The Inquisition - A Political And Military Study Of Its Establishment. Hoffman Nickerson
of honour, but a deliberate judicial test; plaintiff and defendant fought, and the victor won his case. Perhaps the greatest man of the Dark Ages, Charlemagne, is found striving against this custom. In his will he provides that disputes between his heirs as to titles to land are not to be so settled. And for it he substitutes a mild form of ordeal much in favour in settling titles to land, that of the cross. The disputants held out their arms horizontally, and he that endured the longest had the land! There was the ordeal by boiling water, red hot iron, or by fire, all three of which scalded or burned the guilty and spared the innocent. Sometimes lots were drawn, and sometimes the truth or falsity of a statement was tested by whether or not the taking of the consecrated eucharist harmed him who maintained the statement in question. Of course all these tests were accompanied by religious ceremony, and were believed to be especially subject to the direct interposition of God. But the mental stature of those who maintained them:—
“Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda, e passa.”
(We will not speak of them but look and pass on).
The mention of the direct interposition of God brings us naturally to the supernatural bias of the time. Here judgment is not so easy. It is possible to represent the replacement of the old positivism of the educated ancients (by supernaturalism and the transcendental formulas of the creeds) as part of the general decline. It is equally possible to represent it as the one leaven in an unsatisfactory lump. Certainly the divorce between the thought of the (largely positivist) educated class of our own day and that of the populace, now (as ever) full either of religious or political superstition and careless both of philosophic theory and scientific fact, this divorce, I say, is certainly evil. But in the Dark Ages popular superstition ran riot without qualification or corrective.
It is a commonplace that the officials of the Church retained a measure of organization and discipline when civil government was going to pieces, that the Church was the central institution of the time, and that most of its outstanding personalities were churchmen. What is not always seized is the extreme importance of the monastic institution. The monk scholars, whom the Church alone sheltered, could at least hand on the knowledge of the great books of the past, although when they wrote they could make only huge, dull commentaries on those same books.
How then did such a time get any business done at all? Economically, by raising the slave to a serf; politically, by an increase of local power.
With the decay of communications and police, the slave could simply run away and could not be brought back. Clearly, to get any work out of him at all, it must be made to his interest to stay. This was done by requiring of him only a fixed and comparatively small amount of his produce as dues for the land he tilled, and permitting him to enjoy the surplus which he could increase up to the limit of his power. This arrangement “worked” after a fashion. In giving to the labourer more dignity and independence, it had an intimate (although apparently quite unconscious) connection with the Church’s doctrine of an equal worth of all souls in the sight of God.
Politically, the financial exhaustion of the central governments, and the slackening of communications, as the great Roman roads were not kept up, helped to throw more and more power and initiative upon local governors; until at last, instead of appointed officers they became almost local kings who could, and did, hand their offices to their sons as they could their property. This last capital change did not occur until midway in the ninth century, the second of three centuries of attacks from without which broke upon the degraded Roman society and almost destroyed it.
I have spoken of the society as degraded Roman because I believe that the entire weight of the evidence is against the idea of a conquest of civilization by rudely noble “Teutons” who then proceed to invigorate the decaying Roman system. The fact is that the coming of the little barbaric war bands, who were not “Teutonic” at all but of mixed bloods, was only a step, although an important step, in a long and gradual process of decay from within. No contemporary writer, except St. Jerome, seems to have seen anything particularly significant or striking in the event when the barbarian “Auxiliaries” (who for a hundred years had made up the chief part of the imperial armies) sacked the city of Rome itself. Such forces were the “Colonial troops” of the time who would occasionally run amuck in the course of their squabbles with other bands of auxiliaries, or with the impoverished government which had contracted to pay them. Throughout the greater part of the Empire, they seem never to have dreamed of an organized campaign against civilization although they indulged in occasional outbreaks of plundering and disorder. I have not space here in which to combat the vague notion of a sudden destruction and thereafter a distinctly “Teutonic” renewal. Let it suffice that not one single institution not common to all primitive folk, such as the council of warriors or of the elders of the tribe, appears. The tie of personal devotion and loyalty to a chieftain, which they brought with them, belongs not only to every barbarian but also to every schoolboy.
Another line of reasoning which would tend to prove the gradual nature of the decline and the absence of definite break with the past would be to trace the considerable beginnings in the “lower” or later Empire, of the tendencies recognized as marking particularly the Dark Ages. Depopulation, building with the fragments of older and better work, in letters the replacement of any criticism of life by glamour and marvels, all these go back to the fourth and sometimes even to the third century. Nor does the list end here. The fourth century saw cavalry replace infantry as the main reliance of armies, and the third century already saw the wise man thought of more as a magician than a philosopher.
Upon this degraded Roman society fell the triple scourge of Mohammedan, Viking and Magyar. It is perhaps the best answer to the assertion that the “Teutons” had poured new life into Western Christendom to note that it barely weathered the storm. For most of these attacks were not much more than great plundering raids. It was the Mohammedan more than the others who influenced particularly the southern part of France with which we are to be concerned. But it was the Viking who brought our Christendom to its lowest ebb. All three were alike in hatred and contempt for the enfeebled Roman civilization which they ravaged, especially for the religion which had become its bond of union. It was particularly the shrines, where so much of the movable wealth of the time had been concentrated in the form of gold, jewels and precious stuffs, that they went for. They, and not the “Teutons” of the fifth and sixth centuries, made the real barbarian invasions. However, they failed. Before the end of the eighth century, the Moslem, on the whole, was falling back. By 900 the worst of the fearful Viking harry was passed, and a little more than fifty years later the Magyar was held. Thenceforward the inner parts of Christendom were safe from raids. The struggle had so long seemed hopeless that a disembodied spirit, looking down on the thing, might well have called the final victory a miracle.
Following the repulse and (in the case of Viking and Magyar) the conversion of the “paynim” came a pause. The mean and wretched time, which had barely beaten off the pagan, could now take stock of itself. After all, it had achieved three things. The first of these achievements was negative. Leading their petty lives as they did among the colossal wreckage of Rome, they had preserved precious fragments of that which had been the soul of her civilization: her letters, law and philosophy. This living memory of Rome was scattered here and there, almost all of it hidden away in monasteries, as it were underground, without power to act upon the half bestial world around. Still it was there waiting for a time that could make use of it, in a deep sleep but not dead, like the princess in the fairy tale. The second and third achievements were positive, and of them the second was the most immediately useful and perhaps the most apparent. The Dark Ages, as we have seen, had placed authority on the widest possible basis. It was no longer a trust; it was a possession, and therefore to be tenaciously held and (in the main) moderately used, as one does of possessions. The conception of legal right had given way to that of privilege. Take a crude illustration; we know that many of our public men think of government not as something to live under but as something to live upon, that is, a means of prey upon their fellows. The “spoils system” we call it. Suppose a political organization composed of this sort of men getting complete control over elections for a time long enough to enable its local leaders to hand down their power to their sons. Clearly, after the first disorder the change would cause, there would come a time when each “leader” of a community, no matter how dull, could not help seeing that it