the Middle
Ages, all but sovereign powers; and it is less homogeneous in culture.
The Empire forms the centre of the group, and round the Empire the minor
states are grouped like satellites: on the west, Savoy and Provence;
south of the Alps, Venice, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Sicily--
the last-named independent until 1194, and the private property of the
Hohenstauffen from that date till 1268; on the east the kingdoms of
Hungary and Bohemia and Poland, and the Russian principalities; on the
north the three Scandinavian powers. Large as it is, this group only
includes one state of the first rank; for the Norman kingdom, though a
masterpiece of constructive statesmanship, was important in European
politics rather as a second and a makeweight than as a principal, and
would have been more admired than feared but for the accidents which
made the Norman alliance so valuable to the Holy See. When Naples and
Sicily were held by German Emperors, the Empire towered like a colossus
above the states of Scandinavia, the Slav and the Magyar. But even
without this support, the Empire might have continued to dominate two-
thirds of Europe, if the imperial resources had not been swallowed up by
the wars of Italy, and if the Emperors who came after the interregnum
had given the national interest priority over those of their own
families. In fact, however, the mischief of the Mezentian union between
Italy and Germany survived their separation; as in western so in central
Europe, the course of political development was largely determined by
the persistent and disastrous efforts of a Teutonic to absorb a Latin
nationality. But whereas the English attacks on France were directly
responsible for the growth of a French national state, the failure of
Germany left Italy but half emancipated from the foreigner, and more
disintegrated than she had been at any period in the past. And whereas
England, by her failure, was reduced for a while to a secondary rank
among the nations, the purely German Empire of the fifteenth century was
still the leading power east of the Rhine. This was partly the result of
calamities to neighbouring nations which could neither be foreseen or
obviated. While Western Europe was shielded, in the later Middle Ages,
from the inroads of alien races, Eastern Europe felt the impact of the
last migratory movements emanating from Central Asia and the Moslem
lands. In the thirteenth century the advance guards of the Mongol Empire
destroyed the medieval kingdom of Poland, and reduced the Russian
princes to dependence upon the rulers of the Golden Horde. In the
fifteenth, the advance of the Turks along the Danube completed the ruin
of the Magyar state, already weakened by the feuds of aristocratic
factions. But, apart from these favourable circumstances, the resources
of Germany were irresistible when they could be concentrated. Twice
after the Great Interregnum the integrity of the Empire was threatened
by the Bohemian kingdom. On the first occasion, when Ottocar II had
extended his power into the German lands between Bohemia and the
Adriatic, he was overthrown by Rudolf of Hapsburg at the battle of the
Marchfeld (1278); and a new Hapsburg principality was formed out of the
reconquered lands to guard the south-east frontier against future
incursions of Czech or Magyar. On the second, when the Hussite levies
carried their devastations and their propaganda into all the
neighbouring provinces of the Empire (1424-1434), crusade after crusade
was launched against Bohemia until the heretics, uniformly victorious in
the field, were worn out by the strain of their exertions against
superior numbers, and all the more moderate spirits recognised that such
triumphs must end in the ruin and depopulation of Bohemia. The case was
the same in the Baltic, where the struggle with Danish ambitions was
left to the princes and the free towns. Waldemar II (1202-1241), who had
planned to revive the Scandinavian Empire of the great Canute, the
conqueror of England, saw his ambitious edifice crumble to pieces while
it was still in the making; even the Union of Kalmar (1397), by which
the crowns of Norway and Sweden and Denmark were vested in a single
dynasty, could not save the rich prize of the Baltic trade from falling
into German hands. Germany, even when ill-governed and a prey to the
ambitions of provincial dynasties, was still _grande chose et
terrible_, as more than one political adventurer learned to his cost.
The energy, the intelligence and the national spirit of a great people
made good all the errors of statesmen and all the defects of
institutions.
[Illustration: Holy Roman Empire under Frederick Barbarossa]
Late in the fifteenth century the Germans were mortified to discover
that, although a nation, they had not become a state. They found that
the centre of political power had shifted westward, that the destinies
of Europe were now controlled by the French, the English and the
Spaniards. These nations had perfected a new form of autocracy, more
vigorous, more workmanlike in structure, than any medieval form of
government. Germany in the meanwhile had clung to all that was worst and
feeblest in the old order; her monarchy, and the institutions connected
with it, had been reduced to impotence. The same process of decay had
operated in the minor states of the eastern group. In Scandinavia, in
Hungary, in the Slavonic lands, the tree of royal power was enveloped
and strangled by the undergrowth of a bastard feudalism, by the
territorial power of aristocracies which, under cover of administrative
titles, converted whole provinces into family estates and claimed over
their tenants the divine right of unlimited and irresponsible
sovereignty. To investigate all the reasons for the political
backwardness of these eastern peoples would carry us far afield. But one
reason lies on the surface. Outside the free towns they had produced no
middle class; and their towns were neither numerous nor wealthy enough
to be important in national politics. They were not even represented in
the national assemblies. In consequence the sovereigns of these states
were obliged to govern by the help of aristocratic factions; to purchase
recognition by the grant of larger and larger privileges; and for the
sake of power to strip themselves of the resources which alone could
give their power any meaning. But good government in the Middle Ages was
only another name for a public-spirited and powerful monarchy. Such
monarchies existed in the western states; they rested upon the shoulders
of a middle class of small landowners and wealthy merchants, too weak to
defend themselves in a state of nature, a war of all against all, but
collectively strong enough to overawe the forces of anarchy.
It may seem strange that this class, which desired strong government for
purely practical and material reasons, should uniformly have accepted
hereditary kingship as the one form of government practicable in a large
community. Even where there was the warrant of tradition for recourse to
free election, the better governed states preferred that the supreme
power should pass automatically from father to son. The explanation is
to be found in the motives which prompted the Athenians, under widely
different circumstances, to choose their magistrates by lot. The grand
danger, to be avoided at all costs, was that a disputed succession would
leave the daily work of government in abeyance and open the door for
destructive party-conflicts. If continuity and stability of government
were assured, all would go well. The work of a ruler was not supposed to
demand exceptional abilities; he existed to do justice, to secure every
man in the possession of his own, to apply the law without respect of
persons. For these purposes a high sense of duty was the main requisite.
The wisest heads of the community would be at the king's service for the
asking; he could hardly go wrong if he heard attentively and weighed
impartially the counsel which they had to offer. Admitting that he would
be all the more efficient for possessing some practical capacity, some
experience of great affairs, was it not probable that a man of average
intelligence, who had been trained from his youth to fill the kingly
office, would acquit himself better than some self-made adventurer of
genius, who had paid more attention to the arts of winning place and
popularity than to the work that would be thrown upon him when he
reached the goal of his ambition? When we further recollect that
hereditary kingship was sanctioned by use and wont, was the most
intelligible symbol of national unity, and possessed as of right all the
prerogatives which were necessary for effective government, it is no
wonder that even those to whom doctrines of popular sovereignty and a
social contract were perfectly familiar acquiesced contentedly in a form
of government which the modern world regards as unreasonable and
essentially precarious.
But a monarchy, however energetic, however public-spirited, was
powerless until based on the firm foundations of an organised executive,
an expert judicature, and an assembly representative in fact if not in
form. No medieval state was so uniformly fortunate as Germany in finding
kings of exceptional character and talent. Yet Germany, from the
beginning to the end of the Middle Ages, was badly governed. This was
not due solely to the circumstance that the German monarchy was in
principle elective. It is true that the German crown was often purchased
by ill-advised concessions; but a greater source of weakness was the
inability of the Emperors to make the most of the prerogatives which
they retained, and which the nation desired that they should exercise.
Imperial justice was dilatory and inefficient because the imperial law
court followed the Emperor; because the professional was liable to be
overruled by the feudal element among the judges; because the rules of
procedure were uncertain and the decisions based not upon a scientific
jurisprudence but on provincial custom. The Diet of the Empire was weak,
both in deliberation and as a legislature; because the towns and the
lesser nobility had no respect for resolutions in framing which they had
not been consulted. The executive was necessarily inefficient or
unpopular; because the highest offices were claimed as a right by
princes who, if laymen, owed their rank to the accident of birth or, if
ecclesiastics, could only be good servants of the State by becoming
unworthy servants of the Church. The Emperor who confided in his natural
counsellors was ill-served; and if he relied upon new men, selected
solely for their loyalty and qualifications, he incurred the reproach of
tyranny or submission to unworthy favourites. The evils thus rooted in
the German constitution had existed at an earlier date in France and
England. To eradicate them was the object of the constitutional changes
devised by the Plantagenets in England, by the later Capetian kings in
France. And in essentials there is a strong likeness between the work of
the two dynasties. But in England the policy of construction was earlier
adopted, proceeded more rapidly, and produced an edifice which was more
durable because established on a broader basis.
The first stage of the policy was to organise the administration of
those parts of each kingdom which, not having been absorbed in
privileged fiefs, were still subject to the royal justice and
contributory to the royal revenue. Owing to the foresight of William the
Conqueror, there were few such fiefs in England; only in two palatine
earldoms (Durham and Cheshire), on the Welsh and northern borders, and
on the lands of a few prelates, was the king permanently cut off from
immediate contact with the subject population. With these exceptions the
face of England was divided into shires, and administered by sheriffs
who were nominees of the Crown, dismissable at pleasure. The shires
again were divided into hundreds governed under the sheriff by
subordinate officials. But for the most important duties of executive
routine the sheriff alone was responsible; he collected the revenue, he
led the militia, he organised the Watch and Ward and Hue and Cry which
were the medieval equivalents for a constabulary; finally, he presided
over the shire moot in which the freeholders gathered at stated
intervals to declare justice and receive it. The shires were
periodically visited by Justices in Eyre (analogous to the Frankish
_missi_) who heard complaints against the sheriff, inspected his
administration, tried criminals, and heard those civil suits
(particularly cases of freehold) which were deemed sufficiently
important to be reserved for their decision. These itinerant
commissioners were selected from the staff of the royal law court
(_Curia Regis_), a tribunal which, in the thirteenth century, was
subdivided into the three Courts of Common Law and acquired a fixed
domicile at Westminster. The shire courts and the royal court were alike
bound by the statute-law, so far as it extended; but, in the larger half
of their work, they had no guides save the local custom, as expounded by
the good men of the shire court, and the decisions recorded on the rolls
of the royal court. From the latter source was derived the English
Common Law, a system of precedents which, in spite of curious subtleties
and technicalities, remains the most striking monument of medieval
jurisprudence. In and after the fourteenth century it was supplemented
by Equity, the law of the Chancellor's court, to which those suitors
might repair whose grievances could not be remedied at Common Law, but
were held worthy of special redress by the king in his character of a
patron and protector of the defenceless. Lastly, on the fiscal side, the
work of the sheriffs and of the judges was supervised by the Exchequer,
a chamber of audit and receipt, to which the sheriffs rendered a
half-yearly statement, and in which were prepared the articles of
inquiry for the itinerant justices. Originally a branch of the Curia
Regis and a tribunal as well as a treasury, the Exchequer always remains
in close connection with the judicial system, since one of the three
Courts of Common Law is primarily concerned with suits which affect the
royal revenue. Such was the English scheme of administration, and
_mutatis mutandis_ it was reproduced in France. Here the royal
demesne, small in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was enormously
enlarged by the annexations of Philip Augustus and the later Capets, who
brought under their immediate control the larger part of the Angevin
inheritance, the great fiefs of Toulouse and Champagne, and many smaller
territories. To provide for the government of these acquisitions, there
was built up, in the course of the thirteenth century, an administrative
hierarchy consisting of provosts, who correspond to the bailiffs of
English hundreds, of _baillis_ and _senechaux_ who resemble the English
sheriffs, of _enqueteurs_ who perambulate the demesne making inspections
and holding sessions in the same manner as the English Justices in Eyre.
All these functionaries are controlled, from the time of St. Louis, by
the _Chambre des Comptes_ and the _Parlement_, the one a fiscal
department, the other a supreme court of first instance and appeal.
Within the _Parlement_ there is a distinction between the Courts of
Common Law and the _Chambre des Reqeutes_ which deals with petitions by
the rules of Equity.
The vices of both systems were the same. The local officials were too
powerful within their respective spheres; neither inspectors nor royal
courts proved adequate as safeguards against corruption and abuses of
authority, which were the more frequent because the vicious expedients
of farming and selling offices had become an established practice.
Otherwise the English system was superior to that of France,
particularly in making use for certain purposes of local representatives
as an additional check upon the servants of the Crown. The English shire
was in fact as well as in law a community with a true corporate
character (_communitas_), and possessed a public assembly which was
a law court and a local parliament in one. Though the ordinary suitor
counted for little, the secondary landowners, united by ties of local
sentiment and personal relationship, took a lively interest and an
active share in the business of the shire court, upholding the local
custom against sheriffs and judges, serving as jurors, as assessors of
taxes, as guardians of the peace, and (from the fourteenth century) as
petty magistrates. Whether elected by their fellows or the nominees of
the Crown, these functionaries were unpaid, and regarded themselves as
the defenders of local liberty against official usurpations. In France
the district of the _bailli_, and still more that of his subordinate the
_prevot_, was an arbitrary creation, without natural unity or corporate
sentiment; there was therefore no organised resistance to executive
authority, and no reason why the Crown should court the goodwill of the
landed gentry. In the lower grades of the Plantagenet system a powerful
middle class served a political apprenticeship; under the Capets all
power and responsibility were jealously reserved to the professional
administrator. In England the next step in constitutional development,
the addition to the national assembly of a Third Estate, was brilliantly
successful, since the House of Commons was chiefly recruited from
families which had long been active partners in local administration. In
France the Third Estate, though constantly summoned in the fourteenth
century, proved itself politically impotent.