PICTURES OF OLD ENGLAND.*
Da. PAUL!, while collecting documents for his well-known "History of England in the Middle Ages," raked together some materials he found it needless or difficult to use. Unwilling to lose the fruit of much labour and research, he has thrown the discarded materials into a series of essays, which he calls Picture: of Old England. They are all distinguished by the author's usual merits—painstaking accuracy and impartial judgment ; but the majority are not, we think, worthy either of a translation or of the author's fame. They may be, and doubtless will be, exceeding,lyjnterestin,g to Germans who know England only as the first of ifittbral Powers, and Lcindon. only as English tourists know Paris or Vienna. But they are ex- ceedingly slight, and add nothing to the knowledge current among most educated Englishmen. The paper, for example, on the Parlia- ment of the fourteenth century professes to explain the rise and constitution of the British Parliament, but is decidedly inferior both in accuracy of detail and broad generalization to the narratives given in many Peerages, popular Histories of England, and other ac- cessible works.Any experienced guide in Canterbury would give an account of the "worship of St. Thomas itBecket" far more com- plete than Dr. Pauli's, while the learned author does not make an at- tempt to account for the only marvellous feature in the narrative, the long-continued reverence for a saint whose history was too recent for the halo of mystery to surround it. The point of the whole story, that Becket was at once the Saxon saint and the priests' martyr, that he, a man of the lowest origin, tied an archbishop and died to defend the privileges of the priesthood, so that the priests in- culcated from policy the reverence which the people were anxious to pay from political feeling, is completely missed. In its place we have a statement, expanded.iuto pages, that the Black Prince and Henry IV. desired to be buried by his grave, a statement any six- penny guide-book to Canterbury repeats with the same unction, and more brevity. The account of the monks and Mendicant friars is a most ordinary narrative of the rise and fall of the different Orders which by turns becitme powerful in England, till "their ruin was ultimately brought about with as much harshness and want of tolerance as Henry VIII. could impart to the final blow which threw down the centre system." An English schoolboy will scarcely fail to recognize statements like the following—and the paper contains no- thing more novel—as old acquaintances. Dr. Pauli is speaking of the decline of the Franciscans
"The daring wills which they had once taken part in the conflict against the pretensions of the Papal chair, both in England and Germany, the resolution with which they had for a time supported the secular authority, and aided in bringing the struggle for freedom to a successful termination, had been changed into the most unprincipled effrontery, and perverted to their own advantage, while their pretensions and opposition to all other authorities, and their daring attempts to keep in subjection the consciences of men, knew no limits. Their adherence to the external forms of their rule degenerated into the most repulsive hypocrisy, in comparison with which the openly exhibited love of pleasure of the monks appears comparatively unobjectionable. Their Knowledge had degenerated into mere un- profitable theorems and subtile hair-splitting arguments, while the great majority of the brethren were sunk into a state of illiterate stupidity, which would hardly have been a source of gratification to St. Francis, could he have foreseen it. They had forfeited the opportunity which they once possessed of bringing about a much desired and greatly needed reformation in the Church and the State, as well as in society at large, although they still sought to augment the power which they bad acquired in the University, in defiance of the daily increasing complaint that they aimed at nothing short of the exclusive subjection of the minds of the young to their teaching."
"The Fortunes of Nigel" gives at least as accurate a description of London, as "London in the Middle Ages," and surpasses it in picturesqueness. Londoners are, at all events, very tired of the in- cessant repetition of descriptions such as these :
"Cries of Hot peascods! Strawberry ripe! Cherries in the rise! Mackerel! Oysters!' are shouted into his ears right and left as he passes along the booths of Cheapside, where all sorts of people and thing, are jostled and crowded together, and where every article of wearing apparel, from velvet and silk to homespans and yarns, is offered for sale. But he has no money, and can buy none of these fine things; nay, he even sees his own hood, which was stolen from his neck in the throng in Westminster Hall, hanging up in Rag-fair. When he comes into Eastcheap, the landlord of a tavern rushes forth, and pulling him by the sleeve, cries, 'Come, sir, and try our wine What a bustle and confusion is here! One is crying,: Roast-beet I' another Pies!' while all around there is a violent clattering of tin jugs and platters. Then, besides, some are playing the harp, some the bagpipes, and some are singing. One is calling, 'Yea, by cock!' another, Nay, by cock !' while some are singing, for money, of Jenkin and Julian. The poor country wight is. however, heavy at heart, and cries: 'But for lack of money I might not speed."
Four of the twelve essays are, however, of some interest for the English reader, and would have made by themselves a valuable essay on the early relations between Great Britain and Germany. The first, on "England's earliest relations to Austria and Prussia,' opens up a chapter of history, singularly little known to Englishmen, whose idea of it, indeed, is generally confined to the fact that Richard, Duke of Cornwall, once purchased the Imperial crown of Germany. Dr. Pauli's account is still vexatiously slight ; he gives no idea of Richard's special claim on the electors, but he enables us to under- stand why a section of the German nobility should have considered England a natural ally. The Plantagenets, almost without excep- tion, regarded themselves as foes of the Papacy, with which they and their barons maintained for a century a permanent and partially sue- s Pictvra 0/ Oki liViand. By Dr. Psuli. Longman and Co.
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cessful war. Their reigns were synchronous with the last struggles of the Guelphic faction, which, by an odd conjunction of circum- stances, after its long, and on the whole unsuccessful, struggle with the Popes, gave to England in the heirs of its leaders an anti-Papal dynasty. The marriage of the daughter of Henry the Second, our mpress Maud," with Henry the Lion, linked the House in a family bond with the Hohenstauffen, a bond connected by the policy of that family in fostering the trading, then as now the English, interest. They and their followers opened town after town to trade, and Eng- land found herself brought in frequent contact with every part of Flanders, Brabant, Holland, Jailers, Cologne, and Saxony. On the fall of the dynasty its adherents naturally looked to England for a prince least objectionable to local jealousies ; and Richard of Corn- wall was formally elected King of the Romans. His reputed wealth was probably an additional inducement; but the crown was not a phantom one, as most histories of England aver, nor was it sold. The connexion continued with varying intimacy, among its incidents being the marriage of the Emperor Frederic II. with Isabella, sister of Henry III., until Edward I. finally embraced the cause of Rudolf of Hapsburg. An alliance between the two families was even con- templated, and Joan, an infant daughter of Edward, was betrothed to Prince Hartmann, the destined heir to the Imperial throne, and the marriage was only broken off by the death of the German Prince. Dr. Pauli gives an interesting account of this long negotiation, during which Prince Hartmann was constantly accused of slackness, while Edward was curiously divided between his wish to appear attentive to the political advantages of the alliance and his real anxiety as to the precise extent of Prince Hartmann's landed property. Throughout his reign, however, Rudolf maintained intimate relations with the Plan- tagenets ; and Dr. Pauli gives instances in which the intercession of the English King weighed successfully with the Austrian House. After his death, however, the Bavarian line, which succeeded to the throne of Germany, having slender ties of affinity with England, the intercourse with the II:psburoba became more slight and reserved, and was confined: almost entirely to questions of State policy, though not quite BO entirely as Dr. Pauli in the following sentence asserts : "Notwithstanding these friendly dispositions, the marriage of King Philip II. of Spain with Mary of England was the only matrimonial alliance that was ever concluded between the English royal family and the House of Hapsburg." Dr. Pauli has, we fancy, forgotten Catherine of Arragon, who, though not a Hapsburg, was the niece of Charles V.
The intercourse with Germany, however, continued, though re- lations with the Hapsburgs ceased, and led, hi 1337, to a second connexion between the throne of England and the imperial crown. Edward the Third, influenced partly by a desire to increase his revenue through a monopoly of wool, and partly by his desire to secure allies in his projects against France, entered into strict alliance with the Emperor Louis IV. The main provision of this league was one often and shamefully repeated in our history, the Emperor furnishing German troops—then called Hainaulters—for the English wars in France, and receiving a heavy subsidy in return. To ratify the alliance, Edward visited his ally, subscribed 67/. 10s., equal, says Dr. Pauli, to 1000/., towards the cathedral of Cologne, stall finishing to this day, and was appointed Vicar of all the terri- tories on the left bank of the Rhine. Edward, misled appa- rently by the extraordinary reverence still felt in Europe for the successors of the Western Empire, fancied the newgrant had added greatly to his power, but he was soon undeceived. The Germans were as prejudiced as their insular rivals, even Louis's per- sonal partisans refused to obey the summons of the English Vicar, and it was not till 1339 that an allied army could be collected, with which Edward, with all his brilliant capacity for soldiership, effected nothing, and at the end of a few more months quietly dropped his useless and cumbrous dignity. The appointment is seldom men- tioned even in good histories, and is interesting only as the first and last instance in which a King of England has acted as the lieutenant of another Power. Henry V. also welcomed the Emperor Sigismund in London "Sigismund super grammaticam," as Carlyle calls him, gave him the Order of the Garter, and arranged a perpetual treaty of offensive and defensive alliance, which remained unbroken till the death of the British monarch. A personal friendship, very rare among sovereigns, had united theitwo men, and when Sigismund died, the heir of his friend, the weak and ill-fated Henry VI., gave the last evidence of the deep respect in which the ally of England had been held by ordering masses for his soul in every English church.
The first relations of England with Prussia arose in a widely dif- ferent fashion, one almost unique in the history of Europe. Early in the thirteenth century the Teutonic Knights, then the third of the semi-military Orders of Europe, elected Hermann von Salm as their Grand Master. Hermann, who was renowned both as statesman and soldier, resolved to transfer the crusade from the Holy Land to Northern Europe, and settled his knights along the shores of the Baltic, where they commenced a struggle for the conversion of heathen Wends and Lithuanians by force of arms. In this contest they were materially aided by the English knights. The Grand Master himself received a stipend of forty marks annually for a hun- dred years, in aid of his pious labours, and it became a regular habit for an English knight who wanted to acquire renown, or clear his conscience, to do battle against the infidels of Prussia. Chaucer alludes to this custom in the following lines : "Ftil often tyme he hadae the bord bygones Aboven alle nacionna in Pruce.
In Lettowe hadde he reysed and in Race."
Henry Duke of Lancaster, in 1390, headed a strong expedition to their aid, and helped to beleaguer Wiles, bestowed alms in Dantzic, and on his accession to the throne as Henry IV. displayed a know- ledge of Prussian politics which to that age seemed strange, and which enabled him to conduct some difficult negotiations with the leading towns of the Baltic. Had Dr. Pauli worked out the idea which runs through these pages, lie would have added a contribution to history, instead of to the feeblest branch of literature.
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