IT is true that the Norman Conquest found a certain kind of feudality in
existence in England—a feudality which was developed from the customs of
the Teutonic tribes with no admixture of Roman law; and also that even
before the Conquest this country was slowly beginning to be mixed up with
the affairs of the Continent of Europe, and that not only with the
kindred nations of Scandinavia, but with the Romanized countries also.
But the Conquest of Duke William did introduce the complete Feudal system
into the country; and it also connected it by strong bonds to the
Romanized countries, and yet by so doing laid the first foundations of
national feeling in England. The English felt their kinship with the
Norsemen or the Danes, and did not suffer from their conquests when they
had become complete, and when, consequently, mere immediate violence had
disappeared from them; their feeling was tribal rather than national; but
they could have no sense of tribal unity with the varied populations of
the provinces which mere dynastical events had strung together into the
dominion, the manor, one may say, of the foreign princes of Normandy and
Anjou; and, as the kings who ruled them gradually got pushed out of their
French possessions, England began to struggle against the domination of
men felt to be foreigners, and so gradually became conscious of her
separate nationality, though still only in a fashion, as the manor of an
_English_ lord.
It is beyond the scope of this piece to give anything like a connected
story, even of the slightest, of the course of events between the
conquest of Duke William and the fully developed mediæval period of the
fourteenth century, which is the England that I have before my eyes as
Mediæval or Feudal. That period of the fourteenth century united the
developments of the elements which had been stirring in Europe since the
final fall of the Roman Empire, and England shared in the general feeling
and spirit of the age, although, from its position, the course of its
history, and to a certain extent the lives of its people, were different.
It is to this period, therefore, that I wish in the long run to call your
attention, and I will only say so much about the earlier period as may be
necessary to explain how the people of England got into the position in
which they were found by the Statute of Labourers enacted by Edward III.,
and the Peasants’ Rebellion in the time of his grandson and successor,
Richard II.
Undoubtedly, then, the Norman Conquest made a complete break in the
continuity of the history of England. When the Londoners after the
Battle of Hastings accepted Duke William for their king, no doubt they
thought of him as occupying much the same position as that of the newly
slain Harold; or at any rate they looked on him as being such a king of
England as Knut the Dane, who had also conquered the country; and
probably William himself thought no otherwise; but the event was quite
different; for on the one hand, not only was he a man of strong
character, able, masterful, and a great soldier in the modern sense of
the word, but he had at his back his wealthy dukedom of Normandy, which
he had himself reduced to obedience and organized; and, on the other
hand, England lay before him, unorganized, yet stubbornly rebellious to
him; its very disorganization and want of a centre making it more
difficult to deal with by merely overrunning it with an army levied for
that purpose, and backed by a body of house-carles or guards, which would
have been the method of a Scandinavian or native king in dealing with his
rebellious subjects. Duke William’s necessities and instincts combined
led him into a very different course of action, which determined the
future destiny of the country. What he did was to quarter upon England
an army of feudal vassals drawn from his obedient dukedom, and to hand
over to them the lordship of the land of England in return for their
military service to him, the suzerain of them all. Thenceforward, it was
under the rule of these foreign landlords that the people of England had
to develop.
The development of the country as a Teutonic people was checked and
turned aside by this event. Duke William brought, in fact, his Normandy
into England, which was thereby changed from a Teutonic people (Old-Norse
theod), with the tribal customary law still in use among them, into a
province of Romanized Feudal Europe, a piece of France, in short; and
though in time she did grow into another England again, she missed for
ever in her laws, and still more in her language and her literature, the
chance of developing into a great homogeneous Teutonic people infused
usefully with a mixture of Celtic blood.
However, this step which Duke William was forced to take further
influenced the future of the country by creating the great order of the
Baronage, and the history of the early period of England is pretty much
that of the struggle of the king with the Baronage and the Church. For
William fixed the type of the successful English mediæval king, of whom
Henry II. and Edward I. were the most notable examples afterwards. It
was, in fact, with him that the struggle towards monarchical bureaucracy
began, which was checked by the barons, who extorted Magna Charta from
King John, and afterwards by the revolt headed by Simon de Montfort in
Henry III.’s reign; was carried on vigorously by Edward I., and finally
successfully finished by Henry VII. after the long faction-fight of the
Wars of the Roses had weakened the feudal lords so much that they could
no longer assert themselves against the monarchy.
As to the other political struggle of the Middle Ages, the contest
between the Crown and the Church, two things are to be noted; first, that
at least in the earlier period the Church was on the popular side.
Thomas Beckett was canonized, it is true, formally and by regular decree;
but his memory was held so dear by the people that he would probably have
been canonized informally by them if the holy seat at Rome had refused to
do so. The second thing to be noted about the dispute is this, that it
was no contest of principle. According to the mediæval theory of life
and religion, the Church and the State were one in essence, and but
separate manifestations of the Kingdom of God upon earth, which was part
of the Kingdom of God in heaven. The king was an officer of that realm
and a liegeman of God. The doctor of laws and the doctor of physic
partook in a degree of the priestly character. On the other hand, the
Church was not withdrawn from the every-day life of men; the division
into a worldly and spiritual life, neither of which had much to do with
the other, was a creation of the protestantism of the Reformation, and
had no place in the practice at least of the mediæval Church, which we
cannot too carefully remember is little more represented by modern
Catholicism than by modern Protestantism. The contest, therefore,
between the Crown and the Church was a mere bickering between two bodies,
without any essential antagonism between them, as to how far the
administration of either reached; neither dreamed of subordinating one to
the other, far less of extinguishing one by the other.
The history of the Crusades, by-the-way, illustrates very emphatically
this position of the Church in the Middle Ages. The foundation of that
strange feudal kingdom of Jerusalem, whose very coat of arms was a
solecism in heraldry, whose king had precedence, in virtue of his place
as lord of the centre of Christianity, over all other kings and princes;
the orders of men-at-arms vowed to poverty and chastity, like the
Templars and Knights of St. John; and above all the unquestioning sense
of duty that urged men of all classes and kinds into the holy war, show
how strongly the idea of God’s Kingdom on the earth had taken hold of all
men’s minds in the early Middle Ages. As to the result of the Crusades,
they certainly had their influence on the solidification of Europe and
the great feudal system, at the head of which, in theory at least, were
the Pope and the Kaiser. For the rest, the intercourse with the East
gave Europe an opportunity of sharing in the mechanical civilization of
the peoples originally dominated by the Arabs, and infused by the art of
Byzantium and Persia, not without some tincture of the cultivation of the
latter classical period.
The stir and movement also of the Crusades, and the necessities in which
they involved the princes and their barons, furthered the upward movement
of the classes that lay below the feudal vassals, great and little; the
principal opportunity for which movement, however, in England, was given
by the continuous struggle between the Crown and the Church and Baronage.
The early Norman kings, even immediately after the death of the
Conqueror, found themselves involved in this struggle, and were forced to
avail themselves of the help of what had now become the inferior
tribe—the native English, to wit. Henry I., an able and ambitious man,
understood this so clearly that he made a distinct bid for the favour of
the inferior tribe by marrying an English princess; and it was by means
of the help of his English subjects that he conquered his Norman
subjects, and the field of Tenchebray, which put the coping-stone on his
success, was felt by the English people as an English victory over the
oppressing tribe with which Duke William had overwhelmed the English
people. It was during this king’s reign and under these influences that
the trading and industrial classes began to rise somewhat. The merchant
gilds were now in their period of greatest power, and had but just begun,
in England at least, to develop into the corporations of the towns; but
the towns themselves were beginning to gain their freedom and to become
an important element in the society of the time, as little by little they
asserted themselves against the arbitrary rule of the feudal lords, lay
or ecclesiastical: for as to the latter, it must be remembered that the
Church included in herself the orders or classes into which lay society
was divided, and while by its lower clergy of the parishes and by the
friars it touched the people, its upper clergy were simply feudal lords;
and as the religious fervour of the higher clergy, which was marked
enough in the earlier period of the Middle Ages (in Anselm, for example),
faded out, they became more and more mere landlords, although from the
conditions of their landlordism, living as they did on their land and
amidst of their tenants, they were less oppressive than the lay
landlords.
The order and progress of Henry I.’s reign, which marks the transition
from the mere military camp of the Conqueror to the mediæval England I
have to dwell upon, was followed by the period of mere confusion and
misery which accompanied the accession of the princes of Anjou to the
throne of England. In this period the barons widely became mere violent
and illegal robbers; and the castles with which the land was dotted, and
which were begun under the auspices of the Conqueror as military posts,
became mere dens of strong-thieves.
No doubt this made the business of the next able king, Henry II., the
easier. He was a staunch man of business, and turned himself with his
whole soul towards the establishment of order and the consolidation of
the monarchy, which accordingly took a great stride under him towards its
ultimate goal of bureaucracy. He would probably have carried the
business still farther, since in his contest with the Church, in spite of
the canonization of Beckett and the king’s formal penance at his tomb, he
had in fact gained a victory for the Crown which it never really lost
again; but in his days England was only a part of the vast dominion of
his House, which included more than half of France, and his struggle with
his feudatories and the French king, which sowed the seed of the loss of
that dominion to the English Crown, took up much of his life, and finally
beat him.
His two immediate successors, Richard I. and John, were good specimens of
the chiefs of their line, almost all of whom were very able men, having
even a touch of genius in them, but therewithal were such wanton
blackguards and scoundrels that one is almost forced to apply the
theological word “wickedness” to them. Such characters belong specially
to their times, fertile as they were both of great qualities and of
scoundrelism, and in which our own special vice of hypocrisy was entirely
lacking. John, the second of these two pests, put the coping-stone on
the villany of his family, and lost his French dominion in the lump.
Under such rascals as these came the turn of the Baronage; and they, led
by Stephen Langton, the archbishop who had been thrust on the unwilling
king by the Pope, united together and forced from him his assent to Magna
Charta, the great, thoroughly well-considered deed, which is
conventionally called the foundation of English Liberty, but which can
only claim to be so on the ground that it was the confirmation and seal
of the complete feudal system in England, and put the relations between
the vassals, the great feudatories, and the king on a stable basis; since
it created, or at least confirmed, order among these privileged classes,
among whom, indeed, it recognized the towns to a certain extent as part
of the great feudal hierarchy: so that even by this time they had begun
to acquire status in that hierarchy.
So John passed away, and became not long after an almost mythical
personage, the type of the bad king. There are still ballads, and prose
stories deduced from these ballads, in existence, which tell the tale of
this strange monster as the English people imagined it.
As they belong to the literature of the fourteenth century, the period I
have undertaken to tell you about specially, I will give you one of the
latter of these concerning the death of King John, for whom the people
imagined a more dramatic cause of death than mere indigestion, of which
in all probability he really died; and you may take it for a specimen of
popular literature of the fourteenth century.
I can here make bold to quote from memory, without departing very widely
from the old text, since the quaint wording of the original, and the
spirit of bold and blunt heroism which it breathes, have fixed it in my
mind for ever.
The king, you must remember, had halted at Swinestead Abbey, in
Lincolnshire, in his retreat from the hostile barons and their French
allies, and had lost all his baggage by the surprise of the advancing
tide in the Wash; so that he might well be in a somewhat sour mood.
Says the tale: So the king went to meat in the hall, and before him was a
loaf; and he looked grimly on it and said, ‘For how much is such a loaf
sold in this realm?’
‘Sir, for one penny,’ said they.
Then the king smote the board with his fist and said, ‘By God, if I live
for one year such a loaf shall be sold for twelve pence!’
That heard one of the monks who stood thereby, and he thought and
considered that his hour and time to die was come, and that it would be a
good deed to slay so cruel a king and so evil a lord.
So he went into the garden and plucked plums and took out of them the
steles [stalks], and did venom in them each one; and he came before the
king and sat on his knee, and said:
‘Sir, by St. Austin, this is fruit of our garden.’
Then the king looked evilly on him and said, ‘Assay them, monk!’
So the monk took and ate thereof, nor changed countenance any whit: and
the king ate thereafter.
But presently afterwards the monk swelled and turned blue, and fell down
and died before the king: then waxed the king sick at heart, and he also
swelled and died, and so he ended his days.
For a while after the death of John and the accession of Henry III. the
Baronage, strengthened by the great Charter and with a weak and wayward
king on the throne, made their step forward in power and popularity, and
the first serious check to the tendency to monarchical bureaucracy, a
kind of elementary aristocratic constitution, was imposed upon the
weakness of Henry III. Under this movement of the barons, who in their
turn had to seek for the support of the people, the towns made a fresh
step in advance, and Simon de Montfort, the leader of what for want of a
better word must be called the popular party, was forced by his
circumstances to summon to his Parliament citizens from the boroughs.
Earl Simon was one of those men that come to the front in violent times,
and he added real nobility of character to strength of will and
persistence. He became the hero of the people, who went near to
canonizing him after his death. But the monarchy was too strong for him
and his really advanced projects, which by no means squared with the
hopes of the Baronage in general: and when Prince Edward, afterwards
Edward I., grown to his full mental stature, came to the help of the
Crown with his unscrupulous business ability, the struggle was soon over;
and with Evesham field the monarchy began to take a new stride, and the
longest yet taken, towards bureaucracy.
Edward I. is remembered by us chiefly for the struggle he carried on with
the Scotch Baronage for the feudal suzerainty of that kingdom, and the
centuries of animosity between the two countries which that struggle drew
on. But he has other claims to our attention besides this.
At first, and remembering the ruthlessness of many of his acts,
especially in the Scotch war, one is apt to look upon him as a somewhat
pedantic tyrant and a good soldier, with something like a dash of
hypocrisy beyond his time added. But, like the Angevine kings I was
speaking of just now, he was a completely characteristic product of his
time. He was not a hypocrite probably, after all, in spite of his tears
shed after he had irretrievably lost a game, or after he had won one by
stern cruelty. There was a dash of real romance in him, which mingled
curiously with his lawyer-like qualities. He was, perhaps, the man of
all men who represented most completely the finished feudal system, and
who took it most to heart. His law, his romance, and his religion, his
self-command, and his terrible fury were all a part of this innate
feudalism, and exercised within its limits; and we must suppose that he
thoroughly felt his responsibility as the chief of his feudatories, while
at the same time he had no idea of his having any responsibilities
towards the lower part of his subjects. Such a man was specially suited
to carrying on the tendency to bureaucratic centralization, which
culminated in the Tudor monarchy. He had his struggle with the Baronage,
but hard as it was, he was sure not to carry it beyond the due limits of
feudalism; to that he was always loyal. He had slain Earl Simon before
he was king, while he was but his father’s general; but Earl Simon’s work
did not die with him, and henceforward, while the Middle Ages and their
feudal hierarchy lasted, it was impossible for either king or barons to
do anything which would seriously injure each other’s position; the
struggle ended in his reign in a balance of power in England which, on
the one hand, prevented any great feudatory becoming a rival of the king,
as happened in several instances in France, and on the other hand
prevented the king lapsing into a mere despotic monarch.
I have said that bureaucracy took a great stride in Edward’s reign, but
it reached its limits under feudalism as far as the nobles were
concerned. Peace and order was established between the different powers
of the governing classes; henceforward, the struggle is between them and
the governed; that struggle was now to become obvious; the lower tribe
was rising in importance; it was becoming richer for fleecing, but also
it was beginning to have some power; this led the king first, and
afterwards the barons, to attack it definitely; it was rich enough to pay
for the trouble of being robbed, and not yet strong enough to defend
itself with open success, although the slower and less showy success of
growth did not fail it. The instrument of attack in the hands of the
barons was the ordinary feudal privilege, the logical carrying out of
serfdom; but this attack took place two reigns later. We shall come to
that further on. The attack on the lower tribe which was now growing
into importance was in this reign made by the king; and his instrument
was—Parliament.
I have told you that Simon de Montfort made some attempt to get the
burgesses to sit in his Parliament, but it was left to Edward I. to lay
the foundations firmly of parliamentary representation, which he used for
the purpose of augmenting the power of the Crown and crushing the rising
liberty of the towns, though of course his direct aim was simply
at—money.
The Great Council of the Realm was purely feudal; it was composed of the
feudatories of the king, theoretically of all of them, practically of the
great ones only. It was, in fact, the council of the conquering tribe
with their chief at its head; the matters of the due feudal tribute,
aids, reliefs, fines, scutage, and the like—in short, the king’s revenue
due from his men—were settled in this council at once and in the lump.
But the inferior tribe, though not represented there, existed, and, as
aforesaid, was growing rich, and the king had to get their money out of
their purses directly; which, as they were not represented at the
council, he had to do by means of his officers (the sheriffs) dealing
with them one after another, which was a troublesome job; for the men
were stiff-necked and quite disinclined to part with their money; and the
robbery having to be done on the spot, so to say, encountered all sorts
of opposition: and, in fact, it was the money needs both of baron,
bishop, and king which had been the chief instrument in furthering the
progress of the towns. The towns would be pressed by their lords, king,
or baron, or bishop, as it might be, and they would see their advantage
and strike a bargain. For you are not to imagine that because there was
a deal of violence going on in those times there was no respect for law;
on the contrary, there was a quite exaggerated respect for it if it came
within the four corners of the feudal feeling, and the result of this
feeling of respect was the constant struggle for _status_ on the part of
the townships and other associations throughout the Middle Ages.
Well, the burghers would say, “’Tis hard to pay this money, but we will
put ourselves out to pay it if you will do something for us in return;
let, for example, our men be tried in our own court, and the verdict be
of one of compurgation instead of wager of battle,” and so forth, and so
forth.
All this sort of detailed bargaining was, in fact, a safeguard for the
local liberties, so far as they went, of the towns and shires, and did
not suit the king’s views of law and order at all; and so began the
custom of the sheriff (the king’s officer, who had taken the place of the
earl of the Anglo-Saxon period) summoning the burgesses to the council,
which burgesses you must understand were not elected at the folkmotes of
the town, or hundred, but in a sort of hole-and-corner way by a few of
the bigger men of the place. What the king practically said was this: “I
want your money, and I cannot be for ever wrangling with you stubborn
churles at home there, and listening to all your stories of how poor you
are, and what you want; no, I want you to be _represented_. Send me up
from each one of your communes a man or two whom I can bully or cajole or
bribe to sign away your substance for you.”
Under these circumstances it is no wonder that the towns were not very
eager in the cause of _representation_. It was no easy job to get them
to come up to London merely to consult as to the kind of sauce with which
they were to be eaten. However, they did come in some numbers, and by
the year 1295 something like a shadow of our present Parliament was on
foot. Nor need there be much more said about this institution; as time
went on its functions got gradually extended by the petition for the
redress of grievances accompanying the granting of money, but it was
generally to be reckoned on as subservient to the will of the king, who
down to the later Tudor period played some very queer tunes on this
constitutional instrument.
Edward I. gave place to his son, who again was of the type of king who
had hitherto given the opportunity to the barons for their turn of
advancement in the constitutional struggle; and in earlier times no doubt
they would have taken full advantage of the circumstances; as it was they
had little to gain. The king did his best to throw off the restraint of
the feudal constitution, and to govern simply as an absolute monarch.
After a time of apparent success he failed, of course, and only succeeded
in confirming the legal rights of feudalism by bringing about his own
formal deposition at the hands of the Baronage, as a chief who, having
broken the compact with his feudatories, had necessarily forfeited his
right. If we compare his case with that of Charles I. we shall find this
difference in it, besides the obvious one that Edward was held
responsible to his feudatories and Charles towards the upper middle
classes, the squirearchy, as represented by Parliament; that Charles was
condemned by a law created for the purpose, so to say, and evolved from
the principle of the representation of the propertied classes, while
Edward’s deposition was the real logical outcome of the confirmed feudal
system, and was practically legal and regular.
The successor of the deposed king, the third Edward, ushers in the
complete and central period of the Middle Ages in England. The feudal
system is complete: the life and spirit of the country has developed into
a condition if not quite independent, yet quite forgetful, on the one
hand of the ideas and customs of the Celtic and Teutonic tribes, and on
the other of the authority of the Roman Empire. The Middle Ages have
grown into manhood; that manhood has an art of its own, which, though
developed step by step from that of Old Rome and New Rome, and embracing
the strange mysticism and dreamy beauty of the East, has forgotten both
its father and its mother, and stands alone triumphant, the loveliest,
brightest, and gayest of all the creations of the human mind and hand.
It has a literature of its own too, somewhat akin to its art, yet
inferior to it, and lacking its unity, since there is a double stream in
it. On the one hand is the court poet, the gentleman, Chaucer, with his
Italianizing metres, and his formal recognition of the classical stories;
on which, indeed, he builds a superstructure of the quaintest and most
unadulterated mediævalism, as gay and bright as the architecture which
his eyes beheld and his pen pictured for us, so clear, defined, and
elegant it is; a sunny world even amidst its violence and passing
troubles, like those of a happy child, the worst of them an amusement
rather than a grief to the onlookers; a world that scarcely needed hope
in its eager life of adventure and love, amidst the sunlit blossoming
meadows, and green woods, and white begilded manor-houses. A kindly and
human muse is Chaucer’s, nevertheless, interested in and amused by all
life, but of her very nature devoid of strong aspirations for the future;
and that all the more, since, though the strong devotion and fierce piety
of the ruder Middle Ages had by this time waned, and the Church was more
often lightly mocked at than either feared or loved, still the _habit_ of
looking on this life as part of another yet remained: the world is fair
and full of adventure; kind men and true and noble are in it to make one
happy; fools also to laugh at, and rascals to be resisted, yet not wholly
condemned; and when this world is over we shall still go on living in
another which is a part of this. Look at all the picture, note all and
live in all, and be as merry as you may, never forgetting that you are
alive and that it is good to live.
That is the spirit of Chaucer’s poetry; but alongside of it existed yet
the ballad poetry of the people, wholly untouched by courtly elegance and
classical pedantry; rude in art but never coarse, true to the backbone;
instinct with indignation against wrong, and thereby expressing the hope
that was in it; a protest of the poor against the rich, especially in
those songs of the Foresters, which have been called the mediæval epic of
revolt; no more gloomy than the gentleman’s poetry, yet cheerful from
courage, and not content. Half a dozen stanzas of it are worth a
cartload of the whining introspective lyrics of to-day; and he who, when
he has mastered the slight differences of language from our own daily
speech, is not moved by it, does not understand what true poetry means
nor what its aim is.
There is a third element in the literature of this time which you may
call Lollard poetry, the great example of which is William Langland’s
“Piers Plowman.” It is no bad corrective to Chaucer, and in _form_ at
least belongs wholly to the popular side; but it seems to me to show
symptoms of the spirit of the rising middle class, and casts before it
the shadow of the new master that was coming forward for the workman’s
oppression. But I must leave what more I have to say on this subject of
the art and literature of the fourteenth century for another occasion.
In what I have just said, I only wanted to point out to you that the
Middle Ages had by this time come to the fullest growth; and that they
could express in a form which was all their own, the ideas and life of
the time.
That time was in a sense brilliant and progressive, and the life of the
worker in it was better than it ever had been, and might compare with
advantage with what it became in after periods and with what it is now;
and indeed, looking back upon it, there are some minds and some moods
that cannot help regretting it, and are not particularly scared by the
idea of its violence and its lack of accurate knowledge of scientific
detail.
However, one thing is clear to us now, the kind of thing which never is
clear to most people living in such periods—namely, that whatever it was,
it could not last, but must change into something else.
The complete feudalism of the fourteenth century fell, as systems always
fall, by its own corruption, and by development of the innate seeds of
change, some of which indeed had lain asleep during centuries, to wake up
into activity long after the events which had created them were
forgotten.
The feudal system was naturally one of open war; and the alliances,
marriages, and other dealings, family with family, made by the king and
potentates, were always leading them into war by giving them legal
claims, or at least claims that could be legally pleaded, to the domains
of other lords, who took advantage of their being on the spot, of their
strength in men or money, or their popularity with the Baronage, to give
immediate effect to _their_ claims. Such a war was that by which Edward
I. drew on England the enmity of the Scotch; and such again was the great
war which Edward III. entered into with France. You must not suppose
that there was anything in this war of a national, far less of a race,
character. The last series of wars before this time I am now speaking
of, in which race feelings counted for much, was the Crusades. This
French war, I say, was neither national, racial, or tribal; it was the
private business of a lord of the manor, claiming what he considered his
legal rights of another lord, who had, as he thought, usurped them; and
this claim his loyal feudatories were bound to take up for him; loyalty
to a feudal superior, not patriotism to a country, was the virtue which
Edward III.’s soldiers had to offer, if they had any call to be virtuous
in that respect.
This war once started was hard to drop, partly because of the success
that Edward had in it, falling as he did on France with the force of a
country so much more homogeneous than it; and no doubt it was a war very
disastrous to both countries, and so may be reckoned as amongst the
causes which broke up the feudal system.
But the real causes of that break-up lay much deeper than that. The
system was not capable of expansion in production; it was, in fact, as
long as its integrity remained untouched, an army fed by slaves, who
could not be properly and closely exploited; its free men proper might do
something else in their leisure, and so produce art and literature, but
their true business as members of a conquering tribe, their concerted
business, was to fight. There was, indeed, a fringe of people between
the serf and the free noble who produced the matters of handicraft which
were needed for the latter, but deliberately, and, as we should now
think, wastefully; and as these craftsmen and traders began to grow into
importance and to push themselves, as they could not help doing, into the
feudal hierarchy, as they acquired _status_, so the sickness of the
feudal system increased on it, and the shadow of the coming commercialism
fell upon it.
That any set of people who could claim to be other than the property of
free men should not have definite rights differentiated sharply from
those of other groups, was an idea that did not occur to the Middle Ages;
therefore, as soon as men came into existence that were not serfs and
were not nobles, they had to struggle for status by organizing themselves
into associations that should come to be acknowledged members of the
great feudal hierarchy; for indefinite and negative freedom was not
allowed to any person in those days; if you had not status you did not
exist except as an outlaw.
This is, briefly speaking, the motive power of necessity that lay behind
the struggle of the town corporations and craft-gilds to be free, a
struggle which, though it was to result in the breaking up of the
mediæval hierarchy, began by an appearance of strengthening it by adding
to its members, increasing its power of production, and so making it more
stable for the time being.
About this struggle, and the kind of life which accompanied it, I may
have to write another time, and so will not say more about it here.
Except this, that it was much furthered by the change that gradually took
place between the landlords and the class on whom all society rested, the
serfs. These at first were men who had no more rights than chattel
slaves had, except that mostly, as part of the stock of the manor, they
could not be sold off it; they had to do all the work of the manor, and
to earn their own livelihood off it as they best could. But as the power
of production increased, owing to better methods of working, and as the
country got to be more settled, their task-work became easier of
performance and their own land more productive to them; and that tendency
to the definition and differentiation of rights, moreover, was at work
for their benefit, and the custom of the manor defined what their
services were, and they began to acquire rights. From that time they
ceased to be pure serfs, and began to tend towards becoming tenants, at
first paying purely and simply _service_ for their holdings, but
gradually commuting that service for fines and money payment—for rent, in
short.
Towards the close of the fourteenth century, after the country had been
depopulated by the Black Death, and impoverished by the long war, the
feudal lords of these copyholders and tenants began to regret the
slackness with which their predecessors had exploited their _property_,
the serfs, and to consider that under the new commercial light which had
begun to dawn upon them _they_ could do it much better if they only had
their property a little more in hand; but it was too late, for their
property had acquired rights, and therewithal had got strange visions
into their heads of a time much better than that in which they lived,
when even those rights should be supplanted by a condition of things in
which the assertion of rights for any one set of men should no longer be
needed, since all men should be free to enjoy the fruits of their own
labour.
Of that came the great episode of the Peasants’ War, led by men like Wat
Tyler, Jack Straw, and John Ball, who indeed, with those they led,
suffered for daring to be before their time, for the revolt was put down
with cruelty worthy of an Irish landlord or a sweating capitalist of the
present day; but, nevertheless, serfdom came to an end in England, if not
because of the revolt, yet because of the events that made it, and
thereby a death-wound was inflicted on the feudal system.
From that time onward the country, passing through the various troubles
of a new French war of Henry V.’s time, and the War of the Roses, did not
heed these faction fights much.
The workmen grew in prosperity, but also they began to rise into a new
class, and a class beneath them of mere labourers who were not serfs
began to form, and to lay the foundations of capitalistic production.
England got carried into the rising current of commercialism, and the
rich men and landlords to turn their attention to the production of
profit instead of the production of livelihood; the gild-less journeyman
and the landless labourer slowly came into existence; the landlord got
rid of his tenants all he could, turned tillage into pasture, and sweated
the pastures to death in his eagerness for wool, which for him meant
money and the breeding of money; till at last the place of the serf,
which had stood empty, as it were, during a certain transition period,
during which the non-capitalistic production was expanding up to its
utmost limit, was filled by the proletarian working for the service of a
master in a new fashion, a fashion which exploited and (woe worth the
while!) exploits him very much more completely than the customs of the
manor of the feudal period.
The life of the worker and the production of goods in this transition
period, when Feudal society was sickening for its end, is a difficult and
wide subject that requires separate treatment; at present I will leave
the mediæval workman at the full development of that period which found
him a serf bound to the manor, and which left him generally a yeoman or
an artisan sharing the collective _status_ of his gild.
The workman of to-day, if he could realize the position of his
forerunner, has some reason to envy him: the feudal serf worked hard, and
lived poorly, and produced a rough livelihood for his master; whereas the
modern workman, working harder still, and living little if any better
than the serf, produces for his master a state of luxury of which the old
lord of the manor never dreamed. The workman’s powers of production are
multiplied a thousandfold; his own livelihood remains pretty much where
it was. The balance goes to his master and the crowd of useless,
draggled-tailed knaves and fools who pander to his idiotic sham desires,
and who, under the pretentious title of the intellectual part of the
middle classes, have in their turn taken the place of the mediæval
jester.
Truly, if the Positivist motto, “Live for others,” be taken in stark
literality, the modern workman should be a good and wise man, since he
has no chance of living for himself!
And yet, I wish he were wiser still; wise enough to make an end of the
preaching of “Live on others,” which is the motto set forth by
commercialism to her favoured children.
Yet in one thing the modern proletarian has an advantage over the
mediæval serf, and that advantage is a world in itself. Many a century
lay between the serf and successful revolt, and though he tried it many a
time and never lost heart, yet the coming change which his martyrdom
helped on was not to be for him yet, but for the new masters of his
successors. With us it is different. A few years of wearisome struggle
against apathy and ignorance; a year or two of growing hope—and then who
knows? Perhaps a few months, or perhaps a few days of the open struggle
against brute force, with the mask off its face, and the sword in its
hand, and then we are over the bar.
Who knows, I say? Yet this we know, that ahead of us, with nothing
betwixt us except such incidents as are necessary to its development,
lies the inevitable social revolution, which will bring about the end of
mastery and the triumph of fellowship.