wholly dwarfed and dehumanized is a very simple one. It consists in
telling only the story of the professional destroyers and then
complaining that the whole story is one of destruction. A king is at the
best a sort of crowned executioner; all government is an ugly necessity;
and if it was then uglier it was for the most part merely because it was
more difficult. What we call the Judges' circuits were first rather the
King's raids. For a time the criminal class was so strong that ordinary
civil government was conducted by a sort of civil war. When the social
enemy was caught at all he was killed or savagely maimed. The King could
not take Pentonville Prison about with him on wheels. I am far from
denying that there was a real element of cruelty in the Middle Ages; but
the point here is that it was concerned with one side of life, which is
cruel at the best; and that this involved more cruelty for the same
reason that it involved more courage. When we think of our ancestors as
the men who inflicted tortures, we ought sometimes to think of them as
the men who defied them. But the modern critic of mediaevalism commonly
looks only at these crooked shadows and not at the common daylight of
the Middle Ages. When he has got over his indignant astonishment at the
fact that fighters fought and that hangmen hanged, he assumes that any
other ideas there may have been were ineffectual and fruitless. He
despises the monk for avoiding the very same activities which he
despises the warrior for cultivating. And he insists that the arts of
war were sterile, without even admitting the possibility that the arts
of peace were productive. But the truth is that it is precisely in the
arts of peace, and in the type of production, that the Middle Ages stand
singular and unique. This is not eulogy but history; an informed man
must recognize this productive peculiarity even if he happens to hate
it. The melodramatic things currently called mediaeval are much older and
more universal; such as the sport of tournament or the use of torture.
The tournament was indeed a Christian and liberal advance on the
gladiatorial show, since the lords risked themselves and not merely
their slaves. Torture, so far from being peculiarly mediaeval, was copied
from pagan Rome and its most rationalist political science; and its
application to others besides slaves was really part of the slow
mediaeval extinction of slavery. Torture, indeed, is a logical thing
common in states innocent of fanaticism, as in the great agnostic empire
of China. What was really arresting and remarkable about the Middle
Ages, as the Spartan discipline was peculiar to Sparta, or the Russian
communes typical of Russia, was precisely its positive social scheme of
production, of the making, building and growing of all the good things
of life.
For the tale told in a book like this cannot really touch on mediaeval
England at all. The dynasties and the parliaments passed like a changing
cloud and across a stable and fruitful landscape. The institutions which
affected the masses can be compared to corn or fruit trees in one
practical sense at least, that they grew upwards from below. There may
have been better societies, and assuredly we have not to look far for
worse; but it is doubtful if there was ever so spontaneous a society. We
cannot do justice, for instance, to the local government of that epoch,
even where it was very faulty and fragmentary, by any comparisons with
the plans of local government laid down to-day. Modern local government
always comes from above; it is at best granted; it is more often merely
imposed. The modern English oligarchy, the modern German Empire, are
necessarily more efficient in making municipalities upon a plan, or
rather a pattern. The mediaevals not only had self-government, but their
self-government was self-made. They did indeed, as the central powers of
the national monarchies grew stronger, seek and procure the stamp of
state approval; but it was approval of a popular fact already in
existence. Men banded together in guilds and parishes long before Local
Government Acts were dreamed of. Like charity, which was worked in the
same way, their Home Rule began at home. The reactions of recent
centuries have left most educated men bankrupt of the corporate
imagination required even to imagine this. They only think of a mob as a
thing that breaks things--even if they admit it is right to break them.
But the mob made these things. An artist mocked as many-headed, an
artist with many eyes and hands, created these masterpieces. And if the
modern sceptic, in his detestation of the democratic ideal, complains of
my calling them masterpieces, a simple answer will for the moment serve.
It is enough to reply that the very word "masterpiece" is borrowed from
the terminology of the mediaeval craftsmen. But such points in the Guild
System can be considered a little later; here we are only concerned with
the quite spontaneous springing upwards of all these social
institutions, such as they were. They rose in the streets like a silent
rebellion; like a still and statuesque riot. In modern constitutional
countries there are practically no political institutions thus given by
the people; all are received by the people. There is only one thing that
stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some
power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trades Unions.
In agriculture, what had happened to the land was like a universal
landslide. But by a prodigy beyond the catastrophes of geology it may be
said that the land had slid uphill. Rural civilization was on a wholly
new and much higher level; yet there was no great social convulsions or
apparently even great social campaigns to explain it. It is possibly a
solitary instance in history of men thus falling upwards; at least of
outcasts falling on their feet or vagrants straying into the promised
land. Such a thing could not be and was not a mere accident; yet, if we
go by conscious political plans, it was something like a miracle. There
had appeared, like a subterranean race cast up to the sun, something
unknown to the august civilization of the Roman Empire--a peasantry. At
the beginning of the Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society now
grown Christian was as much a slave state as old South Carolina. By the
fourteenth century it was almost as much a state of peasant proprietors
as modern France. No laws had been passed against slavery; no dogmas
even had condemned it by definition; no war had been waged against it,
no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it; but it was gone. This
startling and silent transformation is perhaps the best measure of the
pressure of popular life in the Middle Ages, of how fast it was making
new things in its spiritual factory. Like everything else in the
mediaeval revolution, from its cathedrals to its ballads, it was as
anonymous as it was enormous. It is admitted that the conscious and
active emancipators everywhere were the parish priests and the
religious brotherhoods; but no name among them has survived and no man
of them has reaped his reward in this world. Countless Clarksons and
innumerable Wilberforces, without political machinery or public fame,
worked at death-beds and confessionals in all the villages of Europe;
and the vast system of slavery vanished. It was probably the widest work
ever done which was voluntary on both sides; and the Middle Ages was in
this and other things the age of volunteers. It is possible enough to
state roughly the stages through which the thing passed; but such a
statement does not explain the loosening of the grip of the great
slave-owners; and it cannot be explained except psychologically. The
Catholic type of Christianity was not merely an element, it was a
climate; and in that climate the slave would not grow. I have already
suggested, touching that transformation of the Roman Empire which was
the background of all these centuries, how a mystical view of man's
dignity must have this effect. A table that walked and talked, or a
stool that flew with wings out of window, would be about as workable a
thing as an immortal chattel. But though here as everywhere the spirit
explains the processes, and the processes cannot even plausibly explain
the spirit, these processes involve two very practical points, without
which we cannot understand how this great popular civilization was
created--or how it was destroyed.
What we call the manors were originally the _villae_ of the pagan
lords, each with its population of slaves. Under this process, however
it be explained, what had occurred was the diminishment of the lords'
claim to the whole profit of a slave estate, by which it became a claim
to the profit of part of it, and dwindled at last to certain dues or
customary payments to the lord, having paid which the slave could enjoy
not only the use of the land but the profit of it. It must be remembered
that over a great part, and especially very important parts, of the
whole territory, the lords were abbots, magistrates elected by a
mystical communism and themselves often of peasant birth. Men not only
obtained a fair amount of justice under their care, but a fair amount of
freedom even from their carelessness. But two details of the development
are very vital. First, as has been hinted elsewhere, the slave was long
in the intermediate status of a serf. This meant that while the land was
entitled to the services of the man, he was equally entitled to the
support of the land. He could not be evicted; he could not even, in the
modern fashion, have his rent raised. At the beginning it was merely
that the slave was owned, but at least he could not be disowned. At the
end he had really become a small landlord, merely because it was not the
lord that owned him, but the land. It is hardly unsafe to suggest that
in this (by one of the paradoxes of this extraordinary period) the very
fixity of serfdom was a service to freedom. The new peasant inherited
something of the stability of the slave. He did not come to life in a
competitive scramble where everybody was trying to snatch his freedom
from him. He found himself among neighbours who already regarded his
presence as normal and his frontiers as natural frontiers, and among
whom all-powerful customs crushed all experiments in competition. By a
trick or overturn no romancer has dared to put in a tale, this prisoner
had become the governor of his own prison. For a little time it was
almost true that an Englishman's house was his castle, because it had
been built strong enough to be his dungeon.
The other notable element was this: that when the produce of the land
began by custom to be cut up and only partially transmitted to the lord,
the remainder was generally subdivided into two types of property. One
the serfs enjoyed severally, in private patches, while the other they
enjoyed in common, and generally in common with the lord. Thus arose the
momentously important mediaeval institutions of the Common Land, owned
side by side with private land. It was an alternative and a refuge. The
mediaevals, except when they were monks, were none of them Communists;
but they were all, as it were, potential Communists. It is typical of
the dark and dehumanized picture now drawn of the period that our
romances constantly describe a broken man as falling back on the forests
and the outlaw's den, but never describe him as falling back on the
common land, which was a much more common incident. Mediaevalism
believed in mending its broken men; and as the idea existed in the
communal life for monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants.
It was their great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. A
Common was not a naked and negative thing like the scrub or heath we
call a Common on the edges of the suburbs. It was a reserve of wealth
like a reserve of grain in a barn; it was deliberately kept back as a
balance, as we talk of a balance at the bank. Now these provisions for a
healthier distribution of property would by themselves show any man of
imagination that a real moral effort had been made towards social
justice; that it could not have been mere evolutionary accident that
slowly turned the slave into a serf, and the serf into a peasant
proprietor. But if anybody still thinks that mere blind luck, without
any groping for the light, had somehow brought about the peasant
condition in place of the agrarian slave estate, he has only to turn to
what was happening in all the other callings and affairs of humanity.
Then he will cease to doubt. For he will find the same mediaeval men busy
upon a social scheme which points as plainly in effect to pity and a
craving for equality. And it is a system which could no more be produced
by accident than one of their cathedrals could be built by an
earthquake.
Most work beyond the primary work of agriculture was guarded by the
egalitarian vigilance of the Guilds. It is hard to find any term to
measure the distance between this system and modern society; one can
only approach it first by the faint traces it has left. Our daily life
is littered with a debris of the Middle Ages, especially of dead words
which no longer carry their meaning. I have already suggested one
example. We hardly call up the picture of a return to Christian
Communism whenever we mention Wimbledon Common. This truth descends to
such trifles as the titles which we write on letters and postcards. The
puzzling and truncated monosyllable "Esq." is a pathetic relic of a
remote evolution from chivalry to snobbery. No two historic things could
well be more different than an esquire and a squire. The first was above
all things an incomplete and probationary position--the tadpole of
knighthood; the second is above all things a complete and assured
position--the status of the owners and rulers of rural England
throughout recent centuries. Our esquires did not win their estates till
they had given up any particular fancy for winning their spurs. Esquire
does not mean squire, and esq. does not mean anything. But it remains on
our letters a little wriggle in pen and ink and an indecipherable
hieroglyph twisted by the strange turns of our history, which have
turned a military discipline into a pacific oligarchy, and that into a
mere plutocracy at last. And there are similar historic riddles to be
unpicked in the similar forms of social address. There is something
singularly forlorn about the modern word "Mister." Even in sound it has
a simpering feebleness which marks the shrivelling of the strong word
from which it came. Nor, indeed, is the symbol of the mere sound
inaccurate. I remember seeing a German story of Samson in which he bore
the unassuming name of Simson, which surely shows Samson very much
shorn. There is something of the same dismal _diminuendo_ in the
evolution of a Master into a Mister.
The very vital importance of the word "Master" is this. A Guild was,
very broadly speaking, a Trade Union in which every man was his own
employer. That is, a man could not work at any trade unless he would
join the league and accept the laws of that trade; but he worked in his
own shop with his own tools, and the whole profit went to himself. But
the word "employer" marks a modern deficiency which makes the modern use
of the word "master" quite inexact. A master meant something quite other
and greater than a "boss." It meant a master of the work, where it now
means only a master of the workmen. It is an elementary character of
Capitalism that a shipowner need not know the right end of a ship, or a
landowner have even seen the landscape, that the owner of a goldmine may
be interested in nothing but old pewter, or the owner of a railway
travel exclusively in balloons. He may be a more successful capitalist
if he has a hobby of his own business; he is often a more successful
capitalist if he has the sense to leave it to a manager; but
economically he can control the business because he is a capitalist,
not because he has any kind of hobby or any kind of sense. The highest
grade in the Guild system was a Master, and it meant a mastery of the
business. To take the term created by the colleges in the same epoch,
all the mediaeval bosses were Masters of Arts. The other grades were the
journeyman and the apprentice; but like the corresponding degrees at the
universities, they were grades through which every common man could
pass. They were not social classes; they were degrees and not castes.
This is the whole point of the recurrent romance about the apprentice
marrying his master's daughter. The master would not be surprised at
such a thing, any more than an M.A. would swell with aristocratic
indignation when his daughter married a B.A.
When we pass from the strictly educational hierarchy to the strictly
egalitarian ideal, we find again that the remains of the thing to-day
are so distorted and disconnected as to be comic. There are City
Companies which inherit the coats of arms and the immense relative
wealth of the old Guilds, and inherit nothing else. Even what is good
about them is not what was good about the Guilds. In one case we shall
find something like a Worshipful Company of Bricklayers, in which, it is
unnecessary to say, there is not a single bricklayer or anybody who has
ever known a bricklayer, but in which the senior partners of a few big
businesses in the City, with a few faded military men with a taste in
cookery, tell each other in after-dinner speeches that it has been the
glory of their lives to make allegorical bricks without straw. In
another case we shall find a Worshipful Company of Whitewashers who do
deserve their name, in the sense that many of them employ a large number
of other people to whitewash. These Companies support large charities
and often doubtless very valuable charities; but their object is quite
different from that of the old charities of the Guilds. The aim of the
Guild charities was the same as the aim of the Common Land. It was to
resist inequality--or, as some earnest old gentlemen of the last
generation would probably put it, to resist evolution. It was to ensure,
not only that bricklaying should survive and succeed, but that every
bricklayer should survive and succeed. It sought to rebuild the ruins of
any bricklayer, and to give any faded whitewasher a new white coat. It
was the whole aim of the Guilds to cobble their cobblers like their
shoes and clout their clothiers with their clothes; to strengthen the
weakest link, or go after the hundredth sheep; in short, to keep the row
of little shops unbroken like a line of battle. It resisted the growth
of a big shop like the growth of a dragon. Now even the whitewashers of
the Whitewashers Company will not pretend that it exists to prevent a
small shop being swallowed by a big shop, or that it has done anything
whatever to prevent it. At the best the kindness it would show to a
bankrupt whitewasher would be a kind of compensation; it would not be
reinstatement; it would not be the restoration of status in an
industrial system. So careful of the type it seems, so careless of the
single life; and by that very modern evolutionary philosophy the type
itself has been destroyed. The old Guilds, with the same object of
equality, of course, insisted peremptorily upon the same level system of
payment and treatment which is a point of complaint against the modern
Trades Unions. But they insisted also, as the Trades Unions cannot do,
upon a high standard of craftsmanship, which still astonishes the world
in the corners of perishing buildings or the colours of broken glass.
There is no artist or art critic who will not concede, however distant
his own style from the Gothic school, that there was in this time a
nameless but universal artistic touch in the moulding of the very tools
of life. Accident has preserved the rudest sticks and stools and pots
and pans which have suggestive shapes as if they were possessed not by
devils but by elves. For they were, indeed, as compared with subsequent
systems, produced in the incredible fairyland of a free country.
That the most mediaeval of modern institutions, the Trades Unions, do not
fight for the same ideal of aesthetic finish is true and certainly
tragic; but to make it a matter of blame is wholly to misunderstand the
tragedy. The Trades Unions are confederations of men without property,
seeking to balance its absence by numbers and the necessary character
of their labour. The Guilds were confederations of men with property,
seeking to ensure each man in the possession of that property. This is,
of course, the only condition of affairs in which property can properly
be said to exist at all. We should not speak of a negro community in
which most men were white, but the rare negroes were giants. We should
not conceive a married community in which most men were bachelors, and
three men had harems. A married community means a community where most
people are married; not a community where one or two people are very
much married. A propertied community means a community where most people
have property; not a community where there are a few capitalists. But in
fact the Guildsmen (as also, for that matter, the serfs, semi-serfs and
peasants) were much richer than can be realized even from the fact that
the Guilds protected the possession of houses, tools, and just payment.
The surplus is self-evident upon any just study of the prices of the
period, when all deductions have been made, of course, for the different
value of the actual coinage. When a man could get a goose or a gallon of
ale for one or two of the smallest and commonest coins, the matter is in
no way affected by the name of those coins. Even where the individual
wealth was severely limited, the collective wealth was very large--the
wealth of the Guilds, of the parishes, and especially of the monastic
estates. It is important to remember this fact in the subsequent
history of England.
The next fact to note is that the local government grew out of things
like the Guild system, and not the system from the government. In
sketching the sound principles of this lost society, I shall not, of
course, be supposed by any sane person to be describing a moral
paradise, or to be implying that it was free from the faults and fights
and sorrows that harass human life in all times, and certainly not least
in our own time. There was a fair amount of rioting and fighting in
connection with the Guilds; and there was especially for some time a
combative rivalry between the guilds of merchants who sold things and
those of craftsmen who made them, a conflict in which the craftsmen on
the whole prevailed. But whichever party may have been predominant, it
was the heads of the Guild who became the heads of the town, and not
vice versa. The stiff survivals of this once very spontaneous uprising
can again be seen in the now anomalous constitution of the Lord Mayor
and the Livery of the City of London. We are told so monotonously that
the government of our fathers reposed upon arms, that it is valid to
insist that this, their most intimate and everyday sort of government,
was wholly based upon tools; a government in which the workman's tool
became the sceptre. Blake, in one of his symbolic fantasies, suggests
that in the Golden Age the gold and gems should be taken from the hilt
of the sword and put upon the handle of the plough. But something very
like this did happen in the interlude of this mediaeval democracy,
fermenting under the crust of mediaeval monarchy and aristocracy; where
productive implements often took on the pomp of heraldry. The Guilds
often exhibited emblems and pageantry so compact of their most prosaic
uses, that we can only parallel them by imagining armorial tabards, or
even religious vestments, woven out of a navvy's corderoys or a coster's
pearl buttons.
Two more points must be briefly added; and the rough sketch of this now
foreign and even fantastic state will be as complete as it can be made
here. Both refer to the links between this popular life and the politics
which are conventially the whole of history. The first, and for that age
the most evident, is the Charter. To recur once more to the parallel of
Trades Unions, as convenient for the casual reader of to-day, the
Charter of a Guild roughly corresponded to that "recognition" for which
the railwaymen and other trades unionists asked some years ago, without
success. By this they had the authority of the King, the central or
national government; and this was of great moral weight with mediaevals,
who always conceived of freedom as a positive status, not as a negative
escape: they had none of the modern romanticism which makes liberty akin
to loneliness. Their view remains in the phrase about giving a man the
freedom of a city: they had no desire to give him the freedom of a
wilderness. To say that they had also the authority of the Church is
something of an understatement; for religion ran like a rich thread
through the rude tapestry of these popular things while they were still
merely popular; and many a trade society must have had a patron saint
long before it had a royal seal. The other point is that it was from
these municipal groups already in existence that the first men were
chosen for the largest and perhaps the last of the great mediaeval
experiments: the Parliament.