I think that it was Lincoln who said that "the Lord must like common
people, because he had made so many of them." The path for the common
people in France at this time led through heavy shadows. But a darker
time was approaching. A system of oppression was maturing, which was
soon to envelop them in the obscurity of darkest night.
Those Scandinavian freebooters called Northmen, and later Normans, were
the scourge of the kingdom. Nothing was safe from their insolent
courage and rapacity.
The rich could intrench themselves in stone fortresses, with moats and
drawbridges, and be in comparative security, but the poor were utterly
defenceless against this perennial destroyer. The result was a compact
between the powerful and the weak, which was the beginning of the
Feudal System. It was in effect an exchange of protection for service
and fealty. You give us absolute control of your persons--your
military service when required, and a portion of your substance and the
fruit of your toil--and we will in exchange give you our fortified
castles as a refuge from the Northmen. Such was the offer. It was a
choice between vassalage, serfdom, or destruction outright.
Simple enough in its beginnings, this became a ramified system of
oppression, a curious network of authority, ingeniously controlling an
entire people. The conditions upon which was engrafted this compact
were of great antiquity, had indeed been brought across the Rhine by
their German conquerors; but the Northmen were the impelling cause of
the swift development of feudalism in France.
Charlemagne had felt grave apprehensions of evil from these robber
incursions, but could not have conceived of a result such as this, the
most oppressive system ever fastened upon a nation, and one which would
at the same time sap the foundations of royalty itself.
The theory was that the King was absolute owner of all the territory;
the great lords holding their titles from him on condition of military
service, their vassals pledging military service and obedience to them
again on similar terms, and sub-vassals again to them repeating the
pledge; and so on in descending chain, until at last the serf, that
wretched being whom none looks up to nor fears, is ground to powder
beneath the superimposed mass. No appeal from the authority, no escape
from the caprice or cruelty of his feudal lord. Could any scales
weigh, could any words measure the suffering which must have been
endured? Is it strange, with every aspiration thwarted, hope stifled,
that Europe sank into the long sleep of the Middle Ages?
It is easy to conceive that under such a system, where all the affairs
of the realm were adjusted by individual rulers with unlimited power,
and where the great barons could make war upon each other without
authorization from the King, that by the time this nominal head of the
entire system was reached, there was nothing for him to do. In fact,
there was not left one vestige of kingly authority, and Carlovingian
rulers were almost as insignificant as their Merovingian predecessors.
France had, instead of one great sovereign, 150 petty ones!
* * * * *
In 911 A.D. the Northmen were offered the province henceforth known as
Normandy, upon condition of their acceptance of the religion and
submission to the laws of the realm. Rollo, the disreputable
robber-chief, took the oath of fealty to the King of France his
Suzerain, and Christian baptism transformed him into respectable,
law-abiding Robert, Duke of Normandy.
With marvellous facility this people took on the language and manners
of their neighbors, and in a century and a half were prepared to
instruct the Britons in a higher civilization.
I think it is one hundred years of respectability that is required by a
certain aristocratic club for admission to its membership. The blood
does not acquire the proper shade of azure until it has flowed in the
full light of day for at least three generations. Decidedly, William
the Conqueror, first Norman King of England, could not have been
admitted to this club.
A century before his birth, his ancestors had lived by looting their
neighbors. They were highwaymen, robbers, by profession. And, to
increase his ineligibility, his mother, a pretty Norman peasant girl,
daughter of a tanner, had ensnared the affections of that pleasant Duke
of Normandy, known as "Robert the Devil."
William, the fruit of this unconsecrated union, became in time Duke of
Normandy. With that reversion to ancestral types to which scientists
tell us we are all liable, he seems to have looked across the Channel
toward England, with an awakening of his robber-instincts. In a few
weeks, Harold, the last King of the Saxons, lay dead at his feet, and
William, Duke of Normandy, was William I., King of England.
Then was presented the curious anomaly of an English sovereign who was
also ruler of a French province; an English king who was vassal to the
King of France. A door was thus opened (1066 A.D.) through which
entered entangling complications and countless woes in the future.
* * * * *
If Charlemagne had worn the Church as a precious jewel in his crown in
the ninth century, the Church now in the eleventh century wore all the
European states, a tiara of jewels in her mitre. The centre of
dominion had passed from the Empire of Germany to Rome, when Henry IV.
prostrated himself barefooted before Gregory VII. at Canossa in 1072.
The Church was at its zenith. As a political system it was unrivalled;
but its triumphs brought little joy to the earnest souls still clinging
to the ideals of primitive Christianity. But what availed it for
Abelard to lead an intellectual revolt against corrupted beliefs in the
North, or the Albigenses a spiritual one in the South? He was silenced
and immured for life, while the unhappy inhabitants of Languedoc were
massacred and almost exterminated, and an inquisition, established at
Toulouse, made sure that heretical germs should not again spread from
that infected centre.
But however imperfect the religious sentiment of the time, however it
may have departed from the simple precepts of its founder, its power to
sway the hearts and lives of the people may be judged from the
extraordinary movement started in France in the twelfth century.
How inconceivable, in this practical age, that Europe should three
times have emptied her choicest and best into Asia for a sentiment!
Business suspended, private interests sacrificed or forgotten, life,
treasure, all eagerly given--for what? That a small bit of territory,
a thousand miles away, be torn from profaning infidels, because of its
sacred associations, because it was the birthplace of a religion whose
meaning seems to have escaped them--a religion which they wore on their
battle-flags, but not in their hearts. How would a barefooted,
rope-girdled monk, however inspired and eloquent, fare to-day in New
York, or London, or Paris?
History has no stranger chapter than that of the Crusades. When Peter
the Hermit pictured the desecration of the Holy Land by Mohammedans,
all classes in France, from King to serf, were for the first time moved
by a common sentiment, and poured life and treasure with passionate
zeal into those streams which three times inundated Palestine.
The order of Knights Templar had been created, and a splendid ideal of
manhood held up before the French nation, and now the knightly ideal,
side by side with the Christian and the romantic ideal, entered into
the life of the people. Romance, song, poetry, eloquence came into
being from a sort of spiritual baptism, and France began to wear the
mantle of beauty which was to be her chief glory in the future.
But future France was not clad in coat of mail in the twelfth century.
She was lying helpless, beneath the mass of feudal trappings. Her time
was not yet.