In obedience to the returning Crusaders’ new sense of power came increase of commerce and intercommunication, of population and of wealth. Thus government and administration worthy of the name, which had been the creation of the eleventh century, continue to grow stronger and more centralized. But to them is added a new thing, the knowledge of the Roman law, with its large reasoning and its great sense of the State.
So also building was continued, and the bases of design do not change, but the severity of the older work begins to be lost in encrusted masses of sculptured detail. Most of the carving strikes us as crude; a good deal of it is meant to be grotesque and much of the rest is grotesque—unintentionally. But there is vigour about it; and an effect of richness, through painstaking repetition of simple motifs. This richness of decorative sculpture links up naturally with the new social tendency to refinement in manners.
With refinement in manners we come to our first sharp contrast with that which had been. William the Conqueror, annoyed at having his bastardy continually thrown in his face by his wife, is said to have relieved his feelings by tying her by the hair to his horse’s tail and dragging her out to a neighbouring suburb. Now we find William’s great grandson’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the foremost figure in a totally new sort of “high society” among the governing class of the time in which it was becoming the fashion to concern oneself with an elaborately courteous worship of idealized woman. Not that the eleventh century woman had been nobody. Countess Matilda of Tuscany had been a tower of strength to Hildebrand in his tireless political struggles. But now we find noblewomen taking the lead in social observance (and in literary appreciation) somewhat as they do in the United States to-day. It is true that the lay part of the movement had its centre, as we shall see in the next chapter, in Southern France. But it was general throughout the society of the time, and along with the lay movement went the new cult of the Virgin.
This new religious feeling came as abruptly as the corresponding change in lay society. Whereas Roland had prayed to God the Father, now everyone, even the knight in battle and the austere religious reformer like Saint Bernard, preferred to pray to the Mother of God. What they saw in her, those brought up in the Protestant tradition can scarcely feel. She stood for the illogical, affectionate side of religion. She loved all sorts of flattery and attention and everyone loved her and paid her the court she loved. She loved beautiful and pretry things too, and, womanlike, all the decorative side of life, so that her cult played a great part in the cathedral building. In poems and tales of her it is possible to feel, at least faintly, the tremendous out-pouring of devotion she inspired. It was the twelfth century that placed her among the gods of our West European stock.
Most men worthy of the name dislike feminism. There is something unnatural and strained about it. In civilized times, made possible only by the highest human energy, it is a perpetual riddle to find the sex which is less vigorous, both in body and mind, coming to the fore. Therefore many men have called the feminism of the Cæsarean-Augustan age in Rome, and also of to-day, a sign of social decay. But this will not fit the case of twelfth-century feminism. If feminism is a sickness of society it would seem sometimes to be a growing sickness. It would seem that, in times of rapid expansion of civilized things, the energy of man is so taken up with taming the wilderness, fighting back the barbarian, and producing the wealth by which the body of society must live, that he is surpassed by woman in knowledge of all the arts and studies that make life rich and beautiful, all those things in short that the business man of to-day despises under the name of “general culture.” The woman, then, seeing that she surpasses him in so much, sets up in her own mind to be his superior, and is half acknowledged by him as such. But the man of to-day may console himself with the thought that about feminism there is something forced and malformed, and that, in the past, its excess has never lasted long.
The time that saw the kings strengthened by the Roman law, the new refinement of the rich dominated by the noble lady, and all classes of men and women worshipping the Virgin, saw also a new spirit of civic liberty. The growing towns began to set up as “communes,” practically self-governing corporations. When they could, they bought their freedom in the form of a charter from the feudal overlord; when they could not come to terms they fought him cheerfully. They were turbulent, always rioting about something or other, and the glimpses we get of their municipal finance suggest that the city grafter of to-day could learn from them. Nevertheless, they concentrated in themselves much of the confused, but happy and conquering, energies of the time. Politically, they half realized, without knowing it, the ideal of the ancient free city. Through them and their independence we touch Athens, which they knew not at all. Economically, they brought art and industry out of the monasteries, and organized the craftsman and the artisan in guilds which largely checked competition between their members. Thus they guaranteed to the workman his independence and security so well that our labour unions grope after them to-day like blind giants. Soon, here and there, they were to feel for a new architecture that (as we shall see) was to be the Gothic. All these things they did, not because of any rule or precept but spontaneously, for their own sake, as things that ought to be done.
While the townsman was setting up for a free citizen, the country serf was establishing himself as a practically free peasant. The arrangement grew up that so long as a given family of serfs kept up the payment of the lord’s dues for the land they tilled, members of that family might leave freely to become “guildsmen” (what we should call “union men”) in the towns, could enter the Church, or do what they pleased. A dissatisfied serf might run away to some town where his lord had no jurisdiction, so that lords had to make things easy for serfs. The great tradition of the eighteenth century, out of which our political morality came, makes the idea of feudal dues stink in our nostrils. Nevertheless, we must admit that the new status of the serf class represented substantial freedom. The unconscious, and therefore impregnable, evidence of contemporary literature proves beyond question that the countryman was now, in fact, free. The independent “villeins” of “Aucassin and Nicolette” or “Robin and Marion” are essentially the free French peasants of to-day.
Perhaps the sharpest apparent contrast with that which had been, was that thought, like the arts and crafts, came out of the monastery into the town. Anselm in his cloister had reasoned clearly as churchmen before him had not. The great scholar of the new time reached out, through the faith, as it were, to the metaphysical foundations of all knowledge. His name was Abelard; he “woke the great curiosity from its sleep of a thousand years . . .” (as Belloc says with a fine flourish), and his glory, his love, and his misfortunes have become a legend. Great as he was in himself, the picture of him as a lad of scarcely twenty, standing up in public to the greatest professor of his time and besting him in debate, is even greater as a parable. It would not be altogether true to say, as has been said, that with his generation scholarship became secularized, but it certainly became public. From top to bottom the faith (which the learned, to a man, continued to maintain) became matter for discussion and was expected to justify itself by rational demonstration. The student, although still at least in minor orders, ceased to be a monk, and roamed at will. He loved thought for its own sake, and grouped himself in communities that were already, in substance, universities.
I have said that the time was spontaneous, and in general that is true. The emergence of the serf as a practically free peasant came about quietly, of itself. Even the noisy communes troubled themselves little about the larger implications of their acts. But one man at least, Arnold of Brescia, a pupil (or at least a follower) of Abelard, brought the new learning to the support of the new municipalities. He broke with the Church, his success was short, and he soon went under; but such was his fame that after his execution his body was burned and the ashes thrown into the Tiber for fear that his bones might be cherished as relics, and certain heretics called themselves “Arnoldists” well into the next century.
So the time went on, everywhere making all things new, roads, buildings, philosophies; happy like a young god in creating, and, like God, seeing that its works were good. Its cities were growing fast. Even in Central Europe it was clearing the forests