So they had this resource—free hunting in woods which probably were well stocked with game in comparison with the small human population. Make a note in your mind of this importance of the game, due to the fact that they could get no fresh meat from their domestic stock in winter. It is an importance which partly explains the reason of the fearfully severe game laws—laws to protect the game—which were passed a little later.

That is the picture, as well as I have been able to draw it for you, of the life of those people, our ancestors. You may take it, too, as something like a picture of the life of the people over a large part—say, all except the southern parts—of Charlemagne's wide empire. The feudal system came, to change the conditions, in that Frankish Empire earlier than it came to England; but even in England the conditions were such as would pass easily into feudal arrangements. In theory the ceorls were free, not the vassals of a lord, but their freedom was becoming more and more of an illusion. The eorl was there, getting an increasing authority and an increasing possession of the land, and so making everything ready for the feudal baron to step into his place. But the state of England did not render it so necessary for the ceorl to seek protection under his eorl, as we saw that it became a necessity in France. In England the king, whether in a divided or a united England, could still protect the people and exercise his authority over them and see justice done.

When we come to the tenth century we find that the title of eorl, or earl, for the head man of the village, was no longer in use, but a person exercising almost exactly the same power, and having the same privileges as the earl, was now called the "thane." His powers and privileges were perhaps no greater than those of the earl, but there was this difference in his position, that there was no longer any illusion of his being appointed by, and being one of, the villagers. He was appointed by the king. Generally he had been one of the king's soldiers, and the lordship of a village seems often to have been granted him as a reward for good military service. This would be particularly likely to happen with villages in conquered districts; and in many districts, with the perpetual warfare going on, villages must have been conquered and reconquered again and again.

"Hundreds" and "shires"

The title of earl, however, did not die out in England, as it did on the Continent. Either during or before the tenth century, the villages began to be grouped into what were called "hundreds." Probably the name arose from the idea that each "hundred" was a grouping of ten villages, each represented by its ten thirty-acre men, as we have called them. It is scarcely likely that many hundreds kept these figures long, or even that many ever had them precisely exact.

Then a grouping was made of some of the hundreds, and this group of hundreds was then called a "shire." The title of earl came to be given to the lord, no longer of a single village, but of a shire—a much more important post. The earl of the shire was appointed, like the thane, by the king. There were "hundred courts," as we noticed before, which the freemen, so-called, of the village could attend and vote in. And there were also "shire courts," held less often, which also the freemen might attend, and wherein also they might vote. The president of the shire court was the earl.

We may compare the earl and his shire, in England, with the comte, or count, in France, with his comté or county.

Thus, or somewhat thus, went the story of the people's lives in Europe throughout the time of the rule of the Danish kings in Britain and up to its conquest by William of Normandy in 1066.

CHAPTER XIV

THE SETTLEMENTS OF THE SEA-ROVERS

It is in the reign of King Egbert that we begin to hear of the Danes coming as sea-rovers and raiding the coasts on both sides of the English Channel. They came, they harried and stole, and went away again.

Alfred the Great

That was bad. But it began to be worse when they did not go away again, when they came in such numbers that they could actually dare to establish themselves for the winter up some river. They had then come to stay. Within thirty years after the death of Egbert they became so strong that they took the towns of York and Nottingham. The English kingdom was again, at this time, disunited. This was partly owing to the custom—which proved fatal to the union, of the continental empire also—for a king, at his death, to divide up his kingdom, by will, and give portions to two or more of his sons. But in a fortunate hour for England, Alfred, who won the name of "the Great," came to the throne of Wessex in 871.

He fought the Danes on land, uniting the people of Kent and Essex with his own Wessex men. He fought them with varying success, on the whole getting the better of them. He also (and you might make a note of this as the beginning of Britain's naval power) defeated some of their ships with his own fleet.

Whereupon came many more Danes with many more ships; and English and Danes had to meet in many a battle and skirmish until a decisive victory at length enabled Alfred to come to a settlement with them. Even so, the settlement was far from establishing him as sovereign over all England. An arrangement was made by which the Danes were to occupy, undisturbed, the eastern side, and were to leave the English in peaceable possession of the west. We have spoken before of that old Roman road called Watling Street, which ran from London to Chester: you may take that line as about the boundary line between the two peoples who now held England.

Alfred, besides this peaceful settlement with the Danes, owes his claim to the title of "great" to the wisdom with which he settled the affairs of his own kingdom and for the favour that he showed to literature and culture of all kinds. He was a Christian, and had insisted, when he made his treaty with the Danes, that they should profess themselves Christians and be baptised. He did all that he could to help in educating his people. He himself made translations into the Anglo-Saxon of books written in Latin giving the description and history of parts of Germany from which some of the Gothic tribes had come. He also caused books on religion to be translated, so that the people who were educated sufficiently to be able to read their own language might study them, and while he rebuilt monasteries and other buildings belonging to the Church, which had been ruined in the perpetual wars, he expected the priests and the Churchmen (the clerics, or clerks) to undertake the education of the people.

Probably Alfred was far too wise to suppose that peace would be kept for long between his Anglo-Saxons on the west of the Watling Street and the Danes on the east. The Danes were of a race akin to the Anglo-Saxons and to the Franks—they were German or Gothic. The Romans and Anglo-Saxons themselves had both come into Britain as quite a different race from the inhabitants whom they conquered; but the Danes were of nearly the same stock as those whom they found, and harassed, in England. Both were of that race called Nordic, of which it was characteristic for the men to be tall and large, with fair hair and blue eyes. We have seen how the English were gradually losing their freedom under their earls or thanes. The Danes came in with their freedom little if any less than it ever had been. They were hardy and independent; and even to this day we find these qualities to be characteristic of the dwellers in those lands east of the Watling Street in which most of the Danes settled. The southern and western men are of a tamer character.

A VIKING SHIP.
A VIKING SHIP.

An English king, Ethelred, in the hope, as we are told, of making the Northmen his friends instead of his persecutors and pirates, married the daughter of the Duke of Normandy. This Normandy is the Normandy that you will see on the maps of to-day and lies just across the English Channel. The Duke and his Normans (or Northmen) were of the same kin as the ravagers of the English coast. Therefore Ethelred seemed to be likely to gain peace for his kingdom when he married a daughter of this race. What did happen is that about sixty years later (he was married to the Duke's daughter in 1002) another Duke of Normandy, William, established himself as King of England. It is with this marriage of Ethelred's that the influence of Normandy in England begins. The Normans did not come upon England all of a sudden in 1066, the year of their conquest. There had been some preparation leading to it.

Massacre of the Danes

Unfortunately for Ethelred's hope of peace, he formed, or was led to agree to, a design of exterminating the Danes in England by a wholesale massacre. It was a design in which the English were the more ready to take a hand because of their hatred of the Danish troops which several of the kings had been keeping in their pay. These mercenaries were very insolent and high-handed in their dealings with the civil inhabitants, and on the signal given the inhabitants readily rose against them.

Thus a general massacre took place; but then followed that which, with a people of the fierce and resolute character of the Danes and Northmen, was sure to follow. A great force came over the sea, and, though twice bought off by payment of the Danegeld, they came again in 1013, and yet again, and finally, two years later, under Canute they came to stay. Canute, victorious, was first acknowledged king of the old Danish possessions in the east of England and a few weeks later of the entire country.

Within a year he too married that sister of the Duke of Normandy who had been married to Ethelred and was now a widow. And so, once more, the Norman influence came in.

Canute, who reigned close on twenty years, was followed by two kings of Danish race whose reigns only covered seven years together, and then followed the last of our Saxon kings, the first Edward. He was Saxon on the father's side; for his father was that Ethelred who married the Duke of Normandy's sister. On the mother's side, therefore, he was Norman.

The right of this Edward, called the Confessor, to the kingdom was not undisputed, but he had the support of a certain Earl Godwine, who, with his sons, had become so great a power that he claimed, and was able to maintain, lordship over half the realm of England. This great earl consolidated his power by marrying his daughter to King Edward, and one of the sons of Earl Godwine was that Harold who became king after Edward, and who was defeated and killed by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings.

It is my wish, in telling this story, to trouble you with as few names as possible, in order to avoid confusion, but I want you to bear these names in mind and to be clear as to how the people were related lo each other, because it is this relationship that explains how it was that William the Conqueror came to lay claim to the throne of England. He did not merely come as a conqueror to take, by force, what was not his. He came to enforce what was, or what he claimed to be, his right.

Harold, then, succeeded Edward, on Edward's death, as king. But before his death Edward had tried to arrange for a successor. We have to remember that the principle that the eldest son of the king should follow his father on the throne was not established in those days. But Edward had no son. He had a great-nephew, who was no more than a child. And he seems to have had no wish that the kingdom should go back to the Danes, although he had married a sister of Harold, the Dane. So he approached William, Duke of Normandy, with a proposal to appoint him as successor.

So the story is told; but its truth is not clearly proved. It has also been said that he sent Harold himself as his ambassador in this delicate matter, to the Norman court. That does not sound probable. What does appear to be established is that Harold, by some means or other—possibly by having to run his ship on the coast of Normandy in a storm—came into William's power, and that, while so held, waiting till a ransom should be paid for him and he should be released, William made him take a very solemn oath that on Edward's death he would do his best to support William's claim to the throne of England.

That being done, Edward dies, and Harold, far from keeping that most solemn oath, claims the kingdom of England for himself, and actually accedes to the throne, apparently without any serious opposition from the people.

William the Conqueror

But then comes William of Normandy, mightily indignant, with his fleet. He lands at Hastings, encounters Harold and his forces, defeats them heavily, Harold is killed in the battle, and William becomes King of England. He is accepted with a readiness, and with a slight opposition after the first battle, which we may suppose to be due to two causes, one, that our country had been so long vexed by fighting that it was weary and was willing to receive any peace at any price, and, two, that the Norman influence had spread through the country far and wide before the actual coming of the conqueror, so that the means for establishing his conquest were already prepared.

NORMAN GATEWAY, COLLEGE GREEN, BRISTOL.
NORMAN GATEWAY, COLLEGE GREEN, BRISTOL.

But it is very likely that this coming of the Northmen, the Normans, out of France will have caused you to ask a question or two in your minds. You may be wondering how it should be that Normans, Northmen, should be coming to England from Normandy, that is to say from the south. You may be wondering how it is that there are Northmen established there, as Dukes, that is as great rulers. When last we considered the Continent of Europe this Normandy was part of the great Empire of Charlemagne. In order to see how the Northmen came to be there we may go back to the Empire of Charlemagne in the ninth century. We have seen how that Empire was brought about and compacted. It is now a most important thing for the understanding of the great story that we should see how quickly that splendid Empire fell to pieces after Charlemagne's death. The understanding of that will make quite clear how the Normans were able to settle themselves as independent rulers of the part of France which is still, after them, called Normandy.

CHAPTER XV

THE CRUSADES

We have seen that the kings of the date to which this greatest story now has come, do not seem to have realised that if they partitioned up their possessions among several sons the result was likely to be that there would be disunion and righting. Charlemagne had three sons, and would, it appears, have divided his Empire by his will among them, but two of those sons died, so that the whole Empire came into the hands of the survivor.

This survivor, however, had, in his turn, three sons, and at his death the Empire was divided amongst the three. In this division we see the beginnings of the present arrangement of the greater part of Europe, for one son took a territory of which the boundaries were nearly the same as those of modern France, another had what corresponds more or less to Germany of to-day, and the third to something very like modern Italy. The Italian brother, the eldest, had the title of Emperor.

And now—to state shortly what was the rather natural outcome of that division—the kings, or those who claimed the kingship, of those territories fought over their possessions for at least a century and a half, 150 years.

Of course that meant that the people of the country were in constant misery and fear of their lives and uncertainty about any property they might have. Bands of soldiers, followers of their feudal lords, went about the country, and were very rough and brutal, taking all they could find and paying nothing. The authority of the king could not deal with these disturbers of the peace. The big landowners grew more and more independent of the king. He might be their feudal lord, in name, but for all this century and a half the King of France had no more power than several of the great lords themselves. More and more then it became necessary for the poorer class, if they would live safely, to live under the protection of one or other of the big men. This led to the clustering of the houses of the poor people round about the castle, the strong place, of their lord. He organised them as a fighting force, when fighting had to be done, and stood for them in place of the king. They were his faithful subjects, getting his protection as their return for working and fighting for him. Some of these lords grew so powerful and so dangerous to the king that he was glad to grant them their independence and full possession of their lands in return for their assurance that they would not take arms against him and attack his territory.

Normandy

Now all the while that the Danes and Northmen were harrying the shores of England they paid their attentions no less to the coasts of France, going up the Seine to Rouen, especially, and establishing winter quarters there very much as the Danes did in England. The emperor and the kings of France strove against them, but if they were defeated they only came back again in numbers larger than before. The end of it was that in the beginning of the tenth century the king deemed it his best policy to give up to the Northmen or Normans all that Normandy which they held despite all he could do against them. He made it condition that they should become Christians. And thus it was that they were firmly established as a Duchy under a Duke (dux, or leader) at the date of their conquest of England in 1066.

Descendants of Charlemagne continued to sit on the throne of France until near the end of the tenth century, when one Hugh Capet, a great noble, was elected by his fellow-nobles as king. Note that; that it was by an election of the feudal lords, not because he had a hereditary right—that is, a right by birth—to the throne, that he became king. And how long that dynasty of the Capetian kings, as they are called, lasted in France you may realise from the fact, which you most likely will remember, that the king who was guillotined during the French revolution was called "Louis Capet" by those revolutionists who proclaimed that all men were equal and that titles of all kinds were to be done away.

This first elected Capet king, however, had no more power over those who had elected him than the kings who had descended from Charlemagne. But the Capetians kept the kingdom in their family, as we have seen, all down the ages. Still, it was not until nearly two hundred years later than the election of Hugh Capet that any of his descendants began to have really great power. About that date, that is to say towards the end of the twelfth century, or a little before 1200, the king succeeded in making his power over the nobles very much more effective, and therewith the last days of the feudal system came to an end. It passed away to give place to what is known as the "absolute monarchy"—government by a king who was able to do anything that he chose, without check of any kind.

In the meantime the Carolingian kings (descendants of Carolus Magnus, Charles the Great, or Charlemagne) went out of the story, and the Capetians came into it, in the midst of perpetual disorder and fights among the feudal lords. Each duke, in his duchy, each count in his county, was a little independent king. It seems a wonder that the whole government of Europe did not fall apart and dissolve into these independent governments of the big lords in the different places, each governing according to his own ideas. It seems a wonder, and it really is a thing to wonder at. It seems to suggest that there was some power at work through it all, some one power, powerful everywhere, which kept things together and in some sort of unity and order—kept the same ideas of government and justice and so on underlying all the differences.

The power of the Church

It seems as if there must have been some such power, for how else can we account for the fact that the society of the world did not fall all to pieces? And we know, as a fact, that there was such a power, penetrating everywhere: it was power emanating, as at the time of the Roman Empire, from Rome itself. But now it was not the power of a government with strong military forces, splendidly organised. It was the power of the Christian Church, of which Rome, with its bishop who was called the Pope, was the centre and headquarters for all the Western world.

It seems all the more wonderful that the Pope of Rome should have been able to make his power so widely felt, when we see what constant difficulties he had to encounter in the government of Rome itself. It is evident that Charlemagne himself, even at the height of his Empire, deemed that his authority would be increased if he had the Pope on his side. That is shown by his consecration at Rome, of which we have spoken before. And there is no doubt that the Pope too was very glad to have the Emperor on his side, to help him.

At the same time there was another aspect to the story, for the Pope was continually trying to make himself, as the governor of Rome, independent of the Emperor. Yet, if he became so independent as to be without the Emperor's help, he had scarcely sufficient force at his command to oppose two other parties in Rome who were always striving for power, the nobles and the populace. A proof of this weakness of the Pope's is that on the break-up of the Empire of Charlemagne the Pope at once found himself in difficulties with these other parties in the city and its vicinity. He was able to assume to himself much of the power that had been wielded by the Emperor; but, being now without the help of the Empire, he was without defence against the nobles, who at once obtained greater power.

And, further, there were enemies without, as well as within. The Saracens at this time, that is to say in the first half of the tenth century, were in Sicily and Southern Italy and pressed up from the south, while again, as long before, tribes of the Huns threatened from the north. Both dangers were repelled, by the arms of the "barbarians" far more than by the arms of Rome, and almost at the end of this tenth century we find a "barbarian," a German, elected as Pope of Rome.

Yet, in spite of all these difficulties, and while from one moment to another the very existence of the Pope's rule in Rome, the central city of the Christian Church, seems to have been in danger, the power which went out from that centre reached far and was efficient. Europe, under the feudal system, was very disturbed, maybe, very full of fighting, but it was deeply religious. Partly it was because men were so lawless and committed so many sins that they submitted themselves so humbly to the commands and advice of the priests. They had very many sins to repent of. The Church and its priests taught that remission or absolution of sins might be gained by gifts made by the sinners to the Church. Thus a great lord or a king, to expiate his evil deeds, might build a cathedral or an abbey or give extensive grants of land to the Church. Thus the Church grew rich.

The Holy City

But the Church also taught that forgiveness for sins might be gained by doing penance, that is to say by punishment and suffering; and one of the forms of this punishment which the Church advised as most efficacious was to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Holy City. That is a fact of which it is worth your while to make a special note in your minds, because it was out of this habit of pilgrims going to Jerusalem for the good of their souls that those great expeditions called the Crusades came to be made.

Among the many good things for which the Christian Church was working was peace. It was working for peace in a world that was at constant war, in spite of the Church's efforts. It may seem a strange thing to say, that the Crusades were partly due to the Church's wish for peace, but it is probably true that part of the reason why the Church gave them its blessing was they were a means by which Christian soldiers, instead of fighting against each other, might be united in fighting against non-Christians, against Mahommedans.

This is one reason which might have led the Church to favour the Crusades. Another was that it seemed a dreadful thing that a city so sacred as Jerusalem should be in the hands of the Saracens. Naturally the Church favoured the attempt to recover the Holy Places by the Christian powers.

Yet a third reason which brought about the first of the many Crusades was that the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, in Constantinople, was being hard pressed at the moment by the Mahommedans in Asia Minor, and made a request to the Christians in the West to come to his help. The Eastern Empire had suffered heavy losses. Not only had the Saracens taken possession of its old territories of Egypt and Africa, as well as Palestine and Syria and a large part of Asia Minor, but from the north had come raiders even to the very walls of Constantinople itself. A number of races from the north and east had taken part in these incursions—Huns, Tartars, Slavs, from the Carpathian Mountains. It is in the ninth century that we begin to hear of such a country as Russia, which was inhabited by all these races, and Russia already was beginning to stretch a hand down towards that Constantinople which she has hankered after ever since. Then that large and fertile land which is marked as Hungary in modern maps was already called by that name and had been lost to the Emperor at Constantinople. His was, in fact, an Empire restricted to a comparatively small western slice of Asia Minor, to some of the islands and to the fringes, along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, of all that it had once claimed in Greece and in what we know as Turkey in Europe. The aggression which the Emperor especially dreaded when, he summoned the West to help him was aggression by the Turks, who had by this time established themselves as the chief Mahommedan power in the East.

The Turks, a people of the same kin as those Tartars who formed part of the mixed population of Russia, had come down from the east and north and settled themselves in force in the eastern part of Asia Minor. It would seem that they were a tougher and a rougher race than the Arabians, whose religion they had adopted. But the fact that they had accepted the religion founded by the Arabian Mahomet, did not save the Arabs from the attacks of these invading Turks, who dispossessed them of all their conquests in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Further westward it was chiefly a race of African natives, who had adopted the religion of Mahomet, with but a small contingent of any Arabian people, that conquered Spain and had its capital city at Cordova, in that country. And a little later in the story another Mahommedan African tribe, closely akin to the conquerors of Spain, seized and kept a long slice of that southern shore of the Mediterranean as far east as the Egyptian boundary.

It is the more necessary to make a note of these divisions, because it seems to have been the way of the Crusaders and of all Christian people of that time to group together all Mahommedans, no matter of what race they were, under the common name of Saracen, which originally was applied to one tribe only of the Arabian nation. By the end of the eleventh century, when the first Crusaders went to the Holy Land, the hold of the Moors in Spain was neither as firm nor nearly as extensive as it had been. The country was divided between Christian and Moslem, the Moslem still possessing the southern part, nearer that Africa whence he had come. The fighting was continual, with results that gave now one side and now the other the advantage, but it inclined, on the whole, to favour the Christians. This was the time to which belong the splendid stories about the Cid Campeador and many other great Spanish and Christian heroes.

But while, in the West, the Christian was thus forcing the African Saracen gradually to loosen his grip on Spain, in the East the Turkish Saracen was pressing the Christian so hard as to cause the ruler of Constantinople, though still claiming the title of Eastern Emperor, to send a prayer to all Christians to come to his aid.

Plague in Europe

The conditions of the people in most parts of Europe was probably more miserable about this date, that is to say about 1100, than ever before or since. Besides the misery caused by the perpetual fighting, there was disease, in the form of a plague, which killed large numbers; and a very bad season for farming had brought great scarcity of food. Therefore when the call went forth for volunteers to help the Christians of the East and to regain the Holy Places from the infidel, very many were ready to respond to the summons. The Crusade was preached first by a religious zealot called Peter the Hermit, and attracted the poor people who were so wretched in Europe that any change must have seemed likely to be for the better health of their bodies, quite apart from the saving of their souls. This call of the Hermit's seems to have been the summons of a man full of zeal, but of little wisdom. Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Empire, whence the prayer for help had come, was named as the place in which the Crusaders were to collect for the attack on Palestine. Thither Peter the Hermit led his followers; but very few survived even to reach that city. On the way across Hungary wild tribes set upon them and destroyed a great number. So that poor effort came to nothing, as it was certain that it must from the way in which it was undertaken.

But in the meantime a more orderly movement had been started, with a great Churchman, acting as the Pope's legate, at its head. So it had the Pope's blessing, and many of the great feudal lords were its leaders. There were lords of Italy, of France, of Germany, and we may note especially that there were lords of Normandy.

War for the Cross

The Northmen had not stopped, in their sea-borne incursions, at England and the northern coasts of France. They had established themselves in parts of Spain, they had come through the Straits of Gibraltar, they had ousted, or had greatly helped in ousting, the Saracens who had taken possession of Sicily and of the south of Italy. They had set themselves up as rulers of that Italian south, with Naples as their capital. Thus enterprising, and ever further pushing, were these people from the north.

So these, too, took a part, and a leading part, in the great war for the Cross. Crusade is from the French croissade, which is from croix, a cross. You may have seen figures on tombs in churches, of knights in armour with one leg crossed over the other. This distinction of the crossed legs is only given to the figures of knights who had taken part in one or other of the Crusades.

A CRUSADER.
A CRUSADER.

The outcome of this difference of opinion seems to have been that the leaders of the Crusade did homage, reluctantly, to the Emperor, but perhaps they had the thought in the back of their minds, as they did it, that it was an oath which they might break. However that may be, when the time came to fulfil their vow—for they won a quick and easy success over the Turks in Asia Minor and Syria—they did not give up Palestine and the Holy Places to the Emperor. A portion of Asia Minor which they regained from the Saracens was handed over to the Emperor, but as for Palestine itself, that was taken, and it was retained, by the Crusaders; and the chief result of that first and most successful of the Crusades was that a Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem was set up, and was maintained for nearly a century—from 1097 to 1187. The name of Kingdom of Jerusalem and the title of king endured for many years more, but the kingdom then consisted of no more than a strip of the coast-line of the Levant and did not include the city of Jerusalem at all.

But though the Christians were able to hold this new kingdom in the East for nearly a hundred years, it was within less than fifty that the very important frontier city of the Eastern Empire, Edessa, in Asia Minor, was taken by the Saracens. The Emperor at once sent out another appeal to the West, and this appeal became the occasion of the second Crusade, undertaken in 1146.

It began with even brighter promise than the first; for whereas knights were the leaders of the former, two kings, the King of France and the King of Germany, put themselves, in person, at the head of the second. But in spite of the fair promise the main result was failure. It was the occasion of some successful enterprises by the way; and we may note that whereas the first Crusade had been almost entirely French and Norman, English, as well as Germans, took part in the latter. Also, whereas the route taken by the first had been entirely overland, through Hungary, some of the second Crusaders, from England and Flanders, made their way to the East by sea.

In course of that sea voyage some of the soldiers of the Cross, landing up the Tagus from their ships, took the city of Lisbon from the Moors, and this capture was the beginning of the little kingdom of Portugal. Thence the force went upon its voyage eastward.

The Wends

In the north of Germany some of the forces assembled for the Crusade never went very far from home. They seem to have received the permission of the Pope to fight against a tribe, called Wends, on their eastern frontier, instead of against the Saracens; and seeing that these Wends were heathen, this might perhaps be regarded in the light of a Holy War no less than that in Asia Minor.

It is possible to state very shortly the achievements of the forces that did get to the East—they achieved nothing at all. The two kings seem to have been jealous of each other. They acted separately, with no joint action, and were defeated in turn. They returned home with no glory, and left the Kingdom of Jerusalem in a worse plight than before, just because of their failure, after such preparations and expectations. The Saracen might well think that if this was all that the West, under its two greatest kings, could do, they need not be much afraid.

Therefore they pressed continually closer and closer about the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Christians held their own, with a success that is rather surprising, until the reign of the great Saladin. Until his reign the Saracens in Asia Minor and in the country east of the Jordan had not acted in unison with the Saracens in Egypt. Saladin brought all together; so that now the situation of this Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was even worse than we saw the position of Palestine to be in the very early days of the great story. Then it had lain between the two powerful empires of Egypt and Babylonia. Now it was lying like an island in the midst of a sea of enemies all fighting, not against each other, but united to fight against it.

And then this Jerusalem, taken from the Saracens in 1099, was by them retaken in 1187.

We may be sure that the Christians in the East could not possibly have held their own against the Saracens, as they did during these years, if they had not been constantly receiving reinforcements from the West. History speaks to us of certain definite dates for the first, second, third Crusades, and so on, but we also have to imagine a continual going to and from the East of knights with larger or smaller followings. In this way the strength of the garrisons in the kingdom were maintained, and in this way happened that continual bringing of Eastern ideas to the West, which was really of more importance in the making of this greatest of all stories than any of the victories won or cities taken.

CHAPTER XVI

THE SLAVS IN EASTERN EUROPE

Thus I have tried to give a picture in outline—a cinematograph, or moving picture—of the world after the break up of Charlemagne's Empire. We see the Turks pressing up against the Eastern Empire in Asia Minor, with the result that the Emperor appeals to the West, and that the first Crusade establishes, for nearly a hundred years, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. African Mahommedans have possession of the strip of North Africa running from Egypt—Egypt itself being held by the Turks—till they meet another Mahommedan African people which has possession of the southern part of Spain. That same power had the whole of the Spanish peninsula in its grip a little earlier, but its own divisions, of Arabs, Africans, and Syrians, made it weak, and it was broken as soon as it came against any organised force. Then in Italy we see that the Pope, aided by the Emperors and giving them the aid of the growing power of the Church in return, is on the whole establishing his temporal power in Rome more and more firmly. In the south of Italy and in Sicily the enterprising Normans drive out the Saracens and take possession. Northward, the great territory which, together with Italy, had been Charlemagne's, has been split into the two large divisions, the kingdoms of France and of Germany. But in these so-called kingdoms the king was at this time only a little more powerful than his lords, the barons and big landowners. The feudal system prevailed, and the king was constantly engaged with the hard task of keeping his feudal lords in order. It was disorder, rather than order, that was the rule all over the unhappy world. England fared a little better, thanks to the Channel which cut it off and made its conditions different from those of the Continent. But now it has been conquered by the Norman, and we have to see how that conquest had the result, for a very long while, of counteracting the effect of the Channel as a separating barrier. England was soon caught up into the continental turmoil.

We have to see how that came to pass. But there is still one side or corner of the picture which we have left rather blank, and we had best get that corner filled before we come to consider the part that England played in the continental trouble. It is that corner which is occupied by the large stretch of territory on the eastern fringe of Charlemagne's Empire, from the southern shores of the Baltic right down to Constantinople and the boundaries of the Eastern Empire.

You may have noticed that in the accounts of the Crusades—the first and the second, which are all that have come into our story as yet—I mentioned two names which had not appeared before, Hungary and the Wends. The first was the name of a country through which the Crusaders went to reach Constantinople; the second was the name of a heathen tribe against which certain of the knights who had been enrolled for the second Crusade obtained the sanction of the Pope to go, instead of against the Saracen.

These Wends were a tribe or branch of a race that appears to have increased in numbers very rapidly and, from a small territory to the north of the Carpathian mountains, to have spread over all that large tract just described from the Baltic to the neighbourhood of Constantinople. It was a race of people called Slavs, and even to-day it is thought to number more than any other of the races of man. It is not the first time that it has been mentioned in this greatest of all stories. We saw, in the first volume, that a large number of the serfs under the Roman Empire, especially in the East, were of this people. So large were their numbers that it is from their Latin name servus that we get our word "slave," which we use as a translation of servus. These Slavonic "serfs" were members of the Slav race who had been taken prisoners in battle.

Military knights

The Slavonic people from the East were constantly, as their numbers grew, and perhaps as they too were pressed by Huns and Mongolians from further East again, pressing in upon the Gothic, the Germanic tribes; and now it was against one of the Slav tribes, these Wends, that the knights of Northern Germany received leave to go on Crusade. They took to themselves the name of Knights of the Sword.

A KNIGHT TEMPLAR.
A KNIGHT TEMPLAR.

Just at this moment, then, these Knights of the Sword, who were afterwards amalgamated with the Knights of the Teutonic Order, went, not against the Saracen but against the Wends. Now Wends was the name that the Germans gave to all the Slavs, from this one tribe of the Slavs which was called Wends. In like manner the name of Teutons was, and sometimes still is, given to all Germans and even to all peoples derived from the Gothic tribes, though originally it was the name of one only of these tribes. And so now, with these Teutons and Slavs thus opposing and thrusting at each other, we come into touch with one of the great world struggles that has been going on ever since, and was one of the causes of the Great War—the opposition of Teuton and Slav. It is the opposition of German and Russian, for most of the great population of Russia is Slavonic—that is, made up of Slavs—and Russia became the name of most of the immense territory occupied by the Slavs. It is said that the name of Russia had its origin in three great leaders of men who came from a province called Rus, in Sweden. If that be so, it appears that they again were some of those masterful Northmen, or Normans, whom we have seen taking the lead whenever they came in any number.

Men of Rus

The name of the country may have come from these men of Rus. That is one story. But it is perhaps doubtful whether it may not be rather from "rothsmen," meaning "oarsmen," that is "seafarers"; which is a name likely to be given to any of those northern sea-rovers. It is not often easy to know whether this or the other body of sea-faring Northmen came from Sweden or Norway or Denmark; for these lands were at different times united under one government, or under two, or, again, separated, and each with its own government; and for a time, as at the very moment when Canute was King of England, Denmark was united with the others and was the ruler in the union.

But there seems to be general agreement among historians that either the men of Rus, or the people called Rothsmen, who became rulers of Russia and gave the country its name, came from Sweden.

The Slavs, however, occupied territory outside what came to be called Russia. The Kingdom of Poland was theirs; and it is chiefly by their descendants that those various countries designated to-day by the name of the "Balkan States" are peopled. So the Slavs held a vast country reaching from the Baltic almost down to the Mediterranean along the Eastern boundary of the Western Empire.

But even as early as the sixth century there was a large slice cut out of this Slavonic territory, formed of that land which is now called Hungary. The first conquerors, who thus thrust in and divided the Slavs of the south from those in the north, were a people called Avars, and they, with a certain force of the Huns, together gave to the country the name of Hungary. In the next century we find that the Germans are turning against the Avars, and that Hungary itself is included in the Empire of Charlemagne. But after Charlemagne's death, when his great possessions fell into hands less able to hold them, Hungary is yet again invaded and conquered by a people from the north-east, called Magyars, and what makes that conquest so notable for us is that the Magyars are the dominating race in Hungary to-day. On every side, and in every corner, of the world picture, in fact, we are now beginning to see States and kingdoms and populations settling down into the places and conditions in which we are able to recognise them as we look at a modern map.

These Magyars, then, a people allied to the Finns, of Finland, and coming from the east of the Ural mountains, conquered Hungary towards the close of the ninth century, and have been there ever since. They were pagans, but in the eleventh century they became Christians, and members of the Church of Rome. That is a point to notice, that they joined the Church of which the Pope was the head. The Slavs, that is to say all the peoples to the east of Germany, with the exception of the Magyars, as they accepted Christianity became members of the Greek Church, which had its chief bishop, called the Patriarch, in Constantinople, the capital city of the Eastern Empire.

And now, under the Western Empire, had come into power and been raised to the importance of a duchy the State called Austria. Austria means "Eastern." It was the eastern "mark," that is to say "march" or "boundary," of the Empire. It "marched with," that is, was next to, Hungary and some of the Slav country, and was therefore a kind of fortress State against the enemies of Germany. Thus its importance grew. It had its ancient city, now called Vienna, on the great river, the Danube, which brought much trade and commerce into the land. The valley of the Danube, moreover, was, as you may easily understand by looking at the map of Europe, the route which folk would be likely to follow between the centre of Germany and Constantinople, which was the meeting-place for the Crusaders.

Therefore you may now see how it was that Hungary had to be named as the country through which the Crusaders went, and also you may see how there come into the story the Wends (often an alternative name, as used by the Germans, for the Slavs) against whom went those Knights of the Sword who were at first enrolled with the idea that they should go to the Holy Places in Palestine.

CHAPTER XVII

NORMANS AND ANGEVINS

The Normans who conquered England were far more different from the English whom they conquered than the Danes, under Canute, had been. And yet Danes and Normans, both being "Northmen," were closely akin. But we have to note that the conquering Normans came, not from the north, but from the south from Normandy; and some years of residence there, among the Franks or French, had changed them. Moreover, we have to remember that, according to the estimates of historians, only about one-third of the force with which Duke William came to England was really Norman. The larger part was of Franks and any others whom the adventure attracted or whom William had hired to aid him.

The conquest must have made very much more difference to the upper classes of the English people than to the lower. Many lords were killed at that Battle of Hastings which decided England's fate. In their places the conqueror put his own barons and army leaders, thus rewarding them, at no expense to himself, for their services. Norman lords soon superseded English lords throughout the land, but the peasants, and also the townsfolk, would go on with their lives much as before. The English system was not, as we have seen, so different from the completely feudal system of France that the lower vassals would know much difference in the change from one to the other. The English regarded the land as belonging in the first instance to the people; the Normans regarded it as belonging to the king. But in the practical result this different point of view did not count for much, because the English had already lost all the land rights which had once been valuable to them. We traced the way in which that happened a chapter or two back.

It is curious to note how the Norman influence made itself felt indoors, within the house, more than out-of-doors. The simpler things, which all would use, kept their old names, the Saxon names. It is the words denoting things belonging to the more cultured life that come from the Norman. Thus sheep, oxen, deer, are Saxon names of the animals which the English would use or hunt; but when these creatures are cooked and brought to table they appear there under the French names of mouton or mutton, bœuf or beef, and venaison or venison.

Game laws

Mention of the deer and the venison suggests one particular in which the Norman Conquest probably did restrict the peasants' rights. There is evidence to show that the Normans were not the inventors of those game laws which forbade, under cruel penalties, any hunting in the woodlands. It is certain that this was no new thing of Norman invention, because there are the Forest Laws, as they are called, that is to say, laws for the preservation of the game and the timber, as early as the Saxon Heptarchy. There is also a code of very cruel game laws attributed to Canute. It has been suggested that this code was a forgery invented by the Norman kings to excuse the severity of their game laws. What seems perhaps most probable is that there were severe laws in existence before the Normans came, but that the Normans were the first to apply the laws very strictly. The statements about the numbers of villages and cultivated fields that William Rufus destroyed in order to make himself a hunting estate in the New Forest are almost certainly exaggerated misstatements. We must remember that all the earliest records that we have were written by monks or other clerics. Now the Church was often at variance with the lay authority and with the authority of the king. It was constantly trying to get more and more power into its own hands. Therefore all the stories are likely to have been written in a spirit antagonistic to the laity and in favour of the Church and all the Church's interests.

Just to show you the character of the game laws in those days and also to show how the law imposed different penalties on different classes, I will cite one or two sections from the code attributed to Canute.

"23. If any free or unfree man shall kill any beast of the Forest, he shall for the first pay double (i.e. double of ten shillings), for the second as much, and the third time shall forfeit as much as he is worth to the King.

"24. But if either of them by coursing or hunting shall force a royal beast (which the English call a staggon) to pant and be out of breath, the freeman shall lose his natural liberty for one year, the other his for two years; but if a bondman do the like, he shall be reckoned for an outlaw (what the English call a friendless man).

"25. But if any of them shall kill such a royal beast, the freeman shall lose his freedom, the other his liberty, and the bondman his life."

Human life and liberty were cheap, but the value of the King's deer was high.

I have said that England, by reason of the Norman Conquest, was caught up into the political affairs of the Continent. This was not merely because Normandy was a part of that Continent. It was chiefly because of the relationship or connection by marriage of the ruler of Normandy, who had now become the ruler of England also, with the ruler of another part of that country which we now call France—that is, of Anjou. In order to understand how this happened, we have to get these troublesome relationships into our mind.

A NORMAN HOUSEHOLD. (A banquet is in progress upstairs.) (From Wright's <i>Homes of Other Days</i>.)
A NORMAN HOUSEHOLD.
(A banquet is in progress upstairs.)
(From Wright's Homes of Other Days.)

William I. of Normandy and England was succeeded by William II., Rufus, who was shot by an arrow while hunting in the New Forest. The elder son of Rufus, by name Robert, was far away. He had gone on the first Crusade. Henry, the younger son, seized the English throne, and married an English wife. They had no son, but they had a daughter named Matilda. This Matilda then, on the death of her father Henry I., had this clear and distinct claim to the throne of England.

The Crown of England

But there was also in the world, and ready to take a crown if he could get one, a certain Stephen, who was the son of a daughter of William the Conqueror. Stephen therefore, as the Conqueror's grandson, had a claim to the throne.

The barons of England seem to have given their support now to one and now to the other of these two claimants, bringing their forces to the help of the side which, at the moment, was getting the worse of the struggle. Their idea seems to have been to keep the trouble going in order to make their own power greater.

At length the whole country wearied of the fighting, and a peace was made on the following terms: that Stephen should have the Crown during his life, and that at his death it should go to the son of Matilda. This son's name was Henry, and he did, in due course, succeed to the Crown, on Stephen's death, as Henry II.

Now, notice whom Matilda, his mother, had married. She had married first the Emperor, Henry V., and secondly, the Count of Anjou. Her son Henry inherited Anjou from her, and married Eleanor, who was heiress of Aquitaine and Poitou, in the south of France, and was the divorced wife of the King of France. By his marriage, therefore, Henry became lord of Aquitaine. Then King Stephen died, and this same Henry, our Henry II., had England, Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine. That is to say his possessions on the Continent were more extensive than his English inheritance and also were more extensive than the lands of the King of France himself.

Thus was England taken up, as we may say, into the continental system and became a part of it. She became an actor in the struggles which such a situation as this was evidently sure to cause between the King of England, with all these French possessions, and the King of France. It was a contest between the Capets, the Capetian Kings of France, and the Angevins, the kings of England who had that name from the important lordship of Anjou, which belonged to them; and the contest continued from the middle of the twelfth century almost to the middle of the thirteenth—say from 1150 to 1240. In the course of that struggle a very remarkable, and a very remarkably different, change took place in France and in England in the power of the kings of the two countries over their barons.

In France the king gradually gained in power until, in the long reign of Philip Augustus, which stretched over the last twenty years of the twelfth century and the first twenty-three of the thirteenth, the king became all-powerful.

In England, on the contrary, where the king had been not nearly so much in the hands of the barons as the early Capetian kings of France had been, the barons gained more and more power until, in 1215, we find King John compelled by his barons to allow his seal to be affixed to Magna Carta. This charter gave Englishmen the beginnings of their liberty at the very time when the King of France was effectually establishing the autocratic power of the Crown over all French subjects.

Henry II., although his kingdom was so extensive in England and on the Continent, expanded it yet more widely by a complete and effective conquest of Ireland, and also by receiving homage from the King of Scotland, whom his armies had defeated at Alnwick and made prisoner.

We have seen very little of Scotland in the course of the great story, and little of Ireland since we saw the priests of the Irish Church coming westward and converting the heathen to Christianity. Scotland had for centuries, from the time of the Romans in Britain and probably long before that, been a troublesome neighbour to England on the north boundary. We have seen that boundary shifted once or twice as the forces on one side or on the other prevailed. But Scotland, in her attacks upon England, never succeeded in penetrating very far south, and therefore did not take any very important part, at that time, in the making of the story. And now Henry had the Scottish king prisoner and doing homage to him. That homage gave the King of England the position of feudal lord over the King of Scotland. But feudal vassals, as we have seen, were not always quite subservient to their lords. The Scottish kings were no exception, and they acted very much as if they were no less independent than before.

Ireland

But the conquest of Ireland was different, and complete. Ireland, lying out in the western sea, had escaped the incursions of the Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans that had fallen upon England. Sea-rovers had constantly harried her coasts, as they harried every coast within reach of their sails and oars, and made some settlements there; but the island as a whole had not been overrun by any invaders since the coming of the Celts.

In Ireland, thus cut off from the rest of the world, the Church went its own way in less dependence on the Pope at Rome than, any other in all the Western world. In the Eastern Empire and in all the vast territories of the Slavs the Patriarch at Constantinople was looked up to as the head of what came, in later days, to be known as the Greek Church. It conducted its services rather differently from the Roman Church, and there were some differences in the doctrines of the two. The Church of Constantinople was too strong for the Church of Rome to prevail against it in the East, but Rome claimed universal spiritual authority in the West.

The Pope, moreover, by virtue of a before-mentioned deed signed by Constantine, and called the Donation, or gift, of Constantine, was reputed to have authority over all islands. It did not matter that this famous Donation, or the deed by which it was supposed to be instituted, was strongly suspected to be a forgery, nor did it matter that even if it really were drawn up by Constantine and signed by him, his right to give away authority over "islands" was not quite clear, although he were the emperor of the world. No matter. This gift of "islands," though the document, or deed, was doubtful, was destined to play an important part in the world's story when that story began to be concerned with the discoveries of new continents and islands.

For the moment it served to authorise the Pope to give our Henry II. a mandate to conquer Ireland, and to bring its Church into subservience to Rome. The Pope was Adrian IV., the first, and the only, Englishman who ever held that highest spiritual honour. His behests were willingly and easily obeyed. Ireland, divided between several local chieftains, or kings, did not resist Henry's armies long; and so became subjugated to England. And by thus bringing Ireland into the fold of the Church Henry made some atonement to Rome for that infamous murder, in Canterbury Cathedral, of the Archbishop Thomas, sometimes called à Becket, which was done by some of his knights who thought to give him pleasure by its doing, even if he had not directly bidden it.

The differences between Henry and his archbishop had risen out of that question of "investitures," that is of who should have the appointments to the high offices in the Church (whether those appointments should be made by the Crown or should be kept in the hands of the clerical party), which was the cause of much trouble, and actual fighting, in many lands. The solution of the trouble, as has been noted already, was found in the arrangement that the Church should appoint its own officials for all spiritual offices, but that for its earthly possessions it should do homage to the sovereign of the country in which they lay. The appointment of the Pope himself was put into the hands of a College of Cardinals: that is, of high Church officials.

Cœur-de-Lion

Henry's successor on the English throne was his eldest surviving son Richard, surnamed Cœur-de-Lion for his gallantry in war.

We have come now to the years of which the great story has been told to us in very picturesque language. It seems to be an age of heroes, and of heroes inspired by the highest motives. It is the time of that third Crusade in which the kings of England and of France combined with the emperor to try to win back Jerusalem from Saladin, that great Moslem ruler who held Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the Mediterranean shore of Africa nearly as far west as Tunis. Westward again African Moslems held the southern half of Spain. There were gallant actions to be performed on behalf of the Cross both in East and West.

It was the age of those wandering minstrels the troubadours of the Langue d'oc in the south of France, the trouvères of the Langue d'oil in the north of France, the singers of the Lingua di si in Italy. Each of those was so called from the word used by the people of the locality for our English word: "yes." In the "oil" we have the origin of the modern French "oui." In England we have seen that there were wandering minstrels. In Germany there were the same, by the name of Minnesingers.

These Romance languages, as they were called, of the Langue d'oil and the Langue d'oc, were the result of the mixture, in the different localities, of the Gothic, or German language with the Roman, the Latin. The trouvères of Northern France, like the minnesingers and the English minstrels, were singers or reciters of stories. Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel" may give us an idea of the tales that they recited. But, at this moment of our story, say the end of the twelfth century, we are in the midst of the age of chivalry, as it is called. It was the age when the knight thought it right to devote all his services to some lady of his love whose colours—probably a knot of ribbon which she had worn—he carried conspicuously. It was the age of tournaments, which were encounters between mounted and heavily armed knights held before some great lord's castle. It was an age too of constant fighting, some of which was in the sacred name of the Cross against that Crescent which was the badge and the sign of the Saracens. So these rhymesters had plenty of stories for their telling.

There was a whole series of tales about the Court of King Arthur in Britain, some of which Tennyson has put for us into modern verse in his "Idylls of the King." There was a series, too, about the Court of Charlemagne and his paladins, as his knights were called. Many, indeed most, of the stories, which may have had some historical and real incident underlying them, were so overlaid with invention that it is quite impossible to tell where truth leaves off and fiction begins. The knights are of quite incredible stature and strength, and the feats they perform are far too good and great to be true.

A JOUST BETWEEN KNIGHTS IN THE LISTS
A JOUST BETWEEN KNIGHTS IN THE LISTS

We ask ourselves, then, seeing that we cannot accept these stories as true in all their detail, whether or no they are so far true that they do give us an accurate idea of what life was like in those days: whether knights-errant—that is to say, knights "erring" or wandering—really did go about, as they are represented to us, seeking adventures.

Certainly many of the adventures of which the stories tell us cannot be believed. The knights slay for us such creatures of fairy-tale as dragons and the like. But still there is no reason why something of the kind may not have been true. We have to imagine a country thinly populated and cultivated only in parts. We have to remember, too, that these knights, and their horses also, were covered with armour, so that no weapons of the villeins or men of low degree could hurt them much. Moreover, the reputation of the knights made them very bold against the men of less degree, and made those men of humbler class the more timid and humble. Therefore it is not altogether beyond belief that there may have been much of this going about from castle to castle by wandering knights in armour, and the wastes and woodlands were wild places, where wild beasts and yet wilder outlawed men might be met with. The tales of the minstrels had some foundation; but it is probable that what they were interested in was not so much to tell their audience true stories, as to tell them stories which should amuse them and thrill them.

That is the kind of story that the singers of England, Germany, and Northern France told; but the singers of the south of France, the troubadours of the Langue d'oc, were not so much singers or tellers of stories, as singers of love songs. They could sing hymns of hate, too, against those whom they disliked, and this gave several of them much power. Some were of high rank. They went from castle to castle, providing entertainment in return for the amusement and delight which their verses gave. Remember that the castles were poorly lighted, after dark, that there were few books and few people able to read what books there were, and you may realise that the troubadour would be very welcome.

Troubadours, etc.

"Troubadour" and "trouvère" are both from the French root which we still see in French "trouver," "to find." They were finders or inventors of songs and stories. With them, in their company sometimes, travelled a lower class of musician and entertainer, who did conjuring tricks, played antics, as well as performing on musical instruments. He was called a "joglar," or "jocular," a joking person. Our modern form of the word is "juggler."

With these shows and performances of the minstrels and the juggler, and with dancing, wrestling, and cruel sport like bear-baiting and cock-fighting, the people passed their leisure.

RICHARD CŒUR-DE-LION'S PRISON AT TRIEFELS, RHENISH BAVARIA.
RICHARD CŒUR-DE-LION'S PRISON AT TRIEFELS,
RHENISH BAVARIA.

Now our King Richard, of the lion-heart, was reckoned as a troubadour. He was a verse maker and a singer. That Crusade on which he went with the King of France had a certain measure of success. It did not gain back Jerusalem from Saladin; but it did win towns on the coasts of Palestine, and it ended in an arrangement with Saladin that the Christians should retain these coast towns and that Christian peaceful pilgrims should be allowed to go to Jerusalem without being ill-treated.