LA DAME A LA LICORNE
THE
LEGACY OF THE
MIDDLE AGES
EDITED BY
G.._C.C RUMP &r E. F. JACOB
7V.R.NARV.A\
-
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRI
PREFACE
THE legacies of Greece or Rome or Judaea come
to us from men who owned a common lan-
guage^ common civilization, and a common country.
Those men left us gifts marked by signs easy to
recognize and appreciate. But the legacy of the
Middle Ages comes to us from men who lived in
hard and dangerous times, in a society so chaotic
and ill-defined that it is difficult to form any
coherent picture of its mind and institutions. Greece,
Rome, and Judaea are definite names, and it is not
impossible to assign to their civilizations a definite
place and time. But the Middle Ages have no clear
beginning and can scarcely be said to have an end ;
their chronological limits are as obscure as the
frontiers of the nations which arose in those times
of storm. Their legacy comes not from the citizens
of one city, or the narrow limits of one country,
cities and countries great because men of great
genius and strong character lived together in narrow
limits, but from all the many lands which may be
defined as Western Europe. Within this area there
were many intellectual centres whose importance
altered with the changes and chances of the times.
The difficulty of including in one volume all that
was transmitted to us from this wide area and these
many centuries need not be elaborated ; the success
of the attempt can only be judged by the reader.
If any coherent picture of the intellectual and
social life of that time was to be put together, there
was but one way open, the way of selection. The
vi Preface
most important subjects had to be chosen and those
of less importance omitted. Science has been left
to a succeeding volume, and some sides of medieval
art are only partly described. For the same reason
Scandinavian influences go practically untouched,
and Spain, which transmitted the gifts of Islam in
the twelfth century, is also neglected. But the
chief contributions of the Middle Ages have been
gathered together, and despite omissions the main
lines and masses of the picture are all preserved.
The chapters fall into three divisions. The first
five deal with the things of the mind and the spirit.
In the centre and heart of the book come three upon
law, the most fundamental and characteristic of
medieval bequests ; the remainder are concerned
with the fabric of society and government. There
is no contributor who would not have desired to
treat his subject at greater length, and there is none
to whom the editors would not gladly have accorded
it. For all restrictions we offer our apologies to
contributors and readers alike.
We owe it to the memory of a great jurist to state
that Sir Paul Vinogradoff did not live to see his
article in proof. Our grateful thanks are due to
Mrs. Crump,. Mrs. Buckland, Miss Joan Evans, and
Mr. S. Vesey FitzGerald for translating the con-
tributions of our French colleagues, and to Professor
F. de Zulueta for useful advice and help. Limitations
of space necessitated a slight reduction in the size of
the palaeographical facsimiles, to which Dr. Lowe
has kindly consented.
C. G. C.
E. F. J.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION. By C. G. CRUMP, formerly
of the Public Record Office ... I
1. THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. By F. M. POWICKE,
Professor of Medieval History in the Univer-
sity of Manchester 23
2. ART.
(i) MEDIEVAL ARCHITECTURE. By
W. R. LETHABY, Surveyor of West-
minster Abbey 59
(ii) MEDIEVAL SCULPTURE. By PAUL
VITRY, Conservateur du Musee du
Louvre 93
(iii) DECORATIVE AND INDUSTRIAL
ARTS. By MARCEL AUBERT, Musee
du Louvre . . . . .123
3. LITERATURE.
(i) SOME ASPECTS OF MEDIEVAL
LATIN LITERATURE. By CLAUDE
JENKINS, Lambeth Librarian and Pro-
fessor of Ecclesiastical History, King's
College, London . . . 147
(ii) VERNACULAR LITERATURE. By
CESARE FOLIGNO, Serena Professor of
Italian in the University of Oxford . 173
(iii) HANDWRITING. By E. A. LOWE,
Reader in Palaeography in the Univer-
sity of Oxford . 197
viii Contents
4. PHILOSOPHY. By C. R. S. HARRIS, Fellow of
All Souls College 227
5. EDUCATION. By J. W. ADAMSON, Emeritus
Professor of Education in the University of
London ....... 255
6. LAW.
(i) CUSTOMARY LAW. By the late SIR
PAUL VINOGRADOFF, Corpus Professor of
Jurisprudence in the University of
Oxford 287
(ii) CANON LAW. By GABRIEL LE BRAS,
Professeur a 1'Universite de Strasbourg 321
(iii) ROMAN LAW. By EDOUARD MEYNIAL,
Professeur a la Sorbonne . . . 363
7. THE POSITION OF WOMEN. By EILEEN
POWER, Reader in Medieval Economic
History, University of London . . .401
8. THE ECONOMIC ACTIVITY OF TOWNS.
By N. S. B. GRAS, Professor of History in the
University of Minnesota .... 435
9. ROYAL POWER AND ADMINISTRATION.
By CHARLES JOHNSON, of the Public Record
Office 465
10. POLITICAL THOUGHT. By E. F. JACOB,
Student of Christ Church . . . 505
INDEX 535
LIST OF
ILLUSTRATIONS
La Dame a la Licorne. About 1500. From a tapestry, Musee
de Cluny, Paris. Photograph by Alinari . . Frontispiece
ART ARCHITECTURE
1. Lc Mans Cathedral, western portal .... facing p. 64
2. Chartres Cathedral, western entrance .... 63
3. Chartres Cathedral, southern entrance .... 72
4. Amiens Cathedral, west front ...... 76
5. Le Mans Cathedral, apse ...... So
6. Reims Cathedral, west front ...... 84
7. Reims Cathedral, left portal, west front .... 86
8. Reims Cathedral. Statues in the left portal, west front . 90
The illustrations in this article are reproduced from
photographs by Levy et Neurdein re*unis
ARTSCULPTURE
9. Tympanum in western doorway, Chartres. Twelfth century.
(Photograph by Giraudon) ..... 100
10. St. Firmin blessing, Amiens. Thirteenth century. (Photo-
graph by Giraudon) . . . . . . . 102
n. The smiling Angel, Reims. Thirteenth century. (Photo-
graph by Giraudon) 104
12. Adoration of the Magi, bas-relief by Niccolo Pisano, from
pulpit of Baptistery, Pisa. Thirteenth century. (Photo-
graph by Alinari) ....... ic8
x List of Illustrations
13. Massacre of the Innocents, bas-relief by Giovanni Pisano.
Museo Civico, Pisa. Fourteenth century. (Photograph
by Brogi) ....... Jacingp. no
14. Charles V of France, from Church of the Celestins (Louvre).
Fourteenth century. (Photograph by Giraudon) . . 114
15. Virgin, by Jean de Marville, from the Charterhouse, Dijon.
Fifteenth century. (Photograph by Giraudon) . . 116
1 6. Mary Magdalene, from Abbey of Solesmes. Late fifteenth
century. (Photograph by Giraudon) . . . . 120
ARTDECORATIVE AND INDUSTRIAL ARTS
17. Casket, Limoges work. Thirteenth century. Musce de
Cluny. (Photograph by Giraudon) . . . . 124
1 8. Enamel plaque, Limoges work. Twelfth century. Musee
de Cluny. (Photograph by Giraudon) . . . 126
19. Ivory cover to Psalter of Charles the Bold. Ninth century.
Bibliotheque Nationale. (Photograph by Giraudon) . 128
20. Embroidered Cross (opus Anglicanum). About 1400.
Collection Martin Le Roy. (Photograph by Giraudon) 134
21. Tapestry of the Apocalypse, Cathedral of Angers. Late
fourteenth century. Et datus cst mibi calamus similis
VirgaC) et dictum est mibi: Surge et meter e Templum
Dci(xl. i) 136
22. Tapestries of the Apocalypse. Cathedral of Angers. End of
fourteenth century. The Beast and the False Prophet
driven into the marsh of sulphureous fire (xix. 20). The
Angel leading St. John to the Heavenly Jerusalem (xxi.
10-11) 138
23. Windows from the Cathedral of Evreux. Fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. (Photograph by Les Archives Photo-
graphiques d'Art et d'Histoire) ..... 144
24. Window of Guy de Laval, Church of Montmorency.
1 523-33. (Photograph by Les Archives Photographiques
d'Art et d'Histoire) 146
List of Illustrations xi
LITERATURE HANDWRITING
The illustrations in this article are slightly reduced
25. (a) Capitalis Rustica (Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana
xxxix. i, f. 8. Virgil. Written probably in Rome before
A.D. 494) ; (b) Uncial (Fulda, Landesbibliothek Boni-
fatianus i. Gospel Harmony. Written (probably) at
Capua, about A.D. 546) ; (c) Half-uncial (Bamberg, Staats-
bibliothek B. iv. 21. Jerome and Augustine. Sixth cen-
tury) ; (d) Quarter-uncial (St. Gall Stiftsbibliothek 1395.
Gospels. Fifth century) ..... facing p. 204
26. (a) The Book of Kells (Dublin, Trinity College MS. 58 (A. I.
6). Book of Kells. Seventh to eighth century) ; (b) Irish
and English majuscule scripts. Lindisfarne Gospels.
(London. British Museum Cotton Nero D. IV. Lindisfarne
Gospels. Written probably towards the end of seventh
century) 207
27. Bangor Antiphonary. Irish minuscule. (Milan* Biblioteca
Ambrosiana C. 5. inf., f. I3 V . Bangor Antipbonary. Writ-
ten at Bangor, A.D. 680-91) . . . between pp. 208-9
28. Martyrology of St. Willibrord. Anglo-Saxon Minuscule.
(Paris. Bibliotheque Nationale Lat. 10837, f. 3. Martyro-
logy of St. Willibrord. Written at Echternach, A.D.
703-21) 208-9
29. Visigothic script. (Manchester, John Rylands Library,
MS. 104 (i 1 6), f. 55. Smaragdus, On the rule of St. Bene-
dict. Written A.D. 945, probably in diocese of Burgos)
facing p. 211
30. ' Luxeuil ' type. (Verona. Biblioteca Capitolare MS. XL
(38), f. 65. Gregory, Moralia. Beginning of eighth
century) between pp. 212-13
31. ' Corbie ' a-b type. (Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale MS. II.
4856. Isidorus, Etymologiae. End of eighth century) 212-13
xii List of Illustrations
32. Beneventan script. (Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana Ixvtii.
2, f. 6 V . Tacitus, Annals. Written at Monte Cassino,
about A.D. 1050) ...... facing />. 215
33. Maurdramnus Bible (Corbie). Early Caroline Minuscule.
(Amiens, Bibliothdque Municipale MS. 1 1. Maurdramnus
Bible. Written at Corbie, A.D. 772-80) between pp. 216-17
34. Ada Gospels. Early Caroline Minuscule. (Troves, Stadt-
bibliothek MS. 22, f. 17. Ada Gospels. Written about
A.D. 780) 216-17
35. Majuscule Types. Tours School. (Quedlinburg, Gymnasium,
f. 1 09*. Life of St. Martin. Written at Tours, about
A.D. 800) 218-19
36. Caroline Minuscule. Tours School. (Ibid., f. ii3 v ) . . 218-19
37. Gothic script. (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, f. 26.
Psalter of Isabel of France. Written in the second half of
the thirteenth century) . . 222-3
38. Gothic script. (Ibid., f. 174) 222-3
39. Humanistic script. (London, British Museum, Harley MS.
2593, f. 25. Gianozzo Manetti, De Dignitale et Excel] entia
Hominis. Written by Ciriagio at Florence in A.D. 1454) . 224-5
40. Humanistic script. (London, British Museum Add. MS.
11355, f. i i8 v . Virgil. Written about A.D. i $00) . . 224-5
EDUCATION
41. The House of Learning. From G. Reisch, Margarita Pbilo-
sopbica, 1503 272
INTRODUCTION
ON the 2oth of February in the year 1641, while the
House of Commons was preparing for the impeachment
of the Earl of Stratford, there was a debate on the financial
needs of the realm, arising from the war with Scotland and
the distress of the northern counties. Mr. Pym proposed
that for the safety of the Commonwealth the house should
assume a legislative power and compel the city of London
to lend the money. There were precedents, he thought,
for this. The house seems to have misliked this suggestion
and Sir Simonds D'Ewes was, more suo, very learned in
opposing it ; he gave a sketch of the history of Magna
Charta, with an allusion to the c subtle practice ' of Hubert
de Burgh, quoted the Memoranda Rolls of Henry III, and
declared that he would evade any such demand by selling
all his estate, except his books, at which the greater part of
the house laughed. Those who have read the erudite
utterances of Sir Simonds will share the incredulous and
perhaps despairing amusement of his fellow members. But
for the purpose of this paper the important point to notice
is the common appeal to the practice of the past made by
two men of diverse minds though of one aim. Pym is the
radical desiring to establish the supremacy of the House of
Commons, and ready to use that supremacy even for new
purposes, but yet willing to use precedents, or even invent
them, if men must have precedents to enable them to follow
him ; his antagonist is the other type of man, the man who
believes that the things which he desires existed in the
past, and that the careful study of books and parchments
will result in the discovery of the truth of that belief.
2873 B
2 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Both types of mind can be found at all times, and both
come to the front in times of rapid changes in social or
political institutions. Against them may be set another
type, the man who sees in the past the social and political
forms which he desires to preserve and to which he desires
to return, and appeals to history and research to support
him in this attempt to return against the stream to the
place in which he would be.
In the seventeenth century in England the men who
stood for these types were lawyers, and their precedents
and examples were cited in legal form and the dispute at
least in its earlier stages was conducted in the courts of law.
But if we turn to the next period of history, in which
a similar appeal to medieval practice and authority was
made, we shall find that then the appeal was made
more passionately and yet more scientifically, and that
those who made it were men interested in almost every
department of human thought. It would, indeed, be
possible to write a large part of the history of the nineteenth
century under some such a title as * The appeal to medieval
times and its results '. It began as a reaction, a reaction
from the system of thought upon which the French Revo-
lution had been founded, a system which repudiated
everything medieval and looked back to Greece and Rome
or even to China for its inspiration. In literature this
school produced the writings in prose and verse that have
been grouped under the name of the romantic school, a term
which comprises under one classification such varying minds
as Walter Scott, Chateaubriand, Schiller, and Victor Hugo,
and even more aberrant types. In the study of history
medieval studies took on a new importance and spread into
political thought. Resistance to the unification of Europe,
which Napoleon desired to effect, produced and required
a national spirit, and this spirit looked for its justification
Introduction 3
in the past and obtained it from the medieval historian.
The same feeling can be discovered in the works of some
nineteenth-century jurists; the whole conception of national
law, of law as the expression of a particular social type
produced by a particular race, derives from medieval studies.
And if it is permissible to pursue the story down to less
serious manifestations the existence in England of the type
of thought known as * young England ', with its curious
attempt to restore the glories of the medieval tournament,
or the later attempt to establish ' guild ' socialism on the
lines of medieval craft organization, furnish a proof of the
influence which the Middle Ages have exercised over different
types of mind. Indeed it may be suggested that only the
opposing current of scientific discovery and the schools of
thought associated with it, prevented the influence of
medieval studies playing an even more important part than
they have done in the modern world. And if we add to
these the utilitarian and economic doctrines which have
acquired in continental Europe the name of the Manchester
school of thought, we shall have almost exhausted the
influences opposed to the power of the appeal to the Middle
Ages. Enough has already been said to show that the force
of this appeal was felt by men of very different aims and
characters. Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists, theologians,
and rationalists have drawn their arguments from the events
and institutions of those times, have felt their attraction or
been repelled by dislike for them. There are perhaps to-day
signs that this influence is waning. Greater knowledge has
produced its usual effect, and men are less inclined to praise
or blame passionately the institutions and processes which
they understand. But this change is not yet complete, and
there is still need of knowledge, need to know what the
Middle Ages were and what was the legacy they left behind.
All we can expect to receive from posterity is the same
B 2
4 Legacy of the Middle Ages
treatment that we accord to those who have gone before us.
We need not praise, nor need we blame overmuch, but
certainly we must understand.
To understand the Middle Ages in Western Europe, for
it is mainly with Western Europe that this book is con-
cerned, we must begin with one important fact ; the
source of the food on which men lived. To know this we
should have to know a good deal that is not yet known and
perhaps is hardly knowable. But the main lines can be laid
down and that is as much as need be attempted here.
Over most of Western Europe there prevailed a type of
agricultural settlement or estate known as the manor in
England and by other names in other countries. Every-
where we find a group of dwellings in the middle of a culti-
vated area, surrounded by more or less waste or uncultivated
land ; there will be meadows meant to provide hay and
pasture when the hay has been cut ; each house in the
village will have a share in the arable land and in the meadow,
and rights over the waste and wood, rights of pasture and
rights of taking timber and fuel and so on ; and the whole
thing will look like a compact settlement cutting out an
area of cultivation from a new country. This is not the
only form of agricultural life ; it is easy to find others ; it is
only necessary to look at Wales or Brittany or almost any
mountain country to find that the dwellings are less grouped
and the farms more scattered ; and it is not hard to find
cases of such scattered settlements in most countries. But
the grouped settlement is on the whole the most common,
the ' heap village ' as German scholars speak of it. In the
times of which most is known, the village and its inhabitants
are not indeed the only human element in the story. Among
them and above them is the feudal lord who also has his
share, and a large share, in the arable land and in the meadow,
in the wood and in the waste. He is in some sense the ruler
Introduction 5
and the chief of the settlement ; the village officers are
cither his officers or answerable to him, and the court of the
village is his court. More than this, most of the inhabitants
of the village arc not free men in relation to him ; they are
his bondmen, they owe him payments in kind, in labour,
and in money. Normally they cannot sue him in the king's
court ; they cannot leave their holdings and go where they
will ; and their daughters cannot marry without the manor,
nor their sons leave it to better themselves in the church or
in the towns. The lord and the lord's rights make the
settlement a rigid body.
For a fuller description of this agricultural unit the reader
should turn to the chapter on Customary Law. In this
introduction it is only intended to describe the manor, by
whatever name it may be called, in its function as the
economic basis of society and to deal with the life led upon
it. The difficulty of describing in any probable or reasonable
way the life of the past is very great ; we cannot escape
from our own feelings and prepossessions sufficiently to
enable us to guess at the degree of happiness or well-being
possessed by a dweller in a medieval manor. The only
estimate that we can make of it must rest upon the evidence
of discontent or resistance that we may be able to discover.
Now it is pretty clear that no country organized on the
system described escaped agrarian disturbances for very
long. The strength of the system lay in its total self-
sufficiency ; within limits the manor provided for its own
subsistence, looked to the lord for its defence, and to its
parish priest for its religious comforts. It is easy to over-rate
this self-sufficiency. The manor was by no means inde-
pendent of the surrounding country. The net of markets
and fairs, weekly markets and yearly fairs, that grew up over
England shows that the manor was a trading unit, exporting
mainly grain and some hides and wool, and importing iron
6 Legacy of the Middle Ages
for their ploughs and other tools and cloth and so forth.
But the bare necessities of life it could provide for itself
and also support its lord and his officials, unless they became
too expensive luxuries. The margin was, however, narrow ;
and if the burden on the inhabitants became too great, if
the lord pushed his claims too far, if the seasons were too
unkind, or if a general disaster such as a long war, a pestilence,
or a general famine fell upon the country, there might be
a riot, or a common desertion of the manor, or even a rising
in rebellion over a large tract of country. These sudden
attempts to escape from the system always ended in failure ;
the military power that could be brought against the un-
organized villagers was too great to admit of the success
even of their strongest efforts ; but in many cases they were
able to improve their positions slowly by putting continual
pressure on the lords. Violent and general rebellion was of
course rare ; such risings took place, for instance, in Nor-
mandy in the eleventh century, and in England and France
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ; and sporadic
trouble in particular manors, chiefly on monastic manors,
can be traced in the earlier part of the fourteenth century in
England. How far similar troubles occurred on manors held
by lay owners it is hard to say ; the abbot was far more
likely to appeal for help to the central government than the
lay lord, and in consequence we know less about the lay lord
and his troubles. One bit of evidence, however, we have :
the continual applications at that date for exemplifications
of passages from Doomsday book show how eagerly the
tenants sought to prove that they were tenants on a manor
which was ancient demesne of the crown, and so entitled
to special remedies against what they held to be unreasonable
demands from their lords.
If we look for a moment at the duties of the unfree or
bond tenants or the villeins, who formed the bulk of the
Introduction 7
tenants of the manor, we shall see at once how onerous they
were. The tenant had to make payments in money, in kind,
and in labour. The payments in kind were usually chickens,
eggs, honey, and other things of small value ; though
articles of greater cost, such as a ploughshare, might be
given ; in addition he had to grind his corn at the lord's
mill and pay for doing so with money or a part of the flour.
In France he had to bake his bread in the lord's oven, and
pay for that also ; to crush his grapes or his apples at the
lord's press, and pay for that. The lord's oven existed in
England also, but the lord's press seems unknown. But the
most onerous charge on the villein was the labour exacted
from him. He had to come with his own plough and cattle
and plough the lord's land or demesne ; he had to harrow,
reap, and carry the crop, and do any other work required of
him. The number of day's work he owed in the year was
fixed but the lord could exact extra days in harvest or at
other times, and could demand the performance of other
duties from him. These tasks were incumbent not only on
the tenant himself, but on his whole family ; all were
nativi, born bondmen of the lord.
This description applies to village life over most of
Western Europe. It is true of England, France, Germany,
and Italy, the countries where the institution can be most
easily studied. It came to an end in each of these countries
at different dates and in different ways. In Italy, at least
in Northern Italy, the economic basis of the manor fell
with the fall of the Holy Roman Empire and the growth
of the Italian towns in power. The smaller lords, those who
held fiefs from the great tenants in chief, were squeezed out
by the joint pressure of the great men from above and the
actual holders of the land from below by the beginning
of the thirteenth century. And through that century
a rapid process of the commutation of all labour-rents and
8 Legacy of the Middle Ages
other rights belonging to the lords for money payments was
going on. Even in England it is difficult to draw the line
between a manor and a borough. In Italy it is still more
impossible. The desire of the lords, especially of the
bishops and monastic houses, to come to terms with their
resisting tenants, made them eager to recognize each unit
of their property as consisting of individuals united by
a joint responsibility, with whose representatives they could
negotiate and contract. And in this way the corte, the
lord's manor, or any other aggregate of persons rapidly grew
into a commune, which in some cases can hardly, if at all,
be distinguished except in size from a real municipality or
great town. Nor did the resistance of the rural communes
stop at that point ; jthey were more willing to enter into
contracts with their lords than to keep them. And so
gradually in the greater part of Northern Italy the feudal
aristocracy threw in their lot with the great towns. These,
in turn, gradually annexed by force or negotiation the
country round them and took over the government of the
rural communes, not always to the advantage of the latter.
The rise of the rural communes in Italy was only possible
because there was no strong central government to support
the rights of the feudal lords. It was also easier for the
communes to assume a modified self-government because
agriculture in Italy seems not to have been organized on
a communal system.
If we turn from Italy to England we shall find the earlier
steps of the emancipation of the villagers occurring, but
occurring two centuries later. But we shall find that even
after the labour rents and some other of the lord's rights
have been commuted for money payments that the manor
still persisted. There is no growth of self-government, no
substitution of the towns for the feudal lords. The manor
remains as an agricultural unit, incapable of evolution
Introduction 9
because the system of agriculture is a rigid system, in which
it is almost impossible for one man to cultivate his scattered
strips in any other fashion than that used by his neighbours.
In consequence any alteration or improvement in agriculture
meant a profound change. In England the manor became
an inconvenient legacy from the Middle Ages ; escape was
only found through a fundamental change which, like all
such changes, healed some old troubles and created some
new ones. This is not the place in which to discuss the
history of enclosures, which belongs to modern times ; but
it is necessary to emphasize the fact that the manorial
system had its own evils, and that it sometimes bore even
more hardly on the poorer classes than the system which
succeeded it. The historian may at least congratulate him-
self on the fact that it is from the documents relating to
enclosures that he obtains the best evidence as to what the
manor really was ; had he to rely purely on medieval docu-
ments the task of reconstructing the manor would have
been much harder.
Italy Northern Italy, that is and England are in fact
at two opposite poles. In Italy there was no strong central
government able and ready to enforce the law and keep
order ; in England there was no freedom of agriculture,
there were no varied crops, no vineyards or very few, and no
olives. The two countries are alike in the one thing only,
that both went through the stage of a feudalized agricultural
unit. It is tempting to think that the community of the
English village was the school which taught Englishmen to
think politically. But it is well to remember that the
medieval rural communes of Italy were far more organic
than any English village, and that Italy has had a very
different history from England. It was not only in the
medieval manor court that the political habit of mind was
fostered.
io Legacy of the Middle Ages
In France and Germany the manor had a longer life than
in Italy. For Germany it would be possible to construct
the history of its changes and final form. But it is not
possible to do it here in a few pages. The literature is
immense and controversial, and the manor in Germany is an
institution which takes many forms and has a difficult
history. In France the evidence for the nature of medieval
agriculture seems to be scanty and the methods used vary
far more widely than in England. The only clue seems to
lie in the documents dealing with the attempts made by the
Government in the eighteenth century, just before the
revolution, to improve the system of agriculture. As in
England it is only when the restrictions imposed by the
communal methods of tillage begin to be inconvenient, that
evidence of their real nature can easily be found. To a
writer dealing only with medieval sources it is the feudal
side of the story that is clear, the power of the lord and the
burthen on the tenant ; he is apt to miss the details of the
actual working of the institution. It is only in writing of
the eighteenth century that he has to explain the hampering
effect of the system of scattered holdings and of the common
rights of pasture over hay-meadows when the hay has been
cut and arable land when the crop has been gathered. But
it is easy to see that in France as in England the manor,
where * it existed in the English type, was an unfortunate
legacy, a problem whose solution was difficult and uncom-
fortable. It was not solved before the revolution, and so
far as the lay-out of the fields can be seen from the window
of a railway carriage the strip system exists to-day over
many miles of country.
1 Roughly speaking, there were no manors of the English type in
Normandy, Languedoc, Provence, or Dauphine, i.e. there were no open
fields, and no common cultivation and no rights of pasture. But see
Economic Journal, vol. i, p. 59, for Seebohm's article on French Peasant
Proprietorship.
Introduction n
In reading medieval history it is always necessary to keep
in mind this agricultural foundation. It is the biggest
factor in medieval life, the base on which rested all medieval
trade and town life, all the splendour of medieval art and
architecture, all the life lived in monasteries, all the curious
learning of theologians and philosophers and lawyers, all
the power of kings and statesmen. To move food from
country to country on the modern scale was impossible,
though it could be done if necessary to meet an emergency.
It was not easy to move food from one part of a country to
another. Normally each town subsisted on the food that
could be brought to it by road for small distances, by sea or
river for greater distances. The \vonder is that the manor
could and did produce sufficient surplus food beyond its
own needs to supply the demands of the towns and the
ruling classes. That this was done is its justification ; its
failure came when other needs arose, needs for material that
could be exported like wool, needs for a more rapid pro-
duction of food for a growing population. But while they
lasted the manors were in a way the living cells which formed
the body politic ; and this is not less true even if it be
admitted that their history is a history of rapid changes.
It is a common saying in medieval writers that society
consists of those who work, those who guard, and those who
pray. It is worth while to note in passing that these writers
mean by the workers those who work on the land, and that
the classification omits entirely the merchant and the
dweller in the towns. In point of fact the merchant and
the town fit with difficulty into the medieval scheme. The
growth of a town economy is the mark of the beginning of
a new form of society. Northern Italy, Southern Germany,
and what we now call Belgium and Northern France are
the seed-beds where the towns sprung up. There is a sense
of modern times in those parts which one scarcely feels in
12 Legacy of the Middle Ages
England or elsewhere. In England indeed, if we omit
London, town life was unimportant, and even London is
a small city compared with Florence, Venice, Nuremberg,
Frankfort, Cologne, Bruges, and Ghent ; and London is
the only city or borough in England that ruled over a district
without its own .walls, and had within its walls or just
without them the towers of nobles as an Italian town might
have. But London is an exceptional city in England ; the
other cities and towns in that country were without her
claims to distinction and lay outside the main line of
development during that part of their history. They had
their own importance, but their contribution to the legacy
of the Middle Ages consisted principally in a series of
problems which remained unsolved until the nineteenth
century. But town history and town life is too large a subject
for a passing note, and needs a separate chapter. Let us come
back to the recognized classes of society, those that guard
and those that pray.
The first of these comprises all the men who held their
land by feudal tenures. There were other soldiers of course
in medieval armies, archers, foot-soldiers, and the like, often
of great military importance. But the warrior class was
formed by the men who went to war on horseback and in
armour, and held their lands by performing such services
or paying for professional horsemen to serve for them. At
first sight the system seems a simple one and originally it
was no doubt as simple in practice as it was in theory. The
feudal superior gave to his man a tract of land on condition
that he should serve himself in the army and bring with him
a specified number of other men properly equipped. The
contract was made in a formal manner by a ceremonial oath
of fidelity and a declaration that the recipient of the land
was now the man of the donor ; and both parties were
bound, the lord to allow the tenant to hold the land and
Introduction 13
protect him against all attacks, the tenant to perform the
service due. It is not necessary here to discuss the other
incidents of the tenure, or to do more than note the fact
that the relation of lord and tenant might be created by
the action of the tenant, as well as by a gift from the lord.
The point to be remembered is the personal relation estab-
lished between the two parties. If the lord failed to dis-
charge his obligation, the tenant was free to find another
lord l from whom he might hold the land ; if the tenant
failed, the lord was entitled to take back the land into his
own hands. The relation was not terminated by the death
of either party, but continued from one generation to
another, though it is clear that originally the contract was
made for the life of the tenant only. Nor was the tenant
bound to retain in his own hands the land held by him ;
he might grant out a part at any rate to others, to hold of
him on similar terms, and in this way a sort of pyramid of
relations might grow up with the lord ' paramount ' at the
apex, the tenants * paravail ' at the base, and the layers of
* mcsne ' tenants between. The weak point in the system
was that the contract became meaningless as soon as the
tenant held land from more than one lord. So far indeed
as the legal relationship went it was not beyond the skill of
feudal lawyers to devise means of apportioning to each lord
his proper share of the tenant's allegiance, and of instruct-
ing the tenant in the way in which he should perform his
possibly conflicting duties. But as a real relationship the
feudal contract ceased to be of importance and necessarily de-
clined into a legal form. It is not necessary to look far to
find instances of the difficulties that arose ; the best-known
case in England is to be found in circumstances brought
about by the loss of Normandy in the thirteenth century and
the difficulty that arose when the same men found themselves
1 This would be the chief lord of the lord from whom the tenant held.
14 Legacy of the Middle Ages
holding of King John and of Philip of France at a time
when the two kings were at war. Nothing was possible in
that case but that the luckless tenants should abandon their
lands in one realm or the other. But the process was not
complete, and it was many years before the King of England
finally ceased to be the man of the King of France and to
owe him service for his duchy of Aquitaine. The King of
Naples after the fall of the Hohenstaufens was in an even
odder case. Charles of Anjou, the brother of St. Louis,
held Naples and Sicily of the Pope ; Provence, which came
to him with his wife, he held of the Emperor, a person who
was at the time rather shadowy ; Anjou he held of his
brother the King of France. And so we might go on to
the feudal difficulties of the King of Navarre. Nor, indeed,
were the positions of the greatest kings simple ; special
provisions had to be devised to deal with the case of a king
who by some accident should become the feudal inferior
of one of his own vassals. And if these accidents could occur
to kings, they might even more readily happen to smaller
men. It is pretty clear that by the end of the twelfth
century there was no considerable landholder in England
who did not owe service to several lords ; and the position
of the Earl of Oxford, who was an under-tenant of the
abbot of Ramsey, is in no way exceptional. In England,
indeed, the statute of Quia Emptores put an end to the
creation of new feudal superiorities and marks the point at
which the process of simplification in land tenure began.
But in other countries, such as Scotland and France, there
was no such legislation. Readers of St. Simon's memoirs
will remember that even in his day feudal superiorities were
not without interest in France ; and any one who wishes
to know why Campbell was a hated name in the Scotch
Highlands, and why so many of the clans supported the
Stuarts, will find a likely clue in the study of the feudal
Introduction 15
superiorities held by the Earl of Argyll and the use he made
of them. It is not necessary to deny that originally feudal-
ism had its good side ; undoubtedly it protected the weak
and made for order. But as soon as it ceased to be a social
form and became a system of law it left an awkward legacy
to succeeding generations. That England escaped the
worst effects of feudal law l is due to the statute Quia
Emptorcs.
If we turn from the men who guard to the men who
pray, we shall find ourselves in a wholly new society. It is
not an easy thing to explain in a few words the separation
between the medieval layman and the medieval clerk.
One obvious material mark there was : the clerk was ton-
sured, that is to say he had a small round patch on his head
from which all the hair was removed. The religious service
used in making a clerk can be found in the Pontificate
Romanum, or in any other similar collection of services.
According to the strict rule a candidate for clergy must
have been confirmed, must know how to read and write,
and must understand the rudiments of faith. On the
appointed day he must appear before the bishop carrying
a surplice or gown, and a lighted candle. There is no
canonical day or place or time for the making of clerks ;
it can be done anywhere at any time. A pair of scissors
must be provided for the bishop and a basin in which he may
put the hair. The words of the service may be found in the
sources mentioned above ; in this place only a few points
need be noted. The bishop cuts with the scissors the hair
of the candidate in four places, on the forehead, at the back
of the head, and over each ear ; finally he cuts off some hairs
from the middle of the head and puts them in the basin ;
at a later stage in the service the bishop takes the gown and
1 The common use of the word ' feudal ' as a means of expressing
disapproval of the English land system is more convenient than accurate.
16 Legacy of the Middle Ages
puts it on the candidate ; and in his concluding address he
tells him that on this day he has been made ' de foro ecclesic '
and has obtained the privileges of clergy, and warns him
that he do nothing which may cause him to lose them.
It is unnecessary to insist further on the words ' de foro
ecclesie ' ; the claim was that the fact of clergy made the
clerk as clerk subject only to ecclesiastical courts, at any rate
in the eye of the Church, though the lay power might not
always respect this point of view. Nor need we investigate
further the subsequent career of the clerk who took orders,
obtained benefices, and rose to high rank in the Church.
It is enough here to point out that the tonsure, conferred
as described above, is the first step which brings a man into
the number of the people who pray ; it made him fit to hold
a benefice, always on the condition that he proceeded to
take the further steps required of him. There was, indeed,
nothing irrevocable in the step he had taken ; the tonsure
was not indelible ; a clerk could abandon his clergy ; indeed,
if he chose, he might return to the lay world and even take
up the profession of arms. An extreme case may show the
possible eccentricities in a clerk's career. Philip of Savoy,
the younger brother of Peter, count of Savoy and Lord of
Richmond, was brought up as a clerk ; he never seems to
have received any orders, but by dispensation he held
benefices and was successively allowed to become bishop-
elect of Valence, and archbishop-elect of Lyons. On his
brother's death in 1268 Philip abandoned his clerical con-
dition, resigned his benefices, and succeeded his brother as
count of Savoy. He had in fact changed his life ; from
a clerk he had become a layman ; and such a return was
open to any clerk.
But if the clerk persevered there were many careers open
to him even if he refused to take orders. He would, of
course, begin his career at a school, the school of a great
Introduction 17
abbey, or in the house of a bishop or an archbishop. Thence
he would go on to his university training, passing perhaps
from one to another as the fame of the various teachers
might attract him. He might become a notary or a lawyer
or a learned doctor ; or he might enter into the service of
the king or some other potentate or even into the service
of the Roman court. In this latter case he would have been
well advised to take orders, and so qualify himself to hold
benefices whose revenues might provide him with a sufficient
salary. But the main point to note is that among clerks
equality was the rule ; rank and birth might count but
character and ability counted also. The son of a peasant
might become the first man in France under the king, as
happened in the case of Suger, abbot of St. Denis. At the
abbey school one of Sugcr's fellow scholars was the boy
who was to reign over France as Louis VI ; and when the
prince became king the son of the peasant had already
become the abbot of the great monastery and was the most
trusted councillor of the king ; when Louis VI died the
abbot remained the most trusted councillor of his son.
Suger is perhaps the finest example of his type, the ecclesi-
astical statesman. He was, indeed, neither saint nor
theologian, but he was faithful to the rules of life to which
his profession bound him. He neither enriched himself or
his family nor neglected his abbey. He was well read, a good
writer, and a great administrator. No one could have said
of him, as was said of Robert Burnell, bishop of Bath, the
great chancellor of Edward I, that he had too many illegi-
timate children to be an archbishop. No one could have
found material in his career for the famous doubt as to the
possible salvation of archdeacons, a doubt founded on the
lives of the many archdeacons who had earned that prefer-
ment by serving the king. Not every clerk could be a Suger,
or even an archdeacon. Fate might bring him to a humbler
2873 c
i8 Legacy of the Middle Ages
position ; he might be a teacher in a village school, an
assistant to the parish priest ; he might earn his bread by
writing deeds and letters for the unskilled laity. But one
thing he had, unless he lost it, his membership of a great
fellowship, bound together by the possession of a common
language, Latin, and subject to one law, the canon law.
All Christendom was, in theory at least, open to him, and
in theory and to some extent in fact there was no position
in the Church to which he might not attain, no place in any
government which he might not hold, no university in
which he might not teach. The only thing that could
restrict him to his own country was the jealousy felt for the
foreigner, the growing differentiation of language, the
earliest signs of the conception of nationalism.
It appears, therefore, that a clerical and ecclesiastical
career was the easiest means of escape for those who found
themselves unfitted or unhappy as tillers of the soil or as
holders of fiefs. It was not, indeed, the only way by which
an active mind or a resolute character could travel. The
story of the industrious apprentice who rises in his master's
service and marries his master's daughter, the romance of
the low-born warrior who wins his spurs and weds the
daughter of the great lord, may hardly be paralleled in real
life, but are not impossible. The great banking firms, which
adorned the cities of Italy and made the name of Lombard
almost a common equivalent for financier, sprang from
many origins. Nor could any one venture to say what was
the origin of the family of de la Pole, who rose from obscurity
in Hull almost to the throne of England. The citizens of
a medieval town came from all ranks and might rise to any
estate. But the new man in a medieval town had a harder
fight than the new man who entered on life as a clerk ;
a harder fight, because in every town he would find an
established aristocracy of wealth and position and an
Introduction 19
organization of the larger merchants and traders into which
he would have to make his way. Even harder was the
struggle which faced the new man who tried to make his
way as a soldier. The military system of the Middle Ages
was based on feudalism and knighthood. The reception of
knighthood was a duty and a privilege ; it signified that the
knight had performed the duty of mastering his profession
of arms and that he was fit to command a body of troops ;
it was a privilege because the holding of land as a feudal
tenant gave the holder a right to receive knighthood as well
as a duty to obtain it. The knight-bachelor in his pro-
fession is in a position corresponding to the clerk who has
taken his bachelor's degree at a university. But the new
man, who did not come from the feudal class, had no such
claim. His chance of success lay in another direction ; he
could only rise from the ranks in a mercenary army, that is
in an army not organized on a feudal basis and not even
drawing its commanders from the usual source. The new
man got his chance in the periods when the armies raised by
contending kings consisted of bands of rentiers. No one
for instance can guess where the great soldier Mercadier,
who commanded the armies of Richard I in France, came
from. In the wars of Edward III Duguesclin is almost as
mysterious in his origin ; the story of his romantic youth
makes him the son of a poor Breton noble family, but his
whole career is typical of a time when armies were made up
of hired bands. He fought with such bands and against
them, and save as a soldier could hardly have risen to be the
Constable of France and the principal figure in the French
resistance to the English. Sir John Hawkvvood is an even
more striking .instance. From an obscure position he
became a leader of a great company of mercenaries, and
when the treaty of Bretigny brought a temporary peace to
France, he led his troops into Italy and won there fame and
C 2
20 Legacy of the Middle Ages
fortune and a memorial on the wall of the Cathedral of
Florence. The wars of Edward III were the golden age
of the mercenary bands, and even the great condottieri of
Italy hardly match the fame and fortune of the leaders of
the earlier companies. In cruelty and rapacity there is little
to choose between the meaner leaders in either country.
But the Italians had more scope to show any power of
government, any desire to create order, that they might
possess, than had the new men who fought in the French
wars. If we except a few men like Sir John Chandos on the
English side and Duguesclin on the French side, both of
whom came from the lower rank of feudal tenants, we shall
not find in the other new men made by the wars many
ideas beyond the reach of mere bandits. They had, in fact,
come through a bad school to a bad eminence. Medieval
warfare was to a great extent founded upon plunder and
ransoms ; and any period of long and desperate fighting
quickly destroyed the ideal of chivalry, which was the only
restraining element in it, an ideal always weak and always
confined to a few minds. And over the men who formed
the bands of routiers who fought with Richard I or the
companies who served in the wars of Edward III, even that
weak ideal had no influence.
But the main fact that emerges from this survey is that
society in the Middle Ages was not a rigid form, in which
every man had a place and a life fixed for him. There were
many ways of escape. The son of a peasant could get learning
and rise in or through the Church ; he could win a place in
a town and rise by craft or trade ; he could turn soldier.
The born townsman had the same possibilities open to him.
Even the man who was the younger son of a feudal family
could turn clerk. But for the elder son, the heir to his
family lands, only the profession of arms was open. In
a highly feudalized country, like France, the small feudal
tenant was apt to slip into poverty, to drop into a condition
Introduction 21
that made his life a misery to himself and a menace to his
neighbours. Nor did this condition end with the Middle
Ages. In France and Germany the robber baron was a
reality even in later times. He could neither live on his
estate nor escape from it. As long as there was war, he was
able to serve as a soldier ; when peace came he was useless,
without means of support. And it is largely to this fact
that the character and even the fact of civil war may often
be traced. In England the wars of the Roses are the result
of the Hundred years war ; in France the wars of religion
follow on the French wars in Italy. Both are in a way the
results of demobilization, the work of a military caste
suddenly reduced to poverty and idleness.
It is hardly necessary to point out that there are in all
societies influences that make for permanence. At all times
sons are likely to follow their fathers' trades and professions.
There are many reasons why this is so, and in the Middle
Ages these reasons were perhaps even stronger than they are
to-day. But it is useless to under-cstimate or exaggerate
their force. The rigidity of the manorial system could not
prevent every villein's son from leaving the manor for the
church or the town. The guilds in the towns might become
the stronghold of the medieval capitalist ; they might even
become a serious obstacle to trade and industry ; but there
were still ways of escape from the rigidity imposed by them
on town life.
If we turn from the possible varieties of individual
experience to the general life of medieval man, we shall
find the same scourges of society with which the men of the
present day are familiar. War, famine, and pestilence are
not extinct, even if man's control over all three is greater
than it was. But medieval wars were even more unreasonable
than the wars of our own day, arose on even slighter occa-
sions and lasted longer. It is not strictly true that the
Hundred years war between England and France lasted for
22 Legacy of the Middle Ages
a century ; and it is not entirely true that it was a wholly
unreasonable war. It began because no reasonable frontier
existed between the lands of the two kings, and because no
statesman at that time thought in terms of frontiers at all
any more than the citizens of a Balkan state think to-day.
It is not true that medieval populations were always in
danger of famine, though periods of scarcity were not
infrequent and famine might occur as it may in Russia or
India to-day. Medieval pestilences were certainly com-
moner and more severe than they arc to-day and there was
less power to control them, though no one who realizes the
havoc wrought by influenza and its followers will claim
a high immunity from pestilences for the present day.
That on the whole modern man uses more soap than his
ancestors few will deny ; and most will admit that there
is more comfort to-day than there was in medieval days
and far less crime. But civilization still rests on slender
foundations ; and if men lose their control over the sources
of energy it would not take very many years to bring men
back to medieval conditions, to which indeed we are often
nearer than we realize. The fields of France are still laid
out on the old plan ; an American fundamentalist is the
spiritual descendant of St. Bernard, and every fresh shock
to the industrial system of England produces a series of
suggested remedies based upon medieval lines of thought.
If any justification is needed for this book, such a plea must
rest on this fact that we are not so different from our
ancestors as we believe, and that we had better know some-
thing about them before we use their methods. The
institutions they devised, the lives they led, the laws which
ruled them, the arts they practised, the religion in which
they believed, their ways of thought, make up the sum of
what they had to bequeath to us.
C. G. CRUMP.
24 Legacy of the Middle Ages
love the Lord thy God and thy neighbour as thyself. What
shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose
his own soul ? And again, God so loved the world that he gave
his only begotten Son, that whosoever believelh in Him should
not perish but have everlasting life. No one cometh to the
Father, save by Me. Take, eat ; this is my body. And
again, Go and preach the Kingdom of God. Feed my sheep.
Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my Church.
Peace I leave with you, my peace 1 give unto you. I have
come not to bring peace, but a sword.
I
Only those who accept the dogma of the divinity of
Christ as the central fact in a long process of divine revelation
can escape bewilderment in the contemplation of the spread
of Christianity, which has been so unlike other religions in
its claim to penetrate and control the whole of life. The
historian, who must discard dogmas, betrays his bewilder-
ment at every step. He tends to explain the history of the
Church by explaining it away. The absorption of Greek
thought and the penetration of the traditions of Rome by
the new life and teaching are regarded as causes rather than
as effects of their success. The Word was not as leaven ;
it was an artificial result of the strange ferment of religious
excitement, superstitions, philosophical mysticism, desperate
aspirations which stirred among the peoples of the Levant.
Even if the Gospel narratives are accepted as generally true,
reason and imagination combine in our days to reject the
claims of any body of men, living a fragile life in a world
which is but a speck in an infinite universe, to interpret
with infallible accuracy the significance of the life of Christ,
both for every human soul and in the whole process of
nature. Whatever welcome Christ might receive to-day
The Christian Life 25
it is inconceivable that the later history of his followers
could in the remotest degree resemble the history of the
Christian Church.
We have not to inquire whether, in the conditions of life
which prevailed during the early centuries, the spread of
Christianity was as remarkable as it would be to-day.
Probably we under-cstimate the extent to which the Gospel
appealed then to the trained intellect, just as we over-estimate
the extent to which modern science has altered the outlook
of the average man. ' Never in the whole history of the
world ', it has been said, * did so many people believe so
firmly in so many things, the authority for which they could
not test, as do Londoners to-day.' But, however this may
be, in the history of the medieval church from the fifth
century onwards, the distinction between the sophisticated
and the ignorant, though very marked, had not the particular
significance which it has to-day. The most acute, disinter-
ested and sincere intellects were among the expositors of
the Church. The issue did not lie between reason and faith.
Rationalistic opposition to Christianity had by this time
almost ceased to trouble the Church. Paganism abounded,
but it was the literal paganism of the natural man, a force to
be disciplined or an object of missionary enterprise, not an
intellectual power capable of resistance and organized life.
In the Middle Ages, apologetic writing, with the exception
of the Summa contra Gentiles of St. Thomas Aquinas, has
not the importance in ecclesiastical literature possessed
by the writings of the great Christian apologists or of
St. Augustine ; if we set on one side the numerous but
subordinate tracts against Jews and Mohammedans, it was
anything but defensive in character, it was rather an attempt
to reach self-understanding. Civilized Europe was educated
in a body of doctrine and enriched by a wealth of religious
experience which were in conscious harmony with current
26 Legacy of the Middle Ages
conceptions of the universe. What resistance there was,
so far as it was rooted in a life alien to Christianity, was
ruthlessly suppressed. Like the plague, it was endemic,
but, except for occasional epidemics of which the Albigen-
sian heresy was the most severe, it was kept successfully out
of sight, a monstrous unthinkable thing, abhorrent to the
conscience of mankind. The few great heretics, such as
WyclifTe, did not base their objections to orthodox practice
on principles unintelligible to the medieval mind ; still
less were they rationalists. They were extremists, urged
by a strange medley of mood and circumstance to carry
farther than others would a critical habit which was general
in the great centres of learning. They went over the
line which every man who thought for himself, and every
man of ardent piety, was likely to approach, but from
which all but they recoiled in horror. 1 Hence the problem
of authority did not arise from a conflict between the faith
of an organized Christendom and the reason of men outside
the Church. It was not due, though this would be nearer
the truth, to a conflict between reason within and faith
without the Church. It was the problem of controlling
the interplay within the Church of faith and reason, of
religious experience and theology, the revelation and the
interpretation of the purposes of God. Medieval theology
was not stagnant ; it sprang from intense religious feeling,
1 Marsiglio of Padua in the fourteenth century was probably a
' rationalist ' in the modern sense ; but when the Pope compared
Wycliffe's doctrines with his, he was concerned with results, not with
moods and processes. The sophistical disputations of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries were deliberate acts of * playing with fire ' and
sometimes, notably in the case of the thoroughgoing Siger of Brabant,
the disciple of Averroes, led to trouble ; but, although important as
a step towards the recognition of separate domains of faith and reason,
they were not regarded very seriously, and the disputants rarely imagined
that their conclusions could possess real validity.
The Christian Life 27
and its function was to assist authority in the definition
of dogma, as in the long discussions which preceded the
definite assertion in 1216 of the doctrine of transubstantia-
tion. It could even impose a long disputed dogma upon
the Church. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception
of the Virgin, though left an open question by the Council
of Trent and formally accepted by Pope Pius IX as late as
1854, vvas widely adopted after its reception by the English
Benedictines, and, later, by the Franciscan theologian,
Duns Scotus. On the other hand, theology might easily
cross the line beyond which the general conscience, warned
by tradition, refused to go. If there were few obstinate
heretics in the Middle Ages, there were a great many
persons who at one time or another were taxed with
heresy. Nobody could feel safe unless he was prepared
to rely in the last resort upon the judgement of the Church
expressed through its authorized head. A pope, if he
relied on his private judgement, could go astray and be
called to book. The philosophical teaching of St. Thomas
vvas watched with anxiety and was repudiated by many as
charged with doctrine hostile to the faith. Heresy might
assail the mystic as he sought to analyse the communion of
the soul with God. And if, within the inner stronghold
of the Church, apart from which life seemed incredible,
dangers could beset the doctor and the saint, in how much
greater danger was the multitude of ignorant men, undis-
ciplined in the moral life, of the fanatics who could see but
one ray of light at a time, of those immersed in social and
economic life, distracted by ambition or pleasure or the
precarious nature of their calling ? Beyond the problem of
authority lay the still greater problem of discipline, the task
of finding some harmony between the Christian view of
things and the life of the ordinary man.
How did it come about that the authority of the Church
28 Legacy of the Middle Ages
was so generally accepted as inseparable from the duties
and aspirations of the Christian life ? We now know enough
about what used to be called the ' age of faith ' to discount
the conception of an obedient society, orderly to a point of
unnatural self-suppression in everything relating to the
government, the doctrine, the worship, the artistic interests
of the Church. We no longer believe in that well-behaved
body of the faithful, which, though essentially barbarous
and ignorant, was always so sweetly submissive in its attitude
to the mysteries of the Christian faith. Paganism in the
Middle Ages was as endemic, speculation as bold, speech as
pungent, the varieties of religious experience as numerous
and as extravagant as at any time in the history of mankind.
The state system of modern Europe, its nationalism, tradi-
tions of foreign policy, and strangely mixed ideas of right,
fore:, utility can be traced back into the Middle Ages.
Scholars who work among the repellent remains of late
medieval scholasticism say that, hidden away in those
unreadable manuscripts, are the germs of the mighty ideas
of Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Bruno, Spinoza. Luther
fed his spirit on the writings of the Brethren of the Common
Life ; the intellectual ancestry of Hegel has been traced
to the mystical philosophy of Eckhart. Can medieval
Christianity, then, really have possessed the inner coherence
which we have allowed to it ? Ought we not to regard it
as a complicated tyranny from which men were constantly
striving to free themselves ?
The answer to the view implied in these questions is,
I think, twofold. In the first place the medieval Church
was composed of societies rather than of individuals.
Secondly, the sincerely religious person satisfied the needs
of his inner life by adjusting himself to the interpretation of
the world which the Church expounded.
I. Historically, the medieval Church, as distinct from the
The Christian Life 29
primitive Church, was composed of societies. If we look
at the history of the spread of Christianity from the days
of Constantine, we find that Christianity spread by the
addition of masses of men, not by the conversion of particular
people. There were some striking exceptions, but, generally
speaking, the acceptance of Christianity was, to use a modern
phrase, an affair of state, in which kings and other leaders,
moved no doubt by missionaries and, as time went on,
acting under the influence of the Pope, carried their subjects
with them or imposed their will upon alien social groups.
The success of the great St. Boniface in the eighth, and of
the Cistercian monk, Christian of Oliva, in the thirteenth
century was mainly due to the adherence of the local
magnates and to the backing of friendly or interested
powers outside. Boniface, for example, was more rapidly
and permanently successful than had been the Celtic
missionaries who preceded him in Germany, because he
could rely upon Charles Martel in his organization of
Thuringia and Hesse, and upon Duke Odilo in his organiza-
tion of Bavaria. Christian of Oliva, the first bishop in
Prussia (1212), had the support of the neighbouring duke of
Masovia. The * conversion ' of Norway illustrates the
drastic policy of a ruthless king. King Olaf Tryggvason
proceeded methodically, province by province ; and the
Heimskringla, the later history of the kings of Norway ;
tells some profoundly interesting stories of the devotion
to the old gods which he had to overcome, sometimes with
almost incredible cruelty. 1 A religious system which
originated in this way was, as in a more refined expression
it has remained, a part of the social structure. Its organiza-
tion was inextricably involved with that of the community.
1 Laing, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway (1844), i. 427 ff. Evidence
from other sources on the conversion of northern peoples is collected in
Th. de Cauzons. Histoire de P Inquisition en France^ i (1939), 72 ff.
30 Legacy of the Middle Ages
The powerful men who took pride in their work fostered
and endowed it ; they regarded resistance to it as an affront
not only to God, but to society. The clergy had a recognized
status in the tribal or national life ; they sat in the courts,
took cognizance of public affairs and private conduct,
helped to shape the customs which they put into writing.
Christianity, in general regard, though full of mystery, was
not an alien or esoteric body of practice and belief; it
rapidly became an inseparable element in men's lives, just
as the old religions had been before it. We moderns are
directly descended from these people, and our paganism,
so far as it is unsophisticated, is the paganism of our fore-
fathers, less crude and violent, but equally natural, equally
consistent with a life of Christian conformity, which begins
with baptism and closes with the solemn commitment of
the body to the grave and the soul to the keeping of God.
By paganism I mean a state of acquiescence, or merely
professional activity, unaccompanied by sustained religious
experience and inward discipline. It is not a state of vacancy
and scepticism. It is confined to no class of persons, and is
not hostile to, though it is easily wearied by, religious observ-
ance. It accepts what is offered without any sense of responsi-
bility, has no sense of sin, and easily recovers from twinges of
conscience. At the same time, it is full of curiosity and is
easily moved by what is now called the group-mind. It is
sensitive to the activities of the crowd, is often emotional, and
can be raised to those moods of passion, superstition, and love
of persecution into which religion, on its side, can degenerate.
A medieval, like a modern, man remained a Christian
because he was born a Christian, and most medieval Chris-
tians were probably men of this kind not a few popes,
cardinals, bishops, monks, friars, and parish clergy, and
a large number of the clerks who had no cure of souls.
The medieval Christian was, according to his lights, respect-
The Christian Life 31
able. He was generally far too much interested in life,
had too much to do, and was too affectionate, to be habitually
cruel or sensual or superstitious. His life was inseparable
from that of the community to which his Church gave
a variety of colour, here radiant, there distressing. Although
in periods of crisis he suffered decadence sometimes wide-
spread and horrible casual decadence is more likely to have
affected, not the conventional Christian, but the truly
religious man. 1
The history of the Church is the record of the gradual
and mutual adaptation of Christianity and paganism to each
other. The complete victory of the former has always been
a remote vision. St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians
show how the attempt to persuade their converts to put
away earthly things taxed the patience and energy of the
earliest apostles. The task became impossible when every
member of any political community which possessed an
ecclesiastical organization was supposed to be a follower of
Christ. The influence of the Church penetrated social
relations through and through, and it is foolish to feel
surprise if Christianity suffered in the process. St. Boniface
found that the German converts instinctively regarded
baptism and the rites of the Church as forms of magic or
merely external acts ; 2 and his experience has countless
parallels throughout the history of the Church up to our
own day. The situation within the borders of the Roman
Empire was especially perplexing. The lands around the
Mediterranean were not merely full of superstition, they
were intensely sophisticated, so that it is impossible to draw
a sharp line between their superstition and their sophistry,
1 For this aspect of medieval life see Coulton, Five Centuries of
Religion, vol. i (1923), and Huizinga, Tbe Waning of the Middle Ages
(1924).
2 Hauck, Kircbengescbicbte Deutscblands, i. 474 ff.
32 Legacy of the Middle Ages
between tradition and artifice, sincere piety and exotic
faith. 1 The strange excesses which shocked St. Augustine
and other ecclesiastical leaders in some of their fellow-
Christians were probably not very different from the
psychical extravagance which had disgusted Cicero and
Plutarch. Hence, as the Christian faith penetrated the
society of the Roman world, it fell under the influence both
of rustic traditions and of a variegated paganism which
shaded off into those philosophical and mystical refinements
so dear to the theologian. We are apt to forget that in the
days of Christ the sea of Galilee was not like a silent Wast-
water, lying solitary beneath the lonely hills, but was
bordered by towns with temples and villas like the lakes of
Geneva or Como. From the first the Church was the
victim as well as the victor, and as it absorbed the peoples
of the Mediterranean in the west and spread eastwards into
Persia and India, its spiritual life was shot through and
through with the glittering fancies, the antinomianism, the
morbid extravagances and the endless subtleties of men.
It tried to purify a great sluice into which all the religions,
every kind of philosophy, every remedy for the troubles and
ennui of life had passed. And from this ordeal it passed on
to cope with the mental and spiritual traditions of the great
northern peoples. If we imagine that the Church was able
to work upon a tabula rasa, we cannot understand the
development either of its theology, its ritual, or its religious
experience.
All this has long been familiar to students of the history
of the early Church, and it is fairly familiar to those who
study the interplay of Christianity and other traditions in
the life of to-day ; but it is still apt to puzzle us when we
regard the Church in the Middle Ages. How did the
1 See Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurdius^ Book IV,
c. i, pp. 443 ff.
The Christian Life 33
medieval Church maintain a hold so hardly won in early
times, so easily lost in our own ? We must begin by realizing
that, although its influence meant much more than this,
the Church was the systematic expression of a life which
had taken the place of the older religions. It was organized
in dioceses of Roman or tribal origin ; its ministers were
not foreign enthusiasts, but men drawn from feudal and
village society. The clergy, it is true, made claims upon the
allegiance of their people which had no roots in natural
ties and were independent of their personal worthiness.
They were based on the truth that the kingdom of Christ
is not of this world, and the really serious difficulties which
the Church had to face were due to that ever-present spirit
of anti-clericalism which was in part resistance to the
claims of Christ, in part a sense of the contrast between
Christ and his ministers. At the same time life on earth
would never be comfortable, or even tolerable, if men had
no way of grappling with its mysteries and terrors ; and if
they require 'protection against these, they must pay the
price. On the whole the medieval pagans paid the price
cheerfully. They paid tithes and dues. They allowed the
clergy to receive their children into society at baptism,
to define the limits within which marriage was permissible,
to punish their sexual irregularities, to supervise the dis-
position of their goods by will, to guide their souls at the
hour of death and to bury their bodies. They recognized
the obligations of confession, penance, communion. In one
form or another much of the discipline was as old as society ;
there must be initiation, regulation, and ceremonial in
human relations if men and women are to live together ;
and, on the other hand, it was not altogether as though the
wide-spreading, penetrating, exotic life of the Church was
not largely in their own keeping. It was their own brothers
and cousins who crowned and anointed kings, ruled bishop-
2873 D
34 Legacy of the Middle Ages
rics and monasteries, and celebrated in their churches the
churches which they themselves had built or helped to
maintain. Strangers might bring in new fashions and new
knowledge, but their successors would be men drawn from
themselves. It was all very interesting : the Church gave
them very much, and yet they were at the same time inside
the Church. They were both spectators and actors. They
got wonderful buildings, pictures, plays, festivals, stories
full of apocryphal detail about Biblical heroes and saints ;
but they could themselves help to build, paint, perform,
repeat. They gibed incessantly at the clergy with their
hypocrisy, venality, immorality, yet they had a good deal
of sympathy with them, for they were of their own flesh.
The real enemies were the cranks and heretics who would
not play the game.
What we call abuses or superstition in the medieval Church
were part of the price paid for, not obstacles to, its univer-
sality. They were due to the attempt of pagans to appro-
priate a mystery. If the people paid, so did the Church.
We distort the facts if we try to separate clergy and laity
too sharply, for paganism was common to both. Medieval
thinkers and reformers saw this far more clearly than we can,
and were never tired of discussing the problem. In the
eleventh century Cardinal Peter Damiani pointed out in
his lurid way that it was of no use to try to keep the clergy
apart from the laity unless strict evangelical poverty were
insisted upon for all clergy alike. But Damiani and all the
preachers of Apostolic poverty who came after him were
entangled on the horns of a dilemma. If it is the function
of the Church to drive out sin, it must separate itself from
sin ; if the Church separates itself from sin, it becomes
a clique. The Church took another course. Under the
guidance of austere pontiffs like Gregory VII and Innocent
III it embarked upon an intensive policy of discipline,
The Christian Life 35
whose basis was the very claim to universality. To Inno-
cent III the dilemma was clear enough few men have been
so tortured by reflections upon the misery of mankind
but he was a statesman and lawyer, prepared to deal with
realities as he found them. By his time (he was a contem-
porary of our King John) it was too late to go back. As an
ecclesiastical system the body of Christ was becoming the
most intricate administration which the world had yet seen ;
as a society the Church affected and was affected by every
form of human endeavour. From the one point of view
the distinction between lay and clerical is all important ;
from the other it is irrelevant. The secular influences which
played upon sacred things did not work through the laity
alone. Certainly the men of outstanding piety and wisdom
were generally to be found among the clergy, the militia of
Christ ; but the wind bloweth where it listeth : the pope
might be a pagan at heart, the beggar a saint. 1
In the fifth century, Basil, the local bishop, described in
his book on the miracles of St. Thecla, the conversation
of the pilgrims who gathered for the feast of the saint at
Seleucia. The visitors, sitting around a table, exchange
their impressions. * One is astonished by the magnificence
and splendour of the ceremonies, another by the vast crowds
which they have attracted, a third by the large concourse of
bishops. One praises the eloquence of the preachers,
another the beauty of the psalmody, another the endurance
of the public during the long night office, another the fine
arrangement of the services, another the fervour in prayer
of the assistants. One recalls the dust, another the stifling
heat, while yet another has observed the coming and going
*
1 The documents collected by Finke from the Aragonese archives and
elsewhere show, for example, that the famous but curious person, Pope
Boniface VIII, who lived a hundred years after Innocent III, was a pagan
in the sense in which I have used the word.
D 2
36 Legacy of the Middle Ages
during the holy mysteries, how so-and-so went out, and how
another returned and went away again, the cries and
disputes, the disorder of people getting into each others'
way and refusing to give place, each eager to be the first to
participate.' * In a few words this picture describes the
attitude of the faithful during the history of the Church.
Add to the feast of a saint or martyr, the pilgrimages and
jubilees, the ceremonies of corporate life, the coronation of
kings, the initiation into knighthood, the passion and
miracle plays, the propaganda and conduct of a crusade,
the passage at any time through the countryside of a popular
preacher and we have the circumstances in which the ' group
mind ' was affected in the Middle Ages. Add, again, the
churches and cathedrals with their descriptive or symbolic
ritual, sculpture, wall painting, and we have the material
forms which, so to speak, * fixed ' the belief and imagination
of the medieval Christian. An excitement of the senses
accompanied the appeal of the spirit. One need not look
further than the clerical class. From the little boys in the
bishop's household to the bishop himself they felt with an
infinite variety of intensity that they were members of
a great professional body, but the conditions of their life
would make them partisans attached to their particular
' use ', eager for the success of their patron saint, anxious
about their revenues, ready to fight on behalf of the views
of their favourite teachers. The mixture of motives which
in the few was a source of shame was in the many a sanction
of self-confidence and corporate feeling. In the particular
form in which this natural expression of human nature
affects our modern world, it is a legacy from the conditions
under which the Church developed in the Middle Ages, under
the spacious opportunities opened up by a universal society.
1 See Delehaye, ' Les recueils antiques de miracles des saints/ in
Analecta Bollandiana^ 1925, xliii. 56-7.
The Christian Life 37
The interaction of theological subtlety and popular
credulity had cruder and more dangerous effects. Perhaps
the most striking example is its effect upon the system of
indulgences. In its purest form the theory underlying the
indulgence was a fine one. It was inspired by the writings
of St. Paul and was safeguarded by the maxim of the
Fathers, Quod homo non punit, Deus punit. The system
itself was a natural development of the penitential system
and was related to the power of absolution. Its justification
was found, in the climax of a long discussion among canonists
and theologians, in the doctrine of the treasure stored up
by saints and martyrs and all good Christians, who, a great
body of friends, combine to help the erring. But it was
extremely difficult to avoid misconception and abuse.
Some of the theological terms, notably the term ' remission
of sins', were misleading, some of the preachers of indulgences
were ignorant or headstrong or unscrupulous. Warfare had
constantly to be waged by bishops and universities against
the belief that not punishment, but sin itself, was remitted,
or that indulgences could benefit the dead as well as the
living. The system encouraged fantastic and heterodox
views about the unlimited powers of the Pope, or profitless
discussions on the nature of purgatory ; and in some
directions popular pressure proved too strong for the
theologians, so that later speculation far outran the cautious
handling of the subject by the great scholastics. 1
2. We have seen that the pagan paid homage to the faith.
The Church coloured his whole life and did so very rightly,
because, so men vaguely felt, it interpreted life. Its secret
was not merely part of life, it gave meaning to life, and
was the spring of that knowledge of the universe of which
the Church was the vehicle. Profane knowledge, as it is so
1 Paulus, Gescbichte des Ablasses im Mittelalter^ e. g. i. 288 ff. ; ii.
170 if., I97ff. ; iii. 376 ff.
38 Legacy of the Middle Ages
strangely called, was certainly of value only in so far as it
led men to understand higher truth, yet it was not alien,
not the property of teachers outside the Church. Hence
we can never be sure that the absurdities and abuses of
Christendom were unmixed with fine emotion. Over
against the brutal criticism at the expense of ecclesiastics
and their agents we must set the fact that every activity
fell in some degree under clerical influence, and in doing
so could be touched to finer issues. The history of chivalry
gives us many examples. Pilgrims on the way to Rome or
Compostella stayed in churches and monasteries whose in-
mates repeated tales and legendary incidents which were
worked up into the chansons de geste. At the end of the
twelfth century the Arthurian legend was refined by the
noble improvisation of the Holy Graal, so that a suggestion,
drawn originally perhaps from the apocryphal gospel of
Nicodemus, gave the story of Parsival to the literature of
chivalry. The theme of c courteous love ' was developed
under the influence of mystical experience and even of the
logical methods of the schools, for the poets who turned
from the exaltation of brutal passion to praise unselfish
devotion tp woman had been affected, we are told, by the
cult of the Virgin and by theological elaborations of the
meaning of * Charitas '. Many delicate filaments bound
the new chivalry to the unseen world. And this being so,
it would be unwise to deny the existence of an unselfish
note in the response to all the inducements which were
offered to men and women to abstain from sin ; and we
should be rash to assume that those who adopted as a career
the task of offering the inducements to their neighbours
were un visited by the sense of their high calling. However
professional their attitude, even if they looked upon holy
mysteries as things which could be bought and sold, this
was only possible because they believed that their calling
The Christian Life 39
and their wares were part of a divine economy, interpreting
the very nature of things. Had this belief not been
general, there might have been a revolt, but never a
Reformation.
There is no clear border-line in the region of religious
experience between the swamps and jungle of paganism
and the sunlit uplands of pure faith. St. Francis was not
without a speck, and there was doubtless a glimmering of
piety in the relic mongers who traded in pigs' bones. But
we have no difficulty in distinguishing the pagan from the
saint when we see them. We can recognize throughout
the history of the Church, in all the ranges of society, the
presence of men and women to whom Christianity, as
interpreted by the Church, gave the highest satisfaction
possible to human nature. In the Middle Ages the hold
of the Church was due to the fact that it could satisfy the
best cravings of the whole man, his love of beauty, his desire
for goodness, his endeavour after truth. In these days the
demand for certainty is distracted by conflicting claims.
In the Middle Ages it was not so : the divine mystery was
felt to inspire a divine order in which all knowledge and all
emotion could be reconciled. Of course, if we insist with
cold objectivity on drawing out the implications of the
religious experience or of the philosophical systems of
sincere men, they will rarely fit the mould. Regarded in
this way St. Augustine^ Dante, Eckhart, are probably as
intractable as Spinoza or Milton or Goethe. St. Thomas
himself helped to open a door which the Church has tried
in vain to close. We can no more estimate the measure of
acquiescence between the Church and its members in the
lives of saints and theologians than we can in the secret moods
of its humbler children. The Church is constantly hastening
after the saints, so that in learning from them it may also
control them. But these spiritual discrepancies are signs
40 Legacy of the Middle Ages
of healthy life so long as the vigorous souls, however restless
and independent they may be^ continue to find their
satisfaction in the Church. In the Middle Ages nearly all
men of this type gave themselves whole-heartedly. The
teaching of the Church did no lasting violence to their
experience, doubts, misgivings, for in communion with
the Church they found their highest satisfaction. Dante
says :
* Human longing is measured in this life by that degree of
knowledge which it is here possible to possess ; and that point
is never transgressed except by misapprehension which is beside
the intention of nature. . . . And this is why the saints envy not
one another, because each one attains the goal of his longing,
which longing is commensurate with the nature of his excellence,' 1
This satisfaction was possible because men felt that they
and all their social and spiritual affinities were part of the
divine order inspired by the unfathomable mystery. They
appropriated a body of truth in which, if they adjusted
themselves to it, they felt sure of harmony, and to rebellion
from which they traced the sin and misery of mankind.
Readers of this volume will find in subsequent pages a
brief discussion of the principles of this order in the
physical structure- of earth and heavens, in the harmony of
all law, natural and social, in the dovetailing of the discon-
nected learning, true or false, about men, beasts, birds, plants,
minerals, into a scheme combined of Biblical and classical
suggestion. Here it is enough to point out that although
most of the medieval cosmology and chronology have gone,
the medieval view of the universe lasted a very long time
and has by no means altogether disappeared. The medieval
philosophy of history has not ceased to influence us. It
was deduced from three sources, the Biblical chronology
harmonized with that of non-Jewish peoples by Eusebius,
1 // Convito, iii, c. 15, trans. Wicksteed.
The Christian Life 41
the Augustinian theory of the city of God and its later
developments, the idea of the * preparatio evangelica ',
which took its finest form in Dante's conception of the
provision of the Roman Empire by the Father, with its
universal peace as a cradle for His Son. The Eusebian
chronology, revised by Archbishop Ussher in the seventeenth
century, has indeed gone, but in its simplest expression the
conception of the preparation for the gospel is a living part
of Christian thought. The belief that the earth is the
centre of the stellar system has gone, but the anthropo-
centric ideas bound up with it are dying very hard. The
zoology of the medieval mind was fantastic, but it was due
not to lack of intelligence, but to lack of observation, and
could not be regarded as absurd so long as distinct species
were held to be the results of separate acts of creation.
Underlying the strange parallels between the truths of
revelation and the phenomena of the natural world was that
sense of rhythm in the universe, whose philosophical expres-
sion has a very respectable origin in Greek thought and
a destiny which would seem to be increasing in grandeur.
In a word, medieval thought was at bottom anything but
absurd. It was pursued with an ability which would find no
difficulty in coping with the problems of modern science
and speculation. And it reached forward to a mystical
reception of God, in whom is the ordered union of all the
objects of knowledge, natural and revealed, human and
divine. The great mystics, indeed, boldly urged that for
this very reason the search after God under settled forms
is futile. Eckhart once said :
* He who fondly imagines to get more of God in thoughts,
prayers, pious offices and so forth, than by the fireside or in the
stall : in sooth he does but take God, as it were, and swaddle his
head in a cloak and hide him under the table. For he who seeks
God under settled forms lays hold of the form while missing the
God concealed in it.'
42 Legacy of the Middle Ages
And the same Master Eckhart, the Dominican contemporary
of Dante, also said :
* Man has to seek God in error and forgetfulness and foolish-
ness. For deity has in it the power of all things and no thing
has the like. The sovran light of the impartible essence illumines
all things. St. Dionysius says that beauty is good order with
pre-eminent lucidity. Thus God is an arrangement of three
Persons. And the soul's lower power should be ordered to her
higher, and her higher ones to God ; her outward senses to her
inward and her inward ones to reason : thought to intuition
and intuition to the will and all to unity, so that the soul may
be alone with nothing flowing into her but sheer divinity,
flowing here into itself.' l
Eckhart lived at a time when the best strength of the
Church was expended in the codification of law and disci-
pline and doctrine, and, although he was suspect, as probing
too deep, and some of his teaching was condemned after
his death, he reminds us that the Church was more than
a pedagogue, that it was a school in which the ignorant
and the learned worked together at a common task. Stripped
of all accessories the task of the Church was the elucidation,
in thought and life, of the divine mystery as revealed in the
Bible, all other texts and tools being subsidiary. The Bible
has rightly been called the text-book of the Middle Ages.
It was studied, of course, in Latin, the version, partly
compiled but very largely made by St. Jerome, being the
standard text or Vulgate. The canons of its interpretation,
unfortunately not so good as those laid down by Jerome,
were defined by St. Augustine. The standard commentary,
drawn from the Fathers, and afterwards known as the Gloss,
was compiled by Walafrid Strabo, abbot of Reichenau,
in the ninth century. The Gloss underlies all later work
and influenced every medieval exposition, including that
1 Meister Eckbart, Pfeiffer's edition trans. Evans (London, 1914),
pp. 39-40, 49.
The Christian Life 43
in stone and on glass. The text of the Vulgate was revised
by Alcuin, in the days of Charles the Great, and again by
scholars of the University of Paris in the thirteenth century,
shortly after it had been divided into chapters by Stephen
Langton. Dominicans and others provided it with critical
apparatus and concordances. The authority of the Bible
was final it was an isolated and unsuccessful vagary of
St. Bernard that he regarded the text as subject to the
decision of the Church and no more damaging charge
could be levelled against a group of theologians than that
it gave too little attention to scriptural study. No more
perplexing problem could present itself than an apparent
inconsistency between the teaching of the Bible and the
general consensus of the Church. When Pope John XXII,
preaching, as he was careful to say, not as pope but as
a simple priest, taught his heretical doctrine of the Beatific
Vision, he based his case upon the supreme authority of
Scripture. 1 He bowed before the opposition of the theo-
logians, and it was reserved for Wycliffe to give reality to
the great question whether the Church is or is not to be
regarded as the final authority in interpretation.
Here we come to an issue even more intractable than that
between property and evangelical poverty. The greatest
danger to the Church lay neither in dogma, nor in the
hierarchy, nor in the interpretation of the world ; it lay in
the inner experience of men who received all these things as
a matter of course, and in whom the Church had for cen-
turies found its strength. They had felt the impact of
Christ, and, as time wore on, they found their way to
Christ more and more through the Scriptures. As it strained
to understand the truth in its mysterious inheritance and to
relate it to the rest of experience, the Church had encouraged
1 See Noel Valois' life of John XXII in Histoire litter air e de la France,
xxxiv, notably pp. 559-67, 606.
44 Legacy of the Middle Ages
a strange variety of thought and self-conscious religious life.
Both the thought and the spiritual experience of the
Middle Ages were destined to have a great future, within
and without the Church. As we draw nearer to modern
times, we feel that they were gaining an independent
strength, a sense of confidence, a sanction within themselves
stronger than the sanctions by which they had previously
been directed. Just as the problem of the power of the
Church had been narrowed down to the issue of poverty,
so the problem of authority was at bottom the issue whether
goodness and sincerity were their own sanctions. The
issue is logically insoluble and has shattered Christendom.
In the interests of order and unity the Church had been
able to control the zealots who urged that the guardians
and teachers of the faith should have no worldly ties :
it had found room for all kinds of communities, from the
well ordered and tolerant Benedictines to the severest types
of asceticism ; it had even rallied them all to its defence,
so that its richly brocaded garments were as it were upheld
by mendicants. If they were restless or developed anti-
nomian tendencies, the teachers of poverty were suppressed.
There is no more poignant symbol of the unequal conflict
than the handful of spiritual Franciscans urging their cause
at the magnificent court of the Popes at Avignon. But the
issue raised by sane and well-balanced religious experience
the issue of conscience, so closely related to that of poverty
was a more difficult matter to deal with. The more orthodox
it was, the more dangerous it was. Wycliffe was a truly
portentous figure, but he was too solitary, too subtle and
dogmatic, to be a lasting menace. The Hussites of Bohemia
were prophetic of the national churches which were to come,
but, hidden away in a corner, and distracted by social and
political aspirations, they could be controlled or placated.
The real danger lay in the quiet, active, mystical men and
The Christian Life 45
women who, in the face of evil around them, began to
think and to experience for themselves the implications of
fellowship with Christ. They were not concerned with
vexed questions of interpretation, but with the immediate
appeal of the Bible, and of the life of prayer. To them so
much which, in the eyes of ecclesiastics and lawyers, was all
important, seemed trivial, the basis of their faith so much
more essential than the superstructure, the sense of fellowship
in the sacraments and prayer more urgent than the explana-
tion of the mysterious. 1 There is nothing heterodox in this,
unless it be the tendency to insist that the validity of
a spiritual act depends upon the fitness of him who performs
it. Recent apologists have shown how the^ experiences of
the later mystics can be linked with the teaching of the
twelfth-century mystics, St. Bernard and the school of
St. Victor. Yet, notably through the schools of the Brethren
of the Common Life in the Rhineland, the movement was
strong enough to influence the life, not only of Ignatius
Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, but of Calvin and
indirectly of Luther. 2
How the growth of ordered self-controlled piety, affecting
clergy and laity in little nests of spiritual contentment,
could have results so striking in their diversity is one of the
most fascinating problems in history. The movement
seemed so hopeful, yet was so devastating in its effects. It is
no part of my task to try to explain this problem, except to
point out that its solution is clearly connected with the con-
temporary growth of an equally ordered and self-controlled
secularism. This spirit of secularism affected the organized
1 Cf. the chapter in the Imitatio Christi on nice disputes regarding
the Lord's Supper, Book IV, c. 18.
a See especially Albert Hyma, The Christian Renaissance (Michigan
and The Hague, 1924). Like the Friends of God before them, Groote
and his followers protested against anything over-subtle or antinomian.
46 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Church hardly less than the ' national states '. Piety and
paganism, so to speak, came to their own and tried to settle
their differences in new ways. The dream of a united
Christendom, in which paganism would be transformed
under the beneficent guidance of the official disciples of
Christ, was seen to have been a dream. The Church had
tried to control and never ceased to influence the world,
but it could not identify the world with the Church in one
Kingdom of God. The world had its own claims claims
of nationality, of the interplay of capital and labour, of
trade, of social expression. Perhaps the issue is best summed
up in the words of a Florentine chronicler, who lived in the
days of Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair, of Master Eckhart
and Dante : * Humility is of no avail against sheer evil.' *
Many historians have traced the gradual emergence into
separate life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the
forces, hitherto inextricably connected, of political self-
direction and an elaborate ecclesiastical organism no longer
able, in their struggle for existence, to control the life of the
spirit. But they have written in the light of four centuries of
later history. For the ordinary man, were he devout or pagan
at heart, life in those times must still have been full of colour
and adventure in a world which nothing could shake. If we
go to-day into Winchester cathedral, we can still recapture
the sense of that ordered, that magnificent stability.
Sheltered by the massive Norman walls and the intricate
Gothic roof, the effigies of the ecclesiastics lie Edington,
Wykeham, Beaufort, Waynflete, Fox, prelates and states-
men, each in his painted, delicately chiselled shrine. Those
tombs are a symbol of security. Those men lived in times
full of perplexity, but undisturbed by any feelings of
1 The words are * Niente vale 1' humilta contra alia grande malizia '.
Dino Compagni is meditating on the futility of self-effacing moderation
in the civil strife of the Italian cities.
The Christian Life 47
catastrophe. In their world heresy and antinomianism
could have no abiding place. We realize why the call of
Master Eckhart, deep thinker though he was, to withdraw
oneself to commune with God in the ground of the soul,
died away in secret, why the visionary prophesies of the
Joachimites passed like whispers in the undergrowth, why
the Friends of God and the Brethren of the Common Life
were half contemptuously welcomed as harmless pietists
who performed a useful function, why Wycliffe's academic
influence withered so quickly. The sense of reality was still
to be found in the conventional ways so full of colour and
movement. There were few times and places during the
last centuries of the Middle Ages in which the adventurous
soul could not find intimations of the great opportunities
for mind and spirit made possible by organized Christianity.
The awakening might come slowly, or be arrested in some
career in which the sense of vocation was dormant. But we
must not believe that all lingered in the outer courts.
Expertus potest credere
Quid sit lesum diligere
II
Hitherto we have been trying to understand the atmo-
sphere of medieval Christianity, how it worked in an
undeveloped society, fundamentally pagan. Christianity
was presented through the Church as an interpretation of
the universe, but still more as the living operation of divine
providence. It was established as an essential element in the
social order, and yet it called men to the greatest of adven-
tures, the service and contemplation of God. It could give
excitement to the frivolous, occupation of every kind,
physical or intellectual or contemplative, to the serious ;
and it could offer opportunities in high places as in low to
48 Legacy of the Middle Ages
the depraved. It engaged the highest faculties in co-
operation with the purpose of God by satisfying their
craving for an ordered and just interpretation of life. In
the Church human self-esteem was gratified : nam non
ecclesia propter coelum, sed propter ecclesiam coclum. Through
the Church man could escape from his sense of frustration
by dedicating himself to the glory of God.
Before I close, something should be said about the
organization in which, as a self-protective and directing
force, the ideals of Christian society expressed themselves.
For here, and notably in the earlier history of the papacy,
we may find the highest attempt to give concrete and
permanent shape to the energy, the audacity, love of order
and austerity which played with such bewildering freedom
in the medieval world.
The centralization of the Western Church under one
head satisfied in large measure the desire for unity, order,
peace, righteousness. The most fruitful influence in
expressing this desire was undoubtedly the great bishop of
Hippo, St. Augustine, to whose thought the famous pope
Gregory the Great did most to give currency. 1 St. Augustine
was not concerned with the papal power. It is not easy,
indeed, to say how far he was concerned to maintain that
the organized Church was the only expression on earth
of the City of God. Just as he hesitated in his analysis of the
grounds of secular authority, so he hesitated to admit that
the truth might not lie with faithful souls who had been
forced to suffer in silence through the errors or mis-
understanding of ecclesiastical authority. His writings were
very various and when, like the De Civitate Dei, they
were written over a period of many years, they are not
1 For what follows I am indebted particularly to the writings of
Bernheim and an article by Hauck, ' Die Rezeption und Umbildung der
allgemeinen Synode im Mittelalter ' (Historiscbe Viertcljabrscbrijt, 1907).
The Christian Life 49
perfectly coherent. The important matter is that Augus-
tine's philosophy of history became the main source of
papal apologetic. Its central thought is the harmony which
exists in the society at peace with itself in the enjoyment of
God. This harmony so others drew out his meaning
affects the whole of nature. It is not a quality which is
added, rather it is acquiescence in something eternally true
and real. It is not like the * pax Romana '. In one passage
of his book (xxii. 6) St. Augustine discusses the view, set
out by Cicero in his De Republica, that no good state will
engage in war unless for the sake of safety or in order to
keep faith ; and he shows that in the earthly state this view
involves a possible contradiction, for Cicero regards perma-
nence as the mark of the state, and in order to keep itself
alive a state may have to sacrifice its good faith for the sake
of safety. But the safety of the City of God is maintained
or, rather, acquired with and through faith ; if faith is lost,
salvation is impossible. This argument is not merely a play
upon the words salu*,Jides, for in the City of God the faith
and salvation of the individual are bound up with the
order of a society which has its permanence and its under-
standing in God. The next stage in the argument is that
the supreme active quality of a state of harmony is iustitia
or righteousness, while the prime cause of resistance to it is
pride, the vice which for this reason, that it breaks up the
peace of communion in the enjoyment of God, came to be
regarded in later days as the worst of the seven deadly sins.
So, finally, we can understand the deep significance of the
insistence upon justice in the political thought of the
Middle Ages. The just ruler, whether he be pope or king,
is not merely one who deals fairly; he is the one whose
righteousness proves his kingdom to be part of the harmony
of things. The unjust ruler is a tyrant, the victim of pride
which sets itself against this harmony. When a tyrant
2873 E
50 Legacy of the Middle Ages
holds sway, a touch of confusion disturbs the whole of
nature. A shiver runs through the world, as when the veil
of the Temple was rent in twain at the time of the Cruci-
fixion. The medieval chroniclers who drew dire conclusions
from times of plague, famine, loss of crops and herds,
violent storms and sudden death, paid homage, by no means
always unconscious homage, to this conviction. Conversely,
if justice prevails, all is at peace. This belief became
a theme for high speculation, as in Dante's vision of the
Empire, and survived to inspire Milton's * Ode on the
Morning of Christ's Nativity '.
What may seem to us poetic fancy was an incentive to
action. It gave a direction to policy as clearly as the teaching
of the Stoics did in earlier times or as the doctrine of Karl
Marx has done in our own day. And it influenced some
of the most powerful men who ever lived. We do wrong
to popes like Gregory the Great, and Gregory VII and
Innocent III, if we regard them only as statesmen or lawyers;
and it is quite beside the point to accuse them of incon-
sistency, to collect, for example, Gregory VII's letters about
peace and justice, and to set over against them the devastating
effects of his conflict with the Emperor Henry IV. By
Gregory VII's time the visible Church on earth, under the
guidance of the Pope, had become the accepted embodiment
of the City of God, carrying with it all the high respon-
sibilities which the maintenance of the divine order involved.
Henceforth the Church set its face against any distinction
between the Church visible and invisible. 1 Righteousness
must be tempered with mercy and gentleness ; it was
inconceivable without them ; but it must insist on obedience
to the rule of order and beat down the proud. The just
ruler must be humble, remembering that the inequalities of
man are due to sin and that all men are by nature equal,
1 Cf. the decrees of the Council of Trent, session xxiii, c. z.
The Christian Life 51
yet he has a trust from God and must not shirk the respon-
sibility of conflict, even if it means the use of force and the
sword, against evil.
In the next place, the papacy satisfied the desire for
guidance and certainty. The absence of contact in the
second and third centuries between the adventurous
theologian and the mass of believers has frequently been
noted. There was no strong middle element, and the
learned, whose profound religious experience was refined
and made aware of itself by philosophical contemplation,
tended to regard themselves as the guardians of the heavenly
treasure, the message entrusted to the Church. The things
hidden from the wise, by which God made foolish the
wisdom of the world (i Cor. i. 20), were now, in the opinion
of many, the things hidden by the wise. That this tendency,
which many leaders deplored, was checked in the West, and
the speculations of the theologians put to the test of the
experience of the simple, was largely due to the leadership of
the bishops of Rome. 1 In their categorical expressions of
witness to the faith, free from all dialectic and Biblical
argument and eru'dition, the Popes began their spacious
task of registering the growth of religious and ecclesiastical
experience. It would be impossible to say how far they
declared a general will, and out of place to try to estimate
their authority in the days of the great councils. But the
foundations of papal power were laid in these acts of authori-
tative testimony to the faith of the common man. One
of the great poets of the Church, St. Paulinus of Nola
(d. 431), the rich senator and landowner who gave up his
wealth for Christ, spoke the mind of the West when he said,
' In omnem fidelem Spiritus Dei spirat '.
1 See, for example, the remarks of J. Lebreton on the action of
Dionysius of Rome, in a remarkable article, ' La foi populaire et la
theologie savante,' Revue tTHistoire ecclesiastique, 1924, xx, p. 9 note ;
and, generally, pp. 33-7.
2
52 Legacy of the Middle Ages
To describe the growth of papal leadership would be to
write the history of the Church during the next eleven
hundred years. The ecclesiastical organization of Rome
itself was followed by the gradual penetration, in the West,
of the ordo romanus, that is to say, of Roman liturgical uses,
&c. The inclusion in Christendom of new peoples and
areas under the joint influence of papal and secular authority
involved the development of a disciplinary system : violence
and passion had to be curbed, and barbarian habits subdued
to the moral law of Christ. The penitentials with their
codes of offences and punishments were one of the bases
of the great system of canon law which was elaborated in
a long series of handbooks and culminated in the Decretum
of Gratian and the later codifications of decretals. The
growth of the canon law was made possible by the work of
provincial councils, by papal decrees and schools of juris-
prudence, most of all perhaps by the development of
diocesan administration. The history of these movements
was very uneven. Local authority, whether clerical or lay,
did not acquiesce easily and uniformly in the tendency to
refer difficult matters to Rome, while the moral authority
of the Papacy was frequently disturbed by faction in Rome
itself and by the depravity of the successors of St. Peter.
But in course of time the issue became clear. Reformers,
whose moral sense was shocked by the subjection of spiritual
life to the accidents of local caprice or secular interests,
at last threw their influence on the side of centralized
authority. The local hierarchy, so jealous of its rights,
found that its freedom was better secured by submission to
the higher authority of Rome than by uneasy co-operation
with princes. The organization at head-quarters of a college
of cardinals as an electoral and advisory body, the increasing
employment of papal legates who, like the missi dominici
of Charles the Great, and the itinerant justices of our
The Christian Life 53
English kings, distributed the authority of their master,
gave coherence and uniformity to the exercise of papal
power ; the swollen stream of appeals and references to
Rome hastened the steady elaboration of a common adminis-
trative system. The climax came at the beginning of the
thirteenth century, when Innocent III gave definite
expression to the theory of the plenitude poUstatis of the
Pope, and, consciously reverting to the age of the great
councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, summoned an oecumenical
council in which he restated the faith, in some degree
codified the practice of the Church, and expounded a policy
for the future.
Historians in a one-sided way often deal with this develop-
ment as though it were nothing but a striving after papal
infallibility, or a victory of personal ambition working with
the aid of forged documents. The traditions of Protestant
controversy were reinforced by Dollinger's anonymous
tract, 'The Pope and the Council' (1869), a powerful
criticism of the ultramontane ideas which were so hotly
debated before and during the Vatican Council of 1870.
However effectively this famous tract may appeal to us as
a discussion of an ecclesiastical problem, it was not altogether
happy as an interpretation of the Middle Ages. It suggests
a perpetual cleavage between the central court of Christen-
dom and Christendom itself. 1 Other historians have been
unduly impressed by the drastic criticism to which medieval
writers subjected the Curia ; they forget that men do not
attack so persistently the abuses of an unnecessary tribunal,
and they do not always point out that the criticism was not
accompanied by any hint of schism. The denunciation of
the delays, extortions and venality of the papal court was
an indirect tribute to its actuality. The work done by the
1 I do not deny, of course, that the doctrine of the papal power became
increasingly definite. Its history was made clear by Schulte in 1871.
54 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Curia was enormous, ranging from arbitrations between
kings to minute regulations about disputes in a parish.
The Pope, needless to say, could not transact all this business
unaided. His chancery became the most technical and also
the most efficient administrative machine which had ever
existed. Every stage in the preparation of a bull or mandate
was carefully scrutinized to secure authenticity, prevent
forgery and guarantee that each formality, from the acquies-
cence of the pontiff to the consideration of technical
objections by the parties, had been observed. And the
preparation of a papal bull was merely the culmination of
judicial process or of deliberation in council. When papal
attention was most deeply engaged, the Pope naturally had
recourse to his advisers, and asked the opinion of theologians
and canonists. As the unworthy exponent of divine justice,
he was expected to purge his mind of caprice and prejudice.
The medieval mind, indeed, was much perplexed by the
possibility of error in the interpretation of the will of God.
It spent much labour in the invention of expedients and
rules for distinguishing between the true and the false.
The subtle dialectic, the procedure of the inquisition, the
process of canonization had at least one object in common,
the circumvention of the powers of evil. The Devil and his
agents were everywhere, waiting to take advantage of man-
kind, which since the Fall had been so exposed to the wiles
of duplicity. The great mercy of God is necessary, said
St. Augustine, to secure that he who thinks he has good
angels for friends, has not evil spirits as false friends. If we
consider the vast literature of miracles and visions which
meet us in the lives of the saints we may well believe that
tests were necessary, and cease to marvel that they were
often so ineffective. And if we are amazed at the credulity
which could accept the revelations of a casual epileptic and
at the incredulity which could denounce as suggestions of
The Christian Life 55
demons the visions of Joan of Arc, we should remember
that, in accordance with belief in the fundamental necessity
of unity and order, tests would especially be applied to
those crucial cases, which seemed to involve the safety
of the community, to detect pride and disobedience. For
every power was subject to law. The Pope himself was
not secure, for he was bound by the decisions of the
Fathers and the great councils. He might err ; he might
be condemned for heresy. His moral lapses, his administra-
tive errors, it is true, were matters for God alone, but the
most unflinching papalists were agreed that his dogmatic
errors were a matter for the Church. In one of his sermons
Innocent III dealt with the possibility that he might err in
the faith, and declared that in such a case he could be
judged by the Church ; and his view was sustained by later
canonists and theologians.
Lastly, the growth of the papal power permitted within
a united Church the development of a richer life. The
history of the Church between the fifth and the thirteenth
centuries reveals two tendencies, opposed in their natural
operation, yet reconciled to a remarkable degree under the
guidance of the hierarchy. The appropriation of Chris-
tianity by the vigorous half-civilized peoples of Western
Europe resulted in spiritual and intellectual ferment, in
a luxuriant growth of spiritual experience which manifested
itself in religious associations, in speculation, in various
forms of piety and superstition. But, in contrast with these
phenomena, the spread of Christianity was directed by men,
leaders in an organized community, who were inspired by
the ideas of Cyprian, Ambrose, and Augustine. Conversion,
in this view, was not an opportunity for free thought, but
a call to duty in an ordered world. The varieties of experi-
ence were not repressed, but they were disciplined, so that
the life of the Church was enriched, and not distracted, by
56 Legacy of the Middle Ages
monastic experiments, by the reception of neo-platonic
theology, by the impetus of Greek and Arabic learning.
Scope was allowed for the awakened energies of mind and
spirit which, if undirected, have in all ages retarded progress
in one direction as much as they have advanced it in another. 1
The medieval methods of cultivation and restraint are not
in favour nowadays, but if we reflect upon the magnitude
of the task, the condition of society and the amazing energy
of its life in the early Middle Ages, it cannot justly be said
that they were unduly repressive. And, by maintaining
as a practical guide in life the conception of an ordered
universe, in which there is a fundamental harmony between
moral and physical law, the Church turned the faces of the
European peoples in the only direction along which social
and scientific advance was possible.
New movements within the Church reacted upon the
idea of the Church. During the early period there was an
inevitable tendency in ordinary speech, if not in theological
thought, to narrow the conception of the Church. * Little
man, why is your head shaved ? ' says a heathen champion to
the Pope, in one of the chansons de geste. The contrast
between the Church, represented by a handful of clergy,
and the still reluctant world was still so striking. The same
tendency may be seen in the great struggles between the
lay and clerical powers. As late as the end of the twelfth
century great popes like Alexander III and Innocent III
speak at times as though episcopate and church were
synonymous terms. But by this time the scriptural view,
summed up by the Fathers and always maintained by
theologians, had acquired renewed significance in the
development of all kinds of ecclesiastical activity. It is
1 A useful introduction to the chief types of medieval heresy will be
found in Alphandery's Les I dees morales chez les beterodoxcs latins au
debut du XIII* siede (1903).
The Christian Life 57
often said that the conception of the Church was narrowed
by the growth of a papal tyranny. This is not a correct
analysis of the subsequent unrest. The idea of the Church
as the whole body of the faithful could only acquire such
measure of reality as it ever has acquired through the growth
of organized life which accompanied the growth of papal
influence. The Church as a body of clergy and laity con-
scious of their membership in Christ, and at the same time
coincident with the whole of European society in the West,
did in fact come nearer to realization in the days of the
Crusades, of the revived Benedictine movements, of Abelard
and St. Bernard, Gratian and Petrus Lombardus than in
any other period in its history. The conception was
developed with magnificent elaboration in the writings of
Hugh of St. Victor.
How, borne down by the heavy weight of intricate,
incessantly more intricate, machinery, torn asunder by the
conflicting motion of its adventurous life, the Church failed
to maintain agreement with this view of things, it would
require an essay much longer than the present to explain.
In the eyes of many the Church has seemed but to relax
its hold in order to secure itself more firmly. To others its
history in the Middle Ages is the record of the greatest of
all human efforts to find that certainty, that something
out of life, which ' while it is expected is already gone has
passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash together with the youth,
with the strength, with the romance of illusions '.
F. M. POWICKE.
ART
i. MEDIEVAL ARCHITECTURE
A RCHITECTURE arose as a simple craft of building, and
.ZjLthen expanding became the several crafts of building in
association. From times so remote that they may be called
primitive, building in a customary way would have embodied
many folk-customs and ritual elements. Architecture was
thus a compound of custom and experiment, of superstition
and ceremony. From the first it had a physical side and
a psychological side and these were carried forward in the
long stream of progressing tradition. In speaking of the
diverse strands which make up old arts it is not implied
that an architectural factor can ever be separated from
a residuum of mere building, for such c mere building ' has
never had an existence, and we might as well try to isolate
the beauty of a bird's nest from its utility as the aesthetics
of architecture from its building basis. Of other arts than
' architecture ' it is taken for granted that the design and
style (that is the appearance of things made) are part of the
works themselves. There are no aesthetic theories, for-
tunately, about the design of ships and carts and the thought
of ' design ' has hardly been separated from the thought of
making them. Only of architecture, and partly in conse-
quence of the use of that long word, has it come to be
supposed that there are mysteries which constitute the
essence of the art of building although they are different from
the body of building which conditions and contains them.
When the ancient schools of building flourished everything
60 Legacy of the Middle Ages
made was in its own rank of one artistic kind. A cathedral
or a cottage was a customary product and was built as
naturally as a basket or a bowl. The same kind of art was
made in every shop and sold over every counter. This art
was the expression of the Folk mind ; the spirit and body
were inseparable. The difference between modern ' designs
in the Gothic style ' and the real thing is that one is a whim
of fashion, the other was a function of life.
The dates and details of medieval arts are dealt with in
hundreds of volumes. Here our concern will be with
questions of origin, character, and spirit, leading up to an
endeavour to estimate the legacy bequeathed to us by this
old culture. To obtain a full understanding of the art of
the Middle Ages is of course impossible, yet we criticize
and judge where we ought rather to examine and wonder.
Old architecture was found out by men working in stone,
.a cathedral was, as it were, a natural growth from a quarry.
In looking back at accomplished results it is next to im-
possible to understand all that was in the process which
embodied mysteries of man and the nature of things. We
approve of this and design something like that, until many
have deluded themselves into trying to believe that medieval
architecture might be built to-day although it would be as
easy to become Egyptian by a similar method. All living
arts are folk customs with their roots in the soil ; they
express the common will of the community. We know so
much about past schools of art that we have divided what
was a fast-flowing stream into sections to which the names
of c styles ' have been given, but the names are ours, and
when the works were being done it was thought that each
one in turn was the natural way of building. In any of our
towns there will be modern buildings in the Classic, Byzan-
tine, Romanesque, and Gothic styles, but it is nearly
impossible to get it understood that they are not of the
Medieval Architecture 61
same kind as the ancient buildings ; the very fact that they
were designed in a named style is evidence of the difference.
In the long process of development there were doubtless
periods of greater and less energy and perhaps our style
names sometimes coincide with such epochs ; that is all there
is in them. Great epochs of art were times of adventure
and discovery. History and criticism are our forms of
originality.
What we call medieval architecture was the building art
which was developed in Western Europe in the time be-
tween the Roman decline and the Renaissance. The
mature phase of this art is also called Gothic, a name which
was given by scholars of the Renaissance period in Italy to
the art of the Lombards which they regarded as Germanic
and barbaric. After closer study the later type of medieval
architecture, which we now call Gothic, was divided from
the earlier phases which came to be called Romanesque
with various subsections like Carolingian, Saxon, and Nor-
man. Common use of semicircular arches was the chief
criterion of discrimination between it and * the Pointed or
Gothic style '. Traceried windows and ribbed vaults were
also observed to be characteristic of pointed Gothic.
* Romanesque ' means an art derived from Rome as the
Romance languages derived. ' Gothic ' to us is the art of
a later generation in which new strains of blood had begun
to tell. The name Gothic after all has an inner fitness,
it stands for an infusion of northern blood and a new spirit.
Essentially this spirit is not of Rome but from the North.
In the body of Gothic there is also, as has long been
recognized, much of the East. Wren, with his fresh strong
sight, called it Saracenic. With the fuller study of mechanical
development the tendency has been to look on the process
itself as self explanatory, raising no questions as to why and
whither, although a general debt to the East is commonly
62 Legacy of the Middle Ages
admitted. The borrowing is usually attributed to the
Crusaders but oriental art had already influenced late
Classical or Hellenistic art. Eastward, Rome not only
entered into the rich and various forms of Hellenistic art
which had been developed in Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor,
but came in direct contact with Persia and Armenia, and by
commerce, ' with India and China. The extraordinary
fertility of Christian-Egyptian or Coptic art has only been
made known to us by the researches of the last half-century.
Christian Egypt was certainly one of the great reservoirs
from which the parched arts of Rome were refreshed ;
Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia, and Asia Minor were others.
One of the greatest phenomena of the Middle Ages was the
continuous absorption in the West of oriental thought and
art. Christianity was of the East ; the early monastic
diffusion brought new seeds ; the age of pilgrimage deepened
the interest and the Crusades followed. Arab conquests of
Eastern Christian lands forced large numbers of clergy and
craftsmen westward. Then the East came to the West
politically and commercially by many routes, through
Byzantine rule in Italy, by relations with the German
Empire, and by Saracenic occupation of Sicily and Spain.
Our King Offa issued gold coins imitating an Arab Dinar
of the year 774 with its inscription. The art of the early
Christian Church had penetrated to the West while Rome
was yet the ruling power. Celtic and Anglian schools were
formed later which were to react again on the continent of
Europe. Most precious monuments of this art are the
sculptured crosses at Ruthwell, Bewcastle, Hexham, and
elsewhere ; the Lindisfarne and Kells books ; and several
pieces of metalwork including a marvellous plaque recently
found at Whitby. The technique of the metalwork of this
school derived much from a non -Christian source in the
East which reached England through the Teutonic peoples.
Medieval Architecture 63
Churches of the ' Central type ' that is on circular and
polygonal plans were well known here in the time of Bede,
and simpler rectangular Saxon churches frequently had
a tall central mass with low chancel and porch these have
been called Tower churches and are variants of the central
type so common in the East. The school of culture which
gathered at the Court of Charlemagne drew to itself the art
traditions of all Christendom. The great Emperor in seeking
to revive Roman culture refounded medieval art. In the
Carolingian age vital traditions of art existed eastward in the
Byzantine Empire and in derivative schools in Italy, west-
ward in Ireland and England, and to the south in Spain.
The most living and potent of all was the last, and indeed it
seems to have been almost a possibility that we should have
to name this age from the Caliphs instead of from Charle-
magne. The literature of the time following witnesses to
similar influences. Especially characteristic is the Chanson
de Roland. If we look beyond the incidents to the back-
ground of the story we shall see that what filled the minds
of makers and listeners were Caliphs and Emirs, Mahomet,
Arabs, Turks, and Saracens * who had nothing white but
their teeth ' ; Spain, Africa, Egypt, Persia ; Cordova,
Toledo, Seville, Palermo, Babylon, and Alexandria with its
harbour and ships ; silk from Alexandria, gold of Arabia,
embroideries, c olifants ' and ivory chairs, helmets and swords
ornamented with carbuncles, saddles covered with gold and
gems, painted shields, bright gonfalons, camels and lions.
Not only does a similar regard for things oriental appear
in many of the Romances, but they themselves seem to be
largely of an eastern character. The Orient and Spain were
lands of romance, riches and arts, but they were schools of
learning too. * The ancient learning that first trickled into
the Latin West came almost entirely through Arabic
channels and but seldom direct from Greek sources. The
64 Legacy of the Middle Ages
great reservoir of learning was in Spain and to a less extent
in Sicily.' It was inevitable that with the ' Arabian revival
of learning ', the acquaintance with Arabic numerals,
trigonometry, astrology and philosophy, that the arts would
have had their share of influence, and it is noteworthy that
it was during the reign of our Henry II that a new type of
ornamentation which seems to be ultimately Moorish and
Arabic in character appears in the carvings of English
architecture. The South of France was affected much
earlier and Toulouse became the centre of an orientalizing
type of Romanesque art. At Le Puy there are some remark-
able carved wooden doors bearing Curie inscriptions applied
in an ornamental way, and this use of Cufic decoration spread
later even to England.
About the year 1000 a powerful and progressive school of
building began to form in Normandy, and the great Abbey
Church at Jumieges, built from c. 1048 to 1067, ( was superior
to any contemporary structure in Europe'. Edward the
Confessor, while living in Normandy, acquired knowledge
of the building work there being done, and after his return
and coronation he rebuilt the Abbey Church at West-
minster with such close resemblance to that at Jumieges
that, as excavation has shown, it was practically a copy, and
it may not be doubted that a Norman master-mason was
brought here for the work. The church was of great size
and cruciform, with a tall central tower over the crossing,
through the windows of which light entered the central
space as through a dome. The Confessor's church was
begun about 1050 and consecrated shortly before the
Conquest, when the other Abbey buildings do not seem to
have been begun. The earliest of these, the Dormitory,
still exists and the manner of building shows it to have been
erected about 1070 ; it was practically a continuation of
LE MANS CATHEDRAL, WESTERN PORTAL (see p. 6j)
Medieval Architecture 65
the Confessor's work. All the arches of the vaulting,
windows, and doors are built with a light-coloured stone
and dark tufa arranged alternately. This fashion is charac-
teristic of south-east France rather than of Normandy, but
such counterchanged masonry is represented in the Bayeux
embroidery. That it was delighted in for its own sake is
shown by the way in which it was taken over into painted
decoration. For more than a century it was a common
method of internal decoration to paint walls and arches
with alternate bands and blocks of lighter and darker colour,
as may still be seen at Winchester, St. Albans, and many
other places.
We have been accustomed to think of the immense body
of building done in England in the century following the
Conquest as ' Norman ', and so it was in its chief first
impulse, but threads of many colours were soon woven into
its texture. In this era of building activity direct experi-
ments must have been made here as well as in Normandy.
Foreign influences would have reached us as well as Nor-
mandy and in some cases independently of it. Further, the
old English stock, from which the craftsmen would largely
have been recruited, would have contributed something to
the mind behind style manifestations. The cathedral of
Durham, a work of remarkable power, appears to have some-
thing of Lombard character built in with the stones ; there
was doubtless some Germanic and Lombardic contribution
in all Norman building customs, but here seems to be a
specific if weak infusion of Lombard * feeling '. At Durham
ribbed vaulting, the type of vault which was to be charac-
teristic of Gothic buildings, was used in work done soon after
1093. According to Mr. J. Bilson, the vaults of the choir
aisles date from 1096 and high vaults over the choir were
erected in 1104, while 'Every part of the church was
covered with ribbed vaulting between 1093 and 1133'.
2873 F
66 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Such vaulting exists in Lombardy but the dates are disputed :
a habit of forming domes with ribs on the surfaces was
already common in Byzantine practice. The dome of
St. Sophia, as rebuilt after an earthquake in the last quarter
of the tenth century by Tirdates, an Armenian architect,
had ribs on its lower surface and the dome of the church of
St. Theodore, Tyrone, also has ribs. It is said that ribbed
vaults of early date exist in Armenia and there is a proba-
bility that the idea came from the East, as experiments of
a similar kind seem to have been made in Moslem Spain.
The method quickly spread in England. The aisles of the
nave of Old St. Paul's were vaulted in this way and the
remote ' Norman ' church on Holy Island had a ribbed
vault over the central span of the nave.
In Durham Cathedral much is remarkable besides the
early ribbed vaults. The vaulting arches of the Chapter
House sprang from large corbels sculptured into human
forms, which are of Lombardic style while early examples of
* Norman ' sculpture. A similar character of style appears
also in the fine doorways of the church. The most important
of these, the north entrance, must have been a work of
great beauty and refinement, but it is twelfth-century work
and has been much injured. The shafts are modern, except
for two remaining inside which are carved all over, and the
arches have been pared down. Some capitals of simple
primary form are delicately fluted and truly beautiful. By
comparing the less injured parts of the interior with what
is left outside we may gain a fairly complete idea of this
remarkable doorway and three or four others of smaller size
are of similar style. Durham Cathedral is a great European
monument. It has been claimed that in the period after
the Conquest c the real centre of the Norman school was
in England rather than in Normandy '.
An earlier type of plan had been followed at Durham
Medieval Architecture 67
Cathedral, but the newer pilgrimage church plan with an
ambulatory about the apse and a series of radiating chapels
was early adopted at St. Augustine's, Canterbury. After the
Conquest such foreign fashions were soon known and
smaller works of art, like sculptured fonts and tombs, of
black Tournay marble were frequently imported.
Another variety of what we call the Norman style might
better be thought of as Angevin Romanesque. It is obvious
that Henry II, Count of Anjou and Maine, son of the
Empress Maud, would bring a new strain into English
politics and culture. In such works as the west front of
Rochester Cathedral, the south porch of Malmesbury
Abbey, the church of St. Peter, Northampton, parts of
Reading Abbey, the old cloister of Westminster Abbey, &c.,
there is not only advance but difference of outlook which
implies a fresh infusion from the orientalized Romanesque
of South France. The most noticeable characteristic is
a new type of crisp foliage cut in low relief ' arabesque ' on
capitals, mouldings, and surfaces. In the latter half of the
twelfth century we get sure evidence of this influence in
the ornament imitating Cufic writing which appears in the
Winchester Bible, a book specially admired by Henry II.
The temper of the time is suggested by the description, in
the ' Tristan ' of Thomas, of the silks brought to the court of
King Mark : ' opulentes ', * ornees d'etranges couleurs ', ' une
etoffe de couleur exotique '. Later, when Henry III re-
ceived the relic of the Holy Blood at Westminster, Matthew
Paris records that ' the King sat gloriously on his throne
clad in a golden garment of the most precious brocade of
Baghdad'. The sculptured west doorway of Rochester
Cathedral is so similar to finer doorways at Angers and Le
Mans that its derivation may not be doubted. On the
jambs are tall figures of a king and queen who, as the
prototypes in France show, were Solomon and Sheba.
F2
68 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Here at Rochester too some infusion of Lombardic style
may be traced in the little beasts on which some of the
small shafts of the front are based. Over the Chapter
House door too was a carving (now decayed) of the Ascent
of Alexander. As is well known, a master was called from
Saintes in the time of King John to build London Bridge,
and Henry II brought a mint master from Tours.
It is especially difficult for us to form mind-pictures
of the interiors of great Romanesque churches. As we know
them they are bare and stern and grey ; as they once were
the walls were pictured and patterned all over with bright
colouring. The altars were superb works of silver or enamel,
a tall seven-branched candlestick stood on the axis, and
a great crucifix lifted high on the rood-beam dominated
the whole space. Whoever has seen the painted apse at
Nevers and large remains of decoration at Le Puy and in
the churches of Poitiers, the superb nave ceiling at Hildes-
heim covered with the Bible story from Adam to Christ,
our somewhat similar ceiling at Peterborough, and the many
extensive painted surfaces which exist at Norwich, Win-
chester, St. Albans, Canterbury, &c., will be able to under-
stand that these most noble churches had refinements and
delicacies of their own. Even the exterior walls, and
especially sculptures, received an illumination of colour.
The love of story and brightness appears in a passage of
Theophilus, an artist of the Rhine or north-east France,
working about 1150-1200. * Having illuminated the vaults
or the walls with divers works and colours thou hast shown
forth a vision of God's Paradise bright as springtide with
flowers of every hue, fresh as green grass and as mantles
embroidered with spring flowers.'
Some recent writers have endeavoured to * define ' Gothic
architecture by certain structural features. These criteria
have doubtless been correctly observed but they are not all ;
2. CHARTRES CATHEDRAL. WESTERN ENTRANCE (so
Medieval Architecture 69
there were geographical and historical conditions and mental
states as well which have to be reckoned with. Gothic
architecture was the branch of medieval art, thought, and
life in Western Europe concerned with building. The vital
centre of the development of medieval art was the north
of France ; the time when the special qualities which make
up Gothicness became obvious was the middle of the
twelfth century, and in another hundred years full maturity
had been attained. Gothic is the art of that region and radi-
ating from it at that time. This art and the architecture
which was a subsection had various characteristics, some of
which early students observed and some which they did
not notice ; we have now come to appreciate others, but
many probably still remain hidden from our eyes. If any-
thing is certain it is that these works were not seen by the
builders in the way that we look at them. The Gothic
manner of building answered to a stage in the historical
development of European mind and society, it depended on
the past up to its own point and embodied the spirit of its
own time : adventurous, romantic, mystical, it was the
architecture of chivalry, feudalism, the Guilds and religion.
The form may be described and copied but only the spirit
made it a live thing.
When the energy of life that was to form a new phase
of art began to stir it drew sustenance from all available
sources. The Ile-de-France was the centre of the evolution
but ideas were gathered from all surrounding regions. The
triapsidal plan of some German Romanesque churches was
adopted at Noyon and elsewhere. The ambulatory was taken
from mid-France. Figure sculpture and much else was
inspired by South-French advances. M. Marcel Aubert
recognizes certain Norman influences ; Burgundy and
Champagne made contributions. Antique art was not only
carried forward by tradition but by new reference. Early
70 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Christian and Carolingian ivories and Lombard stone
carving had an influence on sculpture ; Byzantine and
Rhenish enamels suggested motives for stained glass and
Eastern silks for wall paintings. Everything borrowed, how-
ever, was taken with a strong hand because it was needed and
it was perfectly assimilated. Such absorption indeed is the
converse of expansion.
A leading part in the transformation into Gothic archi-
tecture has long been assigned to Abbot Suger, who rebuilt
the church at St. Denis, the choir of which was consecrated
in 1144. ' We gladly admit ', says Male in his recent study,
6 that the art of the Middle Ages was collective, but it was
more intensely incarnated in some men ; crowds do not
create but individuals. Suger was one of the great men
who turned art into new ways ; thanks to him, St. Denis
was from 1145 the foyer of a rekindled art which was to
shine on France and Europe.' The famous de-ambulatory
with radiating chapels of a peculiar type made a school and
there are imitations in a dozen places. The monumental
sculpture of North France was born at St. Denis ; the
portals of Chartres displayed their statues and reliefs after
the model set by Suger. The glass of St. Denis was imitated
in England as well as in France. * I am convinced ', writes
Male, * that the iconography of the Middle Age owes to
Suger as much as do architecture, sculpture, and glass-
painting. In the domain of symbolism Suger was a creator ;
he proposed to artists new types and combinations which
were generally adopted in the following century. He told
the story of his work himself and at each page appears love
of beauty and faith in the virtue of art. He wrote : * Our
poor spirit is so feeble that it is only through sensible
realities that it raises itself to truth.' His new church
seems to have been begun about 1133 and the west front
to have been finished c. 1140. Here in the facade was
Medieval Architecture 71
a noble sculptured doorway c So at St. Denis between
1133 and 1140 was found that marvel the Gothic portal.'
According to Male, sculptors were brought from the south
of France who already possessed skill in dealing with such
a great subject as the Last Judgement which filled the arch
above the central doorway. * The sculptor of St. Denis was
evidently a man of the Midi.' But the scheme was im-
proved by the gifted Abbot.
The type of sculptured tympana, or arch fillings, of
western portals, followed at St. Denis, Male traces to a great
work at Moissac which he suggests rendered into stone
a picture of the Majesty between the four symbols of the
Evangelists as represented in a famous Commentary on
the Apocalypse produced in Spain towards the end of the
eighth century. I refer to this especially because our
Western cycle of sculpture, from say 650 to 1050, may have
made a contribution to European art not recognized by
the French scholar. Already on the Ruthwell cross, c. 675,
we find Christ the Judge sculptured as the chief subject,
while above was the Lamb surrounded by the four symbols
of the Evangelists. That Christ was here the Judge is shown
by his treading on two beasts, emblems of death and hell.
There are several other reliefs on the cross, including the
Crucifixion. Another subject was the meeting of SS.Paul and
Anthony ; that is, the foundation of monasticism. Sculp-
tured Last Judgements were more fully worked out on the
fronts of Irish crosses erected about 900. On the cross at
Monasterboice are many sculptured subjects perfectly co-
ordinated into a didactic series. Those of one side represent
on the stem, the Fall, the Expulsion, David and Goliath ;
then on the cross proper the Last Judgement with St.
Michael weighing souls and their final separation ; at the
top is carved the meeting of SS. Paul and Anthony. On
the other side are panels of the arrest of Christ, the Journey
72 Legacy of the Middle Ages
to Emmaus, and Christ's delivery of the keys x to St. Peter
and a book to St. Paul. The chief subject on this side is the
Crucifixion : on either side are the soldiers, above are two
attendant angels. Over this great subject, at the head of
the cross, is a panel of Moses with his lifted arms supported
by Aaron and Hur. This subject occurring prominently is
a pronounced example of the use of an Old Testament type
of the Crucifixion. On referring to accounts and illustrations
of other Irish crosses it becomes plain that the system of
associating types from the Old Law with New Law fulfil-
ments was clearly understood and practised in the West in
the tenth century! Male tells how the subject of St. Michael
weighing souls appeared and spread in the south of France
in the twelfth century. The sculptors, he thinks, received
the motive from the East ; an ancient fresco recently
discovered in Cappadocia shows an angel with a balance
near Christ the Judge ; probably the motive came from
Egypt, where, in the Book of the Dead, souls were weighed
by Osiris. Now the French examples illustrated are very
like the Irish type carved at Monasterboice soon after
A.D. 900, and the probability seems to be that the West
preserved it and handed it back to the Continent. The
subject of SS. Paul and Anthony meeting is also found in
South- French Romanesque sculpture.
When M. Male finds the correspondence between the
Old and New Testaments at the base of Suger's scheme of
teaching by pictures and sculpture at St. Denis he supposes
it to be a reappearance after neglect for some centuries.
It was known to Bede, as he points out, but then, he suggests,
it passed into oblivion. ' The symbolic opposition of the
Old and New Testaments reappears at St. Denis under the
influence of Suger.'
Again figures of the Wise and Foolish Virgins are asso-
1 Usually said to be a roll or rod, but I think it is a primitive key.
3. CHARTRES CATHEDRAL, SOUTHERN ENTRANCE (sec p. 75)
Medieval Architecture 73
dated with the Last Judgement at St. Denis ; somewhat
earlier figures of the ten Virgins appear in South France,
but Male claims that again Suger made some new departure
in the treatment of the subject. ' At St. Denis it all at once
took a profound significance ; the ten Virgins became
symbols of the separated halves of humanity. It may be
that works of art now lost inspired Suger. Some verses of
Alcuin show that from the Carolingian epoch the Wise
Virgins had been associated with the Judgement, but Suger
applied the motive to monumental sculpture. However,
in the text of Alcuin only the Wise Virgins are mentioned.'
Now this association of the ten Virgins with the Judgement
had been made in the most significant way in Old Christian
Art. In a Coptic stuff (fifth century) lately shown at
South Kensington Museum the Judgement was represented
by a Throne with five Virgins carrying burning torches on
one side and five on the other having inverted torches.
That this scheme of representing the Judgement was known
to Alcuin suggests how continuity may have been main-
tained in other cases, and I have discussed the point because
it indicates that a far western contribution to Carolingian
culture may have been one of the formative germs of
Gothic art. Interlacing patterns of a * Celtic ' type per-
sisted long in use for lead glazing in windows, and this too
was probably a contribution from the West through the
medium of illuminated manuscripts ; Theophilus speaks
of knot-work glazing.
Mature Gothic art was chiefly concerned in cathedral and
castle building, in town development, and Guild organiza-
tion. The cathedrals of many of the cities of France were
now rebuilt on a general impulse and with energy and
power that are phenomenal. Perfecting of the Cathedral
type was carried forward by exploring all that could be done
to rear and balance the greatest structures that might be
74 Legacy of the Middle Ages
made of the customary type required by the rites and
common use. Gothic building depended not only on
experimental construction but on expanding power in
workmanship, and many peculiarities arose by delight in
stone cutting. Undoubtedly intricacies of geometry and
wonderments of craftsmanship came to be over-valued.
Villars de Honnecourt, the thirteenth-century mason, tells
how * the art of geometry biddeth and teacheth ', and the
fifteenth-century mason's book edited by J. O. Halliwell
says, * On this manner through good wit of geometry
began first the art of masonry.' This geometry, however,
included what we should now call 'mechanics.
Gothic building, as it was worked out by progression from
antecedent data, produced high vaults, traceried windows,
flying buttresses, spires and pinnacles, but essentially it was
a manifestation of the life of an age. The art was vital,
adventurous, energetic, organic. There was a marvellous
development which can be likened to flowering, and with
the release of activity came joy, wonder, rhythm. Thus it
is that the more anxiously and learnedly we modern people
copy or make variations of the forms wrought by exploring
craftsmen in the past the less we resemble them. To be
really like them we must turn about and look forward.
Forms kill, but the inspiration might give life. All the once
flourishing schools of art, Medieval, Greek, Oriental,
worked out their own salvation, and we can only learn of
them by facing the facts and finding our own way into the
unknown.
From the middle of the twelfth century the movement
forward into full Gothic was accomplished with great
rapidity, and the result was achieved by transitions so
gradual that all seems a natural process. It was a new
spring-time in art. The vigorous cathedral at Noyon was
begun about 1140, and its round-ended transepts were
Medieval Architecture 75
built c. 1170. Sens Cathedral was erected from about 1144
to 1168. Notre-Dame at Senlis was erected from c. 1155 to
1185. The great cathedral of Paris was begun c. 1162,
and the altar was consecrated in 1182. Laon Cathedral was
commenced about the same time. The vast cathedral at
Bourges was begun c. 1172 and Chartres in 1194, excepting
the west front, which is earlier. Reims Cathedral was com-
menced in 121 1 ; Amiens, the crown of the group, about
1215, and Beauvais some ten years later.
In England the building of Canterbury Cathedral was
undertaken in 1174 by a mason from Sens, who followed the
style of the new cathedral in that city. The choir of St. Hugh
at Lincoln was built before 1200. Many great abbeys were
erected about the same time, and Salisbury Cathedral was
begun in 1220. Notre-Dame at Paris and Amiens Cathedral
were practically completed by the middle of the thirteenth
century. * About 1245 was the moment when Gothic
architecture was at its apogee' (V.-le-Duc). The Sainte
Chapelle at Paris was rapidly erected from 1245 to 1248.
This wonderful little building at the very apex of the
expanding process shows a certain self-consciousness: it
appears to have been imagined as a colossal shrine for its
relics. The speed with which these works were carried
forward is evidence of the excitement with which they were
wrought. Viollet-le-Duc more than once remarks on the
rapidity of execution : * There were interruptions, but always
when they built they built quickly.' The effort was stupen-
dous, the energy amazing, the beauty convincing and
captivating. Thus the art of building climbed swiftly by
exploration and adventure. In this springing Gothic is
expressed health, vigour, rapture. A cathedral of the great
time was a bursting out of power in construction and
energy of workmanship. The joyful intimacy of men and
works was well expressed by Richard Lionheart naming his
76 Legacy of the Middle Ages
fine new castle Gaillard and describing it as * my beautiful
one-year-old daughter J . Admiration for tenseness and poise
is well brought out in a passage quoted by Dr. G. G.
Coulton from an account in the Life of St. Hugh of the
saint's work at Lincoln.
* With wondrous art he built the fabric of the Cathedral. In
the structure the art equals the precious materials, for the vault
may be compared to a bird stretching out its broad wings to fly ;
planted on its firm columns it soars to the clouds . . . precious
columns of swarthy stone close set in all its pores ; it may
suspend the mind in doubt whether it be jasper or marble.
Of this kind are formed those slender shafts which surround the
great pillars as a bevy of maidens assembled for the dance.'
As the manner of building was pressed forward to its
conclusions, piers became more slender, arches wider and
more acute, and such mastery was attained over the possi-
bilities of vaulting that stone might do no more. To
provide counter-pressure to the expanding tendency of the
vaults * flying ' buttresses ramped up against the walls
from lower levels, and larger churches had two tiers of
these. Plain walls came near to being eliminated in the
endeavour to gather up the structure into tense pier,
branching vault, traceried windows, and resisting buttress.
When the * bays ' were entirely occupied by windows, which
became screens between the flying buttresses, the structural '
end had been nearly reached. Tracery at first formed by
grouping separate openings finally became a network of
branching bars of stone. The mystery of mouldings is
explained by the fact that their lines and shadows were
a means of emphasis : rounds and fillets showing bright
between deep hollows led the eye up the piers and arches
in directions opposite to the accidental jointing of the
separate stones.
Spires, pinnacles, tabernacles, gables, are all obviously
4 . AMIENS CATHEDRAL, WK^f *K$ONT fe^JH
Medieval Architecture 77
congruous with the aspiring impulse ; there is something
joyous and triumphant about these high-lifted things which
needs little further explanation. Tall spires were landmarks
and beacons and from the belfries the bells called far.
We travel the dusty road till the light of the day is dim
And sunset shows us spires away on the world's rim. 1
Doubtless too an instinctive memory was retained that
the steeple was the special mark of a Domus altaris. It
carried on the spirit of the old Saxon high crosses which in
inscriptions are called * Victory beacons '.
From one point of view the evolution of the cathedrals
was a purely structural movement ; all had to be organized
for stability and the balancing of active ever-dangerous
forces by meeting thrust with counter-thrust. The problem
of sustaining these pavilions of stone high in the air was not
easy and the builders solved it so as to obtain maximum
results for their labour and material ; no ounce of force
was to be wasted. The masons elected to build dangerously ;
there was an inner energy forcing them on. Our way of
talking about * styles ' has obscured this mysterious element
of energy in the art. The old builders themselves had
wonder and wrought wonder into their structures ; they
had the ability which children have of being enchanted
with their own doings, and hence they entrance us. In the
high-poised vaults, windows of branching work holding glass
bright as sunset sky, and the multitude of watching and
worshipping images there was magic.
The largest churches frequently had towers at the
transept ends as well as at the west front ; and at times
towers were placed on each side of the eastern limb. These
masses were a stay against internal expanding forces. Some
French cathedrals have double aisles on either side of the
1 John Masefield, The Seekers.
78 Legacy of the Middle Ages
central space. At Chartres these surround the east limb of
the church, and chapels open still further. Notre-Dame at
Paris has double aisles to the nave as well ; here, too, chapels
have been added all round, filling the spaces between the
far-projecting buttresses, so that the interior has no less
than seven divisions in its width. The triforium was some-
times a wall passage, at others it extended over the aisles
and was a second vaulted story with chapels corresponding
to some of those on the ground floor. Many variations are
found in the disposition of parts ; transepts were unimpor-
tant or prominent, apsidal chapels might be one or many
and project little or far. Experiment was so constant that
there is no sameness and every building has its own char-
acter. In a group of churches in north-west France a
scheme, originally Early Christian and Roman, of making
the transepts round-ended was received from Germany.
The noble twelfth-century cathedral of Tournay in Belgium
is of this fashion, so is the cathedral of Noyon in France. A
beautiful church once at Valenciennes, built about 1200, was,
judging from its plan, the most perfect example of this type.
The transepts had ambulatories entirely similar to the
eastern termination except that it had three radiating
chapels while each transept had only one projecting east-
ward. These two chapels and the central one of the chevet
rose two stories high, having altars in the triforium as well
as below. The triforium sweeping round these hemi-cycles
with chapels opening from it must have been extraordinarily
beautiful ; doubtless it was vaulted. There were two small
towers in the north-east and south-east angles between the
transepts and the eastern limb, but they did not rise much
above the roof ridge.
Pointed arches and ribbed vaulting were used in buildings
still Romanesque in character ; it was the flying buttress
which made the mature high Gothic possible. By springing
Medieval Architecture 79
these props from extended points of support at lower levels
the high vaults were made secure. Seemingly inert walls
now drew together and energetic pillars, bars, and ribs made
up the construction in every part until all the members
seemed active rather than static. As Professor C. H. Moore
has said, * The stiffness of a Gothic building resides in its
supporting members, which owe their stability to a balance
of active forces in contrast to the inert massiveness of an
ancient building.' Villars de Honnecourt seems to have
had this idea in mind when he wrote : * If you would fain
build altogether with columns and buttresses you must
choose such as have enough projection. Take good heed
how you work, and then you will do as wise and well in-
structed men should.'
Great windows now fully lighted the vast interiors through
brilliantly coloured glass. In France the glass was deeply
stained so as to temper the sunlight. It is a wonderful
experience to pass from the heat and blazing sunshine of
a summer day into Chartres Cathedral, where for a short
time only the illuminated windows may be seen piercing
through a general shadow. In England in such a church as
Salisbury Cathedral, with its large windows (not yet traceried)
and fair scheme of glazing, the interior became a cistern
full flooded with light.
Traceried windows of the new type seem first to have
been perfected at Reims Cathedral. Villars de Honnecourt
says : ' I was on my way to obey a call to the land of Hungary
when I drew this window because it pleased me best of all
windows.' In setting two or more separate lights together
in the arch-shaped space of a vaulting compartment a custom
arose of piercing a circle or rose above the vertical lights ;
then increasingly it seemed obvious that the whole wall-
space beneath the containing arch might be perforated.
So arose the idea of a composite window, which now became
8o Legacy of the Middle Ages
a mere screen of delicate work under a large and strong arch.
In earlier tracery the forms still show their derivation from
separate units and to the end a traceried window was con-
ceived as being made up of vertical c lights ' under a main
arch divided by stone bars in the form of sub-arches, the
idea of a lattice of perforations filling a space is hardly ever
formed. In a similar way Rose windows expanded until
they filled great circles, and later square compartments,
but the divisions almost always radiated from a centre as
in early foliation. Cusping was used for single door and
window openings long before it was applied to compound
tracery.
' Tabernacle work ' was a development of canopies over
the recesses and niches in which images were set. From
an early time they represented shelters and shrines. Paul
the Silentiary, c. 560, describing the church of Santa Sofia,
says that the figures of Christ and St. Peter wrought
on the altar-curtains were under ' temples of gold '. A
factor in the evolution of ornate later work was delight
in seeing tracery set against blue sky. Dibdin, describing
Strasbourg spire, noticed that ' through the interstices
the bright blue sky appears with a lustre of which you have
no conception in England'. This spire is still more amaz-
ing- as I have seen it in dark silhouette against midnight
lightning.
In rebuilding the Abbey Church of Westminster further
inspiration was sought in France. The work was begun in
1245 and pressed forward feverishly by the eager King
Henry III. The first portion, including the east-end,
transepts, and Chapter-house, seems to have been prac-
tically completed in about ten years by the first master
employed, Henry of Reyns. This part of the building shows
close study of the cathedrals of Reims and Amiens. The
treatment and workmanship are in the English tradition,
5. I.E MANS CATHEDRAL, APSE
Medieval Architecture 81
and what was gathered was so much subdued to our native
way of craftsmanship that it is more probable that Master
Henry of Reyns had his name from some such place as
Raines in Essex than from Reims in France.
Most of the building work undertaken in England from
the time when Canterbury Cathedral was built had been
rather for monastic churches in country districts than for
cathedrals, and in these country buildings modest measure
and customary ways gave an exquisite charm, shy, yet
graceful. Westminster Abbey, however, the great church
attached to the King's Palace in a suburb of London, the
special interest of the connoisseur King, was a more ambitious
work designed after a study of the cathedral type in France.
Here apparently for the first time in England double tiers
of flying buttresses were used and bar- tracer ied windows.
The plan was adapted from the cathedrals of Reims and
Amiens, the apsidal chapels particularly from the former ;
the internal bay design and the transept front with its
portals were imitated from Amiens. Here in the north
porch the sculptures of Amiens were closely studied. In
the great arch-space of the central doorway was represented
the Last Judgement, a Majestic Christ in the midst with
angels on either hand bearing instruments of the Passion,
while others called the waking dead. On the jambs below
were ranged tall single figures of Apostles. The side-doors
probably had sculptures relating to the Virgin and St. Peter.
All this would have been illuminated with bright colour
and gilding. The octagonal Chapter-house, a traditional
English form, had large four-light windows of advanced
tracery worked with a knowledge of results recently attained
in France. An inscription on the tiled floor which I have
been able recently to read claimed that ' As the Rose is to
other flowers so this House is among buildings'. The
interior of the church was decorated, around and above the
2873 G
82 Legacy of the Middle Ages
High Altar, with so much gilding that there must have been
a general glow of gold ; this treatment was doubtless taken
from the Sainte Chapelle.
The new departure at Westminster was imitated and
echoed in many later works all over the country ; developed
bar-tracery became common and doubled flying-buttresses
were erected at St. Albans. The Chapter-house and
Cloister of Westminster were practically copied at Salisbury.
The sculptured central porch and the Chapter-house
windows were imitated at Lincoln Cathedral ; and the
porch was again echoed at Lichfield. From the time of the
consecration of Westminster Abbey Church in 1269 there
was no further great transfusion of French art on the English
stock ; there were influences and importations, but the
arts as a whole went their own ways. It has even been
thought that the late phase of English building known as
* Perpendicular ' may have influenced the French flam-
boyant fashion.
The English type of Gothic which followed the advances
at Westminster has from the character of the tracery been
called Geometrical. The circles and simple forms which
composed this tracery were soon modified by more com-
pletely associating one form with another, branching the
bars of stone so that the unit forms were more merged in
an * all-over ' pattern. This phase has been called Curvi-
linear from the flowing lines of the tracery-bars. Later again
the tracery became a net-work largely made up of straight
lines. The buildings in which such tracery appears have
been called c Perpendicular '. In this later work and
especially in the latest medieval phase the Tudor the
arches are extended and flattened so that in some cases they
become almost horizontal in the central part of the span.
One of the influences bringing about this change was the
increasing estimation in later days of carpentry as the leading
Medieval Architecture 83
art in house-building. In constructing low-level stories
with timbers shaped into curved forms, arch-shapes were
naturally flattened and straightened ; hence the carpenters'
need reacted on masons' craft, furnishing serviceable hints in
house building which flowed forward as a fashion. This
reaction of wooden forms on stone construction is an
example not only of the obvious direct conditioning of con-
structive forms by material so that substance is always half
the * style ', but it shows how one material may legitimately
influence the treatment of another by suggestion. The
mason had to show that he could build well lighted, low-
storied houses as well as the carpenter. Thus too in modern
days construction in iron has followed the methods of
framing and bracing used in carpentry.
As with Romanesque buildings so with Gothic, the stone-
work was not completed until it had received a coating of
white or ochre on which partial applications of bright colour
and gilding made all fair, clear, and sharply defined. Sculp-
ture especially was heightened by further decoration of
painting, and this not only in the interiors of buildings but
outside in the weather. What the great portals of French
cathedrals, with their ranks of Saint figures, were when
newly painted and gilt can hardly be guessed at ; such gay
splendours may not now be seen on earth. In books these
buildings are necessarily described as architectural corpses,
'we murder to dissect'. What they are, in the sun and
moonlight as one wanders around them or sees them afar
off, or again enters the still interiors under the different
conditions of sunlight striking through the coloured glass,
or at night when lights reveal only the lower part of piers
which pass away upward into the immense volume of
gloom, no pen may write. All that stained glass might be
like in its glory can only be imagined in cathedrals like
Chartres, Bourges, and Le Mans : we necessarily speak in
G 2
84 Legacy of the Middle Ages
terms of design, subject, and colour, but in fact, as the light
filters through, ancient stained glass has fairy wonder in it.
In Gothic arts sculptured and painted figures of men and
animals often seem exaggerated and quaint, but generally
this came from the need for adapting the forms for special
purposes ; these purposes were stained glass, wall painting,
heraldry, and the like, not portraits in frames. Now figures
photographically correct would not be effective in archi-
tectural sculpture or glass as seen from scores of yards away.
Simple ways of arranging figures and typical modes of repre-
senting hands, feet, hair, and other details had to be found.
A foot, for instance, properly foreshortened would appear
at a distance as a shapeless lump, hence was maintained the
convention of representing painted figures as lifted on their
toes. Lions, stags and eagles represented heraldically on
flags and shields had not only to be displayed in a simple
summary manner, but their parts had to be so disposed that
they would fill as much as possible of the available space in
an even manner. * The statue of a king placed fifty feet
above the spectator's eye and involved in the intricacies of
niche-work and buttress must be emphasized in its royalty ;
hence those exaggerations of attitude which so admirably
justify themselves in the West fronts of Exeter and Wells.'
Notwithstanding these traditions there was a constant move-
ment towards naturalism, and in the representation of
vegetation by carving this had gone far in France even in
the middle of the thirteenth century.
The Sainte Chapelle of Paris had the whole interior
decorated after the model of goldsmiths' enamelled work.
The wall-arcades had inlays of coloured glass, and mouldings
were decorated with gilt gesso work in delicate patterns.
There can be no doubt that it was thought of as a shrine for
the precious relics it was to contain. Similar inlays of coloured
glass are found on some fragments at Bourges and St. Denis.
Medieval Architecture 85
The wooden altar-piece at Westminster is perhaps the most
wonderful thing of this kind now existing, and in the
Victoria and Albert Museum is a late thirteenth-century
stone figure of the Virgin with little panels of decorated
glass set in the robe. Mock Cufic inscriptions have been
mentioned, they were still used in this period, and Oriental
silks were eagerly collected. These are evidences for con-
tinued Oriental influence. To some extent conscious admira-
tion of things Eastern may be discerned in Gothic works.
At times, especially in England, where dark grey Purbeck
marble was a favourite material, shafts of columns and other
select parts of masonry were highly polished, carvings and
mouldings were gilt, and wall surfaces were whitened and
covered with simple ' masonry ' patterns in red lines. The
reclining figures of sculptured tombs were painted ' like to
life ' with red lips, staring eyes, coloured or gilt hair and
patterned garments. Pavements, in a few special cases as at
Westminster, were a mosaic of precious materials, others were
plain polished marble, some of large smooth white slabs
having incised pictures filled with coloured mastics. There
are examples of these three kinds in Canterbury Cathedral.
Many pavements were of glazed tiles, either set in geo-
metrical patterns like a fine pavement recently found at
Byland Abbey, or of the sort called ' painted tiles ' in old
documents. The several kinds of paving show a general
desire that the surface should be polished and light-reflecting.
Of course, these floors were unencumbered and streaks of
light would strike along them. We must add in thought the
furniture, the altars, shrines, roods, candlesticks. The
frontal of the altar at Westminster was a marvellous piece
of gold embroidery, set with precious stones, pearls and
enamels. In other places were frontals wholly of gold and
silver or enamel work. All this was but the setting for
a never-ending drama broken up by entrances and exits
86 Legacy of the Middle Ages
accompanied by the music of ' the merry organ ', solemn
bells, and chanting men. A cathedral was the heart of its
city, an embodiment of its life and thought in vital experi-
mental craftsmanship ; it was a growth from the minds of
the people which sprang up, reached high, expanded wide,
then withered and died away.
Much is known of the master masons who built and
' designed ', as we now should say, the cathedrals of France
and England. The great Gothic was in large measure the
work of the lay masters of the town guilds. One of the
building masters, Villars de Honnecourt, has left a large book
of drawings, recipes, and advice which is known as his
* Sketch Book '. It seems clear, however, from the method
of composition and addresses to the reader that it must have
been intended for * publication '. He appears to have been
of Picardy, to have built a fine church at Vaucelles, c. 1230,
and then, about 1250, the remarkable choir of St. Quentin,
destroyed in the war. It is much the same kind of book as
an earlier work on Divers Arts by the monk Theophilus.
Lately an artist's book, c. 1300, has been made known which
is in the Pepys Library at Cambridge. Two or three books
on the rules of Masons' Guilds exist. In these no word
about * compositions ' or * styles ' is found, only much about
work, geometry and structural mechanics and the brother-
hood of craftsmen. Villars says that his book contains c good
advice for the great power of masonry, and engines of car-
pentry. You will find likewise the power of portraiture and
drawing, even as the art of geometry biddeth and teacheth.'
Recent scientific observers of the * Gothic style ' have
been particularly interested in the exact course traced in
the transformation from Romanesque. Every least change
has been worked out so fully that all seems to have been an
obvious movement in a structural and almost a mechanical
advance in a sort of stone engineering. The question, how-
;. REIMS CATHEDRAL, LEFT PORTAL, WEST FRONT (see p. 75)
Medieval Architecture 87
ever, arises, why was this development in a particular direc-
tion ? The way and the end were not foreknown, but looking
back we can see that the whole was one indivisible progress,
and there must have been an inner spirit informing the forms.
Scholars who have laid down the curve of change would
allow that religious, economic, and other causes must have
profoundly affected the arts. Changes in society were
always reshaping ideas and forms. Until the end of the
eleventh century medieval art was mainly monastic, the
fifteenth century was the age of merchant art.
All the time the craftsmen were feeling their way and
possibly the medieval period was essentially the craftsman's
age in history; craftsmen's culture has been little under-
stood ; the thirteenth century witnessed the culmination
of a particular kind of life.
On the question, What is the essence of Gothic ? I may
refer to four witnesses. Ruskin saw in it not only form but
power and life ; there was a * look of mountain brotherhood
between the Cathedral and the Alp '. Morris saw * freedom
of hand and mind subordinated to the co-operative harmony',
organic structure growth, commonness, * every man who
produces works of handicraft is an artist'. Dr. Salomon
Reinach sees in it a Celtic element, * the art of the Middle
Ages may be characterized as Northern '. This thought is in
perfect harmony with Ruskin's in discerning mind behind
phenomena and in the ' barbaric temperament ' of that
mind. Again, Dr. Josef Strzygowski in The Origins of
Christian Church Art points out how ' the northern spirit
informed the art which we call Gothic . . . the creative
force rose from the well springs of youth'.
There must have been some common psychological
aggregate, which we call the mentality of peoples that
directed the architectural process and shaped the result.
For instance, as will be readily agreed, there was in the
88 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Gothic system of building what a modern student of the
Renaissance has called ' the western love of the vertical '.
Sharpness, slenderness, springingness are traits ; in England
some decorative arches ascend to three or four times their
width. A love of apertures is just as marked ; this was
manifested not only in windows but by traceried parapets and
intricate tabernacle work. Delight is also evident in peaks
and fringes of masonry seen against the sky in spires, sharp
gables, ranks and bunches of pinnacles. As the style worked
itself out, it is easy to see that intricacy of every kind was
an attraction to the workmen ; the tendency to multiply
shafts and ribs, and to push out more and more crockets
seems to have been inherent. Cusps, foliation, much-ribbed
mouldings, appear to have been of the essence of the inner
idea which the masons were always, although unconsciously,
trying to embody in building.
As is commonly known, carving became more naturalistic.
This of course may be explained as the result of increasing
skill, but there seems to have been another impulse. The
manner in which tufts of foliage jut out, as crockets and
finials, from the edges of pinnacles and terminate them with
a big bunch at the apex is significant of some liking. In
ornamental carving bud-like forms first appeared, then
strong growths followed, and finally tangles of lax and
wrinkled foliage were represented. It has also been noticed
that the capitals to columns, derived from Roman archi-
tecture, tended to disappear. In earlier forms of medieval
work the arch-section was markedly different from that of
the pillar and one was divided off from the other by a bold
capital ; steadily the capitals were diminished and arch
mouldings approximated more closely to the form of the
supporting pier. Frequently the two parts became identical
in form and the cap was contracted to a narrow band or it
disappeared altogether ; the piers were then like much
Medieval Architecture 89
furrowed tree-trunks from which arches branched without
interruption. Again, it has been remarked that window
tracery began as an association of separate apertures ; these
drew together and the masons seem thenceforth to have
been more concerned with the branching bars of stone than
with the openings left between them, large branches threw
off smaller ones and those were again subdivided. The
resulting effect of this elaborate tracery is curiously like
crossing tree-branches as seen against the sky. Interlacing
boughs and branches framing * panes ' of bright blue sky will
explain this better than words to any one who is willing to
go outside the ordinary bounds of archaeology.
It used indeed to be said that branching vaults rising from
long avenues of pillars must have been directly imitated
from the woods ; now, however, that the development has
been traced from the beginning we know that it was not so.
But a hidden tendency of mind which gradually found its
satisfaction still remains a true cause. In Gothic archi-
tecture we find up-springing, extension, branching, con-
tinuity, interlacing, sprouting, flowering. The forest mind
seems to have been in the people and the forest romances
were born of the same blood as the buildings. To over-
state the point, the Gothic is Robin Hood architecture.
Morris says, 'the German hero ballad-epics, the French
Romances, the English forest-ballads, the Icelandic sagas
represent its literature'.
Our last sight of Gothic before it disappeared is a fringe
of much crocketed pinnacles like pine-trees ranged along
a peaked horizon. The northern forests had nurtured a
people who could do no other than build according to their
ideals ; not knowing but only doing. As the Greek ex-
pressed lucidity and serenity, so Northern Art had the
mystery of the great forests behind it. It is even possible
that the delight we experience under the vaults of a noble
go Legacy of the Middle Ages
cathedral is in some degree a far-off race memory of life
in forests and village c greens ' ; W. H. Hudson, writing of
Salisbury Cathedral in A Shepherd?* Life, noted ' the shock
of pleased wonder, at the sight of that immense interior,
that extending nave with pillars that stand like the tall
trunks of pines and beeches, and at the end the light screen
which allows the eye to travel on through the rich choir,
to see with fresh wonder and delight, high up and far off
that glory of coloured glass'.
The legacy of the Middle Ages is too great to be com-
puted, we are still living on the inheritance without realizing
what the world will be like when all is squandered. In regard
to any traditional art, we are now in the night following
that day, not knowing whether there will be another dawn.
The Middle Ages left us precious and vast individual build-
ings, the glory of stained glass, and the mighty music of
bells. Further, they gave the type and frame of our cities
as those were up to the day that living men can remember.
More than all, they left to us the thought-image of England
itself which we still hold in our hearts; towns, villages,
churches, bridges, houses, the whole organization and
economy of the country were until recently medieval in fact
or tradition. The Middle Ages bequeathed a testimony as
to the possibility of there being a progressive culture reaching
noble results ; they gave evidence that productive work
may be counted all joy, that the manual arts spring like
drama and music from the hearts of common people ; they
revealed the tender beauty of that which comes fresh from
the folk mind. They proved that * art ' is not a remote
luxury or fashionable futility, but rather it is the right
way of doing right things so that the human spirit shines
through the body of labour. Art is not free design which
may be imposed by a class remote from the craftsmen.
8. REIMS CATHEDRAL. STATUES IN THE LEFT PORTAL, WEST FRONT
Medieval Architecture 91
Scholars of design only arise when experimental art is dead.
Paper flowers have not the fragrance of those growing from
the soil. Gothic architecture was developed by craft-
mastery fostered in the Guilds ; it was found out in the
nature of things by exploration ; it was not a look of grandeur
or correctness obtained by making a composition of borrowed
* features '.
This art teaches that the centre of the building arts must
always be structure. As Professor Moore has said :
' The total structural system governs the character of every-
thing in true Gothic building. . . . Viollet-le-Duc was the first
to realize the significance of structure as the formative principle
of every style. . . . Ruskin saw something of the meaning of the
French master's work and once said to the writer, " Viollet-le-Duc
has shown the skeleton of a Gothic building to be as wonderful
as that of an animal ".'
This idea of the building art being an active organic
thing carrying a renewing spirit within itself gives us
a general philosophy of the art. A work of art is to be
something found in materials and processes when used for
worthy and significant purposes. Gothic architecture was
discovered in doing, and workmanship itself was of the
innermost essence of the style. Mastery of stone cutting
and other wonders of craftsmanship were played with, and
up to a point all art is the play spirit in labour. As saith
Theophilus : ' Work therefore, good man, happy in this life
before God's face and man's. '
W. R. LETHABY.
NOTE. On the Norman Cathedral at Durham see Mr. J. Bilson's
important article in the Archaeological Journal, vol. xxix, issued since
this was in print.
ii, MEDIEVAL SCULPTURE
AMONG the manifestations of thought and art with which
the Middle Ages have enriched the common inheritance of
humanity sculpture would undoubtedly be placed in the
first rank with medieval architecture, that marvellous
architecture which has won the admiration of all subsequent
ages for its boldness, its vigour, its essential Tightness. Even
in later days, when the dictums of classic art once more
resumed their sway over the minds of men, luring them to
the worship of Greece and Rome, every one, whether learned
or ignorant, still marvelled at the splendour and the great-
ness of our cathedrals. On the other hand, the glorious
sculpture which adorned them was universally despised.
So much was this the case that Rousseau declared that their
confused ornamentation only survived ' for the disgrace of
those who had had the patience to fashion it'. To-day
this sentiment is very far from being shared, and the plastic
art of the Middle Ages is held by its richness, its variety, and
its beauty to be almost on an equality with that of antiquity.
For some centuries the art of sculpture was almost wholly
neglected, and such works as were produced were merely
feeble copies of the antique. But at the end of the eleventh
century a new and marvellous art suddenly appeared,
almost simultaneously and everywhere alike. It enriched
Romanesque architecture with a wealth of ornament whose
originality was unquestionable and whose rudeness of work-
manship slowly acquired a mastery over form and expression,
a mastery which culminated, in the middle of the twelfth
century, in veritable masterpieces of sculpture. After
briefly tracing the rapid evolution of this new art from its
earliest days, its full development in the thirteenth century,
94 Legacy of the Middle Ages
when medieval architecture reached the height of its glory,
will be dealt with.
Stone was the true material for these masterpieces of
sculpture; but the earlier craftsmen, of pre- Romanesque
days, had already tried their hands at casting and carving in
metal, ivory, and wood ; their efforts, although rude, yet
show either the influence of antique tradition or a new
striving after originality. Romanesque and Gothic carvers
made use of the same materials, endeavouring to express in
them their ideals both of sculpture and Christianity.
Plastic art in the Middle Ages did, in truth, devote itself
to the service of Christianity in its purest and loftiest form.
Image-makers, always subservient to clerks and often re-
cruited from their ranks, sought only to illustrate the teach-
ing of the Church and to interpret in the most effective way
its most essential types and dogmas. Their art, free in the
details of its realization, more and more permeated with
humanity, secular in execution, is before all things illus-
trative, didactic, and religious. The beauty which they
strove to represent was almost always subservient to the
highest and deepest thought. The Christian sentiment, the
mystic meaning, the traditional grandeur of the figures and
scenes of the Old and New Testaments inspired them ; and
if profane elements did intermingle, as in the representations
of the glories of this world on tombs, it was still the Christian
view of death which dominated them. Hence a moral
value, a unity in the fundamental idea, a touching sincerity
which magnify this art wherein are no weak pretences, no
uncertainties, no emptiness of thought, such as are so often
manifest in styles where skill and technical knowledge fail
from lack of faith to compensate for the absence of moral
support and power of expression.
This profound quality, this species of essential framework,
which is apparent in all this plastic art, is almost invariably
Medieval Sculpture 95
rendered doubly strong by the sustaining power of archi-
tecture, with which it is always so intimately connected.
There are no works without moral significance and, for a long
period, none that are detached from architecture or without
their destined niche in a building. Art for art's sake did not
exist. What a lesson and what a contrast, if not to art in
the great days of antiquity yet, at least, to the Alexandrine
and Roman epochs as much as to our own ! We cling with
veneration, even with passion, to all that past indifference
and past destructiveness, whether purely wanton or due to
changes in religious or political faiths, have left us of the
plastic art of the Middle Ages. Too many complete works
have, alas ! been mutilated ; irreparable losses limit our
knowledge. But, on the one hand, profound and illumi-
nating researches, such as Male's for instance, have enabled us
to pierce the hidden meaning of these ' poems in stone '.
On the other hand, our architects and archaeologists had
long begun to study them for their plastic, historical, and
monumental value, and to disentangle them from the ill-
considered restorations which disfigure them. Casts of all
the most notable examples of medieval sculpture have been
placed to-day in musees documentaires, created for the use of
students or for the preservation of the originals. Finally,
Art Museums have collected fragments, formerly scattered
and neglected, and placed them side by side with the most
celebrated examples of the art of all nations.
I. Romanesque Art
The later centuries of ancient Rome are marked by
a complete decadence in the art of sculpture. Roman art,
heir to the plastic art of Greece, had degenerated even before
the fall of the Western Empire, and it declined still more
rapidly after the Latin world fell a prey to the barbarians.
It did not, however, entirely disappear. In Italy and in
96 Legacy of the Middle Ages
certain provinces of France, Provence, Auvergne, and along
the Rhine for instance, traditions of ancient art found
a refuge in workshops devoted to the fabrication of sarco-
phagi. These sarcophagi, which were pagan at first, were
later on used for Christian burials and were decorated with
Christian symbols. Such workshops were numerous all over
the Empire, particularly in the lower Rhone valley, and
their art gradually grew to be employed in the service of
a triumphant Christianity.
During a prolonged period, both in Italy and Gaul,
Christianity evinced a characteristic dislike to the use of
images as being too closely linked with paganism ; it pre-
ferred to employ designs common to mosaic and decorative
painting to beautify its temples and to illustrate its teaching.
In the East the Christian metropolis of Byzantium remained
in close contact with the culture and the art of Greece ;
on the other hand, she also assimilated large Asiatic elements,
and in spite of many disputes and many heated conflicts,
men persisted in expressing their ideas in sculptural form
and in retaining the use of images. And thus a rich and
abundant art was established in highly favourable circum-
stances and developed, right up to the fifteenth century, in
accordance with its own laws ; it was the earliest great
Christian art which set itself to interpret the dogmas
of faith and to construct a complete iconography. These
laws as well as the style of the East reacted on the entire art
of the West.
Naturally sculpture, and above all statues, played but
a small part in Byzantine art. Nevertheless sarcophagi were
made, very different from Latin ones, it is true, but yet
decorated with figures in relief. An important number of
these have been found in Ravenna and Venice, above all
small ivory monuments which were widely distributed ;
these ivories, in conjunction with paintings and fabrics
Medieval Sculpture 97
woven in designs, furnished the barbarian image-makers,
in search of ideas and new types, with delicate models
wherein something of the spirit of Greece mingled with
the strange fancies and sumptuous richness of the East.
Workshops founded on Byzantine principles of art were
widespread. One in the south-west of France, for instance,
produced a certain type of sarcophagus in direct relation
both with sculpture in low relief and with the ornamental
and somewhat over-elaborated richness of Byzantine art.
The Merovingian period was wholly barbarous and only
produced a few capitals, rough imitations of antique models
like those in the crypt of St. Lawrence at Grenoble, a few
lintels and a few friezes carved with geometrical or inter-
laced designs, such as those of Jouarre in France and of
Bradford-on-Avon in England. The Carolingian renaissance
is essentially a Byzantine renaissance. Byzantium alone, in
fact, was capable of giving Christendom examples of a living
art and also of teaching it the wisdom of ancient tradition.
The Palatine Chapel at Aix, the church of Germigny les
Pres are Byzantine buildings so far as structure and decora-
tion is concerned (ninth century). Statuary, strictly
speaking, plays no part in a Carolingian church. It is only
at the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh
centuries that the earliest attempts occur of the use of
figures in decoration. We have a few images in high relief
of this epoch still preserved, such as the statue in gold of
Sainte Foy de Conques which is one of the oldest specimens
of medieval statuary, heavy and rude enough, in spite of the
traces of Byzantine art which it reveals. The development
of plastic art in metal certainly seems in some parts of the
Christianized world to have preceded that of stone images.
It is this which enables us to assign to the beginning of the
eleventh century the remarkable works in bronze, such as
doors and columns in imitation of the column of Trajan,
2873 H
98 Legacy of the Middle Ages
which the sainted Bishop Bernwardt set up at Hildesheim ;
these works, undoubtedly of local craftsmanship but as
undoubtedly inspired by the antique, were imitated in the
doors of St. Zeno at Verona, although a number of bronze
doors in Italy, as at Amalfi and Benevento, were executed
by Byzantine workmen.
Decorative sculpture in the eleventh century still shows
us nothing but rude and awkward attempts, where the early
Romanesque carvers strive to reproduce in a relief, still
very low, motives borrowed from Greco-Roman or Byzantine
art. These may be acanthus leaves and scroll work more or
less altered and adapted, or geometrical ornamentations,
eastern in origin and probably barbarian ; or again certain
compositions taken from illuminated manuscripts, like the
figure of Christ seated * in majesty ' surrounded by winged
angels which was placed over the door of St. Genis des
Fontaines in RousiUon about the year 1020. But little by
little, at the end of the eleventh and beginning of the
twelfth century, an art, far more skilful and far richer, arose
with marvellous rapidity and so simultaneously that it is
difficult to assert that any one place was influenced by any
other ; this art strove, with greater seeking after expression
if with less skill than that of the old sarcophagus-makers,
to mould the human figure. On capitals and the tympana
of doorways, in cloisters and churches, stories were portrayed
which sought to interpret scenes from the Bible or allegories
taken from the Fathers and preachers. These alternated
with vaguer motives where the symbolic character of the
representations was often interwoven with the decorative
fancies of the craftsman who interpreted, freely and without
any very precise meaning, some fantastic idea suggested
by an Oriental fabric or Byzantine ivory : a lion, a chimera,
a bird, real or monstrous, conventional foliage or human
figures more or less well proportioned and well balanced.
Medieval Sculpture 99
If we consider the various centres in France, so active at
this epoch, Languedoc, Auvergne, Burgundy, Poitou, and
Saintonge, or those in the region of the Rhine and Saxony,
or in England, or again in Spain, the same effort is every-
where visible, in spite of slight differences; here in one
place a leaning to the East, there in another to classical
antiquity ; here a prodigality of figures and there a restriction
to linear decoration ; here an entire fagade covered with an
Oriental profusion of ornament, as in the schools of western
France ; there a certain vigorous sobriety as in those of
Normandy and their English derivatives, where moreover
Saxon and Irish influences accentuated the taste for com-
binations of curved lines and the barbaric interfacings which
flourished in Scandinavia.
Some great scenes of monumental sculpture date from
the first third of the twelfth century. The clumsy seated
figure of Christ, in St. Sernin at Toulouse, surrounded by
cherubim and in the act of blessing, probably belongs to
the last years of the eleventh century. The Christ at
St. Emeran at Ratisbon is of the same period. But at this date
there also appeared in the tympana at Moissac, Souillac,
and Beaulieu, and later at Autun and Vezelay, vast and
tumultuous scenes from the Vision of the Apocalypse, the
Last Judgement or Pentecost, dominated by grandiose
figures of Christ giving his benediction or coming to judge
the quick and the dead. Elsewhere, in the rough-hewn
reliefs, like those at Extern in Westphalia, in the low reliefs,
as those of Chichester Cathedral in England and in the
cloisters of San Domingo de Silos in Spain, various scenes
from the New Testament were depicted : the Descent
from the Cross, the raising of Lazarus, the Crucifixion, or
the holy women at the tomb of Christ. Imagination and
a desire to animate the figures, to crowd the composition
with innumerable accessories and with complicated episodes,
H 2
ioo Legacy of the Middle Ages
all testify to a singularly vigorous intelligence. Human art
seemed to have rediscovered a meaning and a secret which
it had lost, and these image-carvers devoted themselves with
enthusiasm to plastic representations which were veritable
creations.
It was a new plastic art, varied, alive, youthful, and full
of growth which came into being. Depending on Byzantine
iconography for its compositions, it also made use of secular
models and traditions, while at the same time endowing
them with life. It was an art at once very young and very
old, rich in fresh inspiration and in ancient tradition, and
the rapidity of its growth, more startling than in any other
archaic art whatsoever, can perhaps be rightly explained by
this fact. It found in itself, however, its sources of expression
and movement, enlarging to monumental size tiny models
in ivory or translating into relief flat illuminations ; forcing
itself to rediscover, without being conscious of it, the
meaning of sculpture, of an image living and true, by
studying in nature, as yet instinctively and haltingly and in
defiance of conventions and formulas, the right treatment
of faces, bodies, and drapery.
The truth that mere imitation was not enough to vivify
these early efforts lies in the fact that Italy was far from
being, at this moment, at the head of the creative move-
ment. The Lombard art which flourished at Milan,
Verona, Parma, and Modena, and the art of Bonnano and
Gruamonte of Pisa is heavy and lifeless. We have to wait
for the coming of Benedetto Antelami to the cathedral and
baptistry of Parma to find any effort at original composition
and living sculpture. If this Lombard art has any con-
nexion with a French school, if it contributed in any way
to its formation, it can only be with the school of Provence.
It is certain that this latter school, as shown by the portals
of St. Gilles du Gard and St. Trophime at Aries, is late in
o
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Medieval Sculpture 101
development and lacking in originality and initiative.
Other schools, particularly those in Languedoc, spread
abroad their influence and their new discoveries, especially
in the direction of Spain. If this influence is disputed, at
least it must be admitted that from the twelfth century
onwards workshops flourished on both slopes of the Pyrenees
and on either side of the Rhine.
II. Gothic Art
One thing is at any rate incontrovertible. Just as in
the twelfth century a new style of architecture, which we
call * Gothic ' and medieval authors more properly ' opus
Francigenum ', arose in France, most probably northern
France, so in the same way works in plastic art had made
by the middle of the century such marked progress that
we are entitled to consider them as the most perfect expres-
sion of Romanesque art. Yet they still retained the same
naivete and amplitude, the same aspect, at once decorative
and monumental; but, undoubtedly, they constituted the
starting-point of that subtler and more human art which
blossomed forth in the thirteenth century.
The Royal portal at Chartres, which dates somewhere
about 1 145, is the perfect expression of the art of the epoch ;
for the somewhat earlier portal of St. Denis is too mutilated
and disfigured to be taken as an example. If we compare
the grand figures of the tympana at Chartres with the
scarcely older ones of Moissac and Vezelay, we find that
the Christ of the Apocalyptic vision and the Virgin Mother
seated in majesty show a restrained nobility, a perfection
in the rendering of faces and gestures, a certainty of touch
in the treatment of the drapery hitherto entirely unknown.
Round these large figures a series of scenes and smaller
figures are placed on the lintels of the tympana, on the
archivolts, and on the capitals of the shafts which enrich the
102 Legacy of the Middle Ages
jambs of the doorways. These show a justness of proportion,
a restraint and fitness of gesture which mark a similar
remarkable progress. But it is the life-size figures standing
on the supporting shafts which show the most incontestable
and delightful freshness. Still lank and stiff, still an integral
part of the building which they complete and vivify, they
exhibit in all the details of position, dress, headgear, and
type of face a search after exact truth and a quality in the
workmanship which is truly amazing, when we remember
that a bare half-century had elapsed since the newly revived
plastic art could only express itself in the most archaic
manner. The style and the way of placing these statues at
Chartres won popularity not only in France, where similar
portals were set up in the second half of the century, at
Bourges, Angers, Le Mans, Corbeil, St. Loup de Naud, and
elsewhere, but also in England in the cathedral of Rochester,
in Saxony in the Golden Door at Freiberg, in Spain in the
door of the * Gloria ' at St. James of Compostella. In the
case of this last example the style is in marked contrast to
the earlier c Toulousain ' style of the rest of the celebrated
pilgrimage church. Between the west door at Chartres,
which belongs to the cathedral which was burnt down in
1194, and the transepts, which were not built till about the
beginning of the thirteenth century and which belong
unquestionably to Gothic art, an intermediary series can
be noted. In these the rules and conventionalities of
Romanesque art disappear one by one ; the style is clearly
simpler and less encumbered with those trammels of tradi-
tion which had served to sustain it in its early stages. In the
style of decoration this simplification, this tendency towards
naturalism, this transition to pure Gothic is easy to see;
but we can also clearly mark these changes in the carvings
of the St. Anne door in Notre-Dame at Paris, in the statue
of St. fitienne at Sens, and in the portal of Notre-Dame at
io. ST. FIRMIN BLESSING
j ; vrrr/7, ri ,
Medieval Sculpture 103
Senlis. The change was hardly complete when the side-
portals at Chartres were built and this is specially noticeable
in the south door, where the upright Christ on the trumeau
and the Apostles ranged along the shafts at the sides of the
doorway are seen under an austere Last Judgement. A
somewhat harsh regularity is still characteristic of this
particular workshop, a certain constraint in gesture, a certain
conventionality in the drapery. Perfect balance was not
attained till between the years 1220 and 1230 when the
Confessor's door, with its admirable figures of St. George
and St. Theodore, was built at Chartres. To the same
years belong the door with the Coronation of the Virgin at
Notre-Dame in Paris and the entire portal at Amiens with
its three incomparable statues on the trumeaux ; these are
the Christ as Teacher, known as the * Beau Dieu ' of Amiens,
the Virgin standing with the Child in her arms, and the
bishop, St. Firmin, in the act of blessing. All the intricacies,
all the awkwardnesses of the earlier art have gone ; only
a monumental grandeur remains, with the perfect adapta-
tion of the figures to the architecture they adorn and from
which they are scarcely emancipated. A certain austerity
of style also remains tempered with a humanity, a truth,
both psychological and plastic. The craftsman seems to
be less interested in the imitation of mere details and the
faces are possibly less individual, but the idealistic nobility
of the type does not exclude a real contact with nature.
The gestures are true without being over-accentuated, the
draperies natural without being excessively complicated in
their folds. It is the same with subjects less sublime than
the large statues and supernatural scenes, such as the
Coronation of the Virgin and the Last Judgement ; in
scenes depicting the lives of the saints, in representations
of the cardinal virtues and vices or the monthly round of
work, a homeliness and a justness of inspiration is combined
104 Legacy of the Middle Ages
with an austerity, terse and synthetic, which exclude all
anecdote and mere picturesqueness.
This was undoubtedly the golden age of medieval sculp-
ture, its classic period, because its development is serene
and its mastery of its materials complete, while it seems to
shun all movement and over-expression. As was natural,
it was a brief moment in its never-ceasing evolution. This
evolution, pursued in the decoration of the side-portals of
Chartres Cathedral, especially the exterior porches built
after 1235, was continued in the transept doors of Notre-
Dame at Paris after 1250. It can also be seen in the varied
and truly admirable carving in Notre-Dame at Reims
which was in active course of construction from 1210 on-
wards. At Reims the statues were begun in the earliest
style of Chartres, were continued in the severe style of
Amiens, as may be seen in the Annunciation or the Pre-
sentation in the Temple, and towards the middle of the
thirteenth century culminated in the marvellous master-
pieces which typify the true art of Reims, an art full of
vigour and life, of supple and delicate grace. This art is
illustrated in the supernumerary figures of the Presentation,
the attendant of Mary and the St. Joseph, in the St. Nicaise
and his acolyte, the delicious smiling angel, so justly
celebrated, to mention only the most typical of the larger
figures in the west portal ; also in the scenes from the life
of St. Nicaise and the Last Judgement on the tympana of
the north door ; the Passion and the Apocalypse on the
west archivolts ; the Church and the Synagogue and Adam
and Eve in the transept, and so on.
The statues stand almost completely detached from the
column or from the background of the tympanum ; they
pulsate with their own individual life ; they carry on
veritable dialogues between themselves, quietly, without
gesticulation or noise. Proud of his skill, the master-carver
Medieval Sculpture 105
strives to make their faces, whether serious or smiling,
really alive, to endow them with spiritual grace ; he aims
at giving movement to the sculptural scenes, a sense of the
confused animation of a crowd, or of the dramatic aspect
of the Passion ; while in the little figures of the calendar,
or in those which he carved on the pedestals of the big
images he inclines to an anecdotal familiarity, after the
manner of a genre picture. Elsewhere the decorative masks
express by the play of their features the whole gamut of
human feeling from perfect serenity to subtle irony or
jovial conviviality. In these workshops there is shown an
infinite amount of research and an extraordinary precocity.
All the art of the following centuries, realistic, imaginative,
emotional, can be here found in the germ. Nothing is
lacking even to the intelligent and conscious imitation of
antique beauty. In the famous group of the Visitation, and
in other figures, whose inspiration is a mystery, the breadth,
the suppleness, the thin and clinging draperies recall the
Greek masterpieces of the fifth century B.C. and suggest thoee
of a Renaissance where Christianity had survived in all its
intensity.
Finally, in the second half of the thirteenth century such
works as the Virgin of the Golden Door at Amiens, where
the new ideal of the Virgin, tender and smiling Mother,
graceful and exquisite Queen, or the Last Judgement at
Bourges, crowded, fanciful, and full of amusing details, show
the ever-increasing intricacies of this art ; the bas-reliefa
of Rouen and Auxerre, where scenes from Genesis, lives of
saints, figures of fantastical Bestiaries are represented, also
indicate a less monumental tendency as well as a love of
daintiness and variety. It was similar to the change at the
end of the thirteenth century, when we enter into the
purely ornamental type of sculpture with the mighty
capitals * a crochets ' of Notre-Dame, whose floral designs,
106 Legacy of the Middle Ages
mingled with or substituted for Romanesque motives, still
show a magnificent simplicity and rhythm, and pass on to
* corbeilles ' of unparalleled virtuosity, to flowers and leaves
carved in undercut work, to friezes sculptured in high
relief and almost too naturalistic in treatment.
These great works of the thirteenth century are almost all
concentrated in the cathedrals of northern France, those
sublime examples of Gothic art at its culminating point :
Chartres, Laon, Paris, Amiens, Reims, Bourges. Each
church has its own iconographic cycle, more or less complete
and dominated at first by Christ the Teacher, and the Last
Judgement, and later by the Virgin Mother and her glorious
apotheosis. In place of the styles of the provincial schools
of Romanesque architecture, so varied in their originality,
an almost uniform style was substituted derived from the
builders of the lle-de- France ; only slight differences in
details mark the different centres. In the same way plastic
art spread its influence on every side. Certain localities,
Languedoc for instance, which was so active in the twelfth
century, ceased to produce owing to the political conditions
of the times ; others followed the lead of the royal domain, as
was the case in Burgundy, where in Notre-Dame at Dijon,
at Semur and at St. Thibault, some important examples of
decorative carving and figures were produced which were
scarcely influenced by local feeling. In the cathedrals of
Poitiers, Bordeaux, and Bayonne some fine pieces were also
directly inspired by the northern statues and high reliefs
but without attaining their perfection. At Lyons the portal
of the cathedral is covered with a decoration of small bas-
reliefs in quatrefoils, so like those of Rouen that we can
scarcely distinguish one from the other.
It is well known how the glory of French Gothic art
spread over the whole of Christendom in the days of St.
Medieval Sculpture 107
Louis. In many places outside France Romanesque lasted
into the thirteenth century, here heavy and debased, there
more alive and bearing an obvious local impress. But no-
where except in the north of France can we watch the slow
evolution of Gothic art from the archaism of Chartres to
the classicism of Paris. Characteristic imitations of French
Gothic, as at Bamberg, or strong and individual works like
those of Niccolo Pisano in Italy, which in a certain measure
drew their inspiration from the same source, appeared quite
suddenly in the second half of the thirteenth century.
A little group of examples, which show a curious revival of
antique art, had preceded these in Apulia and Campania,
under Frederic II.
In Germany the survival of Romanesque is specially
characteristic. It attained a perfection of style, easy, and
elegant, which gives an impression of a rejuvenated Byzan-
tine art. The most perfect examples of this can be seen
in the bas-reliefs at Halberstadt and in St. Michael at
Hildesheim. On the other hand, in the bas-reliefs in the
choir of St. George at Bamberg there is an obvious striving
after violent expression and extravagance of characterization.
These are the same traits that we shall find a little later on
in Germany ; they first of all crept insidiously into the
imitations of French Gothic in the portals of Bamberg,
especially in the grinning faces in the Last Judgement and
also in the celebrated statues of the Virgin and St. Elizabeth
in the choir, which were undoubtedly suggested by the
Visitation at Reims. At Magdeburg the wise and foolish
Virgins, a subject repeated at Strasbourg, Nuremberg, and
Erfurt, laugh, cry, and gesticulate with an exaggeration of
sentiment which is slightly vulgar. At Naumburg the
statues of the Saxon princes of past ages show an attempt at
individuality and a power of expression rare at the date to
which we must assign them (1260-75). Such were the
io8 Legacy of the Middle Ages
characteristics which were to be met with at Strasbourg and
Bale and other places along the Rhine, half-way between
Reims and Bamberg, characteristics which grew more pro-
nounced farther east.
The French influence in Spain is still more typical.
In the age of Gothic it was French architects who built the
cathedrals of Burgos and Leon, and mainly French sculptors
who decorated them. The Last Judgement in the cathedral
of Leon bears a close relationship to that of Bourges and the
dramatic or spiritual elements are here yet more complicated.
If at Burgos the Sarmental door presents a somewhat dry
and awkward version of the Apocalyptic Vision, the decora-
tion of the doorway into the cloister is unequalled in its
richness and breadth ; it seems almost in advance of the
thirteenth century. The same can be said of the portrait
statues of the kings of Castille which adorn the cloister.
English cathedrals of the thirteenth century also show an
intimate relation with the movement in France, although
the connexion between the one country and the other
cannot always be traced. In England it is a question of
small work, bas-reliefs, medallions, and spandrils rather than
of large decorated surfaces, like the facade of Wells Cathedral.
By the end of the twelfth century at Durham and by the
middle of the thirteenth at Lincoln and Westminster Abbey,
little scenes from the Bible or half figures of angels of great
beauty are to be met with. But it is in the effigies on tombs
carved in stone, wood, and Purbeck marble, or sometimes
cast or beaten in metal, that the most original work was
done. The oldest of these in England, a twelfth-century
tomb, would seem to have been copied from the tombs at
Tournay ; others at the beginning of the thirteenth century
still have the finely folded drapery and other characteristics
of purely Romanesque art. The fine bronze effigies, executed
in 1291 by the London goldsmith William Torel for the
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Medieval Sculpture 109
tombs of Henry III and his daughter-in-law Eleanor of
Castille, resemble in the severe dignity of their style the
figures at St. Denis, carved in stone about 1250 to represent
the long series of the ancestors of St. Louis. But we must
not forget that the two undertakings were separated by forty
years, and that by 1290 French art had already begun to
abandon strict idealism in favour of real and strongly marked
portraiture in effigies on tombs.
In Italy, although Gothic was not adopted in all its
developments, yet buildings were erected in the French
style at the end of the twelfth and in the thirteenth cen-
turies. These buildings, monastic for the most part, had
little carving of any sort and scarcely any of a purely orna-
mental nature, fimile Bertaux has, however, brought to
light all that the first great exponent of Italian sculpture
at the end of the thirteenth century, Niccolo Pisano, owes to
France, possibly through his Apulian origin and his early con-
tact with Norman workshops in Southern Italy. The decora-
tion of the choir at Pisa by Niccolo dated from 1260. The
composition of certain of Niccolo's bas-reliefs, the quite novel
animation which he gives to the heavy and crowded carvings
in high relief, which were in use before his time but whose
Greco-Roman characteristics he exaggerated, are possibly
partly due to Northern influence and to already existing
examples of the style, partly to the artistic individualism,
always common in Italy, of an original and master mind.
Immediately following him, his son Giovanni repudiated
all inspiration from the antique. In his share of the pulpit
at Siena (1266), as in those of St. Andrew at Pistojaand the
cathedral at Pisa, he shows himself as a realist given to an
extreme of characterization, surpassing all the marked
excesses of the Northern Gothic of his day, a precursor,
in short, of Donatello and Mantegna. Certain Virgins with
the Child, however, from the workshops of the two Pisani
no Legacy of the Middle Ages
and their successors, show a striking resemblance to the
French style, for example to the Golden Virgin of Amiens,
which was copied far and wide throughout the fourteenth
century. The art of Fra Guglielmo was simpler and quieter,
and the same can be said of Tino da Camaino of Siena.
It is to them that the canopied type of tomb placed against
the wall is due. Examples of their work can be seen at
Florence, Orvieto, and Naples. The style lasted in Italy
for two hundred years. This particular style of sculpture
was generally executed in marble or bronze and is rarely
to be met with in any large architectural masses. When
Andrea Pisano, and later on Ghiberti, made use again of
small quatrefoils filled with biblical scenes in bas-relief with
two or three figures in each analogous to the Gothic work at
Rouen and Lyons, they only used them for folding doors in
bronze. One of the few important pieces of decorative
work in which sculpture plays an important part is the
facade of Orvieto Cathedral, whose initial conception, due
to Lorenzo Maitani of Siena, recalls its French origin in
some small measure. It shows, however, a difference of idea
in the division of the bas-reliefs into friezes, representing
the Tree of Jesse, the Last Judgement, and the Creation,
an idea which is far from having the same value as that which
appeared in the French tradition of the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries.
III. Sculpture in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
After the death of St. Louis and the building of the last
of the great cathedrals, a marked change took place in the
general type of French sculpture. A new ideal appeared,
more graceful, finer, more sharply cut ; the skill of the
carver increased, but his interest in style, in dignity, in
adaptation of his work to buildings diminished. The age
Medieval Sculpture HI
of vast monumental work was past. A single statue, or
statuette, an altar reredos, took the place of the great
works of yore, just as painted panels replaced huge decora-
tive frescoes. Little by little the very virtuosity of the
craftsmen created formulas ; a sort of preciosity appeared
or an excessive striving after individuality and expression.
A love of familiar scenes increased, joined with a striving
after violent feeling, passion, suffering. Instead of Christ,
lofty and serene, the Man of Sorrows is represented ; cheeks
were hollowed, eyes laughed or were distorted with feeling,
attitudes were contorted and subjects overloaded with
picturesque details. It was the complex reality of life that
they strove to seize ; it was the beginning of * naturalism *.
But the most typical change of all was the introduction of
* portraiture ', an art hitherto unknown. The recumbent
figures on tombs at the end of the twelfth and throughout
the thirteenth centuries were conventional idealized figures.
There appeared, however, in the royal burial-place at St. Denis
the first real portrait of a king that has been preserved,
that of St. Louis's son, Philip III le Hardi, whose tomb
was the joint production of Pierre de Chelles and Jean
d'Arras. It is true that the figure of another of St. Louis's
sons, buried at Royaumont before 1275, shows certain
indications of an individual realism, while later on in the
first half of the fourteenth century effigies are still to be
found of fair ladies and brave knights carved in the old
idealistic style. The change was neither sudden nor com-
plete.
But it is in the figure of the Virgin Mother that the
change was most speedily shown. The Golden Virgin of
Amiens, which dates from 1288, has already been men-
tioned. In stone, marble, wood, and ivory, standing or
sitting, multitudes of statues followed which all bear witness
to the fervour of the worship of the Virgin, whose role of
ii2 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Protectress became more and more a part of a religion less
lofty but more tender than of old. They also bear witness
to the imaginative ingenuity of the craftsmen who com-
posed these groups of the Virgin and Child, often charming,
often a little stereotyped, sometimes slipping into the
insipid elegance of merely pious imagery. Taste deteriorated
and the noble lady of the thirteenth century became
a simple housewife in everyday clothes by the end of the
fourteenth, or a peasant woman dandling or suckling her
quite ordinary babe. Still of serious mien, sometimes
scarcely smiling at the Child that she holds on her left arm,
the Virgin, lightly veiled in many fine and supple folds,
the outline of the hip strongly marked, is directly inspired
by direct observation. At the same time the prophets and
apostles bearded, smiling, or frowning, draped in many
folded cloaks make a contrast to these gracious statues of
the Virgin, of angels and youthful saints, from the figures
of the Sainte Chapelle at Paris to those of the Chapelle de
Rieux at Toulouse. By the end of the fourteenth century
the saints lose their simple attributes and begin to be sur-
rounded with a multitude of picturesque accessories bor-
rowed either from everyday life or from the mystery plays.
Again, the origin of many of the carvings on rood and
choir screens, as well as on the reredoses of the family,
mortuary, or guild chapels which clustered round the
churches, can be traced to the love of these mystery plays.
A sense of the picturesque developed, accompanied by
a dramatic sense in depicting the scenes of the Passion.
Especially this is noticeable in the representations of the
Entombment, which was a more popular subject than any
other throughout the fifteenth century. There was an
effort to express every variety and intensity of human feeling
on the faces of the actors combined with a very noble and
impressive composition
Medieval Sculpture 113
The problem arises in relation to this striking transforma-
tion in Gothic art : What is the origin of this new feeling
for realism which became so apparent in French, and indeed
in European, art at this moment ? It has often been
explained by calling it Franco-Flemish, and though it is true
that artists came from the north to France, especially to
the court of the Valois kings, yet these were by no means
always natives of Flanders. Quite as often they came from
the Meuse country, or were Walloons, as were Pepin de Huy,
Andre Beauneveu of Valenciennes, and Jean of Liege, who
were all among the best-known masters of the period. But
they did not bring with them ready made formulas. The
Low Countries, both northern and southern, had been
influenced either by the Rhine countries or by France
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and it cannot
be safely asserted that they had founded a school of their
own. The font at St. Bartholomew at Liege, the work of
Renier de Huy, which is so astounding when its date (1112)
is taken into account, undoubtedly ought to be associated
with the early German work of the Romanesque period;
while, on the other hand, carvings on buildings, such as
those on the portal of the Hospital of St. John at Bruges,
the statues in the porch of Tournay and even the St. Catherine
of Courtray, fourteenth- century work attributed to Beau-
neveu, are in the purest French style.
The political development and economic activity of the
Flemish towns, particularly from the fourteenth century
onward, gave a special importance to the provinces along the
Meuse and the Scheldt. They certainly supplied artists
and craftsmen of a singularly vigorous temperament, but
it is not so certain that they brought any difference of
tradition with them to the court of France and later to that
of Burgundy. The great workshops of the thirteenth
century were undoubtedly the sources of their tradition ;
2873 i
ii4 Legacy of the Middle Ages
as for the new tendencies, which changed and debased the
pure Gothic art of those workshops, these have already been
dealt with.
It was during the first part of the fifteenth century
that an art peculiar to the Low Countries arose in all its
originality and power of expression. Examples of its
products spread over the whole of Europe in the form of
wood carvings of an exuberant virtuosity, enhanced by
paint and gilding and accompanied by panels painted in
oils. These were produced in great quantities by the
artists of Ghent, Brussels, Bruges, and Antwerp. France
also absorbed a large number of reredoses and retables of
this sort which were sometimes copied by French workmen.
This style of work penetrated into North Germany, Sweden,
and Norway as well as into Spain. But whereas Spain
scarcely used anything except imported works, Germany
only employed Flemish models as a starting-point for work
of her own. It is possible that masters from the Low
Countries settled in Germany ; at any rate it is certain
that workshops flourished there and large quantities of
carvings in wood were produced. The German tendency
to movement and gesture, already noticed, exaggerated the
Flemish taste for the picturesque, the dramatic, and the
homely, as can be seen very clearly at Nuremberg, Wiirzburg,
and Ulm. In German tombs, where the sculpture had
always leaned towards over-accentuated feeling, portrait
effigies of princes and bishops grew rapidly in number and
were often too forcibly speaking likenesses.
But to return to France in the fourteenth century, it is
clear that the inspiration of the new art was frequently
counterbalanced by the strength of the Gothic tradition
of the thirteenth century. This is seen most clearly when
French productions are compared with those of other
countries. The Virgins of the lle-de-France show an
Medieval Sculpture 115
unconstrained dignity and a delicate grace truly remarkable.
In the matter of portraiture the works of the age are notice-
able for their nobility and their wonderful poise, as can be
seen in the royal effigies in St. Denis, in the statues of
Charles V and his wife Jeanne de Bourbon from the
portal of the Celestins in Paris, now in the Louvre, in the
figures carved on the chimney-piece at Poitiers, and lastly
in those of the buttresses of Amiens Cathedral added in
the fourteenth century. Finally in exceptional examples,
such as the Coronation of the Virgin at La Ferte Milon,
there is a breadth of composition and a majesty of treat-
ment to which no other European art attained in the
fourteenth century.
No doubt it was this living tradition united to the
individual work of men of genius which about 1400 created
a new art in Burgundy, fostered by favourable political
and economic conditions and by the wealth of Philip le
Hardi and Jean sans peur, but it is vain to seek the secret
of its origin in the nationality of its earliest craftsmen.
It is assuredly true, however, that the best examples of
Burgundian work, at the end of the fourteenth and the
beginning of the fifteenth centuries, were begun by an
artist who came from the Meuse country, Jean de Marville,
and were finished by two Dutchmen, Claus Sluter and
Claus van Werve : namely, the portal of the Charterhouse
of Champnol, the Well of Moses, and the Ducal tombs at
Dijon. But before the advent of these artists nothing in
their own country could account for the vigour and ampli-
tude of these figures, whether great or small, whether
Virgins, saints, prophets, donors, effigies, or c weepers ' ;
all alike with strongly marked features as alive and expressive
as nature herself, all clothed in gorgeous drapery falling in
majestically ample folds, and all obviously taken from actual
models. The court of Charles V at Paris and later the works
I 2
n6 Legacy of the Middle Ages
undertaken at Angers, Bourges, and Mehun sur Yevre could
very effectively furnish Claus Sluter with models by which
he was well fitted to profit.
The style set by Sluter lasted for nearly a century and
was practised both in Burgundy and in many parts of
France. At Moulins, Avignon, Albi, and Toulouse a con-
siderable quantity of carving inspired by it can be seen,
tombs, Virgins, Holy Sepulchres, all of which exaggerate
both his good qualities and his faults. Clumsiness, a certain
grossness, and sometimes a vulgarity mingled with a spicy
good humour are combined with an easy strength of execu-
tion and a happiness in composition, as for example in the
tomb of Philippe Pot, where the antique theme of weepers *
is developed to a high degree of merit and reaches monu-
mental size.
By Tranche Comte, Switzerland and Alsace this Burgun-
dian art invaded Germany and certainly made its influence
felt. It is even open to question whether, up to a point,
it did not also influence Italian masters of the fifteenth
century : Ghiberti, Donatello, and Jacopo della Quercia.
At this epoch northern art had certainly penetrated into
Italy, a penetration to be repaid later on in ample measure.
Written evidence survives to prove this in regard to Ghiberti,
who praises a certain Maestro Tedesco who had known
and influenced him in his youth. Some of Donatello's
prophets forcibly recall those in the Chartreuse at Champnol,
and there is a certain St. Louis of Toulouse by him which
has the heaviness and the robust amplitude of a Burgundian
statue. Trade and travel brought countries into relation
with each other. In northern Italy at the end of the
fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries,
especially at Venice, Verona, and Milan, the works of the
two brothers Massegna, the capitals of the Ducal Palace,
the tombs of the Scaligers, and even the bas-reliefs of
Medieval Sculpture 117
Orcagna at Florence, all seem to prove clearly the influence
of Western art.
However this may be, it is an analogous phenomenon ; it is
a beginning of that realism which, tardily enough, renewed
and revivified in Italy the Gothic art of Pisa and Florence.
For Gothic art had here worn itself out in dull repetitions
after Giotto's curiously learned and allegorical work on the
Campanile of Florence in 1334 and Nino Pisano's charming
if somewhat finicking compositions. The earliest and
greatest of the Quattrocento artists, Ghiberti, Donatello, and
Jacopo della Quercia, were above all things embued with
realism and nature. But at the same time they were also
under the influence of humanism. Humanism, which began
with Petrarch in the fourteenth century, spread over the whole
of Italy and, owing to the passionate love of Brunelleschi,
Michelozzo, and Alberti for everything antique, speedily
influenced all exterior decoration whether architectural
or any other art. In other lands it did not spread beyond
the realm of knowledge and erudition. Italy took the
lead in this Renaissance of the classics from the beginning
of the fifteenth century. When at its end, thanks to the
Italian wars and to the prodigious fame won by Italian art
by that time, the influence of humanism spread from Italy
to northern Europe, the art it taught was an art saturated
with Greek and Roman feeling. It was the Renaissance of
the classics that it spread abroad.
During the fifteenth century Northern art had not
ceased to be active. It would be an error even to think that
it had become so entirely degenerate that a renaissance was
essential. By the fatality of evolution it had doubtless
deviated from the noble and pure ideal of the thirteenth
century ; it had even lost the almost too exquisite grace,
the hard incisive strength of the fourteenth century. But
n8 Legacy of the Middle Ages
it was still living, still as varied as possible. National
schools had grown up, and these national schools were each
subdivided into various vigorous secondary schools, similar
and yet distinct from each other. Those of Germany and
the Low Countries have already been mentioned. Spain,
after following France, was overrun with Flemish artists
and productions. But Frenchmen, Burgundians, and
Italians also flocked to share in the hospitality and orders of
Spain, and by the end of the century, thanks to the riches
poured into the country after the discovery of America,
these cosmopolitan studios worked with an intensity and an
abundance of output which was truly prodigious. The
churches, convents, and palaces they produced were the
most sumptuous in all Christendom.
From the thirteenth century in England, the local
schools, while accepting French and Flemish styles, developed
along their own original lines with great activity. They
largely contributed to the enrichment of the c flamboyant '
styles, and later to the * perpendicular ' which followed it so
closely. Their work for the most part was represented by
series of statues enshrined in their proper niches or forming
mural decorations, or in the adornment of rood-lofts, of
reredos and of stalls, all of exquisite workmanship but rarely
attaining to -anything truly impressive or living in either
figures or scenes. Their general effect is, on the whole,
cold and lacking in vitality. Tombs were an object of
special luxury. That of Dame Eleanor Percy at Beverley
Minster, with its highly ornamental canopy and little
figures like those at Strasbourg, executed in the fourteenth
century, or that of Richard Beauchamp at Warwick, in the
fifteenth, with its mourning groups like the tombs at Dijon,
are among the most characteristic examples. To these
must be added a number of tombs in bronze, such as
those of Edward IIPs at Westminster and of the Black Prince
Medieval Sculpture 119
at Canterbury, two of the finest realistic portrait effigies of
the century.
A special monumental and industrial art was developed
in England in the fourteenth century and very largely
practised in the fifteenth : that of alabaster tombs. The
material was taken from the quarries of Chellaston in
Derbyshire, and for the most part carved in the workshops
of Nottingham. Sepulchral effigies in alabaster were ex-
ported to the Continent, and still more commonly small
religious objects, often statuettes cut in relief and attached
to panels destined sometimes for the bases of tombs, and
sometimes for the construction of a detached reredos.
Generally these represented the Passion or scenes from the
life of the Virgin. This industrial art, whose success was
assured in the fourteenth century, produced throughout the
fifteenth pieces easily portable and executed in a style
which, though a little fixed and monotonous, was not devoid
of liveliness and expressiveness. Its products were spread
over the whole of Europe, in France, Spain, the Low
Countries, Germany, and even as far as Norway, rivalling
the Flemish retables and reredoses to which they bore
some resemblance in the multiplicity of the figures in their
compositions, but marred by the wearisome repetition of
thin and angular forms and faces lacking in expression.
In France at the end of the Hundred Years' War a new
activity arose side by side with the style peculiar to the
Burgundian workshops. This was particularly the case in
the valley of the Loire, where the ruin and devastation of
war had not penetrated and where the royal court had set
up its abode. Bourges, in the days of Jean de Berry and
Jacques Cceur, and Tours, where Charles VII and Louis XI
lived when not residing in one or other of the neighbouring
castles of Chinon, Loches, or Le Plessis, were important
centres. In these two towns a very charming art came into
120 Legacy of the Middle Ages
existence, less grandiose and striking than that of Burgundy.
It is very clearly illustrated by the rare examples which have
survived to the present day, as for instance, by the recum-
bent effigies of the Bueil family in Touraine, by the
sumptuous decorations of certain mansions like that of
Jacques Coeur at Bourges, or by more simple houses in
town or country where the carving is in wood, or again by
statues in stone of the Virgin and Saints in the chapel of
Dunois Castle at Chateaudun, or by other similar sacred
carvings. All are simple, charming, delicate, realistic, and
though fully draped yet entirely free from fatiguing details
and virtuosity. Gracefulness, perception, and a sense of just
proportion predominate in this art rather than mere size
or any special style. Something of the style of French
Gothic of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries reappears
here after a realism a trifle common and a little over-straining
after dramatic effect. In short, it is both a return to tradi-
tional purity and a kind of calm after the forced and over-
expressive style which had prevailed through several genera-
tions. Truly it was an exquisite and harmonious art, whether
seen in the paintings of Jean Fouquet of Tours or in the
sculpture of his fellow townsman, and almost contem-
porary, Michel Colombe. Born somewhere about 1430
and settled in Tours in his early manhood, Michel Colombe
is known to us only by the work of his old age done at a
date when Italian influences were already penetrating into
France. It was inevitable that he should accept a certain
amount of collaboration in the decorative parts of his work,
and adopt certain ultra-montane iconographic themes in
the composition of his statuary. Nevertheless he remained
essentially French and Gothic in spirit. This fact is obvious
even in the Virtues with which he engirdled the tomb of
Francois II of Brittany at Nantes (1505-10), which was
made after an Italianized design by his colleague Perreal.
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Medieval Sculpture 121
It is still more obvious in the quite Gothic and realistic
St. George at Gaillon, although this was set between pilasters
and arabesques in a purely Italian style. Some years earlier
than the date of Francois of Brittany's tomb, a French
master, probably a native of Tours and sometimes identified,
though with less certainty, with Michel Colombe, carved
the magnificent Easter Sepulchre at Solesmes. On either
side of the monument he placed architectural and decorative
' motifs ' in the Italian style, which are closely allied to
Gothic art in their graceful intricacies and their vigorous
treatment of traditionally flamboyant foliage. But in the
centre he installed the superb group of the Entombment,
perhaps the most beautiful of all those which have already
been described. This group, with its restrained and
balanced composition, worthy of the great cathedral portals,
with its strength and impressive truthfulness in the treat-
ment of the figures, in the satisfying breadth of its draperies,
all culminating in the weeping Magdalen seated and rapt
in prayer, assuredly is the last of the great Gothic master-
pieces, one of the most perfect, the most touching, the most
human. In itself alone it proves the grandeur and the
power, the underlying delicacy, the plastic and moral value,
of medieval sculpture throughout four centuries. For if
some works of outstanding genius surpass the rest, as does
this sepulchre at Solesmes, yet it must not be forgotten
that in every age on the eve of the Renaissance, just as in
the cathedral and Romanesque epochs, these exceptional
examples were always surrounded and supported by an
abundant crop of lesser works. It is by such, grouped
round greater masterpieces and embued with the qualities
proper to their own particular age, that the greatness and the
allurement of all art is made, whatever form it may take.
PAUL VITRY.
iii. DECORATIVE AND INDUSTRIAL ARTS
THE industrial arts of the Middle Ages do not hold, their
due place in the history of art ; they have, indeed, left
nothing behind them that can be compared with the
cathedral of Reims or the * Beau Dieu ' of Amiens ; and
the very materials which the craftsmen used, precious
metals, copper, pottery, glass, linen, wool, or silk, are too
tempting or too frail to survive the threatening hands of
many generations. Inventories describe for us an immense
quantity of goldsmiths' work ; such work was heaped up
in the treasuries of churches, it lay on the tables of princes,
lords, and citizens; but the great dishes that were the
pride of the Merovingian kings, the famous treasures that
Charlemagne collected at Aix-la-Chapelle, the gold plate
of the bankers of the Renaissance, have almost all vanished,
stolen, plundered, or melted down in times of war or revolu-
tion. The Byzantine or Syrian silks, the English and French
embroideries of the early Middle Ages, the innumerable
tapestries of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth cen-
turies are described affectionately in the old chronicles and
in the old epics, in romances and in inventories ; all that
remain are a few precious fragments that cover the relics
of a saint, or some rare specimen the pride of a collection or
a museum. Stained-glass windows, though more fragile,
have shown more power to survive ; but they have often
undergone addition and restoration, and must be studied
with the utmost caution. I hope to show that these arts
played a considerable part in the social life of the Middle
Ages, and that even to-day the study of them will profit the
artist as well as the archaeologist and the historian.
The goldwork of the early Middle Ages springs directly
124 Legacy of the Middle Ages
from the art of the barbarians. The jewels found in
Merovingian, Prankish, and Burgundian tombs are made of
cast metal, decorated with interlaced patterns, with curved
lines inextricably knotted together, and with conventional-
ized representations of men and animals, in the style of the
barbarian peoples, a style suited to the mind of the native
Celts, who had never really accepted the art of high-relief,
which the Greek and Roman artists, who followed Caesar's
armies into Gaul, had tried to teach them. The most
beautiful specimens are decorated in c cloisonn6 ', a process
whose origin must be looked for in the East, in Egypt,
Persia, and on the shores of the Black Sea. The Byzantine
artists used the method successfully, and the barbarians
carried it with them to the countries through which they
passed in their wanderings. Garnets, precious stones, and
sliced pastes were set into little cells marked out by thin
bands of metal fixed on their edge to the foundation plate.
From the fifth to the eighth century this method was used
to decorate the most precious objects, such as the scabbard
of Childeric found at Tournay in 1653, and the beautiful
crowns which Receswinth, King of the Goths in Spain in the
third quarter of the seventh century, dedicated to some
famous sanctuary in Toledo. The Franks showed them-
selves particularly skilful in this craft ; and St. Eloi, the
minister of Dagobert, won fame by his cloisonne work, of
which at least one example is known to us by drawings,
namely the chalice of Chelles.
The Carolingian renaissance, due to the direct impulse
of the Emperor, who understood how much the develop-
ment of letters and arts could enhance the majesty of the
ruler and the greatness of his empire, took its inspiration
from the civilization of Rome seen through the medium of
Ravenna and Byzantium. These Byzantine influences were
mingled with others taken directly from the East ; inter-
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Decorative and Industrial Arts 125
laced ornament and geometric designs became enriched by
figures set face to face, decorations based upon the form of
palm-leaves and hunting scenes, and were enlivened by the
introduction of panels of work in relief forming real little
pictures. These are sometimes wrought with great skill as
on the famous * paliotto ' of St. Ambrose of Milan, the work
of Master Volvinus, which was finished in 835.
About the same time, as the result of Byzantine influence,
enamel gradually took the place of garnets and sliced paste
in cloisonne work ; the little cells were filled with a paste
of glass, coloured by means of metallic oxides, which were
then fused and polished. This becomes opaque when on
a copper or iron base, but remains translucent over gold or
silver, as on the beautiful reliquary of Althaeus at Sion, on
the ewer of Charlemagne at St. Maurice d'Agaune, and on
the delicate reliquary of the Holy Cross in Ste Radegonde
at Poitiers. Soon, in order to simplify the work, grooves
were hollowed out of the metal base, which were then
filled with enamel, thus leaving thin lines of metal to mark
out the pattern on the surface ; in this way plaques of
champleve enamel were made, imitating cloisonne but
produced more quickly.
During the Romanesque period the goldsmiths' art was
carried on in two districts, in Aquitaine and in the country
of the Meuse and Rhine, where the tradition of the Caro-
lingian renaissance still survived. Shrines and plaques of
cloisonne and champleve enamel, like those preserved in
the treasury of Conques, objects in bronze, cast and chiselled
like those made for St. Bernard, bishop of Hildesheim at the
beginning of the eleventh century, golden retables like that
given by the Emperor Henry II to the cathedral of Bale
and now in Musee de Cluny at Paris, all show us the gold-
smiths' skill. Their craft is also fully known to us through
the treatise written by the monk Theophilus, who may
126 Legacy of the Middle Ages
certainly be identified with Rogker of the abbey of Helmers-
hausen near Paderborn, who lived at the beginning of the
twelfth century. In Lorraine during that century the
famous goldsmiths Godfrey de Claire, Nicolas de Verdun,
the monks Gilbert and Frederick of the workshop of St.
Pantaleon of Cologne carved and enamelled great shrines
shaped like churches, sometimes with aisles and transepts,
about which little statues in the round, beautiful as the great
contemporary statues of wood and stone, keep watch.
In the middle of the twelfth century the art of champleve
enamel is centred at Limoges, where during two centuries
the goldsmiths living round St. Martial produced a con-
siderable number of small shrines, crosses, altar vessels,
pyxes, croziers, gemellions, busts made to hold relics, and
sepulchral images often of great size like that of William of
Valence at Westminster. These and other objects, made
for civil and ecclesiastical use, are ornamented in champleve
enamel with designs, repeated from generation to generation.
Only with great difficulty did fresh influences renew and
modify the traditions of these workshops, which produced
their works on an industrial scale for the whole of Christen-
dom. The figures used were at first enamelled on a back-
ground of metal, but in the thirteenth century they were
cast and chiselled and applied to a background enamelled
with bands, flowers, or scroll patterns. In the fourteenth
century they are reserved in metal on a background of
enamel, and have their details first engraved and then filled
in with enamel. Besides such enamels, the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries produced goldsmiths' work soberly
decorated, depending for effect upon grace and elegance of
outline, such as the ciborium of Reims and the reliquary of
the Holy Thorn at St. Maurice d'Agaune.
Towards the middle of the thirteenth century the master-
pieces of Gothic architecture were dominant in art and
1 8. KNAMEL PLAQUE, LIMOGES WORK
Decorative and Industrial Arts 127
the other arts became merely echoes of it, and the gold-
smiths strove to model their shrines on the great cathedrals,
as in the shrines of St. Eleutherius at Tournay, of St. Taurin
at Evreux, and of St. Gertrude at Nivelle, fashioned with
nave, aisles, choir, and transepts, decorated with buttresses
and flying-buttresses and delicate pinnacles. In the four-
teenth century, however, the influence of sculpture prevails
over that of architecture ; reliquaries are borne by angels
or priests ; the saint himself is often represented ; and such
figures as the Virgin of Roncevaux or that of Jeanne d'Evreux
in the Louvre will bear comparison with the finest works
of sculpture on a large scale. In the fifteenth century as
wealth and the taste for luxury increased, an excess of
decoration replaced the former simplicity and elegance.
Complicated lines became common ; design was no longer
restrained by the recollection of the great models of the
past ; and monstrances and sacred vessels, drinking-cups
and salt-cellars, were made in contorted and often heavy
shapes.
By the middle of the fourteenth century the increase in
wealth and in the supply of the precious metals gradually
caused the work produced at Limoges to fall into disuse.
It was replaced by translucent enamel placed upon gold,
produced first in Italy and afterwards almost everywhere.
This remained the fashion until the middle of the fifteenth
century, when Limoges invented a new technique, and
relighted its furnaces, which had been cold for more than
a century ; this was the art of painting with enamel on
copper. Until the seventeenth century this craft was
practised by many artists, the so-called Monvaerhl, the
Penicauds, Pierre Reymond, Leonard Limousin, the artist
who made the great plaques of the Sainte Chapelle and of
the apostles of Anet, now at St. Pere at Chartres, the
splendid portraits of Francis I, of Queen Eleanor, and of the
128 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Constable Anne de Montmorency. To the same school
belong the Nouailhers, the Courts and the Courteys, who
painted on plates, dinner-services, and plaques in bright
colours or in grisaille, taking from antiquity and pagan
mythology the subjects which the Italian Renaissance had
made known to all.
The art of carving in ivory followed a course parallel to
that of sculpture ; and I should not have to speak of it
here, were it not that its evolution throws light on certain
points in the history of the industrial arts which are not
illustrated by the story of the art of the goldsmiths. Ivories
furnish us with some of the most valuable evidence of the
Carolingian renaissance. Workshops of ivory-carvers were
established near the great Rhenish monasteries at Treves, at
Lorsch, at Cologne and at Aix-la-Chapelle, while others
were set up at Reims and yet a third group at Metz. These
craftsmen had relearnt the technique of the ivory-carvers
of Rome, Byzantium, and Alexandria, and translated into
low relief the miniatures painted in the monasteries which
sheltered them. Those who worked in the Rhineland drew
from Byzantine ivories something of that nobility of pose,
that beauty of proportion and majesty of calm, which come
from Greece. The school of Reims took its chief inspiration
from Alexandrian ivories, aiming chiefly at producing the
picturesque and lively style of pose and gesture which the
miniaturists of that district portray with so much truth,
especially in the famous Utrecht Psalter. In the Romanesque
period sculpture in stone, which during the eleventh century
had had to relearn its technique from the goldsmiths and
the ivory-carvers, rapidly gained a complete mastery of
its craft. In consequence ivories almost disappeared in the
West. In the East and in the Moorish parts of Spain
remarkable work was still produced ; and this was one of
the chief ways by which the West received the forms and
19. IVORY COVER TO PSALTER OF CHARLES THE BOLD
IXth century. Bibliothtque Natlonale
Decorative and Industrial Arts 129
subjects of oriental iconography. The thirteenth century
saw a renaissance in the art of the ivory-carvers, who then
came under the influence of the sculptors in stone, and
imitated or even copied the masterpieces of the great
cathedrals. Every one feels the charm of these Virgins of
the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries, leaning
a little to one side, slender, delicate, lovable, full of a
slightly affected grace ; the most beautiful being the Virgin
of the Sainte Chapelle, now in the Louvre. By the end of
the fourteenth century we find the same subjects con-
tinually repeated ; there is a continual production of little
tabernacles sheltering a virgin between angels, or of scenes
from the childhood of Christ, triptychs and diptychs in-
tended for domestic oratories and private chapels, on which
are crowded the same scenes of the Passion or of the life of the
Virgin which cover the great retables ; and the work soon
became complicated, overloaded and rather uninteresting.
Such tendencies were exaggerated by the spirit of relentless
realism which ruled in the late fourteenth and in the
fifteenth centuries. The secular ivories of the fourteenth
century keep a certain grace and charm ; mirrors, caskets,
and women's toilet services are adorned with pretty scenes,
where knights talk with their ladies, play dice, crown their
heads with roses, or joust together ; sometimes there are
episodes from fashionable romances, such as the Roman de la
Rose, Tristan et Yseult, or La Chatelaine de Vergy.
The development of furniture follows in the same way
that of sculpture ; and the history of wood-carving can be
studied in the choir-stalls of churches. Their type became
fixed in the thirteenth century, and has not altered since that
period ; between the sides (parcloses) of the stalls there is
a seat which can be raised ; and underneath it is a small
ledge called a misericorde, against which the clerk, who
had to stand during long services, could rest. The sides
2873 K
13 Legacy of the Middle Ages
carry elbow-rests, slightly sloping backwards ; the back of
the stall is crowned by a canopy, which becomes more and
more projecting in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, and which is supported on the scroll-work
(volutes) forming the upper part of the stall ends (jouees
terminates). At first, as in Notre-Dame de la Roche near
Chevreuse- and in the Cathedral of Poitiers, the ornament
is simple, the back fairly low, and the canopy projects but
little. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, at Lisieux
and Toul, at La Chaise Dieu and at Rodez, and also in the
great English cathedrals, the back is heightened, the canopy
projects farther, pendants hang from it, and ornament is so
rich as to become exuberant. Little figures, grimacing
masks, figures of prophets and saints decorate the sides ;
comic scenes from proverbs and morality-plays are carved
on the misericordes. During the first half of the sixteenth
century most choir-stalls are still Gothic ; those of Amiens,
Brou, and Auch are some of the richest that were ever made.
But here and there decorative details in the style of the
Renaissance begin to appear ; and sometimes, as in the
beautiful choir-stalls of Gaillon, carved early in the sixteenth
century for the Cardinal of Amboise, and now at St. Denis,
the whole decoration is based upon classical subjects. But
the thing that persisted and continued to persist during the
classic period was the form of the stall, which remained
what it had been made in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries.
Of domestic furniture few specimens have survived, yet
enough remains to enable us to understand the changes
which took place in that craft during the Middle Ages.
The earliest pieces, chests or cupboards of the twelfth,
thirteenth or fourteenth centuries are built on posts, which
form the feet ; and between these posts planks are fixed
lengthwise to form the sides ; they are carpenter's work.
Decorative and Industrial Arts 131
In spite of iron bindings, in spite of linen and leather glued
inside and sometimes outside, the .planks crack, split and
come out of joint. In the fifteenth century, instead of
using long and wide planks, the joiner makes a series of
frames formed of upright and cross pieces tenoned and
morticed together and sets within them light panels held in
rebates formed in the frame. The wood may warp, or
swell ; no break or crack will result. Modern furniture
was therefore born in the fifteenth century. During the
whole of the sixteenth century it continued to be made by
the joiner ; only its ornament varied and followed the
fashion. But the veneered and painted furniture of the
Italian type does not penetrate into France. It is only at
the end of this century and during the seventeenth century
that there is a reaction against the excessive use of figures
and mouldings ; the form is simplified, and the wood of
the frame, which up to then had itself been ornamented,
disappears under veneers, veneers of precious woods, veneers
of ebony, or a covering of marquetry ; while the joiner
disappeared to make way for the cabinet-maker.
The arts which I have dealt with, briefly, are intended
for the decoration of buildings, churches or houses, but they
have a definite purpose of their own, and a special use ;
there are other arts, which are essentially and purely
decorative, such as wall-paintings, stuffs, embroideries and
tapestries, and stained glass. These I wish to discuss at
greater length, since their influence on modern decorative
art is very clear.
In the first Christian churches narrow windows admitted
a scanty light, and the wide stretches of wall were decorated
by mosaics and paintings ; and these were used also on the
floor and the vaulting. Mosaics ask for time and patience
from the artist ; they endure longer, and many have come
down to us in good condition. Paintings, whether in fresco
K 2
132 Legacy of the Middle Ages
or encaustic, where the work is in closer relationship with
the craftsman and at the same time more perishable, have
nearly everywhere disappeared. Both commonly repre-
sented stories from the Old and New Testaments, martyr-
doms, portraits of the bishops of the place, landscapes,
seascapes, hunting scenes and victories symbolized by
emperors. They are essentially didactic, as is affirmed by
councils and synods : at Constantinople in 892, and at
Arras in 1025. Charlemagne decrees in his Capitularies of
807 that all the interior surfaces of the churches should be
painted for the instruction of the faithful. Sidonius
Apollinarius, Fortunatus, and Gregory of Tours all relate
that in Gaul, from the time of the Merovingians, the bishops
interested themselves in the decoration of their churches.
Patient, archbishop of Lyons, rebuilt his cathedral and
enriched it with mosaics. Bishop Namatius had the walls
of his church of St. Etienne at Clermont covered with
paintings from the Old and New Testaments, and Gregory
of Tours describes how the bishop's wife selected the subjects
from among the miniatures of a manuscript. Childebert I
built St. Vincent and Sainte-Croix at Paris and adorned the
floor with mosaics, the walls with paintings, and the ceilings
with gilding. The whole story of St. Martin can be seen
on the walls of the cathedral of Tours, the famous miracles
he wrought and his battles with idolatry. Fortunatus cites
many other instances of such decoration, and he describes
the piety of the Franks, who had these paintings and mosaics
made by men of their own nation without invoking the aid
of the Italians. Under Charlemagne and his successors the
interior decoration of churches remained equally rich. We
know the subject of the paintings in Charlemagne's palace
at Aix as well as in that of Louis the Pious at Ingelheim.
Side by side with the story of David and Solomon, the
founding of Constantinople by Constantine, Charles Martel
Decorative and Industrial Arts 133
vanquishing the Frisians, Pepin conquering Aquitaine,
Charlemagne overthrowing the Saxons and the victorious
battles of the Emperor and his ancestors were all to be seen.
In Reims Cathedral, which was rebuilt by Ebbo, his
successor Hincmar had the walls decorated with paintings
and the floor with mosaics, representing saints and angels.
In the monasteries not only the churches but also the
dormitories and the refectories were decorated with
paintings.
In the tenth century, this art in France suffered an
eclipse ; the never-ending wars of the great barons, the
absence of all sense of security, impeded the progress of
civilization. In Italy, in Switzerland, and in Germany
there were flourishing centres where the old traditions were
preserved. There were workshops of renown at Monte
Cassino, at Salerno, and at Farfa, where the church is
painted within and without as in the Roumanian churches
of to-day ; at St. Gall and Reichenau this was also the case.
The names of some of the artists who worked there have
come down to us, though their works have almost entirely
disappeared. " During both the tenth and the eleventh
centuries in France and England it was the usual practice
to whitewash the walls and to hang them on feast-days with
embroideries and precious stuffs, while the timbers of the
structure were painted.
The German monk Theophilus in his Diversarum artium
schedula describes the technique of the painters of his day
in the following manner. On a wall covered with mortar
the painter traced the main lines of his picture, and marked
in the outlines of his figures ; he then laid a wash of fine
lime over as much of the surface as he could paint in one
day, and while the lime was still wet he painted the out-
lines in fresco and laid on his colours in a flat wash. Modelling
was got by means of hatching, white lines in the high-lights
134 Legacy of the Middle Ages
and dark lines in the shadows. For the light tints a paint
was used with a white-lead base ; there was a dark tint
which Theophilus calls ' posch ', made up of a dark green
mixed with a little red ; feet, hands, and faces were painted
in a flesh colour made of a mixture of white, cinnabar, and
ochre. The tints used were few : red and yellow ochres,
and green and white. Blue was expensive, and difficult to
use in fresco ; it was applied with size on the wash when
dry, and often flaked off ; it was only used to produce an
effect of dignity, for the nimbus of Christ or on the edging
of his robe.
This technique was employed in the few paintings of the
twelfth century which have come down to us. At St. Savin
in Poitou all the histories of the Old and New Testaments
are painted, and with them are also represented scenes of
the Last Judgement and the latter end of man. In the same
style are the surviving paintings in the churches in the valley
of the Loire, in Touraine, and in the Sarthe. "But while
Theophilus recommends the dark- blue ground beloved by
Byzantine and Oriental artists, in the paintings of the North
of France the figures stand out against a light background,
and it is not until we reach Central France and Burgundy,
at Le Puy and Charlieu and Cluny, that we find Romanesque
frescoes on a blue ground.
In the Gothic period the size of the windows increased
so much that the walls became only the supports for the
intersecting arches of the vaulting, the thrust of which
was taken by the flying buttresses ; a method of construction
which allowed full play to the daring of the architect. In
consequence general schemes of painting were replaced by
detached pictures in fresco or encaustic filling up a spandrel
or a segment of the vault. In chapels or little churches
painters still decorated the walls with sacred scenes, while
in the rooms of houses or the halls of castles they used
EMBROIDERED CROSS (opus Anglicanum)
Decorative and Industrial Arts 135
scenes from romances ; in both cases the pictures form
a long band painted to resemble tapestry hung on the wall
and enriched with embroidered borders. Italy accepted
from Gothic architecture only its main principle, the inter-
secting arches of the vault ; the large windows were rejected,
since they would have admitted too much sun ; and thus
Italian churches continued to offer the painter large surfaces
to decorate. By the end of the thirteenth century the
Italian painters were accustomed to work in fresco, and
were thus able to express their thoughts with freedom and
rapidity. In the lower church at Assisi the artists still
retain some of the dryness and harshness of their Byzantine
masters, but in the upper church, at the beginning of the
fourteenth century, Giotto and his pupils, while still pre-
serving the unalterable design of the sacred iconography,
paint the scenes from the Gospel with freedom, and endow
their figures with an expression, a sense of life, an ease of
gesture and pose, which then first appear in all their delight-
ful freshness and which continue to increase all through
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In other countries,
in France and England, embroidered hangings and tapestries
took the place of paintings ; these were hung out only on
the great feast-days to enrich the splendour of the building
with their glowing colour.
From the beginning of the Romanesque period work-
shops of embroiderers in the Empire produced such remark-
able works as the mantles preserved in the treasuries of
Bamberg and Ratisbon, and the famous cope used at the
coronations of the kings of Hungary, which was made for
St. Stephen, the king, and his wife Gisela of Bavaria, and
given by them in 1031 to the church of Stuhlweissenburg.
In England, from the tenth century, there were famous
workshops of embroiderers, and Durham Cathedral still
preserves the stole and maniple of its bishop, St. Cuthbert,
136 Legacy of the Middle Ages
embroidered by Queen Aelflaed, the wife of Edward the
Elder, who died before 916. English embroiderers kept
their reputation through all the Middle Ages, and their
work, known as opus Anglicanum, was exported to the whole
of Christendom, notably to Italy, where it was especially
appreciated by the Popes and Princes of the Church. From
these workshops must have come that long band of linen
embroidered in coloured wools which is usually called
* The Bayeux Tapestry ' and attributed to Queen Matilda.
The whole tragedy of Harold and William, the broken oath,
the building of the fleet, the invasion of England, the battle
of Hastings, is there unfolded in scenes full of vivid and
picturesque detail. The style, the details of dress and
armour, the lettering of the legends, all suggest that this
hanging must have been made by English embroiderers at
the end of the eleventh century under the direction of some
English clerk, attached to the Norman cause, and that it was
made for William's half-brother Eudes de Courteville, whose
figure continually appears in the foreground.
In the thirteenth century there were many embroiderers
in Paris. The Livre des Metiers of Etienne Boileau, provost
of the Merchants of Paris from 1258 to 1268, mentions them
repeatedly. Many examples of later thirteenth and four-
teenth-century work remain showing most admirable skill
in execution and grace in design. Such pieces as the Passion
cope at St. Bertrand de Comminges or the altar frontal of
the hospital of Chateau-Thierry, on which the coronation
of the Virgin, the adoration of the Magi, the presentation
in the Temple, and St. John and St. Paul are shown beneath
a trefoiled arch, are compositions of real charm, possessing as
true a claim to rank as an art as the sculpture which they
imitate.
From the fourteenth century tapestry almost completely
takes the place of embroidery, and in many cases even of
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Decorative and Industrial Arts 137
painting in the decoration of churches and castles. Tapes-
tries are mentioned as early as the tenth century, for instance
as in use at the church of St. Florent, Saumur, and at the
court of Queen Adelaide, the wife of Hugh Capet. Frag-
ments of tapestries which may be as old as the eleventh
and twelfth centuries are still preserved in the treasuries
of Halberstadt, of St. Geryon of Cologne, and at Quedlin-
burg, but it is not until the beginning of the fourteenth
century that we hear of workshops equipped with looms
set vertically (haute lisse). This term is found for the first
time in 1303, in an addition to fitienne Boileau's statutes
of guilds. At that time Arras and Paris were the two chief-
centres of the art ; under the stimulating patronage of
Mahaut, Countess of Artois (1302-27), the tapestries of
Arras became famous for their delicacy and the quality
of their yarn. King Jean and his sons, Charles V and the
Dukes of Anjou, Berri, Orleans, and Burgundy, had a great
liking for tapestries ; and we know by the inventories of
their possessions that many were woven for them. We hear
of scenes from the Old and New Testaments, and from the
lives of the saints, trees and foliage, scenes from romances of
chivalry and epic poems, such as Gerard de Nevers, William
of Aquitaine, the Saint-Graal, representations of allegories
and moralities like the Proces de Souper et de Banquet,
actually found in the tent of Charles the Bold ; there were
also scenes of country life, pastorals, hunting scenes, and
scenes taken from contemporary history, battles, tourna-
ments, and knightly feasts. We know for instance that the
Parisian weaver, Nicholas Bataille, with the help of Jacques
Dourdin and Pierre Baumetz wove the history of Bertrand
Duguesclin ; and that Bataille and Dourdin carried out in
less than three years, between 1397 and 1400, the famous
set of hangings of the Jousts of St. Denis, which included
six panels covering nearly 350 square metres. It was taken
138 Legacy of the Middle Ages
away by the Duke of Bedford, and the remains of it may
perhaps exist even to-day in some English collection.
One such set of hangings has come down to us almost
complete, the Apocalypse now preserved in the Cathedral
of Angers. It is the more precious in that the history of its
weaving is completely known, thanks to the work of Leopold
Delisle, Jules Guiffrey, and Louis de Farcy. The Duke of
Anjou borrowed from the rich library of his brother
Charles V a manuscript of the Apocalypse. In the inventory
of the king's manuscripts, drawn up in 1380, by the librarian
Jean Blanchet, there is a note on the margin of the descrip-
tion of the Apocalypse, * The king has lent it to M. d' Anjou,
for the making of a beautiful tapestry.' From the miniatures
in the manuscript the painter Jean de Bruges made large
cartoons, which were paid for in 1378. Nicholas Bataille
then began the weaving, which was not finished before the
middle of the fifteenth century. The whole consists of
seven large pieces five metres high and twenty to twenty-
four metres wide, and is thus more than a hundred and fifty
metres long, and covers a surface of seven hundred and
twenty square metres. Each piece contains fifteen pictures
arranged in two rows. In the earlier pieces the background
is plain, but as the work went on, the backgrounds became
covered with trellis with a powdering of flowers, butterflies,
birds, and vines. Thus the whole evolution of the art of
tapestry, composition, design, and technique can be followed
in this incomparable set covering, as it does, the whole period
from 1378 until 1450 or thereabouts.
During the fifteenth century tapestries were still produced
in the looms of Arras ; but they were somewhat confused in
composition, and so crowded with scenes and figures that the
background is completely hidden. The drawing, however,
is good and the colouring rich. From these workshops came
most of those pieces in the collection of the Dukes of Bur-
22. TAPESTRIES OF THE APOCALYPSE. CATHEDRAL OF ANGERS
End of XIYth century
The Beast and the False Prophet driven into the marsh of sulphurous fire (xix. 2c
Decorative and Industrial Arts 139
gundy which were taken by the Swiss from Charles the
Bold at Granson and Morat, and are now in the Museum
of Berne. In 1477 Arras was destroyed by Louis XI, and
its flourishing industry never revived. The Arras weavers
migrated to Tournay, Valenciennes, Bruges, and especially
to Brussels. There weavers were already numerous and the
new-comers gave a fresh stimulus to their work. The
magnificent pieces woven for Joanna of Castille and Mar-
garet of Austria, for Charles V and Philip II, are famous
everywhere, and are the pride of the collections of Vienna
and Madrid. Jean de Bruxelles, Bernard van Orley, Peter
Coeck of Alost, Michael Coxcie, these last working under the
influence of Raphael and the great masters of the Italian
renaissance, all produced fine compositions, allegorical,
didactic, and religious, depicting triumphal processions and
stories of the gods and heroes drawn from classic mythology.
The earlier of these compositions were very crowded and
somewhat overweighted ; the later ones are simpler in
style and better composed, uniting the elegance of the
Italian renaissance with the realistic genius of the Flemish
artists. In France at the end of the fifteenth century and
the beginning of the sixteenth Gothic art was still a living
influence in tapestry ; an influence clearly to be seen in
such hangings as the Life of the Virgin and the Life of
St. Remy at Reims, the history of the Virgin at Notre-
Dame de Beaune and the history of the New Testament at
La Chaise Dieu. Moral scenes, like those which accompany
this last example, were made known to all by the circulation
of the Speculum Humana Salvationis and the Biblia Pan-
perum.
In the valley of the Loire a school of tapestry arose whose
spirit seemed in keeping with the pleasant country of its
birth and where Gothic art lost something of its hold long
before the triumph of the Italian renaissance. This school
140 Legacy of the Middle Ages
specialized in the fabrication of charming tapestries of rare
grace and freshness, where lovers, musicians, and allegorical
figures stand out against a flowery background ; as for
instance in * The Concert de Rohan ' in the church of
St. Florent at Saumur, and in the charming panels of ' La
Dame a la Licorne ', now exhibited in the Cluny Museum
at Paris. This last piece was possibly made in Central
France by weavers trained in the School of the Loire.
Francis I and Henry II tried to establish, under the
direction of Primaticcio and Philibert de FOrme his succes-
sor, at Fontainebleau and afterwards at Paris, workshops
which might hold their own against the weavers of Brussels.
Some of their productions, for example that in the Gallerie
Francois I designed by Rosso and Primaticcio, are admirable
alike in composition and execution. But these royal work-
shops rapidly declined during the disturbances and wars of
the sixteenth century ; and at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century Henry IV in order to revive the industry
was forced to attract to Paris Flemish artists like the Coo-
mans and the De la Planche. These he established under his
special protection and with very considerable privileges in
the hope of freeing France from the tribute she had paid for
over a century to the weavers of Brussels.
The large number of tapestries woven during the Middle
Ages is easily explained ; they were in frequent use. In
churches they were hung round the choir and behind the
choir stalls as a screen against draughts ; and on feast-days
they were used to decorate the arches between the nave and
aisles and those of the triforium above. In the cities the
streets were hung with them in honour of a procession,
a state entry, or solemn ceremony. In castles they were
hung along the walls and used as door curtains, or were
fixed on rods for bed testers or behind armchairs in the
chimney-corner. They served as screens and made the cold
Decorative and Industrial Arts 141
and bare halls of strong castles more habitable. The hooks
meant to support tapestry have often been found still in
place. They were also used as partitions to divide the great
halls into smaller rooms. Sometimes they were spread on
floors. This fashion of carpets came from the east and was
still unknown in France, England, and Northern Europe
in the middle of the thirteenth century ; but when Eleanor
of Castile, the bride of Prince Edward, the future Edward I,
reached Westminster, she found her apartments furnished
by her own servants and the floors covered with carpets
after the Spanish custom ; and the court then adopted this
fashion.
Kings and lords carried these tapestries with them,
wherever they went ; and in this way Charles the Bold lost
at Granson and Morat the finest tapestries of the house of
Burgundy, which were carried off by the Swiss when they
captured his camp and his tent.
Medieval tapestries are admirably fitted to their purpose ;
they make no attempt to rival painting, but are primarily
decorative. Tapestry must be essentially movable and
flexible ; and the composition of the scenes represented
must be full, quiet, and dignified, as befits all ornament
meant to express and complete the lines of architecture ;
it must be full because its task is to fill up and fill in, and
therefore it must not show empty spaces, which would,
as it were, leave holes in the wall to be covered ; so figures,
accessories, and details must be numerous, the backgrounds
must be covered with foliage and flowers, the horizon line
must be set high so that the scenes depicted should cover the
space and the sky be reduced to small importance. On the
other hand, since the technique of tapestry requires that it
be seen from a distance, it is useless to model the figures
too carefully ; the colouring must be simple, limited in
scale, without those half-tones and broken colours which
142 Legacy of the Middle Ages
alter quickly in the light and lose their relative values.
Tapestry must give an impression of gaiety and joy, so grey
and neutral tones must be avoided. It is by brilliance and
directness of colouring and not by a manifold scheme of
tints that tapestry achieves its effects. Such are the rules
of the great art of tapestry in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance ; and it is the infringement of these rules which
makes the tapestries of the nineteenth century seem to us
so poor and mean.
With the history of the art of stained glass I shall bring
to an end this rapid survey of the industrial and decorative
arts of the Middle Ages. Here too we find the same com-
plete harmony between composition and technique and
purpose, the same break at the Renaissance due to the
failure to understand this fundamental rule, and in the end
the modern return to the old technique. The purpose of
stained glass is to fill in the window-spaces ; it is also meant
to instruct, and to give to the interior of church or hall
a warm and luminous atmosphere, delighting the eye and
uplifting the spirit. At the same time it must be a mosaic
of glass, a truth thoroughly understood by the medieval
artist. The glass itself is stained right through its substance ;
the pieces are rough and irregularly shaped, cut with a hot
iron and trimmed with a grozing-iron l to follow the lines
of the cartoon ; they are set in leads, which are themselves
stiffened by an iron tracery, to which, after the twelfth
century, stone bars were added. The colours are simple :
a cobalt blue, a copper red, a green got from copper, purple
from manganese, 2nd a yellow ; they are separated by the
thick leads, which allow to each colour its own value ; and
their arrangement shows an admirable understanding of the
laws of translucent colours, laws very different from those
1 A species of pincers or nippers used to crush the rough edges of
the pieces of glass.
Decorative and Industrial Arts 143
applying to colours laid on an opaque surface. The lines of
the figures, the folds of the drapery and details generally
are painted in grisaille, strongly defined since they are
meant to be seen against the light and from a distance.
The subjects are simple ; when the windows are lofty the
figures are few and on a large scale, and often isolated;
in other cases they are filled with small pictures easily under-
stood by the people of the Middle Ages, who knew every
incident in the lives of the Saints. Such windows set forth
the story of the Deity, of the Virgin, and of the Saints with
all that luxury of detail which lives for us in the text of the
Golden Legend. Such are the windows in the choir of
St. Denis, which were made between 1140 and 1144 under
the supervision of Suger himself. These windows, un-
happily much restored, represent the history of the Virgin,
that of Moses, the tree of Jesse, and parallel scenes from the
Old and New Testaments. Such again are the windows
in the west front of Chartres Cathedral, where the tree of
Jesse once more is the subject chosen ; a subject repeated
in the Sainte Chapelle at Paris, at York, at Canterbury, and
later on at Autun, at Beauvais, and in many other churches
in France, England, and Germany from the thirteenth to the
sixteenth century. A little of the glass in the cathedrals of
Le Mans and Angers, the great painting of the Crucifixion
in the window at the end of the choir at Poitiers, and
a certain amount of stained glass at Chalons sur Marne,
Strasbourg, and Augsburg date from the twelfth century.
In the thirteenth century the size of windows was increased
as if for the purpose of giving more space to the glass-
painters, so great was the love of our forefathers for the
beauty of glass through which the sun seemed for ever to
shine, and where the whole story of the Golden Legend
was unfolded amid the blue of heaven. At Chartres,
Poitiers, Bourges, Le Mans, Reims, Soissons, Angers, and
144 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Tours there are magnificent windows, as also in the choirs
of Sens, Laon, and Lyons. These are all filled either with
scenes arranged in a series of medallions or with large figures
of saints, apostles, and prophets ; and when we enter these
great cathedrals of the thirteenth century the iridescent
light which passes through these windows falls upon us and
straightway transports us to a higher world. Who is there
who has not felt the sudden thrill which seizes on the visitor
to the Sainte Chapelle at Paris as he suddenly enters the
upper chapel from the dark staircase and meets the blaze
of colour which bursts upon him from a thousand medallions
in the fifteen great windows, with their story of the Bible
told in its entirety ?
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the tech-
nique of stained glass remained unchanged ; composition
was lightened and simplified and large figures almost every-
where took the place of narratives. A silver stain, which
could be melted into the glass, and a flesh colour were
added to the glass-worker's palette without overloading it ;
diapered backgrounds gave a new brilliance and the windows
in the choir of Evreux and in the chapels along the nave
of Strasbourg are as beautiful as any of the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century the technique
of glass painting became more scientific but remained
obedient to the laws which govern the true art of stained
glass. The glass was in larger pieces, smoother, and less
thick ; it was often composed of two layers of different
colour to give greater variety and intensity. Sometimes
portions of the upper layer were removed with a small tool
and in this way pretty effects of colour could be obtained.
Compositions usually remained clear and simple, often
copied from engravings or drawings and adapted to the
limitations of glass. One of the most flourishing workshops
was that of Engrand Leprince at Beauvais, where early in
w
3
PH
o
Q
W
E
h
u
W
Decorative and Industrial Arts 145
the sixteenth century magnificent windows were produced ;
for example, the famous Tree of Jesse on a blue ground
in St. fitienne at Beauvais and the Chariot window in
St. Vincent at Rouen. The churches of Montmorency and
Ecouen both possess series of stained-glass windows of the
same date, which clearly show the influence of the lle-de-
France school; the technique is as excellent as the com-
positions are beautiful. Several churches in Paris have
preserved some of this glass, which was so abundant before
the fashion of the eighteenth century and the Revolution
brought about its disappearance ; instances are St. Etienne
du Mont, St. Merry, St. Gervais, St. Germain PAuxerrois,
and La Sainte-Chapelle at Vincennes. The Norman school
also produced a considerable quantity of stained glass, and
the churches of Rouen can still show splendid examples ;
others can be found at Louviers, Pont-Audemer, Conches,
and in many other churches of the departments of the Eure
and the Seine-Inferieure. In Champagne also there was
a great industry, especially at Troyes and round that town ;
this glass is perhaps less beautiful, less rich than that of
Normandy and the lle-de-France, but the makers of it had
a perfect understanding of their art. Their colours are
simple and fresh, the tones are clearly separated, the figures
few and sharply outlined ; all the glass is stained throughout
its thickness, and the colour enhanced by the use of silver
stain and grisaille.
In other parts of France there are noteworthy windows,
such as the window with the story of St. Louis at Cham-
pigny-sur-Veude near Chinon, the Tree of Jesse with its
clear white background in the Cathedral at Autun ; and
above all the magnificent windows made for Margaret of
Austria in 1528 in her chapel of Brou. The most beautiful
of these is the window in which she has had herself shown
as the donor kneeling opposite to her husband Philibert le
2873 L
146 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Beau. Between them is shown the Assumption of the
Virgin, crowned by a fine frieze after Titian representing
the triumph of Faith. The Italian Renaissance had given
to stained glass a new iconography with new details, mag-
nificent models to use, but its technique remained that of
the Middle Ages. In the middle of the sixteenth century
a new technique appeared, the art of painting in enamel on
glass. It was an easy art, and won its way with the artists,
but it led them into an absurdity, the folly of imitating in
glass paintings on canvas, and this course brought about the
ruin of the art of stained glass. It was only by returning
to the technique of the Middle Ages that nineteenth-century
artists were able to recapture the true beauty and glory of
stained glass.
In the course of this brief study we have seen how closely
the industrial arts follow the evolution of art in general,
and how intimately they are connected with the decorative
portions of the building, for which they provide the orna-
ment. We have also seen that the ornament they give is
a function of their technique, which in turn depends on
the use made of it. This freedom in the use of ornament
is the foundation of medieval art ; it is this freedom that
once more inspires modern ornament, and has given back
to us the art of tapestry and of stained glass.
MARCEL AUBERT.
-I- \VTNOO\V Ol'^ GUV DE L \VAL
( I'.uich of ^foiitmorciuy. 7-T-\, 1 -J5;;
3
LITERATURE
i. SOME ASPECTS OF MEDIEVAL LATIN
LITERATURE
THE modern student who sits down to write of medieval
literature in any of its many aspects may well bethink
himself of a story from the early days of the coming of the
Friars. It is related in a Franciscan sermon that a certain
priest was wont, year by year, to keep the feast of St.
Nicholas (our Santa Claus). And, lo, it chanced that he
became so poor that he was unable to celebrate the wonted
festivity (convivium). As he lay in his bed thinking what
to do, there sounded in his ear the bells ringing to Matins.
The refrain of the first expressed his own perplexity. * What
shall I do ? What shall I do ? ' (I to kefray ; leo kefray)
The second answered it : ' Borrow away, Borrow away '
(A crey ; A crey). While he was cogitating where the
money was to come from for repayment, they both sounded
together, and it seemed to him that they said : * Something
from one, something from him ' (Ke de un y ke de el ; ke de
un, ke de el). And he rose and kept the feast with borrowed
money. The sermon, we are told, was approved by the
Chapter. If our own borrowings do not meet with the
same approval we may console ourselves with the reflection
that this story at any rate has in it something of the music
of the Middle Ages as well as an illustration of the mingling
of languages which made the thirteenth century pregnant
with wonderful possibilities for the future of literature.
Fastidious Roman ears of Jerome's time disliked the
L 2
148 Legacy of the Middle Ages
' sacred but barbarous language ' of the Scriptures with
more reason, it must be admitted, than an earlier critic
had for finding ' Patavinity 9 in Livy. But the austere
classicist of a later day has extended less toleration still to
the Latin of the Middle Ages. Certainly it belongs neither
to the Golden nor the Silver Age as those are ordinarily
discriminated ; and there are many who would scoff at the
suggestion that it is not, therefore, to be condemned.
The language of the New Testament lay under a similar
cloud of disparagement so long as it was regarded as merely
a debased form of classical Greek. A label is at best an
incomplete description : a false, or misinterpreted, label
may be not merely misleading but the instrument of a great
wrong, more especially when it extends to six folio volumes
with four more of appendix or supplement, as is the case
with the monumental work of Charles du Fresne du Cange
with its damning title Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latini-
tatis. Yet it is probable that what scoffers have rendered
as ' Infamous Latin ' will share in days to come something
like the same rehabilitation as has been granted to the
Koine, when it is recognized as the living organ of expression
of an age and of people whose heirs and debtors are the
critics themselves.
We shall remind ourselves of the dangers of exaggeration
on the other side. Regarded as in any strict sense a succes-
sion to that of classical writers, the Latinity of many of the
medieval composers in prose or verse would justify most
of the hard things that have been said against it. It was
inevitable that it should show some change when the works
of the great stylists had fallen into oblivion or disrepute.
Cicero wrote verse (of a kind) as well as prose ; but no voice
was heard in the Middle Ages to say ' Vates Tulli gentilium
Da Christo testimonium ', and as for his prose men remem-
bered rather Jerome's awful warning of celestial condemna-
Medieval Latin Literature 149
tion * Ciceronianus es ! ' Virgil escaped, less hardly, to
win from Dante the most glorious of vindications. But
Virgil could be credited with a theological and an ethical
interest, and if this could hardly be said of Horace or of
Ovid except by those who were prepared to believe any-
thing to be profitable to edification, if properly understood,
such minds were not wanting in theological circles at least
in the Middle Ages. But any one who takes the trouble to
examine the character of the classical quotations to be
found in works or letters from the twelfth to the fourteenth
centuries will be astonished at their limited range, and the
more when he compares them with the not after all very
extensive collections of works found in catalogues of mo-
nastic libraries. 1 And if the time came when authors were
content or obliged to impart to their writings an appearance
of learning or of wit by a classical * tag ' or two borrowed
through Aulus Gellius or Jerome or Macrobius or some
lesser light, there were many to whom (to all appearance)
even so much was unknown or unes teemed. Yet never
always nor to all, for the classical tradition did not wholly
die at any time ; nor is it wise to assume that it did so, in
order to glorify the Renaissance. But still less shall we
understand the Middle Ages if we seek to defend them by
pointing to such evidences as relics surviving in a scene of
universal ruin. It is along other lines, if at all, that we shall
find the clue to what we are seeking, namely in a new trend of
language and in some ways a new development of literature.
A return to Jerome may seem to need apology, save to
those who read him ; but to draw from that fount of learning
1 The present writer had made some tentative efforts towards a study
of their range, when the appearance of the fascinating History of Classical
Scholarship from the Sixth Century B.C. to the End of the Middle Ages
(vol. i, Cambridge University Press, 1903) by Dr. J.'E. Sandys provided
the enduring delight which cutweighs all temporary disappointments.
150 Legacy of the Middle Ages
once is to return many times. There is a curiously inter-
esting passage, however, which may serve as excuse here :
* The Galatians,' he says, * except for the Greek speech,
which is that of all the Orient, have almost the same tongue
of their own as the people of Treves : it does not matter
if some corruptions have crept in thence, for the Africans
have to some extent changed the tongue of the Phoenicians,
and Latin itself is daily being changed by time and place.'
We are not concerned with the Galatians, though we
remember that as to Treves Jerome is speaking from personal
knowledge. But the modification of Latin to which he
thus points at the opening of the fifth century made startling
progress in the centuries that followed. Nor was it without
ostensible defenders in unexpected quarters. The less
carefully guarded utterances of great men are the most
interesting and therefore have the best chance of remem-
brance. There are few students of such matters who have
not either hailed or deplored the protest of Gregory the
Great against subjecting the Divine Oracles to the rules of
Donatus, even if they do not follow John of Salisbury in
attributing to him the crime of burning the Palatine
Library. But the great Pope was not a mere * Philistine ' ;
and while ' nugae et seculares litterae ', which he deemed
unworthy of a religious layman and still more of a bishop,
included much that we should deem valuable, his censure
is not an excuse for barbarism, though it has often been
thus interpreted. His plea is for something else in com-
parison with which, by the irony of history, not the bodies
of Christians but the books of pagan Romans seemed vile
damnum. It is curious, however, that his apprehensions
have not more often been noticed as a testimony to the still
powerful influence of the Classics at a time when it has been
regarded as well-nigh dead. However, it is more certain
that barbarism came than that its course could have been
Medieval Latin Literature 151
sensibly affected by any conceivable action of the rulers
of the Church.
The problem of the future, as Jerome has shown us, was
not entirely new. None but the unreflecting suppose
that the ordinary Roman citizen of Northern Italy,
or of Rome itself, in the last days of the Republic, talked
to his neighbour, still less in his family, in the style of
Cicero's Orations or Caesar's Commentaries, or in the early
days of the Empire wrote to his friends in the manner of
the younger Pliny. And already loan-words are coming
into use in quite respectable circles for other things besides
means of conveyance. After all the use of appropriate
* neologisms ' is far from being a sign of linguistic or even
of literary decadence, and the best writers of most ages and
countries have provided c exceptions ' to the rules of
grammarians as well as of prosodists. But we are witnesses,
as we study, of a marvellous phenomenon the making of
two of the great languages of the modern world, French
and English ; and in the process many streams converge.
In this, as in all study really scientific, observation must
precede criticism. Let us look at some of the most startling
examples that we can find. Jordanes, the Goth, becomes
Bishop of Ravenna in the sixth century : he would write
history and avails himself liberally of existing materials :
they are in Latin, and he too would write in Latin, though
it is to him a foreign language and his grammar and syntax
are shaky : ' scito,' he says, ' me maiorum secutum scriptis
ex eorum latissima prata paucos flores legisse.' Let us
move on five hundred years or more to the greatest of the
* Chansons de Geste '. Roland is enumerating the duties
of the vassal to his lord :
For son signer deit horn sofrir granz mals
endurer e forz freiz e granz calz.
Si'n deit horn perdre del sane e de la earn.
152 Legacy of the Middle Ages
It is Latin without mixture, if not pure. An eminent
French critic has amused himself and us by writing out the
Latin which it represents :
Pro suum seniorem debet homo sufferire grandes malos
Et indurare et fortes frigidos et grandes calidos.
Sic inde debet homo perdere de ilium sanguinem ct de illam
camera. 1
The maieutic process is horrible, but it is a fine vigorous
child that is born. Or we may look at an intermediate
stage of ' progress ' or decay. The student who has not
made the acquaintance of the Historia Francorum of
Gregory of Tours has still an unforgettable joy in store.
The great classicist in Sir John Sandys regards its Latinity
with grave disapprobation ; but in the sympathetic hands
of M. Bonnet it yields nearly 800 pages of a study as fasci-
nating as it is illuminative. 2 There we may see something
of the way in which things came to be, the sources of
confusion of sound and of form, and the curious vagaries
of sixth-century syntax, of which Gregory's fondness for
a nominative or accusative absolute are but two among
many.
We cannot enter into the hotly disputed question of
the relative proportions of Latin and indigenous elements
in the production of ' French '. It was not perhaps without
malice that M. Bonnet placed on the title-page of his book
the words of Gregory : ' Per meam rusticitatem uestram
prudentiam exercebo.' It is the wildest absurdity, however,
to suppose that all medieval writers who wrote Latin wrote
* dog Latin '. It could never be wholly so while Jerome
and Augustine and Gregory the Great were studied, even
if we depreciate unduly Orosius, John Cassian, Cassiodorus,
1 Ferdinand Brunot in Petit de Julleville, Histoire de la Langue et de
la Litterature Jrangaise, II. ii, p. 471.
1 Le Latin de Gregoire de Tours (Paris, Hachctte, 1890).
Medieval Latin Literature 153
Boethius, or Isidore of Seville. And in the hands of the
Schoolmen, Latin as a living language became a dialectical
instrument of marvellous flexibility as well as cogent force,
certainly without producing any impression of * rusticity '
upon the reader. By the thirteenth century Grosseteste
could write that there were in England two languages
Latin for the clergy, French for the ignorant, for English
had not as yet come once more into its own in general
esteem. But c Latin for the clergy ' in days when, as it
has been said, * the Church was the common shelter for all
who held the pen ' meant a certain bias as well as a certain
limitation in the mode of literary development. It would be
instructive, but it is for our present purpose strictly irre-
levant, to discuss the number of ignorant * clergy ' even
among those in sacred orders at any period. The priest
who shocked St. Boniface in the eighth century by adminis-
tering baptism * in nomine Patria et Filia et Spiritu sancta '
was certainly not unique in his ignorance, but scarcely
more typical than the schoolboy who wrote * intelligere
dor ' for * I am given to understand ' in the nineteenth.
Our concern is with the formative influences which moulded
the language no less than the thought of the Middle Ages
as well as with the ignorant or uninstructed who made
strange use of materials, the history and meaning of which
they very imperfectly understood.
Foremost among such influences must be placed the
Latin Scriptures in the Vulgate version. If any demon-
stration were necessary it might be found in the difficulty
experienced by modern scholars in getting behind the
Vulgate. But again we must beware of exaggeration.
One of the first and hardest lessons for the medievalist is to
learn not to accept general statements on whatever authority
without examination of their meaning and validity. Not
every child of well-to-do parents in the Middle Ages saw
154 Legacy of the Middle Ages
in a vision of the night at the age of eight a grave com-
manding figure which inquired ' Hast thou read the Book
of Joshua, the son of Nun ? ' and another that demanded
* Dost thou know the Book of Tobit ? ' And Gregory
answered, of Joshua that he had never heard of it, that he
was having great difficulty in learning to read at all, and of
Tobit that he had not read it. And many eminent persons,
including Henry Beauclerc, would probably have been
incapable of doing so at any age. Again, there is strong
reason for thinking not merely that Gregory knew and used
other versions, or at least another version, besides the
Vulgate, but that it is the Latin of some of these rude
older versions which lies behind some of the word-forms
in Old French. It must be remembered, too, that the
influence of the Scripture language might be very large
even among people who could not read. It is harder to
trace literary or linguistic influence of Missal or of Breviary,
though the latter provided stories for sermons which were
helped out by other * Pulpit aids ' often of greater length
than variety. But the modern student may be grateful for
an inheritance in prayers and hymns of the riches of which
he is too often unconscious. We cannot resist the tempta-
tion to transcribe three out of many which every reader
will recognize as already known in English dress :
' Deus, auctor pacis et amator, quern nosse vivere, cui
servire regnare est, protege ab omnibus impugnationibus
supplices tuos : ut qui defensione tua fidimus, nullius hostili-
tatis anna timeamus.' l
'Deus, qui fidelium mentes unius efficis voluntatis, da
populis tuis, id amare quod praecipis, id desiderare quod
promittis, ut inter mundanas varietates ibi nostra fixa sint
corda ubi vera sunt gaudia.' f
1 Cf. Second Collect, for Peace, Morning Prayer.
1 Cf. Collect of Fourth Sunday after Easter.
Medieval Latin Literature 155
' Deus, in te sperantium fortitude, adesto propitius invoca-
tionibus nostris ; et quia sine te nihil potest mortalis
infirmitas, praesta auxilium gratiae tuae, ut in exequendis
mandatis tuis et voluntate tibi et actione placeamus.' l
This is great Latin, whether it be of the seventh or of
any century, and will remain so whatever criticism may be
offered of language or syntax. And the same may be held,
if with a difference, yet also an added attractiveness, of the
hymns. The Christian Church, it has been finely said,
started on its way singing. 1 Ambrose had to meet the
Arian charge that his hymns were to the people as magic
spells ; and for us too * Aeterne rerum conditor * or
* Splendor paternae gloriae ' have the same attraction, if
for a different reason. In course of time each Hour service
came to have its hymn, and no less the Seasons and the
Saints' days. The iambic tetrameters of Ambrose were
paralleled by other classical metres but also by systems of
scansion by accent, of elision and of rhymed verses which
had no strictly classical ancestry. Under musical influences
perhaps as early as the eighth century came the * tropes '
or added melodies, for glory rather than for sense, and the
sequences or * proses ' which from the ninth century
onwards came to supply rhythmical verses to fit the added
melody, * Prose' because at first not metrical, * Sequentia'
because supplying words for the trope following after e.g.
the Alleluia of the Mass. Most famous among such com-
positions are ' Veni sancte Spiritus ', perhaps by Innocent III
in the thirteenth century and the ' Stola regni laureatus '
or the ' Heri mundus exultavit ' of Adam of St. Victor some
fifty years earlier. Of favourite hymns we can name but
a few. Who does not love the ' Cultor Dei memento ' of
1 Cf. Collect of First Sunday after Trinity.
1 W. H. Frere, Hymns Ancient and Modern : Historical Edition
(Clowes, 1909), a work to which this section is deeply indebted.
156 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Prudcntius or the ' Pange lingua ' and * Vexilla Regis '
of Fortunatus or the great hymn for Prime by an unknown
author, * lam lucis orto sidere ' ? If we can no longer
assign to Bernard of Clairvaux * lesu, dulcis memoria ', nor
even perhaps ' Salve, cuius dulcis vultus ' as we can the
' Hie breve vivitur ' and * Hora novissima ' to Bernard of
Murles, that need not lessen our appreciation of any of
them ; and the c Alleluia, dulce carmen ', * Alleluia piis
edite laudibus ', or * Urbs Sion aurea, patria lactea ', though
anonymous have as secure a place as the ' O quanta qualia
sunt ilia sabbata ' of Abailard, the ' Stabat mater dolorosa '
of Jacopone, the * Dies irae ' of Thomas of Celano, or the
4 Quisquis valet numerare ' and * Jerusalem luminosa ' of
Thomas a Kempis. Our list is becoming a catalogue ; but
that is itself a striking tribute to the capacity of these
hymns for expressing the hopes and fears and longings of
the human spirit, as well as its deepest devotion in ' Sancti
venite, Christi corpus sumite ' the wonderful Irish hymn
of the seventh century or its reasonable faith, in the
6 Adoro te devote ', the ' Bone pastor, panis vere ', and the
* Verbum supernum prodiens ' of Thomas Aquinas. It has
been said of some of the later hymns that they have a devo-
tional rather than a literary value, and it may be so, nor
need we greatly deplore that they should have been not
less loved when we remember that the * Hymnum canentes
martyrum ' and * Praecursor altus luminis ' of the Venerable
Bede failed to win affection because they lacked the inspiration
which others could give.
We learn from a modern writer on the Middle Ages that
' all life was saturated with religion to such an extent
that the people were in constant danger of losing sight of
the distinction between things spiritual and things tem-
poral'. 1 The inference that he draws is misleading, for the
human impulse to parody is as independent of saturation
1 J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Arnold, 1924), p. 140.
Medieval Latin Literature 157
with religion as it is essentially of malice or profanity.
The austerity and difficulty of classical metres might or
might not provoke the product of an Otium didascali, the
solemn jesting of the gravely frivolous ; but accentual
scansion, the lure of rhythm and of rhyme, and a catchy
tune proved to many as irresistible as they are still found
to be to unregenerate minds. Youth because it is young
would slay a giant (which after all is one of the glories of
youth) ; and Golias whether represented by Education or
one of the powers that be, even (horresco referens f) a Bishop,
may be slain perhaps by a set of derisive verses as well as
by a stone from a sling. And students in all civilized lands
in all ages have their songs, of which the refrain will
remain when the rest is forgotten. We wonder how many
but for that would remember more than the first line of
c Heus, Rogere ! ' Some will be grave, some gay, flippant,
amorous, irreverent, sometimes obscene ; the Goliardic
verse or * Carmina Burana ' achieved a popularity from the
twelfth century onwards at which it is quite useless and
even, some may think, quite unnecessary to be shocked.
All metres, all methods of composition, were fair game or
natural instruments, and in the Confessio Goliae, it has been
said, * nests that one medieval Latin verse which everybody
still knows by heart : " Meum est propositum in taberna mori
. . ." ' * That is the lighter side ; but satire could be alike
fierce and almost diabolically ingenious as any one may see
for himself who cares to turn to poems attributed to Walter
Map which were first published by the Camden Society
or the jeux f esprit of the Anglo-Latin satirists of the
twelfth century issued under the grave auspices of the
Master of the Rolls.
The spirit of the Middle Ages is impatient of capture,
insusceptible of analysis, though many have essayed the
task, and we may derive instruction, if also amusement,
1 H. O. Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind (Macmillan, 1911), ii. 218.
158 Legacy of the Middle Ages
from watching them. 'The men of the Middle Age',
a critic will tell us, 'were big children, credulous, and
natfs, who in history preferred anecdotes, in sermons
exempla, and in science the fantastical and the marvellous.
Men who saw God and the devil everywhere could possess
neither the critical spirit nor the gift of observation.' *
Distinguamus, O sodales ! The ewig weiblicbe is everywhere
the mother of the eternal child, but grown men were grown
men even if they kept that spirit, and even though * their
astronomers are astrologers, their chemists alchemists, their
mathematicians sorcerers '. If the four chief attributes of
man at his highest be Love, Reason, Faith, and the sense
of Wonder, they at least had them all : which does not
mean that they always used them well. It is quite true
that they loved stories in their histories, especially stories
of marvel or of portent. Yet we are not really sorry to find
Matthew Paris, greatest of medieval chroniclers, turning
aside to describe and to paint that wonderful elephant
which is his joy (and ours). But he did not see in it the
devil as Philippe de Thaon had called the * cocodrille '
(crocodile) in * the oldest and for that reason in itself the
most interesting of French Bestiaries ', written in England
about a century earlier. De Thaon tells us that his work
is translated from Latin, but he introduces Latin into it.
We see the same influence at work in sermons in what is
known as the * macaronic style % with its strange mixture
of Latin and French, a mixing of languages which reacted
on the language of the people and which survived even
when sermons preached in vulgari, whether French or
English, became common. Giraldus Cambrensis, so he
himself relates, once reduced a Welsh congregation to tears
by preaching to them in Latin of which they understood
not a word; but some priests could not understand the
Latin of their texts so well as their hearers, if we may
1 A. Piaget in Petit de Julleville, op. cit. 9 II. ii, p. 165.
Medieval Latin Literature 159
credit his account of one who, preaching on St. Luke vii. 41,
treated ' quingentos ' and ' quinquaginta ' as the same, and
being pressed by the praepositus villae : * Then he did not
give either more than the other,' extricated himself with
the explanation : * The one lot were Angevin pennies, the
others sterling.' The story, and there are many like it,
may tempt some readers to turn for themselves to the
Gemma Ecclesiastica from which it is taken. It was written
for the instruction of clergy by a man who knew their
difficulties and is full of things which they would remember.
Of the same kind, but with lay-hearers in view, are the
enormous collections of * exempla ' which the reader will
find in the works of men like Bromyard or Brumton or other
authors of a * Summa Praedicantium '.
Truth embodied in a tale has proverbial efficiency, but
it certainly received illustration by strange means and in
strange quarters. To England and to the fourteenth century
belong the * Contes Moralises ' of the Franciscan, Nicolas
Bozon. But of even greater influence is the celebrated
* Gesta Romanorum ', belonging also perhaps originally to
England in the end of the thirteenth century, but famous
throughout Europe and exercising in its Latin or its English
form an attraction which those who read it will readily
acknowledge. * Either directly or indirectly [it] furnished
to Boccaccio the ground- work of his tale of the Two Friends ;
to Lydgate of his Tale of Two Merchants ; to Gower and
Chaucer of their History of Constance; to Shakspere of
his Merchant of Venice^ Lear, and Pericles ( ?) ; to Parnell
of his Hermit ; to Walpole of his Mysterious Mother ; and
to Schiller of his tale ofFridolin. 9 l The claim perhaps goes
too far ; but it was certainly one of the most popular of all
medieval books ; and if it is stronger in morals than in
1 S. J. Herrtage, The Early English Versions of tbe Gesta Romanorum
(Early English Text Society, Extra Series, xxxiii), p. xxvi. The moral it
on p. 41.
160 Legacy of the Middle Ages
history, * thcr be many of us that woll rathir put her lyf
and trust in to the help of the world J?an to the help of god,
]?e which is not oonly myghti but almyghty; and J>erfore
seith oure saviour Si habueritis jidem ut granum synapis,
foUritis dicer e huic tnonti transi, et transit t, That is to say,
if ye have feith, as moche as hath J?e corn of synewey, ye
shull mow sey to a mounten, passe, and hit passeth at a word
of you ', and that is what the medieval writer wished his
readers chiefly to understand.
It has been made a reproach to the Middle Ages that
they brought into prominence Latin authors of the second
or third rank or of no rank at all in preference to most of the
Great Ones. Yet if we look for the manuscripts of one
author who is usually adduced as an example, we shall find,
strange to say, only one complete manuscript of Phaedrus
in existence. That the Roman fabulists enjoyed popularity
may be as true as that in the Gesta or the Fabulists of the
thirteenth century we find traces of eastern influence.
In the case of the ' Directorium Humanae Vitae ' of John of
Capua in the thirteenth or the ' Liber Kalilae et Dimnae *
of Raymond of Beziers in the following century this cannot
be doubted. When the latter translated a work which he
had found in Spanish into Latin * que lingua communior
est et intelligibilior ceteris ' to the glory of the Divine
Name, the utility of the state, and the honour, among
others, of Philip of France and Margaret of England, he
disclosed the history so far as he knew it, of this * liber
regius '. But in less clear cases caution is necessary, for
there are many stories which are, or seem to be, part of the
common stock of most of the races of the world. Again the
4 fabulae ' may be in prose or verse, of considerable length
like the work of * Raimondus de Biterris ' or as short as the
* parable ' of Odo of Cheriton (d. 1247), ' Vnde Archita
Tarentinus offensus servienti ait : Quantum te afflictarem,
Medieval Latin Literature 161
nisi iratus essem ! ' or the fourteen lines of * Johannes de
Schepeya ' on the birds choosing a king, with its conclusion
4 Ideo necessarium est ut praelatus sciat pascere, sciat
picare et quandoque percutere subiectos, ne lasciuiant,
et teneat medium inter nimiam simplicitatem et nimiam
seueritatem ' reflections which have an additional interest
since John of Sheppey (d. 1360) was himself a bishop.
Equally or even more fruitful for purposes of * edification '
or warning were stories from the Lives of the Saints, whether
taken from the Breviary or scattered in separate composi-
tions or preserved in oral tradition. They are almost
innumerable, and if the reader thinks, as he will, that he
observes a great sameness of treatment and of incident in
many of them, one of the most illustrious of the Bollandists
will show him how this came to be. 1 But it was no accident
that the compiler of the most famous of all popular collec-
tions, the Legend a Aurea, the thirteenth-century Archbishop
of Genoa, James of Varaggio, whom we call Jacobus de
(or a) Voragine, was a Dominican, and therefore ex professo
a preacher. No work of its kind can compare with it in its
influence alike before and after the discovery of printing.
Early printers did not produce what would not sell, and
Wynkyn de Worde chose even better, when he selected the
Gesta Romanorum and the Lcgcnda Aurea, than Caxton with
Le Jeu d'Ecbecs moralise or the Treatise ofHawkyng. To the
modern student of folk-lore and the marvellous and also of
linguistic ' development ' we would commend too the great
collection of Irish Lives, 1 and if he desire something of
a different type the Lives of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and
St. Catherine of Sienna.
We live in towns, but are often * pagan ' none the less ;
and in a critical age, without wholly escaping from illusion.
1 H. Dclehayc, Les Lcgendcs Hagiograpbiqucs (Brussels, 1905).
1 C. Plummcr, Vitae Sanctorum Hibcrniae (Clarendon Press, 1910).
8873 M
162 Legacy of the Middle Ages
But it is only in Herefordshire, perhaps, or other rural
counties that simple folk still see the oxen bend the knee
on Christmas night when Christ is born. In the Middle
Ages even men who could not read might learn by sight
as well as ear. And therefore there grew up a type of
* literature ', at first unwritten and in consequence hard to
trace in its historical development the Mystery Plays in
* France ' and England and * Germany ' with their strange
minglings of vulgar and Latin speech. * Le culte chr^tien ',
it has been said, ' est essentiellement dramatique.' And
after all it was but a step from the * prose ' or sequence of
the Christmas Mass ' Quern quaeritis in praesepe, pastores,
dicite ? ' with its answer * Salvatorem Christum Dominum
. . .' * or the * Victimae paschali laudes ', which told of the
joy of Easter, to dramatic representation, from the tenth or
eleventh century onwards. An extension to other subjects,
e. g. ' The Ten Virgins ' or ' The Raising of Lazarus ',
4 Adam* or * Daniel' or 'The Magi', was natural enough.
First come the simple words of the Latin gospels, then the
text rendered in verse still Latin, then dialogue is amplified
and the vernacular inevitably and quite naturally intro-
duced. So we have in an eleventh-century play :
Amen dico
Vos ignosco,
Nam caretis lumine ;
Quo qui <perdunt>
Procul pergunt
Huius aulae limine
or again in the * Daniel ' played by the clerks or students at
Beauvais in the twelfth :
Vir propheta Dei, Daniel, vien al Rot,
Vcni, desiderat parler d toi.
Pavet et turbatur, Daniel ; vim al Roi
Vellet quod nos latet s avoir far toi.
1 For this and what follows, see L. Petit de Julie ville ; Les Mystlres
(Paris, Hachette, 1880), vol. i, pp. 25 ff.
Medieval Latin Literature 163
or the speech of Martha in the Suscitatio Lazari of the same
century:
Si venisses primitus,
Dot en ai,
Non esset hie gemitus.
Bais frere> perdu vos ai.
The words have a haunting ring : it is vernacular speech,
a little heightened perhaps now and then but still the
language of every day. It would be easy to multiply
illustrations where the * Langue d'oc * or the * Langue
d'oil* take their places side by side with Latin, and the
English student will be hard to please if he does not find
interest also in the York and Chester Plays published by the
Early English Text Society.
Few of us speak exactly as we write, except perhaps the
youthful Macaulay with his * I thank you, Madam, the
agony is abated '. Fewer still write as they speak either in
vocabulary or style. But there are certain classes of medieval
writings into which the vernacular makes its way, even
if the main language is Latin, and does so almost of necessity.
The development of a science of economics has led to an
extension of the term * literature ' which may warrant the
inclusion of a ' compotus ' roll or of household accounts.
Nor is it reasonable to complain if in such a case a dialect
dictionary will often be more useful than a Latin lexicon.
We may doubt whether the modern student who laboriously
expands contractions into Latin terminations is not often
doing more than the original writer could have done without
an effort or would have thought it worth while to do at all.
But the fifteenth-century clerk in an episcopal registry who
transcribed an indictment of a certain Thomas who assaulted
(fecit insultum) a certain Robert * et eum uno cultello vocat.
" a London knyffe " pret. 4d. . . . felonice percussit . . . et
ibidem felonice interfecit et murderauit,' l certainly did
1 Cardinal Morton's Register, i, f. 196 b.
M 2
164 Legacy of the Middle Ages
not marvel at the Latinity of his brother who wrote tht
original document in the interests of the peace of our
Lord the King. It said what had to be said, and said it in
a way that could be understood. He wished no more.
And, after all, friars like Thomas of Eccleston or Roger
Bacon and great lawyers like Bracton equally with the
writers in the Year Books use a vocabulary which has as
necessarily been enlarged at that of Scotus or Aquinas ;
and the medieval physicians have indeed drunk strange
waters, as any one may see for himself who is attracted by
curious titles, in latinized or unlatinized Arabic or Greek,
found in catalogues of manuscripts to read their works for
himself. And if the learning of the East enriched the Latin
language as well as Latin literature by way of Salerno or of
Spain, so in many other quarters did talcs of travellers and
chronicles of the Crusades.
Let us turn for a moment to expositions of political
theory, remembering since we are in the Middle Ages that
we shall never separate it wholly from the ethical motive
or the soul's unceasing quest. ' Omnia cedunt in usum
sapientis, habentque materiam virtutis exercendae quae-
cunque dicuntur aut fiunt * : so says John of Salisbury in
the PolicraticuSy which we may venture to consider one of
the greatest political treatises of the Middle Ages, while
at the same time reflecting upon the admirable Latin which
some men at least could write in the twelfth century.
* The purpose of society is not merely that man should live
virtuously, but that by virtue he should come to the enjoy-
ment of God ' : thus teaches St. Thomas of Aquino in the
thirteenth. * O frater Leo, pecorella Dei, quamvis frater
Minor loquatur lingua angelica, et sciat stellarum cursus
et virtutes herbarum, et sciat revelationes thesauri terrarum,
et si cognoscat virtutes et proprietates avium et piscium,
animalium, hominum, radicum, arborum, lapidum et
Medieval Latin Literature 165
aquarum, scribe bene et nota diligenter quia non est ibi
perfecta laetitia ' : so with many like words Frater Hugo-
linus records the judgement of the Blessed Francis. ' Ah,
Domine Deus, quando ero tecum totus unitus et absorptus
meique totaliter oblitus ? ' such is the aspiration of Thomas
a Kempis in the Imitatio Cbristi the one medieval work
besides the Summa of Aquinas which is without question
or reserve a possession for ever. E contra Gregory VII sees
in kingly power an operation of the devil, and Walter Map
a century later begins his De Nugis Curialium with a descrip-
tion of Hell, while the fourteenth-century author of the
Somnium Viridarii tells us that * Roma a praedonibus et
latronibus fuit constructa : unde adhuc retinet primor-
dium. Nam " Romanus rodit : quos rodere non valet odit ' V
There are many phases of medieval thinking here, as there
are many styles of writing, yet more remain than any single
mind can compass, as may presently appear.
He who saw * perfecta laetitia ' in rejection by men
while in the service of God, sang too the Song of the Sun ;
and the extract we have given from the teaching of St.
Francis with its lovely Latin why should we not say it ?
has a further interest. For just that encyclopaedic know-
ledge, in which for him true joy did not consist, was what
with painful care the systematic minds of the Middle Ages,
at least those of a certain type, strove hardest to achieve.
There may be one or two men living now who have read
the whole of the Speculum Mains of Vincent of Beauvais :
there will scarcely be three. It is stupendous alike in its
variety, its scope, and its limitations, but parts at least are
of singular interest. And it did not stand alone. We have
often wondered whether the thirteenth century was not the
real testing time of Latin as a vehicle for the expression of
thought. Certainly when the Florentine Brunetto Latini
compiled his great * Tr6sor des Choses ' a few years before
166 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Vincent's death in 1264 he chose to write in * French',
and he tells us why : * Et se aucuns demandoit pourcoi
chius livres est escris en roumanch, selonc le patois de
Tranche, puis ke nous sommes Ytalijen, je diroie que
ch'est pour deus raisons : 1'une que nous sommes en
Tranche ; Tautre pour chou que la parleure est plus d61itable,
et plus kemune a tous langages.' 1 It is the supreme triumph
of the genius of the Latin language that it survived the
test. But admittedly it sometimes took strange forms.
Fra Ugolino, the reputed author of the Floretum, was
a contemporary of Dante who had shown in the Divina
Commedia and the De Monarcbia what new and old might
be and in the De Vulgari Eloquentia what the future might
hope. But Ugolino can write ' Tu non es unus pulcher
homo ' for the old, if he can also join the two languages in
* Sed quando dicet tibi : Tu es damnatus, et tu secure
respondeas : Apri la bocca et mote cecato, id est, aperi os
tuum et ibi pone cacum.' It is -not really to the point to
urge that his very simplicity is more attractive than all the
luxuriance of St. Bernard's expositions of the Song of
Songs or St. Bonaventure's seraphic commentaries on the
Master of Sentences, though it may be true. Perhaps the
Latin of Fra Ugolino, the Latin of Monte Giorgio, was like
the French of Marlborough, the medieval rival of Stratford
atte Bow. 8 There is malice, though not venom, in the
1 It ia a curious foil to ' Lingua roxnana coram clericis saporem suavi-
tatis non habet '.
1 If the story be, as Matthew Paris feared, offendiculum amicorum^ it is
Walter Map's, not ours. Geoffrey, son of Henry II, was ordered by the
Pope, after seven years' tenure of the bishopric of Lincoln, either to resign
or seek consecration. ' Diu tergiversans neutrum et utrumque voluit et
noluit. Rex igitur qui sollicite considerabat multam terram occupatam
a ficu tali, coegit cum ad alterutrum. Is autem elegit cedere. Cessit
igitur apud Merleburgam, ubi fons est quern si quis, ut aiunt, gustaverit,
Gallice barbarizat, unde cum vitiose quis ilia lingua loquitur, dicimus
Medieval Latin Literature 167
story which the reference recalls, but the Nugae Curialium,
like other collections of anecdotes, sometimes at any rate
embody history and we do not doubt that this is true.
Le style fest Fbomme meme : yet we wonder a little as
we read the twelfth-century poet of Pisa quoted by Mr.
H. O. Taylor :
Inclytorum Pisanorum scriptunis historiam
Antiquorum Romanorum renovo memoriam,
Nam ostendit modo Pisa laudem admirabilem,
Quam olim recepit Roma vincendo Carthaginem. 1
What sort of a man was he who could write like that ?
The last line must be one of the worst in Latin literature.
We feel as if the steed refusing the fence had shot its owner
through the air. However, he recovers himself and writes
quite a great deal more : and that also is the medieval
spirit. It must be admitted that the numbers in which
some of these writers lisped were their misfortune rather
than their merit. But we must not suppose that he was
exceptional in his attitude or his courage. We will wend
our way back a century or so to Gandersheim and find in
the pages of Hrosvitha * illustris et clarissima virgo et
monialis ', one of the most interesting of the learned ladies
of the Middle Ages, 2 another specimen, if in curious verse :
Non me plus licito tantae sophiae fore iacto
Vt sperem plene verbis me dicere posse.
eum loqui Gallicum Merleburgae : unde Map, cum audisset cum verba
resignationis domino Ricardo Cantuariensi dicere, et quaesisset dominus
archiepiscopus ab eo"Quid loqueris?" volens eum iterare quod dixerat,
ut omnes audirent, ct ipso tacente quaereret item " Quid loqueris ? "
respondit pro eo Map " Gallicum Merleburgae ". Ridentibus igitur aliis,
ipse recessit iratus.' (De Nugis Curialium, Dist. v, c. 6, ed. Wright,
pp. 235-6.)
1 Cf. H. O. Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind, i. 252.
2 Mr. Taylor (op. cit. ii. 215) hardly atones for calling her ' tiresome 9
by adding that she is ' unquestionably immoital '.
168 Legacy of the Middle Ages
She has brought the great Otto in her narrative to the
imperial throne :
Hactenus Oddonis famosi denique regis
Gesta (licet tenui musa) cecini modulando.
Now she sends B6renger into exile with his wife Villa,
deposes the Pope and returning to Saxony creates his son
' infantem in cunis ', King at Aachen ; but these are
matters,
Tangcre quae vereor, quia foemineo prohibebor
Sciu : nee vili debent sermone reuolui
Haec igitur nostris nequeunt exponier orsis :
Sed quaerunt seriem longe sibi nobiliorem.
Hinc ego tantarum prohibente grauedine rerum
Vltra non tendo : fincm sed prouide pono.
O admirable Hrosvitha ! Even on the technical side these
leonine hexameters repay examination, and we can only
long for space in which to show her also as writer of plays.
It is a long stretch from Gandersheim to the Birmingham
Oratory, from Hrosvitha to Cardinal Newman, but she in
her age could show how Terence could be made quite
convenable by an adjustment of characters and a denouement
which exhibits the triumph of Virtue. The modern reader
will be foolish if he does not smile rather than criticize,
and though he may regret that her discernment did not
extend to the fact that Terence wrote in verse, she would
not mind: 'Si enim alicui placet mea devotio, gaudebo.
Si autem vel pro mea abiectione vel pro vitiosi sermonis
rusticitate nulli placet, memet ipsam placet quod fed.'
Memet ipsam placet quod fed ! It accounts for much.
But we must turn to look at history in another mode.
A medieval French translator of a Latin chronicle once
observed that he wrote in prose rather than in verse because
Medieval Latin Literature 169
rhyme led to the addition of words not in the Latin. 1
Verse chroniclers like the author of the ' Ligurinus ' had no
such scruple. At any rate he describes at great length events
which he says that he has not been worthy to witness. Otto
of Freising, on whom he based himself, had done better when
he wrote inter alia a chronicle stretching in the medieval
manner from Adam to A.D. 1152, and De Gestis Friderici I.
If we can take nothing else from the latter famous book it
shall be a description of his hero, of whom, justifying himself
by the description given by Sidonius Apollinaris of Theodoric
the Goth, he says that * et moribus et forma talis est ut et
ill is dignus sit agnosci quieum minus familiariter intuentur \
And as we look, the picture grows before us.
' Forma corporis decenter exacta : statura longissimis breuior,
procerior eminentiorque mediocribus : fiaua caesaries, paululum
a vertice fronds crispata. Aures vix superiacentibus crinibus
operiuntur, tonsore pro reuerentia Imperil pilos capitis et
gcnarum assidua succisione curtante. Orbes oculorum acuti et
perspicaces, nasus venustus, barba subrufa, labra subtilia, nee
dilatati oris angulis ampliata, totaque facies laeta et hilaris.
Dentium series ordinata niueum colorem repraesentant. Gut-
turis et colli non obesi, sed parumper succulenti, lactea cutis, et
quae iuuenili rubore suffundatur. Eumque illi crebro colorem
non ira sed vcrecundia facit. Huxneri paulisper prominentes.
In succinctis ilibus vigor. Crura suns fulta turgentibus hono-
rabilia et bene mascula. Incessus firmus et constans, vox clara,
totaque corporis habitudo virilis. Tali corporis forma plurima et
dignitas et auctoritas tarn stand quam sedend acquiritur.'
Certainly Barbarossa is every inch an Emperor, and who
shall deny that a medieval writer can be an artist in words ?
His younger contemporary, Lambert of Hersfeld, though
inferior as a stylist, can draw a striking picture too, as in the
scene of the affray between the Bishop of Bamberg and the
1 The translator of the chronicle of the pseudo-Turpin. Cf. C. V.
Langlois in Petit de Julie villc, Histoirc de la Lang, et Liu. Frang^ II. ii,
p. 282.
17 Legacy of the Middle Ages
* Dux Arabum *. In a quieter manner is the charmingly
simple description of London and the Becket family in
the anonymous Life of St. Thomas ; in one more sprightly
the vivid little scene of King and Chancellor and poor man
wherein the Chancellor loses his cloak by involuntary
beneficence as told by William FitzStephen, most graphic
of biographers. Or if we are in a different mood we may
turn from the chroniclers to the fine passage of stately
rhetoric in which Peter Damiani solemnly throws overboard
and abandons to their fate Plato and Pythagoras, Nico-
machus and Euclid, bent-backed with complicated studies
of geometrical figures, the rhetors with their syllogisms and
the Peripatetics looking for truth at the bottom of a well,
the tragic and the comic poets, Cicero and Demosthenes,
in comparison with the simplicity of Christ, and seeks
counsel on a liturgical question of Leo the hermit ! This,
too, is medieval.
We might add many other studies in the use of words,
each of which would have an interest of its own. Let us
choose one in the grand style William of Malmesbury's
introduction to his Gesta Pontificum :
' Erat certe plenum segnitiei et ignominiae nescire saltern
nomina principum nostrae provinciae, cum pertendat alias
cognitio nostra ad tractus usque Indiae, et si quid ultra iacet
quod infinite Oceano patet. His adductus rationibus, et hie et
alibi, traxi stilum per latebrosissimas historias, quanquam mihi
non hie affluat eadem copia scientiae quae in Gestis Regum.
Siquidem ibi aliquid de cronicis quae prae me habebam mutuatus,
velut e sublimi specula fulgente facula, quo gressum sine errore
tenderem, ammonebar. Hie autem pene omni destitutes solatio,
crassas ignorantiae tenebras palpo, nee ulla lucerna historiae
praevia semitam dirigo. Aderit tamen, ut spero, lux mentium,
ut et Integra non vacillet veritas et institute conscrvctur
brevitas.'
Our last example shall be one which shows as vividly as any-
thing that we know both the development of vocabulary and
Medieval Latin Literature 171
the extraordinary effectiveness of medieval Latin in capable
hands. It is taken from Nicholas of Butrinto's account of his
experiences during the journey of the Emperor Henry VII
in Italy :
* Mane fecimus equos parari et somas ligari. Et dum esscmus
in mensa expectantes nuncium nostrum et responsionem Pote-
statis, audivimus quod campana cum martello pulsabatur. In
continent! vidimus totam stratam plenam armatorum peditum
et equitum. Tune domum nostram giraverunt. Postea ad
scalam quidam de Maguelotis popularis, pulcher homo valde
volens ascendere incepit clamare : Moriantur talcs ! Hospes diu
gladio evaginato in gradibus non dimittebat aliquem ascendere.
In illo tumultu somarii nostri et equi fere omnes per praedictos
ducti sunt. Tune per diversa loca gradus ascenderunt, et ad
cameram nostram venerunt cultellis evaginatis. De nostris
familiaribus tune aliqui fugerunt dimittentes se per fenestras
cadere ad unum hortum ; inter quos fuit socius meus frater
Praedicator. Alii se pre timore mortis abscondentes sub lectis.
Pauci tune nobiscum remanserunt. Sed Deus ... sic nos . . .
confortavit quod in mea conscientia nunquam timui, licet magis
essem in periculo quam alius. Dum hec fierent, in civitate
Florentina fuit tumultus. Quidam dicebant quod male erat
factum sic nos banniendo.'
We have not preserved the * instituta brevitas ' ourselves,
and can only suggest by reference the quaint interest of
works like Gascoigne's Liber Veritatum, the charm of letters
like those of Peter of Blois or of Pecham or the more formal
style of the Papal Chancery seen, for example, among those
of Gregory VII, or the character of the letter which be-
comes a moral treatise in the hands of Henry of Huntingdon,
or of some other writer * De Contemptu Mundi '. We
have said nothing of works of moral theology in which
some would have us see le moyen age intime> though seldom
because * legentibus necnon audientibus ad meritum pro-
ficiunt '. But this is not a survey of medieval literature,
else must much have been said of Roger Bacon and of
172 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Grosseteste and more of the English chroniclers, whom to
know is to love, and of Bede, in some ways greater than
them all. It is but a note of some stages in a great develop-
ment where some have heedlessly seen nothing but decay.
The Middle Ages are neither a sordid tragedy of ecclesias-
ticism nor a splendid interlude, but the testing ground
wherein many seeds were sown, some good, some bad. We
boast ourselves far better than our fathers, but if we dub
them barbarians we are still their children. Nor shall we
grumble at our inheritance if while some dispute of the
origin of the modern state we hold in our hearts the idea
of the ' pecorella Dei ', in our hands some of the greatest
literature of the world.
CLAUDE JENKINS.
ii. VERNACULAR LITERATURE
FASTIDIOUS travellers often acquire a feeling of their own
national superiority over races which have attained a lesser
degree of civilization, mechanical or intellectual or both.
If they roam far afield enough they are given to affect an
attachment to some particular race, with which they have
come into touch, not far removed in kind from the attach-
ment which is felt for a pet animal. The Romans possessed
a good share of such fastidiousness, and with some reason
considered themselves superior to most races of the ancient
world. There came a day when some of these races overran
the Roman Empire and from the very outset broke up the
complex organization of civilized life. Let us imagine that
a similar disaster befell the modern world. Think of
unkempt hordes camping in the squares of our cities, pulling
up the rails of the railways, cutting down the wires of
telegraphs and telephones, setting fire to palaces, factories,
and churches. One must try, however imperfectly, to
visualize the colossal upheaval which brought the ancient
world to an end. It is easy to say now that the ancient
world was corrupt ; the modern world is perhaps little
better ; and the barbaric invasions had the relentlessness
of a cataclysm. The invaders were more backward than
some of the races which our fastidious travellers either
spurn or patronize and it took Europe almost a thousand
years to recover from that deadly blow. But nothing is
absolute in life ; the destruction was not complete and,
though rapid, it was far from being sudden. There were
edifices which did not collapse ; there were forces, old
forces and new forces, which worked for the salvage of
174 Legacy of the Middle Ages
some of the most treasured possessions ; in their turn the
invaders often gloried in frenzied destruction but at times
chose to preserve some of their newly acquired properties.
And it is from those debris of the ancient world and from
the effects of those unconcerted efforts that something has
come down to the modern world which it can claim as its
legacy from the Middle Ages. Those thousand years must
here be considered together ; we must see what they left
behind them without analysing the complex process by
which such results were achieved. Three principal elements
were in conflict, the ancient world as embodied in the
Roman Empire, Christianity which transformed and sub-
verted the principles on which the Roman Empire was
based, and the barbarians who came on to the scene as
predestined forces of destruction.
Marks of decline were traceable in Latin culture long
before the western empire collapsed, but the bulk of
classical learning, in some parts of Europe at least, was
almost intact at the beginning of the Middle Ages ; in
regions more distant from the natural centre the process of
disintegration and re-elaboration had already commenced.
Where the bulk of learning was intact it had altered its
character ; it was intact, but not truly alive, and such life
as it preserved was drawn from new sources. The races
which were destroying the ancient empire were stepping
forward at the same time as its heirs, and they were the
destroyers and the heirs of ancient culture as well as of
political power.
In a way destruction meant rejuvenation, for it may be
a paradox, but not so absurd a paradox as a bigoted classicist
would think it, to affirm that one of the principal benefits
which the Middle Ages bestowed upon the modern era was
the colossal destruction of monuments and books ; their
integral survival would have forced the new peoples into
Vernacular Literature 175
the conscious position of pupils and their conquering
energies would have been deadened.
But the lifelessness of ancient culture at the end of the
classical period was produced by other causes than age and
decay. It was Christianity which sapped the vitality of
ancient learning and ancient institutions. Ancient learning
was heathen and could not survive in its original form when
the ancient beliefs were discarded. . Greek and Latin
became the languages of the Church and culture took
refuge within the precincts of ecclesiastical buildings,
Cassiodorus pointing the way ; but the Christian Church
soon became aware of the need officially to wage war against
classical culture. Such a contradiction was not to be
avoided, for the Christian Church on the one hand was
forced to antagonize all that was the product of false belief,
and on the other hand it was impelled to make use in this
war of the weapons that classical learning provided. No
one seemed to discern at first that the right direction for
a victorious attack was to christianize rather than to destroy
classical culture, and thus its suppression was aimed at.
Much was destroyed but much also was christianized, so
much in fact that it has been asserted that the function of
the Middle Ages was the christianization of classical culture.
It was a period of crisis and thus a period full of crying
contrasts. It saw the rise of the new world and it was fully
dominated by ancient thought and traditions. Medieval
men aimed in politics at a universal empire and brought
about the rise of modern nations ; the languages of learning
and of the Church, almost two names for the same thing
at this age, was Latin, and it was at this age that a multitude
of vernaculars broke through the Latin shell or took the
place of Latin and stood forth as literary languages. Whether
classical models were ignored, antagonized, or imitated, the
result was the same. The glamour of classicism was too
176 Legacy of the Middle Ages
great to prove ineffective. To the people who hated and
despised all things Latin, Rome became the centre of thought
because of their hatred ; to others the glory of imperial
Rome was a source of undying regret or passionate envy ;
and legends arose about her. Rome loomed greater in this
misty period of ignorance than she had shone in the hey-
day of her glory ; but it was as different a Rome as those
envious, regretfal, and ambitious men were different from
the rulers of the ancient world.
Everything seems so confusing and perplexing at a first
glance that one well understands how the adjective ' dark '
readily occurred to those who wrote about the Middle
Ages. But if one looks beyond the printed, or even the
written page, and strives to call forth hi one's imagination
the events of those days, looking at them with the same
close attention and interested uncertainty with which one
needs must look upon contemporary events, things cease
to be puzzling and strange. For the Middle Ages appear
to possess the perplexing character of things living ; change or
if one prefers a more ambitious if less accurate word, progress,
did not follow then and never follows a straight course.
In literature there was an inevitable division. There
was on one side the official literature, Latin, which pre-
tended to continue the Latin tradition, and did continue
it to a certain extent despite the intrusion of all sorts of
new elements ; and on the other side there was vernacular
literature, a literature which had some claim to be considered
the spontaneous production of the new peoples and which
truly voiced their feelings despite an increasing tendency
to conform to classical models. It is precisely this twofold
characteristic of vernacular literature which reveals the
complexity of this epoch and gave rise to momentous
movements and developments lasting well beyond the
accepted boundaries of the Middle Ages.
Vernacular Literature 177
But literature is conditioned by language, and conversely
any effective statement of facts or needs or sentiments
potentially is literature. It only needs a man endowed with
special powers of expression to transform everyday language
into a means of artistic creation. The Romans did not
consider other nations their equals ; out of snobbery their
intellectual classes may have learnt Greek, but as a people
they carried their native language with them. Neighbours
of kindred racial stock seem readily to have accepted their
conqueror's tongue. Later, Etruscans and Celts yielded in
the same way, and it is no wonder therefore that, when the
power and glamour of Rome became greater and extended
beyond the Alps and the sea, peoples more backward in
civilization should offer little resistance to accepting Latin
as their only or their second language when submitting to
the political rule of the Romans. Even so English is now
spoken by British subjects in different latitudes and of
different races. But each race brings peculiarities of its
own in the pronunciation and in the construction of English ;
and it could be admitted a priori even if direct proofs were
lacking, and they are not, that Latin was spoken with
different inflexions by provincials, and that at a later age
it was written by provincials who were unable entirely to
suppress their native habits of thought. Conversely when
the Roman hold upon the provinces began to slacken, this
linguistic uniformity ceased to exist. Where the Roman
domination had lasted longer, local Romanized dialects
gradually worked themselves up to the dignity of written
languages (Romance languages) ; and where the Roman
mark had been stamped less deeply and new barbarians had
settled in large numbers, the local languages, ancient or
new, asserted their pre-eminence by consciously antagon-
izing the language which their previous masters or foes had
spoken, while at the same time they endeavoured to adapt
3873 N
178 Legacy of the Middle Ages
their own speech to the requirements of written languages
on the model of Latin.
With a few exceptions, notably in Saxon England, the
language used in the schools, where schools existed, was still
Latin, but people used their own language in ordinary
intercourse ; and the number of children who were sent to
school, in course of time and in most places, grew steadily
less, until in most countries education became restricted
to such as aimed at pursuing an ecclesiastical career. Even
if able to write and speak Latin in a fashion, they were not
ignorant of their own vernacular ; and their own proficiency
in the language of ' grammar ' reacted upon their usage of
vernacular, particularly when they attempted to write it.
To the tyrannical sway of Latin there succeeded a multi-
plicity of dialects, for there was no logical reason why one
or the other of the dialects spoken by any group of individuals
should be preferred, when writing, to the dialects of kindred
groups. There began a struggle for pre-eminence and the
ultimate victory of one or two dialects in each racial associa-
tion was due to cultural as much as to linguistic and political
causes.
By degrees most of these dialects crept into written
records, in the form of glosses to Latin texts and legal
documents, when an oath was administered to people who
were ignorant of Latin or their evidence taken ; but there
is no proof that the earliest-written records of each single
vernacular or dialect are contemporary with its earliest
literary usage. The circumstances of such a usage at its
inception can only be inferred. Dante in his youthful
Vita nova faced this problem for Italian and Provencal and
ventured upon a guess, which cannot now be substantiated,
when he wrote : * of these (poets) the first was moved to
the writing of such verses by the wish to make himself
understood of a certain lady unto whom Latin poetry was
Vernacular Literature 179
difficult.' Dante was thinking of the conditions prevailing
under the later years of the feudal regime and, so far as
one is able to see, he erred in the particular no less than in
the general case. Who could lay down a rule as to the
emotion which a man, gifted with some versifying ability,
would be first prompted to express in a poem written in
everyday language ?
Individual peculiarities must have had as much influence
as racial and group tendencies and customs. Very little is
known about the earliest winileodos of the Germans ; and
the earliest specimens of love poetry in France are of so
polished a type as to postulate an antecedent period of
development. Above every other consideration it is neces-
sary to bear in mind that, after the fifth century, there is
no ground for assuming such uniform conditions in western
Europe as had prevailed, during the period of centralized
rule. Teutons and Latins lived under different conditions ;
and Teutons differed from Teutons, as Latins or latinized
peoples differed from other groups of the same races. No
doubt men were men, whether fair skinned or swarthy, but
in dealing with intellectual and artistic activities one dares
not to press a parallel down to the bedrock of common
instincts. A rough division must be made between Teutons
and Latins. The first literary attempts in the Teutonic
languages need not be parallel to and due to the same process
of development as the earliest attempts in the Romance
languages.
The Teutons were rapidly passing from a lower to a higher
stage of civilization, and they believed that their triumph
was due to their valour alone ; for centuries they had fought
amid forests, mountains, and moors, and they had worshipped
their gods ; some clans had prospered, others had suffered
defeat ; at this time they seemed to hold the wealth and
the destiny of the world in their grasp. In such conditions
N 2
i8o Legacy of the Middle Ages
it is to be supposed that religious zeal, heathen at first and
later Christian, clannish pride, memories of war must have
gone to the creation of myths and epics, and must have
found poetic expression no later than the milder passion
of love.
The Romance peoples had other interests and a different
fate ; their culture was declining rather than developing ;
in Italy the new settlers kept aloof from or were rapidly
assimilated by the natives, in Spain the Goths were not
many and they were also assimilated, while the Arabs had
a creed and a culture of their own and proved impervious
to the attractions of Latin and Christian civilization. Only
in Gaul the latinized inhabitants freely mixed with the
conquerors. In Britain the latinization had been com-
paratively superficial and the invaders drove the inhabitants
westwards.
On the whole the Teutonic vernaculars reached literary
rank sooner than the Romance vernaculars which had no
clear ground but had to conquer the competition of Latin ;
and thus one could assert that the medieval literature in
the vernacular was, during the earlier centuries, Teutonic,
that, later, the people of France added their voices to it,
and that Spaniards and Italians were last into the field.
Nor can one overlook the different incidence of the process
of christianization. It is obvious that the advent of Chris-
tianity hastened, to say the least, the disintegration of the
Roman Empire, and thus caused the Latin and latinized
peoples to suffer a loss of dignity and power. On the con-
trary it was the conversion to Christianity which fitted the
Teutons for political pre-eminence. Christian literature
was mainly Latin and Greek in the old imperial lands, but
among the Germanic peoples, who had but recently been
converted to Christianity, it is conceivable that some of the
earliest written works must have dealt with religion. Works
Vernacular Literature 181
on religion had a twofold importance : they satisfied the
requirements of piety and Apostolicism, and they con-
stituted an unconscious record of the recent evolution
towards a higher civilization. Even before the Goths were
urged on their westward migration their bishop Wulfila had
translated the Bible for them (fourth century).
The Roman Empire was still in being, but, in the light of
later events, one could scarcely imagine a more significant
and menacing fact than this first introduction of a barbaric
people to Christianity coinciding with the introduction of
their language into the world of literature. For centuries
still other Teutonic groups lived in ignorance of Christianity
or resisted the efforts directed to their conversion. It is
only in the days of Charlemagne that one can speak of
a christianized western Europe. But meanwhile there had
been a push of migration which had brought Teutonic
settlers into Gaul, Britain, Scandinavia, Italy, Iberia, and
North Africa ; hustling the previous occupiers, intermingling
and intermarrying with them, practically suppressing them
or keeping them in a state of political subjection as the
case may have been in the different countries. Of course,
the nearer the invaders reached to the more civilized
centres, and the longer their residence lasted, the quicker
were their strides towards a more cultured condition. In
Gaul, Iberia, Italy, the Alpine region and Dacia they were
unable to withstand the powerful attraction of the Romance
languages which were locally spoken and soon the new
settlers lost every recollection of their original tongues.
So little is known about these wordless races that it is
impossible to set down definite information about the
manner in which the change took place in each country.
But some guess may be risked with the perilous aid of
analogy. One learns from the daily press about the impres-
sions of African potentates who visit the capitals of Europe ;
i82 Legacy of the Middle Ages
if one makes some allowance for the professional picturesque-
ness of the recorders' style, that gives one something to go
upon. But a further step is required. One must still try
to imagine how such impressions would vary and be modified
if these potentates were coming as conquerors. For it was
precisely as restive and ambitious allies, and more often as
conquerors, that the Germans came upon the glory of
civilized life. They were leaving behind their old camps
in the forests of central Europe, and found themselves in
large cities with marble palaces, temples, monumental
bridges ; in their home they had depended for food upon
hunting, fishing, cattle grazing, and primitive agriculture, -
and they were brought into contact with the amenities and
comfort arising from intensive cultivation of land and
organized trade. This was puzzling enough, but the contact
with Rome must have required another and more arduous
effort from the Germans ; for they had to be inserted into
the network of civilized life and to settle down among
people who were vanquished, it is true, and crushed into
political subjection, but who still towered above their
conquerors from the height of an incomparably superior
culture and of glorious traditions.
In so far as Gaul, Iberia, and Italy are concerned, ' Roma
victa vicit Germaniam,' but there were degrees in the
extent of this victory. Rome had produced no popular
epics. The Romans were little inclined to poetic amplifica-
tions ; these undaunted builders were wont to construct
their epics in stone ; miles and miles of paved roads, cutting
straight across hills and forests, must have possessed an
almost emotional appeal such as the long sequences of
single rhymed lines may have had for the French. When
one comes upon some conspicuous remains of Roman work,
one seldom fails to be impressed by it as by something
massive and almost repulsive in its single-minded forceful-
Vernacular Literature 183
ness. But however this be, the Romans would sooner do
things than sit around camp-fires singing the praises of their
mythical heroes. They were satisfied to leave the recording
to more or less partial historians. It was not so with most
of the Germans. With them, on the evidence of Tacitus,
epic songs were a national habit even before they began to
use the Runic alphabet ; theirs was probably a hero-worship
strongly admixed with primitive mythology. But these
songs were not written, and the later works which have been
preserved were either written or modified under the influ-
ence of Christianity, as Beowulf or the Hildebrandslied. The
Scop or gleeman was unknown to Roman days and could
only be compared to early Greek poets. The northern
myths, however disguised, penetrated into European litera-
ture and with them a new taste for epics which was to find
expression in different countries : epics of war such as
Beowulf, epics based on Germanic myths such as the Edda
or much later the Niebelungenlied (end of twelfth century),
and epics in some way connected with conflicts between
Heathens and Christians such as the Chanson de Roland and
to a certain extent the Cantar de mio Cid. And side by side
with these representative poets there were epic ballads,
chansons, cantares, some of which are still extant and many
of which have been lost ; and also historical accounts in
prose and in verse in which at times the epic prevails over
the historical element, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
the Kaiserkronik, or the Cronica general of Alphonse ' el
Sabio '. Some of these legends either had from the beginning
or were to receive in the distant future such poetic expression
as would endow them with the gift of eternity. The Chan-
son de Roland is a thing beautiful in itself, and beautiful are
Parzival and the Cantar de mio Cid, but other legends had
to wait for the master touch of Ariosto and Wagner.
But not the Germanic race alone added to the store of
184 Legacy of the Middle Ages
poetical traditions which had come down from the classical
days. The medieval invaders pushed westwards but did not
destroy the Celts in Britain and France, and thus they came
into touch with the Breton lais about King Arthur and
the Round Table ; lais which originally were or soon
became differentiated from epics and stood for the essential
virtues which belong to chivalry. This romantic literature,
wherever it originated, became widely known in the manner
in which it was elaborated in France ; for it was in France
that the Latin and the barbaric elements mixed more
freely, so that from the tenth to the thirteenth century
France became the crucible in which the old stuff was
remodelled and the new stuff shaped for the use of the
contemporary world. The medieval French conception of
chivalry gave the world the courtly lyrics of Provence and
the passionate romances of Britain. It matters little whether
or not this romantic stuff found its most perfect expression
in France or elsewhere, at the beginning of the thirteenth
or at the end of the fifteenth century, in Wolfram's Parzival
or in the book of Sir Thomas Malory.
The fascination and the fashion of Arthurian romances
were all-conquering during the later Middle Ages ; in
France and in French and Anglo-Norman speaking coun-
tries the note of passionate love and knightly devotion was
touched upon with so refined a delicacy that it is little
wonder that the names of Tristram, Lancelot, Yseult, and
the others became acclimatized almost everywhere. The
wealth of French productions was so great that even such
little jewels as Aucassin et Nicolette and the lais of Marie
de France comparatively received little attention.
But Teutons and Celts were not alone in contributing
fresh sources of inspiration to the new vernacular literatures.
In Spain and Portugal the contact with Arabs and Orientals
was immediate and lasting and their influence greatest and
Vernacular Literature 185
most widely diffused ; elsewhere, in Sicily and southern
Italy and on merchants, crusaders and pilgrims, it was less
profound. It would be easy to emphasize unduly the
importance of this element, but in Spain at any rate the
century-long conflict against the Moors and their residence
in the country had a good deal to do in laying the lines
along which the vernacular literature developed : they
may have contributed lyrical elements, according to some
scholars they may also have suggested epic cycles ; they
certainly stamped a taste for oriental gorgeousness and
complication upon language and literature such as the
Alhambra realizes in stone. And when the political power
of Spain was at its zenith and other literatures had become
barren, this taste was accepted or arose also in other coun-
tries in the days of Baroque. Thus the earlier Middle Ages
saw the glory of Teutonic literature : the rise of Teutonic
epic, of Celtic romance and the fierce religious zeal of the
neophites. Charlemagne, who was so important a factor in
shaping the political ideals of the later Middle Ages, may be
taken as a symbol. It was he who fostered the revival of
classical learning and collected at the same time the old
Teutonic sagas, he, a German-speaking sovereign, who was
destined to become the national hero of France, he who
forced the reluctant Saxons into the Christian fold and
battled against the Moors of Spain. Thus he towered up in
the culminating period of the earlier Middle Ages, for he
summed up in himself the characteristic traits of his Teuton
ancestors, strength, zeal, valour, and pride ; and yet he
was drawn into the sphere of classical civilization to the
extent of being proud to be styled * Roman Emperor ', and
by every means in his power to foster the study of ancient
culture. His object in doing so was religious as well as
political, but he seems instinctively to have felt the ap-
proaching eclipse of the old Teutonic star ; and just as
i86 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Boethius, on the threshold of the Middle Ages, endeavoured
to save classicism from total destruction, Charlemagne,
feeling that the heathen glory of the Teutons was waning,
ordered that their ancient songs should be saved from
impending oblivion. In a way he belonged to the Spanish
as well as to the French epic cycle, and considering his
leaning towards Latin culture it seems fitting that he should
have been celebrated in the full glory of the Renaissance by
the most classical of Italian poets, Lodovico Ariosto.
Again, as a relentless persecutor of heathendom, Charle-
magne is significant. As such he won favour with the clergy.
Religious literature took many forms during the Middle
Ages, from the simple exposition of the W eissenburger
Katecbismus and Caedmon's Paraphrase to the old Saxon
epic of which Der Heliand is a fragment (about 830) and the
countless legends of Saints, translations and adaptations
from Latin texts. It would be too much to credit the
Middle Ages with having created and bestowed upon later
periods all that is Christian in modern literature, but a good
deal of it would not have been written but for the inter-
vention of the new peoples who then acquired political
importance.
The enthusiasm of neophytes was not satisfied with a
direct appeal to reason ; hero-worship such as gave rise to
epic, gave also rise to the legends of Saints. Brief data of
Latin texts were amplified by the imagination of poets,
more enthusiastic than logical, who felt the need of providing
their ignorant audiences with the right kind of material ;
the realistic misinterpretation of metaphoric expression,
in the earlier lives of Saints, became a source of extra-
ordinary errors and of a number of preposterous miracles ;
every exuberant suggestion was translated into an exagger-
ated reality; the giant Christopher became a common
decoration of churches. This legendary literature left few
Vernacular Literature 187
traces in later ages, and inspired only one or two works of
permanent value. From the fourth century there had
existed the Visio Sancti Pauli, a legend describing St. Paul's
rapture in the aftcrworld. A few centuries later the monks,
and particularly the ascetic and enthusiastic Irish monks,
seized upon this theme and produced a series of legends of
the afterworld, from the legend of St. Patrick to that of
the monk St. Brendan. These visions made a complete
appeal. The realistic description of harrowing penalties
inflicted upon the spirits in Hell was intended as a deterrent
from sin, strong enough to impress the mind of Christians
whose sensibility had been blunted by the hardships of
medieval life ; moreover these descriptions, horrifying as
they were, answered to that strain of self-martyrization
which became so common during periods of mystical
emotion and brought about fastings, hermitic penances,
self-fustigations, such as were practised by anchorites in the
East, and by Irish monks and their continental pupils who
strove after a reform in monasticism. The Last Judgement
with its terrors was kept ever present to the mind of the
potential sinner just as the gallows was kept in evidence in
the eyes of potential criminals. Carvings and frescoes on
churches were ever recalling the impending menace. The
faithful, on turning to leave the churches, were forced to
look upon the Last Judgement frescoed above the portals.
On the other hand the people often had a hard lot to bear,
men and women alike ; wars, sieges, piratical invasions,
famines, plagues, poverty, and sickness were more frequent
and deadly than in our days. It would be absurd to describe
the Middle Ages as a series of bleak years uninterrupted by
a ray of sunshine ; there must have been happy, gentle,
tender people no doubt, but happiness was sought in the
afterworld more often than it is now. The ancients had
imagined a joyous period in a mythical golden age of the
i88 Legacy of the Middle Ages
past ; the men of the Middle Ages replied to this by their
legends of the earthly Paradise and better still by their
conception of the afterworld, of a Paradise and a Purgatory,
so much more rich in spiritual content than the Elysian
Fields ,of the Romans. In our days one occasionally reads
of perfect happiness based on some Utopian constitution,
but at best these are intellectual opinions, vague hopes, and
seldom become creeds. In the Middle Ages men sought
a refuge from reality in their unshakable belief in heavenly
reward, and thus it became as obvious that visions should
describe realistically this happy state, as that other legends
should represent the horrors of damnation. In primitive
days, among simple and primitive men, it was but natural
that the joys of Paradise should be realistically represented
so as to render the descriptions of the Christian heaven an
echo of the dreams of the hungry; but there is little
doubt that the world owes some of the features of two of
its literary masterpieces, the Divine Comedy and Paradise
Lost, to the medieval output of transcendental visions.
These visions had been among the tools used by the monks
who were engaged in bringing about the conversion of such
among the Germans as still adhered to heathen practices,
but the enjoyment of visionary works did not cease when
those monks had completed their task and the unsettling
migration of peoples had stopped. There were always men
whose instincts turned to mysticism and who required the
aid of transcendental literature. Unhappiness and ignorance
were perhaps never worse than during the tenth century,
and destitute and ignorant men were to be found in plenty
throughout the Middle Ages. The visions describing
almost materialistic heavens had a particular appeal for such
sections of the population as felt keenly the desire to escape
from their surrounding reality. As if to satisfy such a re-
quirement there appeared tales about happy islands in
Vernacular Literature 189
distant seas where no rain fell, no winter existed, and food
was abundant. These tales were indirectly related to the
earlier transcendental visions and were not immune from
oriental influence ; in their literary form they seemed at
times to be based on certain classical data and they con-
stituted a parallel and a precedent for the pastoral poetry
of the later Middle Ages and of the Renaissance. For
pastoral poets obeyed a similar wish to escape from reality
and to create for themselves a world of fancy in which
peace and happiness reigned and imagination was free
from the restrictions and the checks of truth. One might
even argue that there are stories written in our days about
distant islands in the Southern Pacific which bear some
resemblance in their origin and development to these
medieval prototypes.
To religious literature also the drama was due ; out of
the Roman liturgy, particularly of Easter Sunday, dramatic
actions were developed which were transferred from the
churches into the churchyards on acquiring lay elements.
Miracle Plays, Mysteres, Geistlicbe Scbauspiele, Autos
SacramentaleSy Sacre Rappresentazioni, are but different
names for the same thing. Until the Renaissance the
drama owed nothing to the classics, and even then the
influence of the Greek drama was exercised rather through
dramatic theory than through direct imitation, if one
ignores the painfully pedantic adaptations from Terence
and Plautus. The religious drama appealed perhaps to the
common people more than to the gentry; the gentry
found their amusements in their castles ; in court epics
and lyrics. It was in lyric poetry perhaps that France
showed her later medieval pre-eminence most. Classical
lyrics had become stereotyped but religious lyrics acquired
an ease and sincerity of sentiment which cannot be over-
looked in the study of medieval psychology ; particularly
igo Legacy of the Middle Ages
the cult of the Virgin Mary called forth impassioned and
entrancing hymns, but all were written in Latin. In the
vernacular there must have been some lyrics of a sort at all
times ; Charlemagne thought it necessary to forbid nuns
from receiving winileodos, love poems most likely, but very
little is known about these primitive lyrics. Then, suddenly,
about the twelfth century, when the Feudal system in some
countries had become well established, there broke out in
France a stream of lyric poetry so profuse, so perfect, and
so varied in form that it postulates a long period of pre-
paration.
Love poetry had been common among the Arabs. It had
evidently existed among the Teutons, but nothing could be
compared to the grandiose poetic activity of Provence.
From William of Poitiers onward, for about 150 years,
there was a constant output of lyrics, conventional as the
Feudal civilization was conventional, which imposed itself
as a model to poets in all vernaculars ; poets of Spain, of
northern France, of England, the Minnesingers of Ger-
many, and lastly the poets of * stil nuovo ' in Italy. It was
a fashion, a craze almost comparable to the craze for modern
dances in our days ; and it was not courtly poetry alone,
for there is evidence that it was far from being restricted
to the halls of the gentry. The fashion spread and its
diffusion was helped by the stupendous event of the Crusades
with their intermingling of peoples for objects which were
not only of this world.
There may be traces of oriental poetry in a love lyric of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ; there may be realism
in the poems of the Minnesinger; there may be some new
shade of naturalism in the Owl and the Nightingale ; there
may be a new philosophic strain in the poetry of * stil
nuovo * ; but all modern lyrics owe their origin to the
extraordinary success of the Troubadours. Dante and
Vernacular Literature 191
Petrarch set their lady loves on an altar and Goethe went
back to the same idea in another form. Ronsard's, Wyatt's,
and even Shakespeare's lyrics would have been different if
the troubadours had not set a fashion.
All this was taking place in an atmosphere saturated with
Latin traditions and habits which by degrees were also
affecting the non-Latin nations. In the days of Charle-
magne the French sovereign with the help of Anglo-Saxon
and Irish scholars endeavoured to revive classical learning,
and from the eleventh century onward a persistent effort
was made in this direction. Such classical traditions were
too alive and effective to be as readily christianized in
the same way as the waning Teuton myths had been.
A compromise was found in the Middle Ages by allegorically
interpreting the works of literature and thus exploiting
a device which the Alexandrine Fathers, as early as the third
century, had applied to sacred texts. All that could not
otherwise be explained from a Christian standpoint was
interpreted allegorically ; allegory became an obsession,
for classical and exegetical precedents were easily found
in justification of its use. Again it was France which
showed the way; one simple example must suffice. It
could scarcely be asserted that Ovid's Metamorphoseon libri
has any claim to teach Christian virtues, but in France there
appeared an Ovide Moralise in which the allegorical device
rendered easy what would have been impossible otherwise.
And allegory did not spend and exhaust itself in the Middle
Ages ; Dante stood on the threshold of the Renaissance and
was much closer to the Renaissance than is generally believed,
but his poem is allegorical ; Spenser was one of the leaders
of the Renaissance in England, but the Faerie Queene is
permeated with allegoricism. But allegory satisfied an
intellectual habit and could only find favour with people
of learning, just as the complexities of the Arthurian
192 Legacy of the Middle Ages
romances and the refinements of the later troubadours
delighted the gentry. And after the earlier centuries of the
Middle Ages another class began to assert itself, the * bour-
geoisie '. This middle class owed its revival in part to the
strong individualism of the Germans, but still more to
the advance in industry and trade ; it was formed of busy
and practical people who may have enjoyed, on occasions,
religious and transcendental works, but who, as a rule,
desired to be entertained. The routine of their daily task
made them long for something different. Pilgrims and
crusaders back from the East, merchants resting after
distant journeys had many adventures to tell and the
account of these adventures enjoyed great favour with the
middle classes. Stories of adventure and travel, however,
seem to spring from every soil and in every age. Homer had
pointed the way, Widsith and the Icelandic tales and
Marco Polo's Milionc answered to the same need. But
travellers, pilgrims, and crusaders interspersed their accounts
with anecdotes and tales ; East and West were ransacked
for anything that could arouse pathos, interest, curiosity,
and wonder, or excite ribald laughter. Those who stayed
at home searched in classical books for that which travellers
found in hearsay reports of oriental tales. A vast literature
was formed of which the sources are strangely intertwined.
So long as Rome ruled, the massive uniformity of Latin
had been little accessible to external influences apart from
the Greek. The vernacular literatures, on the contrary,
had no traditions and were readily receptive. Here again it
was France which led the way, for the French, as may be
seen in the Fabliaux, added a licence, which was not neces-
sarily coarse, to their tales, and thus the floodgates of later
medieval story-telling were opened. Finally Boccaccio and
Chaucer became the models for the ages to come; they
loved a good story, whatever its kind, and knew how to tell it.
Vernacular Literature 193
There is no masterpiece in the French literature of the
Middle Ages, not even the Chanson de Roland, which ranks
with the few great masterpieces of literature ; the Roman
de la Rose is stiff compared to Dante's Comedy, the Arthurian
romances are overshadowed by Wolfram von Eschenbach's
Parzival ; but yet it is in France that all the materials, both
lasting materials and less enduring materials, for European
literature were elaborated during the later part of the
Middle Ages, precisely as during the first part the Teutonic
strain had prevailed.
We have seen that oriental tales seem to have penetrated
Europe through France or to have become acceptable to
Europe after they had been touched upon in France. And
the whole time from the earlier to the later Middle Ages
a new national consciousness became noticeable in writers ;
the reign of Latin ceased when the feeling of universality
had become obsolete. With the disappearance of that
feeling vernacular literatures gained strength ; the audiences
to which poets appealed was no longer the wide world, but
a comparatively restricted group of men with which each
poet had a language in common. The pre-eminence of
French literature was such for a time that French threatened
to become a universal means of literary expression, but men
rapidly turned to a more promising course; a symphony
took the place of unison. Towards the end of this age the
slow process of the rediscovery of classical learning ceased
to be instinctive ; it became conscious of its purpose. Thus
the Renaissance proper began to dawn. The pendulum
was swinging back. Centuries of destruction and renovation
had at last provoked a reaction ; and the scholars of the
Renaissance became its agents and champions. Their
services to learning were immense, but, as was almost
inevitable, they went to the other extreme. At an earlier
date an attempt had been made to destroy what was ancient ;
2873 O
194 Legacy of the Middle Ages
the scholars of the Renaissance wished to suppress what was
recent, and insanely tried to exclude the local vernaculars
from literature. They only succeeded in stunting in some
countries and in disturbing in most others the normal
process of literary creation in the vernacular. It was a just
retribution that the works of the masters of the Renaissance,
from Ariosto to Spenser and Rabelais, should be steeped in
medievalism. Long before then modern literature had
begun; Petrarch's lyrics were models which needed no
altering to be attuned to the climate of different countries
and later centuries.
Thus in the Middle Ages much was destroyed of their
classical heritage, while what was not destroyed was trans-
formed and adapted ; but while destruction and adaptation
went on new voices were heard ; the fierce voices of the
Teuton race first, then more faintly the voices of Celts and
Orientals which were echoed in France and from France
through the rest of Europe. Ancient lore was passed on
to the modern age in a form which was almost unrecogniz-
able, but while this heritage was rejected and suppressed
by the Renaissance, the voices which were new the Renais-
sance was powerless to suppress.
Part of the same heritage is revealed by changes in poetic
technique among which one is so representative and precious
that it cannot be passed over in silence. Classical poetry
had been quantitative ; during the decadence of Rome the
feeling for quantities gradually became weaker ; in the
Latin hymns of the Church quantitative and accentual
verses are found for a period side by side ; and then quantity
disappears. The Romance vernaculars knew no quantities.
Germanic verses were also based on stressed syllables, but
mere numbers of syllables and sequences of stresses seemed
unsatisfying to the ear ; the Teutons had a liking for
alliteration which has not entirely disappeared as a sub-
Vernacular Literature 195
sidiary adornment. Latin had known rhyme as an occasional
adornment, and thus medieval writers added rhymes to
quantitative verse with a grating effect.
In the end it was rhyme that triumphed. Long laisses
of monorhymic verses at first and later the fascinating
jingle of cunningly disposed rhymes, fleet as the feet of
dancing youths, tinkling as silver bells, thundering as the
tread of an army. More cultured ages tried to rebel against
this imposition, just as the Renaissance rebelled against
medievalism. But the rhyme is still with us, just as the
heritage of the Middle Ages, romantic and lyrical, is still
with us and together with it the countless variations and
groupings of lines, from the solemn cbanso of the Provencals,
to the faceted sonnet, Ariosto's ottav a and the Spenserian
stanza, all this that we have and ancients had not, this
music so soft and penetrating, many voiced and harmonious
in all languages ; with which no one would like to dispense,
and which is a reminder of all that is less conspicuous but
not less important in the heritage that the Middle Ages
have bestowed upon the literature of later days.
CESARE FOLIGNO.
iii. HANDWRITING
THE impulse to fashion signs and symbols to express ideas
came late in man's development. Compared with his long
sojourn on earth, his engraved and written records are
things of yesterday. Yet, though his pictographs and early
alphabets are of relatively recent date, they are thousands
of years older than the characters with which we deal in
this essay. They belong to alien civilizations, and do not
concern us here. Our own letters, as is well known, go back
to the Latins, who got them from the Greek colonists in
Italy ; who in turn borrowed them from the Phoenicians.
But the particular forms of letters employed to-day both in
writing and printing are not a direct inheritance from
Rome ; they are rather the creation of the centuries which
transmitted, and in transmitting modified, that inheritance.
They are, in short, the legacy of the Middle Ages.
While writing was establishing itself in the economy of
man's life as the normal vehicle by which religious, legal,
political, or literary traditions could be handed on, various
questions of form inevitably arose. The answers to those
questions became the laws of a new art. It is only by
realizing that writing was an art, subject to rules and regula-
tions and not a thing at the mercy of individual whim, that
one can properly understand the history of writing. Calli-
graphy is distinguished by harmony of style. It is conscious
of the methods by which it gets its results. Its forms are
definite. If the art of writing was one of the latest of man's
achievements, it was also one of the slowest in developing.
Being itself an instrument of conservation, it was in the
nature of things extremely conservative. Painting, sculp-
198 Legacy of the Middle Ages
ture, literature, and even architecture change more from
age to age than does writing. Once a type had found
favour, it was apt to last for centuries. Thus we know that
uncial and half-uncial scripts the scripts in use when
St. Jerome was revising and translating the Bible for Pope
Damasus, the script in which our oldest texts of the Bible
were written lasted for five whole centuries ; and the
same long life may be surmised for Capitalis Rustica, the
script with which Tacitus, Trajan, Pliny, must have been
familiar, the script of our oldest extant manuscripts of
Plautus, Terence, Virgil, Sallust, Cicero, Persius, Juvenal ;
the script too which engravers of the second century had
begun using for inscriptions alongside of the older and more
suitable Capitalis Quadrata. Other scripts, which came
into being after the barbarian invasions-, like the Beneventan
in South Italy, the Visigothic in Spain, also lasted five
hundred years each. The Irish script lasted even longer.
If other minuscule scripts were cut short in their career,
like the cursive types of north Italy, the Merovingian types
in France, and the Anglo-Saxon script, there were in each
case extraordinary historic events to account for the fact.
For, though scripts seem to move down the ages with the
majestic slowness of glaciers, they are not mere carriers or
external instruments, but genuine manifestations of their
age, bearing the marks of its vicissitudes. Thus writing,
which is primarily but the humble medium for recording
the deeds, thoughts, and interests of an age, by dint of
being itself an art, becomes at once an expression and
a register of the spirit which informs that age. Herein lies
the peculiar interest that writing has for the student of
culture in general.
The history of writing is so intimately bound up with the
history of the book as to be inseparable from it. It was
in the copying of books that handwriting found its main
Handwriting 199
expression as an art. It is with the writing found in books,
then, that we are chiefly concerned in what follows.
If we examine our legacy in the matter of writing, we
notice that, with the exception of Greece, Armenia, and
the lands of orthodox Slavs, the Latin alphabet is used in
all the countries of western civilization, and wherever that
civilization penetrates beyond the Occident. The various
forms of the Latin letters used to-day in printing and
writing are, broadly speaking, of two kinds : the round or
Roman, like the type of this page, and the pointed or so-
called Gothic, which we call black-letter type. The Roman
type is the normal one everywhere outside of Germany and
Austria, where Gothic characters are still used extensively,
though by no means exclusively. In still using the Gothic
type the Germans are merely showing themselves more
conservative than we are. They are preserving a tradition
that has lived for over eight centuries. If we, on the other
hand, read and write the clear, round, Roman type we have
the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century to thank for it.
For it was they who first broke with a venerable tradition
by discarding the Gothic script which all Europe had been
writing since the thirteenth century. Italy's example was
soon followed by France, Holland, and then by England,
all during the sixteenth century. It was only in the nine-
teenth century that the Scandinavian countries and Den-
mark gave up the use of the Gothic script. To-day Germany
and German Austria are alone in clinging to the pointed
black-letter style, though they use it mainly in their text-
books and books of belles-lettres and devotion.
The script the Italian humanists introduced was not
a creation of their own. It was not a new script at all.
It was only a revival. Their passion for the classics brought
in its wake an abhorrence of everything Gothic, which came
to be a synonym for barbaric. A substitute for the Gothic
200 Legacy of the Middle Ages
script had to be found. It was indeed found, as if made to
order, in those very manuscripts of the classics for which
the libraries of Europe were then being eagerly and diligently
ransacked. It so happens that the great majority of the
classics are written in the Carolingian minuscule of the
ninth and tenth centuries. The clear, round, and comely
characters of this script were to the humanist's eye the very
antithesis of the Gothic. They fitted in admirably with his
notion of a scriptura antiqua, a scriptura Romana. Thus the
humanistic minuscule came into being. It was a conscious
work of resuscitation achieved by a small band of men like
Poggio, Niccol6 Niccoli, Traversari, and their zealous
followers. Petrarch was still Gothic-bound, though his
hand is one of the clearest, for Italian Gothic never lost all
the good features of its Caroline progenitor. Once launched
the success of the humanistic script was assured. History
repeated itself. The fitter script survived. Just as in the
ninth century the Caroline minuscule drove many rivals
from the field, so the humanistic minuscule was destined
to triumph over its competitors. The countries with a
strongly established Latin culture, Italy, France, Spain,
were naturally the first to succumb to the fascination of
the type which had such manifest beauty of form, and which
purported to go back to the Romans. The northern
countries, especially those that were never properly Roman-
ized, and as a result of the Reformation came to feel a natural
antagonism to things Roman, were slowest to adopt the
new, so-called c Roman' script, despite its obvious advantages.
In Germany the process of Romanization was still further
retarded by the false doctrine that Gothic was her national
script, to cherish which was an act of patriotism. In reality, as
we shall see, Gothic, which had been the script of all Europe,
is nothing but a later development of the Caroline minuscule.
What is this Caroline minuscule which the Humanists
Handwriting 201
revived, and which became the basis of our script ? How
ancient is it ? Where did it arise ? What are its ante-
cedents ? Is it a unique phenomenon or part of a general
movement ? Did it originate in Rome, as some claim, or in
France ? Perhaps the best way of answering these questions
would be to look back and examine the period immediately
preceding the birth of minuscule, and follow its rise in the
various centres of Europe. It is indispensable to take this
rather extensive survey, for only by understanding the
history of minuscule script can we gain an understanding
of what was distinctive in the legacy of the Middle Ages.
For several centuries after the break-up of the Roman
Empire scribes had been content to copy their Bibles,
Missals, Jeromes, and Augustines, as well as their Livys,
Ovids, and Juvenals, in uncial and half-uncial letters, that
is, in those two book scripts, whose obscure origins go back
to the fourth or even third centuries, and whose period of
greatness falls in the fifth century for uncials and in the
sixth for half-uncials. The notaries, public or private, no
longer used the cursive formed by straight strokes, the
everyday script known to Cicero, Seneca, or Suetonius,
whose tablets would have been unintelligible to men of
the fifth century ; but a new cursive composed of curved
strokes and of a new type of ligature ; the beginnings of
which we can trace back to the fourth century, and the
importance of which lies in the fact that it became in time
the basis of several calligraphic scripts. After the sixth
century we become aware of a gradual deterioration. No
real works of art, no literature to speak of, appears for several
generations. Spelling begins to grow corrupt, the old
scripts become more artificial. The old discipline is going.
Traditions are breaking down or altogether dying out.
But the torpor consequent upon the bankruptcy of the old
202 Legacy of the Middle Ages
world, and confusion resulting from the migration of the
Germanic nations and incessant wars, were not to last for
ever. New life-forces begin to stir by the beginning of the
eighth century. The foundations of a new Europe are to
be laid in that century. It is during this period that new
scripts begin to make their shy appearance. This is notice-
able, not in one country only, but in nearly all, in Greek- as
well as in Latin-writing countries a clear indication that
it was the result of a general condition.
By then the book trade, it must be remembered, had been
dead for centuries. The scribes were no longer hired men,
paid by author or publisher, but clerics and monks, who
worked for the Church, whether they copied books for
choir, parish school, or monastic library. Not only was
there a distinct change in the kind of book copied, there
was as great a change in the conditions of work, in its motives
and rewards. This was already the case in the sixth century,
as we gather from Cassiodorus' avowal that he feels * of all
bodily tasks a perhaps not unjust preference for the work
of scribes (provided they copy accurately), since by reading
and re-reading Holy Scripture they gain wholesome mental
instruction, and by copying the precepts of the Lord they
help to disseminate them far and wide '. Here the scribes'
rewards, we see, are intellectual and spiritual ; the books
to be copied are religious. Cassiodorus loves this theme of
the scribe, and continues characteristically thus : * What
happy application, what praiseworthy industry, to preach
unto men by means of the hand, to untie the tongues by
means of the fingers, to bring quiet and salvation to mortals,
and fight the Devil's insidious wiles with pen and ink ! For
every word of the Lord which is copied deals Satan a wound.
Thus, though seated in one spot, the scribe traverses diverse
lands through the dissemination of what he has written.'
These words describe an atmosphere and attitude utterly
Handwriting 203
foreign to the old Roman spirit. We are moving in a new
world. And who would suspect these words of coming
from a veteran politician ? It was after a busy public career,
as Chancellor of Theodoric and his successors that Cassio-
dorus retired, in his ripe old age, to his estate in Squillace
in the extreme end of Italy, there to pass the end of his
days in reading and writing. Although his interest, as we
have seen, was mainly religious and his concern with Holy
Scripture, he had many books of secular learning in his
library, of which we are unusually well informed, and he
explicitly recommends his monks to use them and copy
them. From the rules of orthography and grammar which
he lays down we can measure how low learning had already
sunk by that time. Although he stands with his face
averted from the ancient Roman past, the first man of
letters, as it were, to step into the Middle Ages, as Petrarch
may be said to be the first to step out of them he is justly
praised as the man whose zeal in the cause of letters has
been largely responsible for the preservation of learning.
For Cassiodorus lived and wrote at a critical moment, and
it is safe to say that but for him, Petrarch and his fellow
humanists would have had far fewer classics to revive, and
the history of writing might have been very different from
what it is. But the renaissance of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries was preceded by another renaissance
which, though less brilliant, is of the greatest importance
for classical learning and all-important, as we shall see, for
the future of handwriting I mean the Carolingian renais-
sance, when learning and the arts were once more pursued
with vigour and zeal. Stir and movement were in fact
evident for many decades before the reign of Charlemagne,
as our manuscripts amply attest. During the whole of the
eighth century we encounter on all sides earnest attempts
at new forms of writing.
204 Legacy of the Middle Ages
The old scripts evidently no, longer answered to the needs
of the times. The conditions for forming a new script, how-
ever, and the necessity for doing so, were not everywhere
the same. It may be presumed that conditions were least
propitious in Rome, the stronghold of the ancient majuscules.
They must have been most favourable in those centres where
the force of ancient traditions was felt least, where new
experiments would receive the greatest encouragement.
The reasons why the old majuscule scripts had outlived
their usefulness were varied and complex. For one thing,
economic causes must have contributed to the disappearance
of the more stately rustic, uncial and half-uncial scripts.
The times of a plentiful supply of papyrus were no more.
By the eighth century, a papyrus codex was the exception.
Vellum and parchment were the rule. But animal skins
were at all times expensive, and they must have been
doubly difficult to procure after the disorganization resulting
from devastating wars. Thus the supply of membranes
could hardly keep pace with the demand, especially in
centres where many books were copied. The exercise of
economy became a necessity, and necessity is the mother of
invention. The obvious way of saving vellum was to write
more on a page. One way of getting more on a page was to
make narrow instead of broad letters, to write a smaller
script, in short, to use minuscule. It is this forced economy
which made the Irish, probably an impecunious race even
in the seventh and eighth centuries, squeeze more writing
into a page than a decent regard for the reader's convenience
would warrant, or good taste dictate. By writing a tiny,
crowded script, by using subscript letters, and above all by
abbreviating nearly every second word, they managed to
get all that was humanly possible out of the available skins.
And it is perhaps not a mere coincidence that the two
centres from whence come most of our Latin palimpsests
*"*#?.
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fv
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Handwriting 205
are both Irish foundations. How thoroughly the lesson of
thrift had been inculcated in the followers of St. Columban
and St. Gall, and how badly in need they were of writing
material in the seventh and eighth centuries, may be sur-
mised from the frequency with which the monks of St. Gall
and Bobbio made use of membranes that had already been
written upon. It was not out of contempt for the classics
that Cicero's De Republic^ Fronto's letters, Lucan and
Juvenal were erased for biblical and patristic texts suffered
a similar fate but out of sheer need of writing material.
Another reason why new book-scripts were emerging was
the gradual dying off of the scribes who knew how to write
the old ones. For one person capable of writing good
uncial or half-uncial there must have been half a dozen who
could write the everyday hand, the cursive of the notary.
And if the single scribe of a community failed to train and
educate a successor, calligraphic tradition naturally died
out in that locality. This doubtless happened in many
places during the invasions and other disturbances so fatal
to the continuity of tradition, and thus generations grew
up ignorant of the methods and manners of the old calli-
graphy. Yet communities which could not boast of a scribe
might still have a notary, or some one who knew how to
write down wills, conveyances, or other contracts. Wherever
the Roman legions went there Rome's legal and adminis-
trative institutions followed. And the normal medium for
recording legal transactions was the cursive script. Thus
cursive was the scrip tura franca, as it were, of the Roman
Empire. Cursive remained even where calligraphy was lost.
Cursive script is to calligraphy what dialect is to literary
diction. It has a rank vigour and protean potentiality
denied to calligraphy. It was out of the dialects of the
Roman soldier and the peasant that the Romance tongues
were evolved. Similarly it was out of the cursive hand that
206 Legacy of the Middle Ages
new book-scripts sprang up in many districts. New life was
needed in calligraphy. It came, as it usually does, from
lower forms. For scripts, like populations, recruit chiefly
from below.
There was one other important source out of which
a new and economical script could be extracted. The best-
known script of the early Middle Ages, next to cursive,
must have been the half-uncial. It is itself an example of
a calligraphic script formed by promoting cursive elements
to a higher state. Conscious of its lowlier origin this script
was less pretentious than the uncial, and having less dignity
to maintain could without incongruity be written quite
small and thus be used to make cheaper books. The small-
type of half- uncial, thus produced, to which Traube (I dare
say jestingly) gave the name of ' quarter-uncial ', has the
size and almost the form of minuscule, and, like minuscule,
is written on the four-line principle, with the descending
and ascending letters touching the first and fourth lines
respectively. It differs from minuscule, to be sure, in the
general effect, in that indescribable something, that bloom,
which separates a fifth-century manuscript from an eighth.
When the majuscule scripts no longer managed to hold
their own, this small type of half-uncial, which existed in
France as well as Italy, became, after slight modification
due to the impact of cursive and uncial models, an obvious
candidate for their place. How very successful a candidate
it was one sees when one considers the fate of the Caroline
minuscule. But it must not be thought that medieval
scribes failed to realize, as some modern scholars do, that
minuscule and half-uncial were two different scripts. To
a ninth-century calligrapher a half-uncial manuscript, like
the Basilican Hilary of the year 509, was written in majuscule
characters and, as such, belonged to another and higher
category than the script in which he was accustomed to
m oorno
26. IRISH AND ENGLISH MAJUSCULE SCRIPTS
T1^ -n^^l. ^^ V^llo 7, T Jn^ofofno r.r.c.t^o1o
Handwriting 207
copy books. The ninth-century manuscripts written by
the scribes of Tours prove that conclusively. And no one
in that century can be said to be more conscious of the
correct * hierarchy ' of scripts than the monks of St. Martin's
at Tours.
The half-uncial and cursive scripts, then, must have been
the common material everywhere ready to hand to serve
as the basis of new scripts. How variously the basic ingredi-
ents were combined is seen from the divergent types which
arose in the early Middle Ages.
The medieval contribution to writing, par excellence, is the
minuscule. It took different forms in different countries,
the most unusual developments coming from the outlying
lands. Nations situated remote from Rome, and conse-
quently less bound by her traditions, could give free play
to native bent and strike out on lines of their own. This
happened in the British Isles. The centuries between
Gregory the Great and Charlemagne, which on the Con-
tinent were the darkest of the Middle Ages, were for Ireland
a period of brilliant activity. Left to herself undisturbed
for generations, she developed a monasticism and a liturgy
of her own, with distinct Gallican traces, but very unlike
Rome's ; and being outside the general current she retained
the antiquated mode of fixing Easter Sunday. What is of
importance to us here, she developed a variety of Latin
script, all her own, and her own characteristic system of
abbreviation. The efforts of her missionaries in time
extended beyond her own shores to Gaul, to the Alps,
Italy, Germany, as the Irish foundations of Luxeuil, St. Gall,
Bobbio, St. Kilian's testify. By way of lona Irish teachers
reach England and penetrate as far east as Jarrow. Willi-
brord, Aldhelm, Bede, sit at the feet of Celtic masters. These
facts are in our histories. But they are also writ large on
2o8 Legacy of the Middle Ages
the face of our manuscripts. * Show me how you write and
I'll tell you who your teacher was,' was profoundly true of
the early Middle Ages. The oldest manuscripts of England
are so like the Irish as to seem identical. This fact speaks
volumes. To realize the fundamental character of Eng-
land's indebtedness to Ireland in educational matters in the
early period, we need only consider these simple facts :
the manuscripts read and copied during the four centuries
of Roman occupation, assuming that they were not lost
or destroyed after the Germanic conquerors settled the
island, must have been in * capitalis rustica ', or in uncials.
The books England received with the great missions from
Rome under St. Augustine and under Hadrian and Theo-
dore, and those sent by Pope Gregory in 601, must have
been mainly in ' littera Romana ', or uncials. For the copy
of the Gospels which tradition connects with St. Augustine's
mission it is now preserved at Corpus Christ! College,
Cambridge is in uncial script, and the script justifies the
tradition in point of age. Some of England's oldest charters
(from south England) and her earliest dated biblical manu-
scripts (from north England) I refer to the Cotton charters
in the British Museum and to Ceolfrid's Bible now known
as the Codex Amiatinus, and the Stonyhurst Gospel of
St. John are in the uncial hand. For all that, Rome's
example was not strong enough to counteract the nearer
influence of the Celtic teachers. For the predominant
script of England, that which became her national script
is the script she learned from Ireland and not from Rome.
At the Council of Whitby, the conflict between the Roman
and the Celtic liturgy ended in a victory for Rome. The
less dramatic conflict, however, between the two scripts,
ended in a victory for the Celts.
To Ireland belongs the credit of having been the first to
develop a minuscule in the true sense of the word. In the
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Handwriting 209
Bangor Antiphonary, written between 680 and 691 (it is
now in the Ambrosiana at Milan), we have an example of
fully developed minuscule, with punctuation, separation of
words and initials all that we associate with minuscule.
We are probably not far from the truth if we assume that
the beginnings of this script go still farther back. But
before developing a minuscule Irish calligraphers had
created a majuscule, the Irish half-uncial as it is styled, of
which the Book of Kells, a work of unsurpassed skill and
artistry, is the most eminent example. We are still in the
dark as to the appearance of the first Bibles and books of
devotion which taught the Irish their letters and Christian-
ity. We infer that they were not written in uncial char-
acters, since Irish scribes seem utterly ignorant of this
ancient type ; but there is good ground for thinking that
they were written in half-uncials, since Irish oc and 5 could
only have come from a half-uncial alphabet. The particular
type of half-uncial which served as a model must have
come by way of Gaul. It has certain uncial admixtures
not found in the canonical half-uncial of Italy, which, to
judge by its early dated examples, must have attained its
full development during the fifth century. As the province
lagged behind the mother-land, there is nothing inherently
improbable in the supposition that a half-uncial type, with
numerous uncial adhesions, was still largely in vogue in
Gaul in the first half of the fifth century. The evidence
of palaeography would seem to confirm the testimony of
hagiography, both as to the period and the instrument of
Ireland's conversion.
The English were apt pupils. In fact they improved
upon their masters. For all its similarity to the Irish the
English script is different. It is less bizarre, clearer and less
crowded. Like the Irish, the English had both a majuscule
and minuscule script. The Lindisfarne Gospels is the
2873 P
210 Legacy of the Middle Ages
English calligraphic counterpart to the Book of Kells.
It is a book of rare beauty and superb craftsmanship. And
in St. Willibrord's Calendar and Martyrology, which was
written between 703 and 721, we possess an early example
of English minuscule to match the Bangor Antiphonary.
The high degree of excellence attained in this manuscript
presupposes earlier stages and less perfect attempts, so that
the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon minuscule must go back
well into the seventh ceutury. Wherever the English and
Irish went, there their books went with them. Their
manuscripts are to be seen to this day at Saint Gall, Fulda,
and Wiirzburg ; and were to be seen at Bobbio, Corbie,
Tours, Epternach, and elsewhere, before the monastic
libraries were dispersed. But the English and Irish took
not only their books but also their script with them. They
teach it wherever they settle, and many are the books
written by their continental pupils. Yet after a few genera-
tions, the Insular scripts yield to the influence of continental
scripts, which finally supplant them. The Insular scripts,
though first in the minuscule race, did not possess the
cardinal virtue of clearness which distinguished the minus-
cule that eventually won the day.
Another country which early evolved a successful minus-
cule was Spain. And again, geographical position was
largely responsible for the fact ; the enormous vogue
enjoyed by the works of Isidore Bishop of Seville must,
however, have been an important contributing cause.
During the whole of the seventh century, until Bede's
writings began to circulate, Isidore's primacy was undis-
puted. His Etymologies was the most studied text-book
of Europe, until it was supplanted in the ninth century
by the encyclopaedia of Rabanus Maurus. The Saracen
invasion indirectly helped the spread of Spanish learning.
Spanish scholars migrated, and examples of the Spanish
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Handwriting 211
script reached Italy and Gaul. The Orationale Mozara-
bicum, now at Verona, must have reached Italy before 732.
It is written in fully developed Visigothic minuscule, with
perhaps a greater mixture of cursive elements than is per-
mitted later. Scribes of Vercelli, Pisa, Lucca, Monte
Cassino, of Fleury, Autun, Lyons, and Corbie, and scribes
of centres which we cannot fix, came into contact with
Visigothic scribes and methods, as chronicles and extant
manuscripts attest. The Visigothic minuscule derives in
the main from the half-uncial, supplemented by a few
cursive elements (chiefly ligatures with t). The half-
uncial which served as model was the one that has the
uncial form of g ; which may have been the prevalent type
in Spain. This uncial g in the midst of minuscule letters,
which is a Visigothic peculiarity, could hardly have come
from any other source. Visigothic minuscule is neat, self-
possessed, restrained, but not easy to read. The similarity
between a and u is confusing. The form of t, as in the
Beneventan, is a stumbling-block. Like the Beneventan,
it follows the even tenor of its way for five centuries,
undisturbed. It took an ecclesiastical council to suppress it.
It is noteworthy that the script which was to supersede the
' Littera Toletana ', as Spanish minuscule was called, was
designated at the council as Gallic, not as Roman ; just as
in South Italy scripts not Beneventan were described as
Gallic or French showing that in the late Middle Ages the
ordinary minuscule of Europe was regarded as French.
The first calligraphic minuscule frankly derived from
local cursive was a French achievement the minuscule
now known rightly or wrongly as the ' Luxeuil ' type.
In saying this I have not forgotten early Italian attempts
like the Josephus on papyrus, of the Ambrosiana, or Saint
Jerome's De viris illustribus, of Vercelli, or their French
counterpart represented by the St. Avitus on papyrus.
p 2
212 Legacy of the Middle Ages
These are worthy efforts marking a stage between cursive
and minuscule, but they do not attain to the level of calli-
graphy. St. Columban, who founded the monastery of
Luxeuil, did not stay there long, and he probably took his
best teachers with him when he was expelled from France.
For it is a curious fact that Irish manuscripts have not
reached us by way of Luxeuil, and the earliest extant manu-
script from Luxeuil shows no trace of Irish influence.
The Homilies of St. Augustine, written in the year 669, in
French uncials (it is now at the Pierpont Morgan library)
contains not a single Irish abbreviation, nor any other
Insular * symptom '. The same is true of the eighth-century
manuscripts in the so-called Luxeuil minuscule. But it is
not improbable that contact with the Irish, who, as we
have seen, must have been in possession of a minuscule as
early as the first half of the seventh century, first familiarized
the French calligrapher with the idea of a minuscule script.
At any rate, the ' Luxeuil ' type is not merely an amateur
attempt at writing Merovingian cursive in more or less
orderly fashion. It is not one of those abortive efforts of
which the eighth century witnessed many, especially in
Italy. It has the expert flow of line, the finish and distinc-
tion, of a perfectly well-defined type, with a style of capitals
for colophon quite its own, and characteristic initials
possessing a grace of form and gaiety of colour hitherto
unknown in Latin calligraphy. Although short-lived, it
found favour far and wide in France and even beyond the
Alps. Examples of this type exist to this day at Ivrea and
Verona. North Italian scribes were manifestly charmed by
the type, for they try to imitate it. It is quite possible that
French scribes acted as teachers in Italy. In any case, the
compliment paid the type in the attempted imitations is
significant. It indicates the direction of the literary and
artistic currents of the time, and is thus not without some
Handwriting 213
bearing on the general question of the origin of the Caroline
minuscule.
At Bobbio, St. Columban's Italian foundation, we find
a totally different state of things. Irish tradition survived
into the eighth century. The old manuscripts brought from
Ireland are preserved, and later generations imitate them
in both script and abbreviations. But in time native
traditions reassert themselves, and during the eighth
century numerous attempts are made to form a minuscule,
out of local cursive, or out of half-uncial, or out of mixed
material, the most successful of which are the types based
on cursive. By the middle of the eighth century no dis-
tinctive .type had been achieved. So that when Abbot
Anastasius (c. 750) ordered a copy of Gregory's Moralia,
it was written for him not in minuscule but in uncial.
The uncials are of an awkward, debased type, and the
initials, in which the human head and hands play a large
part, are not works of art. It is a far cry from the expert
writing and charming initials found in manuscripts of the
so-called Luxeuil type written some decades earlier. Owing
to the ancient manuscripts which Bobbio has preserved for
posterity, there is a tendency to exaggerate its importance
as a school of writing. In the eighth century its influence
must have been negligible : as a matter of fact, there are
clear indications that it was somewhat under the influence
of French schools. Unimportant too must have been the
position of the more ancient centre of Verona. It had had
a glorious past. It still has incomparably the richest col-
lection of ancient uncial and half-uncial manuscripts,
written in its own scriptoria. But it did not manage to
hammer out a minuscule of its own. It tried and tried.
But the attempts based on cursive, as well as those based
on half-uncial, remained mere essays. Its scribes possessed
so little originality that they attempted to imitate French
214 Legacy of the Middle Ages
models, which had probably reached them either from
Reichenau or by way of Bobbio. When finally, in the ninth
century, they succeeded in developing a minuscule, it was
of the Caroline type, recalling vaguely the St. Gall and
Reichenau variety. We know that their bishops Egino
(t799) an d Rothaldus (1840) had close relations with
Reichenau. Archdeacon Pacificus (1840), through whom
many new books came to Verona, was in touch with Corbie.
Less well-known centres, like Vercelli and Novara, are far
more successful than Verona. By the end of the eighth or
in the early ninth century they are in possession of a well-
developed minuscule based entirely on cursive, like the
Beneventan. Their career, however, was cut short by the
Caroline minuscule during the first half of the ninth
century.
In central Italy, long after beautiful minuscule was being
written in French centres, we encounter a pathetic example
of scribal incompetence in the celebrated Liber Pontificalis
of Lucca, written about the year 800. A scriptorium which
countenanced such a hodge-podge of scripts, with uncial,
half-uncial, and imitation Visigothic jostling elbows, had no
standards, and was too backward to influence the course of
writing. If Rome is the mother of the Caroline minuscule,
as some palaeographers would have it, it is hard to reconcile
the recalcitrant calligraphy of near-by Lucca with the
exemplary performances of Corbie and Tours. But of the
part played by Rome more will be said presently. In South
Italy we have the great abbey of Monte Cassino, the mother
house of western monasticism, and ancient centres like
Capua and Naples. There too the universal need of a
minuscule was felt, and by the middle of the eighth century
a tentative script was formed out of the cursive. For
a generation or two there existed some uncertainty and
indecision, but after that we find strict conformity to a con-
32. BENEVENTAN SCRIPT
Handwriting 215
sciously adopted style : the South Italian schools had
found the type which suited them ; and for half a thousand
years their peculiar script which we call Beneventan reigned
practically supreme in the lower half of the Italian peninsula.
It is the one medieval script of purely cursive origin that
boasted a long life. Its success in holding its own against
the Caroline minuscule shows that the reform emanating
from beyond the Alps did not have sufficient force to
counteract the predominant influence of Monte Cassino.
It is a script difficult to read ; but for all that it is one of the
remarkable achievements of the Middle Ages both as to
calligraphy and ornamentation. By the end of the thir-
teenth century it yielded to the ordinary minuscule of the
rest of Europe.
Having mentioned Luxeuil and Bobbio, the foundations
of St. Columban, one must not quite pass over St. Gall,
the Irish foundation named after Gallus, one of St. Colum-
ban's followers. It became a great centre of learning ; and
as at Bobbio, we find here a considerable number of ancient
Irish manuscripts and some palimpsests. Very little is
known of what happened there during the seventh century,
but by the middle of the eighth we have a definite attempt
at a local minuscule, not based on cursive. Winithar, notary
and scribe, and expert at neither job, has left us a number
of his performances. The advantage of their Irish tradition
may account for the fact that the monks of St. Gall were
in advance of othei Teuton centres. They cannot be said
to have attained a successful minuscule of their own before
the ninth century. It is not unlike the Caroline, except
that it has a certain characteristic breadth and weightiness,
allows the use of the n'-ligature, and shows a characteristic
weakness for the nMigature, even in the middle of a word.
The same type of minuscule was practised at Reichenau,
the celebrated abbey on the Lake of Constance, with which
216 Legacy of the Middle Ages
St. Gall had the very closest relations ; and the influence
of the St. Gall-Reichenau school extended beyond its
immediate vicinity. But there were other Teutonic centres
which ventured upon different lines ; and many of these
show as their common feature a dependence upon Insular
models. The Germanic peoples as such made no new
contribution to handwriting.
This survey of the critical period in the formation of
minuscule scripts will fitly close with mention of the par-
ticular type which was destined to play the important role
in the subsequent history of writing. I mean, of course,
the Caroline minuscule. The origin of this script is still in
dispute ; it is my belief that its home was not Italy, but
yet a land whose ties with Rome and ancient Italian tradi-
tions had never been severed. Manuscripts still exist which
show that in centres like Lyons, Autun, Tours, Luxeuil,
Corbie, and Fleury, the ancient Italian scripts uncial and
half-uncial had been practised with signal success at the
very time when Italy was at its lowest. We have already
seen that France was the first country on the Continent to
develop a minuscule based on cursive, and that this script
which goes by the name of Luxeuil (but which was probably
at home in quite other centres) possessed such charm and
originality that it influenced Italian scribes a significant
fact which suggests the superiority of Gallic over Italian
scribes of that period. The Luxeuil type was the ancestor
of the so-called Corbie type a bolder, more rigid, and more
legible minuscule which still bore traces of cursive. This
strongly conventionalized script, which also goes by the name
of the ab type, soon won favour with various centres of
north France and lasted into the ninth century. It was at
the same monastery of Corbie, and while the ab type
was being successfully practised in that region, that scribes
were trying to evolve a minuscule, based in the main on
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Handwriting 217
half-uncial and free from cursive elements. Similar efforts
were doubtless made in other French centres, but the first
dated example of the new minuscule we call Caroline
comes in fact from Corbie. I refer to the famous Bible
written for Abbot Maurdramnus (t778), which is preserved
in several volumes at Amiens. The next very early example
is the still more famous Lectionary of Charlemagne, of the
year 781. The manuscript itself is written on purple
parchment, in large uncial letters; but its scribe, Godesscalc,
added a page of dedicatory verses, not in uncials, but in
minuscule characters which we are accustomed to regard as
Caroline. We do not know the exact atelier whence issued
this beautiful volume. It is generally assumed to be the
work of the ' Palace school '. Wherever it came from, it
demonstrates that as early as 781 a beautifully formed
minuscule existed, and that a specimen of it was considered
worthy of being included in a book meant for the Emperor.
Closely allied to this script of Godesscalc is that of the Ada
Bible, another book of the period destined for royalty.
This new type based on half-uncial, whose distinctive
feature was the elimination of cursive elements, must have
won the warm approval of Charlemagne and Alcuin. For
the school in which it was to reach its greatest perfection
a level of calligraphic art unsurpassed, to my mind, in the
annals of writing was the school directly under the
Emperor's patronage, in the Abbey where Alcuin was
Abbot the school of St. Martin at Tours. It is hard to say
how large a part Tours played in the early evolution of this
minuscule. It was, if we may judge by the rather mediocre
essays made during the eighth century, probably a secondary
part. Alcuin himself, we know, never got to France until
after the birth of the Caroline minuscule.
The orderliness, simplicity, clarity, and dignity of the
new script were virtues that made a special appeal to a man
218 Legacy of the Middle Ages
like Charlemagne, who, as we know, was not above taking
a profound interest in the labours of scribes. To the
imperial approbation was added that of Alcuin. He too
was in a position to appreciate the new minuscule, whose
special quality of legibility contrasted so favourably with the
difficulty of his native Anglo-Saxon hand. This double
sanction gave to the script the greatest possible prestige.
Among his other reforms Charlemagne had ordered a new
and standard text of the Benedictine Rule, and a revision
of the Vulgate and the liturgy ; and these revised versions,
everywhere in demand, became as it were the apostles and
propagators of the new script. This, then, is the meaning
of the so-called Caroline * reform '. It was not, as has
sometimes been naively pictured, the invention of a script
by a single scholar and its propagation by order of an emperor.
Scripts that survive have sturdier roots than that. It was
rather the achievement, after manifold endeavours, of a type,
the creation of which is a standing monument to the genius
for form possessed in so eminent a degree by the peoples of
Gaul, a type the intrinsic merits of which made its success
certain. That it became, with such extraordinary rapidity,
the dominant script of Europe, was due to a happy com-
bination of political and literary circumstances attending
its birth.
It did not take much more than a generation to win over
all of the French schools to the Caroline minuscule. This
conquest could not have been accomplished without much
opposition and some heart-burning in those centres in
which the new script meant the death of the old tfi-type
that had been practised with such great clat throughout
the reign of Charlemagne. But, almost as soon as in France,
the new minuscule won adherents beyond the Alps. As if
by miracle, the scribes of northern and central Italy cease
writing their own local style and adopt the Caroline. Only
1o fulfil
txrliciyNT
SEVER!
,Tucos posTOj
T
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.
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36. CAROLINE MIXfSCULE. TOVRS SCHOOL
Handwriting 219
Spain, South Italy, Ireland, and England withstood the
new influence. But, in the course of the tenth century,
thanks to close contact with the Continent, the new script
has won its way into England, where before long it assumes
the predominant position, the Anglo-Saxon type having been
relegated to the copying of vernacular. As for Spain and
South Italy, as we have seen, they did not give up their
own scripts until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
respectively.
It has been argued with great learning that Rome took
a leading part in the evolution of the Caroline minuscule ;
that she was in the forefront of the movement, as befitted
her position as * caput ecclesiae '. It is pointed out that
Rome had for centuries been an unfailing source for supply-
ing the transalpine churches and monasteries with books;
that as the centre of Christendom she required a large body
of copyists, and, furthermore, the very existence of a book
like the ' Liber Diurnus ', the papal formulary, written in
good minuscule of the ninth century, furnishes irrefragable
evidence that the new minuscule was cultivated at Rome,
and strong presumption that it started its career there.
It is true that Rome had always been a great repository of
books, especially of the older books ; that it had been a great
exchange centre, a book mart. But that is not the same
thing as being an important centre for producing books.
It has great works of art now, supremely great, but they
are not Roman works. They are the performances of men
from elsewhere, specially summoned to produce those
works. Fra Angelico, Ghirlandaio, Raphael, and Michael
Angelo were pressed into service to the greater glory of
Rome. It was never during the Middle Ages, nor has it
been since, a literary or artistic centre, although artists and
litterateurs in great numbers have always flocked thither.
We know for a fact that the copyists of Rome in the time
220 Legacy of the Middle Ages
of Nicholas V were mostly Germans and Frenchmen.
That was in the heyday of the Renaissance. Perhaps it was
the same during the renaissance in Charlemagne's time.
Rome, the centre of Christendom, the seat of ecclesiastical
authority and administration, had of course a huge staff
of officials ; but hardly of book-scribes. The documents
issued by the Curia, the papal bulls sent to the four corners
of the earth, were not written by calligraphers, in a script
which every one could read. The notaries of the Curia used
a very singular and difficult script, which was unintelligible
even to high prelates of the Middle Ages, as witness the
predicament of Archbishop Ralph of Tours in 1075, who
could make neither head nor tail of a privilege because it
was written in * littera romana '. This curial script is
Rome's unique medieval contribution to handwriting.
When it came to calligraphy she lagged sadly behind. It is
impossible to point to any great school of writing at Rome
during the Middle Ages, nor to Roman manuscripts of the
eighth, ninth, or tenth centuries, remarkable either for
beauty of script or illumination. This cannot all be due to
the medieval habit of anonymity. For we have scores of
beautiful manuscripts of the same period coming from
known schools to the north and south of Rome. The true
reason, however, is not far to seek. The Roman milieu
was not favourable to the development of great schools of
writing. Art does not flourish in an atmosphere of bureau-
cracy. But Rome's bureaucracy was cosmopolitan. Clerics
from all over Christendom took part in the administration ;
so that a book like the * Liber Diurnus ', now in the Vatican
Archives, if it was written at Rome, might none the less have
been the work of a northern scribe. But this book came to
Rome from Nonantola ; another ninth-century copy, now
at the Ambrosiana, came from Bobbio, and a third (known
as the Claromontanus, and now lost) was preserved in
Handwriting 221
France ; so that it looks as if this book had an interest for
places outside of Rome, and as if every copy need not be of
necessity considered a Roman product.
There are other reasons which tell against Rome. During
the seventh and eighth centuries the critical period for
minuscule she shows no signs of literary activity, and her
intellectual life is said to have sunk to a very low level.
These are not the conditions which produce new scripts.
Moreover, Rome, the mother of the old majuscule scripts,
was not likely to abandon them earlier than other centres.
She was far more likely to cling to them longest of all.
Extant uncial manuscripts suggest that this was the case.
Again, it was in France and not in Rome that the new
minuscule soonest reached its height of perfection. Finally,
it has been argued that the extraordinarily rapid spread of
the new minuscule cannot be satisfactorily explained unless
on the hypothesis that it originated in the most influential
centre of Christendom, where the fashion was set for the
rest of the world to follow. But, had this been the case, we
should expect cities to the south of Rome, and very close
to it, to be at least as much affected by Rome's influence
and example as the distant cities of northern Italy, Switzer-
land, and France. But Veroli, and Sulmona, not to mention
places farther south, wrote Beneventan and not Caroline
minuscule. Is it conceivable that the whole of Southern
Italy succumbed to Beneventan influence, when powerful
and ubiquitous Rome pulled in the contrary direction ?
Why should Lucca, Verona, Bobbio, Saint Gall, Tours,
Corbie, and Orleans write in accordance with the alleged
Roman pattern, while Capua, Naples, Benevento, and
towns on both shores of the Adriatic follow the model of
Monte Cassino ? The more reasonable explanation is that
the Caroline minuscule had its origin in France, and that
French influence did not penetrate as far as Southern Italy,
222 Legacy of the Middle Ages
so th^t the influence of Monte Cassino remained predomi-
nant there. Our extant eighth-century manuscripts indicate
that the course of the literary current, in Charlemagne's
time and for a generation or two before, was from Gaul to
Italy, and not vice versa. Lastly, the testimony of the
ancients is on the side of France. By ' littera Romana ' men
of the Middle Ages understood two distinct scripts : the
uncial characters of the book-hand and the curial cursive of
papal charters. They did not use it to signify Caroline
minuscule. On the other hand, * littera Gallica,' or * scrip-
tura Francesca ' was used to denote the ordinary or Caroline
minuscule, as distinguished, say, from the Beneventan or
Visigothic. It must be admitted, then, that Rome's part
in the development of the new minuscule was that of
a follower, not an initiator.
The second great contribution of the Middle Ages is the
Gothic script. It may seem a far cry from the round
Caroline minuscule of Charlemagne's time to this angular
script ; yet the one is the legitimate child of the other,
in direct line of descent. For four centuries generation
after generation transmitted the Caroline heritage sub-
stantially unaltered, yet never quite the same ; and the
accretion of these small variations produced in time a script
astonishingly unlike the stock it sprang from. Owing to
favourable conditions the Caroline script developed quickly
and early attained its zenith. Perfection of form bred, as
it usually does, artificial and adventitious elements : hair-
lines, hooks, and flourishes. Once this fluid mass of manner-
isms got set, as it were, and its innovations codified, a new
style was at hand. The natural movement away from a
round script like the Caroline was in the direction of an
angular script like the Gothic ; the reaction from a script
whose letters are clear, well-defined, and unattached, was
37- GOTHIC SCRIPT
Handwriting 223
a script in which the individuality of single letters is sunk
in the harmony of the whole.
These general tendencies begin to take shape by the end
of the twelfth century. It is the period when Gothic
architecture comes into being. The spirit that informs
that architecture is the self-same one that breathes new
life into the degraded Caroline script. And the new style
which the Gothic builders immortalize in stone is shaping
also the appearance of the written letter. Open one of the
many thirteenth-century Psalters or Books of Hours, and
you seem to be looking at the text as through a series of
Gothic windows an effect produced by emphasizing the
vertical and pointed and eliminating the round strokes, the
prevalence of the heavily shaded upright strokes endowing
the page with the mysterious semi-darkness of a Gothic
chapel, in which all the elements are blended into a har-
monious whole. The Gothic script is difficult to read.
It has the serious faults- of ambiguity, artificiality, and over-
loading. It is the child of an age that was not bent on
achieving the practical, the age of St. Louis and St. Francis.
It is as if the written page was to be looked at and not read.
Instead of legibility its objective seems to be a certain
effect of art and beauty, which it accomplishes by loving
care bestowed upon each stroke and by the unerring con-
sistency of its style. It is a product of the north, with the
mysticism of the north, lacking Italian clarity as northern
skies lack it. It never took a real hold in Italy. The finest
examples come from France, Flanders, and England. In
their way they are as perfect examples of Gothic art as is
the Sainte Chapelle. The spirit of the Middle Ages lives
nowhere more than in such Gothic manuscripts.
Roughly speaking, the Gothic script lived from 1200 to
1500. During these three centuries it was the script of all
Europe, as no script had ever been before. This is not to
224 Legacy of the Middle Ages
say that regional differences did not exist. The Gothic
script in Italy tends to be roundish, in France and England
it is angular. Everywhere, however, it follows certain
curious rules of its own. The cardinal rule is, that if a letter
ends with a bow and the following letter begins with one, the
two letters are written conjoint. Other rules are the us of
2 for r after a letter ending in a bow, the use of uncial d (S) 9
and of s (not /) at the end of words. The joining of bows
gave the line a look of compactness, a look already noticeable
in Beneventan manuscripts as far back as the end of the
eleventh century.
A script like the Gothic was bound to be repugnant to
the taste of the Renaissance. The humanistic minuscule
(the revived Caroline) was certain to drive it from the field.
But this might have taken centuries had not the invention
of printing hastened the process. If it is true that ' the
Gothic sun set behind the colossal press of Mayence ', it
was not because the first printers were unfriendly to Gothic.
The earliest-printed books were exact reproductions of
Gothic manuscripts. They owed their success to the
closeness of the imitation. They took over bodily all the
difficult conjoint letters and even all the numerous abbrevia-
tions. Only initials and rubrics were left blank for the
miniator to fill in by hand. Very soon types were also cut
in exact imitation of the humanistic script, and many are
the beautiful incunabula in this roman type. At first the
Roman was used in Italy for all sorts of books, as the Gothic
was in Germany. Gradually there was a tendency to reserve
the Roman for editions of the classics, to use a plain Gothic
for other books in Latin and a sloping Gothic for books in
the vernacular. For legal books in Anglo-French a special
type was used. As was to be expected, the local variety of
handwriting influenced at first the form of type. The
German printers who settled in Italy used a roundish type
ifcnpturtftantum
tti
cptata^fterenr .-urmKac ra
^wmabftrufiLm^
after re pctfennif ; fei cjuomam tantam
la
(picimof tircuero i vMane efoytenneprtn
cepfcum Je antma cttfferemrac atu4 fvrer
<liaWo <lAg enter
<|uan4atn deeutforurtne loco
ttfiftmuf tumtk^lem omdmmntuf tn c*tne
PVB.-VJE JLG ILll
\LNL1P06 1 1 B T R III
JMMEJL1TAALVI3VAV 5V TI
K i S v I c I D 1 T i^N 1 > V F I AwIi
1 f jfTiVenmtf iwtnc fiiniir 7/fpfMnM
i - (
dH*jfaijfr*f wtVi
Witfrfx mir
"
pn^ x >4<Ww*5 Pvrtndz rniifdiff
<1mt^ nb tr
*~ btn*ti*f tr
f p?9CMi HHIft? CWfWr
40. HUMANISTIC SCRIPT
Handwriting 225
of Gothic to meet the taste of their public. After 1480
many printers began to buy their punches and matrices
instead of making their own type, with the result that the
same type is found in many places. The Roman type came
to dominate the romance lands, Gothic continued to
flourish in Teutonic countries as we know, it is still the
predominant script of Germany and German Austria. Only
in the last century was it abandoned in Scandinavia. Its
hold upon England may be seen from the fact that to the
end of the eighteenth century ' English face ' was the
designation for black face or Gothic. It survives with us
to-day only as an ornamental script, to be used where
legibility is a matter of indifference, as in church windows,
tombstones, wood carving, portals, and, for some inscrutable
reason, in the word {LftU)ei'?a$ at the beginning of clauses
in a legal instrument. Before the close of the fifteenth
century Aldus Manutius had a type cut for him, modelled
on cursive, which gave us our italic characters. To the
Roman, Gothic, and italic types were added the majestic
characters of the c capitalis quadrata * to use as capitals. The
printer's equipment was complete. It is substantially his
equipment to this day.
The hand we use in writing to-day has had in the main
the same history as the book hand ; except that the written
characters have been even more conservative than the
printed. In England the humanistic cursive became known
in the Renaissance, but * the sweet Roman hand ' had
a long struggle. Gothic characters persist into the eigh-
teenth century. In Germany the Gothic script is the one
still commonly taught in the schools.
The Legacy of the Middle Ages, then, is the legacy of
Rome, with modifications developed in the course of
transmission. The generic name we give to the modified
2873 Q
226 Legacy of the Middle Ages
legacy is minuscule. We have seen that when the majuscule
scripts became obsolete, scribes every where 'tried to evolve
a script to take their place. It was based on cursive, or on
half-uncial, or on mixed material. Of the various attempts,
the most successful was the type which was evolved in Gaul
in the time of Charlemagne, and which we call Caroline
minuscule. It became rapidly the predominant script in
all lands save Spain, South Italy, and these islands. The
Caroline script gradually developed into Gothic, which
became the script of all Europe before the Renaissance, but
which the humanists discarded for a revived Caroline.
This humanistic minuscule and the Gothic were the scripts
practised when printing was invented. And these two
types were taken over by the printers, and survive to this
day. Of the two, the type in general use is the one that
originated in France and was brought to light again in
Italy the type we call Roman. Thus it is to France and
Italy, the two lands in which the roots of Roman civilization
went deepest down, that we owe the particular forms of the
letters we write and read to this day.
E. A. LOWE.
4
PHILOSOPHY
THE Prankish successors of the Roman Empire were
scarcely conscious that they were laying the foundations
of a new epoch. To the contemporaries of Charlemagne it
seemed as if the ancient dominion of the Caesars had once
more received a legitimate successor. To them Rome was
immortal, the mother of civilization outside whose sway
lay only the darkness of barbarism, and the Church was the
soul of the still living Empire. It was the Church and the
Church only which through the confusion of the sixth,
seventh, and eighth centuries had kept alight, albeit feebly,
the torch of learning. She had been the sole transmitter
of all that was left of the heritage of the classical age, and
alone had saved mankind not only from hell, but from
savagery. It was the realization of this fact, however
vaguely and half-consciously apprehended, which gave to
the medieval mind its unity and its distinguishing character.
The thought of the Middle Ages was thus essentially
theocentric and the great medieval thinkers were one and
all of them theologians : as soon as this ceased to be the
case the Renaissance may be said to have begun. There
were thus two factors which at each stage of its development
determined the course of the scholastic philosophy. One of
these, the dogmatic teaching of the Church, was permanent,
and inelastic, the other varied from age to age, as the know-
ledge of the writings of the ancient philosophers gradually
increased. From the ninth to the twelfth centuries direct
acquaintance with the two greatest thinkers of antiquity
was astonishingly small. Of Plato only the Timaeus in the
Q 2
228 Legacy of the Middle Ages
translation of Chalchidius had survived, of Aristotle only
the Categories and the De inter pretatione, and though before
the end of the twelfth century the whole of his logic had
been rediscovered, it was not till the beginning of the
thirteenth century that the contents of his principal writings
were generally known. The earlier medieval period was
entirely dominated by the writings of Augustine, who more
than any of the Latin fathers had incorporated in his
teaching the philosophical spirit of the later platonists, and
who continued to exercise the profoundest and most
enduring influence on the medieval mind, even at the time
when the authority of Aristotle was at its strongest. And
though in the later period Aristotelianism becomes the
fashionable philosophy of the schools, its influence neverthe-
less remains comparatively superficial. The theology of the
Church in patristic times had been so deeply imbued with
Platonism that to the end it remained Platonist rather than
Aristotelian.
The task of the medieval thinker was thus one of recon-
ciliation, of synthesis rather than creation. For at a time
when men were beginning to learn once more the rudiments
of civilization, the written word was surrounded with a halo
of veneration. Not only did piety require an implicit belief
in the literal accuracy of all sacred writings scriptural and
even patristic, a similar consideration was extended also to
the great secular writings of the past. Were they not the
perfected triumphs of the purely human reason which in
their own sphere no generation could hope to surpass ?
The scholastic problem was therefore the reconciliation
of the Revelation of the Church with the philosophical
speculation of ancient Greece. That such a reconciliation
was possible was a basic conviction, for man the rational
animal was created in the image of God. Yet human reason
was corrupted in the sin of Adam, and where it came in
Philosophy 229
conflict with the letter of Revelation, instant abdication
was demanded : investigation itself became a deadly sin.
That there was anything improper in such a submission
never for an instant occurred to the medieval mind. To
disbelieve in the teaching of the Church was regarded as
something monstrous, a spiritual disease. It was equivalent
to denying the rationality of the universe altogether. For
reason and revelation alike had their ultimate ground in
a single and unique source, the unfathomable nature of
God. Failure to arrive at a satisfactory synthesis was
therefore attributed to the corruption of man's intellect,
the integrity of which could only be maintained by the grace
of faith. The history of medieval thought is thus the
unfolding of successive attempts to reconcile Christian
dogma first with the Platonic and later with the Aristotelian
philosophy.
John Scotus Erigena, the first and the most profound
philosopher of the Middle Ages, came over from Ireland
to the court of Charles the Bald about the middle of the
ninth century. At once the last of the fathers and the first
of the scholastics, he occupies a unique position in the
history of medieval thought. While his contemporaries
were acquainted only with the Latin fathers and the meagre
fragments of the Greek philosophers which had survived in
Latin translations, he possessed a competent knowledge
of the Greek language and had read deeply in the Greek
fathers and the writings of platonizing Christians like the
so-called Dionysius the Areopagite, whose works he trans-
lated into Latin. The whole spirit of his philosophy is
thus widely different from that of any other medieval
writer. He is almost more neoplatonist than Christian,
and the freedom with which he reinterprets the traditional
dogmas of the Church is wholly without parallel in an age
of literalism and blind adhesion to authority.
230 Legacy of the Middle Ages
To sketch an outline of Erigena's system is by no means
easy, for his thought abounds in abstruse half-mystical
metaphysics which renders it very difficult to understand.
In his chief work De divisione naturae he classifies ' Nature '
or, as we should say, Reality, into four kinds : that which
creates and is not created ; that which is created and
creates ; that which is created and does not create ; that
which neither creates nor is created. By these divisions he
does not mean to specify four different things or classes,
they are rather four aspects or stages of the one world
process. The first deals with God as essence, the ultimate
ground of the universe, the second with the Divine Ideas
or first causes, the third with the created world, and the
last with God as the consummation of all things. God
alone has true being : He is without beginning or end, and
is the beginning, middle, and end of all things, for all
things which have being participate in His essence, subsist
in and through Him and are moved towards Him as their
last end. When, therefore, we say that God created all
things we mean that He is in all things and underlies their
essence ; they are, to use the modern idealist's language,
* adjectival ' to Him, for God alone has ' substantive ' being.
John, however, was no pantheist. Though God is in all
things, He must not be confused with them ; He is not
merely the sum of things ; in His own private being He
transcends them all. Following the negative theology of
the Areopagite we may even say, by a somewhat violent
metaphor, that He is nothing, for His essense transcends all
determinations and is inexpressible. For though reason
arguing from the finite creation concludes that God is, that
He is good, wise, living, &c., and though the revelation of
the Church teaches that He is one Essence in three Sub-
stances or Persons, none of these definitions or attributes
belong to Him in their literal sense ; they are all more or
Philosophy 231
less symbolic. The divine being transcends all possible con-
ceptions.
From the first c nature ' proceeds the second, created and
creating, the ' intelligible world ' of the divine ideas, which
form a system hierarchically arranged in Platonic fashion
from the highest idea, the Good, through all the various
genera and species down to the lowest idea, matter. This
intelligible world is created eternally by the Father in the
Son and nourished in the bosom of the Holy Ghost, by
whose operation the primordial causes or ideas unfold them-
selves into the visible and sensible world. For like a true
Platonist Erigena regards the divine ideas not only as proto-
types but also as the causes of the world of sense. Creation
is thus the procession of the divine being through the
primordial causes into the visible and invisible creatures.
And this procession is eternal. For God does not first
conceive and then make, Fidet enim operando et videndo
operatur. By this eternal act God creates not only the
created world, He also creates Himself. * For the creature
subsists in Him and He in creating is after a marvellous and
ineffable manner created, invisible making Himself visible,
unknown making Himself known, formless giving Himself
form, superessential giving Himself being, maker of all
things being in all things made.'
Passing to the third division, the nature that is created
but not creative, John expounds his cosmology in the form
of a commentary on the first chapters of Genesis, which he
regards not as a statement of historical fact, but as a highly
symbolical allegory. The centre of the created universe is
man, who unites in his nature the spiritual and corporeal
worlds. He is the microcosm, the workshop of creation, and
in him the Divine Trinity creates itself. Erigena is, in fact,
an uncompromising idealist. Thought is the only ultimate
reality and the corporeal sensations are mere illusions.
232 Legacy of the Middle Ages
To be and to be thought is one. Thought is not the image
of things, it is their actual essence. Just as the divine
thought creates eternally the divine ideas or causes of things,
so human thought creates the essences of the things of the
created world, and in it the unfolding of the divine nature
is accomplished. The human soul is thus the image of the
Trinity with its three faculties, understanding, reason, and
sense. For as the Father creates the eternal ideas in the
Son, so the understanding creates the highest concepts in
the reason, and as the Holy Ghost distributes the effects of
the primordial causes in the multiplicity of the created world,
so sense divides and distributes the pure concepts into the
genera and species of the visible world. But the image is
not a perfect one. For in the fall of Adam the nature of
man was corrupted and his soul submitted to the illusions
of the physical senses. The physical qualities which make
up corporeal things are mere appearances ; they are a con-
geries of * accidents ' which come into being and pass away,
whereas the real essence of things is eternal. If we could
but see things as they really are, their sensible qualities
would vanish, they would wholly be resolved into their ideal
elements. The story of the garden of Eden and the tempta-
tion is a symbol. There was no actual time when man
existed in innocence ; he fell' as soon as he was created.
Instead of turning his soul to God he turned towards
himself; and this before he was tempted of the devil.
Thus fallen he was no longer able to fulfil the function for
which he was created, namely the bringing back of all
things to their primordial causes, the involution of the
divine essence into itself.
The last division, the Nature which neither creates nor
is created, represents the final stage of the world process,
when all things have returned into their first causes and rest
in them ; when the distinction between creator and creature
Philosophy 233
has been obliterated, and God is all in all. After the fall,
man was no longer capable of performing this consummation.
He had entered into the entanglement of the physical body
and incurred the penalty of death. But the divine mercy
had prepared a plan for his redemption ; the Word became
flesh assuming the nature of man, and through the Incarna-
tion human nature is restored to its original purity and
brought back into its first causes. This restoration is
accomplished in four stages, the death of the body, the
resurrection of the dead, the transformation of the physical
body into a spiritual body, and the final return of human
nature into its primordial causes. In the resurrection the
whole of the sensible creation will rise again transformed,
transmuted, and eternalized, reassumed into the divine
being, yet without absolute annihilation preserved eternally
as a moment of the divine life ; movebitur in Deum sicut aer
movetur in lucem. But this doctrine of the mystical return
of all things into God, which was no new invention (we
find it in Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa),
has to be adapted to the severer teaching of the Church,
which makes an all-important distinction between the fate
of the saved and of the damned. A place has to be found for
eternal tortures. It cannot be human nature that suffers,
for humanity was restored by the Incarnation, and true to
his Platonic realism Erigcna insists that humanity is one
and indivisible. Even the diabolic nature will share in this
abstract redemption. But the accidents of this perfected
substance do not of necessity participate in this glorification.
The evil of mankind is accidental, for evil has no positive
essence, and evil shall be punished eternally by its own
frustration. The wicked will find no realization of their
wickedness in the future life, and fires of hell are the fires
of an eternal conscience. The elect, on the other hand, will
become united with God, they will be deified, and the
234 Legacy of the Middle Ages
condition of their deification is the knowledge and love of
the Incarnate Word as revealed by the teaching of the
Church.
The philosophy of Erigena was conceived on too grand
a scale to appeal to the ecclesiastical intelligence of the
ninth century. It was condemned as heretical, and the
master left no disciples worthy of his name. In the troublous
times of the tenth century darkness once more descended
on the land, and when in the eleventh century philosophical
speculation began once more to reappear, it was from far
humbler sources that the main stream of medieval thought
drew its origin. Scholasticism may be said to have been
generated out of theology by the disputes of the logicians.
First and foremost of these controversies was that between
the * realists ' and the ' nominalists ' concerning the nature
of general concepts or * universals '. Is ' humanity ', e.g.
a real substance, one and the same in all human beings
whose individuality consists in a mere congeries of c acci-
dents ', or is it merely a class name arbitrarily chosen to
designate a plurality of particular men ? The former
opinion was that of the so-called * realists ', the latter, that
of the so-called * nominalists '. It might seem at first sight
that such a controversy was both absurd and sterile, but in
fact its consequences were of the greatest importance to the
development of medieval thought, not so much because
the issue itself was of such vast gravity, but on account
of the theological implications which were deduced from it.
Thus Roscellinus, the protagonist of the nominalist party,
did not hesitate to apply his logical doctrine to the elucida-
tion of the mysteries of the Trinity. If, he argued, the real
is the universal, then the Three Persons are not three things
but one thing, and the Father and the Holy Ghost became
incarnate with the Son. If, on the other hand, the real
is the singular, we should properly speak not of one God
Philosophy 235
but of three Gods, and this horn of the dilemma he himself
embraced. At this abominable tritheism the whole of
Christendom stood aghast. The more conservative church-
men, who like Peter Damian had long been distrustful of
the study of logic, redoubled their protest against any
attempt to understand the mysteries of the faith. But
even among the most orthodox there were those who took
a larger view. Anselm, afterwards Archbishop of Canter-
bury, saw that heresy must be countered by its own weapon.
The task he set himself was to give a philosophical explana-
tion of Christian dogma which should at the same time
be perfectly orthodox, and to co-ordinate the somewhat
loosely connected tradition of the Latin Church. Starting
from the basis of implicit faith, he yet sought, as far as was
possible for the enfeebled and vitiated intellect, to arrive
at some understanding of the holy mysteries, and to discover,
if that might be permitted to him, the ' necessary reasons *
underlying the principal tenets of the Church concerning
the existence and nature of God and his relation to his
creatures. For the first time since Augustine the great
dogmas of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Redemption,
and the ever-pressing problem of free will and predestination
received a systematic treatment which deserves to be called
both philosophical and orthodox. It was a great advance,
and its consequences were decisive. Whatever flaws we may
discover in the famous ontological argument for the existence
of God which Anselm was the first to formulate, its signi-
ficance is incontestable ; it marks the beginning of a new
effort to place theology once more upon a rational basis.
Meanwhile the strife between nominalists and realists,
hotly contested throughout the eleventh century, acted as
a powerful stimulus on the growing activities of the medieval
mind. Schools of dialectic began to multiply, and in spite
of all the efforts of the most conservative theologians, the
236 Legacy of the Middle Ages
dialectical spirit began to invade the teaching of theology
itself. An important 'stage of this development is marked
by the career of Peter Abelard (d. 1 142), the most renowned
dialectician of the twelfth century. In logic he attempted
to discover a middle way between the absurdities of the
orthodox realists and the blasphemies of the nominalists.
Universals are neither things nor names, they are concepts
which are predicated of particulars. Thus when we say
that Plato and Socrates are both men, we do not mean that
there is a mysterious essence ' humanity ' which, one and
the same, gives being to both, but we mean that both have
similar essences. The humanity of Plato is numerically
distinct from the humanity of Socrates, but it is of the same
kind. Elementary as such considerations may appear, they
were not without importance, and Abelard may be reckoned
as one of the precursors of the logical theory of the thirteenth
century, the so-called moderate or Aristotelian realism.
But it was not as a mere logician that Abelard made his
greatest impression on the speculation of his age. Like
Anselm, he too set out to discover the necessary reasons
which underlay the dogmas of the faith. But whereas
Anselm's was a faith that inquires, Abelard's was a faith
which begins by doubting. For it is only by doubting that
we can come to the investigation of the truth a dangerous
doctrine in the eyes of twelfth-century churchmen ! In
a treatise entitled Sic et non, he collected together all the
contradictory statements he could find in the Scriptures
and the fathers concerning various points of Christian
doctrine, and though he laid down the principles on which
the reconciliation should be effected, he did not venture to
offer any solutions himself. Thus by borrowing the method
of contemporary canonists, who had already begun to
systematize and classify the conflicting rulings of ecclesias-
tical law, he laid the foundations of the scholastic method
Philosophy 237
which was afterwards to govern the discussion of theological
and philosophical questions. In his philosophical specula-
tions Abelard was less fortunate. An ardent admirer of
Plato, whose metaphysic he would embrace, even where he
rejected his logic, he attributed to the pagan philosophers
an anticipation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity
which seemed to trespass on the unique privileges of
ecclesiastical revelation. Did not the One of the platonists
typify the Father, the vows the Son and the world- Soul the
Holy Ghost ? And though under pressure he afterwards
withdrew this detestable opinion, his explanations of the
mystery were incautious ; he reduced the Trinity of Persons
to a mere trinity of attributes, power, wisdom, and love,
and his comparison of the triune unity to a seal, the bronze
of which it is made, and the character incised on it, savoured
too much of Sabellianism to escape the implacable fanaticism
of the redoubtable St. Bernard, who had long been waiting
for the opportunity of silencing the pernicious heretic. 1
The inspired ignorance and unscrupulous astuteness of the
saint procured a condemnation at the Council of Sens,
which did not even listen to a defence, and silenced for
ever the peripatetic of Pallet. But the fulminations of
the orthodox were unable to prevent the evolution of
theological speculation. The twelfth century was an age
of rapid development. Everywhere theology was being
transformed by the philosophical spirit. In the Abbey of
St. Victor, Hugo and Richard were developing the mystical
side of the teaching of St. Augustine, on lines which were
afterwards to b^ perfected by the Franciscan St. Bonaven-
1 Cf. Ep. cxcii : ' Cum de Trim t ate loquitur [Abaelardus] sapit
Arium : cum de gratia, sapit Pelagium ; cum de persona Christi, sapit
Nestorium.' Of Abelard' s attempt to reconcile Platonism and Christian-
ity he writes (Tractates de erroribus Abaclardi, c. iv), ' ubi dum multum
sudat quomodo Platonem faciat Christianum, se probat ethnicum.'
238 Legacy of the Middle Ages
tura, while at Chartres there sprang up a realist school of
Platonists who attempted to harmonize the teaching of the
Ttmaeus with that of the Catholic Church. Indeed
Chartres at this period was the centre of a humanist revival
which has scarcely received from historians (Dr. R. L. Poole
excepted *) the attention which it deserves. Not only were
the classical authors Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Seneca, Cicero,
carefully studied and the art of composition sedulously
cultivated ; the natural sciences also received a due measure
of attention, as is shown by the works of William of Conches,
who attempted to reconcile the atomic theory of Demo-
critus and the Epicureans with the physical theories of the
Timaeus.
The development of this Platonic realism is of particular
interest. To the realist, as we have already seen, general
ideas were endowed with a mysterious metaphysical signi-
ficance ; they were the reality (res) of which the particular
was only the appearance. The world of ideas or ' forms ',
which had first been described by Plato as the intelligible
world, had long been identified by Christian thought with
the divine ideas, the unity of which was the divine word or
Aoyos, through whom the world was created. These ideas
are generated eternally by the Father in the Son before all
worlds ; they are the archetypes or moulds from which
the created world was cast. But ideas are universals, and
the things of the created universe are particulars ; how
then are the two related ? There must be some other
principle to mediate between them, and this the scholastics
found in ' matter '. The * matter ' of the medieval philo-
sophers must not, however, be conceived in terms of the
1 Cf. his Illustrations of the History of Mediaeval Thought and Learning,
2nd ed.. 1920 ; and his article 4 The Masters of the Schools at Paris and
Chartres in John of Salisbury's time ', English Historical Review, xxxv.
321 et seq. See also M. Clerval, Les e coles de Cbartres (1895).
Philosophy 239
modern physicists. It was rather the Greek v\rj 9 an abso-
lutely indeterminate something, which was regarded as the
principle of plurality and change. The created world was
thus produced by the outflowing of the divine ideas or
forms into matter, and all created things are composita or
conjuncta, compounds of c form ' and f matter '. And
though particular individual things pass away and come
into being the world itself is imperishable, for the forms
and matter are alike everlasting. The bond which unites
form and matter and holds them together is the final cause
of the world, the world-soul which is the Holy Ghost.
The universe is thus a great organism animated by one
life which lives in all creatures, in brutes and men and
stones, and sustains it through all its manifold changes,
the spiritus vivificans of the Nicene Creed. This theory,
which approaches in some respects very closely to pantheism,
is expounded in a quaintly characteristic mathematical
symbolism by Theodoric of Chartres in his book De sex
dierum operibus, and also by Bernard Silvestris in a picturesque
allegorical dialogue De universittte mundi. But it would be
a mistake to interpret it as a thorough-going monism ; for
both writers, while maintaining that all things partake in
the divine unity and are derived from it, are careful not to
confuse the creator with the creature, and both insist
equally upon the transcendence as well as the immanence
of the divine being.
Meanwhile another powerful influence was beginning to
pervade medieval thought. From the beginning of the
twelfth century the ' new logic ' of Aristotle began to make
its way into the schools, thus adding a new ingredient to
their composite teaching. Much intellectual ingenuity was
expended in endeavouring to form a synthesis between the
logical doctrine of * Plato ' and ' Aristotle ', which developed
eventually into the typical scholastic doctrine of c universals '.
240 Legacy of the Middle Ages
The * universal ' has a threefold existence. As ' idea ' it is
an eternal moment of the divine mind (ante rem), as
* essence ' it is individualized in the numerically different
real objects of the concrete world (in re), while as ' concept *
(genus or species) it is * abstracted ' by the mind from the
particulars of sense-experience (post rem). Thus was ended
the second phase of the controversy between nominalism
and realism.
But the influence of Aristotle was by no means confined
to logic. Round about 1200 the great philosophical works
of the peripatetic philosopher made their way to the newly
founded university of Paris, the great metropolis of medieval
thought, in Latin translations made in Spain from the
Arabic text, together with the numerous commentaries of
the Arabian and Jewish philosophers. The Physics, Meta-
physics, De Anima, Ethics, and Naturalia, which had been
lost for centuries became once more the property of Latin
Christendom. This rediscovery of the Aristotelian philo-
sophy had a profound and sudden effect. Medieval thought
was confronted with a completed system which was worked
out with a scientific thoroughness and breadth of view,
wholly different from the fragmentary Platonism which had
been the inspiration of the previous centuries. Aristotle,
who had been known merely as a * dialectian ', became at
once 'the Philosopher', and his authority came to be
regarded as almost that of another Bible. Papal prohibitions
against ' reading ' the new treatises in the universities and
schools were quietly disregarded and afterwards withdrawn,
and from henceforward the chief, if not the only requirement
for the degree of Master of Arts, was an intimate and detailed
knowledge of the Aristotelian writings.
The medieval churchman was thus compelled to undertake
a task of synthesis far more complicated than any he had yet
attempted. Aristotelianism and Christianity had somehow
Philosophy 241
to be welded into a unity which embraced the totality of
truth, human and divine. The first great effort in this
direction was the Summa Thtologica of the Franciscan
Alexander of Hales, who attempted to graft on to the
traditional theology the doctrines of the new philosophy.
But the spirit of his 'work remained predominatingly
* Augustinian ' in its characteristic confusion of theological
and philosophical speculation, and he was unable to bring
the newer and the older elements into any coherent unity.
A different method was adopted by the Dominican School
of Albertus Magnus and his pupil St. Thomas Aquinas.
The unity of philosophy and theology was definitely aban-
doned, and they became wholly separate sciences, the one
the product of natural reason, the other that of divine
revelation. The decisive factor in this division was the
Aristotelian empiricist theory of knowledge. The older
* Augustinian ' theory of cognition which reached its
highest expression in the Philosophy of St. Bonaventura,
was essentially mystical in tendency. Knowledge is an
intuition in which we catch some reflection of the eternal
ideas of the divine mind, and the objects of sensual experi-
ence are in the last resort only the guise or symbol under
which these eternal ideas are revealed. The ultimate object
of knowledge is thus always God himself, and all knowing
is dependent upon the illumination of the uncreated light
which reveals itself to the soul of man by progressive stages
rising from ordinary sense-experience to mystical contem-
plation. The distinction between faith and reason was thus
blurred, for what is faith but a higher reason, and reason
but an imperfect faith ? A complete separation of philo-
sophy and theology was therefore theoretically impossible.
The Aristotelian theory of knowledge, on the other hand,
was naturalistic and empiricist. The mind is, of its own
right, so to speak, endowed with certain basic principles of
2873 R
242 Legacy of the Middle Ages
thought, and, for the rest, knowledge comes wholly from
without through the experience of the senses which reflect
or copy a really existing external world. Nihil est in intel-
lectu quod, non frius fuerit in sensu. This profound difference
rendered the separation of natural reason from revelation
inevitable. By making each supreme in its own sphere, it
was hoped that conflict would be avoided. Theological
truths could not indeed be proved, but it could be shown
that they did not contradict the fundamental postulates of
reason, and that was enough.
This divorce, while it appeared to make for harmony, was
in fact intellectually disastrous. It was found impossible
to avoid border-line conflicts, for the principles of the
Aristotelian philosophy were really wholly incompatible
with the Catholic faith, which both in its content and in its
traditions was more closely allied to Platonism. The latent
contradictions one by one revealed themselves beneath the
cloak of compromise, and the ultimate result was a form of
scepticism which expressed itself in the convenient theory
of the two truths.
The great champion of Aristotelianism was St. Thomas
Aquinas, who, breaking away from the older tradition of the
schools, attempted to purify the Aristotelian doctrine from
Arabian accretions and to use it as a philosophical foundation
for Catholic theology. His amazing success was due to his
unrivalled powers of systematization a marvellous grasp
of detail, and a faculty for lucid presentation which no
medieval thinker could equal. But he attempted no less
than the impossible, and the subsequent collapse of
scholasticism was the direct result of the discovery of his
failure.
A few illustrations may serve to show the typical diffi-
culties of the Thomist Aristotelianism, which lead either
to a complete distortion of the original system, or else to
Philosophy 243
an impasse from which the only refuge was an act of faith.
According to Aristotle's theory the universe is composed of
two correlative principles, form and matter, both of which
are eternal. The one is the principle of actuality, the other
of potentiality. Matter of itself has no real existence, but
only potential being : it is the principle of all change being
for ever capable of assuming new forms. At the opposite
pole is God, who is pure actuality, the form of forms and
the final cause of the world. Between matter, the lowest
term, and God, the highest, the real world of concrete
* substances ' composed of form and matter is arranged
hierarchically in an ascending scale from the corruptible
bodies of the sublunary world to the incorruptible spheres,
revolving with an eternal motion, and though in the case
of the terrestrial substances the individuals may come to
birth and perish, yet the form or type is eternal, for ever
realizing itself in the mutability of eternal matter.
The doctrine of the older scholastics with its Augustinian
tradition was far different. For them matter was a sort of
metaphysical world-stuff out of which the universe was
created, a stuff which, while without any positive qualities,
yet had some real existence of its own, even though it had
never actually existed in isolation apart from form. Thomas,
however, follows Aristotle in maintaining the correlativity
of matter to form and in denying to it any real existence,
but he is forced to reject the presupposition which is
essentially implied in this theory, namely the eternity of the
universe, and his mater ia prima is left in the awkward
position of a sort of created nothing which has no repre-
sentative idea in the divine mind and yet is somehow known
by God. The problem of creation was one which caused
him no little trouble. Too good a Christian to deny
creation in time, he was nevertheless too good an Aristotelian
to admit its demonstrability, with the result that he has to
R 2
244 Legacy of the Middle Ages
take refuge ultimately in an act of faith, which is philo-
sophically a very desperate expedient.
In his doctrine of the soul and its relation to the body
St. Thomas's Aristotelianism leads him into even greater
difficulties. According to the * Augustinian ' school as
represented by Alexander of Hales and Bonaventura, body
and soul are each in a sense substances, each being composed
of form and matter. But the body of itself is not a com-
plete substance it is a mere chemico-physical structure
which is not alive. The soul, even though it is itself com-
posite, acts as a ' perfective form ' towards the body and
gives it its living functions. At their dissolution in death,
each still is substantially itself, though the form of the body
being ' corruptible ' the latter quickly disintegrates, while
the soul continues its substantial existence. This ingenious
doctrine of the plurality of forms was naturally abhorrent
to the strict Aristotelianism of St. Thomas. Form and
matter are essentially correlative, and one substance can
therefore only have one substantial form. The soul is, as
Aristotle taught, the substantial form of the body, and soul
and body are not two substances but one substance. But
here an awkward dilemma arises, and once more the im-
plications of the Aristotelian doctrine have to be avoided.
At death the union of form and matter is dissolved and the
individual destroyed. What then of immortality ? The
soul, says St. Thomas, is a * separable form ', it can continue
to exist as an individual without matter, surely a very
strange conclusion, and one which directly contradicts the
fundamental thesis of Aristotelianism, namely, that the
individual, which is the real, is the compound of form and
matter. In fact St. Thomas's anima separata is a philo-
sophical monstrosity. For a ' form ' is universal and on his
own teaching the universal can only be * individualized ' in
matter. A plurality of * forms * of the same * species ', e. g.
Philosophy 245
a plurality of departed spirits, is a logical absurdity which
illustrates admirably the complete incompatibility of the
Aristotelian and the Christian doctrines.
The same contradiction meets us also in his ethics. Here
again St. Thomas attempts to reconcile Aristotle with
Christianity, and though his treatment of ethical problems
is unique among the scholastic philosophers both for its
thoroughness and for its dialectical skill, a satisfactory
synthesis was not really attainable. For the Church had
long worked out in intimate detail a system of morality the
character of which was wholly different from the ethics of
ancient Greece. And while St. Thomas borrows the phraseo-
logy and the formal principles of the Aristotelian system, he
entirely changes their original meaning by constructing
with them a * natural ' morality which is to serve merely
as a basis for the supernatural morality of the world of
grace, the very conception of which is fundamentally
irreconcilable with Aristotle's basic idea of the nature of
ethics. It would in fact be difficult to find two ethical
ideals which are so wholly disparate as those of the good
Christian man and the /*eyaA.oi/a;xos.
And yet this curious patchwork of irreconcilable ideas
was somehow made to work. It suited exactly the genius of
the medieval mind which expressed itself in the synthesis of
traditional authorities. The greater the variety and even
the contrariety of elements, the subtler the ingenuity
necessary to reconcile them and the more satisfactory the
product, as reproducing more perfectly the accumulated
wisdom of the past. Plato and Aristotle, were they not the
great patriarchs of human reason ? To conceive that they
could have been wholly in error would be inordinate pre-
sumption. The first demand of the spirit of the age was
for inclusiveness rather than for real consistency. That
philosophy and theology could be unified, that they were
246 Legacy of the Middle Ages
both somehow true was a postulate that could not be
questioned, and in formal logic there was the instrument
ready to hand : the syllogism was a tool that was all but
omnipotent. The scholastic, in fact, was far too clever
a logician to feel the need for real consistency.
The success of St. Thomas's teaching was immediate and
startling in spite of the bitter opposition of the more
conservative theologians, even within his own order, and
the condemnation of his doctrines both at Paris and at
Oxford. Never before had the medieval schools witnessed
any system which could be compared with Thomism for the
completeness of its articulation and thoroughness of applica-
tion. It became at once the * system of reference ' of
subsequent scholasticism. But its weaknesses and incon-
sistencies did not escape the criticism of the adherents of the
older type of doctrine, especially within the rival Franciscan
order, which lost little time in publishing a * Correctory of
brother Thomas ' by William Lamarre, and raised for itself
a doctor as famous as the * Angelic ' in the person of Duns
Scotus. The Philosophy of Scotus, which, owing to his
early death, never reached the same completeness of expres-
sion as that of Thomas, is a critical reconstruction of the
older Augustinian scholasticism, deeply influenced by the
Thomist system. It also is a synthesis between philosophy
and theology, but less strictly Aristotelian, for where St.
Thomas followed the peripatetic philosopher almost blindly,
Duns is far more discriminating in his selection, and chooses
only those elements which could be made to harmonize
more easily with the teaching of the Church. On several
fundamental points he is in complete agreement with the
Angelic Doctor. He accepts without reserve the empiricist
Aristotelian theory of knowledge, and also the formal separa-
tion of Philosophy and Theology. But the basic principles
of his metaphysic are far different. His theory of form and
Philosophy 247
matter is a restatement of the older doctrine. While
agreeing with the generally accepted teaching of his order,
that matter has real being and that all created things are
composed of form and matter, Duns goes one step farther,
and maintains the fundamental unity of matter in all
creation, a doctrine which is derived from the platonizing
Jewish philosopher, Salaman ben Gabirol (Avicebron).
Matter thus becomes the principle of ' Creatursein ' : it is
the metaphysical stuff from which the whole created world,
spiritual as well as physical, was formed. This doctrine of
the unity of the created universe is expressed in a beautiful
symbol. The world is a gigantic tree planted and tended
by God, whose root is matter and whose trunk is divided
into two main branches representing the physical and the
spiritual creation. The twigs represent the perishable
substances, the falling leaves their * accidents ', while the
flowers represent the human soul and the fruit the Angels. 1
He is thus saved from the strange dilemmas of the Thomist
Aristotelianism, but the doctrine of creation in time also
causes him discomfort, and he is compelled to admit that
while probable it is not strictly demonstrable. At the same
time his conception of form and matter enables him to
avoid the Thomist confusion of the relation of the soul
to the body, and the curious theory of the separate forms.
Scotus agrees with Alexander of Hales and Bonaventura in
maintaining that both soul and body are composed of form
and matter, while also admitting the Thomist contention
that the soul stands to the body as its substantial form.
The survival of the soul as a substance in its own right is
therefore not a palpable absurdity, yet he will not concede
that it can strictly be demonstrated, though again he
1 This passage occurs in the DC rerum principio^ a treatise the authen-
ticity of which has recently been doubted, but there is no reason to regard
the evidence against its genuineness as conclusive.
248 Legacy of the Middle Ages
concedes that balance of probability is strongly in its
favour.
The most interesting of Duns's contributions to the
history of thought is his doctrine of the will, which is
worked out with great minuteness and psychological pene-
tration. Whereas Thomas inclines to an intellectualistic
determinism, because he adheres to the Aristotelian formulae,
and Aristotle had never succeeded in arriving at a conception
of the will at all, Scotus conies forward as the champion of
libertarianism, upholding the primacy of the will over the
intellect. The will, though it may be, and indeed is,
influenced by the intellect, is not, however, ' determined '
by it : in the last resort it determines itself, and thus it is
that a man can act even against his better judgement ;
for the will holds the power of attention, and is to a large
extent the controller of man's thoughts, for it can turn
the contemplation of the intellect from one object to another,
and thus accomplish its purpose, behind the back, as it were,
of the still small voice of reason. But this interesting theory
of freedom leads at once to difficulties. The freedom of
man and the freedom of God come into collision, and
Duns exercises all his subtlety in vain when he attempts to
grapple with the great theological problems of the Reforma-
tion, of Grace and free will, and the divine responsibility
for evil. In the sphere of ethics also this voluntaristic
doctrine leads to difficulties and contradictions, and he is
forced somewhat unwillingly to base the whole moral law
not on the necessities of reason but on the inscrutable
determinations of the divine will.
In spite of the constructive elements in his philosophy,
the chief results of Scotism were rather critical and destruc-
tive. Duns had laid bare with merciless acuteness the
latent contradictions in the Thomist system, and he had
criticized as invalid many of the arguments by which
Philosophy 249
Thomas had attempted to establish a * natural ' theology.
Creationism, Immortality, the Divine Omnipotence, &c.,
these and many other dogmas of the Church were shown
to be undemonstrable by natural reason, and though
Scotus introduced no new principle of scepticism and
only applied more rigorously the distinction invented by
Thomas, the psychological effect of the transfer of one
doctrine after another from the province of reason to the
province of faith, was enormous. The pre-established
harmony between reason and revelation, which was the
fundamental postulate of medieval thought, was collapsing
with alarming rapidity.
There was yet another disintegrating influence which
grew more and more powerful at the beginning of the
fourteenth century. The works of the Arabian physician
and commentator on Aristotle had been widely studied,
and a school of ' Averroists ' grew up at Paris and also in
the universities of Northern Italy, e.g. Padua, where
medicine was eagerly studied. The most important articles
in the Averroist creed were the eternity of the world, and
the denial of the individual immortality of the soul. Ac-
cording to the latter theory, there is only one * reason '
which is eternal and which thinks in each of us by coming
into temporary contact with the mortal sensitive soul which
disintegrates with the death of the body. Both doctrines
reproduced far more accurately the real teaching of Aristotle
than the Christianized version of St. Thomas, and they
appealed to the more rationalistic scientific temperament,
but unfortunately they were irreconcilable with the funda-
mental teaching of the Church. This awkward circum-
stance was therefore explained away by the ingenious and
comfortable hypothesis of the * two truths ', according to
which a proposition could be philosophically true and
theologically false or vice versa. Was not the reconciliation
250 Legacy of the Middle Ages
of contradictions an edifying proof of the divine omni-
potence ? But the reconciliation of contradictions was the
one task which even the subtlety of the scholastic was uhable
to accomplish, and the result of this disastrous teaching was
a polite but scarcely disguised scepticism which heralded the
philosophy of the Renaissance.
The final breakdown of the scholastic attempt to combine
Aristotelianism with Christianity is clearly apparent in the
last great medieval thinker, the anti-papalist William of
Ockham, the reviver of * Nominalism ', who attacked the
so-called c moderate ' realism which had ruled the schools
for about a century. Ockham rejects the conception of the
universal as immanent in particulars (in re). Only the
singular exists and the * universal ' is a fiction of the mind,
a * term ' or natural sign which stands for a plurality of
singulars. The immediate object of all forms of knowledge
(scientiae) is the proposition whose terms are * universals '
which somehow represent real things, though they are not
the things themselves but only ' signs ' of them. This
apparently commonplace doctrine really struck at the roots
of the whole Aristotelian theory of knowledge as understood
by the Middle Ages, and opened the way to a scepticism
which Ockham himself would have been the first to repudi-
ate. For it was argued that if all knowledge is of proposi-
tions and not of * things ', then logic is the only science and
physics and metaphysics are impossible, and, what is more,
if there is no universal immanent in things-in-themselves,
how is any knowledge of them possible ? how do we know
that our * signs ' represent them as they really are ? For
have you not already admitted that * signs ' are * universals ',
and there are no ' universals ' in things ? The difficulties
of the correspondence theory of truth are thus raised in the
most acute form. Once the universal* in re was abolisEed,
the bridge between logic and metaphysic was broken down
Philosophy 251
by the destruction of the real identity of * form ' and
essence.
Nor were the results of Ockham's teaching any less
destructive in the wider realm of metaphysics and theology.
Not content with maintaining as indemonstrable the immor-
tality of the soul, he went even farther and denied the
validity of the arguments proving the existence of God and
His attributes, such as unity, goodness, omnipotence, and so
forth, and though he maintained that on purely rational
grounds the balance lay in favour of the assumption that
there is a God, he insisted that the dogmas of the Church
such as the Trinity and the Incarnation were not only
indemonstrable but highly improbable, in the sense that
to most of the wise men of the world who relied on natural
reason they appeared to be false. He developed also to an
exaggerated degree the voluntarism of Scotus. The will of
God is absolutely arbitrary and bound by no laws, the
physical and the moral order are alike contingent, the nature
of the world and the distinction between right and wrong
rest solely on the absolutely arbitrary decision of the divine
will. The same applies to the order of Grace : God could
if He wished save the wicked and damn the righteous,
just as He might have become incarnate in an ox or a
stone.
Scepticism could scarcely be carried farther without
relapsing into downright infidelity. Medieval thought had
exhausted its power of growth, and a further synthetic
development was no longer possible. The history of philo-
sophy in the later Middle Ages is a story of decay. The
three main schools, Thomism, Scotism, and Terminism
continued, it is true, for two centuries and more reproducing
and commenting on the doctrines of their founders, growing
generation by generation more futilely academic and
elaborately sterile, until scholasticism became the laughing-
252 Legacy of the Middle Ages
stock of the humanists of the Renaissance, a chimera
bombinating in a vacuum of fatuity. The great dream of
St. Anselm, the building up of a Christian philosophy,
which had seemed so near to fulfilment in the Summa of
St. Thomas Aquinas, gradually faded and passed away, and
with it passed that fascinating form of the human spirit,
the medieval mind.
It is, of course, a comparatively easy thing to criticize
thought of a past age from a modern standpoint, and to lay
bare its inconsistencies and inadequacies. But to discover
post-mortem the cause of death is not to solve the mystery
of life. The written word is, after all, little more than the
skeleton or fossil of the living thought, and our histories of
philosophy are rather anatomies than physiologies. And so
with the philosophy of the Middle Ages, whose outlook on
the world and whose problems were so different from ours,
it is hard to realize that it was once a living thing, and to
grasp, beneath the inadequate logic of its expression, the pro-
founder unity of the life which gave it birth. The medieval
spirit was dominated throughout by the conception of
a supreme harmony subordinating the natural to the super-
natural order, a harmony in which all the activities of the
soul, religion, philosophy, art, science, and conduct were
united in the realization of the ideal of the City of God.
The Christian thus had, in the last analysis, little need for
a philosophy the questions which really interested him
and the problems which were of supreme importance to his
destiny were all answered, and his needs all satisfied, by his
theology and its concrete manifestation in his personal
religious life. The achievement of the Middle Ages lay
therefore not so much in the intellectual construction of
a philosophic system as in the mysticism of the devout life,
and the more imaginative synthesis of art, which in the
Divine Comedy of Dante expressed itself in the creation of
Philosophy 253
purest poetry. Fixing his gaze upon the Divine Essence,
Dante, at the end of the Paradiso, exclaims :
Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,
Legato con amore in un volume,
Cio che per 1'universo si squaderna ;
Sustanzia ed accident! e lor costume,
Quasi conflati insieme per tal modo
Che cio ch'io dico e un semplice lume. 1
All arts and all sciences, to use the noble conception of
St. Bonaventura, were but roads which lead back to the
supreme sapitntia, theology. The Catholic faith rounded
and embraced the life of the medieval thinker, just as in his
cosmology the primum mobile contained in itself the totality
of space and created by its divinely sustained movement the
totality of time. But this self-contained completeness was
inadequate to satisfy the growing needs, scientific and philoso-
phical, of the advancing spirit ; and just as the abandonment
of the Ptolemaic system rendered obsolete the medieval con-
ceptions of astronomical science, so the * Copernican revolu-
tion ' of the idealism of the eighteenth century has rendered
obsolete the philosophical c Weltanschauung ' of the Middle
Ages. But even if there is little in modern thought which can
be regarded as a direct legacy of the Middle Age, except
perhaps the doubtful blessing of formal logic, it must always
be remembered that it was scholasticism which transmitted
to European culture its first acquaintance with the philo-
sophical heritage of Greece and Rome, and founded the
academic tradition of our universities which has continued
unbroken to the present time. ~ ~ c
r C. R. S. HARRIS.
1 xxxiii. 85-90 :
I saw that in its depth far down is lying,
Bound up with love together in one volume,
What through the universe in leaves is scattered ;
Substance, and accident, and their operations
All interfused together in such wise
That what I speak of is one simple light. (tr. Longfellow.)
EDUCATION
THE Chief Justice, ruling in 1410 that the education of
children was a ' spiritual ' matter, that is, one beyond
the cognizance of the King's Bench, was asserting history as
well as law ; from the earliest to the latest Middle Ages
public education throughout the West was a function of
the Church. The pre-Christian Empire gave rank and
privilege to distinguished rhetors, professors of rhetoric, and
in the first century of our era State salaries were paid to
those who practised in Rome, and perhaps to others who
taught elsewhere. No such encouragement was given to
the grammatici and literatores of the secondary and primary
schools. Yet such schools existed and in many places were
supported from public funds and by private enterprise.
The definitely local control of education combined with
a central general oversight was the creation of the Church,
which in due course evolved an organization comprising
schools, universities, colleges. The unit was the diocesan
bishop's household and its ' clerks ', who there taught the
Faith, prepared men for holy orders, and conducted the
services of the cathedral and diocesan business generally.
As instructors of the clergy-school the chief aim of these
clerks was to teach ' divine letters ', that is, the Scriptures
and the patristic writings. In essentials this instruction
and the Roman rhetorical training occupied common ground;
both taught c grammar ', that is, language and literature,
both aimed at persuasion by training speakers and writers.
The thorough understanding of a literature which was
involved in grammar demanded the mastery of a consider-
256 Legacy of the Middle Ages
able body of miscellaneous knowledge without which
classical works remained obscure. The * liberal arts ' were
therefore as necessary to the Church as the ey^u'icAio? muScia,
the circle of arts and sciences, had been to pre-Christian
culture. * For without practical knowledge of other sciences
the Holy Scriptures cannot be understood,' said St. Bona-
ventura in the thirteenth century re-echoing St. Augustine
in the fourth. The school of the bishop's seat, whether in
cathedral or monastery, perforce became a school of gram-
mar, which was taught as preparatory and auxiliary to
divinity, the primary object of the school's existence.
To men not quite ignorant of Aristotle theological studies
suggested problems which were philosophical ; and this
association of sacred and secular in due course gave rise to
universities. The singers of a great church must add to
a knowledge of musical notation the ability to read Latin
words, even though, in default of grammar, the sense
remained obscure. So the song school was created ; it
fluctuated throughout its history between the standing of
a school of music and a grammar or a preparatory school.
It was never an elementary school in the modern sense,
a type of different origin.
In early days the bishop or abbot was the head of the
cathedral or monastic school, and he was always its respon-
sible chief; but as his duties became more onerous the care
of the schools devolved upon a member of the chapter,
usually the chancellor, but sometimes the precentor. Next,
this officer (scolasticus, arcbiscola, or scolarius) tended to
become in educational matters an administrator only ; he
might teach theology, but the grammar-teaching was
customarily committed to a schoolmaster, a clerk in minor
orders, in effect a layman. The scolasticus was virtually
director of education under the local authority, the bishop,
or * ordinary '. No one might open a school or teach the
Education 257
liberal arts in the diocese without his licence, under penalty
of trial in the spiritual court. The rudiments of such an
administration may be traced back to the seventh century ;
at Reims scolastici of the ninth century are known by
name ; diocesan control was the rule throughout the Middle
Ages. In time some of the universities emancipated them-
selves from this control, but its place was taken by the
doctrine that only the Pope or the Emperor could found
universities. Notwithstanding their clerical origin, the fact
that the cathedral schools taught grammar, and sometimes at
least one other ' liberal art ', gave to their instruction a value
for others than clergymen. This lay character became more
obvious as time passed ; when the grammar school proved
unable to meet a local demand a guild established one, or
a school was added to an almshouse or attached to a chantry,
either by express foundation or as a useful custom. But
in all cases the bishop's licence was required ; records show
that attempts to evade this rule led to litigation which was
sometimes carried to the highest court of appeal, Rome.
An echo of the bitter struggle between ' regulars ' and
c seculars ' of the Benedictine Age (ninth to twelfth cen-
turies) is still heard in the dispute respecting the monks'
share in teaching laymen. Some assert that the monks alone
educated lay folk, others that monastic instruction was
confined to teaching novices their Rule, the constitution
of the monastic Order. It is agreed that during this period
the great Benedictine houses were centres of learning which
afforded a home for scholars, transcribed and interchanged
books, maintained libraries. It is difficult to make a state-
ment about their part in lay instruction which would be
generally true at any time within the period, since circum-
stances differed with time and place. But their provision
of separate schools for inUrni and externi at least points
to teaching which was not limited to, if at all concerned
2873
258 Legacy of the Middle Ages
with, the Rule ; and there are recorded cases of men who
were educated in convents yet did not become monks on
completing their education. That not only abbots and
priors but some simple monks were learned men inclines
one to believe that where such scholars were found a fair
measure of lay instruction was accessible to the externi.
Certainly some English abbots maintained schools and
schoolmasters and gave exhibitions to poor boys for the
purpose of secular education. The growth of scholasticism
and the study of law were powerful factors in the intel-
lectual ferment of the twelfth century, and to these the
monasteries contributed their share. Yet there is no reason
to doubt that the cathedral and collegiate churches main-
tained their scholastic work wherever the monks failed to
oust canons and clerks. The creation of that characteristic
medieval institution, the university, was due to cathedral
churches, not to monasteries, and the growth of universities
ended the work of the latter as places of education, although
the monks' successors, the friars, were conspicuous in
university history. During the Benedictine age, there was
marked educational activity in the cathedral schools of
Reims, Laon, Chartres, Paris, Orleans, and Liege. Each of
these centres owed its commanding position to the attraction
of great teachers, who in the eager intellectual atmosphere
of the twelfth century brought crowds, native and foreign,
to the schools. The teaching at Chartres followed in the
main the model of rhetorical instruction which Quintilian
had described in the first century ; had it prevailed generally,
the revival of classical learning might have been advanced
by two or three centuries. But Paris and its teachers of
dialectic and theology overshadowed Chartres and made
these the staple higher studies.
It is impossible to point to a particular year in the twelfth
century as marking the beginning of the Bologna, Paris, or
Education 259
Oxford studia generalia, or universities. When Abelard
taught philosophy at Paris, when Irnerius lectured on law
at Bologna, and Robert Pullus taught divinity at Oxford
and Paris, they were sowing the seeds of great universities
in soil already prepared by the scholastic labours of the
cathedral and collegiate churches. Possibly similar local
labours preceded the advent of Cambridge as a studium
early in the thirteenth century.
The teachers and students of the first studia, settled in
a not always friendly city, soon associated themselves in
guilds, or universitates, for common convenience, safety, and
freedom from extortion. The hierarchy of undergraduates,
masters, and doctors, all duly ranked in a faculty of the
Seven Liberal Arts and in at least one of the three faculties,
theology, law, medicine, came later, but still early in
university history. Yet the organization was very fluid at
first ; and whenever Gown found cause of offence in Town,
Gown migrated in a body, not being embarrassed by the
possession of buildings or indeed of much property of any
sort. The men and boys who came from all parts of western
Europe to the studia made their own arrangements for
board arid lodging, sometimes with serious detriment to
their morals and their pockets. A step in advance was taken
when individual teachers opened boarding houses admitting
students only ; and private charity maintained hostels for
the benefit of the extremely poor. The Dominicans and
Franciscans settled at the universities within the first
quarter of the thirteenth century and they were joined by
bodies of other c religious ' before that century closed.
The presence of these well-ordered houses of students living
a common life and in time possessed of libraries, halls,
chapels, and resident tutors, inevitably influenced their
secular neighbours. The result was the creation of another
characteristic medieval institution, the college, which was
82
260 Legacy of the Middle Ages
firmly established at Paris, Oxford, and Cfambridge, between
the years 1256 and 1284. Persistent tradition required that
fees should be low. The Lateran Council of 1179 decided
that in every cathedral church and in other churches where
it had been the practice, a master should be beneficed to
teach gratis the clerks of that church and * other poor
persons ', * poor clerks '. The repeated assertion of this
principle from the sixth or seventh centuries to the thir-
teenth shows that it was not invariably followed. Yet when
fees were exacted they were low. Grammar school boys at
Oxford between 1300 and 1347 paid a terminal fee varying
from ^d. to 5 </., when the usual cost of a scholar's board for
one week was Sd. y and a manuscript Donat, containing about
6,000 words, cost 3^. Writing, an * extra' taught inten-
sively, doubtless by a visiting expert, was charged ^d. per
week in 1347-8. Taking the term's fee as equivalent to half
a week's ' board ', it is very considerably lower than the
lowest fee charged to-day in any English secondary school.
Low fees, or no fees, implied the endowed teacher, whose
position was assured by the later creation of * free grammar
schools '.
Maintenance was the poor student's difficulty. An
ancient obligation made ecclesiastical benefices chargeable
with a contribution to the support of students, one of the
recognized charitable acts ; at the university the college
organization soon developed not only the scholar on the
foundation, but also the servitor, or sizar, who received
commons or part commons for domestic service. Samson
(1135-1 211), later the well-known abbot of Bury, was excused
school-fees on account of poverty ; he supported himself
at Paris by the alms which he received for carrying holy
water to parishioners' houses. There are several episcopal
orders of the thirteenth century directing that this office be
reserved to poor clerks, one bishop asserting that the benefice
Education 261
was expressly created for them. In 1393 the Archbishop of
Canterbury commends this 'laudable custom prevailing
throughout England ' but he has to threaten penalties for
its breach. Matthew Paris pictures a * young clerk ' of
1250 coming from a French village, * bearing water in a little
vessel with its sprinkler, and crusts of bread given to him
for sprinkling holy water '. This clerk meets a papal agent
who demands a tenth of the value of his benefice, to meet
which and prolong a starved existence the mendicant sells
his books and * keeps school for many days '. The aqua-
bajulus, or water-carrier, had a settled domicile ; but the
* begging scholar ' wandered from university to university
gathering alms. His existence implied respect for even the
humblest representatives of learning; but its toleration
was open to abuse. In the fifteenth century young men,
sometimes accompanied by yet younger boys, roamed over
Germany begging and stealing, making their real or pre-
tended zeal for knowledge an excuse for the life of a tramp.
The Oxford Chancellor in 1461 licensed two begging
students. University men came from all social ranks, the
wealthiest and the poorest, but the great majority were
probably drawn from classes which, while not indigent,
were unable without assistance to maintain themselves
throughout the prolonged university course, more especially
if they proceeded to the higher degrees. It was to them that
places were allotted by college foundation statutes. The
phrase * pauper et indigens ', which so frequently defined
the qualification for these emoluments, cannot reasonably
be rendered * indigent pauper ', since it covered boys and
youths in possession of an independent annual income
equivalent to the customary charge for * commons', i.e.
board, for eighteen months or two years. A very burden-
some charge fell upon the new-made bachelor, master and
doctor, the burden increasing with the dignity. Rich men
262 Legacy of the Middle Ages
on graduation seem to have made it a point of honour to
pay for the dinners and presents which their poorer fellow
graduates were expected to provide.
The Latin, or grammar, schools were intended only for
the boys, poor or rich, whose minds were of the scholarly
type ; they formed no part of a system of vernacular ele-
mentary schools. Not a few, perhaps very many, boys
attending them dropped out of the course before ' grammar '
was completed ; possibly the proportion of those who
completed the study of the three * arts ', grammar, rhetoric,
logic, in the * trivial schools ' was not great. But their
failure was no substitute for elementary schooling as now
understood. The duty of teaching gratis was laid upon the
clergy, not excluding parish priests in villages, by a long
series of councils, synods, and bishops' orders ranging over
seven centuries from the sixth. But these were all framed
ad discendas Utter 'as, for the teaching of Latin ; the reitera-
tion of the duty and the unsettled state of affairs, civil and
ecclesiastical, during the earlier of these centuries, imply
that this general provision was earnestly desired rather than
commonly attained. The Decretals of Pope Gregory IX
(1227-41) direct the parish priest to have his clerk to sing
and read the epistle, to be able to keep school and to admon-
ish parishioners to send their sons ad fidem discendam, to
learn their religion, a phrase which later regulations make
precise by specifying the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the
Hail! Mary, and other formularies. Such instructions
regularized these parish, canonical or priests' schools, whose
chief purpose was to give religious instruction to the boys
and girls of the parish. Roger Bacon may have had such
schools in view when he said (1267) that * every one who
desires it ' is * instructed in those things which are of the
faith'. Agnello, head of the first Franciscans in England
(1224), is said to have ' received English lads into the Order
Education 263
and, setting up schools for the poor, was zealous for study 9 .
Friars showed scant respect for the secular parson's juris-
diction and Agnello's schools may have been intended for
general parish use. It is far more probable that they were
meant to prepare boys for the novitiate, and that their ill-
educated pupils justified Bacon's complaint that boys of
ten and upwards * who could read neither the Psalter nor
Donatus yet straightway after their profession were set to
study theology '. Leopold Delisle believed that, from the
thirteenth century, schools increased in number in rural
Normandy. There was a * crowd of non-Latin schools,
song, writing, and reading ' in Troyes in the same century,
says another authority. Simeon Luce thought that during
the most disturbed years of the fourteenth century most
French villages had their schools. In 1400 Gerson, the
Paris scolasticus, inquired whether each parish had its school
and directed the establishment of one where one did not
exist.
These parish schools contained possibilities of develop-
ment. Here and there the parson himself or a clerk in
minor orders might teach reading, either from goodwill or
for pay, like the priest to whom John of Salisbury and
another little boy were sent (c. 1130) ' to learn the Psalms ',
that is, to learn reading and begin the study of Latin. In
France at least such cases were not uncommon ; as economic
change made the advantage of vernacular instruction more
evident, the demand came from even humble quarters.
French priests alleged their canonical obligation as a reason
for keeping charity schools, independent of the scolasticus,
in which religion, reading Latin words, writing and summing
were taught. These seventeenth-century schools probably
had less systematic medieval forerunners. To these
possible opportunities of elementary instruction may be
added the song schools and the services of private teachers,
264 Legacy of the Middle Ages
as well as the express provision of elementary schools during
the closing century or two of the period. Song schools were
originally liturgical only in purpose, but they followed the
general tendency of schools to overstep their original bounds
and the instruction which they gave was utilized by others
than choristers. A record (York, 1367) complains that to
the Precentor's prejudice * chaplains, holy- water carriers,
and many others keep schools of song and for instructing
boys in singing, in parish churches, houses, and other places '.
Perhaps these really were rivals of the cathedral song
school ; more probably they met a demand for teaching
reading greater than that school contemplated. Anchor-
esses, female hermits, often dwelling on the outskirts of
towns, also taught children, although authority frowned
upon the practice. Teaching to read the mother tongue
was no part of the grammar school's business. Yet there are
indications that many could read, even amongst the sex
which was excluded almost, if not quite, entirely from
grammar schools. Before the close of the twelfth century
a French devotional book appeared which was translated
into English about a century later as The Lay Folk's Mass
Book. In the greater German cities children learned to
read and write under private teachers, men and women.
English parents or god-parents were enjoined to teach their
children the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and other formularies
in English long before the invention of printing ; Primers
partly at least in English appeared, containing these and
similar matter. A mass of correspondence dating from
times before and on the eve of the invention of printing
(1440-50) has been preserved in this country, much of
which is now in print. Men and women in quite humble
walks of life, whose circumstances make it unlikely that they
had had schooling in * grammar ', are amongst the corre-
spondents. The earliest English printed books (1476, &c.)
Education 265
were in the mother tongue and were such as would especially
appeal to women and to persons ignorant of any language
but their own. The large number of controversial English
books imported from the Continent between 1500 and 1550
points to readers of the same type. Dr. A. W. Reed found
in the Record Office a document which revealed a party of
village girls of humble rank reading English books in an
Essex village church on Ascension Day in 1534. Who
taught them to read ?
By this date the ecclesiastical provision of schools had
proved inadequate to the needs of a community outgrowing
feudal conditions. Commerce and industry required that
schools should supply in quantity and kind what it was not
the Church's function to furnish. Guilds and municipalities
set up schools, at first to teach the customary studies ; but
it proved necessary to supplement these Latin schools by
purely elementary schools. In 1338, Florence, then a great
commercial and industrial centre, taught reading to boys
and girls in large numbers ; it had also six schools where
boys learned summing by the abacus, or counting-board,
and by algorism, that is, summing by the decimal notation
of integers. Commerce and industry need large numbers
of clerks and work-people able to read and write and cast
an account. Provision for this was made in German cities
by the starting of * German Schools ' during the fourteenth
century, at which time the earliest German universities,
Prague, Vienna, Heidelberg, Cologne, and Erfurt had their
beginning. England passed from the agricultural to the
industrial and commercial stage in the following century,
when * Writing Schools ' began to be established to teach
boys * the three R's ', that, as a foundation deed of 1483
says, * they may be more apt for the mechanical arts and
other worldly affairs*. Schools of this kind, and more
particularly the irregular practitioners who preceded them
266 Legacy of the Middle Ages
in the days of manuscript books, made possible the rapid
advance of the art of printing, the latest of medieval inven-
tions. For the vast majority of girls the standard of school
instruction (where any was given) varied but little through-
out the centuries ; to become proficient in home-making
and scrupulously to discharge their religious duties sufficed.
For the last purpose reading was an advantage and to that
their schooling was mainly directed. But in Paris girls had
the opportunity of learning the rudiments of Latin accidence
equally with little boys, though separate schools were kept
for the sexes. These * Little Schools ' were not elementary
but preparatory to the grammar schools ; they therefore
taught reading and rudimentary Latin grammar. The
name of a Parisian schoolmistress who kept such a school in
1292 is on record. In the following century the Paris
scolasticus, when summoning assemblies of the teachers of
the Little Schools, included * honourable women keeping
and teaching schools in the art of grammar '. Mr. Leach
found a reference (1404) to a ' magistra scolarum ' at
Boston. Since ' magister scolarum ' is the technical term
for the master, i. e. head master, of a grammar school, it would
appear that Boston taught some girls Latin at that date.
To what extent did nunneries assist lay education ? No
brief answer can be satisfactory ; practice differed in
different times, countries, and nunneries. The convents of
the early centuries were the homes of some secular women
of high rank whose upbringing was that of the castle, not
of the school. Bishops frequently forbade nuns to receive
seculars for education, a prohibition perhaps as frequently
disregarded ; the more strictly a convent interpreted its
Rule, the less would it offer education to secular girls.
The studies of two girls, both seculars, in a ninth-century
Flemish nunnery, as described by Miss Eckenstein, com-
prised reading, writing, drawing, illuminating, spinning,
Education 267
weaving, needlecraft ; but these were exemplary pupils.
If writing, drawing, and illuminating be subtracted and
religious instruction added, this list is fairly representative
of what the generality of those girls learned who had any
schooling at all at any time during the Middle Ages ; the
teachers required but little book-learning. Some French
and English nuns of the seventh and eighth centuries were
sufficiently instructed in grammar to make Latin verses
and to write Latin letters ; a tenth-century German nun,
Hroswitha, wrote half a dozen plays whose mixture of
dramatic narrative and irrelevant pedantry does not conceal
their model, Terence. But the standard of the nuns' own
education declined in time. During the fourteenth century
while Latin remained the official language of English
authorities addressing monks, French at first and English
later were employed for nuns in like case. From that time
to the Dissolution in 1537 English replaced French, as it
did in the grammar schools of England after the Black
Death of 1348-9. Formally, nuns were literate; but this
need not mean more than ability to read the Latin Psalter
without an accurate knowledge of the meaning; in 1308
the Bishop of Exeter enjoined the Polsloe nuns to prefer
Latin in conversation, but permitted a relaxation of the
strict demands of grammar.
If Froissart's poem, EspinetU Amoureuse, is autobio-
graphical, he went to a school (about 1350, or earlier) where
both young boys and young girls were taught together.
If the practice in the Low Countries was the same as in
England, Froissart's school was probably in a nunnery.
Miss Eileen Power has examined visitation injunctions,
account rolls, and other matter relating to forty-nine
nunneries, the dates ranging from the late thirteenth
century to the Dissolution. These convents were authorized
to receive young girls, or young girls and still younger boys
268 Legacy of the Middle Ages
for education, the maximum ages being 12-14 anc ^ 9~ IQ
respectively ; and the practice was more generally followed
in the early sixteenth century than in preceding times.
It seems to follow that medieval nunneries taught only
a small fraction of the children of school age. In any case,
for most girls facilities for schooling were meagre, yet
current opinion was satisfied. Of girls who belonged to the
landed class more is said below.
The arbitrary divisions ' ancient ', * medieval ', * modern %
obscure the thread of continuity running through Western
education from the days of the Roman Empire to the
present. When the Christian Church of the fourth century
acquired political standing, it was by force of circumstances
compelled, however unwillingly, to employ the rhetorical
instruction which Rome had adopted from Greece and
which Quintilian had fully described. There was no
alternative. The study of Scripture was of all studies most
congenial to Christian sentiment, and Scriptural study
could only be pursued through ' grammar ', that is, language
and literature. But some Latin and Greek literature,
especially the poetic literature, was offensive to Christian
theology and morals ; Christians of the second century had
scrupled to send their children to school for that reason
and because attendance involved sharing in pagan rites and
countenancing pagan beliefs. Yet it was these schools or
none ; the Christian catechetical schools did not profess
secular knowledge, but limited their teaching to divinity
and apologetic.
Christian thinkers from Tertullian in the second century
onwards agreed that this pre-Christian learning was neces-
sary to an understanding of the Scriptures. The situation
was further embarrassed by the admiration which many
felt for the purely human, aesthetic, and spiritual qualities
Education 269
of the Latin and Greek classics ; and after Christianity had
become the State religion there must have been many
professing Christians whose sympathies could not be
divorced from the literature which had been the core of
their own schooling. So the rhetorical education, which
had formed St. Jerome, and of which St. Augustine, before
his baptism, had been a professor, became in due course
the accepted mode of Christian schooling, notwithstanding
the occasional frowns or active discouragement from the
authorities. Thus the schools of the medieval Church
preserved the memory, howbeit blurred and imperfect, of
the old civilization, and carried onwards a limited knowledge
of its literature, which remained the staple of European
higher education down to the other day. In the West,
such Greek authors as were known Aristotle, a little of
Plato, Homer were best known through Latin versions.
A reputation for Greek scholarship was not infrequently
accorded to men whose Greek was limited to a knowledge
of its notation and odds and ends of words with which they
interlarded their writings. Nevertheless a thin stream of
Greek scholarship never entirely ceased to flow until it
became a broad river at the Renaissance. Latin was the
real vehicle of medieval learning, and Latin classics, parti-
cularly the poets, did not lose their hold even in times when
the Fathers and Christian Latin poets formed the favourite
reading. Just as the Psalter was the boy's first book, so
Ovid was his first ' classic * ; Virgil was looked upon as half
a Christian, Cicero was the model orator and an authority
on philosophy and religion, Seneca was read as moralist
and as man of science. Quintilian was still the authority on
rhetorical education, although familiarity with the Institutia
Oratoria waxed and waned in a strange fashion through the
centuries, until Poggio in 1416 found a dust-begrimed yet
complete text in the St. Gall monastery.
270 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Greek astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and science
passed to the West through the Semitic peoples, the Arabs
and Jews of Spain being the most active agents. The Jews
as speakers of Hellenistic Greek from the days of their
dispersion formed a broad channel of Greek learning to the
East ; and the Arabs, whose conquests in the tenth century
extended throughout the southern coasts of the Mediter-
ranean and to the greater part of modern Spain, became
its eager students, the school of Cordova being especially
famous in the twelfth century. This orientalized Greek
science, or at least its astronomy and astrology, were in
contact with the West as early as the tenth century. Venice
was actively trading with the East in the eighth century ;
it was through the same city that in the late fourteenth
century the revival of Greek study in the West had its
beginning. Of all the Greek thinkers Aristotle exercised by
far the greatest influence upon the * Latins ' of the West.
Abelard, who died in 1142, only knew the elementary parts
of Aristotle's logical doctrine, 'the old logic'. By 1150
the whole of that doctrine the ' new ' and the ' old logic '
had become known to the West ; and by 1 200 most of his
physical, metaphysical, and moral writings, * the Three
Philosophies ', were accessible in Latin translations. These,
not being direct from the Greek but having filtered through
two or more Semitic languages, were so very faulty that
Roger Bacon, who pleaded for a more general study of the
originals, declared * if I had the control of Aristotle's books,
I would cause them all to be reduced to ashes, as their
study is nothing but a waste of time, a cause of error, and the
multiplication of ignorance beyond what their explanation
is worth. And as Aristotle's labours are the foundation
of all philosophy no one can gauge the loss to the West
since its philosophers have entertained these faulty trans-
lations.' Their anti-Christian trend was a further incentive
Education 271
to recover the genuine Aristotle. The Latin occupation
of Constantinople (1204-61) gave an opportunity which
wandering Western scholars did not miss. Nor did Roger
Bacon think that competent teachers were not to be found.
' Teachers are not wanting ; for everywhere there are
Hebrews, and their tongue is substantially one with Arabic
and Chaldee, though different in manner. There are men
in Paris and in France and in all the regions beyond who
know what is needed for the purpose. But Greek is especially
in accord with Latin ; and there are many in England and
France who are sufficiently instructed in it.' He goes on
to say that it would be no great matter for the bishops and
rich men to send for books and teachers to Italy, where in
many parts clergy and people are pure Greek. * This the
saintly Bishop of Lincoln [Grosseteste] was wont to do.'
At this time Paris possessed a College of Orientals versed
in Arabic and other Eastern languages. The University in
1300 petitioned the Pope for a college to teach Arabic,
Greek, and Tartar.
The Seven Liberal Arts formed the curriculum of school
and university ; upon them were erected the professional
studies of divinity, law, and medicine. The Arts were in
two groups, the Trivium of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic,
and the Quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and
astronomy. Pestalozzi's fundamentals of instruction, lan-
guage, number, and (geometrical) form, probably owed
nothing to the Arts for their conception ; but they very
well summarize the Seven. Of the Arts, the first was vital
to them all. ' Grammar ', said Rabanus Maurus (d. 856),
* is the knowledge which interprets poets and historians ;
it is also the method of correct writing and speech. It is
both source and basis of the liberal arts.' Rhetoric, the art
ruling literary expression in general, also included the
272 Legacy of the Middle Ages
composition of formal epistles ; with grammar it constituted
the course for even the best schools, though some, the
' trivial schools ', added logic. Dialectic was differently
interpreted at different times. In its most liberal sense it
was that association of Greek philosophy and Christian
divinity which gave rise to scholasticism ; in its least
liberal form it consisted of the barest bones of elementary,
formal logic, a spare diet usually offered to university fresh-
men. The Summulae of Petrus Hispanus (d. 1277), which
long continued to be the most widely read text-book of
logic, makes claims which reflect the position of that study
throughout the later medieval period. * Dialectic is the art
of arts, the science of sciences, furnishing the way to the
principles of all methods. For dialectic alone discusses
accurately the principles of all other sciences and therefore
in the attainment of sciences dialectic should be the first.'
The boundary separating school from university was ill-
defined. The ' grandes ecoles ', or grammar schools, of
Paris were repeatedly forbidden to trespass upon university
functions ; French school-boys still take the bachelor's
degree before entering the university. Rhetoric thus
formed common ground ; but in the university the art
sometimes included an elementary study of law. Arithmetic
also varied in implication. In Boethius's text-book it meant
the doctrine of the properties of number, especially of ratio
and proportion. In clergy-schools it was the computus 9
a body of rules determining the date of Easter and other
points in the Church calendar ; remains of it survive in the
prefatory matter to the Book of Common Prayer. Here,
of course, astronomy helped arithmetic. Again, arithmetic
meant rules for working the abacus, or counting-board, by
which calculations in money and similar concrete * sums '
were solved. In the eleventh century the abacus and its
employment seem to have enjoyed something like a renais-
41. THE HOUSE OF LEARNING
from (j. Reisch, Margarita Wiilosophica, 1503 (set? pp. 271 ff.)
Education 273
sance in the great schools of Reims, Laon, Fleury, and
Liege. The introduction of the zero to the West from the
Arabian mathematicians somewhere within or near the
twelfth century made algorism possible, that is, calculation
by the nine integers and zero as now practised. Of geometry
and music it is unnecessary to say more than that the former
was based upon Euclid, with some geography added, and
that, as well as notation and singing, the latter included the
numerical relations of musical sound. Astronomy, which
never quite emancipated itself from astrology, included such
observation as was possible with rudely fashioned instru-
ments, the telescope not being one of them.
For nearly a millennium after the fifth century a farrago of
prose and verse, called the Nuptials of Philology and Mercury,
was used as a manual of the Arts. Philology represented
the love of learning ; Mercury, or Hermes, by reason of his
functions, inventions, and patronage, was especially asso-
ciated with education. As the author proposed to describe
the various provinces of knowledge which constituted the
curriculum, he employed the form of an allegorical marriage,
the Greek god being united with a curriculum of Greek
origin. The first two books are occupied by this ambitious
but exceedingly dull and somewhat irrelevant allegory, the
remaining seven, in the words of Sandys, * talk undiluted
and unmitigated text-book', each art giving an account
of herself.
The earliest university statutes (Paris, 1215) present only
the most sketchy outline of a curriculum. They imply
lectures in arts and theology. In arts, rhetoric, the Quad-
rivium and Donatus's Barbarism (a very brief tract on
incorrect Latin, written and spoken) are subjects for lectures
on festival days, when as a rule ' there shall be no lectures '.
Ethics is an optional subject, while the other two Aristotelian
2873 T
274 Legacy of the Middle Ages
* philosophies ', with the writings of certain heretics, are
prohibited studies. Heresy, theological and political, was
rife and the most extreme measures were taken at that time
to extirpate it. At Oxford in 1267 the candidate for the
B.A. degree read grammar, Aristotle's logic, natural philo-
sophy, and psychology. A drastic reform was effected at
Paris in 1452 and the full arts course included grammar in
more modern text-books, verse-making, algorism, logic,
geometry, astronomy, and (subsequent to the bachelor's
degree) mathematics (i. e. arithmetic, geometry, music), and
Aristotle's three * philosophies '. In 1458 Greek was taught
in Paris by a Greek refugee and some seven years later an
Italian taught it in New College, Oxford. Dr. P. S. Allen
has identified three Greeks who were copying Greek manu-
scripts in England about this time. After the arts course
came the professional studies, divinity, law, medicine. The
contest between the Empire and the Papacy gave a great
vogue to both civil and common law as profitable bread-
studies.
A great change in the higher studies was wrought by the
entry of the Mendicant Orders quite early in their history
into the universities. The Dominicans of Paris and the
Oxford Franciscans were conspicuous amongst the scholars
of the time. St. Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), the great
Dominican doctor, sought a reconciliation between Christian
divinity and Aristotelian philosophy. The Franciscans,
and chief among them Duns Scotus (d. 1308?), greatly
fortified scholastic logic. These two names represent a con-
flict in educational opinion. St. Thomas put intellect above
will, just as modern education tends to value knowledge
more highly than conduct. Duns agreed with St. Augustine
in putting will first, a position to which our schools may be
forced to return when it is realized that * all knowledge '
is the province of few, if of any. The Friars were as regard-
Education 275
less of academic practice as of parochial order, yet they
desired to enjoy full academic privilege. So they presented
for divinity degrees Friars who had not followed an arts
course ; the secular university teachers, no doubt as anxious
to maintain their own interests as to uphold an educational
principle, insisted that the arts course was the indispensable
preliminary to study in what were recognized as the superior
faculties. In that sense the dispute was settled at Oxford
in 1253 and at Paris about the same time. Thus a line was
drawn between general and professional education ; yet the
motive of the earliest university studies was primarily
professional. The Dominicans, as disseminators of the
Faith and its upholders against heretics, had special need
of a knowledge of the biblical languages and of modern
tongues ; as missionaries to the very poor, the Franciscans
also needed to know vernaculars, and their settlements in
town slums led them to practise medicine. In 1237 Friar
Philip informed the Pope that Friars Preachers were being
sent to Armenia to learn the language, that the houses of
the Order had been enjoined to study Eastern tongues and
that the Friars spoke and preached * in new languages and
especially in Arabic, which is more common amongst the
people'. The Council of Vienne (1311) directed the
Universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca to
teach Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and Chaldee, and to secure
translations from those languages into Latin, a direction
repeated at Basel in 1434.
The curriculum gives no place to experimental science ;
the tradition inherited from the ancient education, the
deference paid to the written word and the protracted
length of the established courses explain the omission.
Yet experiment, observation, and applied science were not
absolutely neglected in medieval society, even amongst its
scholars ; although they do not belong to * education ', the
T 2
276 Legacy of the Middle Ages
scientific studies of such men as Albertus Magnus and
Roger Bacon sowed seeds which had already come to
vigorous growth when Francis Bacon wrote of the inductive
method and slighted the work of men who were employing
it successfully. The first chapters of Genesis have been in
modern times the battle-ground between theology and
science; in the ^Middle Ages they constantly moved
thoughtful men to an interest? in nature, as witness the
different books, each entitled ' The Six Days ', of which
St. Basil (d. 379) wrote the first.
When the child could read the letters, syllables, and
words of the Latin Psalter, Donatus's On the eight parts of
speech was his next school-book. This elementary Latin
accidence, the work of a fourth-century grammarian,
remained, virtually unaltered, for more than a thousand
years the foundation of grammar-learning and the master-
key to recorded knowledge. It made no pretence of assisting
the memory graphically. Ninth-century manuscripts and
sixteenth-century printed copies are alike in their long,
unbroken paragraphs, initial letters alone disturbing the
page's monotony. A few lines from a mid-fifteenth century
copy will show how little care was taken to help the pupil
in memorizing.
' Participiu quid est ps orois pte capies nois & verbi recipit eni
a noie gen 9 ea & cas 5 a vbo aute tpa & sigficacoes ab utcJ3 num' &
figura.'
More advanced than the Donat was the Grammar of
Priscian, who taught the subject in Constantinople at the
end of the fifth or beginning of the sixth century. The
work in eighteen books treated accidence and, in much less
fullness, syntax. This compilation remained the standard
book until it was formally superseded at Paris (1366) by the
Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa Dei. Yet a greatly reduced
Education 277
Epitome of Priscian was printed at Venice in 1511. The
Doctrinale purported to. be an intermediate book for junior
* clerks ' for whom Alexander must have felt some sym-
pathy, since he presents accidence, syntax, prosody, and
figures of speech, under their repellent technical names, in
some three thousand hexameters of sorts. Certainly some
help was needed to get by rote the jungle of exceptional
forms which it contained. The book was freely used in
Continental universities and was in general school use in
Germany, but neither it nor its sixteenth-century successor,
also in verse, the grammar of the Fleming, Despautere,
attained corresponding favour in England. This country
had its own grammar reform in the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, which gave the English school-boy
a choice of text-books much better arranged for convenience
and compiled on more reasonable principles ; this was the
work of schoolmasters, of whom William Lily was chief.
While Ovid was the first genuine classic which the school-
boy read, the Disticba de Moribus, a series of sententious
couplets attributed to * Cato ', was from early times the
favourite beginner's author, as being at once edifying
and c easy Latin '. The book was one of the many trans-
lated into German by the St. Gall monk, Notker Labeo,
who died in 1022 ; school-boys were using it in the late
seventeenth century, when its moralizing function was
better fulfilled by Lily's Qui mibi Discipulus, a versified code
of school-room behaviour.
The continuity with the ancient civilization is illustrated
by the series of encyclopaedias which ranged from the
works of Varro, Pliny the Elder, and Martianus Capella to
the Margarita Philosophica of 1 503. The Church's emphasis
on authority and on the written word made such works an
especially appropriate instrument of the education over
which the Church presided. They also gave opportunities
278 Legacy of the Middle Ages
for ' editing ' those opinions of antiquity which were
repugnant to Christian belief or principle. In their general
character they resemble the Thirty Seven Books of Histories
of Pliny (A.D. 23-79), a rniscellany of geography, man and
his inventions, animals, plants, vegetable products, medicine,
and medicinal plants, metals, pictures, colours, and gems.
While its greater part is matter of fact, it yet finds room
for credulous, even nonsensical hearsay. Into this world
of things and no-things the medieval writers brought
a world of ideas. The Twenty Books of Etymologies or of
Origins of Isidore of Seville (570-636), to-day obtainable in
one octavo volume of 900 pages, has chapters on law, the
Scriptures, the offices of the Church, on God, angels, saints,
on warfare, languages, cities, and the things of everyday life,
household furniture included. Isidore differs from Pliny
in the attention which he gives to the meaning of terms,
thus producing a modern dictionary rather than a modern
cyclopaedia, a feature which marks his successors' similar
books. It exposes the narrow limits of the writers' know-
ledge.
Medieval education was based on the principle of author-
ity ; that fact and the material conditions under which
instruction was delivered, determined its method. Lack
of books in sufficient quantity and frequent errors of tran-
scription in cheap manuscripts compelled the early medieval
teachers to employ oral methods and in particular the crude
expedient of dictating the text of the authority under con-
sideration. As copies multiplied the need for dictation
disappeared, but the oral tradition was then firmly estab-
lished. With the correct text before his pupils, the teacher's
proper business began ; he expounded the text and made
his commentary. If the teacher's reputation was great, the
commentary was likely thereafter to be the invariable
Education 279
accompaniment of the text. The scarcity of reliable texts
also threw much rote-learning upon the pupil; and to
facilitate rote, there was much repetition, the compiling of
resumes and the employment of mnemonics, in framing
which medieval students were expert. The five apparently
meaningless lines beginning * Barbara Celarent Darii
Ferioque prioris ', which still appear in text-books of logic,
are the contrivance of an unknown genius, who brought
into this compendious shape pretty well all, expressed or
implied, that was needed to operate the syllogism success-
fully. The value of verse-forms in memorizing was well-
understood. Roger Bacon mentions a * versified Bible *
intended seemingly for children ; but he disapproves of it,
because it abridged or mutilated everything. Teachers
favoured the * direct method ' and text-books were in
Latin. As the facilities for multiplying manuscripts im-
proved, epitomes were made for the pupil. After the
tendency of all epitomes, such manuals tended in time to
replace the original authors. The Sentences of Peter Lom-
bard (second half of the twelfth century) and the Summulae of
Petrus Hispanus became substitutes for the Bible and
Aristotle's logic respectively.
But the method par excellence both of teaching and
learning was the disputation. ' This exercise ', said Robert
de Sorbon (d. 1274), * is much more advantageous than
reading, because it results in clearing up doubts. Nothing
is known perfectly which has not been masticated by the
teeth of disputation.' The university student maintained
theses and disputed from end to end of his degree course ;
but the exercise was not confined to universities. Lively
pictures of London school-boys' public disputations are
drawn by Fitz-Stephen (c. 1 1 18) and by Stow, the antiquary,
who took part in them as a boy (c. 1530-40), The method
did not please the Renaissance scholars, yet English boys
280 Legacy of the Middle Ages
of the seventeenth century had manuals designed to help
them to dispute in grammar. Disputation shared with
rhetoric the obvious defect of encouraging readiness to
argue for victory's sake with indifference to truth and the
merits of the case ; but it gave a command over what was
learned and made it real, it bred alert, inquiring, acute
minds, and no doubt incited many to leave the beaten
track and think for themselves. It may even have turned
some to the too much neglected scrutiny of nature. In
any case, the method of disputation provided a powerful
demurrer to the excessive respect shown to authority and
the readiness to accept palpable forgeries, when once
stamped with an authoritative name, failings which sadly
limited the usefulness of education. It was all very well for
Tyndal at a later day to talk of ' the old barking curres,
Dunce's disciples, and lyke draffe, called Scotists, the
children of darkness ', but reasons are not wanting for
calling Duns, * doctor subtilis,' and the other skilful dis-
putants, * lucifers,' bearers of the light.
The distinct type of upbringing which aimed at educating
men and women of the highest social class owed nothing to
schools, yet its tradition may well be regarded as a legacy
bequeathed to the days of universal, compulsory schooling.
Boys of this class used the schools exceptionally, some
certainly resorted to the universities ; most were brought
up apart from schools. A great feudal establishment not
only had its staff of * clerks ' to transact business, it also
included children and young people, the charges of the
lord and lady to whose personal dare they were committed
for education. The object in view was preparation for the
careers of action, of ruler and soldier, and in less degree the
cultivation of the social amenities. In its later history,
chivalric education evolved a regular series of stages from
Education 281
page to squire and thence to knight, with corresponding
stages for the maiden ; it was as c vocational ' as the clerk's,
but it was addressed to the individual and tried to train
a greater variety of aptitudes than did the school. In that
respect it should be instructive to-day. Physical training,
the use of arms, military studies, manners in hall and bower,
games like chess and other social accomplishments were
carefully practised. Women shared with men in out-door
sports and in the ceremony and social intercourse, often on
an international scale, which were associated with the
tourney. The early upbringing of boys and girls was in
women's hands ; the girls acquired an elementary, empirical
knowledge of medicine and surgery as well as of needle-
craft, domestic arts and management. Religious instruction
invariably formed a prominent feature in girls' education.
The association between courts and letters was sometimes
slight, sometimes close, as at the courts of Charlemagne
and of our Henry II ; but the constant presence of ecclesi-
astics and other clerkly persons makes absolute neglect of
letters in great feudal households incredible. Charlemagne's
so-called Palace School was exceptional in its attention to
the liberal arts ; but that it was not due to the King's
personality alone is shown in its maintenance by his grandson,
Charles the Bald, at whose court (873-7) John the Scot
taught Greek and neo-Platonism. Henry II not only
encouraged learning in the clerks who were his able adminis-
trators ; his care for letters fostered romance amongst his
lay courtiers. In Henry Ill's time the Franciscan, Adam
Marsh, regularly corresponded in Latin with Simon de
Montfort and his wife. Of the eleven priests in the house-
hold .of the fifth Earl of Northumberland (1477-1527), one
was a * maister of gramer in my lordes house '. Children
of rank are found from time to time living in convents for
education's sake, a practice which seems to have increased
282 Legacy of the Middle Ages
during the pre-Reformation century. In such cases the
pupils were not associated with the school (if any) attached
to the community, but with the abbess or abbot personally.
That is, they formed part of the household of a feudal
magnate, exactly as did their equals brought up in a castle
or manor house ; they were not at school.
The historical significance of this aristocratic education
consists in this, that it was the channel through which the
humanism of the classical revival became effective. The
patrons and auxiliaries of Renaissance humanism were not
schools and universities, but the princes and princely
merchants of Italy ; its practitioners were wandering scholars
or men like Emanuel Chrysoloras, who was invited in 1397
by Florentine magnates to teach Greek in their city. In
the fifteenth century there was a steady flow of learners,
lay and clerical, men of all ranks, from north of the Alps to
the Italian cities where Greek could be learned from Greeks
or from their Italian pupils. But the spread of humanism,
aided as undoubtedly it was by this revived study of Greek, owed
most to its Italian patrons and to the scholars who served them.
The influence of the classical revival upon the old chivalric
education is exemplified in an essay, On the freeborn way
of life, which Vergerius addressed about the year 1392 to
a son of the lord of Padua ; it has been translated by Mr.
W. H. Woodward. In this essay the chief liberal arts are
arms and letters. * So soon as he is able to use his limbs let
him be trained to arms ; so soon as he can rightly speak
let him be trained to letters.' The curriculum includes the
Seven Liberal Arts, history, moral philosophy, poetry, and
the poetic art, mechanics, perspective, the art and theory
of war, military training. From these the pupil makes his
selection, taking or leaving in harmony with his own
capacity. 'The natural bent should be recognized and
followed in education.'
Education 283
This was liberal education as practised (1423-46) by
Vittorino da Feltre in * the House Joyous ' of the Marquis
of Mantua. Vergerius's counsel reappeared in Castiglione's
The Courtier (1528) and again in Elyot's The Boke of the
Governour (1531), works which became standard texts of
this type of nurture, though they are but intermediate
links in a long chain.
Brantome says that Renee of France, daughter of Louis
XII, ' knew history, mathematics, Latin, and Greek as well
as any learned man of her time,' that Marguerite of Angou-
leme, sister of Francis I, * learned, while quite a child,
Latin, Spanish, and Italian,' and later * a little Greek and
Hebrew '. Marguerite of Valois, wife of Henry IV, spoke
Italian and Spanish ' as eloquently as if she had been born,
nurtured and brought up all her life in Italy and Spain.
It was the same with Latin.' The Latin exercise book of
Mary Stuart, written when as a child of ten she was being
educated in the French royal family, is in the Bibliotheque
Nationale. Everybody has heard of Lady Jane Grey's love
of Greek and of Queen Elizabeth's Latin ; indeed, the
instruction given to these highly placed women has, time
and again, been misrepresented as typical of women's
education in the sixteenth century.
These names have led to the very verge and beyond the
limits of the Middle Ages. Italian universities of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were active in the study
of law rather than of letters ; when the revival reached the
universities outside Italy, those seats of learning retained
the medieval form of their courses, but gradually modified
its content in accord with the newer ideals. Yet the schools
went very near to sterilizing the humanism of the Renais-
sance. Cicero's eminence as an orator was a medieval
tradition which the classical 'revival in Italy turned into
a cult; from Petrarch (1304-74) to Sturm (1507-89)
284 Legacy of the Middle Ages
scholars used the most absurdly exaggerated language in
praise of * Tully '. Papal secretaries and State bureaucrats
strove to express official letters and documents not in the
living Latin of their own day, but in the literary dialect of
Ciceronian prose. To write such prose was a passport to
public employment. Schoolmasters realized the bread-
and-butter value of the accomplishment, and the main
purpose of teaching and learning was the imitation of
Cicero's periods. Sturm's school at Strasbourg (1538-81)
made a show of teaching the Seven Liberal Arts, but its
lengthy course of study was very obviously devoted to one
aim, the mastery of Ciceronian prose, and the Strasbourg
Gymnasium became the model of Protestant Germany and
of Northern Europe.
Medieval education preserved the memory and many of
the literary treasures of the preceding civilization ; it
continued in its formal aspect the education current under
the Roman Empire, it established a curriculum which
suffered little disturbance until the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, and it framed an organization of schools
and universities which is still in operation. To these it
added the tradition of a local as well as a central adminis-
tration. Its strength lay in unity of belief ; society as such
held a common philosophy of life, most men were agreed
in their idea of the universe and man's place in it. Con-
sequently there was virtually universal recognition of one
supreme educational end. But this agreement was always
being threatened, until the individualism of the humanists
and of the Reformation destroyed it. Unity of belief was
both the strength and weakness of the instruction, since it
exaggerated the claim of authority, particularly of the
written word, and tended to keep to a routine, a tendency
which was actual for centuries. Yet its favourite method
Education 285
of disputation served in great measure as a corrective ;
critics and objectors were never lacking, and so long as they
did not contradict the Church's settled decisions, they were
not molested.
Rashdall thought that medieval university education was
too literary yet too practical, too dogmatic yet too disputa-
tious, and that if these couples cancelled each other,
imagination, taste, the sense of beauty were neglected.
But this is to restrict education to the doings of schools
and their like. The Middle Ages did not so restrict it.
In the upbringing of the knight and dame, to whose tastes .
in great measure we owe the beginnings of modern litera-
tures, there was a salutary correction to the hard intellectual-
ism of academic training. Perhaps that is the great medieval
contribution to educational theory and practice. As men
said then, ' The greatest clerks are not the wisest men/
J. W. ADAMSON.
6
LAW
i. CUSTOMARY LAW
I
MEN'S conduct is regulated by two forces by their habits
of mind and by compulsion from outside authority.
The latter may appear in the form of commands sanctioned
by penalties, but even such * laws ' require generally a mea-
sure of support from the opinion and habits of the people
subjected to them in order to function successfully. Laws
repugnant to the notions of right of a community or to its
practical requirements are likely to be defeated by passive
resistance and by the difficulty of constant supervision and
repression. On the contrary, when public opinion and
moral training dispose men to consider certain relations to
be normal or certain acts to be reprehensible these con-
victions and habits form, as it were, a convenient soil on
which the various legal rules can be firmly established.
In advanced civilizations the complicated fabric of social
relations requires an extensive framework of laws, formu-
lated and applied by professional experts, while in earlier
stages the balance has to be drawn the other way : the
rules of human conduct stand in immediate contact with
public opinion and social custom.
This was undoubtedly the case in the Middle Ages. The
attempts of Charlemagne and other rulers to introduce
decrees and to enforce laws were powerless so far as system-
atic legislation was concerned, although they left many
traces in the shape of particular institutions. Even when
288 Legacy of the Middle Ages
political authority began to be consolidated again in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries writers on law explained
that they had to deal mainly with customs and not with
rules established by express legislation and embodied in an
official code. Bracton and Beaumanoir drew to a large
extent on the decisions of judges, but these decisions were
given in conformity to the average customs of the ruling
military class. Eike von Repgow and the provincial laws of
Norway, Sweden, and Denmark summarize the customs
in the Courts in comprehensive recognized statements
without express reference to judicial decisions. Needless
to say that earlier c laws of the folk ' or barbaric laws (Leges
barbarorum) are even more clearly products of popular legal
lore interpreted with occasional chapters (capitularia) of
royal legislation. All these documents and literary efforts
serve the purpose of retaining the memory and fixing the
traditional wording of customary rules, but they were not
general * sources of law ' in the sense of embracing the
whole body of customary rules used by a particular nation
or in a particular region. Law had to be sought and dis-
covered primarily in the vast background of social inter-
course. Judges, when they had to try disputed points, had
not simply to apply officially established texts, but to discover
the rules that had to be applied in the case. English and
American judges have even now to deal with similar pro-
blems when they judge at common law, and in order to
solve these problems they usually rely on a vast collection of
precedents a body of professional decisions. Medieval
judges had to a great extent to discover the customary
views and arrangements prevailing among the people in
their society.
This feature of medieval jurisdiction had characteristic
consequences : it became necessary to ascertain the nature
and details of custom by applying for information to repre-
Customary Law 289
sentatives or experts belonging to the community where the
custom was in use. Judgement (Rich ten) had to be supple-
mented by Verdict (Urteil). This could be done in various
ways. In the earlier period the presiding judge of the
court of a shire, or of a hundred, of a county (tunginus),
the ealdorman or hundredealder left the question as to
the custom to be applied as well as the question as to facts
to the doomsmen, who were either the whole body of
suitors of the court or the representatives of that body
selected for a long period for their experience and wisdom
(the scabini, ecbevins, Scboffen). His own business was to
conduct the proceedings, to announce the ultimate decision,
and to give it effect as far as was possible in those days.
The same course was adopted when the verdict (Urteil} was
meant to be a general pronouncement as to existing custom,
distinct from the sentence of the presiding magistrate or chief.
Two Bavarian records of the ninth century allow us
a glimpse of the way in which the judicial functions were
differentiated between the representative of public power
a Royal Commissioner or Count or other magnate holding
pleas legal experts (indices), and the assembly of doomsmen.
In 822 an Imperial Commissioner (missus) orders that the
law shall be decreed between the parties : Kieselhard,
a public judge, was first in making a pronouncement in
accordance with the law of the Bavarians. In the same
year there is a record of the names of those who took part
in making the * decree ' in accordance with the law of the
Bavarians : Kieselhard, Count Luitpold, and several
vassals of the Emperor are mentioned by name ; at the
close * the whole people proclaimed with one voice that this
was the law of the Bavarians *. 1
In Scandinavian countries such pronouncements were
1 Bitterauf, Traditiones Frisingenses^ NN. 472 (referred to by Brunner,
Deutsche Recbtsgescbicbte^ i, 204, n. 40).
2873 U
290 Legacy of the Middle Ages
sometimes made systematically in the form of addresses to
the popular assembly (the Thing) by elected lawmen
(lagmari). The expert in customary law speaking before the
All-thing in Iceland delivered an actual course on the
various topics extending over the sessions of three years.
The Carolingian practice of sending commissioners of the
central government into the provinces for the control of
administration and the holding of certain pleas led to the
development of another method of inquiry into custom.
The Missi or itinerant justices summoned trustworthy men
from the country to give verdicts as to facts known in the
locality concerned, and questions as to local or special
customs were treated as such facts. The juries of Norman
and Angevin England, the * enquete par jure*s ' in France,
were used in this way to ascertain customs diverging from
the ordinary practice of the Royal Courts, while * notorious *
customs (coutumes notoires) were referred to by justices
from their own knowledge without further inquiry.
A few examples will illustrate these points. In a trial of
1065 concerning the abbey of St. Trond in Lorraine the
oldest inhabitants of the country were asked to declare
faithfully what they had learned from their predecessors
or held themselves up to the present time. 1 In a case
before the Common Bench at Westminster (1224) it was
asserted by the defendant that by the custom of the Manor
of Bray in Berkshire if a daughter remained unmarried
with her parents ' at the hearth ' she succeeded to the
whole inheritance on the decease of the latter. The Court
directed an inquest by jury to be held in order to ascertain
whether a daughter who had been married, so that she lived
outside the tenement, could claim her portion in the tene-
ment on the demise of her parents. 2
The finding of such a jury was conclusive if unanimous.
1 Grimm, Recbtsaltertbumer t 4, ii, 386. * Note Book of Bracton, 95 1 .
Customary Law 291
As this was not always the case, jurymen were sometimes
subjected to searching inquiries by the judges and might be
dismissed and replaced by others.
The formulation of custom was not the privilege of any
particular class every social circle had its peculiar notions
and habits and might be asked to state them. The Crusaders
in Palestine followed different rules of law in the Courts
of the knights and in those of the bourgeois. In Germany
the law of the fiefs (Lebenrecbt) was obligatory for the
military class, while townsmen lived by Stadtrecbt, peasants
by Hofrecbt, and manorial officers by Dienstrecht. In England
the villains were refused access to the King's Court, but were
protected in civil cases by the ' custom of the manor '.
The ideas of justice current in this age were not con-
nected with assumptions as to the natural equality or
freedom of men, but with a notion of stability of rights and
duties. It was generally recognized that there were bound
to be great differences in men's station in life, in the burdens
and advantages appropriate to these stations, but every
group of men, however lowly, claimed in justice to be ruled
by settled customs and not by arbitrary power. This was
an illusion as far as the opposition to change was concerned :
social life in those days as at any other time was in process
of flux, but the tendency towards customary arrangements
gave a characteristic aspect to the juridical thought of this
time. It helped to preserve for centuries any ancient
conceptions and it provided a practical counterpoise against
violence and oppression. The admission and preservation
of customary rights by classes that seemed to be at the
mercy of barbaric masters is perhaps more remarkable than
the insurrectionary movements which helped some groups
e.g. the boroughs to attain a formal improvement of
their condition.
It would be impossible in this short chapter to trace the
u 2
292 Legacy of the Middle Ages
consecutive stages in the formation of European customary
law. It may be mentioned, however, that the origin of
some of these rules may sometimes be derived from pre-
historic antiquity. A curious instance of the tenacity of
ancient custom is presented by the history of the law of
intestate succession. According to Glanvill the personal
property of a deceased person was to be disposed of under
the supervision of the ecclesiastical Courts. The goods
should be distributed in three parts one going to the wife,
another to the children or next of kin, and a third being
disposed for the benefit of the soul of the deceased. 1 This
custom left a deep trace in English law inasmuch as the
probate of wills and the administration of a deceased person's
estate remained up to 1887 in the hands of ecclesiastical
courts. On the other hand, the attribution of one third
of a man's fortune to benefactions for the benefit of his soul
is connected with a primeval belief that the deceased man
ought to keep part of his belongings for his own use in after
life. At the funeral of a Russian chief, probably of Scandi-
navian origin, described in the tenth century by an Arab
traveller, Ibn Fadhlan, one third of the warrior's arms and
apparel together with his favourite wife and his dog was
burnt with him on the pyre, and the funeral of Scyld was
conducted in a similar way according to the description in
the Old English Song of Beowulf. Traces of Celtic and
pre-Celtic (Iberian) customs are also frequent. We may
note among them the practice of marriages concluded for
a year and a day, of which there is particularly graphic
evidence from Ireland. The * coibche ' unions were cele-
brated amid great rejoicings at public festivals (Leinster
custom). They were consolidated as permanent marriages
1 In Normandy the goods of a man who had left no will with some
bequest for the good of his soul in the course of his illness were forfeited
to the King. See Ancienne Coutume, A. Tardif, App. 12.
Customary Law 293
after the birth of children or in case of pregnancy. Such
trial unions are not unknown even at the present time in
certain outlying districts of Bavaria and Central Germany. 1
In many of these cases it is not easy to distinguish between
traditional folklore and results of adaptation to similar
circumstances. Striking analogies may sometimes be
observed in surroundings in which there does not seem to be
any possibility of direct tradition or of loan. The famous
story of Shylock claiming a pound of his debtor's flesh is
hardly derived directly from the rule of the XII Tables
ordering the cutting to pieces of an insolvent debtor, but
both claims are rooted in the same soil in the notion that
one of the methods for securing the payment of a debt was
to make the debtor bodily liable to the creditor, a view
widely spread among the barbarians, and leading to various
unpleasant consequences for the obligee in case of insolvency.
In Prankish law a slayer who was unable to pay the com-
position fine of the heirs and kindred of his victim applied
for assistance to his relations, and if the payment still
remained incomplete, he was produced at three meetings
of the local court (mallus) before being handed over, if
unredeemed, to the mercy of his adversaries. In Muscovy
any insolvent debtor was put up in the market-place and
flogged (fravej) on the chance of some one redeeming him
for the sake of relationship, friendship, or charity,
II
If we consider medieval legal customs in the bulk, it is
easy to see that there are three departments of social life
which have been particularly affected by them namely,
family law, land law, and commercial usages. The basic
institution of all societies is the family group : it is least
dependent on class distinctions in its fundamental arrange-
1 Ehrlich, Grundlage der Sociologiscben Recbtswisstnscbaft.
294 Legacy of the Middle Ages
ments and, on the other hand, its organization exerts its
influence on all social grades of the people. No wonder that
it is very slow in its development and does not easily give
way before cultural changes. Though our present family
system is undoubtedly experiencing a crisis, it still bears
marks of ancient custom in all its parts. The monogamic
group held together mainly by the authority of the father
of the household has been modified in many respects, but
the principal alterations, such as the safeguarding of the
property rights of married women, the emancipation of
grown-up and self-supporting children, the lessening of
parental authority, the increasing facilities for divorce, have
been brought about in comparatively recent times and
have not entirely obliterated the peculiar features of the
strict monogamic household of old times. Some people are
shocked by the requirement of the marriage service that the
bride should promise obedience to her husband ; in France
the fundamental legal rule governing the marriage union
! is still Art. 213 of the Civil Code, which declares that the
i! husband owes protection to his wife, and the wife obedience
) to her husband. The details derived from this principle in
subsequent clauses impose many substantial disabilities on
the subordinate partner. In regard to parental authority
the Code of Napoleon also kept close to the traditions of the
pre-revolutionary customary law, and the reforms brought
about by nineteenth- and twentieth-century legislation have
been gradual and incomplete. It is not my object to prove
that this tenacious adherence to traditional rules in family
organization has been a proof of moral sanity and practical
common sense outweighing apparent advances in the sense of
individual equality and freedom. For the special purpose
of this chapter it is important to notice that the resistance
of family organization to change is directly connected with
the force of social habits which have reached the form of
Customary Law 295
customary law. They constitute a psychological foundation
for conventional and legal rules that corresponds to average
interests and habits of the mass of the people, and with such
psychological facts express legislation and professional
jurisprudence are bound to reckon.
Looking back on the customary history of the family
group in European society we perceive that its foundation
in the Middle Ages was laid by a contractual agreement
between the bridegroom and the father who gave away
the bride, with the support of kinsmen on both sides. The
agreement took the form of a purchase, the power over
the bride was bought (mundi kjgbt in Norway). The ' con-
sideration ' for the surrender of the bride consisted in
various gifts a payment to the father or guardian and his
kindred, a * morning gift ' to the bride herself, a promise
as to dower in case of widowhood (witumd). The bride's side
gave corresponding presents to the kinsmen of the bride-
groom and a marriage portion was assigned to the bride as
her outfit in clothes, trinkets, house implements. The
principal act of the marriage was the exchange of promises
and gages between the two kindreds the wedding (from
wed =gage and pledge).
* If people want to wed a maid or a wife and this is agreeable
to her and to her kinsmen, then it is right that the bridegroom
should first swear according to God's right and secular law and
should wage (pledge himself) to those who are her forspeakers,
that he wishes to have her in such a way as he should hold her by
God's right as his wife and his kinsmen will stand pledge for him.
* Then it is to be settled to whom the price for upfostering her
belongs, and for this the kinsmen should pledge themselves.
' Then let the bridegroom declare what present he will make
her for granting his desire, and what he will give if she lives
longer than he does.
* If it has been settled in this way, then it is right that she
should enjoy half the property, and all if they have a child,
unless she marries another man.
296 Legacy of the Middle Ages
' All this the bridegroom must corroborate by giving a gage,
and his kinsmen stand to pledge for him.
' If they are agreed in all this, then let the kinsmen of the
bride accept and wed their kinswoman to wife and to right life
to him who desires her, and let him take the pledge who rules
over the wedding.
* If she is taken out of the land into another lord's land, then
it is advisable that her kinsmen get a promise that no violence
will be done to her, and that if she has to pay a fine, they ought
to be her next to help her to pay, if she has not enough to pay
herself.' 1
The second act was the conducting of the bride to the
bridegroom's home the bridal run (bryllup, Scandin.),
which still preserved reminiscences of the ancient marriage
by capture in some of its folklore episodes, for instance in
the simulated fight in Irish custom the friends of the
parties throwing shafts at each other. The influence of the
Christian Church made itself chiefly felt by the requirement
of an express consent of the bride which turned the agree-
ment into an exchange of promises between the spouses.
The specific benediction which formed the central point
of the modern Church Office became essential as a result
of a slow process of development. The principal feature of
marriage from the point of view of the early Church was
the exchange of binding promises. Records of the Churches
of York and of Ripon testify to a number of marriages
without Church ceremony, concluded by the exchange of
promises de presenti (immediately binding), confirmed by
' handfasting '. At Easingwold in 1484 a man says, ' Here
I take the, Margaret, to my handfast wif, to hold and to
have, at bed and at burd, for farer for lather, for better for
wars, in sekenes and in heil, to dethe us depart, if holy kirk
it will ordand, and thereto plight I the my trowth.' *
1 Liebermann, Gesetze dcr Angelsacbsen^ i, p. 442.
1 Acts of the Chapter of the Collegiate Church of SS. Peter and Wilfrid,
Ripon, 1452-1506 (Surtees Society, bdv, 1875), ? X 59-
Customary Law 297
On becoming the wedded wife of a man the woman did
not surrender to his arbitrary mercy. She could appeal to
the protection of her kinsmen in case of need, and the
Northern Sagas contain many stories of married women
who lean on their kinsmen for support in their quarrels
with their husbands. The guaranteed dower was a recog-
nized legal institution. Its importance may be seen from
the fact that in English law a life interest on one third of the
husband's inheritance in land was regarded as the average
dower ; in France it amounted to one half. But the
husband was according to most customs to act as the
manager of the wife's property brought in at marriage or
acquired after marriage. Even if he disposed of such
property as if it were his own she could not prevent him or
oppose him in his lifetime. But she could attack his acts
after his death and claim what was hers by right. This
position produced in English procedure a specific right of
action the writ of entry on cui in vita, that is on the
ground that a woman had been unable to contradict her
husband in his lifetime.
The aim of marriage from the point of view of customary
law is not the gratification of personal affection, but the
procreation of legitimate offspring : people marry liberorum
querendorum causa, as they said in Rome. A barren mar-
riage was not only a misfortune, from the popular point
of view, but a ground of divorce. If a man died leaving his
wife pregnant the birth of a live child was an event of
decisive importance in regard to the inheritance. If the
child was born alive ' with skin and hair, with nails and
navel', and it was heard to shriek within the four walls
of the room, the rights to the property of the father and
the mother were joined in its person and inheritance passed
from it as if it had continued alive. If, on the other hand,
the baby was stillborn or there was no offspring at all the
298 Legacy of the Middle Ages
paternal and the maternal contributions to the household
were severed and each fell back to the original kindred from
which it had come paterna paternis> materna maternis.
In normal cases, when the father and mother lived long
enough to rear and educate children, the father exercised
discretionary power over his offspring. All children borne
by the wife in a state of wedlock were presumed to be the
legitimate offspring of her husband, and it was almost
impossible to overthrow this presumption. The Roman
maxim pater est quern nuptiae demons tr ant held good in the
medieval secular courts, and as for the ecclesiastical juris-
diction it favoured in every way the legitimation of children,
even of those born out of wedlock, if the parents had subse-
quently gone through a form of marriage. English laymen
opposed such subsequent legitimation as contrary to popular
custom ' Nolumus leges Angliae mutare ' proclaimed the
English magnates at the Council of Merton in 1234. But
on the other hand they were exceedingly lenient in the
treatment of illegitimate offspring. Bastards were commonly
educated with children issued from regular marriages, and
although they did not enjoy equal rights to property with
their more fortunate brothers and sisters their position in
the household was usually a tolerable one, and some, like
William the Conqueror, achieved a brilliant career in spite
of the initial blemish of their birth.
Emancipation from the father's authority was granted
as a natural outcome of a separate settlement and of the
creation of an independent household. If the outgoing
son was given a considerable outfit to start with, this reduced
his eventual claims to his father's succession unless he gave
back into hotchpot the provision that had been made for
him by his father in the latter's lifetime. The French
thirteenth-century lawyer Beaumanoir states in his c Custom
of Beauvaisis ' that although parents may endow one or
Customary Law 299
the other of their children in their lifetime, especially on
the occasion of their marriage, such gifts must not be so
considerable as to leave the other children disinherited
(orpbelins et desberites). It happens commonly that the
father or the mother is more fond of one of the children
than of the others, and is therefore inclined to increase that
one's portion by gifts, but if such donations are too out-
rageous, the judge should intervene and give redress. 1
A very common and characteristic institution was the
joint household (compaignie, Ganerbs chaff) kept up by
several relations, independent in their personal status.
Married sons remained in this way in the household of their
father, several brothers kept up a joint household after the
death of their father (par age), &c. Such an association was
a voluntary one, and its members were free to demand
partition, but its frequent occurrence in the lower strata of
society testifies to its value in the difficult economic and
political conditions of the Middle Ages.
Ill
The land-law of the Middle Ages is characterized by
a sharp contrast between the customs of the military class
and those of the rest of the population. The notion of
freedom was relative, admitting of many grades and shades,
and a considerable number of small rent-paying freemen
stood between the two principal orders, the knights (milites)
and the serfs, as socmen and franklins in England, as villains
and roturiers in France, as LassiUn or Liten in Germany.
Their customs presented many peculiarities, but on the
whole the main cleavage ran between the armed people
and the unarmed labourers. We need not speak of the law
of the fiefs (Lebenrecbt) which is so prominent in the plead-
1 Beaumanoir, ed. Salroon, p. 482.
300 Legacy of the Middle Ages
ings and decisions of the higher courts. It should be noticed,
however, that it was based on the fundamental conception
of tenure, that is of a holding conditioned by service and
always combining the claims and interest of two persons
in each unit of property the rights and duties of the lord
with the rights and duties of the tenant. The lord's estate
in the land was a direct or eminent domain, the tenant's
estate a useful domain (dominium utile). Thus the old term
dominium which had indicated in Roman law an absolute
ownership excluding all other appropriation and involving
the right to use, to abuse, and to destroy at will, had become
split into two rights balancing each other.
A natural consequence of this modification of the concept
of ownership in feudal land-law consisted in the fact that
ownership of land was not sharply distinguished from posses-
sion of land. The two notions were distinct, but it was not
easy to hold them separated in practice. We come to
understand the situation better if we consider our own law
as to movable goods. If I lose my umbrella and some one
picks it up and uses it, after a certain time it may be difficult
for me to establish my property right to it : the presumption
will be in favour of the actual user. This is expressed in
French legal language in the terse sentence : en fait de
meubles la possession vaut titre. In medieval jurisprudence
the actual * seisin ' of a plot, the fact that a man dwelt on it,
gathered the harvest, cut the timber, established a pre-
sumption of title which could be defeated by proving
a better right, but which was prima facie protected and not
easy to contest. As a matter of fact the tenure of land was
to a great extent a relative notion, very different from the
uncompromising ownership established in Rome by dominium
ex iure Quiritium. In the law of Latin countries Italy,
France the influence of Roman traditions in this respect
was still noticeable, while in Germany, England, and
Customary Law 301
Scandinavian countries the relative character of appropria-
tion was particularly marked. Yet, even in the South,
customary rules were affected by the indistinct nature of
seisin. The defence of possession, the development of
possessory remedies are characteristic of the Middle Ages.
These observations will help us to comprehend the law of
base or servile tenures that governed the life of the bulk of
the population in Feudal Europe. It might be said from
a strictly theoretical point of view that the rural population
was deprived of ownership : whatever an English villein
possessed belonged to his lord. Such arguments are often
produced in trials and summarized in treatises in the course
of the Middle Ages. But in actual life the rights of rustics
in respect of their holdings, their claims as to pasture and
wood, their succession and their transactions were formu-
lated and applied in accordance with * customs of the manor *
which might be occasionally infringed, but which provided
the general framework of their social life. The Court Rolls
of St. Albans or of Ramsey Abbey are records of an adminis-
tration of justice and police similar in detail to the usages
of the royal courts. We find from the Court Rolls of
St. Albans that * a remarkable custom is that of obliging an
incoming tenant, who takes up servile land, to make a con-
tract with the lord that he will be obedient to him in all
things, in Scot and Lot, Tallage, and Services, both in body
and in goods as are all the other villeins. The tenant then
seals this document with his own seal. Traces of this custom
are clear in the Court Rolls at the end of the thirteenth
century and well on in the fourteenth century, but in the
Codicote Cartulary we have the actual scriptum of the
earlier date.' l
The tenant right established by them did not differ in
1 Miss Levett, Transactions of the R. Hist. Soc., 4th series, vol. vii
(1924), p. 69.
302 Legacy of the Middle Ages
substance from the customs of privileged classes the
peasantry of ancient demesne in England or the colonists
protected by a charter in France, although they differed in
regard to access to the courts. Here is an instance of a stand
made by the peasant in an ancient demesne manor against
exactions of the steward.
' John William's son is attached on the security of John Dyke
and Nicholas in the Nook for not coming to the lord's ploughing.
And the said John comes into court and says that he has no beast
of his own wherewith he can plough and has only borrowed
beasts, and he says and alleges that so long as he borrows beasts
for ploughing he is not bound to do any ploughing for the lord,
and as to this he puts himself upon the Ramsey register. There-
fore let the register be inspected before the next court.' *
The fact that medieval land-law was constructed to fit
two strata of society, an upper and a lower one, produced
a cleavage between bookright and folkright, between the
law administered in the Royal Courts and the customs
operative in the daily life of the rural population. One of
the most striking expressions of this dualism is found in the
customary institution of the holding ; the standard tenement
held by an average rustic of free or unfree origin. We are so
familiar with the treatment of land as a marketable com-
modity, exchangeable in various quantities against various
prices in money that we are puzzled when we find all over
Europe in the first centuries of the Middle Ages plots cut
out in accordance with some simple scale. There is the
English bide of some 120 acres of arable, composed of four
virgates or yardlands of about 30 acres and of eight bovates
(oxgangs) of 15 acres each. There is the German Royal
Hufe of 120 morgen (dayworks) and the common Hufo of
30 morgen ; there is the mansus of Latin countries, containing
in some cases 12 bunnaria (Polyptique d'lrminion) ; there
1 Select Pleas of Manorial Courts , Selden Society, vol. ii, p. in.
Customary Law 303
is the bol of Denmark and the attung of Sweden, of varying
size, but equalized in each particular region. Bishop Arne
Suneson in his thirteenth-century version of the law of
Skaane (Southern Sweden) tells us that ' by the use of the
surveyor's chain the whole villa is divided into equal parts,
which in the mother tongue they commonly call boel (cor.
bol) and we in Latin may call mansos, for the purpose of
equalizing the estates and plots to the adjoining estates '. l
How is one to explain such regularity in the presence of
legal rules which allowed transfer and partition of property,
and admitted sons and even daughters to shares in the
inheritance of their deceased parents ? The natural effect
of alienation and partition is inequality the accumulation
of property in the hands of some and the morcellation or
absence of property in the case of others. Have we to
suppose that some artificial measures were taken to ensure
equality among the rustics ? The key to the solution of the
riddle is supplied by the nature and names of the units of
rustic tenure and of the shares into which they are apt to
fall. These units and these shares are not haphazard
accumulations of a number of acres they are organic
units of cultivation which could not be interrupted at
pleasure. In the main they are areas with appendant
rights appropriate for the normal work of a plough- team.
The large plough-team of eight oxen wants a hide as a basis
for its working power it is a full plough land. Under
favourable circumstances it will embrace 160 or 1 80 acres
of arable, although its taxable (geldable) estimate (wara)
will be assessed at 120 acres. In connexion with it there
will be various rights of usage in respect of pasture, wood,
turf, fisheries. A big unit of this kind is only exceptionally
held by a peasant generally they are possessed only of
fractions of it appropriate for cultivation by a yoke of
1 Grimm, Recbtsahertbilmer^ ii. 65.
304 Legacy of the Middle Ages
four oxen (iugum) or a plough team of two oxen (yardlands)
or even of a fraction corresponding to the toil of one ox
(oxgang). In the case of such fractional plots co-operation
was adjusted in accordance with simple and natural divisions
of the team and not as a result of complicated and shifting
reckoning. The proportional distribution of shares in the
land follows in this way on lines indicated by agrarian
organization. The consolidation of holdings in connexion
with their agrarian use and value was by no means confined
to servile tenements. In Norway the most privileged form
of peasant holding, the odal, was constituted as a unit not
to be cut up between co-heirs, but to pass to one of them,
generally the elder, while the younger were provided with
an outfit to start in business outside the odal farm or as
dependants of its representative. The consolidation of
smaller agrarian holdings was even more necessary as long
as society lived mainly in a state of natural husbandry.
When men had to content themselves with cottages and
orchards of some 5 acres or less, they could not any
longer take part in the normal cultivation of the field, they
were therefore classed as mere cottagers in opposition to
tenants * with fields ' (in campis). The tendency of rustic
land tenure under natural husbandry conditions to form
regular holdings on a scale proportioned to the plough
team and its constituent element is, of course, connected
with the fact that householders reckoned not with values
in exchange estimated in money, but with values for con-
sumption, estimated in average requirements per worker
and per family of workers. In Scandinavian countries and
in the east of England permeated by Scandinavian influences
land was sometimes estimated in man-lots.
In the course of economic evolution the standard holdings
get disrupted, the number of irregular plots increases and
estates are valued. In connexion with this process we
Customary Law 305
observe another feature of medieval agrarian organization,
namely the wide diffusion of the so-called open field system,
i.e. of the cultivation of the fields not in separate plots but
in contiguous furlongs and shots, subdivided into strips
attributed to the various householders while the crops are
growing and thrown together for common pasture after
the harvest and before the new sowing season. It was not
the only system used in the Middle Ages in parts of
France and in Italy the cultivation of small areas by isolated
and independent householders was still prevalent in con-
nexion with intensive ploughing and the culture of olives
and vines. But the most common form of agrarian organiza-
tion was the open field system with its inconvenient inter-
mixture of strips and its obligatory rotation of crops.
The single householder could not, without infringing
customary rules, improve or vary the management of his
own land : his strips were shares in a higher unit of cultiva-
tion the township, the * by ', the Dorf. In a case of 1370
the free tenants of the hamlet of Handborough near Oxford
sued the Abbot of Eynsham because he had disturbed- the
customary order of rotation of crops in the township by
substituting a four-field system for a three-field one : they
complained of having lost in proportion pasture rights which
they used to exercise every third year over the commons.
There were several forces which converged to maintain
this peculiar system the necessity of providing sufficient
pasture for the cattle and especially the oxen and horses
engaged in ploughing, harrowing, carting : while the
villagers could not rely on the free waste of moors or alps
they were bound to use the village commons and greens for
their cattle. There were traditions of communal rights as
to land which did not amount to a denial of individual
tenant right and ownership in the strips, houses, orchards,
and gardens, but constituted a kind of eminent domain or
2873 x
306 Legacy of the Middle Ages
superior interest in the soil that enabled the township in
cases of emergency to exercise a decisive influence on the
settlement and land allotment.
On one occasion ' the peasants ' were removed from
a certain area comprising * eight hides of villein land. Of
these eight hides one-fourth was taken, and it was reckoned
that this fourth was an equivalent to the one-third of the
park and of the demesne farm, which ought by right to have
gone to the lord de la Lege. On the basis of this estimation
an exchange was effected. In the time of the war (perhaps
the rebellion of 1173) the eight hides and other hides in
Segheho were encroached upon and appropriated unright-
eously by many, and for this reason a general revision of
the holdings was undertaken before Walter de Wahull and
Hugh de la Lege in full court by six old men ; it was made
out to which of the hides the several acres belonged. At
that time, when all the tenants in Segheho (knights, free-
holders, and others) did not know exactly about the land
of the village and the tenements, and when each man was
contending that his neighbours held unrighteously and
more than they ought, all the people decided by common
agreement and in the presence of the lords de Wahull and
de la Lege, that everybody should surrender his land to be
measured anew with the rood by the old men as if the
ground had been occupied afresh : every one had to receive
his due part on consideration of his rights. At that time
R. F. admitted that he and his predecessors had held the
area near the castle unrighteously. The men in charge of
the distribution divided that area into sixteen strips (buttos),
and these were divided as follows : there are eight hides of
villein land in Segheho and to each two strips were appor-
tioned.' l Such readjustments as this are described at
length in Swedish and Danish laws.
1 See Villainage in England^ pp. 233-4.
Customary Law 37
The co-operation between neighbours (Norwegian Grande)
was more than a matter of simple agreement : it assumed
the character of a customary establishment which neces-
sitated for its alteration the consent of all the members of
a township. The village formed a community, and was
recognized and exploited as such a community by the lord,
and by public authority. The villata is frequently men-
tioned as acting as a unit in English records : it is normally
represented by the priest, the reeve, and four villagers. This
kind of community did not aim at regulating the needs
and advantages of the individuals comprised in it : it
reckoned with the holdings which were in scot and in lot
in the township. The question of redistribution was raised
only in exceptional cases. As a rule the pressure of popula-
tion was met either by emigration of single adventurous
individuals or by the colonization and reclaiming of new soil.
In sketching the customary arrangements of open-field
peasant life I do not presume to describe a uniformly
prevalent system : as I have already said, agrarian conditions
were exceedingly varied in Western Europe. But the
Court Rolls, the Weisthumer, the field-maps and extents
are there to show that we are dealing in this case with widely
prevalent customs, the last vestiges of which we may observe
even now, after the great enclosure movement of modern
centuries, in the commons scattered in the midst of our
present-day enclosed estates.
IV
The customs of townspeople present two aspects : in one
sense they have kept traces of many archaic views and
institutions, on the other hand they are the outcome of
economic and social progress. This contradiction is not
difficult to explain : the close associations of burgesses made
it possible for them to resist encroachments to which the
x 2
3o8 Legacy of the Middle Ages
less organized villagers had succumbed. At the same time
the fact that industry and trade were mainly concentrated
in the towns was bound to exercise its influence by intro-
ducing new ideas and facilitating intercourse in every way.
One of the most tenacious survivals of old times was the
use of the wager of law in procedure before the courts of
boroughs. The great advantages consequent on the intro-
duction of the system of inquests in the Royal Courts were
brought about by the exercise of the Royal prerogative
with the help of a powerful administration. The boroughs
were less fortunate in these respects and clung to more
antiquated methods of conducting trials. We have, e.g.,
the following notice from London (A.D. 1319) r 1
' There is an old custom of the city that when any London
citizen is to purge himself at an eyre of the crime of high treason,
he should purge himself with 36 men from each side of Walbrook,
and of old it was held that if any of the said men thus chosen
should die between the time of their election and the purging
of the said citizen, then the rest of those living swore on the
dead man's grave that if he were alive he would have sworn the
same oath which they swear.'
The number of compurgators is exceptionally large in this
case on account of the accusation of high treason. In
ordinary cases 12, 6, or 3 men were called upon to corro-
borate the oath of the principal compurgator, for instance
in the laws of the four burghs of Scotland. 2
' If a burgess be charged by a countryman for stolen goods,
found in his own house and in his seisin, and can deny the theft
as a free burgess against a countryman, and can say that though
he has no warrantors yet he bought the goods which are challenged
lawfully in the borough market, the burgess shall purge himself
by the oath of twelve neighbours and lose only the goods claimed.
And he shall swear that he knows not where the door opens or
shuts of the house of the man from whom he bought the goods.'
1 Borough Customs, vol. i, Scldcn Soc. Publ., vol. xviii (1904), p. 49.
8 Ibid., p. 58.
Customary Law 309
Another peculiar feature of borough customs is the wide
latitude allowed to self-help. As in primitive tribal
societies, claimants of rights are commonly called upon to
take the law into their own hand without even waiting for
the help of executive officers. The topic of distress is one
of the most developed in the collection of customary rules.
Of course the person distraining had eventually to justify
his conduct in a court of law and to be prepared to defend
an action in replevin. The customs of Winchester (about
1280) provided the following means of putting pressure on
a tenant who failed to pay his rent. 1
' The custom of year and day aforesaid is this, that if there is
any one who takes the rent of any tenement in the franchise of
the city aforesaid, and finds his whole rent in arrears for a year
and more, and can find nothing there to distrain, and there is
a house there and people living in it, by leave of the bailiffs of
the town he may take the doors and windows, and if by this he
cannot get his due for his tenement and can find no other
distress, by award of the court and the view of the alderman
of the street and of his Serjeant there shall be put a stake or
a lock where there is a door, and the cause shall be enrolled in
court and sued from week to week for a full year and a day from
the first day of the suit, and if still no one comes to make satis-
faction the tenant shall lose without recovery, whether he be of
age or no, albeit so that before the judgment passes he may make
satisfaction, the which judgment shall not be delayed to the
damage of the demandant.'
In regard to substantive law the most curious tenacity is
displayed in customs touching family rights and duties.
The fifteenth-century Custumal of Dover, for instance,
formulates clearly the restriction on alienation imposed by
family ties and known in France under the name of ' retrait
lignager '.*
'Dover, cap. 13. Nota de vendicatione tenement! venditi.
And if eny man or woman be in will to sell his herytage within
1 Ibid.) p. 302. * Ibid., ii, p. 72.
310 Legacy of the Middle Ages
the fraunchyse, the next of hys kyn shall have it afore all other :
and though the sale be made to any straunger, yf eny man that
be of kyn come in to the courte anone as he hath knowlcge of the
sale and cleyme the bargayne, he shall have it by awarde of
the mayre and juratts and lesse pryce be every powdne xiid,
of the which overplus the seller shall answer to the straunger/
There are repeated declarations in the Custumals against
the attempts of lords to claim the wardship of burgesses
under age as if they were holding by military tenure.
Burgesses keep up strenuously the ancient folkright in
accordance with which the wardship of infants is to be
exercised by their next of kin. 1
* Bury (about 1200). In the vill of St. Edmund, because it
was a borough, the custom was that the next of blood should
have the wardship of the child with his inheritance until lie
came to years of discretion.'
This is one side of the legal life of the boroughs. As
against it we have to notice new rules in all matters con-
nected with trade. Some of these rules are more character-
istic of the conditions of town life than indicative of pro-
gressive tendencies. We hear, e.g., of the custom by which
any member of a borough or privileged market town could
claim a share in a bargain made by a fellow townsman. In
St. Omer, for instance (twelfth century), 2
* the merchant gildsman had an option of first purchase, as
against the stranger to the gild. In the next clause it is ruled
that if any gildsman had agreed to a price for the purchase of
goods, other than victual, and of the value of five " gros sous "
and upwards, other gildsmen who " supervened " could claim
to go shares in the merchandise at that price. The saving clause
concerning victual goes to prove that membership of the mer-
chant gild was not necessary in this case, and that all inhabitants
had their " lot " here, as was commonly the rule. The merchant
1 Borough Customs^ ii, p. 145. a Ibid., p. Ixix.
Customary Law 31 1
gildsmen's rule was intended to secure equal opportunity for
sharing in wholesale purchases of raw material and materials for
trade, not for household consumption.'
The most important contribution of town life to the
development of law was connected with the history of
contract. While this important branch of law remains
in the background in the common law of medieval England,
the borough custumals and especially the records of fairs
and markets contain abundant materials illustrating varied
transactions of sale and purchase, of loan and hire, of
suretyship and agency, &c. An important factor making
for the widening of the outlook consisted in the pressure
and participation of foreign merchants in the principal
centres of export and import trade. The law merchant of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was a kind of
ius gentium, of international private law, made to fit the
notions and requirements of men from neighbouring places
and even from other countries. A case tried in the fair
court of the Abbot of Ramsey in St. Ives may serve to
illustrate some of the questions which arose between the
persons who transacted business at such a fair. 1
* John Francis of Derby was attached to answer Richard of
Fulham, citizen of London, in a plea that he (John) render to
him ten marks which he owes him and unjustly detains etc. . . .
' And thereupon William of Daventry and Adam of Burton,
servants of the abbot of (Burton)-on-Trent, come and say that
the process of the plea and execution of judgment for the said
horse ought not (to be made) against (the said John) in this
matter ; for they say that, on the day on which the said Richard
was attached to sue the said John Francis for the said debt, he
(John) had no right or property, art or part in the (said horse).
For they say that on the day of the said attachment the said
horse belonged to the abbot, their lord, and was entrusted to
them as his servants to be put on sale in this fair ; and this they
1 Select Cases concerning the Law Merchant, Selden Soc., vol. xxiii
(1908), vol. i, pp. 89, 90.
312 Legacy of the Middle Ages
are ready to prove in any way that the court shall award according
to the law merchant. . . .
' And the said Richard says that the said William and Adam
should not be admitted to make such proof, for he says that
when anyone should make proof of the ownership of any mer-
chandise or of any other thing, it is necessary that he whose
ownership is alleged should appear in his own person to make
(proof), and the said William and Adam are entirely extraneous
for the making of such proof. He craves judgment whether they
ought to be admitted to make such proof etc.
' And William and Adam say that it is entirely necessary that
they should be admitted (to make this proof), for they say that
when perchance any merchant, dwelling in remote parts, whoso-
ever he may be, whether earl or baron, bishop or abbot, or any
such person of rank, should deliver his merchandise and goods
to any servant of his to have them put on sale in any fair, if any
one caused such goods and merchandise to be attached by reason
of a debt owed by another person, it would be hard and incon-
sonant with right if such servants, in whose possession such
goods and chattels were when they were attached, should not
be admitted to make such proof in the name of their lord. And
they still crave to be admitted etc.
* And thereupon all the merchants of the said fair, both
natives and foreigners, to whom judgments belong according to
the law merchant, having been called for this purpose and con-
sulted, say that they (William and Adam) may properly be
admitted in this and similar cases according to the law merchant. 9
One of the principal consequences of this method of
treating commercial cases was the formation of usages and
customs of law merchant free from the extreme formalism
of procedure characteristic of the courts of common law.
Parole agreements were constantly made before witnesses
and binding consent between the parties was established
by the acceptance of a God's penny and of a drink. In
order to provide a material security for the payment of
the price a sum of money or some valuable object was given
as * earnest '.
' William Fleming complains of Matthew Tanner, for that he
has unjustly broken a covenant with him for a cask of beer, which
Customary Law 313
he (William) bought from him for two marks of silver, in hit
(Matthew's) house in the vill of St. Ives on Tuesday after the
close of Easter in the nineteenth year of the reign of King
Edward ; and to bind the purchase he (William) paid him a
farthing as a God's penny and a pottle of beer worth a penny as
beverage, with the understanding, to wit, that the said cask
should remain in the house of the said Matthew until the beer
of the said Matthew should be entirely sold, and then, at any
hour at which the said William wished, he could broach his said
cask. And to confirm this covenant the said William deposited
his wife's surcoat worth l6j. as gage for a half-mark, payable to
the said Matthew as earnest-money on the day of the contract.*
The lasting influence of commercial customs of this kind
is particularly significant in a review of the Legacy of the
Middle Ages : the Law Merchant continued to govern
English trade until the second half of the eighteenth century,
when Lord Mansfield received its rules as part of the
Common Law instead of establishing them in particular
cases as a fact by the evidence of experts.
A curious feature in the history of municipal customs is
the spread of certain formulas by loan from one to the
other. In all the countries of Western Europe there occurs
the same phenomenon of a radiation of franchises and
customs from certain countries to neighbouring and even
to distant localities. The charters of Lorris in Gatinais
and of Beaumont in Argonne have been copied again and
again by hundreds of other communities ; the same happened
to Freiburg in Breisgau in Western Germany and to Magde-
burg not only in Eastern Germany, but in Lithuania and
Poland. A remarkable case is presented in England by the
Custom of Breteuil. This medium-sized town situated in
the present department of Eure on the confines of Nor-
mandy may be regarded as the parent municipality from
whose charter of liberties a number of towns in England and
Wales and Ireland Hereford, Shrewsbury, Preston, Rhud-
lan, Cardiff, Drogheda, &c. have copied their privileges
314 Legacy of the Middle Ages
and customs. We can trace to some extent the genealogical
lines on which these transmissions were effected.
A Norman baron of Scandinavian descent, William Fitz-
Osborn, came over with William the Conqueror and received
the honour of Hereford as a reward of his services in addition
to his fiefs of Breteuil, Cormeilles, and Verneuil in Nor-
mandy. On his death in 1071 his two lordships the
English and the Norman one were divided for the time
in the hands of his sons, but the municipal policy of his
house remained the same on both sides of the house and we
read in Domesday that Hereford, Cardiff, and Drusany were
enjoying the liberties of Breteuil. The customs of Preston
present the fullest record of the practices adopted on the
pattern of Breteuil and, although it would be impossible
to assert that every single clause of the custumal of Preston
is derived from the uses of Breteuil, there can be no doubt
that most of them belong to the group which went under
that name in England and had actually grown by adoption
and imitation from the original stock transferred from
Normandy.
Now a good many of the clauses of this custumal and of
similar charters elsewhere are concerned with exemptions
and alleviations of exactions e.g. the rule that no fine for
transgressors may exceed I2d. except in three cases of
grievous crimes from which fines are due to the King.
There are also a number of instances in which customs
appear which have no reference to the fixation or concession
of seignorial rights. Cl. 3, for instance, deals with the
protection of villeins who have dwelt for a year and a day
in the town against pursuit by their former masters. In
the same way the settlement of a new-comer within the
precincts of the town, although it requires the unanimous
consent of the original burgesses, is deemed legalized by an
unchallenged residence of a year and a day, a rule that
Customary Law 3*5
reminds us forcibly of the famous cl. 45 of the Lex Salica.
The same customary period of limitation occurs in cl. 7
in regard to dispute as to the possession of tenements by
burgesses.
Cl. 33, again, directs that in case a claim of debt is not
satisfied by a burgess the creditor was to be paid from the
fund of the community and the provost was enjoined to
levy the sum from the property of the debtor. This regula-
tion can hardly mean anything else but a guarantee of the
faithful execution of obligations incurred by burgesses in
respect of outsiders, especially foreign merchants a pro-
vision designed to sustain the credit of the town and possibly
to safeguard it against reprisals. The guild of the town is
sometimes mentioned in custumals derived from the charter
of Breteuil, and these mentions may serve as an indication
of the fact that the whole domain of municipal government
and social relations had come to be ordered on lines similar
in substance and form. This seems to be the natural
explanation of the fact that the inhabitants of towns and
regions politically independent of one another framed their
laws on the same pattern. Imitation in these cases was
a device contrived for the sake of obtaining ready-made
formulas for things which were much alike in reality and
needed no separate elaboration.
Something similar took place in yet another department
of law, namely as regards maritime customs. We observe
here most striking instances not only of transmission from
one people and country to another, but also of tenacious
customs bridging from epoch to epoch over hundreds of
years. The other day an American lawyer examined a case
tried by the courts of Illinois (Ricbbeimer v. the People) in
the light of the juridical treatment of the rights and remedies
of an Athenian banker in respect of a cargo bought with
money lent by him and claimed by a creditor of the ship's
316 Legacy of the Middle Ages
captain as a pledge for another loan. 1 And indeed, if we
wish to trace the development of doctrines as to risks, interests
in maritime adventure, jettison, shipwreck, hypothecation
on ship and cargo, bills of lading, rights and duties of
mariners, of skippers, of supercargoes, we may well start
from the laws obtaining nowadays, but we should have to
look back for the reason of their formation and the con-
ditions of their application not only to the customs of the
Dutch, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, but to the com-
pilations of Mediterranean usages called the Consulate of
the sea, the laws of Gotland, the usages of Oleron in Gascony,
the Statutes of Ragusa, the practice of Venice, of the
Genoese, of Pisa, of Amalfi, the Byzantine legislation of the
Basilica (liii), and of Justinian's Corpus iuris (Dig. xiv. 2),
the Rhodian law, the speeches of Demosthenes (v. Lakritos,
v. Phormion, v. Zenothemis). 2
The continuity of development has sometimes been
recognized expressly in modern judgement. Brett, J.,
referred to the Rhodian law on jettison as preserved in
Dig. xiv in Burton v. English (i883). 8 But of course during
the centuries of its history maritime law underwent many
modifications of details in connexion with changes in
economic and social conditions or with naval technique.
An important characteristic of maritime trade in the
ancient world was its treatment as a series of adventures.
The ship or the cargo carried by it were not owned directly
by some capitalist and if, as was mostly the case, the ship
1 Zane on Zenotbemis v. Demon, Micb. Law Rev., 1925.
1 See Ashburner, The Rbodian Law, passim.
1 Brett, J. (221) : 'This docs not arise from any contract at all, but
from the old Rhodian law, and has become incorporated in the law of
England, as the law of the ocean. It is not a matter of contract but
a consequence of the common danger, where natural justice required
that all should contribute to indemnify for the loss of property which is
sacrificed by one in order that the whole adventure may be saved.'
Customary Law 317
had been built and fitted out on borrowed money, if the
cargo had been bought as a result of a loan, the lender had
to face not only the usual risks of failure or dishonesty on
the part of the borrower, but also the risks of the voyage in
stormy seas, with insufficient technical means, in constant
danger from pirates.
Insurance provides against such or similar risks nowadays,
but insurance had not been worked out in antiquity or in
the Middle Ages. Consequently risks had to fall on the
parties to the adventure and for practical reasons they fell
on the lenders, who were usually merchants or bankers
conducting business from a safe place from Athens, or
Rhodes, or Amalfi, or Venice, or London. The borrowers
might be seafaring, skilled and audacious, but not provided
with extensive possessions within the reach of creditors.
On the other hand, if the lenders bore great risks, the
borrowers had to submit to heavy burdens interest on
maritime loans was reckoned at a higher rate than on
ordinary ones. The usual rate in Athens was 1 8 per cent.,
in the Middle Ages it might rise to 24 per cent, and higher
in spite of the condemnation of usury by the Church.
The only result of this condemnation was that the interest
charged was concealed by means of some device in the
apparent tenor of the contracts, e.g. by including the
stipulated interests in the sum of the capital lent. A certain
mitigation of these exorbitant conditions was conceded
when the borrower of money to be invested in grain or
some other cargo could offer in hypothecation as a pledge
not only the cargo concerned in the adventure, but goods
in other ships, or stock on land, or a landed estate. 1
Another feature of the maritime adventure was the
distinction between the economic factors concerned in it.
Roman jurists distinguished between the owner of the ship,
1 Ashburner, Rbodian Sea-Law y pp. ccx, ccxvii.
318 Legacy of the Middle Ages
the exercitor who rented it, the magister who was responsible
for the material arrangements on board, the captain,
and the merchant who invested money for the enterprise.
Of course these various activities could be combined in many
ways the merchant may have been the owner of the ship,
or the exercitor may have acted as a magister and so on.
But the factors could also appear personified in the shape of
different sharers. Their interests fall in any case into three
main groups those connected with the ship, those con-
nected with the cargo, and those connected with the freight.
A natural modification was effected in the Middle Ages as
regards the third group. It was not only the owner of the
ship, the purser (magister), and the captain who were
interested in the freight, but the crew at large (nautae),
who had ceased to be recruited from slaves, as in ancient
Greece or Rome, but were as a rule free or half-free. In
any case the arrival of the ship at the end of the agreed
voyage was the occasion for settling accounts and winding
up transactions. 1
The customary conception of maritime adventure pro-
duced drastic effects in cases when a ship, in difficulty
through storm, collision, grounding on rocks or sandbanks
and the like, had to be saved by sacrificing part of its cargo
or apparel. Such a ' jettison ' (iactus) raised intricate ques-
tions as to the attribution of damage and responsibility.
This gives rise to the law of * average ' which goes back
in its growth to the maritime customs of the Greeks and
produces many subtle distinctions in medieval maritime
custom. It amounts in substance to the recognition of the
fact that sacrifices or expenses incurred by the ship in order
to save the cargo as well as itself and the crew ought not to
be borne exclusively by the ship's owners but should be
shared by the other associates of the enterprise the owners
1 Table o/Amalfi, c. 23 5 Black Book of the Admiralty, iv. 17 f.
Customary Law 319
of the cargo ought to be charged with a contribution and
corresponding deductions should be made from the freight.
Vice versa, the jettison of part of the cargo in order to save
the ship by easing it should be apportioned according to
certain averages between all the three groups of partners
interested in the ship, the cargo, and the freight. The
customs of Oleron, chs. 3-7 (Black Book,ii, 212-18), and the
Table of Amalfi (cl. 27) may be cited in illustration of the
way in which particular points arising from the general
doctrine were treated.
In conclusion I should like to emphasize the view that
has been expressed again and again in different parts of this
survey. The formulation of legal rules and the determina-
tion of vested rights in the Middle Ages was connected in
the last resort with habits and considerations of business life
and social intercourse : judges settled disputes and rulers
issued statutes in accordance with their professional training,
their political insight and their sense of justice, but all these
operations of the minds of the leaders had to conform in
one way or another to the customs of the folk the broad
indications of everyday experiences and practice.
PAUL VlNOGRADOFF.
ii. CANON LAW
IN the spiritual heritage of the Middle Ages to which we
have succeeded, there is nothing that has remained so
unaffected by the changes of time as the legal system of the
Roman Church. Decretals and canons of a date earlier than
the fifteenth century still govern the administration of the
best disciplined and, from the point of view of numbers,
the greatest of all monarchies that of the Sovereign
Pontiff and regulate the religious and social life of the
three hundred millions of the faithful of whom it is com-
posed. The code published in 1234 by order of Gregory IX,
the latest addition to which dates from 1317, was itself in
force until 1918, while the substance of it may be found
incorporated in that by which it was then replaced. Churches,
moreover, which have separated from Rome, retain in their
present constitutions many elements whose origin may be
traced to the time when Christendom was one. Nor indeed
has secular society, though many of its former links with
religion have been broken, entirely rid itself of canonical
conceptions. The principles developed by the Church and
applied by her during the period when no one disputed her
control over all civil matters in which the salvation of souls
was concerned, still underlie a considerable portion of the
common law of the west, and are predominant in large
provinces such as those of marriage or of obligations. And
of the ideas by which modern politics are inspired, some,
as for instance those of submission to the authority of the
State or the protection of the oppressed, were sedulously
fostered by the canonists, while others, such as liberty of
opinion and the abolition of privileges, owe their origin or
2873 Y
322 Legacy of the Middle Ages
their prominence to the reaction which set in with the
Renaissance against the public law of the Church.
In order to understand the condition and tendencies of
the modern world, it is necessary to determine doctrines
to which it is found to be in opposition, and more impor-
tant still to inquire how much in our religious organization,
our legal customs and our conception of law is a survival
from the Christian Middle Ages. Three fundamental
problems may be said to call for solution. First, in what ways
was the systematization of the canon law effected in the years
between the coming of Gregory VII (1073) and the Great
Schism (1378) ; in other words, of what elements and by
what methods was the Corpus luris of the Church compiled,
and what was the scope of its rules ? Primarily this corpus
defined the constitution of the Church. In our second
section, therefore, we shall describe the classic theory of the
clerical order, of the hierarchy and of the relations between
the * two powers '. Finally, since the classic law regulated
the life of the faithful in all its aspects, political, social,
economic and penal, we must examine under these heads
the way in which the Church formulated for the use of all
Christians a complete code of precepts and sanctions.
I
From the earliest times the Church had found it
necessary to draw up rules of government and to define
the obligations of her members in order to preserve her
unity, to maintain her worship, to ensure the exercise of
charity and the practical application of the evangelical
virtues. Holy Scripture and Apostolic tradition formed the
basis of her law ; custom and papal and conciliar decrees
added, as need arose, other provisions relating more particu-
larly to matters concerning the hierarchy. The constitutions
Canon Law 323
of the Christian Emperors determined the temporal position
of the Church, the privileges of clerks and ecclesiastical
property ; the Fathers, notably St. Augustine, gave pre-
cision to her social theory. Conciliar canons and papal
decrees, to which were often added excerpts from the
Scriptures, from the Fathers or from secular law, were early
formed into collections. In the sixth century the Roman
Church adopted a collection made by Dionysius Exiguus,
which contained, in addition to the canons of the great
councils of the east, a series of decretals. This collection
gained considerable authority in the west. It was formally
bestowed (774) by Pope Hadrian, with certain additions
(Dionysio-Hadriana), upon Charlemagne, whose approval
(802) gave it official sanction within the Empire. But the
appearance of the Dionysiana did not prevent the appearance
of an abundant crop of private collections. To the period of
purely local collections, arbitrarily drawn up in the sixth
century for churches which the barbaric invasions had
isolated, succeeded that of national or regional collections
Hispana, Hibernensis, the collection of Angers (of the seventh
and early eighth centuries), not one of which was either
universally accepted or logically arranged. And since these
collections did not meet all the needs of the Church, private
enterprise filled in the gaps in the law. The Celts introduced
upon the Continent the use of Penitential Canons, usually
anonymous and always of a non-official nature, thus providing
a large variety of penances applicable to the different
categories of sins. During the ninth century a group of
Prankish clerks, in order to defend the bishops and eccle-
siastical property, forged apocryphal collections, of which
the False Decretals are the best known. In the eleventh
century the collection most widely current was the Decretum
of Burchard, Bishop of Worms, drawn up about 1012. As
Paul Fournier, who has studied them all, has convincingly
Y 2
324 Legacy of the Middle Ages
shown, neither this collection nor any of those current at
the time were regarded as adequate by the reforming party
in the Church. Not one of them included sufficient decisive
texts, coherently arranged, upon the subjects of principal
interest to the reformers, the primacy of the Apostolic Sec,
the validity of the sacraments, the coercive power of the
Church, investiture, nicolaism, simony. And further, the
hall-mark of universality, bestowed only upon the rules
promulgated or approved by Rome, was absent from these
strings of local councils, penitential canons, apocryphal
decisions, which composed the majority of these collections,
and especially the Decretum of Burchard of Worms. The
first task of the reformers, therefore, was to revise the
contents of the collections. As it was their declared inten-
tion to avoid all innovations and merely to restore the former
discipline, it was to ancient sources that they turned in
their search for all decisions possessed of a universal char-
acter, such as would further their purpose and could replace
the fragmentary texts of whose origin and doctrine they
had become suspicious. As a result of detailed investigations
in the libraries of Italy, there were brought to light many
texts hitherto either unknown or ignored in the west,
canons of general councils held after the fall of the Roman
Empire, papal letters, fragments of patristic writings,
extracts from the Liber Pontificalis. Knowledge of these
was diffused by means of several collections, and particularly
by the one in Seventy-four Titles (c. 1050) and the collection
of Anselm of Lucca, which contained the elements of
a complete theory of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Many problems which arose in the eleventh century
concerning the status of persons and property (marriage, con-
tracts, crime), and of which the canons offered no compre-
hensive solution, had been solved by the Roman Law.
The discovery of the famous Florentine manuscript of the
Canon Law 325
Digest, perhaps by one of the clerks working in the Italian
libraries on behalf of the reformers, came as a welcome aid
to the post-Gregorians. Since 1090, the collection Britati-
nica had included about a hundred excerpts from classical
jurisconsults, and the canonization of the Roman Law was
necessarily continued by the Church, as she worked towards
the completion of her legal system, and thus encroached
upon the province of private law. Both pre-Gregorians and
Gregorians therefore revised the contents of the collections,
but they could not prevent the survival of texts of German
or Celtic origin, the suppression of which they had so
ardently desired. Almost the whole of the Decretum of
Burchard of Worms was included (c. 1095) in the Decretum
of Yvo of Chartres, itself the source of the same author's
Panormia which enjoyed a great reputation in the twelfth
century. The confusion, in fact, which the reformers had
sought to remedy remained. Several families of texts,
several types of collections were competing with one
another, and numerous contradictions became apparent
between the texts appealed to on the one hand by the
champions, on the other by the opponents of reform,
contradictions of which men were more readily aware in
a period of unification and of renewed study of law and of
philosophy. The Pope could hardly think of enforcing on
all alike, by the mere exercise of his authority, those collec-
tions with whose views he was in full agreement, not only
on account of the reputation enjoyed for so long by the
texts which these rejected, but also because the enforcement
in their entirety of the ideas of the reformers seemed at the
end of the eleventh century to be in practice impossible.
On political grounds, a compromising, harmonizing process
seemed advisable ; and the trend of legal science was
drawing men's minds to the same conclusion. A new
method of interpretation grew up, of which Yvo of Chartres
326 Legacy of the Middle Ages
and Bernold of Constance were, at the end of the eleventh
century, the first exponents. Their chief merit is to have
separated precept from counsel, and to have marked off
from principles of eternal validity the variable elements
of the law, which had been suggested by particular circum-
stances, whether of time, place, or persons, and the enforce-
ment of which other conditions might render unseasonable.
This amounted to the recognition of the relativity of rules
and provided a technical method of harmonizing contra-
dictions. Partial use was made of it by Algerus, a canonist
of Liege, while the range of its possibilities was extended
by Abelard in his Sic et Non. Shortly after the year 1140,
Gratian, a Bolognese monk, applied this new dialectic to
the whole mass of texts handed down by the collections
conciliar canons, decretals, fragments from patristic writings,
and excerpts from the Justinian compilations. On each
question he proposed the texts pro et contra, as in two
pleadings, and sought for an explanation of the divergence
by careful definitions of the meaning of the words and of
the precise applicability of the rules. His Decretum was
a private work, but was so generally used in the universities
and courts of the Church that it became the foundation of
the classic law.
Gratian had almost succeeded in separating theology and
ecclesiastical law and had collected and classified all the
important texts. His work nevertheless was not final.
On many points the solutions he offered were hesitating or
fragmentary. And new problems were arising in the
Church, the result of new and unforeseen events of which
the Crusades are an example. The development of trade,
the substitution for the chivalrous ideal of that spirit of
cunning, to which satirical literature from Renard the Fox
to Piers Plowman bears witness, determined the Church,
now reaching the zenith of her power, to transform into
Canon Law 3 2 7
law many a rule that had hitherto been of merely moral
obligation.
In order to complete the system of public and private
law of the Church, the Popes summoned general councils,
the Third (1179) and Fourth (1215) Lateran, the First
(1245) and Second (1274) Lyons, Vienne (1311), and added
to the number of decretals, the additions of Innocent III
(1198-1216) being particularly important. Of these canons
and decretals private compilations were made, and then in
1234 appeared the first official collection, by order of
Gregory IX. Decretals and canons of oecumenical councils
of a date subsequent to this were codified by order of Boni-
face VIII (Liber Sextus, 1298) and of Clement V (Clementinae,
1317). The texts to be found in these three collections
had legal force. They represented the whole of the papal
codification and therefore of the official and universal law
of the Church in the Middle Ages. 1 Many canonists, and
especially University professors, set about explaining the
meaning of each text of the Deere turn or of the Decretals (and
so were called respectively Decretists and Decretalists), or
systematically expounding the rules (Summae). The most
famous of these commentators, who exercised a great influence
upon the ideas and jurisprudence of their time, were Rufinus
(t 1203), Huguccio (t 1210), Innocent IV (f 1254), Hostiensis
(t 1271), Joannes Andreae (f 1348). The majority of the
remaining doctors confined themselves to faithfully copying
these masters, and the Speculum iudiciale of Wilhelmus
1 In the year 1500 two other series (Extravagantes of John XXII,
Extravagantes Communes) were added to these three collections by
Chappuis. The whole, formed by the Decretum and these five compila-
tions, of which two were merely of a private nature, like the Decretum^
received the title of the Corpus Juris Canonici. Gregory XIII author-
ized and ordered to be published a corrected edition at the end of
the sixteenth century, this being the only one used by the Church
until 1918.
328 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Durandus (f 1296). A clear picture of the state of the law
and of canonistic science at the very close of the Middle Ages
is given by Panormitanus (f 1445). Neither law nor science,
however, was characterized by the dogmatism that one
might expect, for the rules of the canon law were both
formulated and applied with a remarkable absence of rigidity.
The feature of the law which had the most disquieting
consequences in the eyes of the canonists was its general
character. For this a remedy was to be found both in par-
ticular laws (privileges) formulated for particular persons or
groups, in derogations from the law as usually enforced (dis-
pensations) granted by the legislative authority usually the
Pope when circumstances rendered such a course advisable.
A second danger was that the purpose of the law might be
defeated, either by malicious use of the powers it conferred
or by artful evasion of the restrictions set by it on individual
rights. Canonists and civilians were at one in forbidding
acts of unfair competition, exercise of rights with the object
of injuring another (the historic precedent of the doctrine
of abus de droif), and acts in deceit of the law. Finally,
since the law could not make provision for every hypothetical
case, the door was always open to custom. The danger of
unauthorized rules was met by the canonists in this way :
they declared custom to be binding only when it is reason-
able, i.e. when it is in accordance with the principles of the
Church, and with the assumed intention of the legislator,
and when it has been in use for a sufficient length of time
(legitime praescripta). The decision as to the presence of
these qualifications lay with the judge. If proved to satisfy
these requirements, a customary rule might, at least from
the time of Gregory IX, supersede statutory law. Thus
to the old rigidity of the civil law was opposed the equity
of the canon law, exemplified in the intelligent, loyal, and
benevolent interpretation and application of its rules.
Canon Law 329
A system which allowed so much freedom to the legislator
and which was tempered by so judicious a method of inter-
pretation could and ought to possess great logical consistency,
and it is this which gives its most striking feature to the law
of the Church.
II
In the thirteenth century the canons provided all the
elements of a perfect system of organization for the Church.
They reduced the laity to a condition of passive obedience
and regulated in every detail the life and position in the
hierarchy of the clerks, who from the earliest centuries of
the Christian era had been regarded as the inheritance of the
Lord (sors Domini), and whom the word Church was nor-
mally used to describe.
The definition of clerk embraced every one who had
received the tonsure. From the sixth century onwards the
tonsure might be given without ordination. In spite of
Celtic opposition, Rome insisted everywhere on the form
of the corona. The clerk, if he was to exercise spiritual
functions, must have received orders, whether minor or
major. From the thirteenth century the sub-diaconate
was considered as the first of the major orders, the second
being the diaconate. The two higher grades, priesthood
and episcopate, formed the sacerdotium. The clerk received
his orders in succession, one after the other and not per
saltum, after the lapse of certain intervals of time (inter-
stitia), and on condition that there was no impediment
through incapacity or irregularity. For candidates for
ordination the Church laid down very precise regulations on
age (a priest or bishop must have reached thirty years), and
also on their necessary physical and intellectual fitness and
moral and social standing. These conditions being satisfied,
ordination was conferred by a competent bishop, com-
33 Legacy of the Middle Ages
petence depending usually upon the domicile of the ordinand
or of his parents. In the thirteenth century, after much
controversy, the validity of ordination conferred by a
heretical, schismatic, or simoniacal bishop was allowed,
provided that such a bishop, having been himself regularly
consecrated, had received his authority in unbroken suc-
cession from the Apostles, and that neither the matter,
form, nor intention required by the Church had been
wanting. Ordination conferred an indelible character,
which could not be effaced by the most severe penalties
inflicted by the Church on the clerk, though by deposition
he was reduced to lay communion, and by degradation his
clerical privileges were withdrawn. Hence a valid ordination
could never be repeated. The clerks formed an order
apart in the Church and were bound by a strict code of
obligations. To engage in any secular occupation was
forbidden them, especially in those of commerce, of arms, in
the practice of medicine or of law. Worldly distractions
were prohibited and the association with women. They
might lodge only with persons free from all taint of sus-
picion. In order to bear witness to their renunciation of
the world, they were compelled to dress in plain clothes of
sober hue. Upon clerks in major orders, the popes in the
eleventh century imposed the rule, already formulated
in the fourth century but for long afterwards neglected, of
continence, under pain of the most severe penalties. The
Second Lateran Council in 1139 declared the marriage of
a clerk to be void. His ordination determined the spiritual
power and place in the hierarchical order of every clerk, his
office defined the sphere within which these powers were
to be exercised and his position in the hierarchy of juris-
diction. No ordination without a title was a principle
almost universally observed from the earliest centuries of the
Middle Ages. Orders were conferred with a view to the
Canon Law 33 1
exercise of a definite function within a definite church.
It was the duty of the bishop to provide for the maintenance
of the clerks whom he ordained. The method of dividing
the revenues of the diocese was fixed by canons in different
ways in different countries. From the early Middle Ages
onwards the revenues of the church to which the clerk was
attached, or part of them, constituted his benefice, the
permanent endowment of his office. The idea that the
maintenance of the clerk must be guaranteed was looked
upon as the justification for this benefice. From the
thirteenth century the conclusion was drawn that every
clerk who enjoyed adequate revenues from whatever source
could be ordained. The man ordained without a title was
received into a diocese, and the bishop, by missio canonica,
assigned him his official position within it. This regulation of
the beneficiary system belonged in the classic period of the
canon law to ius commune. Only an outline can here be
given of its many complications. When a benefice fell vacant
the designation of the titulary, which conferred simply ius ad
rem, i.e. a personal right to get the benefice, might depend
in varied ways upon either an ecclesiastical or a lay person,
and numerous conditions were imposed upon the candidates.
The collation properly so called, which conferred the
ius in re^ 'plenum ius y a full right of administration and
jurisdiction, belonged in general to the ordinary of the
place. Finally the new titulary took formal possession.
Henceforward to his obligations as a clerk were added the
obligations of his charge : he was bound to perform his
duties and to reside, and he could not become a candidate
for other benefices.
The constitution of the administrative and official frame-
work was practically uniform in all Christian countries.
For the spiritual needs of the people the country districts
and towns (in the latter the system did not become general
332 Legacy of the Middle Ages
until the twelfth century) were divided into parishes,
at the head of which was placed the parochus with cure of
souls. In the ninth century neighbouring parishes began
to be grouped into deaneries, presided over by an arch-
priest, who summoned together from time to time all the
clerks of his district (calendar). These rural chapters
acquired in the thirteenth century a legal personality and
were provided with a constitution. All these inferior
organisms were subdivisions of the diocese and were
dependent upon the bishop. To him was committed,
throughout the whole of his jurisdiction, the care of doctrine,
the distribution of spiritual benefits, legislative authority
(in so far as was allowed by ius commune), the super-
vision of the clerks and the administration of ecclesiastical
property. His contentious jurisdiction had reached its
culmination in the thirteenth century. Ration* personae,
he was the judge in all cases which concerned clerks and the
numerous classes of persons assimilated to them, and those
who had need of his protection. Ratione materiae, he was
the judge in all spiritual and mixed causes, such as concerned
heresy, sacrilege, oaths, marriage, ecclesiastical property,
wills, and burials. At the beginning of the classic period
these great powers were limited by those of the archdeacon,
who had his own jurisdiction which tended to absorb that
of the bishop. In the thirteenth century, however, the
importance of the archdeacon's position declined and from
that time onwards the bishop had regular assistants whose
authority was revocable as having been received from him.
These were the official, with control of all affairs of litiga-
tions, and the vicar-general, at first, it seems, appointed
temporarily during the absence of the bishop as his proctor,
and later permanently with authority to act in the bishop's
stead in all administrative affairs.
The power of the bishop was now shared only by the
Canon Law 333
canons. The practice of the common life, commended to
clerks from the earliest times, had been regularized in the
eighth and further developed in the eleventh century, and
had resulted in the formation of cathedral chapters. In
these each member had his own duties and prebend, and
together they acted as a council for the bishop and adminis-
tered the diocese during the vacancy of the see. In the
thirteenth century the chapter reserved to itself the right
granted by the canons to the assembly of the faithful, of
appointing the new titulary. The arrangement of dioceses
into provinces, an arrangement borrowed from the adminis-
trative system of Rome, had gone to pieces during the
period of barbarian rule, but was restored by St. Boniface
and Charlemagne. The position of the metropolitan was
still of some importance in the period of the classic law.
He confirmed and consecrated his suffragans, conducted
visitations in their dioceses, summoned them to provincial
synods over which he presided, and heard cases on appeal
from their courts. Nevertheless the Pope, who by the
granting of the pallium stressed the strict dependence of
the metropolitan upon the Apostolic See, did not augment
this intermediate power. To the patriarchs and primates
little was left but the honour of the title. It is a natural
tendency with all centralized monarchies to restrict the
number of powerful intermediaries and to control their
subjects either directly or through the medium of trusted
agents.
The Pope ruled over the whole Church. He was the
universal legislator, his power being limited only by natural
and positive divine law. He summoned general councils,
presided over them, and his confirmation was necessary for
the putting into force of their decisions. He put an end
to controversy on many points by means of decretals, he
was the interpreter of the law and granted privileges and
334 Legacy of the Middle Ages
dispensations. He was also the supreme judge and adminis-
trator. Cases of importance maiores causae of which
there never was a final enumeration, were reserved for his
judgement. Whilst episcopal impositions were closely
defined and regulated the Roman fiscal system (tithes,
annates) grew and increased from the time of Innocent III.
The general superintendence of ecclesiastical property
belonged to the Pope, who was considered by some to
be the owner or dispensator principalis of the patrimonium
Christi. Even spiritual powers became concentrated in his
hands. He alone could absolve from certain grave sins, of
which the first to be specified (1131) was assault upon
a clerk. He, as trustee of the Treasury of the Church,
monopolized, or nearly so, the distribution of indulgences,
which, in the eleventh century, had been organized by the
bishops. Further, he claimed for himself the canonizing of
saints. The bishops, whose jurisdiction was thus severely
limited, were strictly dependent upon the Holy See. From
1059 they were required to take an oath of obedience, and
the administration of their dioceses was effectually super-
vised by legates, of whom a certain number, legati a latere,
were cardinals and possessed of very extensive powers.
The Pope could create, divide, and suppress bishoprics,
confirm, translate, and depose bishops, and gradually reserved
to himself the right of nomination in more and more
instances. At the same time he often deprived them of
their right of disposing of minor benefices, to which he
himself appointed by means of provisory mandates (the
earliest is of the year 1137), expectative graces, and com-
mends ; the last method, which was also practised in the
case of bishoprics and abbeys, was extensively adopted as
early as the thirteenth century with a view to concealing
pluralism. Finally also the monks, who were to be found
in every diocese, were brought into strict dependence upon
Canon Law 335
the Pope, and by their triple vow of poverty, chastity, and
obedience were completely under the control of the Church.
The authorization of the Pope was necessary for the institu-
tion of an order and also for any change in its rule. The
decretals had carefully regulated the manner of governing
the monasteries and defined the conditions required either
for profession or for dispensation from vows, the intervention
of the Holy See being frequently necessary in the latter case.
The majority of monasteries from the time of Urban II
all those who obtained the libertas Romana by commending
themselves to Peter were exempt from episcopal jurisdic-
tion and directly dependent upon Rome.
This extreme centralization had as its necessary result
the development of the curia. The cardinals, who had been
originally the titular heads of the principal churches in
Rome and who had already been called upon by the Pope
to help him, now took from the time of the Gregorian
reforms a more and more active part in the government
of the Church. From 1059 they enjoyed a preponderating
influence in the elections to the papal chair, and in 1179
under Alexander III this became their exclusive privilege.
He who obtained two-thirds of the votes of the Sacred
College, whose procedure under the title of Conclave was
defined in the thirteenth century, was held to be elected.
In 1245 they acquired precedence over archbishops. They
were the councillors of the Pope and occupied the most
important places in the offices and tribunals of the curia,
the apostolic camera, chancery, and fenitentiaria.
The study of this hierarchical system leaves the impression
of a powerful unitary organization. Beneath the surface,
however, it was divided by conflicting interests and ten-
dencies, and the dominating position of the papacy was
threatened by forces which it had for the time being over-
come. The conflict of interests in the diocese of regular
336 Legacy of the Middle Ages
and secular, of bishop, chapter, and archdeacon, may have
been favourable to the development of the Roman system
of centralization. In all the groups of secular clergy there
\tere, however, to be found causes of complaint against
the papal power. From the thirteenth century onwards
many of the bishops and chapters were restive under the
papal impositions of tithes and the restrictions placed upon
their judicial powers and rights of collation to benefices.
The fourteenth century gave birth to the conciliar move-
ment, and the Sacred College itself now became restless and
at times claimed the right to dictate the policy of the
Pope it was going to elect. But in the classic period the
most effective opposition encountered by the Holy See
originated in the secular states. The definition of the
relations between the ' two powers * was the classical
subject of debate among the Popes and canonists in the
Middle Ages. Those who were haunted by the dream of
unity attempted to justify theocracy, that is to say the sole
supremacy of the Vicar of Christ, with a wealth of imagery
and symbols. The two swords spoken of in the Scriptures,
and representing the spiritual and temporal powers, belonged
to the Pope, the first being used by the Church, the second
on her behalf, ad nutum et patientiam sacerdotis. This
theory found expression in various polemical writings of
the period and inspired certain solemn pronouncements of
the time, the dictatus papae, drafted during the pontificate
of Gregory VII, the bull Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII
(1302). As a consequence of it Popes claimed the right
of appointing and deposing kings, of passing judgement
upon secular laws, and disposing of whole provinces. This
conception of the direct power of the Pope over princes
was more explicitly affirmed in periods of conflict. Thus
in the Gregorian collections were to be found all such texts
as would support the papal supremacy, even in temporal
Canon Law 337
affairs, and especially those which seemed to establish his
right to dispose of the empire. In general, however, the
Popes contented themselves with the claim to intervention
in secular matters rations peccati. Princes were regarded as
dependent upon them not as vassals unless they had
voluntarily done homage as such but as Christians. To
this theory of theocracy was opposed that of imperial
absolutism. At the same time amongst both parties were
to be found more balanced minds who hoped to establish
the peace of the world, not by the subordination of one
power to another, but by the co-ordination of one with
another. This theory of the independence of the temporal
and spiritual powers had been defined in a famous decretal
of Gelasius and was accepted by the Bolognese school from
the eleventh century onwards. And the great canonist
Huguccio had expressly declared : Utraque potestas scilicet
apostolica et imperialis, est a Deo, et neutra pendtt ex altera.
Dante summarizes this theory in certain lines of the Purga-
torio, and elaborates it more precisely in the De Monarchia.
It was adopted by almost all the decretalists of the fifteenth
century, and its practical result may be seen in the Con-
cordats.
Direct power, indirect power, co-ordination, phrases of
such vague connotation can only express tendencies and
aspirations. And to use them precisely, it would be neces-
sary to take account of the circumstances in which they
were coined, and of the various authorities on which they
came to bear. For indeed there was no uniform principle
which would embrace empire and communes, independent
kingdoms and territories in feudal dependence on the
Apostolic See. In their actuality such problems were of too
complex and too individual a nature to be solved by general
theories. They brought face to face with each other not
two ideal persons, Church and State, clerk and knight, but,
2873 z
33 8 Legacy of the Middle Ages
upon ground that bristled with practical difficulties, the
contradictory and conflicting interests of all those who
constituted on the one hand spiritual and on the other
secular society. This entanglement of interests may in the
first place be explained by the growth of ecclesiastical
property. In the payment of tithes and in the making of
pious bequests customs which were now obligatory
the Church possessed fertile and constant sources
of temporal wealth. In point of form, the Church's ideal
of property was that it should be allodial or independent.
But many churches had been built and endowed by indi-
viduals, who included them in their bequests ; much
ecclesiastical property, including even tithes, had been
feudalized, and over all the State maintained or reasserted
its sovereignty. In the Dark Ages the disposal both of
ecclesiastical property and offices was as far as possible
retained by the owners, overlords, and sovereigns. The
Gregorian reforms definitely forbade the lay investiture of
spiritual offices. As regards the minor benefices, the Church
substituted for the ownership of the lord, the right of
patronage, which included as its principal attribute the
right of presentation. This was declared by Alexander III
to be ius spirituali dnnexum, thus reserving to the ecclesias-
tical jurisdiction of the diocese cognizance of all disputed
cases. Thus the independence of the spiritual authority,
of the hierarchy, which the intimate connexion between
the benefice and the priestly function had seriously com-
promised, appeared to be safeguarded. But from the twelfth
century, although the Church admitted neither the private
right of the lord nor arbitrary dispossession, the fiscal
and judicial claims of the secular power were a perpetual
menace to her privileges. The apparent indefinite increase
of her possessions was a source of concern to sovereigns
and overlords alike. For since the fifth century the
Canon Law 339
rule had remained unchanged whereby the immovables
of the Church were inalienable, that is they could not be
sold nor be encumbered by real rights, except in case of
urgent necessity, manifest utility, or for reasons of charity.
Lay owners therefore ran the risk of being progressively
expropriated, while the law of mortmain still more seriously
endangered the freedom of alienation, so that the lords
were deprived of their dues upon the transfer of property.
The principle of the Church's right to acquire freehold
property had been strenuously maintained by the canon
law, but in practice compromises were arrived at, in the last
instance a payment by way of compensation being made
to the lord who suffered by some new acquisition of the
Church. Such a payment was held to have exhausted the
fiscal claims of the secular authorities. By Roman law these
authorities could impose on ecclesiastical property only
ordinary, not extraordinary taxes the privilege of * real
immunity ' but this classification of taxes had disappeared
for many centuries. The first denial of the Church's right
to this immunity came from the communes, and was
dictated, not by an anti-clerical spirit properly so called,
but by their equalitarian principles, their emancipation from
Roman law, and their exceptional needs. The struggles
which had occurred in France and Italy, especially in
Lombardy, between bishops and consuls, resulted in the
third and fourth Lateran Councils. By these the conditions
on which the so-called charitable subsidy was to be paid
were defined. Churches were only to contribute to the
expenses of the state for matters of general interest if
the contributions of the laity were inadequate and after the
consent of the bishop and clergy had been given and with
the authorization of the Pope. This was in effect to leave
to the Pope, who was omnipotent, the exclusive right to
tax the Church. Of this right he made free use and especially
Z 2
34 Legacy of the Middle Ages
to the advantage of the King of France. In the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries conflicts concerning ecclesiastical
immunities arose less often between Pope and prince ; the
stir caused by these quarrels in high places must not be
allowed to create an illusion as to their number ; the conflict
was between Pope and prince on the one hand and the
national clergy on the other, whom their two ' protectors '
combined to tax unsparingly, either to meet the needs of
a joint enterprise or as the result of the desire of each to
please the other. What the clergy however obtained was
the concession that the collection of taxes freely granted
by them should not be in the hands of royal officials ; for to
them entry into the domains of the Church was generally
denied, even for the arrest of criminals who had taken
shelter in consecrated places (right of asylum). This last
point, however, was not strictly enforced, for the Pope,
playing a conciliatory part, promulgated exceptions to the
general rule.
The Church showed no less resolution in defending her
clerks against the secular authorities than in defending her
own property. By reason of their sacred character and
their public duties, she had required and obtained as early
as the fourth century their exemption from the performance
of all personal obligations, military service (in feudal times
men from ecclesiastical fiefs were led to the host of the
overlord by an advocatus), the duty of watch and ward, labour
services, the payment of extraordinary dues. This was the
privilege of personal immunity. Above all they were exempt
from the control of secular jurisdiction (privilegium fort).
After many vicissitudes, this right was defined during the
classic period. The criminous clerk, or one against whom
a civil action (unless this concerned real property) was
brought, could not be arrested by a layman nor be tried in
a secular court, except in cases where the traditio Curiae
Canon Law 34 1
saeculari was allowed. The officialities arrogated to them-
selves cognizance of actions which concerned every kind of
clerk. In the thirteenth century the Pope defined with some
strictness the classes of clerks who could not claim the privi-
lege, in order that it might be confined to such as were faith-
ful to their calling, wore the tonsure and clerical dress, and
not be extended to married or apostate clerks, who were in
effect living as laymen. 1 In France the secular courts in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did not question the
principle of immunity, but they cited the decretals in
opposition to the claims of the ecclesiastical courts, and little
by little they formulated the view that disputes involving
the public interest belonged to the royal jurisdiction.
The history of the legal privileges of the Church in the
Middle Ages may be summarized thus. Their positive
origin is to be found in Roman and early medieval law ; the
Church, taking into consideration the reasons for their
existence (the sacred character of ecclesiastical property and
persons) and their justification in Holy Scripture, canonized
the rules consecrated by law and custom. The papacy
declared itself to be the guardian and moderator of these
privileges, limited the powers of the ecclesiastical courts
and conceded subsidies to the secular authority. The
interests of the prince were served alike by violent publicists
and by patient administrators little inclined for disputes
and fearing censure. Conflicts of interest within the Church,
various practical expedients of the state officials, temporary
alliances between the Pope and the prince for overcoming
the resistance of the national clergy, between prince and
clergy to limit the power of Rome, between the Pope and
clergy to resist secular exactions such are the outlines of the
picture presented by the history of the relations between
the * two powers ' in the Middle Ages, to be reproduced
1 See the works of Gencstal on the privilegium fort.
34 2 Legacy of the Middle Ages
with a surprising variety of shade and detail. If on some
occasions there were difficulties, on others Church and
State combined to find a solution. Nowhere is this col-
laboration more noteworthy than in their efforts to maintain
the unity of the faith. Since the time of St. Augustine
the theory of intolerance was hardly questioned in the
Christian world. Hence the legislation of the Roman
Emperors against schismatics and heretics, hence crusades
against dissenting sects and the organization in the thir-
teenth century of the courts of the Inquisition, with their
secret procedure and the denial of the right of appeal.
It was also this zeal for orthodoxy which compelled the
canon law to forbid all relations with the excommunicated
and to exclude Jews from public offices.
Ill
Thus the Church by a variety of means succeeded in
maintaining the common faith. For Christian society she
prescribed a discipline; prince and subject she instructed
in their duties and their rights. The duty of the prince was
to guarantee the reign of justice, the chief means to be used
to this end being law, which should respect the rights of
God and of the Church, and war. War was an act of
vindictive justice which only the prince could perform.
It must not be entered into with a view to conquest but
only for the restoration of peace, the punishment of evil-
doers, and the recovery of stolen property. An attack made
on another without justification, in a mere spirit of revenge
or gain, was held to be unjust. In this way the Church
limited the casus belli. In the feudal age the councils, in
addition, attempted to alleviate the effects of a state of war
by prohibiting it on certain days (truce of God), in certain
places, and in respect of certain persons (peace of God).
As for the subject, his first duty was to have a respect for
Canon Law 343
authority ; all power was of God, and the prince, by his
consecration, had himself acquired an additionally sacred
character. Indeed, obedience to positive law was canonically
sanctioned by all the penalties known to criminal law, more
especially those proper to homicide and carnal faults.
Before God all men were equal, but human law had to
blend in harmony inequalities of rank and status. From
this inequality peace ensued, pax, tranquillitas ordinis. The
canonists maintained the Roman tradition of a world
immutably organized upon a hierarchic basis, a tradition
dear to the Middle Ages. To them social inequalities
appeared as a special dispensation of Providence, modelled
on the Court of the King of Heaven and instituted
for the salvation of souls. By Isidore of Seville and Rufinus
for example, slavery, though never regarded with favour by
the Church, was thought to help strayers from the right
path to amend their lives. To remain in that state in which
he was born and faithfully to fulfil the obligations which it
entailed, such was the counsel which the Church gave to
every Christian. In order to ensure the strict observance
of the rules of their craft, the Church sanctioned the prac-
tice, common to many guilds, of requiring an oath on the
admission of their members. On the other hand, in order to
counteract whatever excessive harshness might be in her
doctrine of absolute submission to the chances of birth,
the Church had a twofold principle : the protection of the
oppressed, the solidarity of the faithful. The Church's
care for the oppressed was shown in the maintenance of
charitable institutions and in the protection afforded to
miser abiles persona*, widows and orphans. Thus the Church
courts had cognizance of cases in which widows were con-
cerned, whenever justice had been denied, spoliation
suffered, or dower-rights disputed. The conception of the
solidarity of the faithful found its practical expression in
344 Legacy of the Middle Ages
public worship. All the faithful were received and incor-
porated within the Church at baptism, all shared without
distinction in the same sacraments, particularly in those of
Penance and the Eucharist. Since the Fourth Lateran
Council all the faithful were bound to communicate once
a year. All were alike bound by the rules of the liturgical
year as to the order of public worship, days of fasting and
of rest. The idea of the communion of saints found its
highest juristic expression in the well-known theory of the
Treasury of the Church, which seems to have been first
fully developed towards the middle of the thirteenth
century by Hugh of St. Cher. The merits of Jesus Christ,
the saints, and the faithful still on earth were regarded as
the common inheritance of all the members of the Church
upon which they were permitted to draw, by means of
indulgences, that were held to remit, wholly or partly, the
. punishments incurred by their sins.
The sacrament by which the Church exercised the widest
influence upon general social life was that of marriage. In
the tenth century she acquired the exclusive right of legis-
lating on matrimonial matters and of jurisdiction not only
over cases concerning the matrimonial bond, but also over all
cognate questions, such as adultery, the legitimacy of children,
separation a mensa et toro y and, to a certain degree, the
financial relations of husband and wife. For a marriage to be
validly contracted, neither rite nor formality was required.
The two parties were themselves the authors of the contract
and the ministers of the sacrament. The difficult point was
to define exactly the nature of this contractual sacrament.
Was it purely consensual, and therefore concluded from
the moment of the exchange of promises, or was it in some
sort a real contract that is completed only after consumma-
tion? In the early period of the canon law both these
conceptions found support. Gratian still holds that the
Canon Law 345
analogy of the symbol of the union of Christ with His
Church required the copula carnalis. But from the time of
Peter Lombard (c. 1153) the idea that marriage was com-
pleted by consent was victorious, an idea in conformity
with the tradition of the Roman law and the general spirit
of the canon law. It was not difficult to distinguish between
the actual promise by which marriage was contracted and
that made with a view to the future, the contract of be-
trothal, which could be broken in certain cases by either
party and always by mutual consent. But the difficulty,
which was sometimes perplexing, was to prove the existence
of these purely consensual contracts. Such proof could
hardly be supplied except by the agreement of two wit-
nesses who had been present at the exchange of promises,
or again by the possession of a certain legal status (nomen,
tractatus,fama). Before the Council of Trent the presence
of a priest was not required for the validity of a marriage
and the practice of keeping parochial registers only began
in the fifteenth century. Marriage before a notary was rare
in the Middle Ages and the official documents settling the
dos or the donatio propter nuptias were often drawn up
before the celebration of the marriage. The consent must
have been given with a clear mind and a free will ; any
error concerning the identity of one of the two parties, or
some essential and distinctive quality of a party in view of
which the marriage was entered into, or again the liberty
of a party, rendered it null and void. Marriage could not be
validly contracted under the influence of fear (metus grams)
or deceit. Besides defining particular conditions requisite
for marriage, the canon law laid down certain general
conditions necessary for the validity of the act of consent.
The theory of impediments, diriment or prohibitive, was
characterized in the thirteenth century by leniency and
common sense. In general, the regulations as to age imposed
346 Legacy of the Middle Ages
by Roman law were maintained. But in view of its end
marriage below the age of puberty was held to be valid
where it was sanctioned by customs and the parties were
doli et copulae capaccs, able to beget children and capable
of understanding the act they were performing. This
consideration of the end of marriage caused the canonists
to reckon impotence at the time of the mutual promise
among the causes of nullity, in spite of the general principle
of consent. The Church recognized the validity of marriage
between slaves, between a freeman and a person of servile
status, between catholics and heretics or those who had been
excommunicated. In these last cases the impediment which
had formerly been diriment became simply prohibitive.
A difference of faith alone remained an obstacle as between
a Christian and a heathen, since one of the parties would
not have been baptized, a necessary condition for participa-
tion in any of the sacraments. Circumstances likewise
compelled the Church to abandon the exogamic system she
had formerly adopted, by which at the outset of the classic
period, marriage between relations of the seventh degree
was prohibited. Now in rural communities there was
certain to be some connexion whether by blood or by
marriage between all the inhabitants. By the Fourth
Lateran Council the impediment of consanguinity was
confined to relationship within the fourth degree. The
rules concerning impediments through affinity were sim-
plified and it likewise was restricted to connexion within
the fourth degree. Finally, in classic law limitations were
imposed upon spiritual relationship arising from sponsorship.
Similarly rules concerning impediments penal in themselves
were relaxed. Marriage was no longer forbidden, except
occasionally, between the adulterous party who might become
free and the fellow-sinner. Abduction ceased to be regarded
as an impediment to marriage provided the rapta had been
Canon Law 347
set at liberty. In one point only did the canon law make
the doctrine of impediments more strict, namely in declaring
the marriage of professed religious and clerks in major
orders to be null. In spite of these relaxations, the obstacles
in the way of contracting a valid marriage were sufficiently
numerous to make it possible for parties to discover too
late that they had involuntarily disregarded some impedi-
ment. In such cases, in consideration of their good faith,
the children of the marriage were held to be legitimate
and all the consequences which would have resulted from
a valid marriage were admitted up to the day of the declara-
tion of nullity. This was known as a putative marriage.
This important theory was developed by the decretists and
officially sanctioned from the time of Alexander III. In
order to obtain a declaration of nullity, or to prevent a' mar-
riage taking place on the ground of these various impedi-
ments, it was necessary to have recourse to legal action,
a course only allowedj however, with discretion. Prosecu-
tion by the ecclesiastical authority was rare and there was
a tendency to restrict the number of persons who might
make the accusation or denunciation. It was not lawful
for those unrelated to the parties, except in the absence of
near relatives, and amongst strangers preference was given
to those of known prudence. In this way the danger that
the validity of a marriage should be questioned by the ill-
informed and maliciously intentioned was avoided. Yet
though the canonists were alive to the necessity of placing
restrictions upon hasty accusation, they showed an equal
solicitude in allowing time to be no bar to the hearing of
matrimonial causes, in maintaining the imprescriptibility
of all proceedings and in permitting every decision to
be indefinitely open to revision. The sole object of
the legal action was to disprove the existence of the
sacramental bond. In the classic age, if this existed it was
348 Legacy of the Middle Ages
indissoluble in every case, even if one party should have
committed adultery. 1 The Church nevertheless instituted
a legal means by which an end might be put to the common
life without a divorce. This was the judicial separation,
which continued to be called divortium, and of which the
causes were fornication, apostasy, and grave cruelty. Thus
in principle the matrimonial contract could only be dis-
solved by death. The surviving party might remarry, but
while sanctioned in express terms by the Church, second
marriages were not encouraged by her.
Before God the two parties to a marriage were equal and
this doctrine of equality was first taught by Christianity.
In practice it meant, above all, that the obligations, especially
that of fidelity, were mutual. Nevertheless, the husband
was head of the household, and in virtue of his position as
such, he might choose the place of abode, reasonably correct
his wife and demand from her such domestic duties as were
consonant with her social position. Although the Church
was less directly concerned with the pecuniary aspect of
marriage, it was nevertheless a principle of the canon law,
inspired by the idea of protection of the widow, that no
marriage could be contracted without a dower. Even in
the rules concerning the system of dowry (dos) the theories
of the canonists have not been without influence upon
secular jurisprudence, especially in the South of France.
Influenced by practical considerations and by a particular
1 If, however, a heathen, whose marriage by natural law was valid,
were converted and the other party remained heathen and deserted him
or encouraged him to forsake his religion, the new convert might remarry
one who shared his faith (privilegium Paulinum). It should also be
added that a non-consummated marriage was dissolved by the entry
into a religious order of one of the parties and might in any case be
dissolved by the pope. These last rules were a survival from the doctrine
of Gratian, who regarded marriage as complete only after the copula
carnalis.
Canon Law 349
interpretation of the system of Justinian they inclined
towards the doctrine of the inalienability in value as distinct
from an absolute inalienability in specie, a position which
ensures both the protection of the dowry and the credit
of husband and wife. Amongst the chief ends of marriage
was the procreation of children. Classic law was severe in
its treatment of bastards : it refused them Holy Orders
and restricted their capacity. This attitude is explained
by the leaning of the Church in favour of marriage, and
more particularly by the campaign she undertook in the
eleventh century against the concubinage of clerks. On
the other hand the Church was anxious to allow legitimacy
where possible, as the theory of putative marriage shows.
Thus the scope of the Roman theory of legitimation was
widened. Children born before marriage were legitimized
of right without the necessity of complying with any of the
conditions formerly required.
The study of the origins of the temporal property of the
Church has shown the profound influence of the canon law
upon secular life. Throughout the Christian world, laws
concerning the transmission of property upon death had
been materially affected by the action of the Church.
It was under the influence of the Church that the practice
of making a will became general, while the procedure
required for its drawing up was simplified by the abolition
of the Roman beredis institutio, and by the reduction of the
number of required witnesses to two. The Church also
exercised an influence on the rules of intestate successions.
The late Sir Paul Vinogradoff observed that she was the most
powerful opponent of the system which excluded women
from the right of succession to land, and that she always
looked favourably upon the view that land might be trans-
mitted in the same way and with as little formality as money
and movable property.
35 Legacy of the Middle Ages
The sphere in which the direct influence of the canon
law upon the secular law, as far as it concerned real property,
was most strongly felt was that of possession. The two
important chapters on law concerning first the protection
of possession, and secondly acquisition by prolonged posses-
sion, were in fact re-written in the canonists. In order to
protect the property of the Church against powerful lords
who brought accusations against bishops, in order to seize
their goods, the canonists of the ninth century had laid
down the principle : Spoliatus ante omnia restituendus. The
bishop who had been thus treated was restored to possession
of his goods before any process for their recovery was started.
This was nothing more than an exception in procedure,
made for the advantage of determinate individuals who had
suffered complete spoliation. In the eleventh century the
principle of the restitutio spolii was extended by Gregory VII
to civil processes, and in actual practice to persons other
than bishops, sometimes even when only partial spoliation
had occurred. Thus steps were taken towards the general
notion of possessory remedy. But at present it was simply
a question of an intermediate remedy involved in the course
of an action, the application of which was entrusted to the
judge's office. The decretists preserved in the exceptio
spolii the principal features of this traditional remedy. But
they added thereto an action in its own right ; in order to
be reinstated, the aggrieved party must himself bring an
injunction or a suit against the deforciant. This is a great
novelty, the consequences of which can still be perceived in
French law ; to the principle of the exception in procedure
is now added the principle that spoliation and violence
give rise to an action in reprisal. Roman law provided the
bases for this theory ; but canon law substituted for the
deiectio, on which the other system based the action, a far
wider foundation. Every case of unjust deforcement of
Canon Law 351
possession or quasi-possession, one might even go so far as
to say every arbitrary obstacle offered to the exercise of
a right, opens the way for this new canonical form of action
which appears for the first time in the Summa of Sicardus of
Cremona (c. 1180) under the name of Condictio ex Canone
Redintegranda. By this Condictio the protection of possession
went beyond the province assigned to it in Roman law. Not
only were the causes of action extended, but the action
lay in favour of any de facto holder (detentor) against the
present possessor, even when the matter in question was
a chattel or a mere right (for example an office, a benefice,
or a family right). It was sufficient for a plaintiff to show
that he had been in possession before the present possessor.
The above extension was accompanied by an extension
of the doctrine of acquisition of title by prescription. Thus
privileges and ecclesiastical local divisions were considered
proper subjects for prescription, that is title was acquired
by prolonged enjoyment. But here too canon law pro-
foundly modified by extension the theory which it borrowed
from Roman law. The Roman theory was that prescription
only ran if the possessor had acquired under a iustus titulus
(by sale, gift, exchange, and so forth) and was in good faith
at the beginning of his possession : subsequent bad faith
did not prevent time continuing to run. But in the eyes
of the canonists, bad faith, whenever occurring, was a sin.
The civil law punished the negligence of the owner who
did not possess, the canon law reproved the sin of one who
sought to prescribe without good faith. And this is why,
shortly after Gratian's Decretum, which had only dealt with
prescription as extinguishing rights of action, an anonymous
author classifies as furtum the retention of an object, the
true owner of which has come to one's knowledge. Never-
theless this doctrine was at first only applied to ecclesiastical
property out of regard, according to Rufinus, to its immunity.
352 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Stephen of Tournai considerably widened its scope by
declaring that the retention of the property of another was
forbidden by natural law and by the principles of equity.
This was in effect to condemn the whole theory of prescrip-
tion. Huguccio, with more caution, differentiated between
the spiritual and temporal forum : prescription might
justify possession before the law but not before conscience.
Innocent III, in a famous decretal (Vigilanti), decided that
he who claimed by prescription must not at any time have
been aware that the object belonged to another. The
commentators were long doubtful as to the exact import
of this decretal and it provided an opportunity for the
discussion of the great problem of the conflict of principles
between the canons and secular law. From the fifteenth
century, however, the requirement of continuous good faith
became a principle of the secular law. It was adopted in
Germany at the time of the Reception, it appeared in
France in the Great Customal, and more recently in several
Italian codes.
But the greatest influence of the doctrine of bona fides
was destined to lie in the sphere of obligations, where it
led to the completion of the Roman theory of contracts
and pacts.
Roman law had gradually rid itself of formalism. Some
centuries before the Christian era an agreement enforceable
at law could only be created by means of ritual words and
symbolic acts. From the period of the end of the Republic
may be dated the beginning of real and consensual con^
tracts, while certain pacts also became enforceable by
action. But apart from these exceptions the rule remained
that simple agreements by mutual consent were not legally
binding, ex nudo facto actio non oritur. In the Middle Ages,
in order to make the promise more binding or simply to
ensure its legal efficacy, the practice arose of taking an oath.
Canon Law 353
This was not readily accepted by the Church, and after
recognition was accorded to the practice, she claimed the
right of control over it. It was by this means that the
competence of the ecclesiastical tribunals penetrated into
the province of obligations. While the oath implied an
obligation towards God, it was recognized that it also gave
rise to an accessory obligation between the parties. It was
a true formal contract, unilateral, having its cause in itself,
and giving rise to an imprescriptible and perpetual obliga-
tion, whose scope was almost unlimited. It was used not
only to give added force to agreements made within the
terms of the civil law, but even to give validity to agree-
ments entered into in direct opposition to the civil and
even to the canon law. Examples would be the oath
of a woman to respect an alienation . of her dos, and an
agreement under oath to pay interest. And it was a
much debated question whether the oath only was valid,
the agreement itself remaining of no effect, or whether the
agreement was made valid by the oath. But between the
promise made on oath and a simple promise there was no
difference before God. All agreements, by whatever form
they were entered upon, were binding upon the conscience.
Not to fulfil the obligations of a pact was equivalent to
a lie and the canonists of the twelfth century strove after
a legal remedy for its non-fulfilment. According to Huguccio
the duty of ensuring the carrying out of an obligation
arising from a pact lay with the judge. According to
Innocent IV, the only course open to the plaintiff was
denunciatio evangelica. The general opinion, however,
expressed in the Glossa ordinaria in the Decretum allowed to
whoever wished to exact the fulfilment of a simple promise,
a condictio ex canone. Thus was affirmed the principle,
common to all modern law, of the essential part played by
the will in originating obligations. That this theory of the
2873 A a
354 Legacy of the Middle Ages
pact (pactum mutuum) was directly contrary to a maxim
of the Roman law and of secular legislation was somewhat
embarrassing for the canonists. The attempts which they
made to find a practical reconciliation between their theory
and Roman law gave rise to the formulation of a new essential
requirement of a valid contract, an element which the
Romans had not clearly apprehended, namely the causa.
An informal promise would, in most cases, be confirmed
by a written act, cautio. Now the Roman texts, moreover,
relative to the querela non numeratae fecuniae laid down
that if the written act which established mutuum should
contain a mention of the causa y this should constitute an
acknowledgement of his obligation on the part of the
promissor, and should be accepted as such by the judge,
the burden of proving it invalid, so as to release himself,
being laid on the promissor. If on the other hand the
causa were not mentioned, the burthen of proof lay with the
party insisting upon the fulfilment of the promise. These
rules were recalled in a celebrated letter of Gregory IX to
the prior of St. Bartholomew's, and the decretalists boldly
drew from them the conclusion that all promises supported
by causa were enforceable by Roman law. In the fifteenth
century they forgot even the written act and thought only
of the promise : cautio seu debitum, said Panormitanus.
In other words, every pact for which there was a sufficient
legal causa was valid. It mattered not that it was a pact
nudum a solemnitate provided that it was not nudum a causa.
On the definition of c ausa, the canonists were not, it is true,
fully agreed, and in their very differences too they showed
themselves the precursors of modern controversies. The
general meaning on which all were agreed was the necessity
of a purpose to be attained. There was causa if the pro-
missor had in view a definite result, either some definite
legal act or something more comprehensive such as peace.
Canon Law 355
And in order that morality might be safeguarded, it was
not only necessary that the promissor should have an object,
but that this object should be reasonable and equitable.
Reason and equity were interpreted by the canonists in
synallagmatic contracts as the exchange of strictly equal
obligations, that is, the value of the service to be rendered
by one party must be equal to that of the service to be
rendered by the other. To find this balance was not
always an easy task. The only simple case was that in which
the object delivered was a sum of money, as would occur
in a contract for a loan. Exactly the same sum must be
repaid. Here we have the canonist theory of usury, with
its prohibition of all lending at interest. But in the majority
of cases the contract is concerned with the rendering of
certain services, when it becomes a question of fixing a just
wage, or with the conveyance of an immovable or of
a movable other than money, when it becomes a question
of fixing a just price, of determining the effect of a breach
or non-execution of the contract by one of the parties.
In all commutative contracts, the canonists, in order to fix
the price, took account of the material object and the
services to be supplied by the contracting party. Far from
accepting the law of supply and demand as its base, they
had an objective standard of value, which led them to
postulate a fixed tariff. All productive work was worthy
of a wage. The canonists justified the profits of the worker
on the land, whose efforts are as tangible as their results
and who wages an honest warfare with the soil. But they
condemned mercantile profits, obtained without any trans-
formation of matter, the result of speculation and bad faith.
These economic theories were founded upon the reasoning
of Aristotle, upon the hatred of the canonists for all gain
resulting from mere chance, and were perhaps due also to
a feeling of distrust on the part of the Church as the owner
A a 2
356 Legacy of the Middle Ages
of much landed property, for the merchant class, who in the
communes were dealing the first blows at her power. In
practice the theory of the just price led the canonists to
adopt the strictest rules laid down by the civilians in the
matter of laesio for cases of injury. And it was indeed this
same idea of equilibrium and of commutative justice which
gave rise to the theory of the termination of contracts.
If one party did not keep his agreement, the other party was
released from theirs, non servantifidem, fides non est servanda.
This maxim, which seems to have originated with Huguccio,
had in the first instance the same meaning as the Roman
maxim : dolus dolo compensator. But already under Inno-
cent III, a sometime pupil of Huguccio, the question was
debated as one belonging to the sphere of contracts. In the
saying of Huguccio, which he confirmed in three decretals,
the Pope saw a mere interpretation of the intentions of the
contracting parties, the operation of an implied condition ;
neither party was bound except on condition of performance
by the other party. Both these conceptions, the penal and
the contractual, were to be found in the writings of the
canonists in the thirteenth century. What was common to
both and also in the nature of an innovation was the attempt
to base upon a general principle the different hypotheses
upon which termination was admitted in Roman law.
The starting-point of the canonist theory of contract was
thus the repression of sin, as that of the praetorian law was
the repression of wrong. Wrong and sin indeed were not
always clearly differentiated. Crimen and feccatum were
frequently used synonymously in the earlier texts, for it
was a confusion of which the canonists and civilians alike
were guilty, and which was not without its results. In his
Mirror of Justices Andrew Horn still classifies wrongs in
accordance with the theological order of mortal and venial
sins, and this was not without effect, since as the infinite
Canon Law 357
variety of possible wrongdoing made any strict classification
impossible, the number of wrongs might be freely extended,
while the minute and detailed analysis of the circumstances
of the sin, a practice popularized by the Celtic and Prankish
penitentials and carried to an extreme by the casuists,
provided an excellent model for modern criminal lawyers.
This analysis of the circumstances is perhaps the greatest
debt which penal secular law, and especially through the work
of the old Italian criminalists, owes to the canon law.
The conception of many wrongful acts Bartolus instances
particularly fur turn and iniuria was widened and modified.
Above all, a method was provided for the precise investiga-
tion in any given case of the intention (which in itself is not
a justification of the result, but which furnishes the means
of assessing the responsibility of the criminal), and of the
external circumstances of the act, especially of cases of
necessity. It must be added, however, that while in
general the canon law maintained the principle of personal
responsibility for faults, it did not altogether escape the
tendency common to all medieval legal systems, which is,
in determining the penalty, to take account of the group as
much as of the individual, and to obtain reparation, which
should be complete, exemplary, and deterrent, by demand-
ing it from the innocent if it could not be paid by the
guilty. Canon law thus adopted the idea of group responsi-
bility, the penal responsibility of the heir, of corporations
and associations, of the family of the offenders who had
injured the rights of the Church. It borrowed from the
secular law the majority of its vindictive penalties, some-
times with modifications. Thus imprisonment, which had
originally been purely preventive, became a true punish-
ment, which involved solitary confinement in a dungeon
for the moral safeguarding of the prisoners as well as enforced
inaction for the purifying of their souls. The canonist idea
358 Legacy of the Middle Ages
of reformative penalties, excommunication, interdict, sus-
pension, was not without originality. It had as one of its
objects the amendment of the guilty person, although
the Church was as solicitous for their repentance as for
their amendment. The most important of these penalties
was excommunication, which might be either a total
exclusion from the Church (major excommunication), or
merely an exclusion from participation in the sacraments
and the liturgy (minor excommunication). In the pre-
classic period of the law all relations with the excommuni-
cated were forbidden. But in the eleventh century this too
severe rule was modified by numerous exceptions, and at
the end of the Middle Ages, by the bull Ad vitanda of
Martin V (1418), it operated only in the case of those who
had been excommunicated specialiter et expresse.
Finally, while the ecclesiastical courts adopted little by
little almost all the rules of the Roman procedure, they ap-
plied both discrimination and additions. From the Ger-
manic law they borrowed certain features, for example the
purgatio. In order to ensure the effectual prosecution of
crime the Church introduced the system of denunciation,
and to punish misconduct and scandals amongst clerks the
inquisitorial procedure. The ordines iudiciarii of the
canonists drew up detailed rules as to proof, especially
proof by witnesses. In order to establish a fact two ocular
or auricular witnesses were required, worthy of credence
and agreeing in all points. The judge retained a great
discretion in weighing the evidence, his sentence being
dependent only on the testimony of the witnesses ' if he
were thereto inclined '. No form of procedure has ever
given a greater importance to the officium iudicis, and in no
other has the search for truth been more effectively kept
free from the shackles of formalism. We have already
called attention to this feature in the case of marriage, and
Canon Law 359
there is no better illustration of it than the theory of
notoriety, according to which all notorious facts were
adjudged summarily without formal accusation or right
of appeal.
At the very time at which the system of the canon law
was reaching completion the end of the Church's period of
omnipotence was approaching. Internal revolutions the
transference of the Papacy to Avignon, the Great Schism,
the Conciliar movement, the Reformation brought tem-
porarily to the ground the various organisms of which she
was composed and deprived her of the allegiance of a great
many subjects. The power of national states increased,
and little by little the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy
was restricted to spiritual concerns. Acting upon the
theories of absolutism and of enlightened despotism, kings
regained control of all temporal and even of ecclesiastical
affairs (iura circa sacra). The State controlled the activities
and censures of the Church, supervised its accessions of
property, taxed its temporal possessions, bridled the religious
orders, collated to benefices, sapped ecclesiastical juris-
diction. Its own powers increased at the expense of those
of the Church, which were regarded as dependent upon
concessions made by princes and therefore revocable, and
sometimes as bold usurpations of public rights. The last
period in this evolution was reached with the era of tolera-
tion (all forms of faith being on terms of equality) and
the separation of Church and State.
The Church has not accepted this dispersion of her
powers. On certain points she has enunciated her rights as
dogmas. In proportion as her sphere of influence was
diminished, the schools interpreted her principles more
strictly in these, and these lost nothing of their severity in
actual practice. Theological justifications replaced argu-
360 . Legacy of the Middle Ages
ments drawn from positive law. Where formerly canonists
had justified the immunity of clerks and ecclesiastical pro-
perty by citations from the Theodosian code and from the
decretals, for Juan Lopez (fifteenth century) or Girolamo
Albani (sixteenth century) it sufficed to plead their sacred
character and the support of Scripture, in which the
priest, he said, appeared ' as a sort of angel or god '. On
other points, for example in the sphere of economic rela-
tions, there was progressive adaptation of the law to changing
conditions. As commercial ventures increased the impor-
tance of coin and as the Church had need of money and
also of the means of investing her capital, the theories of
usury and of a just price were modified, and nothing is more
curious than to watch the ingenuity and casuistry of the
theologians and canonists in their attempts to reconcile
their principles with necessity.
One section of the classic law therefore has become
obsolete, another has been modified. Yet another has
remained intact and alive. We have noted at the beginning
of this essay the careful way in which the Church has
preserved her former discipline what she has borrowed from
the past is clearly seen in the rich apparatus of notes in the
recent Codex (1918) and also some important contributions
of canon to modern law. The catalogue of these debts is
not yet complete, for every year the most learned and most
acute of our civilians and those least inclined to overrate
the practical value of historical research make fresh addi-
tions to it. The point to be emphasized is that neither the
canonists nor the civilians intended to draw up a list of mere
* relics '. The classic law is not dead ; its principles and
the development of their consequences continues. Two
examples will illustrate this point. First, the characteristic
which appeared fundamental in the history of the hierarchy,
that is centralization, was brought into prominence in the
Canon Law 361
sixteenth century by the Council of Trent and by the popes,
especially Pope Sixtus V, the founder of the Roman Con-
gregations. The Vatican council (1870) defined papal
infallibility and Rome continues along its monarchical way.
And again, the ideas of good faith and equity which underlay
the canonist theory of contracts still influence the legislators
of to-day, and those shrewd conceptions of the just price
and a just wage are more vital than any system that has been
practically applied because they express our permanent
ideal. Thus the present is linked to the distant centuries of
Innocent III and Gregory VII ; and indeed even to those
more distant, for many of the ideas which bore fruit in the
classic age were the heritage of past civilizations. The care
of the poor and the oppressed which was characteristic of
Judaism, the Roman love of order and authority, the Greek
conceptions of political economy and formal logic, the
enthusiasm and scrupulousness of the Celts, which were
shown more particularly in their penitential system all
these conquests of the human mind, which seemed to her
in accordance with her fundamental principles, went to the
enrichment of the Church's law, and were assimilated
to her own doctrine after such modification and correction as
was required to bring them into harmony with her own
point of view. It is indeed the highest moral tradition of
the West and of the Mediterranean peoples which has been
gathered up and handed down to us in the classic law of
the Church.
GABRIEL LE BRAS.
iii. ROMAN LAW
AMONG the most important of those treasures of the mind
handed down by the Middle Ages to modern times must be
reckoned the law of Rome. The complete rule and canon
of a highly organized and civilized society, it establishes
a satisfactory balance between each man's rights and his
duties, visiting their violation with fixed sanctions, and
laying down forms of procedure which permit of those
sanctions being applied with discernment or their rigour
relaxed. Over all stood an authority, powerful to protect
the life and labour of the individual, prudent to secure for
the whole people the full benefit of individual effort. The
formulation of Roman Law was the greatest triumph of the
ancient world. In it the Middle Ages had, of course, no
part ; but they have transmitted it to us. The great
cataclysm of the invasions might easily have destroyed
Roman Law when it destroyed the political sovereignty of
Rome. To reawaken, to restore to life, to spread it far and
wide in everyday use, this was the work of the Middle Ages ;
a work so well performed and so lasting that the Roman
system remained the common law of Germany down to the
promulgation of the German Civil Code of 1900 ; that it
governed the south of France till the Civil Code of 1804 ;
and inspired elsewhere almost every* legal system of the
West. In short, the Middle Ages themselves were inspired
by certain general conceptions of Roman Law which were
only to find their full fruition in the world of to-day.
For this wonderful survival we must at once acknowledge
a great debt of gratitude to the Middle Ages. Nevertheless,
the medieval endeavour was simply to take practical advan-
tage of this legal gospel of Rome ; in so doing they occa-
sionally altered and even falsified it, sometimes from
364 Legacy of the Middle Ages
prejudice, sometimes in the process of adapting the law
of Rome to the new conditions which it was called upon to
govern. The varying perspicacity of interpreters, the
requirements of practice, the new and sometimes contra-
dictory aspirations of peoples, all these factors made for
a partial deviation of medieval Roman Law from the
historical law of ancient Rome. It follows that what they
have handed down to us is a Roman Law very far from its
early purity, complicated and tortured by the efforts of
medieval thought. To sort out the legal stock-in-trade,
and to ascertain what it is that modern society owes to
ancient and what to medieval Roman Law would require
an analysis somewhat too detailed for such an essay as this.
It will, I believe, be easier and at the same time sufficiently
accurate to give a general view of the great movement of ideas
of which Roman Law was at once the axis and the instru-
ment from the downfall of Roman sovereignty to our own
day. TO do so we will investigate three great questions :
I. How and when was the renaissance of Roman Law in
Western Europe brought about, and what has been in
regard to it the attitude from time to time of scholars and
practising lawyers ? II. Which are the great leading con-
ceptions of Rome which struggled to life again in the Middle
Ages and are being more fully realized to-day ? III. What
procedure did the Middle Ages adopt in altering Roman Law
to meet their needs, and how far can we follow their example?
I
I. It is universally recognized that the barbarian invasions
of the fifth century did not, in Gaul, in Italy, or in Spain,
destroy the practice of Roman Law. That practice survived
among the romanized peoples and does not appear even to
have been attacked by the invaders. In the midst of these
populations the Barbarians insinuated themselves in ever-
Roman Law 365
increasing numbers, maintaining their own customs but
respecting those of their neighbours, which it was the duty
of the judges to uphold exactly as it had been while the
lordship of Rome was still effective. This general survival
is a phenomenon of which numerous explanations can be
given. First of all, there is the great numerical preponder-
ance of the romanized population in comparison with the
original barbarian influx, a preponderance which made
impossible the absorption of the Roman by the barbarian
element ; then there is the usual method of the invasion.
As a rule the barbarians who established themselves on the
soil of the Empire came there as auxiliaries forming part
of the Roman army and subjected, at least as a matter of
law, to the Imperial authority : they were mere garrisons
without reason for meddling in the civil life of the popula-
tions in whose midst they were stationed. Later still, when
at different dates in different localities the usurpations
had caused the rejection by the barbarian chiefs of even
their nominal subjection to the Empire, the persistence of
Roman Law is explicable, not only by the previously formed
customs of the diverse races, but also by the inadequacy of
the barbarian laws, which were too rudimentary to regulate
the much more complex and more active juristic intercourse
of the romanized populace. Thus it comes about that even
the barbarian texts themselves admit the existence through-
out the West of two parallel streams of legal activity, a
Roman and a barbarian stream. This state of affairs lasted
several centuries, its duration varying in different regions
according to the extent of their germanization, the impor-
tance of successive barbarian inroads, and even according to
the changes and chances of political history. In France the
South long continued to practise Roman Law in accordance
with the Lex Romana Pisigothorum, while the North more
rapidly forgot it. In Italy Roman formularies continued in
366 Legacy of the Middle Ages
use in spite of the Lombard invasion. Nevertheless, a differ-
ence long obtained between the more germanized valley
of the Po and the Romagna or the Marches which were
less sensitive to barbarian influences. But everywhere the
populace, Roman by race or culture, was the common prey
of all the disorders begotten of conquest, blood feuds
awakened by the helplessness of the judiciary, high-handed
freebooting of banditti chieftains rebellious against every
control ; and it was impossible that it should pass through
such an ordeal unscathed. Ultimately in spite of the efforts
of the Carolingian dynasty to restore civilization, the whole
Western world, Gallo-Roman and barbarian alike, fell back
to a stage of social development far behind that of pre-
barbarian Rome. Roman Law, in those localities where it
still subsisted, was forced to accommodate itself to the level
of the general ignorance, was reduced to precepts more and
more elementary, and, for the majority, ceased even to be
intelligible. Of specific law there remained only a detritus
of practice preserved in traditional usage. Continual
retrogression had reduced popular mentality to the primi-
tive, and forms of social life to the rudimentary : the
Roman system was no longer the law adapted to their needs
or their aspirations : inevitably the crude barbarian concepts
held the field. From the tenth century the night grew
darker and the West seemed incapable of drawing benefit
from its old ties with Rome.
2. Very soon, however, a reaction set in almost every-
where. The cities, organizing themselves more compactly,
began to feel a new security behind their walls. The
national migrations were finished and the peoples of the
West settled down at last to a sedentary state. Men of
peace and social order gathered together of their own
accord and placed themselves under the guidance of the
lord of some neighbouring castle in order to put a stop
Roman Law 367
even by force to family war and to the brigandage of town
against town. They were vigilant in maintaining the
security of the roads, they protected the work of labourers
and artisans, they fostered production and exchange. The
West set itself to climb slowly back up the hill down which
it had so quickly fallen. The return to an organized and
peaceful state of society made possible a renewed under-
standing of the value of ancient discipline ; and when
scholars discovered in ancient manuscripts the laws of Rome,
of which the very existence had almost been forgotten, the
admiration of contemporaries was unreserved and their
hopes unlimited. Studious youth flocked in crowds to the
Universities to hear the new gospel read and expounded, and
returned filled with an overflowing enthusiasm. The Corpus
luris of Justinian, like a great wave on an undefended coast,
seemed likely to submerge Italy, France, even England, and
to wipe out all trace of the customs which the narrow
simplicity of the folk-lawyers had laboriously and often
clumsily raised.
This renaissance of Roman Law came about first in Italy
at the beginning of the twelfth century at the University of
Bologna under a jurisconsult named Irnerius, of whom we
know very little. He was the head of a school which quickly
became famous throughout the West. He left equally
famous disciples, known as * the Four Doctors ' Bulgarus,
Martinus, Ugo, and Jacobus, who were summoned, as
imperial counsel, to sit in the Diet of Roncaglia (1158)
by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The four doctors in
their turn trained up numerous successors ; and, driven
onward by apostolic fervour or sometimes by the ups and
downs of the intestinal squabbles of the little Italian towns
to which they belonged, these successors went out to carry
the good tidings, some to France as Rogerius, Azo, and
Placentinus, others like Vacarius into England.
368 Legacy of the Middle Ages
There has been much discussion about the .causes and
character of this renaissance. But it is now settled that it
was neither so sudden nor so unforeseen as was at one time
supposed. It was but the harvest of a seed-time dating
back for nearly a century before. In Italy the memories of
Rome were more tenaciously held than elsewhere. There
the compilations of Justinian had been reproduced in more
numerous manuscripts, having been brought direct into
the exarchate of Ravenna by the Imperial armies. The
cities of Lombardy had returned to great commercial
prosperity and their inhabitants had felt the need of a deeper
and more searching study of juristic relations. Already, in
answer to this demand, law was being taught in the flourish-
ing Universities of Pavia, of Ravenna, and perhaps even
earlier of Rome. At Pavia the interpreters of Lombard law
had even essayed to adapt their system to the varied juristic
needs of an active commercial intercourse. 1 The restoration
of Roman Law was only the last and the happiest of these
efforts.
From the moment that lawyers applied themselves to
study the Corpus luris of Justinian, they were captivated
by its twofold superiority of theory and practice. Many
were the specific solutions which they found there ready
made, anticipating (even in details) the practical complica-
tions which their own minds were not yet trained to unravel.
Their admiration was also commanded by the methodical
way in which each concrete case was reduced to its juristic
1 The famous Lanfranc was born at Pavia about A.D. 1005. He
taught there for some time and afterwards went to France, where he
founded the abbey of Bee, in Normandy, which rapidly became a great
centre of learning, counting among its scholars Saint Anselm, Yvo of
Chartres, and the future Pope Alexander II. After William's Conquest
of England Lanfranc was chosen Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070,
and it was he who brought to England the first fruitful seeds of Italian
juristic thought.
Roman Law 369
essentials, and was ranged in the category or under the aegis
of some commanding principle, whilst this principle itself
was seen to be but the application of a more exalted and
more general truth. What a gulf separated this harmonious,
logical procession of ideas from the isolated, disconnected,
and apparently arbitrary solutions which were all that even
the most advanced of the barbarian codes could show !
To crown all, these great principles themselves were found
to be closely allied with the moral conceptions, the accept-
ance of which the Church had during twelve centuries been
striving to secure against a welter of physical force. Such,
for instance, was the notion of equity on which the earliest
glossators argued at such length: such was that of the
natural equality of all men which Justinian taught in spite
of the harsh fact of slavery : such again was that of the
sovereignty of the people to which imperial omnipotence
had at least paid lip-service. To conclude, each man found
in the law of Justinian his varying needs and aspirations
satisfied without altering the solidity of its organization or
the fair hierarchy of social orders which it establishes.
The first attitude of scholars brought face to face with
these written monuments was one of devotion. They must
search them and know them ; and to this search they
brought an unbounded faith which refused to admit in the
imperial handiwork the possibility of either failing or
contradiction. Hence the abundant wealth of purely
explanatory literature ; of glosses first grammatical and then
juristic ; of c continuations ' or resumes of whole titles
which, when joined together, became the Summae ; of
quaestiones attempting to reconcile the contradictions of
various Roman texts or later to solve a difficult case not
expressly foreseen. Of all this mighty effort of interpreta-
tion and reconciliation achieved by the * school of the
glossators ' the results were condensed during the first half
2873 B b
37 Legacy of the Middle Ages
of the thirteenth century into the * Great Gloss of Accur-
sius '. Such was its success that in certain towns, and even
at times in University teaching, it usurped the place and the
authority of Justinian.
During this century and a half the authority of Roman
Law was so universally accepted that ancient usages and
municipal statutes were lost in the flood, and lawyers could
hardly think of reserving for them even the smallest corner
in their daily practice. Nevertheless, the day came when
a halt was called : towards the middle of the thirteenth
century enthusiasm calmed down. The glossators, for all
their good intentions, had singularly complicated the legal
system even of Justinian, and had too often made of it a
stumbling-block for the common people who were ignorant
and without advice and had no instinctive tradition to
teach them how to meet the many requirements of the
Roman Law. Moreover, in daily use the classical doctrines
sometimes did violence to the popular conscience ; for
traditional conceptions (notably concerning the government
of the family, succession, the property relations of husband
and wife) and traditional procedure were very different
from the conceptions and practices of Rome. Insensibly
therefore, first in France, afterwards in Italy following the
example of France, the popular will revolted and insisted
on a respect for local usage. A complete theory was accord-
ingly elaborated of the part which should be played and
the legal force which should be wielded by custom ; * and
1 The theory of the authority allowed to custom by the civilians, and
still more the evolution of that theory, are too complicated to be dealt
with in such a paper as this. The glossators did not deny the legal
authority of custom ; but to reconcile the texts of the Digest which
support it with the legislative omnipotence delegated to the Emperor
by the people which finds expression in Justinian, they postulated for
the validity of custom an Imperial grant (express, at first ; afterwards
implied) of legislative authority. It is only the post-glossators who
Roman Law 37*
even Roman rules were interpreted in a more attractive
spirit and with more concession to popular ignorance. In
England the movement amounted almost to an expulsion
of the Civil Law. At the same time, its doctors were carried
along by the great scholastic tide which was setting in
favour of constructive logic, and tended to disregard the
strict letter and to rally more to the principle which could
be extracted from it. This principle they would enlarge
and even modify so as to absorb into it customary concep-
tions, and to provide sanction for practices sprung of new-
found needs. Moreover, from the middle of the twelfth
century alongside the Civil Law and teaching in the same
schools, the Church had worked out a new jurisprudence
whose purpose was to comment on and to expand the new
compilations of its confessors and pontiffs and to provide
for the action of its special courts. This was the Canon Law,
sprung like the Civil Law from Roman sources, but from
biblical and sacred origins as well. Its legislation extended
in part over the same ground as the system of Justinian,
was inspired by the purest Christianity, and made the same
unvarying and universal claim to the allegiance of all
Christendom. The civilians could not possibly ignore this
great movement of jurisprudence ; indeed they frequently
took part in it, just as the canonists also worked in concert
with them at the modification of Roman secular laws.
Obviously, the reciprocal influence of the two systems on
one another was inevitable.
All these new elements gave to the expounding of the law
a new direction and called to birth a new school, that of the
dialecticians, which closed and supplanted that of the
denied the necessity for such a grant and derived custom from juris-
diction allowing that custom, like jurisdiction, could acquire validity by
prescription. Besta, Storia del diritto italiano, i, pp. 433 and foil., 497
and foil. (1925).
B b 2
37 2 Legacy of the Middle Ages
glossators. Beginning in France during the second half of
the thirteenth century, its earliest representative was James
of ReVigny, bishop of Verdun, followed by Peter of Belle-
perche, dean of the chapter of Notre-Dame of Paris, after-
wards bishop of Auxerre and chancellor of the King of
France. The principal representatives of this school among
us are all Churchmen. By Cynus of Pistoia the school was
carried into Italy, which it conquered ; it attained its
highest eminence with an Italian jurisconsult of the first
half of the fourteenth century, Bartolus of Sassoferrato.
Throughout the West, Bartolus achieved a fame comparable
to that which a century earlier had belonged to Accursius,
and left many disciples, of whom the most celebrated,
Baldus, died early in the fifteenth century. This school
was characterized both by its spirit of compromise with
local and canon law and by its constructive dogmatism.
It would use a logical formula at one moment to press to
extremes principles which the sagacity of the ancient juris-
consults moderated by others acting in an opposite direction ;
at another to build up modern and customary ideas on
a Roman foundation.
The doctrinal results of this new orientation of Roman
Law were in unison with certain well-known historical
events. In France, for example, the monarchy was growing
stronger and at the close of the twelfth and beginning of the
thirteenth century (Bouvines, 1214) had cast off the sway
of the German Emperor. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the
Romanists it was simply a local sovereignty legally sub-
ordinate to and contrasted with the Emperor, the principal
characteristic of whose overlordship was (in abstract theory)
that it knew no bounds. Long ages were needed to reduce
this abstract supremacy over all Christendom to a harmless
historical survival. Small wonder that the kings of France
looked with some favour on the assertion before their
Roman Law 373
tribunals of local custom to the prejudice of that Roman
Law which savoured of the Emperor. Indeed, in alliance
with the papacy they showed their hand still more clearly
by measures discouraging the spread of Roman Law teaching.
Although, therefore, during the thirteenth century there
was reason to fear that in Northern as in Southern France
the legislation of Justinian might stifle the existing growth
of custom, in the fourteenth, on the contrary, the South
alone remained subject, and in the North Justinian was
reduced to the role of auxiliary or supplemental law, of
written reason suggesting a solution when custom does not
dictate one. Hence the great division of France into the
territories of written and those of customary law.
This was the outward and visible result, hostile to Roman
Law and in harmony with the liberation of the monarchy
from Roman imperial suzerainty. But there was another
and contrary result which illustrates the high degree of
legal acumen already developed in France. The juris-
consults of the North had all been brought up in the school
of Roman Law. Custom was fluid, uncertain, contra-
dictory ; it had never passed through the crucible of a pro-
mulgation in writing or been refined by abstract juris-
prudence. Inevitable comparisons must daily have shown
the technical superiority of the Civil Law with its tabulated
rules and fine distinctions : as witness Bouteiller, who in the
fourteenth century and in Northern France stigmatizes
the customary law as * hateful ', and, though he admits its
sway, packs his study of it with undisguised borrowings of
Roman rules. Our custumals tell the same tale : the
customary law, though officially victorious, romanizes more
than ever before. At the same time and on the other hand
by its resistance to the civilians in matters of deep-seated
popular sentiment, custom becomes conscious of itself and
is stripped of all but its irreducible essence. In the four-
374 Legacy of the Middle Ages
teenth and fifteenth centuries their Roman legal education
has taught our customary jurists habits of mind to which
their predecessors were strangers ; habits of exactitude, of
steadfastness, and of rigorous logic in the handling of
custom. They strive, sometimes even with the open
assistance of the civilians, to grasp the Proteus of custom
and pave the way for its codification. Such a work could
not be accomplished without large borrowings from Roman
Law, and many were the embryo principles of custom which
had to be abandoned in favour of their Roman rivals.
Roman influence, then, becomes more difficult to disentangle
from the mass ; since it is exerted not only on the solutions
adopted but on the whole spirit of their application.
In England no part of the realm was in direct contact
with Italy; the juristic unity of the whole country was
maintained ; and the romanist influence was only felt, as it
was in the North of France, by the channel of customary
jurists of whom Bracton was the most authoritative. Eng-
land, also, escaped much more quickly, the cycle of Roman
influence ending in the course of the fourteenth century.
The systematic abstractions of Roman Law had from the
very outset bewildered English practitioners. For this very
reason they had begun by rejecting the absolute ' dominium '
of the Romans (imported by Vacarius the glossator of
Bologna) and had established their real property on the
foundation of the purely relative protection afforded by the
Assizes of Henry II. 1 As the years went by consecrating
1 Henry IFs advisers, notably Glanvill and the chancellor Becket,
were thoroughly imbued with Roman jurisprudence ; and the assizes
framed at their instance are no strangers to Roman technique. The
affiliation of the Assize of Novel Disseisin to the Inter die turn Unde Vi
through the canonist Actio Spolii, and perhaps also that of Mort Dan-
cester to Quorum Bonorum are very probable. Nevertheless, it is
incontestable that the Assizes, descendants though they be of the
Roman Law 375
and developing this Royal Law of Assizes, the influence of
Roman Law was stifled. But it reappeared even in the
course of the thirteenth century when the triumph of the
Law of Assizes was complete. Freehold having henceforth
its protective sanctions, it was found necessary also to
protect certain existing tenancies at will, certain tenures of
less dignity than real property, and certain chattel interests
in possession less than those of the proprietors who enjoyed
the protection of the Assize. For this the civilian theory
of possession furnished the materials : the ' action of
trespass ' takes our thoughts back to the Roman interdicts.
But though its Roman affiliation is probable, it is neverthe-
less uncertain ; and though the evolution in England of real
and personal property follows a curve similar to that out-
lined at Rome by c dominium ', * possessio in bonis ', and
* possessio ', English Law preserves in this also a character
all its own. Finally, the school of the dialecticians, as a school
of law, had, properly speaking, no appreciable influence
in England. It is from Azo and the school of Bologna
that Bracton and his successors draw their inspiration.
The fourteenth century was an unpropitious time for
juristic speculation ; and the England of the fifteenth
century turns its thoughts inward and becomes more and
more estranged from the Continent and from Roman Law.
It is extremely probable that the great wave of Roman
Law which overflowed England in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries reached Scotland almost immediately. True, it
was not till the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that
Roman Law took root there so vigorously as to remain even
to this day one of the most fertile sources of Scots law.
But in the fourteenth century appeared Scotland's earliest
juristic manual, the Regiam Maiestatem, which is little more
Roman theory of possession, resulted in the total overthrow and disuse
of the Roman structure of absolute dominium as distinct from possession.
37 6 Legacy of the Middle Ages
than an adaptation of the famous Tractatus de legibus et
consuetudinibus regni Angliae of Glanvill ; and Glanvill's
intimacy with Roman ideas is undeniable. In the twelfth
century Robert, Bishop of St. Andrews, with the assent of
King David I, promulgated to his clergy the Exceptiones
Ecclesiasticarum Regularum, the parentage of which has
been traced by recent scholarship to the Decretum of Yvo
of Chartres.
From the first, Italy in general readily accepted the
doctrine of the earliest glossators. To an even greater
extent than in the South of France, popular usages were
already strongly impregnated with Roman Law and even
the Lombard element in them had already been transformed.
Nevertheless, this must have cost the Italians an effort, since
the Roman Law consecrated among them the supremacy
of the germanic Emperor. The fall of Frederick II terminat-
ing this supremacy could not fail to be favourable to civilian
influence, the more so that henceforth the enemy whom the
Italian republics had to fear was no longer the Emperor
but the Pope, against whom the Civil Law provided a bul-
wark. On the other hand, the growing commercial pros-
perity of the cities, and the rivalries between them accen-
tuated the longing of single cities for juristic autonomy,
for an individualism which the unitary principle of Roman
Law could not satisfy. Hence originate numerous local
statutes corresponding to the French custumals, which
.without rejecting the Roman Law as a common legal
background step in between it and the people and render its
application somewhat more distant. We have already
mentioned the complaisance of the new school of the
dialecticians with regard to these statutes ; and it is well
known that Bartolus even took a leading part in elaborating
the famous * Statute Theory ' which resulted in the accept-
ance of rules permitting in certain cases the authority of
Roman Law 377
Statutes to transcend the limits of civic territorial sove-
reignty and thereby to place a check on the common law of
Rome. But, just as in France though even more noticeably,
the Roman influence was carried on by the romanization
of the Statutes (Balduinus at Genoa, 1229 ; Paul de Castro
at Florence, 1415).
The influence of the dialecticians or Bartolists pre-
dominated in France and in Italy until the sixteenth century,
when it fell under the attack of the historical school of which
we shall shortly speak. But first it will be well to mention
one of the latest conquests of this school, namely Germany,
where it held sway till the nineteenth, we may even say till
the dawn of the twentieth century.
We might perhaps have expected to find Germany among
the earliest and speediest conquests of the Roman renaissance.
The doctrine of the civilians reconstructed the imperial
omniporence to the profit of the German nation, which
appeared as the successor of Rome and claimed title to
bring under her sceptre all Rome's ancient territories.
This was definitely the pretension of Frederick Barbarossa
at the Diet of Roncaglia, where, seated in his consistorium
and surrounded by the faur doctors of Bologna, he added
two ' authentics ' to the ancient laws of Justinian. Never-
theless, Germany's first attitude was one of resistance.
Perhaps because the German folk was still too far removed
by the savagery of its manners from the full refinements of
Roman Law ; perhaps because in the unending strife of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries Roman Law appeared
as the banner of that domineering foreign civilization which
was made such a grievance against the Hohenstaufen ;
in any case there is no trace of Roman influence in the
Mirror of Saxony (1215) and very little in the Mirror of
Swabia (1275). Moreover, both in political life and in
private affairs the conception of personal law was very
37 8 Legacy of the Middle Ages
firmly and very widely held in Germany ; the right, that is,
of every man to live the law of his homeland, and even the
law of his own social class, and to refuse obedience to any
common discipline. This piecemeal tendency to individual
autonomy brought about the eclipse of the Empire during
the interregnum and the growth of a large crop of local
independent legal systems in direct conflict with Roman
unity. Civil Law was not entirely unknown, for the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries are marked in Germany by
numerous little treatises which institute a frequent com-
parison between Roman imperial law and municipal usages.
Rejected though it might be, its influence was none the less
present. Add to this diversity of laws the multiplicity of
jurisdictions each upholding the independence of its own
jurisprudence, and we shall understand the chaos which
was Germany in the fifteenth century. The remedy
came from the very virulence of the disease. Commerce
developed in Germany between city and city and held out
its hands beyond the borders of Germany to the cities of
Italy, France, Flanders, and elsewhere : men were forced
of necessity to erect by common consent superior courts of
intercommunal justice capable of rising above local diver-
gences of legislation and of judging by the light of a common
law of their own making. The groundwork was provided
by the manuals of Roman Law in vogue at the universities
which Italian jurists founded in Germany at this time ;
and some of these manuals enjoyed for this very reason an
astonishingly wide popularity. At the same time in the
most widely discussed cases, the practice grew up of an
official submission of the issue to the masters of the univer-
sities for the opinion which they alone were competent to
base upon broad reasons of equity. Bartolus provided an
inexhaustible mine of solutions couched in peremptory
form. Thus by its own excellence, by the fame of its
Roman Law 379
interpreters, and without any definite legislative acceptance,
Roman Law met the universally admitted need for a common
rule and slowly but surely conquered a country which at the
outset had been indifferent and even hostile. The crown
and summit of this conquest was the foundation in the
sixteenth century of the Imperial Court of Justice. This
made the Roman Law the common law of all Germany
a position which it held down to the promulgation of the
Imperial Civil Code in 1900. True that little by little
during these four centuries its domain was circumscribed
by various royal codes issued in the different kingdoms ;
but until 1900 the Roman Law was admittedly superior to
these. Besides, what Germany followed was not the Roman
Law of Justinian but the law interpreted and transmogrified
by the Bartolists. In Germany, its latest conquest, that
celebrated school continued to flourish long after the rest
of Europe had deserted it for the historical school : of this
we must now speak.
In the sixteenth century, as is well known, western
Europe as a whole turned with enthusiasm to pagan anti-
quity. The happy outcome of a number of accidents had
been to render possible the direct study of ancient texts ;
and men were alive to the mental squalor of preceding
centuries and to the way in which the real facts of antiquity
had been misunderstood by scholastic philosophy and
religious prejudice. Youth and confidence were the order
of the day ; and in the glamour of Greece and Rome reason
and liberty of thought were born anew. Learning was
light-hearted, brave, and youthful, totally without reverence
for the recent past : the leading strings of tradition were
thrown away : nothing was left unquestioned. How could
the Dialecticians survive such a mutiny with their abstruse
involutions, their great piles of rubbish and puerilities ?
For there is no denying that the jurists of this school gave
380 Legacy of the Middle Ages
openings for criticism. Their desire to reconcile every
contradiction, and to find Roman authority for practical
solutions the reverse of Roman led to childish hair-splitting
and great doctrinal uncertainty. They had covered the
Roman texts with a parasitic vegetation so luxuriant as to
alter their whole aspect. It is easy to understand the holy
zeal with which the humanists set about the destruction of
this sacrilege, and the renown achieved by those (of whom,
in France, Cujas is the chief) who made it their life's work
to restore the Roman compilations to their original purity.
But from our present point of view the important fact is that
the humanists in their single-minded restoration of the old
Roman Law in its classical framework have finally banished
it from the present to the everlasting calm of the past.
They saved it from the distortions of everyday life and
practice ; but they made of it for the future no more than
a frigid work of art with no effective influence beyond that
which a cultured mind may feel by the contemplation of an
artistic harmony. The humanists, one might almost say,
ended the popular destiny of Roman Law in the West.
Nevertheless, at first the success of the humanists was
more apparent and resounding than deep or real. The hold
of the Bartolists and of the glossators generally over the
jurisprudence of the West was so close that the humanists
themselves did not even think of pushing their doctrine to
extremes. For nearly three centuries they claimed for the
Civil Law, exactly as the Bartolists had done, a domain of
general daily use* Not till the nineteenth century, hardly
till the latter part of that century, did the humanist reform
lead to its full results. Thus in the ' written law ' territories
of France it was not the Roman Law of Cujas which was
held to be binding. Legal practice maintained its old
habits of compromise and continued to approximate, with
or without the aid of the revised Roman texts, to the
Roman Law 381
solutions adopted in the neighbouring customary territories.
The only effect of the renaissance was to establish a dis-
tinction between written law and Roman Law. In the
customary territories the influence of Roman Law was felt
in two different ways. The great jurists, Dumoulin,
d'Argentre, Chopin, Lebrun, Pothier, were worthy succes-
sors of the ancient prudentes : in successive editions of the
customs and in their own interpretation their art was shown
in guiding custom on the road marked out by the great
Roman signposts. They freed it from local peculiarities,
and accentuated its common tendencies, paving the way
for the fusion of all the customs in a united national law.
Secondly, for lack of commentary on the varying local
customs, lawyers were compelled to fall back on Roman
Law in its great function of supplementary law or * written
reason ' : natural diffidence made them loath to give up
the help of the great past. It was only very gradually that
the elaboration of common principles from a converging
interpretation made it possible for the boldest among them
to appeal to a * customary common law ' rather than to the
* supplementary ' Civil Law. This was due to the impact
of the French Revolution.
Moreover, this * written reason ' of Roman Law was
a conception very close to the natural law which was the
pride of the eighteenth-century philosophers throughout
Europe. Now that the strict letter of the law was no longer
held binding, it was easier to look upon it as a social ideal.
To imitate the classical democracies, as the revolutionary
thinkers conceived them, and to establish the sway of
universal reason : with these aims in view the French
Revolution proclaimed the great principles on which modern
societies rest some at least of which are (as we shall show)
a legacy from Roman Law.
382 Legacy of the Middle Ages
II
Let us endeavour to disentangle the main conceptions of
public and private law which the Middle Ages borrowed
from Rome and have handed down to us ; and first of
public law. A bird's-eye view of modern public law in the
West will throw into prominence, among others, three great
governing principles. These are : (i) the idea of the State,
(ii) the idea of national sovereignty, (iii) the aspiration
towards an international polity. Let us examine the debt
of these conceptions to Rome, taking the two first together
since they are joined together in the same classical texts,
while the third is more widely scattered.
A. First, in the Roman world there was never any doubt
that the source of all public authority was the people.
The people alone had the right to make laws and to issue
commands ; it alone could defend the interests of the city.
The people is fully conscious of this supremacy and mani-
fests it by taking an active part in the civic life in its assem-
blies, in its public festivals, and in the army. The whole
public law is based on this notion of popular sovereignty.
Secondly, the organ of the people is the Roman State, the
respublica. Composed of all the citizens, the respublica is
nevertheless above them all, superior to each individual in
just that measure that the safety of all is more important
than the safety of one. It is invested with an unlimited
authority over the individual and the power to exact from
him the sacrifice of his personal interests, and even of his
life. The social discipline thus imposed on all citizens is
one of the most valuable achievements of the ancient world.
The Roman State was at bottom only the Citygrown larger,
the organ of collective defence against the world outside.
Born of the difficulties of life in a petty town standing
alone in the midst of a frequently hostile countryside, it
Roman Law 383
retained the same stamp even after it had grown to the
furthest extension of the Empire. This absolute authority
of the State is as noticeable in the late Empire as under the
kings. It is this alone which can saddle a man for life with
the duties of a curialis even against his own wishes, and
makes possible the kind of state socialism which we meet
with after Diocletian.
Thirdly, the last in this train of ideas which rule the
public life of Rome is the delegation of the power of the
State to civil servants entrusted with its exercise. The
civil servant wields the powers assigned him not in his own
name but in that of the State of which he is only the pro-
visional incarnation. Two consequences follow. First, the
civil servant partakes of the majesty of the respublica : thus
the Emperor becomes an absolute master from the moment
that the Imperial power is confided to him, and the Lex
lulia Maiestatis is extended to contempts of the Emperor
or his images. On the other hand, the civil servant's
authority belongs not to his person but to his office. He
has no right to transmit it to his heirs, nor is he allowed to
extract from it profit for himself as from his private pro-
perty. He can only wield it for the interest of all and in
the name of all.
The doctrine of the delegation of power by the people to
the Emperor subsists even in the later Empire. Neverthe-
less, we must admit that in the practice of Imperial authority,
eastern influences had mingled at this epoch a personal
element with the old Roman traditions. Thus is established
the hereditary transmission of the throne ; and the privy
purse of the Emperor, the ' fiscus ', absorbs the public
treasury of the Roman State, the ' aerarium '. But these
deviations were without serious doctrinal consequences.
The whole public system of Rome broke down in the
course of the invasions. The invaders, grouped in families,
384 Legacy of the Middle Ages
in tribes, or in semi-nomad bands, knew nothing of the
abstract territorial city of the Roman world. The tie
which bound them together was essentially personal and
private. The company follows its chieftain, trusting him
so long as he is successful in his campaigns, scattering on his
death or defeat ; but attached to him only by the bond of
a personal oath. The chieftains themselves join the following
of a more powerful chief to whom they swear fidelity for
themselves and their men. The king is only the chief of
a greater host, a character which he retains in France for
long centuries and in Germany longer still. On this founda-
tion of personal fealty rests the feudal regime which governed
all Europe till the nineteenth century. Of this barbarian
conception, we may say, are sprung those royal houses which
still exist in western Europe ; allegiance and fealty to
a dynasty embody a mystic sentiment of love for the person
of the Sovereign regarded partly as the representative of the
state of which he is the head but still more as the incarnation
of a powerful ancestral protector and lord.
But the abstract conception of the Roman State reappears
from the first moment of the renaissance of Roman Law.
The minds of men had been made ready for it by the
ceaseless efforts of the Church, which, although it had never
appealed to the lay idea of public interest, had nevertheless
endeavoured to wean the king or chief little by little from
selfish desires by insisting on the duties and responsibilities
of his office before God. It inculcated the duty to uphold
the reign of peace among men, to make wide the bounds of
justice and equity, to protect the weak, and to ensure the
practice of charity and love between neighbours. The
form was different but the substance was the same, namely,
to make of the king the servant of the public interest, the
respublica. For this tendency Justinian's texts provided
a stronger and more exact foundation : a fragment from the
Roman Law 385
institutes of Ulpian, which is reproduced twice over by
Justinian (Inst. i. 2. 6, and D. i. 4. i. I, pr.), was the starting-
point of all Romanist doctrine from the twelfth century.
It runs thus, c The prince's decision has the force of law ;
inasmuch as by the royal law passed concerning his authority
the people has invested him with the whole of its own
authority and power '. Two phases of constitutional
doctrine are here reconciled together by the jurists of the
classical period without distinguishing their historical
succession. The first proclaims the principle of popular
sovereignty : the right to command and therefore the right
to make law belong to the people alone. This principle can
be traced back to the earliest period in Roman history when
the government of the city was made up of two distinct
but allied parts, people and patres. From this distinction
and this common sovereignty derives the celebrated formula
S.P.Q.R. (Senatus populusque Romanus) which was placed at
the head of all official acts. In the later Empire popular
sovereignty has disappeared : its place has been taken by
the imperial will. Hence the second principle which
Ulpian gives us : that which the prince has declared to be
his pleasure has the force of law. However, the new prin-
ciple of imperial sovereignty was not in the eyes of the
jurists incompatible with its forerunner, the sovereignty
of the people : they explained the omnipotence of the
Emperor by saying that the Emperor had received from the
people the delegation of that sovereignty which properly
belonged to it alone. This delegation had been made by
a lex regia passed at the entry into office of each succeeding
Emperor. Actually, the formality of the lex regia had
disappeared in the later Empire. The Emperor was absolute :
true, but that was the natural consequence of the popular
sovereignty of which he was the incarnation. Popular
sovereignty ; delegation thereof to the Emperor ; imperial
2873 ' c c
386 Legacy of the Middle Ages
or royal absolutism : such are the problems which Ulpian's
text raises, and the solution which he gives them reconciles
the ancient constitutional principles of Rome with the state
of affairs introduced by the Empire. From the twelfth
century onwards this text gave rise to ceaseless discussion
among civilians and canonists alike. Oddly enough, it was
the idea, first and foremost, of popular superiority over
king or emperor which fascinated the minds of the majority
of medieval thinkers from William of Auvergne, St. Thomas
Aquinas, Bartolus or Dante down to Hotman, Althusius, or
Hubert Languet. The religious wars of the sixteenth
century made plain the dangers of extreme democratic
doctrines and inclined men's minds towards the other aspect
of the problem, namely, the absolute power of the Emperor.
Then the old theory of a delegation by the people to the
Emperor or king, a delegation henceforth deemed irre-
vocable, was used to justify the exaltation of despotism as,
for instance, by Hobbes. At last, when in the eighteenth
century the defences of royal absolutism are breached,
Rousseau has but to proclaim the popular sovereignty
inalienable and to give a new turn to the idea of delegation
rendering the royal power limited, permissive, and revocable.
All these various and (some might say) conflicting con-
clusions are drawn from the text of Ulpian inflected to
meet the varying political circumstances out of which they
arose : they are all, that is to say, of Roman origin.
B. Rome gave the world the ideal of universality and
brought the same to fruition in her legal system. This was
brilliantly shown by the great German civilian, Von Ihering,
more than fifty years ago. Other cities of classical times
were devoted to the narrowest parochialism. From the
time of her great conquests onwards, the genius of Rome
was exhibited in resistance to this tendency : she brought
together under her aegis thousands of cities united in a single
Roman Law 387
bond of peaceful progress and mutual respect : by regular
slow steps she led up to the same degree of civilization men
of widely different race : she satisfied local peculiarities at
the same time that she exalted the traits common to all
humanity. With the whole known world subjected to her
laws she went far towards realizing the dream of a universal
rule of equality over all the races of mankind. Christianity
has only spiritualized the ideal which Rome inaugurated.
The Germanic invasions broke up this unity, and on the
Roman soil sprang up a whole forest of petty local sove-
reignties jealous of their autonomy and in a perpetual state
of war and brigandage one against another. But their
peoples cherished the memory of the golden age of the great
pax Romana ; and endeavoured with the aid of the Church
to restore it first as the Roman Empire of the West under
Charlemagne, and afterwards as the Holy Roman Empire.
Stubborn facts, however, would not submit to such a con-
struction, and the Germanic Empire was universal only in
dreams. The national kingdoms rose against its pretensions
and threw off all subordination ; and, the better to unite
their jarring but reconcilable elements within, laid stress
upon everything that divided them from the world without.
Among men inspired with the lust of conquest and plunder
a dominion built upon force without the cement of common
sympathies is indeed a house .of cards.
With less noise but more effect than the Holy Roman
Empire, Roman Law in the Middle Ages filled the part of
an international unifying agent. By the world-wide compass
alike of its moral authority and of its practical application
it achieved an influence comparable to that of Christianity
itself, appealing to and ensuring their willing acceptance of
the same ideas of equity and social justice, of discipline and
administrative order. It inclined them to see their temporal
interests in the same light and brought them together in
c c 2
388 Legacy of the Middle Ages
the bond of a common civilization. Overstepping state
frontiers, it united scholars in a great commonwealth of
thought governed by the memory and the law of Rome,
a commonwealth whose horizon was world-wide. The
universities were open to all who hungered for learning and
were filled with all the peoples of the earth. In them
affinities of language, of race, of feeling, unknown or long
forgotten, were discovered or renewed ; and those who went
forth from them carried the good seed back to their homes.
The renaissance of Roman Law in the twelfth century is the
first and foremost glory of the universities.
We have said how numerous they were throughout the
countries which had formed the Roman Empire. In the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they become more local
and more national : from our present point of view, there
is a set-back brought about by wars and devastations and
the return of local jealousy. The second renaissance, that
of the sixteenth century, restores to the rejuvenated Civil
Law its universal appeal. More than ever, the scholars of
all nations are bound in a single brotherhood. By them are
built those dreams of unity, of the universal republic,
which haunted the vision of the eighteenth century, which
fired the generous enthusiasms of the French Revolution,
and have at last taken bodily form, from the anguish of the
last great war, in the League of Nations. Submerged in the
German flood, the Roman seed has nevertheless taken root,
and to-day is struggling to bloom : to give mankind the
freedom of the pax Romana instead of tyrannical strife.
This longing for unity engendered among the nations
by the idea of Rome, yet found its quickest and fullest
development in the internal life of certain countries. This
was specially marked in France, where during the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries the educated classes of the different
provinces were being drawn ever closer together by the
Roman Law 389
intercourse of common universities, and where the royal
house called to its councils the intellectual pick of every
province and sent them forth again as its representatives
in the government of the whole country. The national
wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries brought the
most distant provinces together in the face of a common
danger : from the sixteenth century onwards the abstract
unqualified conception of the respublica was held in high
honour by our legislators ; and the late Roman Empire
became the model for a central bureaucracy growing ever
stronger and controlling more and more completely the
social life of the provinces. Under Francis I the Chancellor
Duprat brought to power the representatives of the Civil
Law Faculty of the University of Toulouse : the absolute
monarchy which they inaugurated was to go forward in the
footsteps of the Roman State and to bring about that
centralization which the Revolutionary leaders, intoxicated
with the strong wine of classical democracy, were to make
still more complete.
Passing from public to private law, we find Roman
influence on the legal systems of Europe still more marked.
But so wide is that influence that we should have to examine
every institution in minute detail in order to balance our
account. There is no legal field where it is not felt ; on
the other hand, there is none in which it has operated
unalloyed.
The law of Things (ius quod ad res attinei) is the branch
of law in which it appears most clearly. Though it may be
true that the distinction between movables and immovables
and the establishment of a different system of rules for each
of these two categories are not of distinctively Roman
origin, yet it would be hard to deny that the very con-
ception of ownership, of its attributes, its bounds, and its
indivisibility (as that conception is held to-day in France,
39 Legacy of the Middle Ages
in Italy, and in Spain) is taken directly from Roman sources.
We can hardly doubt that the analysis of the distinction
between property and possession is of Roman origin. Per-
haps we may even attribute to the civilians in England
the leading part in creating the system of personalty?
In fine, on the Continent at least, the whole system of
real actions and sanctions for the right of property is, we
may confidently assert, derived from the rei vindicatio.
The struggle was a long one which achieved these results.
Not till 1789 in France, and later still in the rest of Europe,
did the single Roman conception of indivisible ownership
triumph over the piecemeal tendencies of the feudal doctrine
of estates.
The law of obligations fell more quickly under the
civilian sway. Barbarian practice and theory alike were
rudimentary and inadequate to the widespread juristic
relations of trade and industry renewed. The fine analysis
of the intention of parties, the reasoned elaboration of the
elements of contract, the classification of obligations, of
their methods and effects : in all these things Roman Law
stood alone and without rival in the Middle Ages. It was
studied with such zeal and applied with so little resistance
that the customs when cast into written form and published
commonly omit all mention of the law of obligations. The
triumph of Civil Law in this sphere goes back to the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries.
As much may be said of procedure in general ; not for
any lack of a barbarian theory of procedure but because
that theory with its wagers of law, its narrow formalism, and
its disingenuous subtleties was a shapeless mass totally unfit
to stand up against the simple, clear, and orderly Roman
procedural mechanism. In this field the Church contributed
much to the acceptance of Roman methods.
On the other hand, in the domain of family law the
Roman Law 391
principal factor in the legal systems of the West has not been
the Civil Law but the Church and Teutonic conceptions.
There need be no surprise at this when we reflect upon the
narrow foundation of the Roman family based only on
power, on authority imperative, absolute and unyielding,
and upon the obviously insufficient place allotted in its
scheme to marriage and the common affections and interests
of the two parents one to another and towards their children.
What power of attraction could so mechanical an idea have
in competition with the Christian family based entirely on
ties of blood and mutual affection, upholding the kinship
of all whom those ties unite and reverencing even in its
discipline the personality of the child ? No doubt the
Roman system did a great deal to soften the harshness of its
early conceptions ; but its foundations remained unchanged,
and its latest reforms, those laid down in Justinian's n8th
Novel, were not known in Gaul until after the sway of
Christian and Teutonic ideas was fully established in the
West. The Teutonic family had been very much more
open to Christian influences ; it extended * as far as a single
drop of blood could be traced ' ; it obeyed the collective
will rather than an absolute chief : the feeling of common
interest was more important than the dry categorical
imperative of discipline.
Hence the ordinance of marriage and the arrangements
of property between husband and wife belong to the Church.
Instead of sanctioning, as at Rome, the entire separation
of interests between spouses and the unqualified protection
of married woman's property, the Church made the wife
partner for richer for poorer, for better for worse, in the
management of the conjugal patrimony. Hence also there
survived for ages a family supervision for the benefit of the
family over the disposal and transmission of ancestral
property by its manager for the time being.
39 2 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Nevertheless, even here where the governing ideas are not
Roman, it would be incorrect to say that Roman Law has
played no part. Let it suffice to instance the Roman
institution of guardianship and the in integrum restitutio ob
aetatem in the law of incapacities ; or to remind ourselves
of the progress throughout the Middle Ages of the right to
dispose of one's property on death. In France it is only with
the Code of 1804 that we see the definite triumph of the
Roman principle that a man's property at his death devolves
as a single whole, and the technical details of the acquisition
and even of the partition of such property. Although in
France the partition of an inheritance is declaratory and
does not involve a transfer of title, yet other rules of partition
are undeniably Roman, as are also the theories of the pay-
ment of debts of the deceased, and of the lien established
by operation of law over the property of the deceased in
favour of the legatees. 1
Enough has been said to show how thoroughly and by
what manifold paths the Civil Law permeated during the
Middle Ages the legal systems of the West. One might wish,
perhaps, for a single striking formula to describe its general
effect on the development of private law ; but it is not
always easy to focus the leading idea quite clearly. Let me
indicate only what appears to me the most marked trait of
this Roman influence.
We may say, I think, that Roman Law more than any
other theoretical factor has facilitated the passage of west
European societies from the economics of the agricultural
family to the rule of commercial and industrial individualism.
It has not been the sole factor in this transition ; for the
whole legal system of movable property, with its rapidity of
circulation and its dearth of specific remedies, has been
largely built up if not on Teutonic foundations, at any rate
1 Cf. Code Civil Art. 1017 with Codex 6. 43. i. 2.
Roman Law 393
upon modern legislative experiments necessitated by the
low esteem in which feudal society held movable wealth.
Roman Law, nevertheless, took the lead in the long stern
fight, never crowned with complete success till the French
Revolution, for the emancipation of the individual and of
property from the ties of family or seigneurial collectivism.
Let us dwell upon this for a moment.
In every primitive society where the State still lacks
authority, its duties are discharged by an elementary
organism, the family or the tribe. These duties do not
usually stop at the protection of the individual ; for in the
general insecurity the group as protector must of necessity
be vested with great authority over everyone of its members.
Nay more, within the group everyday life and work are
hardly thought of except in common. The land, and
frequently also the flocks and herds, are common property.
Later, as the fear of outside attack becomes less pressing,
each man tends to work for himself and to enjoy the fruits
of his labour apart ; he withdraws from the common effort
and the common home ; he feels the need of his own
personality and separates himself whether with or without
his share of the common patrimony. The development of
commercial exchange and intercourse with distant lands,
the growth of movable wealth, the temporary emigration
of the most adventurous spirits, all accelerate this movement.
Legislation favours more and more the accumulation of
individual riches and becomes more hostile to the authority
of the group. But for a very long time traces of an earlier
state of affairs remain.
The historical process is a very common one, and the
Roman world itself went through it. But at the moment
of the German invasions Rome had long passed this stage
and had arrived at an organization, to all appearances, fully
individualist. The ownership of the clan, the control of the
394 Legacy of the Middle Ages
group over the alienation of immovables, impediments on
free gifts by individuals whether inter vivos or mortis causa
all these things have disappeared. Roman Law consecrates
the absolute and unreserved power of the individual over
his property of whatever nature. The law of obligations in
particular, completely freed from the solidarity of the
family, has applied with increasing care the principles of
individual intention and individual responsibility. The
great doctrinal achievement of the prudentes lies in this
principle of intention, accurately and unflinchingly worked
out and placed beyond the reach even of judicial modifica-
tion. The whirl of business, the safety of juristic intercourse,
necessitated complete individual autonomy ; and by one
of those curious contradictions of which life is made up that
autonomy became the more stubborn in Rome that it was
founded not on the solitary individual but on the group ;
that narrow unchanging group of Roman society, the
family incarnate in its chief and serving only as his pedestal.
Here is one of the most distinctive characteristics of Roman
private law : the absorption by the paterfamilias of the
whole juristic life of the familia and the erection of his
individual discretion, omnipotent and unfettered, in the
very centre of private law. The paterfamilias, girt with
the sole authority over the patrimony, is the triumphant
champion of individualism in the classical law.
Over against this robust individual autonomy a very
different state of affairs prevails at the time of the invasions
among the Teutonic folk : great formless groups of kindred,
their boundaries often ill-defined and devoid of any central
authority. Sovereignty is diluted in the folk-moot. At
one time, it may be, discipline was strong enough to make
of the kindred an organization for battle ; but it had
quickly been relaxed and survived only as a control over
landed property vested first in the family as a whole, later
Roman Law 395
in the individual kin in the order of their succession. In
this mitigated form, with variations of time and place and
becoming ever less burdensome, the authority of the family
survives through the centuries down to the nineteenth,
deteriorating slowly, with spasmodic revivals whenever care
for the family property fostered by noble or conservative
sentiment was for a time stronger than the desire for com-
mercial freedom. Some centuries after the invasions along-
side the family association there arises in the West, to meet
the need for military protection, the feudal association with
its strict hierarchy of ranks. To ensure permanence, this
also is founded on the land of which the ownership is divided
among successive holders, each lord in turn possessing the
right to intervene in any alienation of land by his liegeman.
Hence an alienation to be valid must receive the assent of
all who hold sway over the land ; a requirement which,
though worn somewhat threadbare, survives down to the
nineteenth century. Landed property, therefore, the most
vital form of wealth through long ages, is hedged about by
barbarian tradition with a network of successive impedi-
ments, designed, contrary to Roman ideas of liberty, to
keep it in bondage and to render alienation a slow and
difficult business.
Against this organization Roman individualism main-
tained unceasing combat. The first shock of the barbarian
invasions from the fifth to the eighth centuries did not
immediately reveal how violent was the conflict between
the two societies, and the speedy triumph of Roman
conceptions might have been expected. But the decay and
eventual collapse of the Carolingian dynasty revived Teu-
tonic barbarism and made the conflict obvious. The
Italian renaissance of the twelfth century brought back the
individualist principles of the Civil Law ; and their action
from that time onwards has been silent, steady, and unceasing.
396 Legacy of the Middle Ages
That it took seven centuries to achieve the victory is no
doubt due to the fact that only a complex social and eco-
nomic civilization can appreciate to the full the attractions
of individualist law ; but it is due also to the way in which
our legal authorities made use of the Civil Law. This
brings us to our last point.
Ill
Throughout the Middle Ages the Civil Law was the
daily and hourly vade mecum of our jurists. Their own
doctrinal inexperience held them spellbound before this
orderly sequence of juristic commands, this wealth of
dialectical ingenuity. They were attracted at the same
time by the stubbornness of ancient principles and by the
mental subtlety which was capable sometimes of inter-
preting them in a contrary sense. The Civil Law became
to them an inexhaustible arsenal full of all manner of mighty
weapons ready to be snatched up and wielded in the tussles
of everyday life. Of these weapons they availed themselves
in all sorts of causes, as the moment's need dictated, without
troubling their heads about their suitability to the end in
view. The Civil Law was even pressed into the service to
combat its own essential principles, and we find Roman
technicalities used as a brake to retard the progress of Roman
principles. Of this the most striking example is feudalism.
Sub-infeudation involved the parcelling out of ownership
in land, and a hierarchy of ownerships flatly contradictory
to the indivisible and absolute Roman concept. Nothing
less than the downfall of the fief at the French Revolution
was needed to bring about the return of the West to the
theoretic indivisibility of proprietary right. But it is not
so often noticed that the feudal theory has, nevertheless,
been built up entirely of Roman materials and by the
Roman Law 397
Romanists of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. They
elaborated that queer creation of dominium directum and
dominium utile ; at the same time they made the possession
of land inseparable from the contractual obligations of the
tenant which are a direct burden on the land. To effect
all this they did but amplify the Roman notion of actiones
directae and actiones utiles and the distinction between
dominium iure civili, possessio in bonis, and the holding of
provincial soil. At the commencement of the thirteenth
century, feudal relations had not yet been clarified into
a system of law and were still liable to be tossed about by
every wave of changing circumstances. Had they continued
in this condition they would have developed and become
extinct side by side with the military service which they
provided. But erected into real rights, of which the obliga-
tions were but the outward sign, they acquired the power
to outlive the duties which were their justification. Bound
together by the cement of Roman logic and Roman tech-
nique, they continued to weigh heavily upon western
Europe for two or three centuries after the causes which had
given rise to them had vanished. In the end it took the
French Revolution to destroy that which the lawyers had
built up by the aid of Roman jurisprudence, a building
erected in flat defiance of the natural tendencies of Roman
Law to meet the anti-Roman aspirations of medieval society.
In a narrower field we may also mention the theory of
substitutions which was in high favour throughout western
Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
It is well known how in many parts of northern Europe
customary law withstood the introduction of the Roman
testament, maintaining the unavoidable authority of
intestate succession and family co-ownership. The testa-
ment is a mighty instrument in the hands of the individual
to withdraw his patrimony from the unending sway of the
398 Legacy of the Middle Ages
family. In refusing to allow the right of testament, the
northern countries naturally rejected the institutio beredis,
which is its keystone. Nevertheless, they borrowed from it
the substitutio that became in French Law the ' substitution
fidei-commissaire ', which is merely a form of sub-institution ;
and this substitution they made a means not to facilitate
the transfer of the property of the deceased to strangers in
accordance with the will of the deceased, but on the con-
trary to assure its permanence from generation to generation
in the hands of a single family by making void and of no
effect any disposition by the representative of any one of
these generations. Thus the individualist Civil Law is
brought in to support the ingrained sentiment of family
and nobility.
Thus it was that the whole Western world down to the
French Revolution felt the influence, more or less direct,
more or less general, of the Civil Law. The French Revolu-
tion inaugurated throughout the West a great effort of
codification, which, albeit broadly inspired by Roman
principles, has gradually eaten away the official and legal
authority of Justinian's text. In this it has but carried on
the movement which from the sixteenth century onwards
has impelled modern Europe to cut out her own juristic
habiliments for herself.
The publication of the French Civil Code in 1804 was the
first great blow to the Roman supremacy. On one hand
it re-established a single legal system for all France and put
an end to the binding force of Justinian's law in the south.
On the other hand, throughout the country the Civil Law
was no longer allowed even the function of supplementary
law. The Code was intended to be self-sufficient. Where
the letter of the law is insufficient, the solution of every
difficulty brought before our judges must be sought in its
spirit. With us the legislator has been obeyed. During
Roman Law 399
the first half of the nineteenth century the old quotations
from the Digest and the Codex are still received ; but after
that, in France at least, the echoes of the past are stilled.
Italy followed very much the same evolution as France,
but more slowly and irregularly. Not till 1866 was her
Civil Code published after more than half a century of ups
and downs. Germany was still more tardy ; for, as we have
already mentioned, she did not attain her Imperial Civil
Code till 1900, and the Civil Law remained her common
law until that year. We may add that on many points the
German Code of 1900 is even now more romanized than
the French Code of 1804.
Only in our own day, therefore, has the Corpus Juris of
Justinian been divested of binding force. Fourteen hundred
years old in its latest recension, eighteen hundred years in
the majority of its fragments, it has continued to rule the
world through the greatest political and social upheavals
ever known and has outlived by all these long centuries the
civilization which gave it birth.
Must we say that Roman Law, now that its binding force
has gone, has no longer a part to play in western Europe ?
He would be a bold man who should say so, for it con-
tinues to be taught in all the universities. Roman Law is
still the foundation for the liberal education of a lawyer,
the training and the sharpening of his logical equipment.
The methods of reasoning of the Roman jurists, their way of
approaching a legal problem we still follow to-day. To
their classifications we have returned after having long
neglected and sometimes misunderstood them. Above all,
we are still ruled by their idea of justice and their strivings
after equity.
ED. MEYNIAL.
7
THE POSITION OF WOMEN
' I ^HE position of women has been called the test point by
JL which the civilization of a country or of an age may be
judged, and although this is in many respects true, the test
remains one which it is extraordinarily difficult to apply,
because of the difficulty of determining what it is that
constitutes the position of women. Their position in
theory and in law is one thing, their practical position in
everyday life another. These react upon one another, but
they never entirely coincide, and the true position of women
at any particular moment is an insidious blend of both.
In the Middle Ages the proper sphere of women was the
subject of innumerable didactic treatises addressed to them,
or written about them, and their merits and defects were
an evergreen literary theme, which sometimes gave rise to
controversies in which the whole fashionable literary world
of the day was engaged, such as the debate which raged
round Jean de Meun's section of the Roman de la Rose and
Alan Chartier's poem La Belle Dame sans Merci at the
beginning of the fifteenth century.
The characteristic medieval theory about women, thus
laid down and debated, was the creation of two forces, the
Church and the Aristocracy, and it was extremely incon-
sistent. The Church and the Aristocracy were not only
often at loggerheads with each other, but each was at
loggerheads with itself, and both taught the most contra-
dictory doctrines, so that women found themselves per-
petually oscillating between a pit and a pedestal. Had the
Church, indeed, been consistent in its attitude towards them
2873 D d
42 Legacy of the Middle Ages
in the early days of its predominance, their position might
have been much better or much worse. But it was remark-
ably inattentive to the biblical injunction against halting
between two opinions. Janus-faced it looked at woman
out of every pulpit, every law book and every treatise, and
she never knew which face was turned upon her. Was she
Eve, the wife of Adam, or was she Mary, the mother of
Christ ? * Between Adam and God in Paradise ', says
Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240), ' there was but one woman ;
yet she had no rest until she had succeeded in banishing
her husband from the garden of delights and in condemning
Christ to the torment of the cross.' On the other hand,
* Woman', says a manuscript in the University of Cam-
bridge, ' is to be preferred to man, to wit : in material,
because Adam was made from clay and Eve from the side
of Adam ; in place, because Adam was made outside
paradise and Eve within ; in conception, because a woman
conceived God, which a man could not do ; in apparition,
because Christ appeared to a woman after the Resurrection,
to wit, the Magdalen ; in exaltation, because a woman is
exalted above the choirs of angels, to wit, the Blessed Mary.'
It is extremely curious to follow the working of these two
ideas upon the medieval mind. The view of woman as an
instrument of the Devil, a thing at once inferior and evil,
found expression very early in the history of the Church,
and it was the creation of the Church ; for while Rome
knew the tutelage of woman, and barbarism also placed her
in man's mund, both were distinguished by an essential
respect for her. As the ascetic ideal rose and flourished
and monasticism became the refuge of many of the finest
minds and most ardent spirits who drew breath in the
turmoil of the dying Empire and the invasions, there came
into being as an inevitable consequence a conception of
woman as the supreme temptress, ' ianua diaboli ', the most
The Position of Women 403
dangerous of all obstacles in the way of salvation. It is
unnecessary to enter fully into the ramifications of this
attitude. Its importance is that it established a point of
view about woman which survived long after the secular
conditions which created it had passed away. In practice
it had little influence upon men's daily lives ; they con-
tinued marrying and giving in marriage and invoked the
blessing of the Church upon their unions. But opinion
may change irrespective of practice and the monastic
point of view slowly permeated society. Tertullian and
St. Jerome took their place beside Ovid in that ' book of
wikked wyves ', which the Wife of Bath's fifth husband was
wont to read aloud nightly, with such startling results.
The clergy, who preached the ascetic ideal, were for many
centuries the only educated and hence the only articulate
section of the community, and it is not surprising that the
fundamental theory about women should have been a theory
of their essential inferiority.
This theory was accepted by the ordinary layman, but
only up to a point. Outside the ranks of monastic writers
and the more extreme members of a celibate priesthood,
no one, save professional misogynists like the notorious
Matheolus, took the evil nature of women very seriously,
and most men would probably have agreed with the Wife of
Bath's diagnosis,
For trusteth wel, it is an impossible
That any clerk wol speke good of wyves,
But if it be of hooly Seintes lyves,
Ne of noon oother womman never the mo.
What they did accept was the subjection of women. The
ideal of marriage which inspires the majority of the didactic
works addressed to women in the course of the Middle
Ages is founded upon this idea and demands the most
implicit obedience. It is set forth in the stories of Patient
D d 2
404 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Griselda and the Nut-Brown Maid, and the possessive
attitude towards women is nowhere more clearly marked
than in the remarks made upon feminine honour by Philippe
de Novaire (d. 1270) in his treatise Des quatre tens ffaage
fame. ' Women ', he says, ' have a great advantage in
one thing ; they can easily preserve their honour if they
wish to be held virtuous, by one thing only. But for a man
many are needful, if he wish to be esteemed virtuous, for it
behoves him to be courteous and generous, brave and wise.
And for a woman, if she be a worthy woman of her body,
all her other faults are covered and she can go with a high
head wheresoever she will ; and therefore it is in no way
needful to teach as many things to girls as to boys.'
The subjection of women was thus one side of medieval
theory, accepted both by the Church and by the Aristo-
cracy. On the other hand, it was they also who developed
with no apparent sense of incongruity the counter-doctrine
of the superiority of women, that adoration (Frauenditnst)
which gathered round the persons of the Virgin in heaven
and the lady upon earth, and which handed down to the
modern world the ideal of chivalry. The cult of the Virgin
and the cult of chivalry grew together, and continually
reacted upon one another ; they were both, perhaps, the
expression of the same deep-rooted instinct, that craving
for romance which rises to the surface again and again in
the history of mankind; and just as in the nineteenth
century the romantic movement followed upon the age of
common sense, so in the Middle Ages the turmoil and
pessimism of the Dark Ages were followed by the age of
chivalry and of the Virgin. The cult of the Virgin is the
most characteristic flower of medieval religion and nothing
is more striking than the rapidity with which it spread and
the dimensions which it assumed. She was already supreme
by the eleventh century, and supreme she remained until
The Position of Women 405
the end of the Middle Ages. Great pilgrimages grew up
to her shrines and magnificent cathedrals were reared and
decorated in her honour, while in almost every church not
specifically her own she had a lady chapel. In the thirteenth
century about the same time that Philippe de Novaire
was deciding that girls must not be taught to read Albertus
Magnus debated the scholastic question whether the Virgin
Mary possessed perfectly the seven liberal arts and resolved
it in her favour. Her miracles were on every lip, her name
was sown in wild flowers over the fields, and the very fall of
humanity became a matter for congratulation, since without
it mankind would not have seen her enthroned in heaven.
Ne hadde the appil take ben,
The appil taken ben,
Ne hadde never our lady
A ben hevene quene.
Blessed be the time
That appil take was.
Therefore we moun singen
' Deo gracias '.
The cult of the lady was the mundane counterpart of the
cult of the Virgin and it was the invention of the medieval
aristocracy. In chivalry the romantic worship of a woman
was as necessary a quality of the perfect knight as was the
worship of God. As Gibbon puts it, with more wit than
amiability, ' The knight was the champion of God and the
ladies I blush to unite such discordant terms', and the
idea finds clear expression in the refrain of a French ballade
of the fourteenth century, * En ciel un dieu, en terre une
desse '. One of its most interesting manifestations was the
development of a theory of courtly love ', strangely platonic
in conception though in many ways as artificial as contem-
porary scholasticism, which inspired some of the finest
poetry of the age, from the Troubadours and Minnesingers
of France and Germany to the singers of the * dolce stil
406 Legacy of the Middle Ages
nuovo ' and Dante himself in Italy. It is obvious that
a theory which regarded the worship of a lady as next to
that of God and conceived her as the mainspring of brave
deeds, a creature half romantic, half divine, must have done
something to counterbalance the dogma of subjection. The
process of placing women upon a pedestal had begun, and
whatever we may think of the ultimate value of such an
elevation (for few human beings are suited to the part of
Stylites, whether ascetic or romantic) it was at least better
than placing them, as the Fathers of the Church had
inclined to do, in the bottomless pit. Nevertheless, as
a factor in raising the position of women too much impor-
tance must not be attributed to the ideal of chivalry. Just
as asceticism was the limited ideal of a small clerical caste,
so chivalry was the limited ideal of a small aristocratic
caste, and those who were outside that caste had little part
in any refining influence which it possessed. Even in the
class in which it was promulgated and practised, it is im-
possible not to feel that it was little more than a veneer.
Not only in the great chansons de gesu, but in the book
which the fourteenth-century knight of La Tour Landry
wrote for the edification of his daughters, gentlemen in a rage
not infrequently strike their wives to the ground, and the
corporal chastisement of a wife was specifically permitted by
canon law. The ideal of Vamour courtois, too, rapidly
degenerated and its social was far less than its literary
importance. It had a civilizing effect upon manners, but
the fundamental sensuality and triviality beneath the super-
ficial polish is to be seen clearly enough in the many thir-
teenth-century books of deportment for ladies, which were
modelled upon Ovid's Ars Amatoria, so severely condemned
by Christine de Fisan. It is probable that the idea of
chivalry has had more influence upon later ages than it had
upon contemporaries. As a legacy it has certainly affected
The Position of Women 407
the position of women in modern times, for whatever its
effect upon medieval practice, it was one of the most
powerful ideas evolved by the Middle Ages, and though
it owed something to Arab influences, it was substantially
an original idea.
Such, then, was the medieval theory as to the position
of woman, an inconsistent and contradictory thing, as any
generalization about a sex must be, teaching simultaneously
her superiority and her inferiority. It was, as has been said,
formulated by the two classes which were in power at the
outset of the period, the Church and the Aristocracy.
It is true that from the thirteenth century onwards a new
force was added to these ; the Bourgeoisie began to make
itself increasingly felt, and in some respects the Bourgeoisie
showed a greater sense of the normal personality of women
than did either the Aristocracy or the Church ; borough
law had to take account of the woman trader, and in many
towns there existed ' customs ' for the treatment of a married
woman carrying on a trade of her own as zfemme sole. These
are in striking contrast with the laws regulating the position
of the married woman under the common law, and although
they were intended for the protection of the husband they
were also an effective improvement in the status of the wife.
But in the main the Bourgeoisie rose to importance in
a world in which law and opinion had already hardened
into certain moulds, and it accepted as a dispensation of
nature those ideas about women and about marriage which
it found in existence. Indeed the Bourgeois note in litera-
ture, which first makes itself felt in the fabliaux, is if any-
thing rather more hostile to women than the clerical note
and far more so than the courtly note, for except in the
great mercantile families, whose wealth enabled them to
move in the circle of the aristocracy, Frauendienst found
little welcome. Nevertheless, the woman of the fabliaux,
408 Legacy of the Middle Ages
odious as she is, shows something of the practical equality
which prevailed between men and women in the middle
and lower classes ; for if she is in subjection, the subjection
is very imperfectly maintained, and the henpecked husband
is a suspiciously favourite theme. There is a sort of poetic
justice in the fact that men whose ideal wife was Patient
Griselda not infrequently found themselves married to the
Wife of Bath.
Two great bodies of opinion remained wholly unex-
pressed. The working classes, c whose shoulders held the
sky suspended ' above Church and Aristocracy and Bour-
geoisie alike, were to remain inarticulate for many centuries
to come. That busy world of men and women, of which
we catch a glimpse in court roll and borough record, rarely
raised its voice above the whistle of the scythe or the hum
of the loom. One other class, too, remained all but in-
articulate, for we hardly ever hear what women thought
about themselves. All the books, as the Wife of Bath com-
plained, were written by men*
Who peyntede the leoun, tel me who ?
By God, if wommen hadde writen stories
As clerkes han with-inne hir oratories,
They wolde han writen of men more wikkednesse
Than all the mark of Adam may redresse !
Works written by women are rare (apart from the passionate
love-letters of Heloise and the outpourings of the great
women mystics) and such poetesses as the troubadour
Countess Beatrice de Die and the famous writer of lais,
known as Marie de France, in no way detach themselves
from the poetic convention of their day. The Legends of
Good Women which sprang up to counteract the books of
* wikked wyves ', the somewhat jejune Biens des Fames
which replied to the much more vigorous Blastenges des
Fames, were probably all the work of men. It is not until
The Position of Women 409
the end of the fourteenth century that there appears
a woman writer to take up the cudgels for her sex and lead
a party of revolt against the prevalent abuse of women.
Christine de Pisan was skilled in all the courtly conventions,
for she made her living and supported three children by her
pen ; but there is both idealism and reality in her attack
on the Roman de la Rose, and in the educational treatise, Le
Livre des Trois Vertus, which she wrote for the use of wotaen.
For the rest we must deduce the woman's point of view
from an occasional cri du cceur or half-humorous comment,
preserved not in literature but in real life. St. Bernardino
of Siena, in one of his vividly colloquial sermons, urges
husbands to help their wives and strengthens his plea by
one woman's words to him. * Mark thy wife well,' he says,
4 how she travaileth in childbirth, travaileth to suckle the
child, travaileth to rear it, travaileth in washing and cleaning
by day and night. All this travail, secst thou, is of the
woman only, and the man goeth singing on his way. There
was once a baron's lady, who said to me : " Methinks the
dear lord and master doth as he seeth good and I am content
to say that he doth well. But the woman alone beareth the
pain of the children in many things, bearing them in her
body, bringing them into the world, ruling them, and all
this oftentimes with grievous travail. If only God had
given some share to man ; if only God had given him the
child-bearing ! " Thus she reasoned and I answered :
" Methinks there is much reason in what you say." ' Some-
thing of the same spirit inspires an anonymous fifteenth-
century song, which strikes a note of naive and genuine feeling :
I am as lyghte as any roe
To praise womene wher that I goo.
To onpreyse womene yt were a shame,
For a womane was thy dame ;
Our blessed Lady beryth the name
Of all womene wher that they goo.
4 10 Legacy of the Middle Ages
A woman is a worthy thyng,
She dothe washe and dothe wrynge,
' Lullay ! Lullay ! ' she dothe synge,
And yet she has but care and woo.
A womane is a worthy wyght,
She serveth a man both daye and nyght ;
Therto she putty th all her myght,
And yet she hathe but care and woo.
Only rarely was the prevalent theory, ascetic or romantic,
broken by this domestic strain.
But the theory about women, inconsistent and the work
of a small articulate minority as it was, was only one factor
in determining their position and it was the least important
factor. The fact that it received a voluminous and often
striking literary expression has given it a somewhat dispro-
portionate weight, and to arrive at the real position of women
it is necessary constantly to equate it with daily life, as
revealed in more homely records. The result is very much
what common sense would indicate, for in daily life the
position occupied by woman was one neither of inferiority
nor of superiority, but of a certain rough-and-ready equality.
This equality was as marked in the feudal as in the working
classes ; indeed it allowed the lady of the .upper classes
considerably more scope than she sometimes enjoyed at a
much later period, for example, in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. In order to estimate it, we may with
advantage turn from theories to real life and endeavour,
if possible, to disentangle some of the chief characteristics
of the existence led by three typical women, the feudal lady,
the bourgeoise, and the peasant. The typical woman must
be taken to be the wife and more generally the housewife,
but it must not be imagined that marriage was the lot of
every woman and that the Middle Ages were not as familiar
as our own day with the independent spinster. Then as now
The Position of Women 411
the total number of adult women was in excess of that of
men. Reliable statistics are sadly to seek, but here and
there poll-tax and hearth-tax lists afford interesting informa-
tion. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries certain of
the German towns took censuses, from which it appears
that for every 1,000 men there were 1,100 women in Frank-
fort in 1385, 1,207 women in Nuremberg in 1449, and
1,246 women in Basel in 1454 ; the number of women was,
it is true, swelled in these towns, because it was customary
for widows from the country round to retire there, but
a disproportion between the two sexes certainly existed. 1
It is, indeed, to be expected on account of the greater
mortality of men in the constant crusades, wars and town
and family factions, and the discrepancy was aggravated by
the fact that the celibacy of the clergy removed a very large
body of men from marriage.
Medieval records are, indeed, full of these independent
women. A glance at any manorial * extent ' will show
women villeins and cotters living upon their little holdings
and rendering the same services for them as men ; some of
these are widows, but many of them are obviously unmarried.
The unmarried daughters of villeins could always find work
to do upon their father's acres, and could hire out their
strong arms for a wage to weed and hoe and help with the
harvest. Women performed almost every kind of agricul-
tural labour, with the exception of the heavy business of
ploughing. They often acted as thatcher's assistants, and on
many manors they did the greater part of the sheep-shearing,
while the care of the dairy and of the small poultry was
always in their hands. Similarly, in the towns women
carried on a great variety of trades. Of the five hundred
crafts scheduled in Etienne Boileau's Livre des Metiers in
medieval Paris, at least five were their monopoly, and in
1 K. Bucher, Die Frauenjrage im Mittelalter (Tubingen, 1910), p. 6.
412 Legacy of the Middle Ages
a large number of others women were employed as well
as men. Two industries in particular were mainly in
their hands, because they could with ease be carried on as
by-industries in the home. The ale, drunk by every one
who could not afford wine, in those days when only the
most poverty-stricken fell back upon water, was almost
invariably prepared by women, and every student of English
manorial court rolls will remember the regular appearance
at the leet of most of the village alewives, to be fined for
breaking the Assize of Ale. Similarly, in all the great cloth-
working districts, Florence, the Netherlands, England,
women are to be found carrying out the preliminary pro-
cesses of the manufacture. Spinning was, indeed, the
regular occupation of all women and the c spinster's '
habitual means of support ; God, as the Wife of Bath
observes, has given three weapons to women, deceit, weeping,
and spinning ! Other food-producing and textile industries
were also largely practised by them, and domestic service
provided a career for many. It must, of course, be remem-
bered that married as well as single women practised all
these occupations, but it is clear that they offered a solution
to the problem of the ' superfluous ' women of the lower
classes. Nevertheless, this equality of men and women in
the labour market was a limited one. Many craft regulations
exclude female labour, some because the work was con-
sidered too heavy, but most for the reason, with which we
are familiar, that the competition of women undercut the
men. Then, as now, women's wages were lower than those
of men, even for the same work, and the author of a treatise
on Husbandry was enunciating a general principle when,
after describing the duties of the daye or dairywoman, he
added : * If this is a manor where there is no dairy, it is
always good to have a woman there at a much less cost than
a man.'
. The Position of Women 413
The problem of the unmarried girl of the upper class was
more difficult, for in feudal society there was no place for
women who did not marry and marry young. It was the
Church which came to their rescue, by putting within their
reach as brides of Christ a dignity greater than that which
they would have attained as brides of men. The nunnery
was essentially a class institution. It absorbed only women
belonging to the nobility, the gentry, and (in the later
Middle Ages) the bourgeoisie, and in practice (though not
in strict canon law) it demanded a dowry, though a smaller
dowry than an earthly husband might have required. But
the spinsters of the working class were absorbed by industry
and the land and did not need it. To unmarried gentle-
women monasticism gave scope for abilities which might
otherwise have run to waste, assuring them both self-
respect and the respect of society. It made use of their
powers of organization in the government of a community,
and in the management of household and estates ; it allowed
nuns an education which was for long better than that
enjoyed by men and women alike outside the cloister ; and
it opened up for them, when they were capable of rising to
such heights, the supreme experiences of the contemplative
life. Of what it was capable at its best great monastic saints
and notable monastic housewives have left ample record to
testify. Even if it suffered decline and sheltered the idle
with the industrious and the black sheep with the white,
it was still an honourable profession and fulfilled a useful
function for the gentlewomen of the Middle Ages. In the
towns, and for a somewhat lower social class, various lay
sisterhoods, grouped in their Beguinages, Samenungen,
Gotteshduser, offered the same opportunities.
But what of the well-born girl who was not destined for
a nunnery ? Of her it may be said that she married, she
married young and she married the man selected for her by
414 Legacy of the Middle Ages
her father. The careful father would expect to arrange
for his daughter's marriage and often to marry her before
she was fourteen, and if he found himself dying while she was
still a child he would be at great pains to leave her a suitable
dowry ad maritagium suum in his will. A girl insufficiently
dowered might have to suffer that disparagement in mar-
riage which was so much dreaded and so carefully guarded
against, and even in the lowest ranks of society the bride
was expected to bring something with her besides her person
when she entered her husband's house. The dowering of
poor girls was one of the recognized forms of medieval
charity and, like the mending of bad roads, a very sound
one. The system, of course, had its bad side. Modern
civilization has steadily extended the duration of childhood,
and to-day there seems something tragic in the spectacle
of these children, taking so soon upon their young shoulders
the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood. Similarly,
since marriage is to-day most frequently a matter of free
choice between its participants, the indifference sometimes
shown to human personality in feudal marriages of the
highest rank appears shocking. They were often dictated
solely by the interests of the land. ' Let me not to the
marriage of true fiefs admit impediments ' may be said to
have been the dominating motive of a great lord with a son
or daughter or ward to marry, and weddings were often
arranged and sometimes solemnized when children were in
their cradles.
Medieval thinkers showed some consciousness of these
disadvantages themselves. The fact that all feudal mar-
riages were manages de convenance accounts for the funda-
mental dogma of V amour courtois, so startling to modern
ideas, that whatever the respect and affection binding
married people, the sentiment of love could not exist
between them, being in its essence freely sought and freely
The Position of Women 4*5
given and must therefore be sought outside marriage.
* Causa coniugii ab amore non est excusatio.' Langland,
again, inveighs against the * modern ' habit of marrying for
money and counsels other considerations ; * and loke that
loue be more the cause than lond other [or] nobles.'
It is more rarely that the woman's view of a loveless
marriage finds expression, but once at least, in the later
Middle Ages, the voice of a woman passes judgement upon
it, and with it upon the loneliness, the accidia (as monastic
writers would have called it) of that life which medieval
literature decks in all the panoply of romance. The Saxon
reformer, Johann Busch, has preserved in his Liber de reforma-
tion* monasteriorum (1470-5) a poignant dialogue between
himself and the dying Duchess of Brunswick.
' When her confession, with absolution and penance was
ended,' he writes, ' I said to her, " Think you, lady, that you will
pass to the kingdom of heaven when you die ? " She replied,
" This believe I firmly." Said I, " That would be a marvel.
You were born in a fortress and bred in castles and for many
years now you have lived with your husband, the Lord Duke,
ever in the midst of manifold delights, with wine and ale, with
meat and venison both roast and boiled ; and yet you expect
to fly away (evolare) to heaven directly you die." She answered :
" Beloved father, why should I not now go to heaven ? I have
lived here in this castle like an anchoress in a cell. What delights
or pleasures have I enjoyed here, save that I have made shift to
show a happy face to my servants and to my maidens ? I have
a hard husband, as you know, who has scarce any care or inclina-
tion towards women. Have I not been in this castle even as it
were in a cell ? " I said to her, " You think, then, that as soon
as you are dead God will send his angels to your bed to bear
your soul away to Paradise and to the heavenly kingdom of
God ? " and she replied, " This believe I firmly." Then said
I, " May God confirm you in your faith and give you what you
believe." '
But it is unnecessary to suppose that the majority of
feudal marriages turned out badly. The father is not
416 Legacy of the Middle Ages
human who does not wish to do his best for his daughter,
and it was only in the most exalted rank that worldly could
entirely outweigh personal considerations. Moreover, the
fact that most wedded couples began life together while
they were both very young was in their favour. Human
nature is extremely adaptable, and they came to each other
with no strongly marked ideas or prejudices and grew up
together. The medieval attitude towards child marriages
was that to which Christine de Pisan gave such touching
expression when she recalled her own happy life with the
husband whom she married before she was fifteen and who
left her at twenty-five an inconsolable widow with three
children.
II m'amoit et c'estoit droit,
Car joenne lui fuz donnee ;
Si avions toute ordonnee
Nostre amour et nos deux cuers,
Trop plus que freres ne suers
En un seul entier vouloir,
Fust de joye ou de douloir.
Certainly medieval records as a whole show a cameraderie
between husband and wife which contrasts remarkably both
with the picture of woman in subjection which the Church
delighted to draw and with that of the worshipped lady of
chivalry. An obscure Flemish weaver of the sixteenth
century, writing to his wife from England, signs himself
with the charming phrase ' your married friend ', and of
medieval wives as a whole it may be said with truth, that
while literature is full of Griseldas and belles dames sans
merci, life is full of married friends. The mothers, wives, and
daughters of the barons and knights of feudalism are sturdy
witnesses to the truth of Mrs. Peyser's immortal dictum,
* God Almighty made 'em to match the men.' If feudal
marriages submitted them completely to their fiefs, they
could inherit and hold land, honours, and offices like men,
The Position of Women 417
and are to be found fighting for their rights like men, while
widows, in their own right or as guardians of infant sons,
often enjoyed great power. Blanche of Champagne waged
war for fourteen years (1213-27) on behalf of her minor son,
and Blanche of Castile governed a kingdom as regent for
the boy Louis IX. Indeed, the history of the early thirteenth
century is strongly impressed with the character of those
two masterful and energetic sisters, in beauty, talent, and
iron strength of purpose the worthy granddaughters of
6 the eagle ', Eleanor of Aquitaine, Blanche, the mother of
Saint Louis of France, and Berengaria, the mother of Saint
Ferdinand of Castile.
Throughout the Middle Ages, too, the social and physical
conditions of life, the constant wars, and above all the slow
communications, inevitably threw a great deal of respon-
sibility upon wives as the representatives of their absent
husbands. It has been asserted in all ages that the sphere
of woman is the home, but it has not always been acknow-
ledged that that sphere may vary greatly in circumference,
and that in some periods and circumstances it has given
a much wider scope to women than in others. In the
Middle Ages it was, for a variety of reasons, a very wide
sphere, partly because of this constantly recurring necessity
for the wife to take the husband's place. While her lord was
away on military expeditions, on pilgrimages, at court, or
on business, it was she who became the natural guardian of
the fief or manager of the manor, and Europe was full of
competent ladies, not spending all their time in hawking
and flirting, spinning and playing chess, but running
estates, fighting lawsuits, and even standing sieges for their
absent lords. When the nobility of Europe went forth
upon a crusade it was their wives who managed their
affairs at home, superintended the farming, interviewed the
tenants, and saved up money for the next assault. When
2873 E e
418 Legacy of the Middle Ages
the lord was taken prisoner it was his wife who collected his
ransom, squeezing every penny from the estate, bothering
bishops for indulgences, 1 selling her jewels and the family
plate. Once more it was these extremely practical persons
and not the Griseldas, or the
store of Ladies whose bright eies
Rain influence and judge the prise,
who were the typical feudal women.
Christine de Pisan, in her Livre des Trois Vertus (c. 1406),
sets down the things which a lady or baroness living on her
estates ought to be able to do. She must be capable of
replacing her husband in every way during his absence;
6 because that knights, esquires and gentlemen go upon
journeys and follow the wars, it beseemeth their wives to be
wise and of great governance, and to see clearly in all that
they do, for that most often they dwell at home without
their husbands, who are at court or in divers lands.' The
lady must therefore be skilled in all the niceties of tenure
and feudal law, in case her lord's rights should be invaded ;
she must know all about the management of an estate, so as
to supervise the work of the bailiff, and she must understand
her own metier as housewife, and be able to plan her expendi-
ture wisely. The budget of a great lady, Christine suggests,
should be divided into five parts, of which one should be
devoted to almsgiving, one to household expenses, one to
the payment of officials and women, one to gifts, and one
should be set apart to be drawn upon for jewels, dresses,
1 These were common during the Hundred Years War. Archbishop
Kemp c' s York Register, for instance, contains an indulgence of 28 days
to raise 50 required for the ransom of Richard Botiler of Shropshire,
taken captive in France, to be paid either to him or to his wife Elizabeth
(1443), and another on behalf of Elizabeth wife of Sir John Holt, also a
prisoner. Test. Ebor. (Surtees Society), ii, p. 31 (note).
The Position of Women 419
and miscellaneous expenses as required. The good manage-
ment of a housewife is sometimes worth more to a lord
than the income from his tenants ; and in every class of life
it is the wife's function to dispose wisely of her husband's
resources according to his rank, whether it be the baron's
patrimony or the labourer's wage. Christine de Pisan was
writing about how a lady ought to behave, but from many
records we know that the ideal was carried out in practice.
No more striking witness to the confidence reposed by
husbands in the business capacity of their wives is to be
found than the wills and letters of the later Middle Ages.
It is impossible to read through any great collection of
medieval wills, such as the Testamenta Eboracensia, pub-
lished by the Surtees Society, without observing the number
of cases in which a wife is made the executrix of her hus-
band's will, sometimes alone and sometimes as principal in
conjunction with other persons. More than once a touch
of feeling enlivens the legal phraseology, as when John
Sothill of Dewsbury bids his executors, ' I pray you, pray
Thomas my son in my name and for ye lufe of God, yat he
never strife with his moder, as he will have my blissyng,
for he sail fynd hir curtos to del withall '. Letters tell the
same tale. The Paston Letters, for example, give a remark-
able picture of the hard-headed business woman in fifteenth-
century England. No one could really like Margaret
Paston, who bullied her daughter and kept the only soft
corner in a peculiarly hard heart for her husband, but she
was exceedingly competent and managed his property for
him with the utmost success, collecting rents, keeping
accounts, and outwitting enemies, and she seems to have
taken it as part of the day's work to be besieged in her
manor, and to have the walls of her chamber pulled down
about her ears by armed men.
But it was not only on exceptional occasions and in the
62
420 Legacy of the Middle Ages
absence of her husband that the lady found a weight of
responsibility upon her shoulders. It is true that her duties
as a mother were in some ways less arduous than might have
been supposed. Large families were general, and the death-
rate among children was high (as may be guessed from many
a medieval tombstone, in which little shrouded corpses are
ranged with living children behind their kneeling parents),
but the new-born child, in the upper classes at least, was
commonly handed over to a wet nurse and it is sometimes
mentioned as a sign of special affection in a mother that she
should have fed her own children at the breast. Again, the
training of the young squire often took him at an early age
from his mother's society, and it was customary to send both
boys and girls away to the households of great persons to
learn breeding, although no doubt they often remained at
home. In any case the early marriages of the day meant
short childhoods. Books of deportment are singularly
silent, as a whole, on the subject of maternal duties ; they
were (as might be inferred from the shocking behaviour of
Griselda) overshadowed by those of the wife. But if the
nursery was not a great burden, housekeeping in the Middle
Ages, and indeed in all ages prior to the Industrial Revolu-
tion, was a much more complicated business than it is
to-day, except for the fact that domestic servants were
cheap, plentiful, and unexacting. It was no small feat to
clothe and feed a family when households were large, guests
frequent, and when much of what is to-day made in factories
and bought in shops had to be prepared at home. The
butter and cheese were made in the dairy and the beer in
the brewhouse, the candles were made up and the winter's
meat salted down in the larder, and some at least of the
cloth and linen used by the household was spun at home.
The lady of the house had to supervise all these operations,
as well as to make, at fair and market or in the nearest town,
The Position of Women 421
the necessary purchases of wine and foodstuffs and materials
which could not be prepared on the manor.
The country housewife, too, was expected to look after
the bodies of her household in sickness as well as in health,
and it was necessary for her to have a certain skill in physic
and surgery. Life was far less professionalized in the
Middle Ages ; a doctor was not to be found round every
corner, and though the great lady in her town house or the
wealthy bourgeoise might find a physician from Oxford or
Paris or Salerno within reach, some one had to be ready to
deal with emergencies on the lonely manors. Old French
and English metrical romances are full of ladies physicking
and patching up their knights, and household remedies
were handed down with recipes for puddings and perfumes
from mother to daughter ; such knowledge was expected
of them, as it was expected of the * wise woman ', who
mingled it with charms and spells. There exist also various
treatises on the diseases of women which are obviously
written or translated for their own use, and in an English
version of the De Mulierum Passionibus (attributed to
Trotula), the translator asserts himself to have undertaken
the work in order that women shall be able to diagnose and
treat their own diseases ; * and because whomen of oure
tonge donne bettyr rede and undyrstande thys langage than
eny other and euery whoman lettyrde rede hit to other
unlettyrd and help hem and conceyle hem in here maledyes
wt.owtyn shewyng here dysese to man, i have thys drauyn
and wryttyn in englysh.' * If, however, a woman set up
practice as a physician outside the limits of her home and
pretended to something more than the skill of an amateur
1 MS. Bodl. Douce 37 (Western 21611), f. ib. There is a similar
fourteenth-century English treatise on gynaecology, written ' that oon
woman may helpe another in her sykenesse ', in Brit. Mus. MS. Sloane
2463. I owe these references to the kindness of Dr. Singer.
422 Legacy of the Middle Ages
or a witch, there forthwith arose an outcry which seems to
foreshadow the opposition of the medical profession to the
entrance of women in the nineteenth century. The case
of the doctors was a respectable one ; the women had no
medical degrees and therefore no knowledge or training. 1
Nevertheless there were women here and there who acquired
considerable fame as physicians. The most interesting of
them is the well-born lady Jacoba Felicie, who in 1322,
being then about thirty years of age, was prosecuted by the
Medical Faculty at Paris on a charge of contravening the
statute which forbade any one to practise medicine in
the city and suburbs without the Faculty's degree and the
Chancellor's licence. Various witnesses were called to
testify that she made use of all the usual methods of diag-
nosis and treatment, and several of them said that they had
been given up by various doctors before being cured by her
and set forth the names of these legitimate but unsuccessful
practitioners, which was perhaps a little hard on the pro-
fession. Her skill seems to have been undoubted, one
witness stating that * he had heard it said by several that
she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than the
greatest master doctor or surgeon in Paris '. Nevertheless
she was inhibited, although she made an eloquent and
sensible defence ; but as she had already disregarded a pre-
vious inhibition and a heavy fine, she probably continued
as before to practise her healing profession.
The lady was thus obliged not only to be housewife in
her own capacity, but amateur soldier and man-of-the-
house in her husband's absence, and amateur physician
when no skilled doctor could be had. She was also obliged
to be something rather more than an amateur farmer, for
the comprehensive duties of a country housewife brought
1 Trotula and the famous women doctors of Salerno are rapidly
melting away under the cruel searchlight of modern research.
The Position of Women 423
her into close connexion with all sides of the manorial
economy. It is plain from medieval treatises that a general
supervision of the manor farm was expected of her, over and
above that of the dairy, which was her special province.
Christine de Pisan's great lady must understand the choice
of labourers, the seasons for the different operations, the
crops suitable for different soils, the care of animals, the
best markets for farm produce. Stoutly clad, she must
tramp up and down the balks, * par devers ses grans prairies
et frais herbages ', and through the young coppices, to
oversee her cornfields and pastures and woods. She must
have a watchful eye upon her labourers, too. ' Let her go
often into the fields to see how they are working, . . . and
let her be careful to make them get up in the morning.
Let her wait for no one, if she be a good housewife, but let
her rise up herself and throw on a houppelande, and go to
the window and shout until she see them come running out,
for they are given to laziness.' Deschamps' satire on the
manorial housewife was evidently drawn from life :
J'ai le soing de tout gouverner ;
Je ne s^ay pas mon piet tourner
Qu'en vint lieux ne faille respondre.
L'un me dit : ' Les brebis faut tondre ' ;
L'autre dit : * Les aigneaulx sevrer ' ;
L'autre : ' II faut es vignes ouvrer ' ;
L'autre s'en va a la charrue ;
L'autre dit : ' Getter fault en rue
Les vaches apres le vachier * ;
L'autre dit : 'II faut escorchier
Un buef qui s'est laisse mourir * ;
L'autre dit : ' II faut recouvrir
Es estables et sur la grange.'
An equally good portrait of a town housewife, belonging
to the haute bourgeoisie, is to be found in the remarkable
book which an elderly citizen, the Me*nagier de Paris, wrote
424 Legacy of the Middle Ages
about 1392-4 for the instruction of his child wife. The
tenderness of its tone and the extremely practical nature
of the information contained in it, make this treatise unique
among the innumerable didactic works addressed to women
in the Middle Ages. The Menagier explains to his young
wife that he has undertaken the work in response to her
request that he would teach her and because she would
certainly marry again after his death, in which case it would
be a great reflection upon him if she were not wise in all
that concerned the care of house and husband ! And truly
the second husband of the Menagier's wife must have been
a happy man ; if, indeed, he did not suffer the penalty
described by another fourteenth-century bourgeois, Paolo di
Certaldo of Florence, who says : * If thou art able, beware
of taking a widow woman for thy wife, because thou wilt
never be able to satisfy her, and every time thou refusest
her anything she may ask of thee, she will say, " My other
husband did not treat me thus ! " Yet truly, if thou hast
already had another wife thou mayst take her with greater
safety, and if she saith, " My other husband did not treat me
thus," or " Blessed be the soul of So-and-so," thou canst
reply " Blessed be the soul of Madonna So-and-so, who did
not cause me this tribulation every day ! " ' The Menagier
planned his book in three sections. The first deals with the
lady's moral and religious duties, deportment, and duty
towards her husband ; * because these two things, to wit
the salvation of your soul and the comfort of your husband,
are the two things most chiefly necessary, therefore are they
placed first.' The second and most interesting section
deals with household management, the choice and treat-
ment of servants, the best methods of airing, mending, and
cleaning dresses and furs, the best recipes for catching fleas
and other * familiar beasts to man ' and for keeping bed-
rooms free of mosquitoes and barns of rats, the art of
The Position of Women 425
gardening, and above all the choice and preparation of
menus suitable for every sort of meal. * The fourth article
is that you, as sovereign mistress of your house, may know
how to order dinners, suppers, meats and dishes and be
wise concerning butchers' and poulterers' lore and have
knowledge of spicery, and the fifth article teaches you how
to command, order and devise and have made all manner
of soups, stews, sauces, and other viands, and the same for
invalids.' He is truly the Mrs. Beeton of the Middle Ages ;
and it may be remarked that his ideas as to quantity in
ingredients are very similar. The book closes with a third
section, planned but unfortunately unfinished, which deals
with the lady's amusements.
The Menagier's book tells us more about the domestic
economy of a wealthy citizen's home than any other medieval
record. One of its most valuable characteristics is the
particularity of his instructions for dealing with domestic
servants. In the management of her menage his young wife
is assisted by a steward, Master Jehan le dispensier, and by
a sort of duenna-housekeeper, Dame Agnes la beguine, and
the choice of servants is left entirely in her hands, with
their assistance. There were in Paris at the time recom-
manderesses, or women keeping what would to-day be called
registry offices, and the great ordinance of 1351, which fixed
wages after the Black Death, allowed them iSd. for placing
a chambermaid and 2s. for a nurse, * a prendre tant d'une
partie comme d'autre '. The M6nagier warns his wife to
engage no chambermaids c until you first know where their
last place was and send some of your people to get their
character, whether they talked or drank too much, how
long they were in the place, what work they were wont to
do and can do, whether they have homes or friends in the
town, from what sort of people and what part of the country
they come, how long they were in the place and why they
426 Legacy of the Middle Ages
left '. On engaging a girl she is to cause the steward to
enter in his register her name and that of her father and
mother and kinsfolk, the place where they live, the place
of her birth and her references. The closest supervision
is to be maintained over the manners and morals of maid-
servants and their mistress should set them a good example
in all things. They are to be well fed and allowed due time
for recreation, young and foolish girls are to sleep in a room
adjacent to her own and without low windows looking
on to the road, and * if one of your servants fall ill, do you
yourself, laying aside all other cares, very lovingly and
charitably care for him or her '. The daily work of the
servants is set down with even greater care, the sweeping
and cleaning of the house in the morning, the feeding of
pet dogs and cage birds, the airing of sheets, coverlets,
dresses and furs in the sunshine so as to preserve them from
moths, together with sundry recipes for getting rid of
spots, the weekly inspection of wines, vinegars, grains, oils,
nuts, and other provisions by the steward, and the admonish-
ment of Richard of the kitchen to cleanliness. Every man
and maid must have his or her specific work to do, and the
steward, the housekeeper and the young mistress must watch
carefully that they do it.
But the work of the bourgeoise housewife is by no means
confined to running her house and managing her servants,
for she, no less than the lady of a manor, must be ready,
if need be, to take her husband's place ; and she commonly
knows a great deal about his business. William Warner of
Boston, trading in Zealand, habitually sends home to his
wife Iceland stockfish and other goods, that * she shulde
putte the marchaundise to sale as she dydde other mar-
chaundise'. Almost all guild regulations forbidding the
employment of women make exception for the craftsman's
wife and daughter, who are expected to help in the workshop
The Position of Women 427
and need no formal apprenticeship. The training thus
acquired enabled a widow to carry on her husband's trade
and to complete the training of his apprentices and thus we
find widows not only engaged in small crafts but in mercan-
tile operations on a large scale, like Margery Russell of
Coventry, who obtained letters of marque against the
merchants of Santander and seized two of their ships. Nor
was it only as their husband's representatives or widows
that married women came into the labour market, for they
frequently carried on separate businesses as femmes soles,
and it has already been pointed out that many town regula-
tions took cognizance of this fact and allowed them to be
sued for debts and punished for misdeeds as though they were
single women. With single women they shared in the textile
and food-producing industries, and there were other women
besides the Wife of Bath who carried on the business of
clothiers
Of cloth making she hadde swiche an haunte
She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt,
though possibly they did not all wear out five husbands in
their spare time, like that redoubtable lady.
The lower we move in the social scale the more laborious,
naturally, was the housewife's life, because she would
commonly be obliged to help with her husband's craft or
to carry on some by-industry of her own, as well as caring
for house and children. Below the ranks of the gentry and
the richer bourgeoisie few housewives were able to concern
themselves solely with their homes, which were frequently
supported by the earnings of wife as well as of husband.
Most laborious of all was the lot of the peasant woman
living upon the land. Of her indeed the proverbial adage
was true :
Some respit to husbands the weather may send,
But huswiuc's affaires haue neuer an end.
428 Legacy of the Middle Ages
It is true that manorial customs usually exempted the
villein's wife from the obligation to labour on the lord's
land, but her toil could rarely be spared upon her husband's
holding, the inevitable by-industry occupied what time
she could spare from the fields, and in her one-roomed or
two-roomed cottage, dark and smoky and often shared with
the animals, as Chaucer has drawn it in his tale of Chaunte-
cleer and Pertelote, she must labour unceasingly. There
are few passages in medieval literature more poignant than
that in which Langland has described ' the wo of these
women that wonyeth in cotes '.
Nevertheless, the life had its compensations. In Western
Europe at least the small cultivator of the village advanced
steadily in freedom and prosperity during the Middle Ages,
and fabliaux often show us the well-to-do villein
Jadis estoit uns vilains riches
Qui mout estoit avers et chiches.
If manorial custom looked upon women mainly as replen-
ishers of the estate with labour and forced the villein to pay
merchet and leyrwite for his daughter, it also not infre-
quently showed special consideration for his wife while she
was fulfilling her essential function. Sometimes the villein's
wife in childbed is excused the annual tribute of the Shrove-
tide hen, sometimes she may claim a load of firewood,
sometimes she may even fish for herself in the lord's strictly
preserved brook. At Denckendorf in Wiirttemberg each
lying-in bondwoman received two measures of wine and
eight white loaves at the christening of her child. Harsh
and coarse and laborious as it was, the peasant woman's life
had its rude gaieties, and there is some truth in Christine de
Pisan's judgement, * Comment qu'elles soient nourries
communement de pain bis, de lait, de lart, de potaige et
d'eaue abuvrees, et que assez de poine troyent, est leur vie
The Position of Women 429
plus secure et mesmes en plus grant suffisance que telles [qui]
sont bien haultes assises.'
This tale of busy and hard-working lives lived in lord's
manor, in burgess's house, and in peasant's cottage has taken
little account of the amusements of the medieval woman.
Yet there were many. The Menagier de Paris, a wealthy
man with a house in the country as well as in Paris, could
plan for his wife the characteristic diversions of the upper
class, and the third section of his book shows us the lady at
play. He has already, in a previous section, said something
about his wife's employment in her hours of ease : * Know
that it doth not displease, but rather pleases me, that you
should have roses to grow and violets to care for, and that
you should make chaplets and dance and sing ; and I would
well that you should so continue among our friends and
those of our estate, and it is but right and seemly thus to
pass the time of your feminine youth, provided that you
desire and offer not to go to the feasts and dances of lords
too great, for that is not seemly for you, nor suitable to
your estate and mine.' Romances and miniatures both
show how fond medieval ladies were of feasting and dancing,
and of making garlands in gardens with stiff raised beds,
fountains, arbours, and ' flowery medes ', such as the pleasaunce
within a fortress so charmingly described in the Roman de la
Rose, or the ' garden fair ' in which King James of Scotland
saw the lady Johanna Beaumont walking. Apart from these
pleasures, the Menagier wishes his wife to take her part in
the other outdoor and indoor amusements suitable to her
station. In fair weather she will go hawking and his third
section therefore contains a detailed treatise on that art.
In foul weather she will sit indoors with other ladies of her
age and rank, and they will play, not only at chess and
tables, but at games which we have long since relegated
to the nursery, blind man's buff, or pince-mcrille, and
43 Legacy of the Middle Ages
innumerable question-and-answer games and riddles, like the
favourite games known as Le roi qui ne ment pas and ' Rag-
man's roll '. Or else they will sing and tell stories to each
other, for the setting of Boccaccio's Decameron was a common
one in the Middle Ages and every well-educated lady must
have a store of such tales at her finger-tips, and must be
able to play her part wittily in the long ' debates ' and
* tendons ', in which love was ever the favourite theme. It
was the Menagier's intention to complete his book by a
collection of games and riddles, but either death interrupted
him or he wearied of his task, for his third section lacks the
two ' articles ' which were to have contained them. But at
all events his wife must have shone in the telling of tales,
for all his admonitions to her are illustrated by stories,
exempla as the preachers called them. He apologizes to his
wife for including the tale of Griselda with the explanation,
* know that it never befel so, but thus the tale runs and
I may not correct nor alter it, for a wiser than I made it ;
and it is my desire that, since others have read it, you also
may know and be able to talk about everything, even as
other folk do.'
Oral narratives, indeed, played a great part in the amuse-
ments of the age and took the place which is filled by books
to-day. Although such collections as the Paston and Stonor
letters make it clear that the fifteenth-century gentry, both
men and women, could read and write, books were rare
before the invention of printing, and the wills of layfolk
show very few besides service books of one sort or another,
primers, psalters, and the like. But occasionally we hear of
others. Sir Thomas Cumberworth (1451) leaves to his
fortunate niece Annes * my boke of the talys of cantyrbury ' ;
Joan, widow of Sir Robert Hilton of Surrie (1432), leaves
her sister Katherine Cumberworth ' unum librum de
Romanse incipientem cum Decem Preceptis Alembes ' and
The Position of Women 431
her niece * unum librum de Romanse de Septem Sages '.
Sir John Morton of York (1431) leaves Joan Countess of
Westmoreland * unum librum de Anglico vocatum Gower
pro remembrancia ', and John Raventhorp, a York chaplain
(1432), leaves * librum Angliae de Fabulis et Narracionibus '
to Agnes of Celayne, his servant for many years. In general,
however, the imagination of a medieval lady was fed by the
telling of tales, whether by preacher, jongleur, or by her
companions, rather than by the reading of books.
For the town housewife there were a multitude of amuse-
ments, such as those in which the Wife of Bath delighted,
visitaciouns
To vigilies and to processiouns,
To preching eek and to thise pilgrimages,
To pleyes of miracles and manages.
Women readily flocked to hear sermons, when a good
preacher was at hand. Indeed, if Bernardino of Siena or
Berthold of Regensburg were at all typical (which it is to
be feared they were not) sermons must have been as enter-
taining as they were instructive. They were always inter-
larded with exempla, and some moralists (among them
Dante himself) complained that these anecdotes were often
trivial, not to say improper, and crowded out the solid
teaching which should have informed the sermon, * but one
halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack.'
Often, however, the listening women would find their
foibles scourged, particularly their too gay attire, their
crested shoes, long trains, bare bosoms, and horned head-
dresses. Sometimes excitable ladies took these admonitions
seriously. * As in the days when the Breton Thomas Couette
preached,' says Mr. Owst, * and French womenfolk, stung
to the heart, made public bonfires of their favourite orna-
ments and vanities, so two centuries later their sisters of
Italy were wont to do the same in the piazzas of Siena and
432 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Florence at St. Bernardino's bidding. " Tables, cards, dice,
false hair, rouge-pots, and other tribulations, even to chess
boards " had been known to enter the flames. But with the
enthusiasm of the sermon over and the preacher gone, they
were liable to that same reaction which befel certain remorse-
ful ladies once driven to make good the loss of their horned
headdresses, of whom it was written that " like snails in
a fright they had drawn in their horns, but shot them out
again as soon as the danger was over ".' * But St. Bernardino
deserved well of the women who flocked to hear him. He
was always urging their husbands to show them consideration
and praising their housewifely virtues, while he scolded
their vanities. He even declared on one occasion that
6 it is a great grace to be a woman, because more women are
saved than men ', and on another he drew a heartrending
picture of the discomfort of the bachelor's unkempt home,
ending up, * knowest thou how such a man liveth ? even as
a brute beast. I say that it cannot be well for a man to
live thus alone. Ladies, make your curtsey to me ! ' And
it is to be hoped that they did.
Such, then, was the daily existence of some typical
medieval women. If medieval civilization is to be judged
by it, it must be admitted that it comes well out of the test.
It is true that the prevalent dogma of the subjection of
women, becoming embedded in the common law and in the
marriage laws, left to future generations a legacy which was
an unconscionable time in dying. It is true that woman
was not legally ' a free and lawful person ', that she had no
lot or share then, or indeed until the twentieth century,
in what may be called public as distinct from private rights
and duties, and that the higher grades of education were
closed to her. On the other hand, she had a full share in the
private rights and duties arising out of the possession of
1 G. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England (1926), p. 190.
The Position of Women 433
land and played a considerable part in industry, in spite of
the handicap of low wages and sometimes of masculine
exclusiveness. The education of the average laywoman
compared very favourably with that of her husband, and
some ladies of rank were leaders of culture, like the royal
patronesses of the troubadours, and occasionally blue-
stockings, like Christine de Pisan. Although there was
small place in the society of the upper classes for the inde-
pendent unmarried woman, she found an honourable
occupation for her activities in monasticism. In every class
of the community the life of the married woman gave her
a great deal of scope, since, as has already been indicated,
the home of this period was a very wide sphere ; social and
economic conditions demanded that a wife should always
be ready to perform her husband's duties as well as her own,
and that a large range of activities should be carried on
inside the home under her direction. Finally, while the
Middle Ages inherited the doctrine of the subjection of
women, in some degree at least, from the past, it evolved
for itself and handed down to the modern world a conception
of chivalry which has had its share in the inspiration of poets,
the softening of manners, and the advance of civilization.
Taking the rough with the smooth and balancing theory
against practice, the medieval woman played an active and
dignified part in the society of her age.
EILEEN POWER.
2873
8
THE ECONOMIC ACTIVITY OF TOWNS
Q CHOLARSHIP, like everyday life, has its fashions. The
Oorigin, the constitution, and the policy of towns have so
engrossed the attention of students that relatively little
has been written about the contributions that towns have
made to later history. The destruction of village economy,
with all that this meant for social development, is one of
the most general of the town's early accomplishments.
Villages, in the form of manors, were not destroyed but
village economy ceased to exist, as town economy came into
being. Of course, agriculture continued as a form of pro-
duction, and rural life even developed elements of unwonted
prosperity, but the new commercial community, the town,
reduced the neighbouring villages, or manors, to a state
of subordination. Here was a conflict in the making, silent
but far-reaching. The manors were owned singly or
possessed in groups. Here a monastery held twenty manors,
there a bishopric possessed forty, sometimes as far apart as
fifty or a hundred miles. Foodstuffs were sent to the
monastery or the palace in the form of rent or products of
demesne-farming : sheep were driven and bacon and grain
were carted long distances to the lord's place of consumption.
The town, however, challenged this clumsy and uneconomical
distribution of products. It set itself up as a local market
centre, cutting right across the old grouping of manors.
So that henceforth there were two rival systems : the old
feudal-manorial arrangement of scattered village commu-
nities attached to a private household often quite remote,
and the new compact group of manors looking to a town
Ff2
436 Legacy of the Middle Ages
as their focal centre. In the more remote parts of northern
and eastern Europe, elements of the manorial system long
survived, while in the west and the south (in those parts
where it had existed) manorialism died out relatively
rapidly. However this may be, there was now a new centre
of gravity in the town. The relative self-sufficiency of the
individual manor sooner or later gave way to exchange
relationships with the town ; and the sending of the
manorial surplus to the lord's seat gave way to disposal of it
at the nearest market town. The tenants also learned to
market such surplus as they had, and ambitious ones pre-
ferred to give their lords money in lieu of labour. Old-
time service was thereby rivalled and in places soon sup-
planted by money payments : custom was giving way to
contract. The cash nexus of modern society was beginning ;
this was the entering wedge of commercial competition.
Perhaps all this is not so much the contribution of the town
as the town itself.
The town brought in not simply a new economy or
organization but a capacity for accelerated change or pro-
gress. There had been changes, of course, in the pre-urban
stages of society, whether in village economy or an earlier
condition, but the changes had been slow. Henceforth the
town, in the course of three or four centuries, displayed
a remarkable capacity to progress. The infant struggling
town was almost wholly commercial, with a market-place
and, more characteristically, a group of stores or shops.
Such were Lynn and Sandwich, Cambridge and Andover
in England, many north German towns, and Russian towns
even up to the present day. Some of these towns came to
add manufacture to commerce, that is, became highly
skilled in the making of various commodities : copper
utensils in Dinant, wooden wares in Niirnberg, and woollen
cloth in Ghent and many other centres. This may be
The Economic Activity of Towns 437
called the second phase of town growth. A smaller number
of towns attained political and even cultural importance,
becoming indeed the seats of the new art and the new
learning. The capacity for such progress lay not in the
people alone but in the organization of town affairs. Above
all else, there was opportunity for specialization in trade
or manufacture, law or medicine, painting or sculpture.
And of almost equal effect there was the stimulus that
comes through fresh contacts, when Londoners met Lom-
bards and when Venetians traded in the east. The brain
and nerves of the townsmen worked with quickened pace.
Life became a game in which all faculties, physical and
mental, could play a part. The town, indeed, became the
sink of human energy, while the country remained the
reservoir. The town gave leadership, while the country
supplied the leaders. It is fitting that civilization has been
etymologically identified with the work of towns.
To the progress of industrial organization from primitive
manufacture for home use up to the modern factory
system, the town made its contribution. Before towns
came into existence, all manufacture had been for use, not
for sale. This system gave way, or tended to give way, to
the retail handicraft system, as industry was developed in
the towns. In the new system goods were still made by
hand, but for sale, not for use. The consumer, however,
was at first near at hand and purchased his manufactured
wares directly from the handicraftsman. The great advance
lay in the fact that some persons were at last engaged in
the making of wares for sale, while formerly agriculture and
manufacture had been joint occupations. Here is the
beginning of industrial specialization which has gone on to
our day as a giant force in production. At first retail
handicraft was only to fill an order, but later goods were
made up for chance sale. At this point industrial capitalism
438 Legacy of the Middle Ages
shows its head in investment in raw materials and finished
products. In the fourteenth century, in southern and
western Europe, a further step was taken when industrial
and commercial capital and management were specialized.
In short, retail handicraft became wholesale handicraft.
In this latter system handicraftsmen engaged chiefly in the
manufacture of goods, selling their products to merchants
who in turn disposed of them either directly to consumers
or indirectly to consumers through other traders. Goods
were still of handicraft production, made by hand, but the
handicraftsman did not retail his wares to the consumer :
he had to operate through a specialized middleman. So
long as the handicraftsman was free to sell to any merchant,
and so long as he was the owner of his raw materials and
tools and commanded a profit (rather than a wage) from
his enterprise, little could be 'said against the new system.
But when in the early modern period industrial entre-
preneurs arose who reduced the handicraftsman to economic
dependence (putting-out or commission system), the new
system stood condemned first by the sufferers and later by
the general public. For industry, the change from retail
to wholesale handicraft meant specialization in function,
the separation of industrial from commercial capital, a
larger supply of goods, and greater skill. It also was the
beginning of the subordination of the workers and their
exploitation. Revolts and civic turmoil in the larger
industrial towns of the Middle Ages were the signs of the
slowly developing system of wholesale handicraft.
The example and the tradition of revolt may be set down
as a legacy of the medieval town to modern society. To the
uprisings of peasants were added the revolutions of towns-
men. By such means has the commonweal been purged
and the social health maintained. Of course, not all town
revolts were industrial. It is true that those in Ghent
The Economic Activity of Towns 439
(1343-5) and Florence (1378) were largely struggles between
small industrial masters on the one hand and large com-
mercial masters on the other, but then there were also
contests between rival factions of equals and between the
whole community on the one hand and on the other a harsh
illiberal lord who refused to extend the town's liberties.
But the point remains the same : men and classes conscious
of their value to society will and do rise to increase their
share of the total income. The social philosophy, which
is now accepted, was held in the Middle Ages, if we may
judge motive from act, that to the producers belong the
products. Unfortunately for society, there was not then,
as there is not now, any easy means of deciding between the
claims of the producers.
In the more technical or mechanical aspects of pro-
duction, there was noteworthy progress in medieval towns.
The urban community learned how to build light, yet
convenient, houses. It paved some of its streets and market-
places. It erected fulling and grist mills driven by water-
power. It improved processes of manufacture, such as the
dyeing of cloth, the preparation of leather, the making of
copper and pewter utensils, and the decoration of pottery
and wooden wares. The crafts of goldsmiths, glass-makers,
and sculptors became arts of high order. The most notable
mechanical invention was the printing-press with its mov-
able type, a promise at once of the spread of culture and
the extension of mechanics and production. This last
improvement, we may feel sure, owed nothing to antiquity.
It was to make the town the purveyor of secular learning in
rivalry with the monastic copyist and illuminator.
In contemplating the benefits of the mechanical process
of printing, we should not forget the commercial organiza-
tion which made it possible. If men produced simply for
their own use, or if they manufactured for sale directly to
44 Legacy of the Middle Ages
customers, there would have been no future for the printing-
press with its capacity to cater for a wide market. In other
words, it owed not a little of its success to the commercial
organization of the times. The key to this commercial
organization is specialization. Some town traders dealt
wholly in local products such as corn, meat, and poultry.
Others traded in distant wares such as salt, leather, and
wine. A third class, such as mercers, drapers, ironmongers,
and haberdashers, handled only or chiefly manufactured
wares. Such merchants bought from original producer or
importer and sold most commonly to retailer or to exporting
merchant. There was once a controversy among German
scholars as to whether there really was an out-and-out
wholesaler in the medieval period. The fact that town
regulations usually forced importers to sell to consumers
for a period after their arrival in the town with goods,
points to the cardinal fact that, although many merchants
might prefer the wholesale trade, they were not allowed to
be exclusively wholesaling merchants. The significance of
such specialization as has been indicated points to greater
mercantile skill, longer journeys, larger stocks, and the great
strength which merchants possessed in their contest with
other merchants for markets and with industrial masters
for industrial control. All this is modern in the extent of its
dominance, not in its origin.
Out of all this merchandising, developed commercial
ideals, habits, and law of great significance for subsequent
times. The belief in a fair customary price is a medieval
inheritance, though there were plenty of breaches when
opportunity served. Merchandising was then a dignified
and leisurely enterprise, as many people to-day still think
it should be. Wares should be of high and standard quality.
Debts should be paid when due. Such ideals arose out of
the very necessities of direct trade between merchant and
The Economic Activity of Towns 441
retailer, retailer and consumer. But not everything was
left to mere custom or passive sanction. The law merchant
stood above the floating custom as a crystallized body of
practices which could be, and were, enforced summarily in
courts hastily improvised by merchants who were at one
fair to-day and another to-morrow. In the towns them-
selves many of the customs were made the formal laws of
the municipality. Such laws constitute an important part
of our present-day system of commercial intercourse, the
irreducible and little-questioned part of our economic order.
In our present economic activity we find and accept
many instruments which were really of medieval invention
or development. Although money in one form or another
is pre-urban, coined money is a town improvement. Of
course, there is a question as to how much the medieval
town owed to the ancient city. But modern European
coinage owes its start to the medieval system with its units
of pound, shillings, and pence, and their variations. Paper
money, in the form of certificates of municipal indebtedness,
goes back at least to the thirteenth century, when in some
Italian towns these certificates were declared acceptable in
payment of debts to the state, and in Como in 1250 they
were made the equivalent of metal coins. Of course, it is
well known that bills of exchange were passed from hand to
hand as money up to the date when they became due.
Weights and measures, as well as money, were provided by
the town. In England and France the sovereign made
more or less successful efforts to standardize these local
units. The towns do not seem to have come together to
make their systems uniform, but practical treatises were
privately compiled to assist the trader in his reckoning of
prices in terms of strange weights and coins.
At the top of the exchange mechanism stood the bank,
which we are rather too prone to regard as a modern institu-
44 2 Legacy of the Middle Ages
tion. Private banks developed most rapidly in Italian
cities, their activities extending to distant lands. Jews and
gentiles, Florentines and Lombards, engaged in activities
which we now call the banking functions. They changed
money, purchased specie, received deposits, cashed cheques,
and extended credit to customers. The Bardi and Peruzzi
were famous bankers in Florence, the Pisani and Tiepolo
families in Venice. Apparently such banking houses arose
out of the business of merchandising as well as of money
changing. Of public banks, there are but a few examples,
and these come from fifteenth-century Italy and Spain.
The best known is the Bank of St. George in Genoa, which,
though originally a society of state creditors, came to
receive deposits and transfer credits, and in modern times,
indeed, became a full-fledged bank of great economic and
political import in Genoa and an example for other coun-
tries. Public banks arose in Venice only in the sixteenth
century, though private banks had been set up in that city
centuries before. The monies pietatis, charitable loan
institutions provided by some Italian cities, did some of the
work of banks but had little influence on the history of
banking. In general, the banks provided a more effective
instrument for the utilization of capital and facilitated the
exchange of goods and services. The history of banking is
the story of halting trial and grievous error ; the learning
process has been long and arduous. Not the least part of
this process consisted of the early banking experiences of
the medieval period.
Without book-keeping, bankers, and in fact business men
in general, could make but little headway. Single entry
arose wherever commerce was well developed. Double
entry was apparently an Italian contribution. The style
of Venice was most marked and praised, though, it would
appear, we actually have earlier examples of the use of
The Economic Activity of Towns 443
double-entry in Genoa (1340) than in Venice. The first
known treatise on double-entry, compiled by the Venetian
Luca Pacioli, was printed in 1494. Other Venetians wrote
text-books on the subject, and European towns generally
were, by the middle of the sixteenth century, in a position
to learn the art. There can be no question that the funda-
mental principles of accounting, on which our big business
units and our government departments are to-day operating,
had their beginning in Italian practices of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries.
For the earliest-recorded instances of the combination of
business men to form new business units, we have also to
go back to Italian cities. Family partnership of brothers or
other relatives, those eating bread in common (companis),
was a widespread spontaneous growth in local as in distant
trade. It had no special place of origin and no clearly
marked history. Ship partnership, however, arose in Genoa
not later than the twelfth century, and presumably spread
from that city. Some one possessing capital would entrust
it, either in the form of goods or money, to a trader .going
abroad to traffic for profit. The capitalist (commendator)
remaining at home would contract with the active partner
to receive a share of the profits or a rate of interest. In the
former case he would be somewhat in the position of a stock
holder, in the latter of a bond holder. On the Continent
such a scheme for carrying on business developed great
popularity down to the nineteenth century. The silent
partner investing the capital might be, and indeed often
became, a group of persons holding joint stock, while the
actual management was entrusted to the chief or active
partner. But it was the joint-stock form that finally won.
This joint-stock was not in itself a new but an old rival and
competing form of business combination. In the early part
of the fifteenth century the joint-stock principle was in
444 Legacy of the Middle Ages
operation in the Bank of St. George in Genoa (1409 ?) and
in the iron industry of Leoben (1415). There is a difference
of opinion as to the importance of these early joint-stock
companies up to the time of the formation of the Dutch,
English, and French East India companies. Of their
existence, however, there can be no doubt, nor can there be
any question as to the importance of a business combination
which has so effectively mobilized capital for the pursuit of
business on a large scale.
It is not in business combinations, however, but in
business associations that we find the experience of the
medieval town most rich. While combination leads to the
formation of new units jointly sharing profit or loss, associa-
tion leads simply to a convenient grouping of units which
themselves remain independent as before, at least in all
essentials. The association which came first and lasted
longest in some towns was the merchant gild. This was
made up of men of all trades, and sometimes included
professional people, even rural landholders of the district.
At times it was even open to alien merchants trading in the
town. There is much difference of opinion about the date
and place of origin of the merchant gild and about its
relation to the town government, but hardly any concerning
the importance of its work. Over the trade and manu-
facture of the town the merchant gild in the early Middle
Ages, and especially in the smaller towns, had general
supervision, though probably not final control. The
merchant gild was analogous to the modern chamber of
commerce, commercial club, and civic association, though
it is doubtful whether the modern could be shown to have
any lineal descent from the medieval institution. Although
the modern associations have been born again in the period
since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nevertheless
the task of public economic regulation and civic improve-
The Economic Activity of Towns 445
ment begun by the merchant gilds has been continuous in
the towns since at least the eleventh century. It is no small
praise to have begun a work which has continued for nearly
a thousand years.
As the merchant gilds proved inadequate craft gilds
took their places. They were both associations of business
men seeking the fullest measure of advantage for themselves
and their town. As urban communities increased in popu-
lation and in complexity of economic activity, the old
general association was found to be quite incapable of
looking after the needs of the town. Accordingly, craft
gilds, or associations of the members of one single craft,
arose to care for the individual trades. Butchers, poulterers,
bakers, cornmongers, and salters had their gilds ; also
weavers, fullers, and dyers ; carpenters, masons, and
thatchers ; shoemakers, cobblers, lorimers, and saddlers ;
mercers, drapers, ironmongers, and haberdashers ; vintners,
taverners, and brewers ; barbers, doctors, judges, scribes,
and parish clerks. Up to the twelfth and thirteenth cen-
turies there had been no such array of formal specialization
as is represented by the craft gilds. Although some crafts
were unorganized because of their insignificance and others
because of popular hostility, nevertheless, in the fourteenth
century, which was the heyday of their power, there were
scores of gilds ready and able to promote the interests of
their particular crafts. Generally speaking, the gilds
enrolled the apprentices and journeymen as well as the
masters, though it was only the last-named who had any
influence in the management of the association. This was
not a matter of moment so long as all apprentices became
journeymen and practically all journeymen moved up to
the rank of masters. Although the jealousy that one craft
felt of another was probably rooted in human frailty,
nevertheless, the gilds strengthened and perpetuated this
446 Legacy of the Middle Ages
feeling when they secured the enactment of laws limiting
the activity of their rivals. A well-known instance was the
restriction of cobblers to repairing old shoes and shoemakers
to making new ones. A much more significant accomplish-
ment of the gilds was the regulation of their own crafts,
whether commercial or industrial, economic or professional.
It is at least a plausible attitude to take at this distance that
such regulation, while it tended to become restrictive and
hampering, was at first helpful in the inculcating of high
ideals of manufacture and commerce, labour and service.
An attempt, beginning in England, has been made in
recent years (1912, 1915 f.) to found a new brand of socialism
half-way between state socialism and syndicalism. This is
called gild (or guild) socialism. The socialist gilds are to be
not urban but national ; and they are to manage the means
of production which are actually to be owned by the state.
Otherwise these modern bodies are supposed to resemble
the medieval gilds. The cardinal idea is that the new gilds
are to contain a harmonious group of workers from the
apprentices up to the managers. Apparently it is thought
that the medieval gild was a body of this kind. Such harmony
as did exist in the medieval gild, however, was probably
due to the dominance of the masters and the expecta-
tion that each apprentice and each journeyman would some
day rise to the master class, when he would have his turn at
lording it over his fellows. When the journeymen at length
endeavoured to set up a separate association of their own
they met the fiercest kind of opposition. In one other
respect there has been some misunderstanding. The new
socialist movement is to be founded on the craft, as distinct
from the trade, principle. That is, for example, masons,
painters, plasterers, and carpenters are to give up their
separate trade unions in order to form a craft union of house
builders. But in the Middle Ages there was no gild of
The Economic Activity of Towns 447
house builders, so far as I have discovered, and indeed these
particular callings of masons and the like, as well as those of
weavers, fullers, dyers, and shearers of the cloth industry,
had been organized in the craft-gild system. In other
words, it is somewhat erroneous to identify craft gilds with
a lack of division of labour. But, of course, the main idea of
significance here is that the medieval craft gild should have
left behind it a legacy embodying ideals of service in our
day, or indeed any legacy that would be of assistance in the
solution of modern industrial problems.
Because of changes in market, and therefore also in
industrial, organization, many craft gilds were transmuted
into something quite different from what they had originally
been. In London these new associations were called livery
companies. Other large cities on the Continent experienced
the same kind of change. The new livery company, fre-
quently incorporated, was an oligarchy, control lying in the
hands of those members rich enough to provide a costly
livery and to meet other charges. Below the livery were
the poorer masters with but little power or influence in the
affairs of the gild. Below them were the journeymen who,
in many crafts, no longer had any real chance of becoming
masters at all, unless they took jobs into their own homes
and became sweated workers. Sometimes they went into
the country where restrictive rules did not run, where they
did not have to pay a heavy entry fee to become a master,
or provide an expensive masterpiece as proof of their skill,
as was required on the Continent. Analysed differently,
the livery company was a craft gild made up of poor masters,
in many cases handicraftsmen, who constituted the rank
and file of the craft on the one hand, and on the other hand
rich masters or merchant entrepreneurs who were often the
employers of the poor handicraftsmen working in their
own houses. Such was the actual inheritance of medieval
44 8 Legacy of the Middle Ages
associations to the modern period. Indeed, these companies
have lived on in London, even to the present moment, and,
it may be noted, still have a dominant place in elections in
the City of London. A few of them are actively connected
with their trade, for example, fishmongers with the fish
trade ; some, notably the brewers, are made up only of
persons engaged in the business they nominally represent.
There is a movement to rehabilitate those companies which,
beginning with the sixteenth century in most cases, had
tended to divorce themselves from their trade or craft and
to become festive and charitable associations, or indeed to
become moribund.
As capital gradually got control of some of the craft
gilds, or livery companies, there was a movement on the
part of journeymen to secede. Usually, under the guise of
religious worship, brotherhoods of journeymen were formed
to carry on an economic struggle against the rich who
dominated the old-time associations of their craft, or the
great entrepreneurs who were gradually overwhelming the
small masters and making it difficult for the journeymen
to become masters at all, at least in the sense of retail
handicraftsmen selling to any customer that pleased them.
In England these brotherhoods failed to make permanent
gains ; that is, they failed to attain a status of independent
trade unions, as we should say to-day. In parts of Germany,
however, their independence was recognized, after a long
struggle. In Colmar, at the close of the fifteenth century,
the journeymen bakers struck for the recognition of their
brotherhood. After having waged a long and tedious
contest in the courts of the Empire they won their case,
though not in every particular. During the decade of
contention they succeeded in getting financial assistance
from their fellows in neighbouring towns, and in persuading
the journeymen of those towns to blacklist the Colmar
The Economic Activity of Towns 449
master bakers. There can be, of course, no question of any
lineal descent of our modern trade unions, with similar
striking proclivities, from the medieval journeymen associa-
tions, because in England, where modern trade unions
arose, there were probably no independent journeymen
associations that survived the Middle Ages, at least none to
bridge the gap from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.
Nevertheless the tradition and the example of effort had
been set up, and might have passed on from generation to
generation. When working-men were once more sorely
pressed by industrial changes, notably in the eighteenth
century, they again formed secret societies which finally
emerged as trade unions, first tolerated then recognized by
government and society. On the whole, one cannot make
out a very strong case even for a spiritual legacy of medieval
trade unionism.
An association quite different from those mentioned, but
still found in the Middle Ages, was the cartel. This was an
agreement between merchants or others to raise or maintain
prices, either directly or through the restriction of output.
As is to be expected, but little information would be pre-
served of such arrangements. But it is known that Floren-
tine and Hanseatic merchants formed cartels, and that salt
and alum works were operated by formal agreements of this
nature. A more complete investigation might show that
such stints and gentlemen's agreements had an unbroken
existence from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. It is,
indeed, not difficult to discover isolated instances in the
intervening period.
The medieval association which constituted the greatest
heritage to the modern period was the regulated trading
company. This was a society of merchants carrying on one
kind of trade or trading in one district. It was highly
advantageous for such traders to send their ships in a fleet
2873 G g
450 Legacy of the Middle Ages
for mutual defence against pirates. By combining, they
could negotiate for foreign privileges and take measures to
maintain them. The association could be responsible for
its members who had to submit to common regulations.
The Hanseatic League, an association of towns, grew out
of regulated companies of merchants. In England the
earliest-regulated company seems to have been the Merchant
Staplers engaged in exporting wool to the Continent.
The Merchant Adventurers, coming later, exported chiefly
English cloth. Almost without exception, the English
trading companies of the sixteenth century were regulated
companies, as were many of those of the seventeenth
century. By such companies England won markets in the old
world and established colonies in the new. The Middle Ages
had forged a potent weapon for the use of the modern period.
The regulation of trade had been the basis of these
associations. In fact, it was through such agencies that
towns developed their plan of controlling economic activity.
In the absence of a large and well-trained municipal civil
service there was no other way. Although we cannot say
that these associations were created by the town for the
purpose of regulation, they certainly became instruments
in the hands of town magistrates for the control of business
affairs at home and the extension of trade in other districts.
At times these servants of the town asserted and established
their power and even dominance in urban affairs. And
bitter was the rivalry, as one group of associations disputed
power with another. On the whole, the gilds and companies
probably succeeded in doing what they set out to accom-
plish : they regulated manufacture and trade in favour
of their own members. Of course, any assistance given to
producers is filtered through to consumers in some small
measure, but excellence of product was apparently not
a compensation for the high prices that consumers were
. The Economic Activity of Towns 451
requested to pay. However this may be, there were certain
trades which the town authorities kept wholly, or in part,
under their own direct oversight. The provision of corn
and wine, meat and salt, was so important, especially in
years of dearth and in time of war, that town councils had
at least to legislate for the emergency. Otherwise corn
dealers, for instance, would have taken full advantage of
the limited supply to reap undue profits by raising prices
beyond the capacity of the poor to pay. Almost above all
other considerations stood the need to keep the poor fed.
Riots and bloodshed within the town walls created just the
opportunity that turbulent nobles and feudal lords awaited
to turn to their own selfish purposes. On the whole the
provision trades, particularly in times of scarcity, were
regulated in favour of consumers. Importation was favoured,
exports prohibited, fraud checked, and corners in supply
prevented. In all essentials the town policy of regulating
trade and industry became the policy of the modern state.
The earliest form of this state regulation is mercantilism,
which, as German scholars have shown, is town regulation
writ large. In both towns and states citizens were favoured
as against aliens. In both there was great faith in the
power of the government to direct, and also the necessity
of entrusting most of the supervision to private persons or
semi-public bodies. In both, the provision of food had to
be given special consideration. Out of both there arose
a spirit of revolt, which we may call liberalism and in-
dividualism. In town economy it led ambitious individuals
to violate municipal ordinances or even to withdraw to the
country or to new towns where there was more freedom of
action. In national economy it led not only to interloping
and rebellion but to the establishment of a rival plan and
policy which, under the name of liberalism or laisser-fairt,
has had some vogue here and there for short periods.
Gg2
45 2 Legacy of the Middle Ages
Though the medieval town failed to develop, and there-
fore to bequeath to the modern state, a system of tariff-
protection for industry, it did evolve a customs system for
revenue purposes, which, for England at least, was probably
the model on which the national system was based. English
towns had a well-rounded system of tolls or customs on
goods sent beyond the walls and on goods brought within
the walls for sale. This system was financially impaired by
exemptions granted to burgesses or members of the mer-
chant gild. But these very exemptions strengthened the
institution in so far as the persons enforcing and maintaining
it were profiting, or seemed to be profiting, at the expense
of the outsider. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the
kings of England established a national customs system
which soon approximated to the local, as persons and even
communities gained exemption and as the collection was
infeudated or localized. When this national institution had
become an obvious failure later kings set up a brand-new
system in which the weaknesses of the old one were avoided.
Before the appearance of the state, as an economic power,
came various local bodies, the town, the village, and the
monastery. It was the town, however, and the town only,
that had a customs system which could in any way serve
as a model for a state system. When we consider the extent
to which the English national customs system has in turn
been the model for other peoples to follow, we can appre-
ciate the cumulative influence of early English towns.
Besides the local customs system the medieval towns
provided weights and measures and coins, as already noted,
some of which were adopted as national units, such as the
avoirdupois pound of Troyes and the bushel measure of
Winchester. These were obvious conveniences of trade,
but the town actually engaged in trade itself. Genoa,
Basel, and other Continental towns, held a monopoly of
The Economic Activity of Towns 453
the salt trade, and supplied salt to their citizens and to
others either directly through officials or indirectly through
special associations formed for the purpose. Grain was
provided occasionally by Florence for the use of the poor
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and by London
also in the fifteenth century. In 1485 the burgesses of
Hamburg asked to have a municipal granary established.
But it was not until the sixteenth century that public
granaries of any significance were set up in England or on
the Continent. These and other similar activities are well
known, at least in a general way, and can hardly have failed
to influence the history of modern states. Indeed, England
has from the seventeenth to the twentieth century periodi-
cally debated the advisability of maintaining great national
granaries.
The provision of foodstuffs was primarily for the poor
who could not afford to pay the high prices prevailing in
years of dearth. The poor had existed long before the
town, but poverty became a problem only in town economy.
Physical and mental incapacity had long been a potent
force, as had misfortune, in reducing men to the lowest
economic levels. But now in town economy to these
circumstances was added the partial monopoly of land and
capital. Relief before the time of town economy had been
provided largely by the family or clan. Within the town
it was the monastery, private alms, and craft gilds that
came to the assistance of the impoverished and the needy.
Gradually, even in the Middle Ages, however, the town
itself entered the field of poor relief. By the middle of the
fourteenth century there were already traces of communal
poor relief in Marburg. But it was not until 1481 that the
first secular almshouse was set up. It is to be noted that
this was a hundred years before the Reformation reached
that city. Early in the fifteenth century Amsterdam had
454 Legacy of the Middle Ages
municipal officials for poor relief, who distributed alms and
allotted certain available houses to the deserving poor
without charge. Of course, these and other such provisions
were only small beginnings, but they were clear proof that
the secularization of poor relief was practicable. It was the
Reformation, the rise in prices, and in England the enclosure
movement which precipitated the problem, virtually forcing
city or state to take action. Then it was, that is, in the
sixteenth century, that townsmen took more careful account
of the situation, and drew up elaborate plans of rational
treatment, plans which attracted national, and even inter- ,
national, attention.
The accumulation of capital became a characteristic of
the flourishing towns. The many wills or testaments of
merchants still in existence prove the well-being of a great
many traders and handicraftsmen. The large-scale trans-
actions in sale, purchase, and loans of a smaller number
indicate considerable concentration of capital. In the very
flourishing towns a few gilds of rich business men came to
dominate municipal affairs. The Medici of Florence, the
Fuggers of Augsburg, and Dick Whittington of London
are simply the best known of rich late medieval business men.
The German economist, Werner Sombart, has supposed
that the capital accumulations of the Middle Ages arose out
of urban rents which were later turned into foreign com-
merce and thereby greatly increased. Sombart is a socialist
and was doubtless not displeased to have a base capitalistic
system take its root in unearned increment. According to
his view the owners of lands situated in growing towns, or
in villages developing into towns, had such a large income
that they could readily spare considerable sums for invest-
ment in foreign trade. And it must be confessed that the
participation of Italian nobles in ship partnership, for
example in Genoa, lends not a little credence to the general
The Economic Activity of Towns 455
theory. The researches of Heynen, Strieder, and others,
however, have cast rather too much doubt on the whole
hypothesis to justify its acceptance. It is also quite in
keeping with general observation that merchants are more
likely to invest in land than landlords in commerce. Especi-
ally would that have been the case in the Middle Ages when
landlords were noted for their extravagance and consump-
tive, rather than productive, tendencies. The more
plausible, if less striking, theory is that capital accumulated
out of the savings of small tradesmen and retail handicrafts-
men, and that it further developed in wholesale trade,
wholesale handicraft, mining, the management of large
landed estates, and loans to princes and governments. But
however it originated the capital was accumulated and
constituted one of the great legacies of the Middle Ages to
the modern period.
How this capital was used to found hospitals and chantries
the fifteenth century amply testifies. How it influenced
the development of art and learning, the record of the
Italian cities at the close of the period clearly demonstrates.
The Renaissance may have permeated a large number of
persons, but in a peculiar sense it radiated from merchants
and princes who were willing to supply the substance and
at times the inspiration of artistic production. And out of
it all has come the belief, partly based on experiences in the
ancient period, that art and learning can have no other
pedestal than aristocracy or plutocracy. Maecenas the
Roman and the Medici of Florence are replaced, it is true,
by the Rothschilds and the Morgans, except that while the
former were patrons of artists the latter are patrons of art.
It may be that this belief will one day be seen to be a silly
superstition : then it may be apparent that it is not so
much rank and wealth as education that is the basis of the
highest patronage.
456 Legacy of the Middle Ages
The capital accumulations, so advantageous to the art of
the medieval period, were indispensable to its larger political
enterprises. Popes, princes, and kings could carry on wars
only with the help of loans. Only through specialized
manufacturers and merchants could sufficient supplies be
provided for armies that were to keep the field for any
considerable period. Only from the towns could sufficient
taxes be collected to maintain the growing state and the
costly wars. It was the Government in its ambition for
power, and war in its lust for plunder, which were preparing
the way for further urban enterprises. The Government,
for instance, of Louis XI of France and Henry VII of
England, gave the towns law and order ; the towns gave
these kings the harvests of peace and the sinews of war.
The feudal state, based on landed property and personal
services, was giving way to the urban state founded on
personal property and the exchange of goods. It was not
the little commercial town but the growing commercial
and industrial centre with its capital accumulations, its
peace-loving merchants, and its tax-paying citizens that
made the modern centralized state possible. In civic strife
he who held London and a few other English towns would
soon hold the rest of England. It is, of course, true that the
towns did not create the new monarchy, but they made
the new monarchy possible by their material assistance.
Capital accumulations may be credited not only with
a predominant part in the rise of the new art and the
creation of the new monarchy but also with the incoming
of the new imperialism based essentially on expansion over-
seas. Without the large fleets of town ships, the goods to
fill the holds, and business knowledge behind the material
things, the Atlantic might have been crossed but not
spanned, and the Indian Ocean entered but not opened to
European trade. Those nations which allowed the owners
The Economic Activity of Towns 457
of wealth to control the colonizing and trading companies
had most economic success in the new, as in the old, world.
England and the Netherlands left the plantations much
more to their merchants than Spain or France did, and
reaped a greater material harvest as a result. Of course,
the great enterprises of the seventeenth century in the Indies
and the Americas grew out of the activities and accumulated
wealth of the sixteenth. But the sixteenth century was the
fifteenth come to maturity. The later century knew no
forms of association and combination, no tricks of trade,
no mode of development or exploitation that the earlier
century was not already familiar with. Of course, in
economic history there is no dividing line at or near 1500.
The modern period of economic history, it may be argued
with effect, began nearer 1300, when the essentials of the
present economic order commenced to unfold themselves
in the growing towns. Everything that has happened in
the commercial and industrial world since that time is
a logical, some may be inclined to say inevitable, outgrowth
of that early childhood of economic innovation.
Parallel with the new forms went a new spirit. Not only
was capital accumulated but a capitalistic spirit was engen-
dered, not in the whole state but in the towns, especially
in those towns which from situation and general favour of
location offered the greatest reward to effort. Here and
there arose even in the Middle Ages a tireless activity,
a dignified enterprise, a daring venturesomeness, and
a capacity for the almost unlimited use of material goods
in display as well as in traffic. Sombart and his followers,
delighting in finding origins in the dramatic and the cata-
strophic, have assigned to the Renaissance and to war a con-
siderable place in the growth of the new spirit of material
enterprise. It is much more likely that the new culture
was itself a result of the awakening of human activity which
458 Legacy of the Middle Ages
first saw its opportunity of sure reward within the walled
towns of commerce rather than in the studio or in the
scriptorium. One may accept the economic interpretation
of history thus far without going to the length of denying
to the Renaissance a reactionary and reciprocal influence of
great moment. The heightening of intellectual endeavour
in philosophy and letters created a drive which, in the
make-up of some individuals, could find an outlet only in
the business world. And it is not to be forgotten that the
new art products were objects of commerce as well as of
beauty. Not only would art supply trade but, through its
direct influence on men, it would engender the demand
for its output in the form of statues, pictures, musical
instruments, porcelains, jewellery, and tapestries. The
early desire for gain in commerce had doubtless helped to
call forth the individualism that carved the figures of
Michael Angelo and held the brush of Leonardo da Vinci.
But the distinction that came to artists, as to men of learning,
in all probability led men who were not artists or scholars
to seek success in business.
The same spirit of capitalism, with its restless energy and
power to move, broke down the ecclesiastical edifice and
cut the theological entanglements of the Middle Ages.
The old order was condemned in the medieval period,
executed in the modern. But here, as so often, the modern
period gets the glory or the opprobrium, as -the case may be.
Roman Catholicism had grown up as ancient towns were
tumbling, and reached its height in the period when village
or manorial economy flourished. It was a splendid body
of practices and ideals suited to the relatively stagnant
condition of rural life. The economic doctrines of the
Church grew up in the village market. But the town was
rising, and rising to new needs. The economic doctrines
of the Church Fathers had to give way to the concessions
The Economic Activity of Towns 459
of the Schoolmen. These in turn had to be supplemented
by the Canonists' exceptions in favour of town trade.
Each concession to the old doctrines of just price and usury
was a grudging allowance wrung from the Church by its
own necessities as a temporal power and forced on it by
the increase of subterfuges in the towns. During the
Reformation the old shackles on trade were burned with
the martyrs. And in the Post- and Counter-Reformation
period, abandonment of the old economic policy was the
price of ecclesiastical success in Catholic countries. This
is not the first instance in history, nor the last, of a con-
servative privileged caste being forced to accept reform
from outside. It is true that the glory of leadership had
for the time departed, but there was a real social gain in the
ultimate spiritual position of the Church and the immediate
rationalization of economic theory.
It is a plausible view that Protestantism was long overdue
to meet the material needs of the towns, though that
cannot be accepted as the sole explanation of the new
movement, for urban Italy remained Catholic, albeit a
changed Catholic, while rural England became Protestant.
The new economic order of growing capitalism had to face
an old ecclesiastic order of unprogressive ways. Townsmen
were becoming worldly, individualistic, and restlessly
impatient of restraint. In other words, the middle class
of the towns was breaking bounds. The result was manifold.
As we have seen, craft gilds were changed into livery com-
panies ; some ambitious manufacturers forced their journey-
men to work at night in violation of the gild regulations,
whilst others left the town for the freer countryside. And
now in the religious field efforts were made to attain
success where Wycliffites and Hussites had failed, success
in snapping the bands that cast aspersion upon the activities
of business men. Feudal landed Catholics would enjoy ;
460 Legacy of the Middle Ages
budding urban Protestants would produce. The Pro-
testant revolution seems, in part, a great social upheaval,
the angry protest of an ambitious successful class of indi-
viduals who would work, and work hard and ruthlessly, for
selfish personal and class interests. It was the same up-
welling social force moving against what stood in the road,
that first shook the Roman Catholic Church and later even
its ally and abettor, the monarchy itself.
The early Middle Ages had nurtured an excessive idealism
emotionally suited to the economic conditions of village
and manorial existence. The promise of a future life of
pleasure had been high hope in a world of village sickness,
famine, subordination, and opprobrium. The towns
changed this very gradually but very surely. They became
oases of endeavour, dignity, and enjoyment. These hard-
working capable men could profit from the fruits of their
own labour, and, regardless of birth, might even enjoy the
results of other people's efforts. The towns grew, while the
countryside remained almost stagnant or in some districts
indeed even lost in population. Viewed dispassionately, the
blow struck by the towns for worldliness, born of oppor-
tunity, was both good and bad. Its temporary excesses
are clearly enough written into the history of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, but its enduring triumphs are being
realized more and more as the generations go by.
In mechanism and in spirit the medieval town was pro-
gressive, expansive, and full of promise of great things to
come. Business organization, capitalistic accumulations,
an enterprising attitude, and growing worldliness were
strong allies in the making of a new economic order. The
medieval town actually took the first steps in the establish-
ment of metropolitan economy. Just as towns had held the
neighbouring villages in economic subordination, so did one
great commercial centre come to threaten the economic
The Economic Activity of Towns 461
independence of the towns. In Italy and in Germany we
see this beginning in the Middle Ages, but it did not get
very far. In Florence, for example, we observe the occa-
sional use of political force to bring grain not only from the
immediate countryside (contado) but also from the wider
district (distrettd) made up of other towns with their own
countrysides. There was little or no effort, however, to
make Tuscany look upon Florence as the economic centre
for a very large number of goods and services. The real
interest of the medieval town seems to have been the
development of purely local trade and the most profitable
part of distant or international commerce. The town was
a success in catering for the ordinary needs of its own
citizens and of the countrymen in the neighbouring villages.
It also went far in trading by land and sea in distant parts
of the European world. It went so far as to build up large
business units and prosperous associations to pursue this
profitable commerce. It did not do the same, however, for
a very wide area in its immediate district. The wholesaling
functions were for the more extended and international
exchange of goods. The storage of goods and the business
of banking were on the same basis. In short, there was no
effective large-scale organization of the commerce of a wide
compact area or hinterland. The essence of town economy
was the subordination of villages, not of towns. The growth
of London, Paris, and Berlin, and of Manchester, Liverpool,
Hamburg, and Marseilles, as towering economic centres
for the exploitation of a vast area at home as well as for the
carrying on of commerce in distant parts, is a modern
growth. In the late Middle Ages, as has been indicated,
there was promise of all this, and real preparation for it in
the enlargement and perfection of methods of carrying on
trade with distant parts. The organization of the marketing
system for a avide hinterland was, in fact, a slow and laborious
462 Legacy of the Middle Ages
process until the railroads made transportation both rapid
and cheap.
A somewhat similar situation is found in the town's
efforts to establish a political unit. Here we find both
success and failure. In Italy the town created a fairly wide
area of political organization, Genoa in Liguria, Venice in
Venetia, and Florence in Tuscany. But the subordinate
parts did not accept their lot : Ferrara rose against Venice
and Pisa against both Genoa and Florence. And Genoa,
Florence, and Venice were individually just strong enough
to maintain (intermittently) their own independence. They
were unable to form an Italian state, though Machiavelli
dreamed of a united state and wrote of it at the close of the
medieval period. In Germany the great Hanseatic League
of towns was a potent force in the fifteenth century. If it
had grown instead of declined it might have formed a
state based on urban feudalism with a policy of economic
politics instead of political economics, such as actually
has developed. It was no small effort to have brought
together between three and four score of towns for a com-
mon purpose of trade. But no union formed of rival
communities of about the same strength, without the
cementing power of force, could make continuous gains or
even hold its own indefinitely. The middle class was unable
to form a state based upon town economic units. The
dominant economic institution was not in a position to
forge the political weapon which further economic progress
required. And so the way was prepared for another kind
of state, either national as in England and France or terri-
torial as in Germany. In such a state both rural nobles and
town merchants played a part, as did princely power and pro-
letarian passive resistance. To the new political organization
the town contributed its policy and the merchants their wealth.
But the new creation was or became national, net urban.
The Economic Activity of Towns 463
One of the greatest legacies of the medieval towns,
indeed of the economic history of the Middle Ages, is the
ultimate failure of localism itself. In many forms of organiza-
tion and in the direction of its intellectual life, the town
might have succeeded, but, if it could not expand, it could
not hold its own against rival possibilities. On the economic
side the possibility was metropolitan economy ; on the
political side it was the unified state. These two fitted
hand and glove. The state gave the most favourably
located town an unrestricted area over which to extend its
economic dominance. London found no limits put to its
economic ambition except distance and insular boundaries.
This growing metropolitan economy, in turn, brought to
the state a degree of economic unity and concentration that
was beyond precedent. Where there was most concentrated
material strength there was greatest political stability, both
for international struggle and for over-sea expansion. The
strength of England for a long time was the strength of
London, which was the unrivalled heart of the nation and
of the empire.
The medieval town failed to evolve elastic institutions
capable of expansion along the marked lines of town
economy. It failed to evolve a formulated theory of
economics. It failed to do justice to the struggling prole-
tariate which sought to preserve its own health and its own
manhood. On the other hand, the solid contributions of
town economy, indeed of medieval economic history, are
obviously great along the line of capitalism. But it is just
at this point that the town's legacy is most boldly challenged
in our time. The Christian Church and other critics of our
social system have always denounced the legacies of material-
ism, individualism, and worldliness which capitalism has
brought with it. But these tendencies are really marks of
social change, and are not themselves unchanging or unalter-
464 Legacy of the Middle Ages
able, but subject to influences which affect them, compelling
them to shed their evil repute and show their better possi-
bilities. As they develop under these influences, as scientific
study reveals their power for good and explains their meaning,
they make fresh conquests for us, promise us new victories in
new fields of battle, and so postpone indefinitely any final
judgement of their true worth in human affairs.
N. S. B. GRAS.
9
ROYAL POWER AND ADMINISTRATION
THE citizen of a modern State, accustomed as he is to
regard the constitution under which he lives as a machine
for the expression and attainment of the will of the majority,
will find, if he studies it in detail, that it /has been more or
less successfully adapted to a purpose for which it was
clearly not designed. Even where, as in the United States
or in France, the machine has been remodelled according to
modern theories, old forms have a tendency to persist, though
sometimes under new names.
New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large . . .
There is no doubt a vast difference betwixt medieval and
modern institutions : but it is due partly to an extension
of the functions of government, partly to the increase of
the means at its command; such as the facility of com-
munication, the spread of education, and the development
of finance. Yet its essential task remains the same. It must
keep the peace, at home and abroad, administer justice, and
regulate social and economic matters of general concern,
such as traffic, weights and measures, and coinage. The
material necessities for these objects have to be provided :
defences and public offices must be built, soldiers and
public servants must be paid. And we shall reasonably
expect to find a certain similarity in the devices adopted to
meet these ends even where there is no historical connexion.
In most of the States of medieval Europe the constitution
was monarchical. But kingship, in its earlier forms, is not
widely separated from the loose communal organization of
2873 H h
466 Legacy of the Middle Ages
the tribe. There was probably not much difference
politically between a tribe which had a king and one which
had not. The king was rather the representative than the
lord of the community. In a primitive form of monarchy
the royal power is as yet undifferentiated : the king, though
no longer the priest of his people, is still their judge, their
general, their governor. He is almost as much the head
of the family as the chief of the State. His rule is neither
absolute nor yet formally limited. And although we can
trace, throughout the Middle Ages, a gradual tendency to
define and differentiate his power and to impose successive
limitations upon it, there remains, through the whole
period, a wide scope for the play of individual character.
The personal qualities of kings play a far greater part in
medieval than in modern history.
The first period of definition lies between the accession
of Clovis in 481 and the death of Charlemagne. Under the
earlier Merovingians the royal power is growing. The
peace is now ' the king's peace ', and the king has moreover
the power to grant a special protection to individuals or
societies which gives them a privileged position, and renders
those unjustly vexing them liable to special penalties. His
command or ban is enforced by a special penalty bearing the
same name. His office is now definitely hereditary, although
it does not necessarily descend from father to son, but some-
times to a brother or uncle. This uncertainty of succession
persists for a long time in many countries : in some, indeed,
as in Poland, the monarchy became entirely elective. And
even though it gradually became the rule that the son
should succeed to his father, primogeniture, as opposed to
partition, did not obtain universally in Europe until the
close of the Middle Ages. But the vitality of the hereditary
principle is nowhere more clearly shown than in the long
period which intervened between the fall of the royal power
Royal Power and Administration 467
of the Merovingian kings and the close of their dynasty.
For nearly a century their dominions * were governed by
the powerful Mayors of the Palace who set up and deposed
their nominal masters at their pleasure. The powers of the
Merovingian kings had already shrunk to nothing ; but
their persons, distinguished from those of their subjects by
their unshorn hair, were still indispensable to sit on the
throne, to receive ambassadors, and to pronounce the
answers which the Mayors had determined. It was not
till A.D. 752 that the last Merovingian, Childeric III, was
deposed, and the title of King given to the real holder of
the royal power, Pepin, the son of Charles Martel ; nor
was this done without anxious consultation of the pope,
Saint Zacharias.
The royal power was still in theory limited by that of the
popular assembly. But two great factors distinguish the
Merovingian kingdom from the primitive monarchy with
which we began. The Franks had acquired a territory with
a Romanized Christian population, and the remains of
a Roman provincial organization, and, beginning with the
royal house, had accepted Christianity. The king thus
became the possessor of all that the Roman Emperor had
before him, and had large domains at his disposal, together
with what was left of the land and head-taxes, tolls, customs,
and profits of coinage of the Roman province. At the same
time he became the official protector, and not far from the
official head of the Christian Church in his dominions.
Moreover, the monarchy itself acquired a new sacred char-
acter. The relation of the subject to his sovereign was
sanctioned by the oath of fealty. The king summoned the
1 These were Francia, extending from Brittany to the Rhine basin
and divided by a line a little east of Paris into an eastern half called
Austrasia, and a western, called Neustria ; Aquitaine ; Burgundy and
Provence. Each province seems to have had its own mayor.
Hh2
468 Legacy of the Middle Ages
ecclesiastical councils, the proceedings of which coalesced
to some extent with those of the national assemblies of
which we have spoken. The king confirmed the election of
bishops, and frequently appointed them to their sees under
colour of his right of supervision. The power of a Mero-
vingian king had thus no definite limits. In practice, how-
ever, the king was not above the law. Thus, for instance,
Charibert, on his accession, promised not to introduce new
laws or customs ; and a like moral can be drawn from the
story of the * vase of Soissons ', where a soldier disputed
the claim of Clovis to a particular share of the booty which
had not fallen to him by lot, and seems to have made good
his point, though he lost his life in doing so. Moreover,
the king's power was restricted in three practical ways:
by the alienation of the domain without any corresponding
service, by the creation of Immunities, which took away
both the administration and the profits of justice, and by
the conversion of public offices into hereditary estates. It
was these restrictions which greatly contributed to the fall
of the Merovingian dynasty.
The family of the Carolingians, which had frequently
held the office of Mayor of the Palace in Austrasia, recon-
stituted the Merovingian kingdom by successive victories
over their rivals before venturing to take the name of king.
Charlemagne, extending his dominions over the greater
part of Europe, obtained from the pope in A.D. 800 the
title of Emperor. There is no doubt that the throne of
Constantinople was deemed to be vacant, and that the title
which he assumed implied a claim to be the successor of
Augustus. He did not, however, attempt to obtain posses-
sion of the territory of the Eastern Empire, and contented
himself with recognition as Emperor in the West. The
Carolingian Empire was so great (extending as it did from
the Baltic to the Pyrenees and beyond, over most of. Italy,
Royal Power and Administration 469
and from the Atlantic to the Vistula) and the Emperor so
great a figure, that the influence which its organization has
had on the constitutions of European States is almost as
great as its share in the legends of the later Middle Ages.
Even in lands which never formed part of the Empire, such
as England and Scandinavia, imitations may be traced of the
great system which overshadowed the rest of Western Europe.
The royal power, reduced to nothing under the previous
dynasty, was now re-established and consolidated. The
Emperor was not only king in his own dominions, but was
regarded as the secular counterpart of the pope, and equally
with him bound to the extension of the kingdom of Christ.
The victories of Charlemagne over the Saxons, with the
consequent wholesale conversion of the vanquished, and
the expeditions against the Moors in Spain are examples
of the way in which he regarded his office. In ecclesiastical
matters the Emperor exercised a supervision over the right
of election of bishops and abbots, which in many cases
amounted to the right to nominate his own candidates to
these offices. He had a special official, one of the most
important in the palace, expressly to deal with ecclesiastical
business, this was his archchaplain or Apocrisarius, who
exercised an office corresponding more or less closely to
that of the Count Palatine, the chief judge in secular
matters. The sacred character which the Merovingian
kings had possessed persisted in their successors. The
coronation robes of the Emperor resembled those of a bishop,
while those of a king were like those of a priest. Both were
anointed with holy oil, and as time went on were more and
more held to partake of a sacred and inviolable character
which could not be removed. The claim of the kings of
France and England to touch for the King's Evil is an
expression of this doctrine, and in virtue of it the Emperor
ranked as f canon of St. Peter's, and the King of Germany
47 Legacy of the Middle Ages
as a canon of Aix-la-Chapelle. There is at least a connexion
between the appeal of Pepin to Pope Zacharias and the
coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo in the eighth
century and the later doctrine of * divine right ' or the long
alliance of * Church and King '. Moreover, under the
Carolingians the scope of the king's ban is extended, and
certain definite offences are brought within it, the * Pleas
of the Crown ' of our English law. These were sacrilege,
the wronging of widows and orphans, and of poor people
powerless to defend themselves, arson, trespass with violence,
rape of a free woman, and desertion from the army.
The kingdom was hereditary, but not indivisible, and the
king had power to regulate the succession. Thus, not only
did Charlemagne divide his dominions in 806 between his
three sons, but his youngest son Lewis the Pious who
survived his brothers and succeeded to the whole of his
father's empire, in like manner divided his realm betwixt
Lothar, whom he made joint Emperor with himself, Pepin,
who received Aquitaine, and Lewis, who obtained Bavaria
and its dependencies. This principle of division persisted
throughout the Carolingian period without implying a divi-
sion of the empire, at all events in theory. The principle
that a kingdom is indivisible is of later growth, and is bound
up with the conception of nationality, still a very weak and
shadowy thing in the ninth century. We may notice
something similar in English history, since on the death of
William I, Normandy and England devolved upon different
sons, nor was any clear rule of primogeniture established
before the reign of Henry II. In Germany, in the territories
held of the empire, the principles of indivisibility and of
primogeniture were of much slower growth. Although the
Golden Bull of Charles IV in 1356 forbade the division of
the electoral lands, primogeniture was not generally the rule
in the territories until the end of the seventeenth century.
Royal Power and Administration 471
The tightening of the bond between the king and the
nation or nations which he ruled is the great achievement
of Charlemagne. This appears both in military, judicial,
and financial affairs, but is particularly expressed in the
institution of the oath of allegiance. Every free man,
whether or not he had a lord of his own, was bound to swear
allegiance to the king on his accession, and the oath was
administered from time to time to those who had since come
to years of discretion. And though the growth of feudalism
weakened this bond, it was long before it ceased to be
remembered, even in Germany. Thus in 1028, when
Duke Ernest of Swabia rebelled against Conrad II, he
reminded his followers of their oath to himself. Two of
them, who answered for the rest, replied : ' We do not
deny that we promised fealty against all men except him
who gave us to you. Had we been the Emperor's slaves,
lawfully conveyed to you by him, we could not abandon
you. But since we are free men, and the Emperor is the
defender of our freedom, if we desert him we lose our
freedom, which no good man does, it is said, unless he
loses his life with it. We will obey you, therefore, in all that
is honourable and right, but if you desire what is not so,
we will return freely to him from whom we came upon
condition.'
The interpretation given to the oath of allegiance is
a ready index of the reality of the royal power. How
illusory it might be is shown by the dictum of a thirteenth-
century French feudal lawyer, who answers with a confident
c Yes ' the question whether the men of a baron are bound
by their oath of fealty to him to serve him against the king.
The history of this change of doctrine, and of the gradual
reversion in various countries to the earlier conception,
is the history of the rise and fall of Feudalism. The failure
of the sucoessors of Charlemagne to retain control of the
47 2 Legacy of the Middle Ages
centralized machinery of his empire is the measure of his
personal genius. Without a strong head, the system
rapidly disintegrated. The king parted with his direct
control of his subjects. His officers became hereditary
and then independent. A state of anarchy and private war
resulted which brought about a new grouping, which is
characterized by the predominance of the principle of
contract in place of that of public law. For the relation of
a 'feudal superior to his tenant is contractual, and the
contract may be denounced by either party. Similarly the
public peace was secured so far as might be either by
ecclesiastical sanctions, the * Peace of God ', or by leagues
for mutual conciliation, the German * Landfriede '. The
re-establishment of the * King's Peace ' was the mark, in
France as previously in England, of the recovery of the
royal power.
We have seen that the Merovingian kings were restricted
in their legislative powers, but even in their case there was no
formal limitation. The position of Charlemagne was equally
undefined, though he was a fertile legislator. He not only
codified the laws of the various tribes whom he governed, but
added new provisions and issued administrative ordinances
sometimes with, and sometimes without the concurrence of
the people assembled in the annual Diet. The distinction
of ' Statutes ' enacted by the king with the full consent
of his subjects, and ' Ordinances ' made by himself with
the assistance of his council, is not yet drawn. Carolingian
legislation, like that of the Roman Empire, consisted indiffer-
ently of laws, edicts, and rescripts. This legislative activity
is not kept up in the later Middle Ages, unless perhaps in
England. The normal practice was to regard the law
as immemorial, like the English c Common Law ', and to
make innovations by way of explanation rather than by
enactment. The reception of Roman Law in Germany
Royal Power and Administration 473
and in some parts of France had also the effect of discouraging
legislation, and limiting it to the sphere of administrative
regulations. But although legislation, especially in matters
of private law, is less important in the Middle Ages than
administration, it is essentially a royal function. It is bound
up with the coronation oath, whereby the king binds himself
to protect the liberties of his people, and thus the remedies
for specific abuses, whether regarded as innovations or as
returns to the ancient law, are frequently embodied in the
articles of a coronation charter. Thus Henry I, on his
accession, not only restores the law of King Edward * with
those amendments with which my father amended it by the
advice of his barons ', but makes specific rules as to the
taking of reliefs both by himself and by those holding under
him. The two elements of the royal will and the popular
assent co-exist in legislative matters exactly as they do in the
actual appointment of the king, and in both they are
differently stressed at different periods. Thus even at the
time of the Provisions of Oxford the king's assent could not
be formally dispensed with, while on the other hand, in
France in the fourteenth century, ordinances made by the
king on the advice of his ministers (who are persons of no
intrinsic importance) are promulgated as * by the assent of
the prelates and barons '. The meaning to be attached to
these formulae is determined by the growth of absolutism
and of representative institutions respectively. Charters
of Liberties might be granted on other occasions than
coronations. Thus just as the aristocratic resistance to
the Plantagenet kings is marked by Magna Charta and the
Charter of the Forest and their periodical renewals, so in
France the rebellion of 1314 against Philip IV led to the
grant by his successor Louis X in 1315 of a series of charters
to the several provinces as well as to a confirmation of the
ordinance of 1303 for the whole of France. But legislation
474 Legacy of the Middle Ages
usually took a less solemn form. Decisions made by the
king with the assent, real or fictitious, of the great council
of the realm were embodied in Assizes or Statutes, ' Ordon-
nances ', c Reichsabschiede ', and circulated by the Chancery.
In England this practice persists to the present day, except
that circulation through the king's printer has taken the
place of the issue to every county of letters under the
Great Seal. Minor regulations were issued in the form of
proclamations, which were transmitted to the sheriff under
the Great Seal with instructions to have them read aloud
on suitable occasions such as market-days in the principal
towns in his bailiwick. The necessity of publication acted
in France as some restraint on the royal power, since it
became necessary that edicts should be registered in the
' Parlement ', and this afforded an opportunity for the
lawyers who sat there to criticize the proposed order, and
sometimes to procure by their remonstrance its amendment
or withdrawal.
Charlemagne, like his Merovingian predecessors, was the
supreme judge in his dominions. Einhard, his biographer,
tells us that ' while he was putting on his shoes or his cloak,
he not only admitted his friends, but, if the Count Palatine
stated a case which could not be determined without his
order, he bade the litigants be brought in at once, heard
the case, and delivered judgement, just as though he were
sitting in court '. Later kings from time to time observed
the rule of hearing cases in person. Thus Henry III of
England sat in judgement both in the King's Bench and
in the Exchequer. Louis IX heard cases once a week,
sitting under an oak tree at Vincennes. And even Louis XIV
appears to have persuaded himself that he, like his sainted
ancestor, administered justice weekly to all comers. More-
over, Charlemagne resumed that control of justice through-
out the realm which the Merovingians had lost. The
Royal Power and Administration 475
owner of an immunity might still, it is true, administer
justice to whose who lived in his district, but he was under
the strict supervision of the king in the same way as the
king's own officers.
It must be remembered that the king, though the supreme
judge, is not, in the Middle Ages, the sole fountain of
justice. And although few traces remained within the
limits of the Empire of the popular tribunals of the barbaric
period, the decision of the cases remained in the hands of
the free men who composed the court long after the conduct
of the trial had become the function of the king's officers.
And when offices became hereditary, and supervision
ceased, justice was no longer either popular or royal, but
seigneurial. The right of appeal was not uncontested nor
self-evident. The extension of royal power took various
forms : the reception of appeals, the grant of exemptions
from the local jurisdiction to particular persons or classes
of persons, the reservation of special classes of cases, particu-
larly criminal cases, to the royal courts, and, as in England,
the reassertion of the claim to supervise the action of
local jurisdictions through royal commissioners, ' Justices
in Eyre '. And all these measures were resented by the
mesne lords, i.e. those who came between the sovereign
and the ultimate subject. Thus, the reception of appeals
was not only the constant source of difficulties with France,
but provided the occasion of the war of Edward I against
the Scots, since the deposition of John Balliol arose out of
the reception by Edward of appeal cases from Scotland.
Exemptions from jurisdiction, under the name of * Sauve-
garde ', were among the grievances of Edward III in
Guienne, as were * reserved cases '. And one of the principal
provisions of Magna Charta is intended to protect the
barons from the loss of their courts.
Charlemagne led his own armies into the field, or en-
47 6 Legacy of the Middle Ages
trusted them to. the great officers of his household, and the
king's function as commander in chief has scarcely ceased to
be of importance. But in the eighth and ninth centuries
war was normal. Spring was the season ' when kings go out
to battle '. Every free man was a soldier, bound to equip
himself according to his means and to set out, under the
severest penalties, at the king's command. This universal
obligation has never been cancelled, though its importance
is sometimes obscured because the army which it provided
was deficient in cavalry. This need was met by the feudal
contract, by which the tenant bound himself to assist his
suzerain with a definite mounted contingent serving for
a limited period. In both cases the personal relation was
insisted on. Thus there is a distinction in English law
between a * voyage royal ' and an ordinary military expedi-
tion, and in 1297 we find the feudal tenants refusing to go
to Gascony unless the king consented to lead them in
person. This objection only applied to foreign service,
not to national defence. But foreign conquest, in a feudal
monarchy, often takes the form of a joint-stock enterprise,
.like William the Conqueror's expedition to England or
that of Henry II to Ireland. In this, as in other matters,
the extent to which the king retained a direct relation
with his subjects is a measure of his effective power. Thus,
in England, scutage, the composition for feudal service,
was levied directly upon the land by the king's officer, the
sheriff : in, France, the extension of the royal power by
Philip IV is marked by the calling out of the * arriere ban '.
The administration of Charlemagne, as it is presented to
us by Hincmar, whose picture though clearly too flattering
is supported by other evidence, was directly controlled by
the king, personally or through his missi dominici. As the
monarchy declined, these officers assumed a local and
hereditary character, like the counts over whom they
Royal Power and Administration 477
exercised supervision. The great offices of the household
likewise became hereditary, and consequently merely
honorific, the work being done by deputies of lower rank.
Even when ancient offices remained, the departments under
them acquired an independent status and * went out of
court '. A strong king would then entrust the most impor-
tant duties, military or financial, to officers more imme-
diately under his own control. The overthrow of ' the
king's favourites ' or ' unworthy ministers ', which is so
familiar an incident of medieval history, generally represents
an effort of the aristocracy to reduce the royal control of
the administration. But a better method was needed than
the control of the administrative machine by baronial inter-
vention or oligarchical committees. The Middle Ages saw
the beginning of a more effective way of holding the balance
between absolutism and anarchy by the gradual evolution
of representative government.
In the barbaric period representation was unnecessary,
since important measures could be submitted to the groans
or acclamations of the host of free men assembled for the
planning of the annual campaign. And though this method
of ascertaining the popular will can only have been illusory
in States of the size of the Merovingian or Carolingian
dominions, the council of bishops and princes, though not
elected by the people, was not for that reason unrepresenta-
tive. Holding as they did positions of authority in the
various parts of the kingdom, they were able to advise as to
the safety or the reverse of any given course of action,
exactly as a modern member of parliament may warn the
party whips that his constituents will be alienated by some
step which the Government proposes to take. Still, the
method of obtaining the consent of a nation through its
elected delegates, which is what we usually mean when we
speak of representative institutions, has no place in the
478 Legacy of the Middle Ages
history of the earlier Middle Ages, though it was familiar
to the Gauls of the Roman province, who had a national
assembly at Lyons. The Saxons also, before their subjuga-
tion by Charlemagne, had an annual assembly of delegates.
These precedents do not seem to have suggested any modi-
fication of the formal assembly of the whole people, which,
in consequence of its unwieldy nature, soon disappeared.
The principle of the necessity of the assent of the people
was not, however, lost. In a feudal state, the king, or indeed
any other feudal superior, acted, in matters affecting his
subordinates, by the advice of his court, the free tenants
holding of himself. In the thirteenth century this court
begins to be found insufficient, and means are sought for
giving greater weight to the decisions taken in it. There
are no definite constitutional principles, but it is generally
recognized that the king acts, in more important affairs, by
the advice of his council, and that the full court is required
for the most important matters. A special session of this
kind becomes known as a * Parliament ' or * Diet ', and
consists of the full court sitting for judicial, financial, or
deliberative purposes. It is this court which is reinforced
by elected knights and burgesses. The necessity of rein-
forcing the king's ordinary court only gradually appears
and marks a definite stage in national progress. When the
household and territorial officials of the Carolingian council
had become hereditary feudatories, often more powerful
than the king whom they served, it was difficult to secure
their attendance at the regular sessions of the court. Never-
theless, it was a recognized principle that decisions affecting
their rights must be made by their peers, and not by the
officials of lower rank who had succeeded to their duties.
And although all tenants in chief are theoretically * peers ',
the more powerful succeeded in making themselves into
a special class. Thus we have ' Peers of France ', * Princes
Royal Power and Administration 479
of the Empire ', greater and lesser barons in England. The
growth of the royal power at various periods causes them
to unite to resist encroachments, and makes them conscious
of themselves as an * Estate '. There was no need of any
stimulus in the thirteenth century to awake the self-
consciousness of the clergy. The great quarrel over investi-
tures at the end of the eleventh century did not rage so
fiercely in England and France as it did in Germany and
Italy, but it left an abiding impression all over Europe.
And the same struggle between ecclesiastical and civil
jurisdiction which led to the martyrdom of Becket marked
the clergy in all countries as an estate with interests of
its own.
The history of the third * estate, the ' commons ', is less
simple. It is regarded as consisting of all free men who are
neither nobles, clerks, nor monks. But even in England,
and still more in France and Germany, it owes its character
as an estate to the increasing importance of towns. Living
close together, and accustomed by the necessities of trade
to act together for their common interest, the burgesses
purchased from the crown or from their feudal lords special
privileges, including various degrees of self-government,
and ultimately the right to act together as a single person
in law. In France and Germany the * commons ' summoned
to the Parliament or the Imperial Diet are the communities
of the towns : the rural under-tenants are unrepresented,
though they had to contribute to the expenses of the
deputies of the clergy and nobles. On the other hand, in
England corporate consciousness was awakened in the rural
districts by the extension of royal administration with its
important machinery of the inquest, by which the verdict
1 The words ' third estate ' are used here as a convenient term ; they
are not meant to express any theory of the development of ' estates ' in
England.
480 Legacy of the Middle Ages
ofthzpatria or venue was taken, by the arrangements for the
local assessment and collection of taxes, and by the linking
up of the local and central jurisdictions. By a curious
paradox every increase in the efficiency of the central
government in England, and only in England, produced
a corresponding growth of community feeling in the
counties ; the commons of England are in fact the com-
munitates comitatuum Anglie. Again in England the third
estate acquired a national character by coalescing with
a part of the * nobility '. The article of Magna Charta
which provided for the summons of the lesser tenants in
chief to take part in the * common counsel of the realm ',
not by individual summons but through the sheriff, marked
a distinction in the nobility which was probably not new.
Whether the first * knights of the shire ' represented this
class only, as a strictly legal view of the matter might seem
to demand, or, as seems more likely, were elected by the free-
holders of the county in full county court, they ceased to
deliberate separately after the end of the thirteenth century
and combined with the burgesses to form the * House of
Commons '. This coalition did not take place in any other
country, probably because the line between ' noble ' and
not noble was everywhere more sharply drawn than in
England. The result was the development of the Great
Council into a representative body, however imperfect, in
which the grant of the extraordinary supplies which were
constantly necessary could be made dependent on the
redress of grievances.
England is thus not a typical case. The division of the
nobility into two estates is found in Aragon, but there the
inferior nobles had no representatives and appeared in
person, nor did they coalesce with the burgesses. In Scot-
land the right to attend Parliament either in person or by
representatives was limited to tenants in chief, and boroughs
Royal Power and Administration 4 8x
held of the king. In France, the States-General were never
regularly assembled, and lost their connexion with the
Parliament of Paris after the fourteenth century. In this
earlier period there does not seem to have been any system
of representation, although individuals and groups might
and did appear by proxy. An effort made in 1483 to secure
the joint election of deputies in each district by all three
estates was only partly successful, since at Paris the clergy
refused to give their proxies to the deputies elected by the
nobles and the third estate. Moreover, some of the pro-
vinces, like Burgundy, which preserved the relics of their
historical independence, elected their deputies in the
provincial estates, while in Languedoc, which was part
of the king's own dominions separately administered, they
were elected locally. This lack of uniformity is the natural
consequence of the historical independence of the provinces,
just as in the fourteenth century Guienne, being in the
hands of the king of England, was not represented by deputies
in the States-General, or as, in England, the palatinates
of Durham and Chester sent no representatives to Parliament
until long after 1485.
The failure of the States-General to secure a permanent
footing in the French constitution was due to their associa-
tion, in the minds of the king and his advisers, with popular
disturbance. In France, as in England, it had been a
political crisis which induced the Government to call in
their support. Philip IV sought the help of the nation in
1302 in his assertion of its independence against the claims
of Boniface VIII, just as Edward I had in the previous year,
in the parliament of Lincoln, called in the baronage to
protest in the name of the nation, whose rights the king had
not any power to compromise, against the claim of the
same pope to the suzerainty of Scotland. In France, as in
England, the needs of the Government under the exhausting
2873 i i
482 Legacy of the Middle Ages
pressure of the Hundred Years War, gave the estates their
opportunity. Their control of supplies enabled them to
obtain reform of the finances, the administration, and the
council. But the final effort in 1358 of the clergy and
the third estate, unsupported by the nobles, to abolish the
provincial estates and thus make it impossible for the
Government to obtain supplies by separate negotiation,
collapsed with the fall of the leader of the Parisian burgesses,
Etienne Marcel, who had turned the reform movement into
a revolution. Again, in 1413 the States-General which
obtained from the king the famous c ordonnance Cabochienne '
was acting under strong popular pressure, to which an
aristocratic reaction succeeded. Still, the States continued
to be called at intervals through the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, as their consent was held to be needed in questions
of peace and war and for the imposition of taxes. The
recovery of Paris by Charles VII in 1436 strengthened the
king's hands, and enabled him to obtain the consent of
the States-General held at Poitiers in the same year to the
re-establishment of the aids, an unpopular form of indirect
taxation ; and this consent he used as a justification for
levying these aids yearly on his own authority on the pretext
that the convocation of the States was too heavy a burden
on the * poor common people '. The formal right of the
king to levy taxes and to make peace and war without
consulting the States-General was only secured by Louis XI.
A last effort to recover control was made during the minority
of Charles VIII in 1484. Thenceforward the control of the
army and the taxes remained with the king.
The Imperial Diet, owing to the looser bond and more
completely feudal character of the German kingdom, never
attained any importance as a representative assembly. The
period in which England and France were acquiring political
consciousness was the weakest period of the empire. There
Royal Power and Administration 483
was thus no struggle to wrest financial control from a strong
monarchy, although meetings were held for legislative and
other purposes, especially for the pacification of the warring
territories. A decree of William of Holland in 1255 specifies
the participation of princes, counts, and officials of the
empire, and the deputies of the cities of the Rhenish league.
In the fifteenth century the diet organized itself in three
houses : the electors, clerical, and lay ; the other princes and
lords ; and finally (in 1489) the cities. The concurrence of
all three and the sanction of the emperor was necessary to
a valid law. Moreover, no estate had the power to bind its
absent members. The diet determined the contingents to
be provided by the several territories, and voted taxes for
extraordinary expenditure from time to time.
A nearer approach to representative institutions will be
found in the provincial estates of France and the Territorial
Diets of Germany. The French estates, in the fourteenth
century, were the States-General in miniature. The rural
communes were only represented by the towns in whose
circumscription they lay. In the fifteenth, each province is
split up into dioceses, or ' assiettes ' in each of which the
three estates settle the distribution of the burden of the
taxes granted by the estates, to which each * assiette ' sends
deputies. The Government dealt by preference directly
with the provincial estates, whose importance, considerable
in the fourteenth century, was much reduced by the success-
ful extension of royal power affected by Charles VII.
The Territorial Diets in Germany, like the French
Provincial Estates, appear to derive from the general
assemblies held by the Carolingian legates, and after them
by the dukes in the provinces under their rule, and to have
passed through the same phase of being courts of feudal
tenants. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they
attained considerable power by the combination of the several
112
484 Legacy of the Middle Ages
classes to resist taxation. The princes had not at first
sovereign rights. Their authority was military and judicial,
but their financial rights were limited by the feudal contract.
They could only levy aids from their own personal vassals, and
to extend these to the rest of the population, whose fealty
belonged at first exclusively to the emperor, it was necessary
to secure their consent. In exchange for this the estates
obtained charters establishing their rights, or protecting
tnem from the use of their grants as precedents. In some
territories, such as Oldenburg, no diets developed, while in
others, like Tyrol and Wurtemberg, the peasant class obtained
representation. In some there was only one house, in others
three or four. The estates very commonly acted selfishly,
protecting merely their own interests, but they acquired
a large control over legislation and sometimes even adminis-
tered the territory, or elected their ruler, or restrained him
from dividing, pledging, or selling his dominions. In many
cases the observance of the charters granted them was
guaranteed by a stipulated right of insurrection. The
power of the estates was reduced at the end of the fifteenth
century by the reform of the German constitution, which
by establishing perpetual peace destroyed this guarantee,
and at the same time brought about the formal adoption
of Roman Law, which greatly augmented the rights of the
ruler.
It is usual to regard the Cortes of Castile as the nearest
parallel to the English Parliament, and the fact that they
retained some control not only on the raising but also on
the application of the taxes as late as the sixteenth century
gives them a special claim to notice. But this control was
exercised only by the towns. The nobles and clergy seem
to have been exempt from taxation and were only irregularly
represented. Moreover the towns, in Spain as in the rest
of Europe, became more and more oligarchical in constitu-
Royal Power and Administration 485
tion, and by the end of the fifteenth century only seventeen
cities continued to send deputies. The lower nobility and
the peasantry were unrepresented. And though Spain was
longer than other countries in attaining settled government,
the power of the crown became ultimately more absolute
there than anywhere else.
We have attempted to sketch the nature and the limita-
tions of the royal power in the Middle Ages without dwelling
on the machinery through which it was exercised. Its
application to particular cases was determined by two
inconsistent principles of which the earlier is the local
division of undifferentiated powers, the later the differentia-
tion of functions. The first of these systems rests on terri-
torial divisions, the second on the division of the functions
of the king's household among his great officers. But power
may be delegated without local or functional limits, either
to one person, as to the Merovingian Mayor of the Palace,
or to a Regent or Lieutenant of the Realm during the
minority or absence of the king, or to a body of men such as
a representative assembly or a permanent council.
We have already considered this last body in its origin,
and as the basis of representation, but not as a permanent
organ of administration. Its composition was arbitrary,
since the king might, in theory at least, summon to it whom
he would, and, in consequence, aristocratic or popular
interference in politics most usually took the form of a de-
mand for the exclusion or inclusion of particular counsellors.
Some members of it were always in close attendance on the
king. If he were away from his capital, some would be left
behind to carry on the government and settle such matters
as did not require the king's personal decision. Edward I
was accustomed to refer points of detail to the Chancellor
and Treasurer and such others as they might think fit to
summon, and in the fifteenth century the same two officers
486 Legacy of the Middle Ages
with the keeper of the Privy Seal were competent to act as
the council, though on many occasions much larger numbers
were present. A minority or a weak monarchy tends to
enlarge the council, and to make it a more definitely regu-
lated and better-paid part of the government. As the
functions of the council grow more definite there is a ten-
dency for the business to fall more and more into the hands
of a class of professional councillors, clerks and laymen, who
have the details of the business at their fingers' ends, and
form the link between the council and the administrative
offices. Throughout the Middle Ages the council remains
the repository of the unexhausted power of the crown, and
it is for that reason that it is able to throw off, late in the
fifteenth century, judicial institutions of an equitable kind,
such as the Star Chamber and the Court of Requests in
England, or the * Grand Conseil ' in France, to meet cases
where, either from the power of litigants, or their lack of
civil status, or the inadequacy of the law, 1 the ordinary
courts were unable to provide a remedy. It is this undiffer-
entiated character of the Council which enabled it to employ
torture in Tudor times, although the inquisitorial procedure
was unknown to the English common law. Moreover the
Council, both in France and England, long retained some
memory of its origin as the standing committee of the
Curia, the King's Court, whether sitting for legislative,
financial, or judicial purposes. The word ' conseil ' was
applied in France to the Parlement, which corresponded
to some extent with the Court of King's Bench, and to the
Chambre des Comptes. In England, as late as the fourteenth
century, we find the Council sitting in the King's Bench,
in the Exchequer, and in the Chancery, to strengthen the
jurisdiction of these courts. In Parliament it was of course
always present. From the fact that the Council exercised
1 The equitable jurisdiction of the Chancellor has another history.
Royal Power and Administration 487
the undifferentiated royal power arose conflicts of juris-
diction, when, as in France, cases were transferred to the
Council from the regular courts. For the same reason it
became the natural instrument of absolute monarchy, and
thus the reaction against the prerogative of the Stuarts took
the form of the assertion of the common law against council
jurisdiction.
The tribunals which thus found themselves in conflict
had nevertheless a common origin, for the Courts of Justice,
as well as the Council, trace their pedigree to the court of
the king's tenants-in-chief and its Carolingian original.
Thus, in England, we see the court divide into the Curia
Regis or King's Bench, in which the king or his chief justice
sits for judicial purposes, and the Exchequer, in which the
same persons sit for financial or administrative purposes.
From these, or more probably from the latter, is derived
the permanent court sitting in a fixed place, and dealing
more especially with pleas relating to land, called the
Common Pleas. Each of these incarnations of the King's
Court gradually acquires its own personnel and defines the
limits of its jurisdiction. It is a common principle that
each court has jurisdiction over its own officers, at all events
in personal actions, since they cannot be spared from their
duties to answer in other places the claims which may be
brought against them in an age which was, for its civiliza-
tion, remarkably litigious. Furthermore, by the extension
of the jurisdiction of the Exchequer to all cases even remotely
affecting the solvency of Crown debtors, and by the importa-
tion of the fiction of c force and arms ' into pleas which
would otherwise have come before the Common Pleas, it
came about that before the end of the Middle Ages these
three courts were in active competition with each other and
with the equitable jurisdiction of the Chancery for the
same class pf legal business.
488 Legacy of the Middle Ages
The King's Bench retained some traces of its undiffer-
entiated character, in particular a jurisdiction in Error,
but its most important functions as a court of appeal passed
to the extraordinary sessions of the King's Court called
Parliaments, with which we have already dealt in another
connexion. This jurisdiction is still exercised by the House
of Lords. It is this judicial function of the Court which is
most prominent in France, where the term * Parlement '
means in the first instance a court of law, although the
competence of the French court was at first, according to
the best authorities, as completely undifferentiated as that
of the English Curia Regis before the separation of the
Exchequer as an independent court. In France, the Parle-
ment of Paris, retaining its nominal character as the court
of the Peers of France, early became a body of professional
lawyers and officials, clerical and lay, divided into three
sections called respectively Parlement, Chambre desComptes,
and Conseil, according as their functions were Judicial,
Financial, or Political. These bodies did not forget their
common origin, and frequently sat together. Moreover,
their personnel was not completely distinct. Thus the same
institution which became a somewhat intermittent political
assembly in England, early assumed the character in France
of a permanent court of law, and in the fifteenth century
broke its connexion with the States-General and became
purely professional. One consequence of this early regular-
ization was the disappearance of the Peers, who ceased to
sit, except for special purposes, just as they had already
vanished from the King's Bench and the Exchequer in
England. But though the Parlement was essentially a
judicial body, it never wholly lost its political character, but
gave decisions, either alone or in conjunction with the
Chambre des Comptes and Conseil, on matters of national
or even international importance.
Royal Power and Administration 489
Passing from the king and his court to the undifferentiated
local administration, we find it necessary to go back to
a period earlier than that of the highly centralized Carol-
ingian Empire. Of mixed origin, partly Roman and
partly Prankish, these local institutions inherited older
organizations and combined them into a uniform system.
The normal unit of local government is the county, and the
officer in charge of it, the king's representative for military,
fiscal, and judicial purposes alike, is the count. The county
represents sometimes the Gallo-Roman Civitas, sometimes
the Germanic Gau ; and the Roman Comes, the colleague of
the bishop in the administration of his city and district, is
equated with the German Graf. Thus the county is both
the Roman provincial city-district and the German tribal
subdivision. The count is distinguished by the right to
a third of the profits of justice, and we find the English
earl holding the same privilege under the name of the
* third penny of the county '. In the county, the bishop is
supreme in spiritual matters and is the chief judge of the
clergy, the count of the laity, and in the same way we find
the earl and the bishop sitting in the Saxon county court.
On a lower level the ancient German division of the Gau
or Pagus into hundreds gave the title of hundredman or
centenarius to a group of minor officials, whose authority,
even if originally popular, was subordinate to that of the
count and of the same nature.
Such is the Carolingian model : a simple devolution of
powers in three tiers, the king, the count, the hundredman :
but it was complicated in two ways ; by the impossibility of
direct control on so large a scale, and by the grant to
religious or even secular persons of a privileged position
with respect to the law. The latter of these complexities
was an inheritance from the Merovingian period or earlier.
If the bishop or an abbot was himself also the count, the
49 Legacy of the Middle Ages
scheme was only so far interfered with that the king could
not appoint to the office except by virtue of his power to
meddle in ecclesiastical affairs. If, however, the bishop or
abbot had territory in several counties or hundreds, with
jurisdiction over his tenants, a new and often discontinuous
area was created which broke up the county organization.
The men of this territory did not follow the count's banner
to war, or receive justice in the ordinary courts, and enjoyed
exemption from the taxes. The lord of the immunity was
bound to make arrangements for the military, judicial, and
financial administration of his district.
The feudal monarch exercised local administration only
in his own demesne. Thus we find that in France, from the
reign of Henry I, the local authorities are the Prevots, or
land-stewards of the king, whose ordinary duty is the
management of the royal manors. The great feudatories
administered their possessions in exactly the same way,
though the officers might have different titles, such as
Vicomte in Normandy, or Bayle or Viguier (Ficarius) in
the south. But, in substance, local administration, except
in so far as municipalities established themselves, became
an appurtenance of real property. And even municipal
liberties were conceived in the same way, as a class of
property.
The Prevots were supposed to be guided in their decisions
by a council of four ' good men ', and their commands were
executed by Serjeants (servientes). The misdemeanours of
these and of their masters led to the appointment in the
twelfth century of superior officers, called * Baillis % with
power to correct abuses and revise decisions. In the south
the title was Seneschal. The great feudatories followed the
example of the king. These undifferentiated officers per-
sisted throughout the Middle Ages, but their functions were
gradually transferred to others. Their judicial powers fell
Royal Power and Administration 491
to professional judges of appeal, their financial duties to re-
ceivers, their military functions to Captains and Governors.
English local administration was never completely feudal-
ized, except in Cheshire, Durham, and the Welsh Marches,
although jurisdiction over the unfree tenants and in civil
pleas as to the property in land was attached to landed
possessions. The county remains the unit of administration,
although the earl, owing to the grouping of counties in the
tenth century under * dukes ', was replaced as president of
the shire-moot by the sheriff. The origin of this officer is
uncertain, but from the fact that we find him primarily
responsible for the farm of the king's manors in the county,
it is not unnatural to suppose that he corresponds approxi-
mately to the Bailli in France in his capacity of supervisor
of the Prevot. But the Crown retained its direct control
of local administration through him, and was always able
to remove him for misconduct or incompetence. Like the
Bailli the sheriff gradually lost some of his functions, but
hardly before the end of the Middle Ages ; although during
that period new organizations were called into existence to
perform new services which would originaUy have fallen to
him. This control of the central government was exercised
by the Exchequer, and in judicial matters by the king's
courts. Abuses were from time to time remedied by special
commissions, such as the Inquest of Sheriffs in 1170, which
led to the replacement of most of the sheriffs by new men.
While the sheriffdoms very rarely became hereditary, the
hundred courts in many cases fell into religious or private
possession very early, but this did not materially affect
the control of the crown, though it sometimes retarded the
operation of the king's writs. Only when the owners of the
hundreds had the return of writs and accounted separately
at the Exchequer, was the unity of the county disturbed.
Besides the bailiffs of the hundreds, the sheriff had a staff
49 2 Legacy of the Middle Ages
of clerks, one of whom acted as receiver, and of Serjeants to
execute his orders. As the sheriffs remained the effective
heads of local administration, though with gradually
decreasing importance, it is natural that the control of their
appointment should have been, like control of the Council,
one of the points most frequently disputed between the
crown and the successive reform parties. Election of the
sheriffs is one of the claims made by the Provisions of
Oxford in 1258, and was temporarily conceded by the crown
on more than one subsequent occasion ; and statutes
regulating their conduct are frequent in the history of
Parliament.
We have followed the undifferentiated power of the king
through its local subdivisions, and must now consider the
organization which reflects its specific division. Here the
framework is provided by the royal household of Charle-
magne. It is long before any clear distinction is made
between the personal and the official character of the king,
and thus the national expenditure is regarded as his private
expenditure in the same way that the revenues to which he
has a prescriptive right are regarded as his private income.
Hence the doctrine, by no means confined to England, that
c the king should live of his own '. First of the household
services comes the chapel, under the Apocrisarius, whose
deputy is the Chancellor. The combination of the duties
of chaplain and secretary was due to the lack of lay education,
a state of things to which the meaning of the word * clerk '
in its ordinary acceptation is a sufficient testimony. The
official status of the three Rhenish archbishops as chancellors
of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy is a relic of this ecclesi-
astical tradition, and in most countries in Europe the
nominal chancellor was often a bishop. In England the
minor duties of the Chancery were long performed by
the same persons as those of the chapel. The same Serjeant
Royal Power and Administration 493
looked after the wax for the candles and that for the seal.
The Chancellor is the responsible custodian of the king's
seal, and determines the form of all instruments to which
it is appended. He requires, therefore, an engrossing and
recording staff of clerks, and a lay staff of sealers ; since
it is a principle generally recognized in the Middle Ages
that the persons who actually apply the seal shall not be
able to read or understand the documents which they seal.
Thus, for example, the Pope's leaden Bulls are attached by
Cistercian lay-brothers who are ex officio illiterate. This
division of labour between literate ' clerks ' and illiterate
6 Serjeants ' or * knights ' is constantly met with in the
medieval Civil Service. The clerical staff of the Chancery
soon splits up into two classes, draftsmen and copyists, and
a collection of standard formulae is devised, a Liber Diurnus
or a Registrum Omnium Erevium^ to meet the needs of
everyday administrative and judicial business. The power
to vary these standard forms is limited to the highest class
of clerks, who are styled ' notaries ' or ' masters ', and they,
in default of special instructions from the king or the
Chancellor, are governed by precedent. A ' style of the
chancery ' is developed, and orders received from the king
are made to conform to this style unless they contain special
instructions that it shall be disregarded. Hence arises a kind
of administrative jurisdiction, since it rests with the Chan-
cery to determine whether the letters which are desired are
or are not admissible in form, and whether or not they
infringe rights or privileges already granted to third parties.
In England in the thirteenth century the Chancery acquired
also an equitable jurisdiction, due in all probability to the
Chancellor's close association with the Council, of which,
in its primitive form, he was the secretary. The provision
of new legal or administrative forms to remedy grievances
was a duty of the Council, which sat in the Chancery for such
494 Legacy of the Middle Ages
a purpose, and in course of time the Chancellor seems to
have inherited a share of this jurisdiction. The Chancellor,
as custodian of the seal, was originally necessary in all
departments where the use of the seal was necessary, and
his deputy in the Exchequer is still one of the English
ministers of state. But in England, though not in France,
this deputy early escaped from the position of dependence
and acquired complete control of what was at first a duplicate
Great Seal and afterwards developed into the distinct Great
Seal of the Exchequer. Again, as the business of the seal
increases, it became less and less possible for the Chancellor
to be in constant close attendance on the king, and warrants
for the use of the Great Seal are sent to the Chancellor
authenticated by a smaller seal, or even by the king's signet
ring. This smaller or Privy Seal, originally kept by the king
or by a member of his immediate household, may in turn
go * out of court ', as in England, and become a separate
department of state with rules and traditions of its own,
its place being taken by a smaller seal or signet. There is
a natural tendency for diplomatic and secret correspondence
to fall into the hands of the custodian of the seal or signet
most nearly attached to the king ; by the thirteenth century
we find him called the king's secretary, and his importance
rapidly increases towards the end of the Middle Ages ;
by the eighteenth century he has become the Secretary of
State. But while, in England, each of these smaller seals
grows into an independent department, in France all the
holders of these seals are grouped together into a college
under the control of the chancellor, the seals being appro-
priated to distinct classes of business, whereas in England
they were often merely links in the same process.
The chief lay officer of the Carolingian household is the
Count Palatine, who stands in the king's place as judge,
and exerts both an equitable jurisdiction and jurisdiction
Royal Power and Administration 495
in appeal from the courts of the local counts. It is probable
that a number of these served in rotation, just as we find
certain officers doing in the twelfth century in the household
of Henry I of England. The Count Palatine of the Empire
seems to have disappeared early in the eleventh century
though provincial counts palatine remained, and we find the
same name for certain judges of the Papal court. But the
institution of a chief officer of justice persists. In Germany
it attaches itself to the Steward, who was also Count Palatine
of the Rhine, and was alone competent to judge the princes
of the Empire and even the Emperor himself. In England
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we find a Justiciar
whose powers are almost as extensive as the king's, although
subordinate. This office is represented by the Lord Chief
Justice and the judges of the High Court. In France there
seems to have been no Chief Justice, and the powers of the
Count Palatine seem to have been inherited by the Peers
of France, and by the corps of professional judges who sat in
the Parlement. Aragon had a single justice, Castile a college.
While the extent to which the king's judges can interfere
with the local jurisdictions, either by receiving appeals or
by direct supervision, depends, as we have already said, on
the extent to which the constitution has been feudalized,
England is exceptional in the success which attended the
efforts of the crown to get the substantial administration
of justice into its own hands, by the institution first of the
Eyre and afterwards of the Assize system. In the fourteenth
century the appointment of local commissions for minor
criminal work, under the title of Justices of the Peace and
Justices of Labourers, and the establishment of Quarter
Sessions, brought the whole of the local administration in
public matters directly under the control of the Council,
without taking away its local character by imposing an
administrator from outside. In Germany, on the other
496 Legacy of the Middle Ages
hand, although the Emperor retained a jurisdiction in
appeal which developed in 1495 into a national Kammer-
gericht in which both the Emperor and the Estates were
represented, the jurisdiction in first instance was completely
territorialized. The Emperor was until the fourteenth
century the sole source of the right of life and death, and
the Count, though appointed by the territorial ruler, had to
obtain the ' Blutbann ' from him. But his direct adminis-
tration of justice only survived in the very exceptional
institution known as the Wcstphalian * Fehmgericht ', with
its c Free Counts ' and * Free Schoffen \
The financial administration of the Carolingian kingdom
lies in the department of the Chamberlain, whose function
it is to receive the * gifts ' brought to the king at the periods
of the national assemblies and to store them in the palace.
These gifts formed a considerable portion of the royal
revenue, and we find them again in England under Henry II,
and possibly in the ' Bede ' which the German princes
levied on their subjects. The office was regarded as purely
domestic, and the Chamberlain was under the orders of the
queen and jointly responsible with her for the economy of
the household. In the Capetian monarchy the Great
Chamberlain is a person of too great dignity to be concerned
in actual administration, and is replaced by another officer
of lower rank and a slightly different title who performs the
duties of Treasurer. This functionary gradually loses his
importance and becomes a mere Treasurer of the household,
while the treasure is placed in the keeping of the Templars,
and is administered by a section of the Parlement, already
mentioned as the * Chambre des Comptes '. After the fall
of the Templars, three or four treasurers were appointed
under the control of the Chambre des Comptes, but they
were exclusively concerned with the receipt and issue of
money, not with financial administration.
Royal Power and Administration 497
In England, owing to the fortunate accident that we have
a treatise on the Exchequer in the reign of Henry II, the
progress of financial development is somewhat less obscure.
We can draw a clear line between the Treasury staff, which
derives from the Carolingian Chamberlain, and the Court
of Exchequer, which approximates to the Chambre des
Comptes. The Chamberlains of the Exchequer have
already lost any connexion with the Chamberlain of the
Household, and have acquired a clerical colleague, the
Treasurer. These are jointly responsible for the receipt
and issue of money, and for testing its goodness. We gather
too that the earliest phase of national finance was based on
a primitive system of tribute in kind, derived from the royal
manors and gradually exchanged for a money system. The
necessity of testing the fineness of the money brings this
machinery into close connexion with the supervision of the
local moneyers. At a later date, when a central mint is
established, we find a close connexion between its operations
and those of the treasury, since the king will frequently
send to the mint for money or specie, and such expenses
must be credited to the keeper of the mint as payments
into the treasury, or their equivalent. Even in the twelfth
century this treasury organization has lost its connexion
with the royal household, in which its place is taken by
a privy purse, or Camera Curie, in whose coffers are kept
not only the king's private store of money, but his jewels, furs,
and precious wearing apparel. This also, as we shall see,
in time becomes departmentalized: just what happened
in the case of the Great and the Privy Seals.
The Exchequer is primarily a special sitting of the King's
Court for financial purposes, and while it is sitting, the
Treasury staff acts as a part of it, and is known as the
Exchequer of Receipt or Lower Exchequer. The Court
itself, or Upper Exchequer, consists of the great officers of
2873 K k
498 Legacy of the Middle Ages
state and other barons, and hears the accounts of the sheriffs
and other accountants. In process of time the great officers,
except the treasurer, only appear by deputy, and the Court
assumes a professional character and a continuous existence.
Its legal aspect has already been explained. Administra-
tively it supervised the collection of revenue by the sheriffs,
and its expenditure by the various spending departments,
including the departmentalized ' Wardrobe ', which grew
up from the Camera Curie in the king's household.
The finances of a medieval king were more like those of
a private noble than of a modern state. He was himself
a great landowner, and in a feudal society it would have
been difficult for him to maintain his position without large
private estates. The weakness of the German Empire in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was largely due to the
fact that the imperial domain had been almost entirely
alienated. In the early stages of economic development,
when money was scarce, and the produce of the royal farms
had to be taken in kind, it was almost impossible for the
Court to be stationary; and although royal progresses
enabled the king to exercise more perfect political and
judicial control, it is probable that originally they were
due to the necessity of consuming the fruits of the earth
near the place which produced them. Thus we find manors
in Domesday Book which owed the service of entertaining
the king for one or more nights, a service which had been
commuted for a money rent, while the Dialogue of the
Exchequer tells of a time when these money rents, though
estimated in money, were still collected in kind at a fixed
rate of commutation. Closely allied with the rent of land
were the profits of justice, since the local hundred court
tended to be attached to a particular manor and regarded
as a part of its profits, and alienable with it. The king,
as the principal patron of the Church, could add to his
. Royal Power and Administration 499
revenue the fruits of ecclesiastical property during the
vacancy of sees or abbeys, while to him as feudal superior
fell the possessions of tenants in chief dying without heirs.
In Germany this latter source of wealth was restricted by
a provision enforced by the princes of the empire that such
lands must be regranted within a year and a day. He had
reliefs on the succession of the heirs, and the custody of
wards during their minority. Special officers, called
* escheators * were appointed in England to administer
lands falling into the king's hands in this way. Aids might
likewise be demanded of feudal tenants for the ransoming
of the king's person, the knighting of his eldest son, and the
marriage of his eldest daughter. These feudal rights were
not peculiar to the king, but were enjoyed by all lords over
their tenants holding by knight-service. Specially royal
rights were compositions for military service, for fortifica-
tion, and for the repair of roads and bridges, and certain
tolls, customs, and port dues. The royal rights to gold
and silver mines and to salt are less universal, and appear
only to have been recognized in Germany in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries respectively. In France the salt-tax
was no part of the king's ordinary revenue, and we hear
little of it in England. Forest-rights also do not seem to be
original. The right of coinage was a general and lucrative
source of revenue, whether the king established local
moneyers on whom he levied dues in exchange for their
privilege, or set up a central mint and charged a seigniorage
in addition to the cost of coining. The practice of debase-
ment was neither so common nor so lucrative a financial
expedient as the charges of the chroniclers would lead us
to suppose. The sale of privileges, the profits of the central
courts, and the fees of the seal complete the ordinary sources
of the royal revenue, within which, in times of peace, the
king was expected to live.
Kk2
500 Legacy of the Middle Ages
For extraordinary needs the king might from time to
time levy a tax or tallage on his unfree tenants or on the
men of the towns on his domain, or on the Jews, who were
in his land on sufferance and regarded as his chattels.
Beyond this limit it seems to have been generally held that
he could not lawfully go without the consent of his subjects,
and the necessity of showing some urgent cause such as the
defence of the realm. Taxes thus granted might, and
sometimes were, levied by special machinery. They gave rise
in France to a special court, the Cour des Aides, which was
called into existence by the States-General to regulate the
assessment of the taxes and to secure their application to the
objects for which they were granted. This precocious
development was the result of the misfortunes of the war
with England, where the same object was only attained by
slow parliamentary pressure long after the close of the
Middle Ages, when the French institution had fallen
into decay. The taxes granted were of various kinds,
tallages or taxes on chattels, land-taxes such as danegeld,
hidage, or carucage, and such taxes as export duties, poll-
taxes, or temporary monopolies. The growth of absolutism
is most clearly indicated by two things which have an
intimate connexion : the perpetuation of taxes originally
temporary, and the maintenance of a standing army out of
the proceeds.
The connexion which subsists between the medieval army
and the household offices of the Constable and Marshal
does not go back to Carolingian times. The territorial
army, of which we have already spoken, was led by the king
himself or by a son or trusted servant. Even under the
earlier French kings it is the Steward who commands the
host. The local contingent was led by the count, who
commanded not only the free men of his county but also
the men of the immunities in it, though they came to his
Royal Power and Administration 501
banner under the conduct of their own lord or his deputy.
The cavalry of the Carolingian army was provided by the
holders of beneficia, whose service with their horses was the
price of their life-estates, soon to become hereditary fiefs.
In a period of imperfect economic organization the grant
of lands was the only means of maintaining a mercenary
force of cavalry to meet the danger of Saracens, Normans,
or Huns. It is to the predominance of mounted service
in the tenth century and later that the Constable and the
Marshal, the officers of the royal stable, owe their position
as leaders of the feudal host, which is henceforward the
mainstay of the army. At the same time there develops
a definite military class, supported by landed possessions,
and bound to each other by a semi-religious organization
which differs little, if at all from a trade guild, and recog-
nizes the same degrees of apprentice or esquire, journeyman
or c bachelor ', and master or c banneret '. Although
knighthood in the later Middle Ages seems more a status
than a profession, the class was not, at any rate at first,
limited to those who were technically free. The feudal
host may then be regarded as consisting of little groups of
knights serving for forty days at a time under the leadership
of the lords from whom they held their lands. Such an
army was of little use for protracted operations, since its
period of service was so short, and if a knight refused to
serve it was difficult in practice to deprive him of his lands.
Thus we find the English kings exacting a composition fee
equivalent to the wages of a substitute for the obligatory
period (Scutage), and a pecuniary fine for the offence of
refusing to come without excuse. The mustering of the
host is the duty of the Constable and the Marshal, and
scutage is levied according to their certificate of attendance.
Those who have done their service are entitled to the
scutage of their own tenants. The national army, though
502 Legacy of the Middle Ages
existing mainly for defensive purposes, is not superseded.
We find ordinances such as the assize of arms enforcing the
possession by every man of the weapons and armour appro-
priate to his means. Closely allied to this is the not uncom-
mon rule that all who have land of more than a certain
value must accept knighthood, a regulation which was
enforced in England on several occasions in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. Moreover, the right of the
crown to summon its subjects for national defence is nowhere
completely set aside by the feudal contract. Even in
Germany the Tocsin might be sounded and the whole
population called to arms as the ' Landfolge ' ; while in
France the king could summon the Arriere-Ban, or in
England bid the sheriff raise the men of his county, or
appoint commissioners of Array to select a proportion of
them. But, in the fourteenth century, both the feudal host
and the national army were found insufficient, and war was
more and more conducted by paid troops, raised by pro-
fessional captains in accordance with a definite contract,
the beginning of the system under which the modern
regiment is nominally raised and paid by its colonel. The
immediate result of the system was the creation of hordes
of mercenaries, the * Companies ', whose allegiance to any
particular employer was precarious and who were recruited
very largely by throwing open the prisons. The standing
army of a medieval king, which formed a nucleus for these
temporary troops, consisted of the knights and Serjeants of
his household, who were in constant attendance on his
person. These provided officers for the expeditionary force.
In like manner the clerks of his household, who normally
kept its accounts and made its contracts for food and
necessaries, undertook the duties of the commissariat and
the pay-chest. We find the same linking together of clerical
and lay elements which we have already nofed in the
Royal Power and Administration 503
Treasury, and which corresponds with the general system
of dual control of which we find constant examples. The
navy of the Middle Ages was less organized than the army,
except in cases such as that of the Knights of St. John,
where it was the main weapon of offence. The usual plan
was to call upon seaport towns for the loan of one or more
ships, or to impress merchant ships found in the various
ports for a limited period. Soldiers were shipped on board
these vessels for special expeditions. The requisitioning of
ships fell, like the commissariat of the army, within the
sphere of the king's clerks. When Richard I set out for
Palestine he took the exceptional course of purchasing
a half-share in each of the ships engaged for the expedition.
All ships were armed, and piracy was normal, redress
being mainly obtained by reprisals on other ships or mer-
chants of the same nationality. The orthodox method of
procedure was for the injured party to obtain * Letters of
Request ' from his ruler addressed to the head of the State
to which the offenders belonged, or to the chief officer of
their town. If, as usual, no redress was obtained, c march-
law ' was invoked, and any subjects of the State involved
might be * marked ' or subjected to acts of reprisal. The
formal issue of * Letters of Marque ' belongs to the period
'when international law was becoming generally recognized.
With the remaining offices of the household, those of the
Steward and the Butler, the administrative system has little
to do. We have alluded to the exercise by the Steward of
the functions of Justiciar, and of leader of the host. His
place was taken in the household of later times by a person
of less dignity, who was the lay head of the actual establish-
ment. Here also, as we have indicated in speaking of the
army, we find divided lay and clerical control. The clerical
head of the household is its treasurer, and each of the offices
has a clerk pr clerks to keep its accounts, as well as yeomen
504 Legacy of the Middle Ages
to perform the services. The main officers form a household
council, in England the ' Board of Green Cloth ', and the
principal lay officers, the Steward and the Marshal, have
jurisdiction over the servants of the household and persons
who bring claims against them.
So rapid a survey as this of the functions of the king, with
their constitutional limitations^and of the machinery which
linked the head of the State with the humblest subject,
must necessarily be chiefly remarkable for its omissions.
It is bound to appear simpler and more consistent than it
ever was in reality. Conditions were not the same in
different countries, and even in England, where the mon-
archy was on the whole strong, justice and police, especially
in small matters, were largely in private hands. We have
not attempted to indicate in detail how this came about,
but have leaned to the theory that these rights were devolu-
tions of royal power, rather than appurtenances of the soil,
and we have left unsolved the question to what extent they
are to be regarded as survivals of local community juris-
diction. But if such a partial and imperfect survey of one
side of medieval society is of little positive service to scientific
history, it may perhaps have its value in directing the
attention of the student to a field in which there is much
to be learned and unending exercise for a mind which
delights in comparison and construction.
CHARLES JOHNSON.
IO
POLITICAL THOUGHT
NO longer regarded as a philosophical detour between
Aristotle and Machiavelli, the political thought of the
Middle Ages speaks to a steadily widening circle of inquirers.
There are the historically- minded who would discover there
the principles that guided the Papal monarchy in its assump-
tion of the imperial heritage of Rome ; students of modern
diplomacy in search of precedents for international action
in the cause of peace ; liberal thinkers who see in the medieval
demarcation of the spiritual and temporal spheres an early
answer to the old question of the limits of State sovereignty
over the conscience of the citizen ; jurists and social scientists
who, following in the steps of Gierke and Maitland, are
pondering in the light of the group-theories of the twelfth
to fifteenth centuries the problem of the rights of associa-
tions within the State ; and, to speak more generally, many
thoughtful persons who reject the view that the State
should be all-inclusive and all-absorbing, and would seek
in the social process at large the enlightenment and liberation
from narrow and selfish interests, the enlargement of per-
sonality previously held to be within the sphere of the Great
Leviathan. To them the medieval notion of society as
a unity and as organic, however decisively they may reject
its theological basis, makes on other grounds an appeal which
cannot be neglected. Some of these aspects of medieval
thought we shall try to consider in these pages.
When at the outset we ask ourselves if the Middle Ages
had any conception of the State that approximates to ours,
we are met by a difficulty. Theory, especially medieval
506 Legacy of the Middle Ages
theory, studied apart from institutions is not always the
best of guides. If we read only the philosophers, for whom
politics were a branch of theology, we shall probably come
to the conclusion that no conception of the State or of
sovereignty as we know it to-day existed in the Middle
Ages. Regnum and respublica come nearest to our use
of the former term, yet the notion of public authority
exercised more or less uniformly in the public interest
over a definite territorial area seems lacking. When, for
instance, John of Salisbury in his Policraticus (1159-61)
makes the point that respublica is a corpus or body, we
cannot be quite certain that he does not mean society as
a whole instead of the English kingdom to which he seems
in other passages to be alluding. The terminology which
the medieval theorists use is drawn from the early Christian
Fathers, from Roman Law, or from Latin writers of the
imperial age, that is from contexts and periods of a ius
commune, when national monarchies were not thought of.
Furthermore, the writers have deserted the good Aris-
totelian method of observation and comparative study, are
inot in the least concerned with constitutions or systems of
'administration, but very frequently are debating the rela-
tions between two sets of authorities, the spiritual and
i temporal, with arguments so highly metaphorical as to be
lalmost childish. But the vagueness of their terminology
and the remoteness of their arguments must not lead us to
think that no conception of the State existed in the central
period of the Middle Ages ; no more, when we view the
universal prevalence of feudal tenures and feudal notions in
thirteenth-century Europe, should we be wholly justified
in saying that ex bypothesi these were different estates, not
different states that the medieval lines of division were
horizontal rather than vertical. The classical example of
such a generalization is Germany from the ninth to the
Political Thought 57
thirteenth century. It was stoutly maintained that there,
if anywhere, government was largely private property,
legislation bore the nature of a private grant ; the only
4 political ' organizations were the Free Associations (Genos-
senschaften, the guilds and towns), kingship was a patri-
monial lordship, public and private law were inextricably
confused. Where such conditions existed surely men had
no notion of the State. Then came the historian and
quietly showed that a distinction between political and
feudal elements there did in fact exist and was made by
contemporaries : the study of imperial taxation, of the
regalia and of the system of immunities proved that feudal-
ism was not all-pervading, that the attributes of the State
must not be confined to the Free Associations, and that
before the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the period of
separatism, we can legitimately speak of a German State
and proclaim the existence of a constitution based on public
law administered for the communis utilitas or in the public
interest. 1 So far can history correct verdicts drawn from
theory alone.
Now medieval public law is the ordaining and adminis-
tration of the king as guardian of the common weal and as
purveyor of justice. To medieval thinkers the State is the
sphere of the monarch in his dual capacity of protector and
magistrate. This, rather than territorial integrity, is its
essence. The king is, it is true, the feudal suzerain of his
kingdom, first among his tenants-in-chief, perhaps indeed
a vassal of some other monarch ; but he is also its political
sovereign with rights and duties that lie wholly outside the
1 G. von Below in his remarkable book, Der Deutsche Staat des Mittel-
alters, Bd. I (1925), pp. i-xn, gives a summary of the change in thought
wrought by the detailed study of administration and insists on the
importance of recognizing the distinction drawn between public and
private law ift the Middle Ages.
So8 Legacy of the Middle Ages
feudal orbit. In the coronation oath English kings make
the threefold promise of peace, justice, and equity to all
their subjects : they are, as the old phrase has it, * debtors
to all and sundry to do justice,' and, as M. Viollet has said
of the Capetian monarchs, their essential function is that
^ofjudge. That does not mean to imply that there are not
other forms of justice beside the king's, or that the relations
of seignorial courts to the king's court are not a matter of
careful regulation in customary law : for in France it is true,
as Beaumanoir remarked, that every baron is a sovereign
in his barony ; but it does mean that even there in the last
resort, when the common profit of the kingdom is concerned,
royal justice will be put into operation, local immunities
notwithstanding. Royal institutions, Chancery, Exchequer,
and Judicature, though concerned with the king's domanial
and feudal rights and revenues, are yet more than private
institutions : they are expressions of his sovereignty.
Nevertheless that sovereignty has not the uniform extension
and effectiveness of modern public authority. It might
and did vary from year to year with the personal character
of the monarch, the course of his relations with the Church
and with his feudatories, the tenacity and inventiveness of
his administrators, and many other factors. In the Norman
kingdoms that sovereign power is admitted and obeyed.
In the Latin principalities in the near East it scarcely raises
its head at all. We can admit therefore of no further
generalization than that to the medieval Englishman or
Frenchman thejj&tfJ.s^r^, to the medieval German at
any rate before the fourteenth century imperator. It is
a personal conception, however much men may'Tiold the
king to be under the law or bound not to legislate without
the advice of his Council.
But existing side by side with the king and the sphere of
his personality, the State, is the great international com-
Political Thought 59
munity that knows neither the anxieties of the royal succes-
sion nor the fluctuations of baronial allegiance. The first
duty of the monarch is to protect the Church of God :
that task specified in the first article of the Great Charter is
incumbent on him at all times. Throughout the Middle
Ages it would have been hard to find any one who was
not convinced that human affairs were divided into two
great categories, tl^Siritual and the temporal and that
society had an other-worldly purpose, a divine end which
could only be served if the things belonging to the regimen
animarum the guidance of souls were directed by the
society and leader commissioned by the Captain of Salvation.
The demarcation of these spheres and in particular the claim
of the Church to the guardianship of conscience and morality
is an early assertion of the independence of the spiritual life.
Its importance for the growth of modern conceptions of
liberty is unquestionable. Let us look at this assertion in
its primary stages.
As long as the Church in the Roman Empire was an
illicit and persecuted body the question of its relation to the
imperial authorities could scarcely arise. But when Chris-
tianity became the official religion of the Empire and
citizenship equivalent to churchmanship, the Church's com-
prehensiveness and her attitude to the secular authority
raised difficult questions. Conversion had been quick : at
the beginning of the fifth century the Church contained
masses of ignorant people whom, as Mgr. Duchesne has
said, ^he water of Baptism had touched, but the spirit of
^the^Gospel had not penetrated*. Should the Church, the
holy and immaculate, maintain within herself the worldly,
admit them to give or to receive the Sacraments? And
should she rely upon imperial force to coerce doubting and
protesting provincials to receive her nominees ? * Quid
Christianis cum regibus ? Aut quid episcopis cum palatio ? '
5io Legacy of the Middle Ages
Petilian had asked. The question raised by the Donatists,
who, following the old Christian attitude of the period of
persecution, regarded the State as a profane and diabolical
institution, struck deep. The problem was to arise, no less
disquietingly, in the next three centuries, when the bar-
barians came crowding into the Empire, and their kings
after conversion and baptism used the sole force that made
for unity and peace, the Church and churchmen, to aid
them in administering their kingdoms. The pessimist and
the mystic might evade the issue and seek the cloister ; but
the secular Church had to mark out its sphere and assert
both its connexion with, and its independence of, civil
government.
For their answer to the problem in its early form the
Fathers turned to the commonplaces of the Roman lawyers and
the Stoic philosophy : the freedom and equality of human
nature and the contrast between nature and convention.
In the primitive and innocent conditions of human life
men obeyed the law of nature, principles recognized as
universally reasonable and valid, in conditions of brother-
hood and equality. The natural was not merely the primi-
tive ; it was also the real and the permanent, subsisting
beneath change and convention, the ultimately reasonable.
The institutions of society were not natural, but conventional ;
the State with its coercive control of man by man and its
institutions of private property and slavery was conventional,
conditioned by the Fall and man's loss of innocence, which
made necessary a power that would control human appetites
and desires. As such it is an institution for remedying and
correcting human weakness, not, as Aristotle regarded it,
the indispensable means to the good life. Yet given the
fact of sin, coercive government is none the less a divinely
ordained remedy; justice is the basis, the directing aim
of the State, and obedience must be rendered tothe powers
Political Thought 511
that be. Gregory the Great would go so far as to maintain
that the ruler must not in any circumstances be resisted ;
but as a general rule, to quote Dr. A. J. Carlyle's words,
' the Fathers tend to think of the principle of justice
as of something which lies outside the power of the civil
authority something which it does not create and to
which it is in some measure answerable '. This principle
comes by degrees to be regarded as finding expression in the
ecclesiastical order ; the Church has its own rules, its own
authority independent of the civil power though closely
related to it. This attitude is illustrated by the life and the
writings of St._ Ambrose of Milan (| 397). In his letters
to the Emperor Theodosius he expresses the view that in
religious matters the civil magistrate has no authority over
ecclesiastics ; and that, in regard to property, things that
are divina, consecrated and used by the Church, are not
subject to the imperial power. The notion that the Church
has an independent position of her own is greatly developed
by Pope Gelasius (f 49^), whose definition of the two
spheres became authoritative : in Christian society, he held,
the spiritual and temporal powers were entrusted to two
authorities, each holding from God, each supreme in its own
sphere, each dependent on the other. The division, Gelasius
must have known, could not be complete, yet the superiority
of the one over the other had not yet been raised.
The ninth-century writers_Jona p s_ojf Orleans (f 843) and
Jffiagmar of Rheims (t 882) developed tfie Gelasian view.
They maintained that the secular and spiritual powers were
both within the Church ; that it was to some extent the
duty of the priest to see that the secular ruler did his duty ;
and that as in the ceremony of anointing the king the
dignity of the consecrator is greater than that of the conse-
crated, so the dignity of the priest is greater than that of the
prince. With the foundation of the Holy Empire it became
512 Legacy of the Middle Ages
increasingly difficult to maintain the dualism, in proportion
as people saw more and more clearly in daily life the inter-
connexion of the two spheres. But till the eleventh century
political circumstances which might raise the question of
superiority and inferiority in an acute form were still
lacking.
Yet the man who did more to accustom Christian thinkers
of the West to look beyond the state for justice was a figure
belonging almost to classical antiquity an African with the
fierce extremes of the desert in his soul. Politically, St.
Angu&tiae* stands apart from, yet dominates the patristic
age. In the great sea of his thought there are things that
stirred Luther and Calvin as well as the most orthodox
breasts. The De Civitate Dei, profound composite master-
piece of varying aims and occasions, the register of never-
ceasing religious experience, maintains no one clear doctrine
of Church and kingdom : yet its vogue and its importance
in later medieval thought cannot be over-estimated ; they
were primarily due to two cardinal ideas. First, that
justice is not the ratio, not the basis of the State. Cicero
made Scipio define a republic as res populi, and populus
as * a body of men united by their agreement about what
is just and their participation in what is profitable ' ; Augus-
tine defines populus as * a body of rational persons united
by harmonious participation in the things it likes '. The
State may be permeated by justice, but justice is not of its
essence. Secondly, that there are two cities c confused together
in this world, but distinct in the other ' the City of God and
the City of men. These two interwoven Societies (for that
is what Augustine probably meant) are begotten by two
loves, the love of God and the love of self apart from God.
Shall we then identify them with Church and State?
Sometimes Augustine will let us, more often he will not.
All we can say is that Augustine thought of the Givitas Dei
Political Thought 5*3
as the spiritual association, whether here or in the hereafter,
of persons whose minds and lives were directed towards
God, a mystic communio sanctorum ; and of the Civitas
terrena as the residuum of all who did not acknowledge the
predominance of the spiritual motive in their lives, a com-
munio improborum. Later generations, who used the great
work in apology or polemic, did not hesitate to see in the
Church on earth a part of the Divine Society, having its
own rules, structure, and catholic organization ; and to this
view Augustine's own doctrine of the sacraments, his whole
construction of the foundations of other Christian dogma,
had perhaps already made the greatest contribution.
Through him, more than through any other, the Church
came to regard herself as a great organized body holding
out to man the scala perfectionis by which he could ascend
from the Babylon of worldly existence to the Heavenly
Jerusalem. Augustine's spirit lives in Abelard's famous
lines :
Nostrum est interim mentes erigere,
Et totis patriam votis appetere,
Et ad Jerusalem a Babylonia
Post longa regredi tandem exilia. 1
The autonomy of the religious life is preserved by the
autonomy of the society entrusted with its care. What
then if the society, conscious of the predominant importance
of the soul's health, claims for its ordained ministers not
1 Otto of Freising shows in his Historia de duabus civitatibus (ed.
Hofmeister), p. 9, how deeply St. Augustine's idea had sunk into men's
minds : ' Proinde quia temporum mutabilitas stare non potest, ab ea
migrare, ut dixi, sapientem ad stantem et permanentem eternitatis
civitatem debere quis sani capitis negabit ? . . . Cum enim duae sint
civitates, una temporalis, alia eterna, una mundialis, alia caelestis, una
diaboli, alia Christi, Babyloniam hanc, Hierusalem illam esse Katholici
prodidere scAptores.'
2873 L 1
514 Legacy of the Middle Ages
only freedom from contact with the world, but complete
subordination to its primate ? Could the relations between
the spiritual and temporal authorities remain the same ?
The tendency of the reform inseparably connected with
Hildebrand was to unify, centralize, and withdraw from the
old vague compromise with the State the clericalis ordo.
The Church must have her own jurisprudence, her own
jurisdiction that set the Vicar of Christ where the Roman
Emperor had been. The codifying of her canons and
decretals, the strenuous fight for free election and the
chastity and integrity of her officials, the rigid control over
the episcopate were to be the chief weapons of her cam-
paign. However we may estimate Hildebrand's success
it is unquestionable that he aroused a new consciousness of
community throughout the church. But on the other side
national monarchies were steadily realizing themselves in
the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Law and efficient
systems of royal administration were forging them into
states. The Norman and Capetian monarchs, the Saxon
and Salian emperors had what we may term a secular policy,
developed in their subjects a sense of the common weal and
taught them to look to the dynasty for justice and peace.
Inevitably the early dualist theory of Church and State
had to undergo change. One or other of the authorities
will claim to be the sole source of power : the two swords,
spiritual and temporal, a single hand will attempt to grasp.
The great outburst of pamphleteering in the Investiture-
struggle, in its origin the result of the attempt to apply
reforming ideas to the German system of private churches
and patronage exercised in political interests, does not
provide instances of the claim of either power to sole pre-
dominance. It is not the regnum but the rex iniustus whom
Gregory VII is seeking to suppress. Much has been made
of the depreciation of the State in his famous* letter to
Political Thought 5*5
Hermann of Metz, in which he expressed the view that
kings and rulers took their origin from those who in * ignor-
ance of God had at the devil's prompting used every kind
of malice, perfidy and crime to dominate their fellow men ',
and that the power of the humblest exorcist, * a spiritual
emperor for driving out evil spirits ', was greater than that
given to any lay persons for the sake of temporal rule.
Yet these strong expressions and the many instances in
which he opposes iustitia (for which, as he said, he was dying
in exile) to the superbia of the Emperor constitute no
attempt to assert the theoretical supremacy of sacerdotium
over regnum, nor denial that the temporal power has its
coercive task in the world to fulfil. Even the strongest
reformer of the period would concede to secular princes
a measure of influence in episcopal elections, and imperialist
writers admit that lay investiture carried nothing more
than the temporalities of the see. The partisans of regnum
and sacerdotium might claim superiority for their respective
sides : they did not as yet claim omnicompetence for either
of them.
Yet Gregory's conception of * Justice ' which seems to
have meant for him unswerving devotion to the interests
of clerical reform was more far-reaching than he knew.
To later generations there could be no mistaking the
tendency of its deeper implication, the superiority of
divinely directed mind over material force and oppor-
tunism, as soon as it was coupled with the notion that the
other-worldly end of man must determine the organization
by which human society is directed. By the middle of the
twelfth century many people were beginning to conclude
that theoretically there was one authority alone supreme in
Christendom. The metaphor of the two swords was used
both by John of Salisbury and Honorius of Augsburg to
advance tlje view that all authority, ecclesiastical or secular,
Ll2
5*6 Legacy of the Middle Ages
belongs to the spiritual power. John declared that it is
from the Church that the prince received the material
sword, since both weapons were originally hers. The
material sword the prince wields for her use and advantage,
and is consequently her minister. Practical considerations
the development of the Canon Law with its emphasis upon
the Pope's plenitude of power, the definition of sacramental
doctrine, and, not least, the growth of the temporal posses-
sions of the Papacy indicated the same conclusion. It
was crowned by the scholastic philosophy which saw in
every particular being in the universal whole the energy
of a common transcendental aim to which it was the object
of the Church to minister. The Papacy sought to bring
under its direction the whole of human activity, learning,
and education through the universities which were its
organs, trade, and commerce through the enforcement of
just prices and the prohibition of interest. * The theocracy
which it aimed at has been well termed by Dr. Ernest
Barker * a fusion of the actual Church, reformed by papal
direction and governed by papal control with actual lay
society similarly reformed and similarly governed '. That
fusion was to be achieved, not so much (if we may invent
two expressions) by de-laicizing the Church the Hilde-
brandine policy as by clericalizing the world. A single
mentality was to be engendered, the orientation of every
faculty towards God, the complete recognition of a trans-
cendental purpose in life. The greatest of the means to
that end was the sacraments, in particular the Mass, the
service in which the believer was brought into contact with
God by receiving at the hands of the priest His very body
and blood. Only the sacrament of penance could secure
admission to the supreme festival, and penance was made
dependent on periodical confession of sin to a priest. Con-
fession the Lateran Council of 1215 made obligatory upon
Political Thought 517
all the faithful at least once a year. As the complement to
this the judgement of sin was both claimed and exercised
as a matter of course. ' No one of sane mind is ignorant
that it pertains to our office to snatch every Christian from
mortal sin ; and if he despise correction then to coerce him
by ecclesiastical censure ' wrote Innocent III to Philip
Augustus, and the letter with its famous vindication passed
into the Church's law. 1 From that time onwards the
Papacy does not look back ; astounding to many to-day,
yet logically justifiable in the view of Church politicians of
his time, came in the end Boniface VIIPs declaration that
belief in the subjection of every human creature to the
supreme Pontiff was necessary to salvation.
The claim was of tremendous consequence. It lies at the
root of ultramontane doctrine. At the time it provoked
the fierce reaction out of which, as we shall see, later
political theory was born. If we are to understand that
^revolt at all, the presuppositions and the method of argu-
ment adopted by medieval thinkers deserve attention :
it is here that the powerful influence of the Thomist
philosophy described in a previous chapter will be most
clearly apparent.
In the first place the universe is regarded as a single
whole, mankind as a single society. Every being, whether
an individual or a joint-being (i. e. a community), is an
integral part, an organic member of the whole ; its action
is determined by the final cause of the universe ; but at the
same time it is also a whole in itself, a diminished copy or
microcosm of the larger world, the macrocosm. Thus the
unified world is not sharply unified ; it is a community made
1 Decretal., Grcgor. IX, Lib. II, Tit. I, De ludiciis, c. xiii, where also
occurs the famous sentence : ' non enim intcndimus iudicare de feudo,
cuius ad ipsum (regem) spectat iudicium, sed decernere de peccato,
cuius ad nos pertinet sine dubitatione censura.'
5*8 Legacy of the Middle Ages
up of communities, articulated and organized in the most
diverse fashion, each of value to the whole, each essential
to the larger existence. In the second place God is the
monarch of this single realm ; all earthly lordship is, to
quote the words of Gierke, ' a limited representation of the
divine Lordship of the world ' : hence the medieval prefer-
ence for monarchy, both in large and in small units. There
was another reason connected with the idea of representa-
tion : the unity in society must find representation in
a governing part, and this can best be realized if the govern-
ing element is a unit, and so a single individual. Dante
went farther and deeper in his argument that what unites
bodies politic is will, and that to secure a ' unity in wills '
the governing will of one single person is the best means.
Thirdly, the character of the supreme directing authority of
the whole society depends upon the purpose for which society
exists, and this, it is generally assumed, is the same as the end
of each of its component individuals. Here we meet the point
of division between imperialist and papalist. St. Thomas
Ajjuiius in his De Regimine Principum argues that 'the natural
end of a people formed into a society is to live virtuously ; for
the end of any society is the same as that of the individuals
composing it. But, since the virtuous man is also determined
to a further end, the purpose of society is not merely that
man should live virtuously, but that by virtue he should
come to the enjoyment of God '. If men could attain this
end by natural capacities alone, it would be the duty of the
king to direct them to it : but the fruition of God that is
union with Him in the Beatific Vision, is not the result of
human direction ; it belongs to Divine Government, the
government of Jesus Christ. ' The administration of this
Kingdom has been committed, not to the Kings of this
world, but to priests, in order that the spiritual should be
distinct from the temporal ' ; and so to the Supreme
, ' Political Thought 5*9
Pontiff, the representative of Christ, ' to whom all the
kings of Christian people should be subject as to our Lord
Jesus Christ Himself.' Here the argument is that those
who have the care of proximate ends should be governed
by the power whose business is to lead men to their ultimate
end. Dante, on the other hand, stops short at the immediate
end. For him the aim of society is the vitafelice, the happy
life, which is to be attained, as he says, by * actualizing the
potential intellect ' : bringing into play the whole capability
of the mind. This can only be accomplished in an atmo-
sphere of peace, whose requisite condition is unity in
society, and unity only achieved by the universal empire
of a single monarch, who will unite divergent wills of
local rulers. That monarch, as the long argument in the
De Monarchia shows, is the present-day successor of the
emperors of Rome.
All truly medieval argument rests upon the premiss of
unity. There can be no fundamental change in the method
of thought until men have ceased to connect politics with
Platonic speculations on the One and the Many, or to hold
that a transcendental purpose in life determines the form
and extent of political authority. It is when earthly and
localized needs are recognized as the determining factors
that the great synthesis begins to totter. That recognition
began in the protests of secular sovereignty against Papal
domination. The publicists like Pierre du Bois, John of
Paris, and the author of the Quaestio in utramque pattern
who wrote on behalf of Philip the Fair, good Frenchmen
first and foremost, tend to return to the Aristotelian con-
ception of the State unit as the absolute and exclusive
concentration of all group-life, and to bring out what
Aristotle really meant when he said that the State was by
nature; or, by historical argument to claim that the
kingdom of France had never been comprised in the Dona-
520 Legacy of the Middle Ages
tion of Constantine, which they bitterly attack. Far more
radical was the criticism of the transcendental method in
argument found in the Defensor fads (1324), the work of
* two pupils of damnation ' Marsiglio of Padua and John of
Jandun. Political society, they argue, starts in the recogni-
tion of common needs and rests upon the constant will to
co-operation in attaining them : but men are continually
disposed to act in a way that makes co-operation impossible j
hence arise the notions of morality and justice : the sense of
right and wrong in conduct develops because reason recog-
nizes that certain kinds of action are injurious to the com-
munity and may even destroy it. Social utility is the
criterion here ; and government exists to further this
co-operation, to repress injurious activities and to promote
tranquillitas, the peace and security in which material and
intellectual prosperity may flourish. But greater even than
the return to Aristotle or the almost Machiavellian doctrine
(at the time scarcely heeded) of social utility was the logic
of fifteenth-century events, which the upholders of the
Papal thesis of unity could not recognize : the discredit
into which had fallen both Curial administration, owing to
the Papal system of collation to benefices, and imperial
sovereignty, owing to its weakness towards the electors ;
the rise of mystical and heretical sects, which Rome could
neither neutralize nor extirpate ; and the growing secular-
ism, which first demanded the separation of Church and
State, and then attacked the property and possessions of
the clergy. One attempt was made to restore unity on
a basis of self-government. The Conciliar movement aimed
at federalism and decentralization in Church : it sought
to make the supreme spiritual authority in Christendom
a representative assembly; to give voice and encourage-
ment to the local units which more than two hundred years
of ever-increasing Papal absolutism had silenced or over-
Political Thought 521
ridden. It is to the Conciliar writers in particular that the
generalizing of constitutional thought in Europe is due.
The idea of representation borrowed from the practice of
individual States, when applied to the government of the
international Church, received an extension, a publicity
unknown before. The conjoined effort to apply to the
existing ecclesiastical organization the principle of a mixed
constitution or polity, though it broke down at the Council
of Basel, popularized and kept alive the idea of checks and
balances against absolutism. For the time, however,
canonists, Papal administrators, and Concordats made in
national interests, combined to strengthen the old ways.
Yet before we set it down as a noble dream we may remem-
ber that medieval orthodoxy, for all its suppressions and
rigidities, stands as a permanent witness to the fact that
the life of society is made up of many other activities and
interests besides those which can be brought into relation
with a political authority ; its failure testifies to the difficulty
of including the whole complex of human activities within
a religious synthesis.
Some of the most far-reaching legacies of the Middle
Ages are their contributions to the theory of government.
During the epoch of the Reformation and the succeeding
period of absolutism two great doctrines underlie the
territorial sovereignty of national monarchs and the struggles
of religious bodies for toleration and existence : the Divine
Right of Kings, and the Right of Resistance based on the
claim to enforce some kind of responsibility upon the ruler.
The former perished with the collapse of the Dual Monarchy
and the expulsion of the Habsburgs ; its existence, after the
liberal movements of the nineteenth century, had always
been precarious. But the latter, in its various forms, has
had a powerful and lasting influence upon the formation of
522 Legacy of the Middle Ages
modern conceptions of political liberty. It has been invoked
not merely against the irresponsible sovereign, but against
the Machiavellian conception of the ' reason of state ' as
the basis of all governmental action, and the * balance of
power ' as the aim of all international diplomacy. These
doctrines of Divine Right and its limitation have their roots
deep in medieval thought and practice.
In the full-blown doctrine of kingship by Divine Right,
as we find it in seventeenth-century works like Filmer's
Patriarcha, are grouped together three separate proposi-
tions : first, that the principle of monarchy is divinely
willed and ultimate, to the exclusion of all other forms of
government ; secondly, that the legitimate sovereign holds
his power in virtue both of hereditary right and also of
religious consecration ; thirdly, that the sovereign is
responsible to no one, is in fact absolute. The first of these
is partly the result of the study of Aristotle (Filmer strongly
emphasizes the natural sanction of Monarchy), partly an
inference drawn from the idea of the single divine govern-
ment of the world strengthened later by the Romanist
idea (which we find later in Hobbes) of the necessity of
having a single impersonator or representative of the
community. The second represents a blending of primi-
tive Teutonic and purely Christian notions. In each
of the early Germanic races a single family, elevated above
the others by a sort of religious or magic virtue, provided
the supply of kings. Within these families, in pagan times
considered to be heroic, that is, descended from gods, the
people chose the worthiest for king. The royal power,
upon this theory, derived its position from being at once
hereditary and elective. Though primogeniture became
during the twelfth century an almost universal rule in
France and England, the idea that the king held his power
as the elected representative of his people maintained itself
Political Thought 523
throughout the central medieval period, though in practice
* election ' might mean very little more than acceptance. 1
The Church on the other hand was monarchist by principle,
but not after the Teutonic fashion. She paid little considera-
tion to hereditary right : the true King is the King who
governs in conformity with the moral and religious principles
of Catholicism, or which comes to the same in conformity
with clerical interests. In France the Church recognized
the successive usurpations of the Carolingian and Capet
dynasties : in Germany she succeeded in obscuring the old
idea of the legitimate line, until in the thirteenth century
it could even be thought * contrary to justice and reason '
that the son of a king should succeed to the imperial throne.
With parallels from the Old Testament and Byzantine
precedents in her hands she invested kingship with the
divine character. By the ceremony of unction in the
coronation she lifted the king above the ranks of the laity.
He is, as the Carolingian chancery was first to add, Dei
gratia rex. The phrase was not meaningless ; it appeared,
as M. Delisle showed, in Henry IPs diplomata, after the
murder of Thomas Becket a potent reminder to the
penitent king of the source whence his authority was derived.
The Anonymous of York (temp. Henry I) who wrote
fiercely against the Gregorian depredators of the royal
power, gives a good idea of the influence of the earlier
Christian attribution of sanctity to the monarch : ' To him
therefore (the king), who is blessed with such great blessings,
consecrated and deified with such great sacraments, none
other can rightly be preferred, none other is consecrated
and deified with more or greater sacraments. Wherefore
1 On the primitive Germanic custom see H. Brunner, Deutsche
Recbtsgescbicbte, i (1906), 167 : on the blending of hereditary and elective
notions of monarchy, F. Kern, Gottesgnadentum und Wider standsrecbt,
2, pp. 14-93, and Appendix I (' Erbrecht und Wahlrccht '), pp. 296-7,
for a number of French and English examples.
524 Legacy of the Middle Ages
he is not to be called a layman, since he is the Lord's
anointed ' (quia christus Domini est). 1 The blending in the
popular mind of the two originally distinct notions of
legitimism and priestly consecration as the source of the
king's divine power comes out very clearly in the royal
practice of touching diseased persons. The Church sur-
rounded with her ritual the exercise of the magical healing
virtue, inherent in the monarchs of the Capet and Plan-
tagenet families, and the ceremony lasted on into the period
of absolutism, till killed in England by a change of dynasty,
in France by the mockery of the Enlightenment. The
crowds that flocked to Louis XIV and Charles II to be
touched for scrofula were paying their testimony to a doubly
derived conception of sacerdotal kingship.
Consciousness of a divine nature may lead to irresponsi-
bility. One remembers the famous phrase which a Liege
chronicler put into the mouth of the Emperor Henry III.
When the Bishop of Liege summoned him to respect the
priestly dignity, he replied : * I too have been anointed with
holy oil, and by that have received supreme power.'
Against such dangerqus pretensions to independence the
Church reacted : unction was omitted from among the
sacraments, and the publicists of the Curia systematically
abased the regnum before the Sacerdotium. But the idea of
the divinity of kingship had struck the royal mind too
deeply. The arguments advanced by Papal and imperial
protagonists to the great struggle of the thirteenth century
found their echo at a French court outraged by Boniface VIII.
French authors in the time of Philip the Fair assert that
the King of France holds his kingdom immediately from
God alone. The Papal claim to hold sovereignty by Divine
grant is met by the claims of secular sovereigns to a similar
1 M.G.SS. Libelli de Lite, iii. 676. On the whole subject of miracle-
working kings see M. Bloch, Les Rots thaumaturges.
Political Thought 525
tenure. It is not a far step to WycliPs argument in the
De Officio Regis that the king reflects the Godhead of
Christ, the priest only his manhood : the king is not subject
to positive law : he is legibus solutus, his obedience to his
own law is voluntary, not compulsory. The logical end of
this doctrine is absolutism, the principle which Richard II
attempted to put into practice not only by the declaration
(which he had borrowed from Boniface VIII) that the laws
were in his own mouth and at times within his own breast,
but by the whole course of his actions from 1394-9. It is
interesting to find secular absolutism, born from the struggle
against the international Papacy, in its early stages relying
upon the same theological arguments as its opponent. The
fundamental medieval notion of the divine origin of all
power could cut both ways. In an atmosphere of growing
national and territorial consciousness it served as the architect
of national monarchy. One further wrench and the State,
personified by the monarch, is, in Maitland's brilliant
phrase, c parsonified ' as well : the Erastian regime of the
sixteenth century has come into being. James I will declare
that kings are justly called gods, ' judges over all their
subjects, and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but
God only ; that ' to the King is due both the affection of
the soul and the service of the body of his subjects '.
The post-Reformation doctrine of Resistance is the
outcome of various theoretical restraints and limitations
upon monarchy entertained throughout the Middle Ages.
The chief of these are the conceptions of an original contract,
of the subjection of the ruler to law, human or divine, and
of the sovereignty of the Community, whether the people
or the group. Each represents in some measure a reaction
against the idea of Divine Right, to the formation of which
. the Middle Ages made, as we have just seen, so considerable
a contribution.
526 Legacy of the Middle Ages
The notion that the sovereign is bound by a body of more
or less definitely formulated rights which he was bound to
observe is a fundamental Teutonic axiom which Roman
Law was never able to overcome in this country. In the
open struggles between King and nation, personified at
first by baronial, later by Parliamentary, elements, it is the
assumption that underlies all attempts of the opposition
from 1215 to 1688. It is responsible for the idea of ' the
reign of law ', the supremacy of the constitution, which
animates the political systems of the English-speaking
peoples. Originally it derives, no doubt, from the restraints
of customary codes. If the King commits an act contrary
to the * good customs ' of his subjects, their resistance, as the
Sachsenspiegel very clearly states, is not to be considered
a failure of allegiance. Bracton, while never for a moment
denying the royal supremacy, holds that its power should be
exercised subject to the law : * there is no king where
arbitrary will, not the law, reigns ' ; law, the bridle of the
royal power, is the ordinance of king and magnates, passed
after discussion in the feudal assembly ; it is the adjudication
and interpretation of already existing custom rather than
a work of original creation. The king is like a judge inter-
preting a system of rights and duties to which he owes his
own position and which he is bound to uphold. These
were generally received principles in Europe. But in
England where the Norman and Angevin kings had created
a centralized bureaucracy and a common law, they had
from the thirteenth century onwards a peculiar and con-
tinuous development. Here there is far smaller sense of
a fundamental law, far greater recognition of the binding
force of an instrument that is being progressively fashioned
by addition, modification, or change. The lawyers blended
from year to year new royal justice with the old customary
rules, the new royal machinery of government with the old
Political Thought 527
communal institutions, and using the language and technical
forms of the civil and canon law created in time a new
system which could stand by itself upon a basis neither
wholly feudal nor wholly monarchical ; and the factor which
gave this system its stability and continuity and so per-
petuated the doctrine that law should govern the state was
the rise of a representative assembly, in intimate alliance
with the lawyers, which in course of time was to advance the
claim that all legislation must be by the Crown in Parliament.
But there is a higher restraint upon the royal power than
the checks of custom and a common law evolved by the
lawyers and Parliament. The Romans had identified their
ius gentium, the law applying generally to cases in which
others than Roman citizens were concerned, with the Stoic
Law of Nature. The process was carried farther by identi-
fying the Law of Nature with the Law of God. At the
head of the Decretum of Gratian stands the statement that
the Law of Nature is the golden rule, comprised in the Law
and the Gospel, supreme over all kinds of law by antiquity
and dignity, immutable, prevailing over both custom and
express ordinance. It is here that Sir Frederick Pollock
has found the origin of the English lawyers' maxim that
a custom cannot be good if it is contrary to reason, and of
the doctrine current from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
century (though not put into effectual practice) that
a statute may be held void for being repugnant to reason or
c common right '. Still, the law of nature is not entirely
the same as the law of the Church or divine law : it was
left to Aquinas to make their relation precise by his defi-
nition that natural law is divine law so far as revealed
through the medium of natural reason : at all events it
could not be in conflict with the divine law, of which it
was part. Such law, like the king's equity, could be of
practical application when legal texts and authorities on the
528 Legacy of the Middle Ages
disputing sides were silent : otherwise it formed throughout
the Middle Ages and down to the Renaissance a weapon of
controversy used in aid of contending opinions ; most of all,
perhaps, it was employed to strengthen the thesis that the
commands of the prince who misbehaved towards his
subjects were not binding upon them and might be lawfully
resisted. It helped the distinction which clericalist writers
used to draw between the legitimate prince and the tyrant,
with its inevitable conclusion, eagerly snatched at later by
the pamphleteers of the Ligue, that the overbearing monarch
might be put to death. In so far as it stood to perpetuate the
old distinction between nature and convention it bequeathed
an idea of importance in the political philosophy of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it is when
purged of clericalism and applied to the relations of States
with one another that its greatest contribution of the
doctrine of Natural Law to the modern age is seen. Grotius
in his great work De lure Belli et Pads accepts the contem-
porary world of absolute territorial princes : he is not
concerned with a theory of resistance or any criticism of
the conduct of kings inside their countries : he bases his
work on the assumption that men are in a society held
together by a natural law which makes certain common
duties binding : he held up the notion of a law universal
in scope, commanding respect and reverence, that was in
effect a sense of international right, which would condemn
certain actions of State towards State by attaching to them
the stigma of a breach of obligation. Here Grotius and
Gentilis with him struck at the heart of the Machiavellian
total independence of States, their posture as gladiators
in the European arena : the service these jurists rendered
here, and so ultimately to international law, is that they
succeeded in limiting the predominance of the ' reason of
state ' as a received rule of international conduct.
Political Thought 5 2 9
The medieval law of nature, stripped of its theological
clothing, handed to the opponents of Divine Right and the
philosophers of later centuries a doctrine of natural rights
and obligations of great significance in the drift towards
democratic theory 
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