The Eighteen Christian Centuries

EIGHTH CENTURY.

Authors.

Alcuin, (735-804,) Bede, (674-735,) Egbert, Clemens, Dungal, Acca, John Damascanus.

THE EIGHTH CENTURY.

This is indeed a great century, which has Pepin of Heristhal at its commencement and Charlemagne at its end. In this period we shall see the course of the dissolution of manners and government arrested throughout the greater part of Europe, and a new form given to its ruling powers. We must remember that up to this time the progress of what we now call civilization was very slow; or we may perhaps almost say that the extent of civilized territory was smaller than it had been at the final breaking up of the Roman Empire four hundred years before. England had lost the elevating influences which the residence of Roman generals and the presence of disciplined forces had spread from the seats of their government. Every occupied position had been a centre of life and learning; and we see still, from the discoveries which the antiquaries of the present day are continually making, that the dwellings of the Prætors and military commanders were constructed in a style of luxury and refinement which argues a high state of culture and art. All round the circumference of the Romanized portion of Britain these head-quarters of order and improvement were fixed; outside of it lay the obscure and tumultuous populations of Wales and Scotland; and if we trace the situations of the towns with terminations derived from castra, (a camp,) we shall see, by stretching a line from Winchester in the south to Ilchester, thence up to Gloucester, Worcester, Wroxeter, and Chester, how carefully the Western Gael were prevented from ravaging the peaceful and orderly inhabitants; and, as the same precautions were taken to the North against the Picts and Scots, we shall easily be able to estimate the effect of those numerous schools of life and manners on the country-districts in which they were placed. All these establishments had been removed. Barbarism had reasserted her ancient reign; and at the century we have now reached, the institution which alone could compete in its elevating effect with the old imperial subordination, the Christian Church, had not yet established its authority except for the benefit of ambitious bishops; and the same anarchy reigned in the ecclesiastical body as in the civil orders. The eight or nine kingdoms spread over the land were sufficiently powerful in their separate nationalities to prevent any unity of feeling among the subjects of the different crowns. A prelate of the court of Deiria had no point of union with a prelate protected by the kings of Wessex. And it was this very incapacity of combination at home, from the multiplicity of kings, which led to the astonishing spectacle in this century of the efforts of the Anglo-Saxon clergy in behalf of the Bishop of Rome in distant countries. In this great struggle to extend the power of the Popes, the regular orders particularly distinguished themselves. The fact of submitting to convent-rules, of giving up the stormy pleasures of independence for the safe placidity of unreasoning obedience, is a proof of the desire in many human minds of having something to which they can look up, something to obey, in obeying which their self-respect may be preserved, even in the act of offering up their self-will—a desire which, in civil actions and the atmosphere of a court, leads to slavery and every vice, but in a monastery conducts to the noblest sacrifices, and fills the pages of history with saints and martyrs. The Anglo-Saxon, looking out of his convent, saw nothing round him which could give him hope or comfort. Laws were unsettled, the various little principalities were either hostile or unconnected, there was no great combining authority from which orders could be issued with the certainty of being obeyed; and even the clergy, thinly scattered, and dependent on the capricious favour or exposed to the ignorant animosity of their respective sovereigns, were torn into factions, and practically without a chief. But theoretically there was the noblest chiefship that ever was dreamed of by ambition. The lowly heritage of Peter had expanded into the universal government of the Church. In France this claim had not yet been urged; in the East it had been contemptuously rejected; in Italy the Lombard kings were hostile; in Spain the Visigoths were heretic, and at war among themselves; in Germany the gospel had not yet been heard; in Ireland the Church was a rival bitterly defensive of its independence; but in England, among the earnest, thoughtful Anglo-Saxons, the majestic idea of a great family of all the Christian Churches, wherever placed, presided over by the Vicar of Christ and receiving laws from his hallowed lips, had impressed itself beyond the possibility of being effaced. Rome was to them the residence of God’s vicegerent upon earth; obedience to him was worship, and resistance to his slightest wish presumption and impiety. So at the beginning of this century holy men left their monasteries in Essex, and Warwickshire, and Devon, and knelt at the footstool of the Pope, and swore fealty and submission to the Holy See.

It has often been observed that the Papacy differs from other powers in the continued vitality of its members long after the life has left it at the heart. Rome was weak at the centre, but strong at the extremity of its domain. The Emperor of Constantinople looked on the Pope as his representative in Church-affairs, ratified his election, and exacted tribute on his appointment. The Exarch of Ravenna, representing as he did the civil majesty of the successor of the Cæsars, looked down on him as his subordinate. There was also a duke in Rome whose office it was to superintend the proceedings of the bishop, and another officer resident in the Grecian court to whom the bishop was responsible for the management of his delegated powers. But outside of all this depression and subordination, among tribes of half-barbaric blood, among dreamy enthusiasts contemplating what seemed to them the simple and natural scheme of an earthly judge infallible in wisdom and divinely inspired; among bewildered and trampled ecclesiastics, looking forth into the night, and seeing, far above all the storms and darkness that surrounded them in their own distracted land, a star by which they might steer their course, undimmed and unalterable—the Pope of Rome was the highest and holiest of created men. No thought is worth any thing that continues in barren speculation. Honour, then, to the brave monks of England who went forth the missionaries of the Papal kings! Better the struggles and dangers of a plunge among the untamed savages of Friesland, and the blood-stained forests of the farthest Germany, in fulfilment of the office to which they felt themselves called, than the lazy, slumbering way of life which had already begun to be considered the fulfilment of conventual vows. Soldiers of the Cross were they, though fighting for the advancement of an ambitious commander more than the success of the larger cause; and we may well exult in the virtues which their undoubting faith in the supremacy of the pontiff called forth, since it contrasts so nobly with the apathy and indifference to all high and self-denying co-operation which characterized the rest of the world. We shall see the monk Winifried penetrate, as the Pope’s minister, into the darkness beyond the Rhine, and emerge, with crozier and mitre, as Boniface the Archbishop of Mayence, and converter to the Christian faith of great and populous nations which were long the most earnest supporters of the rights and pre-eminence of Rome. This is one strong characteristic of this century, the increased vigour of the Papacy by the efforts of the Anglo-Saxons on its behalf; and now we are going to another still stronger characteristic, the further increase of its influence by the part it played in the change of dynasty in France.

A strange fortune, which in the old Greek mythologies would have been looked on as a fate, overshadowing the blood-stained house of Clovis, had befallen his descendants through all their generations for more than a hundred years. Feeble in mind, and even degenerated in body, the kings of that royal line had been a sight of grief and humiliation to their nominal subjects. Married at fifteen, they had all sunk into premature old age, or died before they were thirty. Too listless for work, and too ignorant for council, they had accepted the restricted sphere within which their duties were confined, and showed themselves, on solemn occasions, at the festivals of the Church, and other great anniversaries, bearing, like their ancestors, the long flowing locks which were the natural sign of their crowned supremacy, seated in a wagon drawn by oxen, and driven by a wagoner with a goad—a primitive relic of vanished times, and as much out of place in Paris in the eighth century as the state carriage of the Queen or the Lord-Mayor’s coach of the present day among ourselves Strange thoughts must have passed through the minds of the spectators as they saw the successors of the rough leader of the Franks degraded to this condition; but the change had been gradual; the public sentiment had become reconciled to the apparent uselessness of the highest offices of the State; for under another title, and with much inferior rank, there was a man who held the reins of government with a hand of iron, and whose power was perhaps strengthened by the fiction which called him the servant and minister of the fainéant or do-nothing king. A succession of men arose in the family of the mayors of the palace, as remarkable for policy and talent as the representatives of the royal line were for the want of these qualities. The origin of their office was conveniently forgotten, or converted by the flattery of their dependants into an equality with the monarchs. Chosen, they said, by the same elective body which nominated the king, they were as much entitled to the command of the army and the administration of the law as their nominal masters to the possession of the palace and royal name. And when for a long period this claim was allowed, who was there to stand up in opposition, either legal or forcible, to a man who appointed all the judges and commanded all the troops? The office at last became hereditary. The successive mayors left their dignity to their sons by will; and time might have been slow in bringing power and title into harmony with each by giving the name of king to the man who already exercised all the kingly power and fulfilled all the kingly duties, if Charles Martel, the mayor, had not, in 732, established such claims to the gratitude of Europe by his defeat of the Saracens, who were about to overrun the whole of Christendom, that it was impossible to refuse either to himself or his successor the highest dignity which Europe had to bestow. When other rulers and princes were willing to acknowledge his superiority, not only in power, but in rank and dignity, it was necessary that their submission should be offered, not to a mere Major-domo, or chief domestic of a court, but to a free sovereign and anointed king. The two most amazing fictions, therefore, which ever flourished on the contemptuous forbearance of mankind, were both about to expire beneath the breath of reality at this time—the kingship of the descendants of Clovis, and the pretensions of the successors of Constantine. The Saracens appeared upon the scene, and those gibbering and unsubstantial ghosts, as if they scented the morning air, immediately disappeared. The Emperors of the East, by a self-deluding process, which preserved their dignity and flattered their pride, professed still to consider themselves the lords of the Roman Empire, and took particular pains to acknowledge the kings and potentates, who established themselves in the various portions of it, as their representatives and lieutenants. They lost no time in sending the title of Patrician and the ensigns of royal rank to the successful founders of a new dynasty, and had gained their object if they received the new ruler’s thanks in return. At Rome, as we have said, they protected the bishop, and gave him the investiture of his office. They retained also the territories called the Exarchate of Ravenna, but with no power of vindicating their authority if it was disputed, or of exacting revenue, except what the gratitude of the bishop or the Exarch might induce them to present to their patron on their nomination or instalment. A long-haired, sad-countenanced, decrepit young man in a wagon drawn by oxen, and a vain voluptuary, wrapped in Oriental splendour, without influence or wealth, were the representatives at this time of the irresistible power of the Frankish warriors, and the glories of Julius and Augustus. But the present had its representatives as well as the past. Charles Martel had still the Frankish sword at his command; the Roman Pontiff had thousands ready to believe and support his claims to be the spiritual ruler of the world. Something was required to unite them in one vast effort at unity and independence, and this opportunity was afforded them by the common danger to which the Saracenic invasion exposed equally the civil and ecclesiastical power. Africa, we have seen, was fringed along the whole of the Mediterranean border with the followers of the Prophet. In one generation the blood of the Arabian and Mauritanian deserts became so blended, that no distinction whatever existed between the men of Mecca and Medina and the native tribes. Where Carthaginian and Roman civilization had never penetrated, the faith of Mohammed was accepted as an indigenous growth. Fanaticism and ambition sailed across the Channel; and early in this century the hot breath of Mohammedanism had dried up the promise of Spain; countless warriors crossed to Gibraltar; their losses were supplied by the inexhaustible populations from the interior, (the ancestors of the Abd-el Kaders and Ben Muzas of modern times,) and, elate with hopes of universal conquest, the crowded tents of the Moslem army were seen on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, and presently all the plains of Languedoc, and the central fields of France as far up as the Loire, were inundated by horse and man. Incredible accounts are given of the number and activity of the desert steeds bestrode by these turbaned apostles. A march of a hundred miles—a village set on fire, and all the males extirpated—strange-looking visages, and wild arrays of galloping battalions seen by terrified watchers from the walls of Paris itself; then, in the twinkling of an eye, nothing visible but the distant dust raised up in their almost unperceived retreat,—these were the peculiarities of this new and unheard-of warfare. And while these dashes were made from the centre of the invasion, alarming the inhabitants at the extremities of the kingdom, the host steadily moved on, secured the ground behind it before any fresh advance, and united in this way the steadiness of European settlement with the wild fury of the original mode of attack. Already the provinces abutting on the Pyrenees had owned their power. Gascony up to the Garonne, and the Narbonnais nearly to the Rhine, had submitted to the conquerors; but when the dispossessed proprietors of Novempopulania and Septimania, as those districts were then called, and the powerful Duke of Aquitaine, also fled before the advancing armies; when all the churches were filled with prayer, and all the towns were in momentary expectation of seeing the irresistible horsemen before their walls, patriotism and religion combined to call upon all the Franks and all the Christians to expel the infidel invader. So Charles, the son of Pepin, whose exploits against the Frisons and other barbaric peoples in the North had already acquired for him the complimentary name of Martel, or the Hammer, put himself at the head of the military forces of the land, and encountered the Saracenic myriads on the great plain round Tours. The East and West were brought front to front—Christianity and Mohammedanism stood face to face for the first time; and it is startling to consider for a moment what the result of an Asiatic victory might have been. If ever there was a case in which the intervention of Divine Providence may be claimed without presumption on the conquering side, it must be here, where the truths of revelation and the progress of society were dependent on the issue. The two faiths, according to all human calculation, had rested their supremacy on their respective champions. If Charles and his Franks and Germans were defeated, there was nothing to resist the march of the perpetually-increasing numbers of the Saracens till they had planted their standards on the pinnacles of Rome. The first glow of Christian belief had been exchanged, we have seen, for ambitious disputes, or died off in many of the practices of superstition. The very man in whom the Christian hope was placed was suspected of leaning to the Wodenism of his Northern ancestors, and was scarcely bought over to the defence of the Church’s faith by a permission to pillage the Church’s wealth. Mohammedanism, on the other hand, was fresh and young. Its promises were clear and tempting—its course triumphant, and its doctrines satisfactory equally to the pride and the indolence of the human heart. But in the former, though unperceived by the warriors at Tours and the prelates at Rome, lay the germ of countless blessings—elevating the mind by the discovery of its strength at the same moment in which it is abased by the feeling of its weakness, and gifted above all with the power of expansion and universality; themselves proofs of its divine original, to which no false religion can lay the slightest claim. Cultivate the Christian mind to the highest—fill it with all knowledge—place round it the miracles of science and art—station it in the snows of Iceland or the heats of India—Christianity, like the all-girding horizon of the sky, widens its circle so as to include the loftiest, and contain within its embrace the utmost diversities of human life and speculation. But with the Mohammedan, as with other impostures, the range is limited. When intellect expands, it bursts the cerement in which it has been involved; and with Buddhism, and Mithrism, and Hindooism, it will be as it was with Druidism, and the more elegant heathendom of Greece and Rome: there will be no safety for them but in the ignorance and barbarism of their disciples. On the result of that great day at Tours in the year 732, therefore, depended the intellectual improvement and civil freedom of the human race. Few particulars are preserved of this momentous battle; but the result showed that the light cavalry, in which the Saracens excelled, were no match for the firm line of the Franks. When confusion once began among the swarthy cavaliers of Abderachman, there was no restoration possible. In wild confusion the mêlée was continued; and all that can be said is, that the slaughter of upwards of three hundred thousand of these impulsive pilgrims of the desert so weakened the Saracenic power in Europe, that in no long time their hosts were withdrawn from the soil of Gaul, and guarded with difficulty the conquest they had made behind the barrier of the Pyrenees. Could the gratitude of Church or State be too generous to the man who preserved both from the sword of the destroyer? If Charles pillaged a monastery or seized the revenues of a bishopric, nobody found any fault. It was almost just that he should have the wealth of the cathedral from which he had driven away the mufti and muezzin. But monasteries and bishops were still powerful, and did not look on the proceedings of Charles the Hammer with the equanimity of the unconcerned spectators. They perhaps thought the battle of Tours had only given them a choice of spoilers, instead of protection from spoliation. In a short time, however, the policy of the sagacious leader led him to see the necessity of gaining over the only united body in the State. He became a benefactor of the Church, and a staunch ally of the Roman bishop. Both had an object to obtain. What the phantom king was to Charles, the phantom emperor was to the Pope. If there was unison between the two dependants, it would be easy to get rid of the two superiors. Presents and compliments were interchanged, and moral support trafficked for material aid. Wherever the one sent missionaries with the Cross, the other sent warriors to their support. The Pontiff bestowed on the Mayor the keys of the sepulchre of St. Peter, and the title of Consul and Patrician, and begged him to come to his assistance against Luitprand, the Lombard king. But this was far too great an exploit to be expected by a simple Bishop, and performed by a simple Mayor of the Palace. So the next great thing we meet with in this century is the investiture of the Mayor with the title of king, and of the Bishop with the sovereignty of Rome and Ravenna. This happened in 752. Pepin the Short, as he was unflatteringly called by his subjects, succeeded Charles in the government of the Franks. The king was Childeric the Third, who lived in complete seclusion and cherished his long hair as the only evidence of monarchy left to the sons of Clovis. Wars in various regions established the reputation of Pepin as the worthy successor of Charles; and by a refinement of policy, the crown, the consummation of all his hopes, was reached in a manner which deprived it of the appearance of injustice, for it was given to him by the hands of saints and popes, and ratified by the council of the nation. He had already asked Pope Zachariah, “who had the best right to the name of king?—he who had merely the title, or he who had the power?” And in answer to this, which was rather a puzzling question, our countryman Winifried, in his new character of Boniface and archbishop, placed upon his head the golden round, and Might and Right were restored to their original combination. But St. Boniface was not enough. In two years the Pope himself clambered over the Alps and anointed the new monarch with holy oil; and by the same act stripped the long hair from the head of the Merovingian puppet, and condemned him and his descendants to the privacy of a cloister.

Now then that Pepin is king, let Luitprand, or any other potentate, beware how he does injury to the Pope of Rome. Twice the Frank armies are moved into Italy in defence of the Holy See; and at last the Exarchate is torn from the hands of its Lombard oppressor, and handed over in sovereignty to the Spiritual Power. Rome itself is declared at the same time the property of the Bishop, and free forever from the suzerainty of the Emperors of the East. No wonder the gratitude of the Popes has made them call the kings of France the eldest sons of the Church. Their donations raised the bishopric to the rank of a royal state; yet it has been remarked that the generosity of the French monarchs has always been limited to the gift of other people’s lands. They were extremely liberal in bestowing large tracts of country belonging to the Lombard kings or the Byzantine Cæsars; but they kept a very watchful eye on the possessions of pope and bishop within their own domain. They reserved to themselves the usufruct of vacant benefices, and the presentations to church and abbey. At almost all periods, indeed, of their history, they have seemed to retain a very clear remembrance of the position which they held towards the Papacy from the beginning, and, while encouraging its arrogance against other principalities and powers, have held a very contemptuous language towards it themselves.

This, then, is the great characteristic of the present century, the restoration of the monarchical principle in the State, and its establishment in the Church. During all these wretched centuries, from the fall of the Roman Empire, the progress has been towards diffusion and separation. Kings rose up here and there, but their kingships were local, and, moreover, so recent, that they were little more than the first officer or representative of the warriors whose leaders they had been. A longing for some higher and remoter influence than this had taken possession of the chiefs of all the early invasions, and we have seen them (even while engaged in wresting whole districts from the sway of the old Roman Empire) accepting with gratitude the ensigns of Roman authority. We have seen Gothic kings glorying in the name of Senator, and Hunnish savages pacified and contented by the title of Prætor or Consul. The world had been accustomed to the oneness of Consular no less than Imperial Rome for more than a thousand years; for, however the parties might be divided at home, the great name of the Eternal City was the sole sound heard in foreign lands. The magic letters, the initials of the Senate and People, had been the ornament of their banners from the earliest times, and a division of power was an idea to which the minds of mankind found it difficult to become accustomed. It was better, therefore, to have only a fragment of this immemorial unity than the freshness of a new authority, however extensive or unquestionable. Vague traditions must have come down—magnified by distance and softened by regret—of the great days before the purple was torn in two by the transference of the seat of power to Constantinople. There were nearly five hundred years lying between the periods; and all the poetic spirits of the new populations had cast longing, lingering looks behind at the image of earthly supremacy presented to them by the existence of an acknowledged master of the world. A pedantic sophist, speaking Greek—the language of slaves and scholars—wearing the loftiest titles, and yet hemmed in within the narrow limits of a single district, assumed to be the representative of the universal “Lord of human kind,” and called himself Emperor of the East and West. The common sense of Goth and Saxon, of Frank and Lombard, rebelled against this claim, when they saw it urged by a person unable to support it by fleets and armies. When, in addition to this want of power, they perceived in this century a want of orthodox belief, or even what they considered an impious profanity, in the successor of Augustus and Constantine, they were still more disinclined to grant even a titular supremacy to the Byzantine ruler. Leo, at that time wearing the purple, and zealous for the purity of the faith, issued an order for the destruction of the marble representations of saints and martyrs which had been used in worship; and within the limits of his personal authority his mandate was obeyed. But when it reached the West, a furious opposition was made to his command. The Pope stood forward as champion of the religious veneration of “storied urn and animated bust.” The emperor was branded with the name of Iconoclast, or the Image-breaker, and the eloquence of all the monks in Europe was let loose upon the sacrilegious Cæsar. Interest, it is to be feared, added fresh energy to their conscientious denunciations, for the monks had attracted to themselves a complete monopoly of the manufacture of these aids to devotion—and obedience to Leo’s order would have impoverished the monasteries all over the land. A Western emperor, it was at once perceived, would not have been so blind to the uses of those holy sculptures, and soon an intense desire was manifested throughout the Western nations for an emperor of their own. Already they were in possession of a spiritual chief, who claimed the inheritance of the Prince of the Apostles, and looked down on the Patriarchs of Constantinople as bishops subordinate to his throne. Why should not they also have a temporal ruler who should renew the old glories of the vanished Empire, and exercise supremacy over all the governors of the earth? Why, indeed, should not the first of those authorities exert his more than human powers in the production of the other? He had converted a Mayor of the Palace into a King of the Franks. Could he not go a step further, and convert a King of the Franks into an Emperor of the West? With this hope, not yet perhaps expressed, but alive in the minds of Pepin and the prelates of France, no attempt was made to check the Roman pontiffs in the extravagance of their pretensions. Lords of wide domains, rich already in the possession of large tracts of country and wealthy establishments in other lands, they were raised above all competition in rank and influence with any other ecclesiastic; and relying on spiritual privileges, and their exemption from active enmity, they were more powerful than many of the greatest princes of the time. Everywhere the mystic dignity of their office was dwelt upon by their supporters. For a long time, as we have seen, their omnipotence was acknowledged by the two classes who saw in the use of that spiritual dominion a counterpoise to the worldly sceptres by which they were crushed. But now the worldly sceptres came to the support of the spiritual dominion. Its limit was enlarged, and made to include the regulation of all human affairs. |A.D. 768.|It was its office to subdue kings and bind nobles in links of iron; and when the son of Pepin, Charles, justly called the Great, though travestied by French vanity into the name of Charlemagne, sat on the throne of the Franks, and carried his arms and influence into the remotest States, it was felt that the hour and the man were come; and the Western Empire was formally renewed.

The curious thing is, that this longing for a restoration of the Roman Empire, and dwelling on its usefulness and grandeur, were dominant, and productive of great events, in populations which had no drop of Roman blood in their veins. The last emperor resident in Rome had never heard the names of the hordes of savages whose descendants had now seized the plains of France and Italy. Yet it seemed as if, with the territory of the Roman Empire, they had inherited its traditions and hopes. They might be Saxons, or Franks, or Burgundians, or Lombards, by national descent, but by residence they were Romans as compared with the Greeks in the East,—and by religion they were Romans as compared with the Sclaves and Saracens, who pressed on them on the North and South. It would not be difficult in this country to find the grandchildren of French refugees boasting with patriotic pride of the English triumphs at Cressy and Agincourt—or the sons of Scottish parents rejoicing in their ancestors’ victory under Cromwell at Dunbar; and here, in the eighth century, the descendants of Alaric and Clovis were patriotically loyal to the memory of the old Empire, and were reminded by the victories of Charlemagne of the trophies of Scipio and Marius. These victories, indeed, were not, as is so often found to be the case, the mere efforts of genius and ambition, with no higher object than to augment the conqueror’s power or reputation. They were systematically pursued with a view to an end. In one advancing tide, all things tended to the Imperial throne. Whatever nation felt the force of Charlemagne’s sword felt also a portion of its humiliation lightened when its submission was perceived to be only an advancement towards the restoration of the old dominion. It might have been degrading to acknowledge the superiority of the son of Pepin—but who could offer resistance to the successor of Augustus? So, after thirty years of uninterrupted war, with campaigns succeeding each in the most distant regions, and all crowned with conquest; after subduing the Saxons beyond the Weser, the Lombards as far as Treviso, the Arabs under the walls of Saragossa, the Bavarians in the neighbourhood of Augsburg, the Sclaves on the Elbe and Oder, the Huns and Avars on the Raab and Danube, and the Greeks themselves on the coast of Dalmatia; when he looked around and saw no rebellion against his authority, but throughout the greater part of his domains a willing submission to the centralizing power which rallied all Christian states for the defence of Christianity, and all civilized nations for the defence of civilization,—nothing more was required than the mere expression in definite words of the great thing that had already taken place, and Charlemagne, at the extreme end of this century, bent before the successor of St. Peter at Rome, and stood up crowned Emperor of the West, and champion and chief of Christendom.

The period of Charlemagne is a great date in history; for it is the legal and formal termination of an antiquated state of society. It was also the introduction to another, totally distinct from itself and from its predecessor. It was not barbarism; it was not feudalism; but it was the bridge which united the two. By barbarism is meant the uneasy state of governments and peoples, where the tribe still predominated over the nation; where the Frank or Lombard continued an encamped warrior, without reference to the soil; and where his patriotism consisted in fidelity to the traditions of his descent, and not to the greatness or independence of the land he occupied. In the reign of Charlemagne, the land of the Frank became practically, and even territorially, France; the district occupied by the Lombards became Lombardy. The feeling of property in the soil was added to the ties of race and kindred; and at the very time that all the nations of the Invasion yielded to the supremacy of one man as emperor, the different populations asserted their separate independence of each other, as distinct and self-sufficing kingdoms—kingdoms, that is to say, without the kings, but in all respects prepared for those individualized expressions of their national life. For though Charlemagne, seated in his great hall at Aix-la-Chapelle, gave laws to the whole of his vast domains, in each country he had assumed to himself nothing more than the monarchic power. To the whole empire he was emperor, but to each separate people, such as Franks and Lombards, he was simply king. Under him there were dukes, counts, viscounts, and other dignitaries, but each limited, in function and influence, to the territory to which he belonged. A French duke had no pre-eminence in Lombardy, and a Bavarian graf had no rank in Italy. Other machinery was at times employed by the central power, in the shape of temporary messengers, or even of emissaries with a longer tenure of office; but these persons were sent for some special purpose, and were more like commissioners appointed by the Crown, than possessors of authority inherent in themselves. The term of their ambassadorship expired, their salary, or the lands they had provisionally held in lieu of salary, reverted to the monarch, and they returned to court with no further pretension to power or influence than an ambassador in our days when he returns from the country to which he is accredited. But when the great local nobility found their authority indissolubly connected with their possessions, and that ducal or princely privileges were hereditary accompaniments of their lands, the foundations of modern feudalism were already laid, and the path to national kingship made easy and unavoidable. When Charlemagne’s empire broke into pieces at his death, we still find, in the next century, that each piece was a kingdom. Modern Europe took its rise from these fragmentary though complete portions; and whereas the breaking-up of the first empire left the world a prey to barbaric hordes, and desolation and misery spread over the fairest lands, the disruption of the latter empire of Charlemagne left Europe united as one whole against Saracen and savage, but separated in itself into many well-defined states, regulated in their intercourse by international law, and listening with the docility of children to the promises or threatenings of the Father of the Universal Church. For with the empire of Charlemagne the empire of the Papacy had grown. The temporal power was a collection of forces dependent on the life of one man; the spiritual power is a principle which is independent of individual aid. So over the fragments, as we have said, of the broken empire, rose higher than ever the unshaken majesty of Rome. Civil authority had shrunk up within local bounds; but the Papacy had expanded beyond the limits of time and space, and shook the dreadful keys and clenched the two-edged sword which typified its dominion over both earth and heaven.

NINTH CENTURY.

Authors.

John Scotus, (Erigena,) Hincmar, Heric, (preceded Des Cartes in philosophical investigation,) Macarius.

THE NINTH CENTURY.

The first year of this century found Charlemagne with the crown of the old Empire upon his head, and the most distant parts of the world filled with his reputation. As in the case of the first Napoleon, we find his antechambers crowded with the fallen rulers of the conquered territories, and even with sovereigns of neighbouring countries. Among others, two of our Anglo-Saxon princes found their way to the great man’s court at Aix-la-Chapelle. Eardulf of Northumberland pleaded his cause so well with Charlemagne and the Pope, that by their good offices he was restored to his states. But a greater man than Eardulf was also a visitor and careful student of the vanquisher and lawgiver of the Western world. Originally a Prince of Kent, he had been expelled by the superior power or arts of Beortrick, King of the West Saxons, and had betaken himself for protection, if not for restoration, to the most powerful ruler of the time. Whether Egbert joined in his expeditions or shared his councils, we do not know, but the history of the Anglo-Saxon monarchies at this date (800 to 830) shows us the exact counterpart, on our own island, of the actions of Charlemagne on the wider stage of continental Europe. Egbert, on the death of Beortrick, obtained possession of Wessex, and one by one the separate States of the British Heptarchy were subdued; some reduced to entire subjection, others only to subordinate rank and the payment of tribute, till, when all things were prepared for the change, Egbert proclaimed the unity of Southern Britain by assuming the title of Bretwalda, in the same way as his prototype had restored the unity of the empire by taking the dignity of Emperor. It is pleasant to pause over the period of Charlemagne’s reign, for it is an isthmus connecting two dark and unsatisfactory states of society,—a past of disunion, barbarity, and violence, and a future of ignorance, selfishness, and crime. The present was not, indeed, exempt from some or all of these characteristics. There must have been quarrellings and brutal animosities on the outskirts of his domain, where half-converted Franks carried fire and sword, in the name of religion, among the still heathen Saxons; there must have been insolence and cruelty among the bishops and priests, whose education, in the majority of instances, was limited to learning the services of the Church by heart. Many laymen, indeed, had seized on the temporalities of the sees; and, in return, many bishops had arrogated to themselves the warlike privileges and authority of the counts and viscounts. But within the radius of Charlemagne’s own influence, in his family apartments, or in the great Hall of Audience at Aix-la-Chapelle, the astonishing sight was presented of a man refreshing himself, after the fatigues of policy and war, by converting his house into a college for the advancement of learning and science. From all quarters came the scholars, and grammarians, and philosophers of the time. Chief of these was our countryman, the Anglo-Saxon monk Alcuin, and from what remains of his writings we can only regret that, in the infancy of that new civilization, his genius, which was undoubtedly great, was devoted to trifles of no real importance. Others came to fill up that noble company; and it is surely a great relief from the bloody records with which we have so long been familiar, to see Charlemagne at home, surrounded by sons and daughters, listening to readings and translations from Roman authors; entering himself into disquisitions on philosophy and antiquities, and acting as president of a select society of earnest searchers after information. To put his companions more at their ease, he hid the terrors of his crown under an assumed name, and only accepted so much of his royal state as his friends assigned to him by giving him the name of King David. The best versifier was known as Virgil. Alcuin himself was Horace; and Angelbert, who cultivated Greek, assumed the proud name of Homer. These literary discussions, however, would have had no better effect than refining the court, and making the days pass pleasantly; but Charlemagne’s object was higher and more liberal than this. Whatever monastery he founded or endowed was forced to maintain a school as part of its establishment. Alcuin was presented with the great Abbey of St. Martin of Tours, which possessed on its domain twenty thousand serfs, and therefore made him one of the richest land-owners in France. There, at full leisure from worldly cares, he composed a vast number of books, of very poor philosophy and very incorrect astronomy, and perhaps looked down from his lofty eminence of wealth and fame on the humble labours of young Eginhart, the secretary of Charlemagne, who has left us a Life of his master, infinitely more interesting and useful than all the dissertations of the sage. From this great Life we learn many delightful characteristics of the great man, his good-heartedness, his love of justice, and blind affection for his children. But it is with his public works, as acting on this century, that we have now to do. Throughout the whole extent of his empire he founded Academies, both for learning and for useful occupations. He encouraged the study and practice of agriculture and trade. The fine arts found him a munificent patron; and though the objects on which the artist’s skill was exercised were not more exalted than the carving of wooden tables, the moulding of metal cups, and the casting of bells, the circumstances of the time are to be taken into consideration, and these efforts may be found as advanced, for the ninth century, as the works of the sculptors and metallurgists of our own day. It is painful to observe that the practice of what is now called adulteration was not unknown at that early period. There was a monk of the name of Tancho, in the monastery of St. Gall, who produced the first bell. Its sound was so sweet and solemn, that it was at once adopted as an indispensable portion of the ornament of church and chapel, and soon after that, of the religious services themselves. Charlemagne, hearing it, and perhaps believing that an increased value in the metal would produce a richer tone, sent him a sufficient quantity of silver to form a second bell. The monk, tempted by the facility of turning the treasure to his own use, brought forward another specimen of his skill, but of a mixed and very inferior material. What the just and severe emperor might have done, on the discovery of the fraud, is not known; but the story ended tragically without the intervention of the legal sword. At the first swing of the clapper it broke the skull of the dishonest founder, who had apparently gone too near to witness the action of the tongue; and the bell was thenceforth looked on with veneration, as the discoverer and punisher of the unjust manufacturer.

The monks, indeed, seem to have been the most refractory of subjects, perhaps because they were already exempted from the ordinary punishments. In order to produce uniformity in the services and chants of the Church, the emperor sent to Rome for twelve monkish musicians, and distributed them in the twelve principal bishoprics of his dominions. The twelve musicians would not consent to be musical according to order, and made the confusion greater than ever, for each of them taught different tunes and a different method. The disappointed emperor could only complain to the Pope, and the Pope put the recusant psalmodists in prison. But it appears the fate of Charlemagne, as of all persons in advance of their age, to be worthy of congratulation only for his attempts. The success of many of his undertakings was not adequate to the pains bestowed upon them. He held many assemblages, both lay and ecclesiastical, during his lengthened reign; he published many excellent laws, which soon fell into disuse; he tried many reforms of churches and monasteries, which shared the same fortune; he held the Popes of Rome and the dignitaries of his empire in perfect submission, but professed so much respect for the office of Pontiff and Bishop, that, when his own overwhelming superiority was withdrawn, the Church rebelled against the State, and claimed dominion over it. His sense of justice, as well as the custom of the time, led him to divide his states among his sons, which not only insured enmity between them, but enfeebled the whole of Christendom. Clouds, indeed, began to gather over him some time before his reign was ended. One day he was at a city of Narbonese Gaul, looking out upon the Mediterranean Sea. He saw some vessels appear before the port. “These,” said the courtiers, “must be ships from the coast of Africa, Jewish merchantmen, or British traders.” But Charlemagne, who had leaned a long time against the wall of the room in a passion of tears, said, “No! these are not the ships of commerce; I know by their lightness of movement. They are the galleys of the Norsemen; and, though I know such miserable pirates can do me no harm, I cannot help weeping when I think of the miseries they will inflict on my descendants and the lands they shall rule.” A true speech, and just occasion for grief, for the descents of these Scandinavian rovers are the great characteristic of this century, by which a new power was introduced into Europe, and great changes took place in the career of France and England.

It would perhaps be more correct to say that, by this new mixture of race and language, France and England were called into existence. England, up to this date, had been a collection of contending states; France, a tributary portion of a great Germanic empire. Slowly stretching northward, the Roman language, modified, of course, by local pronunciation, had pushed its way among the original Franks. Latin had been for many years the language of Divine Service, and of history, and of law. All westward of the Rhine had yielded to those influences, and the old Teutonic tongue which Clovis had brought with him from Germany had long disappeared, from the Alps up to the Channel. |A.D. 814.|When the death of Charlemagne, in 814, had relaxed the hold which held all his subordinate states together, the diversity of the language of Frenchman and German pointed out, almost as clearly as geographical boundaries could have done, the limits of the respective nations. From henceforward, identity of speech was to be considered a more enduring bond of union than the mere inhabiting of the same soil. But other circumstances occurred to favour the idea of a separation into well-defined communities; and among these the principal was a very long experience of the disadvantages of an encumbered and too extensive empire. Even while the sword was held by the strong hand of Charlemagne, each portion of his dominions saw with dissatisfaction that it depended for its peace and prosperity on the peace and prosperity of all the rest, and yet in this peace and prosperity it had neither voice nor influence. The inhabitants of the banks of the Loire were, therefore, naturally discontented when they found their provisions enhanced in price, and their sons called to arms, on account of disturbances on the Elbe, or hostilities in the south of Italy. These evils of their position were further increased when, towards the end of Charlemagne’s reign, the outer circuit of enemies became more combined and powerful. In proportion as he had extended his dominion, he had come into contact with tribes and states with whom it was impossible to be on friendly terms. To the East, he touched upon the irreclaimable Sclaves and Avars—in the South, he came on the settlements of the Italian Greeks—in Spain, he rested upon the Saracens of Cordova. It was hard for the secure centre of the empire to be destroyed and ruined by the struggles of the frontier populations, with which it had no more sympathy in blood and language than with the people with whom they fought. Already, also, we have seen how local their government had become. They had their own dukes and counts, their own bishops and priests to refer to. The empire was, in fact, a name, and the land they inhabited the only reality with which they were concerned. We shall not be surprised, therefore, when we find that universal rebellion took place when Louis the Debonnaire, the just and saint-like successor of Charlemagne, endeavoured to carry on his father’s system. Even his reforms served only to show his own unselfishness, and to irritate the grasping and avaricious offenders whom it was his object to amend. Bishops were stripped of their lay lordships—prevented from wearing sword and arms, and even deprived of the military ornament of glittering spurs to their heels. The monks and nuns, who had almost universally fallen into evil courses, were forcibly reformed by the laws of a second St. Benedict, whose regulations were harsh towards the regular orders, but useless to the community at large—a sad contrast to the agricultural and manly exhortations of the first conventual legislator of that name. Nothing turned out well with this simplest and most generous of the Carlovingian kings. His virtues, inextricably interlaced as they were with the weaknesses of his character, were more injurious to himself and his kingdom than less amiable qualities would have been. Priest and noble were equally ignorant of the real characteristics of a Christian life. When he refunded the exactions of his father, and restored the conquests which he considered illegally acquired, the universal feeling of astonishment was only lost in the stronger sentiment of disdain. An excellent monk in a cell, or judge in a court of law, Louis the Debonnaire was the most unfit man of his time to keep discordant nationalities in awe. His children were as unnatural as those of Lear, whom he resembled in some other respects: for he found what little reverence waits upon a discrowned king; and personal indignities of the most degrading kind were heaped upon him by those whose duty it was to maintain and honour him. Superstition was set to work on his enfeebled mind, and twice he did public penance for crimes of which he was not guilty; and on the last occasion, stripped of his military baldric—the lowest indignity to which a Frankish monarch could be subjected—clothed in a hair shirt by the bands of an ungrateful bishop, he was led by his triumphant son, Lothaire, through the streets of Aix-la-Chapelle. |A.D. 833.|But natural feeling was not extinguished in the hearts of the staring populace. They saw in the meek emperor’s lowly behaviour, and patient endurance of pain and insult, an image of that other and holier King who carried his cross up the steeps of Jerusalem. They saw him denuded of the symbols of earthly power and of military rank, oppressed and wronged—and recognised in that down-trodden man a representation of themselves. This sentiment spread with the magic force of sympathy and remorse. All the world, we are told, left the unnatural son solitary and friendless in the very hour of his success; and Louis, too pure-minded himself to perceive that it was the virtue of his character which made him hated, persisted in pushing on his amendments as if he had the power to carry them into effect. He ordered all lands and other goods which the nobles had seized from the Church to be restored—a tenderness of conscience utterly inexplicable to the marauding baron, who had succeeded by open force, and in a fair field, in despoiling the marauding bishop of land and tower. It was arming his rival, he thought, with a two-edged sword, this silence as to the inroads of the churchman on the property of the nobles, and prevention of their just reprisals on the property of the prelate, by placing it under the safeguard of religion. The rugged warrior kept firm hold of the bishopric or abbey he had secured, and the belted bishop reimbursed himself by appropriating the wealth of his weaker neighbours.

But Louis was as unfortunate in his testamentary arrangement as in all the other regulations of his life. Lothaire was to retain the eastern portion of the empire; Charles, his favourite, had France as far as the Rhine; while Louis was limited to the distant region of Bavaria. |A.D. 840.|And having made this disposition of his power, the meek and useless Louis descended into the tomb—a striking example, the French historians tell us, of the great historic truth renewed at such distant dates, that the villanies and cruelties of a race of kings bring misery on the most virtuous of their descendants. All the crimes of the three preceding reigns—the violence and disregard of life exhibited by Charlemagne himself—found their victim and expiation in his meek and gentle-minded son. The harshness of Henry VIII. of England, they add, and the despotic claims of James, were visited on the personally just and amiable Charles; and they point to the parallel case of their own Louis XVI., and see in the sad fortune of that mild and guileless sovereign the final doom of the murderous Charles IX., and the voluptuous and hypocritical Louis XIV. But these kings are still far off in the darkness of the coming centuries. It is a strange sight, in the middle of the ninth century, to see the successor of the great Emperor stealing through the confused and chaotic events of that wretched period, stripped as it were of sword and crown, but everywhere displaying the beauty of pure and simple goodness. He refused to condemn his enemies to death. He was only inexorable towards his own offences, and sometimes humbled himself for imaginary sins. A protector of the Church, a zealous supporter of Rome, it would give additional dignity to the act of canonization if the name of Louis the Debonnaire were added to the list of Saints.

But we have left the empire which it had taken so long to consolidate, now legally divided into three. There is a Charles in possession of the western division; a Louis in the farther Germany; and Lothaire, the unfilial triumpher at Aix-la-Chapelle, invested with the remainder of the Roman world. But Lothaire was not to be satisfied with remainders. Once in power, he was determined to recover the empire in its undivided state. He was King of Italy; master of Rome and of the Pope; he was eldest grandson of Charlemagne, and defied the opposition of his brothers. |A.D. 842.|A Battle was fought at Fontenay in 842, in which these pretensions were overthrown; and the final severance took place in the following year between the French and German populations. The treaty between the brothers still remains. It is written in duplicate—one in a tongue still intelligible to German ears, and the other in a Romanized speech, which is nearer the French of the present day than the English of Alfred, or even of Edward the Confessor, is to ours.

France, which had hitherto attained that title in right of its predominant race, held it henceforth on the double ground of language and territory. But there is a curious circumstance connected with the partition of the empire, which it may be interesting to remember. France, in gaining its name and language, lost its natural boundary of the Rhine. Up to this time, the limit of ancient Gaul had continued to define the territory of the Western Franks. In rude times, indeed, there can be no other divisions than those supplied by nature; but now that a tongue was considered a bond of nationality, the French were contented to surrender to Lothaire the Emperor a long strip of territory, running the whole way up from Italy to the North Sea, including both banks of the Rhine, and acting as a wall of partition between them and the German-speaking people on the other side,—a great price to pay, even for the easiest and most widely-spread language in Europe. Yet the most ambitious of Frenchmen would pause before he undid the bargain and reacquired the “exulting and abounding river” at the sacrifice of his inimitable tongue.

Very confused and uncertain are all the events for a long time after this date. We see perpetual attempts made to restore the reality as well as the name of the Empire. These battles and competitions of the line of Charlemagne are the subject of chronicles and treaties, and might impose upon us by the grandeur of their appearance, if we did not see, from the incidental facts which come to the surface, how unavailing all efforts must be to arrest the dissociation of state from state. The principle of dissolution was at work everywhere. Kingship itself had fallen into contempt, for the great proprietors had been encouraged to exert a kind of personal power in the reign of Charlemagne, which contributed to the strength of his well-consolidated crown; but when the same individual influence was exercised under the nominal supremacy of Louis the Debonnaire or Charles the Bald, it proved a humiliating and dangerous contrast to the weakness of the throne. A combination of provincial dignitaries could at any time outweigh the authority of the king, and sometimes, even singly, the owners of extensive estates threw off the very name of subject. They claimed their lands as not only hereditary possessions, but endowed with all the rights and privileges which their personal offices had bestowed. If their commission from the emperor had given them authority to judge causes, to raise taxes, or to collect troops, they maintained from henceforth that those high powers were inherent in their lands. The dukes, therefore, invested their estates with ducal rights, independent of the Crown, and left to the holder of the kingly name no real authority except in his own domains. Brittany, and Aquitaine, and Septimania, withdrew their allegiance from the poor King of France. He could not compel the ambitious owners of those duchies to recognise his power, and condescended even to treat them as rival and acknowledged kings. Then there were other magnates who were not to be left mere subjects when dukes had risen to such rank. So the Marquises of Toulouse and Gothia, a district of Languedoc, and Auvergne, were treated more as equals than as appointed deputies recallable at pleasure. But worse enemies of kingly dignity than duke or marquis were the ambitious bishops, who looked with uneasy eyes on the rapid rise of their rivals the lay nobility. Already the hereditary title of those territorial potentates was an accomplished fact; the son of the count inherited his father’s county. But the general celibacy of the clergy fortunately prevented the hereditary transmission of bishopric and abbey. To make up for the want of this advantage, they boldly determined to assert far higher claims as inherent in their rank than marquis or count could aim at. Starting from the universally-conceded ground of their right to reprimand and punish any Christian who committed sin, they logically carried their pretension to the right of deposing kings if they offended the Church. More than fifty years had passed since Charlemagne had received the imperial crown from the hands of the Pope of Rome. Dates are liable to fall into confusion in ignorant times and places, and it was easy to spread a belief that the popes had always exercised the power of bestowing the diadem upon kings. To support these astounding claims with some certain guarantee, and give them the advantage of prescriptive right by a long and legitimate possession, certain documents were spread abroad at this time, purporting to be a collection by Isidore, a saint of the sixth century, of the decretals or judicial sentences of the popes from a very early period, asserting the unquestioned spiritual supremacy of the Roman See at a date when it was in reality but one of many feeble seats of Christian authority; and to equalize its earthly grandeur with its religious pretension, the new edition of Isidore contained a donation by Constantine himself, in the beginning of the fourth century, of the city of Rome and enormous territories in Italy, to be held in sovereignty by the successors of St. Peter. These are now universally acknowledged to be forgeries and impostures of the grossest kind, but at the time they appeared they served the purpose for which they were intended, and gave a sanction to the Papal assumptions far superior to the rights of any existing crown.

Charles the Bald was a true son of Louis the Debonnaire in his devotion to the Church. When the bishops of his own kingdom, with Wenilon of Sens as their leader, offended with some remissness he had temporarily shown in advancing their worldly interests, determined to depose him from the throne, and called Louis the German to take his place, Charles fled and threw himself on the protection of the Pope. And when by submission and promises he had been permitted to re-enter France, he complained of the conduct of the prelates in language which ratified all their claims. “Elected by Wenilon and the other bishops, as well as by the lieges of our kingdom, who expressed their consent by their acclamations, Wenilon consecrated me king according to ecclesiastic tradition, in his own diocese, in the Church of the Holy Cross at Orleans. He anointed me with the holy oil; he gave me the diadem and royal sceptre, and seated me on the throne. After that consecration I could not be removed from the throne, or supplanted by any one, at least without being heard and judged by the bishops, by whose ministry I was consecrated king. It is they who are as the thrones of the Divinity. God reposes upon them, and by them he gives forth his judgments. At all times I have been ready to submit to their fatherly corrections, to their just castigations, and am ready to do so still.” What more could the Church require? Its wealth was the least of its advantages, though the abbacies and bishoprics were richer than dukedoms all over the land. Their temporal power was supported by the terrors of their spiritual authority; and kings, princes, and people appeared so prone to the grossest excesses of credulity and superstition, that it needed little to throw Europe itself at the feet of the priesthood, and place sword and sceptre permanently in subordination to the crozier. Blindly secure of their position, rioting in the riches of the subject land, the bishops probably disregarded, as below their notice, the two antagonistic principles which were at work at this time in the midst of their own body—the principle of absolute submission to authority in articles of faith, and the principle of free inquiry into all religious doctrine. The first gave birth to the great mystery of transubstantiation, which now first made its appearance as an indispensable belief, and was hailed by the laity and inferior clergy as a crowning proof of the miraculous powers inherent in the Church. The second was equally busy, but was not productive of such permanent effects. At the court of Charles the Bald there was a society of learned and ingenious men, presided over by the celebrated John Scot Erigena, (or native of Ireland,) who had studied the early Fathers and the Platonic philosophy, and were inclined to admit human reason to some participation in the reception of Christian truths. There were therefore discussions on the real presence, and free-will, and predestination, which had the usual unsatisfactory termination of all questions transcending man’s understanding, and only embittered their respective adherents without advancing the settlement on either side. While these exercitations of talent and dialectic quickness were carried on, filling the different dioceses with wonder and perplexity, the great body of the people in various countries of Europe were recalled to the practical business of life by disputes of a far more serious character than the wordy wars of Scotus and his foes. Michelet, the most picturesque of the recent historians of France, has given us an amazing view of the state of affairs at this time. It is the darkest period of the human mind; it is also the most unsettled period of human society. Outside of the narrowing limits of peopled Christendom, enemies are pressing upon every side. Saxons on the East are laying their hands in reverence on the manes of horses, and swearing in the name of Odin; Saracens, in the South and West, are gathering once more for the triumph of the Prophet; and suddenly France, Germany, Italy, and England, are awakened to the presence and possible supremacy of a more dreaded invader than either, for the Vikinger, or Norsemen, were abroad upon the sea, and all Christendom was exposed to their ravages. Wherever a river poured its waters into the ocean, on the coast of Narbonne, or Yorkshire, or Calabria, or Friesland, boats, small in size, but countless in number, penetrated into the inland towns, and disembarked wild and fearless warriors, who seemed inspired by the mad fanaticism of some inhuman faith, which made charity and mercy a sin. Starting from the islands and rugged mainland of the present Denmark and Norway, they swept across the stormy North Sea, shouting their hideous songs of glory and defiance, and springing to land when they reached their destination with the agility and bloodthirstiness of famished wolves. Their business was to carry slaughter and destruction wherever they went. They looked with contempt on the lazy occupations of the inhabitants of town or farm, and, above all, were filled with hatred and disdain of the monks and priests Their leaders were warriors and poets. Gliding up noiseless streams, they intoned their battle-cry and shouted the great deeds of their ancestors when they reached the walls of some secluded monastery, and rejoiced in wrapping all its terrified inmates in flames. Bards, soldiers, pirates, buccaneers, and heathens, destitute of fear, or pity, or remorse, amorous of danger, and skilful in management of ship and weapon, these were the most ferocious visitants which Southern Europe had ever seen. No storm was sufficient to be a protection against their approach. On the crest of the highest waves those frail barks were seen by the affrighted dwellers on the shore, careering with all sail set, and steering right into their port. All the people on the coast, from the Rhine to Bayonne, and from Toulouse to the Grecian Isles, fled for protection to the great proprietors of the lands. But the great proprietors of the lands were the peaceful priors of stately abbeys, and bishops of wealthy sees. Their pretensions had been submitted to by kings and nobles; they were the real rulers of France; and even in England their authority was very great. Excommunications had been their arms against recusant baron and refractory count; but the Danish Northmen did not care for bell, book, and candle. The courtly circle of scholars and divines could give no aid to the dishoused villagers and trembling cities, however ingenious the logic might be which reconciled Plato to St. Paul; and Charles the Bald, surprised, no doubt, at the inefficacy of prayers and processions, was forced to replace the influence in the hands, not which carried the crozier and cross, but which curbed the horse and couched the spear. The invasion of the Danes was, in fact, the resuscitation of the courage and manliness of the nationalities they attacked. Dreadful as the suffering was at the time, it was not given to any man then alive to see the future benefits contained in the present woe. We, with a calmer view, look back upon the whole series of those events, and in the intermixture of the new race perceive the elements of greatness and power. Priest-ridden, down-trodden populations received a fresh impulse from those untamed children of the North; and in the forcible relegation of ecclesiastics to the more peaceable offices of their calling, we see the first beginning of the gradation of ranks, and separation of employments, which gave honourable occupation to the respective leaders in Church and State; which limited the clergyman to the unostentatious discharge of his professional duties, and left the baron to command his warriors and give armed protection to all the dwellers in the land. For feudalism, as understood in the Middle Ages, was the inevitable result of the relative positions of priest and noble at the time of the Norsemen’s forays. It was found that the possession of great domains had its duties as well as its rights, and the duty of defence was the most imperative of all. Men held their grounds, therefore, on the obligation of keeping their vassals uninjured by the pirates; the bishops were found unable to perform this work, and the territory passed away from their keeping. Vast estates, no doubt, still remained in their possession, but they were placed in the guardianship of the neighbouring chateaux; and though at intervals, in the succeeding centuries, we shall see the prelate dressing himself in a coat of mail, and rendering in person the military service entailed upon his lands, the public feeling rapidly revolted against the incongruity of the deed. The steel-clad bishop was looked on with slender respect, and was soon found to do more damage to his order, by the contrast between his conduct and his profession, than he could possibly gain for it by his prowess or skill in war. Feudalism, indeed, or the reciprocal obligation of protection and submission, reached its full development by the formal deposition of a descendant of Charlemagne, on the express ground of his inability to defend his people from the enemies by which they were surrounded. |A.D. 879.|A congress of six archbishops, and seventeen bishops, was held in the town of Mantela, near Vienne; and after consultation with the nobility, they came to the following resolution:—“That whereas the great qualities of the old mayors of the palace were their only rights to the throne, and Charlemagne, whom all willingly obeyed, did not transmit his talents, along with his crown, to his posterity, it was right to leave that house.” They therefore sent an offer of the throne of Burgundy to Boso, Count of the Ardennes, with the conditions “that he should be a true patron and defender of high and low, accessible and friendly to all, humble before God, liberal to the Church, and true to his word.”

By this abnegation of temporal weapons, and dependence on the armed warrior for their defence, the prelates put themselves at the head of the unarmed peoples at the same moment that they exercised their spiritual authority over all classes alike. It was useless for them to draw the sword themselves, when they regulated every motion of the hand by which the sword was held.

While this is the state of affairs on the Continent—while the great Empire of Charlemagne is falling to pieces, and the kingly office is practically reduced to a mere equality with the other dignities of the land—while this disunion in nations and weakness in sovereigns is exposing the fairest lands in Europe to the aggressions of enemies on every side—let us cast our eyes for a moment on England, and see in what condition our ancestors are placed at the middle of this century. A most dreadful and alarming condition as ever Old England was in. For many years before this, a pirate’s boat or two from the North would run upon the sand, and send the crews to burn and rob a village on the coast of Berwick or Northumberland. Pirates we superciliously call them, but that is from a misconception of their point of honour, and of the very different estimate they themselves formed of their pursuits and character. They were gentleman, perhaps, “of small estate” in some outlying district of Denmark or Norway, but endowed with stout arms and a great wish to distinguish themselves—if the distinction could be accompanied with an increase of their worldly goods. They considered the sea their own domain, and whatever was found on it as theirs by right of possession. They were, therefore, lords of the manor, looking after their rights, their waifs and strays, their flotsams and jetsams. They were also persons of a strong religious turn, and united the spirit of the missionary to the courage of the warrior and the avidity of the conqueror. Odin was still their god, the doors of the Walhalla were still open to them after death, and the skulls of their enemies were foaming with intoxicating mead. The English were renegades from the true faith, a set of drivelling wretches who believed in a heaven where there was no beer, and worshipped a god who bade them pray for their enemies and bless the very people who used them ill. The remaining similarity in the language of the two peoples must have added a bitterness to the contemptuous feelings of the unreclaimed rovers of the deep; and probably, on their return, these enterprising warriors were as proud of the number of priests they had slain, as of the more valuable trophies they carried home. Denmark itself, up to this time, had been distracted with internal wars. It was only the more active spirits who had rushed across from the Sound, and solaced themselves, in the intervals of their own campaigns, with an onslaught upon an English town. But now the scene was to change. The inroads of separate crews were to be exchanged for national invasions. |A.D. 838.|Harold of the Fair Hair was seated on an undisputed throne, and repressed the outrages of these adventurous warriors by a strong and determined will. He stretched his sceptre over all the Scandinavian world, and neither the North Sea nor the Baltic were safe places for piracy and spoil. One of his countrymen had founded the royal line of Russia, and from his capital of Kieff or Novgorod was civilizing, with whip and battle-axe, the original hordes which now form the Empire of the Czars. Already, from their lurking-places on the shores of the Black Sea, the Norwegian predecessors of the men of Odessa and Sebastopol were threatening a dash upon Constantinople; while sea-kings and jarls, compelled to be quiet and peaceable at home, but backed by all the wild populations of the North, anxious for glory, and greedy of gold and corn, resolved to reduce England to their obedience, and collected an enormous fleet in the quiet recesses of the Baltic, withdrawn from the observation of Harold. It seems fated that France is always, in some sort or other, to set the fashion to her neighbours. We have seen, at the beginning of this century, how England followed the example of the Frankish peoples in consolidating itself into one dominion. Charlemagne was recognised chief potentate of many states, and Egbert was sovereign of all the Saxon lands, from Cornwall to the gates of Edinburgh. But the model was copied no less closely in the splitting-up of the central authority than in its consolidation. While Louis the Debonnaire and Charles the Bald were weakening the throne of Charlemagne, the states of Egbert became parcelled out in the same way between the descendants of the English king. Ethelwolf was the counterpart of Louis, and carried the sceptre in too gentle a hand. He still further diminished his authority by yielding to the dissensions of his court. Like the Frankish ruler, also, he left portions of his territory to his four sons; of whom it will be sufficient for us to remember that the youngest was the great Alfred—the foremost name in all mediæval history; and by an injudicious marriage with the daughter of Charles the Bald, and his unjust divorce of the mother of all his sons, he offended the feelings of the nation, and raised the animosity of his children. Ethelbald his son completed the popular discontent by marrying his father’s widow, the French princess, who had been the cause of so much disagreement; and while the people were thus alienated, and the guiding hand of a true ruler of men was withdrawn, the terrible invasion of Danes and Jutlanders went on. |A.D. 839.|They sailed up the Thames and pillaged London. Winchester was given to the flames. The whole isle of Thanet was seized and permanently occupied. The magic standard, a raven, embroidered by the daughters of the famous Regner Lodbrog, (who had been stung to death by serpents in a dungeon into which he was thrown by Ella, King of Northumberland,) was carried from point to point, and was thought to be the symbol of victory and revenge. The offending Northumbrian now felt the wrath of the sons of Lodbrog. They landed with a great army, and after a battle, in which the chiefs of the English were slain, took the Northumbrian kingdom. Nottingham was soon after captured and destroyed. It was no longer a mere incursion. The nobles and great families of Denmark came over to their new conquest, and stationed themselves in strong fortresses, commanding large circles of country, and lived under their Danish regulations. The land, to be sure, was not populous at that time, and probably the Danish settlements were accomplished without the removal of any original occupiers. |A.D. 860.|But the castles they built, and the towns which rapidly grew around them, acted as outposts against the remaining British kingdoms; and at last, when fleet after fleet disembarked their thousands of warlike colonists—when Leicester, Lincoln, Stamford, York, and Chester, were all in Danish hands, and stretched a line of intrenchments round the lands they considered their own—the divided Anglo-Saxons were glad to purchase a cessation of hostilities by guaranteeing to them forever the places and territories they had secured. And there was now a Danish kingdom enclosed by the fragments of the English empire; there were Danish laws and customs, a Danish mode of pronunciation, and for a good while a still broader gulf of demarcation established between the peoples by their diversity in religious faith. |A.D. 872.|But when Alfred attained the supreme power—and although respecting the treaties between the Danes and English, yet evidently able to defend his countrymen from the aggressions of their foreign neighbour—the pacified pirate, tired of the sea, and softened by the richer soil and milder climate of his new home, began to perceive the very unsatisfactory nature of his ancient belief, and rapidly gave his adhesion to the lessons of the gospel. Guthrum, the Danish chieftain, became a zealous Christian according to his lights, and was baptized with all his subjects. Alfred acted as godfather to the neophyte, and restrained the wildest of his followers within due bounds. Perhaps, even, he was assisted by his Christianized allies in the great and final struggle against Hastings and a new swarm of Scandinavian rovers, whose defeat is the concluding act of this tumultuous century. Alfred drew up near London, and met the advancing hosts on the banks of the river Lea, about twenty miles from town. The patient angler in that suburban river seldom thinks what great events occurred upon its shore. Great ships—all things are comparative—were floating upon its waters, filled with armed Danes. Alfred cut certain openings in the banks and lowered the stream, so that the hostile navy stranded. Out sprang the Danes, astonished at the interruption to their course, and retreated across the country, nor stopped till they had placed themselves in inaccessible positions on the Severn. But the century came to a close. Opening with the great days of Charlemagne, it is right that it should close with the far more glorious reign of Alfred the patriot and sage;—-a century illuminated at its two extremes, but in its middle period dark with disunion and ignorance, and not unlikely, unless controlled to higher uses, to give birth to a state of more hopeless barbarism than that from which the nations of Europe had so recently emerged.