Two causes brought about this greater importance of the moral as compared with the physical factors of power. First, the twelfth century successes were, in all outward and secular things, no more than the partial reconquest of the Roman order which, after a fashion, men still remembered. Whereas the nineteenth century, instead of partly restoring that which had been, and had then been lost, conquered nature and barbarism in regions where such conquest had never been attempted. Hence the twelfth century in the full flush of its achievement was less subject to pride and the illusions which wait upon pride. Second, the moral (and intellectual) life of the twelfth century revolved about a single many-sided institution, the Church, which affected all departments of human life.
It is the task of this chapter to set the stage for the events which follow. The reader must have a notion of the slack and sunken age of Gerbert (the great Pope of the year 1000), secondly the vigorous fighting age of Hildebrand and the great Norman chiefs, of the First Crusade and the Song of Roland, that is, the later eleventh century. Next he must grasp the twelfth century itself, Abelard, the teaching of the Roman law at Bologna, the enrichment and refinement of life, chivalry, “feminism,” and the continuing quarrel of the central and all-pervasive Church with the developing civil governments. Finally, towards the end of the century, he must appreciate the beginnings of the Gothic, the rise of strong and turbulent towns and guilds, and the promise of the long and fruitful marriage of government with the idea of nationality.
There will be no space for anything more than the merest sketch—as if one should set himself to draw a cathedral with half a dozen strokes of the pen. The analysis must of necessity be slight. I shall try to make it just. Especially the influence of the Church must be grasped and also (a thing often missed in accounts of the time) the limitations of that influence.
Before entering upon such a task, I cannot refrain from warning my reader of the necessary limitations and imperfections of history.
The scantiness of record, the bias and the inherent imperfections of human testimony, the tendency of the striking and exceptional fact to get itself recorded and thereby destroy the average (to which I shall return in considering baronial and private wars and comparing them with our strikes); all these things make us see the past not outlined clearly but through a haze.
Finally, we must beware of trying to understand the past too well, when we cannot even understand the present. What evil spell is over the modern male to keep him in such ugly and often uncomfortable clothes? The pedants used to go about solemnly pretending to assay the most inward motives of the great of old time (who were better men than they, and could they come back to the sunlight to deal with these same pedants, would have soused and slimed them in the nearest duck-pond for their prying impudence). They went on doing this, I say, until about the year 1905, when Chesterton asked them whether they themselves put flowers on a dead man’s grave in the belief that their dead could smell.1 Since then they have been a little quieter.
And yet all this seems forgotten by most of the writers and practically all the readers of history. Never mind. When the wretched historians call on the name of “Science,” that modern Mumbo-jumbo idol before whom we are all expected to bow down, let us save our self-respect as honest men by thumbing our noses and wriggling our fingers at such silly superstitions. They are all of a piece with the venerable dotard of an idea that proclaims the Infallibility of the Press and makes people believe a thing “because they see it in print”—pah!
Let us thus absolve ourselves from the sin of pride. The Middle Ages began with the decline of Rome. That high and complex civilization (which, as I have said, with all its divergencies, corresponded with ourselves more than did that of any other past age) saw its great energies slacken. It fell asleep. Nowadays we hear less than formerly about vice as a symptom of that decline, and more recognition of the economic breakdown caused by the crushing of the middle class under a system of taxation such as our own time would call socialistic. At any rate, the process was extremely gradual. It was accompanied, more in the way of an effect than as a cause, by the slow sifting in of comparatively small numbers of barbarians, first into the professional army which was the sole military reliance of the Empire, and thence, when they had become dominant in that army, inevitably into political office. The manner and stages of this decline (fascinating subjects to which justice is only beginning to be done) do not concern this study. What is important is to seize the depth of degradation which was reached.
To judge how low Christendom had fallen, let us glance at the evidence as to three capital points: decrease of population, loss of the power to build, and the substitution of mere folly for judicial weighing of evidence in matters of law.
For the enormous decrease of population, with all that it implied, we may take the two towns of London and Paris. London had been one of the principal towns of Roman Britain, the centre towards which the road system of the island converged. From early in the fifth to the opening years of the seventh century the place is not even mentioned in any document known: so that (in defiance of all probability) certain foolish scholars have been able to maintain that, in the interval, London did not even exist. Like London, Paris had been a capital, and to this day the blackened remains of its Roman palace that look down upon the comings and goings of the Latin Quarter in the “Boul Mich” are well out from the central “island of the city” on which the place began. The amphitheatre is even further away, behind the Pantheon, and anyone can appreciate how necessary it is that a place of public entertainment should not be too far out from the centre of things. And yet towards the end of the ninth century, when the Viking pirates besiege the place, only the little central island is held against them. Admitting fully that neither London nor Paris meant to Britain and Gaul what they mean to-day, still, I repeat, they were both very considerable towns, and it is entirely fair to use them as tests. The cities of Western Christendom had been” minished and brought low.”
Second, as to the loss of the power to build. That loss was well-nigh complete. Any history of architecture in England will parade before its reader the puny relics of Anglo-Saxon building. Paris has a few such things as the rude tower of St. Germain des Prés and a few doubtful stones in the low little church of St. Julien le Pauvre. In Italy, the “carnivorous” Lombard style which Ruskin so vividly identifies with the handful of seventh century “Lombard” freebooters, is now believed by scholars to belong entirely to the eleventh and twelfth centuries that saw Europe resurgent, the Crusades, and the rediscovered Roman law. Except Charlemagne’s octagon at Aix, it is hard to remember a single considerable monument certainly belonging to the four stagnant centuries between the years 600 and 1000. Everywhere men sheltered in corners of the magnificent structures that had come down from the imperial past, like swallows in the eaves of a building. Usually they could not even keep them from decay. Even repair was beyond them.
By what processes of law were civil disputes judged in these diminished cities in which architecture was growing ever ruder, feebler, and more squat? These men, our own ancestors, whose ancestors again had enjoyed the Roman law, decided between litigants by a series of tests or “ordeals” which are a catalogue of trivial stupidity. Merely to give the list will be enough to allow the reader to judge them. There was