Part 21

Civil freedom, as we have seen, dawned first in the great commercial cities of Italy, whence it spread to Germany, Flanders, and Britain. This important change in society may be traced to the institution of free communities of traders, or guilds of merchants; and such confederacies were a necessary consequence of the usurpation and tyranny of the nobles and feudal possessors of the soil. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the usurpations of the nobility became intolerable; they had reduced the great body of the people to a state of actual servitude. Nor was such oppression the portion of those alone who dwelt in the country, and were employed in cultivating the estates of their masters. Cities and villages found it necessary to hold of some great lord, on whom they might depend for protection, and became no less subject to his arbitrary jurisdiction. The inhabitants were deprived of those rights which, in social life, are deemed most natural and inalienable. They could not dispose of the effects which their own industry had acquired, either by a later will, or by any deed executed during their lives. Neither could they marry, nor carry on lawsuits, without the consent of their lord. But as soon as the cities of Italy began to turn their attention towards commerce, and to conceive some idea of the advantages which they might derive from it, they became impatient to shake off the yoke of their insolent lords, and to establish among themselves such a free and equal government as would render property and industry secure. The Italian cities were the first to emancipate themselves, and their example was followed in other great seats of population, the king of the country in general countenancing the establishment of free communities, in order to gain support against the encroachments of the overgrown power of the barons. The first community of this description formed in Scotland is understood to have been that of Berwick-upon-Tweed, which received its charter from William the Lion. Towns, upon acquiring the right of community, became so many little republics, governed by known and equal laws. The inhabitants being trained to arms, and being surrounded by walls, they soon began to hold the neighboring barons in contempt, and to withstand aggressions on their property and privileges. Another great good, of fully more importance, was produced. These free communities were speedily admitted, by their representatives, into the great council of the nation, whether distinguished by the name of a Parliament, a Diet, the Cortes, or the States-General. This is justly esteemed the greatest event in the history of mankind in modern times. Representatives from the English boroughs were first admitted into the great national council by the barons who took up arms against Henry III in the year 1265; being summoned to add to the greater popularity of their party, and to strengthen the barrier against the encroachments of regal power. Readers may draw their own conclusions from an event which ultimately had the effect of revolutionising the framework of society, and of rearing that great body of the people commonly styled ‘the middle class.’

The enfranchising of burghal communities led to the manumission of slaves. Hitherto the tillers of the ground, all the inferior classes of the country, were the bondsmen of the barons. The monarchs of France, in order to reduce the power of the nobles, set the example, by ordering (1315-1318) all serfs to be set at liberty on just and reasonable conditions. The edicts were carried into immediate execution within the royal domain. The example of their sovereigns, together with the expectation of considerable sums which they might raise by this expedient, led many of the nobles to set their dependents at liberty; and servitude was thus gradually abolished in almost every province of the kingdom. This beneficial practice similarly spread over the rest of Europe; and in England, as the spirit of liberty gained ground, the very name and idea of personal servitude, without any formal interposition of the legislature to prohibit it, was totally banished.

While society was assuming the semblance of the form it now bears, the progress of improvement was accelerated by various collateral circumstances, the first of which worth noticing was:

_The Revival of Letters._ The first restorers of learning in Europe were the Arabians, who, in the course of their Asiatic conquests, became acquainted with some of the ancient Greek authors, discovered their merits, and had them translated into Arabic, esteeming those principally which treated of mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. They disseminated their knowledge in the course of their conquests, and founded schools and colleges in all the countries which they subdued. The western kingdoms of Europe became first acquainted with the learning of the ancients through the medium of those Arabian translations. Charlemagne caused them to be retranslated into Latin; and, after the example of the caliphs, founded universities at Bonona, Pavia, Osnaburg, and Paris. Similar efforts were made in England by Alfred; and to him we owe the establishment, or at least the elevation, of the university of Oxford. The first efforts, however, at literary improvement were marred by the subtleties of scholastic divinity. Perhaps the greatest and wisest literary character of the middle ages was an English friar, named Roger Bacon. This extraordinary individual was not only learned, but, what was more uncommon in those times, he was scientific. Hallam asserts that he was acquainted with the nature of gunpowder, though he deemed it prudent to conceal his knowledge. He saw the insufficiency of school philosophy, and was the first to insist on experiment and the observation of nature as the fittest instruments by which to acquire knowledge. He reformed the calendar, and made discoveries in astronomy, optics, chemistry, medicine, and mechanics.

It is to Italy, however, that we owe the first and greatest exertions in the revival of letters. The spirit of liberty which had arisen among its republics was favorable to the cultivation of literature and accordingly we find that not only did they produce many individuals who were most active and successful in bringing to light the relics of classical lore, but that there also arose among them men possessed of the highest order of original genius. Florence produced Dante so early as 1265. Dante was associated with the magistracy of his native city in his earlier years; but having given dissatisfaction in that capacity, he was banished, and in his exile produced his great poem entitled the ‘Divine Comedy.’ It is a representation of the three supposed kingdoms of futurity――Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise――divided into one hundred cantos, and containing about 14,000 lines. The poem has been much praised. Petrarch, born in the year 1304, was likewise a Florentine by birth. The misfortunes of his father had impoverished the family, and Petrarch was too proud to take the usual method of retrieving his affairs. His genius, however, earned for him the friendship of many Italian princes, and even of more popes than one, although he had exerted his talents to expose the vices of their courts. Petrarch’s personal character seems to have exhibited some unamiable traits; but he has sung of love, friendship, glory, patriotism, and religion, in language of such sweetness and power as to have made him the admiration of every succeeding age. Boccaccio, like the two great poets named, was a Florentine. He was born in 1313, and his name has descended to posterity less associated with his poetry than the light, elegant, and easy prose of his novels.

_The discovery of Justinian’s Laws_, as detailed in the Pandects, was another event which powerfully tended to modify the barbarism that prevailed during the middle ages in Europe.

_The invention of the Mariner’s Compass_ must be reckoned of still greater importance, and yet it is absolutely unknown to whom we owe it. That honor has been often bestowed on Gioia, a citizen of Amalphi, who lived about the commencement of the fourteenth century. But the polarity of the magnet at least was known to the Saracens two hundred years before that time; though even after the time of Gioia, it was long before the magnet was made use of as a guide in navigation. ‘It is a singular circumstance,’ says Mr. Hallam, ‘and only to be explained by the obstinacy with which men are apt to reject improvement, that the magnetic needle was not generally adopted in navigation till very long after the discovery of its properties, and even after their peculiar importance had been perceived. The writers of the thirteenth century, who mentioned the polarity of the needle, mention also its use in navigation; yet Campany has found no distinct proof of its employment till 1403, and does not believe that it was frequently on board Mediterranean ships at the latter part of the preceding age.’ The Genoese, however, are known in the fourteenth century to have come out of that inland sea, and steered for Flanders and England. But by far the greatest sailors of the age were the Spaniards and Portuguese. This latter nation had little or no existence during the greater part of the middle ages, but in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, they were able to expel the Moors from a great part of their country; and in the beginning of the fifteenth, John, surnamed the Bastard, who was then their king, was the first European prince who exhibited a respectable navy. It was in 1486 that this adventurous people first doubled the Cape of Good Hope.

_The discovery of America_ (1493) may be mentioned supplementarily to the invention of the mariner’s compass, as an event which, without it, could never have taken place. The immortal honor of that discovery rests with Christopher Columbus, a sailor of Genoa. After unsuccessful applications at almost every court in Europe, and braving obloquy and contempt, Columbus at last obtained a miserable force from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain; and with no landmark but the heavens, nor any guide but his compass, he launched boldly into the sea, and at last conducted Europeans to the great western hemisphere.

In the course of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries, various discoveries in the arts were made, which powerfully tended to the advancement of society; among these the more important were the invention of gunpowder and firearms, clocks and watches, paper-making and printing. This last, the greatest of all, prepared the way for the Reformation in religion, in the sixteenth century, by which religious was added to civil freedom, and a great spur given to individual activity.

HISTORY OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND.

CONQUEST BY THE ROMANS.

Previously to the year 55 before Christ, the British Islands, in common with the whole of northern and western Europe, were occupied by barbarous tribes, who bore nearly the same relation to the civilized nations of Greece and Italy, which the North American Indians of the present day bear to the inhabitants of Great Britain and the United States. The Romans, who for ages had been extending their power over their rude neighbors, had concluded the conquest of Gaul, now called France, when, in the year just mentioned, their celebrated commander, Julius Cæsar, learning from the merchants of that country that there was another fertile land on the opposite side of the narrow sea now termed the British Channel, resolved to proceed thither, and subject it also to the Roman arms. Disembarking at the place since called Deal, he soon overawed the savage natives, though they were naturally warlike, and averse to a foreign yoke. He did not, however, gain a firm footing in Britain till the succeeding year, when he employed no fewer than 800 vessels to convey his troops from Gaul. Except along the coasts, where some tillage prevailed, the British tribes lived exactly as the Indians now do, upon animals caught in hunting, and fruits which grew spontaneously. They stained and tattooed their bodies, and had no religion but a bloody idolatry called Druidism. The people of Ireland were in much the same condition.

Little was done on this occasion to establish the Roman power in Britain; but about a century afterwards――namely, in the year of Christ 43, when the emperor Claudius was reigning at Rome――another large army invaded the island, and reduced a considerable part of it. A British prince called Caradoc, or Caractacus, who had made a noble defense against their arms, was finally taken and sent prisoner to Rome, where he was regarded with the same wonder as we should bestow upon a North American chief who had greatly obstructed the progress of settlements in this quarter of the world. In the year 61, an officer named Suetonius did much to reduce the Britons, by destroying the numerous Druidical temples in the Isle of Anglesea; religion having in this case, as in many others since, been a great support to the patriotic cause. He soon after overthrew the celebrated British princess Boadicéa, who had raised an almost general insurrection against the Roman power.

In the year 79, Agricola, a still greater general, extended the influence of Rome to the Firths of Forth and Clyde, which he formed into a frontier, by connecting them with a chain of forts. It was his policy, after he had subdued part of the country, to render it permanently attached to Rome, by introducing the pleasures and luxuries of the Capital. He was the first to sail round the island. In the year 84, having gone beyond the Forth, he was opposed by a great concourse of the rude inhabitants of the north, under a chief name Galgacus, whom he completely overthrew at _Mons Grampius_, or the Grampian Mountain; a spot about which there are many disputes, but which was probably at Ardoch in Perthshire, where there are still magnificent remains of a Roman camp. Tacitus, a writer related to Agricola, gives a very impressive account of this great conflict, and exhibits the bravery of the native forces as very remarkable; but the correctness of his details cannot be much relied on.

It appears that Agricola, while on the western coast of Scotland, was desirous of making the conquest of Ireland, which he thought would be useful, both as a medium of communication with Spain, and as a position whence he could overawe Britain. He formed an acquaintance with an Irish chief, who, having been driven from his country by civil commotions, was ready to join in invading it. By him Agricola was informed that the island might be conquered by one legion and a few auxiliaries. The inhabitants, according to Tacitus, bore a close resemblance to the Britons.

It is generally allowed that the Romans experienced an unusual degree of difficulty in subduing the Britons; and it is certain that they were baffled in all their attempts upon the northern part of Scotland, which was then called Caledonia. The utmost they could do with the inhabitants of that country, was to build walls across the island to keep them by themselves. The first wall was built in the year 121, by the Emperor Hadrian, between Newcastle and the Solway Firth. The second was built by the Emperor Antoninus, about the year 140, as a connection of the line of forts which Agricola had formed between the Firths of Forth and Clyde. This boundary was not long kept, for in 210 we find the Emperor Severus fortifying the rampart between the Tyne and Solway. Roman armies, however, probably under the command of Lollius Urbicus, had penetrated far beyond the more northerly wall, although, unfortunately, no accounts of their reception are preserved. From comparing Roman remains lately discovered with ancient geographies, it is held as established that the Romans reached the north-east end of Loch Ness, near the modern town of Inverness. The number of roads and camps which they made, and the regularity with which the country was divided into stations, prove their desire to preserve these conquests. When the conquest was thus so far completed, the country was governed in the usual manner of a Roman province; and towns began to rise in the course of time――being generally those whose names are found to end in _chester_, a termination derived from _castra_, the Latin word for camp. The Christian religion was also introduced, and Roman literature made some progress in the country.

CONQUEST BY THE SAXONS.

At length a time came when the Romans could no longer defend their own native country against the nations in the north of Europe. The soldiers were then withdrawn from Britain (about the year 440), and the people left to govern themselves. The Caledonians, who did not like to be so much straitened in the north, took advantage of the unprotected state of the Britons to pour in upon them from the other side of the wall, and despoil them of their lives and goods. The British had no resource but to call in another set of protectors, the Saxons, a warlike people who lived in the north of Germany, and the Jutes and Angles, who inhabited Denmark. The remedy was found hardly any better than the disease. Having once acquired a footing in the island, these hardy strangers proceeded to make it a subject of conquest, as the Romans had done before, with this material difference, that they drove the British to the western parts of the island, particularly into Wales, and settled, with new hordes of their countrymen, over the better part of the land. So completely was the population changed, that, excepting in the names of some of the hills and rivers, the British language was extinguished, and even the name of the country itself was changed, from what it originally was to Angle-land or England, a term taken from the Angles. The conquest required about two hundred and fifty years to be effected, and, like that of the Romans, it extended no farther north than the Firths of Forth and Clyde. Before the Britons were finally cooped up in Wales, many battles were fought; but few of these are accurately recorded. The most distinguished of the British generals were the Princes Vortimer and Aurelius Ambrosius. It is probably on the achievements of the latter that the well-known fables of King Arthur and his knights are founded.

England, exclusive of the western regions, was now divided into seven kingdoms, called Kent, Northumberland, East Anglia, Mercia, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex, each of which was governed by a race descended from the leader who had first subdued it; and the whole have since been called by historians the _Saxon Heptarchy_, the latter word being composed of two Greek words, signifying _seven kingdoms_. To the north of the Forth dwelt a nation called the Picts, who also had a king, and were in all probability the people with whom Agricola had fought under the name of Caledonians. In the Western Highlands there was another nation, known by the name of the Scots, or Dalriads, who had gradually migrated thither from Ireland, between the middle of the third century and the year 503, when they established, under a chief named Fergus, a monarchy destined in time to absorb all the rest. About the year 700 there were no fewer than fifteen kings, or chiefs, within the island, while Ireland was nearly in the same situation. In Britain, at the same time, five languages were in use, the Latin, Saxon, Welsh, the Pictish, and the Irish. The general power of the country has been found to increase as these nations and principalities were gradually amassed together.

Although three of the Saxon kingdoms, Wessex, Mercia, and Northumberland, became predominant, the Heptarchy prevailed from about the year 585 to 800, when Egbert, king of Wessex, acquired a paramount influence over all the other states, though their kings still continued to reign. Alfred, so celebrated for his virtues, was the grandson of Egbert, and began to reign in the year 871. At this time the Danes, who are now a quiet, inoffensive people, were a nation of pirates, and at the same time heathens. They used to come in large fleets, and commit dreadful ravages on the shores of Britain. For some time they completely overturned the sovereignty of Alfred, and compelled him to live in obscurity in the centre of a marsh. But he at length fell upon them when they thought themselves in no danger, and regained the greater part of his kingdom. Alfred spent the rest of his life in literary study, of which he was very fond, and in forming laws and regulations for the good of his people. He was perhaps the most able, most virtuous, and most popular prince that ever reigned in Britain; and all this is the more surprising, when we find that his predecessors and successors, for many ages, were extremely cruel and ignorant. He died in the year 901, in the fifty-third year of his age.

CONQUEST BY THE NORMANS.

The Saxon line of princes continued to rule, with the exception of three Danish reigns, till the year 1066, when the crown was in the possession of a usurper named Harold. The country was then invaded by William, Duke of Normandy, a man of illegitimate birth, attended by a large and powerful army. Harold opposed him at Hastings (October 14), and after a well-contested battle, his army was defeated, and himself slain. William then caused himself to be crowned king at Westminster; and in the course of a few years he succeeded, by means of his warlike Norman followers, in completely subduing the Saxons. His chiefs were settled upon the lands of those who opposed him, and became the ancestors of most of the present noble families of England.

Previously to this period, the Church of Rome, which was the only surviving part of the power of that empire, had established its supremacy over England. The land was also subjected to what is called the feudal system (see HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE AGES), by which all proprietors of land were supposed to hold it from the king for military service, while the tenants were understood to owe them military service in turn for their use of the land. All orders of men were thus kept in a chain of servile obedience, while some of the lower orders were actually slaves to their superiors.

In the year 853, Kenneth, king of the Scots, had added the Pictish kingdom to his own, and his descendant Malcolm II, in 1020, extended his dominions over not only the south of Scotland, but a part of the north of England. Thus, putting aside Wales, which continued to be an independent country, under its own princes, the island was divided, at the time of the Norman Conquest, into two considerable kingdoms, England and Scotland, as they were for some centuries afterwards. Ireland, which had also been invaded by hordes from the north of Europe, was divided into a number of small kingdoms, like England under the Saxon Heptarchy.

EARLY NORMAN KINGS.