Chapter I: Before the Great Rebellion (1)

It is after the great Civil War that English political development becomes most directly instructive, because it is thenceforward that the modern political conditions begin to be directly traceable. Constitutional or parliamentary monarchy takes at that point a virtually new departure. But we shall be better prepared to follow the play of the forces of attraction and repulsion, union and strife, in the modern period, if we first realise how in the ages of feudal monarchy and personal monarchy, as the previous periods have been conveniently named, the same fundamental forces were at work in different channels. The further we follow these forces back the better we are prepared to conceive political movement in terms of naturalist as opposed to verbalist formulas. Above all things, we must get rid of the habit of explaining each phenomenon in terms of the abstraction of itself--as Puritanism by "the Puritan spirit," Christian civilisation by "Christianity," and English history by "the English character." We are to look for the causation of the Puritan spirit and English conduct and the religion of the hour in the interplay of general instincts and particular circumstances.

§ 1

At the very outset, the conventional views as to the bias of the "Anglo-Saxon race"[987] are seen on the least scrutiny to be excluded by the facts. Credited with an innate bent to seafaring, the early English are found to have virtually abandoned the sea after settling in England;[988] the new conditions altering the sea-going bent just as the older had made it, and continued to do in the case of the Scandinavians. Credited in the same fashion with a racial bias to commerce, they are found to have been uncommercial, unadventurous, home-staying; and it took centuries of continental influences to make them otherwise. Up to the fourteenth century "almost the whole of English trade was in the hands of aliens."[989] And of what trade the "free" Anglo-Saxons did conduct, the most important branch seems to have been the slave trade.[990] As to the mass of the population, whatever were their actual life-conditions--and as to this we have very little knowledge--they were certainly not the "free barbarians" of the old Teutonic legend. Unfree in some sense they mostly were; and all that we have seen of the early evolution of Greece and Rome goes to suggest that their status was essentially depressed. In the words of a close student, English economic history "begins with the serfdom of the masses of the rural population under Saxon rule--a serfdom from which it has taken a thousand years of English economic evolution to set them free."[991] This is perhaps an over-statement: serfdom suggests general predial slavery; and this cannot be shown to have existed. But those who repel the proposition seem to take no account of the _tendency_ towards popular depression in early settled communities.[992] If we stand by the terminology of Domesday Book, we are far indeed from the conception of a population of freemen.

That the mass of the "Saxon" English (who included many of
non-Saxon descent) were more or less "unfree" is a conclusion
repeatedly reached on different lines of research. Long ago, the
popular historian Sharon Turner wrote that "There can be no doubt
that nearly three-fourths of the Anglo-Saxon population were in a
state of slavery" (_History of the Anglo-Saxons_, 4th ed. 1823,
iii, 255); and he is here supported by his adversary Dunham
(_Europe during the Middle Ages_, Cab. Cyc. 1834, iii, 49-52).
J.M. Kemble later admitted that the "whole population in some
districts were unfree" (_The Saxons in England_, reprint, 1876, i,
189). Yet another careful student sums up that "at the time of the
Conquest we find the larger portion of the inhabitants of England
in a state of villenage" (J.F. Morgan, _England under the Normans_,
1858, p. 61). (The interesting question of the racial elements of
the population at and after the Conquest is fully discussed by the
Rev. Geoffrey Hill, _Some Consequences of the Norman Conquest_,
1904, ch. i.)

Later and closer research does but indicate gradations in the
status of the unfree--gradations which seem to have varied
arbitrarily in terms of local law. (On this, however, see Morgan,
p. 62.) The Domesday Book specifies multitudes of _villani_,
_servi_, _bordarii_ (or _cotarii_), as well as (occasionally) large
numbers of _sochmanni_, and _liberi homines_. In Cornwall there
were only six chief proprietors, with 1,738 _villani_, 2,441
_bordarii_, and 1,148 _servi_; in Devonshire, 8,246 _villani_,
4,814 _bordarii_, and 3,210 _servi_; in Gloucestershire, 3,071
_villani_, 1,701 _bordarii_, and 2,423 _servi_; while in
Lincolnshire there were 11,322 _sochmanni_, 7,168 _villani_, 3,737
_bordarii_; and in Norfolk 4,528 _villani_, 8,679 _bordarii_, 1,066
_servi_, 5,521 _sochmanni_, and 4,981 _liberi homines_. (Cp. Sharon
Turner, as cited, vol. iii, bk. viii, ch. 9.) Thus the largest
numbers of ostensible freemen are found in the lately settled
Danish districts, and the largest number of slaves where most of
the old British population survived (Ashley, _Economic History_,
1888, i, 17, 18; Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and
Commerce_, 1891, i, 88). "The eastern counties are the home of
liberty" (Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, p. 23). The main
totals are: _bordarii_, 82,119; _villani_, 108,407; _servi_,
25,156; that is, 215,000 heads of families, roughly speaking, all
of whom were more or less "unfree," out of an entire enumerated
male population of 300,000.

The constant tendency was to reduce all shades to one of _nativi_
or born villeins (Stubbs, _Constitutional History_, 4th ed. i,
465); that is to say, the number of absolute serfs tends to lessen,
their status being gradually improved, while higher grades tend to
be somewhat lowered. Prof. Vinogradoff's research, which aims at
correcting Mr. Seebohm's, does but disclose that villenage in
general had three aspects:--"Legal theory and political
disabilities would fain make it all but slavery; the manorial
system ensures it something of the character of the Roman
_colonatus_; there is a stock of freedom in it which speaks of
Saxon tradition" (_Villainage in England_, 1892, p. 137; cp.
Seebohm, as cited, p. 409; and Stubbs, § 132, i, 462-65). Even the
comparatively "free" socmen were tied to the land and were not
independent yeomen (Ashley, i, 19); and even "freedmen" were often
tied to a specified service by the act of manumission (Dunham, as
cited, iii, 51). As to Teutonic slavery in general, cp. C.-F.
Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, French tr. 1878, i, 41-44, and U.R.
Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume's ed. 1900, i, 116; as to France,
cp. Guizot, _Essais sur l'Histoire de France_, édit. 1847, pp.
162-72; _Histoire de la civilisation en France_, 13e édit. iii,
172, 190-203; and as to the Netherlands, see above, pp. 295-96.

There is a tendency on the one hand to exaggerate the significance of the data, as when we identify the lot of an ancient serf or villein with that of a negro in the United States of sixty years ago;[993] and on the other hand to forget, in familiarity with scholarly research, the inevitable moral bearing of all degrees of bondage. The _villanus_ "both is and is not a free man"; but the "not" is none the less morally significant: "though he may be _liber homo_, he is not _francus_";[994] and his name carries a slur. An immeasurable amount of moral history is conveyed in the simple fact that "slave" was always a term of abuse; that "villain" is just "villein"; that "caitiff" is just "captive"; and that "churl" is just "ceorl." So the "neif" (= _naïf_ = native) becomes the "knave";[995] the "scullion" the "blackguard"; and the homeless wanderer the "vagabond"; even as for the Roman "the guest," _hostis_, was "the enemy." The "rogue" has doubtless a similar descent, and "rogue and peasant-slave" in Tudor times, when slavery had ceased, stood for all things contemptible. Men degrade and impoverish their fellows, and out of the created fact of deprivation make their worst aspersions; never asking who or what it is that thus turns human beings into scullions, churls, blackguards, knaves, caitiffs, rogues, and villains. The Greeks knew that a man enslaved was a man demoralised; but saw in the knowledge no motive for change of social tactics. Still less did the Saxons; for their manumissions at the bidding of the priest were but penitential acts, in no way altering the general drift of things.

Green (_Short History_, ch. i, § 6, ed. 1881, pp. 54, 55), laying
stress on the manumissions, asserts that under Edgar "slavery was
gradually disappearing before the efforts of the Church." But this
is going far beyond the evidence. Green seems to have assumed that
the laws framed by Dunstan were efficacious; but they clearly were
not. (Cp. C. Edmond Maurice, _Tyler, Bale, and Oldcastle_, 1875,
pp. 14-18.) Kemble rightly notes--here going deeper than Prof.
Vinogradoff--that there was a constant process of new slave-making
(_Saxons_, i, 183-84; cp. Maitland, p. 31); and in particular
notes how "the honours and security of service became more
anxiously desired than a needy and unsafe freedom" (p. 184). There
is in short a law of worsenment in a crude polity as in an advanced
one. Green himself says of the slave class that it "sprang mainly
from debt or crime" (_The Making of England_, 1885, p. 192; cp.
_Short History_, p. 13). But debt and "crime" were always arising.
Compare his admissions in _The Conquest of England_, 2nd ed. pp.
444, 445. Elsewhere he admits that slaves were multiplied by the
mutual wars of the Saxons (p. 13); and Kemble, recognising "crime"
as an important factor, agrees (i, 186) with Eichhorn and Grimm in
seeing in war and conquest the "principal and original cause of
slavery in all its branches." A battle would make more slaves in a
day than were manumitted in a year. Some slaves indeed, as in the
Roman Empire, were able to buy their freedom (Maurice, as cited, p.
20, and refs.; Dunham, as cited, iii, 51); but there can have been
few such cases. (Cp. C.-F. Allen, _Histoire de Danemark_, French
tr. i, 41-44, as to the general tendencies of Teutonic slavery.)
The clergy for a time promoted enfranchisement, and even set an
example in order to widen their own basis of power; but as Green
later notes (ch. v, § 4, p. 239) the Church in the end promoted
"emancipation, as a work of piety, on all estates but its own."
Green further makes the vital admission that "the decrease of
slavery was more than compensated by the increasing degradation of
the bulk of the people.... Religion had told against political
independence"--for the Church played into the hands of the king.

During the Danish invasions, which involved heavy taxation
(_Danegeld_) to buy off the invaders, slavery increased and
worsened; and Cnut's repetition of the old laws against the foreign
slave trade can have availed little (Maurice, as cited, pp. 23-24).
Prof. Abdy, after recognising that before the Conquest English
liberties were disappearing like those of France (_Lectures on
Feudalism_, 1890, pp. 322, 326-27, 331), argues that, though the
tenure of the villein was servile, he in person was not bond (App.
p. 428). "Bond" is, of course, a term of degree, like others; but
if "not bond" means "freeman," the case will not stand. The sole
argument is that "had he been so [bond], it is difficult to
understand his admission into the conference [in the procedure of
the Domesday Survey] apparently on an equality with the other
members of the inquest." Now he was plainly not on an equality. The
inquest was to be made through the sheriff, the lord of the manor,
the parish priest, the reeve, the bailiff, and _six_ villeins out
of each hamlet (_Id._ p. 360). It is pretty clear that the villeins
were simply witnesses to check, if need were, the statements of
their superiors.

The weightiest argument against the darker view of Saxon serfdom is
the suggestion of the late Prof. Maitland (_Domesday Book_, p. 223)
that the process of technical subordination, broadly called
feudalism, was really a process of infusion of law and order. But
he confessedly made out no clear case, and historical analogy is
against him.

Finally, though under the Normans the Saxon slaves appear to have
gained as beside the middle grades of peasants (Morgan, _England
under the Normans_, p. 225; Ashley, i, 18), it is a plain error to
state that the Bristol slave-trade was suppressed under William by
"the preaching of Wulfstan, and the influence of Lanfranc" (Green,
_Short History_, p. 55; also in longer _History_, i, 127; so also
Bishop Stubbs, i, 463, _note_. The true view is put by Maurice, as
cited, p. 30). The historian incidentally reveals later (_Short
History_, ch. vii, § 8, p. 432, proceeding on Giraldus Cambrensis,
_Expugnatio Hiberniæ_, lib. i, c. 18) that "at the time of Henry
II's accession Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been
kidnapped and sold into slavery, in spite of Royal prohibitions and
the spiritual menaces of the English Church." (Cp. Hallam, _Middle
Ages_, iii, 316, _note_.) He admits, too (p. 55), that "a hundred
years later than Dunstan the wealth of English nobles was sometimes
said to spring from breeding slaves for the market." The "market"
was for concubines and prostitutes, as well as for labourers. (Cp.
Southey, _Book of the Church_, ed. 1824, i, 115, following William
of Malmesbury; and Hallam, as last cited.) Gibbon justifiably
infers (ch. 38, Bohn ed. iv, 227) that the children of the Roman
slave market of the days of Gregory the Great, _non Angli sed
angeli_, were sold into slavery by their parents. "From the first
to the last age," he holds, the Anglo-Saxons "persisted in this
unnatural practice." Cp. Maurice, as cited, pp. 4-5. Gregory
actually encouraged the traffic in English slaves after he became
Pope. (_Ep. to Candidus_, cited in pref. to Mrs. Elstoh's trans. of
the Anglo-Saxon Homily, p. xi.)

Thus, under Saxon, Danish, and Norman law alike, a slave trade
persisted for centuries. As regards the conditions of domestic
slavery, it seems clear that the Conquest lowered the status of the
half-free; but on the other hand "there was a great decrease in the
number of slaves in Essex between the years 1065 and 1085" (Morgan,
as cited, p. 225; cp. Maitland, p. 35).

In Saxondom, for centuries before the Conquest, "history" is made chiefly by the primitive forces of tribal and local animosity, the Northmen coming in to complicate the insoluble strifes of the earlier English, partly uniting these against them, dominating some, and getting ultimately absorbed in the population, but probably constituting for long an extra source of conflict in domestic politics. A broad difference of accent, as in the Scandinavian States down to our own day, is often a strain on fellowship. In any case, the Anglo-Saxons at the time of the Conquest, as always from the time of their own entry, showed themselves utterly devoid of the "gift of union" which has been ascribed to their "race," as to the Roman. No "Celts" were ever more hopelessly divided: the Battle of Hastings is the crowning proof.[996] And in the absence of leading and stimulus from a higher culture, so little progressive force is there in a group of struggling barbaric communities that there was only the scantiest political and other improvement in Saxon England during hundreds of years. When Alfred strove to build up a civilisation, he turned as a matter of course to the Franks.[997] The one civilising force was that of the slight contacts kept up with the Continent, perhaps the most important being the organisation of the Church. It was the Norman Conquest, bringing with it a multitude of new contacts, and an entrance of swarms of French and Flemish artificers and clerics, that decisively began the civilisation of England. The Teutonic basis, barbarous as it was, showed symptoms of degeneration rather than of development. In brief, France was mainly civilised through Italy; England was mainly civilised through France.

Bishop Stubbs, after admitting as much (§ 91, i, 269, 270) and
noting the Norman "genius for every branch of organisation,"
proceeds to say "that the Norman polity had very little substantial
organisation of its own, and that it was native energy that wrought
the subsequent transformation." His own pages supply the disproof.
See in particular as to the legislative and administrative activity
of Henry II, § 147, i, 530-33. As to the arrest or degeneration of
the Saxon civilisation, cp. § 79, i, 227, 228; Sharon Turner,
_History of England during the Middle Ages_, 2nd ed. i, 1, 73; H.W.
C. Davis, _England under the Normans and the Angevins_, 1905, p. 1;
Pearson, _History of England during the Early and Middle Ages_,
1867, i, 288, 308-12, 321, 343, 346, 347; Abdy, as cited above. Mr.
Pearson's testimony, it should be noted, is that of a partisan and
eulogist of the "race."

Gneist, after deciding that the number of the unfree population
"erscheint nicht übergross," admits that the dependent stratum of
the population must needs always increase, "as a result of the land
system. In time of war the class increased through the ruin of the
small holdings; in time of peace through the increase of the
landless members of families. The favourable effects of a new
acquisition through conquest and booty were a gain only to the
possessing class" (_Geschichte des englischen Self-Government_,
1863, p. 7). He concludes that "the social structure of the
Anglo-Saxons appears to be on the whole unchanging, advancing only
in the multiplication of the dependent classes." Among the symptoms
of degeneration may be noted the retirement of nearly thirty kings
and queens into convents or reclusion during the seventh and eighth
centuries. This was presumably a result of clerical management.

In Normandy itself, however, half a century before the Conquest, there had arisen a state of extreme tension between the peasantry and their lords; and a projected rising was crushed in germ with horrible cruelty.[998] William's enterprise thus stood for a pressure of need among his own subjects, as well as for an outburst of feudal ambition; and in making up his force he offered an opportunity of plunder to all classes in his own duchy, as well as to those of other provinces of France. Domesday Book, says one of its keenest students, "is a geld book"--a survey made to facilitate taxation on the lines of the old Danegeld.[999] William was repeating a Roman process. His invasion, therefore, hardly represented the full play of the existing forces of civilisation. These, indeed, had to be renewed again and again in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the conditions of the Conquest were important for the direction of English political evolution. Its first social and psychological effect was to set up new class relations, and in particular a marked division between aristocracy and people, who spoke different languages. This involved a relation of distrust and close class union. When the people's speech began to compete with that of their masters, and the nobles separately began to be on good terms with their people, there would arise wide possibilities of strife as between neighbouring nobles and their retainers; and in Scotland the weakness of the crown long gave this free play. But in England, especially after the period of anarchy under Stephen, when the early baronage was much weakened and many estates were redivided,[1000] the strength of the crown, rooted in military custom and constantly securing itself, tended to unite the nobles as a class for their own aggrandisement and protection. King after king, therefore, sought the support of the people[1001] against the baronage, as the baronage sought their help against the king; while the Church fought for its own share of power and privilege.

The history of Christendom, indeed, cannot be understood save in the light of the fact that the Church, a continuous corporation owning much property as such, is as it were a State within the State,[1002] representing a special source of strife, although its non-military character limits the danger. What the Church has repeatedly done is to throw in its lot with king or nobles, or with the democracy (as in Switzerland and Protestant Scotland), according as its economic interests dictate. The famous case of Becket, transformed from the king's friend into the king's antagonist, is the most dramatic instance of the Church's necessary tendency to fight for its own hand and to act as an independent community. And it is in large part to the check and counter-check of a church, crown, and baronage, all jealously standing on their rights as against each other, that the rise of English constitutionalism is to be traced; the baronage and the Church, further, being withheld from preponderance by the strifes arising within their own pale. For even the Church, unified at once by its principle, its celibacy, its self-interest, and the pressure of outside forces, exhibits in its own sections, from time to time, the law of strife among competing interests.[1003]

The mere strife of interests, however, could not evolve civilisation in such a polity without a constant grafting-on of actual civilising elements from that southern world in which the ancient seeds were again flowering. Mere mixing of Norman with Saxon blood, one Teutonic branch with another, could avail nothing in itself beyond setting up a useful variability of type; and the element of French handicraft and culture introduced in the wake of the Conquest, though not inconsiderable,[1004] could ill survive such a pandemonium as the reign of Stephen. Like Henry I, Stephen depended on the English element as against the baronage; but the struggle brought civilisation lower than it had been since the Conquest. With the accession of Henry II (1154) came a new influx of French culture and French speech,[1005] albeit without any departure from the monarchic policy of evoking the common people as against the nobles. Thenceforward for over a hundred years the administrative methods and the culture are French, down to the erection of a French-speaking Parliament by the southern Frenchman Simon de Montfort. The assumption that some inherent "Teutonic" faculty for self-government shaped the process is one of the superstitions of racial and national vanity.

Dr. C.H. Pearson's reiteration of the old "race" dogma (_History of
England during the Early and Middle Ages_, i, 277) is its
sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_. In the English manner, he
connects with old _Welsh_ usages of revenge the late _Irish_
tradition of "lynch law" that has been "transplanted to
_America_"--as if it were Irishmen who are to-day lynching negroes
in the southern States. He explains in the same way "the contrast
of French progress by revolutionary movements with the slow,
constitutional, onward march of English liberty." On his own
showing there was not progress, but deterioration, as regards
liberty among the Saxons; and the later history of the English
common people is largely one of their efforts to make revolutions.
In France the revolutions were rather fewer. In Denmark and
Germany, again, there was long relapse and then revolution. For the
rest, Mr. Pearson has contrasted Welsh usage of the _sixth_ century
with Saxon usage of the _eleventh_, this while admitting the
lateness of the latter development (pp. 275, 276). We should
require only to go back to the blood-feud stage in Teutondom to
prove the ineradicable tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon to the
_Faustrecht_, which in Germany survived till the sixteenth century,
and to the fisticuffs which occurred in 1895 in the English
Parliament. The reasoning would be on a par with Mr. Pearson's.

Mr. J.H. Round's way of taking it for granted (_The Commune of
London_, 1899, pp. 138-40) that a tendency to strife is permanently
and "truly Hibernian," belongs to the same order of thought.
Irishmen are represented as abnormal in inability to unite against
a common foe, when just such disunion was shown through whole
centuries in Saxondom and in Scandinavia and in Germany; and they
are further described as peculiar in leaving their commerce in
foreign hands, when such was the notorious practice of the
Anglo-Saxons.

One of the most remarkable reversions to the racial way of
reasoning is made by Mr. H.W. C. Davis in his _England under the
Normans and Angevins_ (1905). After setting out with the avowal
that the Anglo-Saxons at the Conquest were "decadent," he reaches
(p. 223) the conclusion that the Teutonic races "climb, slowly and
painfully it is true, but with a steady and continued progress,
from stage to stage of civilisation," while the Celtic, "after
soaring at the first flight to a comparatively elevated point, are
inclined to be content with their achievement, and are ... passed
by their more deliberate competitors." How a Teutonic race, given
these premises, could be "decadent," and be surpassed and finally
uplifted by a "Latin civilisation" (_id._ p. 2), the theorist does
not attempt to explain.

To no virtue in Norman or English character, then,[1006] but to the political circumstances, was it due that there grew up in island England, instead of an all-powerful feudal nobility and a mainly depressed peasantry, as in continental France, a certain balance of classes, in which the king's policy against the nobility restrained and feudally weakened them, and favoured the burghers and yeomen, making sub-tenants king's liegemen; while on the other hand the combination of barons and Church against the king restrained him.[1007] A tyrant king is better for the people than the tyranny of nobles; and the destruction of feudal castles by regal jealousy restrains baronial brigandage. Regal prestige counts for something as against baronial self-assertion; but aristocratic self-esteem also rests itself, as against a reckless king, on popular sympathy. On the other hand, the town corporations, originating in popular interests, became in turn close oligarchies.[1008] Even the class tyranny of the trade gilds, self-regarding corporations in their way,[1009] looking to their own interests and indifferent to those of the outside grades beneath them,[1010] could provide a foothold for the barons in the town mobs, whom the barons could patronise.[1011] What was done by the Parliaments of Edward III to allow free entrance to foreign merchants was by way of furthering the interests of the aristocracy, who wanted to deal with such merchants, as against the English traders who wished to exclude them. Yet again, the yeomanry and burghers, fostered by the royal policy, develop an important military force, which has its own prestige.

Nothing can hinder, however, that foreign wars shall in the end aggrandise the upper as against the lower classes, developing as they do the relation of subjection, increasing the specifically military upper class, and setting up the spirit of force as against the spirit of law. In particular, the king's power is always aggrandised when nobility and people alike are led by him to foreign war.[1012] Edward III, indeed, had to make many legislative concessions to the Commons in order to procure supplies for his wars; and the expansion of commerce in his reign,[1013] furthered by the large influx of Flemish artisans[1014] encouraged by him,[1015] strengthened the middle classes; but all the while the "lower orders" had the worst of it; and the jealousy between traders and artisans, already vigorous in the reign of John, could not be extinguished. And when, after nearly eighty years without a great external war, Edward I invaded Scotland, there began a military epoch in which, while national unity was promoted, the depressed class was necessarily enlarged, as it had been before the Conquest during the Danish wars;[1016] and the poor went to the wall. Instinct made people and baronage alike loth at first to support the king in wars of foreign aggression; but when once the temper was developed throughout the nation, as against France, the spirit of national union helped the growth of class superiority by leaving it comparatively unchecked. In the period between the Conquest and Edward I the free population had actually increased, partly by French and Flemish immigration in the train of the Conquest; partly by Norman manumissions; partly through the arrivals of Flemish weavers exiled by domestic war;[1017] partly by the new growth of towns under Norman influence; partly by reason of the development of the wool export trade, which flourished in virtue of the law and order at length established under the Angevin kings, and so stimulated other industry. But from the beginning of the epoch of systematic national war the increase was checked; and save for the period of betterment consequent on the destruction of population by the Black Death, the condition of the peasantry substantially worsened.[1018] Frenchmen were struck by the number of serfs they saw in southern England as compared with France, and by the stress of their servitude.[1019]

An apparently important offset to the general restriction of freedom is the beginning of a representative parliamentary system under the auspices of Simon de Montfort (1265). It is still customary to make this departure a ground for national self-felicitation, though our later historians are as a rule content to state the historical facts, without inferring any special credit to the "Anglo-Saxon race."[1020] As a matter of fact, Simon de Montfort's Parliament was the application by a naturalised Frenchman, under stress of the struggle between his party in the baronage and the king, of an expedient set up a generation before by the Emperor Frederick II in Sicily, and a century before in Spain. There, and not in England, arose the first Parliaments in which sat together barons, prelates, and representatives of cities. Simon de Montfort, son of the leader of the crusade against the Albigenses, may well have known of the practice of Spain, where in the twelfth century the householders in the cities elected their members. But he must at least have been familiar with the details of the system set up in Sicily, to which English attention had been specially called by the effort of Henry III to obtain the Sicilian crown for his son Edmund; and Simon imitated that system in England, not on any exalted principle of justice, but because the smallness of his support among the barons forced him to make the most of the burgher class, who had stood by him in the struggle. He may even, indeed, have taken his idea proximately from the practice of the rebels in Normandy before the Conquest, when deputies from all the districts met in general assembly and bound themselves by a mutual oath.[1021] Thus accidentally[1022] introduced, under a French name,[1023] the representative system is one more of the civilising factors which England owed to Southern Europe; and, as it was, baronage and burgesses alike failed to maintain Simon against the power of the crown, the monarchic superstition availing to divide even the malcontents, as had previously happened after the granting of Magna Carta by King John.

Reiterated claims had secured in the eighteenth century the general
acceptance of the view that England "set the example" of admitting
cities to representation in national diets (so Koch, _Histor. View
of the European Nations_, Crichton's tr. 3rd ed. p. 46). But as to
the priority of the institution in Spain, see U.R. Burke, _History
of Spain_, Hume's ed. i, 370; and Prescott, _Hist. of the Reign of
Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk's ed. 1889, p. 10 and refs. As to its
existence in Sicily (_circa_ 1232), see Milman, _Hist. of Latin
Christianity_, vi, 154, proceeding on Gregorio, _Considerazioni
sopra la Storia di Sicilia_, 1805 (ed. 2a, 1831-39, vol. ii, cap.
v); and Von Raumer, _Geschichte der Hohenstaufen_ (Aufg. 1857-58,
B. vii, Haupt. 6, Bd. iii, p. 249). Cp. Von Reumont, _The Carafas
of Maddaloni_, Eng. tr. 1854, p. 61, and refs. Frederick's
assemblies, too, were called _Parlamente_. He in turn had, of
course, been influenced by the practice, if not of Spain, at least
of the Italian cities, which he wished his own to rival.

As to Simon's object in summoning burgesses, Hallam admits (_Europe
during the Middle Ages_, ed. 1855, iii, 27) that it "was merely to
strengthen his own faction, which prevailed among the commonalty,"
though the step was too congruous with general developments not to
be followed up. Compare the admissions of Green, pp. 151-53;
Stubbs, ii, 96, 103; and the remark of Adam Smith (_Wealth of
Nations_, bk. iii, ch. iii) that the representation of burghs in
the states-general of _all_ the great European monarchies
originated spontaneously in the desire of the kings for support
against the barons. Freeman's statement (_General Sketch of
European History_, p. 184) that under Simon we find "the whole
English nation, nobles, clergy, and people, acting firmly together"
against the king, is quite erroneous. Cp. Gneist, _Geschichte des
Self-government in England_, 1863, p. 143. Dr. Gardiner (_Student's
History_, p. 245), speaking of the presence of city burgesses and
knights of the shire in the same Parliament under Edward III,
writes that "in no other country in Europe would this have been
possible." He seems to have been entirely unaware of the Spanish
practice.

As the roots of the temper of equality are weakened, the relative prestige of the king is heightened,[1024] provided that in a turbulent age he is strong enough for his functions; though, again, he runs new risks when, in peace, he is weak enough to make favourites, and thus sets up a source of jealousy in the act of surrendering some of his own special prestige. Then he doubles the force against him. History has generally represented favourites as unworthy; but there is no need that they should be so in order to be detested; and whether we take Gaveston, or Buckingham, or Bute, we shall always find that the animosity of the favourite's assailants is so visibly excessive as to imply the inspiration of primordial envy quite as much as resentment of bad government. Whether it is noble denouncing favoured noble or Pym impeaching the Duke, there is always the note of primary animal jealousy.

§ 2

A very obvious and familiar general law, here to be noted afresh, is that the constant and extensive employment of energy in war retards civilisation, by leaving so much less for intellectual work. Some sociologists have arrived at the optimistic half-truths that (1) warfare yields good in the form of chivalry, and that (2) great wars like the Crusades promote civilisation by setting up communication between peoples. But it is not asked whether the good involved in chivalry could not conceivably have been attained without the warfare, and whether (as before noted) there could not have been commerce between East and West without the Crusades.[1025] The ancient Phoenicians had contrived as much in their day. Even the expansion of Italian commerce which followed on the Crusades went on the lines of a trade already in existence, as is proved once for all by the mere numbers of the vessels supplied to the crusaders by the Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians;[1026] and inasmuch as these republics fought furiously for the monopoly, each grabbing for special privileges,[1027] till Genoa overthrew Pisa, the total expansion must have been small, and the political disintegration great.

Nor was it on the whole otherwise with the spirit of chivalry, of which Guizot[1028] gives such an attractive picture. It was with the Church-made code of chivalrous morals as with the Church's code of Christian virtue: the ideal and practice were far asunder. As a matter of fact, the rules of chivalry were in part but the rules of prize-fighters,[1029] without which the game could not continuously be played; and they in no way affected the relations of the prize-fighters with other classes, or even their moral relations with each other save in the matter of fighting. To the "common herd" they were not only brutal but base,[1030] recognising no moral obligations in that direction. So too the Crusades represent a maximum of strife yielding a minimum of intercourse, which (save for the spirit of religious hate which wrought the strife) could have been attained in peace in tenfold degree by the play of the energy spent in preliminary bloodshed.

It is, of course, idle to speak as if the age of warfare might have been different if somebody had anachronistically pointed out the possibilities; but it is worse than idle, on the other hand, to impute a laudable virtue to its impulses because other impulses followed on them. The task of the sociological historian is first to trace sequences, and then to reason from them to the problems of his own age, where most are praise and blame profitable exercises. The lesson of early English history is neither that chivalry is good nor that the feudal knights and kings were ruffians; but that certain things happened to retard civilisation because these had their way, and that similar results would tend to accrue if their ideals got uppermost among us now. Thus we have to note that during the long period of frequent dynastic and other civil war from the Conquest to the reign of Henry II there was almost no intellectual advance in England, the only traceable gain arising when the king was fighting abroad with his foreign forces. There was no such cause at stake as thrilled into fierce song the desperately battling Welsh; and though in the reign of Edward III we have the great poetic florescence of which Chaucer is the crown, the inspiration of that literature had come from or through France; and with the depression of France there came the Nemesis of depression in English culture.

The triumph of Edward over France was, broadly speaking, a result of financial rascality, inasmuch as he succeeded by means of the money which he had borrowed from the Florentine bankers, and which he never repaid.[1031] He was thus well equipped and financed when the French were not; and he was able to buy off the princes of the Empire on the north and east of the French frontier. But though the enterprise thus begun was continued by means of a home revenue raised mainly on the wool trade, the English attempt to dominate France ended in the inevitable way of imperialism, the humiliation of the victors duly following on the misery and humiliation of the vanquished. Only the depopulation of the Black Death prevented extreme misery among the English population; and the conquering king ends his life, as William had done before him, in isolation and ignominy.

It may or may not have been a gain that Edward's victories over France practically determined the adoption of the middle-class, gallicised English speech[1032] by the upper classes, who had hitherto been French-speaking, like the kings themselves. An Anglicising process, such as had been interrupted at the advent of Henry II, had set in when Normandy was lost (1204), to be again interrupted on the accession of Henry III, and resumed in the civil wars of his reign. But Edward I habitually spoke French, and so did his nobles. They had hitherto looked with true aristocratic scorn on the pretensions of the bourgeoisie--"_rustici Londonienses qui se barones vocant ad nauseam_," in the fashion satirised in all ages, down to our own; but in their new relation of hostility and superiority to Normandy and to France, they insensibly adopted the language that had been framed by that very bourgeoisie out of Saxon, and French and French idioms translated into Saxon.

Cp. Pearson, _Fourteenth Century_, pp. 222, 233. Prof. Earle's
quasi-theory of the cause of the recovery of the native tongue
(_Philology of the English Tongue_, 3rd ed. pp. 44, 66) is purely
fanciful. In the end, as he admits, it was not any native dialect,
but the artificial composite "King's English," much modified by
French, that survived. It is noteworthy that many locutions which
pass in the Bible for specially pure archaic English, as "fourscore
and ten," are simply translations of a French idiom, itself ancient
Celtic translated into Romance. (Cp. the _Introduction to the Study
of the History of Language_, by Strong, Logeman, and Wheeler, 1891,
p. 393.)

The Rev. W. Denton, in his learned and instructive survey of the
subject (_England in the Fifteenth Century_, 1888, pp. 1-7),
remarks that "from some cause, now difficult to trace, great
encouragement was given to French in the reign of Henry III.
Probably the foreign tastes and partialities of the king had
something to do with this" (p. 4). They certainly had. As soon as
he could wield power, "hordes of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were
at once summoned over to occupy the royal castles and fill the
judicial and administrative posts about the Court" (Green, _Short
Hist_., ch. iii, § 5, p. 140), as had happened before under Henry
II. Mr. Denton rightly notes (p. 6) how "in the reign of Henry III
the descendants of Norman barons, and the sons of Anglo-Norman
fathers, were proud of the name of Englishmen, and took up arms
against the king's Norman and Angevin favourites, whom they
despised as foreigners." This is the true line of causation. There
is doubtless something in the theory that the general resort to the
use of English in the schools was a result of the Black Death--the
majority of the clergy being destroyed and the new teachers being
unable to instruct in French (Gasquet, _The Great Pestilence_,
1893, p. 202); but there were certainly other causes involved. Mr.
de Montmorency (_State Intervention in English Education_, 1902,
pp. 19-23) develops Gasquet's argument with much force, noting
further that many of the foreign priests who survived forsook their
charges. It might be added that the native peasantry necessarily
counted for more in a social as in an economic sense, after the
great fall in their numbers. But the fact that the Death came in
the period of the successful French wars of Edward III is clearly
of capital importance. But for the moral reaction from these wars,
the tendency would have been to procure new relays of French
priests.

It is indeed conceivable that, but for hostilities with France,
French would have steadily gained ground through literature,
depressing and discrediting the vernacular. On this view it was the
continuance of resistance by the Welsh that probably prevented the
absorption of the Saxon speech by that of the conquered British;
and it is similarly arguable that it was the relation of hostility
between the Carlovingian Franks and the more easterly Germans that
determined the supremacy of the Romance speech in French. The point
is worth psychological investigation.

Though, however, Chaucer's own new-English work is part of the result, the intellectual gain stops there for the time being. No nation, from Rome to Napoleonic France, ever helped its own higher culture by destroying other States.[1033] The French wars of Henry V were not less injurious to English civilisation[1034] than the desperate civil wars which followed them, when English medieval culture reached, relatively to the rest of Europe, its lowest point.[1035] And these wars, it is always important to remember, were the result of the young king's acting on the doctrine (doubtfully ascribed to his father, but in any case all too easily acquired by kings) that whereas peace gave headway to domestic sedition, foreign war unified the mass of the people and fixed them to their leader. The shameless aggression on France did so unify them for the moment, as imperialism among an unmoralised public may always be trusted to do; and it left them more demoralised and divided than ever, in due sequence. In all likelihood it was the new bribe of foreign plunder that first drew men away from Lollardism, considered as an outcome of economic discontent, thus preparing the collapse of the movement on its moral side.[1036] One man's egoism could thus sway the whole nation's evolution for evil,[1037] setting up for it the ideal which haloed him, and which survived him in virtue of the accident that the Nemesis of his course fell upon his successors rather than on him.

§ 3

In the matter of plebeian subjection, the second half of the fourteenth century supplies the proof of the tendency of the period of war. The great gain to the serfs in that period was the result of the depopulation caused by the Black Death (1348-50)--a relation of cause and effect which is still ignored by some writers, in their concern to insist that English labour was once better off than at present. But it was later in the same half-century that the rising of the "Jacquerie," which appears to have been in its origin strictly a revolt against taxation,[1038] was so bloodily repressed. The manner of the revolt sufficiently proves that the peasantry had gained new heart with the improvement in their lot which followed on the pestilence, in spite of laws to keep down wages;[1039] but even this improvement could not strengthen them sufficiently to make them hold their own politically in 1381 against the aristocracy, gentry, and middle class, now hardened in class insolence. It would seem as if those who rose to the status of tenants[1040] after the depopulation sought in their turn to keep down those who remained landless servitors. After the southern and eastern risings had been crushed, the men of Essex were told by Richard, who had given them charters of freedom and immediately afterwards revoked them, inclined as he was to protect the serfs in a measure against their masters, that "bondsmen they had been and bondsmen they should remain, in worse bondage than before"; and the following Parliament declared that the landowners would never consent to the freeing of the serfs, "were they all to die for it in a day." It is noteworthy, on the side of economics, that despite this temper serfage did gradually die out, the people being for long unable to multiply up to the old level, by reason of restraint, ill-usage, civil war, the decline of tillage and the grouping of holdings, and the high death-rate. Jack Cade's rebellion, in 1450, indicated the persistence of the democratic spirit, contending as it did for the suppression of the system under which the nobles plundered the kingdom while the king was imbecile.

The question as to the rate at which the population recovered from
the Black Death has been discussed by Prof. Thorold Rogers, Mr.
Seebohm, and Prof. Cunningham (see the latter's _Growth of English
Industry and Commerce_, 1891, i, 304). Prof. Rogers, on the one
hand, maintains that by 1377, when the tax rolls seem to give a
population of about two and a half millions (cp. Dunton, _England
in the Fifteenth Century_, p. 130), the population had recovered
all it had lost in the Plague, he being of opinion that the England
of that age could not at any time support more than two and a half
millions. Mr. Seebohm, with whom Dr. Cunningham substantially
concurs (see also Pearson, _Fourteenth Century_, p. 249, and
Gasquet, _The Great Pestilence_, 1893, p. 194), thinks that the
return of the Plague in 1361 and 1369, and the unsettled state of
the country, must have prevented recuperation; and, accepting the
loose calculation that the Plague destroyed half the population
(Mr. Pearson says "one-half or two-thirds"; Dr. Gasquet endorses
the general view that "fully one half" were destroyed), he
concludes that the population before 1348 may have been five
millions.

The truth surely lies between these extremes. That the population
should not at all have recovered in twenty-five years is extremely
unlikely. That it should have restored a loss of thirty-three per
cent in twenty-five years, which is what Prof. Rogers's position
amounts to, is still more unlikely (see his _Six Centuries of Work
and Wages_, pp. 223, 226, where the mortality is estimated at
one-third). It is besides utterly incongruous with Prof. Rogers's
own repeated assertion that "during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries the population of England and Wales was almost
stationary" (_Industrial and Commercial History of England_, pp.
46, 49; _Six Centuries of Work and Wages_, p. 337; _Economic
Interpretation of History_, p. 53). How could a medieval population
conceivably stand for half a century at a given figure, then,
having been reduced by one-third, replace the loss in twenty-five
years, and thereafter continue to subsist without further increase
for two centuries more?

On the other hand, there is a natural tendency in every suddenly
depleted population to reproduce itself for a time at a quickened
rate; and in the England of the latter half of the fourteenth
century the conditions would encourage such an effort. The lack of
house-room and settlement which normally checked increase (cp.
Stubbs, § 493) was remedied for a large number of persons; and the
general feeling would be all in favour of marriage and repopulation
(cp. Rogers, _Six Centuries_, p. 226, where, however, evidence
obviously bad is accepted as to multiplied births), though just
after the Plague there would be a great stimulus to the extension
of pasture, since that needed fewer hands than tillage.

On the whole, we may reasonably surmise that the population before
1348 was, not five millions, but between three and four millions
(so Green, ch. v, § 4, p. 241, who, however, takes the somewhat
excessive view that "more than one-half were swept away," and
further, p. 239, that the population "seems to have all but tripled
since the Conquest"), and that it was prevented regaining that
figure in the next century by the economic preference of
sheep-farming to tillage. Mr. Rogers expressly admits (_Six
Centuries_, p. 233) that "the price of labour, proclamations and
statutes notwithstanding, did not ever fall to its old rates," and
repeatedly asserts that "the labourers remained masters of the
situation." On his own principles, this goes to prove that their
numbers remained lower than of old. He infers a "considerable loss
of life" in the famine of 1315-16 from the immediate rise of
agricultural wages (from 23 to 30 per cent), of which on the
average 20 per cent was permanent. Here there is a presumption that
even before 1315 the population was greater than afterwards. Yet
again he states (p. 326, etc.) that "the _fifteenth_ century and
the first quarter of the _sixteenth_ were the golden age of the
English labourer"--a proposition which staggers credence. Cp. W.J.
Corbett, in _Social England_, ii, 382-84.

It is impossible, however, to attain demonstration either on that
head or as regards the numbers of the population in the periods
under notice. Mr. Rogers's claims to give decisive evidence show a
serious misconception of what constitutes proof; and there is
special reason to distrust his conclusion that population was no
greater at the end of Elizabeth's reign than in that of Henry IV.
Cp. Mr. Gibbins's _Industrial History of England_, pp. 107-108.
Prof. J.E. Symes (in _Social England_, iii, 128, 129) decides that
a "great increase of the population undoubtedly took place in the
reign of Henry VIII," adopting the estimate that the total at the
death of Henry VII was about two and a half millions, and at the
death of Henry VIII about four millions. As to the population at
the Conquest, see Sharon Turner's _History of the Anglo-Saxons_,
bk. viii, c. 9, vol. iii, and Dunton, as cited, pp. 128-29. It was
then probably below two millions; and in the reign of Edward II it
may well have been over three millions; for Bishop Pecock about
1450 (cited by Dunton, p. 130 _note_) speaks of a long-continued
decrease, such as would be caused by the wars in France and at
home. But the assertion of Tyndale in 1532 (_id._ _ib._), that the
population was then less by a third than in the time of Richard II,
must be dismissed as a delusion set up by the phenomena of agrarian
depopulation in certain districts. On this see below, p. 405.