[Illustration: Front end paper]
THE PEOPLES
OF
EUROPE
BY
HERBERT JOHN FLEURE, D.Sc.
PROFESSOR OF GEOGRAPHY AND ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF WALES
HON. SECRETARY TO THE GEOGRAPHICAL ASSOCIATION
LONDON
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
HUMPHREY MILFORD
1922
Oxford University Press
_London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen
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Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. 'Races'
2. Language Families--Introductory
3. The Peoples of Romance Speech
4. The Peoples of German Speech
5. Some Peoples intermediate between Romance and
Germanic in Speech
6. Peoples of Low German and Scandinavian Speech
7. The Peoples on the Eastern Border of Europe-of-the-Sea
8. The Slav-speaking Peoples and the Borders of the East
9. Some Phases of Evolution of European Life before the
Industrial Revolution
10. Aspects of Modern Europe
Bibliographical Note
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INTRODUCTION
If there be any truth in the view that our philosophical theories
grow out of our circumstances, it cannot be doubted that the
philosophy of change, sometimes optimistically called progress, is
curiously appropriate to Europe. The intimate juxtaposition of
small areas of mountain and plateau, of river and sea, of valley
and plain has multiplied contacts between men of diverse activities,
experience, and outlook, and has thus encouraged not only
exchange of ideas but also fermentation of thought. Economically,
also, the trend has always been towards mutual dependence,
and the penetration of inland seas far into the Continent has
further assisted intercourse from far-off times. A self-sufficing
community left to itself will evolve a routine and may stagnate
therein; external contacts are most important in that they may
ward off this danger. On the other hand, it must be remembered
that these contacts may prove disastrous by breaking threads of
tradition developing towards a fuller realization of the good life.
Thus social importations into many regions of the Mediterranean
in the days of the growth of the Roman dominion were brought
about through conquest followed by transportation of the enslaved
foemen, with grievous results both to Rome and to the slaves.
Or again, the rapid growth of British trade at the Industrial
Revolution brought many new contacts that, as in the case of
Rome long before, promoted exploitation on a large scale, and
made the stories both of the factory-children of England and of
the slaves of America stand dismally parallel with those of the
slaves of ancient Rome. In both instances the loss of social and
intellectual heritage involved in these ugly schemes is full of
fateful consequences, which worked themselves out in the case
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of Rome and may be doing so in the case of Britain. Contact
and association without alien dominations, whether personal or
regional, at any rate are of the utmost value as refreshers, and
Europe has had unequalled opportunities in this direction.
But Europe, as known in current geography, is not an effective
human unit. In a certain broad sense it becomes one if we add
to it a good deal of South-west Asia and North Africa, so that
all the frame of the Mediterranean, Euxine, and Caspian is
included. In a more real and detailed sense, however, we should
be careful to distinguish that portion which is intimately affected
by the sea from that part which is in the first place the threshold
of the great interior.
Europe, west of the Pripet Marshes, rarely suffers from extreme
heat, and its winter frosts are less severe and prolonged than those
of Muscovy. The temperature north and west of the Alps varies
just enough on either side of the optimum of 60°-64° F. to
provide desirable physiological stimuli, with only short and
irregular periods when conditions are really harmful. The
Russian plain beyond the Pripet Marshes is, on the other hand,
subject to painful extremes which seriously limit man's efficiency
in both winter and summer, and leave him but short periods in
spring and autumn for effective freshness and enterprise. In
consequence of this, Western Europe, or we may call it
Europe-of-the-Sea, shows continuity of activity through the changing
seasons, a continuity of thought and criticism which has exercised
a powerful influence on government and social order, while the
sea, as above suggested, has promoted contacts and kept things
moving. In Europe-of-the-Sea, at least where we do not get the
ill effects of alien domination above mentioned, we thus find that,
between the warrior leaders and the labourers, the traders and
professional people or middle class have developed power and
have acted as a cement for society on the one hand, and as organizers
for its maintenance on the other. Spain (with its long struggle
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between Christianity and Islam), Ireland (under English domination),
the Balkans (under one dominator after another and finally
under the Turk), all show historic inhibitions which have delayed
and hampered the healthy development of a society free to work
for that fuller realization of the good life. Elsewhere it is
noteworthy that there have been many attempts, some successful for
a time and all valuable, to secure real participation by the people
in their problems of social organization, real liberation from the
inhibitions involved in government by a superposed class or
group. In spite of the difficulties of the present generation,
the tendency is for these attempts to gain in power and scope,
and to overstep the artificial boundaries of nation and state which
are becoming a bed of Procrustes for the peoples of Europe.
On the other hand, east of the Pripet Marshes the long periods
of trying climate, coming regularly in winter and in summer,
limit, for the folk who have to live unprotected lives,
the possibilities
of the effective vigilance and criticism whereby the western
European organizations are kept going. There is actual pressing
need of a routine of tradition on which to fall back in these times
of stress. There is also the fear of the grassland tribes tending
to keep the people organized on a traditional basis as war leaders
and labourers, while the distance from the sea diminishes trade
and the middle class, and helps to maintain localism, which in
its turn strengthens routine. There we thus find typically a
middle class largely immigrant and alien to the military and
labouring classes, and this further complicates the problems of
social development and organization.
Europe, east and west, thus shows striking contrasts which have
fateful consequences; there are also contrasts of importance
between north and south. The latitude of most of Europe is such
that the sun's rays strike the soil too obliquely to act chemically
upon it with sufficient rapidity to decompose fresh material for
plant growth as fast as plants use it up. In the Mediterranean
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region this is hardly the case, but in several parts the soil
possibilities are very indifferent, so that our contrast is more between
Europe and the Tropics than between north and south in Europe,
though it is a valuable clue to many of the differences between
the German plain and the Paris basin. Broadly we may say that
our latitude has made a really self-dependent agriculture almost
an impossibility for Europe, and we note in illustration that
Bohemia is suffering sadly because foreign fertilizers could not be
imported in 1914-18. The problem of diminishing fertility has
made itself insistent again and again in European life, and has
proved a goad to drive men to agricultural experiment on the
one hand and to trade as a supplementary source of wealth on
the other. The contrast between Europe and many parts of
China in this respect is a profitable study, if we do not exaggerate,
as is so often done, the supposed stagnation of the Orient.
From trade the men of Europe have been lured on into large-scale
industry with the application of coal, oil, water, and sundry
other forms of power in immense amounts. The opportunities
for domination and consequently exploitation which this
has brought are working out fatefully for us all in many varieties
of hurtful contacts, needing humanization most urgently if the
situation is to be saved for our children.
The process of change, we realize, has progressed faster and
farther in the west than in the east of Europe, which goes forward
against the pressure of severe inhibitions that make its problems
differ from our own. At times we are content to look down upon
the wild ways of East and South-east Europe, forgetting that in
many respects, such as the exposure of severed heads recently
commented upon as happening in the Balkans, we were not long
ago at least as wild as they seem to be now. But we must also
guard against the thought that they are merely some steps behind
us on the path we all are treading; that concept of human evolution
as a procession along a path is a wrong and very misleading one.
{9}
We must reach the broader view which thinks of East Europe
not as undeveloped West, but as diverse.
In our changeful continent we may thus follow out one of the
most varied and perilous of the stories of men, a story of
hardly-won triumph over serious obstacles, triumph maintained for
a while in the face of serious threats that never ceased. It is
a story that leads us to the appreciation of Europe's precarious
position of industrial and administrative leadership, with its
implications of conflict and unsettlement that make our Chinese
friends think of us as the White Peril.
We may study our physical racial origins and see how every
modern European people has come to be composed of moderately
diverse elements, probably attaining some of their present
characteristics during the marked changes of climate and opportunity
accompanying the retreat of the glaciers at the close of the great
Ice Age of Europe, and developing them further with changes
of location and opportunity in subsequent times. We may see,
as it were afar off, facts that will be clearer to the scientific men
of fifty years hence, facts of the Mendelian inheritance of physical
characters, leading, on the one hand, to the maintenance of types
very little changed even through thousands of years, and on the
other to the combination of diverse heritages from many sources,
making an individual in many cases a mosaic of characteristics
from different ancestral types.
We may study the languages and religions of European peoples
and see that in the days before writing and markets became
features of local life, languages changed, albeit slowly, spreading
in waves of civilization, with only a subordinate relation to the
waves of racial type. And if languages spread in waves of
civilization, this has been the case still more in matters of religion,
though folk tradition has a remarkable power of resurgence that
leads to the local adaptation of religious movements time after
time.
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We may finally study economic activities and follow their
influence in waves, the power and direction of which are affected
by racial facts because temperament is no doubt related to physical
type, but are more governed by language distributions because
difference of language makes such a bar to economic intercourse,
at least in early stages. In later stages, with the utilization of
coal and steam the international web is woven more closely and
more subtly, and this has sadly aggravated the catastrophe due
to its rupture by the clumsiness of politicians in the years leading
on to 1914.
And all through the process of evolution of races, of language
and religion and of industry, we may follow the social life of the
European peoples and the development of its organization and
its expression in response to those processes of evolution. We
must see at the same time how it both affects and reflects
alterations which are always occurring in the European environment
through changes of climate, rising and sinking of the land, clearing
of forests and draining of swamps by mankind, development of
communications, and other results of the labour of man.
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1
'_Races_'
Human diversities are deep enough to make the idea of
'European Man' a mere abstraction; we need to think rather
of 'European Men' and to study with that broad fact always
in mind, realizing that Russians and ourselves are not to be thought
of as at different steps on the same ladder, and that the unity
which has undoubtedly been trying to grow up in Europe must
be a unity-in-diversity with an accompanying growth of education
in toleration and breadth of appreciation.
As physical racial facts may be claimed to be to a large extent
very old, it will be well to begin our survey with them, but for
our present purposes it is permissible to neglect the scattered
facts thus far ascertained about the European men of the days
before the close of the last major phase (Würmian phase) of the
Ice Age. From the period of climatic improvement (Aurignacian)
next succeeding, we have several human skeletons that demonstrate
the presence already at that early time of diverse physical types.
One type, known from two skeletons at Grimaldi (lower
Aurignacian), as well as from later remains, shows features in the
mouth and nose as well as in the very long and high skull which
relate it to types that have become specialized as Negroids of
various kinds in Africa, but need not have had marked negroid
characters in the first instance. Another type also possessed of
a very long and high-ridged skull is known from several skeletons
(Brunn, Brux, Combe Capelle, &c.), of which that from Brunn
is the best known. There can be little doubt that this type
with its strong brows, deep-set low eyes, cheek-bones projecting
at the sides, broad nose, projecting upper jaw and dark colouring
{12}
is an element in the modern population of remote spots in several
parts of the maritime fringe of Europe to-day, and was an important
element (whatever its colouring then) among the people of the
'Kurgan' burials so numerous along the borders of the South
Russian steppe. Nor can we any longer doubt that this type,
modified in the course of time, has been an important element
in the evolution of modern European breeds. A third type
remains mysterious; it is that represented by the skeleton of an
old man at Cro-Magnon with tall stature and a fairly long head,
which, however, was not very high or ridged. The nose was
narrower, but the eyes were low and the jaws and cheek-bones very
strong. The matter has been confused by the frequent application
of the term 'Cro-Magnon Type' to all the above indiscriminately,
mainly on the ground of long-headedness, and this
makes it difficult at times to ascertain what writers really mean
when they speak of survivals of the Cro-Magnon type in modern
populations. There is, however, no doubt from Collignon's
careful descriptions that both the Cro-Magnon and the Combe
Capelle types survive in the Dordogne district of Central France,
and it seems likely that the former as well as the latter also
survives at least in the north of the Iberian peninsula.
However this may be, it seems clear that the peoples of
Europe in the Aurignacian and the next following ages (Solutrean
and Magdalenian) were long-headed, with varied accompanying
characters which may still be seen nowadays. Those were ages
of intermittent retreat of the Ice Sheets which had for ages
previously made Europe so inhospitable to mankind, but at the
end of the Magdalenian Age the snow line definitively crept up
the mountain sides to something like its present level, and the
mountain regions were made available for a beginning of human
occupation. The coming of broad-headed men, probably from
Asia Minor, then less divided from Europe, is characteristic of
this period of change, and the mountain axis of Europe has ever
{13}
since been a region of broad-headed men, separating provinces of
long-headed men to the north around the Baltic and (for a time) in
Russia, and to the south around the western Mediterranean, then
becoming increasingly cut off from tropical Africa by the
supervention of desert conditions, in place of grassland, in what we
now call the Sahara.
The long-headed men around the Baltic and in early prehistoric
Russia became, in course of time, what is called the Nordic
race, and those around the western Mediterranean, with allied
elements in the Aegean Isles, the Mediterranean race. In both
cases they include survivors of the Combe Capelle type, and in
the latter at least some of the Grimaldi type as well, and they are
both still long-headed, though in both there has been a general,
if slight, rounding of the head, so that it is less long and narrow
than it was in early times. In the cool and cloudy north, with
long continuance of the open-air life, sex maturity has come late,
growth has been long continued, muscularity and the accompanying
roughness of bone have been maintained and even developed,
the nose has grown long and narrow, and with it the face has
lengthened, the colouring has become fair. In the sunny south
the settled life is of old standing, and sex maturity comes early.
Growth is not so long continued, muscularity is less developed,
and the tendency is towards smoothness of bone, the nose and
face are moderate, the colouring is rather dark.
The provinces of Nordic and Mediterranean races are widely
separated by the mountain zone in Central Europe, but in the
west they grade into one another, and here the old long-headed
type has become neither purely Nordic nor purely Mediterranean.
Especially in Britain, of old a refuge of the past off the shores of
Europe, Aurignacian types have persisted markedly, and this is
still more noteworthy in Ireland. The mass of the population of
our islands is long-headed and intermediate in character between
the two differentiated races, tall, gaunt, and dark in parts of
{14}
the Scottish Highlands and North Wales, short and almost
Mediterranean in parts of South Wales and Ireland, and 'betwixt
and between' almost everywhere. Probably almost every hundred,
not to say every parish, of the British Isles has examples of these
Intermediate Types, as well, of course, as of Nordics due to
immigrations from Scandinavia and the Baltic.
The broad-heads of the mountain axis of Central Europe are
technically called the Alpine race. They are distinguished by
a thick-set appearance, rather straight brown or chestnut hair,
grey to brown eyes, often a dry whitish skin, a short face, a moderate
nose, sometimes pointing out rather markedly. In the Illyrian
Alps and parts of the Carpathians, and stretching from the latter,
on the south side of the Pripet Marshes away into Muscovy, this
stock is often tall and dark. In the Swiss and French Alps it is
rather short and stocky. In the Balkan Peninsula it is often
characterized by a flattening of the back of the very high and
short head; in the west the tendency is rather towards general
rounding of the head.
It is interesting to notice from the above that the main
facts of distribution of race type in Europe probably date from the
beginning of the Neolithic Age, the period of ultimate recession
of the great Ice Sheets. In the subsequent ages there has probably
been modification of the race types to some extent, but the main
facts of distribution of human stocks in Europe became settled in
that early time.
Some of the modifications of this scheme must be noticed briefly.
The old long-headed stocks of the Steppe border in South Russia
probably still form elements of the mixed Cossack populations, but
the spreads of broad-heads both from the Carpathian forelands
and from the Asiatic steppe have altered the average type a good
deal. Asiatic broad-heads with the big cheek-bones and Tungus
(often called Mongol) eyes have also long occupied the Arctic
border of Russia, as Lapps, Samoyedes, &c., and, mixed with
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Nordics, they form the Finn populations. Their features have
at times been said to be distinguishable right down the east side
of the Baltic into East Prussia in individuals here and there;
one certainly finds them now and again in Gothlanders and even
in Swedes. The net result is that the long-headed type is not
a dominant element in Russia, save perhaps in parts of the one
time Baltic provinces, that is in the new Baltic States.
The line along which the hill masses of Central Europe grade
down into the European plain that stretches from Ypres to the
Urals is marked out in many ways in European life. Not far
from it is the main line of European coalfields, a most momentous
factor for modern times. It is a line of exchange towns of ancient
renown. Near it is a belt of loess, that is of loose wind-blown
material laid there in the interglacial phases of the Ice Age, so
fine grained that it does not encourage and has never encouraged
tree growth, though it is valuable for cultivation. The loess belt,
because of its freedom from forest, was naturally of importance
as a line of movement of early man as well as a line of early
settlement, and it lay between the province of the long-heads (Nordics)
and that of the broad-heads (Alpines). All along here are found
and have long been found breeds originating from intimate
inter-mixture of Nordic and Alpine stocks.
The general fact seems to be that the head form is derived from
the Alpine, and so is broad, but the colouring is more usually
inherited from the other side, and so is generally fair. There are
many varieties with distinctive facial and other features, but the
broad fact is that the southern zone of the European plain, where
the two stocks have had much fractionated contact (contacts of
small groups) in little clearings of the forests that grew in Neolithic
times, is a region of Alpine-Nordic stocks which have spread to
Britain and through the Danube gaps towards the Balkans as well
as in many other directions.
The amount of intermixture and intermediacy on the south
{16}
side of the mountain axis is less marked, for here there were not
the same occasions for mingling of small groups. The
broad-headed stocks have, however, spread downhill, and occupy a
great deal of North Italy. They are of less consequence in the
Iberian Peninsula; the Balkan Peninsula is and probably has been
their home from early times. A broad-headed stock with markedly
dark colouring and frequently massive build is found on coastal
patches here and there along the Mediterranean shores and on
the coasts of Western Europe. It occurs as an important
percentage in many coastal communities, and is almost certainly
composed of survivors of prospectors and traders of the dawn of
the Bronze Age and some later periods.
These few references must suffice to illustrate the kind of
modification which the early and fundamental racial distribution
has undergone; it may be condensed into the statement that
broad-headedness has on the whole spread downhill, and has
increasingly limited long-headedness to the fringes of Europe.
It has done this not so much by sheer replacement of population
as through its biological advantage of dominance over long-headedness
in many cases of mixture. There has, however, been a definite
spread of people of broad-headed type into the Russian plain,
as well as many movements of peoples, to some of which we get
references in the early chapters of written history.
2
_Language Families--Introductory_
The languages of the European peoples are to a large extent
grouped into Celtic, Romance, Teutonic, and Slavonic families,
all of which have sufficiently similar features to be classed together
with Sanskrit as Indo-European or, to use a much-disputed term,
Aryan. Asiatic immigrants into Europe both in Arctic regions
{17}
and on the steppes of South Russia have brought in Asiatic
languages which have managed to persist as far west as Lapland,
Finland, Esthonia, and Hungary, but they are not sufficient to
affect the general statement.
The prior home of the Indo-European languages has been
discussed almost _ad nauseam_, and it is still so unsettled a question
as to make it unprofitable to discuss afresh whether that home
was on the Asiatic steppe, in the mountain and plateau country
from Asia Minor to the Hindu Kush, on the grassland borders of
South Russia, or somewhere near the Baltic.
It would at any rate seem that these languages did not originate
in the Mediterranean, and that the languages of that region in
pre-classical times were of other affinities. Minoan, Etruscan, &c.,
are still undeciphered. If then the classical languages came into
that region from outside, the probabilities are that they came in
from the north, where are found related languages which have
certainly not come from the Mediterranean.
The only language which is of older date in Western Europe
than those of the Indo-European family is Basque, still spoken in
and near the western Pyrenees. It is a mistake, however, to speak
of a Basque race, for the physical types to north and south of the
Pyrenees are predominantly broader and longer headed respectively.
Educated people in Basque country speak either French or
Spanish in addition to the mother tongue, and the Basque language
has thus taken up many words from its neighbours; it has very
little literature and has contributed extremely little, so far as is
known, to French and Spanish. Its affinities are quite unknown,
though a kinship with the Bronze Age languages of the Mediterranean
is suspected, and suggestions of relations to languages of
North Africa have been made.
Of the Indo-European languages it seems to be generally agreed
that Lithuanian is the most primitive surviving in Europe, and
may be the most primitive of all.
{18}
This might be held to imply that Lithuania is near the ancient
home of these languages, but it is more probable that old forms
survive here because it is a forest country shut off from the great
highways of human movement by the immense Pripet swamps
to the south of it. It is as likely a place for a 'refuge of the past'
as any spot in Europe. Lettish is related to Lithuanian, but the
Letts have long been active and commercial, and their language
has shed archaisms and borrowed a good deal from Slavonic
tongues. Prussian is now quite extinct. Meillet describes this
little group as Baltic; and it is related to the Slavonic family.
Other writers give the stricter name of Lettic. The Albanian
dialects in the Illyrian Alps are another ancient survival with
unknown but doubtless Indo-European affinities, and also a
considerable Romance element.
Albanian and Letto-Lithuanian apart, the four great families
of Indo-European language, Classical and Romance, Celtic,
Teutonic, and Slavonic, must have become distinct before the
days of the Roman Empire, and must already at that time have
developed diverse forms in their various areas. The Classical
languages seem to have reached Greece and Italy from the north;
how and when we shall not attempt to speculate. The Celtic
languages now spoken by the varied and mixed racial stocks on
the westernmost fringe of France, Britain, and Ireland, include
two groups, one of which, in its use of the _q_ sound and in other
features, is held to be fairly close to the root language of Latin,
while the other often uses _p_ instead of _q_.
The q-Celtic languages spoken in parts of Ireland, Isle of Man,
and the Highlands of Scotland are usually supposed by archaeologists
to have spread westward from Central Europe with the
men of the leaf-shaped (bronze) sword about 1000 B.C. The
view of Zimmer and Kuno Meyer that the q languages reached
Ireland via France without touching Britain is now held to
be less probable. The p-Celtic languages are almost universally
{19}
associated with the invaders of Britain in the pre-Roman Iron
Age (the La Tene period). That these men occupied south-east
Britain to a considerable extent there can be no doubt, and it is
highly probable that their physical type is far more characteristic
of the English plain to-day than of any part of Wales, save probably
the Severn valley. Yet it is Wales that talks the p-Celtic language,
which may have reached it in Roman times, while the Severn valley
and the English plain have taken to English speech. Thus we see
how inadvisable it is to speak of language-groups as race-groups.
The Baltic or Lettic and the Celtic languages are in essentials
survivals of antiquity, of great interest and value as preserving
elements which would otherwise have been lost by process of
time, but of uncertain future, for no man can say to what extent
they are likely to be spoken a few centuries hence. It is otherwise
with the Romance, Teutonic, and Slavonic families of languages;
they are the definite possessions of the peoples of various regions
for centuries to come, and it will be well for us to try to realize how
this has come to pass.
Whatever their origins, the Classical tongues spread
southward into the Mediterranean. Greek was propagated far and
wide by trade and by the movements of which Alexander's march
to India was a sign as well as a factor. Rome gathered up into
itself the general heritage of antiquity for better and for worse,
and associated it with the Latin language, which became a lingua
franca in some sort within the bounds of the Roman dominion,
so that it influenced deeply not only the language of Gaul but also
that of Britain (the p-Celtic language). The power of Latin
was so great that only insensibly did the more modern languages,
Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Provençal, and French,
arise out of it, leaving ancient forms like Walloon, Romansch,
Ladin, and Frioul in remoter spots. Their rise was an event of
the Middle Ages, though the habit of using Latin for scholarly
purposes persisted far longer. In earlier times languages evidently
{20}
were more fluid. Walloon is practically French with Latin and
Celtic elements rather stronger than they are in Parisian, and we
have little doubt of the Latinization and subsequent Gallicization
of a previously Celtic-speaking people. But since the Middle
Ages language frontiers have hardly moved.
This fixation of language has several factors.
In the first place, while villagers beginning to conquer a forest
may be feeble and isolated, and liable to rapid change of domination
and of culture relations, the process of closer settlement
brings them into relation with one another, at any rate over
small areas, and gives language a much greater hold on a larger
number of people.
In the second place, closer settlement generally implies the
evolution of markets, substituted in some cases for the seasonal
fairs that were sufficient in times of smaller needs and sparser
population. And the market with its settled population of
tradesfolk and lawyers makes a language centre. With this goes also
some development of communications, or at least of their use,
and the possibility of the rise of language beyond mere localism.
The crusaders, pilgrims, students, and minstrels of the Middle
Ages need to be in the student's mind in this connexion.
In the third place, the development of the art of writing and
its increased use are great factors of language fixation, and
associated with this is the development of a settled legal system.
We should have these points in mind in trying to understand
the evolution of the modern distribution of the languages belonging
to the three great families, an evolution which has occurred
to a large extent since the fall of the Roman Empire.
{21}
3
_The Peoples of Romance Speech_
Rome may be said to have gathered up the heritages of antiquity
and to have passed them on to that part of Europe which the
Empire administered, profoundly influencing for a time at least
the intimate life, and therefore the language, of the people in all
parts in which it found people not as yet accustomed to writing.
In the Aegean, Greek was old established, and intercourse had
developed a unified language out of the variants and dialects of
earlier times; hence Latin did not impose itself, and a modified
Greek has persisted down to modern times, with the serious limitation
that the written language is very different from the conversational
one, and that therefore the vitality of literature is much
reduced, and the life of the people held back thereby.
It has often been noticed that whereas Latin spread far and
wide from Rome to Portugal, the Rhine and Rumania, Greek
did not spread, or at least did not maintain the majority of its
temporary spreads, from the Aegean.
The reasons for this are doubtless numerous, but among them
one may note that the spread from the Aegean could hardly be
into regions just being opened up for agricultural settlement, and
that the Latin spread was associated with the spread of a great
scheme of communications and of legal organization. Again, one
should realize the localism which was so deep-seated in Greek
feeling, and contrast it with the famous idea of 'Civis Romanus'.
In accord with this we naturally find that the Eastern Church
translated the sacred books into the Slav languages, whereas the
Western Church has insisted on Latin in a way that has been full
of the most momentous consequences for modern Europe. We
must also remember the progressive hemming in of the Greek
region by Islam at the time when languages were growing out of
{22}
Latin in the west, so that the Greek base had nothing like the
expansive power of the Latin one.
Facts of physical geography had a good deal to do with the rise
of the Romance languages from Latin. The Empire reached to
the Danube and Rhine and over the English plain. It had some
hold over Wales, and for a time over South Scotland, but none
over the regions where Celtic has persisted in Gaelic form. It is
abundantly proved that the hold of Rome over Britain was less
close than that over Gaul, where much Romanization of the
leader classes occurred, and the Romanized urban life was fixed
for all later time in the south. Fragments of evidence from
Silchester and elsewhere go to show that Latin was widely used in
urban life, and so its vocabulary penetrated the language of the
pagani or peasantry, and Welsh to this day retains many traces
of this contact with Latin. But a country with marked contrast
of speech between peasant and citizen is linguistically weak, and
the Anglo-Saxons were thus helped to spread their language
when they arrived after the Romans lost their grip and many
Romano-British leaders had emigrated to Brittany. Romance
languages do not now reach the banks of the Rhine anywhere,
though they approach them fairly closely at the gate of Belfort,
that approach to the Rhine where southern influences would
spread most powerfully. Wallony, as a dissected plateau, rather
remote and backward until the coal period, has retained its
Romance speech, and has increasingly assimilated it to modern
French. Lorraine, separated from the Rhine basin by the forested
heights of Hunsrück and Hardt, has also remained stubbornly
French, but German has spread up the Rhine tributaries through
North Switzerland, up the Ill basin, which is now Alsace, up the
Moselle gorge between Hunsrück and Eifel, so that Trier (Augusta
Trevirorum, Treves) is now German, up the tributaries of the
lower Moselle, so that the peasantry of Luxembourg, the people
of the Eifel and of the Saar basin, are largely or even mainly
{23}
German speaking, and along the lowland to Flanders, which
maintains Low German dialects, collectively called Flemish. The
Flemish plain and the Walloon plateau were long separated by
the forests of Hainaut and Brabant, but the clearing of those
forests in the Middle Ages, mainly by people spreading down
from the plateau, extended the area of Gallic speech and reduced
the chances of development of a real linguistic unity in the
Flemish fringe. Flanders in consequence suffers from disparity
of dialects, and French has been widely used as a language of
civilization. With the rise of the nationalist sentiment (see p. 98)
in modern times, a severe reaction against the dominance of
French has set in, and now threatens the very existence of the
Belgian kingdom. A part of the département du Nord, in France,
speaks Flemish, but French has long been gaining ground slightly
on Flemish in France and probably in Belgium too, in spite of
a modern spread of Flemish workpeople into the French
speaking area.
East of Switzerland the great Alpine barrier between the Roman
bank of the Danube and the real Latin areas brought it to
pass that the pagani near the Danube were not fully Romanized,
and made the whole region fall linguistically to the invading
languages, German and Magyar, but a small island of Ladin,
a collective name for several ancient dialects, still persists around
Cortina and in the upper Grodenthal. The allied Frioul (with
more Italian admixture) is spoken in eastern Venetia, and
Romansch, also related, in the south of Grisons, East Switzerland.
The main boundary between Romance and Germanic is, as usual,
not along a main watershed. The watershed, which is pierced by
the Brenner Pass, has German spoken on both sides, and the
agency town on its south side (Bozen) is still German in language,
though strategic considerations have made the victors move the
new bounds of Italy right up to the Brenner.
A curious result of language changes is observable in Rumania.
{24}
The Roman frontier province of Dacia was strongly occupied for
a time (A.D. 107-255), and the Low-Latin element must have had
a marked cultural superiority over the indigenous migratory
shepherds. They imposed their language, and the Transylvanian
mountains have assisted its survival ever since, but it has survived
only thanks to large borrowings which have made its vocabulary
three-fifths Slav. In spite of military pressure from time to time,
the people of this hill knot have followed the usual rule for people
so situated, and have spread downhill, giving an area of modified
Romance language from the Dniester almost to the Tisa (Theiss)
and from Bukovina to the Balkan Danube. This area was,
however, seriously isolated from the other Romance regions after
A.D. 270, and it naturally received Christianity from Constantinople,
so that it has come to be distinct (p. 79) religiously from
the other areas of Romance speech, which are the stronghold of
the Roman Catholic Church.
The large Slav element in Rumanian well illustrates the general
principle that vocabulary is more easily changed than syntax,
a principle one may follow along the Flemish border, where
Flemish idiom is maintained with French words, or along the
Welsh border, where the form of sentence is so often Welsh
though the words be English.
Speaking generally we see that there has been on the whole
a certain recession of Latin from the old boundaries of the Roman
Empire, but that, this apart, that Empire exercised a most potent
influence on the speech of its European citizens. The recession
was due to mass invasions which, however, as a general rule,
penetrated much farther into the Roman domain than one would
judge from linguistic evidence alone; in other words, the Latin
influence has surged up again, and indeed in one sense those
repeated resurgences of Latin feeling have been a main feature
of European life in the last twelve or fourteen centuries, while
the swaying of the power of Latin and non-Latin elements has
{25}
been one of the chief causes of war and disunion on the Continent.
We may now glance at a few aspects of this swaying of boundaries
which are germane to the object of this little book.
The Roman Empire in Gaul seems to have been divisible into
belts, the southern of which, with its dry and sunny summer,
became deeply Romanized in city and country, language and
tradition, a zone in which the cities were the residences of all
who had sufficient wealth. The middle one, in the main the
Paris basin, had fewer cities, but the country was Romanized in
language at least. The northern one near the Rhine had
strong Roman cities, especially frontier-towns along the river,
but the country does not seem to have been Romanized at all
deeply.
The Franks seem to have been bodies of adventurers seeking
new homes, the surplus population of Teutonic regions in what
is now north-western Germany. They were not trained to city
life, and though the strong frontier-cities survived their passage,
the cities of the Paris basin seem to have weakened under their
onset, albeit the invaders were not able to break the continuity
of civic life in the south. The Paris basin thus became provided
with a rural Frankish landed aristocracy around which later on
there developed the localism which is called the feudal system.
As is the way of aristocracies the rude Franks adopted and modified
the Romanized language of the Gauls, making the _langue d'oïl_
the mother of modern French. In the south, older forms persisted
less altered as the dialects of the _langue d'oc_.
Though in more modern times French has more or less
triumphed in the south, two variants of the old languages persist
and have acquired some literary strength; they are Provençal, in
use in Provence, east of the lower Rhone, and Catalan, in use in
Catalonia, and to some extent in Roussillon, modified by contact
with Spanish. Needless to say the _patois_ of the peasantry of
southern France retains many traces of the _langue d'oc_, and the
{26}
boundary between the _langue d'oc_ and _langue d'oïl_ has been traced
by French scholars. A study of that boundary shows that the
_langue d'oïl_ penetrated through the gate of Poitou between the
Central Plateau and the barren lands of La Gatine, and established
its hold in the basin of the Charente, and almost as far as
the gates of Bordeaux. Farther east the lower slopes of the
Central Plateau form its effective boundary; the export of men
and women downhill from the plateau being apparently sufficient
to restrain the general tendency to uphill spread of the language
of the plain. In the Rhone valley the boundary of the _langue d'oc_
bends southwards, so that Lyons belongs to the _langue d'oïl_, and
the whole Isère region is intermediate between north and south.
The boundary near the Rhone is at the narrowing of the river
valley near Valence. The narrow, formerly forested, section of
the Rhone valley between Valence and Donzère has been a barrier
in several ways; Mr. Peake has shown that it divided a Burgundian
from a southern culture in the earlier phases of the Bronze Age.
It was a factor in the southern boundary of the Burgundian
kingdom of Theodoric's time (_c._ A.D. 520), in the boundaries
of the Comté de Provence and the Comté du Valentinois, and so
on. Donzère is approximately the northern limit of the olive,
and the Isère basin has forests that are distinctly non-Mediterranean
on its great slopes. As one journeys from the Isère region
to that of Drôme and Durance one finds the aspect of the country
changing from that of the forest of summer green to that of
bare rock masses and a marked tendency to summer brown.
[Illustration: Central France]
That this boundary is not an isolated phenomenon is well seen
by comparing it with the boundary between the France which
reintroduced the Roman law (_Droit Écrit_) early in the Middle
Ages and the France which preferred to go on judging by customary
law (_Droit Coutumier_). This boundary and that of language
intertwine, but the influence of big cities as legal centres accounts
for some differences. The legal boundary naturally keeps some
{28}
distance north of the linguistic one near the great southern city
of Bordeaux. On the other hand, the influence of valley cities
like Clermont-Ferrand helped the northern law to penetrate up
the slopes of the Central Plateau, so that the legal boundary is
here the more southerly. Lyons, a southern city in so many
ways, pushed the legal boundary far to the north of the linguistic
one in the Rhone-Saone basin. The boundary line of old-time
(pre-1789) Customs Dues, the boundaries of the various Salt
Dues (_Gabelles_), of the Governments in existence in 1789, of
the general prevalence of the Gothic style in architecture, of
the general prevalence of (north) steep-roofed and (south)
flat-roofed houses respectively and so on, are all related to the above
lines, and can be followed in some detail to work out interesting
divergences. The net result of a study of these lines is to show
that the French people, apart from the German borderland,
consist of two cultural elements, a southern with Roman survivals
in cities, language, &c., and a more northern one which is much
less Roman. Between them is an intermediate area with mixed
allegiance. The study of such a set of boundaries can be given
a special value, for it shows us that the linear boundary, however
necessary it may be under our outworn system of aggressive states
in politics, is an artificiality when applied to the study of peoples.
Boundaries are zones, not lines, zones of intermediacy which
with better political organization might become interpreters
rather than causes of conflict as they have been in the past.
In order to understand the German borderlands better it would
be well to use similar methods in studying them, though here
we have difficulties due to political prejudice. We have seen
that in the Paris basin the rural Franks adopted in modified form
the Romanized language of the Gauls, and with this came in the
influence of the Roman Church, the heir of the imperial tradition,
not only here, but also along the old frontier of the Rhine-Danube.
Under this influence civic life grew afresh, and the towns of the
{29}
Paris basin with their market-places dominated by the cathedral
are a most notable feature. As these towns grew, the enlargement
of the churches under the influence of the great wave of mediaeval
enthusiasm led to the adoption of what is called the Ogival or
Gothic style of building, in the Ile-de-France, and soon in the
Paris basin generally, as a substitute for a Romanesque style
which had been tending to change under pressure of Eastern
(Byzantine-Lombardic) influences. With the details of
architecture we are not primarily concerned, but the spread of the
Gothic over the Paris basin, its failure to oust the Romanesque
in the south, its penetration along the Route de S. Jacques
(Pilgrim Road to Compostella) to Bordeaux, Bayonne, Burgos,
and Léon, its later spread through the Flemish lowland and also
across the hills to Metz, Strasbourg, and Basle, are a useful indication
of the spread of Gallic feeling. In the Rhine region it spread
with difficulty, and the Romanesque is highly characteristic here;
beyond the Rhine it spread only with much modification.
The contrasts between the boundary of the fully French Gothic
and the intertwined boundary of French speech, over against
German, are like the contrasts above noted between south and
north in France, and one might further study the growth of
the historic kingdom of France, the lines of Customs Dues,
Gabelles, and so on, as well as facts about the occurrence and
relative importance of Protestantism in various parts. All would
show that between the Paris basin and the Rhine is a zone of
people with mixed allegiances, and that, however convenient
language may be as a distinctive mark, it by no means gives
a full idea of the complexity of the case.
Flanders is Low German in speech, but profoundly affected by
France in many ways, as its architecture suggests; its zealous
Catholicism is a marked feature. Wallony is Celto-Romano-Gallic
in foundation, marvellously altered by modern industrialism.
Luxembourg is indefinitely debatable, Lorraine mainly French,
{30}
Alsace Alemannic (Old High German) in speech, but in other
respects deeply affected by France.
The study of the zone behind the old Roman frontier of the
Danube could be worked out on somewhat similar lines, but with
less profit, owing to complications connected with the spread of
Asiatic peoples and armies in subsequent times.