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A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND
by
G. K. CHESTERTON
London
Chatto & Windus
MCMXVII
Printed in England by
William Clowes and Sons, Limited,
London and Beccles.
All rights reserved
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. THE PROVINCE OF BRITAIN 6
III. THE AGE OF LEGENDS 19
IV. THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS 30
V. ST. EDWARD AND THE NORMAN KINGS 43
VI. THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES 58
VII. THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS 71
VIII. THE MEANING OF MERRY ENGLAND 86
IX. NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH WARS 104
X. THE WAR OF THE USURPERS 119
XI. THE REBELLION OF THE RICH 133
XII. SPAIN AND THE SCHISM OF NATIONS 151
XIII. THE AGE OF THE PURITANS 163
XIV. THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHIGS 179
XV. THE WAR WITH THE GREAT REPUBLICS 195
XVI. ARISTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTENTS 209
XVII. THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN 223
XVIII. CONCLUSION 238
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND
I
INTRODUCTION
It will be very reasonably asked why I should consent, though upon a
sort of challenge, to write even a popular essay in English history, who
make no pretence to particular scholarship and am merely a member of the
public. The answer is that I know just enough to know one thing: that a
history from the standpoint of a member of the public has not been
written. What we call the popular histories should rather be called the
anti-popular histories. They are all, nearly without exception, written
against the people; and in them the populace is either ignored or
elaborately proved to have been wrong. It is true that Green called his
book "A Short History of the English People"; but he seems to have
thought it too short for the people to be properly mentioned. For
instance, he calls one very large part of his story "Puritan England."
But England never was Puritan. It would have been almost as unfair to
call the rise of Henry of Navarre "Puritan France." And some of our
extreme Whig historians would have been pretty nearly capable of calling
the campaign of Wexford and Drogheda "Puritan Ireland."
But it is especially in the matter of the Middle Ages that the popular
histories trample upon the popular traditions. In this respect there is
an almost comic contrast between the general information provided about
England in the last two or three centuries, in which its present
industrial system was being built up, and the general information given
about the preceding centuries, which we call broadly mediaeval. Of the
sort of waxwork history which is thought sufficient for the side-show of
the age of abbots and crusaders, a small instance will be sufficient. A
popular Encyclopaedia appeared some years ago, professing among other
things to teach English History to the masses; and in this I came upon a
series of pictures of the English kings. No one could expect them to be
all authentic; but the interest attached to those that were necessarily
imaginary. There is much vivid material in contemporary literature for
portraits of men like Henry II. or Edward I.; but this did not seem to
have been found, or even sought. And wandering to the image that stood
for Stephen of Blois, my eye was staggered by a gentleman with one of
those helmets with steel brims curved like a crescent, which went with
the age of ruffs and trunk-hose. I am tempted to suspect that the head
was that of a halberdier at some such scene as the execution of Mary
Queen of Scots. But he had a helmet; and helmets were mediaeval; and any
old helmet was good enough for Stephen.
Now suppose the readers of that work of reference had looked for the
portrait of Charles I. and found the head of a policeman. Suppose it had
been taken, modern helmet and all, out of some snapshot in the _Daily
Sketch_ of the arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst. I think we may go so far as to
say that the readers would have refused to accept it as a lifelike
portrait of Charles I. They would have formed the opinion that there
must be some mistake. Yet the time that elapsed between Stephen and Mary
was much longer than the time that has elapsed between Charles and
ourselves. The revolution in human society between the first of the
Crusades and the last of the Tudors was immeasurably more colossal and
complete than any change between Charles and ourselves. And, above all,
that revolution should be the first thing and the final thing in
anything calling itself a popular history. For it is the story of how
our populace gained great things, but to-day has lost everything.
Now I will modestly maintain that I know more about English history than
this; and that I have as much right to make a popular summary of it as
the gentleman who made the crusader and the halberdier change hats. But
the curious and arresting thing about the neglect, one might say the
omission, of mediaeval civilization in such histories as this, lies in
the fact I have already noted. It is exactly the popular story that is
left out of the popular history. For instance, even a working man, a
carpenter or cooper or bricklayer, has been taught about the Great
Charter, as something like the Great Auk, save that its almost monstrous
solitude came from being before its time instead of after. He was not
taught that the whole stuff of the Middle Ages was stiff with the
parchment of charters; that society was once a system of charters, and
of a kind much more interesting to him. The carpenter heard of one
charter given to barons, and chiefly in the interest of barons; the
carpenter did not hear of any of the charters given to carpenters, to
coopers, to all the people like himself. Or, to take another instance,
the boy and girl reading the stock simplified histories of the schools
practically never heard of such a thing as a burgher, until he appears
in a shirt with a noose round his neck. They certainly do not imagine
anything of what he meant in the Middle Ages. And Victorian shopkeepers
did not conceive themselves as taking part in any such romance as the
adventure of Courtrai, where the mediaeval shopkeepers more than won
their spurs--for they won the spurs of their enemies.
I have a very simple motive and excuse for telling the little I know of
this true tale. I have met in my wanderings a man brought up in the
lower quarters of a great house, fed mainly on its leavings and burdened
mostly with its labours. I know that his complaints are stilled, and
his status justified, by a story that is told to him. It is about how
his grandfather was a chimpanzee and his father a wild man of the woods,
caught by hunters and tamed into something like intelligence. In the
light of this, he may well be thankful for the almost human life that he
enjoys; and may be content with the hope of leaving behind him a yet
more evolved animal. Strangely enough, the calling of this story by the
sacred name of Progress ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect
(and to discover) that it is not true. I know by now enough at least of
his origin to know that he was not evolved, but simply disinherited. His
family tree is not a monkey tree, save in the sense that no monkey could
have climbed it; rather it is like that tree torn up by the roots and
named "Dedischado," on the shield of the unknown knight.
II
THE PROVINCE OF BRITAIN
The land on which we live once had the highly poetic privilege of being
the end of the world. Its extremity was _ultima Thule_, the other end of
nowhere. When these islands, lost in a night of northern seas, were lit
up at last by the long searchlights of Rome, it was felt that the
remotest remnant of things had been touched; and more for pride than
possession.
The sentiment was not unsuitable, even in geography. About these realms
upon the edge of everything there was really something that can only be
called edgy. Britain is not so much an island as an archipelago; it is
at least a labyrinth of peninsulas. In few of the kindred countries can
one so easily and so strangely find sea in the fields or fields in the
sea. The great rivers seem not only to meet in the ocean, but barely to
miss each other in the hills: the whole land, though low as a whole,
leans towards the west in shouldering mountains; and a prehistoric
tradition has taught it to look towards the sunset for islands yet
dreamier than its own. The islanders are of a kind with their islands.
Different as are the nations into which they are now divided, the
Scots, the English, the Irish, the Welsh of the western uplands, have
something altogether different from the humdrum docility of the inland
Germans, or from the _bon sens francais_ which can be at will trenchant
or trite. There is something common to all the Britons, which even Acts
of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is insecurity,
something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge of things.
Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without wit, perplex
their critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are fretted like their
coasts. They have an embarrassment, noted by all foreigners: it is
expressed, perhaps, in the Irish by a confusion of speech and in the
English by a confusion of thought. For the Irish bull is a license with
the symbol of language. But Bull's own bull, the English bull, is "a
dumb ox of thought"; a standing mystification in the mind. There is
something double in the thoughts as of the soul mirrored in many waters.
Of all peoples they are least attached to the purely classical; the
imperial plainness which the French do finely and the Germans coarsely,
but the Britons hardly at all. They are constantly colonists and
emigrants; they have the name of being at home in every country. But
they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of
home and love of something else; of which the sea may be the explanation
or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme
which is the finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain of
all English poems--"Over the hills and far away."
The great rationalist hero who first conquered Britain, whether or no he
was the detached demigod of "Caesar and Cleopatra," was certainly a Latin
of the Latins, and described these islands when he found them with all
the curt positivism of his pen of steel. But even Julius Caesar's brief
account of the Britons leaves on us something of this mystery, which is
more than ignorance of fact. They were apparently ruled by that terrible
thing, a pagan priesthood. Stones now shapeless yet arranged in symbolic
shapes bear witness to the order and labour of those that lifted them.
Their worship was probably Nature-worship; and while such a basis may
count for something in the elemental quality that has always soaked the
island arts, the collision between it and the tolerant Empire suggests
the presence of something which generally grows out of Nature-worship--I
mean the unnatural. But upon nearly all the matters of modern
controversy Caesar is silent. He is silent about whether the language was
"Celtic"; and some of the place-names have even given rise to a
suggestion that, in parts at least, it was already Teutonic. I am not
capable of pronouncing upon the truth of such speculations, but I am of
pronouncing upon their importance; at least, to my own very simple
purpose. And indeed their importance has been very much exaggerated.
Caesar professed to give no more than the glimpse of a traveller; but
when, some considerable time after, the Romans returned and turned
Britain into a Roman province, they continued to display a singular
indifference to questions that have excited so many professors. What
they cared about was getting and giving in Britain what they had got and
given in Gaul. We do not know whether the Britons then, or for that
matter the Britons now, were Iberian or Cymric or Teutonic. We do know
that in a short time they were Roman.
Every now and then there is discovered in modern England some fragment
such as a Roman pavement. Such Roman antiquities rather diminish than
increase the Roman reality. They make something seem distant which is
still very near, and something seem dead that is still alive. It is like
writing a man's epitaph on his front door. The epitaph would probably be
a compliment, but hardly a personal introduction. The important thing
about France and England is not that they have Roman remains. They are
Roman remains. In truth they are not so much remains as relics; for they
are still working miracles. A row of poplars is a more Roman relic than
a row of pillars. Nearly all that we call the works of nature have but
grown like fungoids upon this original work of man; and our woods are
mosses on the bones of a giant. Under the seed of our harvests and the
roots of our trees is a foundation of which the fragments of tile and
brick are but emblems; and under the colours of our wildest flowers are
the colours of a Roman pavement.
Britain was directly Roman for fully four hundred years; longer than she
has been Protestant, and very much longer than she has been industrial.
What was meant by being Roman it is necessary in a few lines to say, or
no sense can be made of what happened after, especially of what happened
immediately after. Being Roman did _not_ mean being subject, in the
sense that one savage tribe will enslave another, or in the sense that
the cynical politicians of recent times watched with a horrible
hopefulness for the evanescence of the Irish. Both conquerors and
conquered were heathen, and both had the institutions which seem to us
to give an inhumanity to heathenism: the triumph, the slave-market, the
lack of all the sensitive nationalism of modern history. But the Roman
Empire did not destroy nations; if anything, it created them. Britons
were not originally proud of being Britons; but they were proud of being
Romans. The Roman steel was at least as much a magnet as a sword. In
truth it was rather a round mirror of steel, in which every people came
to see itself. For Rome as Rome the very smallness of the civic origin
was a warrant for the largeness of the civic experiment. Rome itself
obviously could not rule the world, any more than Rutland. I mean it
could not rule the other races as the Spartans ruled the Helots or the
Americans ruled the negroes. A machine so huge had to be human; it had
to have a handle that fitted any man's hand. The Roman Empire
necessarily became less Roman as it became more of an Empire; until not
very long after Rome gave conquerors to Britain, Britain was giving
emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the Britons boasted, came at length
the great Empress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine. And it was
Constantine, as all men know, who first nailed up that proclamation
which all after generations have in truth been struggling either to
protect or to tear down.
About that revolution no man has ever been able to be impartial. The
present writer will make no idle pretence of being so. That it was the
most revolutionary of all revolutions, since it identified the dead body
on a servile gibbet with the fatherhood in the skies, has long been a
commonplace without ceasing to be a paradox. But there is another
historic element that must also be realized. Without saying anything
more of its tremendous essence, it is very necessary to note why even
pre-Christian Rome was regarded as something mystical for long
afterwards by all European men. The extreme view of it was held,
perhaps, by Dante; but it pervaded mediaevalism, and therefore still
haunts modernity. Rome was regarded as Man, mighty, though fallen,
because it was the utmost that Man had done. It was divinely necessary
that the Roman Empire should succeed--if only that it might fail. Hence
the school of Dante implied the paradox that the Roman soldiers killed
Christ, not only by right, but even by divine right. That mere law
might fail at its highest test it had to be real law, and not mere
military lawlessness. Therefore God worked by Pilate as by Peter.
Therefore the mediaeval poet is eager to show that Roman government was
simply good government, and not a usurpation. For it was the whole point
of the Christian revolution to maintain that in this, good government
was as bad as bad. Even good government was not good enough to know God
among the thieves. This is not only generally important as involving a
colossal change in the conscience; the loss of the whole heathen repose
in the complete sufficiency of the city or the state. It made a sort of
eternal rule enclosing an eternal rebellion. It must be incessantly
remembered through the first half of English history; for it is the
whole meaning in the quarrel of the priests and kings.
The double rule of the civilization and the religion in one sense
remained for centuries; and before its first misfortunes came it must be
conceived as substantially the same everywhere. And however it began it
largely ended in equality. Slavery certainly existed, as it had in the
most democratic states of ancient times. Harsh officialism certainly
existed, as it exists in the most democratic states of modern times. But
there was nothing of what we mean in modern times by aristocracy, still
less of what we mean by racial domination. In so far as any change was
passing over that society with its two levels of equal citizens and
equal slaves, it was only the slow growth of the power of the Church at
the expense of the power of the Empire. Now it is important to grasp
that the great exception to equality, the institution of Slavery, was
slowly modified by both causes. It was weakened both by the weakening of
the Empire and by the strengthening of the Church.
Slavery was for the Church not a difficulty of doctrine, but a strain on
the imagination. Aristotle and the pagan sages who had defined the
servile or "useful" arts, had regarded the slave as a tool, an axe to
cut wood or whatever wanted cutting. The Church did not denounce the
cutting; but she felt as if she was cutting glass with a diamond. She
was haunted by the memory that the diamond is so much more precious than
the glass. So Christianity could not settle down into the pagan
simplicity that the man was made for the work, when the work was so much
less immortally momentous than the man. At about this stage of a history
of England there is generally told the anecdote of a pun of Gregory the
Great; and this is perhaps the true point of it. By the Roman theory the
barbarian bondmen were meant to be useful. The saint's mysticism was
moved at finding them ornamental; and "Non Angli sed Angeli" meant more
nearly "Not slaves, but souls." It is to the point, in passing, to note
that in the modern country most collectively Christian, Russia, the
serfs were always referred to as "souls." The great Pope's phrase,
hackneyed as it is, is perhaps the first glimpse of the golden halos in
the best Christian Art. Thus the Church, with whatever other faults,
worked of her own nature towards greater social equality; and it is a
historical error to suppose that the Church hierarchy worked with
aristocracies, or was of a kind with them. It was an inversion of
aristocracy; in the ideal of it, at least, the last were to be first.
The Irish bull that "One man is as good as another and a great deal
better" contains a truth, like many contradictions; a truth that was the
link between Christianity and citizenship. Alone of all superiors, the
saint does not depress the human dignity of others. He is not conscious
of his superiority to them; but only more conscious of his inferiority
than they are.
But while a million little priests and monks like mice were already
nibbling at the bonds of the ancient servitude, another process was
going on, which has here been called the weakening of the Empire. It is
a process which is to this day very difficult to explain. But it
affected all the institutions of all the provinces, especially the
institution of Slavery. But of all the provinces its effect was heaviest
in Britain, which lay on or beyond the borders. The case of Britain,
however, cannot possibly be considered alone. The first half of English
history has been made quite unmeaning in the schools by the attempt to
tell it without reference to that corporate Christendom in which it took
part and pride. I fully accept the truth in Mr. Kipling's question of
"What can they know of England who only England know?" and merely differ
from the view that they will best broaden their minds by the study of
Wagga-Wagga and Timbuctoo. It is therefore necessary, though very
difficult, to frame in few words some idea of what happened to the whole
European race.
Rome itself, which had made all that strong world, was the weakest thing
in it. The centre had been growing fainter and fainter, and now the
centre disappeared. Rome had as much freed the world as ruled it, and
now she could rule no more. Save for the presence of the Pope and his
constantly increasing supernatural prestige, the eternal city became
like one of her own provincial towns. A loose localism was the result
rather than any conscious intellectual mutiny. There was anarchy, but
there was no rebellion. For rebellion must have a principle, and
therefore (for those who can think) an authority. Gibbon called his
great pageant of prose "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The
Empire did decline, but it did not fall. It remains to this hour.
By a process very much more indirect even than that of the Church, this
decentralization and drift also worked against the slave-state of
antiquity. The localism did indeed produce that choice of territorial
chieftains which came to be called Feudalism, and of which we shall
speak later. But the direct possession of man by man the same localism
tended to destroy; though this negative influence upon it bears no kind
of proportion to the positive influence of the Catholic Church. The
later pagan slavery, like our own industrial labour which increasingly
resembles it, was worked on a larger and larger scale; and it was at
last too large to control. The bondman found the visible Lord more
distant than the new invisible one. The slave became the serf; that is,
he could be shut in, but not shut out. When once he belonged to the
land, it could not be long before the land belonged to him. Even in the
old and rather fictitious language of chattel slavery, there is here a
difference. It is the difference between a man being a chair and a man
being a house. Canute might call for his throne; but if he wanted his
throne-room he must go and get it himself. Similarly, he could tell his
slave to run, but he could only tell his serf to stay. Thus the two slow
changes of the time both tended to transform the tool into a man. His
status began to have roots; and whatever has roots will have rights.
What the decline did involve everywhere was decivilization; the loss of
letters, of laws, of roads and means of communication, the exaggeration
of local colour into caprice. But on the edges of the Empire this
decivilization became a definite barbarism, owing to the nearness of
wild neighbours who were ready to destroy as deafly and blindly as
things are destroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apocalyptic
locust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, even
in those darkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least when we
are speaking of the old civilization as a whole. But a deluge of
barbarians is not entirely an exaggeration of what happened on some of
the borders of the Empire; of such edges of the known world as we began
by describing in these pages. And on the extreme edge of the world lay
Britain.
It may be true, though there is little proof of it, that the Roman
civilization itself was thinner in Britain than in the other provinces;
but it was a very civilized civilization. It gathered round the great
cities like York and Chester and London; for the cities are older than
the counties, and indeed older even than the countries. These were
connected by a skeleton of great roads which were and are the bones of
Britain. But with the weakening of Rome the bones began to break under
barbarian pressure, coming at first from the north; from the Picts who
lay beyond Agricola's boundary in what is now the Scotch Lowlands. The
whole of this bewildering time is full of temporary tribal alliances,
generally mercenary; of barbarians paid to come on or barbarians paid to
go away. It seems certain that in this welter Roman Britain bought help
from ruder races living about that neck of Denmark where is now the
duchy of Schleswig. Having been chosen only to fight somebody they
naturally fought anybody; and a century of fighting followed, under the
trampling of which the Roman pavement was broken into yet smaller
pieces. It is perhaps permissible to disagree with the historian Green
when he says that no spot should be more sacred to modern Englishmen
than the neighbourhood of Ramsgate, where the Schleswig people are
supposed to have landed; or when he suggests that their appearance is
the real beginning of our island story. It would be rather more true to
say that it was nearly, though prematurely, the end of it.
III
THE AGE OF LEGENDS
We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel,
and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale.
We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in _Cranford_, after
tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick.
Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies who
had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon.
Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in
British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do
with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and
engineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite
modern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we
are reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men as
tall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization is
no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes a
labyrinth of faerie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggest
but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in
the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific age
comes first and the mythological age after it. One working example, the
echoes of which lingered till very late in English literature, may serve
to sum up the contrast. The British state which was found by Caesar was
long believed to have been founded by Brutus. The contrast between the
one very dry discovery and the other very fantastic foundation has
something decidedly comic about it; as if Caesar's "Et tu, Brute," might
be translated, "What, _you_ here?" But in one respect the fable is quite
as important as the fact. They both testify to the reality of the Roman
foundation of our insular society, and show that even the stories that
seem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman. When England is Elfland, the
elves are not the Angles. All the phrases that can be used as clues
through that tangle of traditions are more or less Latin phrases. And in
all our speech there was no word more Roman than "romance."
The Roman legions left Britain in the fourth century. This did not mean
that the Roman civilization left it; but it did mean that the
civilization lay far more open both to admixture and attack.
Christianity had almost certainly come to Britain, not indeed otherwise
than by the routes established by Rome, but certainly long before the
official Roman mission of Gregory the Great. It had certainly been
largely swamped by later heathen invasions of the undefended coasts. It
may then rationally be urged that the hold both of the Empire and its
new religion were here weaker than elsewhere, and that the description
of the general civilization in the last chapter is proportionately
irrelevant. This, however, is not the chief truth of the matter.
There is one fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole of
this period. Yet a modern man must very nearly turn his mind upside down
to understand it. Almost every modern man has in his head an association
between freedom and the future. The whole culture of our time has been
full of the notion of "A Good Time Coming." Now the whole culture of the
Dark Ages was full of the notion of "A Good Time Going." They looked
backwards to old enlightenment and forwards to new prejudices. In our
time there has come a quarrel between faith and hope--which perhaps must
be healed by charity. But they were situated otherwise. They hoped--but
it may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All the motives that make
a man a progressive now made a man a conservative then. The more he
could keep of the past the more he had of a fair law and a free state;
the more he gave way to the future the more he must endure of ignorance
and privilege. All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. And
this is the clue which we must carry with us through the lives of all
the great men of the Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. If the
most extreme modern Republican were put back in that period he would be
an equally extreme Papist or even Imperialist. For the Pope was what was
left of the Empire; and the Empire what was left of the Republic.
We may compare the man of that time, therefore, to one who has left free
cities and even free fields behind him, and is forced to advance towards
a forest. And the forest is the fittest metaphor, not only because it
was really that wild European growth cloven here and there by the Roman
roads, but also because there has always been associated with forests
another idea which increased as the Roman order decayed. The idea of the
forests was the idea of enchantment. There was a notion of things being
double or different from themselves, of beasts behaving like men and not
merely, as modern wits would say, of men behaving like beasts. But it is
precisely here that it is most necessary to remember that an age of
reason had preceded the age of magic. The central pillar which has
sustained the storied house of our imagination ever since has been the
idea of the civilized knight amid the savage enchantments; the
adventures of a man still sane in a world gone mad.
The next thing to note in the matter is this: that in this barbaric time
none of the _heroes_ are barbaric. They are only heroes if they are
anti-barbaric. Men real or mythical, or more probably both, became
omnipresent like gods among the people, and forced themselves into the
faintest memory and the shortest record, exactly in proportion as they
had mastered the heathen madness of the time and preserved the Christian
rationality that had come from Rome. Arthur has his name because he
killed the heathen; the heathen who killed him have no names at all.
Englishmen who know nothing of English history, but less than nothing of
Irish history, have heard somehow or other of Brian Boru, though they
spell it Boroo and seem to be under the impression that it is a joke. It
is a joke the subtlety of which they would never have been able to
enjoy, if King Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland at the great
Battle of Clontarf. The ordinary English reader would never have heard
of Olaf of Norway if he had not "preached the Gospel with his sword"; or
of the Cid if he had not fought against the Crescent. And though Alfred
the Great seems to have deserved his title even as a personality, he was
not so great as the work he had to do.
But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred. For the
age is the age of legends. Towards these legends most men adopt by
instinct a sane attitude; and, of the two, credulity is certainly much
more sane than incredulity. It does not much matter whether most of the
stories are true; and (as in such cases as Bacon and Shakespeare) to
realize that the question does not matter is the first step towards
answering it correctly. But before the reader dismisses anything like an
attempt to tell the earlier history of the country by its legends, he
will do well to keep two principles in mind, both of them tending to
correct the crude and very thoughtless scepticism which has made this
part of the story so sterile. The nineteenth-century historians went on
the curious principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told,
and concentrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur is
made utterly impersonal because all legends are lies, but somebody of
the type of Hengist is made quite an important personality, merely
because nobody thought him important enough to lie about. Now this is to
reverse all common sense. A great many witty sayings are attributed to
Talleyrand which were really said by somebody else. But they would not
be so attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he had
been a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, nine
times out of ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody to
tell them about. Indeed some allow that marvellous things were done, and
that there may have been a man named Arthur at the time in which they
were done; but here, so far as I am concerned, the distinction becomes
rather dim. I do not understand the attitude which holds that there was
an Ark and a man named Noah, but cannot believe in the existence of
Noah's Ark.
The other fact to be remembered is that scientific research for the last
few years has worked steadily in the direction of confirming and not
dissipating the legends of the populace. To take only the obvious
instance, modern excavators with modern spades have found a solid stone
labyrinth in Crete, like that associated with the Minataur, which was
conceived as being as cloudy a fable as the Chimera. To most people this
would have seemed quite as frantic as finding the roots of Jack's
Beanstalk or the skeletons in Bluebeard's cupboard, yet it is simply the
fact. Finally, a truth is to be remembered which scarcely ever is
remembered in estimating the past. It is the paradox that the past is
always present: yet it is not what was, but whatever seems to have been;
for all the past is a part of faith. What did they believe of their
fathers? In this matter new discoveries are useless because they are
new. We may find men wrong in what they thought they were, but we cannot
find them wrong in what they thought they thought. It is therefore very
practical to put in a few words, if possible, something of what a man of
these islands in the Dark Ages would have said about his ancestors and
his inheritance. I will attempt here to put some of the simpler things
in their order of importance as he would have seen them; and if we are
to understand our fathers who first made this country anything like
itself, it is most important that we should remember that if this was
not their real past, it was their real memory.
After that blessed crime, as the wit of mystics called it, which was for
these men hardly second to the creation of the world, St. Joseph of
Arimathea, one of the few followers of the new religion who seem to
have been wealthy, set sail as a missionary, and after long voyages came
to that litter of little islands which seemed to the men of the
Mediterranean something like the last clouds of the sunset. He came up
upon the western and wilder side of that wild and western land, and made
his way to a valley which through all the oldest records is called
Avalon. Something of rich rains and warmth in its westland meadows, or
something in some lost pagan traditions about it, made it persistently
regarded as a kind of Earthly Paradise. Arthur, after being slain at
Lyonesse, is carried here, as if to heaven. Here the pilgrim planted his
staff in the soil; and it took root as a tree that blossoms on Christmas
Day.
A mystical materialism marked Christianity from its birth; the very soul
of it was a body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations
that were its first foes it fought fiercely and particularly for a
supernatural freedom to cure concrete maladies by concrete substances.
Hence the scattering of relics was everywhere like the scattering of
seed. All who took their mission from the divine tragedy bore tangible
fragments which became the germs of churches and cities. St. Joseph
carried the cup which held the wine of the Last Supper and the blood of
the Crucifixion to that shrine in Avalon which we now call Glastonbury;
and it became the heart of a whole universe of legends and romances, not
only for Britain but for Europe. Throughout this tremendous and
branching tradition it is called the Holy Grail. The vision of it was
especially the reward of that ring of powerful paladins whom King Arthur
feasted at a Round Table, a symbol of heroic comradeship such as was
afterwards imitated or invented by mediaeval knighthood. Both the cup and
the table are of vast importance emblematically in the psychology of the
chivalric experiment. The idea of a round table is not merely
universality but equality. It has in it, modified of course, by other
tendencies to differentiation, the same idea that exists in the very
word "peers," as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this the Round
Table is as Roman as the round arch, which might also serve as a type;
for instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled on the others, the
king was rather the keystone of an arch. But to this tradition of a
level of dignity was added something unearthly that was from Rome, but
not of it; the privilege that inverted all privileges; the glimpse of
heaven which seemed almost as capricious as fairyland; the flying
chalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes, and which
appeared to one knight who was hardly more than a child.
Rightly or wrongly, this romance established Britain for after centuries
as a country with a chivalrous past. Britain had been a mirror of
universal knighthood. This fact, or fancy, is of colossal import in all
ensuing affairs, especially the affairs of barbarians. These and
numberless other local legends are indeed for us buried by the forests
of popular fancies that have grown out of them. It is all the harder for
the serious modern mind because our fathers felt at home with these
tales, and therefore took liberties with them. Probably the rhyme which
runs,
"When good King Arthur ruled this land
He was a noble king,
He stole three pecks of barley meal,"
is much nearer the true mediaeval note than the aristocratic stateliness
of Tennyson. But about all these grotesques of the popular fancy there
is one last thing to be remembered. It must especially be remembered by
those who would dwell exclusively on documents, and take no note of
tradition at all. Wild as would be the results of credulity concerning
all the old wives' tales, it would not be so wild as the errors that can
arise from trusting to written evidence when there is not enough of it.
Now the whole written evidence for the first parts of our history would
go into a small book. A very few details are mentioned, and none are
explained. A fact thus standing alone, without the key of contemporary
thought, may be very much more misleading than any fable. To know what
word an archaic scribe wrote without being sure of what thing he meant,
may produce a result that is literally mad. Thus, for instance, it would
be unwise to accept literally the tale that St. Helena was not only a
native of Colchester, but was a daughter of Old King Cole. But it would
not be very unwise; not so unwise as some things that are deduced from
documents. The natives of Colchester certainly did honour to St. Helena,
and might have had a king named Cole. According to the more serious
story, the saint's father was an innkeeper; and the only recorded action
of Cole is well within the resources of that calling. It would not be
nearly so unwise as to deduce from the written word, as some critic of
the future may do, that the natives of Colchester were oysters.
IV
THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS
It is a quaint accident that we employ the word "short-sighted" as a
condemnation; but not the word "long-sighted," which we should probably
use, if at all, as a compliment. Yet the one is as much a malady of
vision as the other. We rightly say, in rebuke of a small-minded
modernity, that it is very short-sighted to be indifferent to all that
is historic. But it is as disastrously long-sighted to be interested
only in what is prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a large
proportion of the learned who grope in the darkness of unrecorded epochs
for the roots of their favourite race or races. The wars, the
enslavements, the primitive marriage customs, the colossal migrations
and massacres upon which their theories repose, are no part of history
or even of legend. And rather than trust with entire simplicity to these
it would be infinitely wiser to trust to legend of the loosest and most
local sort. In any case, it is as well to record even so simple a
conclusion as that what is prehistoric is unhistorical.
But there is another way in which common sense can be brought to the
criticism of some prodigious racial theories. To employ the same
figure, suppose the scientific historians explain the historic centuries
in terms of a prehistoric division between short-sighted and
long-sighted men. They could cite their instances and illustrations.
They would certainly explain the curiosity of language I mentioned
first, as showing that the short-sighted were the conquered race, and
their name therefore a term of contempt. They could give us very graphic
pictures of the rude tribal war. They could show how the long-sighted
people were always cut to pieces in hand-to-hand struggles with axe and
knife; until, with the invention of bows and arrows, the advantage
veered to the long-sighted, and their enemies were shot down in droves.
I could easily write a ruthless romance about it, and still more easily
a ruthless anthropological theory. According to that thesis which refers
all moral to material changes, they could explain the tradition that old
people grow conservative in politics by the well-known fact that old
people grow more long-sighted. But I think there might be one thing
about this theory which would stump us, and might even, if it be
possible, stump them. Suppose it were pointed out that through all the
three thousand years of recorded history, abounding in literature of
every conceivable kind, there was not so much as a mention of the
oculist question for which all had been dared and done. Suppose not one
of the living or dead languages of mankind had so much as a word for
"long-sighted" or "short-sighted." Suppose, in short, the question that
had torn the whole world in two was never even asked at all, until some
spectacle-maker suggested it somewhere about 1750. In that case I think
we should find it hard to believe that this physical difference had
really played so fundamental a part in human history. And that is
exactly the case with the physical difference between the Celts, the
Teutons and the Latins.
I know of no way in which fair-haired people can be prevented from
falling in love with dark-haired people; and I do not believe that
whether a man was long-headed or round-headed ever made much difference
to any one who felt inclined to break his head. To all mortal
appearance, in all mortal records and experience, people seem to have
killed or spared, married or refrained from marriage, made kings or made
slaves, with reference to almost any other consideration except this
one. There was the love of a valley or a village, a site or a family;
there were enthusiasms for a prince and his hereditary office; there
were passions rooted in locality, special emotions about sea-folk or
mountain-folk; there were historic memories of a cause or an alliance;
there was, more than all, the tremendous test of religion. But of a
cause like that of the Celts or Teutons, covering half the earth, there
was little or nothing. Race was not only never at any given moment a
motive, but it was never even an excuse. The Teutons never had a creed;
they never had a cause; and it was only a few years ago that they began
even to have a cant.
The orthodox modern historian, notably Green, remarks on the singularity
of Britain in being alone of all Roman provinces wholly cleared and
repeopled by a Germanic race. He does not entertain, as an escape from
the singularity of this event, the possibility that it never happened.
In the same spirit he deals with the little that can be quoted of the
Teutonic society. His ideal picture of it is completed in small touches
which even an amateur can detect as dubious. Thus he will touch on the
Teuton with a phrase like "the basis of their society was the free man";
and on the Roman with a phrase like "the mines, if worked by forced
labour, must have been a source of endless oppression." The simple fact
being that the Roman and the Teuton both had slaves, he treats the
Teuton free man as the only thing to be considered, not only then but
now; and then goes out of his way to say that if the Roman treated his
slaves badly, the slaves were badly treated. He expresses a "strange
disappointment" that Gildas, the only British chronicler, does not
describe the great Teutonic system. In the opinion of Gildas, a
modification of that of Gregory, it was a case of _non Angli sed
diaboli_. The modern Teutonist is "disappointed" that the contemporary
authority saw nothing in his Teutons except wolves, dogs, and whelps
from the kennel of barbarism. But it is at least faintly tenable that
there was nothing else to be seen.
In any case when St. Augustine came to the largely barbarized land, with
what may be called the second of the three great southern visitations
which civilized these islands, he did not see any ethnological problems,
whatever there may have been to be seen. With him or his converts the
chain of literary testimony is taken up again; and we must look at the
world as they saw it. He found a king ruling in Kent, beyond whose
borders lay other kingdoms of about the same size, the kings of which
were all apparently heathen. The names of these kings were mostly what
we call Teutonic names; but those who write the almost entirely
hagiological records did not say, and apparently did not ask, whether
the populations were in this sense of unmixed blood. It is at least
possible that, as on the Continent, the kings and courts were almost the
only Teutonic element. The Christians found converts, they found
patrons, they found persecutors; but they did not find Ancient Britons
because they did not look for them; and if they moved among pure
Anglo-Saxons they had not the gratification of knowing it. There was,
indeed, what all history attests, a marked change of feeling towards the
marches of Wales. But all history also attests that this is always
found, apart from any difference in race, in the transition from the
lowlands to the mountain country. But of all the things they found the
thing that counts most in English history is this: that some of the
kingdoms at least did correspond to genuine human divisions, which not
only existed then but which exist now. Northumbria is still a truer
thing than Northumberland. Sussex is still Sussex; Essex is still Essex.
And that third Saxon kingdom whose name is not even to be found upon the
map, the kingdom of Wessex, is called the West Country and is to-day the
most real of them all.