The Coming of the Friars | Page 2

already born, yea born in the city of Rome!"
Though King Richard, in the strange interview of which contemporary

historians have left us a curious narrative, exhibited much more of the
spirit of the scoffer than of the convert, and evidently had no faith in
Abbott Joachim's theories and his mission, it was otherwise with the
world at large. At the close of the twelfth century a very general belief,
the result of a true instinct, pervaded all classes that European society
was passing through a tremendous crisis, that the dawn of a new era, or,
as they phrased it, "the end of all things" was at hand.
The Abbot Joachim was only the spokesman of his age who was lucky
enough to get a hearing. He spoke a language that was a jargon of
rhapsody, but he spoke vaguely of terrors, and perils, and earthquakes,
and thunderings, the day of wrath; and because he spoke so darkly men
listened all the more eagerly, for there was a vague anticipation of the
breaking up of the great waters, and that things that had been heretofore
could not continue as they were.
Verily when the thirteenth century opened, the times were evil, and no
hope seemed anywhere on the horizon. The grasp of the infidel was
tightened upon the Holy City, and what little force there ever had been
among the rabble of Crusaders was gone now; the truculent ruffianism
that pretended to be animated by the crusading spirit showed its real
character in the hideous atrocities for which Simon de Montfort is
answerable, and in the unparalleled enormities of the sack of
Constantinople in 1204. For ten years (1198--1208) through the length
and breadth of Germany there was ceaseless and sanguinary conflict. In
the great Italian towns party warfare, never hesitating to resort to every
kind of crime, had long been chronic. The history of Sicily is one long
record of cruelty, tyranny, and wrong-- committed, suffered, or
revenged. Over the whole continent of Europe people seem to have had
no _homes;_ the merchant, the student, the soldier, the ecclesiastic
were always on the move. Young men made no difficulty in crossing
the Alps to attend lectures at Bologna, or crossing the Channel to or
from Oxford and Paris. The soldier or the scholar was equally a
free-lance, ready to take service whereever it offered, and to settle
wherever there was dread to win or money to save. No one trusted in
the stability of anything. [Footnote: M. Jusserand's beautiful book, "La
Vie Nomade," was not published till 1884, _i.e.,_ a year after this essay
appeared.]
To a thoughtful man watching the signs of the times, it may well have

seemed that the hope for the future of civilization--the hope for any
future, whether of art, science, or religion-lay in the steady growth of
the towns. It might be that the barrier of the Alps would always limit
the influence of Italian cities to Italy and the islands of the
Mediterranean; but for the great towns of what is now Belgium and
Germany what part might not be left for them to play in the history of
the world? In England the towns were as yet insignificant communities
compared with such mighty aggregates of population as were to be
found in Bruges, Antwerp, or Cologne; but even the English towns
were communities, and they were beginning to assert themselves
somewhat loudly while clinging to their chartered rights with jealous
tenacity. Those rights, however, were eminently exclusive and selfish
in their character. The chartered towns were ruled in all cases by an
oligarchy. [Footnote: Stubbs, "Constitutional History," vol. i. Section
131.] The increase in the population brought wealth to a class, the class
of privileged traders, associated into guilds, who kept their several
mysteries to themselves by vigilant measures of protection. Outside the
well-guarded defences which these trades-unions constructed, there
were the masses--hewers of wood and drawers of water--standing to the
skilled artizan of the thirteenth century almost precisely in the same
relation as the bricklayer's labourer does to the mason in our own time.
The sediment of the town population in the Middle Ages was a dense
slough of stagnant misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease, and dull
despair, such as the worst slums of London, Paris, or Liverpool know
nothing of. When we hear of the mortality among the townsmen during
the periodical outbreaks of pestilence or famine, horror suggests that
we should dismiss as incredible such stories as the imagination shrinks
from dwelling on. What greatly added to the dreary wretchedness of the
lower order in the towns was the fact that the ever-increasing throngs of
beggars, outlaws, and ruffian runaways were simply left to shift for
themselves. The civil authorities took no account of them as long as
they quietly