corresponds very roughly to what we call the Midlands. The unbaptized
king, Penda, has even achieved a certain picturesqueness through this
fact, and through the forays and furious ambitions which constituted the
rest of his reputation; so much so that the other day one of those
mystics who will believe anything but Christianity proposed to "continue
the work of Penda" in Ealing: fortunately not on any large scale. What
that prince believed or disbelieved it is now impossible and perhaps
unnecessary to discover; but this last stand of his central kingdom is
not insignificant. The isolation of the Mercian was perhaps due to the
fact that Christianity grew from the eastern and western coasts. The
eastern growth was, of course, the Augustinian mission, which had
already made Canterbury the spiritual capital of the island. The western
grew from whatever was left of the British Christianity. The two
clashed, not in creed but in customs; and the Augustinians ultimately
prevailed. But the work from the west had already been enormous. It is
possible that some prestige went with the possession of Glastonbury,
which was like a piece of the Holy Land; but behind Glastonbury there
was an even grander and more impressive power. There irradiated to all
Europe at that time the glory of the golden age of Ireland. There the
Celts were the classics of Christian art, opened in the Book of Kels
four hundred years before its time. There the baptism of the whole
people had been a spontaneous popular festival which reads almost like a
picnic; and thence came crowds of enthusiasts for the Gospel almost
literally like men running with good news. This must be remembered
through the development of that dark dual destiny that has bound us to
Ireland: for doubts have been thrown on a national unity which was not
from the first a political unity. But if Ireland was not one kingdom it
was in reality one bishopric. Ireland was not converted but created by
Christianity, as a stone church is created; and all its elements were
gathered as under a garment, under the genius of St. Patrick. It was the
more individual because the religion was mere religion, without the
secular conveniences. Ireland was never Roman, and it was always
Romanist.
But indeed this is, in a lesser degree, true of our more immediate
subject. It is the paradox of this time that only the unworldly things
had any worldly success. The politics are a nightmare; the kings are
unstable and the kingdoms shifting; and we are really never on solid
ground except on consecrated ground. The material ambitions are not only
always unfruitful but nearly always unfulfilled. The castles are all
castles in the air; it is only the churches that are built on the
ground. The visionaries are the only practical men, as in that
extraordinary thing, the monastery, which was, in many ways, to be the
key of our history. The time was to come when it was to be rooted out of
our country with a curious and careful violence; and the modern English
reader has therefore a very feeble idea of it and hence of the ages in
which it worked. Even in these pages a word or two about its primary
nature is therefore quite indispensable.
In the tremendous testament of our religion there are present certain
ideals that seem wilder than impieties, which have in later times
produced wild sects professing an almost inhuman perfection on certain
points; as in the Quakers who renounce the right of self-defence, or the
Communists who refuse any personal possessions. Rightly or wrongly, the
Christian Church had from the first dealt with these visions as being
special spiritual adventures which were to the adventurous. She
reconciled them with natural human life by calling them specially good,
without admitting that the neglect of them was necessarily bad. She took
the view that it takes all sorts to make a world, even the religious
world; and used the man who chose to go without arms, family, or
property as a sort of exception that proved the rule. Now the
interesting fact is that he really did prove it. This madman who would
not mind his own business becomes the business man of the age. The very
word "monk" is a revolution, for it means solitude and came to mean
community--one might call it sociability. What happened was that this
communal life became a sort of reserve and refuge behind the individual
life; a hospital for every kind of hospitality. We shall see later how
this same function of the common life was given to the common land. It
is hard to find an image for it in individualist times; but in private
life we most of us know the friend of the family who helps it by being
outside, like a fairy godmother. It is not merely flippant to say that
monks and nuns stood to mankind as a sort of sanctified league of aunts
and uncles. It is a commonplace that they did everything that nobody
else would do; that the abbeys kept the world's diary, faced the plagues
of all flesh, taught the first technical arts, preserved the pagan
literature, and above all, by a perpetual patchwork of charity, kept the
poor from the most distant sight of their modern despair. We still find
it necessary to have a reserve of philanthropists, but we trust it to
men who have made themselves rich, not to men who have made themselves
poor. Finally, the abbots and abbesses were elective. They introduced
representative government, unknown to ancient democracy, and in itself a
semi-sacramental idea. If we could look from the outside at our own
institutions, we should see that the very notion of turning a thousand
men into one large man walking to Westminster is not only an act or
faith, but a fairy tale. The fruitful and effective history of
Anglo-Saxon England would be almost entirely a history of its
monasteries. Mile by mile, and almost man by man, they taught and
enriched the land. And then, about the beginning of the ninth century,
there came a turn, as of the twinkling of an eye, and it seemed that all
their work was in vain.
That outer world of universal anarchy that lay beyond Christendom heaved
another of its colossal and almost cosmic waves and swept everything
away. Through all the eastern gates, left open, as it were, by the first
barbarian auxiliaries, burst a plague of seafaring savages from Denmark
and Scandinavia; and the recently baptized barbarians were again flooded
by the unbaptized. All this time, it must be remembered, the actual
central mechanism of Roman government had been running down like a
clock. It was really a race between the driving energy of the
missionaries on the edges of the Empire and the galloping paralysis of
the city at the centre. In the ninth century the heart had stopped
before the hands could bring help to it. All the monastic civilization
which had grown up in Britain under a vague Roman protection perished
unprotected. The toy kingdoms of the quarrelling Saxons were smashed
like sticks; Guthrum, the pirate chief, slew St. Edmund, assumed the
crown of East England, took tribute from the panic of Mercia, and
towered in menace over Wessex, the last of the Christian lands. The
story that follows, page after page, is only the story of its despair
and its destruction. The story is a string of Christian defeats
alternated with victories so vain as to be more desolate than defeats.
It is only in one of these, the fine but fruitless victory at Ashdown,
that we first see in the dim struggle, in a desperate and secondary
part, the figure who has given his title to the ultimate turning of the
tide. For the victor was not then the king, but only the king's younger
brother. There is, from the first, something humble and even accidental
about Alfred. He was a great understudy. The interest of his early life
lies in this: that he combined an almost commonplace coolness, and
readiness for the ceaseless small bargains and shifting combinations of
all that period, with the flaming patience of saints in times of
persecution. While he would dare anything for the faith, he would
bargain in anything except the faith. He was a conqueror, with no
ambition; an author only too glad to be a translator; a simple,
concentrated, wary man, watching the fortunes of one thing, which he
piloted both boldly and cautiously, and which he saved at last.
He had disappeared after what appeared to be the final heathen triumph
and settlement, and is supposed to have lurked like an outlaw in a
lonely islet in the impenetrable marshlands of the Parret; towards those
wild western lands to which aboriginal races are held to have been
driven by fate itself. But Alfred, as he himself wrote in words that are
his challenge to the period, held that a Christian man was unconcerned
with fate. He began once more to draw to him the bows and spears of the
broken levies of the western shires, especially the men of Somerset; and
in the spring of 878 he flung them at the lines before the fenced camp
of the victorious Danes at Ethandune. His sudden assault was as
successful as that at Ashdown, and it was followed by a siege which was
successful in a different and very definite sense. Guthrum, the
conqueror of England, and all his important supports, were here penned
behind their palisades, and when at last they surrendered the Danish
conquest had come to an end. Guthrum was baptized, and the Treaty of
Wedmore secured the clearance of Wessex. The modern reader will smile at
the baptism, and turn with greater interest to the terms of the treaty.
In this acute attitude the modern reader will be vitally and hopelessly
wrong. He must support the tedium of frequent references to the
religious element in this part of English history, for without it there
would never have been any English history at all. And nothing could
clinch this truth more than the case of the Danes. In all the facts that
followed, the baptism of Guthrum is really much more important than the
Treaty of Wedmore. The treaty itself was a compromise, and even as such
did not endure; a century afterwards a Danish king like Canute was
really ruling in England. But though the Dane got the crown, he did not
get rid of the cross. It was precisely Alfred's religious exaction that
remained unalterable. And Canute himself is actually now only remembered
by men as a witness to the futility of merely pagan power; as the king
who put his own crown upon the image of Christ, and solemnly surrendered
to heaven the Scandinavian empire of the sea.
V
ST. EDWARD AND THE NORMAN KINGS
The reader may be surprised at the disproportionate importance given to
the name which stands first in the title of this chapter. I put it there
as the best way of emphasizing, at the beginning of what we may call the
practical part of our history, an elusive and rather strange thing. It
can only be described as the strength of the weak kings.
It is sometimes valuable to have enough imagination to unlearn as well
as to learn. I would ask the reader to forget his reading and everything
that he learnt at school, and consider the English monarchy as it would
then appear to him. Let him suppose that his acquaintance with the
ancient kings has only come to him as it came to most men in simpler
times, from nursery tales, from the names of places, from the
dedications of churches and charities, from the tales in the tavern, and
the tombs in the churchyard. Let us suppose such a person going upon
some open and ordinary English way, such as the Thames valley to
Windsor, or visiting some old seats of culture, such as Oxford or
Cambridge. One of the first things, for instance, he would find would
be Eton, a place transformed, indeed, by modern aristocracy, but still
enjoying its mediaeval wealth and remembering its mediaeval origin. If he
asked about that origin, it is probable that even a public schoolboy
would know enough history to tell him that it was founded by Henry VI.
If he went to Cambridge and looked with his own eyes for the college
chapel which artistically towers above all others like a cathedral, he
would probably ask about it, and be told it was King's College. If he
asked which king, he would again be told Henry VI. If he then went into
the library and looked up Henry VI. in an encyclopaedia, he would find
that the legendary giant, who had left these gigantic works behind him,
was in history an almost invisible pigmy. Amid the varying and
contending numbers of a great national quarrel, he is the only cipher.
The contending factions carry him about like a bale of goods. His
desires do not seem to be even ascertained, far less satisfied. And yet
his real desires are satisfied in stone and marble, in oak and gold, and
remain through all the maddest revolutions of modern England, while all
the ambitions of those who dictated to him have gone away like dust upon
the wind.
Edward the Confessor, like Henry VI., was not only an invalid but almost
an idiot. It is said that he was wan like an albino, and that the awe
men had of him was partly that which is felt for a monster of mental
deficiency. His Christian charity was of the kind that borders on
anarchism, and the stories about him recall the Christian fools in the
great anarchic novels of Russia. Thus he is reported to have covered the
retreat of a common thief upon the naked plea that the thief needed
things more than he did. Such a story is in strange contrast to the
claims made for other kings, that theft was impossible in their
dominions. Yet the two types of king are afterwards praised by the same
people; and the really arresting fact is that the incompetent king is
praised the more highly of the two. And exactly as in the case of the
last Lancastrian, we find that the praise has really a very practical
meaning in the long run. When we turn from the destructive to the
constructive side of the Middle Ages we find that the village idiot is
the inspiration of cities and civic systems. We find his seal upon the
sacred foundations of Westminster Abbey. We find the Norman victors in
the hour of victory bowing before his very ghost. In the Tapestry of
Bayeux, woven by Norman hands to justify the Norman cause and glorify
the Norman triumph, nothing is claimed for the Conqueror beyond his
conquest and the plain personal tale that excuses it, and the story
abruptly ends with the breaking of the Saxon line at Battle. But over
the bier of the decrepit zany, who died without striking a blow, over
this and this alone, is shown a hand coming out of heaven, and declaring
the true approval of the power that rules the world.
The Confessor, therefore, is a paradox in many ways, and in none more
than in the false reputation of the "English" of that day. As I have
indicated, there is some unreality in talking about the Anglo-Saxon at
all. The Anglo-Saxon is a mythical and straddling giant, who has
presumably left one footprint in England and the other in Saxony. But
there was a community, or rather group of communities, living in Britain
before the Conquest under what we call Saxon names, and of a blood
probably more Germanic and certainly less French than the same
communities after the Conquest. And they have a modern reputation which
is exactly the reverse of their real one. The value of the Anglo-Saxon
is exaggerated, and yet his virtues are ignored. Our Anglo-Saxon blood
is supposed to be the practical part of us; but as a fact the
Anglo-Saxons were more hopelessly unpractical than any Celt. Their
racial influence is supposed to be healthy, or, what many think the same
thing, heathen. But as a fact these "Teutons" were the mystics. The
Anglo-Saxons did one thing, and one thing only, thoroughly well, as they
were fitted to do it thoroughly well. They christened England. Indeed,
they christened it before it was born. The one thing the Angles
obviously and certainly could not manage to do was to become English.
But they did become Christians, and indeed showed a particular
disposition to become monks. Moderns who talk vaguely of them as our
hardy ancestors never do justice to the real good they did us, by thus
opening our history, as it were, with the fable of an age of innocence,
and beginning all our chronicles, as so many chronicles began, with the
golden initial of a saint. By becoming monks they served us in many very
valuable and special capacities, but not notably, perhaps, in the
capacity of ancestors.
Along the northern coast of France, where the Confessor had passed his
early life, lay the lands of one of the most powerful of the French
king's vassals, the Duke of Normandy. He and his people, who constitute
one of the most picturesque and curious elements in European history,
are confused for most of us by irrelevant controversies which would have
been entirely unintelligible to them. The worst of these is the inane
fiction which gives the name of Norman to the English aristocracy during
its great period of the last three hundred years. Tennyson informed a
lady of the name of Vere de Vere that simple faith was more valuable
than Norman blood. But the historical student who can believe in Lady
Clara as the possessor of the Norman blood must be himself a large
possessor of the simple faith. As a matter of fact, as we shall see also
when we come to the political scheme of the Normans, the notion is the
negation of their real importance in history. The fashionable fancy
misses what was best in the Normans, exactly as we have found it missing
what was best in the Saxons. One does not know whether to thank the
Normans more for appearing or for disappearing. Few philanthropists
ever became so rapidly anonymous. It is the great glory of the Norman
adventurer that he threw himself heartily into his chance position; and
had faith not only in his comrades, but in his subjects, and even in his
enemies. He was loyal to the kingdom he had not yet made. Thus the
Norman Bruce becomes a Scot; thus the descendant of the Norman Strongbow
becomes an Irishman. No men less than Normans can be conceived as
remaining as a superior caste until the present time. But this alien and
adventurous loyalty in the Norman, which appears in these other national
histories, appears most strongly of all in the history we have here to
follow. The Duke of Normandy does become a real King of England; his
claim through the Confessor, his election by the Council, even his
symbolic handfuls of the soil of Sussex, these are not altogether empty
forms. And though both phrases would be inaccurate, it is very much
nearer the truth to call William the first of the English than to call
Harold the last of them.
An indeterminate debate touching the dim races that mixed without record
in that dim epoch, has made much of the fact that the Norman edges of
France, like the East Anglian edges of England, were deeply penetrated
by the Norse invasions of the ninth century; and that the ducal house of
Normandy, with what other families we know not, can be traced back to a
Scandinavian seed. The unquestionable power of captaincy and creative
legislation which belonged to the Normans, whoever they were, may be
connected reasonably enough with some infusion of fresh blood. But if
the racial theorists press the point to a comparison of races, it can
obviously only be answered by a study of the two types in separation.
And it must surely be manifest that more civilizing power has since been
shown by the French when untouched by Scandinavian blood than by the
Scandinavians when untouched by French blood. As much fighting (and more
ruling) was done by the Crusaders who were never Vikings as by the
Vikings who were never Crusaders. But in truth there is no need of such
invidious analysis; we may willingly allow a real value to the
Scandinavian contribution to the French as to the English nationality,
so long as we firmly understand the ultimate historic fact that the
duchy of Normandy was about as Scandinavian as the town of Norwich. But
the debate has another danger, in that it tends to exaggerate even the
personal importance of the Norman. Many as were his talents as a master,
he is in history the servant of other and wider things. The landing of
Lanfranc is perhaps more of a date than the landing of William. And
Lanfranc was an Italian--like Julius Caesar. The Norman is not in history
a mere wall, the rather brutal boundary of a mere empire. The Norman is
a gate. He is like one of those gates which still remain as he made
them, with round arch and rude pattern and stout supporting columns; and
what entered by that gate was civilization. William of Falaise has in
history a title much higher than that of Duke of Normandy or King of
England. He was what Julius Caesar was, and what St. Augustine was: he
was the ambassador of Europe to Britain.
William asserted that the Confessor, in the course of that connection
which followed naturally from his Norman education, had promised the
English crown to the holder of the Norman dukedom. Whether he did or not
we shall probably never know: it is not intrinsically impossible or even
improbable. To blame the promise as unpatriotic, even if it was given,
is to read duties defined at a much later date into the first feudal
chaos; to make such blame positive and personal is like expecting the
Ancient Britons to sing "Rule Britannia." William further clinched his
case by declaring that Harold, the principal Saxon noble and the most
probable Saxon claimant, had, while enjoying the Duke's hospitality
after a shipwreck, sworn upon sacred relics not to dispute the Duke's
claim. About this episode also we must agree that we do not know; yet we
shall be quite out of touch with the time if we say that we do not care.
The element of sacrilege in the alleged perjury of Harold probably
affected the Pope when he blessed a banner for William's army; but it
did not affect the Pope much more than it would have affected the
people; and Harold's people quite as much as William's. Harold's people
presumably denied the fact; and their denial is probably the motive of
the very marked and almost eager emphasis with which the Bayeux Tapestry
asserts and reasserts the reality of the personal betrayal. There is
here a rather arresting fact to be noted. A great part of this
celebrated pictorial record is not concerned at all with the well-known
historical events which we have only to note rapidly here. It does,
indeed, dwell a little on the death of Edward; it depicts the
difficulties of William's enterprise in the felling of forests for
shipbuilding, in the crossing of the Channel, and especially in the
charge up the hill at Hastings, in which full justice is done to the
destructive resistance of Harold's army. But it was really after Duke
William had disembarked and defeated Harold on the Sussex coast, that he
did what is historically worthy to be called the Conquest. It is not
until these later operations that we have the note of the new and
scientific militarism from the Continent. Instead of marching upon
London he marched round it; and crossing the Thames at Wallingford cut
off the city from the rest of the country and compelled its surrender.
He had himself elected king with all the forms that would have
accompanied a peaceful succession to the Confessor, and after a brief
return to Normandy took up the work of war again to bring all England
under his crown. Marching through the snow, he laid waste the northern
counties, seized Chester, and made rather than won a kingdom. These
things are the foundations of historical England; but of these things
the pictures woven in honour of his house tell us nothing. The Bayeux
Tapestry may almost be said to stop before the Norman Conquest. But it
tells in great detail the tale of some trivial raid into Brittany solely
that Harold and William may appear as brothers in arms; and especially
that William may be depicted in the very act of giving arms to Harold.
And here again there is much more significance than a modern reader may
fancy, in its bearing upon the new birth of that time and the ancient
symbolism of arms. I have said that Duke William was a vassal of the
King of France; and that phrase in its use and abuse is the key to the
secular side of this epoch. William was indeed a most mutinous vassal,
and a vein of such mutiny runs through his family fortunes: his sons
Rufus and Henry I. disturbed him with internal ambitions antagonistic to
his own. But it would be a blunder to allow such personal broils to
obscure the system, which had indeed existed here before the Conquest,
which clarified and confirmed it. That system we call Feudalism.