Someone has said that "the Lord must like common people, because he
made so many of them." The path for the common people in France at
this time led through heavy shadows. But a darker time was
approaching. A system of oppression was maturing which was soon to
envelop them in the obscurity of darkest night.
Those Scandinavian freebooters called Northmen, and later Normans, were
the scourge of the kingdom. Nothing was safe from their insolent
courage and rapacity.
The rich could intrench themselves in stone fortresses, with moats and
drawbridges, and be in comparative security, but the poor were utterly
defenceless against this perennial destroyer. The result was a compact
between the powerful and the weak, which was the beginning of the
feudal system. It was in effect an exchange of protection for service
and fealty.
You give us absolute control of your persons--your military service
when required, and a portion of your substance and the fruit of your
toil--and we will in exchange give you our fortified castles as a
refuge from the Northmen. Such was the offer. It was a choice between
vassalage, serfdom, or destruction outright.
Simple enough in its beginnings, this became a ramified system of
oppression, a curious network of authority, ingeniously controlling an
entire people. The conditions upon which was engrafted this compact
were of great antiquity, had indeed been brought across the Rhine by
the German conquerors; but the Northmen were the impelling cause of the
swift development of feudalism in France.
Charlemagne had felt grave apprehensions of evil from these robber
incursions, but could not have conceived of a result such as this, the
most oppressive system ever fastened upon a nation, and one which would
at the same time sap the foundations of royalty itself.
The theory was that the king was absolute owner of all the territory;
the great lords holding their titles from him on condition of military
service, their vassals pledging military service and obedience to them
again on similar terms, and sub-vassals again to them repeating the
pledge; and so on in descending chain, until at last the serf, that
wretched being whom none looks up to nor fears, is ground to powder
beneath the superimposed mass; no appeal from the authority, no escape
from the caprice or cruelty of his feudal lord. Could any scales
weigh, could any words measure the suffering which must have been
endured? Is it strange that, with every aspiration thwarted, hope
stifled, Europe sank into the long sleep of the Middle Ages?
It is easy to conceive that, under such a system, where all the affairs
of the realm were adjusted by individual rulers with unlimited power,
and where the great barons could make war upon each other without
authorization from the king, by the time this nominal head of the
entire system was reached there remained nothing for him to do. In
fact, there was not left one vestige of kingly authority, and
Carlovingian rulers were almost as insignificant as their Merovingian
predecessors. France had, instead of one great sovereign, one hundred
and fifty petty ones!
In A.D. 911 the Northmen were offered the province henceforth known as
Normandy, upon condition of their acceptance of the religion and
submission to the laws of the realm. Rollo, the disreputable
robber-chief, took the oath of fealty to the King of France, his
suzerain, and Christian baptism transformed him into respectable,
law-abiding Robert, Duke of Normandy.
So, the enemy had become a vassal. The pirate of the North Sea had
taken his place among the Christian chivalry of Europe, as one of the
twelve peers of France. It was less than a century since the death of
Charlemagne, and the office of king had grown almost as helpless as in
the period of the _Rois Fainéants_. Under the stress of the continuous
invasions, by perfectly natural process the central authority had
passed to the feudal magnates. Many of the feudal states had actually
organized into independent governing bodies. The struggle with the
Northmen ended, France, dismembered, exhausted, was lying prostrate. A
king stripped of every kingly attribute at one extreme of the social
system, and a people trampled into the very dust by feudal oppression
at the other. Owners of nothing, not even of themselves, they might
not fish in the streams, nor hunt in the forests, unless the privilege
was bestowed; and with their lives spent in fighting the incessant
private wars of their lords, there seemed no room for them in the
world, nor for hope in their hearts. With the king effaced, and the
people effaced, there remained only bands of feudal barons trying to
efface each other!
As in the last days of the Merovingians, light came from an unexpected
quarter. The tide turned toward centralization. Robert the Strong, a
man of obscure family, who had laid down his life in a very heroic
resistance to the Northmen, had won the titles "Count of Paris" and
"Duke of France," which he bequeathed, with the estates attached to
them, to his successors.
Somewhat after the manner of the Pepins, this powerful and resourceful
family by sheer native ability grasped one after another the sources of
power in the state; and in the year 987 the dynasty established by
Pepin disappeared, and Hugh Capet, Count of Paris and Abbot, was
declared by the Pope of Rome to be "King of France, in virtue of his
great deeds." It was the ecclesiastical office of this descendant of
Robert the Strong which gave the name to the dynasty that had come to
save France a second time from disintegration. Because he was the
wearer of the _Chape_, or _Cope_, the name _Chapet_, or _Capet_, became
that of the line.
There now commenced a struggle between the antagonistic principles of
royalty and aristocracy; a conflict which was going to last nearly five
centuries, covering that dreary twilight known as the Dark Ages--a time
when, had it not been for the Christian Church and for the torch of the
Saracen in Spain, the light of civilization would really have been
extinguished, and the slender thread of connection with a great past
have been broken.
In the helpless misery existing in France at this time, the Church saw
its opportunity. To that silent, humble, forgotten multitude without
life or hope in the world, she offered refuge, peace, consolation, and
thus forever bound to her the poor of Christendom; by this means
establishing in the end an ecclesiastical dominion to which kings and
peerage would be compelled to bow.
If one would know how kings submitted to the authority of the Church at
this time, let him read the story of the good King Robert, second in
the Capetian line, who for marrying the gentle Bertha, his cousin
fourth removed, suffered the punishment of excommunication; was treated
as a moral leper in his own palace; cut off from contact with human
kind and from sound of human voice; the dishes from which he ate, the
clothes he wore, destroyed, until repentant and heart-broken they
consented to part and to break the bond of their union forever.
It was the despair in the heart of the nation which gave intensity to
the religious instinct at this time. And when pestilence came, and
neither rich nor poor could escape, conscience-stricken barons also
trembled. A belief began to prevail that the end of the world was at
hand. Did not the Book of Revelation say that one thousand years from
the birth of Christ the great dragon was to be let loose and the earth
was to be destroyed?
As the hour of doom approached, labor ceased, the fields were
untouched, and when to pestilence and despair was added famine, then
men's hearts failed them even under coats of mail. The Church came to
the rescue with the "Truce of God," which, in the hope of appeasing an
avenging God, forbade private wars during certain periods in the
ecclesiastical year. Repentant barons, with a similar hope, made peace
with their neighbors, and their swords rusted as they built monasteries
and chapels; or some not yet obtaining peace, and perhaps restless with
their occupation gone, made pilgrimages to Rome, to pray at the graves
of Peter and Paul, and still others even to Jerusalem, that the breath
from Calvary might whiten their sin-steeped souls.
It is interesting to note that among these penitent pilgrims, sixty
years before the first Crusade, was that Duke of Normandy known as
"Robert the Devil," whose pagan ancestor only a century before had been
the terror of European civilization, and whose son, thirty years later,
was to wear the crown of England.
In this way were the currents setting steadily toward the Holy
Sepulchre as the panacea for human woes which were sent by an avenging
God. These were the first stirrings of the breath of the coming storm
which in eight successive waves was soon to sweep over Europe. The way
was preparing for the great event of the Middle Ages.
Whatever its motives, the abstaining from slaughter, and the building
of cathedrals and monasteries and abbeys, was weaving a mantle of
beauty for France, which she still proudly wears. And the greatest of
the builders was the Duke of Normandy; and it is to his dukedom the art
student turns for the most perfect blending of grace and grandeur,
characteristic of the early style. The marvel to which this is
intended to draw attention is the preeminent position swiftly attained
in France by this brilliant race, in every department of living. It
would seem that France did not adopt this terrible child from the
north, but that he adopted France, and changed and gave color to her
whole future. It was a tempestuous element, but it was new life, and
it is impossible to conceive of what that country would have been
without this stimulating, brilliant infusion into its national life.
With such marvellous facility did this people adopt the speech and
manners of their neighbors, that in the year 1066 they were prepared to
instruct the Britons in the ways of a more polished civilization. Only
a century before the birth of William the Conqueror, his ancestors had
lived by looting. They were highwaymen and robbers by profession. His
mother, a Norman peasant girl, daughter of a tanner, won the love of
that gay duke known as "Robert the Devil." William, the child of this
unconsecrated union, upon the death of his father succeeded to the
dukedom. One of the steps in the rapid climb of this family of Rollo
had been a marriage connecting them with the royal family of England.
King Edward, William's remote cousin, died without an heir. Here was
an opportunity. With sixty thousand Norman adventurers like himself,
William started with the desperate purpose of invading England and
wresting the crown from his cousin Harold.
It was not the first time the Northman had invaded England. But never
before had he come bringing a higher civilization, and under the banner
of the Church! In a few weeks Harold, last king of the Saxons, was
dead, and William, Duke of Normandy, was William I., King of England.
Philip, King of France, saw with dismay his richest province ruled by a
king of England, and his own vassal wearing a crown with power superior
to his own! A door had thus opened through which would enter
entangling complications and countless woes in the future.
While William was trampling England into the dust, and with pitiless
hand rivetting a feudal chain upon the Saxons, another and greater
centre of power was developing at Rome, where the monk Hildebrand, who
had now become Pope Gregory VII., claimed a universal sovereignty from
which there was no appeal. Christ was King of Kings. So, as His
vicegerent upon earth, the authority of the pope was absolute in
Christendom.
The moment of this supreme elevation in the Church was reached at
Canossa, 1072, when Henry, the excommunicated Emperor of Germany, came
barefooted, in winter, and prostrated himself before Gregory VII. If
Charlemagne had worn the Church as a precious jewel in his crown in the
ninth century, now in the eleventh the Church wore all the European
states as a tiara of jewels in her mitre. With supreme wisdom, and
with a sure instinct for power, her supremacy had been rooted first in
the hearts of the people, then the mailed hand laid upon their rulers.