sake, as things that ought to be done.
While the townsman was setting up for a free citizen, the country serf was establishing himself as a practically free peasant. The arrangement grew up that so long as a given family of serfs kept up the payment of the lord’s dues for the land they tilled, members of that family might leave freely to become “guildsmen” (what we should call “union men”) in the towns, could enter the Church, or do what they pleased. A dissatisfied serf might run away to some town where his lord had no jurisdiction, so that lords had to make things easy for serfs. The great tradition of the eighteenth century, out of which our political morality came, makes the idea of feudal dues stink in our nostrils. Nevertheless, we must admit that the new status of the serf class represented substantial freedom. The unconscious, and therefore impregnable, evidence of contemporary literature proves beyond question that the countryman was now, in fact, free. The independent “villeins” of “Aucassin and Nicolette” or “Robin and Marion” are essentially the free French peasants of to-day.
Perhaps the sharpest apparent contrast with that which had been, was that thought, like the arts and crafts, came out of the monastery into the town. Anselm in his cloister had reasoned clearly as churchmen before him had not. The great scholar of the new time reached out, through the faith, as it were, to the metaphysical foundations of all knowledge. His name was Abelard; he “woke the great curiosity from its sleep of a thousand years . . .” (as Belloc says with a fine flourish), and his glory, his love, and his misfortunes have become a legend. Great as he was in himself, the picture of him as a lad of scarcely twenty, standing up in public to the greatest professor of his time and besting him in debate, is even greater as a parable. It would not be altogether true to say, as has been said, that with his generation scholarship became secularized, but it certainly became public. From top to bottom the faith (which the learned, to a man, continued to maintain) became matter for discussion and was expected to justify itself by rational demonstration. The student, although still at least in minor orders, ceased to be a monk, and roamed at will. He loved thought for its own sake, and grouped himself in communities that were already, in substance, universities.
I have said that the time was spontaneous, and in general that is true. The emergence of the serf as a practically free peasant came about quietly, of itself. Even the noisy communes troubled themselves little about the larger implications of their acts. But one man at least, Arnold of Brescia, a pupil (or at least a follower) of Abelard, brought the new learning to the support of the new municipalities. He broke with the Church, his success was short, and he soon went under; but such was his fame that after his execution his body was burned and the ashes thrown into the Tiber for fear that his bones might be cherished as relics, and certain heretics called themselves “Arnoldists” well into the next century.
So the time went on, everywhere making all things new, roads, buildings, philosophies; happy like a young god in creating, and, like God, seeing that its works were good. Its cities were growing fast. Even in Central Europe it was clearing the forests until their extent was reduced almost to what it is to-day.1 No new process to spin cloth, smelt steel, or make steam engines, had given it power over material nature. Its learned men were too deeply fascinated with looking into the meaning and end of our human life in God, to experiment in physics. Its material conquests were won by the leaping energy of its own vigorous will.
In the second half of the century appear new elements of artistic and intellectual power, the Gothic and the rediscovered works of Aristotle. In France, the great, new, idea of nationality began dimly to emerge. With the fall of Jerusalem to the Moslem, for the first time since the last ninth-century raids of the heathen Vikings, Christendom feels a great calamity.
The Gothic was altogether new, and was the creation of the new lay spirit of the time. It has been written a thousand times how the pointed arch solved structural difficulties, and gave to men intent upon height the opportunity of building still higher. Its broken line gave them also, as we shall see in a moment, a new expression of their own spirit. As yet, however, the change was only beginning, and buildings showed the broken arch mingled in fellowship with the round.
While the pointed arch was beginning to be seen in building, the texts of Aristotle were coming in from Spain. Abelard’s time had known of Aristotle only his Logic. But now scholars might read in Latin (translated from the Arabic) the Physics, the Metaphysics, and Ethics. Thus, these men, with their keen and active minds, were suddenly face to face with one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, intellect of all mankind. Upon the crowds of students full of discussion and debate, believing confidently that they could build themselves a tower of logic that would reach heaven, the effect was electric. For such men to have for their study Aristotle’s enormous range of thought, to feel his luminous common sense, was to give them more than their youth had dreamed, the discovery of a new world.
Meanwhile, behind the endless political squabbles, the vast idea of nationality could be seen just looming up, faint and dim, but enormous. It harked back to the dim, prehistoric forces that had wrought out the words “Gaul,” “Britain,” “Italy,” and “Spain.” Such words had never been represented by governments. They had stood always for ideas only. But in France, where ideas have power, a sort of underlying force in men’s minds was conjuring up, behind the king, the nation. This force acted through the Roman law which was illuminating the active intellect of the time, but the soul of it was a blind instinct.
This growing and vigorous time that had made and done so many new things, had forgotten what it was to feel a check, until, towards the end of the century, Saladin broke the Syrian Franks at Hattin, and took Jerusalem. The disaster did not seem hopeless. Christendom began forthwith to hum with preparation for a new crusade. Nevertheless, this first great experience of failure throws into high relief, as it were, the buoyancy of the time, and gives us, therefore, a point from which we may survey its accomplishment and seek to fix its spirit.
First of all, it is necessary to insist upon the straightforwardness, the downright directness of that spirit. It is true that the Courts of Love preached far-fetched doctrines, but they were a conscious revolt against grossness of manners, a sort of counter-excess. With this exception, the time nowhere attempted extravagance. The elaborate sculpture of its buildings is framed in structural lines that are firm and even severe. As vet the Gothic (which was to be the expression of the mediæval temper in its completeness and in its decline) gives only here and there a hint of its coming. Height is indeed attempted, but everywhere the general lines of the buildings remain square and solid. Wherever the architect has expressed his own thought in altering the inherited arrangement of the Roman column and arch, the change tends towards frankness and logic. Each part aims to express its function, whether structural or decorative, in relation to the whole. The classic forms begin to be rationalized so as to be not a façade but living parts of the structure; the column begins to be wedded to the arch. As in architecture, so in the other arts and handicrafts. In general, clothes were cut on simple and serviceable lines without hint of theatricality or excess, either fitting close to the body, or falling in simple and graceful folds. Arms, and especially armour, remained light and simple. In the second half of the century the cylindrical pot-helm, completely covering the face, came in and took the place of the open conical helmet with its nose-guard. Already before the new fashion in helmets had come in, the mail shirt had had its sleeves lengthened to the wrist, and now mittens and separate leg coverings of mail were in use also. But the heavy body armour of plate that was to encumber the warriors of later centuries was unknown. The horse-equipment, too, was simple, made for use and not for parade. In all things the time observed simplicity and, as it were, a natural and effortless logic in the outline of that which it made.
The seeming contradiction between the simplicity everywhere aimed at by the men of the twelfth century and the confusion of their society was the natural and inevitable result of the conditions which limited their action. They, with their keenness of mind, could almost remember ancestors who had been half barbarians. The material with which they had to work was painfully scanty. It was not only that the
