The peoples of Europe

by H. J. Fleure

In the lands beyond the Rhine the abbeys were promoting agriculture, with towns growing some time after the corresponding phases were carried through in Gaul, and with the power of the war lord very strongly marked. In the Slavonic lands the phases of settlement and town growth are later still with the church and the war lord in close association, as is exemplified both by the Teutonic Knights in East Prussia and by the inclusion of the cathedral in the castle precincts in Prague and Cracow.

Growth of market towns and of communications, still largely mule tracks no doubt, was leading to fixation of language as discussed in an earlier chapter. One may mention, incidentally, that old mule tracks persist on lands in old-fashioned corners like the Channel Islands, where they are very numerous, and may form rings around the demesnes of the more important houses. The growth of markets was bringing neighbours together, weakening dialectal differences, and so helping to fuse local groups into nations on a basis of common language and common tradition expressed in growing poetry and prose in the evolving languages. Against these influences must be set that of the Roman heritage of universalism so vigorously represented by the Church, which the Holy Roman Empire tried so hard to imitate.

The poverty of the villagers and their weakness in face of the dangers of the forest and its wanderers, outlaws, and adventurers is an outstanding fact of the development of the next phase. There was insufficient freedom for agricultural experiment save to some extent in the monastery gardens, and insufficient knowledge for useful discussion, so cultivation methods remained in the grip of custom, with the modification due to the spread of the three-field system. Even the fallows could not keep the land up to a proper grade of fertility.

So traditional cultivation on lands owned or worked in common by the villagers was ever under threat of disruption, and doubtless the severities of climate and plague in the fourteenth century contributed their quota to the disintegration of the old mode of life. The complaint of diminished fertility made itself heard far and wide, and the end of the Middle Ages witnessed the breakdown of the old village system in the west. Trade and the voyages of discovery furnished supplementary sources of wealth, and the beginnings of larger industry grew out of this. In East-Central Europe change was delayed partly because there was still much forest land to be adapted, but largely because of the absorption of the people in struggles against Turk and Tatar. Even there, however, the old village system decayed in the end, and it is only in central Russia that it has maintained itself among the Slavonic peoples, who, almost to this day, from one point of view, may be looked upon as colonists spreading in the forests and their borders in Muscovy.

Of the lands north of the Mediterranean, France was most favoured agriculturally, and owed most to the Roman heritage of unity, and here grew la grande nation, while farther east national growth was delayed largely by attempts at an imperial unity, worked up as a device for defence against the Turk and Tatar. National growth in isolated or semi-isolated lands like the English plain, Holland, Sweden, and the central Scottish lowland was also a feature, while the diverse outlooks of the diverse coasts of Ireland and the weakness of that country's interior made the Green Isle the tragic type of the island which is so generally disunited.

Villagers with common lands gave place, with many a struggle, to landholding by proprietors with labourers under them, and if in Britain the labourer became landless and so fitted himself to become machine-fodder in the Industrial Revolution, in France he struggled to keep his link with the sacred soil of that sunny land, and ultimately won his position of ownership in the Revolution of the end of the eighteenth century. This change made itself felt as far as the Rhine, beyond which the peasant still remained subject to heavy seigniorial dues. It is claimed that during the recent war there has been a great move towards peasant proprietorship or something akin to it in the lands near the eastern border of Europe-of-the-Sea, carrying eastward, as it were, the work done one hundred years ago in France.

Facts about decline of the old village communities are legion, and cannot even be listed here, but attention may be drawn to the spread of root crops (for winter food for man and beast) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This helped materially to break down traditionalism, for it interfered with the old right of the villagers to free pasture of all the village cattle all over the stubble left after harvest: the lands with root crops had to remain enclosed. Of the new wealth brought in by individual proprietorship and root crops and other agricultural experiments, we have much evidence in the farmhouse buildings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; those of the years 1720-60 or so seem specially characteristic in Guernsey, Channel Islands. But the problem of fertility was not solved, even though leguminous crops were ploughed in and the chemical decomposition of the soil was speeded up by liming. Trade and long sea voyages loomed larger in the lives of the European peoples and industry grew ever larger, so that the urban element gained immensely in numbers and influence. We thus have a picture of the preface, as it were, to the Industrial Revolution, but another series of changes had been working to the same end.

The spread of the habit of sea trade from the Mediterranean to North-west Europe led to changes in the design and construction of ships. By the middle of the seventeenth century old difficulties about disease due to stinking bilge-water had largely been overcome, and ships were being built with better proportions for speed and manoeuvring, and in the early eighteenth century came the full adaptation of the fore-and-aft sail and the use of mahogany and other hard woods from the tropics for ship furniture, and so for house furniture too. With all this went increased size and speed of ships and ability to tack effectively, and so, broadly, to follow a course even if winds were variable. With all this new power and also the development of armaments, Europe found herself in a position to exploit the other parts of the earth inhabited by other races less well equipped. They gradually, nay almost suddenly, became the producers of raw materials, food-stuffs, and fertilizers for the vastly increasing populations of industrial Europe, which began to teem in the manufacturing cities when coal and steam machinery were added to the European equipment.

Along with this industrial development has gone the nationalist revival to which reference has already been made in several places ([pp. 23], [33], [35], [49], [62-3]), a cultural movement which in the nineteenth century became politically embittered, and which through its imperialistic outgrowths in England, Germany, France, and Russia has been a main factor of the recent war.