View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages Part 25

What effect this must have had on agriculture it is easy to conjecture.

The levelling of forests, the draining of mora.s.ses, and the extirpation of mischievous animals which inhabit them, are the first objects of man's labour in reclaiming the earth to his use; and these were forbidden by a landed aristocracy, whose control over the progress of agricultural improvement was unlimited, and who had not yet learned to sacrifice their pleasures to their avarice.

[Sidenote: Bad state of agriculture;]

These habits of the rich, and the miserable servitude of those who cultivated the land, rendered its fertility unavailing. Predial servitude indeed, in some of its modifications, has always been the great bar to improvement. In the agricultural economy of Rome the labouring husbandman, a menial slave of some wealthy senator, had not even that qualified interest in the soil which the tenure of villenage afforded to the peasant of feudal ages. Italy, therefore, a country presenting many natural impediments, was but imperfectly reduced into cultivation before the irruption of the barbarians.[557] That revolution destroyed agriculture with every other art, and succeeding calamities during five or six centuries left the finest regions of Europe unfruitful and desolate. There are but two possible modes in which the produce of the earth can be increased; one by rendering fresh land serviceable, the other by improving the fertility of that which is already cultivated. The last is only attainable by the application of capital and of skill to agriculture, neither of which could be expected in the ruder ages of society. The former is, to a certain extent, always practicable while waste lands remain; but it was checked by laws hostile to improvement, such as the manerial and commonable rights in England, and by the general tone of manners.

Till the reign of Charlemagne there were no towns in Germany, except a few that had been erected on the Rhine and Danube by the Romans. A house with its stables and farm-buildings, surrounded by a hedge or enclosure, was called a court, or, as we find it in our law-books, a curtilage; the toft or homestead of a more genuine English dialect. One of these, with the adjacent domain of arable fields and woods, had the name of a villa or manse. Several manses composed a march; and several marches formed a pagus or district.[558] From these elements in the progress of population arose villages and towns. In France undoubtedly there were always cities of some importance. Country parishes contained several manses or farms of arable land, around a common pasture, where every one was bound by custom to feed his cattle.[559]

[Sidenote: of internal trade;]

The condition even of internal trade was hardly preferable to that of agriculture. There is not a vestige perhaps to be discovered for several centuries of any considerable manufacture; I mean, of working up articles of common utility to an extent beyond what the necessities of an adjacent district required.[560] Rich men kept domestic artisans among their servants; even kings, in the ninth century, had their clothes made by the women upon their farms;[561] but the peasantry must have been supplied with garments and implements of labour by purchase; and every town, it cannot be doubted, had its weaver, its smith, and its currier. But there were almost insuperable impediments to any extended traffic--the insecurity of moveable wealth, and difficulty of acc.u.mulating it; the ignorance of mutual wants; the peril of robbery in conveying merchandise, and the certainty of extortion. In the domains of every lord a toll was to be paid in pa.s.sing his bridge, or along his highway, or at his market.[562] These customs, equitable and necessary in their principle, became in practice oppressive, because they were arbitrary, and renewed in every petty territory which the road might intersect. Several of Charlemagne's capitularies repeat complaints of these exactions, and endeavour to abolish such tolls as were not founded on prescription.[563] One of them rather amusingly ill.u.s.trates the modesty and moderation of the landholders. It is enacted that no one shall be compelled to go out of his way in order to pay toll at a particular bridge, when he can cross the river more conveniently at another place.[564] These provisions, like most others of that age, were unlikely to produce much amendment. It was only the milder species, however, of feudal lords who were content with the tribute of merchants.

The more ravenous descended from their fortresses to pillage the wealthy traveller, or shared in the spoil of inferior plunderers, whom they both protected and instigated. Proofs occur, even in the later periods of the middle ages, when government had regained its energy, and civilization had made considerable progress, of public robberies systematically perpetrated by men of n.o.ble rank. In the more savage times, before the twelfth century, they were probably too frequent to excite much attention. It was a custom in some places to waylay travellers, and not only to plunder, but to sell them as slaves, or compel them to pay a ransom. Harold son of G.o.dwin, having been wrecked on the coast of Ponthieu, was imprisoned by the lord, says an historian, according to the custom of that territory.[565] Germany appears to have been, upon the whole, the country where downright robbery was most unscrupulously practised by the great. Their castles, erected on almost inaccessible heights among the woods, became the secure receptacles of predatory bands, who spread terror over the country. From these barbarian lords of the dark ages, as from a living model, the romances are said to have drawn their giants and other disloyal enemies of true chivalry.

Robbery, indeed, is the constant theme both of the Capitularies and of the Anglo-Saxon laws; one has more reason to wonder at the intrepid thirst of lucre, which induced a very few merchants to exchange the products of different regions, than to ask why no general spirit of commercial activity prevailed.

[Sidenote: and of foreign commerce.]

Under all these circ.u.mstances it is obvious that very little oriental commerce could have existed in these western countries of Europe.

Dest.i.tute as they have been created, speaking comparatively, of natural productions fit for exportation, their invention and industry are the great resources from which they can supply the demands of the East.

Before any manufactures were established in Europe, her commercial intercourse with Egypt and Asia must of necessity have been very trifling; because, whatever inclination she might feel to enjoy the luxuries of those genial regions, she wanted the means of obtaining them. It is not therefore necessary to rest the miserable condition of oriental commerce upon the Saracen conquests, because the poverty of Europe is an adequate cause; and, in fact, what little traffic remained was carried on with no material inconvenience through the channel of Constantinople. Venice took the lead in trading with Greece and more eastern countries.[566] Amalfi had the second place in the commerce of those dark ages. These cities imported, besides natural productions, the fine clothes of Constantinople; yet as this traffic seems to have been illicit, it was not probably extensive.[567] Their exports were gold and silver, by which, as none was likely to return, the circulating money of Europe was probably less in the eleventh century than at the subversion of the Roman empire; furs, which were obtained from the Sclavonian countries; and arms, the sale of which to pagans or Saracens was vainly prohibited by Charlemagne and by the Holy See.[568] A more scandalous traffic, and one that still more fitly called for prohibitory laws, was carried on in slaves. It is an humiliating proof of the degradation of Christendom, that the Venetians were reduced to purchase the luxuries of Asia by supplying the slave-market of the Saracens.[569] Their apology would perhaps have been, that these were purchased from their heathen neighbours; but a slave-dealer was probably not very inquisitive as to the faith or origin of his victim. This trade was not peculiar to Venice. In England it was very common, even after the Conquest, to export slaves to Ireland, till, in the reign of Henry II., the Irish came to a non-importation agreement, which put a stop to the practice.[570]

From this state of degradation and poverty all the countries of Europe have recovered, with a progression in some respects tolerably uniform, in others more unequal; and the course of their improvement, more gradual and less dependent upon conspicuous civil revolutions than their decline, affords one of the most interesting subjects into which a philosophical mind can inquire. The commencement of this restoration has usually been dated from about the close of the eleventh century; though it is unnecessary to observe that the subject does not admit of anything approximating to chronological accuracy. It may, therefore, be sometimes not improper to distinguish the first six of the ten centuries which the present work embraces under the appellation of the _dark_ ages; an epithet which I do not extend to the twelfth and three following. In tracing the decline of society from the subversion of the Roman empire, we have been led, not without connexion, from ignorance to superst.i.tion, from superst.i.tion to vice and lawlessness, and from thence to general rudeness and poverty. I shall pursue an inverted order in pa.s.sing along the ascending scale, and cla.s.s the various improvements which took place between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries under three princ.i.p.al heads, as they relate to the wealth, the manners, or the taste and learning of Europe. Different arrangements might probably be suggested, equally natural and convenient; but in the disposition of topics that have not always an unbroken connexion with each other, no method can be prescribed as absolutely more scientific than the rest.

That which I have adopted appears to me as philosophical and as little liable to transitions as any other.

FOOTNOTES:

[479] The subject of the present chapter, so far as it relates to the condition of literature in the middle ages, has been again treated by me in the first and second chapters of a work, published in 1836, the Introduction to the History of Literature in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries. Some things will be found in it more exactly stated, others newly supplied from recent sources.

[480] The authors of Histoire Litteraire de la France, t. i., can only find three writers of Gaul, no inconsiderable part of the Roman Empire, mentioned upon any authority; two of whom are now lost. In the preceding century the number was considerably greater.

[481] Mosheim, Cent. 4. Tiraboschi endeavours to elevate higher the learning of the early Christians, t. ii. p. 328. Jortin, however, a.s.serts that many of the bishops in the general councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon could not write their names. Remarks on Ecclesiast. Hist. vol.

ii. p. 417.

[482] Gibbon roundly a.s.serts that "the language of Virgil and Cicero, though with some inevitable mixture of corruption, was so universally adopted in Africa, Spain, Gaul, Great Britain, and Pannonia, that the faint traces of the Punic or Celtic idioms were preserved only in the mountains or among the peasants." Decline and Fall, vol. i. p. 60 (8vo.

edit.). For Britain he quotes Tacitus's Life of Agricola as his voucher.

But the only pa.s.sage in this work that gives the least colour to Gibbon's a.s.sertion is one in which Agricola is said to have encouraged the children of British chieftains to acquire a taste for liberal studies, and to have succeeded so much by judicious commendation of their abilities, ut qui modo linguam Romanam abnuebant, eloquentiam concupiscerent. (c. 21.) This, it is sufficiently obvious, is very different from the national adoption of Latin as a mother tongue.

[483] t. vii. preface.

[484] It appears, by a pa.s.sage quoted from the digest by M. Bonamy, Mem.

de l'Acad. des Inscriptions, t. xxiv. p. 589, that Celtic was spoken in Gaul, or at least parts of it, as well as Punic in Africa.

[485] Atque eadem illa litera, quoties ultima est, et vocalem verbi sequentis ita contingit, ut in eam transire possit, etiam si scribitur, tamen parum exprimitur, ut _Multum ille_, et _Quantum erat_: adeo ut pene cujusdam novae literae sonum reddat. Neque enim eximitur, sed obscuratur, et tantum aliqua inter duos vocales velut nota est, ne ipsae coeant. Quintilian, Inst.i.tut. 1. ix. c. 4, p. 585, edit. Capperonier.

[486] The following pa.s.sage of Quintilian is an evidence both of the omission of harsh or superfluous letters by the best speakers, and of the corrupt abbreviations usual with the worst. Dilucida vero erit p.r.o.nunciatio primum, si verba tota exegerit, quorum pars devorari, pars dest.i.tui solet, plerisque extremas syllabas non proferentibus, dum priorum sono indulgent. Ut est autem necessaria verborum explanatio, ita omnes computare et velut adnumerare literas, molestum et odiosum.--Nam et vocales frequentissime coeunt, et consonantium quaedam insequente vocali dissimulantur; utriusque exemplum posuimus; Multum ille et terris. Vitatur etiam duriorum inter se congressus, unde _pellexit_ et _collegit_, et quae alio loco dicta sunt. 1. ii. c. 3, p. 696.

[487] Tiraboschi (Storia dell. Lett. Ital. t. iii. preface, p. v.) imputes this paradox to Bembo and Quadrio; but I can hardly believe that either of them could maintain it in a literal sense.

[488] M. Bonamy, in an essay printed in Mem. de l'Academie des Inscriptions, t. xxiv., has produced several proofs of this from the cla.s.sical writers on agriculture and other arts, though some of his instances are not in point, as any schoolboy would have told him. This essay, which by some accident had escaped my notice till I had nearly finished the observations in my text, contains, I think, the best view that I have seen of the process of transition by which Latin was changed into French and Italian. Add however, the preface to Tiraboschi's third volume and the thirty-second dissertation of Muratori.

[489] See Lanzi, Saggio della Lingua Etrusca, t. i. c. 431; Mem. de l'Acad. des Inscrip. t. xxiv. p. 632.

[490] No description can give so adequate a notion of this extraordinary performance as a short specimen. Take the introductory lines; which really, prejudices of education apart, are by no means inharmonious:--

Praefatio nostra viam erranti demonstrat, Respectumque bonum, c.u.m venerit saeculi meta, aeternum fieri, quod discredunt inscia corda.

Ego similiter erravi tempore multo, Fana prosequendo, parentibus insciis ipsis.

Abstuli me tandem inde, legendo de lege.

Testificor Dominum, doleo, proh! civica turba Inscia quod perdit, pergens deos quaerere vanos.

Ob ea perdoctus ignoros instruo verum.

Commodia.n.u.s however did not keep up this excellence in every part. Some of his lines are not reducible to any p.r.o.nunciation, without the summary rules of Procrustes; as for instance:--

Paratus ad epulas, et refugiscere praecepta; or, Capillos inficitis, oculos fuligine relinitis.

It must be owned that this text is exceedingly corrupt, and I should not despair of seeing a truly critical editor, unscrupulous as his fraternity are apt to be, improve his lines into unblemished hexameters.

Till this time arrives, however, we must consider him either as utterly ignorant of metrical distinctions, or at least as aware that the populace whom he addressed did not observe them in speaking. Commodia.n.u.s is published by Dawes at the end of his edition of Minucius Felix. Some specimens are quoted in Harris's Philological Inquiries.

[491] Archaeologia, vol. xiv. p. 188. The following are the first lines:--

Abundantia peccatorum solet fratres conturbare; Propter hoc Dominus noster voluit nos praemonere, Comparans regnum coelorum reticulo misso in mare, Congreganti multos pisces, omne genus hinc et inde, Quos c.u.m traxissent ad littus, tunc coeperunt separare, Bonos in vasa miserunt, reliquos malos in mare.

This trash is much below the level of Augustin; but it could not have been later than his age.

[492] Recueil des Historiens, t. i. p. 814; it begins in the following manner:--

Praecelso expectabili bis Arbogasto comiti Auspicius, qui diligo, salutem dico plurimam.

Magnas coelesti Domino rependo corde gratias Quod te Tullensi proxime magnum in urbe vidimus.

Multis me tuis artibus laetificabas antea, Sed nunc fecisti maximo me exultare gaudio.

[493] Chilpericus rex ... confecit duos libros, quorum versiculi debiles nullis pedibus subsistere possunt: in quibus, dum non intelligebat, pro longis syllabas breves posuit, et pro brevibus longas statuebat. 1. vi.

c. 46.

[494] Mem. de l'Academie des Inscriptions, t. xvii. Hist. Litteraire de la France, t. ii. p. 28. It seems rather probable that the poetry of Avitus belongs to the fifth century, though not very far from its termination. He was the correspondent of Sidonius Apollinaris, who died in 489, and we may presume his poetry to have been written rather early in life.

[495] One stanza of this song will suffice to show that the Latin language was yet unchanged:--

De Clotario est canere rege Francorum, Qui ivi pugnare c.u.m gente Saxonum, Quam graviter provenisset missis Saxonum, Si non fuisset inc.l.i.tus Faro de gente Burgundionum.

[496] Praecavendum est, ne ad aures populi minus aliquid intelligibile proferatur. Mem. de l'Acad. t. xvii. p. 712.

[497] Rustico et plebeio sermone propter exemplum et imitationem. Id.

ibid.

[498] Hist. Litteraire de la France, t. iii. p. 5. Mem. de l'Academie, t. xxiv. p. 617. Nouveau Traite de Diplomatique, t. iv. p. 485.

[499] Hist. Litteraire de la France, t. vii. p. 12. The editors say that it is mentioned by name even in the seventh century, which is very natural, as the corruption of Latin had then become striking. It is familiarly known that illiterate persons _understand_ a more correct language than they use themselves; so that the corruption of Latin might have gone to a considerable length among the people, while sermons were preached, and tolerably comprehended, in a purer grammar.

[500] Mem. de l'Acad. des Insc. t. xvii. See two memoirs in this volume by du Clos and le Boeuf, especially the latter, as well as that already mentioned in t. xxiv. p. 582, by M. Bonamy.