Translations of some books of Scripture and acts of saints were made
about that time, or even earlier, and there are French sermons of St.
Bernard, from which extracts have been published, in the royal library
at Paris.[862] In 1126, a charter was granted by Louis VI. to the city
of Beauvais in French.[863] Metrical compositions are in general the
first literature of a nation, and even if no distinct proof could be
adduced, we might assume their existence before the twelfth century.
There is however evidence, not to mention the fragments printed by Le
Boeuf, of certain lives of saints translated into French verse by
Thibault de Vernon, a canon of Rouen, before the middle of the preceding
age. And we are told that Taillefer, a Norman minstrel, recited a song
or romance on the deeds of Roland, before the army of his countrymen, at
the battle of Hastings in 1066. Philip de Than, a Norman subject of
Henry I., seems to be the earliest poet whose works as well as name have
reached us, unless we admit a French, translation of the work of one
Marbode upon precious stones to be more ancient.[864] This De Than wrote
a set of rules for computation of time and an account of different
calendars. A happy theme for inspiration without doubt! Another
performance of the same author is a treatise on birds and beasts,
dedicated to Adelaide, queen of Henry I.[865] But a more famous votary
of the muses was Wace, a native of Jersey, who about the beginning of
Henry II.'s reign turned Geoffrey of Monmouth's history into French
metre. Besides this poem, called le Brut d'Angleterre, he composed a
series of metrical histories, containing the transactions of the dukes
of Normandy, from Rollo, their great progenitor, who gave name to the
Roman de Rou, down to his own age. Other productions are ascribed to
Wace, who was at least a prolific versifier, and, if he seem to deserve
no higher title at present, has a claim to indulgence, and even to
esteem, as having far excelled his contemporaries, without any superior
advantages of knowledge. In emulation, however, of his fame, several
Norman writers addicted themselves to composing chronicles, or
devotional treatises in metre. The court of our Norman kings was to the
early poets in the Langue d'Oil, what those of Arles and Toulouse were
to the troubadours. Henry I. was fond enough of literature to obtain
the surname of Beauclerc; Henry II. was more indisputably an encourager
of poetry; and Richard I. has left compositions of his own in one or
other (for the point is doubtful) of the two dialects spoken in
France.[866]
[Sidenote: Norman romances and tales.]
If the poets of Normandy had never gone beyond historical and religious
subjects, they would probably have had less claim to our attention than
their brethren of Provence. But a different and far more interesting
species of composition began to be cultivated in the latter part of the
twelfth century. Without entering upon the controverted question as to
the origin of romantic fictions, referred by one party to the
Scandinavians, by a second to the Arabs, by others to the natives of
Britany, it is manifest that the actual stories upon which one early and
numerous class of romances was founded are related to the traditions of
the last people. These are such as turn upon the fable of Arthur; for
though we are not entitled to deny the existence of such a personage,
his story seems chiefly the creation of Celtic vanity. Traditions
current in Britany, though probably derived from this island, became the
basis of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin prose, which, as has been seen,
was transfused into French metre by Wace.[867] The vicinity of Normandy
enabled its poets to enrich their narratives with other Armorican
fictions, all relating to the heroes who had surrounded the table of the
son of Uther.[868] An equally imaginary history of Charlemagne gave
rise to a new family of romances. The authors of these fictions were
called Trouveurs, a name obviously identical with that of Troubadours.
But except in name there was no resemblance between the minstrels of the
northern and southern dialects. The invention of one class was turned to
description, that of the other to sentiment; the first were epic in
their form and style, the latter almost always lyric. We cannot perhaps
give a better notion of their dissimilitude, than by saying that one
school produced Chaucer, and the other Petrarch. Besides these romances
of chivalry, the trouveurs displayed their powers of lively narration in
comic tales or fabliaux, (a name sometimes extended to the higher
romance,) which have aided the imagination of Boccace and La Fontaine.
These compositions are certainly more entertaining than those of the
troubadours; but, contrary to what I have said of the latter, they often
gain by appearing in a modern dress. Their versification, which
doubtless had its charm when listened to around the hearth of an ancient
castle, is very languid and prosaic, and suitable enough to the tedious
prolixity into which the narrative is apt to fall; and though we find
many sallies of that arch and sprightly simplicity which characterizes
the old language of France as well as England, it requires, upon the
whole, a factitious taste to relish these Norman tales, considered as
poetry in the higher sense of the word, distinguished from metrical
fiction.
[Sidenote: Roman de la Rose.]
A manner very different from that of the fabliaux was adopted, in the
Roman de la Rose, begun by William de Loris about 1250, and completed by
John de Meun half a century later. This poem, which contains about
16,000 lines in the usual octo-syllable verse, from which the early
French writers seldom deviated, is an allegorical vision, wherein, love
and the other passions or qualities connected with it pass over the
stage, without the intervention, I believe, of any less abstract
personages. Though similar allegories were not unknown to the ancients,
and, which is more to the purpose, maybe found in other productions of
the thirteenth century, none had been constructed so elaborately as
that of the Roman de la Rose. Cold and tedious as we now consider this
species of poetry, it originated in the creative power of imagination,
and appealed to more refined feeling than the common metrical narratives
could excite. This poem was highly popular in the middle ages, and
became the source of those numerous allegories which had not ceased in
the seventeenth century.
[Sidenote: Works in French prose.]
The French language was employed in prose as well as in metre. Indeed it
seems to have had almost an exclusive privilege in this respect. "The
language of Oil," says Dante, in his treatise on vulgar speech, "prefers
its claim to be ranked above those of Oc and Si (Provencal and Italian),
on the ground that all translations or compositions in prose have been
written therein, from its greater facility and grace, such as the books
compiled from the Trojan and Roman stories, the delightful fables about
Arthur, and many other works of history and science."[869] I have
mentioned already the sermons of St. Bernard and translations from
Scripture. The laws of the kingdom of Jerusalem purport to have been
drawn up immediately after the first crusade, and though their language
has been materially altered, there seems no doubt that they were
originally compiled in French.[870] Besides some charters, there are
said to have been prose romances before the year 1200.[871] Early in the
next age Ville Hardouin, seneschal of Campagne, recorded the capture of
Constantinople in the fourth crusade, an expedition, the glory and
reward of which he had personally shared, and, as every original work
of prior date has either perished or is of small importance, may be
deemed the father of French prose. The Establishments of St. Louis, and
the law treatise of Beaumanoir, fill up the interval of the thirteenth
century, and before its conclusion we must suppose the excellent memoirs
of Joinville to have been composed, since they are dedicated to Louis X.
in 1315, when the author could hardly be less than ninety years of age.
Without prosecuting any further the history of French literature, I will
only mention the translations of Livy and Sallust, made in the reign and
by the order of John, with those of Caesar, Suetonius, Ovid, and parts of
Cicero, which are, due to his successor Charles V.[872]
[Sidenote: Spanish language.]
I confess myself wholly uninformed as to the original formation of the
Spanish language, and as to the epoch of its separation into the two
principal dialects of Castile and Portugal, or Gallicia;[873] nor should
I perhaps have alluded to the literature of that peninsula, were it not
for a remarkable poem which shines out among the minor lights of those
times. This is a metrical life of the Cid Ruy Diaz, written in a
barbarous style and with the rudest inequality of measure, but with a
truly Homeric warmth and vivacity of delineation. It is much to be
regretted that the author's name has perished; but its date has been
referred by some to the middle of the twelfth century, while the hero's
actions were yet recent, and before the taste of Spain had been
corrupted by the Provencal troubadours, whose extremely different manner
would, if it did not pervert the poet's genius, at least have impeded
his popularity. A very competent judge has pronounced the poem of the
Cid to be "decidedly and beyond comparison the finest in the Spanish
language." It is at least superior to any that was written in Europe
before the appearance of Dante.[874]
[Sidenote: Early writers in the Italian.]
A strange obscurity envelops the infancy of the Italian language. Though
it is certain that grammatical Latin had ceased to be employed in
ordinary discourse, at least from the time of Charlemagne, we have not a
single passage of undisputed authenticity, in the current idiom, for
nearly four centuries afterwards. Though Italian phrases are mixed up in
the barbarous jargon of some charters, not an instrument is extant in
that language before the year 1200, unless we may reckon one in the
Sardinian dialect (which I believe was rather Provencal than Italian),
noticed by Muratori.[875] Nor is there a vestige of Italian poetry older
than a few fragments of Ciullo d'Alcamo, a Sicilian, who must have
written before 1193, since he mentions Saladin as then living.[876] This
may strike us as the more remarkable, when we consider the political
circumstances of Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. From the
struggles of her spirited republics against the emperors and their
internal factions, we might, upon all general reasoning, anticipate the
early use and vigorous cultivation of their native language. Even if it
were not yet ripe for historians and philosophers, it is strange that no
poet should have been inspired with songs of triumph or invective by the
various fortunes of his country. But, on the contrary, the poets of
Lombardy became troubadours, and wasted their genius in Provencal love
strains at the courts of princes. The Milanese and other Lombard
dialects were, indeed, exceedingly rude; but this rudeness separated
them more decidedly from Latin: nor is it possible that the Lombards
could have employed that language intelligibly for any public or
domestic purpose. And indeed in the earliest Italian compositions that
have been published, the new language is so thoroughly formed, that it
is natural to infer a very long disuse of that from which it was
derived. The Sicilians claim the glory of having first adapted their own
harmonious dialect to poetry. Frederic II. both encouraged their art and
cultivated it; among the very first essays of Italian verse we find his
productions and those of his chancellor Piero delle Vigne. Thus Italy
was destined to owe the beginnings of her national literature to a
foreigner and an enemy. These poems are very short and few; those
ascribed to St. Francis about the same time are hardly distinguishable
from prose; but after the middle of the thirteenth century the Tuscan
poets awoke to a sense of the beauties which their native language,
refined from the impurities of vulgar speech,[877] could display, and
the genius of Italian literature was rocked upon the restless waves of
the Florentine democracy. Ricordano Malespini, the first historian, and
nearly the first prose writer in Italian, left memorials of the republic
down to the year 1281, which was that of his death, and it was continued
by Giacchetto Malespini to 1286. These are little inferior in purity of
style to the best Tuscan authors; for it is the singular fate of that
language to have spared itself all intermediate stages of refinement,
and, starting the last in the race, to have arrived almost
instantaneously at the goal. There is an interval of not much more than
half a century between the short fragment of Ciullo d'Alcamo, mentioned
above, and the poems of Guido Guinizzelli, Guitone d'Arezzo, and Guido
Cavalcante, which, in their diction and turn of thought, are sometimes
not unworthy of Petrarch.[878]
[Sidenote: Dante.]
But at the beginning of the next age arose a much greater genius, the
true father of Italian poetry, and the first name in the literature of
the middle ages. This was Dante, or Durante Alighieri, born in 1265, of
a respectable family at Florence. Attached to the Guelf party, which had
then obtained a final ascendency over its rival, he might justly promise
himself the natural reward of talents under a free government, public
trust and the esteem of his compatriots. But the Guelfs unhappily were
split into two factions, the Bianchi and the Neri, with the former of
whom, and, as it proved, the unsuccessful side, Dante was connected. In
1300 he filled the office of one of the Priori, or chief magistrates at
Florence; and having manifested in this, as was alleged, some partiality
towards the Bianchi, a sentence of proscription passed against him about
two years afterwards, when it became the turn of the opposite faction to
triumph. Banished from his country, and baffled in several efforts of
his friends to restore their fortunes, he had no resource but at the
courts of the Scalas at Verona, and other Italian princes, attaching
himself in adversity to the Imperial interests, and tasting, in his own
language, the bitterness of another's bread.[879] In this state of exile
he finished, if he did not commence, his great poem, the Divine Comedy;
a representation of the three kingdoms of futurity, Hell, Purgatory, and
Paradise, divided into one hundred cantos, and containing about 14,000
lines. He died at Ravenna in 1321.
Dante is among the very few who have created the national poetry of
their country. For notwithstanding the polished elegance of some earlier
Italian verse, it had been confined to amorous sentiment; and it was yet
to be seen that the language could sustain, for a greater length than
any existing poem except the Iliad, the varied style of narration,
reasoning, and ornament. Of all writers he is the most unquestionably
original. Virgil was indeed his inspiring genius, as he declares
himself, and as may sometimes be perceived in his diction; but his tone
is so peculiar and characteristic, that few readers would be willing at
first to acknowledge any resemblance. He possessed, in an extraordinary
degree, a command of language, the abuse of which led to his obscurity
and licentious innovations. No poet ever excelled him in conciseness,
and in the rare talent of finishing his pictures by a few bold touches;
the merit of Pindar in his better hours. How prolix would the stories of
Francesca or of Ugolino have become in the hands of Ariosto, or of
Tasso, or of Ovid, or of Spenser! This excellence indeed is most
striking in the first part of his poem. Having formed his plan so as to
give an equal length to the three regions of his spiritual world, he
found himself unable to vary the images of hope or beatitude, and the
Paradise is a continual accumulation of descriptions, separately
beautiful, but uniform and tedious. Though images derived from light and
music are the most pleasing, and can be borne longer in poetry than any
others, their sweetness palls upon the sense by frequent repetition, and
we require the intermixture of sharper flavours. Yet there are detached
passages of great excellence in this third part of Dante's poem; and
even in the long theological discussions which occupy the greater
proportion of its thirty-three cantos, it is impossible not to admire
the enunciation of abstract positions with remarkable energy,
conciseness, and sometimes perspicuity. The first twelve cantos of the
Purgatory are an almost continual flow of soft and brilliant poetry. The
last seven are also very splendid; but there is some heaviness in the
intermediate parts. Fame has justly given the preference to the Inferno,
which displays throughout a more vigorous and masterly conception; but
the mind of Dante cannot be thoroughly appreciated without a perusal of
his entire poem.
The most forced and unnatural turns, the most barbarous licences of
idiom, are found in this poet, whose power of expression is at other
times so peculiarly happy. His style is indeed generally free from those
conceits of thought which discredited the other poets of his country;
but no sense is too remote for a word which he finds convenient for his
measure or his rhyme. It seems indeed as if he never altered a line on
account of the necessity of rhyme, but forced another, or perhaps a
third, into company with it. For many of his faults no sufficient excuse
can be made. But it is candid to remember, that Dante, writing almost in
the infancy of a language which he contributed to create, was not to
anticipate that words which he borrowed from the Latin, and from the
provincial dialects, would by accident, or through the timidity of later
writers, lose their place in the classical idiom of Italy. If Petrarch,
Bembo, and a few more, had not aimed rather at purity than copiousness,
the phrases which now appear barbarous, and are at least obsolete, might
have been fixed by use in poetical language.
The great characteristic excellence of Dante is elevation of sentiment,
to which his compressed diction and the emphatic cadences of his measure
admirably correspond. We read him, not as an amusing poet, but as a
master of moral wisdom, with reverence and awe. Fresh from the deep and
serious, though somewhat barren studies of philosophy, and schooled in
the severer discipline of experience, he has made of his poem a mirror
of his mind and life, the register of his solicitudes and sorrows, and
of the speculations in which he sought to escape their recollection. The
banished magistrate of Florence, the disciple of Brunetto Latini, the
statesman accustomed to trace the varying fluctuations of Italian
faction, is for ever before our eyes. For this reason, even the prodigal
display of erudition, which in an epic poem would be entirely misplaced,
increases the respect we feel for the poet, though it does not tend to
the reader's gratification. Except Milton, he is much the most learned
of all the great poets, and, relatively to his age, far more learned
than Milton. In one so highly endowed by nature, and so consummate by
instruction, we may well sympathise with a resentment which exile and
poverty rendered perpetually fresh. The heart of Dante was naturally
sensible, and even tender; his poetry is full of simple comparisons from
rural life; and the sincerity of his early passion for Beatrice pierces
through the veil of allegory which surrounds her. But the memory of his
injuries pursues him into the immensity of eternal light; and, in the
company of saints and angels, his unforgiving spirit darkens at the name
of Florence.[880]
This great poem was received in Italy with that enthusiastic admiration
which attaches itself to works of genius only in ages too rude to listen
to the envy of competitors, or the fastidiousness of critics. Almost
every library in that country contains manuscript copies of the Divine
Comedy, and an account of those who have abridged or commented upon it
would swell to a volume. It was thrice printed in the year 1472, and at
least nine times within the fifteenth century. The city of Florence in
1373, with a magnanimity which almost redeems her original injustice,
appointed a public professor to read lectures upon Dante; and it was
hardly less honourable to the poet's memory that the first person
selected for this office was Boccaccio. The universities of Pisa and
Piacenza imitated this example; but it is probable that Dante's abstruse
philosophy was often more regarded in their chairs than his higher
excellences.[881] Italy indeed, and all Europe, had reason to be proud
of such a master. Since Claudian, there had been seen for nine hundred
years no considerable body of poetry, except the Spanish poem of the
Cid, of which no one had heard beyond the peninsula, that could be said
to pass mediocrity; and we must go much further back than Claudian to
find any one capable of being compared with Dante. His appearance made
an epoch in the intellectual history of modern nations, and banished the
discouraging suspicion which long ages of lethargy tended to excite,
that nature had exhausted her fertility in the great poets of Greece and
Rome. It was as if, at some of the ancient games, a stranger had
appeared upon the plain, and thrown his quoit among the marks of former
casts which tradition had ascribed to the demigods. But the admiration
of Dante, though it gave a general impulse to the human mind, did not
produce imitators. I am unaware at least of any writer, in whatever
language, who can be said to have followed the steps of Dante: I mean
not so much in his subject as in the character of his genius and style.
His orbit is still all his own, and the track of his wheels can never be
confounded with that of a rival.[882]
[Sidenote: Petrarch.]
In the same year that Dante was expelled from Florence, a notary, by
name Petracco, was involved in a similar banishment. Retired to Arezzo,
he there became the father of Francis Petrarch. This great man shared of
course, during his early years, in the adverse fortune of his family,
which he was invincibly reluctant to restore, according to his father's
wish, by the profession of jurisprudence. The strong bias of nature
determined him to polite letters and poetry. These are seldom the
fountains of wealth; yet they would perhaps have been such to Petrarch,
if his temper could have borne the sacrifice of liberty for any worldly
acquisitions. At the city of Avignon, where his parents had latterly
resided, his graceful appearance and the reputation of his talents
attracted one of the Colonna family, then bishop of Lombes in Gascony.
In him, and in other members of that great house, never so illustrious
as in the fourteenth century, he experienced the union of patronage and
friendship. This, however, was not confined to the Colonnas. Unlike
Dante, no poet was ever so liberally and sincerely encouraged by the
great; nor did any perhaps ever carry to that perilous intercourse a
spirit more irritably independent, or more free from interested
adulation. He praised his friends lavishly because he loved them
ardently; but his temper was easily susceptible of offence, and there
must have been much to tolerate in that restlessness and jealousy of
reputation which is perhaps the inevitable failing of a poet.[883] But
every thing was forgiven to a man who was the acknowledged boast of his
age and country. Clement VI. conferred one or two sinecure benefices
upon Petrarch, and would probably have raised him to a bishopric if he
had chosen to adopt the ecclesiastical profession. But he never took
orders, the clerical tonsure being a sufficient qualification for
holding canonries. The same pope even afforded him the post of
apostolical secretary, and this was repeated by Innocent VI. I know not
whether we should ascribe to magnanimity or to a politic motive the
behaviour of Clement VI. towards Petrarch, who had pursued a course as
vexatious as possible to the Holy See. For not only he made the
residence of the supreme pontiffs at Avignon, and the vices of their
court, the topic of invectives, too well founded to be despised, but he
had ostentatiously put himself forward as the supporter of Nicola di
Rienzi in a project which could evidently have no other aim than to
wrest the city of Rome from the temporal sovereignty of its bishop. Nor
was the friendship and society of Petrarch less courted by the most
respectable Italian princes; by Robert king of Naples, by the Visconti,
the Correggi of Parma, the famous doge of Venice, Andrew Dandolo, and
the Carrara family of Padua, under whose protection he spent the latter
years of his life. Stories are related of the respect shown to him by
men in humbler stations which are perhaps still more satisfactory.[884]
But the most conspicuous testimony of public esteem was bestowed by the
city of Rome, in his solemn coronation as laureat poet in the Capitol.
This ceremony took place in 1341; and it is remarkable that Petrarch had
at that time composed no works which could, in our estimation, give him
pretensions to so singular an honour.
The moral character of Petrarch was formed of dispositions peculiarly
calculated for a poet. An enthusiast in the emotions of love and
friendship, of glory, of patriotism, of religion, he gave the rein to
all their impulses; and there is not perhaps a page in his Italian
writing which does not bear the trace of one or other of these
affections. By far the most predominant, and that which has given the
greatest celebrity to his name, is his passion for Laura. Twenty years
of unrequited and almost unaspiring love were lightened by song; and the
attachment, which, having long survived the beauty of its object,[885]
seems to have at one time nearly passed from the heart to the fancy, was
changed to an intenser feeling, and to a sort of celestial adoration, by
her death. Laura, before the time of Petrarch's first accidental meeting
with her, was united in marriage with another; a fact which, besides
some more particular evidence, appears to me deducible from the whole
tenor of his poetry.[886] Such a passion is undoubtedly not capable of a
moral defence; nor would I seek its palliation so much in the prevalent
manners of his age, by which however the conduct of even good men is
generally not a little influenced, as in the infirmity of Petrarch's
character, which induced him both to obey and to justify the emotions of
his heart. The lady too, whose virtue and prudence we are not to
question, seems to have tempered the light and shadow of her countenance
so as to preserve her admirer from despair, and consequently to prolong
his sufferings and servitude.
The general excellences of Petrarch, are his command over the music of
his native language, his correctness of style, scarcely two or three
words that he has used having been rejected by later writers, his
exquisite elegance of diction, improved by the perpetual study of
Virgil; but, far above all, that tone of pure and melancholy sentiment
which has something in it unearthly, and forms a strong contrast to the
amatory poems of antiquity. Most of these are either licentious or
uninteresting; and those of Catullus, a man endowed by nature with deep
and serious sensibility, and a poet, in my opinion, of greater and more
varied genius than Petrarch, are contaminated above all the rest with
the most degrading grossness. Of this there is not a single instance in
the poet of Vaucluse; and his strains, diffused and admired as they have
been, may have conferred a benefit that criticism cannot estimate, in
giving elevation and refinement to the imaginations of youth. The great
defect of Petrarch was his want of strong original conception, which
prevented him from throwing off the affected and overstrained manner of
the Provencal troubadours, and of the earlier Italian poets. Among his
poems the Triumphs are perhaps superior to the Odes, as the latter are
to the Sonnets; and of the latter, those written subsequently to the
death of Laura are in general the best. But that constrained and
laborious measure cannot equal the graceful flow of the canzone, or the
vigorous compression of the terza rima. The Triumphs have also a claim
to superiority, as the only poetical composition of Petrarch that
extends to any considerable length. They are in some degree perhaps an
imitation of the dramatic Mysteries, and form at least the earliest
specimens of a kind of poetry not uncommon in later times, wherein real
and allegorical personages are intermingled in a masque or scenic
representation.[887]
[Sidenote: English language.]
None of the principal modern languages was so late in its formation, or
in its application to the purposes of literature, as the English. This
arose, as is well known, out of the Saxon branch of the Great Teutonic
stock spoken in England till after the Conquest. From this mother
dialect our English differs less in respect of etymology, than of
syntax, idiom, and flexion. In so gradual a transition as probably took
place, and one so sparingly marked by any existing evidence, we cannot
well assign a definite origin to our present language. The question of
identity is almost as perplexing in languages as in individuals. But, in
the reign of Henry II., a version of Wace's poem of Brut, by one
Layamon, a priest of Ernly-upon-Severn, exhibits as it were the
chrysalis of the English language, in a very corrupt modification of the
Anglo-Saxon.[888] Very soon afterwards the new formation was better
developed; and some metrical pieces, referred by critics to the earlier
part of the thirteenth century, differ but little from our legitimate
grammar.[889] About the beginning of Edward I.'s reign, Robert, a monk
of Gloucester, composed a metrical chronicle from the history of
Geoffrey of Monmouth, which he continued to his own time. This work,
with a similar chronicle of Robert Manning, a monk of Brunne (Bourne) in
Lincolnshire, nearly thirty years later, stand at the head of our
English poetry. The romance of Sir Tristrem, ascribed to Thomas of
Erceldoune, surnamed the Rhymer, a Scottish minstrel, has recently laid
claim to somewhat higher antiquity.[890] In the fourteenth century a
great number of metrical romances were translated from the French. It
requires no small portion of indulgence to speak favourably of any of
these early English productions. A poetical line may no doubt
occasionally be found; but in general the narration is as heavy and
prolix as the versification is unmusical.[891] The first English writer
who can be read with approbation is William Langland, the author of
Piers Plowman's Vision, a severe satire upon the clergy. Though his
measure is more uncouth than that of his predecessors, there is real
energy in his conceptions, which he caught not from the chimeras of
knight-errantry, but the actual manners and opinions of his time.
[Sidenote: Cause of its slow progress.]
The very slow progress of the English language, as an instrument of
literature, is chiefly to be ascribed to the effects of the Norman
conquest, in degrading the native inhabitants and transferring all power
and riches to foreigners. The barons, without perhaps one exception, and
a large proportion of the gentry, were of French descent, and preserved
among themselves the speech of their fathers. This continued much longer
than we should naturally have expected; even after the loss of Normandy
had snapped the thread of French connexions, and they began to pride
themselves in the name of Englishmen, and in the inheritance of
traditionary English privileges. Robert of Gloucester has a remarkable
passage, which proves that in his time, somewhere about 1290, the
superior ranks continued to use the French language.[892] Ralph Higden,
about the early part of Edward III.'s reign, though his expressions do
not go the same length, asserts, that "gentlemen's children are taught
to speak French, from the time they are rocked in their cradle; and
uplandish (country) or inferior men will liken themselves to gentlemen,
and learn with great business for to speak French, for to be the more
told of." Notwithstanding, however, this predominance of French among
the higher class, I do not think that some modern critics are warranted
in concluding that they were in general ignorant of the English tongue.
Men living upon their estates among their tenantry, whom they welcomed
in their halls, and whose assistance they were perpetually needing in
war and civil frays, would hardly have permitted such a barrier to
obstruct their intercourse. For we cannot, at the utmost, presume that
French was so well known to the English commonalty in the thirteenth
century as English is at present to the same class in Wales and the
Scottish Highlands. It may be remarked also, that the institution of
trial by jury must have rendered a knowledge of English almost
indispensable to those who administered justice. There is a proclamation
of Edward I. in Rymer, where he endeavours to excite his subjects
against the king of France by imputing to him the intention of
conquering the country and abolishing the English language (linguam
delere Anglicanam), and this is frequently repeated in the proclamations
of Edward III.[893] In his time, or perhaps a little before, the native
language had become more familiar than French in common use, even with
the court and nobility. Hence the numerous translations of metrical
romances, which are chiefly referred to his reign. An important change
was effected in 1362 by a statute, which enacts that all pleas in courts
of justice shall be pleaded, debated, and judged in English. But Latin
was by this act to be employed in drawing the record; for there seems to
have still continued a sort of prejudice against the use of English as a
written language. The earliest English instrument known to exist is
said to bear the date of 1343.[894] And there are but few entries in our
own tongue upon the rolls of parliament before the reign of Henry VI.,
after whose accession its use becomes very common.[895] Sir John
Mandevile, about 1356, may pass for the father of English prose, no
original work being so ancient as his Travels. But the translation of
the Bible and other writings by Wicliffe, nearly thirty years
afterwards, taught us the copiousness and energy of which our native
dialect was capable; and it was employed in the fifteenth century by two
writers of distinguished merit, Bishop Pecock and Sir John Fortescue.
[Sidenote: Chaucer.]
But the principal ornament of our English literature was Geoffrey
Chaucer, who, with Dante and Petrarch, fills up the triumvirate of great
poets in the middle ages. Chaucer was born in 1328, and his life
extended to the last year of the fourteenth century. That rude and
ignorant generation was not likely to feel the admiration of native
genius as warmly as the compatriots of Petrarch; but he enjoyed the
favour of Edward III., and still more conspicuously of John duke of
Lancaster; his fortunes were far more prosperous than have usually been
the lot of poets; and a reputation was established beyond competition in
his lifetime, from which no succeeding generation has withheld its
sanction. I cannot, in my own taste, go completely along with the
eulogies that some have bestowed upon Chaucer, who seems to me to have
wanted grandeur, where he is original, both in conception and in
language. But in vivacity of imagination and ease of expression, he is
above all poets of the middle time, and comparable perhaps to the
greatest of those who have followed. He invented, or rather introduced
from France, and employed with facility the regular iambic couplet; and
though it was not to be expected that he should perceive the capacities
latent in that measure, his versification, to which he accommodated a
very licentious and arbitrary pronunciation, is uniform and
harmonious.[896] It is chiefly, indeed, as a comic poet, and a minute
observer of manners and circumstances, that Chaucer excels. In serious
and moral poetry he is frequently languid and diffuse; but he springs
like Antaeus from the earth, when his subject changes to coarse satire,
or merry narrative. Among his more elevated compositions, the Knight's
Tale is abundantly sufficient to immortalize Chaucer, since it would be
difficult to find any where a story better conducted, or told with more
animation and strength of fancy. The second place may be given to his
Troilus and Creseide, a beautiful and interesting poem, though enfeebled
by expansion. But perhaps the most eminent, or at any rate the most
characteristic testimony to his genius will be found in the prologue to
his Canterbury Tales; a work entirely and exclusively his own, which can
seldom be said of his poetry, and the vivid delineations of which
perhaps very few writers but Shakspeare could have equalled. As the
first original English poet, if we except Langland, as the inventor of
our most approved measure, as an improver, though with too much
innovation, of our language, and as a faithful witness to the manners of
his age, Chaucer would deserve our reverence, if he had not also
intrinsic claims for excellences, which do not depend upon any
collateral considerations.
[Sidenote: Revival of ancient learning.]
[Sidenote: In the twelfth century;]
The last circumstance which I shall mention, as having contributed to
restore society from the intellectual degradation into which it had
fallen during the dark ages, is the revival of classical learning. The
Latin language indeed, in which all legal instruments were drawn up, and
of which all ecclesiastics availed themselves in their epistolary
intercourse, as well as in their more solemn proceedings, had never
ceased to be familiar. Though many solecisms and barbarous words occur
in the writings of what were called learned men, they possessed a
fluency of expression in Latin which does not often occur at present.
During the dark ages, however, properly so called, or the period from
the sixth to the eleventh century, we chiefly meet with quotations from
the Vulgate or from theological writers. Nevertheless, quotations from
the Latin poets are hardly to be called unusual. Virgil, Ovid, Statius,
and Horace, are brought forward by those who aspired to some literary
reputation, especially during the better periods of that long twilight,
the reigns of Charlemagne and his son in France, part of the tenth
century in Germany, and the eleventh in both. The prose writers of Rome
are not so familiar, but in quotations we are apt to find the poets
preferred; and it is certain that a few could be named who were not
ignorant of Cicero, Sallust, and Livy. A considerable change took place
in the course of the twelfth century. The polite literature, as well as
the abstruser science of antiquity, became the subject of cultivation.
Several writers of that age, in different parts of Europe, are
distinguished more or less for elegance, though not absolute purity of
Latin style; and for their acquaintance with those ancients, who are its
principal models. Such were John of Salisbury, the acute and learned
author of the Polycraticon, William of Malmsbury, Giraldus Cambrensis,
Roger Hoveden, in England; and in foreign countries, Otho of Frisingen,
Saxo Grammaticus, and the best perhaps of all I have named as to style,
Falcandus, the historian of Sicily. In these we meet with frequent
quotations from Livy, Cicero, Pliny, and other considerable writers of
antiquity. The poets were now admired and even imitated. All metrical
Latin before the latter part of the twelfth century, so far as I have
seen, is of little value; but at this time, and early in the succeeding
age, there appeared several versifiers who aspired to the renown of
following the steps of Virgil and Statius in epic poetry. Joseph
Iscanus, an Englishman, seems to have been the earliest of these; his
poem on the Trojan war containing an address to Henry II. He wrote
another, entitled Antiocheis, on the third crusade, most of which has
perished. The wars of Frederic Barbarossa were celebrated by Gunther in
his Ligurinus; and not long afterwards, Guillelmus Brito wrote the
Philippis, in honour of Philip Augustus, and Walter de Chatillon the
Alexandreis, taken from the popular romance of Alexander. None of these
poems, I believe, have much intrinsic merit; but their existence is a
proof of taste that could relish, though not of genius that could
emulate antiquity.[897]
[Sidenote: much more the fourteenth.]
[Sidenote: Invention of linen paper.]
[Sidenote: Libraries.]
In the thirteenth century there seems to have been some decline of
classical literature, in consequence probably of the scholastic
philosophy, which was then in its greatest vigour; at least we do not
find so many good writers as in the preceding age. But about the middle
of the fourteenth, or perhaps a little sooner, an ardent zeal for the
restoration of ancient learning began to display itself. The copying of
books, for some ages slowly and sparingly performed in monasteries, had
already become a branch of trade;[898] and their price was consequently
reduced. Tiraboschi denies that the invention of making paper from linen
rags is older than the middle of that century; and although doubts may
be justly entertained as to the accuracy of this position, yet the
confidence with which so eminent a scholar advances it is at least a
proof that paper manuscripts of an earlier date are very rare.[899]
Princes became far more attentive to literature when it was no longer
confined to metaphysical theology and canon law. I have already
mentioned the translations from classical authors, made by command of
John and Charles V. of France. These French translations diffused some
acquaintance with ancient history and learning among our own
countrymen.[900] The public libraries assumed a more respectable
appearance. Louis IX. had formed one at Paris, in which it does not
appear that any work of elegant literature was found.[901] At the
beginning of the fourteenth century, only four classical manuscripts
existed in this collection; of Cicero, Ovid, Lucan, and Boethius.[902]
The academical library of Oxford, in 1300, consisted of a few tracts
kept in chests under St Mary's church. That of Glastonbury Abbey, in
1240, contained four hundred volumes, among which were Livy, Sallust,
Lucan, Virgil, Claudian, and other ancient writers.[903] But no other,
probably, of that age was so numerous or so valuable. Richard of Bury,
chancellor of England, and Edward III., spared no expense in collecting
a library, the first perhaps that any private man had formed. But the
scarcity of valuable books was still so great, that he gave the abbot of
St. Albans fifty pounds weight of silver for between thirty and forty
volumes.[904] Charles V. increased the royal library at Paris to nine
hundred volumes, which the duke of Bedford purchased and transported to
London.[905] His brother Humphrey duke of Gloucester presented the
university of Oxford with six hundred books, which seem to have been of
extraordinary value, one hundred and twenty of them having been
estimated at one thousand pounds. This indeed was in 1440, at which time
such a library would not have been thought remarkably numerous beyond
the Alps,[906] but England had made comparatively little progress in
learning. Germany, however, was probably still less advanced. Louis,
Elector Palatine, bequeathed in 1421 his library to the university of
Heidelberg, consisting of one hundred and fifty-two volumes. Eighty-nine
of these related to theology, twelve to canon and civil law, forty-five
to medicine, and six to philosophy.[907]
[Sidenote: Transcription of manuscripts.]
Those who first undertook to lay open the stores of ancient learning
found incredible difficulties from the scarcity of manuscripts. So gross
and supine was the ignorance of the monks, within whose walls these
treasures were concealed, that it was impossible to ascertain, except by
indefatigable researches, the extent of what had been saved out of the
great shipwreck of antiquity. To this inquiry Petrarch devoted continual
attention. He spared no means to preserve the remains of authors, who
were perishing from neglect and time. This danger was by no means
passed in the fourteenth century. A treatise of Cicero upon Glory, which
had been in his possession, was afterwards irretrievably lost.[908] He
declares that he had seen in his youth the works of Varro; but all his
endeavours to recover these and the second Decad of Livy were fruitless.
He found, however, Quintilian, in 1350, of which there was no copy in
Italy.[909] Boccaccio, and a man of less general fame, Colluccio
Salutato, were distinguished in the same honourable task. The diligence
of these scholars was not confined to searching for manuscripts.
Transcribed by slovenly monks, or by ignorant persons who made copies
for sale, they required the continual emendation of accurate
critics.[910] Though much certainly was left for the more enlightened
sagacity of later times, we owe the first intelligible text of the Latin
classics to Petrarch, Poggio, and their contemporary labourers in this
vineyard for a hundred years before the invention of printing.
[Sidenote: Industry of the fifteenth century.]
[Sidenote: Poggio.]
What Petrarch began in the fourteenth century was carried on by a new
generation with unabating industry. The whole lives of Italian scholars
in the fifteenth century were devoted to the recovery of manuscripts and
the revival of philology. For this they sacrificed their native
language, which had made such surprising shoots in the preceding age,
and were content to trace, in humble reverence, the footsteps of
antiquity. For this too they lost the hope of permanent glory, which can
never remain with imitators, or such as trim the lamp of ancient
sepulchres. No writer perhaps of the fifteenth century, except Politian,
can aspire at present even to the second class, in a just marshalling of
literary reputation. But we owe them our respect and gratitude for their
taste and diligence. The discovery of an unknown manuscript, says
Tiraboschi, was regarded almost as the conquest of a kingdom. The
classical writers, he adds, were chiefly either found in Italy, or at
least by Italians; they were first amended and first printed in Italy,
and in Italy they were first collected in public libraries.[911] This
is subject to some exception, when fairly considered; several ancient
authors were never lost, and therefore cannot be said to have been
discovered; and we know that Italy did not always anticipate other
countries in classical printing. But her superior merit is
incontestable. Poggio Bracciolini, who stands perhaps at the head of the
restorers of learning, in the earlier part of the fifteenth century,
discovered in the monastery of St. Gall, among dirt and rubbish in a
dungeon scarcely fit for condemned criminals, as he describes it, an
entire copy of Quintilian, and part of Valerius Flaccus. This was in
1414; and soon afterwards, he rescued the poem of Silius Italicus, and
twelve comedies of Plautus, in addition to eight that were previously
known: besides Lucretius, Columella, Tertullian, Ammianus Marcellinus,
and other writers of inferior note.[912] A bishop of Lodi brought to
light the rhetorical treatises of Cicero. Not that we must suppose these
books to have been universally unknown before; Quintilian, at least, is
quoted by English writers much earlier. But so little intercourse
prevailed among different countries, and the monks had so little
acquaintance with the riches of their conventual libraries, that an
author might pass for lost in Italy, who was familiar to a few learned
men in other parts of Europe. To the name of Poggio we may add a number
of others, distinguished in this memorable resurrection of ancient
literature, and united, not always indeed by friendship, for their
bitter animosities disgrace their profession, but by a sort of common
sympathy in the cause of learning; Filelfo, Laurentius Valla, Niccolo
Niccoli, Ambrogio Traversari, more commonly called Il Camaldolense, and
Leonardo Aretino.
[Sidenote: Greek language unknown in the West.]
From the subversion of the Western Empire, or at least from the time
when Rome ceased to pay obedience to the exarchs of Ravenna, the Greek
language and literature had been almost entirely forgotten within the
pale of the Latin church. A very few exceptions might be found,
especially in the earlier period of the middle ages, while the eastern
emperors retained their dominion over part of Italy.[913] Thus
Charlemagne is said to have established a school for Greek at
Osnaburg.[914] John Scotus seems to have been well acquainted with the
language. And Greek characters may occasionally, though very seldom, be
found in the writings of learned men; such as Lanfranc or William of
Malmsbury.[915] It is said that Roger Bacon understood Greek; and that
his eminent contemporary, Robert Grostete, bishop of Lincoln, had a
sufficient intimacy with it to translate a part of Suidas. Since Greek
was spoken with considerable purity by the noble and well educated
natives of Constantinople, we may wonder that, even as a living
language, it was not better known by the western nations, and especially
in so neighbouring a nation as Italy. Yet here the ignorance was perhaps
even more complete than in France or England. In some parts indeed of
Calabria, which had been subject to the eastern empire till near the
year 1100, the liturgy was still performed in Greek; and a considerable
acquaintance with the language was of course preserved. But for the
scholars of Italy, Boccaccio positively asserts, that no one understood
so much as the Greek characters.[916] Nor is there probably a single
line quoted from any poet in that language from the sixth to the
fourteenth century.
[Sidenote: Its study revives in the fourteenth century.]
The first to lead the way in restoring Grecian learning in Europe were
the same men who had revived the kindred muses of Latium, Petrarch and
Boccaccio. Barlaam, a Calabrian by birth, during an embassy from the
court of Constantinople in 1335, was persuaded to become the preceptor
of the former, with whom he read the works of Plato.[917] Leontius
Pilatus, a native of Thessalonica, was encouraged some years afterwards
by Boccaccio to give public lectures upon Homer at Florence.[918]
Whatever might be the share of general attention that he excited, he had
the honour of instructing both these great Italians in his native
language. Neither of them perhaps reached an advanced degree of
proficiency; but they bathed their lips in the fountain, and enjoyed the
pride of being the first who paid the homage of a new posterity to the
father of poetry. For some time little fruit apparently resulted from
their example; but Italy had imbibed the desire of acquisitions in a new
sphere of knowledge, which, after some interval, she was abundantly able
to realize. A few years before the termination of the fourteenth
century, Emanuel Chrysoloras, whom the emperor John Palaeologus had
previously sent into Italy, and even as far as England, upon one of
those unavailing embassies, by which the Byzantine court strove to
obtain sympathy and succour from Europe, returned to Florence as a
public teacher of Grecian literature.[919] His school was afterwards
removed successively to Pavia, Venice, and Rome; and during nearly
twenty years that he taught in Italy, most of those eminent scholars
whom I have already named, and who distinguish the first half of that
century, derived from his instruction their knowledge of the Greek
tongue. Some, not content with being the disciples of Chrysoloras,
betook themselves to the source of that literature at Constantinople;
and returned to Italy, not only with a more accurate insight into the
Greek idiom than they could have attained at home, but with copious
treasures of manuscripts, few, if any, of which probably existed
previously in Italy, where none had ability to read or value them; so
that the principal authors of Grecian antiquity may be considered as
brought to light by these inquirers, the most celebrated of whom are
Guarino of Verona, Aurispa, and Filelfo. The second of these brought
home to Venice in 1423 not less than two hundred and thirty-eight
volumes.[920]
[Sidenote: State of learning in Greece.]
The fall of that eastern empire, which had so long outlived all other
pretensions to respect that it scarcely retained that founded upon its
antiquity, seems to have been providentially delayed till Italy was ripe
to nourish the scattered seeds of literature that would have perished a
few ages earlier in the common catastrophe. From the commencement of the
fifteenth century even the national pride of Greece could not blind her
to the signs of approaching ruin. It was no longer possible to inspire
the European republic, distracted by wars and restrained by calculating
policy, with the generous fanaticism of the crusades; and at the council
of Florence, in 1439, the court and church of Constantinople had the
mortification of sacrificing their long-cherished faith, without
experiencing any sensible return of protection or security. The learned
Greeks were perhaps the first to anticipate, and certainly not the last
to avoid, their country's destruction. The council of Florence brought
many of them into Italian connexions, and held out at least a temporary
accommodation of their conflicting opinions. Though the Roman pontiffs
did nothing, and probably could have done nothing effectual, for the
empire of Constantinople, they were very ready to protect and reward the
learning of individuals. To Eugenius IV., to Nicolas V., to Pius II.,
and some other popes of this age, the Greek exiles were indebted for a
patronage which they repaid by splendid services in the restoration of
their native literature throughout Italy. Bessarion, a disputant on the
Greek side in the council of Florence, was well content to renounce the
doctrine of single procession for a cardinal's hat--a dignity which he
deserved for his learning, if not for his pliancy. Theodore Gaza, George
of Trebizond, and Gemistus Pletho, might equal Bessarion in merit,
though not in honours. They all, however, experienced the patronage of
those admirable protectors of letters, Nicolas V., Cosmo de' Medici, or
Alfonso king of Naples. These men emigrated before the final destruction
of the Greek empire; Lascaris and Musurus, whose arrival in Italy was
posterior to that event, may be deemed perhaps still more conspicuous;
but as the study of the Greek language was already restored, it is
unnecessary to pursue the subject any further.
The Greeks had preserved, through the course of the middle ages, their
share of ancient learning with more fidelity and attention than was
shown in the west of Europe. Genius indeed, or any original excellence,
could not well exist along with their cowardly despotism, and their
contemptible theology, more corrupted by frivolous subtleties than that
of the Latin church. The spirit of persecution, naturally allied to
despotism and bigotry, had nearly, during one period, extinguished the
lamp, or at least reduced the Greeks to a level with the most ignorant
nations of the West. In the age of Justinian, who expelled the last
Platonic philosophers, learning began rapidly to decline; in that of
Heraclius it had reached a much lower point of degradation; and for two
centuries, especially while the worshippers of images were persecuted
with unrelenting intolerance, there is almost a blank in the annals of
Grecian literature.[921] But about the middle of the ninth century it
revived pretty suddenly, and with considerable success.[922] Though, as
I have observed, we find in very few instances any original talent, yet
it was hardly less important to have had compilers of such erudition as
Photius, Suidas, Eustathius, and Tzetzes. With these certainly the
Latins of the middle ages could not place any names in comparison. They
possessed, to an extent which we cannot precisely appreciate, many of
those poets, historians, and orators of ancient Greece, whose loss we
have long regretted and must continue to deem irretrievable. Great
havoc, however, was made in the libraries of Constantinople at its
capture by the Latins--an epoch from which a rapid decline is to be
traced in the literature of the eastern empire. Solecisms and barbarous
terms, which sometimes occur in the old Byzantine writers, are said to
deform the style of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.[923] The
Turkish ravages and destruction of monasteries ensued; and in the
cheerless intervals of immediate terror there was no longer any
encouragement to preserve the monuments of an expiring language, and of
a name that was to lose its place among nations.[924]
[Sidenote: Literature not much improved beyond Italy.]
That ardour for the restoration of classical literature which animated
Italy in the first part of the fifteenth century, was by no means common
to the rest of Europe. Neither England, nor France, nor Germany, seemed
aware of the approaching change. We are told that learning, by which I
believe is only meant the scholastic ontology, had begun to decline at
Oxford from the time of Edward III.[925] And the fifteenth century, from
whatever cause, is particularly barren of writers in the Latin language.
The study of Greek was only introduced by Grocyn and Linacer under
Henry VII., and met with violent opposition in the university of Oxford,
where the unlearned party styled themselves Trojans, as a pretext for
abusing and insulting the scholars.[926] Nor did any classical work
proceed from the respectable press of Caxton. France, at the beginning
of the fifteenth age, had several eminent theologians; but the reigns of
Charles VII. and Louis XI. contributed far more to her political than
her literary renown. A Greek professor was first appointed at Paris in
1458, before which time the language had not been publicly taught, and
was little understood.[927] Much less had Germany thrown off her ancient
rudeness. AEneas Sylvius, indeed, a deliberate flatterer, extols every
circumstance in the social state of that country; but Campano, the papal
legate at Ratisbon in 1471, exclaims against the barbarism of a nation,
where very few possessed any learning, none any elegance.[928] Yet the
progress of intellectual cultivation, at least in the two former
countries, was uniform, though silent; libraries became more numerous,
and books, after the happy invention of paper, though still very scarce,
might be copied at less expense. Many colleges were founded in the
English as well as foreign universities during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. Nor can I pass over institutions that have so
eminently contributed to the literary reputation of this country, and
that still continue to exercise so conspicuous an influence over her
taste and knowledge, as the two great schools of grammatical learning,
Winchester and Eton--the one founded by William of Wykeham, bishop of
Winchester, in 1373; the other in 1432, by King Henry the Sixth.[929]
[Sidenote: Invention of printing.]
But while the learned of Italy were eagerly exploring their recent
acquisitions of manuscripts, decyphered with difficulty and slowly
circulated from hand to hand, a few obscure Germans had gradually
perfected the most important discovery recorded in the annals of
mankind. The invention of printing, so far from being the result of
philosophical sagacity, does not appear to have been suggested by any
regard to the higher branches of literature, or to bear any other
relation than that of coincidence to their revival in Italy. The
question why it was struck out at that particular time must be referred
to that disposition of unknown causes which we call accident. Two or
three centuries earlier, we cannot but acknowledge the discovery would
have been almost equally acceptable. But the invention of paper seems to
have naturally preceded those of engraving and printing. It is generally
agreed that playing cards, which have been traced far back in the
fourteenth century, gave the first notion of taking off impressions from
engraved figures upon wood. The second stage, or rather second
application of this art, was the representation of saints and other
religious devices, several instances of which are still extant. Some of
these are accompanied with an entire page of illustrative text, cut into
the same wooden block. This process is indeed far removed from the
invention that has given immortality to the names of Fust, Schoeffer,
and Gutenburg, yet it probably led to the consideration of means whereby
it might be rendered less operose and inconvenient. Whether moveable
wooden characters were ever employed in any entire work is very
questionable--the opinion that referred their use to Laurence Coster, of
Haarlem, not having stood the test of more accurate investigation. They
appear, however, in the capital letters of some early printed books. But
no expedient of this kind could have fulfilled the great purposes of
this invention, until it was perfected by founding metal types in a
matrix or mould, the essential characteristic of printing, as
distinguished from other arts that bear some analogy to it.
The first book that issued from the presses of Fust and his associates
at Mentz was an edition of the Vulgate, commonly called the Mazarine
Bible, a copy having been discovered in the library that owes its name
to Cardinal Mazarin at Paris. This is supposed to have been printed
between the years 1450 and 1455.[930] In 1457 an edition of the Psalter
appeared, and in this the invention was announced to the world in a
boasting colophon, though certainly not unreasonably bold.[931] Another
edition of the Psalter, one of an ecclesiastical book, Durand's account
of liturgical offices, one of the Constitutions of Pope Clement V., and
one of a popular treatise on general science, called the Catholicon,
filled up the interval till 1462, when the second Mentz Bible proceeded
from the same printers.[932] This, in the opinion of some, is the
earliest book in which cast types were employed--those of the Mazarine
Bible having been cut with the hand. But this is a controverted point.
In 1465 Fust and Schoeffer published an edition of Cicero's Offices,
the first tribute of the new art to polite literature. Two pupils of
their school, Sweynheim and Pannartz, migrated the same year into Italy,
and printed Donatus's grammar and the works of Lactantius at the
monastery of Subiaco, in the neighbourhood of Rome.[933] Venice had the
honour of extending her patronage to John of Spira, the first who
applied the art on an extensive scale to the publication of classical
writers.[934] Several Latin authors came forth from his press in 1470;
and during the next ten years a multitude of editions were published in
various parts of Italy. Though, as we may judge from their present
scarcity, these editions were by no means numerous in respect of
impressions, yet, contrasted with the dilatory process of copying
manuscripts, they were like a new mechanical power in machinery, and
gave a wonderfully accelerated impulse to the intellectual cultivation
of mankind. From the era of these first editions proceeding from the
Spiras, Zarot, Janson, or Sweynheim and Pannartz, literature must be
deemed to have altogether revived in Italy. The sun was now fully above
the horizon, though countries less fortunately circumstanced did not
immediately catch his beams; and the restoration of ancient learning in
France and England cannot be considered as by any means effectual even
at the expiration of the fifteenth century. At this point, however, I
close the present chapter. The last twenty years of the middle ages,
according to the date which I have fixed for their termination in
treating of political history, might well invite me by their brilliancy
to dwell upon that golden morning of Italian literature. But, in the
history of letters, they rather appertain to the modern than the middle
period; nor would it become me to trespass upon the exhausted patience
of my readers by repeating what has been so often and so recently told,
the story of art and learning, that has employed the comprehensive
research of a Tiraboschi, a Ginguene, and a Roscoe.
FOOTNOTES:
[571] Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. i. p. 270. Meyer ascribes
the origin of Flemish trade to Baldwin count of Flanders in 958, who
established markets at Bruges and other cities. Exchanges were in that
age, he says, chiefly effected by barter, little money circulating in
Flanders. Annales Flandrici, fol. 18 (edit. 1561).
[572] Matthew Westmonast, apud Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. i.
p. 415.
[573] Such regulations scared away those Flemish weavers who brought
their art into England under Edward III. Macpherson, p. 467, 494, 546.
Several years later the magistrates of Ghent are said by Meyer (Annales
Flandrici, fol. 156) to have imposed a tax on every loom. Though the
seditious spirit of the Weavers' Company had perhaps justly provoked
them, such a tax on their staple manufacture was a piece of madness,
when English goods were just coming into competition.
[574] Terra marique mercatura, rerumque commercia et quaestus peribant.
Non solum totius Europae mercatores, verum etiam ipsi Turcae aliaeque
sepositae nationes ob bellum istud Flandriae magno afficiebantur dolore.
Erat nempe Flandria totius prope orbis stabile mercatoribus emporium.
Septemdecim regnorum negotiatores tum Brugis sua certa habuere domicilia
ac sedes, praeter complures incognitas paene gentes quae undique
confluebant. Meyer, fol. 205, ad ann. 1385.
[575] Meyer; Froissart; Comines.
[576] It contained, according to Ludovico Guicciardini, 35,000 houses,
and the circuit of its walls was 45,640 Roman feet. Description des Pais
Bas, p. 350, &c. (edit. 1609). Part of this enclosure was not built
upon. The population of Ghent is reckoned by Guicciardini at 70,000, but
in his time it had greatly declined. It is certainly, however, much
exaggerated by earlier historians. And I entertain some doubts as to
Guicciardini's estimate of the number of houses. If at least he was
accurate, more than half of the city must since have been demolished or
become uninhabited, which its present appearance does not indicate; for
Ghent, though not very flourishing, by no means presents the decay and
dilapidation of several Italian towns.
[577] Guicciardini, p. 362; Mem. de Comines, 1. v. c. 17; Meyer, fol.
354; Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. i. p. 647, 651.
[578] Blomefield, the historian of Norfolk, thinks that a colony of
Flemings settled as early as this reign at Worsted, a village in that
county, and immortalized its name by their manufacture. It soon reached
Norwich, though not conspicuous till the reign of Edward I. Hist. of
Norfolk, vol. ii. Macpherson speaks of it for the first time in 1327.
There were several guilds of weavers in the time of Henry II. Lyttelton,
vol. ii. p. 174.
[579] Macpherson's Annals of Commerce, vol. i. p. 412, from Walter
Hemingford. I am considerably indebted to this laborious and useful
publication, which has superseded that of Anderson.
[580] Rymer, t. ii. p. 32, 50, 737, 949, 965; t. iii. p. 533, 1106, et
alibi.
[581] Rymer, t. iii. p. 759. A Flemish factory was established at
Berwick about 1286. Macpherson.
[582] In 1295 Edward I. made masters of neutral ships in English ports
find security not to trade with France. Rymer, t. ii. p. 679.
[583] Rymer, t. iv. p. 491, &c. Fuller draws a notable picture of the
inducements held out to the Flemings. "Here they should feed on fat beef
and mutton, till nothing but their fulness should stint their stomachs;
their beds should be good, and their bedfellows better, seeing the
richest yeomen in England would not disdain to marry their daughters
unto them, and such the English beauties that the most envious
foreigners could not but commend them." Fuller's Church History, quoted
in Blomefield's Hist. of Norfolk.
[584] Rymer, t. v. p. 137, 430, 540.
[585] In 1409 woollen cloths formed great part of our exports, and were
extensively used over Spain and Italy. And in 1449, English cloths
having been prohibited by the duke of Burgundy, it was enacted that,
until he should repeal this ordinance, no merchandise of his dominions
should be admitted into England. 27 H. VI. c. 1. The system of
prohibiting the import of foreign wrought goods was acted upon very
extensively in Edward IV.'s reign.
[586] Stat. 11 E. III. c. 1. Blackstone says that transporting wool out
of the kingdom, to the detriment of our staple manufacture, was
forbidden at common law (vol. iv. c. 19), not recollecting that we had
no staple manufactures in the ages when the common law was formed, and
that the export of wool was almost the only means by which this country
procured silver, or any other article of which it stood in need, from
the continent. In fact, the landholders were so far from neglecting this
source of their wealth, that a minimum was fixed upon it, by a statute
of 1343 (repealed indeed the next year, 18 E. III. c. 3), below which
price it was not to be sold; from a laudable apprehension, as it seems,
that foreigners were getting it too cheap. And this was revived in the
32nd of H. VI., though the act is not printed among the statutes. Rot.
Parl. t. v. p. 275. The exportation of sheep was prohibited in
1338--Rymer, t. v. p. 36; and by act of Parliament in 1425--3 H. VI. c.
2. But this did not prevent our importing the wool of a foreign country,
to our own loss. It is worthy of notice that English wool was superior
to any other for fineness during these ages. Henry II., in his patent to
the Weavers' Company, directs that, if any weaver mingled Spanish wool
with English, it should be burned by the lord mayor. Macpherson, p. 382.
An English flock transported into Spain about 1348 is said to have been
the source of the fine Spanish wool. Ibid. p. 539. But the superiority
of English wool, even as late as 1438, is proved by the laws of
Barcelona forbidding its adulteration. p. 654. Another exportation of
English sheep to Spain took place about 1465, in consequence of a
commercial treaty. Rymer, t. xi. p. 534 et alibi. In return, Spain
supplied England with horses, her breed of which was reckoned the best
in Europe; so that the exchange was tolerably fair. Macpherson, p. 596.
The best horses had been very dear in England, being imported from Spain
and Italy. Ibid.
[587] Schmidt, t. iv. p. 18.
[588] Considerable woollen manufactures appear to have existed in
Picardy about 1315. Macpherson ad annum. Capmany, t. iii. part 2, p.
151.
[589] The sheriffs of Wiltshire and Sussex are directed in 1253 to
purchase for the king 1000 ells of fine linen, lineae telae pulchrae et
delicate. This Macpherson supposes to be of domestic manufacture, which,
however, is not demonstrable. Linen was made at that time in Flanders;
and as late as 1417 the fine linen used in England was imported from
France and the Low Countries. Macpherson, from Rymer, t. ix. p. 334.
Velly's history is defective in giving no account of the French commerce
and manufactures, or at least none that is at all satisfactory.
[590] Adam Bremensis, de Situ Daniae, p. 13. (Elzevir edit.)
[591] Schmidt, t. iv. p. 8. Macpherson, p. 392. The latter writer thinks
they were not known by the name of Hanse so early.
[592] Pfeffel, t. i. p. 443; Schmidt, t. iv. p. 18; t. v. p. 512;
Macpherson's Annals, vol. i. p. 693.
[593] Macpherson, vol. i. passim.
[594] Rymer, t. viii. p. 360.
[595] Macpherson (who quotes Stow), p. 415.
[596] Walsingham, p. 211.
[597] Rymer, t. vii. p. 210, 341; t. viii. p. 9.
[598] Rymer, t. x. p. 461.
[599] Rymer, t. viii. p. 488.
[600] Macpherson, p. 667.
[601] Richard III., in 1485, appointed a Florentine merchant to be
English consul at Pisa, on the ground that some of his subjects intended
to trade to Italy. Macpherson, p. 705, from Rymer. Perhaps we cannot
positively prove the existence of a Mediterranean trade at an earlier
time; and even this instrument is not conclusive. But a considerable
presumption arises from two documents in Rymer, of the year 1412, which
inform us of a great shipment of wool and other goods made by some
merchants of London for the Mediterranean, under supercargoes, whom, it
being a new undertaking, the king expressly recommended to the Genoese
republic. But that people, impelled probably by commercial jealousy,
seized the vessels and their cargoes; which induced the king to grant
the owners letters of reprisal against all Genoese property. Rymer, t.
viii. p. 717, 773. Though it is not perhaps evident that the vessels
were English, the circumstances render it highly probable. The bad
success, however, of this attempt, might prevent its imitation. A Greek
author about the beginning of the fifteenth century reckons the Inglenoi
among the nations who traded to a port in the Archipelago. Gibbon, vol.
xii. p. 52. But these enumerations are generally swelled by vanity or
the love of exaggeration; and a few English sailors on board a foreign
vessel would justify the assertion. Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish
traveller, pretends that the port of Alexandria, about 1160, contained
vessels not only from England, but from Russia, and even _Cracow_.
Harris's Voyages, vol. i. p. 554.
[602] The Amalfitans are thus described by William of Apulia, apud
Muratori, Dissert. 30.
Urbs haec dives opum, populoque referta videtur,
Nulla magis locuples argento, vestibus, auro.
Partibus innumeris ac plurimus urbe moratur
Nauta, maris coelique vias aperire peritus.
Huc et Alexandri diversa feruntur ab urbe,
Regis et Antiochi. Haec [etiam?] freta plurima transit.
Hic Arabes, Indi, Siculi noscuntur, et Afri.
Haec gens est totum prope nobilitata per orbem,
Et mercanda ferens et amans mercata referre.
[There must be, I suspect, some exaggeration about the commerce and
opulence of Amalfi, in the only age when she possessed any at all. The
city could never have been considerable, as we may judge from its
position immediately under a steep mountain; and what is still more
material, has a very small port. According to our notions of trade, she
could never have enjoyed much; the lines quoted from William of Apulia
are to be taken as a poet's panegyric. It is of course a question of
degree; Amalfi was no doubt a commercial republic to the extent of her
capacity; but those who have ever been on the coast must be aware how
limited that was. At present she has, I believe, no foreign trade at
all. 1848.]
[603] The inhabitants of Acre were noted, in an age not very pure, for
the excess of their vices. In 1291 they plundered some of the subjects
of a neighbouring Mohammedan prince, and, refusing reparation, the city
was besieged and taken by storm. Muratori, ad ann. Gibbon, c. 59.
[604] Villani, 1. vii. c. 144.
[605] Macpherson, p. 490.
[606] Capmany, Memorias Historicas, t. iii. preface, p. 11; and part 2,
p. 131. His authority is Balducci Pegalotti, a Florentine writer upon
commerce about 1340, whose work I have never seen. It appears from
Balducci that the route to China was from Asoph to Astrakan, and thence,
by a variety of places which cannot be found in modern maps, to Cambalu,
probably Pekin, the capital city of China, which he describes as being
one hundred miles in circumference. The journey was of rather more than
eight months, going and returning; and he assures us it was perfectly
secure, not only for caravans, but for a single traveller with a couple
of interpreters and a servant. The Venetians had also a settlement in
the Crimea, and appear, by a passage in Petrarch's letters, to have
possessed some of the trade through Tartary. In a letter written from
Venice, after extolling in too rhetorical a manner the commerce of that
republic, he mentions a particular ship that had just sailed for the
Black Sea. Et ipsa quidem Tanaim it visura, nostri enim maris navigatio
non ultra tenditur; eorum vero aliqui, quos haec fert, illic iter
[instituent] eam egressuri, nec antea substituri, quam Gange et Caucaso
superato, ad Indos atque extremos Seres et Orientalem perveniatur
Oceanum. En quo ardens et inexplebilis habendi sitis hominum mentes
rapit! Petrarcae Opera, Senil. 1. ii. ep. 3, p. 760 edit. 1581.
[607] Hist. de Languedoc, t. iii. p. 531; t. iv. p. 517. Mem. de l'Acad.
des Inscriptions, t. xxxvii.
[608] Capmany, Memorias Historicas de Barcelona, t. i. part 2. See
particularly p. 36.
[609] Muratori, Dissert. 30. Denina, Rivoluzione d'Italia, 1. xiv. c.
11. The latter writer is of opinion that mulberries were not cultivated
as an important object till after 1300, nor even to any great extent
till after 1500; the Italian manufacturers buying most of their silk
from Spain or the Levant.
[610] The history of Italian states, and especially Florence, will speak
for the first country; Capmany attests the woollen manufacture of the
second--Mem. Hist. de Barcel. t. i. part 3, p. 7, &c.; and Vaissette
that of Carcassonne and its vicinity--Hist. de Lang. t. iv. p. 517.
[611] None were admitted to the rank of burgesses in the town of Aragon
who used any manual trade, with the exception of dealers in fine cloths.
The woollen manufacture of Spain did not at any time become a
considerable article of export, nor even supply the internal
consumption, as Capmany has well shown. Memorias Historicas, t. iii. p.
325 et seqq., and Edinburgh Review, vol. x.
[612] Boucher, the French translator of Il Consolato del Mare, says that
Edrissi, a Saracen geographer who lived about 1100, gives an account,
though in a confused manner, of the polarity of the magnet. t. ii. p.
280. However, the lines of Guiot de Provins are decisive. These are
quoted in Hist. Litteraire de la France, t. ix. p. 199; Mem. de l'Acad.
des Inscript. t. xxi. p. 192; and several other works. Guinizzelli has
the following passage, in a canzone quoted by Ginguene, Hist. Litteraire
de l'Italie, t. i. p. 413:--
In quelle parti sotto tramontana,
Sono li monti della calamita,
Che dan virtute all'aere
Di trarre il ferro; ma perche lontana,
Vole di simil pietra aver aita,
A far la adoperare,
_E dirizzar lo ago in ver la stella._
We cannot be diverted, by the nonsensical theory these lines contain,
from perceiving the positive testimony of the last verse to the poet's
knowledge of the polarity of the magnet. But if any doubt could remain,
Tiraboschi (t. iv. p. 171) has fully established, from a series of
passages, that this phenomenon was well known in the thirteenth century;
and puts an end altogether to the pretensions of Flavio Gioja, if such a
person, ever existed. See also Macpherson's Annals, p. 364 and 418. It
is provoking to find an historian like Robertson asserting, without
hesitation, that this citizen of Amalfi was the inventor of the compass,
and thus accrediting an error which had already been detected.
It is a singular circumstance, and only to be explained by the obstinacy
with which men are apt to reject improvement, that the magnetic needle
was not generally adopted in navigation till very long after the
discovery of its properties, and even after their peculiar importance
had been perceived. The writers of the thirteenth century, who mention
the polarity of the needle, mention also its use in navigation; yet
Capmany has found no distinct proof of its employment till 1403, and
does not believe that it was frequently on board Mediterranean ships at
the latter part of the preceding age. Memorias Historicas, t. iii. p.
70. Perhaps however he has inferred too much from his negative proof;
and this subject seems open to further inquiry.
[613] Boucher supposes it to have been compiled at Barcelona about 900;
but his reasonings are inconclusive, t. i. p. 72; and indeed Barcelona
at that time was little, if at all, better than a fishing-town. Some
arguments might be drawn in favour of Pisa from the expressions of Henry
IV.'s charter granted to that city in 1081. Consuetudines, quas habent
de mari, sic iis observabimus sicut illorum est consuetudo. Muratori
Dissert. 45. Giannone seems to think the collection was compiled about
the reign of Louis IX. 1. xi. c. 6. Capmany, the last Spanish editor,
whose authority ought perhaps to outweigh every other, asserts and seems
to prove them to have been enacted by the mercantile magistrates of
Barcelona, under the reign of James the Conqueror which is much the same
period. Codigo de las Costumbres Maritimas de Barcelona, Madrid, 1791.
But, by whatever nation they were reduced into their present form, these
laws were certainly the ancient and established usages of the
Mediterranean states: and Pisa may very probably have taken a great
share in first practising what a century or two afterwards was rendered
more precise at Barcelona.
[614] Macpherson, p. 358. Boucher supposes them to be registers of
actual decisions.
[615] I have only the authority of Boucher for referring the Ordinances
of Wisbuy to the year 1400. Beckman imagines them to be older than those
of Oleron. But Wisbuy was not enclosed by a wall till 1288, a proof that
it could not have been previously a town of much importance. It
flourished chiefly in the first part of the fourteenth century, and was
at that time an independent republic, but fell under the yoke of Denmark
before the end of the same age.
[616] Hugh Despenser seized a Genoese vessel valued at 14,300 marks, for
which no restitution was ever made. Rym. t. iv. p. 701. Macpherson, A.D.
1336.
[617] The Cinque Ports and other trading towns of England were in a
constant state of hostility with their opposite neighbours during the
reigns of Edward I. and II. One might quote almost half the instruments
in Rymer in proof of these conflicts, and of those with the mariners of
Norway and Denmark. Sometimes mutual envy produced frays between
different English towns. Thus, in 1254 the Winchelsea mariners attacked
a Yarmouth galley, and killed some of her men. Matt. Paris, apud
Macpherson.
[618] Muratori, Dissert. 53.
[619] Du Cange, voc. Laudum.
[620] Rymer, t. iv. p. 576. Videtur sapientibus et peritis, quod causa,
de jure, non subfuit marcham seu reprisaliam in nostris, seu subditorum
nostrorum, bonis concedendi. See too a case of neutral goods on board an
enemy's vessel claimed by the owners, and a legal distinction taken in
favour of the captors. t. vi. p. 14.
[621] 27 E. III. stat. ii. c. 17, 2 Inst. p. 205.
[622] Rymer, t. i. p. 839.
[623] Idem, t. iii. p. 458, 647, 678, et infra. See too the ordinances
of the staple, in 27 Edw. III., which confirm this among other
privileges, and contain manifold evidence of the regard paid to commerce
in that reign.
[624] Rymer, t. ii. p. 891. Madox, Hist. Exchequer, c. xxii. s. 7.
[625] In the remarkable speech of the Doge Mocenigo, quoted in another
place, vol. i. p. 465, the annual profit made by Venice on her
mercantile capital is reckoned at forty per cent.
[626] Muratori, Dissert. 16.
[627] Bizarri, Hist. Genuens. p. 797. The rate of discount on bills,
which may not have exactly corresponded to the average annual interest
of money, was ten per cent. at Barcelona in 1435. Capmany t. i. p. 209.
[628] Du Cange, v. Usura.
[629] Muratori, Diss. 16.
[630] Greg. Turon. I. iv.
[631] Hist. de Languedoc, t. ii. p. 517; t. iii. p. 531.
[632] Id. t. iii. p. 121.
[633] Id. p. 163.
[634] Marina, Ensayo Historico-Critico, p. 143.
[635] Martenne Thesaurus Anecdotorum, t. i. p. 984.
[636] Velly, t. iv. p. 136.
[637] The city of Cahors, in Quercy, the modern department of the Lot,
produced a tribe of money-dealers. The Caursini are almost as often
noticed as the Lombards. See the article in Du Cange. In Lombardy, Asti,
a city of no great note in other respects, was famous for the same
department of commerce.
[638] There were three species of paper credit in the dealings of
merchants: 1. General letters of credit, not directed to any one, which
are not uncommon in the Levant: 2. Orders to pay money to a particular
person: 3. Bills of exchange regularly negotiable. Boucher, t. ii. p.
621. Instances of the first are mentioned by Macpherson about 1200, p.
367. The second species was introduced by the Jews, about 1183 (Capmany,
t. i. p. 297); but it may be doubtful whether the last stage of the
progress was reached nearly so soon. An instrument in Rymer, however, of
the year 1364 (t. vi. p. 495), mentions literae cambitoriae, which seem to
have been negotiable bills; and by 1400 they were drawn in sets, and
worded exactly as at present. Macpherson, p. 614, and Beckman, History
of Inventions, vol. iii. p. 430, give from Capmany an actual precedent
of a bill dated in 1404.
[639] Usury was looked upon with horror by our English divines long
after the Reformation. Fleury, in his Institutions au Droit
Ecclesiastique, t. ii. p. 129, has shown the subterfuges to which men
had recourse in order to evade this prohibition. It is an unhappy truth,
that great part of the attention devoted to the best of sciences, ethics
and jurisprudence, has been employed to weaken principles that ought
never to have been acknowledged.
One species of usury, and that of the highest importance to commerce,
was always permitted, on account of the risk that attended it This was
marine insurance, which could not have existed, until money was
considered, in itself, as a source of profit. The earliest regulations
on the subject of insurance are those of Barcelona in 1433; but the
practice was, of course, earlier than these, though not of great
antiquity. It is not mentioned in the Consolato del Mare, nor in any of
the Hanseatic laws of the fourteenth century. Beckman, vol. i. p. 388.
This author, not being aware of the Barcelonese laws on this subject
published by Capmany, supposes, the first provisions regulating marine
assurance to have been made at Florence in 1523.
[640] Macpherson, p. 487, et alibi. They had probably excellent
bargains; in 1329 the Bardi farmed all the customs in England for 20_l._
a day. But in 1282 the customs had produced 8411_l._, and half a century
of great improvement had elapsed.
[641] Villani, 1. xii. c. 55, 87. He calls these two banking-houses the
pillars which sustained great part of the commerce of Christendom.
[642] Capmany, t. i. p. 213.
[643] Macpherson, p. 341, from Sanuto. The bank of Venice is referred to
1171.
[644] G. Villani, 1. xi. c. 49.
[645] Matt. Villani, p. 227 (in Muratori, Script. Rer. Ital. t. xiv.).
[646] Bizarri, Hist. Genuens. p. 797 (Antwerp, 1579); Machiavelli,
Storia Fiorentina, 1. viii.
[647] Ricobaldus Ferrarensis, apud Murat. Dissert. 23; Francisc.
Pippinus, ibidem. Muratori endeavours to extenuate the authority of this
passage, on account of some more ancient writers who complain of the
luxury of their times, and of some particular instances of magnificence
and expense. But Ricobaldi alludes, as Muratori himself admits, to the
mode of living in the middle ranks, and not to that of courts, which in
all ages might occasionally display considerable splendour. I see
nothing to weaken so explicit a testimony of a contemporary, which in
fact is confirmed by many writers of the next age, who, according to the
practice of Italian chroniclers, have copied it as their own.
[648] Murat. Dissert. 23.
[649]
Bellincion Berti vid' io andar cinto
Di cuojo e d'osso, e venir dallo specchio
La donna sua senza 'l viso dipinto,
E vidi quel di Nerli, e quel del Vecchio
Esser contenti alla pelle scoverta,
E sue donne al fuso ed al pennechio.
Paradis. canto xv.
See too the rest of this canto. But this is put in the mouth of
Cacciaguida, the poet's ancestor, who lived in the former half of the
twelfth century. The change, however, was probably subsequent to 1250,
when the times of wealth and turbulence began at Florence.
[650] Velly, t. xiii. p. 352. The second continuator of Nangis
vehemently inveighs against the long beards and short breeches of his
age; after the introduction of which novelties, he judiciously observes,
the French were much more disposed to run away from their enemies than
before. Spicilegium, t. iii. p. 105.
[651] 37 E. III. Rep. 38 E. III. Several other statutes of a similar
nature were passed in this and the ensuing reign. In France, there were
sumptuary laws as old as Charlemagne, prohibiting or taxing the use of
furs; but the first extensive regulation was under Philip the Fair.
Velly, t. vii. p. 64; t. xi. p. 190. These attempts to restrain what
cannot be restrained continued even down to 1700. De la Mare, Traite de
la Police, t. i. 1. iii.
[652] Muratori, Antichita Italiane, Dissert. 23, t. i. p. 325.
[653] "These English," said the Spaniards who came over with Philip II.,
"have their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly so
well as the king." Harrison's Description of Britain, prefixed to
Holingshed, vol. i. p. 315 (edit. 1807).
[654] Pfeffel, t. i. p. 293.
[655] AEneas Sylvius, de Moribus Germanorum. This treatise is an
amplified panegyric upon Germany, and contains several curious passages:
they must be taken perhaps with some allowance; for the drift of the
whole is to persuade the Germans, that so rich and noble a country could
afford a little money for the poor pope. Civitates quas vocant liberas,
cum Imperatori solum subjiciuntur, cujus jugum est instar libertatis;
nec profecto usquam gentium tanta libertas est, quanta fruuntur
hujuscemodi civitates. Nam populi quos Itali vocant liberos, hi
potissimum serviunt, sive Venetias inspectes, sive Florentiam aut Caenas,
in quibus cives, praeter paucos qui reliquos ducunt, loco mancipiorum
habentur. Cum nec rebus suis uti, ut libet, vel fari quae velint, et
gravissimis opprimuntur pecuniarum exactionibus. Apud Germanos omnia
laeta sunt, omnia jucunda; nemo suis privatur bonis. Salvo cuique sua
haereditas est, nulli nisi nocenti magistratus nocent. Nec apud eos
factiones sicut apud Italas urbes grassantur. Sunt autem supra centum
civitates hac libertate fruentes. p. 1058.
In another part of his work (p. 719) he gives a specious account of
Vienna. The houses, he says, had glass windows and iron doors. Fenestrae
undique vitreae perlucent, et ostia plerumque ferrea. In domibus multa et
munda supellex. Altae domus magnificaeque visuntur. Unum id dedecori est,
quod tecta plerumque tigno contegunt, pauca latere. Caetera aedificia muro
lapideo consistunt. Pictae domus et exterius et interius splendent.
Civitatis populus 50,000 _communicantium_ creditur. I suppose this gives
at least double for the total population. He proceeds to represent the
manners of the city in a less favourable point of view, charging the
citizens with gluttony and libertinism, the nobility with oppression,
the judges with corruption, &c. Vienna probably had the vices of a
flourishing city; but the love of amplification in so rhetorical a
writer as AEneas Sylvius weakens the value of his testimony, on whichever
side it is given.
[656] Vols. iv. and vi.
[657] Mr. Lysons refers Castleton to the age of William the Conqueror,
but without giving any reasons. Lysons's Derbyshire, p. ccxxxvi. Mr.
King had satisfied himself that it was built during the Heptarchy, and
even before the conversion of the Saxons to Christianity; but in this he
gave the reins, as usual, to his imagination, which as much exceeded his
learning, as the latter did his judgment. Conisborough should seem, by
the name, to have been a royal residence, which it certainly never was
after the Conquest. But if the engravings of the decorative parts in the
Archaeologia, vol. vi. p. 244, are not remarkably inaccurate, the
architecture is too elegant for the Danes, much more for the unconverted
Saxons. Both these castles are enclosed by a court or ballium, with a
fortified entrance, like those erected by the Normans.
[No doubt is now entertained but that Conisborough was built late in the
Norman period. Mr. King's authority, which I followed for want of a
better, is by no means to be depended upon. 1848.]
[658] Whitaker's Hist. of Whalley; Lysons's Cumberland, p. ccvi.
[659] The ruins of Herstmonceux are, I believe, tolerably authentic
remains of Henry VI.'s age, but only a part of Haddon Hall is of the
fifteenth century.
[660] Archaeologia, vol. vi.
[661] Blomefield's Norfolk, vol. iii. p. 242.
[662] Whitaker's Hist. of Whalley.
[663] Lyttelton, t. iv. p. 130.
[664] Harrison says, that few of the houses of the commonalty, except
here and there in the west country towns, were made of stone. p. 314.
This was about 1570.
[665] Hist. of Whalley.
[666] "The ancient manors and houses of our gentlemen," says Harrison,
"are yet and for the most part, of strong timber, in framing whereof our
carpenters have been and are worthily preferred before those of like
science among all other nations. Howbeit such as are lately builded are
either of brick or hard stone, or both." p. 316.
[667] Archaeologia, vol. i. p. 143; vol. iv. p. 91.
[668] Hist. of Whalley. In Strutt's View of Manners we have an inventory
of furniture in the house of Mr. Richard Fermor, ancestor of the earl of
Pomfret, at Easton in Northamptonshire, and another in that of Sir
Adrian Foskewe. Both these houses appear to have been of the dimensions
and arrangement mentioned.
[669] Single rooms, windows, doorways, &c., of an earlier date may
perhaps not unfrequently be found; but such instances are always to be
verified by their intrinsic evidence, not by the tradition of the place.
[Note II.]
[670] Melanges tires d'une grande bibliotheque, par M. de Paulmy, t.
iii. et xxxi. It is to be regretted that Le Grand d'Aussy never
completed that part of his Vie privee des Francais which was to have
comprehended the history of civil architecture. Villaret has slightly
noticed its state about 1380. t. ii. p. 141.
[671] Chenonceaux in Touraine was built by a nephew of Chancellor
Duprat; Gaillon in the department of Eure by Cardinal Amboise; both at
the beginning of the sixteenth century. These are now considered, in
their ruins, as among the most ancient houses in France. A work by
Ducerceau (Les plus excellens Batimens de France, 1607) gives accurate
engravings of thirty houses; but with one or two exceptions, they seem
all to have been built in the sixteenth century. Even in that age,
defence was naturally an object in constructing a French mansion-house;
and where defence is to be regarded, splendour and convenience must give
way. The name of _chateau_ was not retained without meaning.
[672] Melanges tires, &c. t. iii. For the prosperity and downfall of
Jacques Coeur, see Villaret, t. xvi. p. 11; but more especially Mem.
de l'Acad. des Inscript. t. xx. p. 509. His mansion at Bourges still
exists, and is well known to the curious in architectural antiquity. In
former editions I have mentioned a house of Jacques Coeur at
Beaumont-sur-Oise; but this was probably by mistake, as I do not
recollect, nor can find, any authority for it.
[673] Giannone, Ist. di Napoli, t. iii. p. 280.
[674] Muratori, Antich. Ital. Dissert. 25, p. 390. Beckman, in his
History of Inventions, vol. i., a work of very great research, cannot
trace any explicit mention of chimneys beyond the writings of John
Villani, wherein however they are not noticed as a new invention. Piers
Plowman, a few years later than Villani, speaks of a "chambre with a
chimney" in which rich men usually dined. But in the account-book of
Bolton Abbey, under the year 1311, there is a charge pro faciendo camino
in the rectory-house of Gargrave. Whitaker's Hist. of Craven, p. 331.
This may, I think, have been only an iron stove or fire-pan; though Dr.
W. without hesitation translates it a chimney. However, Mr. King, in his
observations on ancient castles, Archaeol. vol. vi., and Mr. Strutt, in
his View of Manners, vol. i., describe chimneys in castles of a very old
construction. That at Conisborough in Yorkshire is peculiarly worthy of
attention, and carries back this important invention to a remote
antiquity.
In a recent work of some reputation, it is said:--"There does not appear
to be any evidence of the use of chimney-shafts in England prior to the
twelfth century. In Rochester Castle, which is in all probability the
work of William Corbyl, about 1130, there are complete fireplaces with
semicircular backs, and a shaft in each jamb, supporting a semicircular
arch over the opening, and that is enriched with the zigzag moulding;
some of these project slightly from the wall; the flues, however, go
only a few feet up in the thickness of the wall, and are then turned out
at the back, the apertures being small oblong holes. At the castle,
Hedingham, Essex, which is of about the same date, there are fireplaces
and chimneys of a similar kind. A few years later, the improvement of
carrying the flue up the whole height of the wall appears; as at Christ
Church, Hants; the keep at Newcastle; Sherborne Castle, &c. The early
chimney-shafts are of considerable height, and similar; afterwards they
assumed a great variety of forms, and during the fourteenth century they
are frequently very short." Glossary of Ancient Architecture, p. 100,
edit. 1845. It is said, too, here that chimneys were seldom used in
halls till near the end of the fifteenth century; the smoke took its
course, if it pleased, through a hole in the roof.
Chimneys are still more modern in France; and seem, according to Paulmy,
to have come into common use since the middle of the seventeenth
century. Jadis nos peres n'avoient qu'un unique chauffoir, qui etoit
commun a toute une famille, et quelquefois a plusieurs. t. iii. p. 133.
In another place, however, he says: Il parait que les tuyaux de
cheminees etaient deja tres en usage en France, t. xxxi. p. 232.
[675] Du Cange, v. Vitreae; Bentham's History of Ely, p. 22.
[676] Matt Paris; Vitae Abbatum St. Alb. 122.
[677] Recueil des Hist. t. xii. p. 101.
[678] Paulmy, t. iii. p. 132. Villaret, t. xi. p. 141. Macpherson, p.
679.
[679] Northumberland Household Book, preface, p. 16. Bishop Percy says,
on the authority of Harrison, that glass was not commonly used in the
reign of Henry VIII.
[680] See some curious valuations of furniture and stock in trade at
Colchester in 1296 and 1301. Eden's Introduct. to State of the Poor, p.
20 and 25, from the Rolls of Parliament. A carpenter's stock was valued
at a shilling, and consisted of five tools. Other tradesmen were almost
as poor; but a tanner's stock, if there is no mistake, was worth 9_l._
7_s._ 10_d._, more than ten times any other. Tanners were principal
tradesmen, the chief part of dress being made of leather. A few silver
cups and spoons are the only articles of plate; and as the former are
valued but at one or two shillings, they had, I suppose, but a little
silver on the rim.
[681] Nicholl's Illustrations, p. 119. In this work, among several
interesting facts of the same class, we have another inventory of the
goods of "John Port, late the king's servant," who died about 1524: he
seems to have been a man of some consideration and probably a merchant.
The house consisted of a hall, parlour, buttery, and kitchen, with two
chambers, and one smaller, on the floor above; a napery, or linen room,
and three garrets, besides a shop, which was probably detached. There
were five bedsteads in the house, and on the whole a great deal of
furniture for those times; much more than I have seen in any other
inventory. His plate is valued at 94_l._; his jewels at 23_l._; his
funeral expenses come to 73_l._ 6_s._ 8_d._ p. 119.
[682] Whitaker's Hist. of Craven, p. 289. A better notion of the
accommodations usual in the rank immediately below may be collected from
two inventories published by Strutt, one of Mr. Fermor's house at
Easton, the other Sir Adrian Foskewe's. I have mentioned the size of
these gentlemen's houses already. In the former, the parlour had
wainscot, a table and a few chairs; the chambers above had two best
beds, and there was one servant's bed; but the inferior servants had
only mattresses on the floor. The best chambers had window shutters and
curtains. Mr. Fermor, being a merchant, was probably better supplied
than the neighbouring gentry. His plate however consisted only of
sixteen spoons, and a few goblets and ale pots. Sir Adrian Foskewe's
opulence appears to have been greater; he had a service of silver plate,
and his parlour was furnished with hangings. This was in 1539; it is not
to be imagined that a knight of the shire a hundred years before would
have rivalled even this scanty provision of moveables. Strutt's View of
Manners, vol. iii. p. 63. These details, trifling as they may appear,
are absolutely necessary in order to give an idea with some precision of
a state of national wealth so totally different from the present.
[683] Cuperent tam egregie Scotorum reges quam mediocres Nurembergae
cives habitare. AEn. Sylv. apud Schmidt, Hist. des Allem. t. v. p. 510.
[684] t. iii. p. 127.
[685] Crescentius in Commodum Ruralium. (Lovaniae, absque anno.) This old
edition contains many coarse wooden cuts, possibly taken from the
illuminations which Paulmy found in his manuscript.
[686] Harrison's account of England, prefixed to Hollingshed's
Chronicles. Chimneys were not used in the farm-houses of Cheshire till
within forty years of the publication of King's Vale-royal (1656); the
fire was in the midst of the house, against a hob of clay, and the oxen
lived under the same roof. Whitaker's Craven, p. 334.
[687] The Saracenic architecture was once conceived to have been the
parent of the Gothic. But the pointed arch does not occur, I believe, in
any Moorish buildings; while the great mosque of Cordova, built in the
eighth century, resembles, except by its superior beauty and
magnificence, one of our oldest cathedrals; the nave of Gloucester, for
example, or Durham. Even the vaulting is similar, and seems to indicate
some imitation, though perhaps of a common model. Compare Archaeologia,
vol. xvii. plate 1 and 2, with Murphy's Arabian Antiquities, plate 5.
The pillars indeed at Cordova are of the Corinthian order, perfectly
executed, if we may trust the engraving, and the work, I presume, of
Christian architects; while those of our Anglo-Norman cathedrals are
generally an imitation of the Tuscan shaft, the builders not venturing
to trust their roofs to a more slender support, though Corinthian
foliage is common in the capitals, especially those of smaller
ornamental columns. In fact, the Roman architecture is universally
acknowledged to have produced what we call the Saxon or Norman; but it
is remarkable that it should have been adopted, with no variation but
that of the singular horse-shoe arch, by the Moors of Spain.
The Gothic, or pointed arch, though very uncommon in the genuine
Saracenic of Spain and the Levant, may be found in some prints from
Eastern buildings; and is particularly striking in the facade of the
great mosque at Lucknow, in Salt's designs for Lord Valentia's Travels.
The pointed arch buildings in the Holy Land have all been traced to the
age of the Crusades. Some arches, if they deserve the name, that have
been referred to this class, are not pointed by their construction, but
rendered such by cutting off and hollowing the projections of horizontal
stones.
[688] Gibbon has asserted, what might justify this appellation, that
"the image of Theodoric's palace at Verona, still extant on a coin,
represents the oldest and most authentic model of Gothic architecture."
vol. vii. p. 33. For this he refers to Maffei, Verona Illustrata, p. 31,
where we find an engraving, not indeed of a coin, but of a seal; the
building represented on which is in a totally dissimilar style. The
following passages in Cassiodorus, for which I am indebted to M.
Ginguene, Hist. Litter. de l'Italie, t. i. p. 55, would be more to the
purpose: Quid dicamus columnarum junceam proceritatem? moles illas
sublimissimas fabricarum quasi quibusdam erectis hastilibus contineri.
These columns of reedy slenderness, so well described by juncea
proceritas, are said to be found in the cathedral of Montreal in Sicily,
built in the eighth century. Knight's Principles of Taste, p. 162. They
are not however sufficient to justify the denomination of Gothic, which
is usually confined to the pointed arch style.
[689] The famous abbot Suger, minister of Louis VI., rebuilt St. Denis
about 1140. The cathedral of Laon is said to have been dedicated in
1114. Hist. Litteraire de la France, t. ix. p. 220. I do not know in
what style the latter of these churches is built, but the former is, or
rather was, Gothic. Notre Dame at Paris was begun soon after the middle
of the twelfth century, and completed under St. Louis. Melanges tires
d'une grande bibliotheque, t. xxxi. p. 108. In England, the earliest
specimen I have seen of pointed arches is in a print of St. Botolphe's
Priory at Colchester, said by Strutt to have been built in 1110. View of
Manners, vol. i. plate 30. These are apertures formed by excavating the
space contained by the intersection of semicircular, or Saxon arches;
which are perpetually disposed, by way of ornament, on the outer as well
as inner surface of old churches, so as to cut each other, and
consequently to produce the figure of a Gothic arch; and if there is no
mistake in the date, they are probably among the most ancient of that
style in Europe. Those of the church of St. Cross near Winchester are of
the reign of Stephen; and generally speaking, the pointed style,
especially in vaulting, the most important object in the construction of
a building, is not considered as older than Henry II. The nave of
Canterbury cathedral, of the erection of which by a French architect
about 1176 we have a full account in Gervase (Twysden, Decem Scriptores,
col. 1289), and the Temple church, dedicated in 1183, are the most
ancient English buildings altogether in the Gothic manner.
The subject of ecclesiastical architecture in the middle ages has been
so fully discussed by intelligent and observant writers since these
pages were first published, that they require some correction. The
oriental theory for the origin of the pointed architecture, though not
given up, has not generally stood its ground; there seems more reason to
believe that it was first adopted in Germany, as Mr. Hope has shown; but
at first in single arches, not in the construction of the entire
building.
The circular and pointed forms, instead of one having at once supplanted
the other, were concurrent in the same building, through Germany, Italy,
and Switzerland, for some centuries. I will just add to the instances
mentioned by Mr. Hope and others, and which every traveller may
corroborate, one not very well known, perhaps as early as any,--the
crypt of the cathedral at Basle, built under the reign of the emperor
Henry II., near the commencement of the eleventh century, where two
pointed with three circular arches stand together, evidently from want
of space enough to preserve the same breadth with the necessary height.
The same circumstance will be found, I think, in the crypt of St. Denis,
near Paris, which, however, is not so old. The writings of Hope,
Rickman, Whewell, and Willis are prominent among many that have thrown
light on this subject. The beauty and magnificence of the pointed style
is acknowledged on all sides; perhaps the imitation of it has been too
servile, and with too much forgetfulness of some very important changes
in our religious aspect rendering that simply ornamental which was once
directed to a great object. [1848.]
[690] The curious subject of freemasonry has unfortunately been treated
only by panegyrists or calumniators, both equally mendacious. I do not
wish to pry into the mysteries of the craft; but it would be interesting
to know more of their history during the period when they were literally
architects. They are charged by an act of parliament, 3 H. VI. c. i.,
with fixing the price of their labour in their annual chapters, contrary
to the statute of labourers, and such chapters are consequently
prohibited. This is their first persecution; they have since undergone
others, and are perhaps reserved for still more. It is remarkable, that
masons were never legally incorporated, like other traders; their bond
of union being stronger than any charter. The article Masonry in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica is worth reading.
[691] I cannot resist the pleasure of transcribing a lively and eloquent
passage from Dr. Whitaker. "Could a curious observer of the present day
carry himself nine or ten centuries back, and ranging the summit of
Pendle survey the forked vale of Calder on one side, and the bolder
margins of Ribble and Hadder on the other, instead of populous towns and
villages, the castle, the old tower-built house, the elegant modern
mansion, the artificial plantation, the inclosed park and pleasure
ground: instead of uninterrupted inclosures which have driven sterility
almost to the summit of the fells, how great must then have been the
contrast, when ranging either at a distance, or immediately beneath, his
eye must have caught vast tracts of forest ground stagnating with bog or
darkened by native woods, where the wild ox, the roe, the stag, and the
wolf, had scarcely learned the supremacy of man, when, directing his
view to the intermediate spaces, to the windings of the valleys, or the
expanse of plains beneath, he could only have distinguished a few
insulated patches of culture, each encircling a village of wretched
cabins, among which would still be remarked one rude mansion of wood,
scarcely equal in comfort to a modern cottage, yet then rising proudly
eminent above the rest, where the Saxon lord, surrounded by his faithful
cotarii, enjoyed a rude and solitary independence, owning no superior
but his sovereign." Hist. of Whalley, p. 133. About a fourteenth part of
this parish of Whalley was cultivated at the time of Domesday. This
proportion, however, would by no means hold in the counties south of
Trent.
[692] "Of the Anglo-Saxon husbandry we may remark," says Mr. Turner,
"that Domesday Survey gives us some indication that the cultivation of
the church lands was much superior to that of any other order of
society. They have much less wood upon them, and less common of pasture;
and what they had appears often in smaller and more irregular pieces;
while their meadow was more abundant, and in more numerous
distributions." Hist. of Anglo-Saxons, vol. ii. p. 167.
It was the glory of St. Benedict's reform, to have substituted bodily
labour for the supine indolence of oriental asceticism. In the East it
was more difficult to succeed in such an endeavour, though it had been
made. "The Benedictins have been," says Guizot, "the great clearers of
land in Europe. A colony, a little swarm of monks, settled in places
nearly uncultivated, often in the midst of a pagan population, in
Germany, for example, or in Britany; there, at once missionaries and
labourers, they accomplished their double service through peril and
fatigue." Civilis. en France, Lecon 14. The north-eastern parts of
France, as far as the Lower Seine, were reduced into cultivation by the
disciples of St. Columban, in the sixth and seventh centuries. The
proofs of this are in Mabillon's Acta Sanctorum Ord. Bened. See Mem. de
l'Acad. des Sciences Morales et Politiques, iii. 708.
Guizot has appreciated the rule of St. Benedict with that candid and
favourable spirit which he always has brought to the history of the
church: anxious, as it seems, not only to escape the imputation of
Protestant prejudices by others, but to combat them in his own mind; and
aware, also, that the partial misrepresentations of Voltaire had sunk
into the minds of many who were listening to his lectures. Compared with
the writers of the eighteenth century, who were too much alienated by
the faults of the clergy to acknowledge any redeeming virtues, or even
with Sismondi, who, coming in a moment of reaction, feared the returning
influence of mediaeval prejudices, Guizot stands forward as an equitable
and indulgent arbitrator. In this spirit he says of the rule of St.
Benedict--La pensee morale et la discipline generale en sont severes;
mais dans le detail de la vie elle est humaine et moderee; plus humaine,
plus moderee que les lois barbares, que les moeurs generales du temps;
et je ne doute pas que les freres, renfermes dans l'interieur d'un
monastere, n'y fussent gouvernes par une autorite, a tout prendre, et
plus raisonnable, et d'une maniere moins dure qu'ils ne l'eussent ete
dans la societe civile.
[693] Thus, in Marca Hispanica, Appendix, p. 770, we have a grant from
Lothaire I. in 834, to a person and his brother, of lands which their
father, ab eremo in Septimania trahens, had possessed by a charter of
Charlemagne. See too p. 773, and other places. Du Cange, v. Eremus,
gives also a few instances.
[694] Du Cange, v. Aprisio. Baluze, Capitularia, t. i. p. 549. They were
permitted to decide petty suits among themselves, but for more important
matters were to repair to the county-court. A liberal policy runs
through the whole charter. See more on the same subject, id. p. 569.
[695] I owe this fact to M. Heeren, Essai sur l'Influence des Croisades,
p. 226. An inundation in their own country is supposed to have
immediately produced this emigration; but it was probably successive,
and connected with political as well as physical causes of greater
permanence. The first instrument in which they are mentioned is a grant
from the bishop of Hamburgh in 1106. This colony has affected the local
usages, as well as the denominations of things and places along the
northern coast of Germany. It must be presumed that a large proportion
of the emigrants were diverted from agriculture to people the commercial
cities which grew up in the twelfth century upon that coast.
[696] Ingulfus tells us that the commissioners were pious enough to
favour Croyland, returning its possessions inaccurately, both as to
measurement and value; non ad verum pretium, nec ad verum spatium
nostrum monasterium librabant misericorditer, praecaventes in futurum
regis exactionibus. p. 79. I may just observe by the way, that Ingulfus
gives the plain meaning of the word Domesday, which has been disputed.
The book was so called, he says, pro sua generalitate omnia tenementa
totius terrae integre continente; that is, it was as general and
conclusive as the last judgment will be.
[697] This of course is subject to the doubt as to the authenticity of
Ingulfus.
[698] 1 Gale, XV Script. p. 77.
[699] Communi plebiscito viritim inter se diviserunt, et quidam suas
portiones agricolantes, quidam ad foenum conservantes, quidam ut prius
ad pasturam suorum animalium, separaliter jacere permittentes, terram
pinguem et uberem repererunt. p. 94.
[700] 1 Gale, XV Script. p. 201.
[701] A good deal of information upon the former state of agriculture
will be found in Cullum's History of Hawsted. Blomefield's Norfolk is in
this respect among the most valuable of our local histories. Sir
Frederic Eden, in the first part of his excellent work on the poor, has
collected several interesting facts.
[702] 1. ii. c. 8.
[703] Cullum, p. 100, 220. Eden's State of Poor, &c. p. 48. Whitaker's
Craven, p. 45, 336.
[704] I infer this from a number of passages in Blomefield, Cullum, and
other writers. Hearne says, that an acre was often called Solidata
terrae; because the yearly rent of one _on the best land_ was a shilling.
Lib. Nig. Scacc. p. 31.
[705] Rot. Parl. vol. v. p. 275.
[706] A passage in Bishop Latimer's sermons, too often quoted to require
repetition, shows that land was much underlet about the end of the
fifteenth century. His father, he says, kept half a dozen husbandmen,
and milked thirty cows, on a farm of three or four pounds a year. It is
not surprising that he lived as plentifully as his son describes.
[707] Rymer, t. xii. p. 204.
[708] Velly and Villaret scarcely mention this subject; and Le Grand
merely tells us that it was entirely neglected; but the details of such
an art, even in its state of neglect, might be interesting.
[709] Muratori, Dissert. 21.
[710] Denina, 1. xi. c. 7.
[711] Denina, 1. vi.
[712] t. iii. p. 145; t. xxxi. p. 258.
[713] De la Mare, Traite de la Police, t. iii. p. 380.
[714] Eden's State of Poor, vol. i. p. 51.
[715] Sir F. Eden, whose table of prices, though capable of some
improvement, is perhaps the best that has appeared, would, I think, have
acted better, by omitting all references to mere historians, and relying
entirely on regular documents. I do not however include local histories,
such as the Annals of Dunstaple, when they record the market-prices of
their neighbourhood, in respect of which the book last mentioned is
almost in the nature of a register. Dr. Whitaker remarks the inexactness
of Stowe, who says that wheat sold in London, A.D. 1514, at 20_s._ a
quarter: whereas it appears to have been at 9_s._ in Lancashire, where
it was always dearer than in the metropolis. Hist. of Whalley, p. 97. It
is an odd mistake, into which Sir F. Eden has fallen, when he asserts
and argues on the supposition, that the price of wheat fluctuated in the
thirteenth century, from 1_s._ to 6_l._ 8_s._ a quarter, vol. i. p. 18.
Certainly, if any chronicler had mentioned such a price as the latter,
equivalent to 150_l._ at present, we should either suppose that his text
was corrupt, or reject it as an absurd exaggeration. But, in fact, the
author has, through haste, mistaken 6_s._ 8_d._ for 6_l._ 8_s._, as will
appear by referring to his own table of prices, where it is set down
rightly. It is observed by Mr. Macpherson, a very competent judge, that
the arithmetical statements of the best historians of the middle ages
are seldom correct, owing partly to their neglect of examination, and
partly to blunders of transcribers. Annals of Commerce, vol. i, p. 423.
[716] The table of comparative values by Sir George Shuckburgh
(Philosoph. Transact. for 1798, p. 196) is strangely incompatible with
every result to which my own reading has led me. It is the hasty attempt
of a man accustomed to different studies; and one can neither pardon the
presumption of obtruding such a slovenly performance on a subject where
the utmost diligence was required, nor the affectation with which he
apologizes for "descending from the dignity of philosophy."
[717] M. Guerard, editor of "Paris sous Philippe le Bel," in the
Documens Inedits (1841, p. 365), after a comparison of the prices of
corn, concludes that the value of silver has declined since that reign,
in the ratio of five to one. This is much less than we allow in England.
M. Leber (Mem. de l'Acad. des Inscript. Nouvelle Serie, xiv. 230)
calculates the power of silver under Charlemagne, compared with the
present day, to have been as nearly eleven to one. It fell afterwards to
eight, and continued to sink during the middle ages; the average of
prices during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, taking corn as the
standard, was six to one; the comparison is of course only for France.
This is an interesting paper, and contains tables worthy of being
consulted.
[718] Blomefield's History of Norfolk, and Sir J. Cullum's of Hawsted,
furnish several pieces even at this early period. Most of them are
collected by Sir F. Eden. Fleta reckons 4_s._ the average price of a
quarter of wheat in his time. 1. ii. c. 84. This writer has a digression
on agriculture, whence however less is to be collected than we should
expect.
[719] The fluctuations of price have unfortunately been so great of late
years, that it is almost as difficult to determine one side of our
equation as the other. Any reader, however, has it in his power to
correct my proportions, and adopt a greater or less multiple, according
to his own estimate of current prices, or the changes that may take
place from the time when this is written [1816].