CHAPTER I.

Transcriber’s Note

Italic text displayed as: _italic_

THE INQUISITION

A POLITICAL AND MILITARY STUDY

OF ITS ESTABLISHMENT

BY

HOFFMAN NICKERSON

WITH A PREFACE BY

HILAIRE BELLOC

JOHN BALE, SONS & DANIELSSON, LTD.

83-91, GREAT TITCHFIELD STREET

LONDON, W. 1.

1923

MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

DEDICATORY LETTER iii

PREFACE BY MR. HILAIRE BELLOC v

CHAPTER I.—The Mediæval Recovery of Civilization 1

” II.—Languedoc and the Albigenses 28

” III.—The Preliminaries of the Crusade 70

” IV.—The Albigensian Crusade—The Early War 106

” V.—The Albigensian Crusade—Muret and its Sequel 145

” VI.—The Mendicant Orders and the Inquisition 191

” VII.—Epilogue on Prohibition 220

BIBLIOGRAPHY 253

TWO MAPS IN POCKET AT END OF BOOK.

(1) Languedoc and Adjacent Lands in 1209.

(2) (_a_) Town of Muret, 1213; (_b_) Battle of Muret, September 11,

1213, 1st phase; (_c_) Battle of Muret, 2nd phase; (_d_) Battle of

Muret, 3rd phase; and (_e_) Approximate Restoration of Toulouse in

1217-1218 to illustrate its siege by de Montfort.

DEDICATORY LETTER.

To R. C. N.

MY DEAR—

This book is rightfully yours for your unfailing help and

encouragement. In dedicating it I do but make a payment on account.

It was begun during a term in the New York State Legislature, when

I endured Prohibition lobbyists, and cast about for something which

might serve as a historical precedent in the way of religio-political

oppression on so vast a scale. I was not long before discovering that

traditional Christianity had more to say for the Inquisitors than for

the Prohibitionists, so that the parallel with Prohibition has been

thrust into an epilogue.

My thanks are due to many mutual friends. Among them are M. Joseph

Poux, Archiviste du Département de l’Aude; Father Astruc, Curé of St.

Vincent’s Church, Carcassonne; Father Villemagne, Curé of Castelnau;

Professor Joseph Anglade of the University of Toulouse; M. Galaberd,

Archiviste and Librarian of the City of Toulouse, and M. Jules

Chalande, also of Toulouse and of the Société Archéologique du Midi

de la France. To the studious man, France is a sort of paradise, for

the local scholars receive you with enthusiasm and lay themselves out

to forward your work.

Our good friend Belloc, the Master of those who would celebrate the

Middle Ages in the English tongue, besides his kindly preface, has

been good enough to read the manuscript and make several helpful

suggestions.

Finally, although all theological discussion has herein been

avoided, still I am sure you would prefer to have me frank with

my readers and tell them that I am by birth an Episcopalian, as we

call Anglicans in America, and by choice a member of the so-called

Anglo-Catholic party in that communion.

HOFFMAN NICKERSON.

_34, West 54 Street,

New York, N.Y.

January, 1923._

PREFACE.

Nearly all the historical work worth doing at the present moment in

the English language is the work of shovelling off heaps of rubbish

inherited from the immediate past.

The history of Europe and of the world suffered, so far as English

letters were concerned, from two vital defects rising at the end of

the eighteenth century and lasting to the end of the nineteenth: when

the wholesome reaction began.

In the first place it was not thorough.

In the second place it blindly followed the continental anti-Catholic

tradition and particularly the German anti-Catholic tradition.

Now that the historian should not be thorough, that he should

scamp his work, is an obvious defect. We have suffered from it in

England, especially our two old Universities of Oxford and Cambridge,

which do not set out to be seats of learning so much as social and

aristocratic institutions.

But the second defect was worse still. History may be scrappy

and superficial and yet, on the whole, right; but if its whole

orientation is warped by a wrong appreciation of the past, then,

however detailed and full of research, it is worse than worthless; it

is harmful and it had better not have been written at all.

These preliminary remarks apply to the history of Europe as a whole

and especially to the history of Europe between the coarsening of the

foundational Roman administrative system in the fifth century and the

rise of modern culture in the seventeenth.

They do not apply to late local history. Late (post 1600) local

history _was_ thoroughly well done. The history of England itself,

when it deals only with the England which sprang out of the

completed Reformation century (still more the local history of the

United States) was detailed and exact. What is more important than

exactitude in detail, it was consonant with the spirit of the thing

described. The writers on either side of the Atlantic, but especially

upon the American side, understood the material with which they were

dealing. Here in England (where I write this Preface) the work on

_later_ history was also national and well done, though it suffered

from no small defect in that the original Catholic England (which was

like a foreign country to the writers in question) lingered on as

a dwindling minority till at least 1715 and somewhat disturbed the

picture; so that our modern English historians are never really at

home until they get to the Hanoverian dynasty. Before that they have

to deal with a remaining remnant of the vigorous Catholic spirit, and

they are perplexed and bewildered by it, so that it vitiates their

conclusions. That is why they cannot write of the later Stuarts, and

especially of James II, with any proper sense of proportion. They

cannot conceive how strong nor even how widespread was the support of

the national dynasty, because that support was mixed up with the (to

them and in our time) utterly alien Catholic idea.

I say that the main task of an historian writing in the English

language is the shovelling away of rubbish; and this is particularly

true of the rubbish which has accumulated over the record of the Dark

and early Middle Ages (A.D. 500 to 1000; A.D. 1000 to 1500).

From the very beginning of the affair popular history was warped

by the spirit of ridicule (Voltaire’s creation propagated in the

English language by Voltaire’s pupil Gibbon) against the formation of

Christendom and that tremendous story of definition upon definition,

council upon council, from which emerged at last the full Christian

creed. The decisive conflicts of Nicea, of Chalcedon, were made a

silly jest, and generations of boys and young men were taught to

think of the most profound questions ever settled by the human mind

as verbal quips and incomprehensible puerilities.

Next the gradual transformation of our Catholic civilization from

the majestic order of our pagan origin to the splendid spring of

the twelfth century was represented with incredible insufficiency

as the conquest of the Occident by barbarian Germans, who, though

barbarians, possessed I know not what fund of strength and virtue.

Institutions which we now know to be of Roman origin were piously

referred to these starved heaths of the Baltic and to the central

European wilds. Their inhabitants were endowed with every good

quality. Whatever we were proud of in our inheritance was referred

to the blank savagery of outer lands at no matter what expense

of tortured hypothesis or bold invention. This warping of truth

was indulged in because the northern part of Europe stood (in the

nineteenth century when this false “Teutonic” school had its greatest

vogue) for a successful opposition to the rest of Christendom, and

for a schism within the body of civilized men.

But the worst fault of all, worse even than the superficial folly of

Gibbon’s tradition in our treatment of the great Christian foundation

and worse than the Teutonic nonsense, was the misunderstanding of

those four great centuries in which our race attained the summit

of its happiness and stable culture—the twelfth, the thirteenth,

the fourteenth and the fifteenth. And of these, the greatest, the

thirteenth, was in particular ignored.

Men did indeed (partly because it enabled them to “turn” the position

of true history by concession to, partly from the unavoidable effect

of, increasing historical knowledge) pay lip service in England,

during the later part of the nineteenth century, to the greatness of

the true Middle Ages. In his early period, Ruskin is a conspicuous

example of a writer who, without in the least understanding what the

Middle Ages were like, hating yet ignorant of the faith that was

their very soul, could not remain blind to the vivid outward effect

of their expression. Even Carlyle, far more ignorant than Ruskin and

far more of a player to the gallery, could not altogether avoid the

strong blast of reality which blew from those times.

But these concessions, these partial admissions, did but deepen

the blindness of such historians and their readers towards the

formation and the climax of our race; upon the Dark and the Middle

Ages, history as written in the English language was warped beyond

recognition.

Then came the reaction towards historical truth: it has already far

advanced and the book for which I have the honour here to write a

Preface is a notable example of that progress.

“History” (said the great Michelet in a phrase which I am never

tired of repeating) “should be a resurrection of the flesh.” What

you need for true history is by no means an agreement with the

philosophy of the time which you describe (you may be wholly opposed

to that philosophy) but at least a full comprehension of it and

an understanding that those who worked its human affairs were men

fundamentally the same as ourselves. Humanity has not essentially

differed from the beginning of recorded, or, indeed, of geological

time. Man as man (the only thing which concerns history, or, indeed,

the morals and philosophy of mankind) has been the same since first

he appears fully developed upon the earth. But in the case of Western

Europe during the Middle Ages the thing is far more intimate. We are

dealing with men who are not only of our genus but of our very stock;

wholly of our particular blood, our own fathers, our own family. What

is more, in those ancestors we should take our greatest pride. For

never did our race do better or more thoroughly, never was it more

faithfully _itself_, than in the years between the First Crusade and

the effects of the Black Death: 1100-1350. Those three long lifetimes

were the very summit of the European story.

Now I say that to treat properly of this affair it is not indeed

necessary to agree with the philosophy of those men—that is, with

their religion. It is certainly not necessary to agree with the

details of their action, as, for example, their lapses into cruelty

on the one hand or their fierce sense of honour on the other. We may

be baser, or more reasonable, or more gentle, or more lethargic than

they, and yet remain true historians of them. But what one must have

if one is to be an historian at all, and not a mere popular writer,

repeating what the public of “the best sellers” wants to have told to

it, is a knowledge of the spirit of our ancestors _from within_.

Now this can only be obtained in one fashion, to wit, by accurate,

detailed, concrete record. Find out _what_ happened and say it.

Proportion is of course essential; but to an honest man proportion

will come of itself from a sufficient reading, and only a dishonest

man will after a sufficient reading warp proportion and make a brief

by picking out special points.

The trouble is that this period has been dealt with in the past

without minute research. There has been plenty of pretence at such

research, but most of it was charlatan.

Let me take as a specific instance by way of example:

Freeman’s huge volumes upon the Norman Conquest were long treated as

a serious classic. He pretended to have read what he had not read. He

pretended to have studied ground he had not studied. He wrote what

he knew would sell because it was consonant with what was popular at

the time. He attacked blindly the universal Catholic religion of the

epoch he dealt with because he hated that religion. But scholarly he

was not and did not attempt to be; yet scholarly he pretended to be,

and upon supposed scholarship he based his false representation. I

will give three examples.

He calls the Battle of Hastings “Senlac.” He found the term not

where he pretends, in Ordericus Vitalis, but in Lingard, who was the

first man to commit the error. Lingard was the great quarry from

which Freeman’s generation of Dons dug out its history without ever

acknowledging the source. “_Senlac_” could not possibly be a Saxon

place-name, but Freeman understood so little about the time and

was so ignorant of the genius of the language, that he took it for

Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps he thought in some vague way he was restoring a

“Teutonic” name; more “Teutonic” than Hastings itself!

To this religious motive of his there was undoubtedly added the

motive of novelty and of showing off. What the ridge of Battle was

originally called by the people of the place, before the Norman

invasion, we cannot tell. It may have been “Sandleg” (which would be

Sussex enough), or it may have been “Senhanger,” also sound Sussex,

or it may have been something ending in the Celtic and Latin “lake.”

But “Senlac” it most certainly could not have been; and that Freeman

should have pretended to scholarship in a matter of that kind damns

him.

The second point is far more striking and can be tested by

anyone who visits the localities mentioned in the five principal

contemporary authorities. He desires to reduce the numbers involved

in the battle; partly from a silly prejudice against anything written

by a monk, partly from a desire to belittle the actions of the early

Middle Ages and the whole of its civilization, partly (mainly,

perhaps) from a desire to be novel. He makes up the estimates out of

his head, grossly reducing the forces actually engaged.

We have contemporary evidence which allows for more than 50,000

men upon Duke William’s side and something of the same sort upon

Harold’s. The evidence not only of those who saw William’s host

mustered and who must actually have handled the lists on the Norman

side, such as the Duke’s secretary, William of Jumièges, but the

evidence of topography also proves this. Pevensey, the harbour in

which the great Norman fleet of 3,000 vessels moored, was a vast

expanse of water comparable to Portsmouth to-day; you may still

trace its limits accurately enough round the contour of the present

marsh. The position held defensively at Hastings by Harold’s command

is only just under a mile long and is one of the most clearly

defined positions in Europe, absolutely unmistakable. Freeman, with

no appreciation of military history, conceives this line of a mile

(held by men closely interlocked and in dense formation capable of

withstanding hurricanes of cavalry charges for nine hours) to have

been held by a handful of men! It is the wildest nonsense, and yet it

passed for a generation as history.

Lastly, as an example of bias and charlatanry combined, you have the

confident statement that Pope Sylvester had given a Bull to Duke

William in support of the invasion. Here Freeman has at least the

grace not to give a sham reference in a footnote, for the thing is

completely false. If Freeman had taken the trouble or had had the

science to look up the Bullarium, or even the letters and documents

of Sylvester in Migne, he might have been spared the contempt of

all competent critics. As it is he preferred a legendary piece of

nonsense in a piece of popular verse to exact history.

The motive through which Freeman invented this Bull was the motive of

his place, time, and generation: hatred of the Catholic Church, that

is, against the religion of the people with whom he was dealing, and

a desire to satisfy the animus of his Victorian readers against the

Papacy.

In contrast to nonsense of this kind, haphazard, ill-evidenced and

invented history, note the admirable description you will read in the

following pages of the battle of Muret.

Here is a real knowledge of ground and, what is more important, _a

careful estimate of time and movement_. I know nothing better in the

reconstruction of a mediæval battle than this first-rate piecing

together of evidence through common sense upon the flanking surprise

movement executed by Simon de Montfort against Foix’s division of the

enemy at Muret. It is an unbreakable chain of calculation, and at the

same time a full explanation of what happened. This piece of work, in

the fifth chapter of the volume here presented to the reader, is as

good as anything can be of its kind, and an excellent representative

of that new, modern, accurate work now ridding us of the loose stuff

which encumbered history through the past two generations. That is

the way to reconstruct a mediæval battle in the absence of detailed

evidence, to see the movements as they actually took place.

I have laid emphasis on this particular section of the book by way of

contrast to the insufficiency of so typical a name as Freeman’s. I

ought rather, perhaps, to turn to the book as a whole and then again

to certain other specific points of excellence which have struck me.

Mr. Nickerson’s study is mainly concerned with explaining the nature

of the early Inquisition; incidentally he gives us a very clear

view of the Albigensian War, and what is especially remarkable in

the clarity of his view is the arrangement of the episodes. I note

that the author has done what is of first importance in all military

chronicling, and that is, the division of episodes _not_ in equal

measures of time but by their separate military characteristics.

It is a principle too often forgotten even by professional military

historians. A war may take twenty years, or fifty, or one. It may,

by accident, divide itself naturally into two or three episodes

of fairly equal length in time or it may by coincidence fall into

episodes corresponding more or less with a successive series of

years (e.g.,) Marlborough’s Campaigns in Flanders in the early

eighteenth century. But much the greater part of military history

is concerned with episodes which have no relation to such more or

less equal time-chapters. The general rule is that three or four

successive phases of a campaign (or battle) occupy the most disparate

lengths of time. The proper way to treat _military_ history is to

give to the capital episodes their relative _military_ importance;

not, as in the case of a civilian chronicle, to weigh that importance

by the time involved.

For instance, no one can read a clear account, however short, of the

great European War without seeing it as a siege; it is therefore,

like every siege (not raised, nor degenerated into a blockade)

essentially divided into three episodes:—

(_a_) The preliminaries of containment, that is the war of movement

prior to the establishment of siege conditions.

(_b_) The siege itself.

(_c_) The storming of the siege line and the collapse of the besieged.

Now if we were to take the Great War in _years_—1914, 1915, 1916,

1917, 1918 would appear. If we divide it into chapters of more or

less equal lengths of time we have a confused, meaningless picture

such as is given us by nearly all the popular histories as yet

published of that great event. However much these accounts succeed in

pleasing each its national audience they fail as histories because

they think a month of war must be thirty times more important than a

day and need thirty times as much telling. The moment we divide the

Great War according to its _military_ values the scheme falls into

place and becomes clear. You have three divisions, of which you can

make, if you like, three volumes or three chapters. The first is

absurdly short in comparison with the length of the whole. It only

seriously begins with the great shock of August 20, 21, 1914, in

Lorraine and in Flanders, and it ends when the Germans went to earth

less than a month later—on the Aisne. From that moment onward the war

was a siege.

Next you get the second division, the completion of the siege lines

in the West to the sea (which is over before the middle of November,

two more months), and then the solid three and a half years of effort

on the part of the besieged to break out in great sorties and on the

part of the besiegers to break down the defence of the besieged.

In mere length of time this episode is prodigious and includes all

the better known stories of the war. It lasts for over forty-four

months and sees the collapse of Russia; the first sorties of the

besieged Prussian alliance through Poland; the tremendous efforts

made by the Allies to break the enemy’s siege-lines in Champagne, on

the Somme, and in Flanders, on the Asiago plateau and on the terrible

Carso Plateau in front of Trieste. It sees the failure of the attack

on the siege wall at the postern of the Dardanelles, and even in

remote Mesopotamia, as well as in the Balkans. It sees further great

sorties, especially the violent struggles of the besieged at the

end to get out of their net: Caporetto, St. Quentin, the Chemin des

Dames. That second division ends on July 15, 1918, when the last

effort of the besieged to get out was made against Gouraud and broken

by him in front of Rheims. On July 18, 1918, three days later, the

third division begins and lasts exactly four months to the Armistice

on November 11. It is nothing but the successive breakdown of the

defence, the crumbling of the siege wall and the collapse of the

besieged.

See the Great War on these lines, and you see it clearly, as it was.

Try to write of it by successive years, and you get nothing but a fog.

Now Mr. Nickerson has done exactly that right thing for the

Albigensian War. He clearly divides the struggle into its _military_

episodes; the first great rush; the long struggle of de Montfort;

the curious but inevitable fruit of the whole business after de

Montfort’s death in the lapse of the South to the crown of France,

that is to the North.

In this connection one cannot praise too highly the simple and clear

fashion in which the author has presented to the reader the real

nature of mediæval warfare. There are two points to be established

in which, I think, he has been permanently successful. First, in

making the reader understand the narrow limits of time to which

any effective work on a large scale by a powerful army was then

confined. Secondly, the contrast between the feudal forces which

were, as it were, normal to the times, and those supplementary

mercenary forces, which, though they were not regarded by the time

as normal, were the real backbone of all continuous military effort

in the West. It is an idea which one might develop in many epochs

of military history besides the Middle Ages. Over and over again a

particular form of recruitment is regarded as normal and after use

for some generations begins from causes inherent in itself to yield

insufficient results; whereupon a supplementary form of recruitment,

which for long continues to be regarded as exceptional, becomes, as

the close observer may discover, the essential of the new fighting

force, e.g., the Auxiliaries and the Legions after, say 180, and

especially after 312.

It was one of the advantages of the English, by the way, in the later

Middle Ages that the difficulty of transporting large feudal forces

over the sea led to an early development of their mercenary forces

and produced the highly trained professional bowmen who are the mark

of the Hundred Years War.

Mr. Nickerson is also right in saying how considerable was the degree

of military organization in the early thirteenth century.

Too often in military history anything earlier than the seventeenth

century or the middle of the sixteenth is treated unscientifically

by the writer, who seems to imagine that if he gets far enough back

he can treat armies as herds moving about at random. The truth is

of course that no great body of men ever so moved or could be moved

without a high degree of organization, and that when you are dealing

with the _rapid movement_ of a very large body the organization must

be nearly as detailed as it is to-day. There is a certain minimum of

organization below which you cannot fall without breaking down, when

it is a case of great bodies moving quickly; and that minimum is so

high that it does not vary very much between the very first epochs of

recorded history and the latest.

The next point I have to notice is Mr. Nickerson’s presentation both

of the Inquisition as an _idea_ and of the contrast between its

_methods_ and those of modern times. The task undertaken is the most

difficult of any that lies before the historian; yet it is also the

most essential. The wrong way of dealing with the remote past when it

presents acts or states of mind quite unfamiliar, and even repulsive

to us, is to express horror or ridicule and leave it at that. Thus we

have Mr. Davis in his typical Oxford textbook upon the Angevin period

sneering at the massacre at Beziers as “pious butchery”; thus we have

another typical Oxford textbook, Mr. Oman’s, dealing with an earlier

period, sneering at the piety of Gildas; and thus we have yet another

textbook—from Cambridge this time—in which the Regius Professor of

History, Dr. Bury, sneers at a vision of St. Patrick’s as the result

of a “pork supper.”

Now that way of writing history, which is, I am sorry to say, still

the common way in our English Universities, is worthless. Your

business in writing of the past is to make the past comprehensible.

More: you ought, as I quoted at the beginning of this, to make it

rise from the dead; and that you certainly cannot do if you are so

little able to enter into its spirit that everything in it which

differs from yourself appears small, repulsive, or absurd. Anyone,

however ignorant, can discover what is repulsive and absurd in

standards different from their own; and one’s learning, no matter how

detailed, is wasted if one gets no further than that. The whole art

of history consists in eliminating that shock of non-comprehension

and in making the reader feel as the men of the past felt.

We have a very good example of the same difficulty in the case of

travel-books. We all know how intolerably boring is a book of travel

in which the writer can get no further than decrying or laughing at

the foreigner, and we all know how the charm of a book of travel

consists in its explaining to us, putting before us as a living and

comprehensible thing, some civilization which at first sight seemed

to us incomprehensible.

It is just the same with history. In the case of the Inquisition it

is particularly difficult to make the modern reader understand the

affair because all the terms have been, so to speak, transliterated;

but I think we can arrive at a fairly satisfactory result if we

translate the terms involved into things which the modern man is

familiar with. Instead of physical torture, for instance, read

cross-examination and public dishonour; instead of the sacrifice of

all civic guarantees to the preponderant interest of united religion,

read the similar sacrifice of all such guarantees to the preponderant

interest of a united nation; instead of clerical officers using every

means (or nearly every means) for the preservation of religious

unity, read civil officers using _every_ means for the preservation

of national unity in time of peril. If you do that, I think the

modern man can understand. Had you presented to the early thirteenth

century the spectacle of the whole male population medically

examined, registered, and forcibly drafted into a life where a

chance error might be punished immediately by death or by some other

terrible punishment; had you shown him men, doubtful in their loyalty

to the nation, condemned to years of perpetual silence, secluded

from their fellow beings after being made a spectacle of public

dishonour in the Courts; had you even sketched for him our universal

spy system whereby a strong modern central Government holds down all

its subjects as no Government of antiquity, however tyrannical, ever

held them down—could you have shown a man of the thirteenth century

all this, he would have felt the same repulsion and horror which most

modern men feel on reading of the Inquisition, its objects and its

methods.

A man who should so explain our modern life to a man of the

thirteenth century as to make it _comprehensible_ to him (a difficult

task!) in spite of his repulsion and horror at our cruelties,

blasphemies, and tyrannies, would be a good historian. The converse

also is true.

There are many special points in the book on the consideration of

which I would delay did space allow. Thus my own knowledge of the

time and place enables me to make certain suggestions. I see that

the author inclines to the Cerdagne route for the march of Pedro of

Aragon. I should do more than incline—I should be morally certain of

it—at least on the evidence to our hand; and that in spite of Pedro’s

presence at Lascuarre in August. If, which is very unlikely, further

evidence comes forward, we may have to accept the Somport sallent or

even the Val d’Aran, but the more I think of it, the more the latter

seems to me out of the question. I know the steep and dangerous

approaches upon either side, especially upon the Aragonese side.

I consider the great difficulty of reaching them from the point of

concentration at Lerida. The Cerdagne is the one really open road.

It was the only easy pass of value then to large armies; as for

the second pass, the Puymorens, into the valley of the Ariege, it

is perfectly easy, a mere lift of land. I have crossed it a dozen

times under all conditions of weather. Again I would find it most

interesting to contrast the procedure even of the late Inquisition

with contemporary civilian procedure, e.g., Torquemada’s procedure

with Henry VII’s Judges in a treason trial. It is to the advantage of

the former. Better still, a trial under Philip III and Cecil’s Judges

in his carefully nursed Gunpowder plot.

But such detailed discussion of a hundred matters of history raised

in this book would unduly prolong what is already too lengthy an

introduction of a work to which the reader must be anxious to turn.

H. BELLOC.

_Kings Land, Shipley,

Horsham._

THE INQUISITION:

A Political and Military Study of its Establishment.

CHAPTER I.

THE MEDIÆVAL RECOVERY OF CIVILIZATION.

What was the society in which the Inquisition, that great attack

upon human liberty, succeeded? To answer this, in the case of that

other great attack of which we are the unhappy spectators, it would

be necessary to estimate first the chief forces active in the world,

and second their modification by local circumstance in America. A

man, having done this, is able to get a just idea of Prohibition. He

must get into the picture of the great nineteenth century expansion

of civilization, and the fact that this expansion was, in great

part, due to increased command over material nature through what we

call “science.” He must see, contemporary with this, the rapid decay

of Protestantism, its abandonment of theology and concentration

upon taboos. Given then, in his mind, a clear notion of the extreme

importance attributed by our society to power over material things,

in which power it has so clearly surpassed all other known societies,

and from this the resulting importance granted to the opinions of the

masters of this “science” which has done such fine things (although

morally, and therefore politically, such men may be, and often are,

grossly ignorant and stupid); given further a true estimate of our

warped Protestant morals now consisting principally of savage taboos,

and such a man is able to estimate justly the “Prohibition” movement.

What, then, were the forces which led to the very similar

“Inquisition” movement?

First of all, the time felt itself strong and confident. We are

apt to think of the world in which the Inquisition was set up as

feeble and crack-brained, shrouding itself in elaborately useless

pageantry. But this is error, due partly to our pre-occupation with

our own age, and with the Imperial Roman time which of all past ages

most nearly resembles our own in high energy, strict government,

frequent communication, positivist view of life and consequent lack

of any defined general code of morals. In reality, most of the

fantastic trappings belong to the later Middle Ages, the Middle Ages

in their decline, and only because we do not see the stagnant “Dark

Ages” clearly enough do we fail to grasp the height and suddenness of

the mediæval rise. In the opening years of the thirteenth century,

men rightly felt themselves to be a society growing and expanding (as

we say in our contemporary jargon “progressing”) so rapidly on all

sides that they must have been almost dizzy with a success so sudden

and vast. Perhaps not even at the beginning of our own twentieth

century did the slope just climbed seem so high, and so steep, and

the future so full of the promise of continued ascent. For, as in

the early years of the twentieth century, there was no sign that the

expanding movement had reached its term. It was still going on, full

of the promise of further achievement, and men hardly seemed to have

the right to be anything but hopeful.

Although the twelfth century resembled the nineteenth in vastness

of achievement, it differed from the nineteenth in the quality of

that achievement, and in the nature of the forces which made it

possible. Of course the vigour of human will is the prime mover in

both cases. In the twelfth century men felt that their strength

had been magnified not so much by new processes giving them an

increased command over physical nature as by moral forces suddenly

making them aware of unsuspected strength within themselves. I do

not mean that the nineteenth century felt that it possessed no new

elements of moral strength. It did. The ideas of the American and

French Revolution thrilled it profoundly; to a lesser extent it was

touched by a limited but nevertheless keen, new, sympathy with those

very Middle Ages with which we are concerned. Nor do I mean that the

Middle Ages enjoyed no greater power over material things than had

been possessed by the simple and childlike Dark Ages immediately

preceding them. I do say that in the twelfth century, as compared

with the nineteenth, the sense of new power over physical nature

played a lesser, and the confidence in new powers within man’s own

nature played a correspondingly greater, part.

Two causes brought about this greater importance of the moral as

compared with the physical factors of power. First, the twelfth

century successes were, in all outward and secular things, no

more than the partial reconquest of the Roman order which, after

a fashion, men still remembered. Whereas the nineteenth century,

instead of partly restoring that which had been, and had then been

lost, conquered nature and barbarism in regions where such conquest

had never been attempted. Hence the twelfth century in the full flush

of its achievement was less subject to pride and the illusions which

wait upon pride. Second, the moral (and intellectual) life of the

twelfth century revolved about a single many-sided institution, the

Church, which affected all departments of human life.

It is the task of this chapter to set the stage for the events which

follow. The reader must have a notion of the slack and sunken age

of Gerbert (the great Pope of the year 1000), secondly the vigorous

fighting age of Hildebrand and the great Norman chiefs, of the First

Crusade and the Song of Roland, that is, the later eleventh century.

Next he must grasp the twelfth century itself, Abelard, the teaching

of the Roman law at Bologna, the enrichment and refinement of life,

chivalry, “feminism,” and the continuing quarrel of the central and

all-pervasive Church with the developing civil governments. Finally,

towards the end of the century, he must appreciate the beginnings of

the Gothic, the rise of strong and turbulent towns and guilds, and

the promise of the long and fruitful marriage of government with the

idea of nationality.

There will be no space for anything more than the merest sketch—as

if one should set himself to draw a cathedral with half a dozen

strokes of the pen. The analysis must of necessity be slight. I shall

try to make it just. Especially the influence of the Church must be

grasped and also (a thing often missed in accounts of the time) the

limitations of that influence.

Before entering upon such a task, I cannot refrain from warning my

reader of the necessary limitations and imperfections of history.

The scantiness of record, the bias and the inherent imperfections of

human testimony, the tendency of the striking and exceptional fact to

get itself recorded and thereby destroy the average (to which I shall

return in considering baronial and private wars and comparing them

with our strikes); all these things make us see the past not outlined

clearly but through a haze.

Finally, we must beware of trying to understand the past too well,

when we cannot even understand the present. What evil spell is over

the modern male to keep him in such ugly and often uncomfortable

clothes? The pedants used to go about solemnly pretending to assay

the most inward motives of the great of old time (who were better

men than they, and could they come back to the sunlight to deal with

these same pedants, would have soused and slimed them in the nearest

duckpond for their prying impudence). They went on doing this, I say,

until about the year 1905, when Chesterton asked them whether they

themselves put flowers on a dead man’s grave in the belief that their

dead could smell.[1] Since then they have been a little quieter.

And yet all this seems forgotten by most of the writers and

practically all the readers of history. Never mind. When the wretched

historians call on the name of “Science,” that modern Mumbo-jumbo

idol before whom we are all expected to bow down, let us save our

self-respect as honest men by thumbing our noses and wriggling our

fingers at such silly superstitions. They are all of a piece with

the venerable dotard of an idea that proclaims the Infallibility of

the Press and makes people believe a thing “because they see it in

print”—pah!

Let us thus absolve ourselves from the sin of pride. The Middle Ages

began with the decline of Rome. That high and complex civilization

(which, as I have said, with all its divergencies, corresponded with

ourselves more than did that of any other past age) saw its great

energies slacken. It fell asleep. Nowadays we hear less than formerly

about vice as a symptom of that decline, and more recognition of the

economic breakdown caused by the crushing of the middle class under

a system of taxation such as our own time would call socialistic.

At any rate, the process was extremely gradual. It was accompanied,

more in the way of an effect than as a cause, by the slow sifting

in of comparatively small numbers of barbarians, first into the

professional army which was the sole military reliance of the Empire,

and thence, when they had become dominant in that army, inevitably

into political office. The manner and stages of this decline

(fascinating subjects to which justice is only beginning to be done)

do not concern this study. What is important is to seize the depth of

degradation which was reached.

To judge how low Christendom had fallen, let us glance at the

evidence as to three capital points: decrease of population, loss of

the power to build, and the substitution of mere folly for judicial

weighing of evidence in matters of law.

For the enormous decrease of population, with all that it implied, we

may take the two towns of London and Paris. London had been one of

the principal towns of Roman Britain, the centre towards which the

road system of the island converged. From early in the fifth to the

opening years of the seventh century the place is not even mentioned

in any document known: so that (in defiance of all probability)

certain foolish scholars have been able to maintain that, in the

interval, London did not even exist. Like London, Paris had been a

capital, and to this day the blackened remains of its Roman palace

that look down upon the comings and goings of the Latin Quarter in

the “Boul’ Mich” are well out from the central “island of the city”

on which the place began. The amphitheatre is even further away,

behind the Pantheon, and anyone can appreciate how necessary it is

that a place of public entertainment should not be too far out from

the centre of things. And yet towards the end of the ninth century,

when the Viking pirates besiege the place, only the little central

island is held against them. Admitting fully that neither London

nor Paris meant to Britain and Gaul what they mean to-day, still, I

repeat, they were both very considerable towns, and it is entirely

fair to use them as tests. The cities of Western Christendom had been

“minished and brought low.”

Second, as to the loss of the power to build. That loss was well-nigh

complete. Any history of architecture in England will parade before

its reader the puny relics of Anglo-Saxon building. Paris has a few

such things as the rude tower of St. Germain des Prés and a few

doubtful stones in the low little church of St. Julien le Pauvre.

In Italy, the “carnivorous” Lombard style which Ruskin so vividly

identifies with the handful of seventh century “Lombard” freebooters,

is now believed by scholars to belong entirely to the eleventh and

twelfth centuries that saw Europe resurgent, the Crusades, and the

rediscovered Roman law. Except Charlemagne’s octagon at Aix, it is

hard to remember a single considerable monument certainly belonging

to the four stagnant centuries between the years 600 and 1000.

Everywhere men sheltered in corners of the magnificent structures

that had come down from the imperial past, like swallows in the eaves

of a building. Usually they could not even keep them from decay. Even

repair was beyond them.

By what processes of law were civil disputes judged in these

diminished cities in which architecture was growing ever ruder,

feebler, and more squat? These men, our own ancestors, whose

ancestors again had enjoyed the Roman law, decided between litigants

by a series of tests or “ordeals” which are a catalogue of trivial

stupidity. Merely to give the list will be enough to allow the reader

to judge them. There was the “wager of battle,” which was not a duel

on the point of honour, but a deliberate judicial test; plaintiff and

defendant fought, and the victor won his case. Perhaps the greatest

man of the Dark Ages, Charlemagne, is found striving against this

custom. In his will he provides that disputes between his heirs as to

titles to land are not to be so settled. And for it he substitutes a

mild form of ordeal much in favour in settling titles to land, that

of the cross. The disputants held out their arms horizontally, and

he that endured the longest had the land! There was the ordeal by

boiling water, red hot iron, or by fire, all three of which scalded

or burned the guilty and spared the innocent. Sometimes lots were

drawn, and sometimes the truth or falsity of a statement was tested

by whether or not the taking of the consecrated eucharist harmed

him who maintained the statement in question. Of course all these

tests were accompanied by religious ceremony, and were believed to be

especially subject to the direct interposition of God. But the mental

stature of those who maintained them:—

“Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa.”

(We will not speak of them but look and pass on).

The mention of the direct interposition of God brings us naturally

to the supernatural bias of the time. Here judgment is not so easy.

It is possible to represent the replacement of the old positivism

of the educated ancients (by supernaturalism and the transcendental

formulas of the creeds) as part of the general decline. It is equally

possible to represent it as the one leaven in an unsatisfactory lump.

Certainly the divorce between the thought of the (largely positivist)

educated class of our own day and that of the populace, now (as ever)

full either of religious or political superstition and careless both

of philosophic theory and scientific fact, this divorce, I say, is

certainly evil. But in the Dark Ages popular superstition ran riot

without qualification or corrective.

It is a commonplace that the officials of the Church retained a

measure of organization and discipline when civil government was

going to pieces, that the Church was the central institution of the

time, and that most of its outstanding personalities were churchmen.

What is not always seized is the extreme importance of the monastic

institution. The monk scholars, whom the Church alone sheltered,

could at least hand on the knowledge of the great books of the past,

although when they wrote they could make only huge, dull commentaries

on those same books.

How then did such a time get any business done at all? Economically,

by raising the slave to a serf; politically, by an increase of local

power.

With the decay of communications and police, the slave could simply

run away and could not be brought back. Clearly, to get any work out

of him at all, it must be made to his interest to stay. This was

done by requiring of him only a fixed and comparatively small amount

of his produce as dues for the land he tilled, and permitting him

to enjoy the surplus which he could increase up to the limit of his

power. This arrangement “worked” after a fashion. In giving to the

labourer more dignity and independence, it had an intimate (although

apparently quite unconscious) connection with the Church’s doctrine

of an equal worth of all souls in the sight of God.

Politically, the financial exhaustion of the central governments,

and the slackening of communications, as the great Roman roads were

not kept up, helped to throw more and more power and initiative upon

local governors; until at last, instead of appointed officers they

became almost local kings who could, and did, hand their offices to

their sons as they could their property. This last capital change

did not occur until midway in the ninth century, the second of three

centuries of attacks from without which broke upon the degraded Roman

society and almost destroyed it.

I have spoken of the society as degraded Roman because I believe

that the entire weight of the evidence is against the idea of a

conquest of civilization by rudely noble “Teutons” who then proceed

to invigorate the decaying Roman system. The fact is that the coming

of the little barbaric war bands, who were not “Teutonic” at all

but of mixed bloods, was only a step, although an important step,

in a long and gradual process of decay from within. No contemporary

writer, except St. Jerome, seems to have seen anything particularly

significant or striking in the event when the barbarian “Auxiliaries”

(who for a hundred years had made up the chief part of the imperial

armies) sacked the city of Rome itself. Such forces were the

“Colonial troops” of the time who would occasionally run amuck in

the course of their squabbles with other bands of auxiliaries, or

with the impoverished government which had contracted to pay them.

Throughout the greater part of the Empire, they seem never to have

dreamed of an organized campaign against civilization although they

indulged in occasional outbreaks of plundering and disorder. I have

not space here in which to combat the vague notion of a sudden

destruction and thereafter a distinctly “Teutonic” renewal. Let it

suffice that not one single institution not common to all primitive

folk, such as the council of warriors or of the elders of the tribe,

appears. The tie of personal devotion and loyalty to a chieftain,

which they brought with them, belongs not only to every barbarian but

also to every schoolboy.

Another line of reasoning which would tend to prove the gradual

nature of the decline and the absence of definite break with the past

would be to trace the considerable beginnings in the “lower” or later

Empire, of the tendencies recognized as marking particularly the Dark

Ages. Depopulation, building with the fragments of older and better

work, in letters the replacement of any criticism of life by glamour

and marvels, all these go back to the fourth and sometimes even to

the third century. Nor does the list end here. The fourth century

saw cavalry replace infantry as the main reliance of armies, and the

third century already saw the wise man thought of more as a magician

than a philosopher.

Upon this degraded Roman society fell the triple scourge of

Mohammedan, Viking and Magyar. It is perhaps the best answer to

the assertion that the “Teutons” had poured new life into Western

Christendom to note that it barely weathered the storm. For most of

these attacks were not much more than great plundering raids. It

was the Mohammedan more than the others who influenced particularly

the southern part of France with which we are to be concerned. But

it was the Viking who brought our Christendom to its lowest ebb.

All three were alike in hatred and contempt for the enfeebled Roman

civilization which they ravaged, especially for the religion which

had become its bond of union. It was particularly the shrines, where

so much of the movable wealth of the time had been concentrated in

the form of gold, jewels and precious stuffs, that they went for.

They, and not the “Teutons” of the fifth and sixth centuries, made

the real barbarian invasions. However, they failed. Before the end of

the eighth century, the Moslem, on the whole, was falling back. By

900 the worst of the fearful Viking harry was passed, and a little

more than fifty years later the Magyar was held. Thenceforward the

inner parts of Christendom were safe from raids. The struggle had so

long seemed hopeless that a disembodied spirit, looking down on the

thing, might well have called the final victory a miracle.

Following the repulse and (in the case of Viking and Magyar) the

conversion of the “paynim” came a pause. The mean and wretched

time, which had barely beaten off the pagan, could now take stock

of itself. After all, it had achieved three things. The first of

these achievements was negative. Leading their petty lives as they

did among the colossal wreckage of Rome, they had preserved precious

fragments of that which had been the soul of her civilization: her

letters, law and philosophy. This living memory of Rome was scattered

here and there, almost all of it hidden away in monasteries, as it

were underground, without power to act upon the half bestial world

around. Still it was there waiting for a time that could make use

of it, in a deep sleep but not dead, like the princess in the fairy

tale. The second and third achievements were positive, and of them

the second was the most immediately useful and perhaps the most

apparent. The Dark Ages, as we have seen, had placed authority on the

widest possible basis. It was no longer a trust; it was a possession,

and therefore to be tenaciously held and (in the main) moderately

used, as one does of possessions. The conception of legal right had

given way to that of privilege. Take a crude illustration; we know

that many of our public men think of government not as something

to live under but as something to live upon, that is, a means of

prey upon their fellows. The “spoils system” we call it. Suppose a

political organization composed of this sort of men getting complete

control over elections for a time long enough to enable its local

leaders to hand down their power to their sons. Clearly, after the

first disorder the change would cause, there would come a time when

each “leader” of a community, no matter how dull, could not help

seeing that it was to his own immediate personal benefit to see that

his domain was prosperous. To a time like our own such a change

would be disaster; to a time struggling doubtfully to keep alive

some vestige of civilized living, it was salvation. Finally, as we

have seen, the great step of abolishing the old slavery in favour of

serfdom had been taken, and the average labourer was more than half a

free man.

These primitive arrangements had come into being through no set

purpose but through the need of the miserable time for guarantees of

any sort of defence and production. The men who established them (or

rather fell into them) were not self-conscious, had no “political

theory” whatsoever. Their actions were spontaneous, and all their

simplicities came into and overspread the Roman order like weeds

growing on a ruin.

This same lack of self-consciousness helped to prevent any clear-cut

break with the past. The local nobles, each all but a little king,

continued to be called by the titles of imperial functionaries; the

count was still the “comes.” Because they had no political theory,

and lived in a world which had no memory of a time without kings

and emperors, it never occurred to them to propose that kings and

emperors should not be at all, although the homage of the local lord

to the overlord would clearly be a far flimsier thing than the homage

of their own needy little vassals to them.

There was a tendency on the part of the secular rulers, emperors,

kings, and nobles alike, to make of the officers of the Church

the instruments and functionaries of their own power. The local

noble wished to choose the village priest, his overlord wished to

“invest” the bishop. What would have happened had this tendency been

unchecked we cannot say. We know that only the Church stood for the

preservation of the great past through scholarship, for a moral

ideal, and above all for the unity of Europe. Therefore, it is just

to call the effort of the secular powers against her independence a

disintegrating tendency.

There was, however, a protest against lay supremacy, coming

principally from the monks and especially from the new order of

Cluny, so that the whole effort is called the Cluniac movement.

Meanwhile the Vikings who had settled in Normandy (alone of all the

outland barbarians who had come into the Empire and then disappeared,

sunk almost without a trace) had crossed with the native stock to

breed a strong new race that was to fight and govern. In the year

1000 the monkish protest and the Norman energy were just sprouting

above ground, and in the main the time was anarchic, formless.

The great Gerbert, Pope in the year 1000 under the name of Sylvester

II, stands as a symbol. Great as an intriguer, to us he is even

greater as a scholar. He had studied mathematics and “al-gebra” (the

word is Arabic) with the Arabs in Spain, and like every scholar

worthy of the name he loved the classics. His mathematics made

him feared as a wizard, and when writing to a friend in Italy for

unchurchly, Latin books, we find him asking that they be “procured

quietly,” promising that he will tell no one of the favour done him.

I have called Gerbert a symbol of his time. To call that time the

“Dark Ages” is just to a degree that few of the stock epithets of our

school are just. They were the morasses from which the Mediæval rise

begins.

For, after the doubtful pause of which I have spoken, Europe arose.

The Normans conquer England and Sicily, and set up systems of

government and administration fit to be models for all the West. The

Hildebrandine reforms free the Church from the feudal anarchy, and

the Church in her new strength fills Christendom with a new sense of

unity and common purpose. This common purpose hurls Europe against

Asia, in the tidal wave of the First Crusade, which breaks down the

barrier between East and West and begins a new day.

It is important to note how short was this Norman-Hildebrandine

period, and how many-sided was its accomplishment.

At the most it covered less than fifty years in time. The first

stroke of the Church to make itself independent of the State comes

after the mid-century. The Normans conquer England in the familiar

year 1066. The Crusade mobilized in 1096 and returned in 1099. Thus,

if we take the Church, the Crusaders were a trifle nearer in time to

the period in which she was the submissive creature of lay government

than an American of the Great War is to the War of Secession. They

were distant from the conquest of England about as we (1920) are

from M’Kinley’s first election and the prosperity that came with it.

Of course there had been preparation. William the Conqueror found

London already so large that his troops could not even blockade it.

The Italian sea-faring republics were already turning the tables on

the Saracen in the Mediterranean in the early part of the century.

Nevertheless, the phase of the first great struggles and great

accomplishment falls into the little space of years I have marked

out. It is an astonishing time.

In moral purpose, the haphazard speech of to-day would say in

“Idealism,” this short period stands supreme in all our long

tradition. The First Crusade proves it. Whether or not Hildebrand’s

new insistence upon the celibacy of priests and upon private,

specific confession were in themselves good, we need not discuss. At

any rate, never before or since, not even in the great war just over,

has Christendom put forth such an effort as the First Crusade.

And this effort came from a Europe that had suddenly remembered how

to think, to govern and to build. Instead of stupidly piling up

extracts, like their predecessors of the five slow centuries just

passed, we now find the best of the monk-scholars, such as Anselm,

reasoning clearly on the greatest themes of how we may prove that God

exists, and why He became man. And this Italian from the Southern

Alps, in whom thought had replaced pedantry, could see from his

Norman monastery new political operations going on about him, as

strong and startling as the sweep of his own reason. The new Norman

race was ruling, taxing, and administering justice with an order and

method that had not been seen in the West since Justinian. In war,

that important subdivision of politics, they could combine the fire

power of infantry with the shock of mail-clad cavalry.[2] In military

engineering they could make fast the lands they had won by great

square towers of masonry that stand to this day. Besides castles,

they built great churches, and in their building they rediscovered

height, the power of throwing up great stone vaults, and the effect

of majesty. Meanwhile the Italians were building fine churches too.

Sant’ Ambrogio, in Milan (to name only one that comes to mind), can

stand comparison with any Norman church. In everything this rudely

powerful time stood erect and wrought as European men had not wrought

for half a thousand years. The Dark Ages had gone; the Middle Ages

had begun.

What was the spirit of these men in their new power? We can try to

feel it in their buildings and writings, but the answers to such

questions are elusive and as baffling as any that the human mind

can put to the sphynx of history. It is a paradox that this time,

with its furious energy and rage of creation, seems to have left us

in its buildings not only an expression of strength, but also of a

self-reliant completeness and repose. The plain round arches, the

heavy pillars, the decoration at once rude and severe, have a sense

of restraint, of balance and solidity about them that the Gothic

never has. They seem akin to the “Song of Roland” with its

“Pagans are wrong and Christians are right,”

as unfaltering as the swing of a great sword. No breath of doubt or

uncertainty as to the faith has come down to us from this eleventh

century. At the same time, it was a brutal age of strong appetites

and passions. Energy and not refinement is its note; war and not

love. The imagination of the time, when it set itself to carving

stone, played often with wild and impossible monsters that throw into

strong relief the strict, clear lines of the architecture. There is

extravagance in it too, for it is Roland’s pride in refusing to sound

his horn in time to summon help that brings him and the peers to

their death.

Meanwhile art and scholarship remained monastic. The architects were

monks and the cathedrals belonged to monks and priests more than to

the lawman. Of laymen the almost universal type is the warrior.

In 1099, just before the turn of the century, the Crusaders returned.

They had come together from all over Europe, and together had seen

the world and done their great deeds. Their homecoming issues in a

new time, the twelfth century.

I have spoken of the Crusade as a tidal wave. The expression is just

so far as it suggests its enormous effort. It is also just in that

it was a breaker down of barriers, not only the barriers between the

divisions of Christendom, which it united in a common effort, but

also the barrier between Europe and the East. But the expression of

a tidal wave is incorrect in suggesting a levelling and destructive

force. For what followed was the continuation and enlargement of what

the Norman-Hildebrandine eleventh century had done, with greater

riches, complexity and refinement. There appear, also, new forces,

but there is no conscious break with the immediate past.

In obedience to the returning Crusaders’ new sense of power came

increase of commerce and intercommunication, of population and of

wealth. Thus government and administration worthy of the name, which

had been the creation of the eleventh century, continue to grow

stronger and more centralized. But to them is added a new thing, the

knowledge of the Roman law, with its large reasoning and its great

sense of the State.

So also building was continued, and the bases of design do not

change, but the severity of the older work begins to be lost in

encrusted masses of sculptured detail. Most of the carving strikes

us as crude; a good deal of it is meant to be grotesque and much of

the rest is grotesque—unintentionally. But there is vigour about it;

and an effect of richness, through painstaking repetition of simple

motifs. This richness of decorative sculpture links up naturally with

the new social tendency to refinement in manners.

With refinement in manners we come to our first sharp contrast with

that which had been. William the Conqueror, annoyed at having his

bastardy continually thrown in his face by his wife, is said to have

relieved his feelings by tying her by the hair to his horse’s tail

and dragging her out to a neighbouring suburb. Now we find William’s

great grandson’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the foremost figure in a

totally new sort of “high society” among the governing class of the

time in which it was becoming the fashion to concern oneself with

an elaborately courteous worship of idealized woman. Not that the

eleventh century woman had been nobody. Countess Matilda of Tuscany

had been a tower of strength to Hildebrand in his tireless political

struggles. But now we find noblewomen taking the lead in social

observance (and in literary appreciation) somewhat as they do in the

United States to-day. It is true that the lay part of the movement

had its centre, as we shall see in the next chapter, in Southern

France. But it was general throughout the society of the time, and

along with the lay movement went the new cult of the Virgin.

This new religious feeling came as abruptly as the corresponding

change in lay society. Whereas Roland had prayed to God the Father,

now everyone, even the knight in battle and the austere religious

reformer like Saint Bernard, preferred to pray to the Mother of God.

What they saw in her, those brought up in the Protestant tradition

can scarcely feel. She stood for the illogical, affectionate side of

religion. She loved all sorts of flattery and attention and everyone

loved her and paid her the court she loved. She loved beautiful and

pretty things too, and, womanlike, all the decorative side of life,

so that her cult played a great part in the cathedral building. In

poems and tales of her it is possible to feel, at least faintly, the

tremendous outpouring of devotion she inspired. It was the twelfth

century that placed her among the gods of our West European stock.

Most men worthy of the name dislike feminism. There is something

unnatural and strained about it. In civilized times, made possible

only by the highest human energy, it is a perpetual riddle to find

the sex which is less vigorous, both in body and mind, coming

to the fore. Therefore many men have called the feminism of the

Cæsarean-Augustan age in Rome, and also of to-day, a sign of social

decay. But this will not fit the case of twelfth-century feminism.

If feminism is a sickness of society it would seem sometimes to be a

growing sickness. It would seem that, in times of rapid expansion of

civilized things, the energy of man is so taken up with taming the

wilderness, fighting back the barbarian, and producing the wealth by

which the body of society must live, that he is surpassed by woman

in knowledge of all the arts and studies that make life rich and

beautiful, all those things in short that the business man of to-day

despises under the name of “general culture.” The woman, then, seeing

that she surpasses him in so much, sets up in her own mind to be his

superior, and is half acknowledged by him as such. But the man of

to-day may console himself with the thought that about feminism there

is something forced and malformed, and that, in the past, its excess

has never lasted long.

The time that saw the kings strengthened by the Roman law, the new

refinement of the rich dominated by the noble lady, and all classes

of men and women worshipping the Virgin, saw also a new spirit of

civic liberty. The growing towns began to set up as “communes,”

practically self-governing corporations. When they could, they bought

their freedom in the form of a charter from the feudal overlord; when

they could not come to terms they fought him cheerfully. They were

turbulent, always rioting about something or other, and the glimpses

we get of their municipal finance suggest that the city grafter of

to-day could learn from them. Nevertheless, they concentrated in

themselves much of the confused, but happy and conquering, energies

of the time. Politically, they half realized, without knowing it, the

ideal of the ancient free city. Through them and their independence

we touch Athens, which they knew not at all. Economically, they

brought art and industry out of the monasteries, and organized the

craftsman and the artisan in guilds which largely checked competition

between their members. Thus they guaranteed to the workman his

independence and security so well that our labour unions grope after

them to-day like blind giants. Soon, here and there, they were to

feel for a new architecture that (as we shall see) was to be the

Gothic. All these things they did, not because of any rule or precept

but spontaneously, for their own sake, as things that ought to be

done.

While the townsman was setting up for a free citizen, the country

serf was establishing himself as a practically free peasant. The

arrangement grew up that so long as a given family of serfs kept up

the payment of the lord’s dues for the land they tilled, members

of that family might leave freely to become “guildsmen” (what we

should call “union men”) in the towns, could enter the Church, or

do what they pleased. A dissatisfied serf might run away to some

town where his lord had no jurisdiction, so that lords had to make

things easy for serfs. The great tradition of the eighteenth century,

out of which our political morality came, makes the idea of feudal

dues stink in our nostrils. Nevertheless, we must admit that the

new status of the serf class represented substantial freedom. The

unconscious, and therefore impregnable, evidence of contemporary

literature proves beyond question that the countryman was now, in

fact, free. The independent “villeins” of “Aucassin and Nicolette”

or “Robin and Marion” are essentially the free French peasants of

to-day.

Perhaps the sharpest apparent contrast with that which had been, was

that thought, like the arts and crafts, came out of the monastery

into the town. Anselm in his cloister had reasoned clearly as

churchmen before him had not. The great scholar of the new time

reached out, through the faith, as it were, to the metaphysical

foundations of all knowledge. His name was Abelard; he “woke the

great curiosity from its sleep of a thousand years ...” (as Belloc

says with a fine flourish), and his glory, his love, and his

misfortunes have become a legend. Great as he was in himself, the

picture of him as a lad of scarcely twenty, standing up in public

to the greatest professor of his time and besting him in debate,

is even greater as a parable. It would not be altogether true to

say, as has been said, that with his generation scholarship became

secularized, but it certainly became public. From top to bottom the

faith (which the learned, to a man, continued to maintain) became

matter for discussion and was expected to justify itself by rational

demonstration. The student, although still at least in minor orders,

ceased to be a monk, and roamed at will. He loved thought for its

own sake, and grouped himself in communities that were already, in

substance, universities.

I have said that the time was spontaneous, and in general that

is true. The emergence of the serf as a practically free peasant

came about quietly, of itself. Even the noisy communes troubled

themselves little about the larger implications of their acts. But

one man at least, Arnold of Brescia, a pupil (or at least a follower)

of Abelard, brought the new learning to the support of the new

municipalities. He broke with the Church, his success was short, and

he soon went under; but such was his fame that after his execution

his body was burned and the ashes thrown into the Tiber for fear that

his bones might be cherished as relics, and certain heretics called

themselves “Arnoldists” well into the next century.

So the time went on, everywhere making all things new, roads,

buildings, philosophies; happy like a young god in creating, and,

like God, seeing that its works were good. Its cities were growing

fast. Even in Central Europe it was clearing the forests until their

extent was reduced almost to what it is to-day.[3] No new process to

spin cloth, smelt steel, or make steam engines, had given it power

over material nature. Its learned men were too deeply fascinated

with looking into the meaning and end of our human life in God, to

experiment in physics. Its material conquests were won by the leaping

energy of its own vigorous will.

In the second half of the century appear new elements of artistic

and intellectual power, the Gothic and the rediscovered works of

Aristotle. In France, the great, new, idea of nationality began dimly

to emerge. With the fall of Jerusalem to the Moslem, for the first

time since the last ninth-century raids of the heathen Vikings,

Christendom feels a great calamity.

The Gothic was altogether new, and was the creation of the new lay

spirit of the time. It has been written a thousand times how the

pointed arch solved structural difficulties, and gave to men intent

upon height the opportunity of building still higher. Its broken line

gave them also, as we shall see in a moment, a new expression of

their own spirit. As yet, however, the change was only beginning, and

buildings showed the broken arch mingled in fellowship with the round.

While the pointed arch was beginning to be seen in building, the

texts of Aristotle were coming in from Spain. Abelard’s time had

known of Aristotle only his Logic. But now scholars might read in

Latin (translated from the Arabic) the Physics, the Metaphysics,

and Ethics. Thus, these men, with their keen and active minds, were

suddenly face to face with one of the greatest, if not the very

greatest, intellect of all mankind. Upon the crowds of students full

of discussion and debate, believing confidently that they could build

themselves a tower of logic that would reach heaven, the effect was

electric. For such men to have for their study Aristotle’s enormous

range of thought, to feel his luminous common sense, was to give

them more than their youth had dreamed, the discovery of a new world.

Meanwhile, behind the endless political squabbles, the vast idea

of nationality could be seen just looming up, faint and dim, but

enormous. It harked back to the dim, prehistoric forces that had

wrought out the words “Gaul,” “Britain,” “Italy,” and “Spain.” Such

words had never been represented by governments. They had stood

always for ideas only. But in France, where ideas have power, a sort

of underlying force in men’s minds was conjuring up, behind the

king, the nation. This force acted through the Roman law which was

illuminating the active intellect of the time, but the soul of it was

a blind instinct.

This growing and vigorous time that had made and done so many new

things, had forgotten what it was to feel a check, until, towards the

end of the century, Saladin broke the Syrian Franks at Hattin, and

took Jerusalem. The disaster did not seem hopeless. Christendom began

forthwith to hum with preparation for a new crusade. Nevertheless,

this first great experience of failure throws into high relief, as it

were, the buoyancy of the time, and gives us, therefore, a point from

which we may survey its accomplishment and seek to fix its spirit.

First of all, it is necessary to insist upon the straightforwardness,

the downright directness of that spirit. It is true that the Courts

of Love preached far-fetched doctrines, but they were a conscious

revolt against grossness of manners, a sort of counter-excess.

With this exception, the time nowhere attempted extravagance. The

elaborate sculpture of its buildings is framed in structural lines

that are firm and even severe. As yet the Gothic (which was to be

the expression of the mediæval temper in its completeness and in its

decline) gives only here and there a hint of its coming. Height is

indeed attempted, but everywhere the general lines of the buildings

remain square and solid. Wherever the architect has expressed his own

thought in altering the inherited arrangement of the Roman column

and arch, the change tends towards frankness and logic. Each part

aims to express its function, whether structural or decorative, in

relation to the whole. The classic forms begin to be rationalized so

as to be not a façade but living parts of the structure; the column

begins to be wedded to the arch. As in architecture, so in the other

arts and handicrafts. In general, clothes were cut on simple and

serviceable lines without hint of theatricality or excess, either

fitting close to the body, or falling in simple and graceful folds.

Arms, and especially armour, remained light and simple. In the second

half of the century the cylindrical pot-helm, completely covering the

face, came in and took the place of the open conical helmet with its

nose-guard. Already before the new fashion in helmets had come in,

the mail shirt had had its sleeves lengthened to the wrist, and now

mittens and separate leg coverings of mail were in use also. But the

heavy body armour of plate that was to encumber the warriors of later

centuries was unknown. The horse-equipment, too, was simple, made for

use and not for parade. In all things the time observed simplicity

and, as it were, a natural and effortless logic in the outline of

that which it made.

The seeming contradiction between the simplicity everywhere aimed

at by the men of the twelfth century and the confusion of their

society was the natural and inevitable result of the conditions

which limited their action. They, with their keenness of mind, could

almost remember ancestors who had been half barbarians. The material

with which they had to work was painfully scanty. It was not only

that the time, with its fluidity and the swiftness and extent of its

social changes, had as yet found no formula that might approach a

definition of its inmost spirit. That difficulty was met a generation

later in the mid-thirteenth century, with Aquinas, St. Louis, and the

culmination of the Gothic. The underlying trouble was that, even at

their best, the Middle Ages had no sufficient accumulation either of

knowledge or of material resources. For want of ordered and detailed

knowledge, the complexity of problems could not be grasped, and for

want of resources the material disasters of the fourteenth century

were to be fatal to the mediæval experiment. As yet, about the year

1200, synthesis and such near approach to perfection as is permitted

to man were in process of attainment. There was no muddle-headed

modern illusion of the necessary goodness of change under the name of

“progress.” It was because the new things that they had made were

certainly good that men felt that they had reason to hope.

Our books over-emphasize the deficiencies of the Middle Ages as

compared with ourselves. But it is true that they were unable to

transform completely the unpromising material they had at hand.

Examples of their limitations could be catalogued without end, all

springing from one or the other, or from both of these causes. Thus,

in spite of the Roman law, the folly of the ordeal and the judicial

combat went on. The new logic had by no means fully penetrated these

populations full of their natural human stubbornness and perversity.

Where a new town was built, the streets of it were as straight

and regular as those of an American or South African city to-day.

Viollet-le-Duc has assembled the evidence on this point, and it is

conclusive. But most of their towns had come down to them from the

Dark Ages as tangles of crooked streets, resulting from centuries of

weak government, and hence of unpunished encroachment upon the public

way. To-day, oppressed with regularity, many of us find such crooked

streets charming. The point is that they seem nowhere to have tried

to straighten out the lines of their old towns so as to make them

conform to the straight streets of their new towns which must have

been a truer expression of their taste. Paris was now a considerable

town, and the King of France might, and did, wall it in and pave its

streets. But to straighten them, even if he had had the money, he

would have had no right, and seems never even to have had the idea,

more than he would have had the idea of large scale water supply or

of drainage. As with the streets of the towns, so with the roads that

connected them. There was no thought-out system of communication such

as Rome had had, or such as we have to-day. Nor did the traveller

over the ill-kept roads enjoy regular and sufficient protection from

the State. The insecurity was not due to “baronial war” between

nobles. Usually such nobles would fight it out between themselves

and their own immediate followers. Not any more than our own strikes

(often accompanied with violence on a scale that would make a

mediæval wonder whether the world was not coming to an end) was such

disorder meant to be directed against the community as a whole.

But to protect society against stray robbers or bands of robbers,

government made no effort, any more than in our “wild west” before

the coming of the sheriff. This lack of police protection seems to

have been accepted as a matter of course, and no one seems to have

tried to think it out and apply the remedy. Just so, when the later

mediæval armies of the fourteenth century took the field they would

sometimes wander about the theatre of war and meet one another by

accident, solely from the want of any organized system of scouting to

give the commander some notion of the enemies’ position and movements.

One must repeat that all such things were mere gaps, unfinished

portions of the clearly outlined logical structure which the time

was struggling to build as an expression of its own strong and eager

spirit.

Unlike ourselves, the twelfth century possessed moral unity. Alone

of all the great eras of growth and change, its movement was

practically without reactionaries, because it was without destructive

moral change. What a contrast to the Cæsarean-Augustan age, the

Renaissance-Reformation period, the French Revolution, and to

ourselves! Here and there a monkish grumble at the action of the new

forces comes to our ears. The new forces themselves were by no means

adjusted to one another. But in all the debates of the time no one

looks back upon the past as Arcadia. For all their differences, the

men of the twelfth century were agreed in pressing onward without

regret.

This moral unity, with its unbroken hopefulness, was due to the

corporate body of the Church, which was central in society and

pervaded it. It is a commonplace that in the Church were united

learning and education, the public care of the sick in hospitals, and

all sorts of “organized charity” and poor relief, that the monastery

served as a hotel for travellers and that such travellers as were

not upon worldly business would almost certainly be pilgrims to the

shrine of some saint. No man was too low for the Church’s pity or

too high for her effective correction. Her doctrine of the equal

worth of souls before God, together with the common observance of

her worship, made strongly for friendliness and confidence between

classes. Her universality, her cosmopolitan officialdom, and her use

of Latin, made for understanding and community of feeling between

localities. So she gave to the time, with its accepted division of

mankind into classes and its poor communications, a greater measure

of fraternity than we possess to-day with all our talk of “equality”

and all our devices permitting men to meet or to speak together.

This she did, not by any forced, mechanical scheme of union, but by

her presentation of a body of teaching which all accepted, and by

accepting bound themselves by a common discipline to be members one

of another.

We can never fully know what was the spirit of the centuries in which

the Church was the unquestioned central institution and pervaded all

society. A man unable to travel and steep himself in the atmosphere

in the old towns and countrysides (photographs at best give only

unrelated bits of them) might best look long at fourteenth-century

Italian paintings, or read over and over the first and one of the

happiest of English comedies: “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” which is in

so many schoolbooks. Before the “Revolution” the traveller in Russia

could feel what a country was like wherein men had never shattered

their holy things, in which society reposed upon an unquestioned

religion, and men felt, therefore, that the universe was friendly.

Russia still is mediæval in that the Russian cannot feel as we do for

suffering and is alternately fiendish and innocent—

“Half devil and half child ...”

Even pre-revolutionary Russia was mediæval only in seeming, and in

reality was rocking, fatally as the event has proved, under the

action of the same forces that disturb our industrial societies

with their exaltation of power, and their dangerous instability.

But outwardly she still suggested to the traveller from Western

Christendom something of what the world of our ancestors must have

been.

The fact that the Church thought of her teaching as above all an

answer to the riddle of human life, rather than as a bundle of “Thou

shalt nots,” made her tolerant of many things. Because she was not

so much a separate institution as a part of the atmosphere breathed

daily by everybody, she had no fear. Thus she permitted the yearly

mockery of her own services in the “feast of fools” when a sham

priest, covered with an ass’s false head burlesqued the mass before

the altar itself, to the accompaniment of general popular horseplay.

So, also, she seems to have permitted a good deal of divorce, at

least among the upper class, by means of “annulments.” Finally, when

so many people were under vows of one kind or another, it was out of

the question to expect that all vows would be strictly kept, and the

language of the reformers from within the Church itself proves that

in general she was easy-going. Some travellers to Latin America tell

us that in those countries where there are few Protestants, the Roman

Church is still easy-going, but whether they are swayed by religious

opposition or whether they are true witnesses I do not know. At

any rate, before the Council of Trent militarized her against

Protestantism, the Church permitted many things. As in Russia,

religious dress covered many saints and also many sinners, some gross

and some refined.

I have said that, in general, the Church was unquestioned.

Nevertheless, there were, necessarily, forces working against her

teaching and her discipline, just as there must always, in any

society, be forces of opposition working against the forces which

control that society. When a time is slack, like the Dark Ages, both

master forces and opposition forces will be torpid, and when a time

is keen, like the twelfth-century time we are considering, both will

be active. Accordingly we find the moral and intellectual forces

opposed to the Church clearly defined.

In the great Investiture quarrel between the papacy and the secular

governments from the Empire down, the faith and morals of the

Church were not at stake. But, at the same time, the claims of her

champions in her good effort to untangle herself from feudalism were

so extravagant that they suggested a downright theocracy, actual

government by the ministers of religion, which has always been

hateful to men of our European stock. Further, the twelfth century

man, in so much fighting against the infidel, had learned that his

enemy was no such bad fellow after all. We find at least one ruler,

Henry Plantagenet in the heat of his quarrel with Becket, crying out

that he would rather turn Mohammedan than yield to the Church! And

the outburst does not seem to have weakened his position. Evidently

the world was moving fast in his day. The noble, so far surpassing

his fathers in riches, luxury, and refinement, often failed to see

eye to eye with the churchman. The story of the time is full of

despoilments of the Church and consequent excommunications. Now and

then a commune, at the height of political struggle with its bishop,

would physically maltreat him (or even kill him) and go off into a

short spasm of blank irreligion.

Moreover, the Church had foes, or at least very lukewarm servitors,

of her own household. We have seen that the student was usually

still in minor orders. But now he was no longer shut up under

strict control in a monastery, but free to wander at will. Under no

constraint, and full of his classic learning with its glorification

of every passion and appetite, he carelessly kicked clear over the

monkish interpretation of the Christian ethic, and as often as not

went wild altogether from any sort of check on his desires. John

Addington Symonds has collected, and translated into English out

of the original Latin, a number of these students’ songs, under

the title of “Wine, Woman and Song.” They are often charming, but

I cannot imagine literature better calculated to enrage a monk, or

indeed anyone of a puritanic cast of mind.

Even the student’s professor, and the student himself in his serious

moments, were not altogether Christians. The Arabian versions of

Aristotle taught an imaginative pantheism, full of ideas about

“the soul of the world” that were inconsistent with belief in any

definite god. The recoil from such fantasies sometimes brought on

an easy-going general scepticism. It was whispered about that the

world had known three great impostors, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed.

The pride of the new logic equalled, in some men, our modern pride

in physical science. Michelet tells the story of a learned professor

of the University of Paris who delighted his hearers with a complete

demonstration of our Lord’s divinity and then turned around and said

that, had he chosen, his logic could have put down “little Jesus” as

low as it had just raised him high. The common people would make up

coarse “fabliaux,” tales and rhymes about the priest and his women

parishioners, that sound harshly upon the ear even of a sceptic of

to-day.

Finally, from top to bottom of society, there was an under-current of

feeling that the wealth and power of the Church were over-tempting

her officials into that pride which they were bound to oppose as the

first of sins. Writing to magnify the work of the mendicant orders,

Dante goes so far as to say that, just before their coming (that is,

in the time we are considering), “The Army of Christ” ... was ...

“laggard, fearsome, and thin-ranked.”[4]

Michelet speaks of the Pope in the year 1200 lifted indeed to a

dizzy height upon the topmost pinnacle of the great structure of the

Church, but seeing therefrom armies marching from all sides to the

attack. Dante and Michelet may exaggerate; nevertheless the situation

was strained.

Still the Church won through. Tossed hither and thither by the swift

new currents, she escaped shipwreck and kept her course. And that

course was shaped by her determination to remain central in society

and to unite all men under her. It was the strength of her position

that, of all the forces we have so far seen to have been working

against her, not one directly denied her teaching and substituted for

it a different, hostile body of doctrine.

In one spot only was there organized, fundamental opposition. That

spot was in the district of Southern France which was later to form

the province of Languedoc. That opposition was a body of doctrine

which has usually been called Albigensianism (inasmuch as one of its

chief centres was the town of Albi). What the nature of the crisis

was, and what precedent that Church had for meeting it, the next

chapter shall consider.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Heretics,” by G. K. Chesterton, chap. xi, “Science and the

Savages.” Copyright, John Lane and Co., London, 1905.

[2] By “fire-power” I mean, of course, archery, not firearms.

[3] “Forests and Human Progress” by Raphael Zon, published in New

York, _Geographical Review_, September 1920: “In Central Europe the

period of the greatest clearing of forest land for settlement was

practically completed by the end of the thirteenth century.”

[4] “... tardo, suspiccioso, e raro.”—“Paradiso,” canto xii, line 39.