Volume I Part 9 (1/2)

[Sidenote: The University and Feudalism]

The story admirably ill.u.s.trates the real character of the new training, and the latent opposition between the spirit of the Universities and the spirit of the Church. The feudal and ecclesiastical order of the old mediaeval world were both alike threatened by this power that had so strangely sprung up in the midst of them. Feudalism rested on local isolation, on the severance of kingdom from kingdom and barony from barony, on the distinction of blood and race, on the supremacy of material or brute force, on an allegiance determined by accidents of place and social position. The University on the other hand was a protest against this isolation of man from man. The smallest school was European and not local. Not merely every province of France, but every people of Christendom had its place among the ”nations” of Paris or Padua. A common language, the Latin tongue, superseded within academical bounds the warring tongues of Europe. A common intellectual kins.h.i.+p and rivalry took the place of the petty strifes which parted province from province or realm from realm. What Church and Empire had both aimed at and both failed in, the knitting of Christian nations together into a vast commonwealth, the Universities for a time actually did. Dante felt himself as little a stranger in the ”Latin” quarter round Mont St.

Genevieve as under the arches of Bologna. Wandering Oxford scholars carried the writings of Wyclif to the libraries of Prague. In England the work of provincial fusion was less difficult or important than elsewhere, but even in England work had to be done. The feuds of Northerner and Southerner which so long disturbed the discipline of Oxford witnessed at any rate to the fact that Northerner and Southerner had at last been brought face to face in its streets. And here as elsewhere the spirit of national isolation was held in check by the larger comprehensiveness of the University. After the dissensions that threatened the prosperity of Paris in the thirteenth century, Norman and Gascon mingled with Englishmen in Oxford lecture-halls. Irish scholars were foremost in the fray with the legate. At a later time the rising of Owen Glyndwr found hundreds of Welshmen gathered round its teachers. And within this strangely mingled ma.s.s society and government rested on a purely democratic basis. Among Oxford scholars the son of the n.o.ble stood on precisely the same footing with the poorest mendicant. Wealth, physical strength, skill in arms, pride of ancestry and blood, the very grounds on which feudal society rested, went for nothing in the lecture-room. The University was a state absolutely self-governed, and whose citizens were admitted by a purely intellectual franchise. Knowledge made the ”master.”

To know more than one's fellows was a man's sole claim to be a regent or ”ruler” in the schools. And within this intellectual aristocracy all were equal. When the free commonwealth of the masters gathered in the aisles of St. Mary's all had an equal right to counsel, all had an equal vote in the final decision. Treasury and library were at their complete disposal.

It was their voice that named every officer, that proposed and sanctioned every statute. Even the Chancellor, their head, who had at first been an officer of the Bishop, became an elected officer of their own.

[Sidenote: The Universities and the Church]

If the democratic spirit of the Universities' threatened feudalism, their spirit of intellectual enquiry threatened the Church. To all outer seeming they were purely ecclesiastical bodies. The wide extension which mediaeval usage gave to the word ”orders” gathered the whole educated world within the pale of the clergy. Whatever might be their age or proficiency, scholar and teacher alike ranked as clerks, free from lay responsibilities or the control of civil tribunals, and amenable only to the rule of the Bishop and the sentence of his spiritual courts. This ecclesiastical character of the University appeared in that of its head.

The Chancellor, as we have seen, was at first no officer of the University itself, but of the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow it had sprung into life. At Oxford he was simply the local officer of the Bishop of Lincoln, within whose immense diocese the University was then situated. But this identification in outer form with the Church only rendered more conspicuous the difference of spirit between them. The sudden expansion of the field of education diminished the importance of those purely ecclesiastical and theological studies which had hitherto absorbed the whole intellectual energies of mankind. The revival of cla.s.sical literature, the rediscovery as it were of an older and a greater world, the contact with a larger, freer life whether in mind, in society, or in politics introduced a spirit of scepticism, of doubt, of denial into the realms of unquestioning belief. Abelard claimed for reason a supremacy over faith. Florentine poets discussed with a smile the immortality of the soul. Even to Dante, while he censures these, Virgil is as sacred as Jeremiah. The imperial ruler in whom the new culture took its most notable form, Frederick the Second, the ”World's Wonder” of his time, was regarded by half Europe as no better than an infidel. A faint revival of physical science, so long crushed as magic by the dominant ecclesiasticism, brought Christians into perilous contact with the Moslem and the Jew. The books of the Rabbis were no longer an accursed thing to Roger Bacon. The scholars of Cordova were no mere Paynim swine to Adelard of Bath. How slowly indeed and against what obstacles science won its way we know from the witness of Roger Bacon.

”Slowly,” he tells us, ”has any portion of the philosophy of Aristotle come into use among the Latins. His Natural Philosophy and his Metaphysics, with the Commentaries of Averroes and others, were translated in my time, and interdicted at Paris up to the year of grace 1237 because of their a.s.sertion of the eternity of the world and of time and because of the book of the divinations by dreams (which is the third book, De Somniis et Vigiliis) and because of many pa.s.sages erroneously translated. Even his logic was slowly received and lectured on. For St.

Edmund, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first in my time who read the Elements at Oxford. And I have seen Master Hugo, who first read the book of Posterior a.n.a.lytics, and I have seen his writing. So there were but few, considering the mult.i.tude of the Latins, who were of any account in the philosophy of Aristotle; nay, very few indeed, and scarcely any up to this year of grace 1292.”

[Sidenote: The Town]

If we pa.s.s from the English University to the English Town we see a progress as important and hardly less interesting. In their origin our boroughs were utterly unlike those of the rest of the western world. The cities of Italy and Provence had preserved the munic.i.p.al inst.i.tutions of their Roman past; the German towns had been founded by Henry the Fowler with the purpose of sheltering industry from the feudal oppression around them; the communes of Northern France sprang into existence in revolt against feudal outrage within their walls. But in England the tradition of Rome pa.s.sed utterly away, while feudal oppression was held fairly in check by the Crown. The English town therefore was in its beginning simply a piece of the general country, organized and governed precisely in the same manner as the towns.h.i.+ps around it. Its existence witnessed indeed to the need which men felt in those earlier times of mutual help and protection. The burh or borough was probably a more defensible place than the common village; it may have had a ditch or mound about it instead of the quickset-hedge or ”tun” from which the towns.h.i.+p took its name. But in itself it was simply a towns.h.i.+p or group of towns.h.i.+ps where men cl.u.s.tered whether for trade or defence more thickly than elsewhere.

The towns were different in the circ.u.mstances and date of their rise.

Some grew up in the fortified camps of the English invaders. Some dated from a later occupation of the sacked and desolate Roman towns. Some cl.u.s.tered round the country houses of king and ealdorman or the walls of church and monastery. Towns like Bristol were the direct result of trade.

There was the same variety in the mode in which the various town communities were formed. While the bulk of them grew by simple increase of population from towns.h.i.+p to town, larger boroughs such as York with its ”six s.h.i.+res” or London with its wards and sokes and franchises show how families and groups of settlers settled down side by side, and claimed as they coalesced, each for itself, its s.h.i.+re or share of the town-ground while jealously preserving its individual life within the town-community. But strange as these aggregations might be, the const.i.tution of the borough which resulted from them was simply that of the people at large. Whether we regard it as a towns.h.i.+p, or rather from its size as a hundred or collection of towns.h.i.+ps, the obligations of the dwellers within its bounds were those of the towns.h.i.+ps round, to keep fence and trench in good repair, to send a contingent to the fyrd, and a reeve and four men to the hundred court and s.h.i.+re court. As in other towns.h.i.+ps, land was a necessary accompaniment of freedom. The landless man who dwelled in a borough had no share in its corporate life; for purposes of government or property the town consisted simply of the landed proprietors within its bounds. The common lands which are still attached to many of our boroughs take us back to a time when each towns.h.i.+p lay within a ring or mark of open ground which served at once as boundary and pasture land. Each of the four wards of York had its common pasture; Oxford has still its own ”Port-meadow.”

[Sidenote: Towns and their lords]

The inner rule of the borough lay as in the towns.h.i.+ps about it in the hands of its own freemen, gathered in ”borough-moot” or ”portmanni-mote.”

But the social change brought about by the Danish wars, the legal requirement that each man should have a lord, affected the towns as it affected the rest of the country. Some pa.s.sed into the hands of great thegns near to them; the bulk became known as in the demesne of the king.

A new officer, the lord's or king's reeve, was a sign of this revolution.

It was the reeve who now summoned the borough-moot and administered justice in it; it was he who collected the lord's dues or annual rent of the town, and who exacted the services it owed to its lord. To modern eyes these services would imply almost complete subjection. When Leicester, for instance, pa.s.sed from the hands of the Conqueror into those of its Earls, its townsmen were bound to reap their lord's corn-crops, to grind at his mill, to redeem their strayed cattle from his pound. The great forest around was the Earl's, and it was only out of his grace that the little borough could drive its swine into the woods or pasture its cattle in the glades. The justice and government of a town lay wholly in its master's hands; he appointed its bailiffs, received the fines and forfeitures of his tenants, and the fees and tolls of their markets and fairs. But in fact when once these dues were paid and these services rendered the English townsman was practically free. His rights were as rigidly defined by custom as those of his lord. Property and person alike were secured against arbitrary seizure. He could demand a fair trial on any charge, and even if justice was administered by his master's reeve it was administered in the presence and with the a.s.sent of his fellow-townsmen. The bell which swung out from the town tower gathered the burgesses to a common meeting, where they could exercise rights of free speech and free deliberation on their own affairs. Their merchant-gild over its ale-feast regulated trade, distributed the sums due from the town among the different burgesses, looked to the due repairs of gate and wall, and acted in fact pretty much the same part as a town-council of to-day.

[Sidenote: The Merchant Gild]

The merchant-gild was the outcome of a tendency to closer a.s.sociation which found support in those principles of mutual aid and mutual restraint that lay at the base of our old inst.i.tutions. Gilds or clubs for religious, charitable, or social purposes were common throughout the country, and especially common in boroughs, where men cl.u.s.tered more thickly together. Each formed a sort of artificial family. An oath of mutual fidelity among its members was subst.i.tuted for the tie of blood, while the gild-feast, held once a month in the common hall, replaced the gathering of the kinsfolk round their family hearth. But within this new family the aim of the gild was to establish a mutual responsibility as close as that of the old. ”Let all share the same lot,” ran its law; ”if any misdo, let all bear it.” A member could look for aid from his gild-brothers in atoning for guilt incurred by mishap. He could call on them for a.s.sistance in case of violence or wrong. If falsely accused they appeared in court as his compurgators, if poor they supported, and when dead they buried him. On the other hand he was responsible to them, as they were to the State, for order and obedience to the laws. A wrong of brother against brother was also a wrong against the general body of the gild and was punished by fine or in the last resort by an expulsion which left the offender a ”lawless” man and an outcast. The one difference between these gilds in country and town was this, that in the latter case from their close local neighbourhood they tended inevitably to coalesce.

Under aethelstan the London gilds united into one for the purpose of carrying out more effectually their common aims, and at a later time we find the gilds of Berwick enacting ”that where many bodies are found side by side in one place they may become one, and have one will, and in the dealings of one with another have a strong and hearty love.” The process was probably a long and difficult one, for the brotherhoods naturally differed much in social rank, and even after the union was effected we see traces of the separate existence to a certain extent of some one or more of the wealthier or more aristocratic gilds. In London for instance the Cnighten-gild which seems to have stood at the head of its fellows retained for a long time its separate property, while its Alderman--as the chief officer of each gild was called--became the Alderman of the united gild of the whole city. In Canterbury we find a similar gild of Thanes from which the chief officers of the town seem commonly to have been selected. Imperfect however as the union might be, when once it was effected the town pa.s.sed from a mere collection of brotherhoods into a powerful community, far more effectually organized than in the loose organization of the towns.h.i.+p, and whose character was inevitably determined by the circ.u.mstances of its origin. In their beginnings our boroughs seem to have been mainly gatherings of persons engaged in agricultural pursuits; the first Dooms of London provide especially for the recovery of cattle belonging to the citizens. But as the increasing security of the country invited the farmer or the landowner to settle apart in his own fields, and the growth of estate and trade told on the towns themselves, the difference between town and country became more sharply defined. London of course took the lead in this new developement of civic life. Even in aethelstan's day every London merchant who had made three long voyages on his own account ranked as a Thegn. Its ”lithsmen,”

or s.h.i.+pmen's-gild, were of sufficient importance under Harthac.n.u.t to figure in the election of a king, and its princ.i.p.al street still tells of the rapid growth of trade in its name of ”Cheap-side” or the bargaining place. But at the Norman Conquest the commercial tendency had become universal. The name given to the united brotherhood in a borough is in almost every case no longer that of the ”town-gild,” but of the ”merchant-gild.”

[Sidenote: Emanc.i.p.ation of Towns]

This social change in the character of the townsmen produced important results in the character of their munic.i.p.al inst.i.tutions. In becoming a merchant-gild the body of citizens who formed the ”town” enlarged their powers of civic legislation by applying them to the control of their internal trade. It became their special business to obtain from the crown or from their lords wider commercial privileges, rights of coinage, grants of fairs, and exemption from tolls, while within the town itself they framed regulations as to the sale and quality of goods, the control of markets, and the recovery of debts. It was only by slow and difficult advances that each step in this securing of privilege was won. Still it went steadily on. Whenever we get a glimpse of the inner history of an English town we find the same peaceful revolution in progress, services disappearing through disuse or omission, while privileges and immunities are being purchased in hard cash. The lord of the town, whether he were king, baron, or abbot, was commonly thriftless or poor, and the capture of a n.o.ble, or the campaign of a sovereign, or the building of some new minster by a prior, brought about an appeal to the thrifty burghers, who were ready to fill again their master's treasury at the price of the strip of parchment which gave them freedom of trade, of justice, and of government. In the silent growth and elevation of the English people the boroughs thus led the way. Unnoticed and despised by prelate and n.o.ble they preserved or won back again the full tradition of Teutonic liberty.

The right of self-government, the right of free speech in free meeting, the right to equal justice at the hands of one's equals, were brought safely across ages of tyranny by the burghers and shopkeepers of the towns. In the quiet quaintly-named streets, in town-mead and market-place, in the lord's mill beside the stream, in the bell that swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote, in merchant-gild, and church-gild and craft-gild, lay the life of Englishmen who were doing more than knight and baron to make England what she is, the life of their home and their trade, of their st.u.r.dy battle with oppression, their steady, ceaseless struggle for right and freedom.

[Sidenote: London]

London stood first among English towns, and the privileges which its citizens won became precedents for the burghers of meaner boroughs. Even at the Conquest its power and wealth secured it a full recognition of all its ancient privileges from the Conqueror. In one way indeed it profited by the revolution which laid England at the feet of the stranger. One immediate result of William's success was an immigration into England from the Continent. A peaceful invasion of the Norman traders followed quick on the invasion of the Norman soldiery. Every Norman n.o.ble as he quartered himself upon English lands, every Norman abbot as he entered his English cloister, gathered French artists, French shopkeepers, French domestics about him. Round the Abbey of Battle which William founded on the site of his great victory ”Gilbert the Foreigner, Gilbert the Weaver, Benet the Steward, Hugh the Secretary, Baldwin the Tailor,” dwelt mixed with the English tenantry. But nowhere did these immigrants play so notable a part as in London. The Normans had had mercantile establishments in London as early as the reign of aethelred, if not of Eadgar. Such settlements however naturally formed nothing more than a trading colony like the colony of the ”Emperor's Men,” or Easterlings.

But with the Conquest their number greatly increased. ”Many of the citizens of Rouen and Caen pa.s.sed over thither, preferring to be dwellers in this city, inasmuch as it was fitter for their trading and better stored with the merchandise in which they were wont to traffic.” The status of these traders indeed had wholly changed. They could no longer be looked upon as strangers in cities which had pa.s.sed under the Norman rule. In some cases, as at Norwich, the French colony isolated itself in a separate French town, side by side with the English borough. But in London it seems to have taken at once the position of a governing cla.s.s.

Gilbert Beket, the father of the famous Archbishop, was believed in later days to have been one of the portreeves of London, the predecessors of its mayors; he held in Stephen's time a large property in houses within the walls, and a proof of his civic importance was preserved in the annual visit of each newly-elected chief magistrate to his tomb in a little chapel which he had founded in the churchyard of St. Paul's. Yet Gilbert was one of the Norman strangers who followed in the wake of the Conqueror; he was by birth a burgher of Rouen, as his wife was of a burgher family from Caen.

[Sidenote: Freedom of London]

It was partly to this infusion of foreign blood, partly no doubt to the long internal peace and order secured by the Norman rule, that London owed the wealth and importance to which it attained during the reign of Henry the First. The charter which Henry granted it became a model for lesser boroughs. The king yielded its citizens the right of justice; each townsman could claim to be tried by his fellow-townsmen in the town-court or hustings whose sessions took place every week. They were subject only to the old English trial by oath, and exempt from the trial by battle which the Normans introduced. Their trade was protected from toll or exaction over the length and breadth of the land. The king however still nominated in London as elsewhere the portreeve, or magistrate of the town, nor were the citizens as yet united together in a commune or corporation. But an imperfect civic organization existed in the ”wards”