There, then, you have the picture of what held the levers of the machine of government during the period of its degradation and transformation, which followed the breakdown of central authority. Clovis, in the north of France, the Burgundian chieftain at Arles, Theodoric in Italy, Athanagild later at Toledo in Spain, were all of them men who had stepped into the shoes of an unbroken local Roman administration, who worked entirely by it, and whose machinery of administration wherever they went was called by the Roman and official name of _Palatium_.
Their families were originally of barbaric stock: they had for their small armed forces a military inst.i.tution descended and derived from the Roman auxiliary forces; often, especially in the early years of their power, they spoke a mixed and partly barbaric tongue [Footnote: The barbaric dialects outside the Empire were already largely latinized through commerce with the Empire and by its influence, and, of course, what we call "Teutonic Languages" are in reality half Roman, long before we get our first full doc.u.ments in the eighth and ninth centuries.] more easily than pure Latin; but every one of them was a soldier of the declining Empire and regarded himself as a part of it, not as even conceivably an enemy of it.
When we appreciate this we can understand how insignificant were those changes of frontier which make so great a show in historical atlases.
The _Rex_ of such and such an auxiliary force dies and divides his "kingdom" between two sons. What does that mean? Not that a nation with its customs and its whole form of administration was suddenly divided into two, still less that there has been what today we call "annexation" or "part.i.tion" of states. It simply means that the honor and advantage of administration are divided between the two heirs, who take, the one the one area, the other the other, over which to gather taxes and to receive personal profit. It must always be remembered that the personal privilege so received was very small in comparison with the total revenue to be administrated, and that the vast ma.s.s of public work as carried on by the judiciary, the officers of the Treasury and so forth, continued to be quite impersonal and fundamentally imperial. This governmental world of clerks and civil servants lived its own life and was only in theory dependent upon the _Rex_, and the _Rex_ was no more than the successor of the chief local Roman official. [Footnote: Our popular historical atlases render a very bad service to education by their way of coloring these districts as though they were separate modern nations. The real division right up to full tide of feudalism was Christian and Pagan, and, within the former, Eastern and Western: Greek and Latin.]
The _Rex_, by the way, called himself always by some definite inferior Roman t.i.tle, such as _Vir Ill.u.s.ter_, as an Englishman today might be called "Sir Charles So and So" or "Lord So and So," never anything more; and often (as in the case of Clovis), he not only accepted directly from the Roman Emperor a particular office, but observed the old popular Roman customs such as, largesse and procession, upon his induction into that office.
Now why did not this man, this _Rex_, in Italy or Gaul or Spain, simply remain in the position of local Roman Governor? One would imagine, if one did not know more about that society, that he should have done this.
The small auxiliary forces of which he had been chieftain rapidly merged into the body of the Empire, as had the infinitely larger ma.s.s of slaves and colonists, equally barbarian in origin, for century after century before that time. The body of civilization was one, and we wonder, at first, why its moral unity did not continue to be represented by a central Monarch. Though the civilization continued to decline, its forms should, one would think, have remained unchanged and the theoretic attachment of each of these subordinates to the Roman Emperor at Constantinople should have endured indefinitely. As a fact, the memory of the old central authority of the Emperor was gradually forgotten; the _Rex_ and his local government as he got weaker also got more isolated. He came to coining his own money, to treating directly as a completely independent ruler. At last the idea of "kings" and "kingdoms" took shape in men"s minds. Why?
The reason that the nature of authority very slowly changed, that the last links with the Roman Empire of the East--that is, with the supreme head at Constantinople--gradually dissolved in the West, and that the modern _nation arose_ around these local governments of the _Reges_, is to be found in that novel feature, the standing Council of great men around the _Rex_, with whom everything is done.
This standing Council expresses three forces, which between them, were transforming society. Those three forces were: first, certain vague underlying national feelings, older than the Empire, Gallic, Brittanic, Iberian; secondly, the economic force of the great Roman landowners, and, lastly, the living organization of the Catholic Church.
On the economic, or material, side of society, the great landowners were the reality of that time.
We have no statistics to go upon. But the facts of the time and the nature of its inst.i.tutions are quite as cogent as detailed statistics. In Spain, in Gaul, in Italy, as in Africa, economic power had concentrated into the hands of exceedingly few men. A few hundred men and women, a few dozen corporations (especially the episcopal sees) had come to own most of the land on which these millions and millions lived; and, with the land, most of the implements and of the slaves.
As to the descent of these great landowners none asked or cared. By the middle of the sixth century only a minority perhaps were still of unmixed blood, but quite certainly none were purely barbaric. Lands waste or confiscated through the decline of population or the effect of the interminable wars and the plagues, lay in the power of the _Palatium_, which granted them out again (strictly under the eye of the Council of Great Men) to new holders.
The few who had come in as original followers and dependents of the "chieftain" of the auxiliary forces benefited largely; but the thing that really concerns the story of civilization is not the origin of these immensely rich owners (which was mixed), nor their sense of race (which simply did not exist), but the fact that they were so few. It explains both what happened and what was to happen.
That a handful of men, for they were no more than a handful, should thus be in control of the economic destinies of mankind--the result of centuries of Roman development in that direction--is the key to all the material decline of the Empire. It should furnish us, if we were wise, with an object lesson for our own politics today.
The decline of the Imperial power was mainly due to this extraordinary concentration of economic power in the hands of a few. It was these few great Roman landowners who in every local government endowed each of the new administrators, each new _Rex_, with a tradition of imperial power, not a little of the dread that went with the old imperial name, and the armed force which it connoted: everywhere the _Rex_ had to reckon with the strength of highly concentrated wealth. This was the first element in that standing "Council of Great Men" which was the mark of the time in every locality and wore down the old official, imperial, absolute, local power.
There was, however, as I have said, another and a much more important element in the Council of Great Men, besides the chief landowners; it consisted of the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
Every Roman city of that time had a princ.i.p.al personage in it, who knew its life better than anybody else, who had, more than anyone else, power over its morals and ideas, and who in many cases actually administered its affairs. That person was the Bishop.
Throughout Western Europe at that moment men"s interest and preoccupation was not race nor even material prosperity, but religion. The great duel between Paganism and the Catholic Church was now decided, after two hard centuries of struggle, in favor of the latter. The Catholic Church, from a small but definite and very tenacious organization within the Empire, and on the whole antagonistic to it, had risen, _first_, to be the only group of men which knew its own mind (200 A.D.); _next_ to be the official religion (300 A.D.); _finally_ to be the cohesive political principle of the great majority of human beings (400 A.D.).
The modern man can distinctly appreciate the phenomenon, if for "creed" he will read "capital," and for the "Faith," "industrial civilization." For just as today men princ.i.p.ally care for great fortunes, and in pursuit of them go indifferently from country to country, and sink, as unimportant compared with such an object, the other businesses of our time, so the men of the fifth and sixth centuries were intent upon the _unity_ and _exact.i.tude_ of religion. That the religion to which the Empire was now converted, the religion of the Catholic Church, should triumph, was their one preoccupation. For _this_ they exiled themselves; for _this_ they would and did run great risks; as minor to _this_ they sank all other things.
The Catholic hierarchy with its enormous power at that moment, civil and economic as well as religious, was not the creator of such a spirit, it was only its leader. And in connection with that intense preoccupation of men"s minds, two factors already appear in the fourth century and are increasingly active through the fifth and sixth. The first is the desire that the living Church should be as free as possible; hence the Catholic Church and its ministers everywhere welcome the growth of local as against centralized power. They do so unconsciously but none the less strongly. The second factor is Arianism: to which I now return.
Arianism, which both in its material success and in the length of its duration, as well as in its concept of religion, and the character of its demise, is singularly parallel to the Protestant movement of recent centuries, had sprung up as the official and fashionable Court heresy opposed to the orthodoxy of the Church.
The Emperor"s Court did indeed at last--after many variations--abandon it, but a tradition survived till long after (and in many places) that Arianism stood for the "wealthy" and "respectable" in life.
Moreover, of those barbarians who had taken service as auxiliaries in the Roman armies, the greater part (the "Goths," for instance, as the generic term went, though that term had no longer any national meaning) had received their baptism into civilized Europe from Arian sources, and this in the old time of the fourth century when Arianism was "the thing." Just as we see in eighteenth century Ireland settlers and immigrants accepting Protestantism as "gentlemanly" or "progressive" (some there are so provincial as still to feel thus), so the _Rex_ in Spain and the _Rex_ in Italy had a family tradition; they, and the descendants of their original companions, were of what had been the "court" and "upper cla.s.s" way of thinking. They were "Arians" and proud of it. The number of these powerful heretics in the little local courts was small, but their irritant effect was great.
It was the one great quarrel and problem of the time.
No one troubled about race, but everybody was at white heat upon the final form of the Church.
The populace felt it in their bones that if Arianism conquered, Europe was lost: for Arianism lacked vision. It was essentially a hesitation to accept the Incarnation and therefore it would have bred sooner or later a denial of the Sacrament, and at length it would have relapsed, as Protestantism has, into nothingness. Such a decline of imagination and of will would have been fatal to a society materially decadent. Had Arianism triumphed, the aged Society of Europe would have perished.
Now it so happened that of these local administrators or governors who were rapidly becoming independent, and who were surrounded by a powerful court, _one_ only was not Arian.
That one was the _Rex Francorum_ or chieftain of the little barbaric auxiliary force of "Franks" which had been drawn into the Roman system from Belgium and the banks of the lower Rhine. This body at the time when the transformation took place between the old Imperial system and the beginnings of the nations, had its headquarters in the Roman town of Tournai.
A lad whose Roman name was Clodovicus, and whom his parents probably called by some such sound as Clodovig (they had no written language), succeeded his father, a Roman officer, [Footnote: He was presumably head of auxiliaries. His tomb has been found. It is wholly Roman.] in the generalship of this small body of troops at the end of the fifth century.
Unlike the other auxiliary generals he was pagan. When with other forces of the Roman Army, he had repelled one of the last of the barbaric invaders close to the frontier at the Roman town of Tolbiac.u.m, and succeeded to the power of local administration in Northern Gaul, he could not but a.s.similate himself with the civilization wherein he was mixed, and he and most of his small command were baptized. He had already married a Christian wife, the daughter of the Burgundian _Rex_; but in any case such a conclusion was inevitable.
The important historical point is not that he was baptized; for an auxiliary general to be baptized was, by the end of the fifth century, as much a matter of course as for an Oriental trader from Bombay, who has become an English Lord or Baronet in London in our time, to wear trousers and a coat. The important thing is that he was received and baptized by _Catholics_ and not by _Arians_--in the midst of that enormous struggle.
Clodovicus--known in history as Clovis--came from a remote corner of civilization. His men were untouched by the worldly attraction of Arianism; they had no tradition that it was "the thing" or "smart" to adopt the old court heresy which was offensive to the poorer ma.s.s of Europeans. When, therefore, this _Rex Francorum_ was settled in Paris--about the year 500--and was beginning to administer local government in Northern Gaul, the weight of his influence was thrown with the popular feeling and against the Arian _Reges_ in Italy and Spain.
The new armed forces of the _Rex Francorum_, a general levy continuing the old Roman tradition, settling things once and for all by battle carried orthodox Catholic administration all over Gaul. They turned the Arian _Rex_ out of Toulouse, they occupied the valley of the Rhone. For a moment it seemed as though they would support the Catholic populace against the Arian officials in Italy itself.
At any rate, their championship of popular and general religion against the irritant, small, administrative Arian bodies in the _Palatium_ of this region and of that, was a very strong lever which the people and the Bishops at their head could not but use in favor of the _Rex Francorum"s_ independent power. It was, therefore, indirectly, a very strong lever for breaking up the now (500-600) decayed and almost forgotten administrative unity of the Roman world.
Under such forces--the power of the Bishop in each town and district, the growing independence of the few and immensely rich great landowners, the occupation of the _Palatium_ and its official machinery by the chieftains of the old auxiliary forces--Western Europe, slowly, very slowly, shifted its political base.
For three generations the mints continued to strike money under the effigy of the Emperor. The new local rulers never took, or dreamed of taking, the Imperial t.i.tle; the roads were still kept up, the Roman tradition in the arts of life, though coa.r.s.ened, was never lost. In cooking, dress, architecture, law, and the rest, all the world was Roman. But the visible unity of the Western or Latin Empire not only lacked a civilian and military centre, but gradually lost all need for such a centre.
Towards the year 600, though our civilization was still one, as it had always been, from the British Channel to the Desert of Sahara, and even (through missionaries) extended its effect a few miles eastward of the old Roman frontier beyond the Rhine, men no longer thought of that civilization as a highly defined area within which they could always find the civilian authority of one organ. Men no longer spoke of our Europe as the _Respublica_ or "common weal." It was already beginning to become a ma.s.s of small and often overlapping divisions. The things that are older than, and lie beneath, all exact political inst.i.tutions, the popular legends, the popular feelings for locality and countrysides, were rising everywhere; the great landowners were appearing as semi-independent rulers, each on his own estates (though the many estates of one man were often widely separated).
The daily speech of men was already becoming divided into an infinity of jargons.
Some of these dialects were of Latin origin, some as in the Germanies and Scandinavia, mixed original Teutonic and Latin; some, as in Brittany, were Celtic; some, as in the eastern Pyrenees, Basque; in North Africa, we may presume, the indigenous tongue of the Berbers resumed its sway; Punic also may have survived in certain towns and villages there. [Footnote: We have evidence that it survived in the fifth century.] But men paid no attention to the origin of such diversities. The common unity that survived was expressed in the fixed Latin tongue, the tongue of the Church; and the Church, now everywhere supreme in the decay of Arianism and of paganism alike, was the principle of life throughout all this great area of the West.
So it was in Gaul, and with the little belt annexed to Gaul that had risen in the Germanies to the east of the Rhine; so with nearly all Italy and Dalmatia, and what today we call Switzerland and a part of what today we call Bavaria and Baden; so with what today we call Spain and Portugal; and so (after local adventures of a parallel sort, followed by a reconquest against Arians by Imperial officers and armies) with North Africa and with a strip of Andalusia.
But _one_ part of _one_ province _did_ suffer a limited and local--but sharp--change: on one frontier belt, narrow but long, came something much more nearly resembling a true barbaric success, and the results thereof, than anything which the Continent could show. There was here a real breach of continuity with Roman things.
This exceptional strip was the eastern coast belt of the province of Britain; and we have next to ask: "_What happened in Britain when the rest of the Empire was being transformed, after the breakdown of central Imperial power?_" Unless we can answer that question we shall fail to possess a true picture of the continuity of Europe and of the early perils in spite of which that continuity has survived.
I turn, therefore, next to answer the question: "What happened in Britain?"
V
WHAT HAPPENED IN BRITAIN?
I have now carried this study through four sections. My object in writing it is to show that the Roman Empire never perished but was only transformed; that the Catholic Church, which, in its maturity, it accepted, caused it to survive and was, in that origin of Europe, and has since remained, the soul of one Western civilization.
In the first chapter I sketched the nature of the Roman Empire, in the second the nature of the Church within the Roman Empire before that civilization in its maturity accepted the Faith. In the third I attempted to lay before the reader that transformation and material decline (it was also a _survival_), which has erroneously been called "the fall" of the Roman Empire. In the fourth I presented a picture of what society must have seemed to an onlooker just after the crisis of that transformation and at the entry into what are called the Dark Ages: the beginnings of the modern European nations which have superficially differentiated from the old unity of Rome.
I could wish that s.p.a.ce had permitted me to describe a hundred other contemporary things which would enable the reader to seize both the magnitude and the significance of the great change from Pagan to Christian times. I should in particular have dwelt upon the transformation of the European mind with its increasing gravity, its ripening contempt for material things, and its resolution upon the ultimate fate of the human soul, which it now had firmly concluded to be personally immortal and subject to a conscious destiny.