i8o LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

relatively unimportant, and they neglected that prime duty of the his-
torian, a willingness to bestow infinite pains on discovering what actually
happened. This is why mediaeval historiography is so weak in critical
method. That weakness was not an accident. It did not depend on the
limitation of the sources and materials at the disposal of scholars. It
depended on a limitation, not of what they could do, but of what they
wanted to do. They did not want an accurate and scientific study of the
actual facts of History; what they wanted xvas an accurate and scientific
study of the divine attributes, a theology . . . which should enable them to
determine a priori what must have happened and what must be going to
happen in the historical process.

'The consequence of this is that, when Mediaeval historiography is
looked at from the point of view of a merely scholarly historian, the kind
of historian who cares for nothing except accuracy in facts, it seems not
only unsatisfactory but deliberately and repulsively wrong-headed; and
the nineteenth-century [Western] historians, who did in general take a
merely scholarly view of the nature of History, regarded it with extreme
lack of sympathy.'1

This hostility towards a Medieval Western Weltansclwtmmg was not
peculiar to a generation of latter-day Western historians whose compla-
cent agnosticism facilely reflected the pleasant tranquillity of the places
in which the lines had happened to be fallen unto them;* at a higher
temperature it also animated both their epigoni and thoir predecessors,
A twentieth-century generation of Mankind, that was tasting the ex-
tremely unpleasant experience of being driven from pillar to post by the
whips of human dictators bent on putting their subjects through four-
years' and five-years' plans, would have revolted, aa from a, chastisement
of scorpions,3 against any seriously intended suggestion that a six-thou-
sand-years' plan was being imposed on them by a dictatorial Deity. The
grotesque precision with which the term of this alleged sentence of penal
servitude on Mankind had been dated by the pedantry of an archbishop,
who had constituted himself the self-appointed clerk of God's court,
would have been the last straw on a twentieth-century camel's back if
this human beast of burden had any longer taken Usaher's calculations
seriously. A seventeenth-century Western Man. who had had to pay for
his fidelity to a Medieval Weltanschauung by inflicting on himself the
agony of the Wars of Religion could not afford either to dismiss Bossuet's
thesis, in the biting twentieth-century manner, as a bad joke or to ignore
it, in the conceited nineteenth-century manner, as the negligibly irrele-
vant error of a securely transcended ignorance, The seventeenth-century
Western intellectual rebel was defiantly up in arms, and the unaccep-
table words of his mouth4 soared, instead of condescending, when he
proclaimed his resolve

To wage by force or guile eternal war,
Irreconcileable to our grand foe,
Who now triumphs, and in th* excess of joy
Sole reigning holds the tyranny of Heaven.8

* Collingwood, R, G.*. The Idea of History (Oxford 1946, Clarendon Press), pp. 55-56.

* Ps. xvi. 6, » See i Kings xii, 1-16,

* Pa. adx, 14. s Milton: Peradist Lost, Book I, II. xai-4-