CONCLUSION
We have followed the race of roamers in many places: on the road, at the hostelry, in woods, in taverns, in churches; we have seen them exercising a host of different trades, a motley crew, minstrels, buffoons, quacks, messengers, pedlars, pilgrims, wandering preachers, beggars, friars, vagabonds of all sorts, labourers broken loose from the soil, pardoners, knights in search of adventure. We have accompanied them here and there over the highroads of England, and followed them to Rome itself, and the Holy Land; there we shall leave them. To the wandering class also belong the representatives of many other professions, such as scribes, tinkers, cobblers, masons, showers of animals or bearwards, like those whom Villard de Honnecourt visited one day in order to draw “al vif,” a lion. But the more important members are those above described.
The current of life represented by the multiplicity of these wayfarers is powerful; notice has been taken of the great though not very apparent part they played in the State. The labourer breaks the bonds which for centuries have attached him to the manor, and henceforward means {420} to be the master of his own person and of his service, to hire himself by the day if he chooses, and for a salary corresponding to the rise in prices and to the demand there may be for his work. The reform is an inevitable one, which will be realized by degrees, in spite of the laws and of the will of the authorities. There is none more important, and its how and wherefore are to be studied not only in the castle, but on the road and by-ways, in the brushwood, where armed bands meet together during church service, and on those unfrequented paths where the false pilgrim throws down his staff to take up his tools and look for work out of the reach of his hereditary master. These people promote by their example and success the emancipation which the wandering preachers justify in their discourses, showing it to be not simply desirable, but rightful.
The great questions of the age, social and religious, move towards their solution, partly on the road, through the influence of the wanderers, a direct influence from the sincere ones, indirect from the others. Begging friars go from door to door, pardoners grow rich, pilgrims live by alms and by the recital of their adventures, always on the way, always at work. What is this work? By constantly addressing the crowd, they in the end make themselves known for what they are, and cause their listeners to pass sentence upon them; by disabusing them they render reform inevitable. Thereby, too, will the rust and superstition of the middle ages drop away, and another step be made towards modern civilization.
Each of these strange types has, moreover, the advantage of showing, very apparent in his own person, some characteristic side of the tastes, the beliefs, and the aspirations of his time. Each of those groups corresponds to a need, an eccentricity, a vice, or a merit of the nation; through them we may examine, as it were, and reconstitute piecemeal the souls of the men of long ago, and have those {421} men stand before us, mind and body, complete, just as the nature of the soil may be guessed from the flora of a country.
The general impression is that the English people then underwent one of those profound transformations which present themselves to the historian’s view like the turning of a highway. Coming out from gorges and mountains the road suddenly leads to an opening, and the rich, sunny, fertile plain is perceived in the distance. It has not yet been reached, many hardships are still to be endured; it will disappear again from sight at intervals, but the traveller has seen it, and knows at least in what direction to tread in order to attain it. During the age which was then beginning the emancipated peasant was to enrich himself in spite of fierce wars especially deadly for the nobility, and the Commons were to be possessed of an instrument of control over the royal power, which would be used, according to the period, more or less well, but which is the best one invented up to our day. The Parliament sitting at Westminster now is in its essential elements identical with the one that, under the Plantagenets, drew up the statutes of the kingdom. In the fourteenth century, despite ultra severe judgments from some thinkers of fame (an age, says Stubbs, “of heartless selfishness and moral degradation”), mankind did not recede, witness the host of truly modern ideas which gained a hold on the mass of the people; among the upper classes under the influence of higher education and wider intercourse with foreign countries, which weakened the notion of the immutability of custom; among the lower classes through the effects of abuses long experienced by men who, though patient, were no weaklings; ideas made popular and rendered practical by the wayfarers, illiterate workmen, single-hearted preachers. All those mad freaks, all the extravagance of the religious spirit, those incessant revolts and follies which have been noticed, were sure to cause a reaction, and a longing for something nearer that {422} reign of reason which mankind, though less remote from the goal, still continues to look for in the far distance.
On a number of questions, whether as the promoter or the object of reform, as working man or as pardoner, whether an unconscious instrument or not, wanderers will always have much to teach whoever will question them. For good or evil it may be said that they acted in mediæval history as “microbes,” a numerous, scarcely visible, but powerful host. They will perhaps reveal the secret of almost incomprehensible transformations, which might have seemed to necessitate a total overturn, like the one that took place in France at the end of the eighteenth century, a new or rather a first contrat social. England, for many reasons, has not required this; one among those reasons is the action of the roamers which, exerting itself on a population temperamentally steadier than many others, more persistently resolute, and less constantly troubled by wars on its territory, united the people and, thanks to that union which made it strong, allowed it to snatch in time the necessary concessions. And as, however, the calmest changes cannot take place without some disturbance, as also among the English there have been, in the course of centuries, more than one bloody fray, the nomad may perhaps end by answering his interrogator in the words of a common proverb of certain, yet unhackneyed wisdom, which should prevent pessimism and lack of hope: “Le bois tortu fait le feu droit”—Crooked log maketh straight fire.
APPENDIX
