So sang a Provençal baron of the twelfth century, and we find an echo of his spirit in Spain as late as the fifteenth, when a certain noble, sighing for the joys and spoils of civil war, remarked, ‘I would there were many kings in Castile for then I should be one of them.’
The Truce of God
The Church, endeavouring to cope with the spirit of anarchy, succeeded in establishing on different occasions a ‘Truce of God’, somewhat resembling the ‘Sacred Months’ devised by the Arabs for a like purpose. From Wednesday to Monday, and during certain seasons of the year, such as Advent or Lent, war was completely forbidden under ecclesiastical censure, while at no time were priests, labourers, women, or children to be molested.
The defect of such reforms lay in the absence of machinery to enforce them; and feudalism, the system by which in practice the few lived at the expense of the many, continued to flourish until foreign adventure, such as the Crusades, absorbed some of its chief supporters, and civilization and humanity succeeded in building up new foundations of society to take its place. It would seem as if the lessons of good government had to be learned in a hard school, generally through bitter experience on the part of the governed.
Monasticism
If the study of feudalism is necessary to a knowledge of the material life of the Middle Ages, its spirit is equally a closed book without an understanding of monasticism. What induced men and women, not just a few devout souls, but thousands of ordinary people of all nations and classes from the prince to the serf to forsake the world for the cloister; and, far from regretting this sacrifice, to maintain with obvious sincerity that they had chosen the better part? If we would realize the mediaeval mind we must find an answer to this question.
Turning to the earliest days of monasticism, when the ‘Fathers of the Church’ sought hermits’ cells, we recall the shrinking of finer natures from the brutality and lust of pagan society; the intense conviction that the way to draw nearer God was to shut out the world; the desire of a Simon Stylites to make the thoughtless mind by the sight of his self-inflicted penance think for a moment at any rate of a future Heaven and Hell.
Motives such as these continued to inspire the enthusiastic Christian throughout the Dark Ages following the fall of Rome; but, as Europe became outwardly converted to the Catholic Faith, it was not paganism from which the monk fled, but the mockery of his own beliefs that he found in the lives of so-called Christians. The corruption of imperial courts, even those of a Constantine or Charlemagne, the cunning cruelty of a baptized Clovis, the ruthless selfishness of a feudal baron or Norman adventurer fighting in the name of Christ: all these were hard to reconcile with a gospel of poverty, gentleness, and brotherhood.
Even the light of pure ideals once held aloft by the Church had begun to burn dim; for men are usually tolerant of evils to which they are accustomed, and the priest who had grown up amid barbarian invasions was inclined to look on the coarseness and violence that they bred as a natural side of life. As a rule he continued to maintain a slightly higher standard of conduct than his parishioners, but sometimes he fell to their level or below.
The great danger to the Church, however, was, as always in her history, not the hardships that she encountered but the prosperity. The bishops, ‘overseers’ responsible for the discipline and well-being of their dioceses, became in the Middle Ages, by reason of their very power and influence, too often the servants of earthly rulers rather than of God. Far better educated and disciplined than the laymen, experienced in diocesan affairs, without ties of wife and family, since the Church law forbade the clergy to marry, they were selected by kings for responsible office in the state. Usually they proved the wisdom of his choice through their gifts of administration and loyalty, but the effect on the Church of adding political to ecclesiastical power proved disastrous in the end.