The History of France (Vol. 1-6). Guizot François

of the great feudal lords, notably in Burgundy and Flanders, it was with but little energy and to but little purpose. He was hardly more potent in his family than in his kingdom. It has already been mentioned that, in spite of his preceptor Gerbert’s advice, he had espoused Bertha, widow of Eudes, count of Blois, and he loved her dearly; but the marriage was assailed by the Church, on the ground of kinship. Robert offered resistance, but afterwards gave way before the excommunication pronounced by Pope Gregory V., and then espoused Constance daughter of William Taillefer, count of Toulouse; and forth-with, says the chronicler Raoul Glaber, “were seen pouring into France and Burgundy, because of this queen, the most vain and most frivolous of all men, coming from Aquitaine and Auvergne. They were outlandish and outrageous equally in their manners and their dress, in their arms and the appointments of their horses; their hair came only half way down their head; they shaved their beards like actors; they wore boots and shoes that were not decent; and, lastly, neither fidelity nor security was to be looked for in any of their ties. Alack! that nation of Franks, which was wont to be the most virtuous, and even the people of Burgundy, too, were eager to follow these criminal examples, and before long they reflected only too faithfully the depravity and infamy of their models.” The evil amounted to something graver than a disturbance of court-fashions. Robert had by Constance three sons, Hugh, Henry, and Robert. First the eldest, and afterwards his two brothers, maddened by the bad character and tyrannical exactions of their mother, left the palace, and withdrew to Dreux and Burgundy, abandoning themselves, in the royal domains and the neighborhood, to all kinds of depredations and excesses. Reconciliation was not without great difficulty effected; and, indeed, peace was never really restored in the royal family. Peace was everywhere the wish and study of King Robert; but he succeeded better in maintaining it with his neighbors than with his children. In 1006, he was on the point of having a quarrel with Henry II., emperor of Germany, who was more active and enterprising, but fortunately not less pious, than himself. The two sovereigns resolved to have an interview at the Meuse, the boundary of their dominions. “The question amongst their respective followings was, which of the two should cross the river to seek audience on the other bank, that is, in the other’s dominions; this would be a humiliation, it was said. The two learned princes remembered this saying of Eclesiasticus: ‘The greater thou art, the humbler be thou in all things.’ The emperor, therefore, rose up early in the morning, and crossed, with some of his people, into the French king’s territory. They embraced with cordiality; the bishops, as was proper, celebrated the sacrament of the mass, and they afterwards sat down to dinner. When the meal was over, King Robert offered Henry immense presents of gold and silver and precious stones, and a hundred horses richly caparisoned, each carrying a cuirass and a helmet; and he added that all that the emperor did not accept of these gifts would be so much deducted from their friendship. Henry, seeing the generosity of his friend, took of the whole only a book containing the Holy Gospel, set with gold and precious stones, and a golden amulet, wherein was a tooth of St. Vincent, priest and martyr. The empress, likewise, accepted only two golden cups. Next day, King Robert crossed with his bishops into the territories of the emperor, who received him magnificently, and, after dinner, offered him a hundred pounds of pure gold. The king, in his turn, accepted only two golden cups; and, after having ratified their pact of friendship, they returned each to his own dominions.”

      Let us add to this summary of Robert’s reign some facts which are characteristic of the epoch. In A.D. 1000, in consequence of the sense attached to certain words in the Sacred Books, many Christians expected the end of the world. The time of expectation was full of anxieties; plagues, famines, and divers accidents which then took place in divers quarters, were an additional aggravation; the churches were crowded; penances, offerings, absolutions, all the forms of invocation and repentance multiplied rapidly; a multitude of souls, in submission or terror, prepared to appear before their Judge. And after what catastrophes? In the midst of what gloom or of what light? These were fearful questions, of which men’s imaginations were exhausted in forestalling the solution. When the last day of the tenth and the first of the eleventh centuries were past, it was like a general regeneration; it might have been said that time was beginning over again; and the work was commenced of rendering the Christian world worthy of the future. “Especially in Italy and in Gaul,” says the chronicler Raoul Glaber, “men took in hand the reconstruction of the basilicas, although the greater part had no need thereof. Christian peoples seemed to vie one with another which should erect the most beautiful. It was as if the world, shaking itself together and casting off its old garments, would have decked itself with the white robes of Christ.” Christian art, in its earliest form of the Gothic style, dates from this epoch; the power and riches of the Christian Church, in its different institutions, received, at this crisis of the human imagination, a fresh impulse.

      Other facts, some lamentable and some salutary, began, about this epoch, to assume in French history a place which was destined before long to become an important one. Piles of fagots were set up, first at Orleans and then at Toulouse, for the punishment of heretics. The heretics of the day were Manicheans. King Robert and Queen Constance sanctioned by their presence this return to human sacrifices offered to God as a penalty inflicted on mental offenders against His word. At the same time a double portion of ire blazed forth against the Jews. “What have we to do,” it was said, “with going abroad to make war on Mussulmans? Have we not in the very midst of us the greatest enemies of Jesus Christ?” Amongst Christians acts of oppression and violence on the part of the great against the small became so excessive and so frequent that they excited in country parts, particularly in Normandy, insurrections which the insurgents tried to organize into permanent resistance. “In several counties of Normandy,” says William of Jumieges, “all the peasants, meeting in conventicles, resolved to live according to their own wills and their own laws, not only in the heart of the forests, but also on the borders of the rivers, and without care for any established rights. To accomplish this design, these mobs of madmen elected each two deputies, who were to form, at the central point, an assembly charged with the execution of their decrees. So soon as the duke (Richard II.) was informed thereof, he sent a large body of armed men to suppress this audacity in the country parts, and to disperse this rustic assembly. In execution of his orders, the deputies of the peasantry and many other rebels were forthwith arrested; their feet and hands were cut off, and they were sent home thus mutilated to deter their fellows from such enterprises, and to render them more prudent, for fear of worse. After this experience, the peasants gave up their meetings and returned to their ploughs.”

      This is a literal translation of the monkish chronicler, who was far from favorable to the insurgent peasants, and was more for applauding the suppression than justifying the insurrection. The suppression, though undoubtedly effectual for the moment, and in the particular spots it reached, produced no general or lasting effect. About a century after the cold recital of William of Jumieges, a poet-chronicler, Robert Wace, in his Romance of Rou, a history in verse of Rollo and the first dukes of Normandy, related the same facts with far more sympathetic feeling and poetical coloring. “The lords do us nought but ill,” he makes the Norman peasants say; “with them we have nor gain nor profit from our labors; every day is, for us, a day of suffering, toil, and weariness; every day we have our cattle taken from us for road-work and forced service. We have plaints and grievances, old and new exactions, pleas and processes without end, money-pleas, market-pleas, road-pleas, forest-pleas, mill-pleas, black-mail-pleas, watch-and-ward-pleas. There are so many provosts, bailiffs, and sergeants, that we have not one hour’s peace; day by day they run us down, seize our movables, and drive us from our lands. There is no security for us against the lords; and no pact is binding with them. Why suffer all this evil to be done to us and not get out of our plight? Are we not men even as they are? Have we not the same stature, the same limbs, the same strength—for suffering? All we need is courage. Let us, then, bind ourselves together by an oath: let us swear to support one another; and if they will make war on us, have we not, for one knight, thirty or forty young peasants, nimble and ready to fight with club, with boar-spear, with arrow, with axe, and even with stones if they have not weapons? Let us learn to resist the knights, and we shall be free to cut down trees, to hunt and fish after our fashion, and we shall work our will in flood and field and wood.”

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