THE SOCIAL LIFE OF THE MIDDLE AGES.* IT is pleasant
to turn occasionally from the complex helter.skelter. of the present time, which must sometimes tire the mind most enamoured of modernism, to look at the simpler forms and the more leisurely arrangement of the life of the past. Books which reconstruct that life for us, in far distant times, among the dead- and-gone peoples of the earth, whether in the historical or the imaginative categories of literature, always find favour; and the charm of poetry and romance attaches to the nearer past of our own race and country, now visible only in the architectural monu- ments which were among the proudest of its living glories. "How lived, how loved, how died they ? "—the men and the women who sleep in the earth we tread on. History does not tell us, except en masse, and on the grand scale ; and there is hardly even analogy, much leas similarity, between the every-day life of the Middle Ages and that of our time. Herein lies the strongest contrast between the East and the West, a contrast whose sharp, clear, defined lines are beginning to fade, to become modified in the case of Japan, but remain unaltered in that of India and Arabia. The domestic life of the Hindoos and the Arabs of to-day is exactly the same as the domestic life of the Hindoos and the Arabs of the past ages, and the writers and artists who deal with it have but to observe ; there is nothing to add, to subtract, or to contrast in their histories, or their pictures, between the present and the past.
But the student of the Western world, the writer or the artist, has a far different task, and the thinker, who would reconstruct human lives, animate the dry bones, and tread backwards "the corridors of time," has to get rid of all his most ordinary sur- roundings in the material as well as the mental order. To keep clear of anachronism is a daily growing difficulty in such pro- cesses of imagination, in an age which parts us farther from the past in a decade than the people of the first century were parted from the Middle Ages by its whole lapse. Historical novels and historical dramas have become rare mainly because of this increasing difficulty, we think, and not for the reason generally assigned to explain their rarity,—the lack of popular interest in the past. A book which furnishes the material wherewith the thinker may reconstruct the life of the Mid- dle Ages, simple in its style, lucid in its arrangement, the produce and result of patient working in what the worker calls "the rich and inexhaustible mine of Medimval archseology," but which has none of the dry, hard method that makes archmology, specifically so called, tough and discouraging reading, is some- thing to be grateful for. It is such a book that Mr. Cutts has compiled from his contributions to the Art Journal, during nearly five and twenty years. The scheme of this work is widely comprehensive, and its execution is so minute and careful that it is of great value from the actual and also from the imaginative point of view. It ought to be highly appreciated by students of history, as a pictorial commentary, in which persons and events are rendered impressive and real, by being shown as they were in their time, with all their surroundings in detail. It illustrates the life of the Middle Ages, in various sections of society, as our age might be illustrated bya series of genre pictures. In some instances the essays are popular sketches in explanation of the woodcuts, which form a series of interesting and valuable contemporary illustrations of the costumes and manners of the Middle Ages ; in others, they are the results of original research into little-known subjects of antiquarian interest.
Many of the woodcuts are very amusing, though unintentionally
Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages. By the Rev. Edward L. Cutts, BA. London: Virtue and Co
so, especially those which illustrate the chapters on chivalry ; but the pictures of the monks are exactly the same as those of to-day, just as the monks themselves are the same. The monks are amusing only when they look out of windows much too small for them, in turrets whose roofs come down upon their heads. Matters ecclesiastical occupy a place in this work proportionate to their great importance in inedimval life, and one of the most curious and interesting chapters is that on Hermits. It is illustrated with several quaint drawings, and its details, while they elucidate some very obscure passages from "Piers Ploughman's Vision," dispel the popular idea of a hermit as a half-crazed enthusiast or a misanthrope, "a kind of Christian Timon," who abandoned the abodes of men, and scooped out for himself a cave in the rocks, or built himself a rude hut in the forest, and lived there a half-savage life, clad in sackcloth or skins, "visited occasionally by superstitious people, who gazed and listened in fear at the mystic ravings or wild denunciations of the gaunt and haggard prophet." The hermit of Goldsmith's poem, with his cherished grief, and his "scrip with herbs and roots supplied, and water from the spring," or Scott's Friar Tuck, was, no more than the popular ideal hermit, like the ordinary English hermit of the middle ages, as Mr. Cutts describes him, with abundant proof from all sorts of curious old- world sources of knowledge :—
" Re was a sober-minded. civilised person, who, dressed in a robe very much like the robes of the other religious orders, lived in a com- fortable little house of stone or timber; often had estates, or a pension, for his maintenance, besides what charitable people were pleased to leave him in their wills, or to offer him in their lifetime ; he lived on bread and meat and beer and wine, and had a chaplain to say daily prayers for him, and a servant or two to wait on him ; his hermitage was not always up in the lonely hills, or deep buried in the shady forests; very often it was by the great high-roads, and sometimes in the
heart of great towns and cities A man could not take upon himself the character of a hermit at his own pleasure. It was a regular order of religion into which a man could not enter without the consent of a bishop of the diocese, and into which he was admitted by a formal religious service ; but the bishops did not admit men to the order of Hermits until they had obtained a hermitage in which to exercise their vocation."
A number of quaint stories and an abridgment of the very beautiful old service for the receiving of a hermit are to be found in this chapter, followed by an account of the ancient "anchor- hold," or reclusorium. Concerning these an extraordinary num- ber of wills are quoted, from which we gather that solitaries were especially numerous in the mediaaval towns, though very many of the village churches had a recluse living within or beside them. Next to the Monks of the middle ages, come in legitimate suc- cession the Knights, and then the Merchants ; under each separate heading, we have a great variety of admirably classified details, which enable the reader to compose his mental pictures of the past from any point of view he may choose to adopt. A short chapter on the beginnings of British commerce, illustrated with wonderful pictures of ships cut in two, with dismembered oarsmen to match, is interesting, not only on account of the number of facts which it contains, but because of the suggestive way in which the writer sets forth the heroic daring of the early adventurers who inaugurated trade with the "Isles of Tin," in the remotest antiquity, before European civilisation first dawned in Greece :—
" We. who have explored the whole earth, and by steam and telegraph brought every corner of it within easy reach ; we, to whom it is a very small matter to make a voyage with women and children to the other side of the world ; we, who walk down to the pier to see the ships return from the under world, keeping their time as regularly as the minster clock ; we cannot comprehend what it was to them, to whom the tideless, sunny Mediterranean was 'the Great Sea,' about which they groped cautiously from one rocky headland to another in fine weather, and laid up in harbour for the winter ; to whom the Pillars of Hercules were the western boundary of the world, beyond which the weird ocean, with its great tides and mountain waves, stretched without limit towards the sunset; we cannot comprehend tho heroic daring of the mon who, in those little ships, without compass, came from the easternmost shores of the Great Sea, westward through its western portal into this outer waste, and steered boldly northwards towards the unknown regions ()fie° and darkness."
A rapid sketch of the condition of commerce in England prior to the Norman Conquest, and of the commercial laws of King Athelstane, with some extracts from a volume of Saxon dialogues, —apparently intended for a school-book,—which show how clear and practical were the views and the rules of that period, and an Early Representation of the Whale Fishery, in which the success- ful adventurers are "cutting out" the blubber very much as they do at present, form an introductory chapter to the third part of this valuable book. This third portion is full of interest, in its details of domestic life, manners, costume, economy, and amuse- ments; it is very pleasantly written, so that the reader is hardly aware how learned, it is, and needs to remind himself at what a cost of labour his pleasure has been procured ; and it will pro. bably be found more generally attractive than the records of Monasticism and Chivalry which precede it. It would be most useful if published in a separate form, and used as an accessory to the study of European history, in our schools, where nothing is more sorely needed than a connecting-link between the imaginative and the technical in that branch of information.
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