The Medieval West

By Geoffrey Gibson

The book covers about 1000 years from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance under the headings the Spectres of Dante and the Pilgrims of Chaucer; Mohammed and Charlemagne; Saint Augustine and Saint Aquinas; Serfs and Peasants; Lords and Vassals; Soldiers and Priests; Knights and Lords; Kings and Popes; Crusaders and Charlatans; and Lawyers and Judges. It is the second volume of A History of the West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geoffrey Gibson
• Release date: Jun 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311488176

Geoffrey Gibson

Geoffrey Gibson is an Australian writer living with the Wolf - his dog - in a kind of rural peace one hour out of Melbourne, the home of his football team, the Melbourne Storm. He has practised law as either a member of the Bar or a major international law firm. He has presided over at least one statutory tribunal for nearly thirty years and he has conducted arbitrations or mediations in Australia and the U S. He has published five books before on the theory and practice of the law, A Journalist's Companion to Australian Law (Melbourne University Press); The Arbitrator's Companion (Federation Press); Law for Directors (Federation Press); The Making of a Lawyer (What They Didn't Teach You at Law School) (Hardie Grant); and The Common Law - A History (Australian Scholarly Publishing)). He is now focussing on writing in general history, philosophy, and literature, fields that he was trained in and that he has pursued over very many Summer Schools at Cambridge, Harvard, and Oxford universities. His twelve eBooks so far published include five volumes of A History of the West - The Ancient West; The Medieval West; The West Awakes; Revolutions in the West; and Twentieth Century West; Confessions of a Babyboomer; Confessions of a Barrister; Parallel Trials, Socrates and Jesus; The English Difference, The Tablets of their Laws; The German Nexus, The Germans in English History; The Humility of Knowledge, Five Geniuses and God; and Windows on Shakespeare. The photo is not great, but at least the Wolf comes out OK.

Book preview

THE MEDIEVAL WEST

VOLUME II

OF

A HISTORY OF THE WEST

By Geoffrey Gibson

****

Published by:

Geoffrey Gibson at Smashwords

Copyright (c) 2014 by Geoffrey Gibson

****

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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IN MEMORY OF MARC BLOCH

The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins

Remorse from power….

There are no tricks in plain and simple faith…

(Brutus in Julius Caesar)

CONTENTS

Prologue

1. The Spectres of Dante and the Pilgrims of Chaucer

2. Saints Augustine and Aquinas

3. The Prophet Mohammed and the King Charlemagne

4. Serfs and Peasants

5. Lords, Knights, and Vassals

6. Soldiers and Priests

7. Kings and Popes

8. Crusaders and Charlatans

9. Lawyers and Judges

10. Powers and Peoples

11. Peoples and Nations

12. Getting by and Making Do

Epilogue

References and Notes

CHRONOLOGY

455 Sack of Rome

480 St Benedict born

427 Justinian emperor

529 Justinian closes schools at Athens

570 Mohammed born

632 Mohammed dies

732 Charles Martel defeats Muslems near Poitiers

735 Death of Bede

771 Charlemagne sole king

800 Charlemagne made emperor

828 Egbert first king of England

987 Hugh Capet king of France

1066 Norman Conquest

1073 Gregory VII Pope

1079 Abelard born

1095 first Crusade

1187 Saladin takes Jerusalem

1215 Magna Carta

1225 Aquinas born

PROLOGUE

While life under the Roman Empire may have been ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, in the words of Hobbes, it showed every sign of getting worse in Europe after the protection of Rome had been withdrawn. People lived in fear of violence from human and supernatural forces.

The Middle Ages may cover a period from, about, say, 400 to, about, say, 1400. The first part of that time – and there are no hard boundaries – is sometimes called the Dark Ages to describe the period of ark unrest in the invasions of people described as barbarians that would afflict the West for hundreds of years.

We get a picture of the epoch from the epic poem Beowulf. There is something about Beowulf, that is at once mystical and elemental, misty but somehow internal. It is as if we see ourselves but darky, in some other plane. It was composed in what we call Anglo-Saxon or Old English toward the end of the first millennium. It was written in England about events in what are now called Denmark and Sweden.

Beowulf is a champion of the Geats. He crosses the sea to help the Danes deal with a monster called Grendel. He prevails over the monster, and later he dies. Like The Iliad, Beowulf then ends with the funeral pyre of a hero. If you like that kind of thing, you might see Beowulf as the missing link between The Iliad and Paradise Lost.

Great were the dangers to be overcome by Beowulf.

All were endangered; young and old

Were hunted down by that dark death-shadow

Who lurked and swooped in the long nights

On the misty moors; nobody knows

Where these reavers from hell roam on their errands.

So Grendel waged his lonely war,

Inflicting constant cruelties on the people,

Atrocious hurt. He took over Heorot,

Haunted the glittering hall after dark

But the throne itself, the treasure seat,

He was kept from approaching; he was the Lord’s outcast.

These were hard times, heart-breaking….

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed

Offerings to idols, swore oaths

That the killer of souls may come to their aid

And save the people. That was their way,

Their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts

They remembered hell. (159-180)

It is hard to imagine someone better equipped to translate this great poem than the late Seamus Heaney, the distinguished Irish poet and scholar.

I came to translating Beowulf with a prejudice in favour of forthright delivery. I remember the voice of the poem as being attractively direct, even though the diction was ornate and the narrative method at times oblique. What I had always loved was a kind of foursquareness about the utterance, a feeling of living inside a constantly indicative mood, in the presence of an understanding that assumes you share an awareness of the perilous nature of life and are yet capable of seeing it steadily, and, when necessary, sternly. There is an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet’s sense of the world which gives his lines immense emotional credibility and allows him to make general observations about life which are far too grounded in experience and reticence to be called ‘moralising.’ These so-called ‘gnomic’ parts of the poem have the cadence and force of earned wisdom, and their combination of cogency and verity was again something that I could remember about the speech I heard as a youngster in the Scullion kitchen….The style of the poem is hospitable to the kind of formulaic phrases which are the stock-in-trade of oral bards, and yet it is marked too by the self-consciousness of an artist convinced that ‘we must labour to be beautiful.’

Here is some more of the remarkable poetry.

That great heart rested. The hall towered,

Until the black raven with raucous glee

Announced heaven’s joy, and a hurry of brightness

Overran the shadows. Warriors rose quickly

Impatient to be off; their own country

Was beckoning the nobles; and the bold voyager

Longed to be aboard his distant boat. (1799-1807)

This is how Heaney saw the epic.

Grendel comes alive in the reader’s imagination as a kind of dog-breath in the dark, a fear of collision with some hard-boned and immensely strong android frame, a mixture of Caliban and hoplite. And while his mother, too, has a definite brute-bearing about her, a creature of slouch and lunge on land if seal-swift in the water, she nevertheless retains a certain non-strangeness. As antagonists of a hero being tested, Grendel and his mother possess an appropriate head-on strength.

The myth of the testing of the hero by a frightening instrument of evil is probably our favourite – right up to the movie Jaws. But this epic is of interest to us also because it tells of the birth of our laws, in the replacement of the vendetta or blood-feud.

There was a feud one time, begun by your father.

With his own hands he had killed Heathaloaf

Who was a Wulfing; so war was looming

And his people in fear of it forced him to leave….

Finally I healed the feud by paying:

I shipped a treasure-trove to the Wulfings

And Ecgtheow acknowledged me with oaths of allegiance. (459-473)

We might call this settling out of court. It is not surprising that the scholar who trumpeted the claim of Beowulf to be taken as literature was named J R R Tolkien.

We learn that the object of the hero – as for Achilles – was to ‘gain enduring glory in a combat’ (1535/6). It is right, then, that the poem ends with these lines.

They extolled his heroic nature and exploits

And gave thanks for his greatness; which was the proper thing

For a man should praise a prince whom he holds dear

And cherish his memory when that moment comes

When he has to be convoyed from his bodily home.

So the Geat people, his hearth companions,

Sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low.

They said that of all the kings upon the earth

He was the man most gracious and fair-minded,

Kindest to his people and keenest to win fame. (3173-3182)

You do not need to crave immortality to see how the poet there speaks to all of us. Heaney speaks of his ‘fondness for the melancholy and fortitude that characterised the poetry.’ He said that this poem has a ‘mythic potency’ that ‘arrives from somewhere beyond the known bourne of our experience, and having fulfilled its purpose…it passes once more into the beyond.’

We have spent time with Beowulf to get a taste for the beginning of our period, and to show the emptiness of the notion that the Dark Ages were somehow free of art. What do we say of people who prefer Beowulf to the Aeneid or the Iliad? That they are not civilised – or just that they are not well educated?

Since we are speaking of a period of about a millennium, where the evidence is often sketchy, we will be subject to the twin vices of too much hindsight, and too much generalisation, but we may with some fairness and sense be able to outline some themes, ridge-lines, and mountain peaks.

The invasions of the West came from the far east, the Huns, the near east, the Germans, and the north, the Vikings and Normans. The German invaders included the peoples we call Franks who settled France, the Lombards who settled the north of Italy, and the Anglo-Saxons, who settled England. Peoples that we call Celts settled in Scotland, Ireland, England and France. By about the close of the first millennium, we can see distinctly German and Italian groupings, and the beginnings of the English and French nations.

The prophet Mohammed died in 632. Followers of the faith of Islam conquered the African and Asian parts of the Roman Empire and Spain, and parts of Hungary. They would be at the gates of Constantinople, more or less, until they took it in 1453. That they were stopped is largely due to the great French king Charlemagne, and to the resistance of the Greek nucleus of the Eastern empire at Constantinople.

The great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne could make three observations. ‘But the Greek nucleus resisted, and by resisting it saved Europe, and doubtless in saving Europe, it saved Christianity.’ ‘It was, however, reserved for France, having checked the continental expansion of Islam in the West, to reconstitute Europe upon new foundations.’ And it ‘is therefore strictly correct to say that without Mohammed, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable.’

The period is dominated by the church which has succeeded in converting pagan Europe to Christianity. The Church is run out of Rome, and it has a hierarchical realm of its own. The separation of church and state was not even a glimmer in the eye back then – the contrary is the case. The other cement binding people to give obedience on one side and protection on the other was what we know as feudalism.

The work of Charlemagne in bringing a degree of unity to Europe, protecting it from Islam, and saving and spreading its learning is fundamental to the survival and evolution of the West as we know it. It is the first gift of the French nation to Europe. By 1170 the French Poet Chretien of Troyes was able to say:

Our books have informed us that the pre-eminence in chivalry and learning once belonged to Greece. Then chivalry passed to Rome, together with that highest learning which now has come to France. God grant that it may be cherished here, that the honour that has taken refuge with us may never depart from France. God had awarded it as another’s share, but of Greeks and Romans no more is heard; their fame is passed and their glowing ash is dead.

Anglo-Saxon England, after its conversion to Christianity, became a stable enough monarchy but it was subject to Viking raids. Christians on the outskirts in Ireland and Scotland kept old learning safe from the hordes. (The Arab libraries served a similar function.) The conquest of England by the Normans would lead to a stronger centralised royal government which would see striking evolution in new legal ideas and forms.

Historians tend to see and talk of a change of tone in what we call the Gothic period. It is a time that we associate with talk of knighthood and chivalry. We come to the great poets Dante and Chaucer – we are still many centuries away from seeing an historian who is even close to Thucydides or Tacitus. Kenneth Clark called the period around and after 1100 as ‘the great thaw’. He looked at the Abbey of Cluny and the great cathedral at Chartres, the first crusade, Abelard and Heloise, and the martyrdom of St Thomas a Becket as a time of ‘heroic energy’. Clark put it all down to ‘the triumph of the Church.’ ‘It could be argued that western civilisation was basically the creation of the church. In saying that, I am not thinking, for the moment, of the Church as the repository of Christian truth and spiritual experience: I am thinking of her as the twelfth century thought of her, as a power – Ecclesia’– sitting like an empress.’

Some parts of that kind of thinking may have more interest for art historians than others. But we are coming to a time in the thirteenth century that for some has more moment than all of the painting and sculpture so finely and lovingly described by Clark in his series.

In 1215 the English barons forced – that is not too strong a word – the King of England to