La Sorcière: The Witch of the Middle Ages. Jules Michelet

be old is to be weak. When the Saracens, when the Norsemen threaten us, what will come to us if the people remain old? Charlemagne weeps, and the Church weeps too. She owns that her relics fail to guard her altars from these Barbarian devils.[13] Had she not better call upon the arm of that wayward child whom she was going to bind fast, the arm of that young giant whom she wanted to paralyse? This movement in two opposite ways fills the whole ninth century. The people are held back, anon they are hurled forward: we fear them and we call on them for aid. With them and by means of them we throw up hasty barriers, defences that may check the Barbarians, while sheltering the priests and their saints escaped thither from their churches.

In spite of the Bald Emperor’s[14] command not to build, there grows up a tower on the mountain. Thither comes the fugitive, crying, “In God’s name, take me in, at least my wife and children! Myself with my cattle will encamp in your outer enclosure.” The tower emboldens him and he feels himself a man. It gives him shade, and he in his turn defends, protects his protector.

Formerly in their hunger the small folk yielded themselves to the great as serfs; but here how great the difference! He offers himself as a vassal, one who would be called brave and valiant.[15] He gives himself up, and keeps himself, and reserves to himself the right of going elsewhere. “I will go further: the earth is large: I, too, like the rest, can rear my tower yonder. If I have defended the outworks, I can surely look after myself within.”

Thus nobly, thus grandly arose the feudal world. The master of the tower received his vassals with some such words as these: “Thou shalt go when thou willest, and if need be with my help; at least, if thou shouldst sink in the mire, I myself will dismount to succour thee.” These are the very words of the old formula.[16]

      But, one day, what do I see? Can my sight be grown dim? The lord of the valley, as he rides about, sets up bounds that none may overleap; ay, and limits that you cannot see. “What is that? I don’t understand.” That means that the manor is shut in. “The lord keeps it all fast under gate and hinge, between heaven and earth.”

      Most horrible! By virtue of what law is this vassus (or valiant one) held to his power? People will thereon have it, that vassus may also mean slave. In like manner the word servus, meaning a servant, often indeed a proud one, even a Count or Prince of the Empire, comes in the case of the weak to signify a serf, a wretch whose life is hardly worth a halfpenny.

      In this damnable net are they caught. But down yonder, on his ground, is a man who avers that his land is free, a freehold, a fief of the sun. Seated on his boundary-stone, with hat pressed firmly down, he looks at Count or Emperor passing near. “Pass on, Emperor; go thy ways! If thou art firm on thy horse, yet more am I on my pillar. Thou mayest pass, but so will not I: for I am Freedom.”

      But I lack courage to say what becomes of this man. The air grows thick around him: he breathes less and less freely. He seems to be under a spell: he cannot move: he is as one paralysed. His very beasts grow thin, as if a charm had been thrown over them. His servants die of hunger. His land bears nothing now; spirits sweep it clean by night.

      Still he holds on: “The poor man is a king in his own house.” But he is not to be let alone. He gets summoned, must answer for himself in the Imperial Court. So he goes, like an old-world spectre, whom no one knows any more. “What is he?” ask the young. “Ah, he is neither a lord, nor a serf! Yet even then is he nothing?”

      “Who am I? I am he who built the first tower, he who succoured you, he who, leaving the tower, went boldly forth to meet the Norse heathens at the bridge. Yet more, I dammed the river, I tilled the meadow, creating the land itself by drawing it God-like out of the waters. From this land who shall drive me?”

      “No, my friend,” says a neighbour—“you shall not be driven away. You shall till this land, but in a way you little think for. Remember, my good fellow, how in your youth, some fifty years ago, you were rash enough to wed my father’s little serf, Jacqueline. Remember the proverb, ‘He who courts my hen is my cock.’ You belong to my fowl-yard. Ungird yourself; throw away your sword! From this day forth you are my serf.”

      There is no invention here. The dreadful tale recurs incessantly during the Middle Ages. Ah, it was a sharp sword that stabbed him. I have abridged and suppressed much, for as often as one returns to these times, the same steel, the same sharp point, pierces right through the heart.

There was one among them who, under this gross insult, fell into so deep a rage that he could not bring up a single word. It was like Roland betrayed. His blood all rushed upwards into his throat. His flaming eyes, his mouth so dumb, yet so fearfully eloquent, turned all the assembly pale. They started back. He was dead: his veins had burst. His arteries spurted the red blood over the faces of his murderers.[17]

      The doubtful state of men’s affairs, the frightfully slippery descent by which the freeman becomes a vassal, the vassal a servant, and the servant a serf—in these things lie the great terror of the Middle Ages, and the depth of their despair. There is no way of escape therefrom; for he who takes one step is lost. He is an alien, a stray, a wild beast of the chase. The ground grows slimy to catch his feet, roots him, as he passes, to the spot. The contagion in the air kills him; he becomes a thing in mortmain, a dead creature, a mere nothing, a beast, a soul worth twopence-halfpenny, whose murder can be atoned for by twopence-halfpenny.

      These are outwardly the two great leading traits in the wretchedness of the Middle Ages, through which they came to give themselves up to the Devil. Meanwhile let us look within, and sound the innermost depths of their moral life.

      FOOTNOTES:

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      [8] Benedict founded a convent at Aniane in Languedoc, in the reign of Charlemagne.

[9] See J. Grimm, Rechts Alterthümer, and my Origines du Droit.

[10] According to the ritual of Rouen. See Ducange on the words Festum and Kalendæ: also Martène, iii. 110. The Sibyl was crowned and followed by Jews and Gentiles, by Moses, the Prophets, Nebuchadnezzar, &c. From a very early time, and continually from the seventh to the seventeenth century, the Church strove to proscribe the great people’s feasts of the Ass, of Innocents, of Children, and of Fools. It never succeeded until the advent of the modern spirit.

[11] See the Capitularies, passim.

[12] An illustrious Breton, the last man of the Middle Ages, who had gone on a bootless errand to convert Rome, received there some brilliant offers. “What do you want?” said the Pope.—“Only one thing: to have done with the Breviary.”

[13] The famous avowal made by Hincmar.

[14] Charles the Bald.—Trans.

[15] A difference too little felt by