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Publications of tbe Qnitietsitp of
HISTORICAL SERIES NO. XL
France and England
Their relations in the Middle Ages and now
Published by the University of Manchester at
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France and England
Their relations in the Middle Ages and nd^ ' •*
By T. F. TOUT, M.A., D.Lirr., F.B.A.
Professor of History ^ Director of Advanced Study in History
1922 Manchester * ^ * At The University Press London, New York, &c. : Longmans, Green & Co
PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER No. CXLVII
EXCHANGE
Preface
The nucleus of this book is the Creighton Lecture, which I delivered before the University of London on October 14, 1920, and afterwards repeated in January 192 1 at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, and before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle- on-Tyne. The title of this lecture was " France and England in the Fourteenth Century and Now." The ground covered by it is represented by the introductory pages of the first lecture and the greater part of the fourth of the present series. My motive in selecting the subject was to emphasize as strongly as I could the common civilization and close affinities of the two countries, even at times when they were most hostile to each other, and to base upon that a plea for the continu- ation of the alliance cemented by the recent war, and perhaps for its development into something stronger and more durable.
Last spring I accepted an invitation to deliver a short course of lectures in English before the University of Rennes. My friend. Professor Eugene Deprez, who had been among the hearers of the Creighton lecture, expressed to me his opinion that an elaboration of that dis- course would be appropriate for my Rennes audience. I gladly fell in with the suggestion, and the present little volume is the result. It represents a somewhat free expansion of the four lectures I gave before the Breton University during last Whit-week. Even then it was clear that the statesmen of the two nations did not always see eye to eye. The events of the summer and autumn show that this unity of vision has not yet been attained. Under such conditions a book that tries to emphasize the points in common between the two peoples may not be altogether unwelcome. The situation may excuse
vi PREFACE
certain references to current politics, which I am reluctant to make for a variety of reasons. But I can truly say that I have aimed not so much at expressing my own opinions, as at interpreting the two different national points of view. However far I may have succeeded in this, I have at least given the same doctrine to my English and French auditors.
It was, I believe, with the view of strengthening academic co-operation between France and England that the University of Rennes honoured me with its invitation. My wife and I will never forget the extreme cordiality of our reception, and the pains taken by new and old friends to make our visit pleasant and profitable. What- ever may be the case with the politicians, the academic bodies of the two countries realize their common ties and obligations.
I am indebted to my pupil Mr. M, V. Gregory, M.A., and to my wife for the greater part of the index.
T. F. Tout.
Manchester^
Christmas 1921
Contents
Preface pp. v-vi
Lecture I. Cosmopolitanism and Feudalism
The Anglo-French Alliance as the salvation of Europe during the Great War : Need of examining its historical antecedents : Long tradition of hostility between England and France : But behind this a strong undercurrent of affinities between the two countries all through their history : Object of the course, to bring out the intimacy of this interconnection, especially during the later Middle Ages : Similarity of mediaeval conditions in F ance and England, because mediaeval conditions were alike over all Western Europe : Mediaeval conception of politics : No national state : Clannishness of mediaeval man : Importance of the tie of Lordship : Personal and local allegiance : Beginnings of national monarchy : The Roman tradition : Unimportance of the Imperial tradition in the West : Importance of the Roman church as the unifying element : Cosmopolitan char- acter of the papacy : The religious, orders : The Canon Law and the University : Beginnings of the national University : Social and economic unity : Beginnings of lay culture : Early lay civilization based on French culture and language. pp. 1-36
Lecture IL Anglo-French Cwilization under Normans^ Angevins^ and Capetians
Beside their share in general Western Civilization England and France became sharers in a special civilization within that civili- zation : Origin of this : England and France before the Norman Conquest : Racial affinities : Result of Norman Conquest : Diffu- sion of Feudalism and the Hildebrandine ideal of the church : Common monasticism and art : Relations of Anglo-Saxon and Norman institutions : The Conquest as Starting Point or Turn- ing Point : Establishment of Anglo-French Civilization and its diffusion throughout the Capetian and Angevin empires • Cos- mopolitan character of Angevin empire : Its unity of adminis- tration : The Angevin chancery and exchequers : Fall of Ange- vin empire. pp. 37-75
Lecture III. Attraction and Repulsion. The Beginnings
of Nationality
A century and a quarter of combined attraction and repulsion (1206-1328) : Saint-Louis and Henry III : Beginnings of separate French and English States : Continuance of Anglo- French Civilization : New waves of French influence in Eng- land : The aUen invasions : Poitevins, Savoyards, Romans, Friars : National resentment in England : Yet continued close relations with France : Paris and Oxford : The treaty of Paris, 1259 : French influence on Edward I : His Continental outlook :
viii CONTENTS
His war and alliance with Philip IV : Edward II and France : Scanty Recognition by English Historians of the French element in English History : The Germanist and Romanist schools : Stubbs' attitude : The age of Edward I and Philip IV as the period of greatest approximation of institutions and ideas : National councils : Parliaments or Estates : Administrative anal- ogies : The Exchequer and Chambre des Comptes : English and French chanceries : Relations through ^terature, Latin, French, and English : English literature not literature written in English, but by Englishmen : Anglo-I^rench literature : Anglo-French speech : Edward III and the Hainault marriage : John Froissart and Walter Manny pp. 76-113
Lecture IV. T/ie Hundred Tears' War and afterwards
Causes of the Hundred Years' War : The question of Gascony : The claim to the French throne : Economic rivalries : The papal mediation Causes of its failure : Beginnings of national hostility : The war as stimulus to national feeling : But less so than a modem war : Amenities of qhivalrous warfare : The war game : Development of art of war makes war more scientific and more fierce : Seriousness of the war at sea : The battle of Sluys : Changes in military tactics : Dismounted men-at-arms, archers, artillery, and defensive battles : French adoption of new tactics after Crecy : Mauron and Poitiers : Bertrand du Guesclin and the beginnings of French successes : The reign of Richard II : The war renewed under Henry V : Thp Anglo-Burgundian Alliance : Joan of Arc, Castillon, and the last phases of the war : The Deso- lation of France : Small size of mediaeval armies : The English successes impossible without French aid, and ceased when Joan of Arc restored French national feeling : Increase of national animosity : Literary illustrations : Jean le Bel : French and English Patriotic literature : Continued absence of intense ill-will : Chaucer fought the French but introduced French poetic art into England : No evidence that he hated France : the Debate of the Heralds : The aftermath of war : Mediaeval and modem analogies as to the results of war : Relations of England and France after the Hundred Years' War : National civilizations replace the common Anglo-French Civilization : Nationalism in speech and art : French becomes a foreign language in England : Contrast of "perpendicular " and " flamboyant " architecture : The Renaissance a unifying, the Reformation a dividing, force : Modem Anglo-French relations : Increasing conflict of interests The balance of power : Economic and colonial rivalries : In- creasing contrast of temperaments : The continuance of affini- ties : Reciprocal influence of England and France on each other, especially in modem times : Dangers in vague understandings and need for a permanent alliance. pp. 1 14-162
Index -^ pp. 163-168
France and England. Their Relations in the Middle Ages and Now
Lecture I
Cosmopolitanism and Feicchlism^ !" •> , ; :•;
The Great War is still too near us for it to be easy to study it dispassionately and set forth its events in due proportion. ;But one thing at least is clearly apparent. It is that the Anglo-French Alliance was the salvation of Europe. Alike in the first fierce resistance to over- whelming forces and in the final combination which secured victory in 191 8, it was the indispensable condi- tion of the triumph of the forces which made for freedom and progress. What was the basis of that alliance ? Was it a temporary expedient brought about by accidental coincidence of interests and the inevitable necessity of uniting forces against a well-prepared com- mon foe ? Or was it based on such deeper harmonies of character, civilization, and ideal between the two nations that the alliance is likely to endure, and become the starting-point of a new series of Anglo-French re- lations differing, almost fundamentally, from those which history has known in the past ?
We have had three years of peace, but the treaty of peace is not yet executed. The reconstruction of Europe, of which that treaty was to be the starting-point, seems as far off as ever. In the East there is still some fighting, but more famine and confusion. Everywhere, at home and abroad, the political and social outlook is black and threatening. Under such gloomy conditions our answer
2 COSMOPOLITANISM ^ FEUDALISM
to this question must still be regarded as doubtful. Just now, when we, read both in French and English news- pape1;S 'of ; the sjtiortcomings of the other ally, and when many* forces of .evil seem to unite in doing their best to uiahyt a, Jzodtinu^d good understanding difficult, there may well be many despondent persons who see only too good reason for replying to it in a negative sense. But the prolonged agony of strong reaction after a period of unprecedented strain is always a trying period in the history both of the nation and of the individuals within it, and it would, therefore, be unwise to take too seriously our present prophets of evil. The shiftings day by day of the diplomatic game give very little enlightenment as to permanent conditions. We should rather seek to get at fundamentals. It may perhaps help to such a broader understanding of the problems, present and future, in- volved in our query, if we endeavour to interrogate his- tory as to its teachings regarding the relations of the two peoples. A broad survey of the dealings of the English and French will, I think, bring out two apparently dis- crepant conclusions. It will show, what is patent to all men, that there is a long tradition of general hostility, breaking out into frequent wars. But it will also sug- gest— ^and this point is, perhaps, less obvious — that, be- hind this general antagonism, there has long been a strong undercurrent of affinities that have always made the re- lations between England and France more intimate and continuous than have been those between any other two nations of Western Europe.
To run through Anglo-French relations from the days of the Norman Conquest to the present hour is
ANTAGONISM AND AFFINITIES 3
clearly impossible in a short course of lectures. My more limited task is to take the period with which my personal work is mainly concerned, and to see what light it throws upon the two contradictory tendencies towards antagon- ism and attraction of which, as I have suggested, the history of the relations between the two peoples is full. Now, my period is, roughly speaking, the Middle Ages, and more particularly at present the fourteenth century, the earlier part of the Hundred Years' War — the time in all the Middle Ages during which England and France were most constantly engaged in warfare. Yet even in those days the points of interrelation between the two lands were extraordinarily numerous. Both earlier and later they have been even more intimate. It would, in short, be as easy to draw up a chronicle of the friendly inter- action of England and France on each other as to collect once more the well-known history of their feuds. The truth can only be attained by considering these two aspects of the dealings between the two neighbours in their relation to each other.
In times such as we have lived through it has been hard for the student of remote periods to abstract his mind from the present-day problems which have seemed so in- finitely more urgent. If he has been able to study at all, he has been tempted to devote himself to the time imme- diately preceding his own, because such study seemed to him more likely to help his country in its bitter need. The mediaevalist, who believes that the Middle Ages have as yet by no means told us all their secrets, cannot but regret the diversion of many scholarly minds, well schooled in mediaeval learning, from the advancement
4 COSMOPOLITANISM & FEUDALISM
of his own branch of science. Yet even those who have had courage to persevere in their ancient paths may welcome such justification for their obstinacy as can be derived from bringing mediaeval study into some relation with the living present. A mediaevalist cannot but recognize the profound differences between the age which he studies and the age in which he lives. He has little temptation to suggest close analogies between his period and his own times. But he knows that human beings are much the same in all ages, and that history still has a curious way of repeating itself. He knows, too, that contrasts are often instructive, and that analogies illustrate even when they do not prove. It is in this spirit that I ask you to consider with me the com- parative relations of the two countries in the Middle Ages Though we shall have mainly to study the Middle Ages, we must not refuse to disregard the hints which the events of remote times may give us as to the more recent relations of the two nations down to our own day.
Modern France — radical, anti-clerical, and republican — seems even more remote from the monarchical, catholic, and aristocratic France of the Middle Ages than does the United Kingdom of to-day from the Eng- land of the Plantagenets. Nevertheless, it was a French scholar who has put in the clearest light our common debt to the Middle Ages. " What we are, we are to a very great extent through the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages live in us ; they live around us ! "* M. Paul Viollet's
* P. Viollet : Histoire des Institutions poHtiques et administra- tive s de la France, ii., i.
SIMILARITY OF CONDITIONS 5
wise doctrine is, on the whole, more true of conservative England than of radical France. Yet I am not even sure whether the conventional epithets, which I have applied to the two countries, are to be taken in any com- plete sense. England has been for centuries working through revolution after revolution without knowing it, and France, though glorying in its one great Revolution which professed to wipe out previous history, is perhaps less radical than it believes itself to be. In any case the roots of the modern life of both nations go back to the Middle Ages. England and France are much more alike even now than many people would have us believe, but there was much less differentiation between the two states in the period with which we are chiefly concerned.
England and France were more alike in the Middle Ages than they are now because mediaeval conditions were similar in all Western Europe. A chief reason for this was that there were few of those differences be- tween one land and another which are brought about by differences of nationality. There is a bad habit of reading present conditions into a remote past from which even historians are not free, though they have less excuse for it than other men. It has resulted from this habit that we are accustomed to apply our present conception of Europe to mediaeval times. We think of Europe as consisting then, as now, of independent units called nations, each of which has its separate history and tradi- tions, each of which is, or imagines itself to be, of a com- mon stock, each of which speaks, or claims to speak, a dominant national tongue, and each one of which is, or hopes to be, the basis of a self-sufEcing national state.
6 COSMOPOLITANISM ^ FEUDALISM
It is hard to say what constitutes a nation. For the present it is hardly going too far to say that each local group, which believes itself to be a nation, has a very reasonable chance of becoming one. We are seeing at this moment one regrettable result of this process. The doctrine of nationality, which for a hundred years has been the rallying cry of political unionism, is in grave danger of being the pretext for a dangerous disintegration of Europe into states, not strong enough to live a dignified and self-respecting national existence, and still less able to constitute sound economic units. In their broad lines our recent treaties have been an attempt to extend the sphere of the national state, partly by readjusting the political boundaries of existing states to suit national conditions, and partly by extending to the many potential ** nations," notably those till yesterday unequally yoked together under the Hapsburg crown, the principle of nationality which hitherto they have been unable to realize. But in no mediaeval treaty — nay, in no modern treaty before the nineteenth century — did any politician dream of making an attempt to shape the boundaries of states so that they should correspond more accurately with the nations. More than that, it was not until quite modern times that the ideal of the national state had presented itself, save to a few dreamers.
The Middle Ages were familiar enough with the word " nation " (natioy nation). If they seldom came across the name in their Virgil or their Ovid, they could read about the nations in their Cicero and their Caesar, and they occasionally found the word in their Latin Bibles, which they read much more often than they read the poets,
MEDIAEVAL CONCEPTIONS OF NATION 7
orators, and historians. But in all these places the word " nation " was destitute of any political significance ; it hardly ever had anything to do with the state. It was sometimes used to denominate vaguely a group of peoples which might be sometimes, but which more often were not, members of the same political community. Some- times it was employed more specifically to denote a minute political entity that could in no wise be described by moderns as a nation. Thus the poet Dante writes of the *' Slavs, the Hungarians, the Germans, the Saxons, the English, and other nations," as if the Slavs had ever been a political state, or as if the subordinate Saxon nation did not convey quite a different sense of nation to that involved in its application to the nation of the Germans.* Elsewhere Dante described himself as a " Florentine by nation," as if a city state and a national state could be regarded as identical.f Clearly "nation" here means sometimes a race, sometimes a state, and sometimes a sub- division of the state. But " nation " was used in other senses as well. There are passages where the tenants of a monastery are said to belong to the " nation " of their house. There are others where the " nations " mean the common people, the tiers etat
The most general use of the term is to indicate a dis- trict, or the people of a district. It was in this sense
* De vuigari eloquio in Opera, p. 383, ed. Moore: He is giving a list of the peoples who, as he imagines, have languages of the same type. All the Teutonic nations "jo affirmando respondent." They are contrasted with the Latin races, whose word for "yes" is "oc," or "oil," or "si."
t Optra, p. 416: " Florentinus natione non moribus."
8 COSMOPOLITANISM ^ FEUDALISM
that the well-known use of " nation " to describe the four " nations " of Germany was made. This was also the sense in which the word " nation " was employed to denote the subdivision of the students of a university. This use began in Italy, where the numerous foreign students who studied at Bologna grouped themselves into clubs called " nations," according to the districts, cisalpine or transalpine, from which they came. When the term was artificially applied to the students of Paris, it resulted in their arbitrary division between four such accidental " nations " as the French, the Normans, the Picards, and the English. There can be nothing political in a list which includes so divided a community as the Picards, or which strove to group the cosmopolitan crowd which flocked to the schools of Paris from the whole of the western world into four such " nations " as these. Whatever " nation " meant to the mediaeval mind, it at least never meant anything that in any wise corresponded to the modern national state.
If we would, then, appreciate rightly the relations of England and France in the Middle Ages, we must begin by clearing away from our minds the modern doctrine of nationality as the normal basis of the political state. We must not assume a Europe split up into separate and self-sufficing unities called nations, and still less must we imagine that political relations, and even the social and economic relations that depend upon politics, could be determined in the long run by the ebb and flow of national sentiment. In modern times it may be recognized that some nations have natural affinities towards others, and therefore tend to have relations of friendship between
CLANNISHNESS OF MEDIAEVAL MAN 9
each other. Others, on the other hand, regard certain states as natural enemies from generation to generation. More often, however, the policy of interests prevails over the policy of traditional likes and dislikes. As the national interests vary or remain constant, so do the dealings be- tween the states embodying the national aspirations. Hence the extraordinary fluctuations that we know too well in the mutual relations of the states of Europe with each other. There was plenty of warfare in the Middle Ages, but it is only at the very end of that period that we can imagine these wars as the result of national sentiment.
Mediaeval man was clannish, local, limited in his at- tachments. He felt the reality of membership of the same community, but the community which made a real claim on his sympathies must be tangible, small, ever present before his eyes. Mere local proximity was not enough, for there might well be the deadliest conflicts between neighbours, since their interests were more likely to clash in proportion as they lived side by side and had diflFerent ends in view. Thus it resulted that the active and potent political relations of the Middle Ages were those which were based upon a small scale. A man felt loyalty to his native town or village and to the lord- ship, county, or other small organi2:ation of which he was consciously a part. He could be a Londoner, a Parisian, a Florentine : he could be a West-Saxon, a Norman, a Breton, or a Bavarian. But he found it hard to feel that he had any obligations as an Englishman, a French- man, or a German.
There was, however, one special loyalty to which mediaeval man could effectively respond. This, if in
10 COSMOPOLITANISM ^ FEUDALISM
many cases serving as a new link in local and clannish attachments, might on occasion prove a real step towards the establishment of a larger allegiance and make, there- fore, towards a broader unity. This was the personal tie of devotion to a common lord. That lord might be the village squire : but he might also be the ultimate ruler of a wide district — a king, a prince, even an emperor. And this bond of lordship was particularly strong in the case of the personal servants of such a lord, h\s familiar es, the members of his household or familia. Accordingly, the most potent force that made for larger unions in the Middle Ages was the tie of lordship. This was the more felt since the lord was proprietor of the soil as well as political ruler, landlord as well as king. In this sense " feudalism " made for a real union. In its higher ranges subjection to a common lord made for national unity : in its lower ranges it made for the local unity which prepared the way for national unity. Indeed, the development of the great monarchies, from which the modern national state was ultimately to arise, would have been quite impossible had it not been that each mighty local lord had been doing within his own sphere what the kings themselves had to do within wider limits. It is not only the Capetians and the Valois who built up the French state. The dukes of Brittany and Bur- gundy, the counts of Champagne and Toulouse, even the English dukes of Guienne, each prepared the way for the realizing of the ultimate ideal by establishing a well-ordered consolidated central power within his own appointed limits. Hence the importance of the smaller aggregations. Hence the constant use of the word
THE TIE OF LORDSHIP ii
" nation " in the sense of province — that is, some district subject to a common lord and having some local feeling of unity. With all his vagaries M. Flach has done good service to scholarship in emphasizing the vital part of what he deftly calls les nationalites regionales in building up la naUonal'tte frangatse*
We may claim, then, that feudalism prepared the way for nationalism, alike by promoting the unity of those smaller aggregations which facilitated the growth of the national state and by bringing together the future nations under a common tie of obedience to an ultimate lord. Yet it must not be supposed that feudalism as a whole made for unity. On the contrary, the feudal baron presents himself in history as an eminently disruptive force. His ideal was that there should be as many kings as there were lords of castles. This conception was fata 1 to all good government, for the lord of a castle was, as a rule, proprietor of an estate too small to give him the resources necessary for becoming an effective ruler. As such he was the natural enemy of strong government, which could only be secured by a monarch, wielding extensive re- sources over a widespread territory. Feudal privilege, which arose from the dissolution of the imperial world- state of the past, was equally incompatible with the universal political unity of Roman tradition and with the national state of the future. Moreover, feudalism was a force common to the whole western world. It made for cosmopolitanism rather than for nationalism, for it was in itself an instrument for levelling up all Europe by the wide diffusion of a common ideal. The feudal baron, * J. Flach: Les origines de I'ancienne France, vol. iv.
12 COSMOPOLITANISM & FEUDALISM
the feudal castle, feudal justice, land tenure, and all the rest were part of that common European heritage which still remained a potent fact, even after the break-up of the Roman Empire had destroyed the political unity which in the early centuries of the Christian era made the whole western world subject to a single state.
This political unity was, moreover, but one side of the picture, and, as time went on, it became the less important side. The Catholic Church was even more cosmopolitan than feudalism, and it was the church, rather than feudalism or the empire, which had now become the chief effective force in keeping the western world together as a single community. Yet the church, like feudalism, was in some ways a disruptive force. It was the church, with its claim to immunities more comprehensive than the franchises of the baron, that had made all ordered political rule difficult, since in its zeal for marking out in grand lines the things which it claimed to belong to God it unduly restricted the sphere which it allowed to Caesar. The church, no less than the baron, was the natural enemy of the king. " All the progress," as M. G^nestal has well said, " all the progress of the royal authority may be summed up in these two phrases — a victorious struggle against the law courts of the feudal lords, a victorious struggle against the jurisdiction of the church."*
Plenty of hard things have been said as to the dangers
* R. G^nestal : Lf Prwilegium Fori en Trance du Dicret de Graiien a lajin du XIV^^ Steele y p. i . Bibliotheque de Tficole des hautes Etudes — Section religieuse, No. 3 5 (Paris : Leroux, 1921).
INFLUENCE OF THE CHURCH 13
of feudalism ; much, too, has been said as to the anti- social activities of the mediaeval church. But in recog- nizing their weaker sides, let us not be blind to the forces emanating from them w^hich made for order and progress. Civilization is the resultant of many potent contributory elements, some of them contradictory to others, but all of them working for progress. Even feudalism, the *' organization of anarchy," must not be too unsparingly condemned. The rabid anti-clerical interpretation of mediaeval history is always in danger of becoming a mere travesty of the facts.
Thus there were many factors contributing to the development of civilization. But of the men wielding these instruments we may feel sure that most of the makers — ro)^l, ecclesiastical, provincial, or baronial — of the modern nations were labouring with absolute unconsciousness of what was to be the result of their efforts. They worked, moreover, not for society but for themselves. Regarding themselves as proprietors of their respective jurisdictions, they were urged, both by duty and interest, to make their dominions strong, united, and prosperous. Their motives, in short, were the same as those of the great vassals who had prepared the way for them. Yet when, as in the age of Philip the Fair and Edward I, they had established a real domination over an ordered and centralized community, the kings of the nations commanded allegiance much more as supreme lords than as political sovereigns. Great kings did not differ in kind but in degree from their nobles. Both classes alike accepted that identity of the economic with the political wherein lay the very essence of feudal-
14 COSMOPOLITANISM ^ FEUDALISM
ism. Every western land was subject to similar condi- tions of government. Everywhere was there an aristo- cratic class of great landed proprietors, who ruled over their landed possessions as princes. All these monarchs, great and small, governed both their domains and their whole dominions by the instrumentality of their house- hold servants, and it was from the organized household of mediaeval potentates that the modern ministries, the modern fashions of administration, had their origin. They did not distinguish between the management of an estate and the government of a principality.
Under these conditions the principle of allegiance remained personal rather than local. The Middle Ages reprobated as an iniquity treason against the lord : they had not yet begun to appreciate the enormity of treason against the community, the betrayal of the interests of the nation to the foreigner. Indeed, the " foreigner " was to the mediaeval man much less the alien of a distant land than the neighbour with whom he had to have constant dealings but with whom he could never agree. England, the first of the nations to raise an outcry against the foreigner, remained one of the most sympathetic lands to the alien who identified himself and his interests with his new domicile. Thus the England of Henry III exhausted its vocabulary of invective against the Poitevin and Savoyard kinsfolk of king and queen who strove to exploit the land in their own interests. Yet England willingly followed the leadership of a pure Frenchman, such as Simon de Montfort, when he put himself at the head of the national party of opposition. The rivalry of family with family, of district with district, of class with
PERSONAL ^ LOCAL ALLEGIANCE 15
class within the same region was much fiercer than strife with distant lands about which the ordinary man knew little and cared less. It seems an astonishing thing to the modern Englishman that the barons, who had wrested Magna Charta from John, should have called in the future Louis VIII, the heir of the French monarchy, to save English liberty from the English tyrant. It seems scandalous to the modern Frenchman that a great Nor- man baron, like Godefroi de Harcourt, should in 1 346 invite the English into Normandy. Even more be- wildering to modern patriotic emotion is that Anglo- Burgundian alliance of the fifteenth century which, for a time, threatened to remove France from the list of independent nations of Europe. But to the Middle Ages both seemed natural enough, and no worse a crime than the ordinary " defiance " by a vassal of his lord. In the same way there seemed nothing monstrous to the fourteenth-century mind that the king of England should claim the throne of France because of some imagined right of descent which, if established, might perhaps have given him a claim to a landed estate. But a kingdom was a landed estate to a mediaeval eye, and men saw no harm in anyone demanding his legal rights.
Even in the thirteenth, still more in the fourteenth, century it was becoming clear that proprietary monarchy was not enough. The instinct which rallied England to expel Louis of France in 121 7, the foresight which in 1 327 led the barons of France to repudiate the insidious doctrine that marriage might give a legal right to a foreigner to dominate their land, showed that national feeling was beginning to assert itself. In the long run,
1 6 COSMOPOLITANISM & FEUDALISM
however, the great forces which made for nationality came not from the people, but from the kings. When once effective lord of a great region, the prince wanted some more natural and compelling claim to lordship than that of mere proprietorship. National monarchy was, in fact, struggling into existence when the prince had become the symbol of national unity, when the king of England or the king of France ruled over the mass of those that spoke the English or the French tongue. Yet the proprietary rights of the prince were in no wise impaired by the fact that part of his subjects were outside the national tradition represented by their lord. It was indeed the case that a political unit was more easily established when prince and subject were bound by a linguistic as well as by a feudal tie. The Celtic element in Brittany, the low-Dutch element in Flanders, made for the regional unity of those regions under their duke or count, even when a large element in the population shared in the French sympathies and tongue of their ruling house. France easily absorbed Burgundy and Normandy be- cause there was no deep linguistic barrier between the recent acquisition and its new ruler. A Dante's interest in the vulgar tongue was perhaps sharpened by the instinct that the Italians, had they a common vernacular language, would be more easily brought together under the Italianate empire of which he dreamed.
Yet this tendency was only rudimentary. No one as yet had thought of claiming that a man who used the language of the sovereign of an inchoate nation should, therefore, be subject to the monarch with whom he had speech in common. For one thing, the vernacular
BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL MONARCHY 17
languages were not yet the tongues that counted, and the languages which mattered were still to a great extent common to the whole west. But even nowadays we must not overstress the identity of language and nation- ality. There are many who speak the French tongue in Belgium, in la Suisse Romande, in Canada, and in Mauritius who are not subjects of the French state ; and there are certainly in America more English-speaking aliens to the British state than are included in all the citizens of the British Empire.
Despite some contrary tendencies, the dominant mediaeval doctrine still regarded western Europe as a single whole. Even when by the fourteenth century the national state was clearly obtruding itself into the world of fact, it found very little expression in the books of the theorists. To the writers on political theory the supreme state was still one, and was most commonly symbolized by the universal monarchy of the Roman Empire. But in this last stage of the vitality of the doctrine of the world-state may we not well believe that imperialism was often nationalism so disguised that the imperialists were themselves unconscious of their national bias ? It was a step forward towards nationalism when we find the champions of the world empire draping a national monarch in the garments of Roman universalism. The German theorists spoke of the emperor's right to rule the world But even when the theorist was a de- nationalized Englishman, like William of Ockham, was he not anticipating the modern claim of the Teuton to dominate his neighbours by reason of his superior prowess and his ineffable cultur ? The most conspicuous
B
1 8 COSMOPOLITANISM Cff FEUDALISM
upholders of the imperial theory are, however, to be found among the Italians. Yet when Dante taught, in his exile from Florence, that only a Roman emperor could restore peace to a distracted world, was he not thinking of his own Italy rather than of the lands west and north of the Alps ? And cannot De Monarchia be best inter- preted as a half-realized vision of a united Italy, an Italy which by reason of its direct representation of the Roman past had the same traditional right to rule less civilized communities that the philosophers and poets of ancient Greece and Rome had claimed for their own highly favoured lands ? To Petrarch at least Englishmen, and perhaps Frenchmen, too, were barbarians in the ancient use of that phrase — barbarians because they were not Italian, and, because barbarians, rightly to be ruled over by the civilized Roman. Nay, when a Pierre Dubois * exhorts Edward I of England to end all wars between Christians and lead a united Europe on a crusade, when the same writer, rather in- consistently, argues in the same breath that Philip the Fair should win the empire for his house and, in addition, translate the papacy from Italy to France — is not the French publicist also asserting, in fact, the pre-eminent claims of the greatest nations of the west to form strong national states rather than to clothe themselves with the tattered rags of decadent Caesarism ? But the Roman
* Pierre Dubois : De Recuperatione Terre Sancte, ed. Ch. V. Langlois. For a commentary on this see F. M. Powicke: "Pierre Dubois: A Mediaeval Radical" in Manchester Uni- versily Historical Essays^ ed. Tout and Tait, pp. 169-192 (1907).
IMPERIALISM AND NATIONALISM 19
Empire was far too permanently Teutonized to make any general appeal, even to the Italians. It made no appeal whatsoever to Frenchmen and Englishmen. In reading these dreams of empire we feel that we are dealing with unrealities, sometimes the imagination of an idealist, sometimes an immediate weapon of controversy in the hands of a politician. We get down to solid earth once more when we read a John of Paris writing in the very beginning of the fourteenth century to deny the obliga- tion of a universal realm, and to maintain that whereas in the church unity is required by the law of God, the faithful laity, inspired by a natural instinct not less divine in its origin, should live in different states. Later on, the anti-clerical Somnium Firidariiy^ written on behalf of Charles V of France, pleads that it will be sufficient if we can but establish unity within each particular realm. In this relation we must not forget that St. Thomas Aquinas could somehow classify and analyze the contemporary state on the lines suggested by the Politics of Aristotle. If the greatest thinker of the Middle Ages could im- plicitly regard the world as consisting of small com- munities of a civic character, like the city states of Greece, it shows how little the theory of an ideal political unity meant to him. Yet St. Thomas had more excuse for reading ancient conditions into his own age than had Jean- Jacques Rousseau for doing the same in the eighteenth century. But Rousseau had the justification that Geneva was a true city state.
Let us not, therefore, overstress the influence on the
* Its date is about 1376. It can be read in Goldast: Monarchia Sancii Rom am Impiriij I.
20 COSMOPOLITANISM & FEUDALISM
western mind of the theoretical world-state, the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. For England and France alike, the empire was a negligible quantity. It was in no sense a reality : it was not even a generally recognized ideal. So far as it lived on at all, it consisted in the following of the Carolingian tradition. Herein lay a broader principle of unity than in the feudal or pro- prietary state : herein, in particular, was a habit of ordered administration, but one that had little influence on the zealot for empire east of the Rhine and Alps. More- over, the Carolingian tradition was no monopoly of the German monarchs, who claimed to be Roman emperors. It was as much a part of the inheritance of the Cape- tian house as it was of the imperial heads of the Germano- Italian realm. This tradition gave a broader character to the French state that could arise from the expansion of a feudal principality into a kingdom. Nay, we may even claim some practical share in this great tradition to the mighty Norman and Angevin kings of the island realm which they had won by conquest. It was in the Angevin lands that the first adequately administered and ordered state was established that bridges the gulf between the Carolingian administrative machinery of the early Middle Ages and the beginnings of quasi-national administration in the England and France of the thirteenth and later centuries.
In dismissing the claims of the Germano-Roman empire to be the chief force in binding the mediaeval world together as a cosmopolitan state, let us not be thought to be impugning the mighty share which the Roman tradition had in the ordering of mediaeval civiliza-
THE UNI VERBALISM OF THE CHURCH 21
don. It was Rome that brought together the western world in a real unity. But the Rome that counted was the Rome of the popes — not the Rome of the emperors. The Catholic Church, of which the Roman bishop was universal ordinary, remained alive while the Roman empire was dead. It was not only a church with a common faith, a common ritual, a common language and literature, and a common standard of moral and social ideals. It was also a church with a world- wide organization. At the head of it was the Roman bishop, the universal ordinary, the successor of the prince of the apostles, appointed by Christ himself to be the source of all ecclesiastical authority. To him were sub- ject all holders of ecclesiastical office in every land. It is a mere modern imagination that has led some English scholars to believe that there was any prelate, however dignified, who could stand up against the papal authority. There was no dignitary of the church who held a stronger position than the archbishop of Canterbury. One femous archbishop of Canterbury was addressed by Urban II as papa alterius orbis. But it was one of his successors as primate of all England who thus apostro- phized the pope at a general council : " Holy father, I am the work and creature of your hands : my church is your church, and my goods are your goods. Dispose therefore of my church and my goods as you would deal with your own."* And it was an English parliament,
* Chronicon Walteri de Hemingburgh, II, 3. Eng. Hist. Soc. This was said by the Dominican archbishop, Robert Kilwardby, to Gregory X at the second Council of Lyons of 1274.
22 COSMOPOLITANISM l^ FEUDALISM
under Edward III, which addressed the pope as *' of the Holy Church of Rome and of the universal Church sovereign bishop," and as " chief of Holy Church, by whom all Holy Church and God's people are as by the sun illuminated."*
There was, it is true, an Ecclesia Anglicana and an Ecclesia Galltcana^ each of which had its officers, its synods, and its canons, but to both of which the will of the pope was the supreme law before which any local usage must give way. The barons of England claimed in the Great Charter that the English church should be free : but the freedom sought for the church was freedom from the jurisdiction of the state, not freedom from the control of its divinely appointed head. In the face of this doctrine there could be no national church, even less than there could be a national state. It is not until the national idea had become well established in the state that in the fifteenth century some Paris doctors, headed by Gerson, introduced into the organization of the Council of Constance some faint expression of the national idea. But Gerson in dividing the Council of Constance into four *' nations " was thinking of the nations of the University of Paris, more than of the nations in a political sense. Italy was, therefore, made a " nation," not to prepare the way for the national Italian state of modern times, but as a means towards breaking down the power of the Italian bishops, by giving them, despite their great numbers, no greater voting power than the com- paratively few bishops that represented France, Germany,
* Adam Murimuth: Continuatio Chronicarumy pp. 138, 139. Rolls Series.
THE PAPACY AND RELIGIOUS ORDERS 23
and England. There was, perhaps, in the " concih'ar movement " a wider vision of setting up oecumenical councils as the parliaments, in the English sense, of a constitutional pope, who only reigned with the counsel and consent of the spiritual magnates of Christendom. At earlier dates even general councils, like the great councils of temporal princes, were advisory and con- sultative, not legislative or executive. They gave the pope advice which he might take or reject When Clement V suppressed the Templars at the Council of Vienne he did it of his own authority, and the council simply recommended him to take this course. Not only, then, was the general council, like the papacy itself, an institution common to the Christian world. As a merely consultative body, it could do little directly to restrain the papal autocracy.
Not only the papacy but many other cosmopolitan organizations kept up the universal appeal of the Catholic Church. The twelfth-century religious orders, for in- stance— the Cistercians, the Carthusians, the Templars, and the Hospitalers — had a world-wide sphere and a world-wide organization. With the thirteenth century came the four orders of friars, each with a single adminis- tration, transcending the nations, and as little regardful of political boundaries as were the provinces of the metropolitans. When Innocent III, at the Lateran Council of 1 21 5, imposed the "congregational" system upon the Benedictines the whole monastic world was subjected to rigid oecumenical control from within each order. This internal control was in addition to and independent of the higher control of the papacy.
24 COSMOPOLITANISM & FEUDALISM
In the realm of law it was the same. There were two laws, each emanating from Rome, which claimed uni- versal validity. But of these the canon law of the church was a real international system of jurisprudence, and had far more authority than the civil law of the emperor because the papacy, the fountain of canon law, was a living reality, while the emperor, the theoretical source of civil law, had no power of adding to a system already codified as complete since the age of Justinian. While the canon law was universally recognized, the civil law was looked upon with suspicion. This was not be- cause it unduly favoured autocracy, but because it stood counter to the municipal laws of the rising national states and was believed to emphasize the force of the secular as against the spiritual arm. Accordingly the great University of Paris had no faculty of civil law, and civil law was most studied as a preliminary to the study of the canons and exercised its chief influence through the canon law which was so largely based upon it. It was through the canon law, even more than through the administrative machinery of the Curia Romana^ that the papacy made its power felt throughout Christendom. The pope was the supreme legislator, the supreme judge, and the ultimate executive officer of the canon law. In every archdeaconry, every diocese, every province there was an active tribunal trying all manner of causes by the methods of the canonists. Over all these the pope had direct sway. His court was not only the chief court of appeal. He could at his discretion evoke any suit before his own tribunal, appoint commissioners to hold his court in any Christian land, or override any decisions
THE CANON LAW 25
of the inferior jurisdictions. This authority was the more potent since it was an age which confused the spheres of church and state, almost as much as it con- fused the status of landholder and ruler. The church accordingly was more than a church : it was a state also — in a way it was a super-state. For the ecclesiastical authority, conscious at its best that it was aiming at the execution of justice, at its worst that it was extending its own authority, took the widest view of the claims of the forum ecclesiasticum. Though there were many disputes as to the limits of the rival jurisdictions of church and state, there was no denial on the part of the secular power of the validity of the canonical authority within its own sphere. It is a mistake to think that the statute of Praemunire was in any specific sense an attack on the international authority of the church universal. It was primarily an attempt to limit the exercise of the world- wide jurisdiction of the papacy to its own proper sphere of things spiritual.
The papacy symbolized the spiritual unity of Christen- dom. The pope was universal bishop, supreme judge and law giver, ultimate arbiter on all questions of faith and morals. In his pride he claimed that the church was the sun and the state the moon, shining only by re- flected light. As inspired from on high, he had a natural oversight over all earthly powers. We shall see how in the Hundred Years' War the papacy acted as mediator between France and England, postponing the struggle for some years, ever anxious to negotiate a truce or peace, and capable, perhaps, either of putting off or of ending the struggle, had not the popes of Avignon been suspected by
26 COSMOPOLITANISM ^ FEUDALISM
Englishmen of undue bias towards their native France. In short, the spirit of nationality was beginning to make itself felt on Frenchmen, even when they became popes. Nevertheless, the papacy still discharged, and not always ineffectively, the functions which idealists hope will in future be assigned to the League of Nations. Even in the political sphere it gave Europe a real basis of unity. Above all, it ensured to Europe its spiritual solidarity.
The intellectual solidarity of Europe was as effective as its spiritual solidarity and was essentially bound up with it. Part of this came through the common in- heritance of ancient Roman literature — the only great literature accessible to the early Middle Ages. More of it came from the university, the most important and novel gift of the Middle Ages to modern times. Now, the mediaeval university was as much a cosmopolitan institution as the papacy or the mendicant orders. Indeed it was, almost as much as the mendicant orders, a creation of the papal authority. Universities arose when the masters or scholars organised themselves into corporations. But they became oecumenical and permanent only when the papacy covered them with its aegis, and emancipated them from the jurisdiction of the local bishop and chapter.* The tongue of the university, like that of the church, was Latin : its organization, its method, its studies, its outlook were the same all over the western world. More- over, universities were few in number before the fifteenth
* A. Luchaire truly says, " Le pape, et non pas le roi, ni r^veque regne sur Tuniversite." Lavisse : Histoire de France^ iii, i> 345-
THE COSMOPOLITAN UNIVERSITY 27
century, and there were only two great and typical universities, Paris and Bologna, to which western learning turned for guidance. Though many Englishmen and Frenchmen studied at Bologna, that university, like Italy as a whole, stood apart from the main currents of western life. To the world in which England and France moved Paris was the one great university. It was very slowly, and largely as a result of the Hundred Years' War, that the local English university at Oxford began to mean to Englishmen all that Paris had meant to the whole western world between the days of Abelard and the early fourteenth century.
The scholars of the Middle Ages were more lucky than we are in one respect. They had in Latin a common tongue, and this common tongue was not only the language of the classrooms, but the speech used by the academic class, teachers and taught, in their daily inter- course with each other. It was also the language of all serious literature and nearly all diplomatic, legal, and business proceedings. This monopoly of Latin was almost absolute up to the end of the thirteenth century : it was impaired, but not seriously endangered, by the increased use of the vernaculars for literary and business purposes in the fourteenth century. But all through the Middle Ages the university spoke only Latin, and the curriculum and organization of every western seat of learning remained established on the same broad lines as in France and England. When a student emigrated from Oxford or Naples to Paris, he found the same sort of lectures, given in the same tongue, that he had learnt in the classrooms of his native country. He found
28 COSMOPOLITANISM & FEUDALISM
the same subjects of instruction, the same technique, the same point of view, the same intellectual atmos- phere as in the universities of his own land. The con- course was greater, the atmosphere freer ; the oppor- tunities of intercourse with greater minds wider, the career open to talent more extensive. Yet the English scholar might find that the famous doctor at whose feet he sat had come from his own country, it may be from his own shire or village. He felt that if he, too, had the brains and character, he might in his turn " rule in the schools " with the best of them. There was no national qualification or distinction. All were citizens of a common fatherland of learning. And the universities trained the statesman, the clerical statesman, as well as the scholar. In the early fourteenth century many English diplomatists must have been college friends of the diplomatic representatives of the enemy. It was surely of some importance that the politicians of the rival nations had learnt the same lessons side by side and carried into the great world the traditions and corporate spirit of the faculty. Not even the war broke off the habit of fre- quenting the schools of a rival country. It was ex- pressly stipulated in the treaty of Calais of 1360 that all subjects of the kings of England and France, who wished to study in the universities of the lands of their sometime enemy, should enjoy all the privileges and liberties which they had possessed before the war. Thus church and university combined to give the educated man a cosmopolitan habit of mind.
Here the contrast between mediaeval and modern reaches its supreme limits. In modern times state con-
THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY 29
trol and perfervid patriotic spirit have tended to make the universities the focus of nationalism. Indeed, the ten- dency had begun already in the fifteenth century, when the English, after Henry V's conquest of Normandy, erected the University of Caen to prevent their Norman subjects frequenting the schools of Paris, and established a Gascon university at Bordeaux to damage the loyal French univer- sity at Toulouse. When Paris itself fell under Anglo- Burgundian rule, Charles VII, the king of Bourges, set up a rival university at Poitiers to check the flow of good French- men to the ancient capital. After the reconquest of Paris by Charles it was resolved that the natio anglkana in the Paris studium should henceforth be called the German nation. It was a time when a university was a new thing in the lands of the German Empire, for the first university beyond the Rhine was only set up in a non-German land at Prague by the emperor Charles IV, who was a persistent friend of France. Within a genera- tion Bohemia resisted German domination, and, under the lead of John Huss, the Czech masters drove the German scholars from Prague, and forced them to erect an antagonistic German university at Leipzig. Was this foundation the first faint warning of the spirit which has made the modern German universities set the tone to extreme pan-Germanism and teach ridiculous theories of race, as if they were the lessons of historical science ? But, though in less blatant terms, all modern universities are national, though we may hope that ere long all societies of scholars will be true to the spirit of the Middle Ages in fostering the cosmopolitanism and humanity of science. Yet some trouble has followed from this
30 COSMOPOLITANISM ^ FEUDALISM
nationalization of culture. The modern student, unless he has had the linguistic drill of a German waiter, finds it hard to wander freely from one foreign seat of learning to another. He is repelled not only by the disappearance from the classrooms of the common tongue that was the lingua franca of all mediaeval scholars. He is sometimes also kept aloof by the intensity of the alien atmosphere which he has to breathe.
Under the heads of the regnum, the sacerdotium^ and the studium we have treated the chief forces which made for mediaeval cosmopolitanism But there were many other international elements in mediaeval civilization. Socially, for example, the western world was ordered on similar lines. The higher society represented a type, best studied in France and largely emanating from France, which spread all over the western world, but nowhere so clearly as in England. A distinguished French scholar, M. Charles Langlois, is bold enough to recognize in certain traits of the upper-class social life in contemporary England survivals of the sport-loving, love-making, open- air life of the lords and ladies of the rural manors of the Middle Ages.* In such a life the social cleavages were as sharp as those of modern times, but the lines of demar- cation were not the same. It was the general recognition of the ultimate nature of these lines that enabled class
* Ch. V. Langlois: La Sociiti frangaise aux XIII' sieck d^apres dix Romans d'Aventure^ pp. 22, 23. He adds: " Les traces qui s'en voient encore contribuent a donner ^ la vie anglaise sa physionomie particuliere, mais il ne faut pas oublier que c'est Tarchaisme de ces manieres qui en fait maintenant, pour nous, Toriginalite apparente."
SOCIAL ^ ECONOMIC CLEAVAGE 31
to mingle with class with greater ease than is always the case nowadays — ^anyhow, in England. And it is doubtful whether, even in egalitarian France, we could find now- adays as great freedom of social intercourse as that exist- ing between the knight, the prioress, the ploughman, the friar, the Oxford scholar, the shipman, and the wife of Bath in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, While we moderns have become democrats, the Middle Ages were aristocratic. But mediaeval aristocracies were no narrow ones. The widely diffused aristocracies of chivalry, the church, the law, and the administration all tended to- wards equality within their own limits. Men, too, could escape from the class in which they were born through the university, the church, and the army, and by the fourteenth century even by acquiring through commerce the means to purchase a landed estate. No doubt the system had its drawbacks, and there were from time to time mediaeval Bolsheviks who strove to over- throw it. But their revolt made no general appeal. The " war of classes," though it had its preachers in our period, was much less often the rallying cry of revolution than in our own age.
It has direct bearing on our subject to remember that the ties of class — the common feelings which bound clerk to clerk, or scholar to scholar — made for international comity and understanding and for the breaking down of strong local prejudices. Nor were these sentiments limited to the clerical and academic class. All over the west remarkable similarity of social, economic, and politi- cal conditions bound knight to knight, baron to baron, burgess to burgess, and craftsman to craftsman. If thert
32 COSMOPOLITANISM & FEUDALISM
were any place for democracy in the mediaeval system, that place must be sought in the towns, and notably in those urban democracies of the Low Countries whose social and political conditions M. Pirenne has so well depicted.* Outside the Netherlands there was no place in any region north of the Alps for a polity based upon ordered urban life. Yet the scattered town workers of normal western lands had sufficient homogeneity with each other to make it possible for a series of closely re- lated revolutionary disturbances to break out almost simultaneously in the Netherlands, in England, in France, and in Florence in the years between 1378 and 1381. Mediaeval solidarity of feeling was naturally strongest in those select classes which, under then existing social conditions, had most of the governing, directing, and fighting in their own hands. It had its clearest expression in the system of chivalry which made the knight, the trained soldier, endowed with adequate landed estate and admitted to the brotherhood of arms, feel that he had the same interests and ideals as his brother knights in other lands. It was the same with other privileged groups — with the clerk, admitted to the tonsure and the numerous immunities of a class which for generations included all educated men; with the graduate of a university, ad- mitted in the same way to the oecumenical brotherhood of the teaching class; and with the master of his craft, made freeman of his guild. Now, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were periods of rapid and radical progress. Society became more complex : life fuller,
* H. Pirenne: L^s anciennes Democraties des Pays-bas, Translated as Belgian Democracy : in early History (191 5).
BEGINNINGS OF LAY CULTURE 33
richer, and happier. Learning and letters were ceasing to be the monopoly of the clerical class. The miles literatusy the knight who could write and speak Latin, was no longer a rare or an extraordinary phenomenon, and the lay lawyer, who owed nothing to universities, was gradually ousting the clerical lawyer, trained in the academic schools in civil or canon law.
One result of extreme importance for us arose from this broadening of the stream of civilization. There arose, side by side with the older clerical culture, an educated lay society, and this society, though it could express itself, if needs be, in Latin, never found that the language of old Rome came trippingly to its tongue. Yet it was, after the mediaeval fashion, not the product of any single locality so much as a general growth. If such men had relations with kindred spirits in other lands, their international needs required an internationl verna- cular. By the thirteenth century such an international speech of lay culture was found in the speech of Paris. The reasons for this were many. France, since the days of Philip Augustus and St. Louis, had become the greatest of monarchies. Moreover, French speech and manners extended far beyond the French realm. French was the tongue of the court, the landed classes, and the higher bour- geoisie of England ; it was spoken, too, in those western imperial lands, such as the Walloon Netherlands, Lorraine, the Burgundies, which, alone of the emperor's dominions, had their faces turned to the west. Whenever western chivalry worked together for a common end it expressed itself in French. French was the language of the crusaders : both of the fighting crusaders gathered
34 COSMOPOLITANISM ^ FEUDALISM
from all lands and of the governing classes in the crusading principalities of the east. To the Oriental, Greek, or Mohammedan the westerners were the Franks, and laws drawn up for Catholic Palestine or Cyprus were written in French, when in England or France laws were still composed in Latin. It was, too, the tongue of international trade, and merchants kept their books and carried on their correspondence in the same speech. This prevalence of the French tongue and French ideals long preceded the greatness of the French state. Even when the French state had become great, the French tongue and French civilization were implicitly accepted by lands and peoples over which French political domina- tion was unthinkable. It was inevitable that this should be so. When other vernaculars were split up into a multitude of dialects, unintelligible outside a narrow district, northern French had become standardized and normalized so that multitudes could speak and read it easily. Accordingly, the knightly culture of the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries had French as its common speech. It was the second international language, the tongue of knightly culture in which much of the best of the lighter literature, songs, poems, romances, sermons, popular histories was naturally composed in all western lands. Primarily the tongue of the gentry, it was also to a large extent a secondary language of clerks, especially after the removal of the papacy to Avignon brought the papal court to the very doors of France. The most universal form of mediaeval art, whose richest product was Gothic architecture, was French in origin and spread by French-speaking craftsmen from Burgundy and the
FRENCH AN INTERNATIONAL TONGUE 35
Ile-de-France to Westminster, Canterbury, and to the dales of Yorkshire and Wales, to the Rhineland and to the East German lands newly conquered from the Slav, and southwards, beyond the Alps and Pyrenees, to the Roman Campagna and to Burgos and Toledo.
We have thus in the general spread of French influence, and particularly in the spread of the French tongue and French art, new instruments of cosmopolitanism. It was not, as with the similar growth under Louis XIV, a force making for French political supremacy. It was much more the strengthening in a new direction of the old tendencies that kept the western world together. Before Dante urged the formation of a common romance vernacular for his native land, Brunetto Latini, another Italian, wrote in French what he wished all men to read, because French was the most delectable and the most universal of all languages. But all these things were common to the western world, and we have tarried, perhaps over long, over generalities which, though true enough, are not specially true of France and England only. The excuse must be that without some indication of the essentially non-national character of the mediaeval state and society, we should go wrong in dealing with the international relations of two states which we know as nations and imagine, therefore, to have been nations for all time. From this point of view France and Eng- land have this essential feature in common — that they were sharers in a common civilization. But this civiliza- tion is so rudimentary, so little realized in detail, so evasive of all definition that a mere generalization such as we are now making does not help us \try much. Much of
36 COSMOPOLITANISM ^ TEUDALI5M
what we can say of the two lands can be said with equal truth of other countries also.
There were, however, far more special and intimate ties that bound together the peoples of France and Eng- land than those links common to the whole world. These particularly intimate relations, which made Anglo-French civilization almost a thing apart from the general civiliza- tion of the west, flowed from the results upon the two lands of the conquest of England by the Normans under William the Bastard. It is accordingly to the Anglo- Norman state of Norman and Angevin times, and to the corresponding early Capetian monarchy of France, that we must devote ourselves in my next lecture.
Lecture II
Anglo-French Civilization
under
Normans^ Angevins^ & Capetians
In my first lecture I tried to indicate the general cos- mopolitan basis of mediaeval society. To the mediaeval mind the western world presented itself as a unity with a single civilization, faith, and manners. Accordingly, France and England had thus much in common that they were sharers in these traditions. But theory and practice were in no wise in harmony, and, despite the strong cos- mopolitan ideals that yoked people to people and state to state, the actual political forces that, after the eleventh and twelfth centuries, were making for order, discipline, and progress were limited and local rather than universal. But however much this was the case, they were in no wise national, for in those days the word " nation " suggested something provincial, tribal, " feudal," racial, rather than anything political. The nation was as yet in no sense the basis of the state. In such a system there is no room for national relations, since there were no national states. We cannot, there- fore, speak of the national relations between French and English in days when French and English meant nothing that was specifically political. There were Frenchmen and Englishmen : there was a France and an England. But these ethnic and geographical expressions meant, at the best, the peoples so-called and the lands in which they lived. They in no strict modern sense suggested a national French and a national English state. Moreover,
38 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
early mediaeval states were such imperfect organizations, and so scantily equipped with material resources, that no close political relations between them were possible. This was pre-eminently the case with England, where civilization was in many ways less advanced than on the continent. Before the Norman conquest England had no continental relations, save those of the most casual and accidental character. It had become bit by bit some- thing approaching a world apart, living its own self-con- tained and limited life and working out its own salvation in ways peculiar to itself.
Let us glance for a moment at this early England. There was an England in the territorial sense as the land in which the English lived. There were also English in the racial sense from a very early period, for did not Bede, an eighth century monk, trace from the fifth century to his own days the ecclesiastical history of the English people — Historia Ecclesiastica gentis jfnglorum f But the English people remained for centuries divided into many kingdoms, often fiercely antagonistic to each other. It was only gradually that one race of kings established a supremacy over the others. It was similarly through a very slow process that there emerged from these supremacies the regnum Anglorum, Even when the tenth century saw the evolution of the English kingdom out of its nucleus in the West Saxon realm, the English kingdom before the Norman conquest remained a formal rather than a real unity. If it at times aspired, not altogether unsuccessfully, to become a monarchy of Britain, its collapse before the Norsemen, and its easy absorption in the northern monarchy of Canute
JNGLU AND FRJNCU 39
the Dane, showed how unstable it was in its very basis.
Things were more advanced on the other side of the Channel. Just as in the island of Britain we have first the Jngli and then an Anglia^ so in the old Roman Gaul there were first the Franci and then a Francia, There were Franci from the third century at least. These Franci swarmed over the Rhine, settled in large numbers in northern Gaul, and played the leading part both in the downfall of the Old Roman Empire and in putting up in its place a new Imperium Romanum of which the Frankish warriors and the Frankish kings were the dominant elements. But the Francia, sometimes spoken of by early writers, was the regnum Francorum^ which at one time meant much less, and ultimately meant much more, than the Gallia of Roman writers. This was especially the case in the great days of the Carolingians, when the monk of St. Gallen, who wrote the life of Charlemagne, expressly explains that he means by Francia all the Cisal- pine provinces of Gaul.f But as time went on, the
* This seems to be the sense in which Gregory of Tours speaks of " Francia," or the " regnum Francorum." I can only discover three passages in which Gregory uses the term " Francia " by itself, though he once speaks (p. 117, ed. Omont et Collon) of " regnum Francie."
'\ De Gestis Caroli Magni in Dom Bouquet, v. no: "Franciam vero interdum cum nomino, omnes cisalpinas pro- vincias significo"; cf. /^., p. 107, " Moderni Galli sive Franci." I owe these quotations to M. Flach*s Origines de rancienne France, iv, 310. He naturally made the most of passages so favourable to his views.
40 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
Francia of our texts is generally used in a narrower sense. It is not so much the whole Frankish realm as the region in which the Franks had established themselves most strongly. This Francia^ sometimes called Francia latina^ ranged on the west from the lower Loire and the March of Brittany through the Seine basin to the Rhine. Be- yond that river eastwards it extended to the region be- tween the Lippe and the lower Main. When the Carolingian realm broke up in the tenth century, Francia is generally used in an even more restricted sense. The eastern Francia^ beyond the Rhine, passed over to the German, or eastern, kingdom. It became the Franken of the Germans, the Franconia of the English and French. The result was that the western, or Gallic, Francia, the nucleus of modern France, simply designates the hassin parisien of the modern geographer, or rather the bassin parisien with some additions, especially towards the west, south, and east. By that time we have reached the beginnings of the real France. We have no longer to follow those modern scholars who translate the older and vaguer Francia as Francie ; we may call it France simply, as everybody nowadays does. The conquests of the Breton king Nomeno6 restricted this France on its western flank : Rennes and Nantes are no longer Francia, but Britannia — Britannia minor to us islanders when we wish to distinguish it from the land which we, in our pride, call Britannia major. The foundation of the Viking duchy of Normandy still further reduced the limits of Francia, for it put the lower Seine valley outside it. Southern Gaul was still more clearly beyond its boundaries.
FRJNCIE BECOMES FRJNCE 41
In the eleventh century Ademar de Chabannes, a Limousin chronicler, considers the Franci and Jquitani as natural enemies.* So late as the fourteenth century we still find this restricted use of France remain- ing current, though, of course, there runs alongside with it the general use of France in the wide sense of all the lands over which the French king was lord. We can to this day read in the Church of Saint-Sauveur at Dinan the inscription recording that the heart of Du Guesclin, the first Breton champion of French nationality, rests there among his own compatriots, though " his body reposes with those of the kings at Saint-Denis in France." If Dinan were not always France in the late fourteenth century, neither was Normandy or Poitou or even Berri. In 1346, when Edward III made his great raid which culminated at Crecy, the invaders swept through Nor- mandy from La Hougue to Vernon, but they only con- sidered themselves to be entering France when they had passed into the Vexin at Longueville, hard by Vernon."|" Yet Normandy had been the domain of the French kings for nearly one hundred and fifty years, and was bitterly hostile to the English invaders all through the struggle. Similarly, ten years later, when the Black Prince was occupied in his Poitiers campaign, he was thought by
* See, for instance, Ademar de Chabannes: Chroniqugj ed. Chabanon, p. 151 — "Sane dux Aquitanorum Willelmus, reprobatus nequitiam Francorum, Hugoni subditus esse noluit."
'\ C/ironicon Galfridi le Baker ^ pp. 80, 81, ed. E. M. Thompson — " Et ospitabantur apud Lungeville, que est juxta bonam villain de Vernon . . . et ibi intrauerunt in Franciam."
42 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
the English only to have invaded France when he crossed the Cher and slept at Vierzon.* Thus slowly did France become to all the world the whole region over which the king of France bore sway, and thus realized her national self-consciousness. La France, as M. Vidal de la Blache has said, est une personne. She was not less, but more, an individuality because her latent personality only developed slowly with the centuries. To realize this we have only to remember the words of another great French scholar, Gaston Paris, " France and England are the products of history."
It follows from the slow growth of national feeling on both sides of the Channel that there could be no possibility of national relations between France and England before they had attained that stage of develop- ment which happens roughly to coincide with the period of the Norman Conquest, and that for centuries later the dealings between states and peoples were not mainly based on national sentiment on either side. This suggests a threefold division of our theme. We have firstly to deal with the pre-Conquest period, when rela- tions were neither numerous nor important. Next comes the time after the Conquest, when relations were extraordinarily intimate, but were in no real sense national. Thirdly comes the epoch when national feeling slowly begins to emerge and, as time goes on, becomes steadily a
* Eulogium Historiarumy iii, 218, Rolls Series: "Postea transivit unam aquam quae dividit ducatum et regnum Franciae, et vocatur Cheri ; et pernoctavit in villa de Virizon." I am afraid the English chronicler is not a good geographer, but I quote him not for what was, but for what people thought to be.
PRE-NORMAN RELATIONS 43
stronger element in determining those relations. It is only in the fifteenth century, at the very close of the Middle Ages, that this element becomes preponderating. By then we have got to the close of the period to which I wish mainly to call attention.
The pre-Conquest period will only detain us for a few minutes. Such few relations as did exist belong to another plane than that in which we are now placed. There are, of course, the great problems of ethnology to be faced, though, when we deal with questions of race, we at once depart from the region of history and approach a vague world of theory and conjecture. But we are at least on safe ground when we affirm that no fundamental distinction of race can be assumed to exist between Britain and Gaul. Into both lands there streamed in much the same order of time the very varied elements out of which the present population grew. To begin with, there was the same primitive stock or stocks, call it Iberian, Mediter- ranian, Basque, or what we will. Then there came the Celtic migration or migrations. To these were added in each case Roman conquest and government, with a certain modest admixture of Roman settlement. To these came centuries later a series of waves of Teutonic conquest : the Franks in northern, the Goths and Bur- gundians in southern, Gaul : the Angles and Saxons in southern and eastern Britain. Subsequently there was the Norse element in both countries alike, and a con- siderable Franco-Norse element in the post-Norman period of British history.
It will be generally agreed that the racial elements in the two countries are essentially the same. It may.
44 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
however, be well argued that there existed a different proportion between the survivals of these same ethnic elements in the two countries. In dealing with this problem difficulties will at once arise, and will remain at every stage.
There is hardly enough evidence to decide as to the relative strength of the primitive " Mediterranean " stock in the two lands. But the survival of the pre-Aryan Basque tongue on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees is a living proof of the preponderating strength of the most ancient of the surviving races in one part of the modern France to which we have no parallel in the British Islands. It is unsafe to be too dogmatic when, departing from the evidence of speech, we have to infer the distinc- tion of race from the physical features — the skulls, the colouring, and the like of the present populations. But it seems pretty certain that different parts of the two areas will yield very different results.
The Celtic element is probably equally diffused in both lands. Towards the east the French probably have more of it than the eastern and southern English. On the other hand, in the west of the British Islands the Celtic element is far stronger than in France. The pro- cess of romanization, so potent in Gaul that it makes Roman Gaul the true starting-point of French history, was so weak in western Britain that it left the Celtic- speaking peoples of Britain not very different from what they had been when the Romans first came. Accordingly, there is a larger Celtic-speaking element in Wales, in the Scottish Highlands, and in Ireland than there is in France. Moreover, the only surviving Celtic speech in France —
RACE IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE 45
the Celtic of la Bretagne hretonnante — is an importation from Cornwall and Wales, not a survival of the tongue of old Gaul, which has passed away so completely that its nature can only be deduced from the evidence of place names and a few inscriptions. The Britons, who fled in the sixth century from the Saxon invaders of Britain, found a new home in western Armorica, whence they transplanted their tongue, their saints, and their special political and social psychology. Accordingly there is between western Brittany and the two south-western peninsulas of southern Britain an identity rather than a mere similarity of race. In addressing a Breton audience it would be a denial of history not to emphasize this identity of some fifteen centuries' standing. As regards the general proposition, it may well be claimed that Britain is more Celtic than Gaul. But I know of no historical or political lesson that can be drawn from this accident of history.
It is for modern men of more importance to stress the immense preponderance of the Roman element in France and of the Germanic element in Britain. The modern evidence of language is, of course, inconclusive as regards race, but it is of overwhelming strength as regards the ethnic influences which have moulded the two peoples. The fact that we speak English and you speak French is here the most eloquent and conclusive proof of the pits from which most of us have been dug. But even here there are exceptions. For one thing, as we shall see later on, we modern English are far less " Teutonic " than our original forefathers This is the case not only by reason of the gradual anglicization of much of what is racially
46 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
Celtic Britain, but also in more abundant measure through the reflex influence of Rome through France, which, for example, gives us the strong romance element that differentiates modern English from the other Teutonic languages. But there are small parts of France more "Teutonic" than even southern England. In the corner of Flanders, which the accidents of history have left to France, that Teutonic speech which is, perhaps, as much akin to early English as any of the tongues of the continent, is still the home language of the country- side in the two arrondissements of Dunkirk and Haze- brouck, and in the Middle Ages the Flemish speech still extended into Artois and the Boulonnais. It is the parti- cular evidence of the attractive force of the French genius that the other part of the modern France speaking a Teutonic tongue is Alsace. Alsace is French at heart not because she was once part of Roman Gaul. It is indisputable that her connection with France had not been much more than two hundred years old, when she was wrested from France against her own will by the mailed fist of the conqueror. She has now come back to France the more ardently since a half-century of painful experience of Prussian domination made her realize more than ever where her real sympathies lay. It is such moral conquests as this conquest of Alsace by France that bring us nearest to the solution of that crucial ques- tion for the future : the question of the co-existence within a great nation of parts different in speech and, it may be, in mentality, but still loyal parts of the common whole which it enriches by its variety. I say to France — ^and I would say it equally to Britain: Do
RACE IN BRITAIN AND FRANCE 47
nothing to minimize or check these racial varieties. Do not normalize over much. In reducing everything to a standard type you not only blot out a page of history; you impoverish the life of the nation.
We must not, however, stray from our proper theme, which is at the moment the racial affinities between Britain and France. The same lesson which we have learned from the older races is true also of the more modern importations. In this relation the only one of importance to us is the Scandinavian element which followed from centuries of Danish invasion, and subse- quently from more restricted Danish settlement. Here the whole of the British islands receives a much stronger Norse infusion than was the case with France. But the peculiar receptivity of the Northmen to the older civiliza- tion in the midst of which they set up their new homes soon assimilated them to the conquered populations, and made Englishmen of the Danes of the Danelaw and Frenchmen of the Normans of Neustria. The result was that, so far as they differed at all from the older Frenchmen and Englishmen, whose speech and manners they adopted, they showed such vivacity and fervour of temperament that they gained a far larger share than their numbers entitled them in the general activities of the peoples with whom they so soon became absorbed. This at once becomes a vital problem for us, since the starting-point for all that gives their peculiar savour to the relations between England and France is the con- quest of England by the Normans.
In emphasizing the ethnic and linguistic relations of pre-Norman Britain and Gaul we have considered what
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really matters. There is no need to do more than allude in passing to other early relations. There is, of course, the special relation of Roman Britain to Roman Gaul, and especially of late Roman Britain with that Prafectura Galliarum of which it formed an integral part for more than a century. We may add to this the intimate re- lations of the local churches, the revival of the flagging Christianity of Britain by Gaulish bishops, like Germanus and Lupus, and the requital of that obligation when Irish, Scottish, and, ultimately, English monks and scholars became missionaries of the Gospel and civilization to many widely scattered regions of Gaul. But these rela- tions of Britain and Gaul, before they had become Eng- land and France are really out of our picture. Post- English relations were friendly enough, but much less intimate. Such were the dealings between Charlemagne and the contemporary English sovereigns, and particularly with Offa of Mercia. Such, too, were the marriage of Ethelbert of Kent with a Frankish princess, which in- directly led to the conversion of the English to Christian- ity, the share which Alcuin of York had in the Caro- lingian Renaissance, and the marriage of Emma of Normandy to two English kings which began that in- timacy between the English monarchy and the Norman duchy which gave William, the Norman duke, a colour- able claim to the English crown.
Thus all our roads bring us up to the same goal, the Norman Conquest of England at the very epoch when the French and English monarchies were struggling into existence, though as yet with little that was specifically national about them, and though still
RESULTS OF NORMAN CONQUEST 49
threatened with being overshadowed by the " provincial nationalities " of which the most advanced and progressive was undoubtedly that Norman duchy which gave England and Normandy a common line of sovereigns. Yet the national nucleus was already there, and the very forms of the chronicles and the records show some consciousness of that fact. To the Norman kings, who were also dukes beyond the Channel, there was a real contrast be- tween the two peoples. It was a contrast not so much between two races, as a contrast between the conquerors and the conquered. And it was not a contrast between the Norman and the English, but between the French and English. When a Norman or Angevin king, down to late in the twelfth century, wished to include in one comprehensive formula all his subjects, he began his charters with an address to them as " French and English " — JViilelmis rex omnibus fidelihus suis^ Francis et Jnglicis^ salutem. And he used such a phraseology, not only when appealing to such of his liegemen as were settled m England, but when he wished to include the Frenchmen of his French domains, as well as the members of the conquering garrison of his new acquisition. There was literal truth as well as historic significance in such a style. Though the majority of the new settlers came from Normandy, adventurers from all the French-speaking lands were welcome to the motley army which fought and won at Hastings and subsequently shared among its mem- bers the English lands that became the spoils of victory. A notable local instance of this is the establishment of a younger branch of the reigning house of Brittany in the Yorkshire earldom of Richmond, which thus
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became for more than three centuries an overseas ap- panage of the Breton county or duchy, and thus forged a new link between the two countries that became of real importance in the fourteenth century.
That the men who followed William to England were, both to themselves and to the English, not Normans, but simply French is a clear proof that the Normans, whose great-grandfathers had been heathen pirates, seeking booty in many lands, had already become, in all things save political subjection to the French monarchy, adopted members of the infant French nation whose birth was preceding the birth of a strong French state Accord- ingly, we must not overstress the purely legal aspect of the Conquest. In the judgment of king William's lawyers it was no " conquest " in our sense at all. It was simply the entering in by the lawful heir to his birthright of the throne of his cousin, Edward the Confessor. It followed that from the moment of his coronation on Christmas Day, 1066, William became a real English king, with the same rights and privileges as his prede- cessors of the West-Saxon house had enjoyed. But, thanks to his followers from beyond sea, the new king had powers of enforcing those rights which none of the former kings had possessed.
The Norman Conquest can, therefore, be regarded as a French conquest of England. Yet we must not, if we respect history, speak of it as involving a conquest of one people by the other in the sense in which there would have been an English conquest of France, had Edward III or Henry V succeeded in making good an equally specious and equally unsound claim to be the heir of the direct
NORMAN CONQUEST OF BRITISH ISLES 51
Capetian house. A real French conquest of England would have given the utmost joy to a real king of France. But no one could well have looked with more displeasure on the English monarchy of William of Normandy than Philip I himself. It was no consolation to the French king that the French name and French influence had been extended over the Channel by his vassal. On the contrary, the strengthening of the Norman duchy by its union with the English kingdom was a real danger to Capetian hegemony, because it made the vassal a match for his suzerain. That danger became the greater when, under the sons of the Conqueror, the Norman power was extended from England to Wales, to Scotland, and to Ire- land, so that within a hundred years of Hastings the whole of the British Islands were subjected to the overlordship of the Anglo-Norman kings.
It has been too much the custom to speak of the Norman Conquest in relation to England only. But we must never forget that there was a Norman Conquest of Wales, of Scotland, and of Ireland, as well as a Norman Conquest of England. In these lands the Normans did their work less thoroughly, but still with lasting results. It was the peaceful permeation of the Celtic kingdom of Scotland by the overflow of the Norman conquerors of England, and the intimate connections of the Scottish kings with the Anglo-Norman court, that made southern and eastern Scotland English in speech and organization. It was the first beginning of those special ties between France and Scotland which were to fructify when in later ages Scotland called upon France to support her against her English would-be conquerors, and with French help
52 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
set up that independent Scottish monarchy of the later Middle Ages which in its reaction from England borrowed French law, French art and manners, and many French fashions of government that never established themselves in England. If the warlike permeation of Wales and Ireland were less remarkable in its results, it prepared the way for union within the British seas : it covered those lands with Norman castles and erected small feudal principalities whose lords could there play the part of independent rulers which the strength of the Anglo- Norman monarchy denied to them in England. To Welsh and Irish alike it was the first stage of an English conquest, and the " French " of the royal charters were confused in the Celtic mind with the hated Saxons whom they had conquered, or, if not confused, combined in a common condemnation.
Thus the Norman Conquest superimposed on all the British Islands an alien system, most thoroughly as re- gards England, less completely as regards the Celtic lands. England had in consequence a French dynasty, a French nobility and upper clergy, and a French-speaking, ruling, fighting, and trading class. This alien emigration did its best service for the conquered lands when it stirred them to a fuller and more vigorous life; when it broke down for ever that absolute wall of separation between Britain and the Continent which neither Caesar nor Agricola, neither Patrick nor Boniface, not even Canute the Dane, had ever been able to breach with any effect. But the Norman conquerors did not long remain aliens, and their influence on the destinies of the British islands would have been far less than it
SPREAD OF FEUDAL IDEALS 53
actually has been, had this been the case. The real result of the Norman Conquest lay in the fact that henceforth Britain was an integral part of western civilization, receiving and responding to every great movement that radiated through France over all the west, and welcoming each the more readily since the mentality of the ruling classes in the two lands was not merely closely allied but substantially identical. Feudal land- tenure and feudal ideals, already prepared for by certain broad general tendencies of purely home growth, became normal and universal in general conformity with French lines of development. The feudal horseman and the feudal castle, which had already saved the western continent from Danish barbarism, were brought into Britain by the descendants of these very Norse Vikings who had now been tamed and taught by the constant pressure of their French environment. English political, military, and social conditions were substantially assimi- lated to those of Gaul. This work was done the more effectively since what we may still call, with hesitation, the " feudal system " was not yet stereotyped and stiffened into the cut-and-dried legal organization which it as- sumed in the course of the twelfth century, but was still growing, liquid, mobile, and open to receive particular direction in accordance with local traditions and sym- pathies.
With the Norman ruler and warrior came the Norman clerk and the Norman trader, who worked out in the ecclesiastical and economic spheres changes similar in general effect to those already imposed upon English, or rather British, policy. Here, too, the new leaven was
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already fermenting in Edward the Confessor's days, and was the more potent because it was gradual and not cata- clysmic in its operations. The ecclesiastical effects of the Norman Conquest are even more clearly visible than its political results. Lanfranc of Pavia, a Lombard born, but already a Norman by thirty years' settlement within the duchy, introduced into Britain the Hildebrandine papacy and all that this new importation involved. If the stiff Italian showed little respect for English tradition and scanty love for English saints, his successor, Anselm of Aosta, was the most human and sympathetic of the champions of the new system. Anselm was not only a long time resident in the Norman abbey of Bee ; though he came from beyond the Alps his native city still re- mains the capital of that transalpine district whose native tongue is still French. He was, therefore, a Burgundian rather than an Italian. Hard on the heels of the new system, came the troubles inseparable from it. Lanfranc had worked so loyally with William the Conqueror that under them there was no thought of friction between church and state. But Anselm soon brought to England a faint replica of the Investiture Contest which had for a generation excited bitter ill-will between the papacy and the empire. That the English dispute was so easily settled was doubtless in part due to the good feeling be- tween Anselm and Henry I. But it may well also be in part attributed to the example of France and Normandy. There had never been lay investitures in Gaul, and yet their absence had not prevented the French kings and princes from exercising their rightful authority over the prelates of their dominions. A French prince, like the
THE HILDEBRANDINE CHURCH 55
English Henry I, could hardly have overstressed so stiffly as the emperors were then doing, the importance of the objectionable form which to all good churchmen suggested a layman conferring ecclesiastical authority on the appointed ministers of the church. In renouncing lay investiture, and thereby resigning the shadow, Henry took care to keep the substance of power, and thus antici- pated by nearly twenty years the settlement of the In- vestiture Contest which the French pope, Calixtus II, agreed upon with the emperor Henry V in the Concordat of Worms. We may, therefore, in part attribute to French influence the softening in England of the mediaeval contests of church and state so chronic in Germany, so exceptional in France, the eldest son of the church.
With the Hildebrandine papacy came in a crowd of other ecclesiastical reforms, all of which filtered into England through French sources. Among them were the rigid separation of church and state, the development of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction which set up in England, as on the continent, a state ecclesiastical over against the state civil, the expansion of the canon law, the legal en- forcement of the celibacy of the clergy, the new ritual expressed by the Sarum use of St. Osmund, and, above all, a new monasticism and a new art.
The chief ecclesiastical fellow-workers of the Norman kings were monks, and three of the Norman archbishops — Lanfranc, Anselm, and Theobald — came from one Norman abbey. This was the famous house of Bec- Hellouin, on the Risle, which was for northern Gaul the same exemplar of monastic perfection that Cluny had become for the Burgundian lands of the Rhone valley.
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The immediate result of such influence was the reform of decadent Engh'sh monasticism by the importation into England of the ideals of these pattern foundations. Old houses were reformed ; new ones set up on conti- nental lines. The piety of the Norman conquerors gave rich English lands to their own favourite monasteries at home. Thus arose the alien priories, those settlements of French monks in English cells of French abbeys which, until the fourteenth century, remained a feature of the English ecclesiastical system. Bee itself was particularly favoured, and its English offshoots, notably Ogbourn, near Marlborough, were among the wealthiest and best known of the alien priories. New houses on the Bee model were set up — as, for instance, when Anselm, not yet archbishop, took twelve chosen monks from Bee to plant a model Benedictine house for northern England at St. Wer- burgh's at Chester. Mighty Norman nobles, like the earls Warenne, set up branches of the congregation of Cluny at Lewes, at Wenlock, and at Castleacre. When the great monastic revival of the early twelfth century radiated from France over the whole west, it was eagerly extended into Norman England by Henry I and Stephen. Thus the two chief orders of reformed Benedictines — the Cistercians and the Carthusians, both of Burgundian origin — obtained their early establishment in England ; and thus the Cistercian autocrat of early twelfth-century Christendom, Bernard of Clairvaux, had no more faithful disciples than in the valleys of Yorkshire and in Wales, and nowhere wrought more changes than in Ireland. There St. Bernard's disciple, St. Malachy of Armagh,
FRENCH MONKS AND ART 57
reformed the disorders of the decadent Celtic Church, ensured papal supremacy by procuring from the first Cistercian pope the archiepiscopal pallium for each of the four archbishops of Ireland, and by his introduction of the Cistercian rule into his native island brought the Irish Church for the first time into conformity with the general western ecclesiastical type.
It was after a similar fashion that Norman influence first introduced into England the Premonstratensians and the other orders of canons regular, who, following the so-called Rule of St. Augustine, succeeded even more in England than in France in showing how the ascetic life of the monk might be combined with the practical pastoral work of the clerk. Thus, too, the crusading orders, the Knights of the Temple and of the Hospital, obtained an early foothold in England, for the crusading movement, first authoritatively preached by the French pope. Urban II, had no more faithful disciples than the Anglo-Norman nobility.
With these great changes in discipline and organization the Norman conquerors brought into Britain a new fashion of art. The small and gloomy temples of the Anglo-Saxon period gave way to vast romanesque min- sters of the type best illustrated beyond sea by the twin foundations of duke William and his wife Matilda, the still abiding ahhaye aux hommes and ahhaye aux dames at Caen. On the eve of the conquest Edward the Confessor set up another mighty fabric of the same sort in the orginal Westminster abbey, consecrated on the eve of the Confessor's death, and only ten months before the invasion of the Normans. No sooner were the con-
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qucrors established in the land than they planted all over the British Islands great churches to which Caen and Westminster stood as the prototypes. We English still describe as Norman the ecclesiastical style which came to our land in the eleventh century, and attained its per- fection of strength and richness in the early twelfth cen- tury. This is paying Normandy too great a compliment, for it was no style peculiar to the duchy. It was the style of the whole western world, and would be much better called Roman or romanesque by us, as it is in all the other lands of its adoption. Nor was it the style of churches only. All through the Middle Ages civil and ecclesiastical architects worked on similar lines. The Norman castle remains in England and Wales an equally widespread and in some ways a more characteristic memorial of Norman influence. If they are seldom surviving in masonry in Ireland and Scotland, it is not because they were not once there. Many a grass-grown artificial motte or natural roche^ once crowned by a Nor- man keep, still remains in both lands to testify to the ubiquity of these restless conquerors. Naturally, the Norman remains in the remoter regions are later in date than those found in southern Britain.
The continuity of French artistic influence was as much felt in the post-romanesque as in the romanesque period of art. It was particularly intimate when in the midst of the twelfth century the so-called " gothic " style arose in the Ile-de-France and in Burgundy, as the solution of the great engineering problem that was be- yond the romanesque architect's skill. This problem was the vaulting over of wide spaces without crushing the
FRENCH AND ENGLISH GOTHIC 59
walls down by the weight of the superincumbent mass. It is not absolutely impossible that this discovery was made as early in England as in France. If we could feel sure that the still-abiding nave vault of Durham cathedral belongs, as many would have us believe, to the first third of the twelfth century, we should have no need to regard the churches beyond the Channel as having exclusively solved the problem. We are on more certain ground in our clear knowledge that the Cistercian pioneers brought from their Burgundian homes to Fountains and Kirkstall in Yorkshire the incipient gothic of Clairvaux and Citeaux. Yet even when William of Sens, a French- man, re-erected the eastern end of Canterbury cathedral, destroyed by a disastrous fire, the still abiding building is much more primitive in type than the contemporary Notre- Dame-de- Paris, completed at the same period. It was not until St. Hugh's work on Lincoln cathedral in the early years of the thirteenth century that the " French art " received its full introduction into England by a bishop who was French by birth. As soon as it became well established, English gothic began to develop features of its own that distinguish it from the towering vaults, the radiating apsidal chapels, and other charac- teristic notes of pure French art. He who compares Salisbury cathedral as a typical English thirteenth- century church with, say, Amiens or Chartres will see wherein these differences both in plan, proportions, and details mainly reside. Where an English church follows French lines, like Henry Ill's rebuilding of Westminster abbey, we see in it the hand of French artists. But we have in England, quite as much as in France or Palestine,
6o ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
fine examples of the developed art of castle-building. Now that the Germans have destroyed the great castle of Coucy, we can hardly find better examples of the '* concentric " castle of the thirteenth century than at Caerphilly or Kidwelly in South Wales. But nowhere within the British seas is there anything comparable with the majestic town fortifications with which the age of St. Louis begirt the rocky height crowned by the cit6 of Carcassonne, and set up the stupendous walls of Aigues Mortes which still tower above the wind-swept levels of the Rhone delta.
I have said so much of the influence of the Conquest on art that I must postpone for a later opportunity what there is still to be said as to its effects on literature, on language, and on economic and social life. After all, it is best to deal with these subjects later, for their full results can only be ascertained by a survey of several cen- turies, and to-day we must resist strong temptation to go beyond the end of the twelfth century. Let us return, then, to speak in more general terms of the most crucial problem of all. The greatest result of the Norman Con- quest was, after all, political. The greatest novelty the early twelfth century saw was the establishment of a stronger and more ordered state than contemporary Europe had as yet seen. Let us ask ourselves the vital question of how this polity arose. Let us examine the relative shares of the English and French in building up the Anglo-Norman state, which under Henry II of Anjou extended its sphere not only over the whole of the British Islands, but over a wider extent of French soil than that immediately ruled by the French king.
STARTING OR TURNING POINT? 6i
There have been two opposing schools as regards the effect of the Norman Conquest on English history. They represent in effect the eternal quarrel of the Germanists and the Romanists. The former school, represented by Freeman and Stubbs, emphasized for all it was worth the continuity of the Anglo-Saxon conditions through the Norman period. The later school, which can count Mr. J. H. Round among its champions, tends to maintain that the effects of the Conquest were so deep that it is, in effect, a new starting-point rather than a turning point in English history. Thus to Stubbs knight service came into England gradually and accidentally as the result of individual experiments how best the Norman lord, bound to supply the king with soldiers, could most easily fulfil his obligation. Round* has completely overthrown this particular doctrine, and in substance has shown that Ordericus Vitalis, though ludicrously wrong in his numbers, was not, in essentials, far off the truth when he suggested that William the Conqueror by one deliberate act divided England into knights' fees. It does not, however, follow that proving this particular instance of discontinuity proves that there was a general new de- parture all round.
Apart from particular points, the doctrine of discontinuity is, moreover, incompatible with the official theory of the Conquest, which held that duke William was simply stepping into his lawful place as the heir of St. Edward ; and that his followers, whom he established as landed proprietors, simply
* See J. H. Round's paper on "The Introduction of Knight Service into England," on pp. 225-316 of his Feudal England.
62 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
received their new estates because the old owners had forfeited their lands as traitors to the rightful heir. You cannot both be a foreign conqueror, making a clear sweep of the older order, and at the same time pose as heir of an ancient heritage. There is a limit even to human want of logic. In our particular instance the incoherence of the argument is all the stronger for two other reasons. Firstly, it soon became the interest of the Norman king to pose as the protector of the English from their im- mediate oppressors, his own barons who were also his own natural enemies. Secondly, it was the interest of the Eng- lish to support king William as the strong man who secured for them order and prosperity and protected them from a multitude of local tyrants. Moreover, the dispossession theory postulates that the Norman polity and civilization were so much superior to those of the English that the conquered race could be treated in the same drastic fashion as that by which the early British settlers in North America or Australia swept the red Indians and the blacks out of their path and started human life afresh on a higher plane. This was very far from being the case in Norman England. We may, indeed, assume a general superiority of the Norman, but the English had points in which they were more advanced than their con- querors. We unluckily know very little of the condition of affairs in Normandy before 1066, though what can be discovered has been recently put together with admirable scholarship by Professor C. H. Haskins, of Harvard.* In the light of present knowledge we may affirm that, with
♦ C. H. Haskins : Norman Institutions ^ in Harvard Historical Studies, xiiv (19 18).
ANGLO-SAXON e^f NORMAN 63
all its defects,the Anglo-Saxon state had a stronger system of local government and in some respects stronger central in- stitutions than the Norman duchy. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy had devised in Danegeld the first general national tax known to the western nations ; the Anglo- Saxon administration had, under Edward the Confessor, evolved a chancery more advanced than that of the Nor- man dukes. This chancery was developing the new diplomatic of the writ charter, which was no Norman invention, as Giry maintained, but devised in England, as Mr. W. H. Stevenson has shown,* before its Conquest, and only developed, perfected, and made general by the Anglo- Norman kings. Again, Edward the Confessor was the first among secular rulers of the west to borrow the principle of the clumsy leaden hul/a of the curia romana and im- prove it into the first doubled-faced wax sceau pendant used in a royal court, at a time when the kings of France and the dukes of the Normans, so far as they used seals at all, were contented with the sceau plaquS, which gave a single impression stamped on the face of the document.! These are but instances, but they surely prove that the English had something to give to the Normans, as well as something to receive from them.
I have not time to labour the point, but must be con- tent to express my general view of the relations of Anglo- Saxon and Norman institutions. Politically, the Norman
* See for this A. Giry: Manuel de Diplomatique,^. 795, and for the contrary view W. H. Stevenson in the English Historical Review, xi, 731, ^/ seq.
t See for this my Chapters in Mediaval Administrative His- tory, i, 1 2 5-1 3 1, and R. L. Poole : Seals and Documents (1919).
64 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
Conquest could not be a new departure, since the Anglo- Norman polity was not brought over with the Con- queror, but was the result of a process of evolution that was rapid enough under the Conqueror and his eldest son, attained its first perfection under Henry I, received a bad set-back under Stephen, and was completed when Henry II of Anjou expanded his grandfather's system — the avttae consuetudines — into the strong administrative machine which controlled the most orderly and effective state that western Europe had known since the Carolin- gians. This polity grew up on English soil as a result of the Conquest, and could not have been brought over with the Conqueror since it had no existence in Nor- mandy at the time. When established it was not for England only, but, so far as circumstances allowed, for the whole Anglo-Norman, or Anglo-Angevin, empire. It was French in impetus and direction : the work of Frenchmen who were striving not only to govern Eng- land, but to keep England and Normandy together under a common system, controlled by a common head. This system was so cunningly compacted of English and French elements, so dexterously worked up into some- thing far better than anything either England or France had had before, that in the long run not only Normandy, but France herself had to work out her administrative salvation on lines suggested by the Normans and developed by the Angevins. Moreover, the Normans combined with a fierce passion of acquisitiveness a gift of imagina- tive sympathy which made them identify themselves easily with the peoples that they conquered. Accord- ingly, the assimilation of the races was rapid. A famous
THE AMALGAMATION OF RACE 65
text of the reign of Henry II tells us that in the case of freemen it was already difficult to determine who were English and who were Normans by race.* When in the early thirteenth century Englishmen were baptized with French names, such as William or Thomas, and Anglo-Frenchmen with English names, such as Edward or Edmund, the last means of easy identification was removed. This habit reached the English royal family under Henry III, who in his special devotion to English royal saints called his two sons Edward and Edmund.
The result of this amalgamation was a French-speaking cosmopolitan ruling class, largely French but partly English by blood, the members of which lived in perfect harmony of social relations with all the French-speaking aristocracies of the west and readily transferred them- selves from one land to another. Thus a French immi- grant, Simon de Montfort, became in a few years the champion of English nationality. In the same way a French-speaking baron of Norman descent, born in England and having lands in England and Scotland, became the pioneer of Scottish independence. Thus, too, the Norman conquerors of Ireland soon became Hi her- nicis hibemiores — more Irish than the Irish themselves. But in becoming patriots in the new homes of their adop- tion, the Anglo-French aristocracy in no wise forsook their speech or culture. They clung to them the more naturally since French speech and culture involved no suggestion of French nationality.
* Diaiogus de Scaccario in Stubbs Select Charters, pp. 201,
202.
66 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
The last stage of the pre-national Anglo-French state was that represented by the reigns of Henry II and his two sons, Richard and John. Henry of Anjou had little that was distinctively Norman about him, save descent on the mother's side. Historians have exhausted their ingenuity to prove that there was something specific- ally Angevin about his temperament and policy, but policy is the only thing that matters, and every attempt to suggest that there was such a thing as an Angevin policy has broken down. The truth is that Henry II was almost as little Norman or Angevin as he was English. He was rather the sublimination of that cosmopolitan French-speaking type which was as much at home in one part of the western world as another. His in- heritance of Anjou and Maine, his wife's hereditary possessions between the Loire and the Pyrenees, his son Geoffrey's establishment in Brittany as the husband of the heiress — all these gave him a position in France far stronger than that of Louis VII and even Philip Augustus. It resulted in his French dominions being to him of far more importance than his English crown, even though this latter was now decorated with definite overlord- ship in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. It also brought about a more intimate connection between Britain and Brittany than had existed since the days when the early Celtic saints found themselves equally at home in Ar- morica, in Cornwall, and in what we now call Wales. And, last of all, it began that Anglo-Gascon connection which was to endure for some four centuries, and to bring the English monarchy into close contact with the French of the south, the men of the Languedoc in the broadest
CHARACTER OF ANGEVIN EMPIRE 67
sense of that term. Hitherto French influence in England had been exclusively that of the north. This was now to be supplemented by fresh impulses from the self-centred and antagonistic culture of the south of France.
It has been too common a habit to treat the Angevin empire as based upon nothing save the personal and acci- dental connection of the Angevin rulers with a great medley of discordant peoples, tongues, and races, dwelling in a vast territory that extended from northern Scotland to the Pyrenees. In France it has been almost resented as a foreign conquest, and your guide books and popular manuals still speak of it as a domination anglais e. It was anything rather than that. We must not correct one mistake by another, or one would be tempted to speak of it from the English point of view as a domination frangaise. In truth, it was neither one nor the other, but rather the most important attempt to establish a cos- mopolitan monarchy, transcending nations and races, that had been made since the days of Charlemagne, and a much more serious cosmopolitan monarchy than the contemporary rule of Frederick Barbarossa or the domination, over a century earlier, of Canute over Den- mark, England, and Norway. It was more serious because it meant more than the personal rule of an individual prince, because it involved some sort of administrative system common to the whole Angevin state.
The very best work of our great historian, William Stubbs, is that in which he describes the administrative methods of Henry of Anjou. But it suffers from what was perhaps the most unfortunate limitation of that eminent scholar — I mean his inability to see things from
68 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
the French point of view. Accordingly, his picture, though never wrong, is sometimes a h'ttle out of focus. To him the Angevin system is something pre-eminently for England, the root from which a century later the English parliamentary and representative constitution sprung, that constitution which was soon, as many writers have maintained, to make England something better and freer than the European continent in general or than France in particular. In result it may well have been that the work of the Angevin king lived on in his island kingdom to an extent to which it failed to do in his continental dominions. But how- ever this was the case in effect, it was in no wise the intention of the restless and innovating reformer who carried out the work, any more than it was the object of his grandfather, Henry I. And deep as was the personal stamp which Henry II made on the institutions of his dominions, it is hard to find any of his reforms that were not foreshadowed by the avitae consuetudtnes on which he built so largely. Recent investigation, notably the labours of Mr. Round, have brought out clearly the great part played by Henry I in the creation of the Norman- Angevin state. We can no longer regard scutage as an invention of Henry II.
It is in the administrative sphere that we see most clearly how Henry II erected a system which was in- tended not for England only but for his whole dominions on both sides of the Channel. His administration was conducted by his household, by that curia regis which followed the monarch on his constant wanderings. The curia regis was not ordered to suit Englishmen, or even
ITS UNITY OF ADMINISTRATION 69
Norman barons established in England ; it was curia ducts and curia comitis, as well as curia regis, and its sphere included every part of the Angevin empire. The system was too big to be controlled from one centre: local government had to be provided for each unit, since each unit saw but seldom the personal presence of its sovereign. Accordingly, there were for local administration sene- schals of Normandy, of Anjou, of Poitou, and of Aqui- taine. The position of each seneschal was like that of an English sheriff in his shire, still more like that of the justiciarius Jnglia in his wider field It was the business of the justiciar to assist the king when he was in England, and to act as his vice-gerent when the monarch was absent. He was, therefore, more than an officer of the court : his sphere was local more than it was curialistic. He was the first approach to a national minister that England had ever had.
Other local officers also grew up round the Angevin throne. The Scottish king, after the surrender at Alnwick, was to be, like an earl of Chester or a bishop of Durham, the vassal holder of a great franchise. After Henry IPs partial conquest of Ireland, the king appointed some Nor- man baron, who had received grants of Irish land, to act as bailli^ custos^ seneschal^ or justiciarius. The latter term soon became his official designation, and the continual absenteeism of the English overlord made the justice the permanent governor of Ireland. Finding the local officials inadequate, Henry II strengthened the central power by the French device of crowning his eldest son as joint-king, that he might act as his father's permanent justiciar and lieutenant, and learn, under direction, that
70 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
art of ruling which he was to exercise, without col- league or controller, after his father's death. Henry had wider dominions than Louis VII, so that he supplemented the appointment of his first-born, Henry, as his assistant by assigning some chief districts of his empire to his younger sons — Aquitaine to Richard, Brittany to Geoffrey, and, for a brief period, Ireland to John — though retaining in each case a strict control over the deputed ruler. But this partial partition of his dominions was a more signal failure than had been his trust in the local seneschals and justices. The wars of the king's sons against their father, and their constant intrigues with the French king prepared the way for the dissolution of the unwieldy Angevin empire.
Unable to teach wisdom or prudence to his own off- spring, Henry II was remarkably successful in building up out of his household staff a centralized administrative system for the whole empire. Here his chief triumph was in the Angevin chancery, a most subtle and effective instrument of government, whose terse and skilful diplo- matic and remarkable anticipations of the secretarial and political methods of a later age were first fully re- vealed to us by the mature scholarship of Leopold Delisle. So business-like was the Angevin chancery that, for nearly twenty years, in its hatred of unnecessary words, it scanda- lized the pious by omitting the Dei Gratia in the suscrip- tion of its letters, only restoring it in 1173 when the adoption by the " young king " of the formula used by his father-in-law, Louis VII, made it judicious for the old king to follow his example.
Those English historians have gravely erred who have
THE ANGEVIN CHANCERY 71
described the Norman or Angevin chancery as the " chancery of England." It was the chancery neither of England nor Normandy, neither of Anjou or of Aqui- taine. It was the king's chancery, and its acts had equal authority in all parts of his dominions. As it " followed the court," it functioned more often in France than in England, though we shall not be able to calculate the pro- portion of its French and English acts until some English scholar supplements Delisle's Catalogue des actes de Henri II concernant la France with a similar calendar of his acts relative to England. However that may be, I feel pretty confident that many of Henry IPs administrative devices were adopted by the chancery of France, as soon as Philip Augustus's conquests put him in possession of Normandy and Anjou, where they were already in operation. It is foolish not to borrow improvements, even from your worst enemy, and the Angevin monarchy was adminis- tratively in advance of the Capetian state. It led the way in the differentiation of its acts into the three classes of charters, letters patent, and letters close. It devised the first departmental seal in Europe in the exchequer seal, which was in full activity before three-fourths of the twelfth century had run its course. By the reign of Richard I it had set up a personal '* small seal," side by side with the great seal of the chancery and the depart- mental seal of the exchequer. The two monarchies were abreast in instituting some sort of seal of absence when in 11 89 Richard I and Philip Augustus went to- gether in uneasy comradeship to the Third Crusade. France has, however, nothing corresponding with the system of enrolment of chancery letters which survives
72 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
from the reign of John and is for the rest of the Middle Ages among the chief glories of the British archives.* The financial system of England was even more ad- vanced than v^^ere its secretarial arrangements. The primi- tive king's chamber had in both England and France grown into an office of household finance. But France has nothing to match the exchequer, which by the time of Henry I had grown out of the camera regis and had only left to the older institution the care of the domestic income and expenditure of the king. Neither has she anything so good as the Domesday Book of 1086, or as the earliest " exchequer enrolments," the so-called Fipe Rolls, record- ing the annual accounts of the exchequer with the local officers. Now, the exchequer was not in its inception any more English than the chancery. Henry I's ex- chequer was clearly for Normandy as well as for England. But the special difficulties of carrying the king's treasure about with the court led, even under Henry I, to a localized English treasury at Winchester and a localized Norman treasury at Rouen or Caen. When, under Henry II, the exchequer acquired a permanent home of its own at Westminster, a further step towards separation was effected. Before long there was an English exchequer, closely related to, but not identical with, the echiquier de Normandie, though down to the French conquest moneys could be paid to one exchequer and accounted for at the other. When Philip Augustus conquered Normandy from John, the Norman exchequer continued to function. It ultimately became a sort of local branch of the Chambre
* All these points are more fully worked out in my Ckapters in Me diceval Administrative History , i, pp. 127-157.
THE ANGEVIN EXCHEQUERS 73
des CompteSy which, from the thirteenth century, had its home at Paris. The localization of the central adminis- trative machinery is important, since it occasioned the need for a *' capital " to each state. The earlier mediaeval systems involved no such necessity. To resume our com- parison, we may say that London, or rather Westminster, began to discharge the functions of a modern capital even earlier than Paris, whose part in the development of the early Capetian monarchy has been exaggerated, notably by such a representative English historian of the last generation as Mr. Freeman. But a capital could only become a reality in either country after the developed administrative methods of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had been established.
How strong the Angevin empire was, is seen from the fact that it survived the domestic strife of Henry II and his sons, and the constant non-residence and neglect of Richard Cceur-de-Lion, the most un-English of English kings, the perfect type of the cosmopolitan soldier of fortune. Credit should, however, be given to Richard for the prudence which allowed the administrative machine to go on of itself, however much he might be absorbed in the quest of personal adventure. Of Richard, too, it might be said that he was the first Anglo-French ruler in whom something of the meridional type began to show itself, as compared with the northern French charac- teristics of all his predecessors since the Conquest.
The system, which survived the neglect of Richard, broke down under the active meddlesomeness of king John. Philip Augustus, who hated the Angevin empire as the chief obstacle in the way of his power, took shrewd
74 ANGLO-FRENCH CIVILIZATION
advantage of his rival's incapacity. After his conquest of Normandy in 1206 nothing but the ties normandes remained under the English crov^n to show, as they do to this day, the source of the English monarchy in the Norman duchy. Even in the thirteenth century it was easier for an English king to retain an island, cut oiff from the mainland by the sea, than his dominions on the conti- nent.
The transfer of Normandy is epoch-making from our point of view.* It separated henceforth England and France into two distinct lands. The Norman lords, who held fiefs on both sides of the Channel, had soon to make up their minds whether to abandon their French estates to save those in England or to give up their Eng- lish lands in order to become liegemen of the French crown. Those who opted for England were already good Englishmen enough to impose Magna Charta on their baffled sovereign, though they were still good French- men enough to call on the son of Philip Augustus to help them against John when he repudiated the charter and waged war against them as rebels. The grant of Magna Charta was not, as Stubbs said, the first corporate act of the English nation, for as yet there was no real national life possible. But, following naturally upon the loss of Normandy, it established an island state with an island polity : a state which, when conditions allowed, became a national state. Similarly, the union with the French crown of Normandy and Maine, of Anjou and, after an interval, Poitou, made the Capetian monarchy
♦ See for this subject F. M. Powicke: The Loss of Normandy (118^-1204) : Studies in the History of the Angevin Empire.
FALL OF ANGEVIN EMPIRE 75
attain something nearly approaching direct rule over the greater portion of northern France. With the failure of John before Philip Augustus we appropriately end the period that began with the Norman Conquest. If old traditions remained strong for more than another century, that period witnessed a slow but real beginning of national monarchy, so that the strife of the monarchs might well also become the warfare of the peoples.
Lecture III
Attraction and Repulsion The Beginnings of Nationality
In my first lecture I strove to set before you some of the chief features of that civilization which was common to all western Europe during the Middle Ages, and therefore naturally shared in by England and France. But within that civilization there arose a more definite and concrete social system — a civilization, so to say, within a civiliza- tion. I tried in my second lecture to suggest how this grew up, m the two lands, after the Norman Conquest of Eng- land, and how it became the property of the French and English peoples, who thus had specially intimate relations by reason of this common inheritance. It will be our business to-day to examine how Anglo-French civiliza- tion, though threatened, was in no wise shattered, even after the severe trials which the constant rivalry of Angevin and Capetian and the fundamental severance of the English and French states which resulted from the conquest of Normandy by Philip Augustus. We must, accordingly, treat of two difi^erent movements. There was a movement of repulsion, naturally resulting from the separation and tending to replace the common heritage by special national civilizations in England and France alike. But side by side with it was a new wave of attraction which poured fresh streams of common influence to and fro between the two lands. Thus, when the development of antagonistic national sentiment led to the beginnings of the Hundred Years* War, the character of that struggle was largely modified
A CENTURY OF APPROXIMATION 77
by the influence of these contradictory tendencies. The result was that the fiercest of hostilities impaired rather than destroyed the close relations of the two lands, and even after a deep trench of separation had been dug be- tween the two peoples, the national civilizations of France and England still gave abundant evidence of their common origin.
These different tendencies present themselves most clearly in a period of about a century and a quarter, whose extreme limits, from the English point of view, are the loss of Normandy and the grant of the Great Charter on the one hand and the beginnings of the Hundred Years' War on the other. It covers entirely the three reigns of Henry III, Edward I, and Edward II in English history, while in France it takes us through Philip Augus- tus and St. Louis to Philip the Fair and his sons. From one point of view it is a period of increasing division be- tween the two realms, marked by a rising tide of national sentiment which, more mighty than the separating sea, was to divide the two nations for the rest of their history. From another equally legitimate standpoint it represents a new wave of common impulse, an increasing share in a common heritage and the time of the greatest likeness of the two lands to each other in temperament, character, and institutions that history was ever to witness. Ac- cordingly, it illustrates with ever-increasing force the two- fold character of the relations of France and England which, at each stage of the argument, history brings up vividly before us. It was not until the approximation of the two countries had attained its highest point that the growth of national ill-will began to manifest itself
78 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
This first became clearly manifest when the long-con- tinued bickerings between the two countries on various minor matters resulted in that Hundred Years' War which established the first clear line of separation between them. Let us then speak, firstly, of the century of ap- proximation, and let us go on, secondly, to the beginnings of that century of strife.
The permanent separation of England and Normandy first drew a clear line of demarcation between the English and French monarchies and divided the English baron of Norman origin, holding lands in England, from the French baron, often his near kinsman, who was pledged by his possession of lands in his native country to be the liegeman of the king of the French. But neither nation appreciated the consequences of this separation. In England in particular neither the monarchy nor the baronage understood what the change really involved. It was after the loss of Normandy that the barons, hostile to king John, called in the heir of France to save their franchises and maintain the Great Charter. It took more than fifty years before Henry III, by sealing the treaty of Paris of 1259, fi>i*nially renounced his title and claim to be duke of Normandy and count of Anjou. This famous renunciation coincided with the Barons' Wars, in which, under Simon de Montfort's leadership, the English magnates secured their right to attune the government of England to their liking and safeguarded themselves by making a representative parliament, not purely aristocratic in character, the necessary check on the autocratic bureaucracy which Henry III had in- herited from the Angevins. Accordingly, the treaty
SAINT LOUIS AND HENRY III 79
of Paris and the Barons' Wars divide our period into two halves. Let us deal with each separately.
The first half of the epoch we have now to consider is approximately that of the reign of Henry III in England and of Louis VIII and St. Louis in France. A French- man will readily recognize that, under St. Louis, France became something like a modern national state. But it seems a mere paradox to maintain that the brother-in-law of St. Louis was, in a more restricted way, the first king of England after the Conquest who might with any truth be called the national king of the English nation. Yet there is a good deal to be said in defence of this daring proposition. Henry III was not the first Englishman born of our post-Conquest kings. Henry I and the two royal sons of Henry II, Richard and John — both born at Oxford — shared with him this accident of birth. But what with his great-great-grandfather, father, and uncle was a mere accident was with Henry III emphasized by a long life, mainly spent in England and devoted to the government of that island which constituted the only effective part of his dominions, and was the source of all his wealth and power. His appearances on the conti- nent were few and far between. They were only of long duration when he was conducting an ineffective and un- successful campaign. They were more often short, and were in essentials simply visits to his continental kinsfolk and friends. He seems to have come back gladly and to have looked upon England as his natural home. He was specially devoted to English saints, and was the first king after the Conquest to give his sons English names. Moreover, he for over forty years was king of England
8o ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
without having done homage to the king of France or to any other secular potentate. Besides this, he ruled with a similar independence of any suzerain over such part of Gascony as the French had not absorbed. As, however, the feudal magnates and the autonomous municipalities had more to say in the government of Gascony than the nominal duke, Henry's chief sphere of activity as a sovereign was England itself.
It resulted from all this that the system which Henry II had devised for the whole of his empire became, under his grandson, localized in England through force of circum- stances rather than from design. Already the exchequer had long been the exchequer of Westminster : but now the chancery, the council, the great officers of state and household had their sphere limited to England. The greatest minister, the justiciar, had already been called in the chronicles "justiciar of England." But now the hereditary court dignitaries, such as the king's marshals, began to call themselves " marshals of England " and the king's stewards "stewards of England." Before the end of the reign the treasurers of the exchequer are sometimes " treasurers of England," and early in the fourteenth century the king's chancellors are occasionally " chancellors of England." The local limitation, meant originally as a restriction of power, became a symbol of dignity, and a Simon de Montfort proudly called himself " steward of England " to emphasize his superior position over acting "stewards of the household," henceforth reduced to be high servants of the court. Thus the household officers of the Angevin empire became the public servants of the local English monarch.
NEW FRENCH INFLUENCES 8i
It is striking that Henry III should have been on the throne when this significant change took place. As a result of it the monarchy and its administration were localized within the limits of the English kingdom. It was only a step further for the state and its offices to be nationalized. What had happened in England might conceivably have followed in that part of Gascony ruled by the English kings. There was some reason, then, for the concessions made by St. Louis in the treaty of Paris and for his satisfaction of at last getting Henry's homage to him for the remnant of his Aquitanian in- heritance. " It seems to me," said the holy king, *' that what I am doing I do well in doing, inasmuch as the king of England has not yet been my vassal, but now he falls under my homage."* But the homage of one king to another was soon, as we shall see, to excite new troubles, and troubles such as the Normans and early Capetians would hardly have understood.
Side by side with this insularizing of the Anglo-French realm of the Angevins, came a series of new French in- fluences which were the direct result of the paramount position which the France of St. Louis was beginning to take in Europe. The early Capetian kings may not have been so impotent as they were once imagined to be. But there is nothing in history more remarkable than the wonderful growth of the French state under Philip Augus- tus. And this growth was the more important since it was attended by an immense impetus to French civiliza- tion all over Europe. There is nothing to parallel this universal influence of French civilization in the thirteenth
♦ Joinville: Fie dg Saint Louis, p. 374, ed. Wailly (1874).
82 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
and fourteenth centuries until three hundred years later, when the sun of Louis XIV illumined every court and every cultivated home of the western world. Though, politically, the France of St. Louis meant much, the influence of the French tongue and of French civiliza- tion was far wider than the political influence of the French monarchy. It was now that French became in the completest sense the common language of knight- hood, of politics, of commercial intercourse, of the litera- ture that entertained lords and barons, of all the lighter aspects of that cosmopolitan culture which expressed it- self in its more serious relations in Latin. Since the Norman Conquest there had been little love lost between the English and the French states. The common desire of the English vassal and the French overlord to maintain correct feudal relations prevented some wars and mitigated those that were natural and inevitable in such days of constant fighting, but they could not prevent frequent passages of arms.
It followed from these petty wars and constant bicker- ings that by the thirteenth century the Englishman was getting to regard the French state as a natural enemy. Yet the English baron denounced France in the French tongue and kept his eye open to those aspects of life which found their best expression in France and among the French-speaking peoples. The thirteenth century witnessed the coming of the friars, the development of the university schools, the triumph of gothic art, the spread of vernacular literature, the scholarly study of *' feudal " law in the light of Roman jurisprudence, the parallel development of the constitutions and adminis-
DEVELOPMENT OF COMMON TIES 83
tration of the two lands. Not one of these movements could have taken place without that close intercon- nection of the English and French peoples which were each of them becoming more homogeneous with each other at the same time that each was acquiring special characteristics of its own. It was the development of these common ties, despite the growing political separa- tion, that made the age of Henry Ilia time of national progress despite the weakness of the central state and the tendency to retrogression in English national politics.
Henry III was himself a pioneer of the new move- ment. A pious, pacific king, who loved friars, clerks, artists, fair buildings and sculpture, good books and cultivated society, he was not the less receptive to the stronger currents of the age because they came to England clothed in a French garb. He was, with all his English sympathies, French rather than English in type, and a crowd of French kinsmen, friends, and servants kept the French point of view perpetually before his eyes. We may best appreciate his attitude when we remember that, though he rebuilt Westminster abbey in honour of his sainted English predecessor, he erected the new struc- ture on purely French lines, so that it stands in strong contrast to Lincoln or Salisbury, products of a more insular architectural type.
There is no need to expatiate on the swarms of aliens whom the goodwill or weakness of Henry III attracted to the land of promise. There were first of all the two great migrations of the king's and queen's kinsmen. There were the Poitevin half-brothers and sisters of Henry, children of his mother, Isabella of Angoultoe,
84 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
by her second marriage with Hugh of Lusignan, count of La Marche. There were the relatives of queen Eleanor ' of Provence, notably her restless, energetic, and self- seeking Savoyard uncles. A Savoyard scholar, M. Francois Mugnier, devoted a volume to telling the story of the Savoyards in England in the thirteenth century,* and another book, quite as big, might well be written on the Poitevins in England during the same period. For each adventurer of high rank, who came to England to seek an earldom, a bishopric, or a great heiress, brought with him a swarm of poorer men — kinsfolk, clerks, servants, fortune hunters — ^who all had to be provided for. Moreover, there came, besides the wholesale inroads of Poitevins and Savoyards, many private adventurers of high foreign birth, anxious to push their way in a new country, and confident of the favour of a prince who was so sympathetic with their ideals. Of these the famous son of the famous conqueror of the Albigenses, Simon de Montfort, is the most noteworthy. A family com- pact centred on him the claims of the Montforts to the earldom of Leicester ; the goodwill of Henry III gave him possession of that dignity and the hand of the mon- arch's sister. Another successful foreign claimant to a derelict earldom was the Poitevin, John du Plessis, who came, perhaps, from the same family which four centuries later numbered Richelieu among its members. This Poitevin became earl of Warwick. A Joinville, closely akin to the biographer of St. Louis, came from Champagne to secure the lion's share of the inheritance of the Lacys
* Francois Mugnier : Les Savoyardi en Angle terre au treizime sihle.
THE ALIEN INVASIONS 85
of Ireland and the Welsh March. So normal was it for the highborn but impecunious Frenchman to seek a career and estate in England that he became one of the stock types of the novelist. Thus, in Philip de Beau- manoir's well-known romance of John of Dammartin and Blonde of Oxford * the story is told how a high- born, but ill-endowed, French aristocrat emigrated to England, secured a post in the household of the mighty earl of Oxford, won his favour, married his daughter, succeeded to his titles and estates, and " lived happily ever afterwards." This was but a literary generalization on the actual experiences of many noble Frenchmen of the period. The essential identity of the two realms made the process of migration easy, and facilitated the absorp- tion of the aristocratic settler with the people of the land which had common ideals, institutions, and standards with those of the country of his birth.
Besides the aristocratic immigrant and his following there was the clerical adventurer. Two main types may be distinguished. There were the clerks who came in the train of a noble master, and there were the clerks who were sent from the curia romana to enjoy some English pre- bend, or living, or to accomplish some mission in England. The first establishment of the Mendicant friars in Britain — the coming of the Franciscans and Dominicans — repre- sented, though it represented at its best, a phase of alien invasion more pervasive and lasting because of its peace- fulness and value. But the foreign clerk that excited the
* Jehan et Blonde is printed by H. Suchier in CEuvres poitiques de Philippe de Beaumanoir, T. II (Soc. des anciens textes fran9ais).
86 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
wrath of the chroniclers was generally a man of very different type. The curialist clerk, being generally an Italian, seldom made England his permanent home, and therefore has less direct interest for us, but the foreign ecclesiastic in the royal household, being normally a Frenchman, must come within our picture. And the foreign clerk, even more than the foreign noble, swarmed in the household and administrative offices of Henry III. It was the Poitevin bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches, and his nephew or son, Peter of Rivaux,* who organized the curialist forces to the undoing of Hubert de Burgh and of all good Englishmen. In 1 234 the indignant natives chased away these foreigners from office, but in a few years they, or others of their type, were again estab- lished in their places. For eighteen years in succession the king's wardrobe — the central household office — was in the hands of foreign keepers, Peter of Aigueblanche, a Savoyard from the Tarentaise, Peter Chaceporc, a Poitevin connected with the royal house by his brother's marriage with a Lusignan, Artaud de Saint-Romain, a Proven9al or a Burgundian, and Peter of Rivaux, the Poitevin, again. In one letter Henry III sent to the papal curia a list of nineteen foreign clerks in the royal service for whom he demanded special favours from the pope.
The English, French-speaking and English-speaking alike, bitterly resented these foreign settlements. The attitude of the chroniclers to them is exemplified by the fierce nationalism of the greatest of English mediaeval historians, Matthew Paris, the monk of Saint Albans.
* Rivaux is probably Arivault, Deux Sevres.
BEGINNINGS OF NATIONAL FEELING 87
The result was the cry against the alienigenae^ which attained its purpose when the Barons' Revolt of 1258 led to the removal of the hated crowd. Yet it would be most unfair to judge these unhappy seekers after a career by the invectives of the St. Albans chronicler. They were as often as not good officials, like the Poitevin Chaceporc. Some were liberal and high-minded, builders of monasteries not only in their own lands, but, as was the case with Chaceporc, in England, which he made the country of his adoption. One of the worst of them, Peter of Aigueblanche, bishop of Hereford, erected a fine collegi- ate church of secular clerks in the Val de Maurienne. Yet to Matthew Paris Peter of Aigueblanche was a " detestable traitor," a man of " foxlike cunning," whose memory " exhales a detestable odour of sulphur," and whose "shameful diseases" were God's judgment on his sins. Archbishop Boniface of Savoy, the queen's uncle, had almost as bad a reputation in England ; yet he deserves to be remembered as a canonist of repute.
There is a modern story of a Devonshire farmer who said that he hated " foreigners," but that when he spoke of " foreigners " he did not mean foreigners from beyond sea, but those " Somerset foreigners " who dwelt in the next county. This is a truly mediaeval point of view. In the Middle Ages you were indifferent to the aliens who lived out of sight and mind. You poured the vials of your wrath on the alien in your midst, the foreigner who came in to compete with you for trade, office, ecclesiastical preferment, or court favour. It did not, therefore, follow from the English prejudice against the alien that there was not much intercourse between the
88 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
better sort of Englishman and the continent. Never was the " English nation " at the Paris University more crowded with students and teachers. Never was there a larger proportion of English-born doctors and masters. English doctors bore their share in the great controversies and movements of the day. At Paris the English cardinal Curzon condemned the pantheistic heresies of Amaury de Bene : at Paris the English doctor, Alexander of Hales, first reconciled the philosophy of Aristotle with the teaching of the Church. Two English doctors, Alexander himself and John of St. Giles, were the first Paris teachers who abandoned the world for a Mendicant convent and resumed their instruction only in the cloister of their choice. A sturdy patriot, like Robert Grosse- teste, the famous bishop of Lincoln, might grudge to France the society of such eminent teachers. We know that Grosseteste persuaded one English scholar to remain at Oxford, and would not leave him alone, when sick in a French town, lest the authorities of the University of Paris should persuade him to lecture in its schools. In the same way he induced John of St. Giles to transfer his teaching from Paris to Oxford. But in such matters Grosseteste was a radical in advance of normal public opinion. For the ordinary Englishman a supplementary course at Paris was regarded as necessary to broaden the narrow outlook, thought likely to be implanted by a local university, such as Oxford, itself the result, as is generally believed, of a migration from the Parisian studium^ and not having yet outgrown the struggle which every university has to face in its youth. To the wealthy student a Paris training brought social as well as academic
PARIS AND OXFORD 89
advantages. When Thomas of Cantilupe, the son of a baron of the Welsh March, was a student at Paris, he lived with great dignity in a hired house with a train of chaplains and servants. Poor students ate up the crumbs that fell from his table : St. Louis himself honoured the young lord with a state visit. This same Thomas went back to Oxford, and was called from the chancellorship of that university to become the chancellor of the govern- ment of which Simon de Montfort was the soul. On Montfort's fall Thomas took refuge in Paris, taught with repute in its schools, until he was again recalled to England to become a bishop, and died in the odour of sanctity. So free was the intercourse between the two realms under Henry III.
The foreigner in England was looked upon at first with suspicion : but Englishmen soon got used to him, if he took to their ways. His settlement was not made difficult by the linguistic difficulty which is such a bar to complete social intercourse to-day. Thus the French- man, Simon de Montfort, became the leader of the baronial opposition, and, being a stronger radical than the ordinary English baron, did more to help forward the growth of representation in parliament than anybody before Edward I. On earl Simon's death on the field of Evesham, the French adventurer received popular canonization, as a saint and martyr, in the land of his adoption. Even the Poitevin half-brothers of Henry III could, if they tried, outlive their unpopularity. Their sons and grandsons became thorough Englishmen. This was notably the case with Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke under Edward II. He was the sanest and
90 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
most moderate of the baronial leaders under that king, and the founder of that " middle party " whose efforts gave Edward IPs unlucky reign what little prosperity it ever enjoyed. Yet this son of the alien Poitevin, in becoming an English patriot kept up his French connections. His three wives were all Frenchwomen: he had estates in France, and frequently visited that country. During Henry Ill's long reign there was almost a cessation of hostility between the two states. It is true that there was no formal peace until 1 259 ; but save for two feeble expeditions, which failed ignobly to reconquer Poitou, there was hardly any actual fighting after the withdrawal of Louis of France from England in 121 7. Henry III and his brother Richard of Cornwall, St. Louis and his brother, Charles of Anjou, married the four daughters of the count of Provence, and, apart from real family affection, the strongest sympathy and the possession of common ideals closely bound together the kings of England and France, It was this cordiality that made easy the mutual renunciations of the treaty of Paris of 1259. And the only enemy of that treaty was Simon de Montfort, who thought his own personal interests endangered by its terms. But its provisions proved illusory as the basis of a permanent settlement. By re- newing the old obligation to do homage to the French king, it involved an obligation that was offensive to the growing national pride of England. Moreover, the inevitable inclusion of Gascony in the sphere within which the French king strove to make his supremacy a reality brought him into antagonism with its English dukes, who resented every encroachment that their over-
FRENCH INFLUENCE ON EDWARD I 91
lord was making, as infringing their traditional rights to govern their duchy as they would.
The reign of Edward I brought out the antagonisms latent in the interpretation of the treaty of Paris and saw a more serious breach between the English and French states than had been witnessed since the days of John. Yet we must not exaggerate the traditional contrast between Edward I and his father. They differed not so much in outlook as in efficiency. They were alike in their resolve to be real kings, and they both took the same measures to attain authority, inasmuch as both aimed at ruling through their household officers rather than through the barons. Even in their attitude to foreigners the difference between them may be overstressed. Though more prudent than his father, Edward still kept a warm place in his heart for his Savoyard and Proven9al kinsfolk and their dependents. Such as had survived the cata- clysm of 1258 were under him becoming good English- men, like the Valences. Under him one Savoyard house, that of Granson, blossomed into the baronial family of Grandison, while another Savoyard immigrant stock, the house of Grilly, or Grailly, in the Pays de Vaud, settled down in the Landes of Bordeaux to produce the Gascon family of the Graillys, whose chief, the Captal de Buch of Edward Ill's reign, was by far the most eminent among the Gascon generals in that king's service. New seekers after preferment still came over, like the high-born Beaumonts, two brothers and a sister, who settled in England, relying on the favour of the court. The most famous of these was Louis of Beaumont, whom papal favour made in 131 7 bishop of Durham, despite his
92 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
scandalous illiteracy and complete neglect of his clerical duties. But for the most part Edward I's fellow workers in England were Englishmen ; and he was perhaps the first English duke who largely employed English officials in the government of what remained to him of Aquitaine. Thus one finds his English wardrobe clerks establishing bastides on the Garonne and the Dordogne, and the same men erecting vtlleneuves, after the French model, in the conquered principality of Wales, such as Conway and Carnarvon ; and even in English shire ground, as at New Winchelsea and at Kingston-on-Hull.
It was not without significance that Edward I was the first king, since Richard I, who had learnt his first experience as a ruler in Aquitaine ; though, unlike Richard, he was always the man of the north to the Gascons. It is interesting to note the various ways in which Edward I, and, indeed, his suc- cessors also, were in Aquitaine not only the assertors of local traditions of independence, but also pioneers of the ways of the north. They accomplished, in fact, for Gascony what Alfonse of Poitiers had done for Poitou and Toulouse, what Charles of Anjou had begun in Provence. With them came orderly central adminis- tration as against baronial immunities, feudal as against Roman law, seals as against notaries, communal muni- cipalities with mayors and jurats as against the consuls and capitouls, the Langue cTotl to the detriment of the Langue d^oc, gothic architecture as shown in the cathe- drals of Bordeaux and Bayonne, and a commercial prosperity based on the trade between the Gascon ports and those of England. Thus their rule, so far as it was
EDWARD Vs CONTINENTAL OUTLOOK 93
effective, involved a levelling-up process v^ith the north, which prepared the v^^ay for the gradual incorporation of the lands under their sway with the Capetian and Valois monarchy. But this was not what they wished : it was what they could not help doing. In Gascony they still strove after some parallelism of administration with that prevalent in England. The wardrobe and chancery of Edward I functioned in Gascony, during his long visit there, much as they acted in England. The constable of Bordeaux was compelled to account for the revenues of Gascony to the exchequer at Westminster. There was the closest economic connection between the two lands when the same merchant prince, and he a Gascon, could act, within a few years, both as mayor of London and mayor of Bordeaux.
There are two general misconceptions of Edward Fs exact place in history. As regards external policy he is often conceived as the pioneer of British unity, who cared little for continental aggrandizement, but threw his whole energy into establishing his domination over Wales, Scotland, and even Ireland. All these things Edward certainly tried to do, but he combined with this ambition a keen interest in continental affairs, constant interven- tion in continental politics, and an assured position in Europe which made his mediation sought for by princes in far distant lands. He was, through his anxiety to maintain every inch of land allowed to him by the treaty of Paris, brought into conflict both with Philippe le Hardi and with Philippe le Bel. The compromise at Amiens, in 1279, established some understanding between him and the elder French monarch, but Edward succumbed to the
94 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
coarser methods and more skilful diplomacy of his son. The war of 1 297-1 299, though in principle a conflict of kings rather than of peoples, anticipated to a certain extent the national wars of a later generation. This was to be seen in such measures as Edward's taking into his hands the alien priories, wherein French monks lived on English soil of English resources. It was seen still more clearly in the tenour of Edward's famous denunciation of his enemy which he thought politic to include in the writ of summons of the bishops and abbots to the parlia- ment of 1295 : " It has now gone forth to every region of the earth how the king of France has cheated us out of Gascony. But now, not satisfied with this wickedness, he has beset our realm with a mighty fleet and army, and proposes, if his power equal his detestable purpose, which God forbid, to wipe out the English tongue altogether from the face of the earth." Here is a definite appeal to national pride in the national tongue — a setting up of nation against nation. No doubt it was a rhetorical address to popular emotion, and meant so little that a few years later Edward married the sister of the unspeakable enemy and betrothed his heir to his daughter. More- over, he was forced to make common cause with Philip against the papacy under Boniface VIII, whose pre- tentions threatened to break down the hard and fast line between state and church, and subject the king to the priest.
Family alliances, restitution of conquered lands, common action against a common foe, could never make Philip and Edward really friendly. The same tension existed between Edward II and his father-in-law and
EDWARD II AND FRANCE 95
three brothers-in-law, who ruled successively over France during the twenty years of his reign. But the feudal reaction under the sons of Philip the Fair diminished the aggressive force of France, just as the constant disputes between Edward II and his barons made England a negligible quantity on the continent. Nevertheless, the French government was strong enough to continue with success its traditional policy of restricting the jurisdiction of the English crown in Gascony. From this arose the ill-feeling which blazed out into war in 1324— 1326. Again Gascony was seized by the French king, and again the English monarch laid violent hands on the alien priories. The period of hostilities was brief, and marked mainly by the conquest of the Agenais by Charles of Valois, who thereby gained the reputation as a special hater of the English. The tragic fall of Edward II ended the war which had been begun by the affair of Saint-Sardos. Yet the French queen of England raised her claim on her son Edward Ill's behalf to the successor of her brother. The recognition of Philip of Valois by the baronage of France showed that the leaders of that nation were resolved to pay no heed to legal subtleties when they resulted in handing over the national throne to a foreign king. After the Valois succession had been established for some twelve years, further disputes be- tween the two countries led to that assumption by Edward III of the title of French king which was the result rather than the cause of the great war which broke out in 1337, but perhaps contributed to protract that war into the Hundred Years' War. In this struggle the element of national animosity, though fer from being in the fore-
96 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
front, was distinctly more clearly in evidence than in the wars of Edward I and Philip the Fair.
Thus the states drifted apart and the nations with them. Nevertheless, the age of Edward I and Philip the Fair showed an increasing approximation in institu- tions and characters between the two realms. Here, too, history has gone too far in distinguishing the policy and motives of the two kings. We need not trouble about the personality of the rivals, for though that of Edward is clearly cut on strong, narrow lines, the character of Philip the Fair was an enigma to his own times and re- mains a subject of debate to modern historians. A more important matter is to consider the second of the two misconceptions which, as I said earlier, have been held as regards this reign. Side by side with the error that Edward I had little interest in European politics, there arose the other error that the polity of the two realms was funda- mentally different in those days. The result is the efforts which English writers, not excluding Stubbs, have at- tempted to establish a contrast between the England of Edward and the France of Philip, when a comparison would much more nearly meet the truth.
I have spoken already of the tendency of English political and constitutional historians not to give due recognition to the French element in English history. One cause of this refusal to recognize the romance element in English history is that excessive following of the Germans which, blatantly expressed by Freeman, is found in a more cautious and judicious form in even so eminent a scholar as Stubbs. I have already had occasion to notice respects in which the teaching of this great
GERMANIST AND ROMANIST 97
master is not so much wrong as out of focus. This is eminently the case with the introductory first chapter to his Constitutional History, in which he seeks to trace back all the formative elements in West-European in- stitutions to a Teutonic source, and from that point of view carries on a comparison between French and English institutions in their developed form. There is no need to minimize the importance of the Teutonic element in English history. As long as Englishmen speak English, this element in our formation is patent to all. But it is going much too far to maintain with Stubbs that "the German element is the paternal element"* in the English system, or that " the polity developed by the German races on British soil is the purest product of their primitive instinct."t It is even further off the mark to say that the French state was " the simple adaptation of the old German polity to the government of a con- quered race," that in France " feudal government ran its logical career,":!: and that French constitutional history is " the easiest subject of historical study."§ These doctrines of Teutonic pervasion are abstract theories borrowed from Teutonic masters, not facts provable by evidence. An impartial study of the known facts shows conclusively that there is no single fountain from which our institutions flowed. We must go back for Teutonic influence to the very origins ; but when once the Germanic migration had made southern Britain England, Teutonic influence becomes a negligible factor in our development. From the moment the English
* Constitutional History, i, 1 1 . f /^., i, 1 1 .
* IK i, 3. § IK i, 6.
G
98 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
were established in Britain there were but the faintest relations between them and the tribes of northern Ger- many. All through the Middle Ages our dealings with Germany were of the slightest — friendly enough for the most part, but never intimate or deep. Those misguided patriots who see in the Hansa and the Steelyard the thirteenth-century beginnings of modern German peace- ful penetration are hopelessly wrong with their facts. We must not rewrite our early history in the light of the emotions excited by German aggression in 19 14. But we may well correct the bias which led the academic fore- runners of German aggression to claim the whole Middle Ages as created by the Teutonic spirit.
Stubbs highly appreciated his great German masters, and had excellent reasons for his faith in them. Nor need we altogether censure his misgivings as regards the scholar- ship of the France of the Second Empire. But he never took in the remarkable work done by French historical science after the catastrophe of 1870. He is alleged to have advised disciples to read French history in Latin or in German, but as little as possible in French — though here, perhaps, there was at least a touch of his charac- teristic humour. However this may be, he neglected the non-Teutonic side. France had her revenge when the English student was compelled to seek in the French edition of Stubbs, inspired by M. Charles Petit- Dutaillis, those rectifications and amplifications of his doctrines which no English scholar has as yet been at pains to put together.*
* M. Petit-Dutaillis' commentaries on the first and second volumes of Stubbs' Constitutional History have been separated from the French translation and issued by themselves for the use
EDWARD I AND PHILIP IV 99
But perhaps Stubbs, too, had his revenge when the en- thusiasts of the romance school fell into almost as great excesses as their Teutonic opponents. Certainly Fustel de Coulanges, and still more Flach, would take a good deal of beating in onesidedness.
It follows that the contrast between England and France in institutions as in national psychology, true enough in some later ages, has for the Middle Ages been tremen- dously overstressed. The orthodox doctrine of the last generation was that Edward I brought to a culmination that unique system of constitutional liberty of which the barons at Runnymede had laid the foundation. On the other hand, Philip the Fair was the selfish creator of an unhealthy despotism which deprived France of all real freedom until 1789. An Englishman can be a good patriot without pushing national self-complacency to such a simple conclusion. The truer view seems that at no time did French and English institutions approach each other as closely as at that period. Edward I and Philip IV worked on parallel lines to a similar end. This end was to strengthen the royal power. If Edward failed to establish a Capetian despotism in England, it was through no fault of his own. Nor was it by reason of any special political instinct of the English people. In both cases you have a strong, vigorous, and not over-scrupulous
of the English reader who has no need for the translation of the text. They have been published, under Professor Tait's editor- ship, as Studies and Notes Supplementary to Stubbs* Constitutional History (Manchester University Press). Unfortunately, the translation and commentary on the third volume have not yet appeared in the French form.
100 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
prince trying, by means of an appeal to the lesser folk, to set his authority on a broader basis and get the better of his natural enemies — the great barons and bishops. Both kings succeeded in their immediate purpose. They both achieved their end of rallying their subjects round them against the nobility by setting up a popular assembly, which not only gave them the immediate help w^hich they required but was destined to have a great part to play in the future. That the English assembly was to loom larger in history than its French equivalent is due to factors that had hardly emerged in the days of Simon de Montfort and Edward I, though it must be recognized that it had deeper roots in the past and a sounder and wider constitution. But we have only to read the writs of summons,* which Edward and Philip issued, to see at a glance that the motives of the two monarchs were essentially the same, and that even the means taken to secure them were to no great extent dissimilar. In both countries the national assembly was in its origin the en- largement and the strengthening of the immemorial concilium regis by the introduction into it, on solemn occasions, of a popular and representative element.
Even in name the representative national councils of England and France were not at first far asunder. But while in England the popular assembly soon appropriated to itself the name of " parliament," the specializing of that word in France to the supreme law court made it
* The French writs are collected in Picot's Documents relatifs aux l£tats gMraux sous Philippe le Bel (Documents inedits sur THistoire de France, 1901). The English are in Palgrave's Parliamentary Writs, vol. i.
CONSTITUTIONAL ANALOGIES loi
necessary to find another word to denote the political and consultative body. It was long, however; "before its usual name was £tats generaux, and it i^^nbt before the middle of the fourteenth century that wt\ c?ven")if^V, " of the trots etats* The doctrine of estates has irideecJ * been overstressed on both sides of the Channel. A great teacher, Professor Pollard of London, has lately warned Englishmen against believing in what he calls " the myth of the three estates."t I do not contest his doctrine, and, indeed, have myself already stated the same view more briefly4 Mr. Pollard might have strengthened his argu- ment by pointing out that, even in France, which he assumes to have been the special home of the doctrine of estates, it is not until after the middle of the fourteenth century that we first read of the tres status^ Us trots itats^ of France, and that tiers itat does not occur before the end of the fifteenth century.^
* An early instance of its use in a chronicler is in Chronique normande (ed. Molinier), which was written about 1 369-1 372. Speaking of the disorders after Poitiers the writer says (p. 118): " Et avoient ordonn^ que le royaume de France seroit ordonn^ et gouvern6 par les trois estaz." The phrase is thrice repeated within a page. The " three estates " are " clers, cheva- liers, bourgois." The use of " knights " for " noblesse "or "lords," and of " burgesses " for the English " commons " is significant.
t A. F. Pollard: The Evolution of Parliament, ch. iv, "The Myth of the Three Estates."
X Tout : Chapters in Mediaeval Administrative History ^ i, 8.
§ See for this Viollet : Histoire des Imtitutions politiques et administratives de la France y iii, 177-185. In 1368 we find "parliament" still used in France in the sense of popular assembly, the "parliamentum regis Francie" consisting of the " tres status lingue d'oy."
102 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
The division into estates was natural enough in a time when glasses 'were so sharply divided, but there is no special* sanctity in the number three. In England the GtirioXis treatise called Modus tenendi Parliamentum, which I feel mclined to date about 1340, tells us that the parliament consisted of six " degrees " or estates.* But the unity of the original assembly was its strength. The doctrine of estates ignored that unity, and the undue separation of the nation into socially distinct groups was a main cause of the discredit into which the system of estates fell all over Europe. It was, I think, the weakness of its tendency towards splitting up into estates that helped to give its amazing vitality to the English Parliament. On the continent the mediaeval estates disappeared, as in France. f They only survived the eighteenth century in Sweden and Finland, and have now vanished even there. It is a source of pride to England that, when parliamentary government was introduced into many lands in the nineteenth century, the model was the British bicameral system. But we may doubt whether it is always wise for one nation to copy another.
The similarity of the institutions of the England of Edward I and the France of Philip the Fair comes out most clearly in the sphere of administration. It would be still more in evidence, had English historians taken as
♦ Stubbs: Select Charters, p. 507. The "sex gradus" are: (i) the king; (2) bishops and abbots holding by barony; (3) proctors of the clergy; (4) earls, barons, and magnates; (5) knights of the shire; (6) citizens and burgesses. I regard the words "status" and "gradus" as synonymous.
t The estates of Jersey and Guernsey, originating long after 1206, have no continental affiliation.
ANALOGIES IN ADMINISTRATION 103
much trouble to elaborate the history of the adminis- trative system of their own country as French scholars, with much worse material to work upon, have taken to describe many of the administrative offices of mediaeval France. The occasional differences only emphasize the similarity of the general arrangements. The divergencies are clearest on the financial side, where there is nothing in France strictly corresponding to the English exchequer, though the chambre des compteSy when it went out of court and became localized in Paris, substantially takes its place. On the other hand, the maison du rot, the household system of the two countries, was substantially identical. For household finance the French camera denarioruniy which then supplemented the semi-nationalized camera compotorum, represents our wardrobe and chamber, though the independence and importance of the English wardrobe over against the chamber has nothing corresponding to it in France. The chanceries of England and France are much more alike, even in such details as the employment of same colours of wax to denote acts of the royal chancery according to their varying degrees of importance — green wax for charters and letters patent of moment, white wax for less formal patents and all letters close under the great seal.* But England had nothing so centralized, so efficient, and so comprehensive as the grande chancellerie royaleyVfYnoh. included within its sphere every writing and sealing depart- ment of state. In England there was a tendency towards the multiplication of chanceries and of seals, so that we have
* It should be remembered, however, that the normal letter close in France was sealed by the secret seal, not by the great seal. The seal is, like English small seals, " plaqu6 en cire rouge."
104 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
the exchequer chancery with the exchequer seal, and the court chancery with its separate secretarial office of the privy seal. In France, too, seals were multiplied, but the secretarial body remained one, even when separate groups of officials were told off to the service of particular seals. It is another sign of the close analogies of English and French usage that red wax was used in both lands, when- ever a document was to be stamped by one of the smaller seals, consisting only of one piece.
I have on previous occasions* ventured to conjecture that towards the end of Edward IPs reign his reforming chancellor, Robert Baldock, took steps to extend to Eng- land the centralized chancery of France ; but, if my guess is right, the speedy overthrow of Edward II, and Baldock's own tragic death in prison, put an effective end to all such efforts. However this may be, there was never a stronger tendency for English officials to imitate France than under Edward II. Take two instances in the develop- ment of the chamber — ^an aspect of Edward IPs policy which was, I feel pretty sure, an imitation of the chamber system of France. It was in 1 3 1 3 that we have first clear evidence of the existence of a cameral seal, the secretum sigtllum, which was distinct from the privatum stgillum^ the English equivalent of the French sceau du secret^ and which, I believe, was from the beginning kept in the king's chamber by one of the clerks subordinate to the king's chamberlain. In 1 3 1 2, the year before Edward II's secretum can be proved to be something different from
* See my Place of the Reign of Edward II in English History, pp. 163-168, and Chapters in Mediaeval Administrative History, ii, pp. 303-313.
ANALOGIES IN HOUSEHOLD SYSTEM 105
his privy seal, a famous, though disputed, passage in Bardin's Chronicle distinguishes for the first time clearly between the three royal seals of France. There are the magnum sigil/um, kept by the chancellor, the parvum sigi//um, that is, the signet, which the king was accustomed to carry himself, and the secretum sigi/Ium, whose custody was with the chamberlain. This is exactly what was the case in the England of Edward II, except that the barons had just forced on the king the appointment of a responsible keeper of his privy seal, which, by thus be- coming officialized, like the great seal, compelled the king to introduce a new personal seal of the French type. Thus in England, as in France, the result of the making of the sometime personal seal a seal of government in- volved the use of a new seal for the king's personal and private aflFairs. Before long this seal in England, as in France, was called the signet. The further glorification of the chamber by the first great chamberlain in English history, the younger Hugh le Despenser, and its revival by Edward III as an administrative expedient for conducting the great war, were also, I venture to suspect, a following of French ways. A hundred years earlier, England set the example to France of administrative progress. By the fourteenth century the French administrative system had become so well ordered that England was content to borrow the new administrative devices of France.
But administrative history is a deadly dull subject, and must not be dealt with orally by a lecturer who does not wish to drive away all his audience. I have now, I hope, brought you to the period of the Hundred Years' War, and we can approach this turning-point in
io6 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
Anglo-French mediaeval relations the more rapidly as it would be otiose to treat at length of such of its causes as bear upon our subject in the university which has the good fortune to have in its chair of history the author of Les Origines de la Guerre de Cent Ans* On the threshold of that great struggle, I would venture to em- phasize once more the similarities of the two peoples. In particular I would again ask the question, why have their many points of affinity been so obscured by historians of both lands, and especially by those of my own ? I have already criticized English constitutional and political historians for treating England as too much of a unit by itself. I must still more blame our historians of literature who have tended to define " English literature " as books written in the English tongue, and not as books written by Englishmen. They have, therefore, hardly made enough allowance for the potent fact that English was only one of the three languages naturally used by English- men, and that, as a tongue of peasants hopelessly split up into dialects, it was, until Chaucer's time, less important for literary purposes than Latin and French. I do not claim for the English of our period that they lived in a great literary age ; but English literature was out and away less barren than this narrow view of literary output suggests. There was an immense pro- duction of learned and scholarly work in Latin. Giraldus Cambrensis and John of Salisbury were the greatest men of letters in their age, and ought not to be kept out of the
* Eugene D^prez : Les Origines de la Guerre de Cent Ans, This is by far the most elaborate and authoritative work on this subject.
ANGLO-FRENCH LITERATURE 107
reckoning because they wrote in Latin. Neither should the multitude of competent and scholarly historians be left out of account, whether they be the twelfth century literary historians, based on the classic models which the school of Chartres was holding up to the admiration of Europe, or the more numerous group of thirteenth century writers whose best efforts culminate in the rich colour and broad effects of a man of letters of the stamp of Matthew Paris. If the fourteenth century showed some decline of literary art, it showed an increasing solidity of scientific equipment, and in a catalogue of English contributions to learning and science neither Roger Bacon, nor Adam Marsh, nor Grosseteste, neither Peckham nor Kilwardby, nor Hales, nor Scotus, nor Ockham should be forgotten among the eminent thinkers, scientists, and politicians who wrote not for England only but for the great cosmopolitan public of the west.
Even more injustice is done when our historians of literature leave out of sight the considerable output of French works, written by subjects of the Angevin mon- archy— on both sides of the Channel in the twelfth century and on the northern side of it in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There were the chroniclers, the poets, and the romancers of mark who wrote in French. Even in the twelfth century there was the Norman Wace, who in the Roman de Ron wrote, at the bidding of his master Henry II, the story of the Norman dukes backwards from his patron to the founder of the duchy. We may not think Wace a good authority for the existence of palisades as defences of the English lines at Hastings, but we must respect him for his vivacity and
io8 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
colour. There was, too, Marie de France, so-called to distinguish her from her English namesakes at the court of Henry II, where she long had her abode. We com- memorate her for two reasons, firstly because of her re- markable popularity with counts, barons, knights, and especially with ladies, and also for the more solid reason that she took her part in bringing into fashion that matikre de Bretagne, that cycle of Celtic poems of which the Arthurian legend is the culmination, which is in itself eminently illustrative of the close literary relations of the two nations. Whether the stories were Breton or Welsh in origin, they only gained universal currency through the wide publicity they received from English and French men of letters, writing either in Latin or French, on both sides of the Channel. There is no branch of letters that more clearly brings out the identity of literary impulse in the two lands than does the Arthurian legend. This identity is the more complete and significant by reason of the important part played in it by the Celtic element in Britain and Gaul alike.
We must not ever neglect the technical French of the lawyers, which F. W. Maitland has shown to be no mere barbarous jargon but a living and vivid language, at once the best surviving example of Anglo-French vernacular and a written tongue capable of adaptation to all the uses put upon it. Nor should we ignore the mass of French correspondence, official and private, though most of it lies unprinted in our archives. The study of the French of England — Anglo-Norman as it is sometimes rather inaccurately called — ^still cries for at- tention. Its hard fate has been to be crushed between
ANGLO-FRENCH SPEECH 109
the contempt of the Parisian-trained scholar, to whom all departure from the normal tongue of the bassin parisien is a barbarism, and the Teutonizing Englishman, who regarded it as a monstrous thing that honest Englishmen should ever have presumed to have spoken and written in a romance tongue. There is much for which I have freely blamed my own countrymen in many relations, but in this respect I must praise yours. I must record our gratitude in England for the feet that so much of our knowledge of the Latin and French literature of early mediaeval England is mainly to be derived from French scholars, whether we pursue the story in detail in the many volumes of the Htstoire litteraire de la France^ or study it in a concentrated form in that marvellously packed precis in which Gaston Paris summarized la litterature frangaise du moyen age in less than three hundred pages. We have only to work care- fully through this little treatise to appreciate what a large share in making mediaeval French literature — especially in its humbler grades — belongs to Anglo- French authors. For such men we English must claim our share in the common heritage, and, if I may also add a gentle expostulation with such eminent men, we must ask for a little more sympathy with the study and forms of Anglo-French on the ground that, though not the French of Paris, the French even of Stratford-atte-Bowe has its own little place in the history of civilization. I make this plaint because I remember that Monsieur Gaston Paris complained that the Liber exemplorum (a treasury of anecdotes for the use of preachers), composed by an English Franciscan, Nicholas Bozon, for the use
no ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
of writers of vernacular sermons, was composed in a style that would be pleasant enough if the Anglo-Norman tongue did not show so markedly the features which distinguish it from good French.* But it was no part of the mediaeval ideal to normalize the vernacular tongues upon too strict lines.
Other types of historians may also share the blame which I am so freely scattering. Some ecclesiastical historians of England are to be censured for their vain reading-back into the Middle Ages of the modern high- Church ideal of an ecclesia angltcana^ such as has had wide currency since the days of Laud and Andrews. But thee mediaeval church was through and through Roman, and a church without pope or monks would not have appealed to mediaeval man at all. But I will not go on any further. Enough has been said to show that, up to the fourteenth century, there was such an intimate cor- relation between the mediaeval civilization of France and England that in a real sense it made the two countries common provinces of a single realm. This connection was all for the advantage of England, for France was, after all, by far the larger and greater country, and much more in the centre of things. Thus England through France lost not a little of its insularity. And may not France also have got just a little benefit on her side ?
* La LittSrature frangaise an moyen dge^ p. 223: "Si le langage anglo-normand n'y montrait pas d*une fa^on aussi marqude les caract^res qui I'eloignent du bon fran^ais de France." Another Liber exemplorum, also written in French, by an English Franciscan, has been published by my colleague, Mr. A. G. Little, for the British Society of Franciscan Studies.
• EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY iii
A final wave of French influence overspread England in the early fourteenth century. The seventy years of the Babylonish captivity of the church at Avignon — which was virtually, though not technically, French — made French the tongue of the rulers of the church in a way it had never been before. The papal curia in Italy had been preponderatingly Italian, and its language in all officials acts was, of course, Latin. But the English clerk, canonist, suitor, diplomat, or place-hunter found at Avignon a partly French-speaking city and French car- dinals, lawyers, and officials. Of these a good many were Gascons and born subjects of the English king, for in the fourteenth century it was as easy for the plausible and eloquent Gascon to become pope as it is in our own age for the meridional to become a prime minister of France. The result is to be seen in the general tendency of the Avignon popes to cultivate the friendship both of the French and the English monarchs and to keep up a good understanding between them. For the first time, per- haps, English kings corresponded with popes and cardinals in the common vernacular of both. If all formal corres- pondence was still in Latin, the secret and intimate letters were now often written in French. A striking example is the confidential note which accidentally contains the earliest known specimen of the handwriting of an English king. When preparing to throw off the yoke of Mortimer, Edward III wrote to John XXII, warning him that many royal letters that reached Avignon from the English court might well contain official requests in which the king had little personal interest. But henceforth the pope was instructed that any letter containing a suggestion, which
112 ATTRACTION AND REPULSION
Edward had specially at heart, would contain two words written in the round boyish hand of the young king.* This was, perhaps, the first time that correspondence between the English crown and the papacy had been written in any tongue than Latin. It was a concession alike to the growing vogue of French and to the spreading use of the vernacular in correspondence.
A further wave of French-speaking influence came in with the marriage of Edward III with Philippa of Hainault. The daughter of the count of Hainault came from a land which, though technically no part of France, was entirely French-speaking and dominated by French ideals. A swarm of Walloon clerks and soldiers followed the young queen to England, and two of these made a deep mark on English history. One of these only came to England towards the end of Philippa's life. This was a young clerk from Valenciennes, John Froissart, who wrote the first draft of his famous chronicle when still regarding the English queen as his mistress and her husband as the mirror of chivalry. The restless wander- ings of the brilliant chronicler soon took him far from England and subjected him to anti-English influences. But his sojourn in Philippa's court and his travels in the English king's lands, on both sides of the Channel, gave him that intimate acquaintance with English ways that
* See for this Mr. C. G. Crump's note on " The arrest of Roger Mortimer and Queen Isabel" in English Historical Review, xxxvi, 331, 332, where a facsimile of the two words "pater sancte" is given in Edward's handwriting. Edward apologises for the variety of occupations which compel him to have the text of the letter written by his confidant, Richard of Bury, keeper of his privy seal.
HAINAULT INFLUENCE 113
enabled him to give at first hand his picture of the common civilization of French and English at the moment of its greatest brilliancy and before its obscuration by the growth of national animosities to which the cosmopolitan chroni- cler only gradually became amenable. Unlike Froissart, Sir Walter Manny came over to England in the train of the young bride and, also unlike Froissart, found there his permanent home. A gallant knight and distinguished leader of men, Manny fought for king Edward with all his might, married one of the greatest of English ladies, and founded the London Charterhouse, almost the last of the great monastic foundations of the English Middle Ages. Men such as Manny, and the numerous knights of the Netherlands who fought on Edward's side, owed no allegiance to the French crown, but they were none the less powerful exponents of the French point of view. Before they had had much time to exercise influence, however, there came the cataclysm of the Hundred Years' War.
Lecture IV
The Hundred Tears War and Afterwards
I HAVE already suggested that the Hundred Years* War was the great dividing line in the mediaeval relations of France and England. The two countries entered into it as kinsfolk and neighbours, who, if they often quarrelled and sometimes slandered each other, managed to keep on fairly close relations. They emerged from the struggle with a tradition of national enmity which, despite long periods of approximation in every succeeding century, only became faint when France began to forget Pitt and his guineas and England to outlive the fear of Napoleon and the Revolution. But it is the bad habit of the modern historian, who tries to be a man of science, that he no sooner makes a categorical statement than he begins to qualify it. I have, therefore, to begin to-day by explain- ing that even the opening stages of the Hundred Years' War did not alter the current of national feeling in either land with the same sure swiftness that a modern war is bound to occasion. It was very gradually, and never, indeed, completely, that the Hundred Years* War be- came a struggle between two nations.
I have already refused to enlarge on the causes of the war. They are known to everybody who takes any interest in the fourteenth century, and there is among historians a substantial agreement about them.* The fundamental basis of the quarrel was the impossible position of an Eng- lish king who was also duke of Gascony. As Gascon
* Dt-prez' Les Priliminaires de la Guerre de Cent Atis gives the fullest and best analysis of the causes of the war.
CAUSES OF THE WAR 115
duke he was obliged to resist the French king's applica- tion to that region of the same policy of monarchical centralization that he himself, as English king, was ap- plying with all his strength to his own insular dominions, and even, so far as his power allowed, to Gascony itself. He could not, therefore, live on friendly terms with the French monarch because he was also one of the feudal potentates of the French realm whose interests were directly counter to those of the French crown. It was immaterial what were the precise rights of the overlord and the vassal. This was ultimately a question of feudal right — a matter for lawyers and diplomatists. But the lawyers and diplomatists of both countries had been wrang- ling about the respective claims of their masters in Gascony for Mty or sixty years, and had never found any solution of their problems, or even a satisfactory compromise be- tween the contending pretensions. If this technical and juridical dispute provoked ill-feeling in England, it was not likely that such irritation would extend beyond official and military circles. It was a matter of small importance to the man in the street. Even less deeply seated was the dynastic claim to the French throne. All moderns would regard this as baseless and provocative, but even at the time it was only seriously pursued as a protective measure after hostilities had already begun. For Edward only assumed the title of king of France in 1340, and only did so then to please his Flemish allies, who thought their interests were better secured by imagin- ing that Edward and not Philip was their overlord : be- lieving that by this device they might escape the conse- quences of the interdict that Boniface VIII had launched
ii6 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
against them whenever they dared to rise in revolt against the king of France. Personal loyalty of vassal to lord was a great thing in the Middle Ages ; and the litigious Middle Ages loved a long drawn-out juridical dispute. Yet it is hard to see why a natural desire to support their king in a rash and presumptuous claim should make Englishmen hate Frenchmen, though it might well make Frenchmen resent English interference. It was the same with the support given by Philip VI to the Scottish patriots, whom the English persisted in regarding as rebels. But this was a matter for the northern lords, who alone bore the burden of the Scottish campaigns And Eng- land north of the Tweed was the region least concerned with war with the French. It was agreed that they had their hands full with fighting the Scots. The continental campaign was, then, only to be the affair of the southerners. % The economic disputes underlying the struggle in- volved a more real conflict of interests. Economic rivalry has been in all ages a fruitful cause of wars, and the dream of Richard Cobden of uniting nations by the peaceful bonds of trade has proved too often a pious illusion, for how are traders united through furious at- tempts to get the better of each other and become rich at their rivals' expense ! Moreover, commercial rivalry could only affect the commercial classes, and they counted for little in fourteenth-century politics. The economic interpretation of history is a key that unlocks one casket of motives, but it is far, indeed, from being a complete explanation even of modern history, and is ludicrously in- adequate to explain the acts of an age when business in- terests counted for little in matters of high politics. Com-
THE ECONOMIC RIVALRY 117
mercial rivalry, then, may explain some aspects of the ani- mosity that the war engendered. It may well account for the feud between the sailors of the Cinque Ports and the mariners of Normandy and Picardy, and help to show why Normandy, only French for a century, and even the county of Ponthieu, ruled as count by the English king up to its confiscation at the beginning of hostilities, were strongly on the French side. It may also explain the fierce animosity of the men interested in the Flemish wool trade, who resented the action of the French king and the Flemish count. It certainly explains the economic pressure which caused the Flemish towns to abandon the neutrality, imposed upon them as a compromise between their business interests and their political obligations. They declared for the English alliance because their livelihood depended on the free importation of English wool, with- out which they had not enough material to feed the looms of Ghent and Ypres. Moreover, for political reasons they needed English support against the strong pro-French sympathies of their count and of the gallicized Flemish aristocrats, who took their tone from Paris and hated the rebellious weavers of Ghent as the nearest fourteenth- century approach to the modern Bolshevik. But the establishment of the Anglo-Flemish alliance had little effect on the fortunes of the war. It was less futile that the imperial alliance which Edward III relied upon in the earliest phase of the struggle, but which he soon saw brought him nothing but debt, irritation, and em- barrassing ecclesiastical and international complications. Even Edward's brother-in-law, the emperor Louis of Bavaria, only became his ally because he thought England
ii8 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
a good stick for beating John XXII and the king of France. The imperial vassals of the Netherlands — the duke of Brabant, the count of Hainault and Holland, the counts of Jiilich and Gelderland — were simply out to make money by taking Edward's pay as soldiers and by luring his merchants to their markets. They never gave him value for his subsidies, and Edward soon dropped them in disgust as unprofitable allies.
Perhaps no aspect of the preliminary negotiations stirred up more ill-will in England than the abortive attempts of the Avignon papacy to prevent the war, so long as prevention was just possible, and to end the war, as soon as war had become the order of the day. The French popes of the captivity have had bad treatment at the hands of historians, and we owe to the modern French scholars, who are editing their registers, the material which enables us to appreciate more fairly their energy and pertinacity. It seems clear that John XXII and his successors were honestly trying to prevent the effusion of Christian blood, and were doing good service to the world by their unwearied and thankless mediation. But they had a natural bias towards their own country j they had an equally natural conviction that there was not much to be said in favour of the English claim ; they were the heads of the corrupt and greedy curiay whose procrastination, venality, and self-seeking were notorious to so many English clerks, and whose very virtue in re- fusing promotion in the church to many unprofitable seekers after preferment had embittered more than one disappointed cleric who saw himself outrun in the race for bishoprics.
PAPAL MEDIATION 119
Accordingly, the English never gave the pope a fair chance : they suspected his motives and disbelieved in his impartiality. The pope was a Frenchman, eager to win the favour of his natural lord, and prejudging, there- fore, any claim that seemed opposed to his interests. It was in two ways a proof that national feeling had become a strong factor in politics. The Englishman was con- vinced that a French pope must be a partisan of the French king. A man born in the kingdom of France was now considered to be a Frenchman. A hundred years earlier none of the Avignon popes would have been regarded as French in any strict sense. They all came from the south — from Quercy, the Limousin, the county of Foix. the Gevaudan — and only one, Clement VI, sometime archbishop of Sens and Rouen, had had any enduring connection with the France north of the Loire or inti- mate dealings with the French court. Some of them would, had the treaty of 1 259 ever been strictly executed, have been born subjects of the English king, like the first of the series, Clement V. Such were the men whom the English accused of French partiality. Was not this an indication that accusers and accused were swayed by national feeling ? That many Englishmen and many Frenchmen had some ill-will to each other cannot be denied. All unconsciously, national sentiment was grow- ing up in both lands. To a limited extent, therefore, we may include an incipient national animosity among the factors producing the war. But it was inconspicuous among them, and weighed little either with diplomatists or in public opinion.
Nations grow not only when the men of a country
120 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
become conscious of national identity one with another, but also when they bring home from their travels a strong feeling that they were not like the men they had seen abroad and a hatred of foreigners because their manners were not like their own. Still more is this the case where fierce and repeated hostilities exacerbate feeling between two rival peoples. It was in this way that the Hundred Years' War became by repulsion a powerful factor in stimulating national sentiment. We see its growth when we turn over the pages of a disappointed office seeker like the English chronicler, Adam Murimuth, who never has a good word to say for the curia at Avignon, or for the French cardinals and clerks that controlled it. It swelled the growing anti-clerical tide in England. It made popular the permanent assumption into the royal hands of the alien priories to avoid the scandal of French monks sending to the French king the revenues of English estates to furnish him with men and money for fighting the king of England. It accounts for the statutes of provisors and praemunire, and it explains why John Wycliffe, the first famous English heretic, became a political personage by defending the rights of the English crown against the papacy and France in the Conference of Bruges. Yet the road to Avignon — though not the direct road — was still open, even in wartime. The popes could generally be persuaded to " provide " the clerks the English kings wished to honour to high pre- ferment in the English Church. Even the French monks, garrisoning the alien priories, were allowed to re- main in their old homes on paying a rent to the king that left little chance of their sending anything over to France.
STIMULUS TO NATIONAL FEELING 121
Under such circumstances not even the outbreak of the Hundred Years' War put a complete and abrupt end to the common outlook of the two lands. If there were war, it was war of a limited and old-fashioned sort. The French and English knights fought in all courtesy and with a nice regard to the rules of the ring. If they killed each other, it was part of the day's work. If one warrior led the other captive, he treated him with studied respect and good fellowship, though he did not forget to make a shrewd bargain as to the amount to be paid for his ransom. Frequent truces broke the monotony of warfare ; during these periods English knights travelled freely through the enemy's country and mixed in familiar fashion with their sometime enemies. It was a gentle- manly and regulated warfare, conducted with a keen sense of rivalry, but yet with not much more ill-feeling than a modern rowing or cricket match between English universities, and with much less acrimony, and not many more broken bones, than some modern football contests. This regulated and restricted warfare of good sportsmen was at its height during the early Netherlandish cam- paigns of 1 338-1 340. It made possible such an attitude as that of count William of Hainault, who was brother of queen Philippa of England and nephew of king Philip of France. William of Hainault took his brother-in- law's wages and followed him, not only as his paymaster and kinsman, but because as an imperial prince he was bound to obey the vicar of the emperor. When the army of Edward crossed the French boundary, the count with- drew his forces. His conscience did not allow him to wage war in France against his uncle, to whom he was
122 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
bound by liege homage for some little fief which he held of the French crown. It was appropriate that the truce which ended these ineffective early struggles should have been negotiated by William's mother, the widowed abbess of Fontenelles, sister of the king of France and mother of the queen of England.
Some of these amenities were kept up much later in the struggle. It is significant that in the year after Crecy the French widow of earl Aymer of Pembroke could found a college at Cambridge in which a preference was given to Frenchmen over Englishmen in all ap- pointments to the foundation. It is not likely that the preference was ever effective, for it is improbable that in the succeeding period there would be any French scholars willing to live among the enemy in order to enjoy the modest bounty of the countess at Pembroke College, Cambridge. But it shows the lack of acerbity in the struggle that such a plan should have been thought possible. Compare the stipulations of Mary of Saint- Pol with the fate of the Rhodes scholarships established by the empire-builder of South Africa, Cecil Rhodes, that young Germans, like young British colonial students, should participate in the invigorating training of the English governing classes which, he thought, it was the special glory of Oxford to provide. On the outbreak of war in 1914, the German Rhodes scholars promptly dis- appeared, and the trustees of the foundation abolished the whole scheme for promoting Anglo-German friendship.
After the war had been waged for many years, there still occur instances of friendly co-operation between the two protagonist nations. Duke Henry of Lancaster went
AMENITIES OF CHIVALROUS WAR 123
to fight against the "heathen" in the lands to the east of the Baltic. On his return journey he publicly asserted that duke Otto of Brunswick laid an ambush to waylay him and lead him prisoner to France. This treachery partook of the nature of sacrilege, since the Baltic crusade was technically regarded as a holy war. Duke Otto gave Henry the lie direct and challenged him to mortal combat, provided that the time and place of the duel were to be settled by the king of France. Finally, it was arranged that the fight should take place at Paris under the eye of king John of France, who was to preside over the lists. The English duke made no objection to this, though Otto had been in the French service. It was not a time of formal truce ; yet the two courts allowed duke Henry to march through the enemy's country from Calais to Paris with a train of sixty knights and men-at-arms. At Paris the citizens went out to meet him ; king John received him with honour in his palace ; and a great gathering of knights flocked to Paris to witness the duel. But, when the day of meeting at last took place, the bad conscience or pusillanimity of the German reduced the com- bat to a farce. The Brunswicker humiliated himself and withdrew his complaint. Finally, the French king enter- tained Lancaster and the famous knights — all heroes of the war — to a magnificent banquet, and on his departure presented his hereditary foe with a thorn from Christ's crown of thorns. The chivalry of Europe accepted and applauded his decision.* Nevertheless, these same knights
* There are two long accounts of this duel in Geoffrey the Baker, pp. 121, 122, and Knighton, ii, 69-73. The French accounts, though shorter, are extraordinarily impartial, and say that
124 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
who agreed to refer a delicate point of personal honour to the chief enemy of their country, and keep up with him the most friendly of social relations, had found no words too strong to denounce the French king's father when he declined to attain the full measure of reckless chivalry which Edward of England was proud to illustrate in his own person.
It was in the same spirit that the two rival kings challenged each other to fight out their quarrel by personal combat or by a limited tournament of a few chosen knights representing each side. Nor was this state of things limited to the early years of the war. We see it notably in Brittany in the famous Battle of the Thirty, when thirty knights — Breton, French, and English — represented each side of the two rival factions that were contending with English and French support to obtain for their champion the disputed succession to the Breton duchy. A famous poem commemorates this fierce little struggle, fought out by arrangement, hard by the great oak-tree, the chene de mi-voie^ that formed the halfway distance mark between Josselin and Ploermel. But the war of the Breton succession was in a sense a backwater where the old traditions lingered longest — both the traditions that made for feats of personal courage and for deeds of hot-blooded ruthlessness. Yet the main cam- paigns were often marked by the survival of a similar spirit. There was still the continued challenge to single combat, though we must not, perhaps, take these appeals
king John prevented the fight and succeeded in reconciling the two combatants {Chronographia Regum Francorum, ii, 251, 252, and notes). The date is 1352.
THE WAR GAME 125
too seriously. Perhaps they were primarily an attempt at playing to the gallery of Christian chivalry : but the fact that the pretence was thought worth while, is in itself some indication of how popular opinion was likely to regard such boasting.
We find a greater sincerity in the desire of the rival generals to show that they were as brave and as spirited as any of their followers. This was particularly the case with Edward of England. On one occasion, when the French devised a well-thought-out scheme to recover Calais, Edward, having timely intimation of their machi- nations, betook himself secretly to the threatened city. When the French plan failed, and picked soldiers of the garrison made a gallant sortie against the enemy's forces, an unknown English knight, with visor down and with no device or badge to indicate his personality, performed prodi- gies of valour. When the French were utterly discomfited, the unknown knight revealed to the admiring soldiers that he was the king of England in person. It was a point of honour for him to show that his personal prowess was equal to that of any of his followers. And it was by deeds such as this that Edward won his reputation among contemporaries who understood the hero of the tourna- ment, who trusted to his strong right arm, better than the strategist or tactician, who sought to win battles through his brains.
War could not go on indefinitely upon such purely artificial lines. If an appeal be made to arms, decision can be obtained only by a demonstration of superior strength. And, with all the chivalry in the world, the going out to kill or be killed could not but stir up the
126 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
savage that is latent in every man. Even in the first struggles of the Hundred Years' War there were plenty of instances of violence and brutality. Witness the blazing farms and homesteads of the Cambresis that re- sulted from Edward's first appearance as a foeman on land in 1339. An English judge took the cardinal, who had so long striven to mediate between the two powers, on to the top of a lofty tower from whence he could see the darkness of night illuminated by the flaring country- side. " Lord Cardinal," said the Englishman, " is not the silken thread that should gird France around now broken ? " Without a word the cardinal fell in a swoon on the roof of the tower, rendered senseless by grief and fear. Witness, too, the long siege of Tournai by the English and Flemish and the ruthless expulsion by the garrison of all the useless mouths among the population, who were left to perish of want and cold between the two armies.
It was the same with the French, who answered the English preparations for invasion by organizing a great naval expedition which, prepared and manned by Nor- mans, seemed to threaten a new Norman conquest of England. As such it was a dismal failure, but it left its mark in the desolation and plunder of English south-coast towns that were soon to be amply avenged by the ruin wrought in France. The Norman sailors, however, meant business from the first, and fought not for glory but for victory. The same need to force a decision, and in particular to secure the command of the narrow sea, soon extended to the English also. It is, perhaps, characteristic that the first battle which was fought to the
NAVAL WARFARE SERIOUS 127
death was fought at sea. This was the famous battle of Sluys of midsummer day 1 340, where the great fleets of the two nations joined on the vital issue of keeping open communications between England and our Netherlandish allies, an issue the same as, and with results not dis- similar from, the struggles oflF Zeebrugge within sight of the silted-up haven of Sluys — the Zeebrugge of the Middle Ages. " This battle," says Froissart,* " was right fierce and horrible, for battles by sea are more dangerous and fiercer than battles by land, for at sea there is no retreat nor fleeing : there is no remedy but to fight and abide fortune." Despite the lapse of nearly six hundred years and all our modern methods of making warfare more horrible, this saying remained, a few years ago, as true of the attack on Zeebrugge Mole as of the larger operations in 1 340 in the estuary of the Zwyn. At sea you either perish or survive : on land you may well be wounded, sick, or prisoner.
It is of this battle of Sluys, also, that the Antwerp historian, John the Clerk, says that all who spoke the German tongue rejoiced. There was, then, an element of racial feeling here. But the " German tongue " was the Low Dutch of Antwerp, Ghent, and Brussels — the tongue of the men whose descendants rejected even the Flemish university when offered to them by their German conquerors. It was not High-Dutch, or even Platt-Deutsch from beyond the Rhine. And the hatred of the Fleming or the Brabanter for the French tongue brings with it a suggestion not only of opposition to the
* Ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, iii, 196. Characteristically, Froissart dates the battle two days wrong.
128 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
French monarchy but of the class war between the Flemish-speaking townsfolk, backed up by the English, and the French-speaking noblesse of Flanders, relying on the support of the monarchy and chivalry of France. Besides this, the fierce hostility of the English to the Norman traders, who had planned the invasion of England which the victory off Sluys prevented, had something to do with the exacerbation of the conditions of the fight.
Even on land the more up-to-date, scientific concep- tion of warfare began to prevail over the easy-going, chivalrous doctrine that regarded a battle as a more lively and interesting tournament. At sea the difficulty did not arise, for at all ages sea fighting must be professional, and every sailor was in those days enough of a pirate to know the use of arms. But the land campaigns of the early years of the war illustrate the development of the professional as opposed to the chivalrous practice of war- fare, of the art of war as opposed to the joy of fighting for fighting's sake. In the Netherlandish campaigns both armies shared fully in the doctrine which regarded war as a glorified tournament. But the French, with all their talk of forcing an issue, showed prudence in avoiding a battle that might be to their disadvantage, and the English, who overwhelmed the French with reproaches for hiding behind walls and declining to face their foes in an open country where the best man must win, took immense pains to limit their challenges to situations where their own methods of giving battle could have full scope.
It was a critical period in the history of warfare all over Europe. The Flemings at Courtrai, the Swiss at Morgarten, and the Scots at Bannockburn had all
THE NEW TACTICS 129
shown that resolute, disciplined, and well-equipped foot- men could resist the fierce charge of feudal cavalry, and the triple defeat of the chivalry of France, Germany, and England had rung the death knell of the mail-clad horse- man as the effective element in battle. Bitter experience in their own island had impressed on the English a new method of tactics, which they had matured before 1339 when they first brought it over to the continent. The change involved no radical alteration in the composition of an army. Those who have seen in the new tactics the approach of democracy, the triumph of the middle class over the landed nobility, have greatly erred. The solid element of an army was still the armure defer, the mail- clad knight or man-at-arms, so expensively armoured and weaponed that only a man of position could be a soldier. But the English had learnt that the man-at-arms was wise to leave his steed in the rear, to stand shoulder to shoulder with his comrades and fight a defensive battle in a dense phalanx. They had learnt also the use of missiles, and placed on the wings, as supports of the main array, well-drilled, trained, and expert archers, whose long bows, skilfully wielded, were sufficient to stop a cavalry charge. What social change there was in the new tactics lies in the fact that the archers were yeomen, or townsmen — ^substantial representatives of a diffused middle class. By utilizing men of this stamp as serious soldiers, the English broadened the basis of their armies and made the war more popular and more national.
The result was to give the English a tactical superiority over the French in two respects. Their gens-cT-armes fought on foot ; their real infantry, their archers, were
130 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
disciplined soldiers, working in co-operation with the heavy troopers, not the rabble of disorderly footmen that the aristocrats regarded with contempt and rode down with- out scruple or danger to themselves. At Buironfosse, before the walls of Tournai, on the landes de Lanvaux in Brittany, the English, in their conscious superiority, challenged the enemy to meet them in the field. The French felt in honour bound to accept so chivalrous a challenge, but they always found that the place of combat chosen was on ground carefully selected as adapted to the new method of fighting. Most wisely, the French re- fused to walk into the snare. Thereupon the English denounced them as cowards who had faith neither in the justice of their cause nor in the strength of their arms. But sooner or later the invaders were compelled to with- draw to their base, leaving the enemy's army intact. Under such circumstances both sides claimed the victory : the French because the English had retreated, the English because the French had declined the hazard of a general engagement.
The risk of a land battle was first run in Brittany. I have spoken of the Breton campaigns as a backwater, and from one point of view that statement can hardly be gainsaid. But, on the other hand, Brittany witnessed some of the most interesting and critical operations of the war : operations conducted, indeed, on a small scale, but nevertheless of real importance as illustrating the military developments that resulted from the long struggle. The first of these was in 1 342 at the little battle near Morlaix, when the earl of Northampton, the ablest of the hereditary generals of the higher English nobility.
FRENCH ADOPTION OF NEW TACTICS 131
successfully applied the tactics of Halidonhill against an army of overwhelmingly superior force under Charles of Blois. His following was so small that he could gain none of the fruits of victory, but in compelling the enemy to fight at all he did better than his sovereign, who, a few months later, saw the failure of Buironfosse repeated on the landes de Lanvaux,
It was only in 1 346, at the battle of Crecy, that Ed- ward III succeeded in forcing the French to fight a pitched battle on a large scale on ground of his own selection as adapted to the new English tactics. The overwhelming disaster that followed demonstrated both the tactical superiority of the English methods and the good judgment of the French generals in generally avoiding a collision between forces thus unequally matched. An im- portant result of the disaster was that the French began to study and copy the English tactics. It was a proof that\ the scientific theory of warfare was beginning to make its way even among the proud and self-conscious nobles of France. The interest of the ten years that fill up the gap between Crecy and Poitiers lies in the series of French experiments to meet the English on their own ground. The most important of these experiments was made in the battle of Mauron, fought in 1 352, near the little town of that name some five-and-twenty miles south-west of Rennes. In the fight Guy de Nesle, marshal of France, dismounted all his men-at-arms save those on one wing, who charged the dreaded archers, rode them down, and would have secured the victory but for the failure of the French men-at-arms to hold their own against the English.
132 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
Four years later, at Poitiers, king John of France pursued the tactics of Mauron on a larger scale. But the French nobles had not yet learnt fully their lesson, and carried it out under circumstances that were fatal to their success. There were two conditions of the English tactical system. One was a battle fought on the defensive, and the other was adequate archery support. Accordingly, the English would only accept battle when established in a strong defensive position. But at Poitiers the dismounted chivalry of France attempted to attack the English line. It was natural that dismounted men-at-arms should be less effective in attack than in defence. Moreover, the effective missiles of the English archers were as important as the close front of heavily armed knights and squires in bringing about English victories. For the French to set up an adequate yeoman force to match the English archers involved something like a social revolution, since the co-operation of English archers and men-at-arms re- quired a greater coherence between the aristocracy and the substantial farmer class than French conditions made easily practicable. Hence the French failure at Poitiers, and their subsequent disability to win the victory in several later battles of the same type. It was not until guns and gunpowder became effective military instruments that the French could provide a means of fighting from a distance that was adequate to overcome the English arrows. Now, guns and gunpowder were known to both sides from the beginnings of the war. They were probably employed in the field by the English at Crecy, and were certainly used by both sides as siege weapons — for instance, by the English at
BERTRAND DU GUESCLIN 133
Calais. But in the fourteenth century they were still in the experimental stage and had no decisive action on one side or the other. Accordingly, the English tactical superiority still remained an ultimate fact.
I have spoken of the light thrown by the Breton war on the development of military science. But the greatest gift Brittany made to France was by supplying her with her first leader who had something of the insight of genius. It was the Breton knight, Bertrand du Guesclin, who first systematized that plan of campaign which successfully avoided pitched battles and wore down the victors by a desultory war of sieges and skirmishes. So bold did Du Guesclin become that, after the treaty of Calais, he ventured to challenge once more the fortunes of the field. At Cocherel, in Normandy, he won a brilliant little victory over the king of Navarre, at the moment an English ally. This was the first undoubted triumph of the French side in a pitched battle. But this good fortune was not sustained. Du Guesclin himself soon went down before the Anglo-Montfortian forces at Auray and shared in the crowning disaster of Najera, the last notable triumph of English tactics under Edward III. When the great war was renewed in 1369, the French took great pains to avoid the decision of the field. The result was that, though English armies marched through France from end to end, they made few permanent conquests, and got home worn out, discouraged, and depressed. Such victories as they won were, like many of Wellington's battles in the Peninsula, triumphs that could not be followed up. Each glorious victory was followed by an inglorious retreat. At the end of Edward Ill's
134 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
reign only Calais and its pale remained as the spoils of victory.
Under Richard II hostilities died out. Though the continued assumption by the English king of the title of king of France made a formal peace hopeless, there was again an Anglo-French royal marriage, and Richard in his bold stroke for despotism showed the sincerity of his admiration for his child-wife's country by striving to rule England something after the fashion in which the French kings governed France.
The cordial relations of England and France under Richard II show that even the war had left no hopeless bad blood behind it. All aristocratic society in France lamented the downfall of Richard and regarded his sup- planter as a usurper and a murderer. But the first Lancastrian king was too weakly set upon his throne to make him anxious to renew the policy of Edward III and the Black Prince. His son, Henry V, once more challenged the French crown in earnest. With Henry V's invasions of France the military conditions of the reign of Edward III were so completely renewed that there is little profit in following them out in detail. Agincourt was another Poitiers, and its special feature was that English archers, all unarmoured as they were, fought side by side with the men-at-arms in repulsing the desperate but disorderly assaults of the chivalry of France. It was the same, with rare exceptions, so long as the struggle continued on the old lines. Crevant and Verneuil, fought by the regent Bedford on behalf of the infant Henry VI, were again repetitions of the earlier battles of the war.
ANGLO-BURGUNDIAN ALLIANCE 135
Apart from tactics, there were new factors in the fifteenth-century period of the Hundred Years' War that throw vivid Hght on the nature of the struggle. The first of these was the Anglo-Burgundian aUiance, which for a moment bade fair to realize the insular dream of a single monarchy extending over both England and France. But the recognition by the French estates of Henry VI as future king of France was not, as the English vainly thought, the triumph of one nation over another. It was an equal alliance be- tween the stronger and better disciplined of the two factions into which the France of Charles VI was un- happily divided, and the strenuous islanders who had won Agincourt and conquered Normandy. As a result, the war ceases from the French point of view to be a war between nation and nation. Henry VI was crowned king in Paris : the bourgeoisie and university of the French capital acknowledged the son of the victor of Agincourt as their natural lord. But whatever Bur- gundian complaisance might imagine, the English them- selves assumed that they had conquered France by their own prowess, and expected to give character and direction to French national policy. It was a hopelessly unnatural position, and there was only one way out of it. It was necessary to preach the gospel of French national unity to repel the foreigner. It was at this crisis that a fresh direction was given to the situation by the mission of Joan of Arc. This revived French national feeling and made the long continuanceof the Anglo-Burgundian alliance impos- sible. The Maid of Orleans taught all loyal Frenchmen the duty of making common cause against the invaders.
136 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
Soon all that was best on the Burgundian side fell away from the unnatural alliance with the English. Joan's short career was ended before she had done more than begin her work. For her martyrdom the Burgundians must bear as large a share of the shame and responsibility as the English. But the example of Joan lived on after her death at the stake. Within twenty years her vision of French unity was realized. It was her eternal glory that she had taught all Frenchmen that France was a nation.
In the last phase of the war the English were struggling against overwhelming odds, both material and moral. France now had her revenge when the outbreak in England of factions, almost as dangerous as those of the Burgundians and Armagnacs, made it impossible for the English to fight their losing fight with their full power. Even their tactical superiority was now a thing of the past. The French had now fully learnt the lessons of the war, and a new military factor appeared with the perfection of artillery by the French. At last the guns which manned the French earthworks at Castillon blew to pieces the Anglo-Gascon army of Talbot and ended the Hundred Years' War by the final expulsion of the English from Guienne.
In the long run it was not military but moral forces that ended the war, and it was only so long as military superiority remained with the English, while a weak sense of national obligation divided the French, that the possi- bility of a small nation dominating a big one could be thinkable. And at no stage of the war were the victories purely English successes, as the perversities of English
LAST PHASE OF THE WAR 137
patriotism have sometimes vainly imagined. I call them English successes for short, but we must not forget that, even in Edward Ill's days, there were almost as many Frenchmen fighting on Edward's side as against him. At Poitiers the Gascons under the gallant Captal de Buch, at Auray the Bretons who upheld the cause of Montfort, had a full share in the victory, for they had learnt better than the armies on the French side how to assimilate the new method of fighting. In the fifteenth century the Anglo-Burgundian alliance gave French soldiers an even larger part in the armies that fought against France. And such military successes as were gained in the field were neutralized by the inability of the English to make use of them. At no time were the English successful in strategy, and, later on, their surviving tactical superiority was increasingly neutralized by the strategic skill of Du Guesclin and his school. The military result of all the fighting was then exceedingly meagre. Its worse effects were in the ruined countryside, the desolation of the churches and monasteries of France, symbolized in the tale of bankrupt religious houses and ruined fabrics of churches, authenticated by the records of the papal curia* It is only fair to add that all over France the supreme desolation was not that wrought by regular armies but by the disbanded and mutinous soldiery of both sides, and that at its worst the power of the mediaeval warrior to work permanent ruin was small as compared with the
* See for this Denifle's La Desolation des £glises et Monasthes en France pendant la Guerre de Cent Ans. Father Denifle's elaborate introductions give a more coherent account of the war than is found in many formal histories.
138 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
havoc brought about by the Germans in the course of the four years between 19 14 and 19 18. Nowhere was the war so desolating and so ineffective as in Brittany, where there was no real issue save the rival claims of Montfort and Charles de Blois, and where the English, too weak to do thoroughly the work they had in hand, ruined the country by their method of making war support war, and letting out the castles and strongholds of the duchy to any military adventurer who would pay the highest price for them, regardless of the fact that he must wring his ransom from the wretched population. But even in Brittany the results of the war were not all evil, for the dreary struggle taught only too clearly the evils of disunion, and created out of two discordant elements, French and Celtic, a united Breton state, instinct with a patriotism quite as real as the larger patriotisms of France and England, which also arose out of the war.
To revert to the military aspects of the war, we must remember the small size of mediaeval armies relatively to those of our own age. It is not too much to say that the differences of military equipment, then and now, pale before the insignificance of numbers of a mediaeval host as compared with the gigantic masses forming a modern national army. At Crecy, or at Agincourt, the English were, in modern phrase, a weak division. In most of the minor battles — ^at Mauron, say, or Auray — the strength of the victors rather approached that of a modern brigade. Only for the siege of Calais did the English by extraordinary efforts keep in the field, for many months in succession, an army approaching the size of a modern army corps. And it is likely that the French
MEDIAEVAL ^ MODERN ARMIES 139
numerical superiority was not so much in the men-at- arms of the real fighting line as in the hordes of infantry, who had neither discipline nor adequate weapons and were as much a source of weakness as of strength to their side.
The English triumphs were the triumphs of the pro- fessional over the amateur. They were also the result of better organization : an administrative system at home, singularly elastic and capable of expansion and adaptation to war needs ; a system of taxation more effec- tive and less burdensome than that of France, and a social system in which, though there was all the difference in the world between the gentleman and the yeoman, the well-born knight and the yeoman archer could work side by side in a common cause. Another evidence of greater national homogeneity was in the fact that all England was behind its king, while a good deal of France was against its ruler. I have claimed for the French fighting on Edward's side a large share in the English king's military achievements. Without Gascon, Breton, | and Flemish support Edward Ill's position would have been very different. In the fifteenth century it was not Agincourt, nor even the slow English conquest of Nor- mandy, that brought about the treaty of Troyes. It was the Anglo-Burgundian alliance in which northern France, headed by Philip of Burgundy, called in the invader and promised him the succession to the throne as the easiest way of securing the victory over the rival faction. France was still less a nation than England ; but the reaction from this national betrayal made France a nation such as it had never been before.
140 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
Thus the war, as it went on, led to an increase of national feeling and increasing national animosity on both sides. We may illustrate this by comparing the attitude of the literature of both sides at different parts of the war. Let us first cite a neutral witness, for the attitude of neutrals, even more than that of combatants, shows the general drift of public opinion. There was no more absolute neutral than the high-born Walloon ecclesiastic, Jean le Bel, canon of Liege, who was pro- foundly indifferent to the question of rights and looked upon the war as a contest for the palm of glory. This palm of glory the Liegeois writer awards to the English king. He does so by calling his favourite " the noble king Edward " and the other simply " king Philip." " I do not do this," he goes on to say, " out of partisan feeling. I do it merely to give honour to the king who in this history has comported himself the more nobly. This is the noble king Edward whom we cannot too greatly honour. For he has always in his affairs given heed to good advice. He has always honoured his followers, each man according to his estate. He has well defended his kingdom against his enemies and has made many conquests over them. He has risked his own body, and he has paid well his soldiers and his allies. All these things king Philip has neglected to do. He has allowed his own land to be wasted. He has con- stantly kept himself in the neighbourhood of Paris for his bodily ease and to save himself from danger. He has always given ear to the bad advice of clerks and bishops and has rejected the counsel of the lords of his own land. Truly, it is a great pity and loss when by evil counsel this
NEUTRAL OPINION ON THE WAR 141
realm of France, which surpassed the whole world in honour, wisdom, clergy, knighthood, commerce, and all other good things, is thus reduced to affliction. Full sure am I that it is for a miracle that God suffers it."*
Thus far Jean le Bel, impartial as between France and England, but a hot partisan for Edward as against Philip because the English king's character appealed more directly to the chivalry of that age. Whether the appreciation is just, whether Edward was all that Jean le Bel thought him, is another matter. It is enough for us that a con- temporary took such a view of him.
We see a different picture in the literature of the com- batant nations which increasingly bears witness to the growing acerbity of national sentiment. Read, for example, the highly coloured " yellow journalism " of the English chronicler, Geoffrey Baker, with his denun- ciations of the " pseudo-king," the " tyrant of France," and his eager belief in ridiculous stories to the discredit of king Philip's father. Read, too, the fierce spirit that glows through the battle songs of the English verse- maker Lawrence Minot. But study most of all the intense resentment of the French writers. Take, for instance, the anonymous Norman soldier whose chroni- cle t throws so new a light on the military history of the war. This disciple of Du Guesclin is a declared patriot, a partisan of the Valois, grimly delighting in enumerating the outrages and ruin done to France by English soldiers and in emphasizing the breaches of faith committed by the English king. Study, again, more literary work —
* Jean le Bel : Chronique^ ii, S^-Sj, ed. Viard et D6prez. t Chronique normande^ ed. Molinier.
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for instance, that of Eustace Deschamps. Deschamps* compliment to Chaucer as the grand translatour did not prevent him being a furious patriot, stung, naturally enough, by the desolation wrought by the English in France. Yet even here there is more fairness than we might expect. Even Geoffrey Baker can make excep- tions in favour of a gallant enemy like Charles of Blois, just as the Norman soldier-chronicler can wholeheartedly praise an English partisan, like Philip of Navarre, as a gallant knight. Twenty-five years of captivity in Eng- land did little to embitter the mind or affect the poetry of Charles of Orleans. The result is that curious parallel- ism of ruthlessness and chivalry which we have already noted. It comes out with exceptional force in the contrast between the Black Prince butchering the help- less inhabitants of Cite of Limoges and the same prince's treatment of the conquered king John after Poitiers. Froissart's famous account of the consequences of Poitiers shows that the Black Prince behaved like a gentleman to his captive, but we moderns could have wished that his humility had been a little less ostentatious. John paid back the prince's trust with interest. When he found that France could not pay the huge ransom imposed as the price of his deliverance, he went back to his English prison -and died there. Ten years before Charles of Blois had done the same thing, though, more happy than his suzerain, he ultimately regained his liberty, only to perish gloriously on the fatal field of Auray. Is there not in these fine examples of adherence to good faith some moral for the Germans who are executing the treaty of Versailles 1
WEAKNESS OF NATIONAL ANIMOSITY 143
At its worst we cannot say that there was the strong national animosity between England and France which would certainly have arisen under modern conditions of warfare. The " foreigner " still was not so much the national enemy as the neighbour from a rival borough or the next county. English and Norman sailors fought against each other like cat and dog. But this they did not only in war but in peace time, for every mediaeval sailor had a bit of the pirate in his constitution. And the hatred of English sailors against the French was no more fierce than, let us say, that prevailing for centuries among different sections of English mariners ; for instance, be- tween the men of the Cinque Ports and the men of Yarmouth and the northern ports. Churlish English- men were then, as later, rude to any stray foreigner whose speech and dress suggested that he deviated from the ways of the true-born Englishman. It was also good policy for a king, anxious to get money from his parliament to carry on a costly war, to play upon English dislike of foreigners in general and Frenchmen in particular. I have already mentioned how Edward I told his parliament that the French king aimed at destroying the English tongue. Since the thirteenth century there had been plenty of literary badinage between French and English, but that must not be taken too seriously. Frenchmen believed that Englishmen were too much given to strong drink and wore long tails, but the latter reproach, which a sprightly scholar has traced through the ages,* does not seem to be so satisfactorily proved as the former. In the same spirit a bad-tempered English chronicler, denouncing * See G. Neilson : Caudatus Anglicus,
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Louis de Beaumont, a French aristocrat foisted by pope and king on to an English bishopric, who happened to be lame, generalizes from the poor man's misfortune. He tells us that bishop Louis was " lame in both feet, as are many Frenchmen."* There is a whole literature of such reproaches, stronger on the French than on the English side because the French writers were better. It is mainly clumsy humour, good-tempered enough in a rough way, and testifies to nothing worse than some national in- compatibilities.
The case of Geoffrey Chaucer may be cited to show how little ill-will there was between the French and English as such. There was no literary profession in the Middle Ages for laymen, because, before the invention of printing, no money could be made by the sale of a man's books. The clerical man of letters, like Froissart, might look forward to preferment in the Church. The nearest analogy for the layman was some post under government This was the way in which Chaucer earned his livelihood. He was by profession what we should call nowadays a member of the civil service — a fonctionnaire. He was, therefore, familiar with the tone of the English court society in which he moved. He " did his bit " as a young man against the French, and had the ill-fortune to be taken a prisoner in that unlucky winter campaign of 1359 in which Edward III wandered from Calais to Reims, along very much the same lines as those held by the allies against the Germans during the recent war.
* Murimuth, p. 35 : " Claudus utroque pede, sicut sunt multi Francigenae.'' For Louis de Beaumont, bishop of Durham, see above, pp. 91-92.
CHAUCER'S ATTITUDE TO FRANCE 145
The poet's ransom cost his royal master a good round sum, and for ten years there was peace between the two lands. But when war was renewed Chaucer served again as a soldier, and also took part in several diplomatic missions to the French enemy. Yet we may search his volumi- nous works from one end to the other and hardly find evidence that England and France were enemies, and none at all that he regarded Frenchmen with any dislike. On the contrary, his artistic mission was, as is well recognized, to adopt for his native land the metres and methods of contemporary French poetry, and so to make English poetry more acceptable to the widening cultivated circles in England, who were beginning to prefer to use the mother- tongue of the majority rather than the French vernacular of the higher classes. In the same spirit Chaucer standardized the English speech by incorporating into it that large romance vocabulary, and those many romance idioms, which have ever since distinguished our tongue from the other Teutonic languages. His eminent French bio- grapher, M. Legouis, goes so far as to claim Chaucer as " French in essentials," " French in mind as in name," and regards it as wrong to speak of a " French period " in his development, " for he was always French." But M. Legouis seems here to be looking at the fourteenth century with somewhat modern eyes, and, unless it be argued that all great artists are French, I see little more reason for calling Chaucer a Frenchman than Shakespeare a German. But there is this difference in the two cases: that while Germany to Shakespeare was a world unknown, Chaucer shared to the full in that common civilization
146 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
which both England and France enjoyed in the fourteenth century, and it was the prerogative of his genius that en- abled him to get so much more out of it than ordinary mortals. Yet he was a good citizen. If he imitated the art of Machault, the only evidence that we have that he might have had relations with the old French poet is that, had he not been taken prisoner somewhere near Machault's native village, he might have looked down from the hills round Reims on the beleaguered city where Machault was teaching the art of verse to the youthful Eustace Deschamps. It is, however, to be remembered that Chaucer's chief literary activity was under Richard II, when the English sovereign consciously strove to remodel English institutions to match the growing autocracy of France, and when peace generally prevailed between the two realms. But it was just in those days that Chaucer had abandoned the French masters of his youth and had become the disciple of the poets of Italy.
Mediaeval battles, then, engendered less ill-feeling than modern ones, partly because they were looked upon as part of the order of nature, partly because they were, as between French and English, waged between peoples who had almost everything in common and, besides, had a very imperfect conception of national solidarity. Thus, while in our recent war only hopeless sentimentalists or open traitors went over to the enemy, even in thought, quite honourable Frenchmen saw nothing derogatory in taking sides with the English. This was the case under Edward III. It was still more usual in the early fifteenth century when the unhappy division of France between the rival factions of Burgundians and Armagnacs threw
THE AFTERMATH OF WAR 147
the more national and patriotic of French parties into the arms of the English and made Paris, the centre of the Burgundian power, the mainstay of English hopes. But national feeling was gone too far to make this a permanent settlement, and the wonderful mission of the Maid of Orleans taught Frenchmen that France was France and England England.
Another point of comparison may be briefly noted. The conclusion of a long truce or the arrangement of a definite peace did not then, as now, leave things as they were before the struggle. There was that aftermath of war which troubles us so sorely now, which in the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries produced difficulties, similar in kind though less in degree. There were the same violent disturbances of economic relations. The im- mense rise in prices, especially in the wages of labour, has been set down to the Black Death. But there has been, especially in England, an excessive tendency to bring in the Black Death as the Deus ex machina to explain all sub- sequent history. May not the rise also be assigned, like our own increased cost of living, to the effects of the war ? The revolutionary disturbances which, during the long truce under Richard II, made 1381 a year of threatened revolution all over England extended itself over all western lands. There were counterparts to the Peasants' Revolt abroad, especially in the clothing towns of Flanders, in Paris, Rouen, and Toulouse, and even in Florence. These *' international " combinations to effect revolution, these class wars, these unions of labourers to defeat ob- noxious legislation, and the frequent strikes despite re- pressive laws to prevent them ; these depreciations of the
148 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
currency, dislocations of credit, bankruptcy of merchants, repudiation of debts and stupid interferences of ignorant politicians with the course of trade — were they not, in the fourteenth century, among the economic conse- quences of war as much as the more mighty disturbances with which we are now painfully familiar ?
In the last stage of the Hundred Years' War English- men and Frenchmen began to theorize as to the reasons of their rivalry. About the middle of the fifteenth cen- tury these discussions took a curious literary shape.* A French and an English herald were imagined to be debating, before Dame Prudence as judge, whether the English or the French approached nearer to honour. To the modern reader the arguments of the two heralds are singularly irrelevant and unconvincing. They deal largely with the material resources of the two countries. The Englishman boasts of his coal mines and the French- man answers that this is simply because of the poverty of England in forests, for no one would be so foolish as to warm himself with smoky pit coal if he could, like the happy Frenchman, easily get enough wood to burn. The Frenchman rejoices that he can hunt wild boars and wolves, fierce beasts that require great courage for their pursuit. He reproaches the Englishman for having neither of these pleasures and suggests that his hunting of tame beasts and birds is such child's play that even ladies can take part in English field sports. But the Englishman in reply thanks God that his happy island contains no such destructive and dangerous beasts as boars and wolves.
* Les Dibats des H&auts d^Armes de France et d^ Angle terre, ed. Pannier and Meyer (Soc. des anciens textes fran9ais).
THE HERALDS' DEBATE 149
He argues, too, that the presence of ladies in the English hunting field shows both the civilized nature of English pastimes and the spirit of English ladies. The French- man boasts of his wine and reproaches the drunken English for wasting a large proportion of their corn crops in making so inferior a drink as beer. When they at last come to moral rather than physical differences, both sides are even more vague. The arrogant and self-conscious Englishman boasts of the battles he has won, but the Frenchman points out that the English are better hands at beginning wars than in ending them, and that they cannot even keep in subjection the savage Irish, so that more honour is due to those poor barbarians than to the braggart English. No one nowadays would compliment the English as to their readiness in beginning wars. But the reproach as to inability to manage Ireland has lost little of its sting from recent history.
At one point the two heralds are so reduced to find good arguments to prove the superiority of their respective countries that each puts in a claim that the ladies of his own land are more beautiful and sympathetic than the dames of the rival country. It is no wonder that, after so inconclusive a debate. Dame Prudence postponed giving her decision. We cannot do better than imitate the discretion of the good lady and refrain from invidious balancing of the argument. But it is significant that, even when seeking far and near for the reasons of their preference for their own land, these debaters, with all their memories of Agincourt and Joan of Arc, hardly ever suggest deep racial animosity. The French herald reproaches Englishmen for killing Richard II : he does
150 THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR
not write down against them the burning of Joan the Maid. It was left for the Elizabethan drama to hurl the worst insults against the Maid of Orleans, just as on the French side we must go to the moderns, to Voltaire and to Anatole France, to find the extreme measure of lack of sympathy with the saint and martyr.
At the present moment we realize only too vividly that the effects of war do not end with the conclusion of the war itself. This was true even in the Middle Ages, though to a less degree than it is at the present day. The sanguine belief that a war, even of the justest, could end war for all time : that out of the very fallible human material, retaining all its war and pre-war tradi- tions and losing much of its pre-war elasticity and hope, a new heaven and earth could be created, as if by magic, is a kindly illusion which hard necessity has driven away even from the minds of optimists. An appeal to history shows us, on the contrary, that there are no sudden and effective revolutions in the tide of human life : that everything moves slowly by a gradual and almost im- perceptible process of development, and that any attempt to force the pace of progress, to do everything at once, is more likely to end in disaster than in_ success. The Middle Ages, clearer-eyed within their limitations, cherished no such illusions. But even the Middle Ages, where war was, as we have seen, chronic, found that a fierce war brought to a head many problems and diffi- culties that might well have gone on slumbering in less disturbed times. The Hundred Years' War was com- plicated by troubles that cannot but remind us of those that we are now rather helplessly trying to deal with.
MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN ANALOGIES 151
I have suggested how there was an anticipation of our modern threats of class war in the rising of the Jacquerie after Poitiers and, more than twenty years later, in the revolutionary disturbances of the period 1378-82. We had, too, in England our first serious labour troubles, partly, at least, occasioned by the disorganization of prices and exchanges caused by the war. The fourteenth- century Englishman strove to meet these by legislation, and, in his simple way, enacted the statute of labourers, by which an attempt was made to force everyone to be content with the prices prevalent before the troubles and, in particular, to compel the labourer to take the wages which he had previously been in the habit of receiving. We have, too, the same rise in prices, depreciation of cur- rency, the loss of credit, dislocation of trade, foolish at- tempts of ignorant politicians to bring in remedies worse than the disease These efforts broke down, as in the nature of things all such efforts must break down. What changes for the better came out of these troubles were due not to such hasty legislation, any more than the good that resulted from the peasants' revolt of 1381 was the result of the sanguinary repression of the defeated peasantry. But with all the problems and all the losses that war, famine, and social unrest engendered, there was in the end a real amelioration of social conditions. With all its faults the next age was a time of greater comfort, pros- perity, freedom, and progress. May our present troubles have as happy an outcome!
We have for most practical purposes arrived at the end of the Middle Ages. And as the Middle Ages glided
152 MODERN ANGLO-FRENCH RELATIONS
imperceptibly into Modern Times, civilization gradually loses that cosmopolitan character which it had maintained for so many centuries. In particular the special Anglo- French civilization, that civilization within a civilization which I have endeavoured to describe, was pretty well wrecked by the storms and stress of the long struggle. Henceforth each country was destined to live a life of its own, a more national but also a more restricted life. A notable feature of the differentiation between the two countries was the supersession of French by English as the vernacular of the English governing classes. It was with the fifteenth century that the gentry of England had first to learn the familiar French speech of their ancestors as a foreign language, and that for their guidance a whole literature of dictionaries, grammars, and phrase books grew up that would have been unnecessary in any earlier age.* In the same way they found their everyday reading not in French poems and romances, but in the works of Chaucer and his school. Similarly, English ousted French in literature, in parliament, in the statute book, in the pulpit, in correspondence, and in the law courts, though the excessive conservatism of the lawyers still kept up the law French of the Year Books, though it was now degenerating into an unmeaning jargon. It became unlikely that, during the fifteenth century, a poet like Gower should address the great public indifferently in French and English. It would have been almost impossible for a fourteenth-century family of country gentry, like the
* See for this Miss K. Lambley's The Teaching and Cultiva- tion of the French Language in England during Tudor and Stuart Times.
NATIONALISM IN SPEECH ^ ART 153
Pastons, to carry on the whole of its familiar correspon- dence in the English tongue. Even the hide-bound traditions of government offices at last yield to the true vernacular. For a century royal letters under the privy seal had been commonly drafted in French because French was the vernacular of the court. It is significant that the earliest surviving writ of privy seal, drafted in English, was issued by Henry V from the Bois de Vincennes at the moment when his armies were approaching their supreme triumph.* Thus the first English king, who had some reason to believe that the monarchy of France was within his grasp, was also the first who used the English mother tongue in his official correspondence.
With the differentiation between the languages arose further separations between the two peoples. In both lands art, like literature, follows an increasingly national course, and instead of the early gothic, substantially identical throughout the west, the fifteenth-century builders em- phasized the difference between national methods by the strong contrast between the " flamboyant " of France and the "perpendicular." of England. If Scotland built in the fifteenth century after the flamboyant rather than the perpendicular style, it was but an instance of the many ways in which the small nation, re- lying in its long fight for independence on French support, deliberately chose to follow the French fashion because it wished to have as little as it could to do with the hated
* Deprez' Manuel de Diplomatique anglaise, pp. 37, 38, prints the first extant English writ of privy seal, dated a few days before the king's death. A signet letter, also sent from France, was written in English in 141 7 {jb,^ pp. 99, 100).
154 MODERN ANGLO-FRENCH RELATIONS
English. But as regards England and France the forces that made for divergency became increasingly strong. There was a clearer-cut separation in political and ad- ministrative machinery, however much in both countries the forces of the age were making for strong monarchy. Nevertheless, even in Tudor times the political institutions of constitutional and parliamentary England seemed to contemporary observers to be different in kind from those of monarchical and despotic France. Social and economic differences arose which the Middle Ages knew little of. If the humanists of the Renaissance attempted in some measure to set up new cosmopolitan standards of culture to replace those of the decadent Middle Ages, it was an effort limited to select circles which had no great influence on national life. Indeed, by hoping to erect Ciceronian Latin into the universal tongue of culture it made the common medium so difficult and so badly expressive of modern needs that in the long run it made impossible the continuance of Latin as the ver- nacular of learning and of the church. The Reforma- tion renounced Latin as a liturgical language because it was so little understood by the people, and replaced it by the local tongue of each protestant country. Yet the vogue of Latin was due not to any tradition that it was a special hieratic speech. It was used in the churches of the west because it was the common tongue of the west, just as Greek was similarly employed in the churches of the east.
In this and in more important ways the Reformation built up further walls of separation between the two peoples. After the Reformation religion was no longer
NATIONAL POLITY AND RELIGION 155
an integrating but a separating force. Side by side with the national state arose the national church. Colonial and commercial rivalry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought about a sharp conflict of interests be- tween England and France. Again English persistence in upholding the political balance, though bringing us into friendly relations with France in the days of Austro- Spanish greatness, led to fresh antagonisms when we took a prominent part in bringing about the conditions that laid low the preponderance of Louis XIV and the univer- sal monarchy of Napoleon. The war against the French Revolution, undertaken as it was to save Belgium from French invasion, became something like a crusade against the new order in France when Burke gave tone to a large mass of English opinion. Even when there were not wars, as since 18 15, there were constant divergencies of opinion and plenty of mutual distrust. Nor is the attitude of suspicion rare in either land, even at the present moment.
As England and France went further forward on the road of national self-expression, there arose an increasing contrast of temperaments. The Englishman loves com- promise and cares little for general principles. The Frenchman is ever prone to be under the bondage of abstract ideas. He is clearer and more systematic than Englishmen, but sometimes is apt to forget that the world is not run on logical principles. The Englishman, though his manner may suggest profound conviction of his own superiority, tends to be more diffident and is generally more tolerant. The Frenchman is certainly more thrifty, prudent, and hard working. The English-
156 MODERN ANGLO-FRENCH RELATIONS
man is, perhaps, more speculative and enterprising. There is even now more hberty in England than in France : but there is certainly more equality in France than in England. But it is hard either to give a testi- monial to, or to " write an indictment against," a whole nation, consisting of many million souls living under very different circumstances in a great country. There is no single English type and no single French type. The typical Englishman, like the typical Frenchman, is found mainly in the humorous drama, the second-rate novel, the partisan pamphlet, the comic newspaper, and in the gossip of the ill-informed and the prejudiced. What is there in common between a Norman, who is very like a Yorkshireman, and the Proven9al ? — though I sometimes wonder whether the real Proven9al is always like the Provencal of Alphonse Daudet. How much there is in common, even apart from speech, between a Breton and a Welshman ? But these interrogatories might be repeated for ever, and would always be answered by each in- dividual according to his personal point of view.
We must recognize that there will always be an English and a French way of regarding life. This arises from differences of temperament, conditions, interests, and tradi- tions. Even in these days of aeronautics England has still the advantage of being an island, while France is sur- rounded by neighbours who have been in the past, and may be again in the future, her bitter enemies. Englishmen must not, therefore, be surprised or alarmed if France insists more than they do on the need of sureties, safeguards, and guarantees for the future. Neither must they be blind to the enormous losses and sufferings of France in the war.
DIFFERENCES OF TEMPERAMENT 157
or to the desolation wrought in those fair regions where the fiercest of the campaigns were fought. Again, we must allow for the difference of outlook between a self- sufficing, self-contained community whose tradition has been to " live of its own " and that of a little island which would easily become another Holland but for its immense manufactures for export, its overseas trade, and, above all, its relations to the " dominions," which, while in a sense separate states, are bound to it by common citizenship, sympathies, and traditions. There is no need to give ear to the baser and more ignorant clamour that we now hear. The average Frenchman is certainly not an " imperialist " or a " reactionary," and his country is no more likely to be permanently controlled on those lines than is Britain. The Frenchman may not be sympathetic with some ex- ternal features of English character, but he has too much good sense to believe that the average Englishman has a double dose of perfidy or hypocrisy, or that the British state aims at a universal empire after the sometime German fashion.
Yet despite all differences, and despite their exacerba- tion on both sides of the Channel by denunciations of the *' hereditary enemy " beyond the narrow seas, it would still be possible for the historian to emphasize in the post-mediaeval relations of France and England the con- tinuance of a certain element of intimacy and affinity, intertwined with the more obvious evidence of alienation and hostility. There is no need to stress the latter, which is written large in all the history books. But in nearly every generation there is some indication of the former, even in times when the governments of
158 MODERN ANGLO-FRENCH RELATIONS
the two countries were generally unfriendly. There were long periods when the relations of the two states were in no wise hostile. There was in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the political friendship between the France of Henry IV and the England of Elizabeth and James I. There was, again, the alliance of Cromwell and Mazarin and its less glorious continuation under the later Stuarts. There were interludes of friendship even during that longest period of political rivalry, that second Hundred Years' War, as Seeley called it, whose extreme limits are the Revolution of 1688 on the one hand and on the other the pacification of Europe after the fall of Napoleon in 18 15. There is the continuous peace which has continued from 1815 to the present day : a peace sometimes threatened, indeed, but never very seriously endangered. More im- portant is the recrudescence of intellectual and spiritual affinities from generation to generation, sometimes in one form, sometimes in another. The study of comparative literature has revealed the debt of the Elizabethans to French literature and art. He who runs may read the many-sided obligations of our " Augustan age " to the Steele de Louis XIV. There was an approach in the in- tellectual correlation of eighteenth-century France and England to that which we found in the non-political dealings of the two countries in the fourteenth. Voltaire learnt in England the philosophy which he was to preach from France to the whole western world. Rousseau wrote some of his most characteristic work in a Derby- shire country house. There were the widespread sym- pathy for the doctrines of the French Revolution and the
ELEMENTS OF AFFINITY 159
enthusiasm of the English Whigs for the great Napoleon. To turn to another side, there were the constant attempts at commercial relations from the days of Bolingbroke to those of the younger Pitt and, again, on to the days of Cobden's Commercial Treaty and beyond it. How- much does our most modern England owe to French literature, art, thought, and emotion! How great is the obligation of us historians to the schools of French histori- cal scholarship which have arisen since the catastrophe of 1870!
There is no time, and there is little need, to emphasize all these things. And in our own days may we not recognize that, quite apart from the Anglo-French alliance against Germany, there has long been a certain tendency to narrow the gulf which at certain periods separated the two peoples. We Englishmen have shifted not a little from our " early Victorian " attitude, and some of these shiftings have brought us nearer to the French point of view. Take, for instance, the immense growth of state control which the England of the last generation has witnessed. Time was when the English- man believed in individual liberty — in John Mill and in Herbert Spencer — and disliked nothing so much as the governmental interference exercised through officials. How often has the mid-nineteenth-century Englishman contrasted the symmetrical educational system of France with the spontaneous and natural growth of his own wonderful want of system ! But we have changed all that now. In England we have now gone in for state regulation not only in education, but in many other re- lations of life. The result is that we in England are now
i6o MODERN ANGLO-FRENCH RELATIONS
much more directed, inspected, subsidized, and controlled by a benevolent centralized state than were our laisser faire fathers and grandfathers. We have not yet got pre- fects in England, but wandering inspectors do very well in their place and keep the local authorities strictly to their administrative spheres. In education we shall soon be very much as the French used to be, and it requires no great effort of imagination to picture one of Mr. Fisher's successors, as President of the Board of Education, taking his watch out of his pocket, like the famous (or shall I not rather say fabulous ?) minister of public instruction of the Second Empire, and saying, "At this hour all the boys in every lycee of France are study- ing this particular Latin book, or that particular problem of geometry." If, however, our bureaucratic and cen- tralizing tendencies bring us nearer to France again, some good will come out of a largely evil process.
Let us not pursue any longer these inconclusive and misleading comparisons. After all, such differences as I have suggested lie in the angle of vision, and at their worst are more effective in making individual members of the two nations look upon each other with amusement or suspicion than in determining national relations. Moreover, the distinctions are evasive when closely pursued and are always much less than the similarities. An ignorance which seized upon and magnified super- ficial differences of manners and habits perhaps lay at the root of much of the antipathy of the two nations for each other. It need not be believed that mutual intercourse will of itself dispel that ignorance and prejudice, for very often the superficial relations of a traveller to a strange
NEED FOR PERMANENT ALLIANCE i6i
land confirm his ignorance and strengthen his prejudices. But our recent alliance has given millions of Englishmen a clearer personal knowledge of France and Frenchmen than any large class of Englishmen has possessed since the Hundred Years' Wan That knowledge is not very deep, and the same may also be said as to the French knowledge of Englishmen, arising from the same conditions.
There is in some quarters of both lands a very repre- hensible tendency to make the most of the differences of opinion which have recently arisen between the two states over the interpretation and execution of the peace treaties. But it would be a superficial view to regard these bickerings as seriously threatening our friendly relations. And if they did, is there not a special duty on us of the academic class to do our best to minimize these causes of friction ? Let us recall the mediaeval ideal of a cosmopoli- tan university, and, instead of boasting of the success of this country or of that, realize the universal mission of science to all educated men. But let us not forget the ties of country. Let us not be unmindful that the establishment of a real friendship of closely related peoples may be a more permanent step towards the pacification of the world than vague protestations of universal brother- hood which are too indefinite to have much real content. An isolated France cannot disarm, and the responsibility for this inability is at least shared by those whose in- action occasions it. Failing a definite alliance, France must from time to time be tempted to succumb to the temptation of taking her destinies in her own hands without excessive regard to the susceptibilities of her
L
i62 MODERN ANGLO-FRENCH RELATIONS
allies. But we must not be over anxious about the future. Let our immediate task be to make the best of the present. To that end let us, both in England and France, do all that we can to understand and sympathize with each other, and to make this knowledge and sympathy the basis of a common policy. We historians have in this relation an easier task than those represent- ing other walks of life. We can contribute to the mutual understanding of the two nations our strong protests against the travesties of history which have done so much to impair friendly relations between the two peoples. And most of all can we historians of the Middle Ages help to strengthen the bonds between the two nations, for, whether we like it or not, English and French mediaeval history are one subject, to be studied by the same methods and from the same sources. We must be, therefore, the first to testify to this solidarity between the two lands. Our friendly relations are based on the intimate associations of two neighbouring peoples, sharing a common civilization and enjoying institutions con- stantly approximating to each other. These associations have been so deep in the past that centuries of unfriendli- ness have not destroyed them. Our recent alliance arose from necessity : it was cemented by common sacri- fices and consolidated by a common triumph. May it be continued by common interests and duties, and strengthened by common spiritual and intellectual ties.
Index
Abelard, 27
Agenais, the, 95
Agincourt, battle of, 134, 13s, 138,
139, 149 Aigueblanche, Peter of, 86, 87 Aigues Mortes, 60 Albigenses, 84 Alcuin, 48
Alien Priories, the, 56, 94, 120 Allegiance, personal and local, 9, 14 Alliance, Anglo-Burgundian, 135, 136,
139, 146, 147 ; Anglo-French,
1914-18, 12, 158, 162 Alnwick, 69 Alsace, 46 Amiens, 59, 93
AngoulSme, Isabella of, 83, 84 Anjou, 66, 69 ; house of, 66-68 Anselm, St., 21, 54, 55 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 19 Aquitaine, 41, 69, 70, 81, 92, 95. See
also Guinenne and Gascony Aquitani, the, 41 Archers, 129, 131, 132, 134 Architecture, 34, 35, 58, 59, 60, 153 A ri vault, 86
Armagnacs, the, 136, 146 Armure defer, 129 Army, the mediaeval, 138 Art, 35, 55, s8, 59, 60, 153 Arthurian legend, the, 108 Artillery, 136. See also Guns and
Gunpowder Augustan age, the, 158 Augustine, St., Rule of, 57 Auray, battle of, 133, 137, 138, 142 Avignon, 25, 34, iii, 119, 120
Baker, Geoffrey le, chronicler, 41,
123, 141. 142 Baldock, Robert, 104 Bardin, chronicle of, 105 Barons' wars, 79, 86 Basques, the, 45 Bastides, 92
Battles, mediaeval, characteristics of, 146
Beaumanoir, Philip de, 85
Beaumont, Louis de, bishop of Dur- ham, 91, 144
Bec-Hellouin, 54, 55, 56
Bede, 38
Bedford, the regent, 134
Bel, Jean le, canon of Li^ge, 140, 141
Belgium, 155
Bfene, Amaury de, 88
Bernard of Clairvaux, St., 56
Bible, the Latin, 6
Blache, Vidal de la, 42
Black Death, the, 147
Black Prince, the. See Edward, prince of Wales
Blois, Charles of. See Charles
Bologna, University of, 8, 27
Boniface, St., 52
Boniface of Savoy, archbishop of Canterbury, 87
Boniface VIII, pope, 94, 115
Bordeaux, 92, 93 ; University of, 2
Bozon, Nicholas, 109
Brittany, 10, 16, 40, 44, 45, 49, 50, 70, 108, 124, 130, 133, 137, 138, 156
Bruges, Conference of, 120
Brunswick, Otto of, 123
Buch, Captal de, 91, 137
Buironfosse, 130, 131
Bureaucracy, growth of, 160
Burgh, Hubert de, 86
Burgundy, 10, 16, 33, 58, 135, 136, 139, 146, 147
Burke, Edmund, 15S
Caen, 57, 72 ; University of, 29
Caerphilly, 60
Calais, 125, i33, 134, 138; treaty of
(1360), 28 Calixtus II, pope, 55 Cambr^sis. the, 126 Cambridge, Pembroke College, 122 Canterbury, 59
164
INDEX
Cantilupe, Thomas of, 89
Canute, king, 39, 52, 67
Castillon, battle of, 136
Cavalry, 129
Celts, 16, 44, 45, 108, 138
Centralization, 159, 160
Chaceporc, Peter, 86, 87
Chabannes, Addmar de, 41
Chamber, the king's, 104, 105
Chamhre des Comptes, 72, 73, 103
Champagne, 10
Chancery, the, 63, 70-72, 80, 93, 103
Channel Islands, the, 74, 102
Charlemagne, 39, 48, 167
Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, 90,
92 Charles of Blois, 131, 138, 142 Charles the Bad, king of Navarre, 133,
138 Charles IV, Emperor, 29 Charles V, king of France, 19 Charles VI, king of France, 135 Charles VII, king of France, 29 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 31, 108, 142, 144,
14s, 146, 152 Charterhouse, the London, 113 Chartres, 50, 107 Chester, 57, 69
Chivalry, 31, 33, 121, 125, 132, 142 Cinque Ports, the, 117, 143 Clement V, pope, 23, 119 Clement VI, pope, 119 Clerk, John the, 127 Cobden, Richard, 116, 159 Cocherel, battle of, 133 Colonial disputes, 155 Combat des Trente, 124 Commercial rivalry, 11 6-1 18, 155 Concordat of Worms, 55 Constance, council of, 22 Cornwall, 45, 66 Cosmopolitanism, 11, 12, 28, 35, 65,
66,67 Coucy, 60
Crecy, battle of, 41, 131, 132, 138 Crevant, battle of, 134
Cromwell, 158
Crump, C. G., 112
Curia, the papal, 24, 25, 63, 85, ii8,
120, 137 Curia regis, the, 68, 69 Curzon, cardinal, 88
Dammartin, John of, 85
Danegeld, 63
Danelaw, the, 47
Dante, 7, 16, 18, 35
Daudet, Alphonse, 156
Delisle, Leopold, 70, 71
Ddprez, Eugene, vii, 106, 114, 153
Deschamps, Eustace, 141, 142, 146
Despenser, Hugh le, 105
Dialogus de Scaccario, 65
Dinan, 41
Domesday Book, 72
Drama, the Elizabethan, 150
Dubois, Pierre, 18
Dunkirk, 46
Durham, 59, 69, 144
Education in France and England,
160. See also Universities Edward the Confessor, 50, 57, 61, 63 Edward I, king of England, 13, 18, 77
91-95,96,143 Edward II, king of England, 77, 90,
94, 95, 104 Edward III, king of England, 22, 41,
50, 95, 105, III, 112, 115, 117, 125,
131, 133, 134, 137, 139, 140, 146 Edward, prince of Wales, the Black
Prince, 41, 134, 141 Eleanor of Provence, queen of Henry
111,84 Elizabeth, queen of England, 158 English nation in University of Paris,
8, 29 " Estates," the system of, loi, 103, 135 Exchequer, the, 72, 78, 80, 93, 103 Exchequer of Normandy, 72
Familia, the mediaeval household, 10
INDEX
165
Feudalism, 10-12, 53 ; its relations to nationalism, 11 ; its separatist and unifying aspects, 11, 13, 14
Finland, 102
Flach, Jacques, 11, 39, 99
Flanders, 16, 117, 127, 128, 147
Florence, 7, 18, 32, 147
Fontenelles, abbess of, 122
Foreigner, mediaeval conception of 14,87
France, Anatole, 150
France, Marie de, 108
Francia, meanings of the term, 39-42
Franco-Scottish relations, beginnings of, 51
Frederick Barbarossa, 67
Freeman, E. A., 61, 73, 96
French national feeling, beginnings of, 39-42
French nation in University of Paris, 8
French Revolution, the, 155, 159
Friars, the Mendicant, 23, 26, 85
Fustel de Coulanges, 99
Froissart, John, 112, 113, 127, 142, 144
Gascony and Gascons, the, 66, 67, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, III, 115, 136, 137
Gelderland, count of, 118
G^nestal, R., 12
Gens-d'-armes, 129, 131, 132
Geoffrey, duke of Brittany, 66
Germain, St., 48
Germans, the, 7, 8, 29, 138, 142, 144, 145
Germany, the nations of, 7
Gerson, 22
Giry, A., 63
Giraldus Cambrensis, 106
Grailly, John de, 91. See also Bucb, Captal de
Greek, 154
Gregory of Tours, 39
Gregory X, pope, 21
Grosseteste, Robert, bishop of Lin- coln, 88
Giie8clin,BertraDddu, 41, 133, 137,141
Guienne, 10, 136. See also Aquitaine
and Gascony Gunpowder, 132. See Artillery Guns, 132, 136. See Artillery
Hainault, count of , 112, 118, 121, 131 Hales, Alexander of, 88, 107 Halidonhill, battle of, 131 Harcourt, Godefroi de, 15 Haskins, Professor C. H., 62 Hazebrouck, 46 Hemingburgh, Walter of, 21 Henry I, king of England, 54, 55, 64,
68, 72, 79 Henry II, king of England, 65, 66-72,
73, 74, 79, 80, 107, 108 Henry, son of Henry II, the " young
king," 69, 70 Henry III, king of England, 14, 59,
77, 78, 79, 81, 83-86, 87-89, 90 Henry V, king of England, 29, 50, 134,
153 Henry VI, king of England, 134, 135 Henry IV, king of France, 158 Henry V, emperor, 55 Histoire littiraire de la France, 109 Holland, 118, 157 Household Administration in England
and France, 103 Hull, 92 Huss, John, 29
Infantry, 129, 130, 139. See also
Archers Innocent III, pope, 23 Investiture contest, the, 54, 55 Ireland, 48, 51, 52, 58, 65, 66, 70, 93 Isabella, queen of John, 83 Isabella, queen of Edward II, 95, 112 Italy, the poets of, 146
Jacquerie, the, 151
James I of England, 158
Joan of Arc, 135, 136, 147, 149, 150
John, king of England, 15, 72, 73» 74f
75, 78, 91
1 66
INDEX
John, king of France, 123, 132, 142 John XXII, pope, iii, 118 Joinville, 81, 84 Josselin, 124 Jiilich, count of, 118
Kidwelly, 60
Kilwardby, archbishop, 21, 107
LABOrmERS, statute of, 151
Lancaster, duke Henry of, 122, 123
Lancaster, house of, 134
Lanfranc, archbishop, 54, 55
Langlois, C. V., 30
Languages, vernacular, 7, 16, 17, 33 ; French the international vernacular for the laity, 33-35, 82 ; French and English, 152, 153, I54 ; as factor in differentiating nationality, 45~47 ; Langue d'oil,langue d'oc, 7, 92
Lanvaux, les landes de, 130, 131
Lateran council, 23
Latin, use of, 26-28, 33, 106, 107, 108, III, 154
Latini, Brunetto, 35
Law, canon, 24, 25, 33, 55 ; civil, 24, 33 ; municipal, 24 ; feudal, 82
Legouis, M., 145
Leipzig, University of, 29
Liber exemplorum, 109, no
Li6ge, Jean le Bel, canon of, 140, 141
Limoges, 142
Lincoln, 59, 83
Literature, Elizabethan, 158
the English ** Augustan age,* 156 English, 107, 108 French and English, 107, 108, 141-14S, 148-150, 153
Little, A. G., no
Lordship, mediaeval conception of, 9, 10
Lorraine, 33
Louis IV of Bavaria, emperor, 117, 121
Louis VII, king of France, 66, 70
I^uis VIII, king of France, 15. 79
Louis IX, St., king of France, 33, 77,
78,81,89,90 Louis XIV, king of France, 35, 82,
155, 158 Luchaire, A., 26 Lupus, St., 48 Lusignan, Hugh of, count of la
Marche, 84 Lyons, council of, 21
Machault, 146
Magna Carta, 15, 22, 74, 77, 78
Maitland, F. W., 108
Malachy, St., archbishop of Armagh,
56 Matilda, queen, 57 Manny, Sir Walter, 113 Marche, la, 84 Marsh, Adam, 107 Maurienne, Val de, 87 Mauron, battle of, 131, 132, 138 Mazarin, 158
Men-at-arms. See Gens-d'-armes Mill, John S., 159 Minot, Lawrence, 141 Modern times, 152-162 Modus tenendi Parliamentum, 102 Molinier, A., loi
Monasteries of France, 23, 56, 137 Monasticism in England, 23 , 55-58, 85 Montfort, John de, duke of Brittany,
133, 137, 138 Montfort, Simon de, earl of Leicester
14, 65, 78, 80, 84, 89, 90, 100 Mortimer, Roger, earl of March, in Morlaix, battle of, 130 Mugnier, Franijois, 84 Murimuth, Adam, 22, 120
Najera, battle of, 133 Naples, University of, 27 Napoleon, 114, 155, 158, 159 Nation, the mediaeval and modern con- ceptions ot, 7, 8, 6-11, 15, 16, 17 Nations in the universities, 8, 22, 29 Nationality, conception of, 5-9, 15, 25
INDEX
167
Navarre, king of , 1 33 . See also Charles
Nesle, Guy de, 131
Nom6no^, 40
Norman Conquest, significance of, 50-54, 60 ; effect on English his- tory, 61-64
Norman nation in University of Paris 8 1
Normandy, 15, 16, 40, 41, 49, 72; 74, 75, 78-81, 133, 135, 143, 156
Northampton, earl of, 130
OCKHAM, William of, 17, 107
Offa, king of the Mercians, 48
Ogbourne, 56
Ordericus Vitalis, 61
Orleans, the Maid of, 135, 136, 147,
149, 150 Orleans, Charles, duke of, 142 Osmund, St., 55 Otto of Brunswick, 123 Oxford, 79 ; University of, 27, 88, 89,
122 ; earl of, 85 ; Blonde of, 85
Papacy, 21-26, 54, 55, no, in, 112,
118-120 Paris, 40, 59, 73, 103, 109, 135,140,147 Paris, treaty of (1259), 78, 80, 90, 93,
119; University of, 8, 22, 24, 27,
29, 88, 89, 135 Paris, Gaston, 42, 109 Paris, John of, 19 Paris, Matthew, 86, 87, 107 Pastons, the, 153 Patrick, St., 52 Peasants' Revolt, the, 151 Peninsula, the, 133 Petit-DutailUs, C, 98 Petrarch, 18
Philip 1, king of France, 51 Philip II, Augustus, king of France,
33, 66, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81 Philip III, the Bold, king of France, 93 Philip VI, the Fair, king of France,
13, 77, 93, 95, 96, 99 Philip VI, of Valois, king of France,
95, 116, 140, 141
Philip the GJood, duke of Burgundy,
139, 140, 141 Philip of Navarre, 142 Philippa, queen of Ed ward III, 112,121 Picard nation in University of Paris, 8 Picot, M., 100 Pipe Rolls, 72 Pirenne, H., 32 Plessis, John du, 84 Ploermel, 124 Poitiers, 142, 151 ; battle of, 41, 131,
132, 137 ; University of, 29 Poitiers, Alphonse de, 92 Poitou and the Poitevins, the, 41, 69,
83, 84, 86, 87,89 Politics, of Aristotle, 19 Pollard, Professor, 10 1 Ponthieu, 117 Poole, R. L., 63 Powicke, Professor, 19, 74 Praemunire, statute of, 25 Prague, University of, 29 Prince, the Black. See Edward,
prince of Wales Printing, 144 Provence, 86, 87, 90. 91, 92, 156
QUERCY, 119
Reformation, the, 154, 155
Reims, 144, 146
Renaissance, the, 154
Rennes, v, vi, 42, 131
Rhodes, Cecil, 122
Richard I, king of England, 71, 73, 79,
92 Richard II, king of England, 134, 146,
147, 149 Richmond, earldom of, 49 Rivaux, Peter of, 86 Roches, Peter des, 86 Rouen, 72, 119, 147 Round, J. H., 61,68 Rousseau, J. J., 19, 158 St. Gallen, the monk of, 39 St. Giles, John of, 88 Saint-Pol, Mary of, laa
1 68
INDEX
Saint-Romain, Artaud de, 87
Saint-Sardos, 95
Salisbury, 55, 59, 83
Salisbury, John of, 106
Savoy and Savoyards, 84, 86, 91
Seals, the great, the privy, and the
small, in France and England, 63,
71, 103-10S, 153 Seeley, Sir John, 158 Sens, William of, 59 Scotland, 5 1, 58, 65, 66, 69, 93, 1 16, 153 Scotus, Duns, 107 Shakespeare, 145 Sluys, battle of, 127 Somnium Vtridarii, 19 Spencer, Herbert, 159 Steelyard, the, 98 Stephen, king of England, 56, 64 Stevenson, W. H., 63 Stubbs, William, 61, 66, 67, 96, 97, 98 Sweden, 102
Tait, Professor, 99
Talbot, 136
Temperaments, contrast of French
and English, ISS-I57 Templars, Order of, 23, 57 Teutonic element in English History,
17, 19, 96-99 Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury,
55 Thomas Aquinas, St., 19 Thomas, the name, 65 Three estates, the, 10 1 Toledo, 35
Toulouse,io,92, 147; University of, 29 Toumai, 126, 130 Treasurer, the, 80 Troyes, treaty of, 139 Tudors, the, 154
Universities, the, 8, 24, 26-30, 122,
13s Urban II, pope, 21, 57
Valence, Aymer de, earl of Pembroke,
89, 90, 122 Valenciennes, 112 Valois, the, 10, 141 ; Charles of, 95.
See under Philip, etc. Vaud, pays de, 91 Vemeuil, battle of, 134 Vernon, 41
Versailles, treaty of (19 19), i, 142 Vexin, the, 41 Victorian age, 159 Vienne, council of, 23 Vierzon, 43 Villeneuves, 92 Vincennes, le hois de, 153 Viollet, Paul, 4, loi Voltaire, 150, 15S Wage, his Roman de Rou, 107 Wales, 35, 44,45, 51, 52, 56, 58, 66, 93,
156 Wardrobe, the king's, 86, 92, 93 Warenne, the earls, 56 Warwick, John du Plessis, earl of, 84 War, development of art of, in Hun- dred Years' War, 128 Wellington, duke of, 133 Westminster, 72, 73, 80, 93 ; Abbey,
35, 57, 58, 59, 83 William I, king of the English, 36, 48,
49, 50, 51, 54, 57,61, 62,63 William, count of Hainault, 121 Winchelsea, 92 Winchester, 72 World State, mediaeval doctrine of, 17.
18, 20 Worms, Concordat of, 55 Writ charter, the, 63 Wycliffe, John, 120
Yarmouth, 143 Year Book, the, 108, 152 Yorkshire, 35, 49, 59, 156 Zeebrugge, 127
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