For instance, one cannot be surprised to find this popular history, written in England and depending upon English encylopædias, talking of an Anglo-Saxon conquest of this country at the beginning of the Dark Ages—nearly all educated Englishmen even now still speak in those terms, and have a vague idea at the back of their minds that a number of Germans, called Anglo-Saxons, came over the sea in boats, centuries ago, killed all the people who then lived in England, and started everything over again. And there is a great deal to be said (though I think it is wrong) for the conventional derivation of Viking from the word for “bay.”
I will even admit that writing of Charlemagne as speaking Frankish (that is, a sort of Flemish) as his habitual tongue is not a thing to carp at in a popular history, though it is almost certainly wrong. All the last generation believed that kind of thing, and it is still conventional teaching in England and Germany. Mr. Wells also has the imagination to see that Charlemagne must have known the Latin tongue as well, and admits that his talking literary Latin is “open to discussion.” A more detailed knowledge of the period makes it clear that a man in Charlemagne’s social position must have talked and thought in Latin, though it is true that a writer of the time talked of the old Frankish speech as being the “ancestral tongue” of that great man.
In the same way the description of the changes in the Papacy of the tenth century is the conventional description of from one hundred and fifty to fifty years ago—a virtuous German reform of wicked Italians—and it is natural that the modern scholarship which shows the real struggle to have been between an attempted renewal of Byzantine influence and the counter Western Imperial influence should never have been presented to our author.
All that, though out of date, may pass. But there are certain extreme statements in what I have called this “old-fashioned conventional history” which really are too much out of date to go without notice.
For instance, Mr. Wells quotes, quite innocently, as though it were history, the ridiculous sentence from some other popular history or other, that “to practise medicine was forbidden by the Church, which expected cures to be effected by religious rites.” He probably means that the strong general feeling of the day against dissection of the dead had clerical support. But to think that there were no doctors in the Dark Ages is really going a little too far in old-fashionedness: it is not even 1850. It is 1820.
In the same way the idea that Austrasia and Neustria were the German and French speaking halves of the Frankish dominion is really too antiquated. The people who believed that kind of thing and yet could claim to be scholars have been dead, even the longest-lived of them, many years since, and to use such language is rather like talking (as some people still do talk) of the United States as though they were a colony of Englishmen. The truth is, of course, that the two divisions were purely administrative, an eastern and a western; the area being too great for permanent single rule. They were obviously made without any consideration of language. Who cared about language in the seventh and early eighth centuries? They were designed to give fairly equal burdens and resources. The majority of people living in Austrasia had probably never heard German speech. The only thing in Austrasia that was German was the broad Eastern fringe, very ill-populated, with no cities that were not Roman, and with all the culture and the wealth—save Alsace and the Cologne-Aix, Rhine and lower Moselle region—romance in speech. After all, Rheims was in Austrasia, and perhaps its most important city.
In the same way, to talk of the “subject population” after the defeat of Syagrius by his fellow-general, Clovis, is beyond the limit of what is tolerable in the way of exploded mid-nineteenth century convention. Everybody knows, since Fustel, that there was no trace of a conquering and a subject race. The Gallo-Romans, the Flemish-speaking Franks in the very beginning of the business, sundry German-speaking adventurers and nobles, chance soldiers from the extreme East, a great many from the South of Gaul, a mass of clerics, made up that society. It was never divided by race at all or by speech. That was the quite gratuitous assumption of people who thought noble Protestant Prussia to be the modern example of Franks, and decadent Catholic “Latins” to be the modern example of Gallo-Romans. It has no relation to reality. The social divisions of the sixth and seventh centuries were between free and unfree, between those belonging to the Curia and those governed by it, and (much the most prominent division of all) between Christian and non-Christian.
This impossible old idea about a German Austrasia has serious consequences in Mr. Wells’s History, for it makes him still talk of the two divisions as the origins of modern France and Germany; just as they used to talk in 1870! Nowadays that kind of thing won’t do.
Nor is it tolerable to speak of Mercia as “holding out stoutly against the priests and for the ancient Faith and ways.” We leave all that kind of thing to John Richard Green. The conversion of Mercia naturally came later than that of Kent and Northumbria because it lay further inland, but Penda of Mercia marched with the army of Christian Welsh Princes, and Sussex and the Isle of Wight were evangelized much later than Mercia.
To talk of Pepin of Heristal as “conquering Neustria” has been inadmissible for the better part of fifty years. And it is still wilder to speak of “but small racial or social difference” between the “Anglo-Saxon, Jute, or Dane.”