only that crust of society for which heraldry was an art and chivalry an
etiquette. The direct contrary is the fact. The First Crusade especially
was much more an unanimous popular rising than most that are called
riots and revolutions. The Guilds, the great democratic systems of the
time, often owed their increasing power to corporate fighting for the
Cross; but I shall deal with such things later. Often it was not so much
a levy of men as a trek of whole families, like new gipsies moving
eastwards. And it has passed into a proverb that children by themselves
often organized a crusade as they now organize a charade. But we shall
best realize the fact by fancying every Crusade as a Children's Crusade.
They were full of all that the modern world worships in children,
because it has crushed it out of men. Their lives were full, as the
rudest remains of their vulgarest arts are full, of something that we
all saw out of the nursery window. It can best be seen later, for
instance, in the lanced and latticed interiors of Memling, but it is
ubiquitous in the older and more unconscious contemporary art; something
that domesticated distant lands and made the horizon at home. They
fitted into the corners of small houses the ends of the earth and the
edges of the sky. Their perspective is rude and crazy, but it is
perspective; it is not the decorative flatness of orientalism. In a
word, their world, like a child's, is full of foreshortening, as of a
short cut to fairyland. Their maps are more provocative than pictures.
Their half-fabulous animals are monsters, and yet are pets. It is
impossible to state verbally this very vivid atmosphere; but it was an
atmosphere as well as an adventure. It was precisely these outlandish
visions that truly came home to everybody; it was the royal councils and
feudal quarrels that were comparatively remote. The Holy Land was much
nearer to a plain man's house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearer
than Runymede. To give a list of English kings and parliaments, without
pausing for a moment upon this prodigious presence of a religious
transfiguration in common life, is something the folly of which can but
faintly be conveyed by a more modern parallel, with secularity and
religion reversed. It is as if some Clericalist or Royalist writer
should give a list of the Archbishops of Paris from 1750 to 1850, noting
how one died of small-pox, another of old age, another by a curious
accident of decapitation, and throughout all his record should never
once mention the nature, or even the name, of the French Revolution.
VII
THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS
It is a point of prestige with what is called the Higher Criticism in
all branches to proclaim that certain popular texts and authorities are
"late," and therefore apparently worthless. Two similar events are
always the same event, and the later alone is even credible. This
fanaticism is often in mere fact mistaken; it ignores the most common
coincidences of human life: and some future critic will probably say
that the tale of the Tower of Babel cannot be older than the Eiffel
Tower, because there was certainly a confusion of tongues at the Paris
Exhibition. Most of the mediaeval remains familiar to the modern reader
are necessarily "late," such as Chaucer or the Robin Hood ballads; but
they are none the less, to a wiser criticism, worthy of attention and
even trust. That which lingers after an epoch is generally that which
lived most luxuriantly in it. It is an excellent habit to read history
backwards. It is far wiser for a modern man to read the Middle Ages
backwards from Shakespeare, whom he can judge for himself, and who yet
is crammed with the Middle Ages, than to attempt to read them forwards
from Caedmon, of whom he can know nothing, and of whom even the
authorities he must trust know very little. If this be true of
Shakespeare, it is even truer, of course, of Chaucer. If we really want
to know what was strongest in the twelfth century, it is no bad way to
ask what remained of it in the fourteenth. When the average reader turns
to the "Canterbury Tales," which are still as amusing as Dickens yet as
mediaeval as Durham Cathedral, what is the very first question to be
asked? Why, for instance, are they called Canterbury Tales; and what
were the pilgrims doing on the road to Canterbury? They were, of course,
taking part in a popular festival like a modern public holiday, though
much more genial and leisurely. Nor are we, perhaps, prepared to accept
it as a self-evident step in progress that their holidays were derived
from saints, while ours are dictated by bankers.
It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very good
man. The notion of an eminence merely moral, consistent with complete
stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by its
very familiarity, and needing, as do so many things of this older
society, some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its original
freshness and point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillar
like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn that the hero on
the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a
chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a brass
band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that
he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such
pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the
Christian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be
realized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in a
sense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same as those of
labour and domesticity: it did not need the sword or sceptre, but rather
the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty. All this must be
approximately visualized before we catch a glimpse of the great effects
of the story which lay behind the Canterbury Pilgrimage.
The first few lines of Chaucer's poem, to say nothing of thousands in
the course of it, make it instantly plain that it was no case of secular
revels still linked by a slight ritual to the name of some forgotten
god, as may have happened in the pagan decline. Chaucer and his friends
did think about St. Thomas, at least more frequently than a clerk at
Margate thinks about St. Lubbock. They did definitely believe in the
bodily cures wrought for them through St. Thomas, at least as firmly as
the most enlightened and progressive modern can believe in those of Mrs.
Eddy. Who was St. Thomas, to whose shrine the whole of that society is
thus seen in the act of moving; and why was he so important? If there be
a streak of sincerity in the claim to teach social and democratic
history, instead of a string of kings and battles, this is the obvious
and open gate by which to approach the figure which disputed England
with the first Plantagenet. A real popular history should think more of
his popularity even than his policy. And unquestionably thousands of
ploughmen, carpenters, cooks, and yeomen, as in the motley crowd of
Chaucer, knew a great deal about St. Thomas when they had never even
heard of Becket.
It would be easy to detail what followed the Conquest as the feudal
tangle that it was, till a prince from Anjou repeated the unifying
effort of the Conqueror. It is found equally easy to write of the Red
King's hunting instead of his building, which has lasted longer, and
which he probably loved much more. It is easy to catalogue the questions
he disputed with Anselm--leaving out the question Anselm cared most
about, and which he asked with explosive simplicity, as, "Why was God a
man?" All this is as simple as saying that a king died of eating
lampreys, from which, however, there is little to learn nowadays, unless
it be that when a modern monarch perishes of gluttony the newspapers
seldom say so. But if we want to know what really happened to England in
this dim epoch, I think it can be dimly but truly traced in the story of
St. Thomas of Canterbury.
Henry of Anjou, who brought fresh French blood into the monarchy,
brought also a refreshment of the idea for which the French have always
stood: the idea in the Roman Law of something impersonal and
omnipresent. It is the thing we smile at even in a small French
detective story; when Justice opens a handbag or Justice runs after a
cab. Henry II. really produced this impression of being a police force
in person; a contemporary priest compared his restless vigilance to the
bird and the fish of scripture whose way no man knoweth. Kinghood,
however, meant law and not caprice; its ideal at least was a justice
cheap and obvious as daylight, an atmosphere which lingers only in
popular phrases about the King's English or the King's highway. But
though it tended to be egalitarian it did not, of itself, tend to be
humanitarian. In modern France, as in ancient Rome, the other name of
Justice has sometimes been Terror. The Frenchman especially is always a
Revolutionist--and never an Anarchist. Now this effort of kings like
Henry II. to rebuild on a plan like that of the Roman Law was not only,
of course, crossed and entangled by countless feudal fancies and
feelings in themselves as well as others, it was also conditioned by
what was the corner-stone of the whole civilization. It had to happen
not only with but within the Church. For a Church was to these men
rather a world they lived in than a building to which they went. Without
the Church the Middle Ages would have had no law, as without the Church
the Reformation would have had no Bible. Many priests expounded and
embellished the Roman Law, and many priests supported Henry II. And yet
there was another element in the Church, stored in its first foundations
like dynamite, and destined in every age to destroy and renew the world.
An idealism akin to impossibilism ran down the ages parallel to all its
political compromises. Monasticism itself was the throwing off of
innumerable Utopias, without posterity yet with perpetuity. It had, as
was proved recurrently after corrupt epochs, a strange secret of getting
poor quickly; a mushroom magnificence of destitution. This wind of
revolution in the crusading time caught Francis in Assissi and stripped
him of his rich garments in the street. The same wind of revolution
suddenly smote Thomas Becket, King Henry's brilliant and luxurious
Chancellor, and drove him on to an unearthly glory and a bloody end.
Becket was a type of those historic times in which it is really very
practical to be impracticable. The quarrel which tore him from his
friend's side cannot be appreciated in the light of those legal and
constitutional debates which the misfortunes of the seventeenth century
have made so much of in more recent history. To convict St. Thomas of
illegality and clerical intrigue, when he set the law of the Church
against that of the State, is about as adequate as to convict St.
Francis of bad heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun and
moon. There may have been heralds stupid enough to say so even in that
much more logical age, but it is no sufficient way of dealing with
visions or with revolutions. St. Thomas of Canterbury was a great
visionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as England was concerned
his revolution failed and his vision was not fulfilled. We are therefore
told in the text-books little more than that he wrangled with the King
about certain regulations; the most crucial being whether "criminous
clerks" should be punished by the State or the Church. And this was
indeed the chief text of the dispute; but to realise it we must
reiterate what is hardest for modern England to understand--the nature
of the Catholic Church when it was itself a government, and the
permanent sense in which it was itself a revolution.
It is always the first fact that escapes notice; and the first fact
about the Church was that it created a machinery of pardon, where the
State could only work with a machinery of punishment. It claimed to be a
divine detective who helped the criminal to escape by a plea of guilty.
It was, therefore, in the very nature of the institution, that when it
did punish materially it punished more lightly. If any modern man were
put back in the Becket quarrel, his sympathies would certainly be torn
in two; for if the King's scheme was the more rational, the Archbishop's
was the more humane. And despite the horrors that darkened religious
disputes long afterwards, this character was certainly in the bulk the
historic character of Church government. It is admitted, for instance,
that things like eviction, or the harsh treatment of tenants, was
practically unknown wherever the Church was landlord. The principle
lingered into more evil days in the form by which the Church authorities
handed over culprits to the secular arm to be killed, even for religious
offences. In modern romances this is treated as a mere hypocrisy; but
the man who treats every human inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a
hypocrite about his own inconsistencies.
Our world, then, cannot understand St. Thomas, any more than St.
Francis, without accepting very simply a flaming and even fantastic
charity, by which the great Archbishop undoubtedly stands for the
victims of this world, where the wheel of fortune grinds the faces of
the poor. He may well have been too idealistic; he wished to protect the
Church as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules might seem to
him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to the King as
capricious as those of fairyland. But if the priest was too idealistic,
the King was really too practical; it is intrinsically true to say he
was too practical to succeed in practice. There re-enters here, and
runs, I think, through all English history, the rather indescribable
truth I have suggested about the Conqueror; that perhaps he was hardly
impersonal enough for a pure despot. The real moral of our mediaeval
story is, I think, subtly contrary to Carlyle's vision of a stormy
strong man to hammer and weld the state like a smith. Our strong men
were too strong for us, and too strong for themselves. They were too
strong for their own aim of a just and equal monarchy. The smith broke
upon the anvil the sword of state that he was hammering for himself.
Whether or no this will serve as a key to the very complicated story of
our kings and barons, it is the exact posture of Henry II. to his rival.
He became lawless out of sheer love of law. He also stood, though in a
colder and more remote manner, for the whole people against feudal
oppression; and if his policy had succeeded in its purity, it would at
least have made impossible the privilege and capitalism of later times.
But that bodily restlessness which stamped and spurned the furniture was
a symbol of him; it was some such thing that prevented him and his heirs
from sitting as quietly on their throne as the heirs of St. Louis. He
thrust again and again at the tough intangibility of the priests'
Utopianism like a man fighting a ghost; he answered transcendental
defiances with baser material persecutions; and at last, on a dark and,
I think, decisive day in English history, his word sent four feudal
murderers into the cloisters of Canterbury, who went there to destroy a
traitor and who created a saint.
At the grave of the dead man broke forth what can only be called an
epidemic of healing. For miracles so narrated there is the same evidence
as for half the facts of history; and any one denying them must deny
them upon a dogma. But something followed which would seem to modern
civilization even more monstrous than a miracle. If the reader can
imagine Mr. Cecil Rhodes submitting to be horsewhipped by a Boer in St.
Paul's Cathedral, as an apology for some indefensible death incidental
to the Jameson Raid, he will form but a faint idea of what was meant
when Henry II. was beaten by monks at the tomb of his vassal and enemy.
The modern parallel called up is comic, but the truth is that mediaeval
actualities have a violence that does seem comic to our conventions. The
Catholics of that age were driven by two dominant thoughts: the
all-importance of penitence as an answer to sin, and the all-importance
of vivid and evident external acts as a proof of penitence. Extravagant
humiliation after extravagant pride for them restored the balance of
sanity. The point is worth stressing, because without it moderns make
neither head nor tail of the period. Green gravely suggests, for
instance, of Henry's ancestor Fulk of Anjou, that his tyrannies and
frauds were further blackened by "low superstition," which led him to be
dragged in a halter round a shrine, scourged and screaming for the mercy
of God. Mediaevals would simply have said that such a man might well
scream for it, but his scream was the only logical comment he could
make. But they would have quite refused to see why the scream should be
added to the sins and not subtracted from them. They would have thought
it simply muddle-headed to have the same horror at a man for being
horribly sinful and for being horribly sorry.
But it may be suggested, I think, though with the doubt proper to
ignorance, that the Angevin ideal of the King's justice lost more by the
death of St. Thomas than was instantly apparent in the horror of
Christendom, the canonization of the victim and the public penance of
the tyrant. These things indeed were in a sense temporary; the King
recovered the power to judge clerics, and many later kings and
justiciars continued the monarchical plan. But I would suggest, as a
possible clue to puzzling after events, that here and by this murderous
stroke the crown lost what should have been the silent and massive
support of its whole policy. I mean that it lost the people.
It need not be repeated that the case for despotism is democratic. As a
rule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak. An autocrat
cannot be judged as a historical character by his relations with other
historical characters. His true applause comes not from the few actors
on the lighted stage of aristocracy, but from that enormous audience
which must always sit in darkness throughout the drama. The king who
helps numberless helps nameless men, and when he flings his widest
largesse he is a Christian doing good by stealth. This sort of monarchy
was certainly a mediaeval ideal, nor need it necessarily fail as a
reality. French kings were never so merciful to the people as when they
were merciless to the peers; and it is probably true that a Czar who was
a great lord to his intimates was often a little father in innumerable
little homes. It is overwhelmingly probable that such a central power,
though it might at last have deserved destruction in England as in
France, would in England as in France have prevented the few from
seizing and holding all the wealth and power to this day. But in England
it broke off short, through something of which the slaying of St. Thomas
may well have been the supreme example. It was something overstrained
and startling and against the instincts of the people. And of what was
meant in the Middle Ages by that very powerful and rather peculiar
thing, the people, I shall speak in the next chapter.
In any case this conjecture finds support in the ensuing events. It is
not merely that, just as the great but personal plan of the Conqueror
collapsed after all into the chaos of the Stephen transition, so the
great but personal plan of the first Plantagenet collapsed into the
chaos of the Barons' Wars. When all allowance is made for constitutional
fictions and afterthoughts, it does seem likely that here for the first
time some moral strength deserted the monarchy. The character of Henry's
second son John (for Richard belongs rather to the last chapter) stamped
it with something accidental and yet symbolic. It was not that John was
a mere black blot on the pure gold of the Plantagenets, the texture was
much more mixed and continuous; but he really was a discredited
Plantagenet, and as it were a damaged Plantagenet. It was not that he
was much more of a bad man than many opposed to him, but he was the
kind of bad man whom bad men and good do combine to oppose. In a sense
subtler than that of the legal and parliamentary logic-chopping invented
long afterwards, he certainly managed to put the Crown in the wrong.
Nobody suggested that the barons of Stephen's time starved men in
dungeons to promote political liberty, or hung them up by the heels as a
symbolic request for a free parliament. In the reign of John and his son
it was still the barons, and not in the least the people, who seized the
power; but there did begin to appear a _case_ for their seizing it, for
contemporaries as well as constitutional historians afterwards. John, in
one of his diplomatic doublings, had put England into the papal care, as
an estate is put in Chancery. And unluckily the Pope, whose counsels had
generally been mild and liberal, was then in his death-grapple with the
Germanic Emperor and wanted every penny he could get to win. His winning
was a blessing to Europe, but a curse to England, for he used the island
as a mere treasury for this foreign war. In this and other matters the
baronial party began to have something like a principle, which is the
backbone of a policy. Much conventional history that connects their
councils with a thing like our House of Commons is as far-fetched as it
would be to say that the Speaker wields a Mace like those which the
barons brandished in battle. Simon de Montfort was not an enthusiast for
the Whig theory of the British Constitution, but he was an enthusiast
for something. He founded a parliament in a fit of considerable absence
of mind; but it was with true presence of mind, in the responsible and
even religious sense which had made his father so savage a Crusader
against heretics, that he laid about him with his great sword before he
fell at Evesham.
Magna Carta was not a step towards democracy, but it was a step away
from despotism. If we hold that double truth firmly, we have something
like a key to the rest of English history. A rather loose aristocracy
not only gained but often deserved the name of liberty. And the history
of the English can be most briefly summarized by taking the French motto
of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," and noting that the English have
sincerely loved the first and lost the other two.
In the contemporary complication much could be urged both for the Crown
and the new and more national rally of the nobility. But it was a
complication, whereas a miracle is a plain matter that any man can
understand. The possibilities or impossibilities of St. Thomas Becket
were left a riddle for history; the white flame of his audacious
theocracy was frustrated, and his work cut short like a fairy tale left
untold. But his memory passed into the care of the common people, and
with them he was more active dead than alive--yes, even more busy. In
the next chapter we shall consider what was meant in the Middle Ages by
the common people, and how uncommon we should think it to-day. And in
the last chapter we have already seen how in the Crusading age the
strangest things grew homely, and men fed on travellers' tales when
there were no national newspapers. A many-coloured pageant of
martyrology on numberless walls and windows had familiarized the most
ignorant with alien cruelties in many climes; with a bishop flayed by
Danes or a virgin burned by Saracens, with one saint stoned by Jews and
another hewn in pieces by negroes. I cannot think it was a small matter
that among these images one of the most magnificent had met his death
but lately at the hands of an English monarch. There was at least
something akin to the primitive and epical romances of that period in
the tale of those two mighty friends, one of whom struck too hard and
slew the other. It may even have been so early as this that something
was judged in silence; and for the multitude rested on the Crown a
mysterious seal of insecurity like that of Cain, and of exile on the
English kings.
VIII
THE MEANING OF MERRY ENGLAND