“No, my friend,” says a neighbour—“you shall not be driven away. You shall till this land, but in a way you little think for. Remember, my good fellow, how in your youth, some fifty years ago, you were rash enough to wed my father’s little serf, Jacqueline. Remember the proverb, ‘He who courts my hen is my cock.’ You belong to my fowl-yard. Ungird yourself; throw away your sword! From this day forth you are my serf.”
There is no invention here. The dreadful tale recurs incessantly during the Middle Ages. Ah, it was a sharp sword that stabbed him. I have abridged and suppressed much, for as often as one returns to these times, the same steel, the same sharp point, pierces right through the heart.
There was one among them who, under this gross insult, fell into so deep a rage that he could not bring up a single word. It was like Roland betrayed. His blood all rushed upwards into his throat. His flaming eyes, his mouth so dumb, yet so fearfully eloquent, turned all the assembly pale. They started back. He was dead: his veins had burst. His arteries spurted the red blood over the faces of his murderers.[17]
The doubtful state of men’s affairs, the frightfully slippery descent by which the freeman becomes a vassal, the vassal a servant, and the servant a serf,—in these things lie the great terror of the Middle Ages, and the depth of their despair. There is no way of escape therefrom; for he who takes one step is lost. He is an alien, a stray, a wild beast of the chase. The ground grows slimy to catch his feet, roots him, as he passes, to the spot. The contagion in the air kills him; he becomes a thing in mortmain, a dead creature, a mere nothing, a beast, a soul worth twopence-halfpenny, whose murder can be atoned for by twopence-halfpenny.
These are outwardly the two great leading traits in the wretchedness of the Middle Ages, through which they came to give themselves up to the Devil. Meanwhile let us look within, and sound the innermost depths of their moral life.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Benedict founded a convent at Aniane in Languedoc, in the reign of Charlemagne.
[9] See J. Grimm, Rechts Alterthümer, and my Origines du Droit.
[10] According to the ritual of Rouen. See Ducange on the words Festum and Kalendæ: also Martène, iii. 110. The Sibyl was crowned and followed by Jews and Gentiles, by Moses, the Prophets, Nebuchadnezzar, &c. From a very early time, and continually from the seventh to the seventeenth century, the Church strove to proscribe the great people’s feasts of the Ass, of Innocents, of Children, and of Fools. It never succeeded until the advent of the modern spirit.