[Illustration: Cover art]
[Illustration: Map: CENTRAL EUROPE in the Middle Ages (left half)]
[Illustration: Map: CENTRAL EUROPE in the Middle Ages (right half)]
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD, PERIOD I
NATURE'S MOODS AND TENSES
WHEN LIFE WAS NEW
THE FORTNIGHTLY CLUB
EDITED BY
THE PRIVATE DIARIES OF THE RT. HON. SIR A. WEST
WARRIORS AND STATESMEN
From the Literary Gleanings of the late EARL BRASSEY
_All rights reserved_
THE GREATEST STORY
IN THE WORLD
PERIOD II
The Further Story of the Old World up to the Discovery
of the New
[Frontispiece: HADRIAN'S WALL AT THE PRESENT DAY, LOOKING EAST FROM
HOTBANK CRAGS, BARDON MILL, NORTHUMBERLAND. Photo by E. E.
Oldershaw, Esq.]
THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD
PERIOD II
The Further Story of the Old World up to the
Discovery of the New
BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
FIRST PUBLISHED ... 1924
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
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PREFACE TO PERIOD II
I have taken up our "Greatest Story" from the point at which we
dropped it at the end of the first volume; that is about the year
A.D. 100, when the Roman Empire was a solidly established institution.
Throughout that first volume our own land of Britain scarcely had a
place. In the latter part of the period--A.D. 100 to A.D.
1500--which this second volume covers, men of Britain played a great
role. For centuries, kings of England were rulers of large domains
on the Continent of Europe also, and at one time their Continental
territories were more extensive and richer than their insular
possessions. The world story thus becomes, in some measure,
England's also. Moreover, when there have seemed to be two or more
ways open for the telling of the story, I have always tried to adopt
what I may call the English way, the way which seemed likely to bring
it most warmly and intimately home to English hearts and minds.
Thus, for example, when the course of history brought us to the point
at which we were to consider the manner of life of those Gothic or
Germanic tribes which came flooding in from the eastern side of the
Rhine, I have chosen, for a type of their lives in general, what we
partly know and partly surmise of those lives as they were lived in
our own island. Again, where I have endeavoured to give an idea of
the manner in which the Northmen, the sea-rovers, made their
settlements, I have taken their incursions on England as a type {x}
of the rest. In both instances it would have been equally possible
to tell the story of some of the people of Charlemagne's great empire
and the Continental settlements of the Northmen as typical examples,
but the other appeared to me the way far more likely to make the
picture real and the story appealing to the eye of an Anglo-Saxon
reader.
The period is one of dissolution, in the first place, as the Roman
Empire broke to pieces under its own dissensions and the inroads of
the barbarians. The break-up was followed by a certain
reconstruction under the later empire of Charlemagne. But this again
was followed by a second dissolution, less complete than the former.
The feudal system then plays its temporary part as a means of holding
society together in some sort of cohesion. And finally we see the
kings asserting the central authority in their kingdoms more and more
at the cost of the local authority of the feudal lords.
Throughout these centuries of successive change there is one power
which works all the while to prevent humanity from falling back into
a state of barbarism and complete lawlessness--the power of the
Church exercised through the person of the Pope and of his officials
who covered Christendom. The Crusades, with all that they brought of
good and ill, are an episode in the story's course.
By the end of the period the Moor has finally been expelled from the
south-western corner of the scene, but the Turk has established
himself largely on its eastern side.
The year A.D. 1500 brings the story down to the dawn of a new day,
when the darkness of the Middle Ages shall be dispelled by the light
which is spreading out from Italy to illuminate Europe. We are at
the point when the new story of America in the West and the very
ancient stories of India and China in the {xi} East are just about to
be brought in and woven up with our own story. But they have not
been brought in yet.
In this second volume I have followed the plan adopted for the
first--avoiding, as far as possible, names and dates that are not of
the highest importance, for the sake of simplification and in order
to give their true value to those which are the most important. Only
the large outlines are laid down, so that the reader may know, when
he comes to the study of any one particular section of history, the
place which that section occupies in relation to the whole.
I have again aimed at telling the narrative in very simple language;
but in this second volume I have tried to adapt it for scholars
perhaps a year or so older than those for whom the first was
specially written. I have made this slight difference presuming that
the scholar was likely to read the earlier part of the story first
and then to pass on to this latter.
And once more, as in the Preface to Period I, I have to thank Mr. R.
B. Lattimer for much valuable correction and advice.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Britain
II. The Camps of the Legions
III. The Barbarian at the Walls
IV. The Division of the Empire
V. The Barbarian breaking through
VI. How Britain became England
VII. The Passing of the Barbarian
VIII. The Pope
IX. How England became Christian
X. The Saracens
XI. The Franks and the Feudal System
XII. How the People Lived
XIII. How the People Lived--_continued_
XIV. The Settlements Of The Sea-Rovers
XV. The Crusades
XVI. The Slavs in Eastern Europe
XVII. Normans and Angevins
XVIII. The Strength and the Weakness of Rome
XIX. The Moslems in Spain
XX. The Plantagenets in France and England
XXI. England, France, and Burgundy
XXII. The Teuton and the Slav
XXIII. The Turks in Europe
XXIV. The New Dawn
Index
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Hadrian's Wall To-Day .... _Frontispiece_
Stonehenge
The Iron Crown of the Lombards
Rome and St. Peter's
Whitby Abbey
Charlemagne's Sword
Canterbury
An Anglo-Saxon Mansion
An Anglo-Saxon Dinner Party
A Viking Ship
Norman Gateway
A Crusader
A Knight Templar
A Norman Household
A Joust between Knights
Cœur-de-Lion's Prison
Knight in Chain Armour
The Giralda, Seville
Byzantine Architecture
Gothic Architecture
Constantinople
Genoa
Columbus
Ship of Columbus' Time
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THE GREATEST STORY IN THE WORLD
CHAPTER I
BRITAIN
In the first volume of this _Greatest Story in the World_ we saw how
man lived upon the earth from the earliest times at which we know
anything about him. We followed the story down to about the year
A.D. 100 when the different threads of the story came together into
one hand--the mighty hand of Rome and of the firmly established Roman
Empire. The whole world, or what the people of that time regarded as
the whole of the world that mattered, was controlled by the Roman
hand. This second volume will be mainly the story of what happened
when the grasp of that hand weakened, and allowed the threads to fall
apart again.
Rome had driven its fine roads, which you may imagine going out, from
the imperial city as their centre, like the spokes of a great wheel,
to the farthest ends of the Empire. And you should notice a
peculiarity about those spokes--those roads--that they always went
straight. It did not matter how high a hill they came to, nor how
deep a {2} valley--unless the hill or the vale side were impossibly
steep, the road never turned. It did not go round the hill: it went
over the top of it and down the other side.
I suggest to you that you should take notice of this straight going
of the roads, partly because the fact of their straightness is
interesting in itself and also because it is so like the way in which
the Romans, who made those roads, acted in all their doings. They
went straight ahead and would not be turned aside or stopped by any
obstacles. Their roads, of which we are still able to trace
portions, are signs of their character as a nation.
Posting along these roads they had a fine system of mounted
messengers, one messenger, at a post say twenty miles out of Rome,
taking up, with a fresh horse, the message which another had brought
out from the city, and so on--perhaps as far as Byzantium (the name
of Constantinople had not yet been thought of) eastward, as far as
the coasts of Gaul, from which men could look across to the cliffs of
Britain, northward. They were roads along which armies would march,
trade would be carried, government officials, with all their train of
slaves and servants, would go to their appointed places in the
provinces, carrying with them Roman ideas of discipline and
obedience, Greek arts and thought and, possibly, and more and more as
time went on, the new religion of Christianity.
At the northern cliffs of what we now call France the road would come
to an end--of necessity, because there the sea began. But, once
across the narrow sea which we call the Channel, the road building
would begin again, if the Romans were intending to make any long stay
in the country. The first time that the Roman legions came they were
led by Julius Cæsar about 50 years B.C. Probably that wise general
and statesman did not think that the cost of making Britain a part of
the Roman Empire was worth paying, at {3} that time. His legions had
plenty to do in keeping the tribes of Gaul in order. He established
no Roman authority in Britain, but sailed back to the Continent, and
the Romans seem to have paid no attention whatever to Britain for
nearly a hundred years.
[Sidenote: Claudius in Britain]
And on this second occasion of their coming there is no doubt that
they came intending to stay. It was about A.D. 50, or a little
sooner, that Claudius, the emperor, himself with the legions,
appeared in Britain and easily made himself master of most of the
southern and all the south-eastern part of the island.
We must try to get a picture in our minds of the state of Britain at
that time, and realise how the people lived and what kind of people
they were.
Perhaps the first thing to realise about them is that they were not
English at all. This name English, if it was used in those days at
all, was the name of a tribe that lived across the North Sea on what
we now call Sleswig. North of them lived a tribe called the Jutes,
on that Jutland from which the great sea-fight takes its name, and
south of them a tribe called Saxons. All were of the same race,
originally, and all came conquering to Britain--but not just yet.
When Julius Cæsar, and also when Claudius, nearly a century later,
came to Britain it was inhabited by a people from whom it had its
name, the Brythons. It is believed that they were not the original
inhabitants of the island, but that they had come from some part of
that great nursery of the human family, the east of Germany and
Poland and the west and south of Russia. There had been at least two
great westward migrations of an ancient race called Celts from that
nursery, before the time of the Romans coming to Britain. All over
the western world and as far south as Byzantium itself these Celts
penetrated, and, coming from the east, it is noticeable that they
maintained themselves against later invaders most strongly in {4} the
farthest west--in Spain, in Brittany, in Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and
the West of Scotland.
[Sidenote: The Brythons]
The earlier immigration of Celts into Britain had taken place in what
is called the Bronze Age, when man had learnt to make weapons and
tools and ornaments of bronze, but had not yet learnt the use of
iron. These Bronze Age Celts were called Goidels. But the people
after whom the island was named, the Brythons, came in the Iron Age;
and it was them that Cæsar and all the later-coming Romans found in
possession.
So much has been written about the ancient Britons dyeing themselves
blue with "woad" and so on that we are inclined to regard them as far
more rude and savage than they were. They seem to have lived in huts
made of stone and turf and partly excavated in the ground and to have
been hunters, and, in a very simple way, farmers. Some of their
houses were built on oak piles driven into the soft ground of the
marshes. They lived in small communities, or tribes, often fighting
against each other, and with a head-man over each tribe. But besides
these communities scattered over the country, there had already been
established towns where markets, for buying and selling, were held.
This, at all events, would be a tolerably correct picture of the
south and east of Britain, where there was a close connection, across
the narrow Channel, with Gaul and the Roman influences. Cæsar's
Romans found the Brythons buying and selling with gold coins and iron
bars serving them for money.
I say that this is a tolerably true picture of the south and east,
particularly because it is in those parts that an invader, whether he
came for peaceful trading or for warlike aggression, would find it
the most easy to establish himself. If we look for a moment at the
geography of our country we shall see that this must have been so.
{5}
For one thing, they are the parts which lie nearest to Gaul and the
rest of the Continent from which the invader would be likely to come.
And then you will see that the south and east, say as far north as
the Humber and as far west as the Severn, are, in spite of certain
high ridges of downs and hills, by far the more level, generally, and
less broken. They were easier to traverse. We have to imagine all
the country far more densely wooded than it is now, and all the river
valleys far more marshy. In consequence of the marshy softness of
the lower ground, we find that the old tracks generally went along
the uplands, wherever that was possible.
Colchester, in Essex, was the chief city of Britain when the first
serious Roman invasion came, and under Claudius the legions crossed
the Thames, took Colchester and mastered all the south-east of
Britain. Wherever the Romans came, it was their custom to make
military roads if they had any intention of settling in the country.
Julius Cæsar's expedition we have to regard as little more than one
of discovery--to see what the island was like, and whether its
products would pay the Empire for the cost of conquest. His decision
must have been that it was worth the cost, because we know that
several of the emperors had designs for making the conquest, but,
busy as they were elsewhere, nothing was done to achieve it until
Claudius came to the throne in Rome.
The produce that the Romans found, which induced them to think that
the island was worth conquering, was chiefly mineral; tin, lead and
iron, with a little gold; and later Britain grew corn for the Empire.
The Brythons seem to have been stubborn fighters. They had horses
and chariots, with blades, like scythes, sticking out from the sides
of the chariots. But it seems that they had little discipline and
little idea of forming themselves into any order when they went {6}
into battle. They could have had no real chance against the
experience and skill, to say nothing of the better arms, of the Roman
soldiers.
So, after the establishment of the Roman authority in the south, the
penetration of the island by the legions went on. They penetrated as
far north as Cromarty, and as far west as Anglesey, but they never
really subdued either the far north, where the people called Picts
then lived, or the broken and hilly countries in the west, which the
Celtic Brythons still occupied. Under one of the generals, Agricola,
whose campaigns are described by the Roman historian, Tacitus, we
find that a line of forts was established across the narrowest part
of Scotland, from the Clyde to the Forth. But under the Emperor
Hadrian, who reigned from 117 to 138, the great effort of the Empire
was to establish certain limits, or boundaries, which it would be
able to hold against all attacks from beyond those boundaries.
During his reign the Empire gave up some of its conquered territory
in Asia. Hadrian erected a line of palisades, or strong wooden
walls, along the boundary line of the Empire between the Rhine and
the Danube, and in Britain he threw up a wall, a long way south of
the Clyde and Forth, from the Solway to the mouth of the Tyne.
Evidently, however, this obstacle was not effective in keeping out
the Pict, for twenty years later we find his successor, Antoninus
Pius, building a second wall from Forth to Clyde, for the better
security of the frontier.
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