caves, and cover them over with a great quantity of manure. These they use as winter retreats and granaries. . .

...

The marriage bond is strict and severe among them; nor are any of their manners more praiseworthy than this. Almost singly among the Barbarians they content themselves with one wife (though a very few great chiefs are polygamists). When a woman is married she is admonished by the ceremonial that she comes to her husband as a partner of his toils and dangers, to suffer and to dare equally with him in peace and in war. The women live therefore fenced around with chastity, corrupted by no seductive spectacles, no convivial excitements. Adultery is extremely rare among so numerous a people (and profligate women are outcasts from society). Every mother suckles her own children and does not deliver them into the hands of servants and nurses (as at Rome). The young people are equally matched in their marriage, and the children inherit the vigor of their parents.

48. Effect on the Roman World of the News of the Sacking of Rome by Alaric

(Dill, S., Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, p. 305. 2d ed., London, 1899)

The following selection from the important bock by Professor Dill states the profound impression created throughout the civilized world by the news of the fall and sacking of the Eternal City. The picture drawn by Saint Jerome may be a little overcolored; still the effect produced by the news was staggering.

In 410, when after the failure of all negotiations, the city [of Rome] had at last fallen a prey to the army of Alaric, everything was changed. Eight hundred years had passed since Rome had been violated by the Gauls of Brennus. In spite of all the troubles on the frontiers, in spite of the alarms of the great invasions of the second, third, and fourth centuries, the sacred centre of government had never realized the possibility that her own stately security would ever be disturbed. Not only had all true sons of Rome a religious faith in her mission and destiny, but they had good reason to rely on the awe which she inspired in the barbarous races who ranged around her frontiers.

But now the spell was broken; the mystery and awe which surrounded the great city had been pierced and set at naught. The moral force, so much more important in government than the material, had been weakened and desecrated. The shock given by this catastrophe to old Roman confidence and pride must, for the time, have been overwhelming. We can conjecture the feelings [of men of the time. . . ] from the words Saint Jerome penned in his cell in Bethlehem in the year 411. Although he had fled from the world, he was still a Roman at heart, steeped in her literary culture, and proud of her great history. When

the rumor of the fall of Rome reached him, he broke off his commentary on Ezekiel; his voice was choked with sobs as he thought of the capture of the great city, "which had taken captive all the world."

In an earlier letter, referring to the invasion of the eastern provinces, he says that his soul shudders at the ruin of his time. For twenty years all the lands from Constantinople to the Julian Alps are drenched with Roman blood. The provinces are a prey to Alans, Huns, Vandals, and Marcomanni. Matrons and virgins devoted to God, the noble and the priest, are made a sport of these monsters. The churches are demolished; the bones of the martyrs are dug up; horses are stabled at the altars of Christ. "The Roman world is sinking in ruin, . . . and yet we wish to live, and think that those who have been taken from such a scene are to be mourned rather than deemed happy in their fate. It is through our sins that the barbarians are strong."

...

[In another letter] he speaks of the countless hordes that have swept from the Rhine to the Pyrenees. Great cities like Mainz, Rheims, and Nantes have been wiped out; the provinces of Aquitaine, Lyons, and Narbonne have been desolated, thousands have been butchered even in the churches, and famine has completed the work of the sword.

49. Fate of the Old Roman Towns

(By Giry and Réville, in Lavisse et Rambaud's Histoire Générale; trans. by Bates and Titsworth, in their Emancipation of Medieval Towns. Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1907. Reproduced by permission)

The following selection describes briefly the decline and obliteration of the Roman towns which took place with the decline in power of Rome and the coming of the barbarians into the Empire.

The history of the towns and of urban civilization during the first centuries of the Middle Ages is little known; indeed it would be truer to say that it is almost entirely unknown. The meager documents which these times have left us touch only the greater political events, the history of kings and of the more prominent characters; as to the fate of the people, the anonymous masses, they give us but rare and vague ideas. Nevertheless, though explicit statements are lacking, we may see in part what was the lot of the urban groups and of the individuals who composed them.

The Roman Empire bequeathed to the Middle Ages a goodly number of towns. Of these the most important, by reason of population, wealth, and rank, were the cities. There were about one hundred and twelve such towns in ancient Gaul. Other towns, called castra, were simply fortified places. The cities, which for a long time had enjoyed a considerable degree of freedom, possessed municipal institutions; but this régime, under the oppressive action of the fisc and of an overwhelming centralization, was in full disintegration as early as the fourth cer

tury, even before the invasions had precipitated the fall of the Empire. In the anarchy which followed the arrival of the Barbarians, nothing remained standing of all this structure, for no one was interested in preserving it. The Roman municipal régime expired.

What, then, became of the cities? In most of them a certain personage soon distinguished himself among the inhabitants and gained over them an undisputed preeminence: this was the bishop. He was no longer simply the first priest of his town, he was its lord. As early as the end of the seventh century, perhaps before, Tours was under the rule of its bishop. Thus it was that most of the old Roman cities became, in the Middle Ages, episcopal seigniories. This was the case with Amiens, Laon, Beauvais, and many others.

All, however, did not have the same fate. Some, in consequence of wars, or of partitions, passed into the hands of lay princes. Angers belonged to the count of Anjou, Bordeaux to the duke of Aquitaine; Orleans and Paris were directly under the king. Elsewhere, beside the old city where the bishop ruled, there sprang up a new town, the bourg, which was under another lord, lay or ecclesiastical: thus at Marseilles the city was under the bishop, and the town under the viscount. In the same way the bourg was distinguished from the city at Arles, Narbonne, Toulouse, and Tours. Other places again, pillaged, ruined, and depopulated, lost their rank as towns and were reduced to simple villages, or were even blotted out. London, after the English invasions, was a heap of ruins, and the courses of the old Roman roads which intersected it were so completely obscured that the new streets, marked out in the same directions when the town was reviving in the Middle Ages, no longer coincided with them. Viriconium, one of the richest of the British cities, was reduced to nothing, and it is only in our times (1857) that its exact situation has been discovered. In the same way the destruction of the Portus Itius, which stood upon the shores of the Strait of Dover, and that of Tauroentum, upon the coast of Provence, were so complete that to this day scholars do not agree as to where they were located.

Such are the vague ideas which we possess concerning the political changes in the Roman towns at the beginning of the Middle Ages: with so much the more reason do we know nothing of the history of the small towns, of the simple fortified bourgs, which were built in great numbers at the end of the Empire. All must have come to constitute seigniories, but we do not know how this transformation took place.

50. The Invaders, and what they brought

(Kingsley, Chas., Introduction to Hypatia; selected)

The Reverend Charles Kingsley (1819-75), an English writer, in the Introduction to his historical novel Hypatia gives a good

pen picture of the invasions and their effect on the western world, though perhaps rather idealizing the barbarian and underestimating the Roman. The following selection is taken from this work.

The health of a Church depends not merely on the creed which it professes, not even on the wisdom and holiness of a few great ecclesiastics, but on the faith and virtue of its individual members. The

mens sana must have a corpus sanum to inhabit. And even for the Western Church, the lofty future which was in store for it would have been impossible, without some infusion of new and healthier blood into the veins of a world drained and tainted by the influence of Rome.

And the new blood . . . was at hand. The great tide of those Gothic nations, of which the Norwegian and the German are the purest remaining types, though every nation of Europe, from Gibraltar to St. Petersburg, owes to them the most precious elements of strength, was sweeping onward, wave over wave, in a steady southwestern current across the whole Roman territory, and only stopping and recoiling when it reached the shores of the Mediterranean. Those wild tribes were bringing with them into the magic circle of the Western Church's influence the very materials which she required for the building up of a

future Christendom, and which she could find as little in the Western Empire, as in the Eastern; comparative purity of morals; sacred respect for woman, for family life, law, equal justice, individual freedom, and, above all, for honesty in word and deed; bodies untainted by hereditary effeminacy, hearts earnest though genial, and blest with a strange willingness to learn, even from those whom they despised; a brain equal to that of the Roman in practical power, and not too far behind that of the Eastern in imaginative and speculative acute

ness.

And their strength was felt at once. Their vanguard, confined with difficulty for three centuries beyond the Eastern Alps, at the expense of sanguinary wars had been adopted, wherever it was practicable, into the service of the Empire; and the heart's core of the Roman legion was composed of Gothic officers and soldiers. But now the main body had arrived. Tribe after tribe was crowding down to the Alps, and trampling upon each other on the frontiers of the Empire. The Huns, singly their inferiors, pressed them from behind with the irresistible weight of numbers; Italy, with her rich cities and fertile lowlands, beckoned them on to plunder; as auxiliaries, they had learned their own strength and Roman weakness; a casus belli was soon found. How iniquitous was the conduct of the sons of Theodosius, in refusing the usual bounty, by which the Goths were bribed not to attack the Empire! - The whole pent-up deluge burst over the plains of Italy, and the Western Empire became from that day forth a dying idiot, while the new invaders divided Europe among themselves. . . . The countless treasures which five centuries of rapine had accumulated around the Capitol, had become the prey of men clothed in sheepskin and horsehide; and the sister of an emperor had found her beauty, virtue, and pride of race, worthily matched by those of the hard-handed Northern hero who led her away from Italy as his captive and his bride,' to found new kingdoms in South France and Spain, and to drive the newly arrived Vandals across the Straits of Gibraltar into the then blooming coast-land of Northern Africa. Everywhere the mangled limbs of the Old World were seething in the Medea's caldron, to come forth whole, and young, and strong. The Longbeards, noblest of their race, had found a temporary restingplace upon the Austrian frontier, after long southward wanderings from the Swedish mountains, soon to be dispossessed again by the advancing Huns, and, crossing the Alps, to give their name forever to the plains of Lombardy. A few more tumultuous years, and the Franks would find themselves lords of the Lower Rhineland; and before the hairs of Hypatia's scholars had grown gray, the mythic Hengist and Horsa would have landed on the shores of Kent and an English nation have begun its world-wide life.

1 Adolf, the Visigoth, carried captive from Rome the sister of the Emperor Honorius, the beautiful and learned Placidia, who became his wife.