A Literary History of the English People Part 25

Bracton, in the thirteenth century, is very positive; an inquest was necessary, "ut sciri possit utrum interfectus _Anglicus_ fuerit, vel _Francigena_."[384] The _Anglicus_ and the _Francigena_ therefore still subsisted, and were not equal before the law. The rule had not fallen into disuse, since a formal statute was needed to repeal it; the statute of 1340, which abolishes the "presentement d'Englescherie,"[385] thus sweeping away one of the most conspicuous marks left behind by the Conquest.

About the same time the fusion of idioms took place, and the English language was definitively const.i.tuted. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, towards 1311, the text of the king's oath was to be found in Latin among the State doc.u.ments, and a note was added declaring that "if the king was illiterate," he was to swear in French[386]; it was in the latter tongue that Edward II. took his oath in 1307; the idea that it could be sworn in English did not occur. But when the century was closing, in 1399, an exactly opposite phenomenon happened. Henry of Lancaster usurped the throne and, in the Parliament a.s.sembled at Westminster, p.r.o.nounced in English the solemn words by which he claimed the crown: "In the name of Fadir, Son and Holy Gost, I, Henry of Lancastre, chalenge yis Rewme of Yngland."[387]

During this interval, the union of the two languages had taken place.

The work of aggregation can be followed in its various phases, and almost from year to year. In the first half of the century, the "lowe men," the "rustics," _rurales homines_, are still keen to learn French, _satagunt omni nisu_; they wish to frenchify, _francigenare_,[388]

themselves, in order to imitate the n.o.bles, and be more thought of.

Their efforts had a remarkable result, precisely for the reason that they never succeeded in speaking pure French, and that in their ill-cleared brains the two languages were never kept distinctly apart.

The n.o.bles, cleverer men, could speak both idioms without confounding them, but so could not these _rurales_, who lisped the master's tongue with difficulty, mixing together the two vocabularies and the two grammars, mistaking the genders, a.s.signing, for want of better knowledge, the neuter to all the words that did not designate beings with a s.e.x, in other words, strange as it may seem, creating the new language. It was on the lips of "lowe men" that the fusion first began; they are the real founders of modern English; the "French of Stratford-at-Bow" had not less to do with it than the "French of Paris."

Even the n.o.bles had not been able to completely escape the consequences of a perpetual contact with the _rurales_. Had these latter been utterly ignorant of French, the language of the master would have been kept purer, but they spoke the French idiom after a fas.h.i.+on, and their manner of speaking it had a contagious influence on that of the great.

In the best families, the children being in constant communication with native servants and young peasants, spoke the idiom of France less and less correctly. From the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, they confuse French words that bear a resemblance to each other, and then also commences for them that annoyance to which so many English children have been subjected, from generation to generation down to our time: the difficulty of knowing when to say _mon_ and _ma_--"kaunt dewunt dire moun et ma"--that is how to distinguish the genders. They have to be taught by manuals, and the popularity of one written by Walter de Biblesworth,[389] in the fourteenth century, shows how greatly such treatises were needed. "Dear sister," writes Walter to the Lady Dionyse de Montchensy, "I have composed this work so that your children can know the properties of the things they see, and also when to say _mon_ and _ma_, _son_ and _sa_, _le_ and _la_, _moi_ and _je_." And he goes on showing at the same time the maze and the way out of it: "You have _la levre_ and _le lievre_; and _la livre_ and _le livre_. The _levre_ closes the teeth in; _le lievre_ the woods inhabits; _la livre_ is used in trade; _le livre_ is used at church."[390]

Inextricable difficulties! And all the harder to unravel that Anglo-Saxon too had genders, equally arbitrary, which did not agree with the French ones. It is easy to conceive that among the various compromises effected between the two idioms, from which English was finally to emerge, the princ.i.p.al should be the suppression of this c.u.mbersome distinction of genders.

What happened in the manor happened also in the courts of justice. There French was likewise spoken, it being the rule, and the trials were apparently not lacking in liveliness, witness this judge whom we see paraphrasing the usual formula: "Allez a Dieu," or "Adieu," and wis.h.i.+ng the defendant, none other than the bishop of Chester, to "go to the great devil"--"Allez au grant deable."[391]--("'What,' said Ponocrates, 'brother John, do you swear?' 'It is only,' said the monk, 'to adorn my speech. These are colours of Ciceronian rhetoric.'")--But from most of the speeches registered in French in the "Year-books," it is easily gathered that advocates, _serjeants_ as they were called, did not express themselves without difficulty, and that they delivered in French what they had thought in English.

Their trouble goes on increasing. In 1300 a regulation in force at Oxford allowed people who had to speak in a suit to express themselves in "_any_ language generally understood."[392] In the second half of the century, the difficulties have reached such a pitch that a reform becomes indispensable; counsel and clients no longer understand each other. In 1362, a statute ordains that henceforward all pleas shall be conducted in English, and they shall be enrolled in Latin; and that in the English law courts "the French language, which is too unknown in the said realm,"[393] shall be discontinued.

This ignorance is now notorious. Froissart remarks on it; the English, he says, do not observe treaties faithfully, "and to this they are inclined by their not understanding very well all the terms of the language of France; and one does not know how to force a thing into their head unless it be all to their advantage."[394] Trevisa, about the same time, translating into English the chronicle of Ralph Higden, reaches the pa.s.sage where it is said that all the country people endeavour to learn French, and inserts a note to rectify the statement.

This manner, he writes, is since the great pestilence (1349) "sumdel i-chaunged," and to-day, in the year 1385, "in alle the gramere scoles of Engelond, children leveth Frensche and construeth and lerneth an Englische." This allows them to make rapid progress; but now they "conneth na more Frensche than can hir (their) lift heele, and that is harme for hem, and (if) they schulle pa.s.se the see and travaille in straunge landes and in many other places. Also gentil men haveth now moche i-left for to teche here children Frensche."[395]

The English themselves laugh at their French; they are conscious of speaking, like Chaucer's Prioress, the French of Stratford-at-Bow, or, like Avarice in the "Visions" of Langland, that "of the ferthest end of Norfolke."[396]

There will shortly be found in the kingdom personages of importance, exceptions it is true, with whom it will be impossible to negotiate in French. This is the case with the amba.s.sadors sent by Henry IV., that same Henry of Lancaster who had claimed the crown by an English speech, to Flanders and France in 1404. They beseech the "Paternitates ac Magnificentias" of the Grand Council of France to answer them in Latin, French being "like Hebrew" to them; but the Magnificents of the Grand Council, conforming to a tradition which has remained unbroken down to our day, refuse to employ for the negotiation any language but their own.[397] Was it not still, as in the time of Brunetto Latini, the modern tongue most prized in Europe? In England even, men were found who agreed to this, while rendering to Latin the tribute due to it; and the author of one of the numerous treatises composed in this country for the benefit of those who wished to keep up their knowledge of French said: "Sweet French is the finest and most graceful tongue, the n.o.blest speech in the world after school Latin, and the one most esteemed and beloved by all people.... And it can be well compared to the speech of the angels of heaven for its great sweetness and beauty."[398]

In spite of these praises, the end of French, as the language "most esteemed and beloved," was near at hand in England. Poets like Gower still use it in the fourteenth century for their ballads, and prose writers like the author of the "Croniques de London"[399]; but these are exceptions. It remains the idiom of the Court and the great; the Black Prince writes in French the verses that will be graven on his tomb: these are nothing but curious cases. Better instructed than the lawyers and suitors in the courts of justice, the members of Parliament continue to use it; but English makes its appearance even among them, and in 1363 the Chancellor has opened the session by a speech in English, the first ever heard in Westminster.

The survival of French was at last nothing but an elegance; it was still learnt, but only as Madame de Sevigne studied Italian, "pour entretenir n.o.blesse." Among the upper cla.s.s the knowledge of French was a traditional accomplishment, and it has continued to be one to our day.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the laws were still, according to habit, written in French; but complaints on this score were made to Henry VIII., and his subjects pointed out to him that this token of the ancient subjection of England to the Normans of France should be removed. This mark has disappeared, not however without leaving some trace behind, as laws continue to be a.s.sented to by the sovereign in French: "La Reine le veut." They are vetoed in the same manner: "La Reine s'avisera"; though this last manner is less frequently resorted to than in the time of the Plantagenets.

French disappears. It does not disappear so much because it is forgotten as because it is gradually absorbed. It disappears, and so does the Anglo-Saxon; a new language is forming, an offspring of the two others, but distinct from them, with a new grammar, versification, and vocabulary. It less resembles the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred's time than the Italian of Dante resembles Latin.

The vocabulary is deeply modified. It numbered before the Conquest a few words of Latin origin, but not many; they were words recalling the great works of the Romans, such as _street_ and _chester_, from _strata_ and _castrum_, or else words borrowed from the language of the clerks, and concerning mainly religion, such as _mynster_, _tempel_, _bisceop_, derived from _monasterium_, _templum_, _episcopus_, &c. The Conquest was productive of a great change, but not all at once; the languages, as has been seen, remained at first distinctly separate; then in the thirteenth, and especially in the fourteenth century, they permeated each other, and were blended in one. In 1205, only fifty words of Latin origin were found in the sixteen thousand long lines of Layamon's "Brut"; a hundred can be counted in the first five hundred lines of Robert of Gloucester about 1298, and a hundred and seventy in the first five hundred lines of Robert Mannyng of Brunne, in 1303.[400]

As we advance further into the fourteenth century, the change is still more rapid. Numerous families of words are naturalised in England, and little by little is const.i.tuted that language the vocabulary of which contains to-day twice as many words drawn from French or Latin as from Germanic sources. At the end of Skeat's "Etymological Dictionary,"[401]

there is a table of the words of the language cla.s.sified according to their derivation; the words borrowed from Germanic or Scandinavian idioms fill seven columns and a half; those taken from the French, and the Romance or cla.s.sic tongues, sixteen columns.

It is true the proportion of words used in a page of ordinary English does not correspond to these figures. With some authors in truth it is simply reversed; with Shakespeare, for instance, or with Tennyson, who exhibit a marked predilection for Anglo-Saxon words. It is nevertheless to be observed: first, that the const.i.tution of the vocabulary with its majority of Franco-Latin words is an actual fact; then that in a page of ordinary English the proportion of words having a Germanic origin is increased by the number of Anglo-Saxon articles, conjunctions, and p.r.o.nouns, words that are merely the servants of the others, and are, as they should be, more numerous than their masters. A nearer approach to the numbers supplied by the lists of Skeat will be made if real words only are counted, those which are free and independent citizens of the language, and not the shadow nor the reflection of any other.

The contributive part of French in the new vocabulary corresponds to the branches of activity reserved to the new-comers. From their maternal idiom have been borrowed the words that composed the language of war, of commerce, of jurisprudence, of science, of art, of metaphysics, of pure thought, and also the language of games, of pastimes, of tourneys, and of chivalry. In some cases no compromise took place, neither the French nor the Anglo-Saxon word would give way and die, and they have both come down to us, alive and irreducible: _act_ and _deed_; _captive_ and _thrall_; _chief_ and _head_, &c.[402] It is a trace of the Conquest, like the formula: "La Reine le veut."

Chaucer, in whose time these double survivals were naturally far more numerous than they are to-day, often uses both words at once, sure of being thus intelligible to all:

They callen love a woodnes or a folye.[403]

Versification is transformed in the same proportion; here again the two prosodies arrive at a compromise. Native verse had two ornaments: the number of accents and alliteration; French verse in the fourteenth century had also two ornaments, the number of syllables and rhyme. The French gave up their strict number of syllables, and consented to note the number of accents; the natives discarded alliteration and accepted rhyme in its stead. Thus was English verse created, its cadence being Germanic and its rhyme French, and such was the prosody of Chaucer, who wrote his "Canterbury Tales" in rhymed English verse, with five accents, but with syllables varying in number from nine to eleven.

The fusion of the two versifications was as gradual as that of the two vocabularies had been. Layamon in the thirteenth century mingled both prosodies in his "Brut," sometimes using alliteration, sometimes rhyme, and occasionally both at once. The fourteenth century is the last in which alliterative verse really flourished, though it survived even beyond the Renaissance. In the sixteenth century a new form was tried; rhyme was suppressed mainly in imitation of the Italians and the ancients, and blank verse was created, which Shakespeare and Milton used in their masterpieces; but alliteration never found place again in the normal prosody of England.

Grammar was affected in the same way. In the Anglo-Saxon grammar, nouns and adjectives had declensions as in German; and not very simple ones.

"Not only had our old adjectives a declension in three genders, but more than this, it had a double set of trigeneric inflexions, Definite and Indefinite, Strong and Weak, just like that which makes the beginner's despair in German."[404] Verbs were conjugated without auxiliaries; and as there was no particular inflection to indicate the future, the present was used instead, a very indifferent subst.i.tute, which did not contribute much to the clearness of the phrase. Degrees of comparison in the adjectives were marked, not by adverbs, as in French, but by differences in the terminations. In short, the relations of words to each other, as well as the particular part they had to play in the phrase, were not indicated by other special words, prepositions, adverbs or auxiliaries, those useful menials, but by variations in the endings of the terms themselves, that is, by inflections. The necessity for a compromise with the French, which had lost its primitive declensions and inflections, hastened an already begun transformation and resulted in the new language's possessing in the fourteenth century a grammar remarkably simple, brief and clear. Auxiliaries were introduced, and they allowed every shade of action, action that has been, or is, or will be, or would be, to be clearly defined. The gender of nouns used to present all the singularities which are one of the troubles in German or French; _mona_, moon, was masculine as in German; _sunne_, sun, was feminine; _wif_, wife, was not feminine but neuter; as was also _maeden_, maiden. "A German gentleman," as "Philologus," has so well observed, "writes a masculine letter of feminine love to a neuter young lady with a feminine pen and feminine ink on masculine sheets of neuter paper, and encloses it in a masculine envelope with a feminine address to his darling, though neuter, Gretchen. He has a masculine head, a feminine hand, and a neuter heart."[405] Anglo-Saxon gentlemen were in about the same predicament, before William the Conqueror came in his own way to their help and rescued them from this maze. In the transaction which took place, the Anglo-Saxon and the French both gave up the arbitrariness of their genders; nouns denoting male beings became masculine, those denoting female beings became feminine; all the others became neuter; _wife_ and _maiden_ resumed their s.e.x, while _nation_, _sun_ and _moon_ were neuter. Nouns and adjectives lost their declensions; adjectives ceased to vary in their endings according to the nouns they were attached to, and yet the clearness of the phrase was not in the least obscured.

In the same way as with the prosody and vocabulary, these changes were effected by degrees. Great confusion prevailed in the thirteenth century; the authors of the "Brut" and the "Ancren Riwle" have visibly no fixed ideas on the use of inflections, or on the distinctions of the genders. Only under Edward III. and Richard II. were the main principles established upon which English grammar rests. As happened also for the vocabulary, in certain exceptional cases the French and the Saxon uses have been both preserved. The possessive case, for instance, can be expressed either by means of a proposition, in French fas.h.i.+on: "The works of Shakespeare," or by means of the ancient genitive: "Shakespeare's works."

Thus was formed the new language out of a combination of the two others.

In our time, moved by a patriotic but rather preposterous feeling, some have tried to react against the consequences of the Conquest, and undo the work of eight centuries. They have endeavoured to exclude from their writings words of Franco-Latin origin, in order to use only those derived from the Anglo-Saxon spring. A vain undertaking: the progress of a s.h.i.+p cannot be stopped by putting one's shoulder to the bulkheads; a singular misapprehension of history besides. The English people is the offspring of two nations; it has a father and a mother, whose union has been fruitful if stormy; and the parent disowned by some to-day, under cover of filial tenderness, is perhaps not the one who devoted the least care in forming and instructing the common posterity of both.

II.

The race and the language are transformed; the nation also, considered as a political body, undergoes change. Until the fourteenth century, the centre of thought, of desire, and of ambition was, according to the vocation of each, Rome, Paris, or that movable, ever-s.h.i.+fting centre, the Court of the king. Light, strength, and advancement in the world all proceeded from these various centres. In the fourteenth century, what took place for the race and language takes place also for the nation. It coalesces and condenses; it becomes conscious of its own limits; it discerns and maintains them. The action of Rome is circ.u.mscribed; appeals to the pontifical Court are prohibited,[406] and, though they still continue to be made, the oft-expressed wish of the nation is that the king should be judge, not the pope; it is the beginning of the religious supremacy of the English sovereigns. Oxford has grown; it is no longer indispensable to go to Paris in order to learn. Limits are established: the wars with France are royal and not national ones.

Edward III., having a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of king of France, his subjects compel him to declare that their allegiance is only owed to him as king of England, and not as king of France.[407] No longer is the nation Anglo-French, Norman, Angevin, or Gascon; it is English; the nebula condenses into a star.

The first consequences of the Conquest had been to bind England to the civilisations of the south. The experiment had proved a successful one, the results obtained were definitive; there was no need to go further, the ties could now without harm slacken or break. Owing to that evolutionary movement perpetually evinced in human affairs, this first experiment having been perfected after a lapse of three hundred years, a counter-experiment now begins. A new centre, unknown till then, gradually draws to itself every one's attention; it will soon attract the eyes of the English in preference to Rome, Paris, or even the king's Court. This new centre is Westminster. There, an inst.i.tution derived from French and Saxonic sources, but destined to be abortive in France, is developed to an extent unparalleled in any other country. Parliament, which was, at the end of the thirteenth century, in an embryonic state, is found at the end of the fourteenth completely const.i.tuted, endowed with all its actual elements, with power, prerogatives, and an influence in the State that it has rarely surpa.s.sed at any time.

Not in vain have the Normans, Angevins, and Gascons given to the men of the land the example of their clever and shrewd practice. Not in vain have they blended the two races into one: their peculiar characteristics have been infused into their new compatriots: so much so that from the first day Parliament begins to feel conscious of its strength, it displays bias most astonis.h.i.+ng to behold: it thinks and acts and behaves as an a.s.sembly of Normans. The once violent and vacillating Anglo-Saxons, easily roused to enthusiasm and brought down to despair, now calculate, consider, deliberate, do nothing in haste, act with diplomatic subtlety, _bargain_. All compromises between the Court and Parliament, in the fourteenth century, are a series of bargains; Parliament pays on condition that the king reforms; nothing for nothing; and the fulfilling of the bargain is minutely watched. It comes to this at last, that Parliament proves more Norman than the Court; it manoeuvres with more skill, and remains master of the situation; "a Normand, Normand et demi." The Plantagenets behold with astonishment the rise of a power they are now unable to control; their offspring is hardy, and strong, and beats its nurse.

After the attempts of Simon de Montfort, Edward I. had convened, in 1295, the first real Parliament. He had rea.s.serted the fundamental principle of all liberties, by appropriating to himself the old maxim from Justinian's code, according to which "what touches the interests of all must be approved by all."[408] He forms the habit of appealing to the people; he wants them to know the truth, and decide according to truth which is in the right, whether the king or his turbulent barons[409]; he behaves on occasion as if he felt that _over_ him was the nation. And this strange sight is seen: the descendant of the Norman autocrats modestly explains his plans for war in Flanders and in France, excuses himself for the aid he is obliged to ask of his subjects, and even condescends to solicit the spiritual benefit of their prayers: "He the king, on this and on the state of himself and of his realm, and how the business of his realm has come to nothing, makes it known and wants that all know the truth, which is as follows.... He can neither defend himself nor his realm without the help of his good people. And it grieves him sorely to have them, on this account, so heavily charged.... And he prays them to take as an excuse for what he has done, that that he did not do in order to buy lands and tenements, or castles and towns, but to defend himself, and them, and the whole kingdom.... And as he has great faith that the good prayers of his good people will help him very much in bringing this business to a good end, he begs that they will intently pray for him and those that with him go."[410]

At first, Parliament is astonished: such excess of honour alarms it; then it understands the chance that offers, and guesses that in the proffered bargain it may very well be the winner. This once understood, progress is rapid, and from year to year can be observed the growth of its definitive privileges. The Commons have their Speaker, "M. Thomas de Hungerford, knight, who had the words for the Commons of England"[411]; they want deputies to be elected by "due election," and they protest against all interference of the Government; against official candidatures, and against the election of royal functionaries. On difficult questions, the members request to be allowed to return to their counties and consult with their const.i.tuents before voting.[412]

In spite of all the aristocratic ideas with which they are still imbued, many of those audacious members who clamour for reforms and oppose the king are very inconsiderable people, and such men are seen taking their seats at Westminster as "Walterus l'espicer," "Paga.n.u.s le tailour,"

"Radulphus le teynturer," "Ricardus orfevre."[413]

Great is the power of this mixed gathering. No new taxes can be levied without its consent; every individual, every personage, every authority having a pet.i.tion to present, or a complaint to make, sends it to the a.s.sembly of Westminster. The king consults it on peace or war: "So,"

says the Chamberlain to the Commons in 1354, "you are willing to a.s.sent to a permanent treaty of peace, if one can be obtained? And the said Commons answered entirely and unanimously: Yes, yes! (Ol! Ol!)"[414]

Nothing is too great or too small for Parliament to attend to; the sovereign appeals to it, and the clergy too, and beggars also. In 1330, the poor, the "poverail" of Greenwich, complain that alms are no longer bestowed on them as formerly, to the great detriment, say they, of the souls of the benefactors of the place "who are in Purgatory."[415]

Convents claim privileges that time has effaced; servants ask for their wages; the barber of Edward II. solicits the maintenance of favours granted by a prince he had bled and shaved for twenty-six years.[416]

And before the same gathering of men, far different quarrels are brought forth. The king's ministers, Latymer and Neville, are impeached; his mistress Alice Perrers hears sentence[417]; his household, personal attendants and expenses are reformed; and from then can be foreseen a time when, owing to the tread of centuries, the king will reign but no longer govern. Such is almost the case even in the fourteenth century.

Parliament deposes Richard II., who fancied himself king by right divine, and claimed, long before the Stuarts, to hold his crown, "del doun de Dieu," as a "gift of G.o.d."[418] In the list of grievances drawn up by the a.s.sembly to justify the deposition, figures the a.s.sertion attributed to the king "that the laws proceeded from his lips or from his heart, and that he alone could make or alter the laws of his kingdom."[419] In 1399 such language was already held to be criminal in England. In 1527 Claude Gaillard, prime President of the Parliament of Paris, says in his remonstrance to Francis I., king of France: "We do not wish, Sire, to doubt or question your power; it would be a kind of sacrilege, and we well know you are above all law, and that statutes and ordinances cannot touch you.... "[420] The ideas on political "sacrilege" differed widely in the two countries.

From the end of the fourteenth century, an Englishman could already say as he does to-day: My business is not the business of the State, but the business of the State is my business. The whole of the English const.i.tution, from the vote on the taxes to the _habeas corpus_, is comprised in this formula. In France the nation, practical, lucid, and logical in so many things, but easily amused, and too fond of chansons, neglected the opportunities that offered; the elect failed to attend the sittings; the bargains struck were not kept to. The Westminster Parliament voted subsidies on condition that reforms would be inst.i.tuted; the people paid and the king reformed. In France, on the contrary, during the Middle Ages, the people tried not to pay, and the king tried not to reform. Thus the levying of the subsidy voted by the States-General of 1356-7, was the cause of b.l.o.o.d.y riots in France; the people, unenlightened as to their own interests, did their best to destroy their defenders: the agents of the States-General were ma.s.sacred at Rouen and Arras; King John "the Good" published a decree forbidding the orders of the States to be fulfilled, and acquired instant popularity by this the most tyrannic measure of all his reign.

These differences between the two political bodies had important consequences with regard to the development of thought in the two countries; they also excited the wonder and sometimes the admiration of the French. "The king of England must obey his subjects," says Froissart, "and do all they want him to."[421] "To my mind," writes Commines, "of all the communities I know in the world, the one where public business is best attended to, where the people are least exposed to violence, where there are no buildings ruined and pulled down on account of wars, that one is England."[422] "The English are the masters of their king," writes Amba.s.sador Courtin in 1665, in almost the same words as Froissart, "their king can do nothing, unless what he wants is what they will."[423]

III.

Now are the vanquished and the victors of Hastings blended into one nation, and they are endowed with a Parliament as a safeguard for their liberties. "This is," Montesquieu said later, "the nation in the world that has best known how to avail itself at the same time of those three great things: religion, trade, and liberty."[424] Four hundred years before Montesquieu it already availed itself of these three great things; under Edward and Richard Plantagenets, England was what it has ever been since, a "merchant island."[425]

Its mines are worked, even those of "sea-coal," as it was then called, "carboun de meer."[426] It has a numerous mercantile navy which carries to the Baltic, to Iceland, to Flanders, to Guyenne, and to Spain, wool, skins, cloth, wheat, b.u.t.ter and cheese, "buyre et furmage." Each year the galleys of Venice come laden with cotton, silks from Damascus, sugar, spices, perfumes, ivory, and gla.s.s. The great commercial houses, and the merchant corporations are powers in the State; Edward III.

grants to the London gilds the right of electing members to Parliament, and they preserved this right until the Reform Bill of 1832. The wealthy merchants lent money to the king; they were called to his councils; they behaved as great citizens. Anthony Blache lends Edward III. 11,720 pounds; the Blankets of Bristol gather enormous wealth; John Blanket dies in 1405, bequeathing a third of his fortune to his wife, a third to his children, and a third to the poor; John Philpot, a grocer of London, embarks on his s.h.i.+ps and fights for the kingdom; Richard Whittington, he of the legendary cat, is famed in history for his wealth and liberality, and was mayor of London in 1398, 1406, and 1419. These merchants are enn.o.bled, and from their stock spring earls and dukes; the De la Poles, wool-merchants of Hull, mortgage their property for the king. William de la Pole rescues Edward III., detained in Flanders by want of money, and is made a knight-banneret; his son Michael is created earl of Suffolk; one of his grandsons is killed at Agincourt; another besieges Orleans, which is delivered by Joan of Arc; he becomes duke of Suffolk, is impeached in 1450 for high treason and beheaded; no honour is lacking to the house.

From the time of the Edwards, the Commons are very touchy upon the subject of the maritime power and glory of their country; they already consider the ocean as their appointed realm. Do they observe, or fancy they observe, any diminution in the strength of England? They complain to the king in remonstrances more than once heard again, word for word, within the halls of Westminster: "Twenty years ago, and always before, the s.h.i.+pping of the Realm was in all the ports and good towns upon the sea or rivers, so n.o.ble and plenteous that all the countries held and called our said sovereign, the King of the Sea."[427] At this time, 1372, the country is, without possibility of doubt, the England of the English.

From that period the English are found either singly or in small bands on all the seas and on all the highways.[428] Their nature has been modified; the island no longer suffices them as it sufficed the Anglo-Saxons. "Il ne sait rien, qui ne va hors"--he knows nothing who stirs not out--think they with Des Champs; they are keen to see what goes on elsewhere, and like practical folks to profit by it. When the opportunity is good they seize it, whatsoever its nature; encountering Saracens they slay them: so much towards Paradise; moving about in Italy they are not long in discovering the advantages offered by a condottiere's existence. They adopt and even perfect it, and after their death are magnificently buried in the cathedral of Florence, and Paolo Uccello paints their portrait on the wall.[429] On every occasion they behave like Normans; in the halls of Westminster, in their City counting houses, on the highroads of Italy and on the ocean they everywhere resemble the rulers whose spirit has pa.s.sed into them, and prove themselves to be at once adventurous and practical. "They are good walkers and good hors.e.m.e.n," said Ralph Higden of them in the fourteenth century, adding: "They are curious, and like to tell the wonders they have seen and observed." How many books of travel we owe to this propensity! "They roam over all lands," he continues, "and succeed still better in other countries than in their own.... They spread over the earth; every land they inhabit becomes as their own country."[430] They are themselves, and no longer seek to be any one else; they cease by degrees to _francigenare_. This combination of boldness and obstinacy that is theirs, is the blend of qualities by which distant settlements can be established and kept; to these qualities must be traced the founding of the English colonial empire, and the power which allowed the Plantagenet kings to aspire, as early as the fourteenth century, to be the "Rois de la Mier."

Trade brings luxury, comfort, and the love of art in its train. The same happened in London as in Venice, Florence, and Bruges; these merchants and n.o.bles were fond of beautiful things. It is an era of prosperity for imagers, miniaturists, painters, and sculptors.[431] The wealthy order to be chiselled for themselves ivory Virgins whose tender, half-mundane smile, is not less charming for the doubt it leaves whether it is of earth or of heaven; devotional tablets in painted ivory, in gold, or translucid enamels; golden goblets with figures, silver cups "enamelled with children's games," salt-cellars in the shape of lions or dogs, "golden images of St. John the Baptist, in the wilderness,"[432] all those precious articles with which our museums are filled. Edward II.