WE have now to deal with that 60 Mediæval Society which was based on the fusion of the ideas of tribal communism and Roman individualism and bureaucracy respectively.
The transition from the Pax Romana, the final establishment of the Roman Empire, the high-water mark of classical civilisation, to the apparent chaos which followed the successful inroads of the barbarian tribes in the 5th century is long and obscure. But the fact before hinted at of the corruption of the Empire into a mere centralised tax-gathering machine is obvious enough to the careful student of history. 61 The ancient aristocratic families of the provinces were, under the name of the Decuriones, made responsible for the taxes, and had the odium of acting as tax-gatherers, their own estates suffering if they failed to obtain the full amount decreed. As the resources of the Empire began to decline, the central government squeezed so much the harder, and, as before stated, the position of these Decuriones became intolerable, so that they were driven to the wholesale manumission of their slaves. These now became serfs, owing service to their former masters, and being the necessary human live-stock of the great estates once owned by those masters. It seems most probable that these necessary circumstances, fused with the system of the Teutonic Mark, gradually produced the Manor, which was the basis of mediaeval economic life. This, of course, only applies to those countries which had been more or less definitely Romanised. In other non-Romanised lands the serfs were the descendants of the conquered tribe, while the freemen of the conquering tribe, the “gentle-men,” 62 or men of the Gens, were the holders of the land, under some tenure or other. The irresistible tendency of the new society, therefore, whatever circumstances it had to deal with, was towards a hierarchical system, under which, while no man was positively owned by another, no man was free of service to another; even the serfs, the lowest rank, had certain rights, the chief of which was the use of a portion of the Manor; the right of livelihood, in fact, was not withheld from them, in theory at least. The theory of the feudal system is an unbroken chain of service from the serf up to the kaiser, and of protection from the kaiser down to the serf. It recognised no absolute ownership of land. God was the owner of the earth, the kaiser and his kings were His viceregents there, who might devolve their authority to their vassals, and they in turn to theirs, and so on till it reached the serf; the difference being in the quality of the service, the men of the conquering tribe paying none but military duties of some kind, while the serf paid productive labour. Except the right of livelihood 63 guaranteed by custom, the latter had in general no rights, but his lord, nevertheless, was bound to protect him against wrongs from outside. And the theory of the system at least invested the lord with a quasi-religious character.
The change to this system was much furthered by the domination of the Teutonic races in Italy, France, and Spain, so that the old Roman, or Roman provincial slave-owning noble, was gradually superseded by the barbarian lord of the manor, who naturally carried with him the custom of the tribe, developing little by little into the complete feudal system. This was helped on by the break-up of the world-market of ancient civilisation; which break-up brought about at last conditions under which the land was the only source of livelihood, and, as we have seen, was cultivated mainly for the behoof of the lords by a population of serfs and of tenants in villeinage,—although there were everywhere in Teutonic countries remains of the old holding by the freemen of communal lands.
As already hinted this hierarchical 64 system was mixed up with religious ideas. Accordingly, we find that the Middle Ages had a distinct religion of their own, developed from, but by no means identical with, that early Christianity, which was one of the forces that broke up the Roman Empire. As long as that empire lasted in its integrity Christianity was purely individualistic; it bade every man do his best for his future in another world, and had no commands to give about the government of this world, except to obey the “powers that be” in non-religious matters, in order to escape troubles and complications which might distract the attention of the Christian from the kingdom of God.
But in mediaeval Christianity, although this idea of individual devotion to the perfection of the next world still existed, it was kept in the background, and was almost dormant, except sporadically (as exemplified by St. Thomas à Kempis, St. Francis, St. Bernard, etc.) in the presence of the idea of the Church. The latter was not merely a link between the earthly and the heavenly kingdoms, 65 but may even be said to have brought the kingdom of heaven to earth by breathing its spirit into the temporal power, which it recognised as another manifestation of its own authority. The struggles between the temporal and the spiritual power, which form so large a part of the history of the Middle Ages, were not the result of any antagonism of ideas between the two, but came of the tendency of one side of the great organisation of society to absorb the other, without rejecting its theory.
In short, on the one hand, the Church was political and social as much as religious, while, on the other, the State was at least as much religious, as it was political and social.
For instance, all the great corporations, which were such a prominent feature of the Middle Ages, from the fraternity of knighthood to the guilds of craft, were on the one hand religious institutions, though on the other they were devised for obvious practical purposes. Again, in both physicians and lawyers a certain religious character was formally recognised, of which some 66 shadow of a memory still exists in their official garments and formulae.
As an example of the closeness with which this idea of the gradation of ranks for service-protection clung to the religious, as well as to the secular, polity of the Middle Ages, we may cite the Mystery Plays, in which not only heaven and earth are furnished each with its due hierarchy, but hell also has a like constitution. The simple medieval man conceived of the universe, it must be remembered, as divided into three parts, heaven above, earth in the midst, and hell below, though this was modified with the more learned by a curious mixture of quasi-Ptolemaic lore.
But the relations between the feudal lords, their vassals and their serfs, as such, only show us one side of the society of the Middle Ages. The tendency to association within that society is one of its most marked features. In fact, nothing could be done in those days without such association. Life seemed impossible to the medieval mind without common action. 67 All men, as we have seen, both great and small, belonged to the great corporation of the Church; damnation in this world and the next was the only alternative. The ecclesiastics proper, and those specially devoted to the religious life, including those whose business was fighting for the Church, formed themselves into strictly regulated orders. The nobles were bound by the ties of the fraternity of knighthood in one or other of its forms.
Production and Exchange were in the hands of great associations formed by traders and craftsmen for protection of commerce and organisation of industry. The mediæval towns had two origins: first, there was the town, which was a survival of the city of Roman times and is mostly found in the south of Europe, Italy, Spain, France, etc. although there are examples in Britain and Western Germany. And next there were the new towns which grew up for reasons of convenience out of the “Mark,” and for the most part became incorporated into the feudal manorial system. The freemen—that is, the landholders of 68 the mark, formed a municipal aristocracy in these inchoate towns, and from them the governing body was chosen. When the towns began to be incorporated through privileges granted to them by their feudal overlord, the old semi-independent inhabitants, who were probably the survival of the conquered tribe, joined to those who had flowed into the town for protection and convenience, formed a population of craftsmen and traders. Of these, the traders, who fetched and carried wares from the east of Europe, mainly Byzantium, still the centre of organised commerce as in the later Empire, were the most important as to position, although very few in numbers. They were the first founders of the Merchant Guild, which, as its name imports, was purely commercial in tendency, although organised like all associations of the Middle Ages on quasi-religious grounds, and including some survivals of the fellowship of the freemen. A recent work on the Merchant Guild by Mr. Grosse shows conclusively that it was not deduced from the old Frith-gild; neither, on the other hand, 69 was it identical with the corporation of the towns, since non-residents could be members of it, whereas the members of the corporation (Les Lineages, Geschlechte, Porterey, Ehrbarkeit, Patricians, etc.) were bound to be holders of the lands which were once tribal.
But the principle of association was ~sure to have further development amongst the useful classes of the time; as handicraft began to grow in its capacity for production, guilds for the special crafts were founded all over Europe, till they embraced every department of craftsmanship in the widest sense of the word; thus the ploughman’s guild was the most important one in the villages and small towns of England. The constitution of these guilds was strictly on the received model of mediæval associations, but concerned itself also with the minutest details of the craft. They were thoroughly recognised legal bodies, having the power of enforcing penalties for the breaking of their special rules; and before long they became partakers In the supreme government of the towns, being commonly represented on 70 the corporation by members of their own body. In the later period of the Middle Ages they even went beyond this, and in not a few cases the representatives of the craft-guilds pushed out the original aristocracy, the men of the Lineages, Geschlechte, or Patricians. For example, towards the close of the 15th century, in Zurich, Hans Waldmann, the famous Burgermaster of that town, who had originally been a member of the tanner’s guild, on attaining to power, altered the constitution of the executive, which had at first been composed, half of the municipal aristocracy, and half of the guildsmen, and gained a definite perpetual majority for the latter by increasing the proportion of their representatives to two-thirds. Even earlier than this, in the latter half of the 14th century, the account given us by Froissart of the famous war of Ghent and its allies against their feudal lord, the Earl of Flanders, shows us that the municipal aristocracy had little power unless backed by the craft-guilds. Wherever in Flanders "the lesser crafts” (i.e. mainly the handicrafts) were 71 powerful, the corporation had to give way, and take up the war against the Earl; where the “greater crafts” (such as the mariners) had sway, the corporation was able to hold the town for him.
To sum up, the corporation was the direct descendant of the mark, i.e. the tribal land-holding body, and the common tendency was for the craft-guilds to supplant this aristocracy after the Merchant Guilds had been overshadowed by their growing power. We may again mention that these corporations and guilds, the industrial associations in short, were accepted as due and legal members of the feudal hierarchy. It is necessary now to take note of the relations between them and the kings and their nobles.
As soon as feudalism became paramount in Europe, the tribal mark lost its independence, and came under the domination of the baron or lord of the manor, although much of its constitution and most of its customs remained intact under the feudal lordship,41 as they had done under Roman bureaucracy. As the 72 mark became consolidated into the town, with the land attached thereto, it began to acquire fresh privileges from its new lords, lay and ecclesiastic. These privileges were for the most part bought from the overlords under the compulsion of the need of money, bred by the wars they were engaged in, or, in the church territories, by the overweening love of splendid building, and the intrigues with Rome and foreign courts in which they were involved. These privileges consisted mainly of independent jurisdiction, rights of market and tolls, freedom from military service, etc., etc.
It was the interest of the towns to favour the growth of power in the king or monarch, since he was far off, and his domination was much less real and much less vexatious than that of the feudal neighbour, their immediate lord. The king, on his side, always engaged in disputes with his baronage, found his interest in creating and supporting free corporations in the towns, and thereby curbing the overweening power of his vassals; while at the same time the growing production of the towns added 73 to his exchequer, by creating a fresh source of supply, easier to exploit than that which the military nobles yielded.
This process of the gaining of independence of the growing medieval towns began as early as the 11th century, and culminated in the 14th. The first English charter was granted by Edward the Confessor. In France the first charter was granted to Le Mans in 1072, to Cambrai 1076; Laon, Beauvais, Amiens, and other towns followed. In later times the kings themselves founded free towns, as notably Edward I., both in Guienne and England; Kingston upon Hull (hodie Hull) and Winchelsea are examples of such places still remaining, though fortune has dealt with these two in such a widely different way.
In Spain, in quite early days the Visigothic code, a blending of Roman law and Teutonic custom, recognised the corporations definitely: the first charter was granted to Leon in 1020.
In Germany the towns were in the early Middle Ages appanages of the vassals of the Empire, and were governed by the bishops as their vicars: the 74 process of emancipation here was that at first, in the 12th century, the townsmen carried on a government side by side with the bishop, and in the 13th century got rid of him either by purchase or main force, and so at last reached the goal of holding directly of the Empire. When this was accomplished, they were more completely freed than elsewhere in Europe, and ensured their independence by the formation of confederacies of cities, of which the Hanseatic League was the most famous.
In Flanders, owing to the great development of production by handicraft, the cities, though not theoretically so free, were powerful enough to carry on a struggle with their feudal lord through almost the whole of the 14th century, and were not altogether crushed, even when the battle of Rosebeque and the death of Philip van Artavelde closed the more dramatic phase of that struggle. As an example of the completeness of the legal recognition of the status of these cities, it may be mentioned that, in the second act of the war with the Earl of Flanders, when the younger 75 Artavelde was entering on the scene, the city of Ghent summoned to its banner certain knights and lords to do it due military feudal service, while these very lords were in the Earl's camp preparing to do battle against Ghent: but it 1s clear that the historian recognises to the full the right of the city in the matter, though he applauds the refusal of the vassals on “gentlemanly” grounds.
41. Cf. Gomme’s Village Communities.Back