that which would strike our eyes most immediately if we could transfer
ourselves in time, and enjoy a physical impression of that world. This
characteristic was derived from what I have just been saying. It was
the material counterpart of the moral immobility or steadfastness of
the time. It was this: that the external forms of things stood quite
unchanged. The semi-circular arch, the short, stout pillar,
occasionally (but rarely) the dome: these were everywhere the mark of
architecture. There was no change nor any attempt at change. The arts
were saved but not increased, and the whole of the work that men did
with their hands stood fast in mere tradition. No new town arises. If
one is mentioned (Oxford, for instance) for the first time in the Dark
Ages, whether in Britain or in Gaul, one may fairly presume a Roman
origin for it, even though there be no actual mention of it handed down
from Roman times.
No new roads were laid. The old Roman military system of highways was
kept up and repaired, though kept up and repaired with a declining
vigor. The wheel of European life had settled to one slow rate of
turning.
Not only were all these forms enduring, they were also few and simple.
One type of public building and of church, one type of writing,
everywhere recognizable, one type of agriculture, with very few
products to differentiate it, alone remained.
The fifth characteristic of the Dark Ages is one apparently, but only
apparently, contradictory of that immobile and fundamental character
which I have just been describing. It is this: the Dark Ages were the
point during which there very gradually germinated and came into
outward existence things which still remain among us and help to
differentiate our Christendom from the past of classical antiquity.
This is true of certain material things. The spur, the double bridle,
the stirrup, the book in leaves distinct from the old roll—and very
much else. It is true of the road system of Europe wherever that road
system has departed from the old Roman scheme. It was in the Dark Ages
with the gradual break-down of expensive causeways over marshes; with
the gradual decline of certain centres; with bridges left unrepaired;
culverts choked and making a morass against the dam of the roads, that
you got the deflection of the great ways. In almost every broad river
valley in England, where an old Roman road crosses the stream and its
low-lying banks, you may see something which the Dark Ages left to us
in our road system: you may see the modern road leaving the old Roman
line and picking its way across the wet lands from one drier point to
another, and rejoining the Roman line beyond. It is a thing you will
see in almost anyone of our Strettons, Stanfords, Stamfords, Staffords,
etc., which everywhere mark the crossing of a Roman road over a water
course.
But much more than in material things the Dark Ages set a mold wherein
the European mind grew. For instance, it was they that gave to us two
forms of legend. The one something older than history, older than the
Roman order, something Western reappearing with the release of the mind
from the rigid accuracy of a high civilization; the other that legend
which preserves historical truth under a guise of phantasy.
Of the first, the British story of Tristan is one example out of a
thousand. Of the second, the legend of Constantine, which gradually and
unconsciously developed into the famous Donation.
The Dark Ages gave us that wealth of story coloring and enlivening all
our European life, and what is more, largely preserving historic truth;
for nothing is more valuable to true history than legend. They also
gave us our order in speech. Great hosts of words unknown to antiquity
sprang up naturally among the people when the force of the classical
centre failed. Some of them were words of the languages before the
Roman armies came—cask, for instance, the old Iberian word. Some of
them were the camp talk of the soldiers. Spade, for instance, and
“_épée_,” the same piece of Greek slang, “the broad one,” which has
come to mean in French a sword; in English that with which we dig the
earth. Masses of technical words in the old Roman laws turned into
popular usage through that appetite the poor have for long official
phrases: for instance, our English words _wild_, _weald_, _wold_,
_waste_, _gain_, _rider_, _rode_, _ledge_, _say_, and a thousand
others, all branch out from the lawyers’ phrases of the later Roman
Empire.
In this closed crucible of the Dark Ages crystallized also—by a process
which we cannot watch, or of which we have but glimpses—that rich mass
of jewels, the local customs of Europe, and even the local dress, which
differentiates one place from another, when the communications of a
high material civilization break down. In all this the Dark Ages are a
comfort to the modern man, for he sees by their example that the
process of increasing complexity reaches its term; that the strain of
development is at last relieved; that humanity sooner or later returns
upon itself; that there is an end in repose and that the repose is
fruitful.
The last characteristic of the Dark Ages is that which has most
engrossed, puzzled, and warped the judgment of non-Catholic historians
when they have attempted a conspectus of European development; it was
the segregation, the homogeneity of and the dominance of clerical
organization. The hierarchy of the Church, its unity and its sense of
discipline was the chief civil institution and the chief binding social
force of the times. Side by side with it went the establishment of the
monastic institution which everywhere took on a separate life of its
own, preserved what could be preserved of arts and letters, drained the
marshes and cleared the forests, and formed the ideal economic unit for
such a period; almost the only economic unit in which capital could
then be accumulated and preserved. The great order of St. Benedict
formed a framework of living points upon which was stretched the moral
life of Europe. The vast and increasing endowments of great and fixed
religious houses formed the economic flywheel of those centuries. They
were the granary and the storehouse. But for the monks, the
fluctuations proceeding from raid and from decline would, in their
violence, at some point or another, have snapped the chain of economic
tradition, and we should all have fallen into barbarism.
Meanwhile the Catholic hierarchy as an institution—I have already
called it by a violent metaphor, a civil institution—at any rate as a
political institution—remained absolute above the social disintegration
of the time.
All natural things were slowly growing up unchecked and disturbing the
strict lines of the old centralized governmental order which men still
remembered. In language Europe was a medley of infinitely varying local
dialects.
Thousands upon thousands of local customs were coming to be separate
laws in each separate village.
Legend, as I have said, was obscuring fixed history. The tribal basis
from which we spring was thrusting its instincts back into the strict
and rational Latin fabric of the State. Status was everywhere replacing
contract, and habit replacing a reason for things. Above this medley
the only absolute organization that could be was that of the Church.
The Papacy was the one centre whose shifting could not even be
imagined. The Latin tongue, in the late form in which the Church used
it, was everywhere the same, and everywhere suited to rituals that
differed but slightly from province to province when we contrast them
with the millioned diversity of local habit and speech.
Whenever a high civilization was to re-arise out of the soil of the
Dark Ages, it was certain first to show a full organization of the
Church under some Pope of exceptional vigor, and next to show that
Pope, or his successors in this tradition, at issue with new civil
powers. Whenever central government should rise again and in whatever
form, a conflict would begin between the new kings and the clerical
organization which had so strengthened itself during the Dark Ages.
Now Europe, as we know, did awake from its long sleep. The eleventh
century was the moment of its awakening. Three great forces—the
personality of St. Gregory VII., the appearance (by a happy accident of
slight cross breeding: a touch of Scandinavian blood added to the
French race) of the Norman race, finally the Crusades—drew out of the
darkness the enormous vigor of the early Middle Ages. They were to
produce an intense and active civilization of their own; a civilization
which was undoubtedly the highest and the best our race has known,
conformable to the instincts of the European, fulfilling his nature,
giving him that happiness which is the end of men.
As we also know, Europe on this great experiment of the Middle Ages,
after four hundred years of high vitality, was rising to still greater
heights when it suffered shipwreck.
With that disaster, the disaster of the Reformation, I shall deal later
in this series.
In my next chapter I shall describe the inception of the Middle Ages,
and show what they were before our promise in them was ruined.
VII
THE MIDDLE AGES
I said in my last chapter that the Dark Ages might be compared to a
long sleep of Europe: a sleep lasting from the fatigue of the old
society in the fifth century to the spring and rising of the eleventh
and twelfth. The metaphor is far too simple, of course, for that sleep
was a sleep of war. In all those centuries Europe was desperately
holding its own against the attack of all that desired to destroy it:
refined and ardent Islam from the South, letterless barbarian pagans
from the East and North. At any rate, from that sleep or that besieging
Europe awoke or was relieved.
I said that three great forces, humanly speaking, worked this miracle;
the personality of St. Gregory VII.; the brief appearance, by a happy
accident, of the Norman State; and finally the Crusades.
The Normans of history, the true French Normans we know, are stirring a
generation after the year 1000. St. Gregory filled that same
generation. He was a young man when the Norman effort began. He died,
full of an enormous achievement, in 1085. As much as one man could,
_he_, the heir of Cluny, had re-made Europe. Immediately after his
death there was heard the march of the Crusades. From these three the
vigor of a fresh, young, renewed Europe proceeds.
Much might be added. The perpetual and successful chivalric charge
against the Mohammedan in Spain illumined all that time and clarified
it. Asia was pushed back from the Pyrenees, and through the passes of
the Pyrenees perpetually cavalcaded the high adventurers of
Christendom. The Basques—a strange and very strong small people—were
the pivot of that reconquest, but the valley of the torrent of the
Aragon was its channel. The life of St. Gregory is contemporaneous with
that of El Cid Campeador. In the same year that St. Gregory died,
Toledo, the sacred centre of Spain, was at last forced from the
Mohammedans, and their Jewish allies, and firmly held. All Southern
Europe was alive with the sword.
In that same moment romance appeared; the great songs: the greatest of
them all, the Song of Roland; then was a ferment of the European mind,
eager from its long repose, piercing into the undiscovered fields. That
watching skepticism which flanks and follows the march of the Faith
when the Faith is most vigorous had also begun to speak.
There was even some expansion beyond the boundaries eastward, so that
something of the unfruitful Baltic Plain was reclaimed. Letters awoke
and Philosophy. Soon the greatest of all human exponents, St. Thomas
Aquinas, was to appear. The plastic arts leapt up: Color and Stone.
Humor fully returned: general travel: vision. In general, the moment
was one of expectation and of advance. It was spring.
For the purposes of these few pages I must confine the attention of my
reader to those three tangible sources of the new Europe, which, as I
have said, were the Normans, St. Gregory VII., and the Crusades.
Of the Norman race we may say that it resembled in history those _miræ_
or new stars which flare out upon the darkness of the night sky for
some few hours or weeks or years, and then are lost or merged in the
infinity of things. He is indeed unhistorical who would pretend William
the Conqueror, the organizer and maker of what we now call England,
Robert the Wizard, the conquerors of Sicily, or any of the great Norman
names that light Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to be
even partly Scandinavians. They were Gauls: short in stature, lucid in
design, vigorous in stroke, positive in philosophy. They bore no
outward relation to the soft and tall and sentimental North from which
some few of their remote ancestry had drawn ancestral names.
But on the other hand, anyone who should pretend that this amazing and
ephemeral phenomenon, the Norman, was _merely_ Gallo-Roman, would
commit an error: an error far less gross but still misleading. In
speech, in manner, in accoutrement, in the very trick of riding the
horse, in the cooking of food, in that most intimate part of man, his
jests, the Norman was wholly and apparently a Gaul. In his body—hard,
short, square, broad-shouldered, alert—the Norman was a Frenchman only.
But no other part of Gaul _then_ did what Normandy did: nor could any
other French province show, as Normandy showed, immediate, organized
and creative power, during the few years that the marvel lasted.
That marvel is capable of explanation and I will attempt to explain it.
Those dull, blundering and murderous ravagings of the coasts of
Christian Europe by the pirates of Scandinavia (few in number, futile
in achievement) which we call in English history, “The Danish
Invasions,” were called upon the opposite coast of the Channel, “The
Invasions of the Nordmanni” or “the Men of the North.” They came from
the Baltic and from Norway. They were part of the universal assault
which the Dark Ages of Christendom had to sustain: part of a ceaseless
pressure from without against civilization; and they were but a part of
it. They were few, as pirates always must be. It was on the estuaries
of a few continental rivers and in the British Isles that they counted
most in the lives of Europeans.
Now among the estuaries of the great rivers was the estuary of the
Seine. The Scandinavian pirates forced it again and again. At the end
of the ninth century they had besieged Paris, which was then rapidly
becoming the political centre of Gaul.
So much was there left of the Roman tradition in that last stronghold
of the Roman Empire that the quieting of invading hordes by their
settlement (by inter-marriage with and granting of land in, a fixed
Roman province) was a policy still obvious to those who still called
themselves “The Emperors” of the West.
In the year 911 this antique method, consecrated by centuries of
tradition, produced its last example and the barbarian troublers from
the sea were given a fixed limit of land wherein they might settle. The
maritime province “Lugdunensis Secunda” [Footnote: The delimitation of
this province dated from Diocletian. It was already six hundred years
old, its later name of “Normandy” masked this essential fact that it
was and is a Roman division, as for that matter are probably our
English counties.] was handed over to them for settlement, that is,
they might not attempt a partition of the land outside its boundaries.
On the analogy of all similar experiments we can be fairly certain of
what happened, though there is no contemporary record of such domestic
details in the case of Normandy.
The barbarians, few in number, coming into a fertile and thickly
populated Roman province, only slightly affected its blood, but their
leaders occupied waste land, planted themselves as heirs of existing
childless lords, took to wife the heiresses of others; enfeoffed groups
of small men; took a share of the revenue; helped to answer for
military levy and general government. Their chief was responsible to
the crown.
To the mass of the population the new arrangement would make no change;
they were no longer slaves, but they were still serfs. Secure of their
small farms, but still bound to work for their lord, it mattered little
to them whether that lord of theirs had married his daughter to a
pirate or had made a pirate his heir or his partner in the management
of the estate. All the change the serf would notice from the settlement
was that the harrying and the plundering of occasional barbarian raids
had ceased.
In the governing class of perhaps some ten to twenty thousand families
the difference would be very noticeable indeed. The pirate newcomers,
though insignificant in number compared with the total population, were
a very large fraction added to so small a body. The additional blood,
though numerically a small proportion, permeated rapidly throughout the
whole community. Scandinavian names and habits may have had at first
some little effect upon the owner-class with which the Scandinavians
first mingled; it soon disappeared. But, as had been the case centuries
before in the earlier experiments of that sort, it was the barbarian
chief and his hereditary descendants who took over the local government
and “held it,” as the phrase went, of the universal government of Gaul.
These “North-men,” the new and striking addition to the province, the
Gallo-Romans called, as we have seen “Nordmanni.” The Roman province,
within the limits of which they were strictly settled, the second
Lyonnese, came to be called “Normannia.” For a century the slight
admixture of new blood worked in the general Gallo-Roman mass of the
province and, numerically small though it was, influenced its
character, or rather produced a new thing; just as in certain chemical
combinations the small admixture of a new element transforms the whole.
With the beginning of the eleventh century, as everything was springing
into new life, when the great saint who, from the chair of Peter, was
to restore the Church was already born, when the advance of the
Pyreneans against Islam was beginning to strike its decisive conquering
blows, there appeared, a sudden phenomenon, this new thing—French in
speech and habit and disposition of body, yet just differentiated from
the rest of Frenchmen—_the Norman Race_.
It possessed these characteristics—a great love of exact order, an
alert military temper and a passion for reality which made its building
even of ships (though it was not in the main seafaring) excellent, and
of churches and of castles the most solid of its time.
All the Normans’ characteristics (once the race was formed), led them
to advance. They conquered England and organized it; they conquered and
organized Sicily and Southern Italy; they made of Normandy itself the
model state in a confused time; they surveyed land; they developed a
regular tactic for mailed cavalry. Yet they endured for but a hundred
years, and after that brief coruscation they are wholly merged again in
the mass of European things!
You may take the first adventurous lords of the Cotentin in, say 1030,
for the beginning of the Norman thing; you may take the Court of young
Henry II. with his Southerners and his high culture in, say 1160, most
certainly for the burial of it. During that little space of time the
Norman had not only reintroduced exactitude in the government of men,
he had also provided the sword of the new Papacy and he had furnished
the framework of the crusading host. But before his adventure was done
the French language and the writ of Rome ran from the Grampians to the
Euphrates.
Of the Papacy and the Crusades I now speak.
St. Gregory VII., the second of the great re-creative forces of that
time, was of the Tuscan peasantry, Etrurian in type, therefore Italian
in speech, by name Hildebrand. Whether an historian understands his
career or no is a very test of whether that historian understands the
nature of Europe. For St. Gregory VII. imposed nothing upon Europe. He
made nothing new. What he did was to stiffen the ideal with reality. He
provoked a resurrection of the flesh. He made corporate the centralized
Church and the West.
For instance; it was the ideal, the doctrine, the tradition, the major
custom by far, that the clergy should be celibate. He enforced celibacy
as universal discipline.
The awful majesty of the Papacy had been present in all men’s minds as
a vast political conception for centuries too long to recall; St.
Gregory organized that monarchy, and gave it proper instruments of
rule.
The Unity of the Church had been the constant image without which
Christendom could not be; St. Gregory VII. at every point made that
unity tangible and visible. The Protestant historians who, for the most
part, see in the man a sporadic phenomenon, by such a misconception
betray the source of their anæmia and prove their intellectual
nourishment to be unfed from the fountain of European life. St. Gregory
VII. was not an inventor, but a renovator. He worked not upon, but in,
his material; and his material was the nature of Europe: our nature.
Of the awful obstacles such workers must encounter all history speaks.
They are at conflict not only with evil, but with inertia; and with
local interest, with blurred vision and with restricted landscapes.
Always they think themselves defeated, as did St. Gregory when he died.
Always they prove themselves before posterity to have done much more
than any other mold of man. Napoleon also was of this kind.
When St. Gregory was dead the Europe which he left was the monument of
that triumph whose completion he had doubted and the fear of whose
failure had put upon his dying lips the phrase: “I have loved justice
and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.”
Immediately after his death came the stupendous Gallic effort of the
Crusades.
The Crusades were the second of the main armed eruptions of the Gauls.
The first, centuries before, had been the Gallic invasion of Italy and
Greece and the Mediterranean shores in the old Pagan time. The third,
centuries later, was to be the wave of the Revolution and of Napoleon.
The preface to the Crusades appeared in those endless and already
successful wars of Christendom against Asia upon the high plateaus of
Spain. _These_ had taught the enthusiasm and the method by which Asia,
for so long at high tide flooding a beleaguered Europe, might be slowly
repelled, and from _these_ had proceeded the military science and the
aptitude for strain which made possible the advance of two thousand
miles upon the Holy Land. The consequences of this last and third
factor in the re-awakening of Europe were so many that I can give but a
list of them here.
The West, still primitive, discovered through the Crusades the
intensive culture, the accumulated wealth, the fixed civilized
traditions of the Greek Empire and of the town of Constantinople. It
discovered also, in a vivid new experience, the East. The mere covering
of so much land, the mere seeing of so many sights by a million men
expanded and broke the walls of the mind of the Dark Ages. The
Mediterranean came to be covered with Christian ships, and took its
place again with fertile rapidity as the great highway of exchange.