(1856-)
r. Frederic was born in Utica, New York, August 19th, 1856. He spent his boyhood in that neighborhood, and was educated in its schools. The rural Central New York of a half-century ago was a region of rich farms, of conservative ideas, and of strong indigenous types of character. These undoubtedly offered unconscious studies to the future novelist.
Harold Frederic
Like many of his guild he began writing on a newspaper, rising by degrees from the position of reporter to that of editor. The drill and discipline taught him to make the most of time and opportunity, and he contrived leisure enough to write two or three long stories. Working at journalism in Utica, Albany, and New York, in 1884 he became chief foreign correspondent of the New York Times, making his headquarters in London, where he has since lived.
Mr. Frederic's reputation rests on journalistic correspondence of the higher class, and on his novels, of which he has published six. His stories are distinctively American. He has caught up contrasting elements of local life in the eastern part of the United States, and grouped them with ingenuity and power. His first important story was 'Seth's Brother's Wife,' originally appearing as a serial in Scribner's Magazine. Following this came 'The Lawton Girl,' a study of rustic life; 'In the Valley,' a semi-historical novel, turning on aspects of colonial times along the Mohawk River; 'The Copperhead,' a tale of the Civil War; 'Mukena and Other Stories,' graphic character sketches, displaying humor and insight; 'The Damnation of Theron Ware,' the most serious and carefully studied of his books; and 'March Hares,' a sketch of contemporary society.
A student of the life about him, possessing a dramatic sense and a saving grace of humor, Mr. Frederic in his fiction is often photographic and minute in detail, while he does not forget the importance of the mass which the detail is to explain or embellish. He likes to deal with types of that mixed population peculiar to the farming valleys of Central New York,—German, Irish, and American,—bringing out by contrast their marked social and individual traits. Not a disciple of realism, his books are emphatically "human documents."
There is always moreover a definite plot, often a dramatic development. But it is the attrition of character against character that really interests him. 'Seth's Brother's Wife' and 'The Lawton Girl' leave a definite ethical intention. In the 'Damnation of Theron Ware' is depicted the tragedy of a weak and crude character suddenly put in touch with a higher intellectual and emotional life, which it is too meagre and too untrained to adopt, and through which it suffers shipwreck. In 'In the Valley' the gayety and seriousness of homely life stand out against a savage and martial background.
Mr. Frederic profoundly respects his art, is never careless, and never unconscientious. Of his constructive instinct a distinguished English critic has said that it "ignores nothing that is significant; makes use of nothing that is not significant; and binds every element of character and every incident together in a consistent, coherent, dramatic whole."
THE LAST RITE
From 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.' Copyright 1896, by Stone & Kimball
Walking homeward briskly now, with his eyes on the sidewalk, and his mind all aglow with crowding suggestions for the new work and impatience to be at it, Theron Ware came abruptly upon a group of men and boys who occupied the whole path, and were moving forward so noiselessly that he had not heard them coming. He almost ran into the leader of this little procession, and began a stammering apology, the final words of which were left unspoken, so solemnly heedless of him and his talk were all the faces he saw.
In the centre of the group were four workingmen, bearing between them an extemporized litter of two poles and a blanket hastily secured across them with spikes. Most of what this litter held was covered by another blanket, rounded in coarse folds over a shapeless bulk. From beneath its farther end protruded a big broom-like black beard, thrown upward at such an angle as to hide everything beyond those in front. The tall young minister, stepping aside and standing tiptoe, could see sloping downward, behind this hedge of beard, a pinched and chalk-like face, with wide-open, staring eyes. Its lips, of a dull lilac hue, were moving ceaselessly, and made a dry, clicking sound.
Theron instinctively joined himself to those who followed the litter, a motley dozen of street idlers, chiefly boys. One of these in whispers explained to him that the man was one of Jerry Madden's workmen in the wagonshops, who had been deployed to trim an elm-tree in front of his employer's house, and being unused to such work, had fallen from the top and broken all his bones. They would have cared for him at Madden's house, but he insisted upon being taken home. His name was MacEvoy, and he was Joey MacEvoy's father, and likewise Jim's and Hughey's and Martin's. After a pause, the lad, a bright-eyed, freckled, barefooted wee Irishman, volunteered the further information that his big brother had run to bring "Father Forbess," on the chance that he might be in time to administer "extry munction."
The way of the silent little procession led through back streets,—where women hanging up clothes in the yards hurried to the gates, their aprons full of clothes-pins, to stare open-mouthed at the passers-by,—and came to a halt at last in an irregular and muddy lane, before one of a half-dozen shanties reared among the ash-heaps and débris of the town's most bedraggled outskirts.
A stout, middle-aged, red-armed woman, already warned by some messenger of calamity, stood waiting on the roadside bank. There were whimpering children clinging to her skirts, and a surrounding cluster of women of the neighborhood; some of the more elderly of whom, shriveled little crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their eyes, were beginning in a low-murmured minor the wail which presently should rise into the keen of death. Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no moan, and her broad ruddy face was stern in expression rather than sorrowful. When the litter stopped beside her, she laid a hand for an instant on her husband's wet brow, and looked—one could have sworn impassively—into his staring eyes. Then, still without a word, she waved the bearers toward the door, and led the way herself.
Theron, somewhat wonderingly, found himself a minute later inside a dark and ill-smelling room, the air of which was humid with the steam from a boiler of clothes on the stove, and not in other ways improved by the presence of a jostling score of women, all straining their gaze upon the open door of the only other apartment, the bedchamber. Through this they could see the workmen laying MacEvoy on the bed, and standing awkwardly about thereafter, getting in the way of the wife and old Maggie Quirk as they strove to remove the garments from his crushed limbs. As the neighbors watched what could be seen of these proceedings, they whispered among themselves eulogies of the injured man's industry and good temper, his habit of bringing his money home to his wife, and the way he kept his Father Mathew pledge and attended to his religious duties. They admitted freely that by the light of his example, their own husbands and sons left much to be desired; and from this wandered easily off into domestic digressions of their own. But all the while their eyes were bent upon the bedroom door; and Theron made out, after he had grown accustomed to the gloom and the smell, that many of them were telling their beads even while they kept the muttered conversation alive. None of them paid any attention to him, or seemed to regard his presence there as unusual.
Presently he saw enter through the sunlit street doorway a person of a different class. The bright light shone for a passing instant upon a fashionable, flowered hat, and upon some remarkably brilliant shade of red hair beneath it. In another moment there had edged along through the throng, to almost within touch of him, a tall young woman, the owner of this hat and wonderful hair. She was clad in light and pleasing spring attire, and carried a parasol with a long oxidized silver handle of a quaint pattern. She looked at him, and he saw that her face was of a lengthened oval, with a luminous rose-tinted skin, full red lips, and big brown, frank eyes with heavy auburn lashes. She made a grave little inclination of her head toward him, and he bowed in response. Since her arrival, he noted, the chattering of the others had entirely ceased.
"I followed the others in, in the hope that I might be of some assistance," he ventured to explain to her in a low murmur, feeling that at last here was some one to whom an explanation of his presence in this Romish house was due. "I hope they won't feel that I have intruded."
She nodded her head as if she quite understood.
"They'll take the will for the deed," she whispered back. "Father Forbes will be here in a minute. Do you know, is it too late?"
Even as she spoke, the outer doorway was darkened by the commanding bulk of a new-comer's figure. The flash of a silk hat, and the deferential way in which the assembled neighbors fell back to clear a passage, made his identity clear. Theron felt his blood tingle in an unaccustomed way as this priest of a strange Church advanced across the room,—a broad-shouldered, portly man of more than middle height, with a shapely, strong-lined face of almost waxen pallor, and a firm, commanding tread. He carried in his hands, besides his hat, a small leather-bound case. To this and to him the women curtsied and bowed their heads as he passed.
"Come with me," whispered the tall girl with the parasol, to Theron; and he found himself pushing along in her wake until they intercepted the priest just outside the bedroom door. She touched Father Forbes on the arm.
"Just to tell you that I am here," she said. The priest nodded with a grave face, and passed into the other room. In a minute or two the workmen, Mrs. MacEvoy, and her helper came out, and the door was shut behind them.
"He is making his confession," explained the young lady. "Stay here for a minute."
She moved over to where the woman of the house stood, glum-faced and tearless, and whispered something to her. A confused movement among the crowd followed, and out of it presently resulted a small table, covered with a white cloth, and bearing on it two unlighted candles, a basin of water, and a spoon, which was brought forward and placed in readiness before the closed door. Some of those nearest this cleared space were kneeling now, and murmuring a low buzz of prayer to the click of beads on their rosaries.
The door opened, and Theron saw the priest standing in the doorway with an uplifted hand. He wore now a surplice, with a purple band over his shoulders, and on his pale face there shone a tranquil and tender light.
One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand, lighted the two candles, and bore the table with its contents into the bedroom. The young woman plucked Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into the chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen, headed by Mrs. MacEvoy and her children, which filled the little room, and overflowed now outward to the street door. He found himself bowing with the others to receive the sprinkled holy water from the priest's white fingers; kneeling with the others for the prayers; following in impressed silence with the others the strange ceremonial by which the priest traced crosses of holy oil with his thumb upon the eyes, ears, nostrils, lips, hands, and feet of the dying man, wiping off the oil with a piece of cotton-batting each time after he had repeated the invocation to forgiveness for that particular sense. But most of all he was moved by the rich, novel sound of the Latin as the priest rolled it forth in the 'Asperges me, Domine,' and 'Misereatur vestri omnipotens Deus,' with its soft Continental vowels and liquid r's. It seemed to him that he had never really heard Latin before. Then the astonishing young woman with the red hair declaimed the 'Confiteor' vigorously and with a resonant distinctness of enunciation. It was a different Latin, harsher and more sonorous; and while it still dominated the murmured undertone of the other's prayers the last moment came.
Theron had stood face to face with death at many other bed-sides; no other final scene had stirred him like this. It must have been the girl's Latin chant, with its clanging reiteration of the great names,—'beatum Michaelem Archangelum,' 'beatum Joannem Baptistam,' 'sanctos Apostolos Petrum et Paulum,'—invoked with such proud confidence in this squalid little shanty, which so strangely affected him.
He came out with the others at last,—the candles and the folded hands over the crucifix left behind,—and walked as one in a dream. Even by the time that he had gained the outer doorway, and stood blinking at the bright light and filling his lungs with honest air once more, it had begun to seem incredible to him that he had seen and done all this.
EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN
(1823-1892)
BY JOHN BACH McMASTER
dward Augustus Freeman, one of the most prolific of recent English historians, was born at Harborne in Staffordshire, England, on August 2d, 1823. His early education was received at home and in private schools, from which at the age of eighteen he went up to Oxford, where he was elected a scholar of Trinity College. Four years later (1845) he took his degree and was elected a Fellow of Trinity, an honor which he held till his marriage in 1847 forced him to relinquish it.
Long before this event, Freeman was deep in historical study. His fortune was easy. The injunction that he should eat bread in the sweat of his face had not been laid on him. His time was his own, and was devoted with characteristic zeal and energy to labor in the field of history, which in the course of fifty years was made to yield him a goodly crop.
Edward A. Freeman
Year after year he poured forth a steady stream of Essays, Thoughts, Remarks, Suggestions, Lectures, Short Histories on matters of current interest, little monographs on great events or great men,—all covering a range of subjects which bear evidence to most astonishing versatility and learning. Sometimes his topic was a cathedral church, as that of Wells or Leominster Priory; or a cathedral city, as Ely or Norwich. At others it was a grave historical theme, as the 'Unity of History'; or 'Comparative Politics'; or the 'Growth of the English Constitution from the Earliest Times'; or 'Old English History for Children.' His 'General Sketch of European History' is still a standard text book in our high schools and colleges. His 'William the Conqueror' in Macmillan's 'Twelve English Statesmen'; his 'Short History of the Norman Conquest of England' in the Clarendon Press Series; his studies of Godwin, Harold, and the Normans, in the 'Encyclopædia Britannica,' are the best of their kind.
His contributions to the reviews and magazines make a small library, encyclopædic in character. Thirty-one essays were published in the Fortnightly Review; thirty in the Contemporary Review; twenty-seven in Macmillan's Magazine; twelve in the British Quarterly, and as many more in the National Review; while such as are scattered through the other periodicals of Great Britain and the United States swell the list to one hundred and fifty-seven titles. Every conceivable subject is treated,—politics, government, history, field sports, architecture, archaeology, books, linguistics, finance, great men living and dead, questions of the day. But even this list does not comprise all of Freeman's writings, for regularly every week, for more than twenty years, he contributed two long articles to the Saturday Review.
Taken as a whole, this array of publications represents an industry which was simply enormous, and a learning as varied as it was immense. If classified according to their subjects, they fall naturally into six groups. The antiquarian and architectural sketches and addresses are the least valuable and instructive. They are of interest because they exhibit a strong bent of mind which appears constantly in Freeman's works, and because it was by the aid of such remains that he studied the early history of nations. Then come the studies in politics and government, such as the essays on presidential government; on American institutional history; on the House of Lords; the growth of commonwealths, and such elaborate treatises as the six lectures on 'Comparative Politics,' and the 'History of Federal Government,'—all notable because of the liberal spirit and breadth of view that mark them, and because of a positiveness of statement and confidence in the correctness of the author's judgments. Then come the historical essays; then the lectures and addresses; then his occasional pieces, written at the request of publishers or editors to fill some long-felt want; and finally the series of histories on which, in the long run, the reputation of Freeman must rest. These, in the order of merit and value, are the 'Norman Conquest'; the 'Reign of William Rufus,' which is really a supplement to the 'Conquest'; the 'History of Sicily,' which the author did not live to finish.
The roll of his works is enough to show that the kind of history which appealed to Freeman was that of the distant past, and that which dealt with politics rather than with social life. Of ancient history he had a good mastery; English history from its dawn to the thirteenth century he knew minutely: European history of the same period he knew profoundly. After the thirteenth century his interest grew less and less as modern times were approached, and his knowledge smaller and smaller till it became that of a man very well read in history and no more.
Freeman was therefore essentially a historian of the far past; and as such had, it is safe to say, no living superior in England. But in his treatment of the past he presents a small part of the picture. He is concerned with great conquerors, with military leaders, with battles and sieges and systems of government. The mass of the people have no interest for him at all. His books abound in battle-pieces of the age of the long-bow and the javelin, of the battle-axe, the mace, and the spear; of the age when brain went for little and when brawn counted for much; and when the fate of nations depended less on the skill of individual commanders than on the personal prowess of those who met in hand-to-hand encounters. He delights in descriptions of historic buildings; he is never weary of drawing long analogies between one kind of government and another; but for the customs, the manner, the usages, the daily life of the people, he has never a word. "History," said he on one occasion, "is past politics; politics is present history," and to this epigram he is strictly faithful. The England of the serf and the villein, the curfew and the monastery, is brushed aside to leave room for the story of the way in which William of Normandy conquered the Saxons, and of the way in which William Rufus conducted his quarrels with Bishop Anselm.
With all of this no fault is to be found. It was his cast of mind, his point of view; and the questions which alone concern us in any estimate of his work are: Did he do it well? What is its value? Did he make a real contribution to historical knowledge? What are its merits and defects? Judged by the standard he himself set up, Freeman's chief merits, the qualities which mark him out as a great historian, are an intense love of truth and a determination to discover it at any cost; a sincere desire to mete out an even-handed justice to each and every man; unflagging industry, common-sense, broad views, and the power to reproduce the past most graphically.
From these merits comes Freeman's chief defect,—prolixity. His earnest desire to be accurate made him not only say the same thing over and over again, but say it with an unnecessary and useless fullness of detail, and back up his statement with a profusion of notes, which in many cases amount to more than half the text. Indeed, were they printed in the same type as the text, the space they occupy would often exceed it. Thus, in the first volume of the 'Norman Conquest' there are 528 pages of text, with foot-notes occupying from a third to a half of almost every page, and an appendix of notes of 244 pages; in the second volume, the text and foot-notes amount to 512, and the appendix 179; in the third, the text covers 562 and the appendix 206 pages. These notes are always interesting and always instructive. But the end of a volume is not the place for an exhibition of the doubts and fears that have tormented the historian, for a statement of the reasons which have led him to one conclusion rather than another, nor for the denunciation or reputation of the opinions of his predecessors. When the building is finished, we do not want to see the lumber used as the scaffolding piled in the back yard. Mr. Freeman's histories would be all the better for a condensation of the text and an elimination of the long appendices.
With these exceptions, the workmanship is excellent. He entered so thoroughly into the past that it became to him more real and understandable than the present. He was not merely the contemporary but the companion of the men he had to deal with. He knew every spot of ground, every Roman ruin, every mediæval castle, that came in any way to be connected with his story, as well as he knew the topography of the country that stretched beneath his study window, or the arrangement of the house in which he lived.
In his histories, therefore, we are presented at every turn with life-like portraits of the illustrious dead, bearing all the marks of having been taken from life; with descriptions of castles and towers, minsters and abbeys, and of the scenes that have made them memorable; with comparisons of one ruler with another, always sane and just; and with graphic pictures of coronations, of battles, sieges, burnings, and all the havoc and pomp of war.
The essays and studies in politics show Mr. Freeman in a yet more interesting light; many are elaborate reviews of historical works, and therefore cover a wide range of topics, both ancient and of the present time. Now his subject is Mr. Bryce's 'Holy Roman Empire'; now the Flavian Cæsars; now Mr. Gladstone's 'Homer and the Homeric Age'; now Kirk's 'Charles the Bold'; now presidential government; now Athenian democracy; now the Byzantine Empire; now the Eastern Church; now the growth of commonwealths; now the geographical aspects of the Eastern Question.
By so wide a range of topics, an opportunity is afforded for a variety of remarks, analogies, judgments of men and times, far greater than the histories could give. In the main, these judgments may be accepted; but so thoroughly was Freeman a historian of the past, that some of his estimates of contemporary men and things were singularly erroneous. While our Civil War was still raging he began a 'History of Federal Government,' which was to extend from the Achaean League "to the disruption of the United States." A prudent historian would not have taken up the role of prophet. He would have waited for the end of the struggle. But absolute self-confidence in his own good judgment was one of Freeman's most conspicuous traits. His estimate of Lincoln is another instance of inability to understand the times in which he lived. In the 'Essay on Presidential Government,' published in the National Review in 1864 and republished in the first series of 'Historical Essays' in 1871, the greatest President and the grandest public character the United States has yet produced is declared inferior to each and all the Presidents from Washington to John Quincy Adams. A comparison of Lincoln with Monroe or Madison or Jefferson by Freeman would have been entertaining.
Two views of history as set forth in the essays are especially deserving of notice. He is never weary of insisting on the unity and the continuity of history in general and that of England in particular, and he attaches unreasonable importance to the influence of the Teutonic element in English history. This latter was the inevitable result of his method of studying the past along the lines of philology and ethnology, and has carried him to extremes which taken by anybody else he would have been quick to see.
An examination of Freeman's minor contributions to the reviews—such essays, sketches, and discussions as he did not think important enough to republish in book form—is indicative of his interest in current affairs. They made little draft on his learning, yet the point of view is generally the result of his learning. He believed, for instance, that a sound judgment on the Franco-Prussian War could not be found save in the light of history. "The present war," he wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette, "has largely risen out of a misconception of history, out of the dream of a frontier of the Rhine which never existed. The war on the part of Germany is in truth a vigorous setting forth of the historical truth that the Rhine is, and always has been, a German river."
Freeman was still busy with his 'History of Sicily' from the earliest times, and had just finished the preface to the third volume, when he died at Alicante in Spain, March 16th, 1892. Since his death a fourth volume, prepared from his notes, has been published.
But one biography of Freeman has yet appeared, 'The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman,' by W. R. W. Stephens, 2 vols., 1895.
THE ALTERED ASPECTS OF ROME
From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' Third Series. London, Macmillan & Co., 1879
The two great phenomena, then, of the general appearance of Rome, are the utter abandonment of so large a part of the ancient city and the general lack of buildings of the Middle Ages. Both of these facts are fully accounted for by the peculiar history of Rome. It may be that the sack and fire under Robert Wiscard—a sack and fire done in the cause of a pope in warfare against an emperor—was the immediate cause of the desolation of a large part of Rome; but if so, the destruction which was then wrought only gave a helping hand to causes which were at work both before and after. A city could not do otherwise than dwindle away, in which neither emperor nor pope nor commonwealth could keep up any lasting form of regular government; a city which had no resources of its own, and which lived, as a place of pilgrimage, on the shadow of its own greatness. Another idea which is sure to suggest itself at Rome is rather a delusion. The amazing extent of ancient ruins at Rome unavoidably fills us with the notion that an unusual amount of destruction has gone on there. When we cannot walk without seeing, besides the more perfect monuments, gigantic masses of ancient wall on every side,—when we stumble at every step on fragments of marble columns or on richly adorned tombs,—we are apt to think that they must have perished in some special havoc unknown in other places. The truth is really the other way. The abundance of ruins and fragments—again setting aside the more perfect monuments—proves that destruction has been much less thorough in Rome than in almost any other Roman city. Elsewhere the ancient buildings have been utterly swept away; at Rome they survive, though mainly in a state of ruin. But by surviving in a state of ruin they remind us of their former existence, which in other places we are inclined to forget. Certainly Rome is, even in proportion to its greatness above all other Roman cities, rich in ancient remains above all other Roman cities. Compare those cities of the West which at one time or another supplanted Rome as the dwelling-places of her own Cæsars,—Milan, Ravenna, York, Trier itself. York may be looked upon as lucky in having kept a tower and some pieces of wall through the havoc of the English conquest. Trier is rich above all the rest, and she has, in her Porta Nigra, one monument of Roman power which Rome herself cannot outdo. But rich as Trier—the second Rome—is, she is certainly not richer in proportion than Rome herself. The Roman remains at Milan hardly extend beyond a single range of columns, and it may be thought that that alone is something, when we remember the overthrow of the city under Frederick Barbarossa. But compare Rome and Ravenna: no city is richer than Ravenna in monuments of its own special class,—Christian Roman, Gothic, Byzantine, but of works of the days of heathen Rome there is no trace—no walls, no gates, no triumphal arch, no temple, no amphitheatre. The city of Placidia and Theodoric is there; but of the city which Augustus made one of the two great maritime stations of Italy there is hardly a trace. Verona, as never being an imperial residence, was not on our list; but rich as Verona is, Rome is—even proportionally—far richer. Provence is probably richer in Roman remains than Italy herself; but even the Provençal cities are hardly so full of Roman remains as Rome herself. The truth is, that there is nothing so destructive to the antiquities of a city as its continued prosperity. A city which has always gone on flourishing according to the standard of each age, which has been always building and rebuilding and spreading itself beyond its ancient bounds, works a gradual destruction of its ancient remains beyond anything that the havoc of any barbarians on earth can work. In such a city a few special monuments may be kept in a perfect or nearly perfect state; but it is impossible that large tracts of ground can be left covered with ruins as they are at Rome. Now, it is the ruins, rather than the perfect buildings, which form the most characteristic feature of Roman scenery and topography, and they have been preserved by the decay of the city; while in other cities they have been swept away by their prosperity. As Rome became Christian, several ancient buildings, temples and others, were turned into churches, and a greater number were destroyed to employ their materials, especially their marble columns, in the building of churches. But though this cause led to the loss of a great many ancient buildings, it had very little to do with the creation of the vast mass of the Roman ruins. The desolation of the Flavian amphitheatre and of the baths of Antoninus Caracalla comes from another cause. As the buildings became disused,—and if we rejoice at the disuse of the amphitheatre, we must both mourn and wonder at the disuse of the baths,—they were sometimes turned into fortresses, sometimes used as quarries for the building of fortresses. Every turbulent noble turned some fragment of the buildings of the ancient city into a stronghold from which he might make war upon his brother nobles, from which he might defy every power which had the slightest shadow of lawful authority, be it emperor, pope, or senator. Fresh havoc followed on every local struggle: destruction came whenever a lawful government was overthrown and whenever a lawful government was restored; for one form of revolution implied the building, the other implied the pulling down, of these nests of robbers. The damage which a lying prejudice attributes to Goths and Vandals was really done by the Romans themselves, and in the Middle Ages mainly by the Roman nobles. As for Goths and Vandals, Genseric undoubtedly did some mischief in the way of carrying off precious objects, but even he is not charged with the actual destruction of any buildings. And it would be hard to show that any Goth, from Alaric to Tovilas, ever did any mischief whatever to any of the monuments of Rome, beyond what might happen through the unavoidable necessities and accidents of warfare. Theodoric of course stands out among all the ages as the great preserver and repairer of the monuments of Ancient Rome. The few marble columns which Charles the Great carried away from Rome, as well as from Ravenna, can have gone but a very little way towards accounting for so vast a havoc. It was almost wholly by Roman hands that buildings which might have defied time and the barbarian were brought to the ruined state in which we now find them.
But the barons of mediæval Rome, great and sad as was the destruction which was wrought by them, were neither the most destructive nor the basest of the enemies at whose hands the buildings of ancient Rome have had to suffer. The mediæval barons simply did according to their kind. Their one notion of life was fighting, and they valued buildings or anything else simply as they might be made use of for that one purpose of life. There is something more revolting in the systematic destruction, disfigurement, and robbery of the ancient monuments of Rome, heathen and Christian, at the hands of her modern rulers and their belongings. Bad as contending barons or invading Normans may have been, both were outdone by the fouler brood of papal nephews. Who that looks on the ruined Coliseum, who that looks on the palace raised out of its ruins, can fail to think of the famous line—
"Quod non fecere barbari, fecere Barberini"?
And well-nigh every other obscure or infamous name in the roll-call of the mushroom nobility of modern Rome has tried its hand at the same evil work. Nothing can be so ancient, nothing so beautiful, nothing so sacred, as to be safe against their destroying hands. The boasted age of the Renaissance, the time when men turned away from all reverence for their own forefathers and professed to recall the forms and the feelings of ages which are forever gone, was the time of all times when the monuments of those very ages were most brutally destroyed. Barons and Normans and Saracens destroyed what they did not understand or care for; the artistic men of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries destroyed the very things which they professed to admire and imitate. And when they did not actually destroy, as in the case of statues, sarcophagi, and the like, they did all they could to efface their truest interest, their local and historical association.
A museum or collection of any kind is a dreary place. For some kinds of antiquities, for those which cannot be left in their own places, and which need special scientific classification, such collections are necessary. But surely a statue or a tomb should be left in the spot where it is found, or in the nearest possible place to it. How far nobler would be the associations of Pompey's statue, if the hero had been set up in the nearest open space to his own theatre; even if he had been set up with Marcus and the Great Twin Brethren on the Capitol, instead of being stowed away in an unmeaning corner of a private palace! It is sadder still to wind our way through the recesses of the great Cornelian sepulchre, and to find that sacrilegious hands have rifled the resting-place of the mighty dead; that the real tombs, the real inscriptions, have been stolen away, and that copies only are left in their places. Far more speaking, far more instructive, would it have been to grope out the antique letters of the first of Roman inscriptions, to spell out the name and deeds of "Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus Gnaivod patre prognatus" by the light of a flickering torch in the spot where his kinsfolk and gentiles laid him, than to read it in the full light of the Vatican, numbered as if it stood in a shop to be sold, and bearing a fulsome inscription recording the "munificentia" of the triple-crowned robber who wrought the deed of selfish desecration. Scipio indeed was a heathen; but Christian holy places, places which are the very homes of ecclesiastical history or legend, are no safer than the monuments of heathendom against the desolating fury of ecclesiastical destroyers.
Saddest of all it is to visit the sepulchral church of St. Constantia—be her legend true or false, it makes no difference—to trace out the series of mosaics, where the old emblems of Bacchanalian worship, the vintage and the treading of the wine-press, are turned about to teach a double lesson of Christian mysteries; and then to see the place of the tomb empty, and to find that the tomb itself, the central point of the building, with the series of images which is begun in the pictures and continued in its sculpture, has been torn away from the place where it had meaning and almost life, to stand as number so-and-so among the curiosities of a dreary gallery. Such is the reverence of modern pontiffs for the most sacred antiquities, pagan and Christian, of the city where they have too long worked their destroying will.
In one part however of the city, destruction has been, as in other cities, the consequence of reviving prosperity on the part of the city itself. One of the first lessons to be got by heart on a visit to Rome is the way in which the city has shifted its site. The inhabited parts of ancient and of modern Rome have but a very small space of ground in common. While so large a space within the walls both of Aurelius and of Servius lies desolate, the modern city has spread itself beyond both. The Leonine city beyond the Tiber, the Sixtine city on the Field of Mars—both of them beyond the wall of Servius, the Leonine city largely beyond the wall of Aurelian—together make up the greater part of modern Rome. Here, in a thickly inhabited modern city, there is no space for the ruins which form the main features of the Palatine, Coelian, and Aventine Hills. Such ancient buildings as have been spared remain in a state far less pleasing than that of their ruined fellows. The Pantheon was happily saved by its consecration as a Christian church. But the degraded state in which we see the theatre of Marcellus and the beautiful remains of the portico of Octavia; above all, the still lower fate to which the mighty sepulchre of Augustus has been brought down,—if they enable the moralist to point a lesson, are far more offensive to the student of history than the utter desolation of the Coliseum and the imperial palace. The mole of Hadrian has undergone a somewhat different fate; its successive transformations and disfigurements are a direct part, and a most living and speaking part, of the history of Rome. Such a building, at such a point, could not fail to become a fortress, long before the days of contending Colonnas and Orsini; and if the statues which adorned it were hurled down on the heads of Gothic besiegers, that is a piece of destruction which can hardly be turned to the charge of the Goths. It is in these parts of Rome that the causes which have been at work have been more nearly the same as those which have been at work in other cities. At the same time, it must be remembered that it is only for a much shorter period that they have been fully at work. And wretched as with one great exception is their state, it must be allowed that the actual amount of ancient remains preserved in the Leonine and Sixtine cities is certainly above the average amount of such remains in Roman cities elsewhere.
THE CONTINUITY OF ENGLISH HISTORY
From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London, Macmillan & Co., 1871
A comparison between the histories of England, France, and Germany, as regards their political development, would be a subject well worth working out in detail. Each country started with much that was common to all three, while the separate course of each has been wholly different. The distinctive character of English history is its continuity. No broad gap separates the present from the past. If there is any point at which a line between the present and the past is to be drawn, it is at all events not to be drawn at the point where a superficial glance might perhaps induce us to draw it,—at the Norman invasion in 1066. At first sight, that event might seem to separate us from all before it in a way to which there is no analogy in the history either of our own or of kindred lands. Neither France nor Germany ever saw any event to be compared to the Norman Conquest. Neither of them has ever received a permanent dynasty of foreign kings; neither has seen its lands divided among the soldiers of a foreign army, and its native sons shut out from every position of wealth or dignity. England, alone of the three, has undergone a real and permanent foreign conquest. One might have expected that the greatest of all possible historical chasms would have divided the ages before and the ages after such an event. Yet in truth modern England has practically far more to do with the England of the West-Saxon kings than modern France or Germany has to do with the Gaul and Germany of Charles the Great, or even of much more recent times. The England of the age before the Norman Conquest is indeed, in all external respects, widely removed from us. But the England of the age immediately succeeding the Norman Conquest is something more widely removed still. The age when Englishmen dwelt in their own land as a conquered race, when their name and tongue were badges of contempt and slavery, when England was counted for little more than an accession of power to the Duke of Rouen in his struggle with the King of Paris, is an age than which we can conceive none more alien to every feeling and circumstance of our own.
When, then, did the England in which we still live and move have its beginning? Where are we to draw the broad line, if any line is to be drawn, between the present and the past? We answer, In the great creative and destructive age of Europe and of civilized Asia—the thirteenth century. The England of Richard Coeur de Lion is an England which is past forever; but the England of Edward the First is essentially the still living England in which we have our own being. Up to the thirteenth century our history is the domain of antiquaries; from that point it becomes the domain of lawyers. A law of King Ælfred's Witenagemót is a valuable link in the chain of our political progress, but it could not have been alleged as any legal authority by the accusers of Strafford or the defenders of the Seven Bishops. A statute of Edward the First is quite another matter. Unless it can be shown to have been repealed by some later statute, it is just as good to this day as a statute of Queen Victoria. In the earlier period we may indeed trace the rudiments of our laws, our language, our political institutions; but from the thirteenth century onwards we see the things themselves, in that very essence which we all agree in wishing to retain, though successive generations have wrought improvement in many points of detail and may have left many others capable of further improvement still.
Let us illustrate our meaning by the greatest of all examples. Since the first Teutonic settlers landed on her shores, England has never known full and complete submission to a single will. Some Assembly, Witenagemót, Great Council, or Parliament, there has always been, capable of checking the caprices of tyrants and of speaking, with more or less of right, in the name of the nation. From Hengest to Victoria, England has always had what we may fairly call a parliamentary constitution. Normans, Tudors, and Stewarts might suspend or weaken it, but they could not wholly sweep it away. Our Old-English Witenagemóts, our Norman Great Councils, are matters of antiquarian research, whose exact constitution it puzzles our best antiquaries fully to explain. But from the thirteenth century onwards we have a veritable Parliament, essentially as we see it before our own eyes. In the course of the fourteenth century every fundamental constitutional principle becomes fully recognized. The best worthies of the seventeenth century struggled, not for the establishment of anything new, but for the preservation of what even then was already old. It is on the Great Charter that we still rest the foundation of all our rights. And no later parliamentary reformer has ever wrought or proposed so vast a change as when Simon of Montfort, by a single writ, conferred their parliamentary being upon the cities and boroughs of England.
This continuity of English history from the very beginning is a point which cannot be too strongly insisted on, but it is its special continuity from the thirteenth century onwards which forms the most instructive part of the comparison between English history and the history of Germany and France. At the time of the Norman Conquest the many small Teutonic kingdoms in Britain had grown into the one Teutonic kingdom of England, rich in her barbaric greatness and barbaric freedom, with the germs, but as yet only the germs, of every institution which we most dearly prize. At the close of the thirteenth century we see the England with which we are still familiar, young indeed and tender, but still possessing more than the germs,—the very things themselves. She has already King, Lords, and Commons; she has a King, mighty indeed and honored, but who may neither ordain laws nor impose taxes against the will of his people. She has Lords with high hereditary powers, but Lords who are still only the foremost rank of the people, whose children sink into the general mass of Englishmen, and into whose order any Englishman may be raised. She has a Commons still diffident in the exercise of new-born rights; but a Commons whose constitution and whose powers we have altered only by gradual changes of detail; a Commons which, if it sometimes shrank from hard questions of State, was at least resolved that no man should take their money without their leave. The courts of justice, the great offices of State, the chief features of local administration, have assumed, or are rapidly assuming, the form whose essential character they still retain. The struggle with Papal Rome has already begun; doctrines and ceremonies indeed remain as yet unchallenged, but statute after statute is passed to restrain the abuses and exactions of the ever-hateful Roman court. The great middle class of England is rapidly forming; a middle class not, as elsewhere, confined to a few great cities, but spread, in the form of a minor gentry and a wealthy yeomanry, over the whole face of the land. Villanage still exists, but both law and custom are paving the way for that gradual and silent extinction of it, which without any formal abolition of the legal status left, three centuries later, not a legal villain among us.
With this exception, there was in theory equal law for all classes, and imperfectly as the theory may have been carried out, it was at least far less imperfectly so than in any other kingdom. Our language was fast taking its present shape; English, in the main intelligible at the present day, was the speech of the mass of the people, and it was soon to expel French from the halls of princes and nobles. England at the close of the century is, for the first time since the Conquest, ruled by a prince bearing a purely English name, and following a purely English policy. Edward the First was no doubt as despotic as he could be or dared to be; so was every prince of those days who could not practice the superhuman righteousness of St. Lewis. But he ruled over a people who knew how to keep even his despotism within bounds. The legislator of England, the conqueror of Wales and Scotland, seems truly like an old Bretwalda or West-Saxon Basileus, sitting once more on the throne of Cerdic and of Ælfred. The modern English nation is now fully formed; it stands ready for those struggles for French dominion in the two following centuries, which, utterly unjust and fruitless as they were, still proved indirectly the confirmation of our liberties at home, and which forever fixed the national character for good and for evil.
Let us here sketch out a comparison between the history and institutions of England and those of France and Germany. As we before said, our modern Parliament is traced up in an unbroken line to the early Great Council, and to the still earlier Witenagemót. The latter institution, widely different as it is from the earlier, has not been substituted for the earlier, but has grown out of it. It would be ludicrous to look for any such continuity between the Diet of ambassadors which meets at Frankfurt and the Assemblies which met to obey Henry the Third and to depose Henry the Fourth. And how stands the case in France? France has tried constitutional government in all its shapes; in its old Teutonic, in its mediæval, and in all its modern forms—Kings with one Chamber and Kings with two, Republics without Presidents and Republics with, Conventions, Directories, Consulates, and Empires. All of these have been separate experiments; all have failed; there is no historical continuity between any of them. Charles the Great gathered his Great Council around him year by year; his successors in the Eastern Francia, the Kings of the Teutonic Kingdom, went on doing so long afterwards. But in Gaul, in Western Francia, after it fell away from the common centre, no such assembly could be gathered together. The kingdom split into fragments; every province did what was right in its own eyes; Aquitaine and Toulouse had neither fear nor love enough for their nominal King to contribute any members to a Council of his summoning. Philip the Fair, for his own convenience, summoned the States-General. But the States-General were no historical continuation of the old Frankish Assemblies; they were a new institution of his own, devised, it maybe, in imitation of the English Parliament or of the Spanish Cortes. From that time the French States-General ran a brilliant and a fitful course. Very different indeed were they from the homely Parliaments of England. Our stout knights and citizens were altogether guiltless of political theories. They had no longing after great and comprehensive measures. But if they saw any practical abuses in the land, the King could get no money out of them till he set matters right again. If they saw a bad law, they demanded its alteration; if they saw a wicked minister, they demanded his dismissal. It is this sort of bit-by-bit reform, going on for six hundred years, which has saved us alike from magnificent theories and from massacres in the cause of humanity. Both were as familiar in France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as ever they were at the close of the eighteenth. The demands of the States-General, and of what we may call the liberal party in France generally, throughout those two centuries, are as wide in their extent, and as neatly expressed, as any modern constitution from 1791 to 1848. But while the English Parliament, meeting year after year, made almost every year some small addition or other to the mass of our liberties, the States-General, meeting only now and then, effected nothing lasting, and gradually sank into as complete disuse as the old Frankish Assemblies. By the time of the revolution of 1789, their constitution and mode of proceeding had become matters of antiquarian curiosity. Of later attempts, National Assemblies, National Conventions, Chambers of Deputies, we need not speak. They have risen and they have fallen, while the House of Lords and the House of Commons have gone on undisturbed.
RACE AND LANGUAGE
From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London, Macmillan & Co., 1871
Having ruled that races and nations, though largely formed by the working of an artificial law, are still real and living things, groups in which the idea of kindred is the idea around which everything has grown,—how are we to define our races and our nations? How are we to mark them off one from the other? Bearing in mind the cautions and qualifications which have been already given, bearing in mind large classes of exceptions which will presently be spoken of, I say unhesitatingly that for practical purposes there is one test, and one only; and that that test is language.
It is hardly needful to show that races and nations cannot be defined by the merely political arrangements which group men under various governments. For some purposes of ordinary language, for some purposes of ordinary politics, we are tempted, sometimes driven, to take this standard. And in some parts of the world, in our own Western Europe for instance, nations and governments do in a rough way fairly answer to one another. And in any case, political divisions are not without their influence on the formation of national divisions, while national divisions ought to have the greatest influence on political divisions. That is to say, primâ facie a nation and a government should coincide. I say only primâ facie, for this is assuredly no inflexible rule; there are often good reasons why it should be otherwise; only, whenever it is otherwise, there should be some good reason forthcoming. It might even be true that in no case did a government and a nation exactly coincide, and yet it would none the less be the rule that a government and a nation should coincide. That is to say, so far as a nation and a government coincide, we accept it as the natural state of things, and ask no question as to the cause; so far as they do not coincide, we mark the case as exceptional by asking what is the cause. And by saying that a government and a nation should coincide, we mean that as far as possible the boundaries of governments should be so laid out as to agree with the boundaries of nations. That is, we assume the nation as something already existing, something primary, to which the secondary arrangements of government should as far as possible conform. How then do we define the nation which is, if there is no special reason to the contrary, to fix the limits of a government? Primarily, I say, as a rule,—but a rule subject to exceptions,—as a primâ facie standard, subject to special reasons to the contrary,—we define the nation by language. We may at least apply the test negatively. It would be unsafe to rule that all speakers of the same language must have a common nationality; but we may safely say that where there is not community of language, there is no common nationality in the highest sense. It is true that without community of language there may be an artificial nationality, a nationality which may be good for all political purposes, and which may engender a common national feeling. Still, this is not quite the same thing as that fuller national unity which is felt where there is community of language.
In fact, mankind instinctively takes language as the badge of nationality. We so far take it as the badge, that we instinctively assume community of language as a nation as the rule, and we set down anything that departs from that rule as an exception. The first idea suggested by the word Frenchman, or German, or any other national name, is that he is a man who speaks French or German as his mother tongue. We take for granted, in the absence of anything to make us think otherwise, that a Frenchman is a speaker of French and that a speaker of French is a Frenchman. Where in any case it is otherwise, we mark that case as an exception, and we ask the special cause. Again, the rule is none the less the rule nor the exceptions the exceptions, because the exceptions may easily outnumber the instances which conform to the rule. The rule is still the rule, because we take the instances which conform to it as a matter of course, while in every case which does not conform to it we ask for the explanation. All the larger countries of Europe provide us with exceptions; but we treat them all as exceptions. We do not ask why a native of France speaks French. But when a native of France speaks as his mother tongue some other tongue than French, when French, or something which popularly passes for French, is spoken as his mother tongue by some one who is not a native of France, we at once ask the reason. And the reason will be found in each case in some special historical cause, which withdraws that case from the operation of the general law. A very good reason can be given why French, or something which popularly passes for French, is spoken in parts of Belgium and Switzerland whose inhabitants are certainly not Frenchmen. But the reason has to be given, and it may fairly be asked.
In the like sort, if we turn to our own country, whenever within the bounds of Great Britain we find any tongue spoken other than English, we at once ask the reason and we learn the special historic cause. In a part of France and a part of Great Britain we find tongues spoken which differ alike from English and from French, but which are strongly akin to one another. We find that these are the survivals of a group of tongues once common to Gaul and Britain, but which the settlement of other nations, the introduction and the growth of other tongues, have brought down to the level of survivals. So again we find islands which both speech and geographical position seem to mark as French, but which are dependencies, and loyal dependencies, of the English crown. We soon learn the cause of the phenomenon which seems so strange. Those islands are the remains of a State and a people which adopted the French tongue, but which, while it remained one, did not become a part of the French State. That people brought England by force of arms under the rule of their own sovereigns. The greater part of that people were afterwards conquered by France, and gradually became French in feeling as well as in language. But a remnant clave to their connection with the land which their forefathers had conquered, and that remnant, while keeping the French tongue, never became French in feeling. This last case, that of the Norman Islands, is a specially instructive one. Normandy and England were politically connected, while language and geography pointed rather to a union between Normandy and France. In the case of Continental Normandy, where the geographical tie was strongest, language and geography together would carry the day, and the Continental Norman became a Frenchman. In the islands, where the geographical tie was less strong, political traditions and manifest interest carried the day against language and a weaker geographical tie. The insular Norman did not become a Frenchman. But neither did he become an Englishman. He alone remained Norman, keeping his own tongue and his own laws, but attached to the English crown by a tie at once of tradition and of advantage. Between States of the relative size of England and the Norman Islands, the relation naturally becomes a relation of dependence on the part of the smaller members of the union. But it is well to remember that our forefathers never conquered the forefathers of the men of the Norman Islands, but that their forefathers did once conquer ours.
These instances and countless others bear out the position, that while community of language is the most obvious sign of common nationality,—while it is the main element, or something more than an element, in the formation of nationality,—the rule is open to exceptions of all kinds; and that the influence of language is at all times liable to be overruled by other influences. But all the exceptions confirm the rule, because we specially remark those cases which contradict the rule, and we do not specially remark those cases which do conform to it.
THE NORMAN COUNCIL AND THE ASSEMBLY OF LILLEBONNE
From 'The History of the Norman Conquest of England'
The case of William had thus to be brought to bear on the minds of his own people, on the minds of the neighboring countries whence he invited and looked for volunteers, on the minds of the foreign princes whose help or at least whose neutrality he asked for, and above all, on the minds of the Roman Pontiff and his advisers. The order of these various negotiations is not very clear, and in all probability all were being carried on at once. But there is little doubt that William's first step, on receiving the refusal of Harold to surrender his crown,—or whatever else was the exact purport of the English King's answer,—was to lay the matter before a select body of his most trusted counselors. The names of most of the men whom William thus honored with his special confidence are already familiar to us. They were the men of his own blood, the friends of his youth, the faithful vassals who had fought at his side against French invaders and Norman rebels. There was his brother, Robert, Count of Mortain, the lord of the castle by the waterfalls, the spoil of the banished Warling. And there was one closer than a brother,—the proud William the son of Osborn, the son of the faithful guardian of his childhood. There, perhaps the only priest in that gathering of warriors, was his other brother, Odo of Bayeux, soon to prove himself a warrior as stout of heart and as strong of arm as any of his race. There too, not otherwise renowned, was Iwun-al-Chapel, the husband of the sister of William, Robert, and Odo. There was a kinsman, nearer in legitimate succession to the stock of Rolf than William himself,—Richard of Evreux, the son of Robert the Archbishop, the grandson of Richard the Fearless. There was the true kinsman and vassal who guarded the frontier fortress of Eu, the brother of the traitor Busac and of the holy prelate of Lisieux. There was Roger of Beaumont, who rid the world of Roger of Toesny, and Ralph, the worthier grandson of that old foe of Normandy and mankind. There was Ralph's companion in banishment, Hugh of Grantmesnil, and Roger of Montgomery, the loyal son-in-law of him who cursed the Bastard in his cradle. There too were the other worthies of the day of Mortemar, Walter Giffard and Hugh of Montfort, and William of Warren, the valiant youth who had received the chiefest guerdon of that memorable ambush. These men, chiefs of the great houses of Normandy, founders, some of them, of greater houses in England, were gathered together at their sovereign's bidding. They were to be the first to share his counsels in the enterprise which he was planning, an enterprise planned against the land which with so many in that assembly was to become a second home, a home perhaps all the more cherished that it was won by the might of their own right hands.
To this select Council the duke made his first appeal. He told them, what some of them at least knew well already, of the wrongs which he had suffered from Harold of England. It was his purpose to cross the sea, in order to assert his rights and to chastise the wrong-doer. With the help of God and with the loyal service of his faithful Normans, he doubted not his power to do what he purposed. He had gathered them together to know their minds upon the matter. Did they approve of his purpose? Did they deem the enterprise within his power? Were they ready themselves to help him to the uttermost to recover his right? The answer of the Norman leaders, the personal kinsmen and friends of their sovereign, was wise and constitutional. They approved his purpose; they deemed that the enterprise was not beyond the power of Normandy to accomplish. The valor of the Norman knighthood, the wealth of the Norman Church, was fully enough to put their duke in possession of all that he claimed. Their own personal service they pledged at once; they would follow him to the war; they would pledge, they would sell, their lands to cover the costs of the expedition. But they would not answer for others. Where all were to share in the work, all ought to share in the counsel. Those whom the duke had gathered together were not the whole baronage of Normandy. There were other wise and brave men in the duchy, whose arms were as strong, and whose counsel would be as sage, as those of the chosen party to whom he spoke. Let the duke call a larger meeting of all the barons of his duchy, and lay his designs before them.
The duke hearkened to this advice, and he at once sent forth a summons for the gathering of a larger Assembly. This is the only time when we come across any details of the proceedings of a Norman Parliament. And we at once see how widely the political condition of Normandy differed from that of England. We see how much further England had advanced, or more truly, how much further Normandy had gone back, in the path of political freedom. The Norman Assembly which assembled to discuss the war against England was a widely different body from the Great Cemór which had voted for the restoration of Godwine. Godwine had made his speech before the King and all the people of the land. That people had met under the canopy of heaven, beneath the walls of the greatest city of the realm. But in William's Assembly we hear of none but barons. The old Teutonic constitution had wholly died away from the memories of the descendants of the men who followed Rolf and Harold Blaatand. The immemorial democracy had passed away, and the later constitution of the mediæval States had not yet arisen. There was no Third Estate, because the personal right of every freeman to attend had altogether vanished, while the idea of the representation of particular privileged towns had not yet been heard of. And if the Third Order was wanting, the First Order was at least less prominent than it was in other lands. The wealth of the Church had been already pointed out as an important element in the duke's ways and means, and both the wealth and the personal prowess of the Norman clergy were, when the day came, freely placed at William's disposal. The peculiar tradition of Norman Assemblies, which shut out the clergy from all share in the national deliberations, seems now to have been relaxed. It is implied rather than asserted that the bishops of Normandy were present in the Assembly which now met; but it is clear that the main stress of the debates fell on the lay barons, and that the spirit of the Assembly was a spirit which was especially theirs.
Narrow as was the constitution of the Assembly, it showed, when it met, no lack either of political foresight or of parliamentary boldness. In a society so aristocratically constituted as that of Normandy was, the nobles are in truth, in a political sense, the people, and we must expect to find in any gathering of nobles both the virtues and the vices of a real Popular Assembly. William had already consulted his Senate; he had now to bring his resolution, fortified by their approval, before the body which came as near as any body in Normandy could come to the character of an Assembly of the Norman people. The valiant gentlemen of Normandy, as wary as they were valiant, proved good guardians of the public purse, trusty keepers of what one knows not whether to call the rights of the nation or the privileges of their order. The duke laid his case before them. He told once more the tale of his own rights and of the wrong which Harold had done him. He said that his own mind was to assert his rights by force of arms. He would fain enter England in the course of the year on which they had entered. But without their help he could do nothing. Of his own he had neither ships enough nor men enough for such an enterprise. He would not ask whether they would help him in such a cause. He took their zeal and loyalty for granted; he asked only how many ships, how many men, each of his hearers would bring as a free-will offering.
A Norman Assembly was not a body to be surprised into a hasty assent, even when the craft and the eloquence of William was brought to bear upon it. The barons asked for time to consider of their answer. They would debate among themselves, and they would let him know the conclusion to which they came. William was obliged to consent to this delay, and the Assembly broke up into knots, greater or smaller, each eagerly discussing the great question. Parties of fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, sixty, a hundred, gathered round this or that energetic speaker. Some professed their readiness to follow the duke; others were in debt, and were too poor to venture on such hazards. Other speakers set forth the dangers and difficulties of the enterprise. Normandy could not conquer England; their fair and flourishing land would be ruined by the attempt. The conquest of England was an undertaking beyond the power of a Roman emperor. Harold and his land were rich; they had wealth to take foreign kings and dukes into their service; their own forces were in mere numbers such as Normandy could not hope to strive against. They had abundance of tried soldiers, and above all, they had a mighty fleet, with crews skilled beyond other men in all that pertained to the warfare of the sea. How could a fleet be raised, how could the sailors be gathered together, how could they be taught, within a year's space, to cope with such an enemy? The feeling of the Assembly was distinctly against so desperate an enterprise as the invasion of England. It seemed as if the hopes and schemes of William were about to be shattered in their beginning through the opposition of his own subjects.
A daring though cunning attempt was now made by William Fitz-Osbern, the duke's nearest personal friend, to cajole the Assembly into an assent to his master's will. He appealed to their sense of feudal honor; they owed the duke service for their fiefs: let them come forward and do with a good heart all, and more than all, that their tenure of their fiefs bound them to. Let not their sovereign be driven to implore the services of his subjects. Let them rather forestall his will; let them win his favor by ready offerings even beyond their power to fulfill. He enlarged on the character of the lord with whom they had to deal. William's jealous temper would not brook disappointment at their hands. It would be the worse for them in the end, if the duke should ever have to say that he had failed in his enterprise because they had failed in readiness to support him.
The language of William Fitz-Osbern seems to have startled and perplexed even the stout hearts with whom he had to deal. The barons prayed him to be their spokesman with the duke. He knew their minds and could speak for them all, and they would be bound by what he said. But they gave him no direct commission to bind them to any consent to the duke's demand. Their words indeed tended ominously the other way; they feared the sea,—so changed was the race which had once manned the ships of Rolf and Harold Blaatand,—and they were not bound to serve beyond it.
A point seemed to have been gained, by the seeming license given by the Assembly to the duke's most intimate friend to speak as he would in the name of the whole baronage. William Fitz-Osbern now spoke to the duke. He began with an exordium of almost cringing loyalty, setting forth how great was the zeal and affection of the Normans for their prince, and how there was no danger which they would not willingly undergo in his service. But the orator soon overshot his mark. He promised, in the name of the whole Assembly, that every man would not only cross the sea with the duke, but would bring with him double the contingent to which his holding bound him. The lord of twenty knights' fees would serve with forty knights, and the lord of a hundred with two hundred. He himself, of his love and zeal, would furnish sixty ships, well equipped, and filled with fighting men.
The barons now felt themselves taken in a snare. They were in nearly the same case as the king against whom they were called on to march. They had indeed promised; they had commissioned William Fitz-Osbern to speak in their names. But their commission had been stretched beyond all reasonable construction; their spokesman had pledged them to engagements which had never entered into their minds. Loud shouts of dissent rose through the hall. The mention of serving with double the regular contingent awakened special indignation. With a true parliamentary instinct, the Norman barons feared lest a consent to this demand should be drawn into a precedent, and lest their fiefs should be forever burthened with this double service. The shouts grew louder; the whole hall was in confusion; no speaker could be heard; no man would hearken to reason or render a reason for himself.
The rash speech of William Fitz-Osbern had thus destroyed all hope of a regular parliamentary consent on the part of the Assembly. But it is possible that the duke gained in the end by the hazardous experiment of his seneschal. It is even possible that the manœuvre may have been concerted beforehand between him and his master. It was not likely that any persuasion could have brought the Assembly as a body to agree to the lavish offer of volunteer service which was put into its mouth by William Fitz-Osbern. There was no hope of carrying any such vote on a formal division. But the confusion which followed the speech of the seneschal hindered any formal division from being taken. The Assembly, in short, as an assembly, was broken up. The fagot was unloosed, and the sticks could now be broken one by one. The baronage of Normandy had lost all the strength of union; they were brought, one by one, within the reach of the personal fascinations of their sovereign. William conferred with each man apart; he employed all his arts on minds which, when no longer strengthened by the sympathy of a crowd, could not refuse anything that he asked. He pledged himself that the doubling of their services should not become a precedent; no man's fief should be burthened with any charge beyond what it had borne from time immemorial. Men thus personally appealed to, brought in this way within the magic sphere of princely influence, were no longer slack to promise; and having once promised, they were not slack to fulfill. William had more than gained his point. If he had not gained the formal sanction of the Norman baronage to his expedition, he had won over each individual Norman baron to serve him as a volunteer. And wary as ever, William took heed that no man who had promised should draw back from his promise. His scribes and clerks were at hand, and the number of ships and soldiers promised by each baron was at once set down in a book. A Domesday of the conquerors was in short drawn up in the ducal hall at Lillebonne, a forerunner of the greater Domesday of the conquered, which twenty years later was brought to King William of England in his royal palace at Winchester.