However, the onward march of civilisation can never be so completely suspended that these centuries were absolutely sterile for the progress of humanity. In the church thought awakened, and in lay society poetry made its appearance. There was even some progress in morals, at least among the ruling classes. In the isolation in which each one lived, exposed to all sorts of perils, the soul fortified itself to meet them. The feeling of the dignity of man, which despotism managed to smother, was revived; and the society which spilled blood with such deplorable facility showed often a moral elevation which is to be found only in this age. The low vices and cowardice of the decadent Romans or enslaved peoples were unknown to them, and the Middle Ages have bequeathed to modern times the sentiment of honour. The feudal nobility knew how to die, which is the first condition of knowing how to get the most out of life.
Another beneficial consequence was the reorganisation of the family. In ancient cities the head of the family lived outside his house, in the fields or in the forum. He scarcely knew his wife and children, yet had over them the right of life and death. In primitive times the custom of polygamy and the facility for divorce prevented the family from establishing itself on any better basis. In feudal society men lived in isolation, and the head of the family was brought into close touch with it. When wars gave him leisure in his castle, perched like an eagle’s nest on the mountain top, he had nothing to occupy his life and his heart but his wife and children. The church, which brought rough soldiers to the feet of a virgin and made them for the sake of the mother of Christ respect female virtue, softened the temper of the warrior and prepared him to come under the spell of the finer feelings and more delicate sentiments with which nature had endowed the other sex.
Woman assumed, then, her place in the family and in society which the Mosaic law had once given her. Things went even further—she became the object of a cult which created new sentiments, which the poetry of troubadours and minstrels seized upon and which chivalry expressed in action. As in the beautiful legend of St. Christopher, the strong was conquered by the weak, the giant by the little child.
Tower of a German Feudal Castle
This is seen in an institution of the times. Robert d’Arbrissel founded near Saumur at Fontevrault, about the year 1100, an abbey which soon became famous, and which opened its gates to recluses of both sexes. The women were cloistered, and spent their time in prayer. The men worked in the fields, drained the marshes, cleared the land, and remained the perpetual servants of the women. The abbey was governed by an abbess, “because,” says the bull of confirmation, “Jesus Christ in dying gave his best beloved disciple to his mother for a son.”
Outside the family, the state was doubtless badly organised. It is necessary to call attention, in spite of all contradictory facts, to the political theory which this society represents. If the serf had no rights, the vassals had them, and well-defined ones too. The feudal tie was formed on conditions well known and accepted by him in advance; new conditions could not be placed upon him except by his own agreement. From these come those grand and strong maxims of common law which, in spite of a thousand violations, have come down to us—no tax can be imposed without the consent of the contributants; no law is valid unless accepted by those who must obey it; no sentence is legal unless declared by the peers of the accused. These are the laws of feudalism which the states general of 1789 buried under the débris of absolute monarchy; and in guarantee of these rights the vassal had the power of breaking the tie of vassalage by giving up his fief or of responding by war to a denial of justice from his lord. This right of armed resistance, which St. Louis himself recognised, led, it is true, to anarchy; it weakened the social structure, but it strengthened the individual. But it is with the individual that we must commence. Before intelligently building up the state, it is necessary to elevate the individual and the family; this double work was the task of the Middle Ages.
The church worked with energy to establish the sanctity of marriage, even for the serf; in preaching the equality of all men before God, which was a threat to the great inequalities of this world; by proclaiming by the principle of election that she reserved for herself at the very pinnacle of hierarchy the rights of the intellect, in contradistinction to the feudal world which recognised but the right of blood; and in crowning with the triple crown and seating in the chair of St. Peter, where they had one foot on the neck of kings, a serf like Adrian II and the son of a poor carpenter, like Gregory VII.