fashionable information; but it is of the sort that seeks the past
rather in Wardour Street than Watling Street. For that matter, the very
term "mediaeval" is used for almost anything from Early English to Early
Victorian. An eminent Socialist applied it to our armaments, which is
like applying it to our aeroplanes. Similarly the just description of
Feudalism, and of how far it was a part and how far rather an impediment
in the main mediaeval movement, is confused by current debates about
quite modern things--especially that modern thing, the English
squirearchy. Feudalism was very nearly the opposite of squirearchy. For
it is the whole point of the squire that his ownership is absolute and
is pacific. And it is the very definition of Feudalism that it was a
tenure, and a tenure by military service. Men paid their rent in steel
instead of gold, in spears and arrows against the enemies of their
landlord. But even these landlords were not landlords in the modern
sense; every one was practically as well as theoretically a tenant of
the King; and even he often fell into a feudal inferiority to a Pope or
an Emperor. To call it mere tenure by soldiering may seem a
simplification; but indeed it is precisely here that it was not so
simple as it seems. It is precisely a certain knot or enigma in the
nature of Feudalism which makes half the struggle of European history,
but especially English history.
There was a certain unique type of state and culture which we call
mediaeval, for want of a better word, which we see in the Gothic or the
great Schoolmen. This thing in itself was above all things logical. Its
very cult of authority was a thing of reason, as all men who can reason
themselves instantly recognize, even if, like Huxley, they deny its
premises or dislike its fruits. Being logical, it was very exact about
who had the authority. Now Feudalism was not quite logical, and was
never quite exact about who had the authority. Feudalism already
flourished before the mediaeval renascence began. It was, if not the
forest the mediaevals had to clear, at least the rude timber with which
they had to build. Feudalism was a fighting growth of the Dark Ages
before the Middle Ages; the age of barbarians resisted by
semi-barbarians. I do not say this in disparagement of it. Feudalism was
mostly a very human thing; the nearest contemporary name for it was
homage, a word which almost means humanity. On the other hand, mediaeval
logic, never quite reconciled to it, could become in its extremes
inhuman. It was often mere prejudice that protected men, and pure reason
that burned them. The feudal units grew through the lively localism of
the Dark Ages, when hills without roads shut in a valley like a
garrison. Patriotism had to be parochial; for men had no country, but
only a countryside. In such cases the lord grew larger than the king;
but it bred not only a local lordship but a kind of local liberty. And
it would be very inadvisable to ignore the freer element in Feudalism in
English history. For it is the one kind of freedom that the English have
had and held.
The knot in the system was something like this. In theory the King owned
everything, like an earthly providence; and that made for despotism and
"divine right," which meant in substance a natural authority. In one
aspect the King was simply the one lord anointed by the Church, that is
recognized by the ethics of the age. But while there was more royalty in
theory, there could be more rebellion in practice. Fighting was much
more equal than in our age of munitions, and the various groups could
arm almost instantly with bows from the forest or spears from the smith.
Where men are military there is no militarism. But it is more vital that
while the kingdom was in this sense one territorial army, the regiments
of it were also kingdoms. The sub-units were also sub-loyalties. Hence
the loyalist to his lord might be a rebel to his king; or the king be a
demagogue delivering him from the lord. This tangle is responsible for
the tragic passions about betrayal, as in the case of William and
Harold; the alleged traitor who is always found to be recurrent, yet
always felt to be exceptional. To break the tie was at once easy and
terrible. Treason in the sense of rebellion was then really felt as
treason in the sense of treachery, since it was desertion on a perpetual
battlefield. Now, there was even more of this civil war in English than
in other history, and the more local and less logical energy on the
whole prevailed. Whether there was something in those island
idiosyncracies, shapeless as sea-mists, with which this story began, or
whether the Roman imprint had really been lighter than in Gaul, the
feudal undergrowth prevented even a full attempt to build the _Civitas
Dei_, or ideal mediaeval state. What emerged was a compromise, which men
long afterwards amused themselves by calling a constitution.
There are paradoxes permissible for the redressing of a bad balance in
criticism, and which may safely even be emphasized so long as they are
not isolated. One of these I have called at the beginning of this
chapter the strength of the weak kings. And there is a complement of it,
even in this crisis of the Norman mastery, which might well be called
the weakness of the strong kings. William of Normandy succeeded
immediately, he did not quite succeed ultimately; there was in his huge
success a secret of failure that only bore fruit long after his death.
It was certainly his single aim to simplify England into a popular
autocracy, like that growing up in France; with that aim he scattered
the feudal holdings in scraps, demanded a direct vow from the
sub-vassals to himself, and used any tool against the barony, from the
highest culture of the foreign ecclesiastics to the rudest relics of
Saxon custom. But the very parallel of France makes the paradox
startlingly apparent. It is a proverb that the first French kings were
puppets; that the mayor of the palace was quite insolently the king of
the king. Yet it is certain that the puppet became an idol; a popular
idol of unparalleled power, before which all mayors and nobles bent or
were broken. In France arose absolute government, the more because it
was not precisely personal government. The King was already a
thing--like the Republic. Indeed the mediaeval Republics were rigid with
divine right. In Norman England, perhaps, the government was too
personal to be absolute. Anyhow, there is a real though recondite sense
in which William the Conqueror was William the Conquered. When his two
sons were dead, the whole country fell into a feudal chaos almost like
that before the Conquest. In France the princes who had been slaves
became something exceptional like priests; and one of them became a
saint. But somehow our greatest kings were still barons; and by that
very energy our barons became our kings.
VI
THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES
The last chapter began, in an apparent irrelevance, with the name of St.
Edward; and this one might very well begin with the name of St. George.
His first appearance, it is said, as a patron of our people, occurred at
the instance of Richard Coeur de Lion during his campaign in
Palestine; and this, as we shall see, really stands for a new England
which might well have a new saint. But the Confessor is a character in
English history; whereas St. George, apart from his place in martyrology
as a Roman soldier, can hardly be said to be a character in any history.
And if we wish to understand the noblest and most neglected of human
revolutions, we can hardly get closer to it than by considering this
paradox, of how much progress and enlightenment was represented by thus
passing from a chronicle to a romance.
In any intellectual corner of modernity can be found such a phrase as I
have just read in a newspaper controversy: "Salvation, like other good
things, must not come from outside." To call a spiritual thing external
and not internal is the chief mode of modernist excommunication. But if
our subject of study is mediaeval and not modern, we must pit against
this apparent platitude the very opposite idea. We must put ourselves in
the posture of men who thought that almost every good thing came from
outside--like good news. I confess that I am not impartial in my
sympathies here; and that the newspaper phrase I quoted strikes me as a
blunder about the very nature of life. I do not, in my private capacity,
believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb;
nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and denying
its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks
are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled
by wonder. But this faith in receptiveness, and in respect for things
outside oneself, need here do no more than help me in explaining what
any version of this epoch ought in any case to explain. In nothing is
the modern German more modern, or more mad, than in his dream of finding
a German name for everything; eating his language, or in other words
biting his tongue. And in nothing were the mediaevals more free and sane
than in their acceptance of names and emblems from outside their most
beloved limits. The monastery would often not only take in the stranger
but almost canonize him. A mere adventurer like Bruce was enthroned and
thanked as if he had really come as a knight errant. And a passionately
patriotic community more often than not had a foreigner for a patron
saint. Thus crowds of saints were Irishmen, but St. Patrick was not an
Irishman. Thus as the English gradually became a nation, they left the
numberless Saxon saints in a sense behind them, passed over by
comparison not only the sanctity of Edward but the solid fame of Alfred,
and invoked a half mythical hero, striving in an eastern desert against
an impossible monster.
That transition and that symbol stand for the Crusades. In their romance
and reality they were the first English experience of learning, not only
from the external, but the remote. England, like every Christian thing,
had thriven on outer things without shame. From the roads of Caesar to
the churches of Lanfranc, it had sought its meat from God. But now the
eagles were on the wing, scenting a more distant slaughter; they were
seeking the strange things instead of receiving them. The English had
stepped from acceptance to adventure, and the epic of their ships had
begun. The scope of the great religious movement which swept England
along with all the West would distend a book like this into huge
disproportion, yet it would be much better to do so than to dismiss it
in the distant and frigid fashion common in such short summaries. The
inadequacy of our insular method in popular history is perfectly shown
in the treatment of Richard Coeur de Lion. His tale is told with the
implication that his departure for the Crusade was something like the
escapade of a schoolboy running away to sea. It was, in this view, a
pardonable or lovable prank; whereas in truth it was more like a
responsible Englishman now going to the Front. Christendom was nearly
one nation, and the Front was the Holy Land. That Richard himself was of
an adventurous and even romantic temper is true, though it is not
unreasonably romantic for a born soldier to do the work he does best.
But the point of the argument against insular history is particularly
illustrated here by the absence of a continental comparison. In this
case we have only to step across the Straits of Dover to find the
fallacy. Philip Augustus, Richard's contemporary in France, had the name
of a particularly cautious and coldly public-spirited statesman; yet
Philip Augustus went on the same Crusade. The reason was, of course,
that the Crusades were, for all thoughtful Europeans, things of the
highest statesmanship and the purest public spirit.
Some six hundred years after Christianity sprang up in the East and
swept westwards, another great faith arose in almost the same eastern
lands and followed it like its gigantic shadow. Like a shadow, it was at
once a copy and a contrary. We call it Islam, or the creed of the
Moslems; and perhaps its most explanatory description is that it was the
final flaming up of the accumulated Orientalisms, perhaps of the
accumulated Hebraisms, gradually rejected as the Church grew more
European, or as Christianity turned into Christendom. Its highest
motive was a hatred of idols, and in its view Incarnation was itself an
idolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idea of God being made
flesh and of His being afterwards made wood or stone. A study of the
questions smouldering in the track of the prairie fire of the Christian
conversion favours the suggestion that this fanaticism against art or
mythology was at once a development and a reaction from that conversion,
a sort of minority report of the Hebraists. In this sense Islam was
something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of
mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from
the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his
soul. And the Greek Iconoclasts had poured into Italy, breaking the
popular statues and denouncing the idolatry of the Pope, until routed,
in a style sufficiently symbolic, by the sword of the father of
Charlemagne. It was all these disappointed negations that took fire from
the genius of Mahomet, and launched out of the burning lands a cavalry
charge that nearly conquered the world. And if it be suggested that a
note on such Oriental origins is rather remote from a history of
England, the answer is that this book may, alas! contain many
digressions, but that this is not a digression. It is quite peculiarly
necessary to keep in mind that this Semite god haunted Christianity like
a ghost; to remember it in every European corner, but especially in our
corner. If any one doubts the necessity, let him take a walk to all the
parish churches in England within a radius of thirty miles, and ask why
this stone virgin is headless or that coloured glass is gone. He will
soon learn that it was lately, and in his own lanes and homesteads, that
the ecstasy of the deserts returned, and his bleak northern island was
filled with the fury of the Iconoclasts.
It was an element in this sublime and yet sinister simplicity of Islam
that it knew no boundaries. Its very home was homeless. For it was born
in a sandy waste among nomads, and it went everywhere because it came
from nowhere. But in the Saracens of the early Middle Ages this nomadic
quality in Islam was masked by a high civilization, more scientific if
less creatively artistic than that of contemporary Christendom. The
Moslem monotheism was, or appeared to be, the more rationalist religion
of the two. This rootless refinement was characteristically advanced in
abstract things, of which a memory remains in the very name of algebra.
In comparison the Christian civilization was still largely instinctive,
but its instincts were very strong and very much the other way. It was
full of local affections, which found form in that system of _fences_
which runs like a pattern through everything mediaeval, from heraldry to
the holding of land. There was a shape and colour in all their customs
and statutes which can be seen in all their tabards and escutcheons;
something at once strict and gay. This is not a departure from the
interest in external things, but rather a part of it. The very welcome
they would often give to a stranger from beyond the wall was a
recognition of the wall. Those who think their own life all-sufficient
do not see its limit as a wall, but as the end of the world. The Chinese
called the white man "a sky-breaker." The mediaeval spirit loved its part
in life as a part, not a whole; its charter for it came from something
else. There is a joke about a Benedictine monk who used the common grace
of _Benedictus benedicat_, whereupon the unlettered Franciscan
triumphantly retorted _Franciscus Franciscat_. It is something of a
parable of mediaeval history; for if there were a verb Franciscare it
would be an approximate description of what St. Francis afterwards did.
But that more individual mysticism was only approaching its birth, and
_Benedictus benedicat_ is very precisely the motto of the earliest
mediaevalism. I mean that everything is blessed from beyond, by something
which has in its turn been blessed from beyond again; only the blessed
bless. But the point which is the clue to the Crusades is this: that for
them the beyond was not the infinite, as in a modern religion. Every
beyond was a place. The mystery of locality, with all its hold on the
human heart, was as much present in the most ethereal things of
Christendom as it was absent from the most practical things of Islam.
England would derive a thing from France, France from Italy, Italy from
Greece, Greece from Palestine, Palestine from Paradise. It was not
merely that a yeoman of Kent would have his house hallowed by the
priest of the parish church, which was confirmed by Canterbury, which
was confirmed by Rome. Rome herself did not worship herself, as in the
pagan age. Rome herself looked eastward to the mysterious cradle of her
creed, to a land of which the very earth was called holy. And when she
looked eastward for it she saw the face of Mahound. She saw standing in
the place that was her earthly heaven a devouring giant out of the
deserts, to whom all places were the same.
It has been necessary thus to pause upon the inner emotions of the
Crusade, because the modern English reader is widely cut off from these
particular feelings of his fathers; and the real quarrel of Christendom
and Islam, the fire-baptism of the young nations, could not otherwise be
seized in its unique character. It was nothing so simple as a quarrel
between two men who both wanted Jerusalem. It was the much deadlier
quarrel between one man who wanted it and another man who could not see
why it was wanted. The Moslem, of course, had his own holy places; but
he has never felt about them as Westerns can feel about a field or a
roof-tree; he thought of the holiness as holy, not of the places as
places. The austerity which forbade him imagery, the wandering war that
forbade him rest, shut him off from all that was breaking out and
blossoming in our local patriotisms; just as it has given the Turks an
empire without ever giving them a nation.
Now, the effect of this adventure against a mighty and mysterious enemy
was simply enormous in the transformation of England, as of all the
nations that were developing side by side with England. Firstly, we
learnt enormously from what the Saracen did. Secondly, we learnt yet
more enormously from what the Saracen did not do. Touching some of the
good things which we lacked, we were fortunately able to follow him. But
in all the good things which he lacked, we were confirmed like adamant
to defy him. It may be said that Christians never knew how right they
were till they went to war with Moslems. At once the most obvious and
the most representative reaction was the reaction which produced the
best of what we call Christian Art; and especially those grotesques of
Gothic architecture, which are not only alive but kicking. The East as
an environment, as an impersonal glamour, certainly stimulated the
Western mind, but stimulated it rather to break the Moslem commandment
than to keep it. It was as if the Christian were impelled, like a
caricaturist, to cover all that faceless ornament with faces; to give
heads to all those headless serpents and birds to all these lifeless
trees. Statuary quickened and came to life under the veto of the enemy
as under a benediction. The image, merely because it was called an idol,
became not only an ensign but a weapon. A hundredfold host of stone
sprang up all over the shrines and streets of Europe. The Iconoclasts
made more statues than they destroyed.
The place of Coeur de Lion in popular fable and gossip is far more
like his place in true history than the place of the mere denationalized
ne'er-do-weel given him in our utilitarian school books. Indeed the
vulgar rumour is nearly always much nearer the historical truth than the
"educated" opinion of to-day; for tradition is truer than fashion. King
Richard, as the typical Crusader, did make a momentous difference to
England by gaining glory in the East, instead of devoting himself
conscientiously to domestic politics in the exemplary manner of King
John. The accident of his military genius and prestige gave England
something which it kept for four hundred years, and without which it is
incomprehensible throughout that period--the reputation of being in the
very vanguard of chivalry. The great romances of the Round Table, the
attachment of knighthood to the name of a British king, belong to this
period. Richard was not only a knight but a troubadour; and culture and
courtesy were linked up with the idea of English valour. The mediaeval
Englishman was even proud of being polite; which is at least no worse
than being proud of money and bad manners, which is what many Englishmen
in our later centuries have meant by their common sense.
Chivalry might be called the baptism of Feudalism. It was an attempt to
bring the justice and even the logic of the Catholic creed into a
military system which already existed; to turn its discipline into an
initiation and its inequalities into a hierarchy. To the comparative
grace of the new period belongs, of course, that considerable cultus of
the dignity of woman, to which the word "chivalry" is often narrowed, or
perhaps exalted. This also was a revolt against one of the worst gaps in
the more polished civilization of the Saracens. Moslems denied even
souls to women; perhaps from the same instinct which recoiled from the
sacred birth, with its inevitable glorification of the mother; perhaps
merely because, having originally had tents rather than houses, they had
slaves rather than housewives. It is false to say that the chivalric
view of women was merely an affectation, except in the sense in which
there must always be an affectation where there is an ideal. It is the
worst sort of superficiality not to see the pressure of a general
sentiment merely because it is always broken up by events; the Crusade
itself, for example, is more present and potent as a dream even than as
a reality. From the first Plantagenet to the last Lancastrian it haunts
the minds of English kings, giving as a background to their battles a
mirage of Palestine. So a devotion like that of Edward I. to his queen
was quite a real motive in the lives of multitudes of his
contemporaries. When crowds of enlightened tourists, setting forth to
sneer at the superstitions of the continent, are taking tickets and
labelling luggage at the large railway station at the west end of the
Strand, I do not know whether they all speak to their wives with a more
flowing courtesy than their fathers in Edward's time, or whether they
pause to meditate on the legend of a husband's sorrow, to be found in
the very name of Charing Cross.