The Roman and the Teuton Part 14

Scattered in the vast woodlands and marshes lie small farms, enclosed by ditches and posts and rails, from which if you steal a rail, you are fined 1s., if you steal a post, 3s. There were stake fences, which you must be careful in making, for if a horse stakes himself by leaping in, you pay nothing; but if he does so by leaping out, you pay the price of the horse. Moreover, you must leave no sharp stakes standing out of the hedge; for if a man or beast wounds himself thereby in pa.s.sing, you have to pay full weregeld.

Walking over sown land, or sending a woman of your mundium to do so, in accordance with an ancient superst.i.tion, is a severe offence; so is injuring a vineyard, or taking more than tres uvae (bunches of grapes, I presume) from the vine. Injuring landmarks cut on the trees (theclaturas and signaturas) or any other boundary mark, is severely punishable either in a slave, or in a freeman.

In the vast woods range herds of swine, and in the pastures, horses, cared for by law; for to take a herd of swine or brood mares as pledge, without the king's leave, is punishable by death, or a fine of 900_s._ Oxen or horses used to the yoke can be taken as pledge; but only by leave of the king, or of the schuldhais (local magistrate), on proof that the debtor has no other property; for by them he gets his living. If, however, you find pigs routing in your enclosure, you may kill one, under certain restrictions, but not the 'sornpair,' sounder boar, who 'batt.i.t et vincit' all the other boars in the sounder (old English for herd).

Rival swineherds, as is to be supposed, 'battidunt inter se,' and 'scandalum faciunt,' often enough. Whereon the law advises them to fight it out, and then settle the damage between them.

Horses are cared for. To ride another man's horse costs 2s.; to dock or crop him, eight-fold the damage; and so on of hurting another man's horse. Moreover, if your neighbour's dog flies at you, you may hit him with a stick or little sword, and kill him, but if you throw a stone after him and kill him, you being then out of danger, you must give the master a new dog.

Then there are quaint laws about hunting; and damage caused by wild beasts caught in snares or brought to bay. A wounded stag belongs to the man who has wounded it for twenty-four hours: but after that to anyone.

Tame deer, it is observable, are kept; and to kill a doe or fawn costs 6s., to kill a buck, 12s. Tame hawks, cranes, and swans, if taken in snares, cost 6s. But any man may take flying hawks out of his neighbour's wood, but not out of the Gaias Regis, the king's gehage, haies, hedges, or enclosed parks.

And now, I have but one more law to mention--would G.o.d that it had been in force in later centuries--

'Let no one presume to kill another man's aldia or ancilla, as a striga, witch, which is called masca; because it is not to be believed by Christian minds, that a woman can eat up a live man from within; and if any one does so he shall pay 60s. as her price, and for his fault, half to her master, and half to the king.'

This last strange law forces on us a serious question, one which may have been suggesting itself to you throughout my lecture. If these were the old Teutonic laws, this the old Teutonic liberty, the respect for man as man, for woman as woman, whence came the opposite element? How is it that these liberties have been lost throughout almost all Europe? How is it that a system of law prevailed over the whole continent, up to the French revolution, and prevails still in too many countries, the very opposite of all this?

I am afraid that I must answer, Mainly through the influence of the Roman clergy during the middle age.

The original difference of race between the clergy and the Teutonic conquerors, which I have already pointed out to you, had a curious effect, which lingers to this day. It placed the Church in antagonism, more or less open, to the civil administration of justice. The criminal was looked on by the priest rather as a sufferer to be delivered, than an offender to be punished. All who are conversant with the lives of saints must recollect cases in which the saint performs even miracles on behalf of the condemned. Mediaeval tales are full of instances of the same feeling which prompted the Italian brigands, even in our own times, to carry a leaden saint's image in his hat as a safeguard. In an old French fabliau, for instance, we read how a certain highway-robber was always careful to address his prayers to the Blessed Virgin, before going out to murder and steal; and found the practice pay him well. For when he was taken and hanged, our Lady put her 'mains blanches' under his feet, and supported him invisibly for a whole day, till the executioner, finding it impossible to kill him, was forced to let him retire peaceably into a monastery, where he lived and died devoutly. We may laugh at such fancies; or express, if we will, our abhorrence of their immorality: but it will be more useful to examine into the causes which produced them.

They seem to have been twofold. In the first place, the Church did not look on the Teutonic laws, whether Frank, Burgund, Goth or Lombard, as law at all. Her law, whether ecclesiastical or civil, was formed on the Roman model; and by it alone she wished herself, and those who were under her protection, to be judged. Next--and this count is altogether to her honour--law, such as it was, was too often administered, especially by the Franks, capriciously and brutally; while the servile population, always the great majority, can hardly be said to have been under the protection of law at all. No one can read the pages of Fredegarius, or Gregory of Tours, without seeing that there must have been cases weekly, even daily, which called on the clergy, in the name of justice and humanity, to deliver if possible, the poor from him that spoiled him; which excused fully the rise of the right of sanctuary, and of benefit of clergy, afterwards so much abused; which made it a pious duty in prelates to work themselves into power at court, and there, as the 'Chancellors'

of princes, try to get something like regular justice done; and naturally enough, to remodel the laws of each nation on the time-honoured and scientific Roman form. Nevertheless, the antagonism of the Church to the national and secular law remained for centuries. It died out first perhaps, in England, after the signature of Magna Charta. For then the English prelates began to take up that truly Protestant and national att.i.tude which issued in the great Reformation: but it lingers still in Ireland and in Italy. It lingered in France up to the French revolution, as may be seen notably in the account of the execution of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, by the priest who attended her. Horror at her atrocious crimes is quite swallowed up, in the mind of the good father, by sympathy with her suffering; and the mob s.n.a.t.c.h her bones from the funeral pile, and keep them as the relics of a saint.

But more. While the Roman clergy did real good to Europe, in preserving the scientific elements of Roman law, they did harm by preserving therewith other elements--Roman chicane, and Roman cruelty. In that respect, as in others, 'Rome conquered her conquerors;' and the descendants of those Roman lawyers, whom the honest Teutons called adders, and as adders killed them down, destroyed, in course of time, Teutonic freedom.

But those descendants were, alas! the clergy. Weak, they began early to adopt those arms of quibbling and craft, which religious men too often fancy are the proper arms of 'the saints' against 'the world.' Holding human nature in suspicion and contempt, they early gave way to the maxim of the savage, that every one is likely to be guilty till proved innocent, and therefore licensed the stupid brutalities of torture to extract confession. Holding self-degradation to be a virtue, and independence as a carnal vice; glorying in being slaves themselves, till to become, under the name of holy obedience, 'perinde ac cadaver,' was the ideal of a good monk; and accustomed, themselves, to degrading corporal punishment; they did not shrink from inflicting, even on boys and women, tortures as dastardly as indecent. Looking on the world, and on the future of the human race, through a medium compared with which the darkest fancies of a modern fanatic are bright and clear, they did not shrink from inflicting penalties, the very mention of which makes the blood run cold. Suspecting, if not alternately envying and despising, all women who were not nuns; writing openly of the whole s.e.x (until uns.e.xed) as the snare and curse of mankind; and possessed by a Manichaean belief in the power and presence of innumerable demons, whose especial victims were women; they erected witch-hunting into a science; they pandered to, and actually formalized, and justified on scientific grounds, the most cruel and cowardly superst.i.tions of the mob; and again and again raised literal crusades against women, torturing, exposing, burning, young and old, not merely in the witch-mania of the 17th century, but through the whole middle age. It is a detestable page of history. I ask those who may think my statement exaggerated, to consult the original authorities. Let them contrast Rothar's law about the impossibility of witchcraft, with the pages of the Malleus Maleficarum, Nider's Fornicarium, or Delrio the Jesuit, and see for themselves who were the false teachers. And if they be told, that the cruelties of the Inquisition were only those in vogue according to the secular law of the day, let them recollect that the formulizers of that law were none other than the celibate Roman clergy.

I do not deny that there was in all this a just, though a terrible, Nemesis. What was the essential fault of these Lombard laws--indeed of all the Teutonic codes? This--that there was one law for the free man, another for the slave. Ecclesiastical dominion was necessary, to make one law for all cla.s.ses, even though it were a law of common slavery. As the free had done to the slave, even so, and far worse, would the Roman clergy do to them. The Albigense persecutors, burning sixty ladies in one day; Conrad of Marpurg scourging his own sovereign, St. Elizabeth; shaving the Count of Saiym's head; and burning n.o.ble ladies almost without trial; Sprenger and his compeers, offering up female hecatombs of the highest blood thoughout Germany; English bishops burning in Smithfield Anne Askew, the hapless court-beauty, and her fellow-courtier Mr. Lascelles, just as if they had been Ess.e.x or Berks.h.i.+re peasants;--all these evildoers were welding the different cla.s.ses of the European nations, by a community of suffering, into nations; into the belief that free and slave had one blood, one humanity, one conscience, one capacity of suffering; and at last, one capacity of rebelling, and making common cause, high and low alike, against him who reigned in Italy under the 'Romani nominis umbram.'

And if our English law, our English ideas of justice and mercy, have retained, more than most European codes, the freedom, the truthfulness, the kindliness, of the old Teutonic laws, we owe it to the fact, that England escaped, more than any other land, the taint of effete Roman civilization; that she therefore first of the lands, in the 12th century, rebelled against, and first of them, in the 16th century, threw off, the Ultramontane yoke.

And surely it will be so, in due time, with the descendants of these very Lombards. We have seen them in these very years arise out of the dust and shame of centuries, and determine to be Lombards once again. We have seen a hero arise among them of the true old Teuton stamp, bearing worthily the name which his forefathers brought over the Alps with Alboin--Garibald, the 'bold in war.' May they succeed in the same n.o.ble struggle as that in which we succeeded, and returning, not in letter, but in spirit, to the old laws of Rothar and their free forefathers, become the leading race of a free and united Italy!

LECTURE XI--THE POPES AND THE LOMBARDS

'Our Lady the Mother of G.o.d, even Virgin Maria, together with us, protests to you, adjuring you with great obligations, and admonishes and commands you, and with her the thrones, dominations, all the heavenly angels, the martyrs and confessors of Christ, on behalf of the Roman city, committed to us by the Lord G.o.d, and the sheep of the Lord dwelling in it. Defend and free it speedily from the hands of the persecuting Lombards, lest my body which suffered torments for Christ, and my home in which it rests by the command of G.o.d, be contaminated by the people of the Lombards, who are guilty of such iniquitous perjury, and are proud transgressors of the divine scripture. So will I at the day of judgment reward you with my patronage, and prepare for you in the kingdom of G.o.d most s.h.i.+ning and glorious tabernacles, promising you the reward of eternal retribution, and the infinite joys of paradise.

'Run, by the true and living G.o.d I exhort you, run, and help; before the living fountain, whence you were consecrated and born again, shall dry up: before the little spark remaining of that brilliant flame, from which you knew the light, be extinguished; before your spiritual mother, the holy Church of G.o.d, in which you hope to receive eternal life, shall be humiliated, invaded, violated, and defiled by the impious.

'But if not, may your provinces in return, and your possessions, be invaded by people whom you know not. Separate not yourselves from my Roman people; so you will not be aliens, and separate from the kingdom of G.o.d, and eternal life. For whatever you shall ask of me, I will surely give you, and be your patron. a.s.sist my Roman people, your brothers; and strive more perfectly; for it is written, No man receiveth the crown, unless he strive lawfully.

'I conjure you, most beloved, by the living G.o.d, leave not this my city of Rome to be any longer torn by the Lombards, lest your bodies and souls be torn and tormented for ever, in inextinguishable and Tartarian fire with the devil and his pestiferous angels; and let not the sheep of the Lord's flock, which are the Roman people, be dispersed any more, lest the Lord disperse you, and cast you forth as the people of Israel was dispersed.'

You will conclude, doubtless, that this curious doc.u.ment can be nothing but a papal allocution. Its peculiar scriptural style (wrongly supposed to have been invented by the Puritans, who merely learnt it from the old Roman clergy), as well as the self-conceit, which fancies the fate of the whole world to depend on the prosperity of a small half-ruined city in Italy, will be to you sufficient marks of the Roman hand. But you will be somewhat mistaken. It is hardly an epistle from the successor of St.

Peter. It professes to be an epistle from St. Peter himself, and sent by him through the hands of Pope Stephen III. to Pepin the king of the Franks, in the year 755. You will have concluded also from it, that Catholic Christianity is in its extreme agony; that the wors.h.i.+p and name of our Lord, and the fountains of sacramental grace are about to be extinguished for ever, and that nothing but heresy or heathendom can follow. Then you will be quite mistaken. These Lombards are pious Catholics. Builders of churches and monasteries, they are taking up the relics of the Roman martyrs, to transfer them to the churches of Milan and Pavia. They have just given Pope Stephen the most striking proof of their awe of his person and office. But they are quarrelling with him about the boundaries of his estates for the patrimony of St. Peter. They consider that he and his predecessors have grossly wronged them at different times; and now last of all, by calling in foreign invaders; and they are at the gates of Rome laying waste the country, and demanding a poll-tax as ransom. That is all.

The causes which led to this quarrel must be sought far back in history.

The original doc.u.ments in which you will find the facts will be Paulus Diaconus, as far as King Luitprand's death; then the Life and Writings of Gregory the Great; and then Baronius' Annals, especially his quotations from Anastasius' Life of Stephen III., bearing in mind that, as with the Ostrogoths, we have only the Roman Papal story; that the Lombards have never stated their case, not even through Paulus Diaconus, who, being a clergyman, prudently holds his tongue about the whole matter. But by far the best account is to be found in Dean Milman's 'Latin Christianity,'

Vols. I. and II. Rome, you must understand, has become gradually the patrimony of St. Peter; the Popes are the practical kings of Rome, possessing, in the name of the Church, much land round Rome, and many estates scattered throughout Italy, and even in Sicily, Gaul, Africa, and the East--estates probably bequeathed by pious people. They have succeeded to this jurisdiction simply by default. They rule Rome, because there is no one else to rule it. We find St. Gregory the Great feeding the pauper-ma.s.ses of Rome, on the first day of every month, from the fruitful corn-bearing estates in Sicily; keeping up the 'Panem;' but subst.i.tuting, thank Heaven, for the 'Circenses' at least the services of the Church. Of course, the man who could keep the Roman people alive must needs become, ipso facto, their monarch.

The Pope acknowledges, of course, a certain allegiance to the Emperor at Constantinople, and therefore to his representative, the Exarch of Ravenna: that is to say, he meets them with flattery when they are working on his side; with wrath when they oppose him. He intrigues with them, too, whenever he can safely do so, against the Lombards.

Thus the Pope has become, during the four centuries which followed the destruction of the Western Empire, the sole surviving representative of that Empire. He is the head of the 'gens togata;' of the 'Senatus Populusque Roma.n.u.s.' In him Rome has risen again out of her grave, to awe the peoples once more by the Romani nominis umbra; and to found a new Empire; not as before, on physical force, and the awe of visible power; but on the deeper and more enduring ground of spiritual force, and the awe of the invisible world.

An Empire, I say. The Popes were becoming, from the 5th to the 8th centuries, not merely the lords of Rome, but the lords of the Western Church. Their spiritual Empire, to do them justice, was not so much deliberately sought by them, as thrust upon them. As the clergy were, all over the Empire, the representatives of the down-trodden Romans, so they naturally gravitated toward the Eternal City, their ancient mistress. Like all disciplined and organized bodies they felt the need of unity, of monarchy. Where could they find it, save at Rome? Rome was still, practically and in fact, the fountain of their doctrine, of their superior civilization; and to submit themselves to the Pope of Rome was their only means of keeping up one faith, one practice, and the strength which comes from union.

To seat the Pope upon the throne of the Caesars; to attribute to him powers weightier than all which the Caesars had possest . . . It was a magnificent idea. A politic idea, too; for it would cover the priesthood with all the prestige of ancient Rome, and enable them to face the barbarian in the name of that great people whose very memory still awed him; whose baths, aqueducts, palaces, he looked on as the work of demons; whose sages and poets were to him enchanters; whose very gems, dug out of the ruins by night, in fear and trembling, possest magic influence for healing, for preservation, for good fortune in peace or war.

Politic; and in their eyes, true. Easy enough to be believed honestly, by men who already believed honestly in their own divine mission. They were the representatives of Christ on earth. Of that fact there could be then, or can be now, no doubt whatsoever. Whatsoever truth, light, righteousness, there was in the West, came to it through them. And Christ was the King of kings. But He delayed his coming: at moments, He seemed to have deserted the earth, and left mankind to tear itself in pieces, with wild war and misrule. But it could not be so. If Christ were absent, He must at least have left an authority behind Him to occupy till He came; a head and ruler for his opprest and distracted Church. And who could that be, if not the Pope of Rome?

It ought to be so.--It must be so--thought they. And to men in that mood, proofs that it was so soon came to hand, and acc.u.mulated from generation to generation; till the Pope at last found himself proclaiming, and what was more, believing, that G.o.d had given the whole world to St. Peter, and through St. Peter to him; and that he was the only source of power, law, kings.h.i.+p, who could set up and pull down whom he would, as the vicegerent of G.o.d on earth.

Such pretensions, of course, grew but slowly. It was not, I believe, till the year 875, 180 years after the time of which I am speaking, that Pope John VIII. distinctly a.s.serted his right, as representative of the ancient Roman Empire, to create the Caesar; and informed the Synod of Pavia that he had 'elected and approved Charles the Bald, with the consent of his brothers the bishops, of the other ministers of the Holy Roman Church, and' (significant, though empty words) 'of the Roman senate and people.'

At the time of which I speak, the power was still in embryo, growing, through many struggles: but growing surely and strongly, and destined speedily to avenge the fall of Rome on the simple barbarians who were tearing each other to pieces over her spoils.

It is not easy to explain the lasting and hereditary hatred of the Popes to the Lombards. Its origin is simple enough: but not so its continuance. Why they should be nefandissimi in the eyes of Pope Gregory the Great one sees: but why 100 years afterwards, they should be still nefandissimi, and 'non dicenda gens Langobardorum,' not to be called a nation, is puzzling.

At first, of course, the Pope could only look on them as a fresh horde of barbarous conquerors; half heathen, half Arian. Their virtuous and loyal life within the boundaries of Alboin's conquests--of which Paulus Diaconus says, that violence and treachery were unknown--that no one oppressed, no one plundered--that the traveller went where he would in perfect safety--all this would be hid from the Pope by the plain fact, that they were continually enlarging their frontier toward Rome; that they had founded two half-independent Dukedoms of Beneventum and Spoleto, that Autharis had swept over South Italy, and ridden his horse into the sea at Reggio, to strike with his lance a column in the waves, and cry, 'Here ends the Lombard kingdom.'

The Pope (Gregory the Great I am speaking of) could only recollect, again, that during the lawless interregnum before Autharis' coronation, the independent Lombard dukes had plundered churches and monasteries, slain the clergy, and destroyed the people, who had 'grown up again like corn.'

But as years rolled on, these Arian Lombards had become good Catholics; and that in the lifetime of Gregory the Great.

Theodelinda, the Bavarian princess, she to whom Autharis had gone in disguise to her father's court, and only confessed himself at his departure, by rising in his stirrups, and burying his battle-axe in a tree stem with the cry, 'Thus smites Autharis the Lombard,'--this Theodelinda, I say, had married after his death Agilwulf his cousin, and made him king of the Lombards.

She was a Catholic; and through her Gregory the Great converted Autharis, and the Lombard nation. To her he addressed those famous dialogues of his, full alike of true piety and earnestness, and of childish superst.i.tion. But in judging them and him we must bear in mind, that these Lombards became at least by his means Catholics, and that Arians would have believed in the superst.i.tions just as much as Catholics. And it is surely better to believe a great truth, plus certain mistakes which do not affect it in the least, than a great lie, plus the very same mistakes likewise. Which is best, to believe that the road to London lies through Bishopstortford, and that there are dog-headed men on the road: or that it lies through Edinburgh, but that there are dog-headed men on that road too?

Theodelinda had built at Modicaea, twelve miles above Milan, a fair basilica to John the Baptist, enriched by her and the Lombard kings and dukes, 'crowns, crosses, golden tables adorned with emeralds, hyacinths, amber, carbuncles and pearls, gold and silver altar-cloths, and that admirable cup of sapphire,' all which remained till the eighteenth century. There, too, was the famous iron crown of Lombardy, which Austria still claims as her own; so called from a thin ring of iron inserted in it, made from a nail of the true cross which Gregory had sent Agilwulf; just as he sent Childebert, the Frankish king, some filings of St. Peter's chains; which however, he says, did not always allow their sacred selves to be filed.

In return, Agilwulf had restored the church-property which he had plundered, had reinstated the bishops; and why did not all go well? Why are these Lombards still the most wicked of men?

Again, in the beginning of the eighth century came the days of the good Luitprand, 'wise and pious, a lover of peace, and mighty in war; merciful to offenders, chaste and modest, instant in prayer, bountiful in alms, equal to the philosophers, though he knew no letters, a nourisher of his people, an augmenter of the laws.' He it was, who, when he had quarrelled with Pope Gregory II., and marched on Rome, was stopped at the Gates of the Vatican by the Pontiff's prayers and threats. And a sacred awe fell on him; and humbly entering St. Peter's, he wors.h.i.+pped there, and laid on the Apostle's tomb his royal arms, his silver cross and crown of gold, and withdrawing his army, went home again in peace. But why were this great king's good deeds towards the Pope and the Catholic faith rewarded, by what we can only call detestable intrigue and treachery?

Again; Leo the Iconoclast Emperor destroyed the holy images in the East, and sent commands to the Exarch of Ravenna to destroy them in western Italy. Pope Gregory II. replied by renouncing allegiance to the Emperor of Constantinople; and by two famous letters which are still preserved; in which he tells the Iconoclast Emperor, that, 'if he went round the grammar-schools at Rome, the children would throw their horn-books at his head . . . that he implored Christ to send the Emperor a devil, for the destruction of his body and the salvation of his soul . . . that if he attempted to destroy the images in Rome, the pontiff would take refuge with the Lombards, and then he might as well chase the wind that the Popes were the mediators of peace between East and West, and that the eyes of the nations were fixed on the Pope's humility, and adored as a G.o.d on earth the apostle St. Peter. And that the pious Barbarians, kindled into rage, thirsted to avenge the persecution of the East.' Then Luitprand took up the cause of the Pope and his images, and of the mob, who were furious at the loss of their idols; and marched on Ravenna, which opened her gates to him, so that he became master of the whole Pentapolis; and image-wors.h.i.+p, to which some plainspoken people give a harsher name, was saved for ever and a day in Italy. Why did Gregory II.

in return, call in Orso, the first Venetian Doge, to expel from Ravenna the very Luitprand who had fought his battles for him, and to restore that Exarchate of Ravenna, of which it was confessed, that its civil quarrels, misrule, and extortions, made it the most miserable government in Italy? And why did he enter into secret negotiations with the Franks to come and invade Italy?

Again, when Luitprand wanted to reduce the duchies of Beneventum and Spoleto, which he considered as rebels against him, their feudal suzerain; why did the next Pope, Gregory III., again send over the Alps to Charles Martel to come and invade Italy, and deliver the Church and Christ's people from ruin?

And who were these Franks, the ancestors of that magnificent, but profligate aristocracy whose destruction our grandfathers beheld in 1793?

I have purposely abstained from describing them, till they appear upon the stage of Italy, and take part in her fortunes--which were then the fortunes of the world.

They appear first on the Roman frontier in A.D. 241, and from that time are never at rest till they have conquered the north of Gaul. They are supposed (with reason) not to have been a race or tribe at all; but a confederation of warriors, who were simply 'Franken,' 'free;' 'free companions,' or 'free lances,' as they would have been called a few centuries later; who recruited themselves from any and every tribe who would join them in war and plunder. If this was the case; if they had thrown away, as adventurers, much of the old Teutonic respect for law, for the royal races, for family life, for the sacred bonds of kindred, many of their peculiarities are explained. Falsehood, brutality, lawlessness, ignorance, and cruelty to the conquered Romans, were their special sins; while their special, and indeed only virtue, was that indomitable daring which they transmitted to their descendants for so many hundred years. The buccaneers of the young world, they were insensible to all influences save that of superst.i.tion. They had become, under Clovis, orthodox Christians: but their conversion, to judge from the notorious facts of history, worked little improvement on their morals. The pages of Gregory of Tours are comparable, for dreary monotony of horrors, only to those of Johnson's History of the Pyrates.