Medieval England (eBook)

Mary Bateson (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
175 Seiten
Merkaba Press (Verlag)
978-0-00-001945-5 (ISBN)

Infos

My object has been to keep social rather than political facts in view, and throughout to supply by illustration from contemporary accounts some of the characteristic detail which is apt to be crowded out in political histories. The story of social evolution may fairly be called the national story. The political story brings to view the procession of great events, the social story the procession of dead ancestors who acted, howsoever humbly, their part in shaping those events. In political history we see the trophies borne along in the triumphal cars, and in social history the groups of ordinary men, women, and children who fill the carriages or stream along on foot. There is not one way, but rather there are many ways of telling a nation's story: the growth of governmental institutions, fluctuations in territorial expansion, the spread of commerce, changes in foreign relations, the history of methods of thought, all make urgent claim to consideration. But not the least truthful measure of progress lies in those superficial indications of civilisation which are set aside as the province of social history. In the medieval Englishman's domesticity there is an epitome of the life of the nation: English private life has its unity, its episodes and catastrophes, which reflect the shifting lights and shadows of the national story. The private history of kings and princes, nobility, clergy and commons, has become now, with the progress of historical study, a theme more easy of treatment than it was a while ago. Changes in the social relations of the classes of men can now be traced, changes that have had their part in shaping the story of a nation, no less than the evolution of the agencies of government, the historic series of victories and defeats, gains and losses of territory, the happy or the luckless political chance, the fateful power of the point of time. A history of medieval civilisation that gives a hurried sequence of events is like a novel which never shows the characters save under the stress of conspiring fate, creatures not mortal because they never sleep or eat. It was certainly not rapidity in the movement of life which gives the English Middle Ages their peculiar colour. - Mary Bateson

Textauszug

II. THE NOBILITY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      1. The supplanting of the English nobility — 2. Baronial households — 3. Evidences of literary taste among the barons — 4. Nature of their castle-building: armour — 5. Private war: ideas of honour — 6. The military orders — 7. Ladies.

       

      1. It was part of the Conqueror’s scheme that as far as possible the whole frame-work of English government and English society should be maintained and made the basis on which the strengthening and systematising Norman genius for government should be set to work. The principle of retention was carried so far that in the distribution of lands to his followers William did not map out the country into compact military districts, suitable for military occupation, but gave as a rule to each Norman the holding of an English predecessor, a holding that had been casually and unsystematically pieced together, whose portions lay scattered far and wide and were held on many various conditions. Surrounded by his own relatives and by adventurers from all parts of Gaul, William was obliged to give to the greedy, but he gave in such a way as not to weaken himself.

      The process of supplanting the English nobility and the English official class was carried out with great completeness, though the method of the change varied in different parts of the country. In Kent, the most civilised part, many non-feudal characteristics were allowed to stand, to trouble lawyers in aftertimes: on the marches of Wales and in the least civilised parts of the country the king accepted an unmitigated feudalism, with all its dangers, as the best guarantee, at the moment, of his own peace. He delegated to the lords of lands the sovereign powers he could not exercise himself The great feudalists, whom William endowed, shared with him the racial genius for government, which showed itself not in England only but likewise in Sicily, where at this very time "the best organised and most united" state in Europe was being built up by them. Their law and their architecture are the most eloquent witnesses to their character. Bold and stern, ruggedly simple, what they built was destined to endure.

      2. Of their domesticity we can know less even than of the king’s. Not a single account of baronial expenses comes from this period or from the next. But the Normans did not create many different types of domestic life. The scheme of the king’s household was that of every baron. The "Laws of Edward the Confessor," not always trustworthy, speak truth when they tell us that archbishops, bishops, earls, barons had in their households their knights and servants, namely dapifers, butlers, chamberlains, cooks, bakers. So great an earl as he of Chester is said by Henry of Huntingdon to have owned a third of the kingdom. Whether this be true or not, Ordericus Vitalis has a good deal to say of his style of living. Hugh of Avranches, earl of Chester, "the Wolf," "the Fat," gathered about him a vast household of clerks, knights, and young men: his court was a school of manners of a boisterous kind. A lover of riotous sport, he was before all a lover of minstrelsy, romance, and jest. He engaged the best narrators of historic feats, to spur on the young to rivalry. Gaimar bears out part of this story, and describes his house as open to all, a place where wine flowed like water. The earl’s friendship for Anselm proves that his character was many-sided. A careful collection of rather scrappy evidence might show that some of the Norman barons had their peaceful interests which give relief to that picture of their turbulence, violence, and cruelty which doubtless cannot be painted in colours too dark. Even Robert of Belleme, one of the worst specimens, made it his interest to improve the English breed of horses by introducing Spanish stallions, and Gerald of Whales a century later praises the result of his work.

      3. Although there were but few, comparatively speaking, among the Norman laymen, who cared aught for cultivation of mind, the names of those who are associated with literature deserve the more to be remembered. Henry I.’s illegitimate son, Robert, Earl of Gloucester, has earned for himself, through William of Malmesbury’s dedications, a lasting fame. William tells in terms of unbounded praise of Robert’s devotion to literature, of his copious draughts from the fount of science. And his story is borne out by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s dedication of his History of the Kings of Britain, addressed likewise to Robert. Geoffrey’s history, according to his own account, was based on oral traditions, recited by heart "as though they were written," and on a Latin rendering made by Walter, archdeacon of Oxford, from a Breton or Welsh chronicle. Gaimar, who used Geoffrey of Monmouth, says likewise that he used Walter’s work, and that it was rendered from the Welsh at Robert of Gloucester’s request. Neither Welsh nor Breton original, nor Walter of Oxford’s Latin, is extant, nor indeed seems to have been known to any of Geoffrey’s successors, so that doubt has been thrown on the whole story. But whether Geoffrey is to be credited with more or less imaginative power, or more or less respect for historic truth, we may believe that in Gloucester he found a patron; and from Gaimar’s account it is clear that in Lincolnshire also there was a group of nobles and ladies interested in romantic literature. Gaimar records his indebtedness to the patronage of Dame Custance wife of Ralph fitzGilbert, the founder of a Cistercian abbey, Kirkstead, in Lincolnshire. He used many books before he finished; indeed he never could have finished, he says, had it not been for her aid. For his use she sent to Helmsley for a book belonging to one Walter Espec (the Woodpecker). This work was the translation made from the Welsh at Robert of Gloucester’s request. Custance prized the volume so much that she paid a mark of silver, burnt and weighed, for a copy, and kept it always in her chamber. The book-lender Walter Espec is introduced to us in another capacity by the historian of the Battle of the Standard, who describes him as a man of gigantic stature, with raven-black hair and a voice like a trumpet. The fine speech which Ailred puts in his mouth may well be his, at least based on his own words; he bids the Normans remember that they have seen the King of France turn tail, that it is they who have subdued distant Apulia, Calabria, Sicily, and will their mailed knights be beaten by the bare-legged barbarous Scotch?

      Another Lincolnshire patroness of literature was Adelaide de Condé of Horncastle, who employed in her household the trouvère Samson of Nanteuil. A baron who was himself a writer was the clever Breton, Earl Brian fitzCount, reared and knighted by Henry I., an Exchequer auditor and a supporter of the Empress Matilda against Stephen. He composed a treatise (now lost) in defence of her rights, so eloquent that a very learned man, Foliot, bishop of Hereford, writes that it kept him engrossed to the neglect of his duties.

      But the best evidence that lay education was not wholly neglected is the number of barons who were famous lawyers, like Alberic de Ver, "causidicus," chief justiciar and chamberlain to Stephen, one of whose judicial speeches remains on record. Such another, Henry I.’s councillor and judge, the earl of Leicester, though no great Latinist, could see through many a legal subtlety in lay and ecclesiastical controversy. For this man’s sons Henry I. provided an education, bringing them up "like his own children"; and when these youths were sent to dispute with the cardinals in logic, they beat them "in sophisms and lively argument," so says William of Malmesbury.

      Another of Henry I.’s bastard sons, Richard, was educated by Bloet, bishop of Lincoln, together with the historian Henry of Huntingdon. The Empress Matilda’s son, the future Henry II., was given the greatest continental teachers in the Latin classics, natural philosophy and versification, and while under his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, likewise, he had in England excellent teaching, together with that earl’s sons. One of these sons, Roger, became bishop of Worcester; another, William, had for his chaplain that same Geoffrey of Monmouth who was to be chief of a school of quasi-historical romance.

      But there were few learned knights, such as the friend of Paul, abbot of St. Alban’s, who delighted to buy books for the church, few ladies like the Countess Goda, wife of Eustace of Boulogne and sister to the Confessor, who possessed a choice copy of the Gospels, worthy to be presented to such a library as that of Rochester cathedral.

      4. What is more characteristic of the baronial spirit of the Norman era is their building of castles, whose ruins remain to show the dominance of force in everyday Norman life.

      Modern scientific inquiry inclines to ascribe more and more of the earth-works, motae, to the Norman rather than to the Anglo-Saxon time. The castle towers, none of which were pre-Norman, fall into two well-defined groups, one solid and rectangular, floored and intended for habitation, the other hollow and generally round, a shell-keep, built as a defence added to an artificial mound. The rectangular keep, requiring solid foundations, is not found in conjunction with the artificial mota. The majority of the barons seem to have been content at first with an enclosed camp, planted in a defensible...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.7.2017
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Mittelalter
• ISBN-10: 0-00-001945-3 / 0000019453
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-001945-5 / 9780000019455