THE CASTLE PROPRIETARY SUPERSEDED.

85

At that day, whenever a right was infringed, or even threatened, force was appealed to. The intervention of legal method and mediatory process was at best but tolerated, and there were seasons when a general confusion prevailed. In the days of King Stephen, says the faithful chronicler, "Everyone who was able built a castle," just as everyone now would retain an attorney, who suffered injury in property or person. And the worst of all was, that physical force, divided and dispersed throughout society, was as often the instrument of wrong as of right. It had yet to be gathered, centralised and unified, collectively deposited in the hands of the State, to be there available for our mutual protection.

The change was not brought about in a day, but was wrought by degrees through several centuries. First, the Castle proprietary was continually thinned by intestine feuds and their power diminished. They were fearfully mauled in the wars of the Roses. Then came the time when the sovereign Line developed and confirmed its own authority. The Tudors, by alternate craft and cruelty, attained at length to that supremacy which would tolerate no act of violence but their own. And then, when the day of reckoning came, in

the time of the Stuarts, the work was done, and the force of

the state was concentrated in its hands. The general destruction of castles at that time marks, not so much the progress of a contest as the consequence of a strife, and the conclusion of a victory. The giants were trapped ere their dens were entered, and the destruction of their strongholds only ensued when they had themselves become comparatively innocuous.

And yet when the shell of Feudalism was crushed, there was little sense of retribution in those who did the work. The castles were destroyed, but not from a dread of their capacity to maintain the dominance of any particular class. They had long ceased to be the strongholds of brigands in coat armour, and the memory of the purposes they had served

was forgotten. They were doomed to the dustheap from the fact of their uselessness from the fact that their functions were otherwise performed. In a word, society had passed far beyond them. Cromwell might have garrisoned them again had he pleased, but for what purpose should he scatter his soldiery? He, of all men, most required a force, which he could retain at his side without inconvenient dispersion or abatement. And why should he oppose the tendency of events? Because the castles were worthless to him, rather than because others might render them mischievous, he blew them to pieces in every direction. He may occasionally have gratified his spleen at their resistance, but the simple question,-"Why cumber ye the ground?" which would naturally occur to him, accounts for their general destruction.

It is admitted now, that there had been a time when the castle builders and the castles had done the state service.. As we said, while Western Europe was newly settled, with its races moving hither and thither, as if ascertaining the boundaries of their domain, a class was required to enforce cohesion and compress the fluid elements of society. To this class castles were indispensable, as the several centres of their dominant influence. Hence they exercised a petty but efficient sovereignty over all who came within their neighbourhood; hence they descended to punish or redress, or to extend protection to those beneath them; and turbulent or tyrannical as they were at times, hence they insisted on an average tranquillity. To the internal peace of the state they were requisite at a time when nations had no revenue to pay police or subsidise armies. And still more necessary were they, in the aggregate, while the European system was menaced from without by the pirates or Moslem, who hovered on its borders. When Europe was begirt with a hostile barbarism, and destitute of the means which developed power and technical skill supply for its discomfiture, she had

THE CASTLE-AGE PARENTHETICAL.

87

no resource but her breed of barons-her turreted walls and their stalwart defenders.*

And other advantages of Castles might be urged-the domestic virtues which gathered at their hearthstones, the chivalric graces which grew up in their tilt yards. But the gist of the whole is simply this:-That it was only as a make-shift that they multiplied on every side. We are simply solicitous to point the distinction, so strange in contrast with their material strength, that the castles were essentially perishable structures. A tent, a house of lath and plaster, a hedge-row, or a sheep-pen, had more legitimate pretentions to permanence. The castle builders, like the castle breakers, had their several parts in the sequence of events; but they constructed nothing for remote posterity, and they left little behind them of which we can recognise the importance. Of course we except their services to romancists and painters. They fringed a few leagues of the advancing stream with objects which are picturesque, especially in ruin, but, in the absence of any enduring influence, they contributed a mere parenthesis to the broad page of history.

It is the remark of the Norman Orderic Vitalis, that the Saxons were so easily subdued by the Normans, principally through the want of defences of this kind-"For there were very few fortresses, which the

French call Castles,' in the English provinces, and for that reason the English, although they were warlike and bold, were yet found to be weak in resisting their enemies."

THE MEDIEVAL BOROUGH.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF AN ENGLISH BOROUGH IN THE TIME OF EDWARD THE FOURTH.

The Boroughs as a Political Element. -Wars of the Roses.-A Typical City -Its Outline and Contents.-Outer Circle of Religious Houses.-Accord of Monks and Burghers.—A Fact and a Symbol.-Formality of Municipal Life.-An Evening Survey.-Contemporary Characters.-Trivial and vexatious Ordinances.-The Medieval Borough deficient in a moral sense.

THE importance of the municipal element, as one of the four corner stones which lie at the foundation of the modern political edifice, has been stated with such masterly precision by Monsieur Guizot, in his treatise on the History of Civilisation in Europe, that it is quite superfluous to repeat the substance of his admirable outline. In fact, it is hardly possible to state in a clearer form what the Boroughs have contributed to the advancement of the individual and of society. In England our possession of self-government is more directly owing to these, than to the impulses derived from the Feudal system itself, with its underlying sense of personal independence, and its consequent tendencies to mutual isolation. In fact there came a time, towards the close of the middle ages, when the spirit of Feudality had become so exclusively an element of disorder, was so direct an agent in disintegrating the body politic, that the interests of the community required its summary suppression. By that time the English Boroughs were stronger than ever in the organisation, which maintained their zeal for their chartered liberties; and, when the English Barons were crushed and ruined by their own excessive turbulence, the Boroughs remained strong enough to sustain, by themselves, the pressure

THE WARS OF THE ROSES.

89

of the survivor, the Sovereign civil power. Their organisation went hand in hand with that of the Church and of the Crown, up to a later date, and when its strength was put to the test it proved superior to either; for their love of liberty was corroborated by a strict internal discipline, and they made extraordinary sacrifices to the requirements of order, until they were powerful enough to chip the shell which had become too narrow for their growing energies.

A review of the English Boroughs at the particular date when they were content with their own ascertained status, and apparently gratified by the ruin of the nobility,* would be as interesting a contribution as English literature could receive. At this date the wars of the Roses were producing a wholesale havoc among the rural men at arms, and such private episodes as the siege of Caistor, or the battle of Nibley Green, were serviceably consuming their supplement of hot-headed country gentlemen. The private was often more intelligible than the public quarrel, while both were sanguinary and even salutary in a prospective point of view, though they were rolling a sort of prairie fire of confusion through the kingdom. At the same time, if we could look into the interior of the civic communities, we suspect we should find them for the most part acquiescent and tranquil. The war which was rumbling past them was no business of theirs, and they only apprehended in a faint degree its large ulterior consequences. At this date they were friendly with the Crown and with the Church. The House of Lancaster had suppressed the Lollards, and there were as yet no other presentiments of the Reformation. The invention of printing was as yet issueless. The discovery of America was to come; and the Boroughs, growing opulent at their ease, were unconscious of

Until the day when the news of the battle of Towton came, "London was as sorry a city as might be," says the Paston correspondent; and it is presumable that that unequalled slaughter of the greater nobles was

satisfactory to it, for other reasons than its sympathy with the House of York, which it may be said to have participated vaguely with many other of the trading communities.