 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter 7. The Problem of the Plantagenance It is a point of prestige with what is called the higher criticism in all branches to proclaim the certain popular texts and authorities are late and therefore apparently worthless. Two similar events are always the same event and the latter alone is even credible. This fanaticism is often in mere fact mistaken. It ignores the most common coincidences of human life and some future critic will probably say that the tale of the Tower of Babel cannot be older than the Eiffel Tower because there was certainly a confusion of tongues at the Paris exhibition. Most of the medieval remains to the modern reader are necessarily late such as Chaucer or the Robin Hood ballads but they are nonetheless to a wiser criticism worthy of attention and even trust. That which lingers after an epic is generally that which lived most luxuriously in it. It is an excellent habit to read history backwards. It is far wiser for a modern man to read the Middle Ages backward from Shakespeare whom he can judge for himself and who yet is crammed with the Middle Ages then to attempt to read them forward from Cadman of whom he can know nothing and of whom even the authorities he must trust know very little. If this be true of Shakespeare it is even true of Chaucer. If we really want to know what was strongest in the 12th century it is no bad way to ask what remained of it in the 14th. When the average reader turns to the Canterbury Tales which are still as amusing as Dickens yet as medieval as Durham Cathedral what is the very first question to be asked? Why for instance are they called Canterbury Tales and what were the pilgrims doing on the road to Canterbury? They were of course taking part in a popular festival like a modern public holiday though much more genial and leisurely. Nor are we perhaps prepared to accept it as a self-evidence step in progress that their holidays were derived from saints while ours are dictated by bankers. It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very good man. The notion of an immanence merely moral consistent with complete stupidity or unsuccessful is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by its very familiarity and needing as do so many things of this older society some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its original freshness and point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillar like the Nelson Tullum we should be surprised to learn that the hero on the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a brass band and a hero on a white horse we should think it odd to be told that he had been very patient with a half witted maiden aunt. Yet some such pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the Christian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be realized that while this kind of glory was the highest it was also in a sense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same as those of labor and domesticity. It did not need the sword or the scepter but rather the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty. All this must be approximately visualized before we catch a glimpse of the great effects of the story which lay behind the Canterbury pilgrimage. The first few lines of Chaucer's poem to say nothing of thousands in the course of it make it instantly plain that it was no case of secular rebels still linked by a slight ritual. To the name of some forgotten God as may have happened in the pagan decline. Chaucer and his friends did think about Saint Thomas at least more frequently than a clerk at Margate thinks about Saint Lubbock. They did definitely believe in the bodily cures brought for them through Saint Thomas at least as firmly as the most enlightened and progressive modern can believe of those of Mrs. Eddie. Who was Saint Thomas to who shriined the whole of that society is thus seen in the act of moving and why was he so important? If there be a streak of sincerity in the claim to teach social and democratic history instead of a string of kings and battles this is the obvious and open gate by which to approach the figure which disputed England with the first Plantagenet. A real popular history should think more of his popularity even than his policy. And unquestionably thousands of plammon, carpenters, cooks and yeoman as in the motley crowd of Chaucer knew a great deal about Saint Thomas when they had never even heard of Beckett. It would be easy to detail what followed the conquest as the feudal tank old that it was. Still a prince from Anu repeated the unifying effort of the conqueror. It is found equally easy to write of the Red King's hunting instead of his building which has lasted longer and which he probably loved much more. It is easy to catalog the questions he disputed with Anselm leaving out the question Anselm cared most about and which he asked with explosive simplicity as Why was God a man? All this is as simple as saying that a king died of eating lampreys from which however there is little to learn nowadays unless it be that when a modern monarch perishes of gluttony the newspapers seldom say so. But if we want to know what really happened to England in this dim epic I think it can be dimly but truly traced in the story of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Henry of Anu who brought fresh French blood into the monarchy brought also a refreshment of the idea for which the French have always stood. The idea in the Roman law of something impersonal and omnipresent. It is the thing we smile at even in a small French detective story when justice opens a handbag or justice runs after a cab. Henry II really produced this impression of being a police force in person. A contemporary priest compared his restless vigilance to the bird and the fish of Scripture whose way no man knoweth. Kinghood however met law and not caprice. Its ideal at least was a justice cheap and obvious as daylight. An atmosphere which lingers only in popular phrases about the king's English or the king's highway. But though it tended to be England it did not of itself tend to be humanitarian. In modern France as in ancient Rome the other name of justice has sometimes been terror. The Frenchman especially is always a revolutionist and never an anarchist. Now this effort of kings like Henry II to rebuild on a plan like that of Roman law was not only of course crossed and entangled by countless feudal fancies and feelings in themselves as well as others. It was also conditioned by what was the cornerstone of the whole civilization. It had to happen not only with but within the church. For a church was to these men rather a world they lived in than a building to which they went. Without the church the Middle Ages would have had no law as without the church the Reformation would have had no Bible. Many priests expounded and embellished the Roman law and many priests supported Henry II. And yet there was another element of the church stored in its first foundations like dynamite and destined in every age to destroy and renew the world. An idealism akin to impossibilism ran down the ages parallel to all its political compromises. Monasticism itself was the throwing off of innumerable utopias without posterity yet with perpetuity. It had as was proved recurrently after corrupt epics a strange secret of getting poor quickly a mushroom magnificence of destitution. This wind of revolution in the crusading time caught Francis in a CC and stripped him of his rich garments in the street. The same wind of revolution suddenly smoked Thomas Beckett, King Henry's brilliant and luxurious chancellor and drove him on to an unearthly glory and a bloody end. Beckett was a type of those historic times in which it is really very practical to be impractical. The quarrel which tore him from his friend's side cannot be appreciated in the light of those legal and constitutional debates which the misfortunes of the 17th century have made so much of in more recent history. To convict St. Thomas of illegality and clerical intrigue when he set the law of the church against that of the state is about as adequate as to convict St. Francis of bad heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun and moon. There may have been heralds, stupid enough to say so, even in that much more logical age, but it is no sufficient way of dealing with visions or with revolutions. St. Thomas of Canterbury was a great visionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as England was concerned, his revolution failed and his vision was not fulfilled. We are therefore told in the textbooks little more than that he rankled with the king about certain regulations, the most crucial being whether criminalist clerks should be punished by the state or the church. And this was indeed the chief text of the dispute, but to realize we must reiterate what is hardest for modern England to understand the nature of the Catholic Church when it was itself a government and the permanent sense in which it was itself a revolution. It is always the first fact that it escapes notice, and the first fact about the church was that it created a machinery of pardon where the state could only work with a machinery of punishment. It claimed to be a divine detective who helped the criminal to escape by a plea of guilty. It was therefore in the very nature of the institution that when it did punish materially, it punished more lightly. If any modern man were put back in the beckett quarrel, his sympathies would certainly be torn into, for if the king's scheme was the more rational, the archbishops was the more humane. And despite the horrors the darkened religious disputes long afterwards, this character was certainly in the bulk the historic character of church government. It is admitted, for instance, that things like eviction or the harsh treatment of tenants was practically unknown wherever the church was landlord. The principal lingered into more evil days in the form by which the church authorities handed over culprits to the secular armed to be killed, even for religious offenses. In modern romances this is treated as mere hypocrisy, but the man who treats every human inconsistency as hypocrisy is himself a hypocrite about his own inconsistencies. Our world then cannot understand St. Thomas any more than St. Francis without accepting very simply a flaming and even fantastic charity by which the great archbishop undoubtedly stands for the victims of this world. Where the wheel of fortune grinds the faces of the poor. He may well have been too idealistic. He wished to protect the church as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules might seem to him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to the king as capricious as those of a fairyland. But if the priest was too idealistic, the king was really too practical. It is intrinsically true to say that he was too practical to succeed in practice. There reenters here and runs, I think, through all English history the rather indescribable truth I have suggested about the conqueror, that perhaps he was hardly impersonal enough for a pure despot. The real moral of our medieval story is, I think, subtly contrary to Carlisle's vision of a stormy strong man to hammer and weld the state like a smith. Our strong men were too strong for us, and too strong for themselves. They were too strong for their own aim of adjusting equal monarchy. The smith broke upon the anvil the sort of state that he was hammering for himself. Whether or no this will serve as key to the very complicated story of our kings and barons, it is the exact posture of Henry II to his rival. He became lawless out of sheer love of law. He also stood, though in a colder and more remote manner, for the whole people against feudal oppression, and if his policy had succeeded in its purity it would at least have made impossible the privilege and capitalism of later times. But that bodily restlessness which stamped and spurned the furniture was a symbol of him. It was some such thing that prevented him and his heirs from sitting as quietly on their throne as the heirs of St. Louis. He thrust again and again at the tough intangibility of the priests' utopianism, like a man fighting a ghost. He answered transcendental defiances with baser material persecutions, and at last on a dark and, I think, decisive day in English history. His words sent four feudal murderers into the cloisters of Canterbury, who went there to destroy a traitor, and who created a saint. At the grave of the dead man go forth what can only be called an epidemic of healing, for miracles so narrated there is the same evidence as for half the facts of history, and anyone denying them must deny them upon the dogma. But something followed, which would seem to modern civilization even more monstrous than a miracle. If the reader can imagine Mr. Cecil Rhodes submitting to be horsewhipped by a boar in St. Paul's Cathedral as an apology for some indefensible death, incident to the Jameson raid, he will form but a faint idea of what was meant when Henry II was beaten by monks at the tomb of his vassal and enemy. The modern parallel called up his comic, but the truth is that the medieval actualities have a violence that does seem comic to our conventions. The Catholics of that age were driven by two dominant thoughts, the all importance of penitence as an answer to sin, and the all importance of vivid and evident external acts as a proof of penitence. Extravagant humiliation after extravagant pride for them restored the balance of sanity. The point is worth stressing because without it moderns make neither head nor tail of the period. Green bravely suggests, for instance, of Henry's ancestor Folk of Anjou, that his tyrannies and frauds were further blackened by low superstition, which led him to be dragged in a halter round a shrine scourged and screaming for the mercy of God. Many evils would simply have said that such a man might well scream for it, but his scream was the only logical comment he could make. But they would have quite refused to see why the screams should be added to the sins and not subtracted from them. They would have thought it simply muddleheaded to have the same horror at a man for being horribly sinful and for being horribly sorry. But it may be suggested, I think, though with the doubt proper to ignorance, that the Anjouvan ideal of the King's justice lost more by the death of St. Thomas than was instantly apparent in the horror of Christendom, the canonization of the victim and the public penance of the Timer. These things, indeed, were in a sense temporary. The King recovered the power to judge clerics, and many later Kings and Justicires continued the monarchial plan. But I would suggest, as a possible clue to puzzling after events, that here, and by this murderous stroke, the Crown lost what should have been the silent and massive support of its whole policy. I mean that it lost the people. It may not be repeated that the case for despotism is democratic, as a rule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak. An autocrat cannot be judged as a historical character by his relations with other historical characters. His true applause comes not from the few actors on the lighted stage of aristocracy, but from that enormous audience which must always sit in darkness throughout the drama. The King, who helps numberless, helps nameless men, and when he flings his widest largesse he is a Christian doing good by stealth. This sort of monarchy was certainly a medieval idea, nor need it necessarily fail as a reality. French Kings were never so merciful to the people as when they were merciless to the peers, and it is probably true that Azar, who was a great lord to his enemies, was often a little father in innumerable little homes. It is overwhelmingly probable that such a central power, though it might at last have deserved destruction in England as in France, would in England as in France have prevented the few from seizing and holding all the wealth and power to this day. But in England it broke off short through something of which the slaying of St. Thomas may well have been the supreme example. It was something overstrained and startling against the instincts of the people, and of what was meant in the Middle Ages by that very powerful and rather peculiar thing in the people. I shall speak in the next chapter. In any case this conjecture finds support in ensuing events. It is not merely that just as the great but personal plan of the conqueror collapsed, after all, into the chaos of the Stephen transition, so the great but personal plan of the first Plantagenet collapsed into the chaos of the Baron's Wars. When all allowance is made for constitutional fictions and afterthoughts, it does seem likely that here, for the first time, some moral strength deserted the monarchy. The character of Henry's second son John, or Richard, belongs rather to the last chapter, stamped it with something accidental and yet symbolic. It was not that John was mere black blot on the pure gold of the Plantagenets. The texture was much more mixed and continuous. But he really was a discredited Plantagenet, and as it were a damaged Plantagenet. It was not that he was much more of a bad man than many opposed to him, but he was the kind of bad man whom bad man and good do combine to oppose. In a sense subtler than that of the legal and parliamentary logic-chopping invented long afterwards, he certainly managed to put the crown in the wrong. Nobody suggested that the barons of Stephen's time starved many dungeons to promote political liberty, or held them up by the heels as a symbolic request for a free parliament. In the reign of John and his son, it was still the barons, and not in the least the people who seized the power. But there did begin to appear a case for their seizing it, for contemporaries as well as constitutional historians afterwards. John, in one of his diplomatic doublings, had put England into the papal care as an estate as put into chanceery. And, unluckily, the pope, whose consuls had generally been mild and liberal, was then in his death grapple with the Germanic emperor and wanted every penny he could get to win. His winning was a blessing to Europe, but a curse to England, for he used the island as a mere treasury for this foreign war. In this and other matters, the Maronial Party began to have something like a principle, which is the backbone of policy. Much conventional history that connects their consuls with a thing like our House of Commons is as far-fetched as it would be to say that the speaker wields a mace like those which the barons brandished in battle. Simon de Montfort was not an enthusiast for the weak theory of British constitution, but he was an enthusiast for something. He founded a parliament in a fit of considerable absence of mind, but it was with true presence of mind in the responsible and even religious sense which had made his father so savage a crusader against heretics that he laid about him with his great sword before he fell at Evershire. Magna Cardi was not a step toward democracy, but it was a step away from despotism. If we hold that double-truth firmly, we have something like the key to the rest of English history. A rather loose aristocracy not only gained but often deserved the name of liberty, and the history of the English can be most briefly summarized by taking the French model of liberty, equality, and fraternity and noting it to English have sincerely loved the first and lost the other two. In the contemporary complication much could be urged both for the crowns and the new and more national rally of the nobility. But it was a complication, whereas the miracle is a plain matter, that any man can understand. The possibilities or impossibilities of St. Thomas Becket were left a riddle for history. The white flame of his audacious theocracy was frustrated, and his work cut short like a fairy tale left untold. But his memory passed into the care of the common people, and with them he was more active dead than alive, yes, even more busy. In the next chapter we should consider what was meant in the Middle Ages by the common people, and how uncommon we should think it today. And in the last chapter we have already seen how in the crusading age the strangest things grew homely, and then fed on traveller's tales when there were no national newspapers. A mini-colored pageant of martyrology on numberless walls and windows had familiarized the most ignorant with alien cruelties in many climes, with a bishop flayed by Danes or a virgin burned by Saracens, with one stoned by Jews and another hewn in pieces by Negroes. I cannot think it was a small matter that among these images one of the most magnificent had met his death but lately at the hands of an English monarch. There was at least something akin to the primitive and epical romances of that period in the tale of those two mighty friends, one of whom struck too hard and slew the other. It may even have been so early as this that something was judged in silence, and for the multitude rested on the crown a mysterious seal of insecurity like that of Cain, and a vexile on the English canes. CHAPTER VIII. THE MEANING OF MARRY INGLAND The mental trick by which the first half of English history has been wholly dwarfed and dehumanized is a very simple one. It consists in telling only the story of the professional destroyers, and then complaining that the whole story is one of destruction. A king is at best a sort of crowned executioner. All government is an ugly necessity, and if it was then uglier it was for the most part merely because it was more difficult. What we call the judge's circuits were first rather the king's raids. For at a time the criminal class was so strong that ordinary civil government was conducted by a sort of civil war. When the social enemy was caught at all, he was killed or savagely maimed. The king could not take Pentonville prison about with him on wheels. I am far from denying that there was a real element of cruelty in the Middle Ages, but the point here is that it was concerned with one side of life, which is cruel at best, and that this involved more cruelty for the same reason that it involved more courage. When we think of our ancestors as the men who inflicted tortures, we ought sometimes to think of them as the men who defied them. But the modern critic of medievalism commonly looks only at these crooked shadows and not at the common daylight of the Middle Ages. When he has got over his indignant astonishment at the fact that fighters fought and that hangmen hanged, he assumes that any other idea there may have been were ineffectual and fruitless. He despises the monk for avoiding the very same activity which he despises the warrior for cultivating, and he insists that the arts of war were sterile without even admitting the possibility that the arts of peace were productive. But the truth is that it is precisely in the arts of peace and in the type of production that the Middle Ages stand singular and unique. This is not eulogy but history, and informed man must recognize this productive peculiarity even if he happens to hate it. The melodramatic things, currently called medieval, are much older and more universal, such as the sport of tournament or the use of torture. The tournament was indeed a Christian and liberal advance on the gladiatorial show since the lords risked themselves and not really their slaves. Torture, so far from being peculiarly medieval, was copied from pagan Rome and its most rationalist political science and its application to others besides slaves was really part of the slow medieval extinction of slavery. Torture indeed is a logical thing common in states innocent of fanaticism, as in the great agnostic empire of China. What was really arresting and remarkable about the Middle Ages, as the Spartan discipline was peculiar to Sparta, or the Russian communes typical of Russia, was precisely its positive social scheme of production, of making, building and growing of all the good things of life. For the tale told in a book like this cannot really touch on medieval England at all. The dynasties and the parliaments passed like changing cloud and across a stable and fruitful landscape. The institutions which affected the masses can be compared to corn or fruit trees in one practical sense at least, that they grew upwards from below. There may have been better societies and assuredly we have not to look far for worse, but it is doubtful if there was ever so spontaneous a society. We cannot do justice for instance to the local government of that epic, even when it was very faulty and fragmentary, by any comparisons with the plans of local government laid down today. Modern local government always comes from above. It is at best granted, it is more often merely imposed. The modern English oligarchy, the modern German empire, are necessarily more efficient in making municipalities upon a plan, or rather a pattern. The many evils not only had self-government, but their self-government was self-made. They did indeed, as the central powers of the national monarchies grew stronger, seek and procure the stamp of state approval. But it was approval of a popular fact already in existence. Men banded together in guilds and parishes, long before local government attacks were dreamed of. Like charity, which was worked in the same way, their home rule began at home. The reactions of recent centuries have left most educated men bankrupt of the corporate imagination required to even imagine this. They only think of a mob as a thing that breaks things, even if they admit it is right to break them. But the mob made these things. An artist mocked as many-headed, an artist with many eyes and hands created these masterpieces. And if the modern skeptic in his detestation of the democratic ideal complains of my calling them masterpieces, a simple answer will for the moment serve. It is enough to reply that the very word masterpiece is borrowed from the terminology of the medieval craftsmen. But such points in the guild system can be considered a little later. Here we are only concerned with the quite spontaneous springing upwards of all these social institutions, such as they were. They rose in the streets like a silent rebellion, like a still and statuesque riot. Yet in modern constitutional countries there are practically no political institutions, thus given by the people. All are received by the people. There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages, the trade's unions. In agriculture what had happened to the land was like a universal landslide. But by a prodigy beyond the catastrophes of geology, it may be said that the land had slid uphill. Rural civilization was on a wholly new and much higher level, yet there was no great social convulsion or apparently even great social campaigns to explain it. It is possibly a solitary instance in history of men thus falling upwards, at least of outcasts falling on their feet or vagrants straying into the promised land. Such a thing could not be and was not a mere accident, yet if we go by conscious political plans it was something like a miracle. There had appeared like a subterranean race cast up to the sun, something unknown to the August civilization of the Roman Empire, a peasantry. At the beginning of the Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society, now grown Christian, was as much a slave state as old South Carolina. By the 14th century it was almost as much a state of peasant proprietors as modern France. No laws had been passed against slavery, no dogmas even had condemned it by definition, no war had been waged against it, no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it. But it was gone. The startling and silent transformation is perhaps the best measure of the pressure of popular life in the Middle Ages, of how fast it was making new things in its spiritual factory. Like everything else in the medieval revolution, from its cathedrals to its ballads, it was as anonymous as it was enormous. It is admitted that the conscious and active emancipators everywhere were the parish priests and the religious brotherhoods, but no name among them has survived and no man of them has reached his reward in this world. Countless Clarksons and innumerable Wilbur forces, without political machinery or public fame, worked at deathbeds and confessionals in all the villages of Europe, and the vast system of slavery vanished. It was probably the widest work ever done which was voluntary on both sides, and the Middle Ages was in this and other things, the age of volunteers. It is possible enough to state roughly the stages through which the thing passed, but such a statement does not explain the loosening of the grip of the great slave owners, and it cannot be explained, except psychologically. The Catholic type of Christianity was not merely an element, it was a climate. And in that climate, the slave would not grow. I have already suggested, touching that transformation of the Roman Empire, which was the background of all these centuries, how a mystical view of man's dignity must have this effect. A table that walked and talked, or a stool that flew with wings out of a window, would be about as workable a thing as an immortal channel. But though here, as everywhere, the Spirit explains the process, and the process cannot even plausibly explain the Spirit. These processes involve two very practical points, without which we cannot understand how this great popular civilization was created, or how it was destroyed. What we call the manners were originally the Villa of the Pagan Lords, each with its population of slaves. Under this process, however, it be explained, what had occurred was the diminishment of the Lord's claim to the whole prophet of the slave estate, by which it became a claim to the prophet of part of it, and dwindled at last to certain dues or customary payments to the Lord, having paid which the slaves could enjoy not only the use of the land, but the prophet of it. It must be remembered that, over a great part, and especially very important parts of the whole territory, the Lords were abbots, magistrates elected by a mystical communism, and themselves often of peasant birth. Men not only obtained a fair amount of justice under their care, but a fair amount of freedom even from their carelessness. But two details of the development are very vital. First, as has been hinted elsewhere, the slave was long in the intermediate status of a serf. This meant that while the land was entitled to the services of the man, he was equally entitled to the support of the land. He could not be evicted. He could not even, in the modern fashion, have his rent raised. At the beginning it was merely that the slave was owned, but at least he could not be disowned. At the end he had really become a small landlord, merely because it was not the Lord that owned him, but the land. It is hardly unsaved to suggest that in this, by one of the paradoxes of this extraordinary period, the very fixity of serfdom was a service to freedom. The new peasant inherited something of the stability of the slave. He did not come to life in a competitive scramble where everybody was trying to snatch his freedom from him. He found himself among neighbors who already regarded his presence as normal, and his frontiers as natural frontiers, and among whom all powerful customs crushed all experiments in competition. By a trick or overturn no-world answer as dared put into a tale, this prisoner has become the governor of his own prison. For a little time it was almost true that an Englishman's house was his castle, because it had been built strong enough to be his dungeon. The other notable element was this, that when the produce of the land began by custom to be cut up and only partially transmitted to the Lord, the remainder was generally subdivided into two types of property. One, the serfs enjoyed severally in private patches, while the other they enjoyed in common, and generally in common with the Lord. Thus arose the momentously important medieval institution of the common land, owned side by side with private land. It was an alternative and a refuge. The medievals, except when they were monks, were none of them communists, but they were all, as it were, potential communists. It is typical of the dark and dehumanized picture now drawn of the period, that our romances constantly describe a broken man as falling back on the forests and the outlaws' den, but never describe him as falling back on the common land, which was a much more common incident. Medievalism believed in mending its broken men, and as the idea existed in the communal life for monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants. It was their great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. A common was not a naked and a negative thing, like the scrub or heath, we call a common on the edges of the suburbs. It was a reserve of wealth, like a reserve of grain and a barn. It was deliberately kept back as a balance, as we talk of balance at the bank. Now these provisions for a healthier distribution of property would by themselves show any man of imagination that a real moral effort had been made towards social justice, that it could not have been mere evolutionary accident that slowly turned the slave into a serf and the serf into a peasant proprietor. But if anybody still thinks that mere blind luck, without any groping for the light, had somehow brought about the peasant condition in place of the agrarian slave estate, he has only to turn to what was happening in all the other thawlings and affairs of humanity. Then he will cease to doubt, for he will find the same medieval men busy upon a social scheme which points as plainly in effect to pity and a craving for equality. And it is a system which could no more be produced by accident than one of their cathedrals could be built by an earthquake. Most work beyond the primary work of agriculture was guarded by the eclaterian vigilance of the guilds. It is hard to find any term to measure the distance between this system and modern society. One can only approach it first by the faint traces it has left. Our daily life is littered with the debris of the Middle Ages, especially of dead words, which no longer carry their meaning. I have already suggested one example. We hardly call up the picture of a return to Christian communism whenever we mention Wimbledon Common. This truth descends to such trifles as the titles which we write on letters and postcards. The puzzling and truncated monosyllable Esquire is a pathetic relic of a remote evolution from chivalry to snobbery. No two historic things could well be more different than an Esquire and a Squire. The first was above all things an incomplete and probationary position, the tadpole of knighthood. The second is above all things a complete and assured position, the status of the owners and rulers of rural England throughout recent centuries. Our Esquires did not win their estates till they had given up any particular fancy for winning their spurs. Esquire does not mean Squire and ESQ does not mean anything, but it remains on our letters as a little wriggle in pen and ink and an indecipherable hieroglyph twisted by the strange turns of our history which have turned a military discipline into a pacific oligarchy. And that into a mere plutocracy at last. And there are similar historic riddles to be unpicked in the similar forms of social address. There is something singularly forlorn about the modern word Nister, even in sound that has a simpering feebleness which marks the shriveling of the strong word from which it came. Nor indeed is the symbol of the mere sound inaccurate. I remember seeing a German story of Samson in which he bore the unassuming name of Simpson, which surely shows Samson very much shorn. There is something of the same dismal demuendo in the evolution of a master into a mister. The very vital importance of the word master is this. A guild was, very broadly speaking, a trade union in which every man was his own employer. That is, a man could not work at any trade unless he would join the league and accept the laws of that trade. But he worked in his own shop with his own tools and the whole profit went to himself. But the word employer marks a modern deficiency which makes the modern use of the word master quite inexact. A master meant something quite other and greater than a boss. It meant a master of the work, where it now means only a master of the workmen. It is an elementary character of capitalism that a shipowner need not know the right end of a ship, or a landowner have even seen the landscape that the owner of a gold mine may be interested in nothing but old pewter, or the owner of a railway travel exclusively in balloons. He may be more successful capitalist if he has a hobby of his own business. He is often a more successful capitalist if he has the sense to leave it to a manager. But economically he can control the business because he is a capitalist, not because he has any kind of hobby or any kind of sense. The highest grade in the guild system was a master, and it meant a mastery of the business. To take the term created by the colleges in the same epic, all the medieval bosses were masters of arts. The other grades were the journeymen and the apprentice. But like the corresponding degrees at the universities, they were grades through which every common man could pass. They were not social classes, they were degrees and not castes. This is the whole point of the recurrent romance about the apprentice marrying his master's daughter. The master would not be surprised at such a thing any more than an MA would swell with aristocratic indignation when his daughter married a BA. When we pass from the strictly educational hierarchy to the strictly egalitarian ideal, we find again that the remains of the thing today are so distorted and disconnected as to be comic. There are city companies which inherit the coats of arms and the immense relative wealth of the old guilds and inherit nothing else. Even what is good about them is not what was good about the guilds. In one case we shall find something like a worshipful company of bricklayers in which it is unnecessary to say there is not a single bricklayer or anybody who has ever known a bricklayer. But in which the senior partners of a few big businesses in the city, with a few faded military men with a taste of cookery, tell each other in after-dinner speeches that it has been the glory of their lives to make allegorical bricks without straw. In another case we shall find a worshipful company of whitewashers who do deserve their name in the sense that many of them employ a large number of other people to whitewash. These companies support large charities and often doubtless, very valuable charities, but their object is quite different from that of the old charities of the guilds. The aim of the guild charities was the same as the aim of the common land. It was to resist inequality, or as some earnest old gentleman of the last generation would probably put it, to resist evolution. It was to ensure not only that bricklaying should survive and succeed, but that every bricklayer should survive and succeed. It sought to rebuild the ruins of any bricklayer and to give any faded white washer a new white coat. It was the whole aim of the guilds to cobble their cobblers like their shoes and clout their clothiers with their clothes to keep strengthening the weakest link and go after the hundredth sheep, in short to keep the row of little shops unbroken like a lion battle. It resisted the growth of a big shop like the growth of a dragon. Now even the whitewashers of the whitewashers company will not pretend that it exists to prevent the small shop being swallowed by a big shop, or that it has done anything whatever to prevent it. At the best, the kindness it would show to a bank growth white washer would be a kind of compensation. It would not be reinstatement. It would not be the restoration of status in an industrial system. So careful of the type, it seems, so careless of the single life, and by that very modern evolutionary philosophy, the type itself has been destroyed. The old guilds with the same object of equality, of course, insisted peremptorily upon the same level system of payment and treatment, which is a point of complaint against the modern trade unions. But they insisted also, as the trade unions cannot do, upon a high standard of craftsmanship, which still astonishes the world in the corners of perishing buildings or the colors of broken glass. There is no artist or art critic who will not concede, however distant his own style from the Gothic school, that there was in this time a nameless but universal artistic touch in the molding of the very tools of life. Accident has preserved the root of sticks and stools and pots and pans, which have suggested shapes as if they were possessed not by devils but by elves, where they were indeed, as compared with subsequent systems, produced in the incredible fairyland of a free country. That the most medieval of modern institution, the trade unions, do not fight for the same ideal of aesthetic finish, is true and certainly tragic, but to make it a matter of blame is wholly to misunderstand the tragedy. The trade unions are confederations of men without property, seeking to balance its absence by numbers and the necessary character of their labor. The gills were confederations of men with property, seeking to ensure each man in the possession of that property. This is, of course, the only condition of affairs in which property can properly be said to exist at all. We should not speak of a negro community in which most men were white, but the rare negroes were giants. We should not conceive a married community in which most men were bachelors and three men had herons. A married community means a community where most people are married, not a community where one or two people are very much married. A property community means a community where most people have property, not a community where there are a few capitalists. But in fact the guildsmen, as also for that matter the serfs, semi-serfs and peasants, were much richer than can be realized even from the fact that the guilds protected the possession of houses, tools and just payment. The surplus is self-evident upon any just study of the prices of the period, when all deductions have been made of course for the different values of the actual coinage. When a man could get a goose or a gallon of ale for one or two of the smallest and commonest coins, the matter is in no way affected by the name of those coins. Even where the individual wealth was severely limited, the collective wealth was very large, the wealth of the guilds, of the parishes and especially of the monastic estates. It is important to remember this fact in the subsequent history of England. The next fact to note is that the local government grew out of things like the guild system and not the system from the government. In sketching the sound principles of this lost society, I shall not of course be supposed by any sane person to be describing a moral paradise, or to be implying that it was free from the faults and fights and sorrows that harass human life in all times and certainly not least in our own time. There was a fair amount of rioting and fighting in connection with the guilds, and there was especially for some time a combative rivalry between the guilds and merchants who sold things and of those craftsmen who made them, a conflict in which the craftsmen on the whole prevailed. But whichever party may have been predominant, it was the heads of the guild who became the heads of the town and not vice versa. The stiffs' survivals of this once very spontaneous uprising can again be seen in the now anomalous constitution of the Lord Mayor and the livery of the City of London. We are told so monotonously that the government of our fathers reposed upon arms that it is valid to insist that this, their most intimate and everyday sort of government, was wholly based upon tools, a government in which the workmen's tools became deceptor. Blake, in one of his symbolic fantasies, suggests that in the Golden Age the gold and gems should be taken from the hilt of the sword and put upon the handle of the plow. But something very like this did happen in the interlude of this medieval democracy, fermenting under the crust of medieval monarchy and aristocracy, where productive implements often took on the pomp of heraldry. The guilds often exhibited emblems and pageantry so compact of their most prosaic uses that we can only parallel them by imagining our memorial tibards, or even religious vestments woven out of a navvy's corduroy's, or a costar's pearl buttons. Two more points must be briefly added, and the rough sketch of this now foreign and even fantastic tale will be as complete as it can be made here. Both refer to the links between this popular life and the politics which are conventionally the whole of history. The first, and for that age the most evident, is the Charter. To recur once more to the parallels of trade unions as convenient for the casual reader of today, the Charter of a guild roughly corresponded to that recognition for which the railwaymen and other trade unionists asked some years ago without success. By this they had the authority of the king, the central or national government, and this was of great moral weight with many evils, who always conceived of freedom as a positive status, not as a negative escape. They had none of the modern romanticism which makes liberty akin to loneliness. Their view remains in the phrase about giving a man the freedom of a city. They had no desire to give him the freedom of a wilderness. To say that they had also the authority of the church is something of an understatement, for religion ran like rich thread through the rude tapestry of these popular things while they were still merely popular, and many a trade society must have had a patron saint long before it had a royal seal. The other point is that it was from these municipal groups, already in existence, that the first men were chosen for the largest and perhaps the last of the great medieval experiments, the parliament. We have all read at school that Simon de Montfort and Edward I, when they first summoned commons to council, chiefly as advisors on local taxation, called two burgesses from every town. If we had read a little more closely those simple words would have given away the whole secret of the lost medieval civilization. We had only to ask what burgesses were and whether they grew on trees. We should immediately have discovered that England was full of little parliaments out of which the great parliament was made, and if it be a matter of wonder that the great council, still called in quaint archaism by its old title of the House of Commons, is the only one of these popular or elective corporations of which we hear much in our books of history. The explanation I fear is simple and a little sad. It is that the parliament was the one thing among these many evil creations which ultimately consented to betray and to destroy the rest. The end of Chapter 8 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org A short history of England by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 9 Nationality and the French Wars If anyone wishes to know what we mean when we say that Christendom was and is one culture or one civilization, there is a rough but plain way of putting it. It is by asking what is the most common or rather the most common place of all the uses of the word Christian. There is of course the highest use of all, but it has nowadays many other uses. Sometimes a Christian means an evangelical. Sometimes and more recently a Christian means a Quaker. Sometimes a Christian means a modest person who believes that he bears a resemblance to Christ. But it has long had one meaning in casual speech among common people. And it means a culture or a civilization. Ben Gunn on Treasure Island did not actually say to Jim Hawkins, I feel myself out of touch with a certain type of civilization. But he did say, I haven't tasted Christian food. The old wives in a village looking at a lady with short hair and trousers do not indeed say, we perceive a divergence between her culture and our own. But they do say, why can't she dress like a Christian? That the sentiment has thus soaked down to the simplest and even stupidest daily talk is but one evidence that Christendom was a very real thing. But it was also, as we have seen, a very localized thing. Especially in the Middle Ages. And that very lively localism, the Christian faith and affections encouraged, led it last to an excessive and exclusive parochialism. There were rival shrines of the same saint and a sort of duel between two statues of the same divinity. By a process, it is now our difficult duty to follow, a real estrangement between European peoples began. Men began to feel that foreigners did not eat or drink like Christians. And even when the philosophic schism came to doubt if they were Christians. There was indeed much more than this involved. While the internal structure of medievalism was thus parochial and largely popular, in the great affairs and especially the external affairs such as peace and war, most, though by no means all, of what was medieval, was monarchial. To see what the kings came to mean, we must glance back at the great background as of darkness and daybreak against which the first figures of our history have already appeared. That background was the war with the barbarians. While it lasted, Christendom was not only one nation, but more like one city, and a besieged city. Wessex was but one wall, or Paris, one tower of it, and in one tongue and spirit, Bede might have chronicled the siege of Paris, or Abo sung the song of Alfred. What followed was a conquest and a conversion. All the end of the Dark Ages and the dawn of medievalism is full of the evangelizing of barbarism, and it is the paradox of the Crusades that, though the Saracen was superficially more civilized than the Christian, it was a sound instinct which saw him also to be, in spirit, a destroyer. In the simpler case of Northern Heathenry, the civilization spread with simpler progress, but it was not until the end of the Middle Ages and close on the Reformation that the people of Prussia, the wild land lying beyond Germany, were baptized at all. A flippant person, if he permitted himself for profane confusion with vaccination, might almost be inclined to suggest that for some reason it didn't take even then. The barbarian peril was thus brought under bit by bit, and even in the case of Islam, the alien power which could not be crushed was evidently curbed. The Crusades became hopeless, but they also became needless. As these fears faded, the princes of Europe who had come together to face them were left facing each other. They had more leisure to find that their own captains ceased clashed, but this would easily have been overruled or would have produced a petty riot, had not the true creative spontaneity of which we have spoken in the local life tended to real variety. Royalties found they were representatives almost without knowing it, and many a king insisting on a genealogical tree or a tidal deed found he spoke for the forest and the songs of a whole countryside. In England, especially, the transition is typified in the accident which raised to the throne, one of the noblest men of the Middle Ages. Edward I came clad in all the splendors of his epic. He had taken the cross and fought the Saracens. He had been the only worthy foe of Simon de Montfort in those baronial wars, which as we have seen were the first sign, however faint, of a serious theory that England should be ruled by its barons rather than its kings. He proceeded, like Simon de Montfort and more solidly, to develop the great medieval institution of a parliament. As has been said, it was superimposed on the existing parish democracies and was first merely the summoning of local representatives to advise on local taxation. Indeed, its rise was one with the rise of what we call taxation, and there is thus the thread of theory leading to its latter claims to have the sole right of taxing. But in the beginning it was an instrument of the most equitable kings and notably an instrument of Edward I. He often quarreled with his parliaments and may sometimes have displeased his people, which has never been at all the same thing. But on the whole he was supremely the representative sovereign. In this connection one curious and difficult question may be considered here, though it marks the end of the story that began with the Norman conquest. It is pretty certain that he was never more truly a representative king. One might say a Republican king, then in the fact he expelled the Jews. The problem is so much misunderstood and mixed with notions of stupid spite against a gifted and historic race as such, that we must pause for a paragraph upon it. The Jews in the Middle Ages were as powerful as they were unpopular. They were the capitalists of the age, the men with wealth banked ready for use. It is very tenable that in this way they were useful. It is certain that in this way they were used. It is also quite fair to say that in this way they were ill-used. The ill-usage was not indeed that suggested at random romances, which mostly revolve on the one idea that their teeth were pulled out. Those who know this as a story about King John generally do not know the rather important fact that it was a story against King John. It is probably doubtful, it was only insisted on as exceptional, and it was by that very insistence, obviously regarded as disreputable. But the real unfairness of the Jews' position was deeper and more distressing to a sensitive and highly civilized people. They might reasonably say that Christian kings and nobles, and even Christian popes and bishops, used for Christian purposes, such as the Crusades and the cathedrals, the money that could only be accumulated in such mountains by a ushery they inconsistently denounced as un-Christian, and then, when worst times came, gave up the Jew to the fury of the poor, whom that useful ushery had ruined. That was the real case for the Jew, and no doubt he really felt himself oppressed. Unfortunately it was the case for the Christians that they, with at least equal reason, felt him as the oppressor, and that mutual charge of tyranny is the semantic trouble in all times. It is certain that in popular sentiment this anti-Semitism was not excused as uncharitableness, but simply regarded as charity. Chaucer puts his curse on Hebrew cruelty into the mouth of the soft-hearted Pryorus, who wept when she saw a mouse in a trap. And it was when Edward, breaking the rule by which the rulers had hitherto fostered their banker's wealth, flung the alien financiers out of the land that his people probably saw him most plainly at once as a night-arent and a tender father of his people. Whatever the merits of this question, such a portrait of Edward was far from false. He was the most just and conscientious type of medieval monarch, and it is exactly this fact that brings into relief the new force which was to cross his path and in strife with which he died. While he was just, he was also imminently legal, and it must be remembered, if we would not really read back ourselves into the past, that much of the dispute of the time was legal. The adjustment of dynastic and feudal differences not yet felt to be anything else. In this spirit Edward was asked to arbitrate by the rival claimants to the Scottish Crown, and in this sense he seems to have arbitrated quite honestly. But his legal, or as some say pedantic mind, made the proviso that the Scottish King as such was already under his susanity, and he probably never understood the spirit he called up against him. For that spirit had as yet no name. We call it today nationalism. Scotland resisted, and the adventures of an outlawed knight named Wallace soon furnished it with one of those legends, which are more important than history. In a way that was then at least equally practical, the Catholic priests of Scotland became especially the patriotic and anti-English party, as indeed they remained even throughout the Reformation. Wallace was defeated and executed, but the heather was already on fire, and the espousal of the new national cause by one of Edward's own knights named Bruce seemed to the old king a mere betrayal of feudal equity. He died in a final fury at the head of a new invasion upon the very border of Scotland, with his last words the great king commanded that his bones should be born in front of the battle, and the bones which were of gigantic size were eventually buried with the epithet. Here lies Edward the Tall, who was the hammer of the Scots. It was a true epithet, but in a sense exactly the opposite to its intention. He was the hammer, but he did not break but make them, for he smelt them on an anvil and he forged them into a sword. That coincidence or course of events which must often be remarked in this story, by which for whatever reason our most powerful kings did not somehow leave their power secure, showed itself in the next reign when the baronial corals were resumed, and the northern kingdom under Bruce cut itself finally free by the stroke of Bennet Byrne. Otherwise the reign is a mere interlude, and it is with the succeeding one that we find the new national tenancy yet further developed. The great French wars, in which England won so much glory, were opened by Edward III and grew more and more nationalist. But even to feel the transition of the time, we must first realize that the Third Edward made as strictly legal and dynastic a claim to France that the First Edward had made to Scotland. The claim was far weaker in substance, but it was equally conventional in form. Ethauts were said he had a claim on a kingdom as the squire might say he had a claim on an estate. Superficially it was an affair for the English and French lawyers. To read into this that the people were sheep, bought and sold, is to misunderstand all medieval history. Sheep have no trade union. The Germans owed much of their force to the class of the free yeoman, and the success of the infantry, especially of the archery, largely stood for that popular element which had already unhorsed the high French chivalry at Coutre. But the point is this, that while the lawyers were talking about the Salic Law, the soldiers who would once have been talking about Gilles Law or Glee Law were already talking about English Law and French Law. The French were first in this tendency to see something outside the township, the trade brotherhood, the feudal dues, or the village common. The whole history of the change can be seen in the fact that the French had early begun to call the nation the greater land. France was the first of nations and has remained the norm of nations, the only one which is a nation and nothing else. But in the collision the English grew equally corporate, and the true patriotic applause probably hailed the victories of Cricy and Portiers, as it certainly hailed the later victory of Egan Court. The latter did not indeed occur until after an interval of internal revolutions in England, which will be considered on a later page. But as regards the growth of nationalism, the French wars were continuous, and the English tradition that followed after Egan Court was continuous also. It is embodied in rude and spirited ballads before the great Elizabethans. The Henry V of Shakespeare is not indeed the Henry V of history. He is more historic. He is not only a saner and more genial, but a more important person. For the tradition of the whole adventure was not that of Henry, but of the populace who turned Henry into Harry. There were a thousand Harrys in the army at Egan Court, and not one. For the figure that Shakespeare framed out of the legends of the great victory is largely the figure that all men saw as the Englishmen of the Middle Ages. He did not really talk in poetry like Shakespeare's hero, but he would have liked to. Not being able to do so he sang, and the English people principally appear in contemporary impressions as the singing people. They were evidently not only expansive, but exaggerative, and perhaps it was not only in battle that they drew the long bow. That fine, tarsical imagery which has descended to the comic songs and common speech of the English poor even today had its happy infancy when England thus became a nation, though the modern poor under the pressure of economic progress have partly lost the gaiety and kept only the humor. But in that early April of patriotism, the new unity of the state still sat lightly upon them, and a cobbler in Henry's army, who would at home have thought first that it was the day of St. Crispin of the Cobblers, might truly as well as sincerely have hailed a splintering of the French lances in a storm of arrows, and cried St. George for Mary England. Human things are uncomfortably complex, and while it was the April of patriotism, it was the autumn of medieval history. In the next chapters I shall try to trace the forces that were disintegrating the civilization, and even here after the first victories it is necessary to insist on the bitterness and barren ambition that showed itself more and more in the later stages as the long French wars dragged on. France was at the time far less happy than England, wasted by the treason of its nobles and the weakness of its kings almost as much by the invasion of the islanders, and yet it was this very despair and humiliation that seemed at last to rend the sky and let in the light of what it is hard for the coldest historian to call anything but a miracle. It may be this apparent miracle that has apparently made nationalism eternal. It may be conjectured that the question is too difficult to be developed here, that there was something in the great moral change which turned the Roman Empire into Christendom, by which each great thing to which it afterwards gave birth was baptized into a promise, or at least into a hope of permanence. It may be that each of its ideas was as it were mixed with immortality. Certainly something of this kind can be seen in the conception which turned marriage from a contract into a sacrament. But whatever the cause, it is certain that even for the most secular types of our own time, their relationship to their native land has become not contractual but sacramental. We may say that flags are rags, that frontiers are fictions, but the very men who have said it for half their lives are dying for a rag, and being rent in pieces for a fiction even as I write. When the battle trumpet blew in 1914, modern humanity had grouped itself into nations almost before it knew what it had done. If the same sound is heard a thousand years hence, there is no sign in the world to suggest to any rational man that humanity will not do exactly the same thing. But even if this great and strange development be not enduring, the point is that it is felt as enduring. It is hard to give a definition of loyalty, but perhaps we come near it if we call it the thing which operates where an obligation is felt to be unlimited. And the minimum of duty or even decency asked of a patriot is the maximum that is asked by the most miraculous view of marriage. The recognized reality of patriotism is not mere citizenship. The recognized reality of patriotism is, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, in national growth and glory, and in national disgrace and decline. It is not to travel in the ship of state as a passenger, but if need be, to go down with the ship. It is needless to tell here again the tale of that earthquake episode in which a clearance in the earth and sky above the contusion and abasement of the crowns showed the commanding figure of a woman of the people. She was, in her own living loneliness, a French revolution. She was the proof that a certain power was not in the French kings or in the French knights, but in the French. But the fact that she saw something above her that was other than the sky, the fact that she lived the life of a saint and died the death of a martyr, probably stamped the new national sentiment with the sacred seal. And the fact that she fought for a defeated country, and even though it was victorious, was herself ultimately defeated, defines that darker element of devotion of which I spoke above, which makes even pessimism consistent with patriotism. It is more appropriate in this place to consider the ultimate reaction of this sacrifice upon the romance and the realities of England. I have never countered a patriotic part to plaster my own country with conventional and unconvincing compliments. But no one can understand England who does not understand that such an episode is this, in which she was so clearly in the wrong has yet been ultimately linked up with a curious quality that is rather unusually in the right. No one candidly comparing us with other countries can say we have specially failed to build the sepulchres of the prophets we stoned, or even the prophets who stoned us. The English historical tradition has at least a loose, large-mindedness which always finally falls into the praise not only of great foreigners, but great foes. Often, along with much injustice, it has an illogical generosity. And while it will dismiss the great people with mere ignorance, it treats a great personality with hearty hero worship. There are more examples than one even in this chapter, or our books may well make out Wallace a better man than he was, as they afterwards assigned to Washington an even better cause than he had. Thackery smiled at Miss Jane Porter's picture of Wallace going into war weeping with a Cambridge pocket handkerchief. But her attitude was more English and not less accurate, for her idealization was, if anything, near the truth than Thackery's own notion of a medievalism of hypocritical hogs and armor. Edward, who figures as a tyrant, could weep with compassion, and it is probable enough that Wallace wept with or without a pocket handkerchief. Moreover, her romance was a reality, the reality of nationalism, and she knew much more about the Scottish Patriots' ages before her time than Thackery did about the Irish Patriots immediately under his nose. Thackery was a great man, but in that matter he was a very small man and indeed an invisible one. The cases of Wallace and Washington and many others are here only mentioned, however, to suggest an eccentric magnanimity which surely balances some of our prejudices. We have done many foolish things, but we have at least done one fine thing. We have whitewashed our worst enemies. If we have done this for a bold Scottish raider and a vigorous Virginian slaveholder, it may at least show that we are not likely to fail in our final appreciation of the one white figure in the motley processions of war. I believe there to be in modern England something like a universal enthusiasm on this subject, but I have seen a great English critic write a book about his heroine in opposition to a great French critic solely in order to blame him for not having praised her enough. And I do not believe there lives an Englishman now who if he had the offer of being an Englishman then would not discard his chance of writing as the crowned conqueror at the head of all the Spears of Agencourt. If he could be that English common soldier of whom tradition tells he broke his spirit asunder to bind it into a cross for Joan of Arc. End of Chapter 9 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 10 The poet Pope though a friend of the greatest of Tory Democrats Bollingbroke necessarily lived in a world in which even Toryism was wiggish. And the wig as a wit never expressed his political point more clearly than in Pope's line which ran the right divine of kings to govern wrong. It will be apparent when I deal with that period of reason in Divine Right as Filmer and some of the pedantic Cavaliers construed it. It professed the impossible ideal of non-resistance to any national and legitimate power though I cannot see that even that was so servile and superstitious as the more modern ideal of non-resistance even to a foreign and lawless power. But the 17th century was an age of sects that is a fads made a fad of Divine Right. Its roots were older equally religious but much more realistic and though tangled with many other and even opposite things of the Middle Ages ramified through all the changes we have now to consider. The connection can hardly be stated better than by taking Pope's easy epigram and pointing out that it is after all very weak in philosophy. The right divine is wrong considered as the snare really evades all that we mean by a right. To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it. What Pope says satirically about a Divine Right is what we all say quite seriously about a human right. If a man has a right to vote has he not a right to vote wrong? If a man has a right to choose his wife to choose wrong I have a right to express the opinion which I am now setting down but I should hesitate to make the controversial claim that this proves the opinion to be right. Now medieval monarchy though only one aspect of medieval rule was roughly represented in the idea that the ruler had a right to rule as a voter has a right to vote. He might govern wrong but unless he governed horribly and extravagantly wrong he had a right to vote right. As a private man retains his right to marriage and locomotion unless he goes horribly and extravagantly off his head. It was not really even so simple as this for the middle ages were not as it is often the fashion to fancy under a single and steely discipline. They were very controversial and therefore very complex and it is easy by isolating items whether about just duvinum or primus interperis to maintain that the medieval were almost anything it has been seriously maintained that they were all Germans but it is true that the influence of the church though by no means of all the great churchmen encouraged the sense of a sort of sacrament of government which was meant to make the monarch terrible and therefore often made the man tyrannical. The disadvantage of such despotism the precise nature of its advantage must be better understood than it is not for its own sake so much as for the story we have now to tell. The advantage of divine right or irremovable legitimacy is this that there is a limit to the ambitions of the rich Roy Napius the royal power whether it was or was not the power of heaven in one respect like the power of heaven it was not for sale constitutional moralists have often implied that a tyrant and a rabble have the same vices it has perhaps been less noticed that a tyrant and a rabble most emphatically have the same virtues and one virtue which they very markedly share is that neither a tyrant nor a rabble are snobs they do not care a button what they do to wealthy people the tyranny was sometimes treated as coming from the heavens almost in the lesser and more literal sense of coming from the sky a man had no more expected to be the king than to be the west wind or the morning star but at least no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only his own mill no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star to be his own reading land yet something very like this is what really happened to England and the first sign of it I fancy was the fall on Richard the second Shakespeare's historical plays are something truer than historical they are traditional the living memory of many things lingered though the memory of others was lost he is right in making Richard the second incarnate the claim to Divine Rite and Bollingbrook the baronial ambition which ultimately broke up the old medieval order but Divine Rite had become at once drier and more fantastic by the time of the tutors Shakespeare could not recover the fresh and popular part of the thing or he came at a later stage in a process of stiffening which is the main thing to be studied in later medievalism Richard himself was possibly a wayward and exasperating prince it might well be the weak link that snapped in the strong chain of the Plantagenets a real case against the coup d'etat which he affected in 1397 and his kinsman Henry of Bollingbrook may have had strong sections of disappointed opinion on his side when he affected in 1399 the first true usurpation in English history but if we wish to understand that larger tradition which even Shakespeare had lost we must glance back at something which befell Richard even in the first years of his reign was certainly the greatest event of his reign and it was possibly the greatest event of all the reigns which are rapidly considered in this book the real English people the men who worked with their hands lifted their hands to strike their masters probably for the first and certainly for the last time in history pagan slavery had slowly perished not so much by decaying as by developing into something better in one sense it did not die but rather came to life the slave owner was like a man who should set up a row of sticks for offense and then find that they had struck root and were budding into small trees they would be at once more valuable and less manageable especially less portable and such a difference between a stick and a tree was precisely the difference between a slave and a surf or even the free peasant which the surf seemed rapidly tending to become it was in the best sense of a bettered phrase a social evolution and it had the great evil of one the evil was that while it was essentially orderly it was still literally lawless that is the emancipation of the commons had already advanced very far but it had not yet advanced far enough to be embodied in a law the custom was unwritten like the British constitution and like that evolutionary evasive entity could always be overridden by the rich who now drive their great coaches through acts of parliament the new peasant was still legally a slave and was to learn it by one of those turns of fortune which confound a foolish faith in the common sense of unwritten constitutions the French wars gradually grew to be almost as much of a scourge to England as they were to France England was despoiled by her own victories and poverty increased at the extremes of society and by a process more proper to an ensuing chapter the balance of the better medievalism was lost finally a furious plague called the black death burst like a blast on the land thinning the population and throwing the work of the world into ruin it was a shortage of labor a difficulty of getting luxuries and the great lords did what of the law they appealed to a rule already nearly obsolete to drive the serf back to the more direct servitude of the dark ages they announced their decision to the people and the people rose in arms the two dramatic stories which connect Watt Tyler doubtfully with the beginning and definitely with the end of the revolt are far from unimportant despite the desire of our present prosaic historians to pretend to make stories are unimportant the tale of Tyler's first blow is significant in the sense that it is not only dramatic but domestic it avenged an insult to the family and made the legend of the whole riot whatever its incidental indecencies a sort of demonstration on behalf of decency this is important where the dignity of the poor is almost unneeding in modern debates and an inspector in a printed form and a few long words to do the same thing without having his head broken the occasion of the protest and the form which the feudal reaction had first taken was a poll tax but this was but a part of a general process of pressing the population to survive labor which fully explains the ferocious language held by the government after the rising had failed the language in which it threatened to make the state of the serf the facts attending the feduring question are less in dispute the medieval populace showed considerable military energy and cooperation stormed its way to London and was met outside the city by a company containing the king and the lord mayor who were forced to consent to a parley the treacherous stabbing of Tyler by the mayor gave the signal for battle and massacre on the spot the peasants closed in roaring and a strange thing happened something which gives us a fleeting and a final glimpse of the crowned sacramental man of the middle ages for one wild moment divine right was divine the king was no more than a boy his very voice must have rung out to that multitude almost like the voice of a child but the power of his fathers and the great Christendom from which he came fell in some strange fashion upon him and riding out alone before the people he cried out I am your leader and himself promised to grant them all they asked that promise was afterwards broken but those who see in the breach of it the mere fickleness of the young, driveless king are not only shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole trend of the time the point must be seized if subsequent things are to be seen as they are is that parliament certainly encouraged and parliament almost certainly obliged the king to repudiate the people for when after the rejoicing revolutionists had disarmed and were betrayed the king urged a humane compromise on the parliament and the parliament furiously refused it already parliament is not merely a governing body but a governing class parliament was as contemptuous of the peasants in the fourteenth as of the chartists in the nineteenth century this council first summoned by the king like juries and many other things to get from plain men rather reluctant evidence about taxation has already become an object of ambition and is therefore an aristocracy there is already war in this case literally to the knife between the commons with a large C and the commons with a small one talking about the knife it is notable that the murderer of Tyler was not a mere noble but an elective magistrate of the mercantile oligarchy of London though there is probably no truth in the tale that his bloodstained dagger figures on the arms of the city of London the medieval Londoners were quite capable of assassinating a man but not of sticking so dirty a knife into the neighborhood of the cross of their redeemer in the place which is really occupied by the sword of St. Paul it is remarked above that parliament was now an aristocracy being an object of ambition the truth is perhaps more subtle than this but if ever men yearn to serve on juries we may probably guess that juries are no longer popular anyhow this must be kept in mind as against the opposite idea of the just divinem or fixed authority if we would appreciate the fall of Richard if the thing which dethroned him was a rebellion it was a rebellion of the parliament of the thing that had just proved more pitiless than he toward a rebellion of the people but this is not the main point the point is that by the removal of Richard a step above the parliament became possible for the first time the position was tremendous the crown became an object of ambition that which one could snatch another could snatch from him that which the house of Lancaster held merely by force the house of York could take from it by force the spell of an undethronable king seated out of reach was broken and for three unhappy generations adventurous strove and stumbled on a stairway slippery with blood above which was something new in the medieval imagination an empty throne it is obvious that the insecurity of the Lancastrian usurper largely because he was a usurper is the clue to many things some of which we should now call good some bad all of which we should probably call good or bad with the excessive facility with which we dismiss distant things it led the Lancastrian house to lean on parliament which was the mixed matter we have already seen it may have been in some ways good for the monarchy to be checked and challenged by an institution which at least kept something of the old freshness and freedom of speech it was almost certainly bad for the parliament making it yet more the ally of the mere ambitious noble of which we shall see much later it also led the Lancastrian house to lean on patriotism which was perhaps more popular to make English the tongue of the court for the first time and to reopen the French wars with a fine flag waving a begging court it led again to lean on the church or rather perhaps on the higher clergy and that in the least worthy aspect of clericalism a certain morbidity which more and more darkened the end of medievalism showed itself in new and more careful cruelties against the last crop of heresies the slight knowledge of the philosophy of these heresies will lend little support to the notion that they were in themselves prophetic of the reformation it's hard to see how anybody can call Wycliffe a Protestant unless he calls Pelagius or Arius a Protestant and if John Ball was a reformer Latimer was not a reformer but though the new heresies did not even hint at the beginning of English Protestantism they did perhaps hint at the end of English Catholicism Cobham did not light a candle to be handed on to nonconformist chapels but a Rundle did light a torch and put it into his own church such real unpopularity as did the time attached to the old religious system and which afterwards became a true national tradition against Mary was doubtless started by the diseased energy of these 15th century bishops persecution can be a philosophy and a defensible philosophy but with some of these men persecution was rather a perversion across the channel one of them was presiding at the trial of Joan of Arc but this perversion this diseased energy is the power in all the epic that follows the fall of Richard II and especially in those feuds that found so ironic in imagery in English roses and thorns the foreshortening of such a backward glance as this book can alone claim to be forbids any entrance into the military mazes of the wars of York and Lancaster or any attempt to follow the thrilling recoveries and revenges which filled the lives of Warwick the kingmaker and the war-like widow of Henry V the rivals were not indeed as is sometimes exaggeratively implied fighting for nothing or even like a lion and the unicorn merely fighting for the crown the shadow of a moral difference can still be traced even in that stormy twilight of a heroic time but when we have said that Lancaster stood on the hole for the new notion of a king propped by parliaments and powerful bishops and York on the hole for the remains of the older idea of a king who permits nothing to come between him and his people we have said everything of permanent political interest that could be traced by counting all the bows of Barnett or all the lances of Tuxbury but this truth is one thing which can only vaguely be called Tory about the Yorkist has at least one interest that it lends a justifiable romance to the last and most remarkable figure of the fighting house of York with whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended if we desire at all to catch the strange colors of the sunset of the Middle Ages to see what had changed yet not wholly killed chivalry there is no better study than the Riddler Richard III caricature with which his much meaner successor placarded the world when he was dead he was not even a hunchback he had one shoulder slightly higher than the other probably the effect of his furious swordsmanship on a naturally slender and sensitive brain yet his soul if not his body haunts us somehow as the crooked shadow of a straight night of better days he was not an ogre shedding rivers of blood some of the many executed deserve and even the tale of his murdered nephews is not certain and is told by those who also tell us he was born with tusks and was originally covered with hair yet a crimson cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory and so tainted is the very error of that time with carnage that we cannot say he was incapable even of the things of which he may have been innocent whether or no he was a good man he was apparently a good king and even a popular one yet we think of him vaguely and not a fancy untruly as on sufferance he anticipated the renaissance and an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music and he seems to have held to the old paths of religion and charity he did not pluck perpetually at his sword and dagger because his only pleasure was in cutting throats he probably did it because he was nervous it was the age of our first portrait painting and a fine contemporary portrait with a more plausible light on this particular detail for it shows him touching and probably twisting a ring on his finger the very act of a high strong personality who would also fidget with the dagger and in his face as they are painted we can study all that has made it worthwhile to pause so long upon his name an atmosphere very different from everything before and after the face has a remarkable intellectual beauty but there is something else that is hardly in itself either good or evil and that thing is death the death of an epic the death of a great civilization the death of something which once sang to the sun in the catechol of st. francis and sailed to the ends of the earth in ships of the first crusade but which in peace we read and turned its weapons inwards wounded its own brethren broke its own loyalties gambled for the crown even about the creed and has this one grace among its dying britches that its valor is the last to die but whatever else may have been bad or good about Richard of Gloucester there was a touch about him which makes him truly the last of the medieval kings it is expressed in the one word which he cried aloud as he struck down foe after foe in the last charge at Bosworth treason for him, as for the first Norman kings treason was the same as treachery and in this case at least it was the same as treachery when his nobles deserted him before the battle he did not regard it as a new political combination but as the sin of false friends and faithless servants using his own voice like the trumpet of a herald he challenged his rival to a fight as personal as that of two paladins of Charlemagne his rival did not reply and was not likely to reply the modern world had begun the call echoed unanswered down the ages for since that day no English king has fought after that fashion having slain many he was himself slain and his diminished force destroyed so ended the war of the usurpers and the last and most doubtful of all the usurpers a wanderer from the Welsh marches a knight from nowhere found the crown of England under a bush of thorn End of Chapter 10