in great part, due to increased command over material nature through what we call “science.” He must see, contemporary with this, the rapid decay of Protestantism, its abandonment of theology and concentration upon taboos. Given then, in his mind, a clear notion of the extreme importance attributed by our society to power over material things, in which power it has so clearly surpassed all other known societies, and from this the resulting importance granted to the opinions of the masters of this “science” which has done such fine things (although morally, and therefore politically, such men may be, and often are, grossly ignorant and stupid); given further a true estimate of our warped Protestant morals now consisting principally of savage taboos, and such a man is able to estimate justly the “Prohibition” movement.
What, then, were the forces which led to the very similar “Inquisition” movement?
First of all, the time felt itself strong and confident. We are apt to think of the world in which the Inquisition was set up as feeble and crack-brained, shrouding itself in elaborately useless pageantry. But this is error, due partly to our pre-occupation with our own age, and with the Imperial Roman time which of all past ages most nearly resembles our own in high energy, strict government, frequent communication, positivist view of life and consequent lack of any defined general code of morals. In reality, most of the fantastic trappings belong to the later Middle Ages, the Middle Ages in their decline, and only because we do not see the stagnant “Dark Ages” clearly enough do we fail to grasp the height and suddenness of the mediæval rise. In the opening years of the thirteenth century, men rightly felt themselves to be a society growing and expanding (as we say in our contemporary jargon “progressing”) so rapidly on all sides that they must have been almost dizzy with a success so sudden and vast. Perhaps not even at the beginning of our own twentieth century did the slope just climbed seem so high, and so steep, and the future so full of the promise of continued ascent. For, as in the early years of the twentieth century, there was no sign that the expanding movement had reached its term. It was still going on, full of the promise of further achievement, and men hardly seemed to have the right to be anything but hopeful.
Although the twelfth century resembled the nineteenth in vastness of achievement, it differed from the nineteenth in the quality of that achievement, and in the nature of the forces which made it possible. Of course the vigour of human will is the prime mover in both cases. In the twelfth century men felt that their strength had been magnified not so much by new processes giving them an increased command over physical nature as by moral forces suddenly making them aware of unsuspected strength within themselves. I do not mean that the nineteenth century felt that it possessed no new elements of moral strength. It did. The ideas of the American and French Revolution thrilled it profoundly; to a lesser extent it was touched by a limited but nevertheless keen, new, sympathy with those very Middle Ages with which we are concerned. Nor do I mean that the Middle Ages enjoyed no greater power over material things than had been possessed by the simple and childlike Dark Ages immediately preceding them. I do say that in the twelfth century, as compared with the nineteenth, the sense of new power over physical nature played a lesser, and the confidence in new powers within man’s own nature played a correspondingly greater, part.
Two causes brought about this greater importance of the moral as compared with the physical factors of power. First, the twelfth century successes were, in all outward and secular things, no more than the partial reconquest of the Roman order which, after a fashion, men still remembered. Whereas the nineteenth century, instead of partly restoring that which had been, and had then been lost, conquered nature and barbarism in regions where such conquest had never been attempted. Hence the twelfth century in the full flush of its achievement was less subject to pride and the illusions which wait upon pride. Second, the moral (and intellectual) life of the twelfth century revolved about a single many-sided institution, the Church, which affected all departments of human life.
It is the task of this chapter to set the stage for the events which follow. The reader must have a notion of the slack and sunken age of Gerbert (the great Pope of the year 1000), secondly the vigorous fighting age of Hildebrand and the great Norman chiefs, of the First Crusade and the Song of Roland, that is, the later eleventh century. Next he must grasp the twelfth century itself, Abelard, the teaching of the Roman law at Bologna, the enrichment and refinement of life, chivalry, “feminism,” and the continuing quarrel of the central and all-pervasive Church with the developing civil governments. Finally, towards the end of the century, he must appreciate the beginnings of the Gothic, the rise of strong and turbulent towns and guilds, and the promise of the long and fruitful marriage of government with the idea of nationality.
There will be no space for anything more than the merest sketch—as if one should set himself to draw a cathedral with half a dozen strokes of the pen. The analysis must of necessity be slight. I shall try to make it just. Especially the influence of the Church must be grasped and also (a thing often missed in accounts of the time) the limitations of that influence.
Before entering upon such a task, I cannot refrain from warning my reader of the necessary limitations and imperfections of history.
The scantiness of record, the bias and the inherent imperfections of human testimony, the tendency of the striking and exceptional fact to get itself recorded and thereby destroy the average (to which I shall return in considering baronial and private wars and comparing them with our strikes); all these things make us see the past not outlined clearly but through a haze.
Finally, we must beware of trying to understand the past too well, when we cannot even understand the present. What evil spell is over the modern male to keep him in such ugly and often uncomfortable clothes? The pedants used to go about solemnly pretending to assay the most inward motives of the great of old time (who were better men than they, and could they come back to the sunlight to deal with these same pedants, would have soused and slimed them in the nearest duck-pond for their prying impudence). They went on doing this, I say, until about the year 1905, when Chesterton asked them whether they themselves put flowers on a dead man’s grave in the belief that their dead could smell.1 Since then they have been a little quieter.
And yet all this seems forgotten by most of the writers and practically all the readers of history. Never mind. When the wretched historians call on the name of “Science,” that modern Mumbo-jumbo idol before whom we are all expected to bow down, let us save our self-respect as honest men by thumbing our noses and wriggling our fingers at such silly superstitions. They are all of a piece with the venerable dotard of an idea that proclaims the Infallibility of the Press and makes people believe a thing “because they see it in print”—pah!
Let us thus absolve ourselves from the sin of pride. The Middle Ages began with the decline of Rome. That high and complex civilization (which, as I have said, with all its divergencies, corresponded with ourselves more than did that of any other past age) saw its great energies slacken. It fell asleep. Nowadays we hear less than formerly about vice as a symptom of that decline, and more recognition of the economic breakdown caused by the crushing of the middle class under a system of taxation such as our own time would call socialistic. At any rate, the process was extremely gradual. It was accompanied, more in the way of an effect than as a cause, by the slow sifting in of comparatively small numbers of barbarians, first into the professional army which was the sole military reliance of the Empire, and thence, when they had become dominant in that army, inevitably into political office. The manner and stages of this decline (fascinating subjects to which justice is only beginning to be done) do not concern this study. What is important is to seize the depth of degradation which was reached.
To judge how low Christendom had fallen, let us glance at the evidence as to three capital points: decrease of population, loss of the power to build, and the substitution of mere folly for judicial weighing of evidence in matters of law.
For the enormous decrease of population, with all that it implied, we may take the two towns of London and Paris. London had been one of the
