CHAPTER V

THE EARLY RENAISSANCE: ITS EFFECTS ON LITERATURE IN ITALY, FRANCE, AND ENGLAND

THE Normans, by naturalising French literature in England, made the newly formed English language an instrument for expressing the thought of a widely extended society. Up to the middle of the thirteenth century European poetry may be said to possess a universal character. Whether composed in Latin or in any of the infant vernacular tongues, the thoughts embodied in it—scientific, devotional, sentimental, or romantic—are completely free from all traces of local or national colouring. When an Englishman or a Frenchman writes a Bestiary, he is, in each case, sure to describe in it the attributes of the panther, and to inform his readers that the animal's sweet breath makes him a type of the Saviour. A poetical moralist, whatever be his tongue, wishing to dwell on the vanity of earthly things, will certainly draw some of his ideas from Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophia; and the poetical homilist will be under like obligations to Gregory the Great. Love poetry composed by the troubadours of Provence is intelligible to the knights of the German castles; and the tales of Lancelot and Guenevere, or Tristram and Iseult, written perhaps beyond the English Channel, are read on the shores of Rimini.1

European poetry presents this universal character

1 See the story of Francesca da Rimini in Dante's Inferno, canto v. 127 :— Noi leggevamo un giorno per diletto

Di Lancilotto, come amor lo strinse.

because it reflects the image of a society which still preserves many of the essential features of the universal Roman Empire. Little indeed remained of that great original structure, except in history and poetry, and it may safely be asserted that, in the thirteenth century, no man in Europe understood the principle of the imperial rule of Constantine, in which the Emperor was at once the head, if not of the Church, at least of the established religion of the State; the guardian of the great fabric of order founded on the base of Roman citizenship; the promoter of the encyclopædic system of education inherited from the Greeks. The memory of this vast scheme had been eclipsed by one scarcely less catholic and extensive, but in which the powers of Church and State were no longer united but co-ordinate. In the revived Empire of Charlemagne, though the Emperor was indeed the heir of the Cæsars, and the guardian of what remained of Hellenic civilisation, he had received the imperial crown in trust, not from the Roman Senate and the Roman people, but from the Bishop of Rome, now universally recognised as the head of the Western Church. And not only was Charlemagne head of the Roman Empire, he was also chief of the whole system of Teutonic feudalism, with all its complex hierarchy of duchies, marquisates, and counties, swarming with barbarous ideas and customs, which had flowed around, and almost submerged, the old structure of European civilisation.

Theoretically the constitution of the Empire of Charlemagne is still recognised in the Europe of the fourteenth century, and the order of society groups itself round the allied but rival powers of the Papacy and the Empire. The Pope is now the representative of the unity of Western Christendom. His seat in the imperial city is the centre to which all spiritual causes are referred. As the guardian of the whole system of ecclesiastical education, he can mould the minds of men in every European country. By means of interdict and excommunication, he can make the force of his decrees felt even in the secular affairs of each European kingdom.

His

authority is fortified by the logic of the schools, and enforced against schismatic and heretic by the roving armies of the preaching orders.

Theoretically again, in the secular sphere, the authority of the Emperor is as comprehensive as the Pope's in spiritual matters. In his capacity of Emperor of Rome, his power extends over every land embraced within the dominions of the great historic Empire; in his capacity of feudal chief of the barbarian conquerors, he is the military head and suzerain of all the kings who derive from Charlemagne authority to represent him in the various parts of his dominions, as his counts and lieutenants.

Such was the theory of European order at the time from which this history of English poetry takes its departure. In its outward application it was still clothed with a certain show of pomp and pageantry. And the best way of measuring how far the time-honoured instrument of government, and the corresponding moulds of catholic thought, were adapted to the actual wants of mankind, is to watch the imperial system at work. The student, who wishes to form in his mind an image of feudal Europe in the fourteenth century, may observe all the vital forces of the time brought picturesquely before him at the Diet of Coblenz, held, in 1338, on the very eve of the Hundred Years' War between France and England.

"Two thrones," says a French historian, describing the scene, "were erected in the market-place, before the church of Saint Castor; on the more elevated sat the Emperor, on the other King Edward; around them 17,000 men-at-arms-Germans, Brabançons, Hollanders, Walloons, and English-crowded the market-place, the streets of the town, and the banks of the river. The Emperor held in his right hand the sceptre, in his left the globe, emblem of the empire of the world, and a German knight raised a naked sword above his head. A clerk read the constitution by which the Diet of Frankfort had vindicated the independence of the imperial crown against the pretensions of the Pope; then Edward rose and prayed the Emperor and the princes

of the Empire to aid him to have justice against Philip of Valois, who was unjustly detaining from him both the ancient possessions of the Plantagenets and the crown of France itself. Louis received the request of Edward as a suzerain from whom justice is demanded, and further accused Philip of felony on his own account, inasmuch as Philip had refused him homage for the fiefs which he held of the Empire. The Emperor, on the advice of the great vassals, declared Philip to be deprived of all right to the protection of the Empire, and conferred on King Edward the title of Imperial Vicar for seven years in all the provinces on the left bank of the Rhine, investing him also with military command, and all the rights of sovereignty, including even that of coining money."

Here, under cover of a splendid pageant, we see advanced pretensions of the most venerable antiquity; a protest against the claim of the Pope to bestow the possession of the Roman Empire; the claim of the Emperor to be the over-lord of all the kings of the world; the recognition of the Feudal System as part of the law of Europe. And yet life had ebbed so swiftly from each of these great forces in Church and State, that the clerks, if they were shrewd men, must have smiled as they proclaimed the sounding principles. Had the Diet indeed been held a century earlier, there might have been some meaning in a protest against the claims of the Papacy to paramount authority. Then the triumph of Hildebrand over the Emperor Henry IV. would have still lingered in men's memories, and they would have recalled how recently Innocent III. had released the subjects of John in England from their allegiance, and in France had humbled the pride of Philip Augustus. But the Popes, in the pursuit of their temporal interests, had long ago impaired the operation of their spiritual power; by aiming at supremacy in Italy they had lost their world-wide dominion; at the time of the Diet of Coblenz the Pope was a dependant of the

1 Translated from H. Martin's Histoire de France, vol. v. p. 41 (edition of 1855).

French king at Avignon; heresy had sprung up in the heart of one of the great orders on which his authority so largely rested; the spiritual influence of the Holy See had been weakened by the most flagrant venality. The power of the Emperor was even more infirm, for while his title to be the successor of the Cæsars was recognised to rest upon a figment, he lacked the strength to support his acknowledged rights as the elected chief of the Feudal System. The vassal whom he had declared to be "deprived of the protection of the Empire" had contemptuously ignored his authority; the vassal who had appealed to his supreme tribunal had indignantly declined to render him the external marks of homage.

The Feudal System itself under a superficial splendour veiled an extreme decrepitude. It still appealed with a strong religious sanction to some of the noblest instincts in human nature, the mutual obligations between superior and inferior, and the duties of the strong to the weak. By the honour also which it paid to the virtue of courtesy, and by its respect for women, it had done much to establish a noble and gentle code of manners, which was reflected in the literature of the period. But, being the natural offspring of tribal institutions, it was ill adapted to promote the ends of civil society. Even if it could have been held together by a succession of strong rulers like Charlemagne, the rights of inheritance, which must have grown up in spite of the central government, with the spirit of lawlessness encouraged by local independence and private war, would have effectually checked the growth of any system of legal order. The fervour of religious zeal united for a time the warring atoms of feudalism in a succession of Crusades. But as these were wanting altogether in definite purpose, and amounted to little more than an exodus of tribal leaders from west to east, their sole lasting effect was to increase the anarchy, and weaken the power, of the system in the various countries of Europe.

If the Diet of Coblenz presents a brilliant image of the external splendour of feudalism, which was indeed