Part 1 (1/2)
Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period.
by Paul Lacroix.
Preface.
The several successive editions of ”The Arts of the Middle Ages and Period of the Renaissance” sufficiently testify to its appreciation by the public. The object of that work was to introduce the reader to a branch of learning to which access had hitherto appeared only permitted to the scientific. That attempt, which was a bold one, succeeded too well not to induce us to push our researches further. In fact, art alone cannot acquaint us entirely with an epoch. ”The arts, considered in their generality, are the true expressions of society. They tell us its tastes, its ideas, and its character.” We thus spoke in the preface to our first work, and we find nothing to modify in this opinion. Art must be the faithful expression of a society, since it represents it by its works as it has created them--undeniable witnesses of its spirit and manners for future generations. But it must be acknowledged that art is only the consequence of the ideas which it expresses; it is the fruit of civilisation, not its origin. To understand the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it is necessary to go back to the source of its art, and to know the life of our fathers; these are two inseparable things, which entwine one another, and become complete one by the other.
The Manners and Customs of the Middle Ages:--this subject is of the greatest interest, not only to the man of science, but to the man of the world also. In it, too, ”we retrace not only one single period, but two periods quite distinct one from the other.” In the first, the public and private customs offer a curious mixture of barbarism and civilisation. We find barbarian, Roman, and Christian customs and character in presence of each other, mixed up in the same society, and very often in the same individuals. Everywhere the most adverse and opposite tendencies display themselves. What an ardent struggle during that long period! and how full, too, of emotion is its picture! Society tends to reconst.i.tute itself in every aspect. She wants to create, so to say, from every side, property, authority, justice, &c., &c., in a word, everything which can establish the basis of public life; and this new order of things must be established by means of the elements supplied at once by the barbarian, Roman, and Christian world--a prodigious creation, the working of which occupied the whole of the Middle Ages. Hardly does modern society, civilised by Christianity, reach the fullness of its power, than it divides itself to follow different paths. Ancient art and literature resuscitates because custom _insensibly_ takes that direction. Under that influence, everything is modified both in private and public life. The history of the human race does not present a subject more vast or more interesting. It is a subject we have chosen to succeed our first book, and which will be followed by a similar study on the various aspects of Religious and Military Life.
This work, devoted to the vivid and faithful description of the Manners and Customs of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, answers fully to the requirements of contemporary times. We are, in fact, no longer content with the chronological narration and simple nomenclatures which formerly were considered sufficient for education. We no longer imagine that the history of our inst.i.tutions has less interest than that of our wars, nor that the annals of the humbler cla.s.ses are irrelevant to those of the privileged orders. We go further still. What is above all sought for in historical works nowadays is the physiognomy, the inmost character of past generations. ”How did our fathers live?” is a daily question. ”What inst.i.tutions had they? What were their political rights? Can you not place before us their pastimes, their hunting parties, their meals, and all sorts of scenes, sad or gay, which composed their home life? We should like to follow them in public and private occupations, and to know their manner of living hourly, as we know our own.”
In a high order of ideas, what great facts serve as a foundation to our history and that of the modern world! We have first royalty, which, weak and debased under the Merovingians, rises and establishes itself energetically under Pepin and Charlemagne, to degenerate under Louis le Debonnaire and Charles le Chauve. After having dared a second time to found the Empire of the Caesars, it quickly sees its sovereignty replaced by feudal rights, and all its rights usurped by the n.o.bles, and has to struggle for many centuries to recover its rights one by one.
Feudalism, evidently of Germanic origin, will also attract our attention, and we shall draw a rapid outline of this legislation, which, barbarian at the onset, becomes by degrees subject to the rules of moral progress. We shall ascertain that military service is the essence itself of the ”fief,”
and that thence springs feudal right. On our way we shall protest against civil wars, and shall welcome emanc.i.p.ation and the formation of the communes. Following the thousand details of the life of the people, we shall see the slave become serf, and the serf become peasant. We shall a.s.sist at the dispensation of justice by royalty and n.o.bility, at the solemn sittings of parliaments, and we shall see the complicated details of a strict ceremonial, which formed an integral part of the law, develop themselves before us. The counters of dealers, fairs and markets, manufactures, commerce, and industry, also merit our attention; we must search deeply into corporations of workmen and tradesmen, examining their statutes, and initiating ourselves into their business. Fas.h.i.+on and dress are also a manifestation of public and private customs; for that reason we must give them particular attention.
And to accomplish the work we have undertaken, we are lucky to have the conscientious studies of our old a.s.sociates in the great work of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to a.s.sist us: such as those of Emile Begin, Elzear Blaze, Depping, Benjamin Guerard, Le Roux de Lincy, H.
Martin, Mary-Lafon, Francisque Michel, A. Monteil, Rabutau, Ferdinand Sere, Horace de Viel-Castel, A. de la Villegille, Vallet de Viriville.
As in the volume of the Arts of the Middle Ages, engraving and chromo-lithography will come to our a.s.sistance by reproducing, by means of strict fac-similes, the rarest engravings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the most precious miniatures of the ma.n.u.scripts preserved in the princ.i.p.al libraries of France and Europe. Here again we have the aid of the eminent artist, M. Kellerhoven, who quite recently found means of reproducing with so much fidelity the gems of Italian painting.
Paul Lacroix (Bibliophile Jacob).
Manners, Customs, and Dress During the Middle Ages, and During the Renaissance Period.
Condition of Persons and Lands.
Disorganization of the West at the Beginning of the Middle Ages.--Mixture of Roman, Germanic, and Gallic Inst.i.tutions.--Fusion organized under Charlemagne.--Royal Authority.--Position of the Great Feudalists.--Division of the Territory and Prerogatives attached to Landed Possessions.--Freemen and Tenants.--The Laeti, the Colon, the Serf, and the Labourer, who may be called the Origin of the Modern Lower Cla.s.ses.--Formation of Communities.--Right of Mortmain.
The period known as the Middle Ages, says the learned Benjamin Guerard, is the produce of Pagan civilisation, of Germanic barbarism, and of Christianity. It began in 476, on the fall of Agustulus, and ended in 1453, at the taking of Constantinople by Mahomet II., and consequently the fall of two empires, that of the West and that of the East, marks its duration. Its first act, which was due to the Germans, was the destruction of political unity, and this was destined to be afterwards replaced by religions unity. Then we find a mult.i.tude of scattered and disorderly influences growing on the ruins of central power. The yoke of imperial dominion was broken by the barbarians; but the populace, far from acquiring liberty, fell to the lowest degrees of servitude. Instead of one despot, it found thousands of tyrants, and it was but slowly and with much trouble that it succeeded in freeing itself from feudalism. Nothing could be more strangely troubled than the West at the time of the dissolution of the Empire of the Caesars; nothing more diverse or more discordant than the interests, the inst.i.tutions, and the state of society, which were delivered to the Germans (Figs. 1 and 2). In fact, it would be impossible in the whole pages of history to find a society formed of more heterogeneous or incompatible elements. On the one side might be placed the Goths, Burgundians, Vandals, Germans, Franks, Saxons, and Lombards, nations, or more strictly hordes, accustomed to rough and successful warfare, and, on the other, the Romans, including those people who by long servitude to Roman dominion had become closely allied with their conquerors (Fig. 3). There were, on both sides, freemen, freedmen, colons, and slaves; different ranks and degrees being, however, observable both in freedom and servitude. This hierarchical principle applied itself even to the land, which was divided into freeholds, tributary lands, lands of the n.o.bility, and servile lands, thus const.i.tuting the freeholds, the benefices, the fiefs, and the tenures. It may be added that the customs, and to a certain degree the laws, varied according to the masters of the country, so that it can hardly be wondered at that everywhere diversity and inequality were to be found, and, as a consequence, that anarchy and confusion ruled supreme.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Figs. 1 and 2.--Costumes of the Franks from the Fourth to the Eighth Centuries, collected by H. de Vielcastel, from original Doc.u.ments in the great Libraries of Europe.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 3.--Costumes of Roman Soldiers. Fig. 4.--Costume of German Soldiers. From Miniatures on different Ma.n.u.scripts, from the Sixth to the Twelfth Centuries.]
The Germans (Fig. 4) had brought with them over the Rhine none of the heroic virtues attributed to them by Tacitus when he wrote their history, with the evident intention of making a satire on his countrymen. Amongst the degenerate Romans whom those ferocious Germans had subjugated, civilisation was reconst.i.tuted on the ruins of vices common in the early history of a new society by the adoption of a series of loose and dissolute habits, both by the conquerors and the conquered.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 5.--Costumes of Slaves or Serfs, from the Sixth to the Twelfth Centuries, collected by H. de Vielcastel, from original Doc.u.ments in the great Libraries of Europe.]
In fact, the conquerors contributed the worse share (Fig. 5); for, whilst exercising the low and debasing instincts of their former barbarism, they undertook the work of social reconstruction with a sort of natural and innate servitude. To them, liberty, the desire for which caused them to brave the greatest dangers, was simply the right of doing evil--of obeying their ardent thirst for plunder. Long ago, in the depths of their forests, they had adopted the curious inst.i.tution of va.s.salage. When they came to the West to create States, instead of reducing personal power, every step in their social edifice, from the top to the bottom, was made to depend on individual superiority. To bow to a superior was their first political principle; and on that principle feudalism was one day to find its base.
Servitude was in fact to be found in all conditions and ranks, equally in the palace of the sovereign as in the dwellings of his subjects. The va.s.sal who was waited on at his own table by a varlet, himself served at the table of his lord; the n.o.bles treated each other likewise, according to their rank; and all the exactions which each submitted to from his superiors, and required to be paid to him by those below him, were looked upon not as onerous duties, but as rights and honours. The sentiment of dignity and of personal independence, which has become, so to say, the soul of modern society, did not exist at all, or at least but very slightly, amongst the Germans. If we could doubt the fact, we have but to remember that these men, so proud, so indifferent to suffering or death, would often think little of staking their liberty in gambling, in the hope that if successful their gain might afford them the means of gratifying some brutal pa.s.sion.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 6.--King or Chief of Franks armed with the Seramasax, from a Miniature of the Ninth Century, drawn by H. de Vielcastel.]
When the Franks took root in Gaul, their dress and inst.i.tutions were adopted by the Roman society (Fig. 6). This had the most disastrous influence in every point of view, and it is easy to prove that civilisation did not emerge from this chaos until by degrees the Teutonic spirit disappeared from the world. As long as this spirit reigned, neither private nor public liberty existed. Individual patriotism only extended as far as the border of a man's family, and the nation became broken up into clans. Gaul soon found itself parcelled off into domains which were almost independent of one another. It was thus that Germanic genius became developed.