 A short history of England by G. K. Chesterton. It will be very reasonably asked why I should consent, though upon a sort of challenge, to write even a popular essay in English history, who make no pretense to particular scholarship and am merely a member of the public. The answer is that I know just enough to know one thing, that a history from the standpoint of a member of the public has not been written. What we call the popular histories should rather be called the anti-popular histories. They are all, nearly without exception, written against the people, and in them the populace is either ignored or elaborately proved to have been wrong. It is true the Green called his book a short history of the English people, but he seems to have thought it too short for the people to be properly mentioned. For instance, he calls one very large part of his story Puritan England, but England never was Puritan. It would have been almost as unfair to call the rise of Henry of Navarre Puritan France, and some of our extreme Whig historians would have been pretty nearly capable of calling the campaign of Wexford and Dracaeta Puritan Ireland. But it is especially in the matter of the Middle Ages that the popular histories trample upon the popular traditions. In this respect there is an almost comic contrast between the general information provided about England in the last two or three centuries in which its present industrial system was being built up, and the general information given about the preceding centuries which we call broadly medieval. Of this sort of waxwork history, which is thought sufficient for the sideshow of the age of abbots and crusaders, a small instance will be sufficient. A popular encyclopedia appeared some years ago, professing among other things to teach English history to the masses. And in this I came upon a series of pictures of the English kings. No one could expect them to be all authentic, but the interest attached to those that were necessarily imaginary. There is much vivid material in contemporary literature for portraits of men like Henry II or Edward I, but this did not seem to have been found or even saw it. And wandering to the image that stood for Stephen Abloy, my eye was staggered by a gentleman with one of those helmets with steel brims curved like the Crescent, which went with the age of ruffs and trunk hose. I am tempted to suspect that the head was that of a hell-birder at some such scene as the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. But he had a helmet, and helmets were medieval, and any old helmet was good enough for Stephen. Now, suppose the readers of that work of reference had looked for the portrait of Charles I and found the head of a policeman. Suppose it had been taken, modern helmet and all, out of some snapshot in the daily sketch of the arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst. I think we may go so far as to say that the readers would have refused to accept it as a lifelike portrait of Charles I. They would have formed the opinion that there must be some mistake. At the time that elapsed between Stephen and Mary was much longer than the time that has elapsed between Charles and ourselves. The revolution in human society between the first of the Crusades and the last of the Tudors was immeasurably more colossal and complete than any change between Charles and ourselves. And above all, that revolution should be the first thing and the final thing in anything calling itself a popular history. For it is the story of how our populace gained great things, but today has lost everything. Now I will modestly maintain that I know more about English history than this, and that I have as much right to make a popular summary of it as the gentlemen who made the Crusader and the Holberter change hats. But the curious and arresting thing about the neglect, one might say the omission of many evil civilization in such histories as this, lies in the fact that I have already noted. It is exactly the popular story that is left out of the popular history. For instance, even a working man, a carpenter or cooper or bricklayer, has been taught about the Great Charter as something like the Great Auc, saved that its almost monstrous solitude came from being before its time instead of after. He was not taught that the whole stuff of the Middle Ages was stiff with a parchment of charters, that society was once a system of charters and of a kind much more interesting to him. The carpenter heard of one charter given to Barons, and chiefly in the interest of Barons, the carpenter did not hear of any of the charters given to Carpenters, to Coopers, to all the people like himself. Or to take another instance, the boy and girl reading the stock simplified histories of the schools practically never heard of such a thing as a burger, until he appears in a shirt with a noose round his neck. They certainly do not imagine anything of what he meant in the Middle Ages. And Victorian shopkeepers did not conceive themselves as taking part in any such romance as the adventure of Cretari, where the medieval shopkeepers more than won their spurs, for they won the spurs of their enemies. I have a very simple motive and excuse for telling the little I know of this true tale. I have met in my wanderings a man brought up in the lower quarters of a great house, that mainly on its leavings and burdened mostly with its labors. I know that his complaints are stilled and his status justified by a story that is told to him. It is about how his grandfather was a chimpanzee and his father a wild man of the woods, caught by hunters and tamed into something like intelligence. In the light of this he may well be thankful for the almost human life that he enjoys, and may be content with the hope of leaving behind him a yet more evolved animal. Strangely enough, the calling of this story by the sacred name of progress ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect and to discover that it is not true. I know by now, enough at least of his origin to know, that he was not evolved, but simply disinherited. His family tree is not a monkey tree, save in the sense that no monkey could have climbed it. Rather, it is like that tree torn up by the roots and named Derishado on the shield of the Unknown Knight. End of chapter 1, introduction. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton. Chapter 2 The Province of Britain. The land on which we live once had the highly poetic privilege of being the end of the world. Its extremity was Ultima Thule, the other end of nowhere. When these islands, lost in a night of northern seas, were lit up at last by the long search lights of Rome, it was felt that the remotest remnant of things had been touched, and more for pride than for possession. The sentiment was not unsuitable, even in geography. About these realms, upon the edge of everything, there was really something that can only be called edgy. Britain is not so much an island as an archipelago. It is at least a labyrinth of peninsulas. In few of the kindred countries can one so easily and so strangely find sea in the fields or fields in the sea. The great rivers seem not only to meet in the ocean, but barely to miss each other in the hills. The whole land, though low as a whole, leans toward the west in shouldering mountains, and a prehistoric tradition has taught it to look towards the sunset for islands yet dreamier than its own. The islanders are a kind with their islands, different as are the nations into which they are now divided. The Scots, the English, the Irish, the Welsh of the Western uplands, have something altogether different from the humdrum docileity of the inland Germans, or from the bon sens français, which can be at will trenchant or trite. There is something common to all the Britons, which even acts of union have not torn us under. The nearest name for it is insecurity, something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge of things. Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humor without wit, perplex their critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are expressed perhaps in the Irish by a confusion of speech and in the English by a confusion of thought, for the Irish bull is a license with the symbol of language, but bull's own bull, the English bull, is a dumb ox of thought. A standing mystification in the mind. There is something double in the thought as of the soul mirrored in many waters. Of all peoples they are least attached to the purely classical, the imperial plainness which the French do finally and the Germans coarsely, but the Britons hardly at all. They are constantly colonists and immigrants, and they have the name of being at home in every country. But they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of home and love of something else, of which the sea may be the explanation or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is the finest line in English literature and the dumbest refrain of all English poems, over the hills and far away. The great rationalist hero who first conquered Britain, whether or no he was the detached demigod of Caesar and Cleopatra, was certainly a Latin of the Latins and described these islands when he found them with all the curt positivism of his pen of steel. But even Julius Caesar's brief account with the Britons leaves us something of this mystery which is more than ignorance a fact. They were apparently ruled by that terrible thing, a pagan priesthood. The Britons now shapeless yet arranged in symbolic shapes bear witness to the order and labor of those that lifted them. Their worship was probably nature worship, and while such a basis may count for something in the elemental quality that has always soaked the island arts, the collision between it and the tolerant empire suggests the presence of something which generally grows out of nature worship. I mean the unnatural. But upon nearly all the matters of modern controversy Caesar is silent. He is silent about whether the language was Celtic and some of the place names have even given rise to a suggestion that in parts at least it was already Teutonic. I'm not capable of pronouncing upon the truth of such speculations, but I am of pronouncing upon the importance, at least to my own very simple purpose. And indeed their importance has been very much exaggerated. Caesar professed to give no more than the glimpse of a traveler, but when some considerable time after the Romans returned and turned Britain into a Roman province, they continued to display a singular indifference to questions that have excited so many professors. What they cared about was getting and giving in Britain what they had got and given in Gaul. We do not know whether the Britons then or for that matter the Britons now were Iberian or Symeric or Teutonic. We do know that in a short time they were Roman. Every now and then there is discovered in modern England some fragments such as a Roman pavement. Such Roman antiquities rather diminish than increase the Roman reality. They make something seem distant which is still very near and something seem dead that is still alive. It is like writing a man's epitaph on his front door. The epitaph would probably be a compliment but hardly a personal introduction. The important thing about France and England is not that they have Roman remains, they are Roman remains. In truth they are not so much remains as relics, for they are still working miracles. A row of poplars is a more Roman relic than a row of pillars. Probably all that we call the works of nature have but grown like fungoids upon this original work of man, and our woods are mosses on the bones of a giant. Under the seed of our harvests and the roots of our trees is a foundation of which the fragments of tile and brick are but emblems, and under the colors of our wildest flowers are the colors of a Roman pavement. Roman was directly Roman for fully four hundred years, longer than she has been Protestant, and very much longer than she has been industrial. What was meant by being Roman is necessary in a few lines to say, or no sense can be made of what happened after, especially of what happened immediately after. Being Roman did not mean being subject in the sense that one savage tribe will enslave another, or in the sense that the cynical politicians of recent times watched with a horrible hopefulness for the evanescence of the Irish. Both conquerors and conquered were heathen, and both had the institutions which seemed to us to give an inhumanity to heathenism. The triumph, the slave market, the lack of all the sensitive nationalism of modern history. But the Roman Empire did not destroy nations. If anything, it created them. Britons were not originally proud of being Britons, but they were proud of being Romans. The Roman steel was at least as much a magnet as a sword. In truth it was rather a round mirror of steel in which every people came to see itself. For Rome, as Rome, the very smallness of the civic origin was a warrant for the largeness of the civic experiment. Rome itself, obviously, could not rule the world any more than Rutland. I mean it could not rule the other races as the Spartans ruled the Helots, or the Americans ruled the Negros. A machine so huge had to be human. It had to have a handle that fitted any man's hand. The Roman Empire necessarily became less Roman as it became more of an empire until not very long after Rome gave conquerors to Britain. Britain was giving emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the Britons boasted, came at length the great Empress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine. And it was Constantine, as all men know, who first nailed up that proclamation, which all after generations have in truth been struggling to either protect or tear down. About that revolution, no man has ever been able to be impartial. The present writer will make no idle pretence of being so. That it was the most revolutionary of all revolutions since it identified the dead body on a servile gibbet with the fatherhood of the skies as long been a commonplace without ceasing to be a paradox. But there is another historic element that must also be realized. Without saying anything more of its tremendous essence, it is very necessary to know why even pre-Christian Rome was regarded as something mystical or long afterwards by all European men. The extreme view of it was held perhaps by Dante, but it pervaded medievalism and therefore still haunts modernity. Rome was regarded as man, mighty though fallen, because it was the utmost that man had done. It was divinely necessary that the Roman Empire should succeed if only that it might fail. Hence the School of Dante implied the paradox that the Roman soldiers killed Christ not only by right but even by divine right, that mere law might fall at its highest test. It had to be real law and not mere military lawlessness. For God worked by Pilate as by Peter, therefore the medieval poet is eager to show that Roman government was simply good government and not a usurpation. For it was the whole point of the Christian Revolution to maintain that in this good government was as bad as bad. Even good government was not good enough to know God among the thieves. This is not only generally important as evolving a colossal change in the conscience, the loss of the whole heathen repose in the complete sufficiency of the city or state. It made a sort of eternal rule in closing an eternal rebellion. It must be incessantly remembered through the first half of English history, for it is the whole meaning in the quarrel of the priests and kings. The double rule of the civilization and the religion in one sense remained for centuries, and before its first misfortunes came it must be conceived as substantially the same everywhere. And however it began, it largely ended inequality. Slavery certainly existed, as it had in the most democratic states of ancient times. Harsh officialism certainly existed, as it exists in the most democratic states of modern times. But there was nothing of what we mean in modern times by aristocracy, still less of what we mean by racial domination. Insofar as any change was passing over that society with its two levels of equal citizens and equal slaves, it was only the slow growth of the power of the church at the expense of the power of the empire. Now it is important to grasp that the great exception to equality, the institution of slavery, was slowly modified by both causes. It was weakened both by the weakening of the empire and by the strengthening of the church. Slavery was for the church not a difficulty of doctrine, but a strain on the imagination. Aristotle and the pagan sages who had defined the servile or useful arts had regarded the slave as a tool, an axe to cut wood or whatever wanted cutting. The church did not denounce the cutting, but she felt as if she was cutting glass with a diamond. She was haunted by the memory that the diamond is so much more precious than the glass. So Christianity could not settle down into the pagan simplicity that the man was made for the work, when the work was so much less immortally momentous than the man. At about this stage of the history of England there is generally told the anecdote of a fun of Gregory the Great, and this is perhaps the true point of it. By the Roman theory the barbarian, the Bonsman, were meant to be useful. The saint's mysticism was moved at finding them ornamental, and non-angly said Angeli, meant more nearly not slaves but souls. It is to the point in passing to note that in the modern country, most collectively Christian, Russia, the serfs were always referred to as souls. The great pope's phrase, heck-need as it is, is perhaps the first glimpse of the golden halos in the best Christian art. Thus the church, with whatever other faults, worked of her own nature toward greater social equality, and it is a historical error to suppose that the church hierarchy worked with aristocracies, or was of a kind with them. It was an inversion of aristocracy. In the ideal of it, at least the last were to be the first. The Irish bull that one man is as good as another, and a great deal better, contains the truth, like many contradictions, the truth that was the link between Christianity and citizenship. Alone of all superiors, the saint does not depress the human dignity of others. He is not conscious of his superiority to them, but only more conscious of his inferiority than they are. But while a million little priests and monks like mice were already nibbling at the bonds of the ancient servitude, another process was going on, which has here been called the weakening of the empire. It is a process which is to this day very difficult to explain, but it affected all the institutions of all the provinces, especially the institution of slavery. But of all the provinces, its effect was heaviest in Britain, which lay on or beyond the borders. The case of Britain, however, cannot possibly be considered alone. The first half of English history has been made quite unmeaning in the schools by the attempt to tell it without reference to that corporate Christendom in which it took part in pride. I fully accept the truths in Mr. Kipling's question of what can they know of England, who only England know, and merely differ from the view that they will best broaden their minds by the study of Wege Wege and Timbuktu. It is therefore necessary, though very difficult, to frame in a few words some idea of what happened to the whole European race. Rome itself, which had made all that strong world, was the weakest thing in it. The center had been growing fainter and fainter, and now the center disappeared. Rome had as much freed the world as ruled it, and now she could rule no more. Save for the presence of the pope and his constantly increasing supernatural prestige, the eternal city became like one of her own provincial towns. A loose localism was the result, rather than any conscious intellectual mutiny. There was anarchy, but there was no rebellion. For rebellion must have a principle, and therefore for those who can think and authority. Gibbon called his great pageant of prose the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The Empire did decline, but it did not fall. It remains to this hour. By a process very much more indirect even than that of the Church, this decentralization and drift also worked against the slaves of antiquity. The localism did indeed produce that choice of territorial chieftains, which came to be called feudalism, and of which we shall speak later. But the direct possession of man by man, the same localism tended to destroy. Though this negative influence upon it, there is no kind of proportion to the positive influence of the Catholic Church. The later pagan slavery, like our own industrial labor, which increasingly resembles it, was working on a larger and larger scale. And it was at last too large to control. The Bonsman found the visible Lord more distant than the new invisible one. The slave became the serf. That is, he could be shut in, but not shut out. When once he belonged to the land, it could not be long before the land belonged to him. Even in the old and rather fictitious language of chattel slavery, there is here a difference. It is the difference between a man being a chair and a man being a house. Canute might call for his throne, but if he wanted his throne room, he must go and get it himself. Similarly, he could tell his slave to run, but he could only tell his serf to stay. Thus the two slow changes of the time both tended to transform the tool into a man. The status began to have roots, and whatever has roots will have rights. What the decline did involve everywhere was de-civilization, the loss of letters, of laws, of roads, and means of communication, the exaggeration of local color into caprice. But on the edges of the empire, this de-civilization became a definite barbarism, owing to the nearness of wild neighbors who were ready to destroy as deftly and blindly as things are destroyed by fire. Save for the lured and apocalyptic locust flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk even in those darkest ages of a deluge of the barbarians, at least when we are speaking of the old civilization as a whole. But a deluge of barbarians is not entirely an exaggeration of what happened on some of the borders of the empire, of such edges of the known world as we began by describing in these pages, and on the extreme edge of the world, lay Britain. It may be true, though, there is little proof of it, that the Roman civilization itself was thinner in Britain than in the other provinces, but it was a very civilized civilization. It gathered round the great cities like York and Chester and London, but the cities are older than the counties, and indeed older even than the countries. These were connected by a skeleton of great roads which were and are the bones of Britain. But with the weakening of Rome, the bones began to break under barbarian pressure, coming at first from the north from the Picts, who lay beyond Agricola's boundary in what is now called the Scotch Lowlands. The whole of this bewildering time is full of temporary tribal alliances, generally mercenary, of barbarians paid to come on, or barbarians paid to go away. It seems certain that in this welter, Roman Britain bought help from rudor races living about that neck of Denmark, whereas now the Duchy of Schleswig, having been chosen only to fight somebody they naturally fought anybody, and a century of fighting followed, under the trampling of which the Roman pavement was broken into yet smaller pieces. It is perhaps permissible to disagree with this story in Green when he says that no spot should be more sacred to modern Englishmen than the neighborhood of Ramsgate, where the Schleswig people are supposed to have landed, or when he suggests that their appearance is the real beginning of our island story. It would be rather more true to say that it was nearly, though prematurely, the end of it. The End of Chapter 2 The Province of Britain This is a LibraVox recording. All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org, A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton Chapter 3 The Age of Legends We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairytale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in Cranford, after tightly sweeping up the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies, having just met a dragoon, were to walk a little further and meet a dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place in British history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and then all of a sudden we are reading a wandering bells and wizard lances of wars against man as tall as trees or short as told stools. The soldier of civilization is no longer fighting with Goths but with goblins. The land becomes a labyrinth of fairy towns unknown to history and scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up in the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific age comes first and the mythological age after it. One working example, the echoes of which lingered till very late in English literature, may serve to sum up the contrast. The British state, which was found by Caesar, was long believed to have been founded by Brutus. The contrast between the one very dry discovery and the other very fantastic foundation has something decidedly comic about it, as if Caesar's A2 Brutae might be translated what, you hear? But in one respect, the fable is quite as important as the fact. They both testify to the reality of the Roman foundation of our insular society and show that even the stories that seem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman. When England is Elfland, the Elves are not the Angles. All the phrases that can be used as clues through that tangling traditions are more or less Latin phrases and in all our speech there is no word more Roman than romance. The Roman legions left Britain in the fourth century. This did not mean that the Roman civilization left it. But it did mean that the civilization lay far more open both to admixture and attack. Christianity had almost certainly come to Britain, not indeed otherwise than by routes established by Rome, but certainly long before the official Roman mission of Gregory the Great. It had certainly been largely swamped by later heathen invasions of the undefended coasts. It may then rationally be urged that the hold, both of the Empire and its new religion, were here weaker than anywhere else, and that the description of the general civilization in the last chapter is proportionately irrelevant. This, however, is not the chief truth of the matter. There is one fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole of this period. Yet a modern man must very nearly turn his mind upside down to understand it. Almost every modern man has in his head an association between freedom and the future. The whole culture of our time has been full of the notion of a good time coming. Now the whole culture of the Dark Ages was full of the notion of a good time going. They look backwards to old enlightenment and forwards to new prejudices. In our time there has come a quarrel between faith and hope, which perhaps must be healed by charity. But they were situated otherwise. They hoped, but it may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All the motives that make a man a progressive now, made a man a conservative then. The more he could keep of the past, the more he had of a fair law and free state. The more he gave way to the future, the more he must endure of ignorance and privilege. All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. And this is the clue which we must carry with us through the lives of all the great men of the Dark Ages, of Alfred and B.D. of Dunstan. If the most extreme modern Republican were put back in that period he would be an equally extreme Papist or even Imperialist, for the Pope was what was left of the Empire and the Empire what was left of the Republic. We may compare the man at that time, therefore to one who has left free cities and even free fields behind him, and is forced to advance toward a forest. And the forest is the fittest metaphor. Not only because it was really that wild European grove cloven here and thereby the Roman roads, but also because there has always been associated with forests, another idea which increased as the Roman order decayed. The idea of the forest was the idea of enchantment. There was a notion of things being double or different from themselves, of beasts behaving like men, and not merely as modern wits would say of men behaving like beasts. But it is precisely here that it is most necessary to remember that an age of reason had preceded the age of magic. The central pillar which had sustained the storied house of our imagination ever since has been the idea of the civilized night amid the savage enchantments. The next thing to note in the matter is this, that in this barbaric time none of the heroes are barbaric. They are only heroes if they are anti-biberic. Men real or mythical, or more probably both, became underpresent like gods among the people, and forced themselves into the faintest memory and the shortest record, exactly in proportion as they had mastered the heathen madness of the time and preserved the Christian rationality that had come from Rome. Arthur has his name because he killed the heathen. The heathen who killed him have no names at all. Englishmen who know nothing of English history, but less than nothing of Irish history, have heard some how or other of Brian Baroo, though they spell it B-A-R-O-O, and seem to be under the impression that it is a joke. It is a joke, the subtlety of which they would never have been able to enjoy, if King Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland at the great battle of Contarf. The ordinary English reader would never have heard of Olaf of Norway if he had not preached the gospel with his sword, or of the Sidd, if he had not fought against the Crescent. And though Elfer the Great seems to have deserved his title even as a personality, he was not so great as the work he had to do. But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred, for the age is the age of legends. Toward these legends most men adopt by instinct a sane attitude, and of the two, credulity is certainly much more sane than incredulity. It does not much matter whether most of the stories are true, even in such cases as Bacon and Shakespeare, to realize that the question does not matter is the first step toward answering it correctly. But before the reader dismisses anything like an attempt to tell the earlier history of the country-biased legends, he will do well to keep two principles in mind, both of them tending to correct the crude and very thoughtless skepticism which has made this part of the story so sterile. The nineteenth-century historians went on the curious principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told, and concentrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus Arthur is made utterly impersonal because all legends are lies. But somebody of the type of hengeist is made quite an important personality merely because nobody thought him important enough to lie about. Now this is to reverse all common sense. A great many witty sayings are attributed to Tellyran, which were really said by somebody else, but they would not be so attributed if Tellyran had been a fool, still less if he had been a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, nine times out of ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody to tell them about. Indeed some allow that marvelous things were done, and that there may have been a man named Arthur at the time in which they were done, but here, so far as I am concerned, the distinction becomes rather dim. I do not understand the attitude which holds that there was an Ark and a man named Noah, but cannot believe in the existence of Noah's Ark. The other fact to be remembered is that scientific research for the last few years has worked steadily in the direction of confirming and not dissipating the legends of the populace. To take only the obvious instance, modern excavators with modern spades have found a solid stone labyrinth in Crete, like that associated with the Minotaur, which was conceived as being as cloudy a fable as the Camero. To most people this would have seemed quite as frantic as finding the roots of Jack's beanstalk, or the skeletons in Bluebeard's cupboard, yet it is simply the fact. Only a truth is to be remembered, which scarcely ever is remembered, in estimating the past. It is the paradox that the past is always present, yet it is not what was, but whatever seems to have been. For all the past is part of faith. What did they believe of their fathers? In this matter new discoveries are useless because they are new. We may find men wrong in what they thought they were, but we cannot find them wrong in what they thought they thought. It is therefore very practical to put in a few words, if possible, something of what a man of these islands in the dark ages would have said about his ancestors and his inheritance. I will attempt here to put some of the simpler things in their order of importance, as he would have seen them. And if we are to understand our fathers, who first made this country, anything like itself, it is most important that we should remember that if this was not their real past, it was their real memory. After that blessed crime, as the wit of mystics called it, which was for these men hardly second to creation of the world, St. Joseph of Arimathea, one of the few followers of the new religion, who seemed to have been wealthy, set sail as a missionary, and after long voyages came to that litter of little islands which seemed to the man of the Mediterranean, something like the last clouds of the sunset. He came up upon the western and wilder side of that wild and western land, and made his way to a valley which, through all the oldest records, is called Avalon, something of rich rains and warmth in its westland meadows, or something in some lost pagan traditions about it, made it persistently regarded as a kind of earthly paradise. After being slain at Lioness is carried here as if to heaven. Here the pilgrim planted his staff in the soil, and it took root as a tree that blossoms on Christmas day. A mystical materialism marked Christianity from its birth. The very soul of it was a body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations that were its first foes, it fought fiercely and particularly for a supernatural freedom to cure concrete melodies by concrete substances. Hence the scattering of relics was everywhere like the scattering of seed. All who took their mission from the divine tragedy, or tangible fragments which became the germs of churches and cities. St. Joseph carried a cup which held the wine of the Last Supper and the blood of the crucifixion to that shrine in Avalon which we now call Glastonbury. And it became the heart of a whole universe of legends and romances, not only for Britain but for Europe. Throughout this tremendous and branching tradition it is called the Holy Grail. The vision of it was especially the reward of that ring of powerful palatins whom King Arthur feasted at a round table. A symbol of heroic comradeship such as was afterwards imitated or invented by medieval knighthood. Both the cup and the table are of vast importance emblematically in the psychology of the chivalric experiment. The idea of a round table is not merely universality but equality. It has in it modified a force by other tendencies to differentiation, the same idea that exists in the very word piers as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this the round table is as romant as the round arch which might also serve as a type, for instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled on the others, the king was rather the keystone of an arch. But to this tradition of a level of dignity was added something unearthly that was from Rome but not of it. The privilege that inverted all privileges, the glimpse of heaven which seemed almost as capricious as fairyland, the flying chalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes, and which appeared to one knight who was hardly more than a child, rightly or wrongly, this romance established Britain for after centuries as a country where the chivalrous past Britain had been a mirror of universal knighthood. This fact or fancy is of colossal import in all ensuing affairs, especially the affairs of barbarians. These and numberless other local legends are indeed for us buried by the forests of popular fancies that have grown out of them. It is all the harder for serious modern mind because our fathers felt at home with these tales and therefore took liberties with them. Probably the rhyme which runs, when good king Arthur ruled the land, he was a noble king. He stole three pecs of barley meal. Is much nearer the true medieval note than the aristocratic stateliness of Tennyson. But about all these grotesques of the popular fancy there is one last thing to be remembered. It must especially be remembered by those who would dwell exclusively on documents and take no note of tradition at all. Wild as would be the results of credulity concerning all the old wives tale, it would not be so wild as the errors that can arise from trusting to written evidence when there is not enough of it. Now the whole written evidence for the first parts of our history would go into a small book. A very few details are mentioned and none are explained. A fact thus standing alone without the key of contemporary thought may be very much more misleading than any fable. To know what word an archaic scribe wrote without being sure of what thing he meant may produce a result that is literally mad. Thus, for instance, it would be unwise to accept literally the tale that St. Helena was not only a native of Colchester, but was a daughter of old King Cole. But it would not be very unwise, not so unwise as some things that are deduced from documents. The natives of Colchester certainly did honor to St. Helena, and might have had a king named Cole. According to the more serious story, the saint's father was an innkeeper, and the only recorded action of Cole is well within the resources of that calling. It would not be nearly so unwise as to deduce from the written word, as some critic of the future may do, that the natives of Colchester were oysters. CHAPTER IV THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBERIANS It is a quaint accident that we employ the word short-sighted as a condemnation, but not the word long-sighted, which we should probably use if at all as a compliment. Yet the one is as much a malady of vision as the other. We rightly say, in rebuke of a small-minded modernity, that it is very short-sighted to be indifferent to all that is historic. But it is as disastrously long-sighted to be interested only in what is prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a large proportion of the learned, who grope in the darkness of unrecorded epics for the roots of their favorite race or races. The wars, the enslavements, the primitive marriage customs, the colossal migrations, and massacres upon which their theories repose are no part of history or even of legend. And rather than trust with entire simplicity to these, it would be infinitely wiser to trust a legend of the loosest and most local sword. In any case, it is well to record, even so simple a conclusion as that what is prehistoric is unhistorical. But there is another way in which common sense can be brought to the criticism of some prodigious racial theories. To employ the same figure, suppose the scientific historians explain the historic centuries in terms of a prehistoric division between short-sighted and long-sighted men. They could cite their instance and illustrations. They would certainly explain the curiosity of language I mentioned first, as showing that the short-sighted were the conquered race, and they're named therefore a term of contempt. They could give us very graphic pictures of the rude tribal war. They could show how the long-sighted people were always cut to pieces in hand-to-hand struggles with axe and knife, until with the invention of bows and arrows the advantage veered to the long-sighted, and their enemies were shot down in droves. I could easily write a ruthless romance about it and still more easily a ruthless anthropological theory. According to that thesis, which refers all moral to material changes, they could explain the tradition that old people grow conservative in politics by the well-known fact that old people grow more long-sighted. But I think there might be one thing about this theory which would stump us, and it might even, if it be possible, stump them. Suppose it were pointed out that through all the three thousand years of recorded history, abounding in literature of every conceivable kind, there was not so much as mention of the Oculus question for which all had been dared and done. Suppose not one of the living or dead languages of mankind had so much as a word for long-sighted or short-sighted. Suppose in short the question that had torn the whole world into was never even asked at all, until some spectacle maker suggested it somewhere about 1750. In that case, I think we should find it hard to believe that this physical difference had really played so fundamental a part in human history, and that is exactly the case with the physical difference between the Celts, the Tutans, and the Latins. I know of no way in which fair-haired people can be prevented from falling in love with dark-haired people, and I do not believe that whether a man was long-headed or round-headed ever made much difference to anyone who felt inclined to break his head. To all mortal appearance, in all mortal records and experience, people seemed to have killed or spared, married or refrained from marriage, made kings or made slaves, with reference to almost any other consideration except this one. There was the love of a valley or a village, a site or a family. There were enthusiasm for a prince and his hereditary office. There were passions rooted in locality, especially emotions about sea folk or mountain folk. There were historic memories of a cause or an alliance. There was, more than all, the tremendous test of religion. But of a cause like that of the Celts or Tutans covering half the earth, there was little or nothing. Race was not only never at any given moment a motive, but it was never even an excuse. The Tutans never had a creed. They never had a cause that it was only a few years ago that they began to even have a can't. The Orthodox modern historians, notably Green, remarks on the singularity of Britain in being alone of all Roman provinces wholly cleared and re-peopled by a Germanic race. He does not entertain as an escape from the singularity of this event the possibility that it never happened. In the same spirit he deals with the little that can be quoted of the Tutanic society. His ideal picture of it is completed in small touches, which even an amateur can detect as dubious. Thus he will touch on the Tutan with a phrase like, the basis of their society was the free man, and on the Roman with a phrase like, the minds if worked by forced labor must have been a source of endless oppression. The simple fact being that the Roman and the Tutan both had slaves, he treats the Tutan free man as the only thing to be considered, not only then, but now, and then goes out of his way to say that if the Roman treated his slaves badly, the slaves were badly treated. He expresses a strange disappointment at Gildus. The only British chronicler does not describe the great Tutanic system. In the opinion of Gildus, a modification of that of Gregory, it was a case of non-angly said Diabali. The modern Tutanist is disappointed that the contemporary authority saw nothing in his Tutans except wolves, dogs, and whelps from the kennel of a barbarism. But it is at least faintly tenable that there was nothing else to be seen. In any case, when St. Augustine came to the largely barbarized land, with what may be called the second of the three great southern visitations which civilized these islands, he did not see any anthological problems whatever there may have been to be seen. With him or his converts, the chain of literary testimony is taken up again, and we must look at the world as they saw it. He found a king ruling in Kent, beyond whose borders lay other kingdoms of about the same size, the kings of which were all apparently heathen. The names of these kings were mostly what we call Tutanic names, but those who write the almost entirely hagiological records did not say and apparently did not ask whether the populations were in this sense of unmixed blood. It is at least possible that, as on the continent, the kings and courts were almost the only Tutanic element. The Christians found converts, they found patrons, they found persecutors, but they did not find ancient Britons because they did not look for them, and if they moved among pure Anglo-Saxons, they had not the gratification of knowing it. There was indeed what all history attests, a marked change of feeling toward the marches of the whales, but all history also attests that this is always found, apart from any difference in race, in the transition from the lowlands to the mountain country. But of all the things they found, the thing that counts most in English history is this, that some of the kingdoms at least did not correspond to genuine human divisions, which not only existed then, but which exist now. Northumbria is still a truer thing than Northumberland. Sussex is still Sussex, Essex is still Essex. And that third Saxon kingdom whose name is not even to be found upon the map, the Kingdom of Wessex, is called the West Country, and is today the most real of them all. The last of the heathen kingdoms to accept the cross was Mercia, which corresponds very roughly to what we call the Midlands. The unbaptized king, Penda, has even achieved a certain picturesqueness through this fact, and through the forays and furious ambitions which constitute the rest of his reputation. So much so that the other day one of those mystics who will believe anything but Christianity, proposed to continue the work of Penda in Ealing, fortunately not on any large scale. Both that prince believed or disbelieved is now impossible and perhaps unnecessary to discover. But this last stand of his central kingdom is not insignificant. The isolation of the Mercian was perhaps due to the fact that Christianity grew from the Eastern and Western coasts. The Eastern growth was, of course, the Augustinian mission, which had already made Canterbury the spiritual capital of the island. The Western grew from what was left of the British Christianity. The two clashed, but not in creed, but in customs, and the Augustinians ultimately prevailed. But the work from the West had already been enormous. It is possible that some prestige went with the procession of Glastonbury, which was like a piece of the Holy Land. But behind Glastonbury there was an even grander and more impressive power. They're irradiated to all Europe at that time, the glory of the Golden Age of Ireland. There the Celts were the classics of Christian art, opened in the Book of Kells four hundred years before its time. There the baptism of the whole people had been a spontaneous popular festival, which reads almost like a picnic. And thence came crowds of enthusiasts for the gospel, almost literally like men running with good news. This must be remembered through the development of that dark, dual destiny that has bound us to Ireland. For doubts have been thrown on a national unity, which was not from the first to political unity. But if Ireland was not once kingdom, it was in reality one bishopry. Ireland was not converted, but created by Christianity, as the stone church is created, and all its elements were gathered under a garment, under the genius of St. Patrick. It was the more individual because the religion was mere religion, without the secular conveniences. It was never Roman, and it was always Romanist. But indeed this is, in a lesser degree, true of our more immediate subject. It is the paradox of this time that only the unworldly things had any worldly success. The politics are a nightmare. The kings are unstable, and the kingdoms shifting, and we are really never on solid ground, except on consecrated ground. The material ambitions are not only always untruthful, but nearly always unfulfilled. The castles are all castles in the air. It is only the churches that are built on the ground. Divisionaries are the only practical men, as in that extraordinary thing, the monastery, which was in many ways to be the key of our history. The time was to come, when it was to be rooted out of our country with a curious and careful violence, and the modern English reader has therefore a very feeble idea of it, and hence of the ages in which it worked. Even in these pages, a word or two about its primary nature is therefore quite indispensable. In the tremendous testament of our religion, there are present certain ideals that seem wilder than impiates, which have in later times produced wild sex professing an almost inhuman perfection on certain points, as in the Quakers, who renounced the right of self-defense, or the communists who refuse any personal possessions, rightly or wrongly the Christian church had from the first dealt with these visions as being special spiritual adventures which were to the adventurous. She reconciled in the natural human life by calling them specially good, without admitting that the neglect of them was necessarily bad. She took the view that it takes all sorts to make a world, in the religious world, and used the man who chose to go without arms, family, or property as a sort of exception that proved the rule. Now the interesting fact is that he really did prove it. This mad man who would not mind his own business becomes the businessman of the age. The very word monk is a revolution, or it means solitude, and came to mean community, one might call it sociability. What happened was that this communal life became a sort of reserve and refuge behind the individual life, a hospital for every kind of hospitality. We shall see later how this same function of the common life was given to the common land. It is hard to find an image for it in individualist times, but in private life we, most of us, know the friend or the family who helps it by being outside, like a fairy godmother. It is not merely flippant to say that monks and nuns stood to mankind as a sort of sanctified league of aunts and uncles. It is a commonplace that they did everything that nobody else would do. That the abbeys kept the world's diary, faced the plagues of all flesh, taught the first technical arts, reserved the pagan literature, and above all, by perpetual patchwork of charity, kept the poor from the most distant sight of their modern despair. We still find it necessary to have a reserve of philanthropists, but we trust it to men who have made themselves rich, not to men who have made themselves poor. Finally the abbeys in the abbeys were elective. They introduced representative government, unknown to ancient democracy, and in itself a semi-sacramental idea. If we could look from the outside at our own institutions, we should see that the very notion of turning a thousand men into one large man walking to Westminster is not only an act of faith, but a fairy tale. The fruitful and effective history of Anglo-Saxon England would be almost entirely a history of its monasteries. Mile by mile, and almost man by man, they taught and enriched the land. And then, about the beginning of the ninth century, there came a return, as the twinkling of an eye, and it seemed that all their work was in vain. That outer world of universal anarchy that lay beyond Christendom heaved another of its colossal and almost cosmic waves, and swept everything away. Through all the eastern gates left open, as it were by the first barbarian auxiliaries, first a plague of seafaring savages from Denmark and Scandinavia, and the recently baptized barbarians were again flooded by the unbaptized. All this time it must be remembered the actual central mechanism of Roman government had been running down like a clock. It was really a race between the driving energy of the missionaries on the edges of the empire, and a galloping paralysis of the city at the center. In the ninth century, the heart had stopped before the hands could bring help to it. All the monastic civilization which had grown up in Britain under a vague Roman protection perished unprotected. The toy kingdoms of the quarreling Saxons were smashed like sticks. Guthram, the pirate chief, slew St. Edmund, assumed the crown of East England, took tribute from the Panic of Mircea, and towered in Minnesota over Wessex, the last of the Christian lands. The story that follows, page after page, is only the story of despair and its destruction. The story is a string of Christian defeats alternated with victory so vain as to be more desolate than defeats. It is only in one of these, the fine but fruitless victory at Ashton, that we first see in the dim struggle, in a desperate and secondary part, the figure who has given his title to the ultimate turning of the tide. For the victor was not then the king, but only the king's younger brother. There is from the first something humble and even accidental about Alfred. He was a great understudy. The interest of his early life lies in this, that he combined an almost commonplace coolness and readiness for the ceaseless small bargains and shifting combinations of all that period, with the flaming patience of saints in times of persecution. While he would dare anything for the faith, he would bargain in anything except the faith. He was a conqueror with no ambitions, an author only too glad to be a translator, a simple, concentrated, wary man watching the fortunes of one thing, which he piloted both boldly and cautiously, and which he saved at last. He had disappeared after what appeared to be the final heathen triumph and settlement, and is supposed to have lurked like an outlaw in a lonely island in the impenetrable marshlands of the parrot. Towards those wild western lands to which aboriginal races are held to have been driven by faith itself. But Alfred, as he himself, wrote in words that are his challenge to the period, held that a Christian man was unconcerned with faith. He began once more to draw to him the bows and spears of the broken levees of the western shires, especially the men of Somerset, and in the spring of 878 he flung them at the lines before the fence camp of the victorious Danes at Ethan Doom. His sudden assault was as successful as that at Ashdown, and it was followed by a siege which was successful in a different and very definite sense. Gothram, the conqueror of England, and all his important supports were here penned behind their palisades, and when at last they surrendered the Danish conquest had come to an end. Gothram was baptized, and the Treaty of Wedmore secured the clearance of Wessex. The modern reader will smile at the baptism and turn with great interest to the terms of the treaty. In this acute attitude the modern reader will be vitally and hopelessly wrong. He must support the tedium of frequent references to the religious element in this part of English history, for without it there never would have been any English history at all. And nothing could clinch this truth more than the case of the Danes. In all the facts that followed the baptism of Gothram is really much more important than the Treaty of Wedmore. The treaty itself was a compromise, and even as such did not endure. A century afterwards the Danish king like Canute was really ruling in England. But though the Danes got the crown, he did not get rid of the cross. It was precisely Alfred's religious exaction that remained unalterable, and Canute himself is actually now only remembered by men as a witness to the futility of merely pagan power, as the king who put his own crown upon the image of Christ and solemnly surrendered to Heaven the Scandinavian Empire of the sea. End of Chapter 4. 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 5. St. Edward and the Norman Kings. The reader may be surprised at the disproportionate importance given to the name which stands first in the title of this chapter. I put it there as the best way of emphasizing, at the beginning of what we may call the practical part of our history, an elusive and rather strange thing. It can only be described as the strength of the weak kings. It is sometimes valuable to have enough imagination to unlearn as well as to learn. I would ask the reader to forget his reading and everything that he learned at school and consider the English monarchy as it would then appear to him. Let him suppose that his acquaintance with the ancient kings has only come to him as he came to most men in simpler times, from nursery tales, from the names of places, from the dedications of churches and charities, from the tales in the taverns and the tombs in the church yard. Let us suppose such a person going upon some open and ordinary English way, such as the Thames Valley to Windsor, or visiting some old seats of culture such as Oxford or Cambridge. One of the first things, for instance, he would be eaten, a place transformed indeed by modern aristocracy, but still enjoying its medieval wealth and remembering its medieval origin. If he asked about that origin, it is probable that even a public schoolboy would know enough history to tell him that it was founded by Henry VI. If he went to Cambridge and looked with his own eyes for the College Chapel, which artistically towers above all others like the cathedral, he would probably ask about it and be told it was King's College. If he asked which king, he would again be told Henry VI. If he then went into the library and looked up Henry VI in encyclopedia, he would find that the legendary giant, who had left these gigantic works behind him, was in history and almost invisible pygmy. Amid the varying and contending numbers of a great national quarrel, he is the only cipher. The contending factions carry him about like a bale of goods. His desires do not seem to be even ascertained, far less satisfied, and yet his real desires are satisfied in stone and marble, in oak and gold, and remain through all the maddest revolutions of modern England, while all the ambitions of those who dictated to him have gone away like dust upon the wind. Edward the Confessor, like Henry VI, was not only an invalid, but almost an idiot. It is said that he was one like an albino, and that the awe man had of him was partly that which is felt for a monster of mental deficiency. His Christian charity was of the kind that borders on anarchism, and the stories about him recall the Christian fools in the great anarchic novels of Russia. Thus he is reported to have covered the retreat of a common thief upon the naked plea that the thief needed things more than he did. Such a story is in strange contrast to the claims made for other kings, that theft was impossible in their dominions. Yet the two types of king are afterwards praised by the same people, and the really arresting fact is that the incompetent king is praised the more highly of the two. And exactly, as in the case of the last Lancastrian, we find that the praise has really a very practical meaning in the long run. When we turn from the destructive to the constructive side of the Middle Ages, we find that the village idiot is the inspiration of cities and civic systems. We find his seal upon the sacred foundations of West Minister Abbey. We find the Norman victors in the hour of victory bowing before his very ghost. In the tapestry of Bayou woven by Norman hands, to justify the Norman cause and glorify the Norman triumph, nothing is claimed for the conqueror beyond his conquest and the plain personal tale that excuses it, and the story abruptly ends with the breaking of the Saxon line at battle. But over the beer of the decrepit Zaini, who died without striking a blow, over this and this alone is shown a hand coming out of heaven and declaring the true approval of the power that rules the world. The confessor, therefore, is a paradox in many ways, and in none more than in the false reputation of the English of that day. As I have indicated, there is some unreality in talking about the Anglo-Saxon at all. The Anglo-Saxon is a mythical and straddling giant who has presumably left one footprint in England and the other in Saxony. But there was a community, or rather group of communities living in Britain before the conquest under what we call Saxon names, and of a blood probably more Germanic and certainly less French than the same communities after the conquest. And they have a modern reputation, which is exactly the reverse of their real one. The value of the Anglo-Saxon is exaggerated, and yet his virtues are ignored. Our Anglo-Saxon blood is supposed to be the practical part of us, but as a fact, the Anglo-Saxons were more hopelessly unpractical than any count. Their racial influence is supposed to be healthy, or what many think the same thing heathen. But as a fact, these two tons were the mystics. The Anglo-Saxons did one thing and one thing only thoroughly well, as they were fitted to do it thoroughly well. They christened England. Indeed they christened it before it was born. The one thing the Angles obviously and certainly could not manage to do was to become English. But they did become Christians, and indeed showed a particular disposition to become monks. Monarchs, who talk vaguely of them as our hearty ancestors, never do justice to the real good they did us by thus opening our history as it were, with the fable of an age of innocence, and beginning all our chronicles as so many chronicles began with the golden initial of a saint. By becoming monks they served us in many very valuable and special capacities, but not notably, perhaps, in the capacity of ancestors. Along the northern coast of France, where the confessor had passed his early life, lay the lands of one of the most powerful of the French king's vassals, the Duke of Normandy. He and his people, who constitute one of the most picturesque and curious elements in European history, are confused for most of us by irrelevant controversies which would have been entirely unintelligible to them. The worst of these is the inane fiction which gives the name of Norman to the English aristocracy during its great period of the last three hundred years. Tennyson informed the lady of the name of Vier de Vier that simple faith was more valuable than Norman blood, but the historical student who can believe in Lady Clara as the possessor of the Norman blood must be himself a large possessor of the simple faith. As a matter of fact, as we shall see also when we come to the political scheme of the Normans, the notion is the negation of their real importance in history. The fashionable fancy misses what was best in the Normans, exactly as we have found it missing what was best in this accent. One does not know whether to thank the Normans more for appearing or for disappearing. Few philanthropists ever became so rapidly anonymous. It is the great glory of the Norman adventure that he threw himself hardly into his chance position and had faith not only in his comrades but in his subjects and even in his enemies. He was loyal to the kingdom he had not yet made. Thus the Norman Bruce becomes a Scott. Thus the descent of the Norman strongbow becomes an Irishman. No man less than Normans can be conceived as remaining as a superior caste until the present time. But this alien and adventurous loyalty in the Norman, which appears in these and other national histories, appears most strongly of all in the history we have here to follow. The Duke of Normandy does become a real king of England. His claim through the confessor, his election by the council, even his symbolic handfuls of the soil of Sussex, these are not altogether empty forms. It is very much nearer the truth to call William the first of the English than to call Harold the last of them. An indeterminate debate touching the dim races that mixed without record in that dim epic has made much of the fact that the Norman edges of France, like the East Anglian edges of England, were deeply penetrated by the Norse invasions of the 9th century, and that the ducal house of Normandy, with what other families we know not, can be traced back to a Scandinavian seed. The unquestionable power of captaincy and creative legislation which belonged to the Normans, whoever they were, may be connected reasonably well enough with some infusion of fresh blood. But if the racial theorists press the point to a comparison of races, it can obviously only be answered by a study of the two types in separation, and it must surely be manifest that more civilizing power has since been shown by the French when untouched by Scandinavian blood than by the Scandinavians when untouched by French blood. As much fighting and more ruling was done by the Crusaders who were never Vikings as by the Vikings who were never Crusaders. But in truth there is no need of such invidious analysis. We may willingly allow a real value to the Scandinavian contribution to the French as to the English nationality, so long as we firmly understand the ultimate historic fact that the duchy of Normandy was about as Scandinavian as the town of Norwich. But the debate has another danger in that it tends to exaggerate even the personal importance of the Norman. Many were his talents as a master. He is in history the servant of other and wider things, the landing of Len Frank, perhaps more of a date than the landing of William, and Len Frank was an Italian like Julius Caesar. The Norman is not in history a mere wall, the rather brutal boundary of a mere empire. The Norman is a gate. He is like one of those gates which still remain as he made them, with round arched, rude pattern and stout supporting columns, and what entered by that gate was civilization. William F.L.A.'s has in history a title much higher than that of Duke of Normandy or King of England. He was what Julius Caesar was and what St. Augustine was. He was the ambassador of Europe to Britain. William asserted that the confessor, in the course of that connection which followed naturally from his Norman education, had promised the English crown to the holder of the Norman dukedom. Whether he did or not, we shall probably never know. It is not intrinsically impossible or even improbable. To blame the promises unpatriotic, even if it was given, is to read duties defined at a much later date into the first feudal chaos. To make such blame positive and personal is like expecting the ancient Britons to sing Rue Britannia. William further clenched his case by declaring that Harrell, the principal Saxon noble and the most probable Saxon claimant, had, while enjoying the duke's hospitality after a shipwreck, sworn upon sacred relics not to dispute the duke's claim. About this episode also we must agree that we do not know, and we shall be quite out of touch with the time if we say that we do not care. The element of sacrilege in the alleged perjury of Harrell probably affected the Pope when he blessed a banner for William's army. But it did not affect the Pope much more than it would have affected the people, and Harrell's people quite as much as William's. Harrell's people presumably deny the fact, and their denial is probably the motive of the very marked and almost ear emphasis with which the bayou tapestry asserts and reasserts the reality of the personal betrayal. There is here a rather arresting fact to be noted. A great part of this celebrated pictorial record is not concerned at all with the well-known historical events which we have only to note rapidly here. It does indeed dwell a little on the death of Edward. It depicts the difficulties of William's enterprise in the felling of forests for the shipbuilding in the crossing of the Channel, and especially in the charge up the hill at Hastings, in which full justice is done to the destructive resistance of Harrell's army. But it was really after Duke William had disembarked and defeated Harrell on the Sussex Coast that he did what is historically worthy to be called the Conquest. It is not until these later operations that we have the note of the new and scientific militarism from the continent. Instead of marching upon London, he marched round it, and crossing the Thames at Wallingford, cut off the city from the rest of the country, and compelled its surrender. He had himself elected king with all the forms that would have accompanied a peaceful succession to the Confessor, and after a brief return to Normandy took up the work of war again to bring all England under his crown. Marching through the snow, he laid waste to the northern counties, seized Chester and Maid rather than one a kingdom. These things are the foundations of historical England, but of these things the pictures woven in honor of his house tell us nothing. The Bayou Tapestry may almost be said to stop before the Norman Conquest, but it tells in great detail the tale of some trivial raid into Brittany solely that Harold and William may appear as brothers-in-arms, and especially that William may be depicted in the very act of giving arms to Harold. And here again there is much more significance than a modern reader may fancy. In its bearing upon the new birth of that time and the ancient symbolism of arms, I have said that Duke William was a vassal of the King of France, and that phrase in its use and that abuse is the key to the secular side of this epic. William was indeed a most mutinous vassal, and the vein of such mutiny runs through his family fortunes. His son's Rufus and Henry I disturbed him with internal ambitions antagonistic to his own. But it would be a blunder to allow such personal broils to obscure the system which had indeed existed here before the Conquest, which clarified and confirmed it. That system we call feudalism. The feudalism was the main work of the Middle Ages is a common place of our fashionable information, but it is of the sort that seeks the past rather in Warder Street than in Watling Street. For that matter the very term medieval is used for almost anything from early English to early Victorian. An imminent socialist applied it to our armaments, which is like applying it to our airplanes. Similarly, the just description of feudalism and of how far it was apart and how far rather an impediment in the main medieval movement is confused by current debates about quite modern things, especially that modern thing, the English Squierarchy. Feudalism was very nearly the opposite of Squierarchy, for it is the whole point of the Squier that his ownership is absolute and is pacific, and it is the very definition of feudalism that it was a tenure, and a tenure by military service. Men paid their rent in steel instead of gold, in spears and arrows against the enemies of their landlord. But even these landlords were not landlords in the modern sense. Everyone was practically as well as theoretically a tenant of the king, and even he often fell into a feudal inferiority to a pope or an emperor. To call it mere tenure by soldiering may seem a simplification, but indeed it is precisely here that it was not so simple as it seems. It is precisely a certain knot or enigma in the nature of feudalism which makes half the struggle of European history, but especially English history. There was a certain unique type of state and culture which we call medieval, or want of a better word, which we see in the Gothic of the Great Schoolmen. This thing in itself was above all things logical. Its very cult of authority was a thing of reason, as all men who can reason themselves instantly recognize. Even if like Huxley they deny its premises or dislike its fruits. Being logical it was very exact about who had the authority. Now feudalism was not quite logical, and it was never quite exact about who had the authority. Feudalism already flourished before the medieval renaissance began. It was, if not the forest the medievalists had to clear, at least the root timber with which they had to build. Feudalism was a fighting growth of the Dark Ages before the Middle Ages, the age of barbarians resisted by semi-barbarians. I do not say this in disparagement of it. Feudalism was mostly a very human thing. The nearest contemporary name for it was homage, a word which omols means humanity. On the other hand, medieval logic never quite reconciled to it could become in its extremes inhuman. It was often mere prejudice that protected men in pure reason that burned them. The feudal units grew through the lively localism of the Dark Ages, when hills without roads shut in a valley like a garrison. Patriotism had to be parochial for men had no country but only a countryside. In such cases the Lord grew larger than the King, but it bred not only a local lordship but a kind of local liberty, and it would be very inadvisable to ignore the freer elements of feudalism in English history, for it is the one kind of freedom that the English had and held. The knot in the system was something like this. In theory the King owned everything, like an earthly province, and that made for despotism and divine right, which meant in substance a natural authority. In one aspect the King was simply the one Lord anointed by the church, that is recognized by the ethics of the age. But while there was more royalty in theory there could be more rebellion in practice. Fighting was much more equal than in our age of munitions, and the various groups could arm almost instantly with bows from the forest or spears from the smith. For men are military, there is no militarism, but it is more vital that while the King was in this sense one territorial army, the regiments of it were also kingdoms, the subunits were also subloyalties, hence the loyalist to his Lord might be a rebel to his King, or the King be a demagogue delivering him from the Lord. This tankle is responsible for the tragic passions about betrayal, as in the case of William and Harold, the alleged traitor who is always found to be recurrent yet always felt to be exceptional. To break the tie was at once easy and terrible, treason in the sense of rebellion was then really felt as treason in the sense of treachery, since it was desertion on a perpetual battlefield. Now there was even more of this civil war in English than in other history, and the more local and less logical energy on the whole prevailed. Whether there was something in those island idiosyncrasies, shapeless as sea mists with which this story began, or whether the Roman imprint had really been lighter than in Gaul, the feudal undergrowth prevented even a full attempt to build the civitous day or ideal medieval state. What emerged was a compromise which men long afterwards amused themselves by calling a constitution. There are paradoxes permissible for the redressing of a bad balance in criticism, and which may safely even be emphasized so long as they are not isolated. One of these I have called at the beginning of this chapter, the strength of the weak kings, and there is a complement of it even in this crisis of the Norman mastery which might well be called the weakness of the strong kings. William of Normany succeeded immediately. He did not quite succeed ultimately. There was, in his huge success a secret of failure, that only bore fruit long after his death. It was certainly his single aim to simplify England into a popular autocracy like that grown up in France. With that aim he scattered the feudal holdings in scraps, demanded a direct vow from the sub-vassals to himself, and used any tool against the barony from the highest culture of the foreign ecclesiastics to the rudest relics of Saxon customs. But the very parallel of France makes the paradox startlingly apparent. It is a proverb that the first French kings were puppets, that the mayor of the palace was quite insolently the king of the king. Yet it is certain that the puppet became an idol, a popular idol of unparalleled power before which all mayors and nobles bent or were broken. In France arose absolute government, the more because it was not precisely personal government. The king was already a thing like the Republic. Indeed, the medieval republics were rigid with divine right. In Norman England perhaps the government was too personal to be absolute. Anyhow, there is a real though recondite sense in which William the Conqueror was William the Conqueror. When his two sons were dead the whole country fell into a futile chaos almost like that before the conquest. In France the princes who had been slaves became something exceptional like priests, and one of them became a saint. But somehow our greatest kings were still barons, and by that very energy our barons became our kings. Chapter 6 The Age of the Crusades The last chapter began in an apparent irrelevance with the name of Saint Edward, and this one might very well begin with the name of Saint George. His first appearance, it is said, as a patron of our people, occurred at the instance of Richard Gourdillon during his campaign in Palestine, and this we shall see really stands for a new England which might well have a new saint. But the confessor is a character in English history, whereas Saint George, apart from his place in martyrology as a Roman soldier, can hardly be said to be a character in any history. And if we wish to understand the noblest and most neglected of human revolutions, we can hardly get closer to it than by considering this paradox of how much progress and enlightenment was represented by thus passing from a chronicle to a romance. In any intellectual corner of modernity can be found such a phrase as I have just read in a newspaper controversy. Quote, salvation, like other good things, must not come from outside. To call a spiritual thing external and not internal is the chief mode of modernist's excommunication. But if our subject of study is medieval and not modern, we must pit against this apparent platitude, the very opposite idea. We must put ourselves in the posture of man who thought that almost every good thing came from outside, like good news. I confess that I am not impartial in my sympathies here, and that the newspaper phrase I quoted strikes me as a blunder about the very nature of life. I do not in my private capacity believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb, nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul and denying its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. But this faith in receptiveness and in respect for things outside oneself need here do no more than help me in explaining what any version of this epic ought, in any case, to explain. In nothing is the modern German more modern or more mad than in his dream of finding a German name for everything, eating his language, or in other words, biting his tongue. And in nothing were the medievalists more free and sane than in their acceptance of names and emblems from outside their most beloved limits. The monastery would often not only take in the stranger, but almost canonize him. A mere adventurer, like Bruce, was enthroned and thanked as if he had really come as an iterant, and a passionately patriotic community more often than not had a foreigner for a patron saint. Thus crowds of saints were Irishmen, but St. Patrick was not an Irishman. Thus, as the English gradually became a nation, they left the numberless Saxon saints in a sense behind them, passed over by comparison not only the sanctity of Edward, but the solid fame of Alfred, and invoked a half-mythical hero striving in an eastern desert against an impossible monster. That transition and that symbol stand for the Crusades. In their romance and reality they were the first English experience of learning, not only from the external but the remote. England, like every Christian thing, had driven on outer things without shame, from the roads of Caesar to the churches of Land Frank. It had sought its meat from God. But now the eagles were on the wing, sending a more distant slaughter. They were seeking the strange things instead of receiving them. The English had stepped from acceptance to adventure, and the epic of their ships had begun. The scope of the great religious movement which swept England, along with all the West, would distend a book like this into huge disproportion. Yet it would be much better to do so than to dismiss it in the distant and frigid fashion common in such short summaries. The inadequacy of our insular method in popular history is perfectly shown in the treatment of Richard Cordeleon. His tale is told with the implication that his departure for the Crusade was something like the escapade of a schoolboy running away to sea. It was in this view a pardonable or lovable prank, whereas in truth it was more like a responsible Englishman now going to the front. Christendom was nearly one nation, and the front was the Holy Land. That Richard himself was of an adventurous and even romantic temper is true, though it is not unreasonably romantic for a born soldier to do the work he does best. But the point of the argument against insular history is particularly illustrated here by the absence of a continual comparison. In this case we have only to step across the Straits of Dover to find the fallacy. Philip Augustus, Richard's contemporary in France, had the name of a particularly cautious and coldly public-spirited statesman. Yet Philip Augustus went on the same crusade. The reason was, of course, that the Crusades were for all thoughtful Europeans things of the highest statesmanship and the purest public spirit. Some 600 years after Christianity sprang up in the east and swept westwards, another great faith arose in almost the same eastern lands and followed it like its gigantic shadow. Like a shadow it wasn't once a copy and a contrary. We call it Islam or the creed of the Muslims. And perhaps its most explanatory description is that it was the final flaming up of the accumulated Orientalisms, perhaps of the accumulated Hebraisms, gradually rejected as the Church grew more European or as Christianity turned into Christendom. Its highest motive was the hatred of idols, and in its view incarnation was itself an idolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idea of God being made flesh and of his being afterwards made wood or stone. A study of the question smoldering in the track of the prairie fire of the Christian conversion favors the suggestion that this fanaticism against art or mythology was at once a development and a reaction from that conversion, a sort of minority report of the Hebraists. In this sense Islam was something like Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul. The Greek iconoclasts had poured into Italy, breaking the popular statues and denouncing the idolatry of the Pope until routed in a style sufficiently symbolic by the sword of the father of Charlemagne. It was all these disappointed negations that took fire from the genius of Muhammad and launched out of the burning lands a cavalry charge that nearly conquered the world. If it be suggested that a note on such oriental origins is rather remote from the history of England, the answer is that this book may, alas, contain many digressions, but that this is not a digression. It is quite peculiarly necessary to keep in mind that this semi-to-God haunted Christianity like a ghost, to remember it in every European corner, but especially in our corner. If anyone doubts the necessity, let him take a walk to all the parish churches of England within a radius of thirty miles and ask why this stone virgin is headless or that colored glass is gone. He will soon learn that it was lately, and in his own lanes and homesteads, that the ecstasy of the desert returned, and his bleak northern island was filled with the fury of the iconoclasts. It was an element in this sublime and yet sinister simplicity of Islam that it knew no boundaries. Its very home was homeless, for it was born in a sandy waste among nomads, and it went everywhere because it came from nowhere. But in the serocens of the early Middle Ages, this nomadic quality in Islam was masked by a high civilization, more scientific, if less creatively artistic than that of contemporary Christendom. The Muslim monotheism was, or appeared to be, the more rationalist religion of the two. This ruthless refinement was characteristically advanced in abstract things, of which a memory remains in the very name of algebra. In comparison, the Christian civilization was still largely instinctive, but its instincts were very strong and very much the other way. It was full of local affections which found form in that system of fences which runs like a pattern throughout everything made of evil. From heraldry to the folding of land, there was shape and color to all their customs and statues, which can be seen in all their tabards and estatians. Something at once strict and gay. This is not a departure from the interest in external things, but rather a part of it. The very welcome they would often give to a stranger from beyond the wall was a recognition of the wall. Those who think their own life all sufficient do not see its limits as a wall, but as the end of the world. The Chinese called the white man a skybreaker. The medieval spirit loved its part in life as a part, not a whole. Its charter for it came from something else. There is a joke where upon the unlettered Franciscan triumphantly retorted Franciscus Franciscat. It is something of a parable of medieval history, for if there were a verb Franciscare it would be an approximate description of what St. Francis afterwards did. But that more individual mysticism was only approaching its birth, and Benedictus benedicat is very precisely the motto of the earliest medievalism. I mean that everything is blessed from beyond by something which has its turn been blessed from beyond again. Only the blessed bless. But the point which is the clue to the Crusades is this, that for them the beyond was not the infinite as in a modern religion. Every beyond was a place. The mystery of locality with all its hold on the human heart was as much present in the most ethereal things of Christendom as it was absent from the most practical things of Islam. England would derive a thing from France, France from Italy, Italy from Greece, Greece from Palestine, Palestine from Paradise. It was not merely that a yeoman of Kent would have his house hallowed by the priest of the parish church, which was confirmed by Canterbury, which was confirmed by Rome. Rome herself did not worship herself as in the pagan age. Rome herself looked eastward to the mysterious cradle of her creed, to a land which the very earth was called Holy, and when she looked eastward for it she saw the face of Mahoud. She saw standing in the palace that was her earthly heaven, a devouring giant out of the deserts to whom all places were the same. It has been necessary thus to pause upon the inner emotions of the Crusade, because the modern English reader is widely cut off from these particular feelings of his father's, and the real quarrel of Christendom and Islam, the fire baptism of the young nations, could not otherwise be seized in its unique character. It was nothing so simple as a quarrel between two men who both wanted Jerusalem. It was a much deadlier quarrel between one man who wanted it and another man who could not see why it was wanted. The Muslim, of course, had his own holy places, but he has never felt about them as Westerns can feel about a field or a roof tree. He thought of the holiness as holy, not of the places as places. The austerity which forbade him imagery, the wandering war that forbade him rest, shot him off from all that was breaking out and blossoming in our local patriotisms, just as it has given the Turks an empire without ever giving them a nation. The effect of this adventure against a mighty and mysterious enemy was simply enormous in the transformation of England, as of all the nations that were developing side by side with England. Firstly we learned enormously from what the Saracen did. Secondly we learned more enormously from what the Saracen did not do. During some of the good things which we lacked, we were fortunately able to follow him, but in all the good things which he lacked, we were confirmed like adamant to defy him. It may be said that Christians never knew how right they were till they went to war with Muslims. At once the most obvious and the most representative reaction was the reaction which produced the best of what we call Christian art, and especially those grotesques of gothic architecture, which are not only alive but kicking. The East as an environment, as an impersonal glamour, certainly stimulated the Western mind, but stimulated it, rather, to break the Muslim commandment than to keep it. It was as if the Christian were impelled like a caricaturist to cover all that faceless ornament with faces, to give heads to all those headless serpents and birds to all these lifeless trees. The statuary quickened and came to life under the veto of the enemy as under a benediction. The image, merely because it was called an idol, became not only an ensign, but a weapon. A hundredfold host of stones sprang up all over the shrines and streets of Europe. The Iconoclasts made more statues than they destroyed. The place of Kur De Leon in popular fable and gossip is far more like his place in true history than the place of the mere, de-nationalized ne'er-de-will, given him our utilitarian school books. Indeed the vulgar rumor is nearly always much nearer the historical truth than the educated opinion of today. For tradition is truer than fashion. King Richard, as the typical crusader, did make a momentous difference to England by gaining glory in the East, instead of devoting himself conscientiously to domestic politics in the exemplary manner of King John. The accident of his military genius and prestige gave England something which he kept for four hundred years, and without which it is incomprehensible throughout that period. The reputation of being in the very vanguard of chivalry. The great romances of the round table, the attachment of knighthood to the name of a British king, belong to this period. Richard was not only a knight, but a troubadour and a culture and courtesy were linked up with the idea of English valor. The medieval Englishman was even proud of being polite, which is at least no worse than being proud of money and bad manners, which is what many Englishmen in our later centuries have meant by their common sense. Chivalry might be called the baptism of feudalism. It was an attempt to bring the justice and even the logic of the Catholic creed into a military system which already existed, to turn its discipline into an initiation and its inequalities into a hierarchy. To the comparative grace of the new period belongs, of course, a considerable cultus of the dignity of woman to which the word chivalry is often narrowed or perhaps exalted. This also was a revolt against one of the worst gaps in the more polished civilization of the Syriacians. Muslims denied even souls to women, perhaps from the same instinct which recoiled from the sacred birth with its inevitable glorification of the mother, perhaps merely because having originally had tents rather than houses, they had had slaves rather than housewives. It is false to say that the chivalry guill of women was merely an effectation, except in the sense in which there must always be an effectation where there is an ideal. It is the worst sort of superficiality not to see the pressure of a general sentiment merely because it is always broken up by events. The crusade itself, for example, is more present and potent as a dream even than as a reality. From the first planned tangent to the last Lankestrian it haunts the minds of English kings, giving as a background to their battles a mirage of Palestine. So a devotion like that of Edward I to his queen was quite a real motive in the lives of multitudes of his contemporaries. When crowds of enlightened tourists, setting forth to sneer at the superstition of the continent, are taking tickets and labeling luggage at the large railway stations at the west end of the Strand, I do not know whether they all speak to their wives with a more flowing courtesy than their fathers in Edward's time, or whether they pause to meditate on the legend of a husband's sorrow to be found in the very name of Charing Cross. But it is a huge historical error to suppose that the crusades concerned only that crust of society for which heraldry was an art and chivalry an etiquette. The direct contrary is the fact. The first crusade especially was much more a unanimous popular rising than most that are called riots and revolutions. The guilds, the great democratic systems of the time, often owed their increasing power to corporate fighting for the cross. But I shall deal with such things later. Often it was not so much a levy of men as a trek of whole families, like new gypsies moving eastwards. And it has passed into a proverb that children by themselves often organized a crusade as they now organize a charade. But we shall best realize the fact by fan-saying every crusade as a children's crusade. They were full of all that the modern world worships in children because it has crushed it out of men. Their lives were full as the rudest remains of the vulgarest arts are full of something that we all saw out of the nursery window. It can best be seen later, for instance, in the lanced and lattice interiors of Memling. But it is ubiquitous in the older and more unconscious contemporary art, something that domesticated distant lands and made the horizon at home. They fitted into the corners of small houses the ends of the earth and the edges of the sky. Their perspective is rude and crazy, but it is perspective. It is not the decorative flatness of Orientalism. In a word, their world, like a child's, is full of foreshortening as of a shortcut to fairyland. Their maps are more provocative than pictures, their half-fabulous animals are monsters, and yet are pets. It is impossible to state verbally this very vivid atmosphere, but it was an atmosphere as well as an adventure. It was precisely these outlandish visions that truly came home to everybody. It was the royal councils and feudal quarrels that were comparatively remote. The Holy Land was much nearer to a plain man's house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearer than run and meet. To give a list of the English kings and parliaments without pausing for a moment upon this prodigious presence of a religious transfiguration in common life is something of the folly of which can but faintly be conveyed by a more modern parallel, with secularity and religion reversed. It is as if some clericalist or royalist writer should give a list of the Archbishop's of Paris from 1750 to 1850, noting how one died a smallpox, another of old age, another by a curious accident of decapitation, and throughout all his record should never once mention the nature, or even the name, of the French Revolution.