indifferent to our modern ideas of race. Of nationality it knew
nothing. It was concerned with the maintenance of the Catholic Church
especially against the outer Pagan. This filled the mind. This drove
all the mastering energies of the time. The Church, that is, all the
acts of life, but especially record and common culture, came back into
a Britain which had been cut off. It reopened the gate. It was refused
aid by the Christian whom it relieved. It decided for the courts of the
South and East, taught them organization, and carried their dialects
with it through the Island which it gradually recovered for
civilization.
We are now in a position to sum up our conclusions upon the matter:
Britain, connected with the rest of civilization by a narrow and
precarious neck of sea-travel over the Straits of Dover, had, in the
last centuries of Roman rule, often furnished great armies to usurpers
or Imperial claimants, sometimes leaving the Island almost bare of
regular troops. But with each return of peace these armies also had
returned and the rule of the central Roman government over Britain had
been fairly continuous until the beginning of the fifth century. At
that moment—in 410 A.D.—the bulk of the trained soldiers again left
upon a foreign adventure. But the central rule of Rome was then
breaking down: these regulars never returned—though many auxiliary
troops may have remained.
At this moment, when every province of the West was subject to
disturbance and to the over-running of barbarian bands, small but
destructive, Britain particularly suffered. Scotch, Irish and German
barbarians looted her on all sides.
These last, the Saxon pirates, brought in as auxiliaries in the Roman
fashion, may already have been settled in places upon the eastern
coast, their various half-German dialects may have already been common
upon those coasts; but at any rate, after the breakdown of the Roman
order, detached communities under little local chiefs arose. The towns
were not destroyed. Neither the slaves, nor, for that matter, the
greater part of the free population fell. But wealth declined rapidly
in the chaos as it did throughout Western Europe. And side by side with
this ruin came the replacing of the Roman official language by a welter
of Celtic and of half-German dialects in a mass of little courts. The
new official Roman religion—certainly at the moment of the breakdown
the religion of a small minority—almost or wholly disappeared in the
Eastern pirate settlements. The Roman language similarly disappeared in
the many small principalities of the western part of the island; they
reverted to their original Celtic dialects. There was no boundary
between the hotchpotch of little German-speaking territories on the
East and the little Celtic territories on the West. There was no more
than a vague common feeling of West against East or East against West;
all fought indiscriminately among themselves.
After a time which could be covered by two long lives, during which
decline had been very rapid, and as noticeable in the West as in the
East throughout the Island, the full influence of civilization
returned, with the landing in 597 of St. Augustine and his missionaries
sent by the Pope.
_But the little Pirate courts of the East happened to have settled on
coasts which occupied the gateway into the Island_; it was thus through
them that civilization had been cut off, and it was through them that
civilization came back. On this account:
(1) The little kingdoms tended to coalesce under the united discipline
of the Church.
(2) The united British civilization so forming was able to advance
gradually _westward_ across the island.
(3) Though the institutions of Europe were much the same wherever Roman
civilization had existed and had declined, though the councils of
magnates surrounding the King, the assemblies of armed men, the
division of land and people into “hundreds” and the rest of it were
common to Europe, _these things were given, over a wider and wider area
of Britain, Eastern, half-German names because it was through the
courts of the Eastern kinglets that civilization had returned_. The
kinglets of the East, as civilization grew, were continually fed from
the Continent, strengthened with ideas, institutions, arts, and the
discipline of the Church. Thus did they politically become more and
more powerful, until the whole island, except the Cornish peninsula,
Wales and the Northwestern mountains, was more or less administered by
the courts which had their roots in the eastern coasts and rivers, and
which spoke dialects cognate to those beyond the North Sea, while the
West, cut off from this Latin restoration, decayed in political power
and saw its Celtic dialects shrink in area.
By the time that this old Roman province of Britain re-arises as an
ordered Christian land in the eighth century, its records are kept not
only in Latin but in the Court “Anglo-Saxon” dialects: by far the most
important being that of Winchester. Many place names, and the general
speech of its inhabitants have followed suit, and this, a superficial
but a very vivid change, is the chief outward change in the slow
transformation that has been going on in Britain for three hundred
years (450-500 to 750-800).
Britain is reconquered for civilization and that easily; it is again an
established part of the European unity, with the same sacraments, the
same morals, and all those same conceptions of human life as bound
Europe together even more firmly than the old central government of
Rome had bound it. And within this unity of civilized Christendom
England was to remain for eight hundred years.
VI
THE DARK AGES
So far we have traced the fortunes of the Roman Empire (that is of
European civilization and of the Catholic Church with which that
civilization was identified) from the origins both of the Church and of
the Empire, to the turning point of the fifth century. We have seen the
character of that turning point.
There was a gradual decline in the power of the central monarchy, an
increasing use of auxiliary barbarian troops in the army upon which
Roman society was founded, until at last (in the years from 400 to 500
A.D.) authority, though Roman in every detail of its form, gradually
ceased to be exercised from Rome or Constantinople, but fell
imperceptibly into the hands of a number of local governments. We have
seen that the administration of these local governments usually
devolved on the chief officers of the auxiliary barbarian troops, who
were also, as a rule, their chieftains by some kind of inheritance.
We have seen that there was no considerable infiltration of barbarian
blood, no “invasions” in our modern sense of the term—(or rather, no
successful ones); no blotting out of civilization, still less any
introduction of new institutions or ideas drawn from barbarism.
The coast regions of Eastern Britain (the strongest example of all, for
there the change was most severe) were reconquered for civilization and
for the Faith by the efforts of St. Augustine; Africa was recaptured
for the direct rule of the Emperor: so was Italy and the South of
Spain. At the end of the seventh century that which was in the future
to be called Christendom (and which is nothing more than the Roman
Empire continuing though transformed) is again reunited.
What followed was a whole series of generations in which the forms of
civilization were set and crystallized in a few very simple,
traditional and easily appreciated types. The whole standard of Europe
was lowered to the level of its fundamentals, as it were. The primary
arts upon which we depend for our food and drink, and raiment and
shelter survived intact. The secondary arts reposing upon these, failed
and disappeared almost in proportion to their distance from fundamental
necessities of our race. History became no more than a simple
chronicle. Letters, in the finer sense, almost ceased. Four hundred
years more were to pass before Europe was to reawaken from this sort of
sleep into which her spirit had retreated, and the passage from the
full civilization of Rome through this period of simple and sometimes
barbarous things, is properly called the Dark Ages.
It is of great importance for anyone who would comprehend the general
story of Europe, to grasp the nature of those half-hidden centuries.
They may be compared to a lake into which the activities of the old
world flowed and stirred and then were still, and from which in good
time the activities of the Middle Ages, properly so called, were again
to flow.
Again one may compare the Dark Ages to the leafsoil of a forest. They
are formed by the disintegration of an antique florescence. They are
the bed from which new florescence shall spring.
It is a curious phenomenon to consider: this hibernation, or sleep:
this rest of the stuff of Europe. It leads one to consider the flux and
reflux of civilization as something much more comparable to a pulse
than to a growth. It makes us remember that _rhythm_ which is observed
in all forms of energy. It makes us doubt that mere progress from
simplicity to complexity which used to be affirmed as the main law of
history.
The contemplation of the Dark Ages affords a powerful criticism of that
superficial theory of social evolution which is among the intellectual
plagues of our own generation. Much more is the story of Europe like
the waking and the sleeping of a mature man, than like any indefinite
increase in the aptitudes and powers of a growing body.
Though the prime characteristic of the Dark Ages is one of
recollection, and though they are chiefly marked by this note of Europe
sinking back into herself, very much more must be known of them before
we have the truth, even in its most general form.
I will put in the form of a category or list the chief points which we
must bear in mind.
In the first place the Dark Ages were a period of intense military
action. Christendom was besieged from all around. It was held like a
stronghold, and in those centuries of struggle its institutions were
molded by military necessities: so that Christendom has ever since had
about it the quality of a soldier. There was one unending series of
attacks, Pagan and Mohammedan, from the North, from the East and from
the South; attacks not comparable to the older raids of external
hordes, eager only to enjoy civilization within the Empire, small in
number and yet ready to accept the faith and customs of Europe. The
barbarian incursions of the fifth and sixth centuries—at the end of the
United Roman Empire—had been of this lesser kind. The mighty struggles
of the eighth, ninth and especially the tenth centuries—of the Dark
Ages—were a very different matter. Had the military institutions of
Europe failed in _that_ struggle, our civilization would have been
wiped out; and indeed at one or two critical points, as in the middle
of the eighth against the Mohammedan, and at the end of the ninth
century against the northern pirates, all human judgment would have
decided that Europe _was_ doomed.
In point of fact, as we shall see in a moment, Europe was just barely
saved. It was saved by the sword and by the intense Christian ideal
which nerved the sword arm. But it was only just barely saved.
The first assault came from Islam.
A new intense and vividly anti-Christian thing arose in a moment, as it
were, out of nothing, out of the hot sands to the East and spread like
a fire. It consumed all the Levant. It arrived at the doors of the
West. This was no mere rush of barbarism. The Mohammedan world was as
cultured as our own in its first expansion. It maintained a higher and
an increasing culture while ours declined; and its conquest, where it
conquered us, was the conquest of something materially superior for the
moment over the remaining arts and traditions of Christian Europe.
Just at the moment when Britain was finally won back to Europe, and
when the unity of the West seemed to be recovered (though its life had
fallen to so much lower a plane), we lost North Africa; it was swept
from end to end in one tidal rush by that new force which aimed
fiercely at our destruction. Immediately afterwards the first
Mohammedan force crossed the Straits of Gibraltar; and in a few months
after its landing the whole of the Spanish Peninsula, that strong Rock
as it had seemed of ancient Roman culture, the hard Iberian land,
crumbled. Politically, at least, and right up to the Pyrenees, Asia had
it in its grip. In the mountain valleys alone, and especially in the
tangle of highlands which occupies the northwestern corner of the
Spanish square, individual communities of soldiers held out. From these
the gradual reconquest of Spain by Christendom was to proceed, but for
the moment they were crowded and penned upon the Asturian hills like
men fighting against a wall.
Even Gaul was threatened: a Mohammedan host poured up into its very
centre far beyond Poitiers: halfway to Tours. Luckily it was defeated;
but Moslem garrisons continued to hold out in the Southern districts,
in the northern fringes of the Pyrenees and along the shore line of the
Narbonese and Provence.
Southern Italy was raided and partly occupied. The islands of the
Mediterranean fell.
Against this sudden successful spring which had lopped off half of the
West, the Dark Ages, and especially the French of the Dark Ages, spent
a great part of their military energy. The knights of Northern Spain
and the chiefs of the unconquered valleys recruited their forces
perpetually from Gaul beyond the Pyrenees; and the northern valley of
the Ebro, the high plains of Castile and Leon, were the training ground
of European valor for three hundred years. The Basques were the
unyielding basis of all the advance.
This Mohammedan swoop was the first and most disastrously successful of
the three great assaults.
Next came the Scandinavian pirates.
Their descent was a purely barbaric thing, not numerous but (since
pirates can destroy much with small numbers) for centuries unexhausted.
They harried all the rivers and coasts of Britain, of Gaul, and of the
Netherlands. They appeared in the Southern seas and their efforts
seemed indefatigable. Britain especially (where the raiders bore the
local name of “Danes”) suffered from a ceaseless pillage, and these new
enemies had no attraction to the Roman land save loot. They merely
destroyed. They refused our religion. Had they succeeded they would not
have mingled with us, but would have ended us.
Both in Northern Gaul and in Britain their chieftains acquired
something of a foothold, but only after the perilous moment in which
their armies were checked; they were tamed and constrained to accept
the society they had attacked.
This critical moment when Europe seemed doomed was the last generation
of the ninth century. France had been harried up to the gates of Paris.
Britain was so raided that its last independent king, Alfred, was in
hiding.
Both in Britain and Gaul Christendom triumphed and in the same
generation.
Paris stood a successful siege, and the family which defended it was
destined to become the royal family of all France at the inception of
the Middle Ages. Alfred of Wessex in the same decade recovered South
England. In both provinces of Christendom the situation was saved. The
chiefs of the pirates were baptized; and though Northern barbarism
remained a material menace for another hundred years, there was no
further danger of our destruction.
Finally, less noticed by history, but quite as grievous, and needing a
defence as gallant, was the pagan advance over the North German Plain
and up the valley of the Danube.
All the frontier of Christendom upon this line from Augsburg and the
Lech to the course of the Elbe and the North Sea, was but a line of
fortresses and continual battlefields. It was but recently organized
land. Until the generations before the year 800 there was no
civilization beyond the Rhine save the upper Danube partially
reclaimed, and a very scanty single extension up the valley of the
Lower Main.
But Charlemagne, with vast Gallic armies, broke into the barbaric
Germanies right up to the Elbe. He compelled them by arms to accept
religion, letters and arts. He extended Europe to these new boundaries
and organized them as a sort of rampart in the East: a thing the Roman
Empire had not done. The Church was the cement of this new belt of
defence—the imperfect population of which were evangelized from Ireland
and Britain. It was an experiment, this creation of the Germanies by
Western culture, this spiritual colonization of a _March_ beyond the
limits of the Empire. It did not completely succeed, as the Reformation
proves; but it had at least the strength in the century after
Charlemagne, its founder, to withstand the Eastern attack upon
Christendom.
The attack was not racial. It was Pagan Slav, mixed with much that was
left of Pagan German, even Mongol. Its character was the advance of the
savage against the civilized man, and it remained a peril two
generations longer than the peril which Gaul and Britain had staved off
from the North.
This, then, is the first characteristic to be remembered of the Dark
Ages: the violence of the physical struggle and the intense physical
effort by which Europe was saved.
The second characteristic of the Dark Ages proceeds from this first
military one: it may be called Feudalism.
Briefly it was this: the passing of actual government from the hands of
the old Roman provincial centres of administration into the hands of
each small local society and its lord. On such a basis there was a
reconstruction of society from below: these local lords associating
themselves under greater men, and these again holding together in great
national groups under a national overlord.
In the violence of the struggle through which Christendom passed, town
and village, valley and castle, had often to defend itself alone.
The great Roman landed estates, with their masses of dependents and
slaves, under a lord or owner, had never disappeared. The descendants
of these Roman, Gallic, British, _owners_ formed the fighting class of
the Dark Ages, and in this new function of theirs, perpetually lifted
up to be the sole depositories of authority in some small imperiled
countryside, they grew to be nearly independent units. For the purposes
of cohesion that family which possessed most estates in a district
tended to become the leader of it. Whole provinces were thus formed and
grouped, and the vaguer sentiments of a larger unity expressed
themselves by the choice of some one family, one of the most powerful
in every county, who would be the overlord of all the other lords,
great and small.
Side by side with this growth of local independence and of voluntary
local groupings, went the transformation of the old imperial nominated
offices into hereditary and personal things.
A _count_, for instance, was originally a _“comes”_ or “companion” of
the Emperor. The word dates from long before the break-up of the
central authority of Rome. A _count_ later was a great official: a
local governor and judge—the Vice-Roy of a large district (a French
county and English shire). His office was revocable, like other
official appointments. He was appointed for a season, first at the
Emperor’s, later at the local King’s discretion, to a particular local
government. In the Dark Ages the _count_ becomes hereditary. He thinks
of his government as a possession which his son should rightly have
after him. He bases his right to his government upon the possession of
great estates within the area of that government. In a word, he comes
to think of himself not as an official at all but as a _feudal
overlord_, and all society (and the remaining shadow of central
authority itself) agrees with him.
The second note, then, of the Dark Ages is the gradual transition of
Christian society from a number of slave-owning, rich, landed
proprietors, taxed and administered by a regular government, to a
society of fighting _nobles_ and their descendants, organized upon a
basis of independence and in a hierarchy of lord and overlord, and
supported no longer by _slaves_ in the _villages_, but by half-free
serfs or “_villeins_.”
Later an elaborate theory was constructed in order to rationalize this
living and real thing. It was pretended—by a legal fiction—that the
central King owned nearly all the land, that the great overlords “held”
their land of him, the lesser lords “holding” theirs hereditarily of
the overlords, and so forth. This idea of “holding” instead of
“owning,” though it gave an easy machinery for confiscation in time of
rebellion, was legal theory only, and, so far as men’s views of
property went, a mere form. The reality was what I have described.
The third characteristic of the Dark Ages was the curious fixity of
morals, of traditions, of the forms of religion, and of all that makes
up social life.
We may presume that all civilization originally sprang from a soil in
which custom was equally permanent.
We know that in the great civilizations of the East an enduring fixity
of form is normal.
But in the general history of Europe, it has been otherwise. There has
been a perpetual flux in the outward form of things, in architecture,
in dress, and in the statement of philosophy as well (though not in its
fundamentals).
In this mobile surface of European history the Dark Ages form a sort of
island of changelessness. There is an absence of any great heresies in
the West, and, save in one or two names, an absence of speculation. It
was as though men had no time for any other activity but the ceaseless
business of arms and of the defence of the West.
Consider the life of Charlemagne, who is the central figure of those
centuries. It is spent almost entirely in the saddle. One season finds
him upon the Elbe, the next upon the Pyrenees. One Easter he celebrates
in Northern Gaul, another in Rome. The whole story is one of perpetual
marching, and of blows parrying here, thrusting there, upon all the
boundaries of isolated and besieged Christendom. He will attend to
learning, but the ideal of learning is repetitive and conservative: its
passion is to hold what was, not to create or expand. An anxious and
sometimes desperate determination to preserve the memory of a great but
half-forgotten past is the business of his court, which dissolves just
before the worst of the Pagan assault; as it is the business of Alfred,
who arises a century later, just after the worst assault has been
finally repelled.
Religion during these centuries settled and consolidated, as it were.
An enemy would say that it petrified, a friend that it was enormously
strengthened by pressure. But whatever the metaphor chosen, the truth
indicated will be this: that the Catholic Faith became between the
years 600 and 1000 utterly one with Europe. The last vestiges of the
antique and Pagan civilization of the Mediterranean were absorbed. A
habit of certitude and of fixity even in the details of thought was
formed in the European mind.
It is to be noted in this connection that geographically the centre of
things had somewhat shifted. With the loss of Spain and of Northern
Africa, the Mohammedan raiding of Southern Italy and the islands, the
Mediterranean was no longer a vehicle of Western civilization, but the
frontier of it. Rome itself might now be regarded as a frontier town.
The eruption of the barbarians from the East along the Danube had
singularly cut off the Latin West from Constantinople and from all the
high culture of its Empire. Therefore, the centre of that which
resisted in the West, the geographical nucleus of the island of
Christendom, which was besieged all round, was France, and in
particular Northern France. Northern Italy, the Germanies, the Pyrenees
and the upper valley of the Ebro were essentially the marches of Gaul.
Gaul was to preserve all that could be preserved of the material side
of Europe, and also of the European spirit. And therefore the New
World, when it arose, with its Gothic Architecture, its Parliaments,
its Universities, and, in general, its spring of the Middle Ages, was
to be a Gallic thing.