The Hierarchic Conception of Society by Johan Huizinga

When, somewhat more than a hundred years ago, medieval history began to assert itself as an object of interest and admiration, the first element of it to draw general attention and to become a source of enthusiasm and inspiration was chivalry. To the epoch of romanticism the Middle Ages and Chivalry were almost synonymous terms. Historical imagination dwelt by preference on crusades, tournaments, knights errant. Since the history has become democratic. Chivalry is now only seen as a very special efflorescence of civilization, which, far from having controlled the course of medieval history, has been rather a secondary factor in the political and social evolution of the epoch. For us the problems of the Middle Ages lies first of all in the development of communal organization, of economic conditions, of monarchic power, of administrative and judicial institutions; and, in the second place, in the domain of religion, scholasticism and art. Towards the end of the period our attention is almost entirely occupied by the genesis of new forms of political and economic life (absolutism, capitalism), and new modes of expression ( Renaissance). From this point of view feudalism and chivalry appear as little more than a remnant of a superannuated order already crumbling into insignificance, and, for the understanding of the epoch, almost negligible.

Nevertheless, an assiduous reader of the chronicles and literature of the fifteenth century will hardly resist the impression that nobility and chivalry occupy a much more considerable place there than our general conception of the epoch would imply. The reason of this disproportion lies in the fact, that long after nobility and feudalism had ceased to be really essential factors in the state and in society, they continued to impress the mind as dominant forms of life. The men of the fifteenth century could not understand that the real moving powers of political and social evolution might be looked for anywhere else than in the doings of a warlike or courtly nobility. They persisted in regarding the nobility  as the foremost of social forces and attributed a very exaggerated importance to it, undervaluing altogether the social significance of the lower classes.

So this mistake, it may be argued, is theirs, and our conception of the Middle Ages is right. This would be so if, to understand the spirit of the age, it sufficed to know its real and hidden forces and not its illusions, its fancies and errors. But for the history of civilization every delusion or opinion of an epoch has the value of an important fact. In the fifteenth century chivalry was still, after religion the strongest of all ethical conceptions which dominated the mind and the heart. It was thought of as the crown of the whole social system. Medieval political speculation is imbued to the marrow with the idea of a structure of society based on distinct orders. This notion of ‘orders’ is itself by no means fixed. The words ‘estate’;  and ‘order,’ almost synonymous, designate a great variety of social realities. The idea of an ‘estate’ is not at all limited to that of a class; it extends to every social function, to every profession, to every group. Side by side with the French system of the three estates of the realm, which in England, according to Professor Pollard, was only secondarily and theoretically adopted after the French model, we find traces of a system of twelve social estates.

The functions or groupings, which the Middle Ages designated by the word ‘estate’ and ‘order,’ are of a very diverse nature. There are, first of all, the estates of the realm, but there are also the trades, the state of matrimony and that of virginity, the state of sin. At the court there are the ‘four estates of body and mouth’: bread-masters, cup-bearers, carvers, and cooks. In the Church, there are sacerdotal orders and monastic orders. Finally, there are the different orders of chivalry. That which, in medieval thought, establishes unity in the very dissimilar meanings of the word, is the conviction that every one of these groupings represents a divine institution, an element of the organism of Creation emanating from the will of God, constituting an actual entity and being, at bottom, as venerable as the angelic hierarchy.

Now, if the degrees of the social edifice are conceived as the lower steps of the throne of the Eternal, the value assigned to each order will not depend on its utility, but on its sanctity –that is to say, its proximity to the highest place. Even if the Middle Ages had recognized the diminishing importance of the nobility as a limb of the social body, that would not have changed the conception they had of its high value, no more than the spectacle of a violent and dissipated nobility ever hindered the veneration of the order itself. To the catholic soul the unworthiness of the persons never compromises the sacred character of the institution. The morals of the clergy, or the decadence of the chivalrous virtues, might be stigmatized, without deviating for a moment from the respect due to the Church or the nobility as such. The estates of society cannot be but venerable and lasting, because they all have been ordained by God. The conception of society in the Middle Ages is statical, not dynamical.

The aspect which society and politics assume under the influence of these general ideas is bound to be a strange one. The chroniclers of the fifteenth century have, nearly all, been the dupes of an absolute mis-appreciation of their times, of which the real moving forces escaped them. Chastellain, the historiographer of the dukes of Burgundy, may serve as an instance. A Fleming by birth, he had been face to face, in the Netherlands, with the power and wealth of the commoners, nowhere stronger and more self-conscious than there. The extraordinary fortune of the Burgundian branch of Valois transplanted to Flanders was in reality based on the wealth of the Flemish and Brabant towns. Nevertheless, dazzled by the splendor and magnificence  of an extravagant court, Chastellain imagined that the power of the house of Burgundy was especially due to the heroism and the devotion of knighthood.

God, he says, created the common people to till the earthy and to procure by trade the commodities necessary for life; he created the clergy for the works of religion; the nobles that they should cultivate virtue and maintain justice, so that the deeds and morals of these fine personages might be a pattern for others. All the highest tasks in the state are assigned by Chastellain to the nobility; notably those of protecting the Church, augmenting the faith, defending the people from oppression, maintaining public prosperity, combating violence and tyranny, confirming peace. Veracity, courage, integrity, liberality, appertain properly to the noble class, and French nobility, according to this pompous panegyrist, comes up to this ideal image. In spite of his general pessimism, Chastellain does his best to see his times through the tinted glasses of this aristocratic conception.

This failing to see the social importance of the common people, which is proper to nearly all authors of th

e fifteenth century, may be regarded as a kind of mental inertia, which is a phenomena of frequent occurrence and vital importance in history. The idea which people had of the third estate had not yet been corrected and remodeled in accordance with altered realities. This idea was simple and summary, like those miniatures of breviaries, or those bas-relief of cathedrals, representing the tasks of the year in the shape of the toiling laborer, the industrious artisan, or the busy merchant. Among the archaic types like these there is neither place for the figure of the wealthy patrician encroaching upon the power of the nobleman, nor for that of the militant representative of a revolutionary craft-guild. Nobody perceived that the nobility only maintained itself than to the blood and riches of the commoners. No distinction in principle was made, in the third estate, between rich and poor citizens, nor between the townsmen and country-people. The figure of the poor peasant alternates indiscriminately with that of the wealthy burgher, but a sound definition of the economic and political functions of these different classes does not take shape. In 1412 the reform program of an Augustinian friar demanded in all earnest that every non-noble person in France should either devote himself to some handicraft or to labor, or  be banished from the kingdom, evidently considering commerce and law as useless occupations.

Chastellain, who is very naïve in political matters and very susceptible to ethical delusions, attributes sublime virtues only to the nobility and only inferior ones to the common people. “Coming to the third estate, making up the kingdom as a whole, it is the estate of the good towns, of merchants and of laboring men, of whom it is not becoming to give such a long exposition as of the others, because it is hardly possible to attribute great qualities to them, as they are of a servile degree.’ Humility, diligence, obedience to the king, and docility in bowing ‘voluntarily to the pleasure of the lords,’ those are the qualities which bring credit to ‘cestuy bas estat de Francois’ ( This low estate of the Frenchmen.)

May not this strange infatuation, by preventing them from foreseeing future times of economic expansion have contributed to engender pessimism in minds such as that of Chastellain, who could only expect the good of mankind from the virtues of the nobility?

Chastellain still calls the rich burghers simply villeins. He has not the slightest notion of middle-class honor. Duke Philip the Good was wont to abuse his powers by marrying his archers or other servants of lesser nobility to rich burgher widows and heiresses. To avoid those alliances, the parents on their side married their daughters as soon as they reached marriageable age. Jacques u Clercq mentions the case of a widow, who for this reason remarried two days after the burial of her husband. Once the duke, while engaged in such marriage-broking, met with an obstinate refusal from a rich brewer of Lille, who felt affronted at such an alliance for his daughter. The duke secured the person of the young girl; the father removed with all his possessions to Tournay, outside the ducal jurisdiction, in order to be abler to bring the matter before the Parliament of Paris. This brought him nothing but vexation, and he fell ill with grief. At last he sent his wife to Lille ‘in order to beg mercy of the duke and give up his daughter to him.’ The latter, in honor of Good Friday, gave her back to the mother, but with scornful and humiliating words, - Castellain’s sympathies are all on the side of his master, though, on other occasions, he did not at all fear to record his disapproval of the duke’s conduct. For the injured father he has no other terms than ‘this rebellious rustic brewer,’ ‘and such a naughty villein too.’

There are in the sentiments of the aristocratic class towards the people two parallel currents. Side by side with this haughty disdain of the small man, already a little out of date, we notice a sympathetic attitude in the nobility, which seems in absolute contrast with it. Whereas feudal satire goes on expressing hatred mixed with contempt and sometimes with fear, as in the Proverbes del Vilain and in the Kerelslied, the song of the Flemish villagers, the code of aristocratic ethics teaches, on the other hand, a sentimental compassion for the miseries of the oppressed and defenseless people. Despoiled by war, exploited by officials, the people live in the greatest distress.

The innocents must starve

With which the big wolves fill their belly every day,

Who by the thousands and hundreds hoard

Ill-gotten treasures;

It is the grain, it is the corn,

The blood, the bones of poor people

Which have ploughed the earth

And therefore their souls call

Upon God for vengeance and woe  to lordship.

They suffer in patience. ‘The prince knows nothing of this.’ If, at times, they murmur, ‘poor sheep, poor foolish people,’ a word from the Prince will suffice to appease them. The devastation and insecurity which in consequence of the Hundred Years’ War had finally spread over almost all of France, gave these laments a sad actuality. From the year 1400 downwards there is no end of the complaints about the fate of the peasants, plundered, squeezed, maltreated by gangs of enemies or friends, robbed of their cattle, driven from their homes. They are expressed by the great Churchmen, who favored reform, such as Nicolas de Clemanges, in his Liber de lapsu et reparatione justitiae, or Gerson in his political sermon Vivat rex, preached on November 7, 1405, in the queen’s palace at Paris, before the regents and the court. ‘The poor man’- said the brave chancellor –‘will not have bread to eat, except perhaps a handful of rye or barley; his poor wife will lie in and they will have four or six little ones about the hearth or the oven, which perchance will be warm; they will ask for bread, they will scream, mad with hunger. The poor mother will but have a very littler salted bread to put in their mouths. Now such misery ought to suffice; but no: -the plunderers will com, who will seek everything .  .  . Everything will be taken and snapped up; and we need not ask who pays.’

Statesmen, too, make themselves the spokesmen of the miserable people, and utter their complaints. Jean Jouvenel laid them before the States of Blois in 1433, and those of Orlean’s in 1439. In a petition presented to the king at the meeting of the States of Tours in 1484, theses complaints take the direct form of a political ‘remonstrance.’

The chroniclers could not help reverting to the subject again and again: it was bound up with their subject-matter.

The poets in their turn took hold of the motif. Alain Chartier treats it in his Quadriloge Invectif, and Robert Gaguin in his Debat du Labourer, du Prestre et du Gendarme, inspired by Chartier. A hundred years later La Complainte du povre Commun et des povres Laboreurs de France of about 1400, Jean Molinet was to compose a Resource du petit Peuple. Jean Meschinot never tires of reminding the ruling classes of the fact that the common people are being neglected.

O God, see the indigence of the common people,
Provide for it with speed:

Alas: with hunger, cold, fear and misery they tremble,
If they have sinned or are guilty of negligence toward Thee,

They beg indulgence.
Is it not a pity that they are bereft of their goods?
They have no more corn to take to the mill,

Woolen and linen goods are taken from them,

Only water is left to them to drink.

This pity, however, remains sterile. It does not result in acts, not even in programmes, of reform. The felt need of serious reform is lacking to it and will be lacking for a long time. In La Bruyere, in Fenelon, perhaps in the elder Mirabeau, the theme is still the same; even they have not yet got beyond theoretical and stereotyped commiseration.

It is natural that the belated chivalrous spirits of the fifteenth century join in this chorus of pity for the people. Was it not the knight’s duty to protect the weak? The ideal of chivalry implied, after all, two ideas which might seem to concur in forbidding a haughty contempt for the small man; the ideas, namely, that true nobility is based on virtue, and all men are equal.

We should be careful not to overrate the importance of these two ideas. They were equally stereotyped and theoretical. To acknowledge true chivalry a matter of the heart should not be considered a victory over the spirit of feudalism or an achievement of the Renaissance. This medieval notion of equality is by no means a manifestation of the spirit or revolt. It does not owe its origin to radical reformers. In quoting the text of John Ball, who preached the revolt of 1381, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was them the gentleman?’ one is inclined to fancy that the nobles must have trembled on hearing it. But, in fact, it was the nobility themselves who for a long time had ben repeating this ancient them.

The two ideas of the equality of men and of the nature of true nobility were commonplaces of courteous literature, just as they were in the salons of the ‘ancien regime.’ Both derived from antiquity. The poetry of the troubadours has sung and popularized them. Every one applauded them.

Whence comes to all sovereign nobility?

From the gentle heart, adorned by noble morals . . .

No one is a villein unless it comes from his heart.

The notion of equality had been borrowed by the Fathers of the Church from Cicero and Seneca. Gregory the Great, the great initiator of tye Middle Ages, had given a text for coming ages in his Omnes namque homines natura aequales sumus. It had been repeated in all keys, but an actual social purport was not attached to it. It was a moral sentence, nothing more; to the men of the Middle Ages it meant the approaching equality of death, and was far from holding out, as a consolation for the inequalities of this world, a receptive prospect of equality on earth. The thought of equality in the Middle Ages is closely akin to a memento mori . . . .

How is it that one is a villein and the other assumes the name of gentility, of you, brothers? Whence comes such nobility? I do not know, unless it springs from virtues and the villeins from all vice, which wounds: you are all covered with the same skin.

Jean le Maire de Belge, in Les Chansions da Namur, purposely mentions the exploits of rustic heroes, to acquaint the nobles with the fact that those they treat as villeins are sometime animated with the greatest gallantry. For the reason of these poetical admonitions on the subject of true nobility and human equality generally lies in the stimulus they impart to the nobles to adapt themselves to the true ideal of knighthood, an thereby to support and to purify the world. In the virtues of the nobles, says Chastellain, lies the remedy for the evils of the time; the weal of the kingdom, the peace of the Church, the rule of justice, depend ontyem. – ‘Two things,’ it is said in Le Livre des Faicts du Mareschal Boucicaut, ‘have by the will of God, been established in the world, like two pillars to sustain the order of divine and human laws .  .  . Chivalry and Learning, which go very well together.’ “Learning, Faith and Chivalry’ are the three flowers of the Chapel des Fleurs-de-lis of Philippe Vitri; it is the duty of knighthood to preserve and protect the two others.

 

Long after the Middle Ages a certain equivalence of knighthood and a doctor’s degree was generally acknowledged. This parallelism indicates the high ethical value attaching to the idea of chivalry. The two dignities of knight and of a doctor are conceived as the sacred forms of two superior functions, that of courage and of knowledge. By being knighted the man of action is raised to an ideal level; by taking his doctor’s degree the man of knowledge receives a badge of superiority. They are stamped, the one as a hero, the other as a sage. The devotion to a higher life-work is expressed by a ceremonial consecration. If as an element of social life the idea of chivalry has been of much greater importance, it was because it contained, besides its ethical value, an abundance of aesthetic value of the most suggestive kind.

 

Rome and Athens in the Age of Constantine by Jacob Burckhardt

Between this Christian society and the more educated and noble pagans of the fourth century we insert the description of the great masses of Rome it is presented to us, to be sure not without artful illumination, by Ammianus Marcellinus.

Ammanius begins on the occasion of a commotion because of a shortage of wine, and teaches us, incidentally, that the Roman population was very bibulous; even today there is somewhat more drinking in Rome than in Florence or Naples. The distributions of wine instituted in the time of Constantine did not suffice; anyone with money to spend passed whole nights in the taverns. When it was rumored of the City Prefect Symmachus that he would rather use wine to slake lime than reduce its price his house was set on fire. When Rome was mentioned anywhere, there was at once  talk of riotous drinking houses. Like morra today, dice was the pastime inside and outside the inn and filled all leisure; this was accompanied by jarring cries which penetrated the marrow of all within earshot. If games with tesserae were considered more respectable than those with aleae, Ammanius is of the opinion that the difference is no greater than that between a thief and a highwayman. Unfortunately, he says, gambling companionship was the only bond which still held people together.

 

The ordinary Romans were moreover still a defiant people filled with conscious pride; despite accretions of half a millennium from all lands, there were still many ancient citizen families who prided themselves on such names as Cimessor, Statarius, Cicimbricus, Pordaca, Salsula, and the like, even if they were barefoot. From time to time, at least in the theater, the wild and menacing cry was heard, ‘Out with the foreigners!’ – these foreigners, says Ammanius, who were their sole support and salvation. But the chief cry of Rome was still panem et circenses. As regards bread, there was no more anxious moment than when the corn fleets from Africa were held back by war or adverse winds. On one such occasion the City Prefect Tertullus ( 359)  presented his children to the raging mob as a pledge, and thereby so far calmed them that it was possible to proceed to the ever-green Tiber Island near Ostia, fragrant with roses and adorned with the temple of the Dioscuri (‘The Sons of Zeus’), where the Roman people were accustomed to celebrate a gay festival annually; there Tertullus offered sacrificed to Castor and Pollux, and the sea became calm and a gentle south wind wafted the corn-laden  fleet to the shore. That part of the holiday crowd which was not content with the bread, wine, and pork which had been distributed took places at the vents of cook shops and enjoyed at least the aroma of roasts and other foods.

The Romans were altogether insatiable for anything that might be called a spectacle. In the fourth century state subsidies for the purpose were far from sufficient, and the want was supplied by the munificence of the newly nominated higher officials and of senators. This obligation constituted a very heavy burden upon these persons, who were not necessarily wealthy, for everyone must seek to outdo his predecessors, not  merely out of ambition but even more because of the insatiability of the populace. A great part of the correspondence of Symmaachus is devoted to the anxiety which the necessity of providing entertainment, at the time of his own promotion and that of his relatives on other occasions, caused him. Since Diocletian there was no longer such imperial extravagance in entertainment as had suggested to Carinus the notion of covering half a quarter in the region of the Capitol with a wooden amphitheater, decorating it most sumptuously with precious stones, gold, and ivory, and then display, among other rarities, mountain goats and hippopotamuses, and presenting fights between bears and seals.

The emperor still provided for the buildings, as for example when Constantine carried out a magnificent restoration of the Circus Maximus; but the spectacles themselves had become predominantly the affair of wealthy dignitaries who were required to compensate the state in this fashion and to expend their incomes in return for their immunity from taxation. It was of no avail to leave Rome, the registrars of taxes, as it appears, presented the games in the name of the absent donor in such cases. A man was lucky if he could import the exotic beasts duty-free.

The most important item was always the choice of horses for the Circus; it was in the horse races that the distinguished like the ordinary Roman satisfied his superstitious passion for wager, and where a jockey could acquire the greatest personal glory and every kind of inviolability. Roman taste in these matters had grown so refined that breeds had to be constantly changed; commissioners traversed half the known world to find something new and extraordinary and to transport it carefully to Rome. Symmachus’ letters to these agents could not be more obsequious. For the beast fights in the theaters and the Colosseum and for the hunts (sylvae) in the Circus Maximus there were required gladiators, ‘a band of fighters worse than those of Spartacus.’ Captive barbarians, as for example the Saxons, occasionally appeared, but by now, in keeping with the spirit of the time, fights between animals probably predominated. Here we find the givers of the games in constant embarrassment as to how the requisite animals were be provided – the bears, which sometimes arrived in an emaciated state and sometimes exchanged in transit, the  Libyan lions, the crowds of leopards, Scottish hounds, crocodiles, and even animals whose identity cannot now certainly be determined. There is mention of the Emperor’s helping out with a few elephants after a Persian victory, but this was an exception.

To this same category belongs the scenic decoration of the Circus or a specific theater, for which Symmachus once summoned artists from Sicily. Of Symmachus, we can assume that he only did what his office required and was himself above such interests; but there were as fanatic admirers of individual gladiators in his day as ever there had been in the earlier Empire. The very extensive but somewhat barbarized mosaics in the Villa Borghese representing gladiatorial games and beast fights probably derive from the fourth century; the persons who appear in these mosaics have their names inscribed by their figures. Art now had often to reconcile itself to perpetuating such displays and to decorating entire halls and facades with them. The theater proper still had its ardent admirers also, among them persons bearing great names, like that Junius Messala who, in the age of Constantine, bestowed upon his mimes his entire wealth, including the valuable clothing of his parents. ‘Comedy’ at least still enjoyed a certain interest in Rome, but more among ordinary people, whose greatest pleasure was said to be hissing the actors off the stage, a fate which the actors are said to have sought to avoid by bribery. We may presume that the ‘comedy’ in question is the farce (mimus). Much more important was the pantomime, that is, the ballet, which, according to perhaps a hyperbolic statement, still employed three thousand dancing girls and a large number of musicians.

If our sources are adequate on the subject of bread and circuses, we re left wholly in the dark concerning a thousand other details which are necessary for a complete picture of contemporary Rome. For example, the prime question of the numerical relationship of slaves to freemen cannot be answered even approximately, and attempted estimates vary widely. Here and there a chasm opens before the eyes of the researcher and provides a glimpse into that cross between state factory and slave galley where work was done for the public need. This is the case with the great bakeries which provided for the general distribution of bread.  In the course of time the superintendent of these bakeries (mancipes) built taverns and brothels near by, from which many an imprudent man was suddenly shanghaied into the factory to spend the rest of his life in slave labor; he disappeared completely, and his family regarded him as dead. The Romans must have known of this practice, and the victims were usually foreigners. The officials were informed about it as surely as certain modern governments are informed concerning the impressing of sailors; and if Theodosius put an end to the cruelty on a specific occasion, we may not therefore infer we that it was first discovered at that time.

Ammianus’s account of the life and conduct of the upper classes raises a strong suspicion that that proud and spirited man was unduly irked by a feeling of offended pride. As an Antiochene he had no special justification for depreciating the Romans; but as a courtier of Constantius and Julian his reception in the great Roman families was probably not vert cordial. Many of his complaints are directed against the vices which are ascribed to rich rich and prominent people at all times and in all places; others refer to his own age in general. Ammianus deplores the prodigious passion for gilded honorific states on the part of a class immersed in trivial novelties and complete effeminacy. He scores the habit of refusing to know strangers who have been presented after their first visit, and of making it plain that persons who are seen again after a long absence have not been missed. He describes the unfortunate practice of giving dinner parties only to discharge social obligations – dinner parties at which the nomenclatores ( a sort of master of ceremonies of the slave class) sometimes provide substitutes from the common people for a gratuity.

 Even in Juvenal’s day vanity frequently found an outlet in riding at breakneck speed and in showing a fanatical enthusiasm for one’s own and for the circus horses; this fashion also continued. Many would appear in public only if they were surrounded by a whole procession of servants and domestics; ‘under the command of the majordomos with their staves there marched by the carriage first a company of slave weavers, then the kitchen slaves in black dress, then the other servants of the household, mingled with idle folk from the neighborhood; the procession is closed by an army of eunuchs of every age, from old men to mere lads, all sickly and deformed.’ At home even in the better families, as presently among ourselves, music concealed numerous social gaps. Song and harp sound continuously; ‘instead of the philosopher, the singer was employed’ instead of the rhetor, the teacher of the arts of enjoyment; while libraries were closed tight as a tomb, hydraules (water organ) were constructed and lyres as big as stage-coaches.’ Rage for the theater was characteristic of the higher classes also, and the coquetry of many a lady was comprised in imitating theatrical poses with slight variations. Gestures and bearing continued to be of studied artifice; Ammianus knew a city prefect named Lampadius who took it amiss when the sense of style he displayed in spitting was not properly appreciated. The practice of maintaining clients and parasites was probably not much changed since Juvenal’s day; neither was legacy-hunting among the childless rich and many other similar abuses of the early Empire. But it must be emphasized that despite his sour mood Ammianus has almost nothing to say of the iniquities and enormities which Juvenal excoriates. Christianity contributed little to this improvement; the transformation which caused the new moral standard had already made is appearance in the third century.

This fashionable society is plainly pagan, as can be observed in the first instance by its superstitions. Whenever there was a question of wills and legacies, for example, the haruspices were summoned, to seek a decision in te entrails of animals. Even unbelievers would refuse to walk in the street, take their place at a table, or go to the bath without consulting the ephemeris, or astrological calendar, for the positon of the planets. We know from other sources that the majority of the Senate was pagan until the times of Theodosius. Everything possible was done to maintain the priesthoods and the ceremonies in their complete forms; this endeavor cost Symmachus enormous effort and anxiety. But along with the public sacra, the  most respectable Romans of the fourth century addressed themselves with great enthusiasm to occult worship, and indeed, as we have observed above, in a peculiar amalgamation.  By taking practically all available secret initiations, the individual sought to secure and strengthen himself against the inroads of Christianity.

All things considered, Rome’s pagan Senate may still have been the Emperor’s most respected assembly and society .Despite Ammianus’s slanders, the Senate must still of contained many men- provincials as well as Romans- of the old stalwart Roman spirit, in whose families traditions were cherished which would be sought in vain in Alexandria and Antioch and certainly in Constantinople. Above all, the senators themselves revered the Senate, the asylum mundi totius. They still demanded a specific simple and serious style of eloquence, which would display nothing of the theatrical; always the effort was made to maintain at least the fiction that Rome was still its ancient self and that the Romans were still citizens. These were merely big words, to be sure, but there were men of stature among the senators and it was not their fault if big things did not issue from them. In Symmachus himself the courage of his advocacy for persons oppressed arouses high admiration and, like the patriotism of Eumenius, balances the inevitable flatteries in which he elsewhere indulges. As a gentleman of large and independent stature he was personally above the titles of dignity which were the ambition of so many others.

 

The higher education which prevailed in these circles can no more be judged according to the literal words of Ammianus than can other matters. He allows the Romans no other readings than Juvenal and the imperial history of Marius Maximus, of which we know the first half of the Historia Augustus is a jejune reworking. Of the literary rendezvous at the Temple of Peace (where one of the twenty-eight public libraries was located) there is not much to say, for even Trebellius Pollio could display his wares there. But the circle of friends which Macrobius gathered about himself, the environment in which Symmachus himself moved, shows how much true education still survived in the upper classes. We must not be misled by the pedantry of the former (very useful to us) or by the Plinian preciosity of the latter. The literary age is indeed one of decline, more appropriate for the collection and criticism than for creation.. . .

There was another city in the ancient world Empire, a city which was perhaps never named under Constantine, but concerning whose life and survival our sympathetic curiosity may well be aroused.

The position of ATHENS ha been greatly diminished after the Peloponnesian war, and after the conquest of Sulla it had grown more and more deserted and was reduced to small compass. But the aura of glory which surrounded the city, its easy and pleasant life, the majestic monuments, the reverence for the Attic mysteries, and the awareness of the whole Hellenic world of of its debt to Athens –all of this drew a continual stream of free and educated spirits to the city; philosophers and rhetors appeared, and numerous disciples followed. From the time of Hadrian – the new founder of Athens, as gratitude styled him- study burgeoned into a sort of university, which was made secure by imperial endowments and later became the most important source of livelihood for the impoverished city.

All who cherished antiquity in these late ages must needs love the Athenians. Lucian has his  Nigrinus utter beautiful and moving words concerning this people, among who philosophy and poverty were equally at home, and who were not ashamed of their poverty but regarded themselves as rich and happy in their freedom, the moderation of their life, and in their golden leisure. ‘The climate there is altogether philosophical, the fairest for fair-thinking men; indeed, one who wishes luxury, power, flattery, lies, servitude must live in Rome.’ But not only the Syrian of Samosata, who is otherwise so seldom serious, but also an Alciphron, a Maximus of Tyre, a Libanius of Antioch, and other even later figures burst into flame whenever the Athenians are mentioned; we can never be certain whether in a given case ancient Athens of the period of bloom is thought of or whether the virtues of ancient Athens are discovered or assumed in the contemporary population. Speaking of forgiveness for insults which might be avenged, Libanius says, for example, that such conduct is ‘worthy of the Greeks, the Athenians, and godlike men.’ Heliodorus of Emesa has an Athenian girl who has been captured by Egyptian robbers write: ‘Barbarian love is not of so much worth as Athenian hatred.’ These later pagans, who could not be at ease either in the organized life of Rome or in the Christian Church, adhered to the most sacred site of ancient Greek life with a genuine tenderness. Anyone who could spend his life in that environment counted himself happy.

But the studies for which the sophists and their disciples assembled in Athens bore the stamp of their age all too plainly. Just As Philostratus and Gellius are copious sources for the school of Athens in the early Empire, so are Libanius and Eunapius for its condition the fourth century, and it cannot be said that it had improved in the interval. The one-sided predominance of rhetorical education and the extravagance and mysterious airs of individual Neoplatonists, the vanity of the teachers and the partisanship of their devotees – all of this disrupted the calm of Athens with a peculiar kind of rivalry. The very arrival of the student was a perilous affair; at the Piraeus, if he had not already been encountered at the headland of Sunium, men stood ready to watch for new students to recruit them for one or another lecture hall (didascaleion), even employing threats to change a decision the student might already taken at home. Teachers suddenly appeared at the harbor to make sure of their prey. If a man got safely to Athens, perhaps under the protection of the ship’s captain, he found himself ex[posed to actual violence, not infrequently there were assault, murder, and consequent criminal investigations, and all because of the rivalry of teachers. The student’s country of origin was a matter of great importance; when Eunapius was a student in Athens the easterners adhered to Epiphanius, the Arabs to Diophantus, the men of Pontus to their divine countryman Proaeresius, who also attracted many from Asia Minor, Egypt and Libya. But no student was bound to follow this practice, and moreover the incessant transfers from school to school kept enmities constantly  aflame. The students were divided into armed ‘choruses’ with prostates at their head, their bloody brawls appeared to them ‘of equal value with battles for the fatherland.’ If things went so far that two parties, comprised of teachers and auditors, were required to answer for their deeds before the proconsul of Achaia at Corinth, a regular ceremonious rhetorical context was staged in the presence of the proconsul, especially when it was worthwhile, when the official was ‘quite well educated for a mere Roman.’ There was no sort of comradely feeling. It ha long been imprudent to venture an appearance in public theaters and halls, which might immediately arouse bloody riots. The more prosperous sophists built themselves small theaters in their homes. Eunapius gives us a description of the house of Julianus, which was so equipped: ‘It was a small, modest house, but it breathed  of Hermes and the Muses, so like it was to a sanctuary, with statues of its owner’s friends; the theater was of stone masonry, an imitation of the public theater on a small scale.’ But a teacher who was as poor as Proaeresius, who at first shared only a robe, a cloak and a few carpets with his friend Hephaestion, had to help himself a best he could.

In the ‘choruses’ of the students there were great and deeply rooted abuses. At his first arrival the new student was pledge to a costly and elaborate initiation and permanent obligation under oath, and this not infrequently led to acquaintanceship with usurers. By day there was a great deal of ball playing, by night wanderings and visits to ‘ the sweet singing siren’. Crude and unscrupulous elements thought it a prank to attack unprotected houses in robbery fashion. When Libanius finally  disentangled himself from these ‘fraternities’- not without some difficulty – he took pleasure in peaceful excursions, especially to Corinth. Apparently many still journeyed, as they had done at the time of Philostratus, to the Olympian, Isthmian, and other national festivals, which were even then held in high esteem. But the greatest prize which a zealous pagan could take with him was the Eleusinian initiation.

All this colorful activity took place among the most majestic monuments of the world, in which the noblest o forms and the most significant of historical reminiscences united to produce and inexpressible effect. We no longer know what these works meant to the sophist of the four century and his pupils. It was the period during which one mainspring after another of the Greek genius died, until only hair-splitting dialectic and lifeless compilation remained. The Parthenon of Pallas Athene and the Propylaea looked down upon the city in their ancient and virtually undisturbed majesty; despite the Gothic incursion under Decius and despite the plunder under Constantine, perhaps most of what Pausanias had seen and described in the second century still survived. But the pure harmony of architectural forms, the untrammeled grandeur of the images of  the gods, uttered a language that was no longer wholly intelligible ot the spirit of this age.

 

The Norman Conquest by Frank Stenton

 

The partition of England among a foreign aristocracy organized for war was the chief immediate result of the Norman Conquest. After all allowance for the sporadic survival of English landowners and the creation of new holdings for the household servants of great men, the fact remains that an overwhelming majority of the manors described in the Domesday Book were held by some form of military tenure. The provision of knights for the king in adequate numbers was the first charge upon the baronage of the Norman settlement. The arrangement devised for this purpose gave to the upper ranges of Anglo-Norman society a stability and cohesion unknown in the pre-Conquest state. They substituted for the fluctuating relationships which had connected the Lords and their men in Old English times a system which held the higher social classes permanently together in a definite responsibility for military assistance to the king. There was no place in Norman England for the man of position who claimed the right to ‘go with his land to whatever lord he would.’

It was the outstanding merit of this aristocracy that it set itself to use the institutions which it found in England. The chief administrative divisions of the country – shires, hundreds, and wapentakes* – were accepted as a matter of course by its new lords. They for their part applied Old English methods to the management of their estates, and they were remarkably tolerant of the varied and often inconvenient types of manorial structures which has come down from King Edward’s time. The institutions which they found it necessary to create were few in number and specialized in purpose. The honorial court,  which was the chief of them, came into being for the the settlement of the internal business of a great fief. The castlery, which never became of first importance in English life, was a tract of country organized by a series of planned enfeoffments for the maintenance of a particular fortress. Neither of these innovations interfered at any essential point with the accustomed course of local government. The framework of the Old English state survived the Conquest.

The innovation which touched the common man most nearly was the formidable body of rues and penalties which the Norman king imposed on the inhabitants of the districts reserved for their hunting. The French origin of the Anglo-Norman forest law has now bee placed beyond dispute, and the Conqueror’s severity towards those who broke the peace of his deer is recorded by one who had known him. That he enlarged the border’s of King Edward’s forests is certain, and there is no need to doubt the early tradition that the New Forest was converted into a royal preserve by his orders, to the destruction of many peasants who were struggling for existence in that unfriendly land.** Nevertheless even within the forest sphere there was no absolute break with the past. The idea of a royal forest, jealously preserved, had been familiar to Englishmen for forty years at least before the Conquest. Cnut had laid a heavy fine on anyone who hunted in a district which he had set apart for his own pleasure. Forest wardens had been maintained by Edward the Confessor. It is more important that the new forest legislation, which was intended for the protection of the king’s deer, never interrupted the operation of the common law. The forest courts brought the peasant within their jurisdiction under a new surveillance in the interests of the king’s sport, but left him in all other matters to the familiar justice of shire and hundred.

In these ancient institutions the Anglo-Saxon tradition was never broken. The virtue of the Old English State has lain in the local courts. Their strength had been due to the association of thegns*** and peasants in the work of justice, administration, and finance, under the direction of officers responsible to the king. The memory of this association  survived all the changes of the Conqueror’s reign. To all appearance, his barons and their men accepted as a consequence of their position the share in local business which had fallen to their English predecessors. As early as 1086 the feoffees of Norman lords can be seen on the hundredal juries which swore to the information collected for the Domesday Survey. Their successors carried the aristocratic element in local government down to the heart of the middle ages, and beyond. There is a genuine continuity of the function between the thegns of the shire to whom the Confessor addressed his writs and the knights of the shire whose co-operation made possible the Angevin experiment in centralization.

In some, and perhaps in many, cases there was also continuity of descent. The number of thirteen-century landed families which can be traced backwards to an ancestor bearing an English or Danish name is by no means inconsiderable. It includes some families of baronial rank, such a Berkeley, Cromwell, Neville, Lumley, Greystoke, Audley, Fitzwilliam of Hinderskelf and Fitzwilliam of Sprotborough, and many others of less prominence which were influential in their own districts. Isolated families of position with such an ancestry can be found in most pats of England, but they were especially numerous in the far north. Where they were indistinguishable from the English aristocracy of southern Scotland, in Yorkshire and Lancashire, and in the northern midlands,. A few families of this type are known to have been descended from English landowners of 1086, and a small minority of these families are carried back by Domesday Book to the time of King Edward. But there are many which cannot be traced beyond the first half of the twelfth century, and of which the origin must be left an open question. Their distribution suggested that some at least of them were founded by Englishmen who had been planted by the king or by some Norman lord on lands devastated in the wars of the Conquest. It may be hoped that more descents of this kind will be worked out in the future, for every established case helps to reduce the abruptness of the transition from the English to the Norman order.

In the law and practice of the local courts few changes of the first importance had been made by the end of the Conqueror’s reign. The most far-reaching was the withdrawal of the ecclesiastical pleas from the jurisdiction of the hundred. Of the king’s other innovations the chief was the institution of a device for the protection of Frenchmen who ha come to England since 1066. It was ordered that if any of them were killed, and his lord failed to arrest his slayer within five days, the lord must pay 46 marks to the king, the hundred in which the murder took place being responsible for any portion of this sum which the lord was unable to produce. The regulation probably belongs to an early part of the Conqueror’s reign, when most Frenchmen in England were attached to the households of knights or baron, and it gives no more than a point of departure for the mass of custom which rapidly developed round the murder fine and presentment of Englishry. For the orderly settlements of disputes between Frenchmen and Englishmen the Conqueror provided that if a Frenchman accused an Englishman of perjury, or of one of the commoner sorts of violent crime, the Englishman might choose for his defense either the native ordeal of iron or the foreign method of the judicial; combat. Here the  advantage was clearly with the English defendant. For the rest, there is little in the remains of William’s legislation which might not have been prescribed by an Anglo-Saxon king; and the only enactment which reads like a deliberate modification of English practice is an order that offenses formerly punished by death should in the future be punished by mutilation. In most of its details the laws observed by Englishmen in 1087 was the law of King Edward, and, for that matter, the law of Cnut and Aethelred II.

But in spite of these and many other points of continuity, the fact remained that sooner or later every aspect of English life was changed by the Norman Conquest. The conclusions which different historians have reached about its significance have naturally varied with their personal interests and with the kind of approach which each of them has chosen. By some, impressed with the Old English achievement in arts and letters, the Conquest has been lamented as the destruction of a civilization. Others have regarded it as a clearance of the ground for a cosmopolitan culture of which  Anglo-Saxon England gave no promise. Some have stressed the survival of English institutions and ideas; others, the novelty of the social order to which the Norman settlement gave rise. There will never be unanimity on the degree to which, in the historian’s balance, the efficiency of the Norman government should outweigh the havoc done by the Conqueror’s armies. On all the problems connected with the Conquest opinion is constantly changing as the attention of students shifts from one type of evidence to another, as fresh materials come to light, and a old theories are tested by a new grouping of familiar facts.

For all this, it can at least be said that to the ordinary Englishman who had lived from the accession of King Edward to the death of king William, the Conquest must have seemed an unqualified disaster. It is probable that, as a class, the peasants had suffered less than those above them. Many individuals must have lost life or livelihoods at the hands of Norman raiders, and many estates may have been harshly exploited in the interests of Norman lords anxious for ready money; but the structure of rural society  was not seriously affected by the Norman settlement. To the thegnly class the Conquest brought not only the  material consequences of an unsuccessful war, but also the loss of privilege and social consideration. The thegn of 1066 who made his peace with the Conqueror lived thence-forward in a strange and unfriendly environment. The political system of his youth had been destroyed, he had become the subject of a foreign king, and must have felt at every turn the dominance of a foreign aristocrat which regarded him and his kind, at best,, with tolerant indifference. It was as the depressed survivor of a beaten race that he handed on the Old English tradition of local government to the men who has overthrown the Old English state.

To such a man there can have been little satisfaction in the strength of the Anglo-Norman monarchy or the scale of its executive achievement. But it is hard to believe that he can have been wholly unconscious of the new spirit which had entered into the direction of English affairs at the Conquest. The gallantry of individuals in the crisis of 1066  - of Edwin and Morcar at Fulford, of Harold at Stamforbridge and Hastings- tends to conceal the troubled insecurity of the preceding years. Throughout the reign of King Edward England has been a threatened state, relying for existence on a military system which recent events had shown to be insufficient for its needs. The initiative had always been with its enemies, it had never found an effectual ally, and before King Edward’s death it had ceased to count as a factor in European politics. The Normans who entered into the English inheritance were a harsh and violet race. They were the closest of all western peoples to the barbarian strain in the continental order. They had produced little in art and learning, and nothing in literature, that could be set beside the work of Englishmen. But politically, they were the masters of the world.

 

* a subdivision of some English shires corresponding to a hundred. Middle English, from Old English wǣpentæc, from Old Norse vāpnatak act of grasping weapons, from vāpn weapon + tak act of grasping, from taka to take; probably from the brandishing of weapons as an expression of approval when the chief of the wapentake entered upon his office. Hundred, unit of English local government and taxation, intermediate between village and shire, which survived into the 19th century. Originally, the term probably referred to a group of 100 hides (units of land required to support one peasant family), headed by a hundred-man or hundred eolder.

**New Forest, Hampshire Wiltshire. Twelfth-century chroniclers alleged that William had created the forest by evicting the inhabitants of 36 parishes, reducing a flourishing district to a wasteland; this account is thought dubious by most historians, as the poor soil in much of the area is believed to have been incapable of supporting large-scale agriculture, and significant areas appear to have always been uninhabited. There were perhaps 20 small hamlets and isolated farmsteads in William’s time.

*** a thegn or thane was an aristocrat who owned substantial land in one or more counties. Thanes ranked at the third level in lay society, below the king and ealdormen.