THE present edition contains a considerable amount of fresh matter form Salimbene’s chronicle, omitted from the first mainly for the insufficient reason that I had already published it elsewhere. The notes and appendices have been even more extended, especially on points where different critics seemed to think the evidence inadequate.
Apart from the more obvious advantage of a second edition, an author must always welcome the further opportunity of explaining himself; especially when he has struck for a definite case and provoked hard knocks in return. To most of my reviewers I owe hearty thanks, and certainly not least to a Guardian critic, whose evident disagreement with me on important points did not prevent him from giving me credit for an honest attempt to describe the facts as they appeared to one pair of eyes. In that recognition an author finds his real reward: after all, even Goethe was content to say, “I can promise to be sincere, but not to be impartial.”* Genuine impartiality is one of the rarest virtues, though there have always been plenty of authors who shirk thorny questions, or who concede points to the weaker side with the cheap generosity which impels a jury to find for a needy plaintiff against a rich man. Never, perhaps, was this kind of impartiality so common as at present, when (to quote a recent witty writer) “the fashion is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an agnostic conscience; you get the medieval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.” Even the Editors of the Cambridge Modern History, fearing more the [viii] suspicion of partiality than the certainty of an error, have allowed two contributors to contradict each other almost categorically, within a few pages, on one of the most important points in the first volume.* Direct references to authorities are forbidden by the plans of the History: there is, of course, nothing to warn the ordinary reader how far one of the two contributors surpasses the other in originality and depth of research; and it is practically left to him to accept whichever of the two statements fits in best with his preconceived opinions. We cannot imagine a great co-operative work on Natural Science written nowadays on these principles; and this alone would go far to account for the present unjust neglect of history by readers of an exact turn of mind. Yet there is a further reason also; for to shirk disputed questions is to neglect matters of the deepest interest: an the elaborate dulness of many official histories is a libel on the many-coloured web of human life.
Eleven years ago, finding it impossible to get from the accredited text-books satisfactory information on points which I had long studied in a desultory way, I began systematic work for myself within a narrow area, and soon found how little the original documents are really studied, and how much one historian is content to take at second-hand from another. In cases like this, anything that can be done to sweep away ancient cobwebs is a real gain. I knew that I should make mistakes, as even officialism is far from infallible, and we have recently seen reviewer fill three and a half quarto columns with the slips made by one of our most dignified professors in a single octavo volume. I knew also that, however correct my facts, the very effort to expose widely-accredited fallacies would gave a certain want of perspective to my work. But, without for a moment supposing that this book would by itself given anything like a complete picture of medieval life, I yet believed that our forefathers’ “common [ix] thoughts about common things” would never really become intelligible without informed and frankly personal studies of the kind; and the public reception has now strengthened this belief.
I have, however, departed even more from official usage in another matter — the direct criticism of many misstatements which have gained currency by reaction from the equally one-sided Protestantism of a century ago, more especially through the writings of Abbot Gasquet. While it is to the direct interest of all Roman Catholic clergy, and of many High Churchmen, to misread certain facts of history, there are comparatively few who have the same official excuse for equal vigilance and persistence on the other side. The extreme dread of partiality, into which modern literature has swung from the still worse extreme of blind partisanship, restrains first-rate historians form speaking with sufficient plainness, even in the few cases where they have found time to convince themselves, by carefully verifying his references, of an author’s inaccuracy. So long, therefore, as the most authoritative writers salve their consciences by merely describing certain books as able pleas from the roman Catholic point of view, the public will never grasp what this indulgent phrase really means. Moreover, the euphemism itself would seem to imply a very low view both of history and of religion. No man of science would content himself with such equivocal language in the face of systematic distortions and suppressions of evidence, however personally respectable the literary offender might be. For it is absolutely necessary here to separate the personal and the literary questions as much as possible. The fact that an author is sincerely attached to a particular church, in which he also holds a high official position, is thoroughly honourable to him personally; but it aggravates the ill effect of his interested misstatements. Not charity, but cynicism underlies the plea which is constantly implied, if not expressed, that certain religious beliefs should be allowed wide licence in the treatment of historical
[x]
facts — that a writer’s public falsehoods may be considered an almost inseparable accident of his private creed, a superfetation of his excessive piety. No bitterer condemnation could be imagined than this contemptuous leniency which most men extend to a priest’s misstatement in the name of Christian Truth. Moreover, we all know Roman Catholics whose theory and practice alike contradict this plea. It was Lord Acton who said, after years of struggle against official distortions of history, “the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.” Nor did Lord Acton stand alone here: for cultivated laymen show an increasing repugnance to the crooked historical methods which are still only too popular in ecclesiastical circles; and certain apologists pay already to truth at least the unwilling homage of anonymity. Legends, which once stalked boldly abroad, are fain to lurk now in unsigned articles for the
I realise as clearly, perhaps, as some of my critics, how inadequate [xi] and unsatisfactory mere negative work must necessarily be. But, having once liberated my soul by plainly exposing the dislike felt by a certain school of historians and critics for the open discussion of actual medieval documents, I hope presently to pass on to a more constructive picture of social life in the past. Yet it may still be doubted whether any history of the Middle Ages can at present avoid controversy without falling into superficiality: and the blame of these conditions les partly with the want of proper organization at our universities, though there are recent signs of a real awakening. All history is a chain which may break at any point unless each link has been forged with separate care. We cannot understand our place I the modern world without comprehending the French Revolution and the Reformation: nor can we understand these without an accurate conception of the ancien regime which each replaced. For instance (to state the problem which the Cambridge History sometimes obscures), were the clergy, from whom the laity revolted four hundred years ago, such as would be tolerated by any civilized country of to-day? The question is far from insoluble; it may almost be said that judgment has already gone by default, since Dr. Lea’s Sacerdotal Celibacy has held the field for forty years. Certainly, if it were made worth their while, one or two able men could in a few years work through the evidence, and bring the public to the same rough agreement as has long been reached on many subjects once as contentious as this. Dozens of important questions similarly await a solution before any real history of medieval life can be written; and, in default of such organized study as we have long seen in physical science, most of this necessary foundation-work will continue to be done slowly and fitfully by volunteers, amateurs, and controversialists, while the universities are raising enormous monuments on the quicksands of our present uncertainties. The forthcoming Cambridge Medieval History cannot possibly come [xii] near to finality, even in the limited sense in which that word can ever be rightly used. Large numbers of vital documents are still unprinted: many even of the printed volumes are not yet digested, and generations of acute controversy are likely to elapse before a real historian of the Middle Ages could find such materials as Gibbon found ready to his hand. It is pathetic to see how much of professional historiography is still a mere pouring of ole wine into new bottles, and to think that Carlyle wrote half a century ago After interpreting the Geeks and Romans for a thousand years, let us now try our own a little. . . . How clear this has been to myself a long while! Not one soul, I believe, has yet taken it into him. Universities founded by “monk ages” are not fit at all for this age. . . . What all want to know is the condition of our fellow men; and, strange to say, it is the thing of all least understood, or to be understood as matters go.”* The condemnation of the universities is, of course, couched in terms of Carlylean exaggeration: but it can scarcely be denied that the official schools are still tempted — through official timidity, or natural laziness, or mere muddle — to neglect those questions of past history which are indeed most contentious, but which go nearest to the roots of human life.
Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections, translated by T. Bailey Saunders, p. 91.
Cambridge Modern History, vol. i, p. 632: cf. 660, 672, 674-6.
Froude’s “Early Life of Thomas Carlyle” (1891), vol. ii, pp. 16, 85.
THERE are many nowadays, and of the best among us, who still halt between the medieval and the modern ideals. In their just dislike of much that is blameworthy in the present, they are often tempted to imagine Religion as a lamp glimmering in the far depths of the past, dimmer and dimmer to human eyes as the world moves onward down the ages. At other times, with the healthy instinct of life, they cling to the more hopeful conception of Faith as a sacred flame kindled from torch to torch in the hands of advancing humanity — varying and dividing as it passes on, yet always essentially the same — broadening over the earth to satisfy man’s wider needs, instead of fading away in proportion as God multiples the souls that need it.
These two ideals are mutually exclusive, and the choice is plain if historians would write plainly. Medieval history has been too exclusively given over to the poet, the romancer, an the ecclesiastic, who by their very profession are more or less conscious apologists. Yet we cannot understand the present until we face the past without fear or prejudice. The thirteenth century — the golden age of the old ideal — is on the one hand near enough for close and accurate observation, while it is sufficiently distant to afford the wide angle needed for our survey.
This present study lays no claim to impartiality in one sense, for I cannot affect to doubt which is the higher of the two ideals. At the same time, when I first fell in love with the Middle Ages, thirty years ago, it was as most people begin to love them, through Chaucer and the splendid relics of Gothic art. An inclination, at first merely æsthetic, has widened and deepened with the rowing conviction that the key to most [vii] modern problems is to be found in the so-called ages of Faith. Even here, where the very conception of my work compels me to run counter to many cherished convictions, I have honestly tried to avoid doubtful statements or exaggerations, and am ready to guarantee this by the only pledge in my power — by an offer which I have already made (in substance) several times in vain. Many writers disparage modern civilization in comparison with what seems to me a purely imaginary past. If any of these will now take me at my word, I will willingly accept his severest criticism to the extent of thirty-two octavo pages, restrict my reply within the same limit, and publish the whole at my own expense without further comment. If my contentions are false, I am thus undertaking to offer every facility for my own exposure.
I must here record my special thanks to Prof. L. Clédat of Lyons, and Geheimrath-Prof. O. Holder-Egger of Berlin. The former, who had once projected a complete edition of Salimbene, generously put his very extensive collations at my service: and the latter, who has at last published the Chronicle with a perfection of scholarly apparatus which leaves nothing to be desired, has not only met my enquiries with the most ungrudging courtesy, but has kindly supplied me with advance sheets of his great work.
G. G. COULTON.
EASTBOURNE, July, 1906.