Toronto,
January 21, 1891.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.
THE ENGLISH MANOR.
In spite of all the labour that has been spent on the early history of England, scholars are at variance upon the most fundamental of questions: the question whether that history began with a population of independent freemen or with a population of dependent serfs. Nothing less than this is at issue in the current discussions as to the existence of the “mark” and the origin of the manor; as well as in the discussions, at first sight of less significance, as to the character of our mediæval constitution. Neither for the government of the parish nor for the government of the nation is it possible to construct an historical theory which does not rest, consciously or unconsciously, on some view as to the position of the body of the people.
The opinion almost universally accepted four or five years ago was to this effect: that the English people, when it came to Britain, was composed of a stalwart host of free men, who governed themselves by popular national councils, administered justice by popular local assemblies, and lived together in little village groups of independent yeomen. It was, indeed, recognised that there were gradations of rank—eorl and ceorl, and the like,—and that some individuals were unfortunate enough to be slaves. But these and similar facts were not supposed to affect the general outlines of the picture; and even those writers who expressed themselves most guardedly as to this “primitive Teutonic polity,” proceeded by the subsequent course of their narrative to assume it as their starting point. And looking back on the intellectual history of the last fifty years, we can easily trace the forces which assisted in giving this view currency. To begin with, the historical movement of this century was undoubtedly the offspring of Romanticism; and with Romanticism the noble independence of the unlettered barbarian was an article of faith. Moreover, the discovery of modern constitutionalism “in the forests of Germany” harmonised with a comfortable belief, which was at one time very common. This was the belief to which Kingsley gave such eloquent expression, that the barbarian invasions were the predestined means of bringing into the effete civilisation of Rome the manly virtues of the North. For England the theory had the additional charm, during a period of democratic change, of satisfying that most unscientific but most English desire, the desire for precedent. An extension of the suffrage rose far above mere expediency when it became a reconquest of primitive rights.
But, though we can understand how it was that historians came to discover the imposing figure of the free Teuton, it does not necessarily follow that they were mistaken. The disproof must be accomplished, if at all, by erudition equal to that by which the doctrine has been supported; and it has been the task of M. Fustel de Coulanges to assail with enormous learning and a cogent style almost every one of those propositions as to early mediæval constitutional history, which we were beginning to deem the secure achievements of German science.
There was a great contrast, both in their character and in the reception afforded to them, between the earlier and the later works of M. Fustel. He gained his reputation, in 1864, by his Cité Antique, a book wherein, unlike his later insistence on the complexity of institutions, he used one simple idea—that of the religion of the family—to solve most of the problems presented by ancient civilisation. It gained immediately an extraordinary success; especially in England, where it fell in with all that current of thought which was then beginning to turn into the direction of social evolution, comparative politics, and the like. For a year or so, the final piece of advice which schoolmasters gave to men who were going up for scholarships at the Universities was to read the Cité Antique.
Then for several years M. Fustel was not heard from, at any rate in England; although it might have been seen by occasional articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes and elsewhere that he was devoting himself to the early Middle Ages. In 1875 appeared the first volume of a Histoire des Institutions politiques de l’ancienne France, reaching to the end of the Merovingian period. But further investigation and the controversy to which the book gave rise made him resolve to go over the ground again more minutely in a series of volumes. Meanwhile he issued in 1885 his Recherches sur quelques problèmes d’histoire. With the modest declaration that before attempting to write the history of feudalism—“un corps infiniment vaste, à organes multiples, à faces changeantes, à vie complexe”—it was necessary to consider some preliminary questions, he threw down the gauntlet to the dominant school. He challenged the whole theory of primitive German life which was fondly supposed to rest on the authority of Cæsar and Tacitus; he showed how little evidence there was for the supposed existence of popular courts of justice; he traced the growth of the class of coloni or semi-servile peasants under the later Roman empire, in a way which suggested that they must have played a far more important part in subsequent social development than is usually assigned to them; and, finally, he denied altogether the existence of that free, self-governing village community with common ownership of the village lands, which Maurer had made familiar to us as the mark. His antagonism to German scholars was evidently sharpened by national antipathy: like his countrymen in many other departments of science, he was bent on proving that France could beat Germany with its own peculiar instruments of patient scholarship and minute research. It is turning the tables with a vengeance, when the Frenchman shakes his head, with much apparent reason, over the inexplicable rashness of his German brethren.