As every circle has its centre, so had every manor its hall, the centre
of its organization, the heart whence throbbed the vital force through
the district, and to which it returned. The hall was not merely the
place where the lord lived, for he did not always occupy it, but it was
the gathering place of the courts leet and baron.
It is the fashion to hold that land was originally held in common, and
that private proprietorship in land is an encroachment on the public
rights.
That was, no doubt, the case with the Celt, and it has been fatal to
his ever taking a lead among the nations; it has so eaten into his
habits of mind as to have rendered him incapable of being other than
a subject under the control of another people, which had happily got
beyond such infantile notions.
It is the case with individuals, starting on the battle of life, that
they sometimes, by chance, take a wrong direction, and then, once
involved therein, have not the power or will or chance to turn back and
take another. That is how some men make a botch of their lives, whereas
others, perhaps their inferiors in ability, by mere accident strike on
a course which leads to power, prosperity, and a name.
It is so among nations, races--and among these the highly-gifted Celt
went wrong at the outstart, and that is it which has been his bane
through centuries. Now the time for recovery is past. He is forced to
take a lower room.
The French, that is to say the Gauls under Frank domination, were
forcibly put right. I do not deny that feudalism led to gross abuses,
and that it was well to have these swept away, but that which I think
was fatal to France at the Revolution was reversion to the Celtic
principle of subdivision. This is inevitably and inexorably killing
France; it is reducing its population, extinguishing its life.
[Illustration: SOUTH WRAXALL, WILTSHIRE
The Quadrangle]
Between 1831 and 1840 there were in France but three departments in
which the mortality exceeded the natality, now there are between
forty-five to sixty departments in this condition.
"If we traverse France rapidly in train from the Channel to the
Pyrenees, there is one observation that may be made from the carriage
windows. Between the Loire and the Garonne, in departments where the
soil is poor, there the houses are smiling and well kept--there is
evidence of comfort. But, on the contrary, in the departments formerly
the richest, there are crumbling walls and empty houses.... The rich
departments are being depopulated, and in the poor ones there the
population remains stationary or only slowly decreases."[3]
The population in the rich departments is dwindling at the rate of 50
per cent. in half a century.
Why is this? Because all property is subdivided. In the poor districts,
too, land will not support all those born, and therefore some take up
trades or go as labourers and artisans.
The increase in population in France per thousand in the year is 18,
whereas in Prussia it is 13.
I was much amused last summer with the remark of a little fellow of
twelve, who was showing me the way across some fields, as a short cut.
I remarked on the beauty of the place, and the fertility of the soil.
"Yes," said he, "but I think it is time for me to be moving, and look
out for some place for myself."
Such a thought, springing up in an English child's mind, would not
occur to a French child. But it is just this which has made us
successful colonists, and it is the absence of this which makes French
colonies dead failures. Whereas we and the Germans pour forth tens of
thousands of emigrants, France sends to her North African Settlements
just over six hundred persons per annum--and they are nearly all
officials.
The maker of pottery, after having tempered his clay, puts into it
particles of grit, of sand, and about these the clay crystallizes, and
it is the making these centres of crystallization that gives to pottery
its cohesion. Without these particles it goes to pieces in burning,
it breaks up with the least pressure. And our manor houses are these
particles of grit, centres of crystallization to our people, that make
us so tough and so cohesive a race--at least, I think it is one very
important element in the manufacture.
If we desire to study the organization of a manor as set about by one
of the branches of the great Scandinavian-Teutonic stock, we cannot do
better than observe the conduct of the settlers in Iceland at the end
of the ninth century.
When the Norsemen came to Iceland they brought with them their
thralls, and they proceeded to make their claims to land, till they
had portioned out all the soil worth having among the great heads
of families. The land thus fell into shares, such as we should call
manors, and each share was under a chief, who planted on the soil his
kinsmen, and any others who applied to him for allotments. No freeman,
if he could help it, would accept the land as a gift, for the reception
of a gift entailed responsibility to the giver, a sort of dependence
that the free spirit of the race greatly disliked.
"The period during which the settlement of Iceland was going on lasted
about sixty years. At the end of that time the island was as fully
peopled as it has ever been since. During all that period each chief,
and his children after him, had lived on his holding, which proved
a little kingdom of itself, allotting his land to new comers, whose
kinship, turn of mind, or inferiority in rank allowed them to accept
the gift, marrying and inter-marrying with the families of neighbouring
chiefs, setting up his children in abodes of their own, putting his
freed men and thralls out in farms and holdings, fulfilling the duties
of the priesthood in his temple, and otherwise exercising what we
should call the legitimate influence on those around him, to which he
was entitled by his strength of arm, or birth, or wealth."[4]
This is just what took place in the conquest of Britain by the Saxons,
Jutes, and Angles. They portioned out the land among them, and turned
the original inhabitants into serfs; to some of these they gave
tenements to hold subject to service: these are now represented by our
tenant farmers; to others, kinsmen, they gave lands free of charge, but
under their own lordship: such are the ancestors of our yeomen.
Now an Icelandic chief was magistrate and priest in one. He was called
the Godi--the Good man. Hard by his hall was the sacred circular
temple, and he offered sacrifice therein. In his hall were assembled
the free householders, to consult relative to the affairs of the
district. This was the husting, or house council. We had precisely the
same condition of affairs in England. Where a manor is there is the
hall, and in that hall were held the courts, which all free holders
attended.
Very probably each Anglo-Saxon lord had his temple adjoining his hall,
but when England became Christian, several manors, when small, combined
to keep a priest between them; but when the church adjoins the manor
house, then almost certainly it occupies the site of the old heathen
Saxon temple; except in Wessex, which was subjugated by Christianised
Saxons.
The hall was the social and political centre of each community. There
the lord showed hospitality, administered justice, appointed his
thralls their tasks, and received the dues of his tenants.
In the earliest period, in it he and his house-churls and family slept,
as well as ate and worked. But the women had a separate apartment,
which in time became the with-drawing room. Bedrooms, kitchens,
parlours, were aftergrowths, as men sought more comfort or privacy, and
these were grouped about the hall. Nevertheless, the custom of sleeping
in the hall continued till Tudor times.
It is instructive to notice the difference between the residence of
the feudal lord on the Continent and that occupied by him in England.
In the former his place of abode is a castle, château, derived from
_castellum_, schloss, from schliesen, a place into which the lord
might lock himself in and from whence lock out all enemies. But the
English terms--mansion, manor-house, hall, court, imply nothing
military, give token of no exclusiveness, make no threat. The chronic
warfare and petty disturbances that prevailed on the continent of
Europe obliged the lords of the soil to perch their residences on
inaccessible and barren rocks, whereas in England they are seated
comfortably in valleys, in the midst of the richest land. In France,
in Germany, in Italy, each feudal owner quarrelled with his neighbour,
and made war on him when he listed. There was nothing of that kind
in England. With the exception of the struggle between Stephen and
Matilda, and the Wars of the Roses, we were spared serious internecine
strife, and the hand of the king was strong enough to put down private
feuds.
The castle was an importation into England, brought in by the Norman
and Angevin kings, and it was only the foreign favourites to whom the
king granted vast numbers of manors who had castles. But the castles
never affected English domestic architecture; on the contrary, the
English sense of comfort, peace, and goodwill prevailed over the
fortress, broke holes in it for immense windows and for wide doorways;
and nothing remained of menace and power except the towers and
battlements.
On the Continent, however, till the eighteenth century, the type
of fortress prevailed; the angle towers became turrets, but were
indispensable wherever a gentleman had a château. As to the English
noble or squire, his only tower was the dove-cot, and the holes in it
not for muskets and crossbows, but for the peaceful pigeon to fly in
and out.
The pedigree of a castle is this:
The stronghold in France in Merovingian days consisted of an adaptation
of the Roman camp. It was an earthwork with a stockade on top,
enclosing a level tract on the top of a hill, if a suitable hill could
be found; within was a mound, a _motte_; on this stood a great round
tower of woodwork, in which lived the chief. The earthwork surrounding
the camp had mounds at intervals, and in the space within the stockade
were similar constructions, a hall and storehouses.
[Illustration: CHATEAU DE JUMILHAC]
Now the mediæval castle was precisely this, with the one
exception--that stone took the place of wood, and the tower on a mound
became the keep.
When the Normans came to England they translated to our island the
type of castle they had been accustomed to in France. They had to
bring their architects, in some cases their material, from France.
But, whereas this became the type of the château in France, it had
nothing to do with the genesis of the manor-house in old England. Our
manor-houses did not pass out of lordly castles, but out of halls. The
very situation of our old manorial mansions shows that they were never
thought of as fortresses.
The Anglo-Saxon did no building of domestic architecture save with
wood. The English lord lived in his great wooden hall, with his tenants
and bonders about him. If he squeezed them, it was gently, as a man
milks his cow. Of the Norman it was said, _Quot domini castellorum, tot
tyranni_.
In France the fortress of the peasant was the church, and the tower his
keep, and in times of trouble he conveyed his goods to the church, and
the entire building became to him a city of refuge. That is why wells,
bake-houses, and other conveniences are found in connection with many
foreign churches.
The battlements of our churches and their towers may perhaps point
to these having been regarded in something the same light by the
inhabitants of a parish in England, but more probably they came
into use when the roofs were not steep, and instead of being slated
or shingled, were covered with lead. To a lead roof, a parapet is
necessary, or rather advisable; and the parapet not only finishes
it off above the wall, but also serves to conceal the ugliness of a
low-pitched roof. And the parapet was broken into battlements to enable
the gutter to be readily cleaned, by throwing over accumulations of
snow and leaves.
The battlement became a mere ornament--almost a joke to English
architects; they even battlemented the transoms of windows, and the
caps of pillars. It would seem as though, in the sense of security
in which the English were, they took a pleasure in laughing at the
grave precautions employed on the Continent, where the battlement was
something far too serious and important to be treated as an ornament.
[Illustration: BATTLEMENTED TRANSOM]
The poor old hall has shrunk and been degraded into a mere lobby,
in which to hang up great coats and hats and sticks and umbrellas.
Originally it was the main feature of the manor-house, to which
everything else was subsidiary; then it was ceiled over, a floor put
across it, and it became a reception-room, and now a reception-room for
overcoats only.
But let it be borne in mind where a real hall is in place and where it
is not. It belongs to a manor and to a manor only; it is incongruous in
a villa residence, and wholly out of place in a town dwelling. Many a
modern gentleman's place in the country is designed to look very pretty
and very mediæval or Tudor; but this is all so much ornament stuck on,
and the organic structure agreeth not therewith.
The hall, so far from excluding people, was so open-doored as to invite
not people only but all the winds of heaven to blow into and through it.
Very usually the front door of the house under the porch opened into
it, and immediately opposite was the door out of the hall into the
court. Naturally the wind marched through.
As a bit of shelter a screen was run up, but only of timber, and the
passage boxed in. Above was the minstrels' gallery; and in the screen
were, of course, doors into the hall, and a buttery hatch, as on the
further side of the passage was either kitchen or cellar, or both.
To almost every hall was a slit or eye and earlet hole communicating
with a lady's chamber. The tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse had a prison
which was so constructed that every whisper in it from one prisoner to
another was carried through a tube to his private apartment, where he
sat and listened to what his captives said.
The slit above mentioned was the Dionysius's ear of that domestic
tyrant, the lady of the house. She sat in her room, with her ear to
this opening, when her good lord revelled and joked in the hall with
his boon companions, and afterwards--behind the curtains--his words
were commented on and his jokes submitted to searching criticism.
Moreover, through this slit her eye raked the hall when the servants
were there, and she could see if they attended to their work or romped
with the men, or idled gossiping.
We have so far advanced that the ear is no longer employed--but the
domestic tyrant is, I am credibly informed, still with us, advancing
triumphant through ages, and like a snowball acquiring force,
consistency, and hardness in progress.
[Illustration: THE DOMESTIC HEARTH]