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by its universality. It did not content itself with a few great epochs of life, with a single day in the week, or with a single faculty of the soul; it led the faithful as it were by the hand through life; it interwove itself with sorrow and joy; it was the cradle of science and art; it was beaten back from law and politics, but it occupied them as debateable ground to the last; and lest the soldier should escape it, it consecrated the service. of arms, and called it chivalry.

Apologists for medieval Catholicism are apt to talk of the monasteries as a great antidote for pauperism. They certainly were the best improvers of land during the somewhat limited period in which retainers were more valuable to the nobles than labourers; and if, as corporate bodies, they could not compete with the squires when agriculture became a study, they were still popular landlords from their very conservatism. The value of a great house, with resident proprietors and with large granaries, was also one which would be keenly felt when roads were bad and famines usual. But setting aside these chance results of the system, there seems no reason to believe that it was ever a sufficient substitute for our own parochial systems. To a certain extent the convents no doubt gave alms; at a time when charity was a sacred duty, they could scarcely do otherwise; but the doles administered at the convent-doors would only relieve neighbours and a few vagrants. On the other hand, the evidence of statutes, chronicles, and popular songs, &c., sufficiently shows that the abbots preferred entertaining the rich to relieving the poor. Again, the money of rich penitents might be diverted from the relief of distress to carve an oriel or glaze a window without any great shock to the conscience of any but the most devout men; the great examples of the temple at Jerusalem, and of the spikenard poured on the Saviour's feet, were an obvious apology. The men who built Netley Abbey as a summer-house, and cultivated the vine on the Hampshire slopes, did not, we may be sure, regard the relief of the sick and aged as the primary destination of their revenues. But, moreover, the Reformation showed that indebtedness was the normal state of conventual establishments. They continued to spend largely, and they had come to farm ill; the devotion of the rich had decreased, and the fifteenth century had founded only one monastery for ten that had arisen in the twelfth. Like the Jesuits at a later date, the monks availed themselves of their foreign connection to recruit their fortunes by trade; but this position of beggarly greatness striving to keep up appearances was ill fitted to sustain the pauperism of the State in addition to its own burden. We know from Henry VIII's statutes that vagrancy had become a nuisance

before the king had suppressed a single monastery. We know that the great change was effected with some violence to the religious sentiment of the people, but without occasioning any material suffering. Fifteen or twenty years later, under a weak government, the people, vaguely conscious of distress, rose up and clamoured for a return to the old ways. It was not that much had been taken from them, but that what was given them in return had never been carried out; that men glutted with the spoil of the Church were trying to enclose the commons, and because, under the strong stimulus of trade, whole villages were dismantled to become sheepfolds. Against the evidence of popular regret for the hierarchy we may fairly place the more credible witness of the rioters under Wat Tyler, who made the destruction of all orders, except those of the mendicant friars, an article in their programme of State reform.

What the actual state of the people was during the reign. of any one of the Plantagenets can only be conjectured from imperfect data. We know that under Edward III. the average wages of a day labourer were from two to three shillings of our money; that the quarter of wheat was often sold for eighteen shillings, and that butcher's meat was proportionally cheap. We know that meat was considered part of the regular diet of household servants, and that ploughmen were forbidden by statute to spend more than fifteen shillings a yard on their dress. Facts such as these have induced Mr. Hallam and Mr. Froude to believe that the lower classes of our countrymen have suffered in material well-being from the progress which has enriched merchants and manufacturers. But the evidence of statutes and averages is a little delusive. The rate of wages must be diminished by subtracting from its yearly sum the idle winter months in which nothing was done, the numerous feasts of the Church on which idleness was a duty, and the days of forced labour for the feudal lord. With these deductions, the wages of a peasant in the Middle Ages will scarcely exceed those of a Dorsetshire labourer at present. The greater cheapness of food formerly is yet more disputable; what with bad farming and bad roads, variations in its price prevailed to an extent which would now be incredible; and if in the first few months after harvest the loaf which would now cost a shilling was sold for fourpence, it constantly rose to eight or twelve times its value before the next harvest had been gathered in. The cottiers of a country manor had no resource against these seasons of scarcity except in the pigs and poultry which they kept on their little plots of ground; and we constantly hear that they eked out life with nettles, or green corn, or the bark of trees. Famine, therefore, was an institution in the land; and dysentery,

scrofula, and leprosy followed inexorably in its train. The evil was partly mitigated by the fact, that only the strong and healthy could ever grow up; the imperfect science of the times was unable to rear the sickly child or transmit diseased life through a series of wretched generations. But in spite of this greater hardihood among adults, their bodily stature was small and their average of life short. They spent more than their descendants can afford upon a single dress, both because the dress lasted them for years, and because their occasions of expense were few. Their houses were cabins of wood, which a day's labour provided, and which on occasion could be taken away in a cart; their furniture was a settle and a pot. The pedlar traversed the country from time to time; but even this traffic cannot have been extensive, when the smallest coin in circulation was equal to fourpence of our money. Unless he were member of a guild, which insured him against fire, travel, and law, the three most likely misfortunes of the time, the peasant's ordinary expenses were confined to his dress and the Church. If he saved money, he invited oppression; his lord was a remote danger; but the bailiff, the verger, and the summoner were foes at his very threshold, who would watch the signs of prosperity, and who always had law at hand to enforce oppression. If he were strong or wary enough to escape these, the sheriff might ruin him with a few citations to serve on juries out of the county. The high might defy the laws, and the humble escape them; but for all who had substance without power the danger from the rival courts of law was like the passage for Bunyan's pilgrims between Pope and Pagan.

A sketch of the Middle Ages, though it only embrace from the middle of the twelfth to the fourteenth century, must necessarily give very partial ideas of some two centuries and a half in a nation's life. The great point is to establish to readers who have been trained on Robertson or on the Lives of the Saints that these times have a character of their own. They form a distinct epoch in history; and if a single essay cannot do them justice, the nicknames currently applied are still more imperfect. They are not lawless ages, in the sense of wanting legal systems or the love of order; rather they are distinguished by an excessive love of legislation and police; the laws, oppressive in themselves, are more often perverted than violated. Neither can the term Dark Ages be used with any propriety of times which possessed a large literature of their own, and which were ceaselessly occupied in reconciling Christianity as a system of faith and action to the grandest philosophy of Greece. Yet neither on that account are they ages of faith, unless we hold that faith to be profound must be uncritical, or that it applies

to the framework of a system rather than to its thoughts. Too strong, too consistent to be despised, they are also too gross and hard to deserve regret in themselves, whatever feeling they may inspire in comparison with some more corrupt or cowardly periods that have since visited the world. They must be judged by their works which have followed them. The popular instinct which connects them with feudalism and chivalry, with the crusades, with the medieval Church and the schoolmen, however vaguely it may appreciate all these, is right, after all, in its test. Nor is it unreasonable to suppose that, after all the work of change has been summed up, we inherit something from the Middle Ages beyond a few gray ruins, or legal technicalities, or even the groundwork of our parliamentary constitution.

In the very first rank among medieval ideas, we are disposed to place the constitution of society on the personal basis. Greece and Rome had created a system of property under which men and women might be mere chattels, and had extended the family system to become the basis of the State and yet include strangers. The distinctive feature of feudalism is, that it establishes a new relation under which the dependent is neither son nor slave, and is connected by rights and duties not only with his lord but with the head of the State. The negative good of this theory was incalculable; it saved Europe from an oligarchy of mere thing-owners, like the Roman nobles, and it prevented the formation of clans, like the Irish. It confounded all conceptions of absolute rank when the same man was at once vassal and lord. It enlisted the honour of the higher orders to do justice to their inferiors; and imperfect as the safeguard was, it was better than none. The theory had its weak side: it gave sovereignty the appearance of personal property; it furnished a pretext for the wars of the Roses, and conducted Charles Stuart to the scaffold; but it also invested the rights of the subject with an equal dignity, and gave corporations that personal character from which the whole representative theory is derived. We must go back to the old idea of the corporation as a union of many men into one organic life, one feudal personality, before we can understand the theory that one or two members of a society may represent and express a thousand different wills. The idea was foreign to all classical theory, which at most only recognised aristocratic senates, or partnerships between governing families. Aristotle distinctly says, that a free state will be unmanageable if it number as many as 100,000 citizens; they cannot all meet in the agora; and yet no freeman can be deprived of political action. The Middle Ages solved the problem the more easily because their con

ception of individual rights was a little imperfect: they looked at results in the gross, and were satisfied if the general sum of taxation was procured, or the general due of punishment inflicted, though some inequalities might have occurred in the assessment. We may often trace the indirect effects of this personal theory upon society. Marriage by Roman law was a mere contract. The Church called it a sacrament, but made no change in the legal character of the connection. But in the hands of English lawyers it became a union of a kind hitherto unexampled; uniting life to life under the sanction of society in a bond whose date could never be altered, and from whose consequences there was no escape; creating a new existence for the woman and definite rights for her children. Ubi tu Caius, ego Caia, finds no analogy in the English marriage-formula: it may be pagan in some of its words, as Grimm surmises; in its general bearing it indicates the formation of a family tie, so distinct that it may fairly be called new.

Another cardinal idea which we owe to the Middle Ages is that of the gentleman. Of course the conception of an upper class, distinguished by birth, by refinement, and by the habit of command, is as old as the society of men. But the existence of such a class had hitherto been accepted as a fact connected somehow with the possession of wealth, to be regarded with envy or hatred by all who were not privileged. In fact, the model gentleman of Athens was a mixture of ruffian and charlatan; the better part of his character was based on his self-respect, and his actions subject to this reserve were devoted to self-indulgence. Not among the kaλoì xảyaboí of a Greek city could any reverence for honour as the law of life be found; that exquisite instinct of the highest minds, which cultivates truth for its own loveliness, was at best the cloudy ideal of a few philosophers. Chivalry brought it home to every man, as Christianity had popularised the highest results of Marcus Aurelius. Again, partly from its intense vigour, the old classical life was unsympathetic and hard: it built no hospitals for lepers and no almshouses for its poor; it had no respect for weakness or for the fallen. The contrasts of medieval character in this respect are no doubt more striking on paper than they were in fact: the knight was not always or often true to his rules; but still those rules existed, deriving their strength from the first facts of his faith, and pleading against him before his own conscience if he wantonly broke through them. But, above all, sobriety and simplicity of tone, an absence of all selfseeking, were part of the medieval idea of a gentleman. The modern tricks of veneer and advertisement were unknown to the less scientific vanity of our forefathers. The difference is

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