social changes, had as yet found no formula that might approach a definition of its inmost spirit. That difficulty was met a generation later in the mid-thirteenth century, with Aquinas, St. Louis, and the culmination of the Gothic. The underlying trouble was that, even at their best, the Middle Ages had no sufficient accumulation either of knowledge or of material resources. For want of ordered and detailed knowledge, the complexity of problems could not be grasped, and for want of resources the material disasters of the fourteenth century were to be fatal to the mediæval experiment. As yet, about the year 1200, synthesis and such near approach to perfection as is permitted to man were in process of attainment. There was no muddle-headed modern illusion of the necessary goodness of change under the name of “progress.” It was because the new things that they had made were certainly good that men felt that they had reason to hope.
Our books over-emphasize the deficiencies of the Middle Ages as compared with ourselves. But it is true that they were unable to transform completely the unpromising material they had at hand.
Examples of their limitations could be catalogued without end, all springing from one or the other, or from both of these causes. Thus, in spite of the Roman law, the folly of the ordeal and the judicial combat went on. The new logic had by no means fully penetrated these populations full of their natural human stubbornness and perversity. Where a new town was built, the streets of it were as straight and regular as those of an American or South African city to-day. Viollet-le-Duc has assembled the evidence on this point, and it is conclusive. But most of their towns had come down to them from the Dark Ages as tangles of crooked streets, resulting from centuries of weak government, and hence of unpunished encroachment upon the public way. To-day, oppressed with regularity, many of us find such crooked streets charming. The point is that they seem nowhere to have tried to straighten out the lines of their old towns so as to make them conform to the straight streets of their new towns which must have been a truer expression of their taste. Paris was now a considerable town, and the King of France might, and did, wall it in and pave its streets. But to straighten them, even if he had had the money, he would have had no right, and seems never even to have had the idea, more than he would have had the idea of large scale water supply or of drainage. As with the streets of the towns, so with the roads that connected them. There was no thought-out system of communication such as Rome had had, or such as we have to-day. Nor did the traveller over the ill-kept roads enjoy regular and sufficient protection from the State. The insecurity was not due to “baronial war” between nobles. Usually such nobles would fight it out between themselves and their own immediate followers. Not any more than our own strikes (often accompanied with violence on a scale that would make a mediæval wonder whether the world was not coming to an end) was such disorder meant to be directed against the community as a whole. But to protect society against stray robbers or bands of robbers, government made no effort, any more than in our “wild west” before the coming of the sheriff. This lack of police protection seems to have been accepted as a matter of course, and no one seems to have tried to think it out and apply the remedy. Just so, when the later mediæval armies of the fourteenth century took the field they would sometimes wander about the theatre of war and meet one another by accident, solely from the want of any organized system of scouting to give the commander some notion of the enemies’ position and movements.
One must repeat that all such things were mere gaps, unfinished portions of the clearly outlined logical structure which the time was struggling to build as an expression of its own strong and eager spirit.
Unlike ourselves, the twelfth century possessed moral unity. Alone of all the great eras of growth and change, its movement was practically without reactionaries, because it was without destructive moral change. What a contrast to the Cæsarean-Augustan age, the Renaissance-Reformation period, the French Revolution, and to ourselves! Here and there a monkish grumble at the action of the new forces comes to our ears. The new forces themselves were by no means adjusted to one another. But in all the debates of the time no one looks back upon the past as Arcadia. For all their differences, the men of the twelfth century were agreed in pressing onward without regret.
This moral unity, with its unbroken hopefulness, was due to the corporate body of the Church, which was central in society and pervaded it. It is a commonplace that in the Church were united learning and education, the public care of the sick in hospitals, and all sorts of “organized charity” and poor relief, that the monastery served as a hotel for travellers and that such travellers as were not upon worldly business would almost certainly be pilgrims to the shrine of some saint. No man was too low for the Church’s pity or too high for her effective correction. Her doctrine of the equal worth of souls before God, together with the common observance of her worship, made strongly for friendliness and confidence between classes. Her universality, her cosmopolitan officialdom, and her use of Latin, made for understanding and community of feeling between localities. So she gave to the time, with its accepted division of mankind into classes and its poor communications, a greater measure of fraternity than we possess to-day with all our talk of “equality” and all our devices permitting men to meet or to speak together. This she did, not by any forced, mechanical scheme of union, but by her presentation of a body of teaching which all accepted, and by accepting bound themselves by a common discipline to be members one of another.
We can never fully know what was the spirit of the centuries in which the Church was the unquestioned central institution and pervaded all society. A man unable to travel and steep himself in the atmosphere in the old towns and countrysides (photographs at best give only unrelated bits of them) might best look long at fourteenth-century Italian paintings, or read over and over the first and one of the happiest of English comedies: “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” which is in so many school-books. Before the “Revolution” the traveller in Russia could feel what a country was like wherein men had never shattered their holy things, in which society reposed upon an unquestioned religion, and men felt, therefore, that the universe was friendly. Russia still is mediæval in that the Russian cannot feel as we do for suffering and is alternately fiendish and innocent—
“Half devil and half child . . .”
Even pre-revolutionary Russia was mediæval only in seeming, and in reality was rocking, fatally as the event has proved, under the action of the same forces that disturb our industrial societies with their exaltation of power, and their dangerous instability. But outwardly she still suggested to the traveller from Western Christendom something of what the world of our ancestors must have been.
The fact that the Church thought of her teaching as above all an answer to the riddle of human life, rather than as a bundle of “Thou shalt nots,” made her tolerant of many things. Because she was not so much a separate institution as a part of the atmosphere breathed daily by everybody, she had no fear. Thus she permitted the yearly mockery of her own services in the “feast of fools” when a sham priest, covered with an ass’s false head burlesqued the mass before the altar itself, to the accompaniment of general popular horseplay. So, also, she seems to have permitted a good deal of divorce, at least among the upper class, by means of “annulments.” Finally, when so many people were under vows of one kind or another, it was out of the question to expect that all vows would be strictly kept, and the language of the reformers from within the Church itself proves that in general she was easy-going. Some travellers to Latin America tell us that in those countries where there are few Protestants, the Roman Church is still easy-going, but whether they are swayed by religious opposition or whether they are true witnesses I do not know. At any rate, before the Council of Trent militarized her against Protestantism, the Church permitted many things. As in Russia, religious dress covered many saints and also many sinners, some gross and some refined.
I have said that, in general, the Church was unquestioned. Nevertheless, there were, necessarily, forces working against her teaching and her discipline, just as there must always, in any society, be forces of opposition working against the forces which control that society. When a time is slack, like the Dark Ages, both master forces and opposition forces will be torpid, and when a time is keen, like the twelfth-century time we are considering, both will be active. Accordingly we find the moral
