34 THE CHURCH
But when we think we have begun to appreciate the villager's
mind, thus encompassed by his hopes and fears of the Church,
*we have but half done. "The broad shadow of the Cross lay
over the whole medieval world", Mr B. L. Manning writes;1
and while we heartily agree with this, we have still to remember
that other—perhaps broader—shadow that darkened medieval
life and thought—the shadow of "the Devil and all his works".
This was no abstraction for the peasant, but every corner of his
fields and every corner of his home were liable to harbour some
agent of Hell who could harm him unless it were exorcised and
overcome.
For we must remember how circumscribed was the world in
which the majority of these people lived. Their village was their
world: beyond, some ten or twenty miles led to the local shrine
or the great fair, and there, perhaps, once or twice a year they
made their way; but, for the most part, their lives were ground
out in a perpetual round from one field to another, and so to the
next, London seemed very far off—almost as far as Rome or
Jerusalem itself. Hence, they were easily impressed by "the
wonders of the world "—and fact and fiction were indistinguish-
able to them. Even the greatest minds were curiously limited
(according to our modern conceptions of knowledge): Aquinas
could talk of the power of miracles, and enforce his argument
that "it may seem miraculous to him who hath no comprehension
of that power; as to the ignorant it seemeth miraculous that the
magnet draweth iron, or that a little fish holdeth back a ship ".2
Similarly, all the chroniclers mingle fact and fiction in a be-
wildering fashion, and vagueness and confusion are of the very
stuff of their information. It is not surprising, therefore, that the
uneducated peasant, who relied on gossip and the stories of
passing travellers, should be credulous and superstitious.
Superstition, which feeds and grows on ignorance, was indeed
encouraged by the most powerful of the peasant's teachers—the
clergy. The Church consistently showed itself slow to acknow-
ledge the claims of human reason, which it saw pressing for
recognition on all sides. Dissection, for example, was for long
1 The People's Faith in the Time of Wyclif, 15.
2 Quoted from Swnma Contra Gentiles, Lib. in, cap* 102* by Dr Coulton
in his Social Britain, 532, commenting on Trevisa's account of this fish
scarcely a foot long "!