No More Learning

Quoted by Luchaire, Manuel des institutions françaises, p. 185.
1
2


## p. 469 (#515) ############################################

Feudal Courts
469
to a great extent as to pleas concerning the persons of the vassals. The
first group of pleas stands out so clearly that there is no special
necessity to dwell on its range. It need only be noticed that the
proceedings concerning unfree tenures were substantially of the same
kind as those affecting free or noble tenancies. A dispute as to the
possession of a villenagium followed on the same lines as a trial in
which a free tenement was the object in dispute, although the latter was
naturally much more complex. From the technical point of view, in
the first case the trial took place before the peers of the contending
parties, who as suitors of the court were its judges, while in the second
case the lord or his steward was the only judge and such assessors as
were called up had only advisory powers. But as a matter of fact the
verdicts of the court were regarded as the expression of legal custom in
the second case, and the reservation that the lord might override the
customary rules was due to his exceptional position, and not to the
ordinary working of manorial courts. A body of legal tradition and of
conceptions of equity grew up in the lower social stratum as well as in
the upper. This is especially noticeable in the case of English manorial
courts, in the composition of which free and unfree elements are generally
intermixed in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish between
verdicts laid down by the free tenants and those contributed by the
villeins. The one really important difference lay in the fact that the
villeins had to look for justice to the manorial court in all cases, not
only tenurial, but also personal, such as cases of battery, defamation,
adultery and the like, while free men and specially men of noble birth
were either directly amenable to justice by the medium of the royal
tribunals or could, if they appeared before a feudal court, insist on a very
strict maintenance of their privileges in view of the supervision of royal
courts.
In a sense the circle of tenants constituting the peers' court was a
most complete expression of the principle of equality as between allied
sovereigns. The decision was formulated strictly by the peers of the
contending parties, and this led, in regard to criminal accusations, to the
famous doctrine of the Great Charter: "nullus liber homo capiatur vel
imprisonetur nisi per judicium parium suorum vel per legem terrae”
(sect. 39). The decision of a court of peers was final. An appeal was
impossible from the feudal point of view, because it would have meant
a revision of the judgment by higher authority, and feudal litigants
submitted not to higher authority but to a convention in which they
had taken part. There were, however, two cases in which a vassal
.
,
might seek redress from a source of law superior to the court of peers
presided over by his suzerain. If justice was denied to him by this
tribunal he could ask the overlord, that is, the suzerain of his immediate
lord, to see that justice should be done. This was, however, no appeal
as to law or facts, but only an attempt to set the machinery of feudal
a
CH. XVIII.


## p. 470 (#516) ############################################

470
Appeal of judgment
jurisdiction in motion. The second eventuality occurred when one of
the parties to a suit actually contested the justice of a particular decision
or sentence. He could in French feudal law attaint or falsify the verdict
by pronouncing the formula," je vous appelle de faux jugement. ” This
meant that he challenged the fairness and honour of the judges, and the
result was single combat between the protesting party and one or several
of the judges, not a satisfactory solution of the difficulties from our point
of view, nor, probably, from that of many judges concerned. There were
devices which rendered such attaint hazardous in some cases: the members
of the tribunal could pronounce the decision in corpore, and in this case
the option for the dissatisfied party was to fight them all. In any case
this mode of appeal was directed towards the revision of the judgment
by God rather than by man, and at bottom did not subvert the principle
that a man ought to be judged by his peers and by his peers only. It
is hardly necessary to add that the falsifying of judgments has been
described here in conformity to strict rules of feudal theory. In practice
all sorts of compromises took place. In England, for example, the
revision of judgments by higher courts was brought about at a very
early stage by the intervention of the king's court, though not without
opposition from the barons. An instructive case occurred, for example,
in the reign of William the Conqueror. In a trial as to land between
Bishop Gundulf of Rochester and Picot, the Sheriff of Cambridgeshire,
the county pronounced in favour of the latter, but through the inter-
vention of Odo of Bayeux twelve representatives of the shire were called
up to confirm the verdict by oath in the king's court, and ultimately,
after a declaration by a monk who had been steward of the estate in
question, the unlucky doomsmen were driven either to go through the
ordeal of redhot iron or to recant. The indirect way in which the
prejudiced intervention of the higher powers took effect in this case is
characteristic of the traditional difficulties which stood in the way of
downright revision. As on many other occasions, there are threads
connecting feudal theory with recent or actual practice, and we may not
unreasonably see in the doctrine as to the finality of jury verdicts a
modernised offshoot of the older doctrine of the judgment by peers.
Of course the differentiation between questions of fact and questions of
law has made it possible to concede to juries the highly privileged
position which they generally enjoy, but the germ of the corresponding
rules is historically connected with the immunity from outside influence
which formed one of the most characteristic traits of the feudal judg-
ment by peers.
Similar phenomena meet our eye when we come to consider the
processes of legislation obtaining in the feudal world. It is evident in
theory that a baron, being a sovereign, could not be subjected to any
will but his own, and that therefore such common arrangements as had
1 Bigelow, Placita Anglo-normannica, p. 34.


## p. 471 (#517) ############################################

Feudal legislation
471
to be made in medieval society had to be effected on the same lines as
modern international conventions. And indeed we find this idea at the
root of the feudal doctrine of legislation; in the custom of Touraine-Anjou
it was expressed in the following way: “The baron has all manner of
justice in his territory, and the king cannot proclaim his command in
the land of the baron without the latter's consent; nor can the baron
proclaim his command in the land of his tenant without the consent of
the tenant1. "
In consequence of this general principle, all feudal legislation ranging
outside the immediate demesne of the single baron takes the shape of a
stabilimentum (établissement) or of an assize enacted in the court of a
superior lord with the express or implied consent of his vassals. An
ordinance of the Viscount of Thouars (A. D. 1099), for example, instituting
a certain annual charge to be paid by the tenants, refers at the close to
“the authority and will of the barons of my land” (quoted by Luchaire,
Manuel des institutions françaises, p. 253). The same notion reappears
in ordinances made by much greater potentates, such as the dukes of
Normandy, e. g. by William the Conqueror, in 1064 (on public peace),
by counts of Flanders (Baldwin of Constantinople, in 1199, on usury),
by dukes of Brittany (in 1185, on succession to fiefs), even by kings of
France and kings of England; Henry II's Assize of the Forest, for
instance, begins in the following manner: “This is the assize of the Lord
King Henry, the son of Maud, in England, about forest and hunting, by
the advice and consent (per consilium et assensum) of the archbishops,
bishops and barons, earls (comitum) and noblemen of England at Wood-
stock(Stubbs, Select Ch. 157). Theoretically, the individual consent
of each member of the gathering to any decision was needed if it were
to bind him, but historically, the legislative assemblies were not merely
the outcome of feudal meetings, they were also survivals of more ancient
popular assemblies, while, as a matter of practice, the authority of the
superior lord and the influence of leading magnates asserted themselves
in a much greater degree than would have been allowed from a purely
individual point of view. It thus depended very much on circumstances
whether centripetal or centrifugal tendencies got the upper hand. The
majority principle had not been evolved either, at least during the
eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As the French historian
Luchaire has expressed it, voices were rather weighed than counted. But
the idea of a convention made itself felt in a very definite manner, and
this point must be noticed as very important in view of subsequent develop-
ment. The early doctrine of medieval estates is clearly connected with these
feudal views on the side both of legislation and taxation. The view that
1 Coutume'de Touraine-Anjou, p. 17: Bers si a toutes en sa terre, ne li rois ne puet
mettre ban en la tere au baron, sanz son assentement, ne li bers ne puet mettre ban
en la terre au vavasor, sanz l'assentement au vavasor; (received in the Établissement
de St Louis, 1. p. 26. See P. Viollet, Établissements de St Louis, 11. p. 36).
а
CH. XVIII.


## p. 472 (#518) ############################################

472
The manor
the nation is not bound to pay a tax to the imposition of which it has
not consented through its representatives (the constitutional rule on
which the development of Parliament depended later on) certainly has
its roots in the feudal maxim that no baron was bound by ordinances in
the “establishment” of which he had not taken a part. It is also not
alien to our purpose to notice that the distinction between greater and
smaller barons suggested by the far-reaching differences, in regard to the
appropriation of public power, afforded a germ for the subsequent rise of
aristocratic “Second Chambers. ". The House of Lords, as a court, is
a house of peers, and it is not only in England that the prominence of
the magnates secured for them a special personal standing in legislative
organisation : a curious parallel, all the more instructive because it is
supplied by a microscopic state, is presented by the history of Béarn in
the Pyrenees. In that vicomté, an aristocratic council of twelve hereditary
jurati, drawn from the most powerful houses of local nobility, appears as
the cour majour and acts as a standing committee of the full court
(cour plénière). It had to settle disputes between the viscounts and
their vassals and in general to control the current administration of
law 1.
A survey of medieval society from the one point of view of
contractual relations would, however, be incomplete, one-sided and
artificial. In order to be correct it ought to be matched by an
examination of the constituent elements combining to form the feudal
organisation. Such an examination would have to take each feudal unit
singly and to describe the rule of the lord over his subjects as well as the
work of these subjects.
The most characteristic type of such a feudal unit is certainly the
English manor, and I should like to turn now to a study of it which
will afford a key to the understanding of similar phenomena in other
countries of Western Europe. The manor is a necessary outcome of
so-called natural husbandry, providing for the requirements of life by
work carried out on the spot, without much exchanging and buying.
It is the connecting link in the social life of classes, some of which are
primarily occupied with the rough work of feeding, clothing and housing
society, while others specialise in defending it and providing for its
secular and spiritual government. It presents the lowest and most
efficient unit of medieval organisation, and local justice, administration
and police are all more or less dependent on its arrangements. Let us
look at the different elements of which this historical group is composed.
First of all there is the economic element. The manor afforded the
most convenient, and even the necessary, arrangements of work and profit
in those times. It would be quite wrong to assume that the interests
and rights of the many were simply sacrificed to the interests and rights
of a few rulers, that the manor was nothing but an estate, cultivated
i Cadier, Les États du Béarn, quoted by Luchaire, Manuel, p. 254,


## p. 473 (#519) ############################################

The village community
473
and exploited for the sake of the lord and managed at discretion by his
will and the will of his servants. On the contrary, one of the best
established facts in the economic life of the manor was its double
mechanism, if one may say so.
It consisted, as a rule, of a village
community with wide though peculiar self-government and of a manorial
administration superimposed on it, influencing and modifying the life
of the community but not creating it. This double aim and double
mechanism of the manor must be noticed at the outset as
a very
characteristic feature; it places the manor in a sharp contrast both to
the plantations of slaves of the ancient world and to the commercial
husbandry of a modern estate struggling for profit as best it may.
Manorial husbandry was all along striving towards two intimately
connected aims, providing the villagers with means of existence and
providing the lord with profits. Hence a dual machinery to attain
these aims, both a village community and the lord's demesne.
The village community lay at the basis of the whole'. It gave rise
to a very peculiar system of holding and using land, not to be confused
either with the case of the tribal community in which rights are graduated
according to the pedigree of a person, or with that of the communalism of
the Russian mir or of some Hindu settlements, in which land is allotted
and redivided according to the requirements and the economic strength
of the settlers. The peculiar bent of the English rural community
would perhaps be best indicated by the expression “shareholding arrange-
ment” or “community of shareholders. ” Each of the households settled
in the village had a fixed and constant share, or maybe half a share, or
a quarter, or the eighth part of a share assigned to it. It stood in scot
and in lot with the village as a hide or two virgates or one virgate or
a bovate, according to the size of the share. By the standard of this
hereditary share all rights and duties were apportioned. By the side
of the shareholders there generally lived in the village smaller tenants
(cottagers, crofters) but they were merely an adjunct to the main body
of the tenantry and may be left out of reckoning in our general
survey.
The system of communal shareholding was very strikingly illustrated
by the treatment of waste and pasture in the medieval village. It was
not divided among the tenants, and, though later in legal theory
it belonged to the lord, it was everywhere considered by custom as a
common ” for the use of the villagers. In most cases it had to be
stinted to some extent: rules were formulated as to the species and number
of beasts to be sent to pasture, as to seasons, and as to precautions against
abuses; and these rules can generally be traced to the main principle,
that
every household has to use the common according to the size of its
1 In parts of the country settled on the system of scattered farms, arable and
meadows came naturally to be divided among separate households, but even then
a great deal of communalism remained in the management of pasture and wood.
66
CH, XVIII.


## p. 474 (#520) ############################################

474
Common fields
а
share, so that, for instance, a virgater had the right to send two cows
and eight sheep to the pasture, while the owner of a bovate could only send
one cow and four sheep, and so on. The use of wood for building purposes,
of hedges for fuel, of turf, and other profits drawn from the common
and undivided fund of the village, were regulated by rules or by-laws of
the same kind. In regard to meadows, which were scarce and highly
valued, the communalism of the village found a suitable expression in
the division of these meadows into a certain number of strips according
to the number of households taking part in the community: these
strips were then allotted to one after the other of the households in a
customary order or by casting lots. The arable did not change hands in
the same way. As a rule, the strips of the arable were owned by each
household in hereditary succession, each generation entering into the
rights of the preceding generation in this respect. But, even in the
case of the arable, there were many facts to shew that it was considered
dependent on the community, though held to a certain extent in severalty
by the households. To begin with, the holding in severalty existed on
the land only for one part of the year. The tenant had a particular
right to it while it was under crop, that is, when it had been ploughed up
and sown, and while the harvest had not yet removed the proceeds of the
individual labour and care which the tiller had bestowed upon it. As
most fields were cultivated in medieval England on the three-field or
on the two-field system, the households of shareowners obtained private
rights over their arable strips while winter corn or spring corn grew
on the soil, and these separate rights were marked off by narrow lines
of turf between the strips, called balks, while the whole of the sown
field was protected from the inroads of cattle by a temporary hedge.
But after harvest had been gathered the hedges fell, and the whole
field returned to the condition of waste to be used for pasture as a
common: a condition which took up the whole of every third year in
a three-field and the whole of every second year in a two-field husbandry,
besides a considerable part of the years when the field received seed.
Private occupation of the strips emerged in this way from time to time
from the open common field, an arrangement which not only kept up
the principle that the arable was, after all, the property of the village
as a whole, but had direct practical consequences in hampering private
industry and the use of private capital in cultivation: it rendered, for
instance, manuring a very complicated and rather exceptional process.
Nor is this all : the householder did not only cease to cultivate his plot
as soon as harvest was over, but he had, even before then, to conform in the
plan and methods of cultivation to the customs and arrangements of his
neighbours. The arable of his holding was generally composed of a
certain number of strips in proportion to the importance of his share,
and these strips lay intermixed with the strips of other villagers so that
every one came to own patches of land, acres and half-acres in all the


## p. 475 (#521) ############################################

The demesne
475
“shots and furlongs of the village,” as the fields were called, and had to
wander about in all directions to look after his own.
Such an arrange-
ment would be the height of absurdity in any state of society where
individual ownership prevails, and this point by itself would be sufficient
to shew that what was meant was not a division of claims according
to the simple rules of private ownership, so familiar to us, but a communal
cultivation in which the arable was divided between the shareholders with
as much proportionate fairness as possible. In keeping with this principle,
the plan of cultivation, the reclaiming of land, the sequence of seasons
for its use for wheat, barley, oats, peas, the time of its lying fallow,
for setting up of hedges and their removal, the rules as to sending cattle
on to the stubble, and the like, were worked out and put in practice, not
by the industry of every single householder, but by the decision of
the village as a whole. We may even discover traces of re-divisions,
by which the shares of the householders were partitioned anew according
to the standard of proportionate importance, though such instances are
very exceptional and mostly connected with cases where some confusion
had occurred to break up the proper relations of the holdings. If we look
at the open-field system as a whole, we must insist upon the fact that
the key to its arrangement lies in the principle of shareholding, every
household being admitted to a certain proportion of rights according to
its share in the community, and being held to corresponding duties.
The village community has, as a rule, a demesne farm superimposed
on it, and the connexion between the two is very close and intimate.
To begin with, the lord's demesne farm draws rents in money and in
kind from the plots of the tenants, and it serves as a counting-house
for the discharge of these rents. By the side of the counting-house
stand barns and stores, where the multifarious proceeds of natural
husbandry are gathered as they come in from the holdings. In some
manors the dues are arranged to form a complete outfit for the con-
sumption of the lord's household, a farm of one night, of a we of
a fortnight, as the case may be. The manors of the Abbey of Ramsey
were bound to render as a fortnight's farm 12 quarters of flour, 2000 loaves
of bread, 24 gallons of beer, 48 gallons of malt, 2 sesters of honey,
10 Aitches of bacon, 10 rounds of cheese, 10 very best sucking pigs,
14 lambs, 14 geese, 120 chickens, 2000 eggs, 2 tubs of butter, 24 gallons
of audit ale. In Lent the bacon and the cheese were struck off and money
paid in their stead.
By the help of these accumulated stores, and of funds drawn from
money rents and of small leases, the lord keeps a number of servants, and
hires some labourers for the cultivation of the home farm, of the orchard
and the arable set apart for it, as well as for looking after the buildings, the
implements, etc. But the peculiar feature of the manorial arrangement
consists in the fact that the demesne farm does not live independently
of the village community adjoined to it, does not merely draw profits
CH XVIII.


## p. 476 (#522) ############################################

476
Week work and boonwork
a
from it in the way of rents, but actually gets its labour from this village
community and thereby builds up its husbandry.
The most important of these services is the week work performed by
the peasantry. Every virgater or holder of a bovate has to send
labourer to do work on the lord's farm for about half the number of
days in the week. Three days is indeed the most common standard for
service of this kind, though four or even five occur sometimes, as
well as two. It must be borne in mind in the case of heavy charges,
such as four or five days' week work, that only one labourer from the
whole holding is meant, while generally there were several men living on
every holding; otherwise the service of five days would be impossible to
perform. In the course of these three days, or whatever the number
was, many requirements of the demesne had to be met. The principal
of these was ploughing the fields belonging to the lord, and for such
ploughing the peasant had not only to appear personally as a labourer,
but to bring his oxen and plough or rather to join with his oxen and
plough in the work imposed on the village: the heavy plough with a
team of eight oxen had usually to be made up by several peasants con-
tributing their beasts and implements towards its composition. In the
same way the villagers had to go through the work of harrowing with
their harrows, and of carrying the harvest in their wains and carts.
Carrying duties, in carts and on horseback, were also apportioned
according to the time they took as a part of the week work. Then
came innumerable varieties of manual work for the erection and keeping
up of hedges, the preservation of dykes, canals, and ditches, the thresh-
ing and garnering of corn, the tending and shearing of sheep and so forth.
All this hand-work was reckoned according to customary standards as
day work and week work. But alongside of all these services into which
the regular week work of the peasantry was distributed stood some
additional duties. The ploughing for the lord, for instance, was not
only imposed in the shape of a certain number of days in the week, but
also took the shape of a certain number of acres which the village had
to plough and to sow for the lord irrespective of the amount of time
it took to do so. This was sometimes termed gafolearth. Then again
exceedingly burdensome services were required, in the seasons when
farming processes are, as it were, at their height, at times of mowing
and reaping when every day is of special value and the working power
of the farm-hands is strained to the utmost. At that time it was the
custom to call up the whole able-bodied population of the manor,
with the exception of the housewives, for two, three or more days of
mowing and reaping on the lord's fields. To these boonworks the peasantry
was asked or invited by special summons, and their value was so far
appreciated that the villagers were usually treated to meals in cases
where they were again and again called off from their own fields to the
demesne. The liberality of the lord actually went so far in exceptionally
a
1


## p. 477 (#523) ############################################

The villeins
477
hard straits, as to serve some ale to the labourers to keep them in
good humour. In this way the demesne farm throve as a kind of huge
parasitical growth by drawing on the strength of the tenantry.
Let us now turn to the second constitutive element of the manor, to
what we have called its social aspect in distinction to the economic and
to the political aspects. From the social point of view the manor is
a combination of classes, and the three main classes are to be found
on its soil : the villeins, or as they are sometimes called the customary
tenants, the freeholders or free tenants, and the officials and servants
of the lord.
The villeins are in the majority. They come from people whose
position was by no means uniform. Some of them are the offspring of
slaves, some of free men who have lapsed into serfdom through crime
or inability to provide the means of existence. Some claim to descend
from the ceorls of Saxon times, a class of free peasants who were gradually
crushed down to rural servitude. Be that as it may, the distinctive
features of villeinage are derived from all its original sources and are
blended to form a condition which is neither slavery nor self-incurred
serfdom nor the subjection of free peasants to their rulers. Three main
traits seem especially characteristic of manorial villeinage: the per-
formance of rural services, the inability to claim and defend civil
rights against the lord, and the recognition of villeins as free men in
all matters concerning the political and criminal law of the realm. Each
of these traits deserves some special notice.
The villein is primarily a man obliged to perform rural work for his
lord. Every person in the medieval social scheme is bound to perform
some kind of work, every one holds by some kind of service or appears as
a follower of one who holds by some service. The Church holds some
of her lands in return for her obligation to pray and to minister to
spiritual needs. The knights and serjeants hold theirs by military
.
service of different kinds. The burgesses and socagers hold in the main
by paying rents, by rent service. The villein has to perform agricultural
services to his lord. Some such agricultural services may be linked to the
tenure of other classes, to the tenure of socagers, burgesses, and even
military tenants, but the characteristic week work was primarily imposed
on the villeins, and though they sometimes succeeded in getting rid of
it by commuting it for money payments, these modifications of their
status were considered as secondary and exceptional, and generally some
traces of the original obligations of agricultural service were left: even
privileged villeins had to serve their lord as reeves or rural stewards, had
to send their sheep to the lord's fold, had to appear at the bidding
of manorial officers to perform one or the other kind of work in the
field. The villein was emphatically a man who held by the fork and
the flail.
In the early days of feudalism agricultural service must have decided
CH. XVIII.


## p. 478 (#524) ############################################

478
Status of villeins
the fate of many people who had good claims to rank as free. In a
rough way the really important distinction was this: on one side stood
people who were bound to feed the rest and were therefore bound to the
glebe, on the other those who were free to go wherever they pleased,
provided they performed their military or ecclesiastical duties, and paid
their rents. But when once the main social cleavage had taken place, the
lawyers had to face a vast number of personal claims and disputes, and
they gradually worked out a principle which itself became a basis for
social distinctions, namely that the villein, the peasant holding by rural
work, had no civil claims against his lord. It was convenient to assume
that everything a villein possessed was derived from a grant of his lord
and liable to be resumed by him, and though this may by no means be true
in point of historical fact, it became as good as true because the king's
courts declined to examine and decide civil suits of villeins against their
lord. Villeins were left unprotected, and this lack of protection gave birth
to a series of customary exactions quite apart from the many instances
when a lord simply ill-treated the peasants. A villein had to pay a fine on
the marriage of his daughter because she was considered the property of
the lord, and this fine was materially increased when she married out of
the lordship, as the lord lost his bond-woman and her offspring by such
a marriage. On the death of a villein his heir could not enter his
inheritance without surrendering a valuable horse or ox in recognition
of the claims of the lord to the agricultural outfit of the holding.
As a matter of fact the civil disability of villeins did not amount to a
general insecurity of their rights of possession. On the contrary, the custom
of the manor was elaborately constant and provided for most contingencies
of rural life with as much accuracy and nicety of distinction as the law
administered in the royal courts. But all these provisions were merely
.
customary rules drawn from facts; they were not binding on the lord,
and in one very important respect, the amount and kind of work to
be exacted from the peasant, changes and increases occasionally oc-
curred. There was one class of the English peasantry which enjoyed
a much better condition, namely the villeins on the so-called ancient
demesne of the Crown. In manors which had belonged to the kings
before the Conquest and had been granted to subjects after the Conquest,
the lords had no right to oust the villagers from their holdings and to
increase their services at pleasure, but were bound to follow the customs
which held good at the time of the transfer of the estates from the
Crown. In such manors a recourse to the rural courts was admitted
and the peasants were treated as free people in regard to their tenements
and services; their tenure became a species of lease or contract, though
burdened with base services. This valuable privilege only emphasised
with greater sharpness the rightless condition of the rest of the
peasantry.
This rightlessness was, however, restricted to the relations of the


## p. 479 (#525) ############################################

Rights of villeins
479
villeins with their lord. In regard to all third persons and in regard to
the requirements of the State they were considered to be free. This is
the third marked feature of their condition. Let us remember that the
slave of Roman and Saxon times was a thing, an animal at best, that he
was supposed to act merely on behalf of his master, that if he committed
a theft or slew somebody his master was held responsible for his crime,
and that he was not admitted as a warrior to the host and did not pay any
taxes to grasping fiscal authorities, though he was estimated at his worth
and more than his worth when his master had to pay. All these traits
of slavery gradually disappeared when slaves and ceorls were blended in
the mould of villeinage. The villein was recognised as having a soul and
a will of his own not only in the eyes of the Christian Church but in those
of the feudal State. He could enter into agreements, and acquire property
in spite of the fact that some authoritative lawyers maintained that he
could acquire nothing for himself and that all he had belonged to his
lord. He was set in the stocks or hanged for crimes, and the lord had to
be content with the loss of his man, as he had not to pay for his felonies.
Villeins were grouped in frithborgs or tithings of frankpledge in order
that the peace of the realm and its police might be better enforced.
They were not merely taxed by their lords and through their lords, but
also had to pay hidage and geld from their own land and fifteenths and
twentieths from their own chattels. Altogether the government looked
upon them as its direct subjects and did not fail to impose duties on
them, though it declined to protect their customary rights against the
lord.
The celebrated enactments of Magna Charta as to personal security
and rights of property applied primarily to free men and to free tene-
ments, and of such there were a good many in the manor.
Indeed a
manor was deemed incomplete without them. Besides the knights and
squires or serjeants who held of the lord by military service, there were
numerous tenants who stood to him in a relation of definite agreement,
paying certain fixed rents or performing certain specified services which,
however burdensome, did not amount to the general obligation of rural
labour incumbent on the villeins. Many were the tenants, who, without
appealing to a charter or a specified agreement to prove their contractual
relation to the lord, held their tenements from father to son as if there
were a specific agreement between them and the lord, performing certain
services and paying certain rents; and this class was the most important of
all. These were the freeholders properly so termed or, as they were
called in many ancient manors, the sokemen. Without going into the
question of their origin and history, we must emphatically lay down the
principle of their tenure in feudal society: it was tenure by contract and
therefore free. Such was its essence, although in many, perhaps in most
cases, the formation of the contract was hidden by lapse of time unto which
memory does not run, and indeed hardly amounted to more than a legal
CH. XVIII.


## p. 480 (#526) ############################################

480
Freeholders
presumption. The clear distinction, drawn by the Courts between tenants
in a relation of contract with their lord and tenants in a relation of custom-
ary subjection, divided sharply the classes of freeholders and villeins and
moulded all the details of their personal position. It was not always
easy to make out in particular cases to which of the two great sub-
divisions a person and a holding belonged, and, as a matter of history,
the process of pressing the people into the hard and fast lines of this
classification was achieved by disregarding previous and more organic
arrangements, but undoubtedly this distinction created a mould, which
not only worked powerfully to bring some order into feudal society, but
set a definite aim before the very class which was depressed by it; to
obtain freedom the villeins must aspire to contractual relations with
their lords.
We are now concerned with the period when these aspirations were
only more or less indefinite ferments of social progress, and the legal
distinction still acted as a firm rule. The freeholders sought and
obtained protection for their rights in the royal courts and thereby
not only acquired a privileged position in regard to holdings, dues and
services, but in a sense, obtained an entirely different footing from the
villein and were able to step out of the manorial arrangement, to seek
their law outside it. This was undoubtedly the case, and the count-
less records of law suits between lords and tenants tell us of all the
possibilities which such a position opened to the freeholders. But it is
necessary to realise the other side of the matter, which we may be apt
to disregard if we lay too much stress on the legal standing of
freeholders in the King's Courts. In all that touched the life and
arrangements of the village community underlying the manor, the
freeholders were in scot and in lot with the township and therefore on
an equal footing with the villeins. In speaking of the management of
open field and waste, of the distribution of arable and meadows, of the
practices of enclosure and pasture, etc. , we did not make any difference
between villeins and freeholılers, indeed we have not even mentioned the
terms. We have spoken of tenants, of members of the community, of
shareholders, and now that we have learnt to fathom the deep legal
chasm between the two sections of the tenantry, we still must insist on
the fact that both sections were at one in regard to all the rights and
duties derived from their agrarian association, appertaining to them as
tillers of the soil and as husbands of their homes. Both sections joined
to frame the by-laws and to declare the customs which ruled the life of
the village and its intricate economic practices. And the freeholders
had not only to take part in the management of the community but, of
course, to conform to its decisions. They were not free in the sense of
being able to use their plots as they liked, to manage their arable and
pasture in severalty, to keep up a separate and independent husbandry.
If they transgressed against the rules laid down by the community, they


## p. 481 (#527) ############################################

Officers of the lord
481
were liable to pay fines, to get their cattle impounded, to have their
property distrained upon. Of course, the processes of customary law
were greatly hampered and even modified by the fact that the freeholders
had access to the royal courts, and so could challenge the verdicts of the
manorial jurisdiction and the decisions of the township in the royal
courts. And undoubtedly the firm footing obtained by freeholders in
this respect enabled them on many occasions to thwart the petty juris-
diction of their neighbours, and to set up claims which were not in keeping
with a subjection to by-laws made by the manorial community. But this
clashing of definitions and attributes, though unavoidable in view of the
ambiguous position of freeholders, must not prevent us from recognising
the second principle of their condition as well as the first; they were
not merely tenants by contract but also members of a village community
and subjected to its by-laws.
After what has been said of the position of the tenants, we need not
dwell very long on the standing of the lord and of his immediate
helpers. The lord was a monarch in the manor, but a monarch fettered
by a customary constitution and by contractual rights. He was often
strong enough to break through these customs and agreements, to act
in an arbitrary way, to indulge in cruelty and violence. But in the
great majority of cases feelings and caprice gave way to reasonable
considerations. A reasonable lord could not afford to disregard the
standards of fairness and justice which were set up by immemorial
custom, and a knowledge of the actual conditions of life. A mean line
had to be struck between the claims of the rulers and the interests
of the subjects, and along this mean line by-laws were framed and
customs grew up which protected the tenantry even though it was
forsaken by the king's judges. This unwritten constitution was safe-
guarded not only by the apprehension that its infringement might
scatter the rustic population on whose labour the well-being of the lord
and his retainers after all depended, but also by the necessity of keeping
within bounds the power of the manorial staff of which the lord had to
avail himself. This staff comprised the stewards and seneschals who had
to act as overseers of the whole, to preside in the manorial courts, to
keep accounts, to represent the lord on all occasions; the reeves who,
though chosen by the villagers, acted as a kind of middlemen between
them and the lord and had to take the lead in the organisation of
all the rural services; the beadles and radknights or radmen who had
to serve summonses and to carry orders; the various warders, such as
the hayward, who had to superintend hedges, the woodward for pastures
and wood, the sower and the thresher; the graves of moors and dykes
who had to look after canals, ditches and drainage; the ploughmen
and herdsmen, employed for the use of the domanial plough-teams
and herds. All these ministri had to be kept in check by a well-
advised landlord, and one of the most efficient checks on them was
C. MED, H. VOL. III. CH. XVIII.
31


## p. 482 (#528) ############################################

482
Local administration
а
provided by the formation of manorial custom. It was in the interest
of the lord himself to strengthen the customary order which pre-
vented grasping stewards and serjeants from ruining the peasantry by
extortions and arbitrary rule. This led to the great enrolments of custom
as to holdings and services, of which many have come down to us from
the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ; they were a safeguard
for the interests both of the tenants and of the lord.
The complex machinery of the manor as the centre of economic
affairs and of social relations demanded by itself a suitable organisation.
But besides this the manor was the local centre for purposes of police
and justice; it had to enforce the king's commands and the law of
the realm in its locality. It would be more correct to say that the
manor and the village community or township underlying it were re-
garded as local centres of justice and police, because in these political
matters the double aspect of the manor, the fact of its being composed
of an upper and a lower half, came quite as plainly to the fore as
in its economic working. Indeed, for purposes of justice, taxation,
supervision of vagabonds, catching and watching thieves, keeping in
order roads, and the like, the government did not recognise as the direct
local unit the manor, but the vill, the village community or town, as
the old English term went. The vill had to look after the formation
of frank pledge, to keep ward, to watch over prisoners and to conduct
them to gaol, to make presentments to justices and to appear at the
sheriff's turn. This fact is a momentous piece of historical evidence
as to the growth of manorial jurisdiction, but, apart from that, it has to
be noticed as a feature of the actual administration of justice and police
during the feudal period. It may be said that when the central power
appealed directly to the population either for help or for responsibility,
it did so through the medium not of the manors, but of the ancient
towns or townships merged in them.
But there were many affairs delegated to the care of the manor, in
which the central power intervened only indirectly. There was the
whole domain of petty jurisdiction over villeins, as subjects of the lord,
there were the numberless cases arising from agrarian transgressions
and disputes, there were disputes between tenants of the same lord in
regard to land held from him, there were the franchises, that is, the
powers surrendered by special grants of the government or by imme-
morial encroachment of the lords in regard to tolls, market rights,
the assize of bread and ale and other matters of commercial police,
to the trying of thieves, poachers, and the like. In all these respects
the manorial lord was called upon to act according to his standing and
warranted privileges. But in no case could he act alone and by himself:
he acted in his court and through his court. Originally this court,
the halimote, the hall meeting, as we may translate the term, dealt with
all sorts of affairs : it tried the cases where villeins were concerned,
:


## p. 483 (#529) ############################################

Survey of Europe
483
transacted the conveyancing business, enforced the jurisdiction of the
franchises. Its suitors were freeholders and villeins alike, and if they
did not always act jointly, we have at least no means of distinguishing
between the different parts they played. Gradually, however, a
differentiation took place, and three main types of courts came into
being, the Customary Court, the Court Baron and the Court Leet;
but we need not here concern ourselves with the technical distinctions
involved by this differentiation of courts.
All these details have a simple and reasonable meaning when we
consider them from the point of view of an all-round arrangement
of each locality for the settlement of all its affairs, administrative, fiscal,
jurisdictional, as well as economic and civil. This confusing variety has
to be explained by the fact that, notwithstanding all striving to make
the manor complete and self-sufficient in this petty local sphere, it
could not cut itself off from the general fabric of the kingdom. Through
the channels which connected it with the central authorities came
disturbing elements ; the privileges of free tenants, the control over
the use of franchises, the interference of royal courts and royal officers.
All these factors rendered manorial arrangements more complex and
less compact than they might otherwise have been; but, of course,
these
very
elements insured its further development towards more perfect
forms of organisation and prevented it from degenerating into despotism
or into caste.
The manor is peculiarly an English institution, although it may serve
to illustrate Western European society in general. Feudalism, natural
husbandry, the sway of the military class, the crystallisation of powers
and rights in local centres, are phenomena which took place all over
Western Europe and which led in France, in Germany, in Italy and
Spain to similar though not identical results. It is interesting to
watch how in these bygone times and far-off customs some of the
historical traits which even now divide England from its neighbours
are forming themselves at the very time when the close relationship
between the European countries is clearly visible. The disruption of
the nation into local organisms is more complete in France and in
Germany than in England, which, through the fact of the Norman
Conquest and the early rise of Norman royalty and Norman aristocracy,
was welded into a national whole at a period when its southern neighbours
were nearly oblivious of national union. Even so, the English manor
was more systematically arranged and more powerfully united than the
French Seigneurie or the German Grundherrschaft. The French baron
ruled in an arbitrary manner over his serfs and was almost powerless in
regard to his free vassaux, while the German Grundherr had a most
confusing complex of social groups to deal with, a complex more akin to
the classes of England which existed on the day when King Edward the
Confessor was “alive and dead” than to the England of Henry II and
CH. XVIII.
31-2


## p. 484 (#530) ############################################

484
Precedence of England
Edward I. The social distinction between the military class and the rural
labouring class, the natural husbandry, which dispensed to a great ex-
tent with commercial intercourse and money dealings, produced in all
western countries the subjection of villeins and the super-imposition of a
lord's demesne on the holdings of the working-class. But instead of
assuming the form of a union between the lord's demesne and a firmly
organised village community, the central economy of the lord had to deal
in France with loose clusters of separate settlements, while in Germany
the communal element combined with the domanial in all sorts of chance
ways, which, though very advantageous in some cases, did not develop
without difficulty into a firmly established and generally recognised body
of rural custom.
In England things were different. There can be hardly any doubt
that through the strong constitution, rooted in custom, of its manor
England, in its social development, got quite as much start of its neigh-
bours, as it obtained precedence over them politically through the early
growth of parliamentary institutions.
a


## p. 485 (#531) ############################################

485
CHAPTER XIX.
LEARNING AND LITERATURE TILL THE DEATH OF BEDE.
BOETHIUS, according to the famous phrase, is the last of the Romans.
Between him and the writers who mark the highest point of the Caro-
lingian Renaissance—one may take Einhard as a sample—three centuries
intervene. It is the first part of my task to trace the paths along which
the torch of learning was carried from the one height to the other.
With what equipment was the journey begun? A reader of the
Saturnalia of Macrobius cannot fail to be impressed with the abundance
and variety of the ancient literature which the literary man at the
beginning of the fifth century had at his disposal-sacral, anti-
quarian, critical--reaching back to the days of Ennius. It may fairly be
said that down to the time of Alaric's invasion the Latin literature was
intact; and that long after that date, at many educational centres in
Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, large stores of works now lost to us were pre-
served and used. Still, the existence of a not inconsiderable part of the
literature was bound up with that of Rome : particularly that part
which was specifically pagan. Of treatises like those of Veranius on the
Pontifices or Trebatius Testa De religionibus there were probably few if
any copies outside the public libraries of the city: no Christian would
be at the pains of transcribing them; a single conflagration put an end
to them for good and all. What perished during the fifth century we
shall never know; but we may be sure that between the days of Macrobius
and Boethius there must have been extensive losses,
The works of Boethius are not of a kind to throw much light upon
the preservation of Latin literature in his time. Some are versions or
adaptations of Greek sources which for the most part still exist. The
greatest, the De consolatione Philosophiae-in external form resembling
the work of an African writer of the previous century, Martianus
Capella-witnesses, indeed, to the nobility of the man who wrote it:
but the conditions under which it was produced (and for that matter,
its whole scope) forbid us to expect from it that wealth of quotation and
reference which might have characterised it, had it emanated from the
home of Boethius and not from his prison'.
Among the contemporaries of Boethius there is one, Cassiodorus, of
whose literary resources we can form a more precise estimate. It is
1 This statement is not meant to exclude the possibility of the indebtedness of
Boethius to earlier writers in the general lines or even in the subject-matter of his work.
CB. XIX.


## p. 486 (#532) ############################################

486
Cassiodorus
ours.
Cassiodorus, moreover, whom we must regard as the greatest individual
contributor to the preservation of learning in the West. His long life
(c. 490-583) was enormously effective, both for his own time and for
What made it so effective was his conviction that there ought
to be an educated clergy. We have seen (1. 570) that in 535-6, under
Pope Agapetus, he attempted to found a Christian academy in Rome,
avowedly in imitation of those which had existed at Alexandria and
Antioch and that which was still active at Nisibis. Failing in this
project, he turned to another, which, more modest in its conception, was
in reality destined to attain a success far wider, probably, than would
have attended the other. The library, which he founded for his monks
at Squillace (Vivarium, the Calabrian monastery to which he retired
about 540), and the handbooks which he compiled for them to serve as
a key thereto (De Institutione Divinarum Litterarum, and De Artibus et
Disciplinis Liberalium Litterarum), served to organise the literary side of
monastic life. But for the existence of such a sanction for literary
culture, it is quite possible that, with the exception of Virgil, no Latin
classic would have reached us in a complete form. Not that Cassiodorus
specially commends to his monks the study of belles lettres or of
antiquity for their own sake; such matters are (and this is true
of the whole period after Boethius) ancillary to the study of the
Bible.
The Bible, therefore, occupies the forefront. There must be, in the
first place, examination and comparison of the older versions, both
Greek and Latin; and the purest possible text of the standard version,
that of Jerome, must be secured. Of the textual labours of Cassiodorus
the greatest remaining monument is the Codex Amiatinus ; the story of
its journey from England to Italy in the seventh century is a striking
reminder of the wide range of influence which he obtained'. Further
research is needed to place us in a position to gauge with certainty the
extent to which his labours can be traced in the text of the Vulgate
Gospels. Upon the fixing of the text of the sacred books follows the
ascertaining of their meaning. A valuable companion to the books was
provided by Cassiodorus in the shape of a Latin version of the Antiquities
of Josephus, made at his instigation but not by his own hand. His
personal contribution consisted of a voluminous commentary on the
* In this connexion the theory put forth in 1911 by the late Dr Rudolf Beer is
of surpassing interest. On the evidence of the lists of authors named or used by
Cassiodorus, coupled with the old catalogues and extant remains of the Library of
Bobbio (founded in 612 by St Columban), he makes it appear probable that there
was a great transference of books from Vivarium to Bobbio. Thus the famous
palimpsests of which Mai revealed the contents to an astonished world in the early
years of the nineteenth century are nothing less than the remnants of the treasure
accumulated by Cassiodorus himself.
? It is worth mention that quite recently a leaf of a second Cassiodorian Bible has
been recovered in the north of England, and other leaves are in private possession.


## p. 487 (#533) ############################################

St Gregory the Great
487
Psalms, and a more valuable, though incomplete, version of Clement of
Alexandria's notes on the Catholic Epistles
. His library contained all
the best Latin expositors of the fourth and fifth centuries.
His anxiety for the faithful presentation of the Biblical text finds
expression in the stress he lays upon “orthography," a term which
includes a great deal of what we should call grammar: he recommends
the use of a number of older writers on the subject, and his own latest
work was devoted to it. Incidentally he speaks of the utility of certain
geographical books in connexion with sacred study, and of the Church
histories of the fifth-century Greek writers, Socrates, Sozomen, and
Theodoret, which he had induced one Epiphanius to render into Latin ;
we know this translation as the Historia Tripartita.
The end of the first division of the Institutions deals with the
practically useful arts of agriculture (gardening) and medicine. The
second part is a summary introduction to the seven Liberal Arts—they
are the same for Cassiodorus as for Martianus Capella-Grammar,
Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, Astronomy. The
bibliography is here much scantier than in the first book, but even so, some
works are named and used which we no longer have. We do not, as was
said above, find our author definitely prescribing for his monks the study
of the older poets and historians. What we do find is a recognition of
the usefulness of secular as well as of sacred learning, an authorisation
of the enlargement of the field, an encouragement to make use of all
that could be drawn from sources that might subsequently be opened, as
well as from those that were at hand.
Thus Cassiodorus did his best to provide tools and to indicate the
method of using them. An older contemporary had prepared the
workmen and the field. There is no need to recapitulate here what has
already been said (1. 537 sqq. ) of St Benedict and his Rule. Only it is
clear that, but for his work, that of Cassiodorus would not have outlasted
more than a few generations. The Rule was, it seems likely, in force at
Vivarium itself; but whether this was so or not, and whether or not
St Benedict would have accorded a welcome to the scheme of study
outlined by Cassiodorus, the fact remains that the ideas of the latter were
taken up by the Order and were propagated with more or less activity
wherever the Order settled.
There was a third agent in this same century who was a factor of
immense importance (though, even more clearly than Benedict, an
involuntary factor) in the preservation of ancient learning. This was
St Gregory the Great (+604). Gregory was not a “learned” writer.
He knew (he says) no Greek: it is doubtful if his writings have been the
means of handing down a single reference to an ancient author,-even to
a Christian author of the earliest period. His contempt for secular
studies is more than once expressed; he is even credited (by John of
Salisbury, in the twelfth century) with having burned the library of the
CH. XIX.


## p. 488 (#534) ############################################

488
Africa
Palatine Apollo. Yet, but for Gregory and his mission of Augustine,
there would have been no Aldhelm, no Benedict Biscop, no Bede, no
Alcuin, no opening for the enormously important influence of Theodore
of Tarsus and of Hadrian the Abbot.
But, this great service apart, his voluminous works were, if not in
themselves of great literary value, the progenitors of literature which is
of the highest interest. Alfred translated his Pastoral Care ; Aelfric
drew copiously from his Homilies on the gospels. His Moralia on Job
gave occupation to calligraphers and excerptors in Spain and Ireland.
Above all, his four books of Dialogues formed a model for subsequent
writers of the lives of saints as well as a sanction for that mass of miracle
and vision literature in which so much of the imaginations and hopes of
the medieval peoples is preserved for us.
Thus in the persons of Cassiodorus, Benedict, and Gregory, Italy,
which had provided the world with a great literature, furnished also the
means by which that literature was to be preserved. It was her last
contribution to the cause of learning for many years.
We must turn to the other great fields of western learning, and first
to Africa and Spain.
The existence of a flourishing Latin literature in Africa is generally
realised : the names of Tertullian, Apuleius, Cyprian, Augustine,
Martianus Capella stand out as representative in earlier centuries ;
something too has been said (1. 322) of the less-known writers of the
period of the Vandal kingdom, of Dracontius, almost the last of
Christian poets to treat of mythological subjects, and of those (Luxorius
and others) whose fugitive pieces have been preserved in the Latin
anthology of the Codex Salmasianus. We come now to their successors.
From Verecundus, Bishop of Junca (+552), we have an exposition of
certain Old Testament canticles which are commonly attached to the
Psalter and used in the Church services. In this work Verecundus refers
his reader to the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, to Solinus, and to
a form of the famous Physiologus, that manual of allegorised natural
history which in later times afforded a multitude of subjects to
illuminators and sculptors. From this region and period also comes in
all probability a poem on the Resurrection of the Dead and the Last
Judgment, dedicated to Flavius Felix (an official to whom some poems
in the Salmasian Anthology are addressed). It has been handed down
under the names of Tertullian and of Cyprian. Both attributions are
out of the question. The author, whoever he was, had written other
poems, notably one on the four seasons of the year, to which he alludes.
In the resurrection-poem a singular point of interest is that it shews
traces of obligation to the ancient Apocalypse of Peter.
The two epics of Fl. Cresconius Corippus, the Johannis, produced
about 550, and the De laudibus Justini (minoris), of sixteen years later,
are from the purely literary point of view the most remarkable


## p. 489 (#535) ############################################

Spain
489
achievements of African culture in the sixth century. The first tells the
story of the successful campaign of Johannes the magister militum against
the Moors in 546-8. The other, essentially a court-poem, describes the
accession of Justin and the rejoicings and festivities which accompanied
it. In both, but especially in the Johannis, Corippus has modelled
himself upon the antique with extraordinary fidelity, and with
undeniable success.
One other production, of small extent but appreciable importance,
needs to be noticed before we pass from Africa to Spain. This is a short
continuation (extending to but twelve sections) of the catalogue of
distinguished Church writers, which, begun by Jerome, perhaps on a model
furnished by Suetonius, was continued by Gennadius of Marseilles. An
African writer of about 550—it is thought, Pontianus, a bishop-fur-
nished this small supplement. In the next century we shall find Isidore
of Seville and his friend Braulio carrying on the work, and, a generation
later, Hildefonsus of Toledo, whose outlook is almost confined to his own
country. The succession is then broken off, and it is not until the twelfth
century that similar compilations again come into fashion.
The extinction of the Vandal kingdom in Africa meant the trans-
ference of much literary activity to Spain. There must have been many
like the monk Donatus, of whom Hildefonsus tells us that, seeing the
imminence of the barbarian invasion, he took ship for Spain with about
seventy monks and a large collection of books. Certain it is that
towards the end of the sixth century Africa becomes silent, and Spain
begins to speak.
Perhaps the first writer in our period whose sphere of influence was
Spanish—though it was so by adoption only—is Martin, called of Dumio
and of Bracara (Braga), the latter being the see of which he died
archbishop in 580. Like the great Martin of Tours he was a Pannonian
by birth : but after a pilgrimage to Palestine he chose Galicia and the
Arian kingdom of the Suevi as a field for missionary work. He was
successful in bringing the Suevi to orthodoxy; and he seems to have been
a man of both strong and attractive personality. There is a distinction
about his not very voluminous works. Two of them at least are excerpts
from writings of Seneca, the De officiis and De ira. The first treats of
the four Cardinal Virtues, and is addressed to King Miro under the title
of Formula honestae vitae. It is by far the most widely diffused of
Martin's books. The other (which incidentally helps to fill a lacuna
in the text of Seneca) is of comparatively rare occurrence. Besides these
we have ethical tracts of more definitely Christian complexion, also
dedicated to Miro, principally concerned with pride and humility. A
collection of sayings of the hermits, and another of conciliar canons,
testify to Martin's knowledge of Greek. A brief discourse on the Paschal
question states a complicated problem in a strikingly clear form. But
of all that we have from him, Martin's instruction for simple people
a
CH, XIX.


## p. 490 (#536) ############################################

490
Martin of Bracara
(De correctione rusticorum), addressed to Polemius, Bishop of Asturica, has
aroused the greatest interest in modern times. It is indeed a very
notable example of the way in which the negative and positive sides of
Christian teaching were put before the neophytes of the country districts.
Martin begins by setting forth the view of his time as to the origin of the
heathen gods. They are devils who fell with Lucifer : therefore all
observances which entail any show of reverence towards them are so
many denials of the profession of faith made at baptism. He objects-
vainly, as time has shewn—to the ordinary names of the days of the
week, and to the celebration of the first of January as New Year's day;
and further, to the observing of “ days of moths and mice" (the object
of which was to protect clothes and storerooms from their ravages), to
the naming of Minerva over the web on the loom, the lighting of tapers
by rocks and springs, and many like usages, which we meet with later
in canons of councils and indiculi superstitionum : while over and over
again the question is asked, “Is this consistent with your promise at the
font to renounce the devil and all his works? ” Of the positive side of
the teaching more need not be said than that it is admirably adapted to
its purpose. It is interesting to find that nearly the whole of the matter
recurs in a Homily of Caesarius of Arles (542), as well as in a tract of
the Irish missionary Pirminius of Reichenau (+758), called Scarapsus, and
in the sermon of St Eligius of Noyon which his biographer St Audoen
has either preserved or excogitated. This suggests a question whether
Caesarius or Martin is the original source, or whether both may not be
utilising a form agreed upon perhaps by a synodical authority.
Let it be recorded, lastly, that Martin of Bracara held in reverence
his namesake and fellow-countryman, the saint of Tours, and composed
some interesting verses which were inscribed over the south door of the
great basilica there.
Before the death of Martin, the life of Isidore of Seville (c. 570–636)
had begun. He was beyond question the leading transmitter of knowledge
in his century. In the twenty books of his Etymologiae he brought
together a collection of facts (and fictions) which served as the encyclo-
paedia of the whole medieval period.