DOMESTIC MANNERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES.*
Mn. Wright and Mr. Fairholt were pretty certain to produce a work of some value between them, and they have actually brought out one which is interesting and beautiful in the highest degree as well as in- structive. The last twenty years have done a great deal to promote a sound knowledge of our early history as a nation, and the growth of law and liberty and the compass of mediseval thought begin to be understood in their true relations to us. But outside actual history lies the vast domain of our ancestors' daily life. What houses they built, how they dressed, their furniture, their food, and their amuse- ments have hitherto been matters known only to antiquarians, and may now be studied from their own words and pictures cleverly put ' together. It is important not to overrate knowledge of this sort. Common cant about progress in the nineteenth century will never induce any thinking man to suppose that the ages which pro- duced the laws of Alfred, the thought of Roger Bacon, or the poetry of Chaucer, are to be despised 'because glass was little used, cotton factories unknown, and roads bad. The life, after all, is more than meat, and the mind than dress and dinners. Nevertheless an essentially sound book on domestic manners, such as this of Mr. Wright's, can scarcely fail to impress some of the most important results of history upon the reader. It shows incidentally the un- broken chain of civilization that connects us with our fathers, and our fathers with Rome and Greece. It proves that not only the essentials of humanity, the heart and thought, but little trifles of fashion and tricks of circumstance have been curiously alike in all ages. And when we have done justice to the real greatness of the dead who shaped order out of chaos, and transmitted society to us, we may still derive hope for our future from the small but certain advance that has been made in certain departments of ethics, such as the position of women, as well as in physical science. We have groped painfully towards the light, but our path, taking it all in all, has been onwards.
It is curious to see how many words of common use were derived by the Anglo-Saxons from a Latin original. "Ore," pitcher, from " urceus ;" "disc," dish, from "discus ;" " c6c," cook, from "coquus ;" are as unmistakable as " candel" from "candela," and "pund," pound, from "pondus ;" while the names of vegetables, trees, and flowers—" cawl.," cabbage, from " caulis," which is still preserved in colewort and cauliflower ; " nedic," radish, from "radix," not as Mr. Wright rather oddly surmises, from " raphanus ;" and " mor-beam," the mulberry-tree, from "moms ;" are a few among many specimens of the permanence of Roman horticulture. The only question would seem to be, whether these words may not have been derived from Augustine and his followers, rather than from the Roman ized popula- tion which the Saxons found here. But words of common use are more likely to have been preserved by a subject population than in- troduced by foreign missionaries. Again, many of the Latin words in Anglo-Saxon are Latin also in Welsh, as, for instance, among those we have quoted, dysgl, cog, canwyll, punt, cawl, rhuddigl, and mor- wydden, or, in fact, seven out of eight. We thus obtain a firm starting-point by knowing that the Saxon conquerors of England entered upon the inheritance of Roman civilisation, at least, in its inferior parts. The remedies of the Saxon pharmacopceia, which Mr. Wright has not touched upon in this volume, were also derived from the nostrums of Boman practice. A thought will show how curiously-mixed the life of Saxon-England during the sixth century must have been. A subject British population, with its native super- stitions coloured by Christianity, the long-haired Germanic con- querors worshipping Odin in groves outside the towns, Roman streets, basilicas and baths, traditions of Roman law blending with Teutonic practice, and the old Roman guilds handing down the secrets of Roman manufactures and commerce. Nor must we ex- clude Augustine and his fellows from the rank of civilizers ; they renewed the old connexion with the Continent, restored literature, and probably introduced the organ, and renewed architecture. But this denvative civilization was almost extinguished during the ninth
• A History of Domestic Mamma and Sestiments is England daring the ithhile Ages. By Thomas Wright, F.S.A., to. With Illustaations by F. W. Fuirholt, Esq., F.S.A. London : Chapman and Hall.
century, when the Danes scoured the land, burning and breaking up everywhere. Much as we owe to the mixed races who have made England what it is, every separate occupation appeared for the time to undo all the progress that had been painfully built up. It should never be forgotten that the great writers of Anglo-gavon times—Bede, Ccedmon, and Alcuin.—belong to the centuries before Alfred. The Danes brought us the stuff of which men are made, but they para- lyzed learning and trade. What little thought still lived was ab- sorbed in Daustan's ecclesiastical struggles.
With the Norman Conquest we come into a new region of facts and ideas. Feudalism, chivalry, scholasticism, are the great land- marks of the later middle ages. The picture of the condition of England under its Norman kings .is not altogether a pleasant one. An upper class of soldiers is certain to weigh heavily on yeoman and
peasant, and the best that can be Said is, that the Normans were probably not much worse than the Saxon and Danish nobles had
been, while the Norman legislature and police were infinitely better. To say, as Mr. .Wright does in one place, that "the law of the land was a mere nominal institution" during a great part of the middle ages, is certainly much too strong. Monsters like Robert de Bel- lesme—who impaled men and women in bloody sport, and squeezed out his godson's eyes at the font—are exceptional features in any society ; if they were otherwise it could not exist. Under Stephen and during Richard the First's absence from England, and for some time during the minority of Henry the Third, England was in a state of anarchy. But the right of private war was never recognized by our kin's, and if the temptations to crime were constantly stronger than the correctives, a main cause of this lay in the very conditions of society, in the turbulence of armed retainers before soldiers were introduced, in the many miles of bad road and desolate country, and in the un- certainty of justice, when the police was badly organized, and the eanons of criminal evidence uncertain. But never did any genera- tions strive after law and order more strenuously than our Anglo- Norman forefathers, and the headsman's sword was rather blunted with use than dim with rust. When all short-comings have been admitted, the great facts still remain, that property increased in value, even under the Conqueror himself; that the wealth of England amazed the German envoys under Richard I.; that our population had probably doubled between the battles of Hastings and of Crecy, and that no distinction of race, however it might exist as a fact, was allowed to petrify in our legal institutions. Mr. Wright is a little too fond of quoting from French romances in a book on Eng,lish society. Now, romances are at best uncertain materials for history. They are often constructed out of old materials which reflect the barbarism of earlier times ; they are crowded with adventures in which force and fraud are necessary foils to courage and loyalty; they give-a national point of view at times when the level of European culture was unequal. They may, no doubt, be used freely to indicate or to corroborate a conclusion, but they are insufficient in themselves. Mr. Wright, of course takes them with proper abate- ments. But it is the fault of his book that he does not sufficiently guard his readers against one-sidedness. Here, for instance, it is, we think, evident that national wealth and increase cannot coexist with universal oppression and lawlessness. On the other hand, in another important point, Mr. Wright, from taking a wider range, has arrived at just conclusions on the difficult subject of the relations of the sexes. Mr. Kenelm Digby, looking at the spirit of chivalrous romances and the legends of the saints, imagined that faith and purity were especial characteristics of the middle ages. Mr. Wright give, the other side of the picture. In times when houses were small, men and women lived of necessity very much in common, and the lady received visitors in her bedroom. lathe lack of literary employment, eating and drinking were the great pleasures of the day. Soldiers trained in the licence of camps, and many thousands of idle men, or mere men. of letters who had taken orders to secure a sustenance and were shut out from marriage, formed the tone of society and mixed with women who had neither principle nor education to restrain them from the vice which opportunity, idleness, and temptation recom- mended. "La vertu des femines c'est la plus belle invention des hommes," says a French lady, and the saying has its historical evi- dence. Mr. Kenelm Digby has confounded what existed in germ as a thought with the melancholy facts of the period. Yet the strong yearning for something nobler and purer than could be met with, which chivalrous romances and conventual foundations reflect, did actually prepare the way for gradual elevation. Chaucer's women were replaced by the noble matrons of the Commonwealth times, by a Mrs. Hutchinson and a Lady Fairfax.
We have dwelt upon these points in preference to quoting from Mr. Wright's interesting text, becauk his title seems to us a slight misnomer. His book is an-excellent handbook to mediseval manners, to whatever is outward and visible, but it does not give the feelings and thoughts of our forefathers. Purposely, no doubt, Mr. Wright has omitted all mention of the Church and its influences. It is needless to show that a book which passes without notice the piety of Auselm, the self-devotion of the first followers of St. Francis, the large charities that covered England with hospitals, the spirit that made a soldier like Robert de Bossn and a statesman like Richard de Luci retire into the cloister, and the religious fury of the Crusades, does not cover the larger or better part of mediseval sentiment. But again much outward life was bound up with the services of the Latin Church. Its bells called the faithful morning and evening to prayer ; its architecture, music, sculptures, and paintings were the real art of the times for which the brain was inventive and the hand toil-worn; its mysteries were the drama, as its mock-feasts were the farce of the populace; and the charter of English liberties was read
within church walls to the sturdy worshippers whose arms had con- quered freedom. A local tyrant or scamp might be denounced from the English altar of the twelfth century, as an Irish landlord or a "gos- peller" may still be in Galway or Tipperary; and rioters might be brought to the church porch to be scourged into Christian life and quiet behaviour. The sham sentiment of modern reactions, Puseyite or ultramontane, has tried to cast a dishonest gloss over these secular aspects of religion, and to represent the world as subjugated by a sickly faith like their own, when in reality the spiritual life of Becket's and Stephen Langton's contemporaries was the healthy and broad materialism of unedutated men, who carried their natures and habits with them into the service of the sanctuary. Religion gained in width of culture, society in a tone of Christian idealism, and the whole mixed order separated into new forms of life, when God's good time came. We are far from blaming Mr. Wright if he has not chosen to grapple with so vast a subject. Only in the interests of his readers who are not as learned as himself, and in the interests of his book, to which we hope and predict permanent success, it is im- portant that those who read it should take it for what it really is, an interesting and good view of medifeval manners, and not as a history of early thought and feeling. But its best recommendation will be to be seen and read.
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