The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

Reiterated claims had secured in the eighteenth century the general acceptance of the view that England "set the example" of admitting cities to representation in national diets (so Koch, Histor. View of the European Nations, Crichton's tr. 3rd ed. p. 46). But as to the priority of the institution in Spain, see U.R. Burke, History of Spain, Hume's ed. i, 370; and Prescott, Hist. of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, Kirk's ed. 1889, p. 10 and refs. As to its existence in Sicily (circa 1232), see Milman, Hist. of Latin Christianity, vi, 154, proceeding on Gregorio, Considerazioni sopra la Storia di Sicilia, 1805 (ed. 2a, 1831-39, vol. ii, cap. v); and Von Raumer, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen (Aufg. 1857-58, B. vii, Haupt. 6, Bd. iii, p. 249). Cp. Von Reumont, The Carafas of Maddaloni, Eng. tr. 1854, p. 61, and refs. Frederick's assemblies, too, were called Parlamente. He in turn had, of course, been influenced by the practice, if not of Spain, at least of the Italian cities, which he wished his own to rival.

As to Simon's object in summoning burgesses, Hallam admits (Europe during the Middle Ages, ed. 1855, iii, 27) that it "was merely to strengthen his own faction, which prevailed among the commonalty," though the step was too congruous with general developments not to be followed up. Compare the admissions of Green, pp. 151-53; Stubbs, ii, 96, 103; and the remark of Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iii) that the representation of burghs in the states-general of all the great European monarchies originated spontaneously in the desire of the kings for support against the barons. Freeman's statement (General Sketch of European History, p. 184) that under Simon we find "the whole English nation, nobles, clergy, and people, acting firmly together" against the king, is quite erroneous. Cp. Gneist, Geschichte des Self-government in England, 1863, p. 143. Dr. Gardiner (Student's History, p. 245), speaking of the presence of city burgesses and knights of the shire in the same Parliament under Edward III, writes that "in no other country in Europe would this have been possible." He seems to have been entirely unaware of the Spanish practice.

As the roots of the temper of equality are weakened, the relative prestige of the king is heightened,[1024] provided that in a turbulent age he is strong enough for his functions; though, again, he runs new risks when, in peace, he is weak enough to make favourites, and thus sets up a source of jealousy in the act of surrendering some of his own special prestige. Then he doubles the force against him. History has generally represented favourites as unworthy; but there is no need that they should be so in order to be detested; and whether we take Gaveston, or Buckingham, or Bute, we shall always find that the animosity of the favourite's assailants is so visibly excessive as to imply the inspiration of primordial envy quite as much as resentment of bad government. Whether it is noble denouncing favoured noble or Pym impeaching the Duke, there is always the note of primary animal jealousy.

§ 2

A very obvious and familiar general law, here to be noted afresh, is that the constant and extensive employment of energy in war retards civilisation, by leaving so much less for intellectual work. Some sociologists have arrived at the optimistic half-truths that (1) warfare yields good in the form of chivalry, and that (2) great wars like the Crusades promote civilisation by setting up communication between peoples. But it is not asked whether the good involved in chivalry could not conceivably have been attained without the warfare, and whether (as before noted) there could not have been commerce between East and West without the Crusades.[1025] The ancient Phœnicians had contrived as much in their day. Even the expansion of Italian commerce which followed on the Crusades went on the lines of a trade already in existence, as is proved once for all by the mere numbers of the vessels supplied to the crusaders by the Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians;[1026] and inasmuch as these republics fought furiously for the monopoly, each grabbing for special privileges,[1027] till Genoa overthrew Pisa, the total expansion must have been small, and the political disintegration great.

Nor was it on the whole otherwise with the spirit of chivalry, of which Guizot[1028] gives such an attractive picture. It was with the Church-made code of chivalrous morals as with the Church's code of Christian virtue: the ideal and practice were far asunder. As a matter of fact, the rules of chivalry were in part but the rules of prize-fighters,[1029] without which the game could not continuously be played; and they in no way affected the relations of the prize-fighters with other classes, or even their moral relations with each other save in the matter of fighting. To the "common herd" they were not only brutal but base,[1030] recognising no moral obligations in that direction. So too the Crusades represent a maximum of strife yielding a minimum of intercourse, which (save for the spirit of religious hate which wrought the strife) could have been attained in peace in tenfold degree by the play of the energy spent in preliminary bloodshed.

It is, of course, idle to speak as if the age of warfare might have been different if somebody had anachronistically pointed out the possibilities; but it is worse than idle, on the other hand, to impute a laudable virtue to its impulses because other impulses followed on them. The task of the sociological historian is first to trace sequences, and then to reason from them to the problems of his own age, where most are praise and blame profitable exercises. The lesson of early English history is neither that chivalry is good nor that the feudal knights and kings were ruffians; but that certain things happened to retard civilisation because these had their way, and that similar results would tend to accrue if their ideals got uppermost among us now. Thus we have to note that during the long period of frequent dynastic and other civil war from the Conquest to the reign of Henry II there was almost no intellectual advance in England, the only traceable gain arising when the king was fighting abroad with his foreign forces. There was no such cause at stake as thrilled into fierce song the desperately battling Welsh; and though in the reign of Edward III we have the great poetic florescence of which Chaucer is the crown, the inspiration of that literature had come from or through France; and with the depression of France there came the Nemesis of depression in English culture.

The triumph of Edward over France was, broadly speaking, a result of financial rascality, inasmuch as he succeeded by means of the money which he had borrowed from the Florentine bankers, and which he never repaid.[1031] He was thus well equipped and financed when the French were not; and he was able to buy off the princes of the Empire on the north and east of the French frontier. But though the enterprise thus begun was continued by means of a home revenue raised mainly on the wool trade, the English attempt to dominate France ended in the inevitable way of imperialism, the humiliation of the victors duly following on the misery and humiliation of the vanquished. Only the depopulation of the Black Death prevented extreme misery among the English population; and the conquering king ends his life, as William had done before him, in isolation and ignominy.

It may or may not have been a gain that Edward's victories over France practically determined the adoption of the middle-class, gallicised English speech[1032] by the upper classes, who had hitherto been French-speaking, like the kings themselves. An Anglicising process, such as had been interrupted at the advent of Henry II, had set in when Normandy was lost (1204), to be again interrupted on the accession of Henry III, and resumed in the civil wars of his reign. But Edward I habitually spoke French, and so did his nobles. They had hitherto looked with true aristocratic scorn on the pretensions of the bourgeoisie—"rustici Londonienses qui se barones vocant ad nauseam," in the fashion satirised in all ages, down to our own; but in their new relation of hostility and superiority to Normandy and to France, they insensibly adopted the language that had been framed by that very bourgeoisie out of Saxon, and French and French idioms translated into Saxon.

Cp. Pearson, Fourteenth Century, pp. 222, 233. Prof. Earle's quasi-theory of the cause of the recovery of the native tongue (Philology of the English Tongue, 3rd ed. pp. 44, 66) is purely fanciful. In the end, as he admits, it was not any native dialect, but the artificial composite "King's English," much modified by French, that survived. It is noteworthy that many locutions which pass in the Bible for specially pure archaic English, as "fourscore and ten," are simply translations of a French idiom, itself ancient Celtic translated into Romance. (Cp. the Introduction to the Study of the History of Language, by Strong, Logeman, and Wheeler, 1891, p. 393.)