the victory was the work of king and people, barons, knights, burghers, and peasants of Ile-de-France, of Orleanness, of Picardy, of Normandy, of Champagne, and of Burgundy. And this union of different classes and different populations in a sentiment, a contest, and a triumph shared in common was a decisive step in the organization and unity of France. The victory of Bouvines marked the commencement of the time at which men might speak, and indeed did speak, by one single name, of the French. The nation in France and the kingship in France on that day rose out of and above the feudal system.
Philip Augustus was about the same time apprised of his son Louis’s success on the banks of the Loire. The incapacity and swaggering insolence of King John had made all his Poitevine allies disgusted with him; he had been obliged to abandon his attack upon the King of France in the provinces, and the insurrection, growing daily more serious, of the English barons and clergy for the purpose of obtaining Magna Charta was preparing for him other reverses. He had ceased to be a dangerous rival to Philip.
No period has had better reason than our own to know how successes and conquests can intoxicate warlike kings; but Philip, whose valor, on occasion, was second to none, had no actual inclination towards war or towards conquest for the sole pleasure of extending his dominion. “Liking better, according to his custom,” says William the Breton, “to conquer by peace than by war,” he hasted to put an end by treaties, truces, or contracts to his quarrels with King John, the Count of Flanders, and the principal lords made prisoners at Bouvines; discretion, in his case, was proof against the temptations of circumstances, or the promptings of passion, and he took care not to overtly compromise his power, his responsibility, and the honor of his name by enterprises which did not naturally come in his way, or which he considered without chances of success. Whilst still a youth, he had given, in 1191, a sure proof of that self-command which is so rare amongst ambitious princes by withdrawing from the crusade in which he had been engaged with Richard Coeur de Lion; and it was still more apparent in two great events at the latter end of his reign—the crusade against the Albigensians and his son Louis’s expedition in England, the crown of which had, in 1215, been offered to him by the barons at war with King John in defence of Magna Charta.
The organization of the kingdom, the nation, and the kingship in France was not the only great event and the only great achievement of that epoch. At the same time that this political movement was going on in the State, a religious and intellectual ferment was making head in the Church and in men’s minds. After the conquest of the Gauls by the Franks, the Christian clergy, sole depositaries of all lights to lighten their age, and sole possessors of any idea of opposing the conquerors with arguments other than those of brute force, or of employing towards the vanquished any instrument of subjection other than violence, became the connecting link between the nation of the conquerors and the nation of the conquered, and, in the name of one and the same divine law, enjoined obedience on the subjects, and, in the case of the masters, moderated the transports of power. But in the course of this active and salutary participation in the affairs of the world, the Christian clergy lost somewhat of their primitive and proper character; religion in their hands was a means of power as well as of civilization; and its principal members became rich, and frequently substituted material weapons for the spiritual authority which had originally been their only reliance. When they were in a condition to hold their own against powerful laymen, they frequently adopted the powerful laymen’s morals and shared their ignorance; and in the seventh and eighth centuries the barbarism which held the world in its clutches had made inroads upon the Church. Charlemagne essayed to resuscitate dying civilization, and sought amongst the clergy his chief means of success; he founded schools, filled them with students to whom promises of ecclesiastical preferments were held out as rewards of their merit, and, in fine, exerted himself with all his might to restore to the Christian Church her dignity and her influence. When Charlemagne was dead, nearly all his great achievements disappeared in the chaos which came after him; his schools alone survived and preserved certain centres of intellectual activity. When the feudal system had become established, and had introduced some rule into social relations, when the fate of mankind appeared no longer entirely left to the risks of force, intellect once more found some sort of employment, and once more assumed some sort of sway. Active and educated minds once more began to watch with some sort of independence the social facts before their eyes, to stigmatize vices and to seek for remedies. The spectacle afforded by their age could not fail to strike them. Society, after having made some few strides away from physical chaos, seemed in danger of falling into moral chaos; morals had sunk far below the laws, and religion was in deplorable contrast to morals. It was not laymen only who abandoned themselves with impunity to every excess of violence and licentiousness; scandals were frequent amongst the clergy themselves; bishoprics and other ecclesiastical benefices, publicly sold or left by will, passed down through families from father to son, and from husband to wife, and the possessions of the Church served for dowry to the daughters of bishops. Absolution was at a low quotation in the market, and redemption for sins of the greatest enormity cost scarcely the price of founding a church or a monastery. Horror-stricken at the sight of such corruption in the only things they at that time recognized as holy, men no longer knew where to find the rule of life or the safeguard of conscience. But it is the peculiar and glorious characteristic of Christianity that it is unable to bear for long, without making an effort to check them, the vices it has been unable to prevent, and that it always carries in its womb the vigorous germ of human regeneration. In the midst of their irregularities, the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the outbreak of a grand religious, moral, and intellectual fermentation, and it was the Church herself that had the honor and the power of taking the initiative in the reformation. Under the influence of Gregory VII. the rigor of the popes began to declare itself against the scandals of the episcopate, the traffic in ecclesiastical benefices, and the bad morals of the secular clergy. At the same time, austere men exerted themselves to rekindle the fervor of monastic life, re-established rigid rules in the cloister, and refilled the monasteries by their preaching and example. St. Robert of Moleme founded the order of Citeaux; St. Norbert that of Premontre; St. Bernard detached Clairvaux from Meaux, which he considered too worldly; St. Bruno built Chartreuse; St. Hugo, St. Gerard, and others besides gave the Abbey of Cluni its renown; and ecclesiastical reform extended everywhere. Hereupon rich and powerful laymen, filled with ardor for their faith or fear for their eternal welfare, went seeking after solitude, and devoted themselves to prayer in the monasteries they had founded or enriched with their wealth; whole families were dispersed amongst various religious houses; and all the severities of penance hardly sufficed to quiet imaginations scared at the perils of living in the world or at the vices of their age. And, at the same time, in addition to this outburst of piety, ignorance was decried and stigmatized as the source of the prevailing evils; the function of teaching was included amongst the duties of the religious estate; and every newly-founded or reformed monastery became a school in which pupils of all conditions were gratuitously instructed in the sciences known by the name of liberal arts. Bold spirits began to use the rights of individual thought in opposition to the authority of established doctrines; and others, without dreaming of opposing, strove at any rate to understand, which is the way to produce discussion. Activity and freedom of thought were receiving development at the same time that fervent faith and fervent piety were.
This great moral movement of humanity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries arose from events very different in different parts of the beautiful country which was not yet, but was from that time forward tending to become, France. Amongst these events, which cannot be here recounted in detail, we will fix upon two, which were the most striking, and the most productive of important consequences in the whole history of the epoch, the quarrel of Abelard with St. Bernard and the crusade against the Albigensians. We shall there see how Northern France and Southern France differed one from the other before the bloody crisis which was to unite them in one single name and one common destiny.
In France properly so called at that time, north of the Rhone and the Loire, the church had herself accomplished the chief part of the reforms which had become necessary. It was there that the most active and most eloquent of the reforming monks had appeared, had preached, and had founded or regenerated a great number of monasteries. It was there that, at first amongst the clergy, and then, through their example, amongst the laity, Christian discipline and morals had resumed some
