ART. V.-THE MIDDLE AGES IN ENGLAND.

Monumenta Gildhalle Londoniensis. Liber Albus. Edited for the Record Commission by H. T. Riley, M.A.

Monumenta Franciscana. R. Baconi Opera Minora. Edited for the Record Commission by the Rev. Professor Brewer.

Memoirs of Libraries. By Edward Edwards. London: Trübner and Co.

We know of no more curious fact in the annals of literature than the contrast between our knowledge of classical antiquity and our ignorance of the ages that lie between the ruins of the Roman Empire and the Reformation. Most educated men have a clear and vivid, if not an accurate, conception of the great epochs in Greek and Roman history. The epical struggle which ended at Salamis, the party-questions of the Athenian agora, the drama and the schools of thought, the architecture and the art of Greece, seem rather a part of our own experience than traditions of past time. It has been so through all centuries in which the sword of the barbarian left leisure to think and feel. To the medieval poet and philosopher, to Dante and Roger Bacon, Plato, Trajan, and Seneca are fellow-citizens in the great commonwealth of time: the prejudice of a different faith is overpowered by the greater points of union. Precisely this common interest appears to be wanting hitherto to the students of English history. Beyond some four or five hundred years they are content to see nothing but a few battle-pieces, and a world in which soldier and priest are the only actors. Between reaction and revival it has fared ill with our forefathers; they were neither centaurs nor monks: coarse violence and maudlin devotion were often found among them it is true, but were only side-scenes in the drama of actual life. The subtle structure of feudal law, the great metaphysical poem of realism, and the artistic ideal of action, chivalry, are all evidences of intense and earnest thought. Carent vate sacro, or rather the men of those times were careless of artistic excellence except when they wrought in stone. We are tempted to overrate their greatness when we judge them by the castles and churches which they sowed broadcast over the land; we fall below its fair measure when we judge them by the chronicles which second-rate men in a cloister have compiled. A single Herodotus or Tacitus would have shown that the Middle Ages were no chasm in history, but a splendid passage from the old world to the new.

The points of difference between the civilisation of Athens

or ancient Rome and of England under the Plantagenets must be clearly borne in mind by all who would wish to understand medieval history. Alcibiades and Cæsar may serve to point a contrast with St. Louis or Edward I. The Greek aimed at making life richer by extending the sphere of action and thought he founded colonies, made conquests, spread his fleets over the gean, or studied under the Sophists of his day, with the irrepressible energies of manhood struggling for growth. His religion was only a part of the system he had built up about himself. His splendid self-culture was pursued pitilessly, without a thought for its victims, and it left him hard and polished and supple as steel. Again, both Greece and Italy were centres of commerce; as traders no less than as conquerors the two nations traversed every highway and every sea. Very different were the influences of thought and geographical position under which the peoples of the Middle Ages were trained. Their great need was order, not intercourse; their great ideal concentration, not development. The seas swarmed with pirates, and the old Roman roads were broken up or ran through hostile states. The best thought of the age was inferior to that contained in Greek or Roman manuscripts; and travel, therefore, might seem to subserve fewer purposes than studious seclusion. But, above all, the Christian theory had borrowed the language of Eastern mysticism, or caught the tone of the effeminate subject peoples who first accepted it; and the body had come to be regarded, not as part of man's better nature, and the nursing-mother of the mind, but as the fomes peccati to be macerated and subdued. The intellectual cravings of the times tended therefore towards a sedentary contemplative form; the postulates of all truth had already been taken on trust from the Church and the old masters; the only question was to apply them, and to fill up the map of knowledge that had been already sketched. All this was in harmony with and reacted upon the political system of the time. The true meaning of the feudal system is the struggle after perpetuity and law. Perhaps the grand tragedy of the Roman Empire, the remembrance of which lasted even longer than its greatness, and the belief that the world itself was breaking up, induced men to draw the bonds of society closer, and invest civil relations with a sacramental character, that they might bind the world as it were to the feet of God. The mere political convenience of dealing with corporations or heads of families, instead of with individuals, in matters affecting the State was a further and a powerful motive. The result is beyond doubt. Not even the Roman father, with his power of life or death over his children, his right to dispose of their property, and his right to take up strangers

into the midst of them, was more absolute than the feudal lord, whose authority rested on no patriarchal fiction. Add to all this, that the Anglo-Norman who did not belong to some lord or some community was an outlaw; that the community to which he did belong, however innocent of his crimes, were responsible for them; that the feudal oath, in the casuistry of the times, outweighed the marriage oath, although marriage was a sacrament; and that all the links of the system were interdependent, so that none could be severed or drop,—and the tremendous comprehensiveness of the system will be understood. Never did man enter upon life under more stringent pledges to society than the English peasant who was born a royal subject, the member of a tithing, a feudal vassal, and the son of the Church.

Neither must it be supposed that even the least of these obligations could be easily shaken off. The network of a police system, compared with which Austrian passports and Aufenthalts-scheine are a flimsy cobweb, extended over the whole country. The fugitive from a village was like a runaway slave in the southern states of the Union; from the moment he stepped out of his tithing he could not be harboured for more than a night; he must enter and leave his host's house by daylight; and whenever the next county-court was held, once a year at least, he must evade the periodical visitation, by which the influx of new-comers was ascertained; if his presence were known to the men in power, he would be at once imprisoned and sent back to his lord. His best chance of escape was by taking refuge in a town. There, if he could only lurk undenounced for a year and a day, he was safe within the civic sanctuary and no longer a serf. But neither was he a freeman, at a time when libertas only meant privilege; he was the pariah of the streets; all around him were possessed of some franchise or members of some guild, occupying the quarters of trade, meeting in the town-hall, and insured by mutual contributions against poverty, fire, or the expenses of law. New-comers might struggle upwards into this class, but they did not naturally belong to it. They herded "in wooden sheds, rudely plastered or whitewashed, on the edge of the town-ditch:" in the eloquent language of Professor Brewer, "a mixed race, of whom little inquiry was made; tolerated, not acknowledged; of all blood, all diseases, and all religions; permitted to live or die as it pleased God or themselves,-provided only that they yielded due obedience to the proper civic authorities." Of course the measure of bondage differed at various epochs. As early as the fourteenth century the humane subtlety of English law, "a free father, a free son," had emancipated a numerous class; many had been freed by the foreign wars, and probably a still larger class had

been evicted, and therefore freed, as the trade in wool increased, that their holdings might be turned into pasture. But the legislators were not disposed to relax their hold upon labour. The famous statutes of labourers under Edward III. and Richard II. are singular instances of an attempt by the governing landowners to procure the peasant's work at their own price, at a time when he was no longer bound to them by any tie of dependence, and when he owed them neither protection nor support. Probably he gained on the whole, for he was free to change his residence, and might choose his masters at the statute fair; but he could not decline to offer himself for hire at the rate which the law had fixed.

Another notable feature in English life was the moral censorship exercised by local courts of law. The mere application of any system in its rigour is sufficiently grievous; and the first efficient organisation of justice under Edward I. kept the country in a state of suppressed rebellion; not so much because the judges were corrupt, though even that was true, but because small offences were punished with pitiless severity. As a song of the time complains, a respectable man might be ruined for chastising his apprentice with the hand. It will be remembered that the mob under Wat Tyler burned the Temple to the ground, and proposed the extermination of all lawyers as an article in the first people's charter. But the numerous Bishop's Courts were the ulcer that eat deepest into the land. Every offence against faith or morals had its penalty-the man who eat meat on a fast-day and the shameless debauchee alike fell under the archdeacon; and the zealous clergy, who wished to reform their flock, and the covetous, who, like Chaucer's Sompnour, thought that a man's soul was in his purse, were almost equally fatal to the poor. The revival of this system by Laud was probably one of the main causes of the Rebellion; and yet Laud's commissioners were men of sense and character. A court of inquisition administered by the immoral English clergy of the fourteenth century had wider power and was less restrained by opinion. Men said that a rich man might at any time be licensed by the consistory to part from his own wife and to take his neighbour's. Oppression drove the weak into secret vice or perjury, and the trade in crime sent out branches on every side.

It must not be supposed, however, that either State or Church were exceptionally bad; the fault lay in the ideas of the time. Those centuries which we are apt to consider lawless were really sinking under the burden of self-imposed laws; and the terrible words of Tacitus, corruptissimá republicá plurimæ leges, would serve, if inverted, for the best motto of the times.

A strong government was the great cry of the people, and the great ideal of the cities in their stern self-rule. Præcepta regis sunt nobis vincula legis, said a poet of the people; and generations of tradesmen, in their little way, built up such a fabric of restrictive despotisms in the towns as the world has never witnessed before or since. The Liber Albus, admirably edited by Mr. Riley, contains the principal regulations of trade in London. Those relating to the baking of bread will give an idea of the spirit of the general code. No bread might be brought into London from the country. There were public places for rolling flour; the loaves were marked when made with the baker's seal; and they might only be sold in the market, or by privileged hucksters. The oven was not to be heated with fern, straw, stubble, or reeds; fountain-water might not be used for kneading; the same man might not deal in bread of bolted and of unbolted meal; and no loaves might be made above a certain quality. The weight and price of every kind was fixed by law; inspectors visited the ovens from time to time to enforce the legal standard; and at last, as mere fines proved insufficient for the stringent jealousy of the laws, the sheriffs were ordered to punish all offenders with the pillory. For a third conviction the culprit lost the right to trade. These are merely samples of the minute and systematic network of enactments which made every man a public servant, and opened every house to the public gaze. Privacy in a wardmote was far less possible then than it is in the days of journalism; and a man lived in terrible dependence on the good-will of his neighbours. Little offences against trade or police might ruin him; the slight charge of having bathed in the Thames at a certain spot; the accident that a beggar-woman had died of hunger near his door; or the suspicion of having tampered with a fearfullybad coinage, might all cause him to stand his trial for life or death. In his trial there would be no nice sifting of evidence, no charge in favour of mercy from the bench; the extreme penalties of the law would be pressed against him; and the jury would only speak to his previous character. The surly, peevish, or unprotected man was crushed; money and friends were the sure means by which the strong man of those times broke through the meshes of legality.

Concentration, interdependence, solidity, a belief in systems and hierarchies as counterparts of a divine order, an assumption that human reason can devise the most efficient restraints upon passion and lawlessness, these are the chief features of the most artificial state-polity that has existed in the European family of nations. It is easy to trace the more prominent causes that coalesced in these results. We can if we choose derive the feudal