[Sidenote: [987-1180 A.D.]]
The period of 240 years--from the accession of Hugh Capet to that of
St. Louis--is described by Sismondi[i] as “a long interregnum, during
which the authority of king was extinct, although the name continued
to subsist.” A history of France, during this period, is a history not
of its monarch but of its nobles. And as yet these details are neither
heroic nor important enough to be interesting. A duke had sprung up in
Aquitaine, a king in Provence. The establishment of the Norman princes
has already been narrated. Betwixt them and Aquitaine, Anjou obeyed a
warlike count. To the north, the first Baldwin possessed the county
of Flanders betwixt the Somme and the Maas. The duchy of Burgundy was
formed in the east; whilst that of Lorraine was altogether independent of
France, and held by tongue as well as régime to the empire of Germany.
Taking away these provinces from the map of France, a central portion
will be found to remain betwixt the Loire and the Flemish border. Even
here, however, the last Carlovingians possessed scarcely a castle which
they could call their own. The counts of Paris possessed that city, as
well as Orleans. The counts of Vermandois, whose capital was St. Quentin,
at this time ruled Champagne also; but soon after that province came
to increase the territories of the counts of Blois. The only town that
obeyed the last reigning descendants of Charlemagne was Laon, and here
they usually resided, unless when obliged to take refuge at Rheims, under
the protection of the archbishop, against the attacks of the surrounding
nobles.
Charles of Lorraine, the uncle of Louis V and sole heir of the
Carlovingians, though thus prevented of his rights, was neither
friendless nor vanquished. He soon took forcible possession of Laon and
of Rheims, from which Hugh Capet was unable to drive him by force of
arms. He adroitly, however, contrived to attach to his interests Ascelin,
bishop of Laon, whom Charles, somewhat mistrusting, kept with him at
Rheims. A conspiracy, formed by Ascelin, was attended with complete
success. Charles was seized in his bed, and, together with his nephew,
the archbishop of Rheims, delivered over to Hugh Capet. That monarch
placed his prisoners in confinement at Orleans, where the competitor,
Charles of Lorraine, soon after died (991).
[Sidenote: [991-996 A.D.]]
These, if we except a long quarrel respecting the archbishopric of
Rheims, are the sole events of the reign of Hugh Capet, which is supposed
to have occupied nine years. Some modern historians regard the founder
of the third dynasty of French monarchs as a hero and a master spirit,
whose talents won for him a crown. Others, amongst whom is Sismondi,[i]
represent him as a pious sluggard, indebted solely to fortune for his
elevation. Both are in extreme. We see no proof of his heroism. But his
was an iron age, in which the exertions of individuals had slight power
in changing the course of events. Nor does it follow that, because he
was pious, he was pusillanimous. He made war on the count of Montreuil,
to recover the relics of St. Riquier, which that count had stolen. Hugh
Capet compelled him to surrender them, and himself bore the memorable
remains on his royal shoulders to the abbey of the saint. Such is the
account of the chroniclers. But if we observe that Hugh at the same time
built and fortified Abbeville, the monarch will not seem altogether sunk
in the superstitious votary.
[Illustration: ROBERT II, KING OF FRANCE]
“Who made thee count?” demanded Hugh Capet of a refractory noble,
supposed by some to be Talleyrand, count of Angoulême. “The same right
that made thee king,” was the bold reply. Such was the measure of the
new monarch’s authority. The great feudatories, in consenting to place
the crown on one of their own body, thought less of his elevation than
of humbling the throne. Their views were sound, if they considered but
themselves--short sighted, if they looked forward to posterity. Feudality
ascended the throne with Hugh Capet; and, despite the precautions or
intentions of the founders, the head of so powerful a system could not
long remain powerless himself. Organised as society now was in regular
and successive gradations of inferior and superior, a supreme chief
became necessary to complete the whole. There was something wanting to
crown the structure. The nobles imagined to adorn it with the lifeless
image of royalty. But their statue, like Pygmalion’s, took life as it
became the object of veneration, and grew at length to wield its sceptre
with a muscular arm.
[Sidenote: [996-1035 A.D.]]
Hugh Capet had taken the precaution to have his son crowned and
consecrated during his own lifetime. Thus, on the demise of the former,
Robert II found himself the undisputed king of France. The young monarch
was one of those soft, domestic tempers which fate so often misplaces
on a throne. He had married Bertha, the widow of the count of Blois,
and was tenderly attached to her. The spouses had the misfortune to be
distantly related, and Robert had been godfather to one of Bertha’s
children by her former husband. The pope considered these circumstances
sufficient to render the marriage incestuous; and he accordingly issued
a command to Robert, desiring him to put away Bertha, under pain of
excommunication. The popes had erected themselves into the censors of
princes, and they were especially rigid in prohibiting the marriage of
cousins. Such unions, they said, drew down divine vengeance, and were to
be avoided, lest they should produce national calamities. Nor was this
mere superstition on their part: it had its policy. It was chiefly by
intermarriages that the great aristocracy at this time increased their
territories and influence. Every obstacle thrown in the way of these
alliances consequently checked the growth of their exorbitant might;
every difficulty or scruple, being in the power of the pontiff alone to
remove, brought considerable advantage, both in revenue and respect, to
the holy see. Robert struggled for four or five years in behalf of his
legitimate wife, against the terrors of excommunication; but he was at
length compelled to yield, to chase poor Bertha from his presence, and
to take another wife, Constance, the daughter of the count of Toulouse.
With her, a woman of more spirit than her predecessor, Robert was less
happy. The monarch dreaded her, and was even obliged to do his alms in
secret for fear of her reproof. His chief amusement was the singing and
composing of psalms, to which the musical taste of that age was confined.
In a pilgrimage to Rome, Robert left a sealed paper on the altar of
the apostles. The priesthood expected it to contain a magnificent
donation, and were not little surprised and disappointed to find it to
contain but a hymn of the monarch’s composition. The piety of Robert was
most exemplary. He was anxious to save his subjects from the crime of
perjury; the means he took were to abstract privately the holy relics
from the cases which contained them, and on which people were sworn. He
substituted an ostrich’s egg, as an innocent object, incapable of taking
vengeance on the false swearer.
Such are the facts which we have to relate of a reign of nearly
thirty-five years. The good king Robert slumbered on his throne, with a
want of vigour and capacity that would have caused a monarch of the first
two races to totter from his seat, or at least would have transferred
his authority to some minister or powerful duke. The Capetians as yet,
however, unlike the Carlovingians, had neither power nor prerogative to
tempt the ambition of a usurper. The very title of king was unenvied. And
whilst the sovereign led the choir at St. Denis, France was not the less
vigorously governed by its independent and feudal nobility.[b]
HENRY I (1031-1060 A.D.)
[Sidenote: [1031-1060 A.D.]]
Robert’s son and successor, Henry I, had first of all to sustain a family
war against his mother, Constance, who put his young brother Robert
on the throne. The church declared for Henry, and the famous Robert
the Magnificent, more commonly known as Robert le Diable, duke of the
Normans, lent him the support of his sword and secured the crown upon
Henry’s head. Henry vanquished his brother, pardoned and granted him the
duchy of Burgundy, the first house of which was founded by Robert. During
this reign a famine made terrible ravage among the French and in several
places men ate one another. Following this scourge, troops of wolves
devastated the country, and the lords, more terrible than wild beasts,
carried on their barbaric wars in the midst of this widespread desolation.
[Illustration: EXCOMMUNICATION OF ROBERT THE PIOUS]
The clergy with difficulty husbanded their anger in calling the vengeance
of heaven upon this state of affairs and in affirming a multitude of
miracles, and finally, in councils, ordered everyone to lay down his
arms. They put forward the “Peace of God” in 1035, and threatened
excommunication to those who violated so holy a decree. When the council
in each province had formulated this peace deacons made it known to the
people assembled in the churches. After the Gospel had been read the
deacons mounted the pulpits and launched against infractors of the peace
the following malediction: “Cursed be they who aid in doing evil; cursed
be their arms and their horses! may they be banished with Cain, the
fratricide, with Judas the traitor; with Dathan and Abiram, who descended
living into hell. May their joy be extinguished at the sight of the holy
angels as are these flames before your eyes.” At these words the priests
who were holding lighted tapers threw them down and put them out, while
the people, seized with fear, repeated with one voice, “May God thus
extinguish the joy of those who will not accept peace and justice.”
[Illustration: HENRY I
(From an old engraving)]
But passions were too rampant and ambitions, too indomitable for evil
thus to be rooted out entirely. The Peace of God only multiplied
perjurers without diminishing assassins. Five years later another law
known as the “Truce of God” was substituted for it. The councils which
proclaimed this did not try to stop the flow of all human passions but to
control them and regulate war according to laws of honour and humanity.
Recourse to force was no longer forbidden to those who could invoke
no other law, but the employment of this means was submitted to wise
restrictions. All military attack and all shedding of blood was forbidden
from sunset Wednesday evening to sunrise Monday morning, as well as on
all fast and feast days. A perpetual inviolability was accorded the
churches, unarmed clerics, and monks, while the protection of the truce
was extended to the peasants, their flocks, and implements of tillage.
Promulgated first in Aquitaine, this wise and beneficial law was adopted
throughout almost all Gaul, where the lords swore to observe it; and
although it was often violated and soon fell into desuetude, it did much
good in softening the manners of the nation and was the finest work of
the mediæval clergy. Rumour spread that a horrible malady known as the
“sacred fire” would punish infractors of the truce. The weakling king
Henry, through “unreasonable pride,” was almost the only one to refuse
to recognise it within his estates, giving as a pretext that it was an
encroachment of the clergy upon his authority.
This king has left no creditable impression upon history.[d] Save for a
few expeditions into Normandy, most of which were unfortunate, he did
nothing. In 1046 he refused the homage of the duke of Upper and Lower
Lorraine, and even allowed the count of Flanders to declare for the
emperor of Germany as suzerain.[c]
It is said that from fear of unwittingly marrying a wife who might be
allied to him by ties of blood, he sought one at the extremities of
Europe, and married for his third wife the princess Anne, daughter of the
grand duke Yaroslaff of Russia. Henry had three sons by this marriage, of
whom he caused the eldest, Philip, to be made joint king in the last year
of his life. He died in 1060 after a reign of twenty-nine years.[d]
_Deeds of the Great Barons_
[Sidenote: [1028-1054 A.D.]]
The king did nothing, but the great lords accomplished much. Three
especially filled France with the noise of their ambitions and their
wars. Robert, surnamed the Magnificent by the nobles and the Devil by
the people, had usurped the ducal crown of Normandy by poisoning his
brother Richard III and his chief barons at a feast (1028). By force of
energy and courage he crushed the opposition which his crime aroused and,
uncontested sovereign of Normandy, interfered with all his neighbours.
He upheld King Henry I against his brother, for which he received the
French Vexin in return. He set out to oust Canute the Great from the
throne of England for the profit of the sons of Ethelred, his cousin;
but a storm having driven his fleet from the English coast upon that
of Brittany, he invaded this country and forced the duke Alain to do
him homage (1033). In 1035 struck with remorse he went to seek peace of
conscience at Jerusalem. While returning he died in Asia Minor. Below
Rouen, in one of the most beautiful positions in Normandy, you may see
a hill covered with shapeless ruins. These are the remains of Robert
le Diable’s castle, which, according to tradition, was haunted by evil
spirits. The place is not far from the spot where John Lackland is said
to have stabbed his nephew.
The son and successor of Robert the Magnificent was William the Bastard,
who had much to do to obtain the obedience of his vassals: the battle
of Val-des-Dunes, near Caen (1046), finally rid him of his adversaries.
King Henry, his suzerain, who fought that day on his side, soon found the
young duke too powerful, and formed an alliance of all his enemies. This
was the cause of numerous encounters between the Normans and the French
(inhabitants of the Île-de-France), the latter in every event sustained
by the Angevins and the Bretons. The bloodiest of these combats was that
fought at Mortemer in 1054. The king supported by the count of Anjou had
entered Normandy through the county of Évreux, while his brother Eudes
penetrated the Pays de Caux with horsemen from Picardy, Champagne, and
Burgundy.
Duke William met this double invasion with two armies--that which marched
against Eudes encountered, near Mortemer, the French, dispersed, and
engaged in pillaging. The Normans killed some, took others, and put the
rest to flight. Swift messengers bore the good news to the duke. “When
night had come he despatched one of his men who climbed a tree near the
king’s camp and began to utter loud cries. The sentinels asked why he
thus cried aloud at an unseemly hour. ‘My name is Raoul de Ternois,’
he replied, ‘and I bring you bad news. Take your wagons and carts to
Mortemer to carry away your friends who are dead, for the French came
against us to test the Normans’ chivalry, and they have found it much
greater than they liked. Eudes, their standard-bearer, has been put to
flight in shame; and Guy, count of Ponthieu, has been taken. All the
others have been made prisoners or are dead, or have had great difficulty
in saving themselves by rapid flight. Announce at once this news to the
king of the French, on the part of the duke of Normandy.’” The frightened
king retired in all haste, and Geoffrey Martel was obliged to abandon to
William the sovereignty of Maine.
Eudes II, count of Blois, desired to seize the kingdom of Provence and
afterwards Lorraine, and to this reconstructed Lorraine he hoped to add
the crown of Italy. But a battle in Barrois ended the schemes of the
turbulent baron. Eudes was defeated and killed (1037); his wife alone was
able to recognise his body among the corpses which strewed the field,
and pay the last honours to his remains.
[Sidenote: [987-1066 A.D.]]
A prince against whom Eudes often fought, Fulk (Foulques) Nerra--or
the Black--count of Anjou, was even more renowned. Thrice did he make
pilgrimages to the Holy Land. On the last he caused himself to be drawn
on a sledge, naked, and with rope around the neck, through the streets of
Jerusalem, whipped the while with great blows by two valets, and crying
with all his might, “Lord have mercy on the traitor, the perjurer Fulk.”
Then he attempted to return on foot, but died on the way (1040). Fulk
had indeed many crimes to expiate. Queen Constance was his niece. One
day she complained to him of one of her husband’s favourites, and Fulk
immediately despatched twelve knights with orders to stab the favourite
wherever they might find him. Of his two wives, he had one burned to
death, or according to other accounts stabbed her himself after she had
been rescued from a precipice over which he tried to throw her; the other
he compelled by ill treatment to retire to Palestine. His son Geoffrey
Martel was also a fighter. He tried by force of arms in 1036 to compel
his father to cede him the county of Anjou, but the old Fulk defeated and
made him undergo the punishment of the _harnescar_. The rebel son had to
travel several miles on all fours, a saddle on his back, to reach the
count’s feet and implore his pardon.
Geoffrey Martel, jealous of the duke of Normandy’s power, united with
Henry I against him. His successors kept up this policy and the kings
of France found the Angevin counts useful allies against the Norman
duke--now become kings of England, at least until the moment the counts
inherited the English crown themselves. It is related that Geoffrey
Martel’s wife was fond of reading, but such was the scarcity of books
that she was obliged to give two hundred sheep, five quarters of wheat,
and as much rye and millet for a manuscript of the homilies. The
beautiful cathedral of Angers was begun under Fulk Nerra.[c]
PHILIP I (1060-1108 A.D.)
Philip I at the age of eight succeeded his father under the regency
of Baldwin V, count of Flanders. The most important event of Philip’s
minority, and one in which he took no part, was the conquest of England.
The Norman knights were distinguished above all others by their
immoderate desire for warlike adventure and their brilliant exploits.
Some of them, landing sixty years before as pilgrims on the south coast
of Italy, had helped the besieged inhabitants of Salerno to drive off a
Saracen army. Inspired by the success of their compatriots, the sons of a
petty nobleman, Tancred de Hauteville, followed by a band of adventurers,
wrested Apulia from the Greeks, Lombards, and Arabs, and sustained
with success a most unequal struggle against the German and Byzantine
emperors, who joined forces to exterminate them. They made prisoner the
German pope Leo IX, devoted to the family of the emperor Henry III;
and, humbling themselves before their captive, obtained permission to
hold their conquest as a fief of the church. Robert Guiscard completed
the subjection of Apulia and Calabria, and his brother Roger conquered
Sicily, and it was thus the Normans founded the kingdom of the Two
Sicilies and the pope obtained suzerainty over it.
Norman valour was the talk of Europe, when William the Bastard, son of
Robert the Magnificent, began to assemble an army for the conquest of
England. Warriors, full of confidence in his destiny, rushed from all
directions to his standard.[4] It was several hundred years since Britain
had been conquered by the Saxons, and the country was now under the rule
of King Harold, whom a storm had once wrecked, before he was king, upon
the coast of Normandy. As William’s prisoner, Harold was compelled to
cede the Norman his rights to the throne; and when free at this price no
longer considered himself bound by an oath extracted under compulsion. It
was the custom in those days to consider shipwrecked persons as delivered
by the judgment of God to the lord of the shore on which the storm had
cast them. They could be held captive and even put to torture for the
sake of ransom. William recalled to Harold his promise, especially
invoked the will of Edward the Confessor, the last king of England, and
declared his willingness to abide by the decision of the church. The
consistory, assembled at the Lateran, pronounced in William’s favour,
and at the instigation of the monk Hildebrand awarded him the kingdom
of England and sent him, together with a blessed standard, a diploma as
sovereign of the country. A great battle fought between the two rivals
near Hastings in 1066 decided the issue. Harold lost his life; and
England, after a desperate struggle, became the conquest of the Normans.
William divided the country into fiefs for his barons and knights, and
thenceforth feudalism spread over England the network it had already
fastened upon France, Germany, and Italy.
[Illustration: PHILIP I
(From an old French print)]
This great event inflamed people’s spirits and disposed them to
adventurous expeditions in distant lands. It was the forerunner of the
Crusades; although the latter had a nobler motive than the others,
springing, as they did, from the enthusiasm of exalted piety.
[Sidenote: [1066-1073 A.D.]]
A great revolution was taking place at this time in the church. Nicholas
II occupied the pontifical chair at this moment. He had for counsellor
a monk who deplored the vices of the clergy and the degradation of the
church as much as the encroachments of the temporal upon spiritual
authority. This monk, this man so celebrated in ecclesiastical history,
was Hildebrand. He resolved to deprive the princes and lords of every
source of influence over the clergy, to strengthen the ecclesiastical
hierarchy, and to raise the pope above the kings of the earth, hoping
thus to regain for the church her virtue, her splendour, and all her
power. Such a project of universal domination, which would seem like
madness to-day, was in Hildebrand’s age a conception of genius. It
was Hildebrand’s glory to have wished to free the church’s spiritual
authority from all temporal bonds; it was his mistake to have listened
too much to his own ambition in trying to enslave the political
government of the princes to ecclesiastical authority. In 1073 Hildebrand
was chosen by the people and clergy of Rome as successor to Pope
Alexander II. He took the name of Gregory VII.
[Sidenote: [1071-1099 A.D.]]
Philip of France was leading a life filled with scandal and violence.
To satisfy his unbridled desires he, like Henry IV of Germany, was
carrying on, in contempt of Gregory’s prohibition, the most shameful
traffic in clerical benefices. The angered pontiff threatened Philip
with excommunication. The colossal structure raised by the pontiff did
not perish with him; his successors bound it together. He founded the
universal monarchy of the popes upon a durable basis and on the ruling
spirit of the time, and this domination reached a century after him, its
highest point. The Crusades contributed powerfully to hold it together.
Gregory conceived the plan of these, but it was not given to him to carry
it out. The first of these memorable events took place in the time of
Philip I and in the pontificate of Urban II. Philip was not associated
with the First Crusade; he took no part in any of the great enterprises
which marked the age in which he lived, and his reign offers nothing
worthy of remembrance.
In 1071 the widow of his guardian, Count Baldwin of Flanders, was robbed
by the latter’s brother, Robert the Frisian, and she had recourse to
Philip. The king took up arms in her behalf and marched against Robert,
but suffered a shameful defeat at Cassel.[5] He also fought a twelve
years’ war with William the Conqueror, but it was a war marked by no
memorable event. William seduced Philip’s counsellors and partisans by
offering them great domains in England. Philip on his side promised
protection to the discontented element among the Normans and took the
part of William’s eldest son Robert, in revolt against his father. After
a truce and during an illness of the duke, the king made fun of the
former’s extreme fatness by inquiring when he expected to be brought to
bed. William heard of this and, furious, swore to bring the king the
candles for the churching. He assembled a formidable army and was setting
out to ravage Philip’s estates when he fell ill at Rouen and died there
in 1087. When he was scarcely cold the lords who were with him departed
in haste for their castles; his servants pillaged his effects, taking
everything but the bed he lay on, and left the body of the conqueror
naked on the mattress. A poor knight found it in this state and moved to
pity covered it, at his own expense, with mourning robes and prepared to
bury it. He had spoken the funeral service and the body was in the grave
when a Norman named Asselin came forward and said, “This ground belongs
to me; the man whose eulogy you have just pronounced robbed me of it. On
this spot stood my father’s house, this man seized it against all justice
and without paying a price for it. In God’s name I forbid you to cover
the robber’s body with earth that is mine.” This is a memorable example
of the vanity of an existence full of greatness and iniquity--a striking
sign of the forerunner of the judgment which threatened, on the threshold
of the other life, him who had founded his power on rapine and the
extermination and misery of a people. This William, conqueror of a great
realm and ravisher of immense domains in a foreign land, only obtained a
resting-place in his native soil through pity; those who assisted at his
funeral had to lay the price of it upon his coffin.
[Sidenote: [1087-1108 A.D.]]
None of his three sons paid him his last duties, but waged fierce war for
his heritage.[d] William Rufus succeeded to the throne in England, and
his brother Robert Courte-Heuse (Court-Hose or Short-Hose) in Normandy.
But William was not content with his portion. He invaded Normandy in
1090, and also disturbed the peace of the French monarchy by a vigorous
claim on the French Vexin and a war on the count of Maine. When Robert
joined the First Crusade he mortgaged his duchy to his brother, who
occupied it. But William’s tenure was short. An arrow in the New Forest
ended his life (1100). Robert Courte-Heuse hastened home and resumed his
rule, but Henry I, the Conqueror’s youngest son who succeeded William
Rufus in England, thirsted likewise for the paternal dominions. In 1104
he appeared in Normandy and two years later the struggle was over. At
the battle of Tinchebray Robert lost his lands and his liberty. Normandy
passed to the English crown.[a]
The death of the Conqueror was a great cause of joy to Philip and enabled
him to continue his indolent and scandalous career. He had married
Bertha, daughter of Count Florent of Holland, but tired of her and shut
her up while he eloped with Bertrade, wife of Fulk le Réchin, count
of Anjou, and married her. Pope Urban ordered the dissolution of this
marriage, and on the refusal to obey a council assembled at Autun in 1094
excommunicated the king. Philip no longer wished to wear the external
marks of royalty; he was afflicted with grievous infirmities, which he
recognised as the chastisement of God; so in 1100 he associated his son
Louis with the crown, and thenceforth reigned only in name. A terrible
fear of hell seized upon him. In humility he renounced burial in the
sepulchre of the kings at St. Denis, and died in 1108 in the habit of a
Benedictine monk.[d]
LOUIS THE FAT AND LOUIS THE YOUNG (1108-1180 A.D.)
Feebleness and inertness mark the reign of the first four Capetians. In
the successor of Philip the race began to partake in the general activity
of the age.
The reign of Louis VI, better known as Louis le Gros, or the Fat, began
in the lifetime of his predecessor. He was the first French monarch that
entertained any settled maxim of government, or whose ideas reached a
system of policy. His predecessors had been the creatures, the followers,
of events. Louis knew how to control these. The whole effort and aim of
his reign was to reduce the barons of the duchy of France to obedience.
His views did not extend to the kingdom. He prudently limited his
exertions to the counties within or bordering upon his power. History
may disdain to recount minutely the wars carried on by Louis against the
barons of Montmorency, whose castle rose within view of his capital, or
against the lords of Puiset, of Montlhéry, or of Coucy, possessors of
strongholds within a few leagues of Paris, from whence they were wont
to sally forth to the plunder of travellers and merchants. And yet,
of all the wars that adorn or sully the French annals, none was more
wise in aim, more useful or important in consequences, than these petty
enterprises of Louis.
His first attempt was against the Burchards, lords of Montmorency, who
were continually in quarrel with the abbaye of St. Denis; and, if we
are to believe the chronicles of the day, written for the most part
in that famous convent, the Montmorencys were impious spoliators and
enemies of the church. Louis stood forth the champion of the clergy, and
brought the Burchards to reason. His next efforts were directed against
the château of Montlhéry and its rapacious owners, who interrupted all
communication betwixt the royal towns of Paris and Orleans, greatly to
the detriment of commerce and the annoyance of the townsfolk. Louis here
took care to have a pretext also. He did not assert his royal authority
and arm to avenge it. It was as the ally of the clergy that he subdued
the Montmorencys; it was as the friend of commerce, and the avenger of
the plundered burgesses, that he besieged Montlhéry. Louis XI did not
use more policy and feint in his undermining of the aristocracy than did
Louis VI; the latter, unfortunately for his own fame, having only the
smaller sphere of action (1101).
[Illustration: LOUIS VI
(From an old engraving)]
[Sidenote: [1101-1119 A.D.]]
Nevertheless, the name of Louis the Fat stands connected with one of the
most important revolutions in the civil history of France, _viz._, the
enfranchisement of the _communes_ or commons, as the early municipalities
were called. From him towns received their first charters; from his reign
their first liberties date. In some towns the bishops favoured, in some
they opposed, the enfranchisement of the commons. The barons were, in
general, averse. The king was obliged to wage a tedious war against the
family of Coucy, which, by means of a fortress, kept possession of the
town of Amiens. He at length took and razed it; and the seigniory of the
De Coucys merged in the township of Amiens.
It was not merely by military exploits, and by the elevation of the
_tiers état_ or third estate, that the royal authority progressed during
the reign of Louis VI. The judicial authority attributed to the monarch
by the feudal system, and exercised by him in his court or council of
peers, made him the arbiter of disputed successions. It was thus that
Philip I had extended his influence over the province of Berri. His
son Louis interfered in the quarrels of the house of Bourbon, where a
minor struggled against the usurpation of his uncle. Louis entered the
Bourbonnais with an army in 1115, took Germigny, the principal fortress
of Aymon de Bourbon, and compelled him to submit. Not since the early
Carlovingians had the banners of a king of France been seen so far from
his capital.
[Sidenote: [1119-1127 A.D.]]
The continued rivalry betwixt the Normans, or English, and the French
excited and kept alive the warlike spirit of both nations. Henry I
reigned in England, and also in Normandy, which he had usurped from his
brother Robert. Louis took the part of the latter, as well as of his son
William Clito; and mutual wars, or rather ravages, were frequent, with
intervals of peace, betwixt the nations.[b] The principal feud between
Henry and Louis was produced by accident.
_Battle of Brenneville_
On the 20th of August, 1119, Louis and Henry found themselves
unexpectedly face to face on the plain of Brenmule or Brenneville,
three leagues from Les Andelys. Henry descended from the height of
Verclive with his sons Richard and Robert, five hundred men-at-arms,
and some infantry. Louis, seeing that what he had long desired was now
approaching, marched straight at the enemy at the head of four hundred
knights, accompanied by William Clito, who had taken arms to deliver
his father from a long captivity and to win back the heritage of his
ancestors. William de Crespigny, a Norman knight on Clito’s side, charged
first with eighty men-at-arms, penetrated as far as King Henry himself,
and smote him such a blow on the head as, but for his cap of mail, must
have split his skull; but Crespigny was instantly thrown from his horse
and made prisoner with most of his followers. The knights of the Vexin
and the rest of the French then fell impetuously on the Anglo-Normans,
and at first caused them to give way, but Henry’s soldiers, closing up
their ranks, pressed between them and overthrew the assailants, who were
thrown into disorder by the sheer force of their charge. King Louis,
seeing his followers in disarray and anxious to effect a retreat in order
to avoid an irreparable loss, fled at full gallop, leaving his royal
banner and 140 of his knights in the hands of the conquerors.
“Of nine hundred knights who were present at this battle,” says Ordericus
Vitalis,[g] “there were only three killed; for they were completely cased
in iron and, moreover, mutually sparing one another as much from the fear
of God as for the sake of brotherhood in arms. They concerned themselves
less to kill the flying than to take them prisoners.”
The king of the French, divided from his companions in his fright, lost
his way in a forest (that of Lyons) where a peasant, who did not know
him, guided him to Les Andelys in the hope of a large reward. King Henry
bought the silver standard of Louis for forty marks from a man-at-arms,
who had seized it and kept it as a witness of his victory; but the next
day he sent back to King Louis his horse with its saddle, its rein, and
all the royal trappings (Louis had apparently changed horses that he
might fly without being recognised). And William Ætheling had sent back
to his cousin, William Clito, the palfrey which the latter had lost in
the battle, with other presents which King Henry had thought needful
for an exile.[e] After this defeat Louis had to abandon William Clito’s
cause. Pope Calixtus II arranged a peace and Henry I embarked for England
with his family and his court. The journey is memorable for the loss of
the “White Ship” (_Blanche Nef_) in which the most renowned knights and
the heirs of the most illustrious house of the Norman race, including the
two sons and a daughter of the king, perished. One child alone remained
to the bereaved monarch, Matilda or Maud, the wife of the emperor Henry V
but afterwards married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou.[a]
[Sidenote: [1127-1149 A.D.]]
Another enterprise of Louis, in the year 1121, marks the rapid increase
of the king’s influence. A few years since he had established his
authority in the Bourbonnais: now he extended it to Auvergne. In a
quarrel betwixt the count and the bishop of Clermont, the latter
appealed to Louis, who summoned the count to his supreme court, and, on
his refusal to appear, marched with an army and subdued him, as he had
previously the lord of Bourbon. The counts of Anjou and of Nevers aided
him in the expedition. They felt no reluctance in carrying into effect
the decrees of that court of peers of which they formed a part. Louis
was not so fortunate in his treatment of Flanders as in his subjugation
of Aquitaine. The Flemings, indeed, proved always intractable to French
treatment whether of amity or hostility. The count of that province,
perplexed and curbed by the frowardness of the townsfolk and the middle
class, sought to taunt the family of Van der Straten by asserting they
were serfs. One of them replied by cleaving the young count’s skull
as he knelt at prayers. There being no heir to the family of Flanders,
Louis sought to give the county to William Clito (1127). This unfortunate
prince soon after fell in an engagement; and Flanders passed to Theodoric
of Alsace, a descendant of Robert the Frisian (1129). Louis VI died in
1137. It is strange that history could find for this monarch no epithet
save that of the Fat, at the same time that it records innumerable proofs
of a talented mind, of an active and enterprising spirit.
[Illustration: LOUIS VII]
Towards the conclusion of this monarch’s reign, fortune came to reward
and crown his efforts for the extension of the royal authority. William,
count of Poitiers, about to undertake a pilgrimage, from which he had the
presentiment that he never should return, offered his daughter Eleanor in
marriage to Louis the Young, son of Louis the Fat. She was the heiress
of her father’s possessions, which surpassed in extent and importance
those of the king of France himself, comprising Guienne and Poitou--all
the country, in fact, betwixt the Loire and the Adour. The marriage was
celebrated at Bordeaux; and soon after it arrived tidings of the deaths
both of the king and of the count of Poitiers. Thus Louis VII, or the
Young, succeeded to dominions and authority infinitely more ample than
those which his father had inherited. But the want of talent in the son
did away with all these advantages. Nevertheless he commenced his reign
with spirit. He chastised several refractory nobles, and resolved to
support the queen’s rights to the county of Toulouse. Louis besieged that
town. He failed in taking it, indeed; but the king of France, at the
head of an army, made his name and power known for the first time to the
inhabitants of the south. During a war carried on about the same time
against Thibaut, count of Champagne, an accident occurred which had a
marked effect upon the future conduct and character of Louis the Young.
He had taken by storm the castle of Vitry, and set fire to it. The flames
chanced to catch the neighbouring church, into which the population
had crowded, to preserve themselves from the fury of the soldiery. It
appears that they had no means of escape. Thirteen hundred men, women,
and children perished in the conflagration. Louis was horror-struck on
beholding the mass of half consumed bodies, and the weight of the remorse
hung ever after upon him, and weighed down his spirit. It was the chief
cause that induced him to receive the cross, and to lead that expedition
to Jerusalem which is known in history as the Second Crusade.
Not a single feat of arms marked the stay of Louis in Palestine, where he
lingered till 1149, ashamed to return. The ignominy of this ill success,
and the desertion of his followers, fell upon King Louis; and he felt
it, not to rally and redeem his character, but to sink under the shame.
He abandoned the feelings of the monarch and the warrior for those of
the pilgrim; refused at first to undertake any enterprise against the
infidels, and stole from Antioch to Jerusalem like a craven. If his
subjects were discontented with such weakness in their sovereign,
Eleanor of Aquitaine was still more disgusted with such a husband: she
refused longer to remain on any friendly terms with him.[b] On his
return the king repudiated his wife, who had so displeased him during
the crusade. [Queen Eleanor at once petitioned the pope for a divorce.
In 1152 the pope granted her wish.] Shortly afterwards a new marriage
transferred her duchy of Guienne to Henry Plantagenet, count of Anjou,
duke of Normandy and heir to the English crown. When, two years later,
Henry entered into possession of his heritage, and afterwards added
Brittany, through the marriage of one of his sons with the only daughter
of the count of that country, he found himself master of almost the whole
of western France.[c]
[Sidenote: [1103-1180 A.D.]]
Hence dates the rivalry betwixt the kings which fills up the rest of
their reigns. But in that age war tended more to mutual annoyance than to
conquest: it was a livelihood to the needy, a portion to the powerful;
and neither were very serious or bent upon the destruction of an enemy.
Feudal rights and supremacy were also held in high respect; and the name
of suzerain, though but a name, often supplied to Louis the place of
the armies of his vassal Henry. In time the church came to fling itself
into the scale. The persecution and murder of Thomas à Becket roused
all the clergy in enmity to Henry, and Louis took advantage of their
aid. Later still, the French monarch used the more unworthy expedient of
exciting the sons of Henry to rebel against their parent; and throughout
he contrived to supply by intrigue what he wanted in martial spirit,
activity, and power. Louis VII married Alix of Champagne, after the
divorce; he was long without a son, and at length, so the story goes,
he obtained one by dint of prayer. When the life of the prince was
threatened by a fever, the anxious parent undertook a pilgrimage to
Canterbury, to the tomb of Thomas à Becket, for his recovery. The young
Philip recovered; but Louis, on his return, was struck with a palsy,
under which he lingered for the space of a year, and died in 1180.[b]
_The Abbot Suger_
[Sidenote: [1081-1149 A.D.]]
On his return from the crusade, Louis found his country in a most
peaceful and flourishing condition owing to the skilful administration of
his preceptor the abbot Suger, whom he had left in charge of affairs.[a]
Suger is indubitably the most illustrious, perhaps, even, the only
historian who has a place in the general history of France, and who
really influenced her destinies. Such a fame cannot be usurped; whoso
possesses it merits it.
No great and lasting memorials were raised in France by Suger and his
master, Louis the Fat; they made no great conquests, established no
memorable laws; it is even a mistake to ascribe to them the honour of
being the first to enfranchise the communes. This enfranchisement had
preceded them; it arose from causes beyond their control, fulfilled its
destiny without their aid, and was as often opposed as seconded by them.
But Louis the Fat and Suger, the one as king, the other as minister, were
the first since Charlemagne to have a true and just perception of their
position and mission, and to bind themselves to act upon it. This great
idea, without which there can be nothing of state or king, the idea of
a public authority, devoted to the maintenance of public order, called
to something higher than ministration to the interests and personal
caprices of its temporary holder, had been conceived by the giant mind of
Charlemagne, but, despite his genius and a long reign, it was not for him
to put it into action, to found a throne and a nation. Certain customs
of unity, of regularity, of government, in short, existed indeed in the
earlier years of Louis le Débonnaire’s reign, but they soon vanished,
society and authority alike fell into decay, and for two centuries there
was neither king, kingdom, nor nation, Frank nor French.
Hugh Capet, in taking the title of king, laid the first stone of a new
monarchy in the very heart of feudalism. But it was no more than a
title of vague meaning and no import under him. He had not the force of
character, nor is there anything to indicate that he had the design,
to raise the sovereignty above suzerainty and reunite in one body the
scattered members of the nation. Under his immediate successors the
power of the throne drooped more and more. In the reigns of Robert,
Henry I, and Philip I, one can scarcely discern any traces of national
and monarchical unity. Isolation and independence waxed stronger, not
only in the case of powerful or distant feudatories, but also among the
nearest and humblest vassals of the crown. Only the feudal tie continued
in force, a real and precious tie since it still maintained a show of
confederation under a leader and prevented the utter dismemberment of
the government and the country; but its influence, always more moral
than political, yielded at the least shock and seemed even on the point
of disappearance. With Louis the Fat a new era begins; the extent of
his power, even the sphere of his activities, is still very restricted;
the results of his endeavours are, for the present at least, of little
value. It is almost always in the outskirts of Paris, against the simple
squires, for the securing of a route, for the protection of merchants,
that his courage and wisdom are exercised. Nevertheless in these small
undertakings, and in certain others more remote, we can see a definite
design of central and regular government; sovereignty separates itself
from suzerainty, and in its own name claims, though timidly, rights of
another sort. It presents itself to us as a power general and superior,
called to maintain justice and order, to the advantage of all, and
against all comers--a power all too weak for such a task, but awake to
a perception of its dignity and its mission, and to a dawning of the
same in the mind of its subjects. Such is the true character of the
reign of Louis the Fat; he did little for the liberties of the public,
much for the forming of the state and national government. He guided
sovereignty in its first steps out of a feudal régime, gave to it other
principles, placed it in a different attitude; and it is in this work,
the development of which decided the lot of France, that Suger rendered
powerful assistance during twenty five years’ administration.
He did not seem marked out by birth for so great things, his father,
Hélinand, being only a man of the people, living, according to the
most probable supposition, at St. Omer, where Suger was born in 1081.
But even at that date the church busied herself in searching out and
welcoming, even from among the lowest ranks, men capable of serving and
honouring her. Everywhere present and active, in touch with all the
social conditions, associating alike with poor and rich, dwelling with
the humble as with the great, she went forward to meet even childhood
on its way, studying its varying dispositions, surrounding its earliest
days, unfolding to it a brilliant career, the only one which invited
development of its intellectual faculties, in which every reward was
accessible to merit, and, finally, in which principles of equality and
co-operation reigned. The monastery of St. Denis received and brought
up the young Suger; he passed ten years in the dependent priory of
Lettrée, and when, in 1095, Philip intrusted the education of his son,
Louis the Fat, to the monks of St. Denis, Abbot Adam recalled Suger
into the abbey itself that he might become the companion of the young
prince. Thus sprang up between the children the intimacy which was to
bind them together all their lives. In 1098, Louis returned to his
father’s house, and Suger went to complete his studies in the monastery
of Florent-de-Saumur, where the sciences of the day flourished under
Abbot William. In returning to St. Denis in 1103 he speedily became the
confidant of Abbot Adam, who, not content with employing him in all
matters relating to the monastery, frequently took him to court where
Prince Louis, who now for four years had had a share in the throne, knit
yet more closely the bonds that had bound him to his childhood’s friend.
From this date there is no further need to trace the life of Suger; it
is part of history and nearly all the details that have come down to us
are to be found either in his _Vie de Louis VI_[k] or in the _Panegyric_
written upon him by the monk William, his secretary.
Before his elevation to the dignity of abbot of St. Denis, when
charged with diverse missions either to ecclesiastical gatherings or
to the court at Rome, or even called upon to defend with mailed fist
certain domains belonging to St. Denis against the brigand nobles who
ravaged them, he displayed in turn the tact of the ecclesiastic and the
courage of the knight. Later on, when Louis had constituted him his
most intimate adviser, it seems that so much power temporarily dazzled
Suger. St. Bernard speaks of his pomp and pride, and of the disorder
introduced into his abbey. “The interior of the monastery,” he says,
“is filled with knights, sometimes it is even open to women; one hears
business of all sorts being transacted there; there quarrels break out;
lastly it is there that that which is Cæsar’s is rendered unto Cæsar,
without deduction or delay, but never unto God that which is God’s.”
Whether it be that St. Bernard’s warnings aroused Suger from this first
intoxication of power, or whether he perceived of himself the harm the
scandal would do him, he did not delay putting an end to it. In 1127 he
introduced drastic reforms into his abbey, compelled his monks to submit
to them, and scrupulously conformed himself, and very shortly his power
in the court was but more firmly established by this episode. Proud of
the austerity of his morals, whilst at the same time profiting by his
influence, the church cried him up on all occasions, and bishops and
abbots of the most celebrated monasteries contemplated with equal pride
the gorgeous church rebuilt by him at St. Denis, and the humble cell,
barely fifteen feet long by ten feet wide, where he applied himself in
solitude to religious exercises. After the death of Louis the Fat his
power increased yet more; the indolent and incompetent Louis the Young
shifting to his shoulders the whole weight of the government.
[Sidenote: [1147-1149 A.D.]]
Suger’s regency during this king’s crusade, from the year 1147 to the
year 1149, is the most brilliant period of his career. He firmly upheld
the royal authority, rebuked the usurpations of the vassals, established
some degree of order wherever his influence attained to, met the king’s
expenses in Palestine by his excellent administration of the crown
revenues, and the advancement of his domains, and, finally, won such fame
throughout the length and breadth of Europe that persons from Italy and
England came to study the salutary results of his government, and the
title of “the Solomon of the century” was bestowed upon him by foreigners
contemporary with him. Hitherto only illustrious bishops, or learned
and subtle theologians had attained this European distinction by their
authority in the church or by their writings; no other man had ever won
it on the sole merit of his political conduct, and from the ninth to the
twelfth century Suger remains the first example of a minister who won
admiration for his skill and wisdom from beyond the mountains and over
the seas. He did not show any anxiety to retain this absolute power which
the king’s absence conferred on him, and, by a rare unselfishness, the
interests of the state preoccupied him more than his personal ambitions.
He was himself opposed to a crusade from which he foresaw dangers, and
had only yielded at the instance of St. Bernard’s ardent entreaties, the
pope’s orders, and the prevailing opinion of the day. When certain of the
nobles, Robert de Dreux, his brother, among them, who had accompanied
Louis, abandoned him in Palestine and returned without him to France,
Suger never ceased from urging his immediate return to his dominions.
“The disturbers of the public peace,” he wrote, “have returned, whilst
you, under bond to defend your subjects, remain as it were captive in a
foreign land. Of what are you thinking, sire, thus to leave the flock
intrusted to you at the mercy of the wolves? How can you disguise from
yourself the perils with which the robbers who have outstripped you
menace the state? No, it is not permissible for you to remain any longer
so far away from us. Everything here craves your presence. Therefore we
pray your highness, we exhort your piety, we call upon your goodness
of heart, finally we conjure you by the faith which binds reciprocally
prince and subject, not to prolong beyond Easter your sojourn in Syria,
lest a longer delay render you guilty in the eyes of the Lord of
disregarding the oath which you swore on assuming the crown. You will, I
think, find cause for contentment in our conduct. We have placed in the
hands of the knights Templar the money which we had intended to send you.
We have further repaid to the count of Vermandois the £3,000 which he
had lent us for your use. At the present time your land and your people
enjoy a happy peace. We lay in store against your return the broken
victuals for the fiefs dependent on you, the tallage and victuals which
we levy from your domains. You will find your houses and palaces in good
preservation owing to the care we have taken in doing repairs. I have now
reached the decline of life, but I dare venture to say that the works I
engaged to do from love to God and devotion to your person have hastened
my old age. With regard to the queen, your wife, I advise that you
conceal the dissatisfaction she causes you till such time as, restored to
your realm, you can quietly deliberate over that and other matters.”
[Illustration: AN OFFICER OF THE KING, TWELFTH CENTURY]
Louis kept them waiting for him yet a long time. Suger had to fight
against the pretensions and plottings of Robert de Dreux and his party.
He realised that single-handed he would not be able to hold his own, and
boldly summoned to Soissons an assembly of the bishops and principal
barons of the realm. This generous appeal to the opinions and the
liberties of the times had the result he anticipated: the assembly sided
with him and strengthened him against his enemies. Defeated in their
purpose in France, they made an attack on him in Palestine, this time
within the mind of the king himself, who, frivolous and credulous, at
first believed all their accusations. But on passing through Italy on
his return to his dominions Louis received through Pope Eugenius III,
friend and admirer of Suger, a completely different impression, in which
he was fully confirmed on arriving in France by the good order which he
there found established, the resources husbanded for him by Suger, and
the eagerness shown by the regent to hand over to the king his rightful
authority.
Other ideas were at work in the old man’s brain. He had disapproved of
his master’s crusade as fatal to the interests of the kingdom; but the
misfortunes to the Christians in the East, and regret at seeing the Holy
Land on the point of once more falling into the hands of the infidels,
preoccupied his mind continually. He conceived the idea of himself
attempting a fresh expedition to Palestine, of raising an army at his
own expense, of devoting all his wealth and influence to the cause, of
inducing the leading bishops to follow his example, and of personally
heading an undertaking by which he hoped Jerusalem would be saved without
imperilling France and his king. In the narrative of William, his
biographer, we can see with what ardour and perseverance he threw himself
into this project, even after illness forbade him to hope for the glory
resulting from it. He had already chosen the leader whom he deemed most
competent to replace him and had presented him with the sums of money
collected for carrying out the scheme, when death overtook him, January
12th, 1151, at the age of seventy.[h]
EMANCIPATORY MOVEMENTS AFTER THE CRUSADES
[Sidenote: [1000-1151 A.D.]]
The grand movement of the crusade having for a while withdrawn men from
local servitude, and led them abroad through Europe and Asia, they sought
Jerusalem and found freedom. That liberating trumpet of the archangel,
which was thought to have been heard in the year 1000, sounded a century
later in the preaching of the crusade. The village awoke at the foot
of the feudal castle, whose shade hung heavy over it. The pitiless man
who descended from his vulture’s eyrie only to despoil his vassals,
now himself armed them, led them, lived with them, suffered with them.
Communion in misery softened his heart. Many a serf could say to the
baron, “My lord, I found you a draft of water in the desert; I shielded
you with my body at the siege of Antioch, or Jerusalem.”
_The Communes_
Humanity, then, began again to honour itself, even in its most miserable
conditions. The first communal revolutions preceded, or closely followed,
the year 1100. They began to think that every man was entitled to dispose
of the fruits of his own labour, and to give away his own children in
marriage; they emboldened themselves to think that they had a right to
come and go, to buy and sell, and they suspected, in their presumption,
that it might very possibly be that men were equal.
Until then, that formidable thought of equality had not come forth in a
very precise and tangible form. We are told, indeed, that the peasants
of Normandy revolted in the year 1000, but they were easily put down; a
few knights ravaged the country, dispersed the villeins, cut off their
feet and hands, and there was an end of the matter. The peasants, in
general, were too much isolated from each other; their _jacqueries_ were
always unsuccessful throughout the Middle Ages. Unhappily, too, it
must be owned, they were too degraded by slavery, too brutalised by the
excess of their woes; their triumph would have been that of barbarism.
It was especially in the populous boroughs, grouped round the castles,
and, above all, round the churches, that ideas of emancipation fermented.
The lay, or ecclesiastical lords had encouraged the population of those
boroughs by concessions of land, being desirous of augmenting their own
strength and the number of their vassals. These towns were not large
and commercial cities, like those of the south of France and Italy, but
they had some rude branches of trade, some blacksmiths, many weavers,
butchers, and innkeepers, in the towns of transit. Sometimes the lords
invited skilful workmen to settle in their towns, such, at least, as
could embroider a stole, or forge armour; it was absolutely necessary to
leave those men a little liberty, for, otherwise, as they carried their
all in their hands, they would have left the country.
The growth of freedom, then, was destined to commence by the central
towns of France, which, obtaining their franchises by fair means or by
force, received the name of privileged towns, or communes. The occasion
of this result was, generally, the defence made by the inhabitants
against the oppression and robbery of the feudal lords, and, in
particular, the defence of the Île-de-France against Normandy, the feudal
country _par excellence_. “At this period,” says Ordericus Vitalis,[g]
“popular communality was established by the bishops in such wise that
the priests accompanied the king to siege or battle, with the banners
of their parishes and all their parishioners.” According to the same
historian, it was a Montfort (an illustrious family, which was, in the
following century, to destroy the liberties of the south of France, and
to lay the foundation of those of England), it was Amaury de Montfort,
who advised Louis the Fat, after his defeat at Brenneville, to employ
against the Normans the men of the communes, marching under the banners
of their parishes (1119). But when these communes returned within their
own walls, they became more urgent in their demands; it was a mortal
blow to their humility, to have once seen the great war-steeds and the
noble knights flying before their parochial banners; to have put an
end, with Louis the Fat, to the highway robberies of the Rocheforts; to
have harried the lair of the De Coucys. They said, with the poet of the
twelfth century: “We are men as well as they; our hearts are as great;
we are as capable of endurance as they.” They all wanted some franchise,
some privilege, and for this they offered money--which they contrived to
find, indigent and wretched as they were. Poor artisans, blacksmiths, or
weavers, allowed, as a matter of favour, to set themselves down at the
foot of a castle; fugitive serfs, who had taken refuge round a church,
such were the founders of liberty; they stinted themselves of bread to
obtain them, and the lords and the king were eager to sell diplomas so
well paid for.
This revolution was accomplished everywhere, under a thousand forms, and
with little noise; it was only prominently remarked in some towns of Oise
and Somme, which, being placed in less favourable circumstances, divided
between two lords, lay and ecclesiastical, applied to the king to obtain
a solemn guarantee for concessions often violated, and which maintained
a precarious liberty at the cost of many centuries of civil war. It
was upon these towns that the name of “communes” was more particularly
bestowed. These wars are a small, but dramatic incident in the great
revolution which was taking place silently, and under various forms, in
all the towns of the north of France.
It was in the valiant and choleric Picardy, the communes of which had so
well beaten the Normans; it was in the country of Calvin, and so many
other revolutionary spirits, that these explosions took place.[f] Le
Mans in 1066, then Cambray in 1076, gave the signal, followed by Noyon,
Beauvais, St. Quentin, Laon, Amiens and Soissons. All wrested communal
charters from their lords, mostly of the ecclesiastical order. In 1112
the bishop of Laon attempted to repeal the communal charter he had
granted, somewhat under compulsion, three years before. His house was
surrounded; the nobles who came to his assistance were killed, and the
prelate himself fell under the blows of an axe. The king came and the
commune was abolished. But before sixteen years had passed the communal
party regained the ascendancy. In 1128 the king ratified a new charter
granted by the bishop.[c] Great or small, the Picard communes were
heroic, and bravely did they fight. They too had their belfry, their
tower, not inclined and faced with marble, like the _miranda_ of Italy,
but furnished with a sonorous bell, that summoned the citizens, not in
vain, to battle against the bishop or the lord. Women went forth to these
fights, against men. Eighty women insisted on taking part in the attack
upon the castle of Amiens, and were wounded there.
So, likewise, Joan Hachette fought afterwards, at the siege of Beauvais.
A sprightly and laughter-loving population it was, of impetuous
soldiers and merry story-tellers, a country of light manners, of smutty
_fabliaux_, of good songs. It was their delight, in the twelfth century,
to see the count of Amiens, mounted upon his big horse, venturing beyond
the pont-levis, and caracoling clumsily; thereupon the innkeepers and
the butchers planted themselves boldly at their doors, and startled the
feudal animal with their loud laughter.
It has been said that the king founded the communes, but the reverse is,
rather, the fact--it was the communes that founded the king; without them
he could not have repulsed the Normans. Those conquerors of England and
of the Two Sicilies would, probably, have conquered France; it was the
communes, or, to employ a more general and more exact word, it was the
_bourgeoisies_ which, under the banner of the parish saint, achieved the
security of public peace between the Oise and the Loire; and the king,
mounted on horseback, carried the banner of the abbey of St. Denis, at
the head of the lords. A vassal, as count of Vexin, abbot of St. Martin
de Tours, canon of St. Quentin, defender of the churches, he waged holy
war against the brigandage of the lords of Montmorency and Puiset, and
against the execrable ferocity of the Coucys. He had upon his side the
nascent _bourgeoisie_ and the church; feudalism had had all the rest, all
the strength and the glory; the poor helpless king was smothered between
the vast dominations of his vassals.
_Philosophy and Thought; Abelard and St. Bernard_
[Sidenote: [1079-1115 A.D.]]
The chain of free-thinkers, broken, it would seem, after Johannes Scotus,
had its links reunited by the great Gerbert, who became pope in the year
1000. Educated at Cordova, and admitted a master at Rheims, Gerbert had
for disciple Fulbert of Chartres, whose pupil Bérenger [Berengarius] of
Tours affrighted the church by the first doubt cast upon the Eucharist.
Soon after, the canon Rosselin of Compiègne dared to touch upon the
question of the Trinity. He taught, moreover, that general ideas were but
words: “The virtuous man is a reality; virtue is but a sound.” This bold
reform gave a violent shock to all poetry, to all religion; it accustomed
men to see nothing but personifications in those ideas that had been
regarded as real things; it was nothing less than a transition from
poetry to prose. This logical heresy inspired the contemporaries of the
First Crusade with horror; nominalism, as it was called, was stifled for
a while.
Champions were not wanting to the church against the innovators.
The Lombards, Lanfranc and St. Anselm, both of them archbishops of
Canterbury, combated Bérenger and Rosselin. St. Anselm, an original
genius, anticipated the famous argument of Descartes, for the existence
of God: “If God did not exist, I could not conceive him.” It was a
great delight for him to have made this discovery, after a long fit of
sleeplessness. Another conflict of an intellectual kind, and one of a
much graver nature, was about to begin, so soon as the question should
have come down from politics to theology and morals, and the very
morality of Christianity should have been brought in question. Thus,
Pelagius came after Arius, and Abelard after Bérenger.
The church seemed at peace; the school of Laon and that of Paris were
occupied by two pupils of St. Anselm of Canterbury, Anselm of Laon, and
William of Champeaux. Great signs and tokens, however, were appearing;
the Vaudois had translated the Bible into the vulgar tongue; the
_Institutes_ were also translated, and law was taught, simultaneously
with theology, at Orleans and at Angers. The mere existence of the
school of Paris was an immense innovation and danger. The ideas which,
till then, had been dispersed, and exposed to close inspection in the
various ecclesiastical schools, were about to converge to a centre. The
conquests of the Normans and the First Crusade had carried that potent
philosophic idiom everywhere--into England, into Sicily, into Jerusalem.
This circumstance alone gave France, especially central France and
Paris, an immense attractive force. The French of Paris became gradually
proverbial; feudalism had found its political centre in the royal city,
and that city was now about to become the capital of human thought.
He who began this revolution was not a priest; he was a handsome young
man, of brilliant and engaging qualities, and of noble race. No one,
like him, could write love verses in the vulgar tongue, and he sang them
himself; then his erudition was extraordinary for the times--he was the
only man who knew Greek and Hebrew.[6] Perhaps he had frequented the
Jewish schools (there were many of them in the south), or the rabbis
of Troyes, Vitry, or Orleans. There were then two principal schools in
Paris; the old episcopal school of Notre Dame, and that of St. Geneviève,
on the mountain, where William of Champeaux was in the zenith of his
fame. Abelard became one of his pupils, laid his doubts before him,
puzzled his master, made sport of him, and put him to silence. He would
have done the same with Anselm of Laon, had not the professor, who was
a bishop, expelled him from his diocese. Thus did the knight-errant of
dialectics go about unhorsing the most famous champions. He says himself
that he renounced the other kind of tilting, that of the tournaments,
only from his love for the war of words. Thenceforth, victorious and
unrivalled, he taught at Paris and at Melun, where Louis the Fat resided,
and where the lords were beginning to gather in great numbers. These
knights encouraged a man of their own order, who had beaten the priests
upon their own ground, and who put the most self-sufficient of the clerks
to silence.
The whole body of Christianity was at stake; it was attacked at its base.
If original sin, as Abelard said, was not a sin, but a penalty, that
penalty was unjust, and redemption was useless. Abelard defended himself
from such a conclusion; but he justified Christianity by means of such
feeble arguments, that he rather did it more damage by declaring that
he had no better answer to give. He suffered himself to be brought to a
stand by means of the _argumentum ad absurdum_, and then he appealed to
authority and faith. And so, then, man was no longer guilty; the flesh
was justified and restored to honour; all the sufferings with which
men had immolated themselves were superfluous. What became of so many
voluntary martyrs, so many fastings and mortifications--the vigils of
monks, the tribulations of hermits, the countless tears shed before God?
All was vanity--mockery. God was an amiable and easy God, who had nothing
to do with all this.
The church was then under the sway of a monk, a simple abbot of
Clairvaux, St. Bernard. He was of noble birth, like Abelard, a native of
Upper Burgundy. He had been brought up in the puissant house of Cîteaux,
the sister and rival of Cluny, which sent forth so many illustrious
preachers, and which, half a century afterwards, made the crusade
against the Albigenses. But St. Bernard thought Cîteaux too splendid and
too rich: he went into needy Champagne, and founded the monastery of
Clairvaux in the “Valley of Wormwood.” There he was free to lead that
life of sorrows that was needful to him: nothing could win him from it;
never would he hear of being anything else than a monk, though he might
have become archbishop and pope. Constrained to reply to all the kings
who consulted him, he found himself all-potent in spite of himself, and
condemned to govern Europe. A letter from St. Bernard made the army of
the king of France withdraw from Champagne. When schism broke out, by the
simultaneous elevation of Innocent II and of Anacletus, St. Bernard was
appointed by the church of France to choose between them, and he chose
Innocent. But these were not his greatest affairs, as his letters inform
us; he lent, not gave, himself to the world; his love and his treasure
were elsewhere. Living in the inward life, in prayer and sacrifice, no
one could make himself more alone in the midst of bustle; the senses
no longer spoke to him of the world. He walked a whole day, says his
biographer, along the Lake of Lausanne, and in the evening he asked where
the lake was. He drank oil for water, and took clotted blood for butter.
He could hardly support himself erect, and yet he found strength to
preach the crusade to a hundred thousand men. The multitude thought it
was a spirit, rather than a man they saw, when he appeared thus before
them, with his red and white beard, his fair and hoary hair; meagre and
weak, with but a scarcely visible indication of life upon his cheeks. His
sermons were terrible; mothers kept their sons away from them, and wives
their husbands; they would else have all followed him to the monasteries.
As for him, when he had sent forth the breath of life over the multitude,
he returned with speed to Clairvaux, reconstructed his little hut of
boughs and foliage near the convent, and assuaged a little his love-sick
soul in writing the exposition of the “Song of Songs” which employed his
whole life.
Imagine with what grief such a man must have heard of Abelard’s
success--of the usurpations of logic over religion; the prosaic victory
of reasoning over faith; the flame of the sacrifice becoming stifled and
extinguished in the world. It was robbing him of his God. St. Bernard was
not to be compared with his rival as a logician; but the latter himself
wrought his own downfall. He undertook to deduce its consequences from
his doctrine, and he applied it to his conduct in life. He had reached
that excess of prosperity in which the infatuation common to our nature
plunges us into some great fault. Everything succeeded with him; men
held their peace before him; women all regarded with looks of love an
engaging, invincible young man, beautiful in face and all-powerful in
mind, who had a whole people for his followers. “I had reached such a
pass,” he says, “that honour what woman I would with my love, I had
no refusal to fear.” Rousseau says precisely the same thing in his
_Confessions_ in relating the success of the _Nouvelle Héloïse_.
[Sidenote: [1115-1140 A.D.]]
The Héloïse of the twelfth century was the niece of the canon Fulbert,
very young, beautiful, learned, and already celebrated; she was intrusted
by her uncle to the teaching of Abelard, who seduced her. This fault had
not even love for its excuse; it was deliberately, in cold blood, by way
of pastime, that Abelard betrayed the confidence of Fulbert. We know
that he was cruelly punished by mutilation for his crime; he renounced
the world, and became a Benedictine at St. Denis, about the year 1119.
Thither he was pursued by ecclesiastical persecutions, and he found
no rest there. The archbishop of Rheims, the friend of St. Bernard,
assembled a council against him at Soissons; Abelard was like to have
been stoned by the people; he was frightened, shed many tears, burned his
books, and said whatever they pleased. He was condemned without inquiry,
his enemies alleging that it was enough that he had taught without the
authority of the church.
Shut up at St. Médard de Soissons, and afterwards a refugee at St. Denis,
he was obliged to fly from that asylum. He had presumed to doubt that St.
Denis, the Areopagite, had ever visited France.[7] To impugn that legend
was to attack the religion of the monarchy; and from that moment the
court withdrew its protection from him. He fled to the dominions of the
count of Champagne, and hid himself in a desert place on the Ardusson,
two leagues from Nogent. Reduced now to poverty, and having but one
clerk with him, he built a hut of reeds and an oratory in honour of that
Trinity he was accused of denying, and named his hermitage the Comforter,
the Paraclet. But his disciples, having learned where he was, flocked
round him; they built them huts, and a town rose in the desert, dedicated
to science and to liberty. A little more, and he would once more have
appeared as a public teacher; but he was compelled again to hold his
peace, and to accept the priory of St. Gildas de Ruys in Brittany, the
language of which he did not understand. It was his fate to find no rest;
his Breton monks, whose habits he endeavoured to reform, endeavoured to
give him poison in the chalice. Thenceforth, the unfortunate man led
a wandering life, and even thought, it is said, of taking refuge in
some land of the infidels; but first he would once measure his strength
against that of the terrible adversary who everywhere pursued him with
his zeal and his sanctity. At the instigation of Arnold of Brescia, he
challenged St. Bernard to a logical duel before the Council of Sens. The
king, the counts of Champagne and Nevers, and a host of bishops were
to be present, and to judge of the hits. St. Bernard repaired to the
rendezvous reluctantly, conscious as he was of his inferiority. But the
threats of the people and the timidity of his rival relieved him from all
embarrassment. Abelard durst not defend himself, but contented himself
with appealing to the pope. Innocent II owed everything to St. Bernard,
and hated Abelard for the sake of his disciple, Arnold of Brescia, who
was then roaming over Italy, and summoning the towns to freedom. He
ordered Abelard to be shut up; but the latter had anticipated him by
voluntarily taking refuge in the monastery of Cluny. The abbot, Peter
the Venerable, answered for Abelard, who died there two years afterwards.
Such was the end of the restorer of philosophy in the Middle Ages--the
son of Pelagius, the father of Descartes, and a Breton like them. From
another point of view, he may be regarded as a precursor of the humane
and sentimental school, which was revived in the persons of Fénelon and
Rousseau.
[Sidenote: [1140-1142 A.D.]]
There is no memory more popular in France than that of Abelard’s
mistress. The fall of the man made the grandeur of the woman; but for
Abelard’s misfortune, Héloïse would have been unknown; she would have
remained obscure and in the shade, she would have desired no other glory
than that of her spouse. At the period of their separation, he made her
take the veil, and built for her the Paraclet, of which she became the
abbess. There she held a great school of theology, Greek, and Hebrew.
Many similar monasteries rose around the Paraclet, and some years after
the death of Abelard, Héloïse was declared head of an order by the pope.
But her glory consists in her love, so constant and so disinterested--a
love to which Abelard’s coldness and hardness of heart give a new lustre.
Let us compare the language of the two lovers:
“Fulbert,” says Abelard, “gave her up, without reserve, to my control,
so that, upon my return from the schools, I should apply myself to her
instruction, and, if I found her negligent, should chastise her severely.
Was not this giving full license to my desires, so that, if I did not
succeed by caresses, I might compass my end by threats and blows?”
This dastardly brutality of a pedant of the twelfth century is in strange
contrast with the exalted and disinterested sentiments expressed by
Héloïse. “God knows, in thee, I sought but thee; nothing of thee but
thyself; such was the sole object of my desire. I was ambitious of no
advantage, not even of the bond of wedlock; I thought not, thou well
knowest, of satisfying either my own wishes or my own pleasure, but
thine. If the name of spouse is more holy, sweeter to me seemed that
of thy mistress, that (be not angry) of thy concubine (_concubinæ vel
seorti_). The more I humbled myself for thee, the more I hoped to gain in
thy heart. Yes, though the master of the world, though the emperor had
been willing to honour me with the name of his spouse, I would rather
have been called thy mistress than his wife and his empress (_tua dici
meretrix, quàm illius imperatrix_).” She accounts in a singular manner
for her having long refused to be the wife of Abelard: “Would it not have
been an unseemly, a deplorable thing, that one woman should appropriate
and take for herself alone, him whom nature had created for all mankind?
What mind, intent upon the meditations of philosophy or of sacred
things, could endure the crying of children, the prating of nurses, the
disturbance and tumult of serving-men and women?”
The mere form of the letters that passed between Abelard and Héloïse
shows how little the passion of the latter was returned. Abelard divides
and subdivides his mistress’s letters; he replies to them methodically,
and by chapters. He heads his own: “To the spouse of Christ, the slave
of Christ”; or “To his dear sister in Christ, Abelard her brother in
Christ.” Héloïse’s tone is very different: “To her master, nay, father;
to her husband, nay, brother; his handmaid, his spouse, nay, his
daughter, his sister; Héloïse to Abelard.”[f]
_Abelard and the University_
[Sidenote: [1100-1150 A.D.]]
Hasting Rashdall describes the relations between Abelard’s influence in
Paris and the ultimate development of the University of Paris as follows:
“The less imaginative historians of the University of Paris have
generally been contented with tracing its origin to the teaching of
Abelard. And it was undoubtedly to the intellectual movement of which
Abelard is the most conspicuous representative that the rise of the
university must ultimately be ascribed. But there was nothing in the
organisation of the schools wherein Abelard taught to distinguish them
from any other cathedral schools which might for a time be rendered
famous by the teaching of some illustrious master. In the age of Abelard
there were three great churches at Paris more or less famous for their
schools. In the first place there was the cathedral (Notre Dame), whose
schools were presided over by William of Champeaux. Then, on the left
bank of the Seine, there was the collegiate church of St. Geneviève;
and there was the church of the Canons Regular of St. Victor’s, where a
school for external scholars was started by William after his retirement
from the world. St. Victor’s became the head-quarters of the old
traditional or positive theology, and it had ceased to exist, or ceased
to attract secular students, before the first traces of a university
organisation begin to appear. With both the secular schools of Paris,
Abelard was at one time or other connected. Denifle’s repudiation of
the old view that the university arose from a junction between the arts
schools of St. Geneviève and the theological schools of Notre Dame goes
slightly beyond the evidence, but in the main he is unquestionably
right in contending that it was the cathedral schools which eventually
developed into the university.
“It was the fame of Abelard which first drew to the streets of Paris the
hordes of students whose presence involved that multiplication of masters
by whom the university was ultimately formed. In that sense, and in that
sense only the origin of the University of Paris may be connected with
the name and age of Abelard. Of a university or a recognised society of
masters we hear nothing; nay, the existence of such an institution was
impossible at a time when the single master of the cloister school seems
to have been as a rule the only recognised master in or around each
particular church.”[m]
_The Position of Woman_
Abelard had propounded the ideal of pure and disinterested love in his
writings, as the consummation of the religious soul. Woman rose up to
it, for the first time, in the writings of Héloïse; but still indeed
referring it to man, to her spouse, to her visible God.
The restoration of woman, which had begun with Christianity, took place
chiefly in the twelfth century. A slave in the East, even in the Greek
gynæceum a recluse, emancipated by imperial jurisprudence, she was
recognised by the new religion as man’s equal. Still Christianity, but
just liberated from pagan sensuality, continued to fear and distrust
woman; men knew themselves to be weak and fond, and they repudiated her
all the more strongly, the more they felt how they sympathised with her
in their hearts. Hence, the harsh, and even contemptuous expressions with
which they labour to fortify themselves. Woman is usually designated by
the ecclesiastical writers, and in the Capitularies, by that degrading,
but most expressive phrase, “the weaker vessel” (_vas infirmius_). When
Gregory VII wished to free the clergy from its double bond, woman and
land, there was a new outburst of invective against that dangerous Eve
whose seduction wrought Adam’s ruin, and who evermore pursues him in his
sons.
A quite opposite movement began in the twelfth century. Free mysticism
undertook to raise up what sacerdotal harshness had trampled under
foot. It was especially a Breton, Robert d’Arbrissel, who fulfilled
this mission of love. He reopened the bosom of Christ to women,
founded asylums for them, built them Fontevrault, and there were soon
Fontevraults all over Christendom. The enterprising charity of Robert
applied itself, by preference, to great sinners of the female sex. He
taught the clemency of God, and his immeasurable mercy in the vilest
haunts. It was a curious thing to see the blessed Robert d’Arbrissel
holding forth day and night amidst a crowd of disciples of both sexes,
all resting together around him. The bitter sarcasms of his enemies
had no effect upon the charitable and courageous Breton, nor even the
scandals to which these meetings gave occasion; he covered all with the
wide mantle of grace.
As grace prevailed over the law, a great religious revolution took
place. Piety became converted into an enthusiasm of chivalric gallantry;
the mystical church of Lyons celebrated a festival of the Immaculate
Conception (1134), thus exalting the ideal of maternal purity precisely
at the period when Héloïse was expressing the pure disinterestedness of
love in her famous letters. Woman reigned in heaven; she reigned also
upon earth. We see her interfere, and with authority, in the affairs of
this world. Bertrade de Montfort ruled at once over her first husband,
Fulk of Anjou, and her second, Philip I, king of France. Louis VII dates
his acts from the coronation of his wife Adela. Women, natural judges in
poetical contests, and in the courts of love, sat also as judges in grave
matters, and upon an equality with their husbands. The king of France
expressly recognises this right.
In the first half of the twelfth century women were everywhere restored
to that right of inheritance from which they had been excluded by feudal
barbarism in England, Castile, Aragon, Jerusalem, Burgundy, Flanders,
Hainault, Vermandois, Aquitaine, Provence, and Lower Languedoc. The rapid
extinction of male heirs, the softening of manners, and the progress
of equity, restored the right of inheritance to women. They brought
sovereignties with them into foreign houses; they linked and bound the
world together, accelerated the agglomeration of states, and prepared the
way for the centralisation of the great monarchies.
One royal house alone, that of the Capets, did not recognise the right
of women; it remained safe from the mutations which transferred the
other states from one dynasty to another; it received and it did not
give. Foreign queens might come; the female, the movable element, might
be renewed, but the male element did not come to it from without, it
remained always the same, and with it remained an identity of spirit and
a perpetuity of system. This fixity of the dynasty is one of those things
which have most contributed to insure the unity and the personality of
this mobile country. The common characteristic of the period following
the crusade, is an attempt at emancipation. The crusade in its immense
movement had been an occasion--an impulse; when the occasion came, the
attempt took place, an attempt for the emancipation of the people in the
communes, for the emancipation of women, for that of philosophy and of
pure thought. This echo of the crusade, like the crusade itself, was to
display all its potency and its effect in France, among the most sociable
of nations.[f]
FOOTNOTES
[4] [Contemporaries assign very varied and incoherent numbers for the
size of William’s army. One of them, Hugues de Fleury, estimates it at
150,000 men. Modern historians have cut this down to about 60,000, which
is still regarded by some as too high.]
[5] [The trouble with Robert did not end until 1076, when a treaty was
made and the king received the homage of Flanders.]
[6] [She (Héloïse) was perfect mistress of Latin and knew enough Greek
and Hebrew to form the basis of her future proficiency. He (Abelard)
knew nothing of Greek or Hebrew, although all his biographers except M.
Rémusat assume that he knew them both.--G. W. LEWES.[l]]
[7] [A legend had identified St. Denis who flourished in the third
century with Dionysius the Areopagite who was converted by St. Paul.]
[Illustration]