A Short History of England | Page 2

think we may go so far as to
say that the readers would have refused to accept it as a lifelike portrait
of Charles I. They would have formed the opinion that there must be
some mistake. Yet the time that elapsed between Stephen and Mary

was much longer than the time that has elapsed between Charles and
ourselves. The revolution in human society between the first of the
Crusades and the last of the Tudors was immeasurably more colossal
and complete than any change between Charles and ourselves. And,
above all, that revolution should be the first thing and the final thing in
anything calling itself a popular history. For it is the story of how our
populace gained great things, but to-day has lost everything.
Now I will modestly maintain that I know more about English history
than this; and that I have as much right to make a popular summary of
it as the gentleman who made the crusader and the halberdier change
hats. But the curious and arresting thing about the neglect, one might
say the omission, of mediæval civilization in such histories as this, lies
in the fact I have already noted. It is exactly the popular story that is
left out of the popular history. For instance, even a working man, a
carpenter or cooper or bricklayer, has been taught about the Great
Charter, as something like the Great Auk, save that its almost
monstrous solitude came from being before its time instead of after. He
was not taught that the whole stuff of the Middle Ages was stiff with
the parchment of charters; that society was once a system of charters,
and of a kind much more interesting to him. The carpenter heard of one
charter given to barons, and chiefly in the interest of barons; the
carpenter did not hear of any of the charters given to carpenters, to
coopers, to all the people like himself. Or, to take another instance, the
boy and girl reading the stock simplified histories of the schools
practically never heard of such a thing as a burgher, until he appears in
a shirt with a noose round his neck. They certainly do not imagine
anything of what he meant in the Middle Ages. And Victorian
shopkeepers did not conceive themselves as taking part in any such
romance as the adventure of Courtrai, where the mediæval shopkeepers
more than won their spurs--for they won the spurs of their enemies.
I have a very simple motive and excuse for telling the little I know of
this true tale. I have met in my wanderings a man brought up in the
lower quarters of a great house, fed mainly on its leavings and
burdened mostly with its labours. I know that his complaints are stilled,
and his status justified, by a story that is told to him. It is about how his

grandfather was a chimpanzee and his father a wild man of the woods,
caught by hunters and tamed into something like intelligence. In the
light of this, he may well be thankful for the almost human life that he
enjoys; and may be content with the hope of leaving behind him a yet
more evolved animal. Strangely enough, the calling of this story by the
sacred name of Progress ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect
(and to discover) that it is not true. I know by now enough at least of
his origin to know that he was not evolved, but simply disinherited. His
family tree is not a monkey tree, save in the sense that no monkey
could have climbed it; rather it is like that tree torn up by the roots and
named "Dedischado," on the shield of the unknown knight.

II
THE PROVINCE OF BRITAIN
The land on which we live once had the highly poetic privilege of
being the end of the world. Its extremity was ultima Thule, the other
end of nowhere. When these islands, lost in a night of northern seas,
were lit up at last by the long searchlights of Rome, it was felt that the
remotest remnant of things had been touched; and more for pride than
possession.
The sentiment was not unsuitable, even in geography. About these
realms upon the edge of everything there was really something that can
only be called edgy. Britain is not so much an island as an archipelago;
it is at least a labyrinth of peninsulas. In few of the kindred countries
can one so easily and so strangely find sea in the fields or fields in the
sea. The great rivers seem not only to meet in the ocean, but barely to
miss each other in the hills: the whole land, though low as a whole,
leans towards the west