the thirteenth century, the last Syrian town in the hands of the Christians was yielded to the Saracens, and the peculiar enthusiasm which had driven multitudes by an irresistible force to the conquest of the holy places had vanished. The struggle of the Papacy with the Empire had been really itself a contest between the ecclesiastical and the lay elements of society. The triumph of the Papacy had been owing to the peculiar constitution and intrinsic weakness of the German monarchy. It had been effected by the aid of the German princes; but they, in their turn, were found ready to resist papal encroachments. From the time of the barbarian invasions, Europe had formed, so to speak, one family, united by the bond of religion, under the tutelage of the Papacy. All other influences tended to division and isolation. The empire of Charlemagne formed but a temporary breakwater in opposition to these tendencies. The German spirit of independence was unfavorable to political unity. The feudal system was an atomic condition of political society. In this state of things, the Church, through its hierarchical organization under one chief, did a beneficent work for civilization by fusing the peoples, as far as its influence went, into a single community, and subjecting them to a uniform training. The mediæval Papacy, whatever evils may have been connected with it, saved Europe from anarchy and lawlessness. "Providence might have otherwise ordained, but it is impossible for man to imagine by what other organizing or consolidating force, the commonwealth of the Western nations could have grown up to a discordant, indeed, and conflicting league, but still to a league, with that unity and conformity of manners, usages, laws, religion, which have made their rivalries, oppugnancies, and even their long, ceaseless wars, on the whole to issue in the noblest, highest, most intellectual form of civilization known to man.1" But the time must come for the diversifying of 1 Milman, History of Latin Christianity, ii. 43. See also iii. 360.

THE VERNACULAR LITERATURE.

33

this unity, for the development of the nations in their separate individuality. This was a change equally indispensable.

The development of the national languages which follows the chaotic period of the ninth and tenth centuries, is an interesting sign of that new stage in the advancement of civilization, upon which Europe was preparing to enter. It is worthy of notice that the earliest vernacular literature in Italy, Germany, France, and England involved to so great an extent satires and invectives against ecclesiastics. Many of the writers in the living tongues were laymen. A class of lay readers sprang up, so that it was no longer the case that "clerk was a synonym for one who is able to read and write. "The greater part of literature in the Middle Ages," says Hallam, "at least from the twelfth century, may be considered as artillery leveled against the clergy." In Spain, the contest with the Moors infused into the earliest literary productions the mingled sentiments of loyalty and religion.2 But in Germany the minnesingers abound in hostile allusions to the wealth and tyranny of ecclesiastics. Walter von der Vogelweide, the greatest of the lyric poets of his time, a warm champion of the imperial side against the popes, denounces freely the riches and usurpations of the Church. It is true that the brute epic, of which Reynard the Fox may be considered the blossom, which figures largely in the early literature of Germany and the neighboring countries, was not didactic or satirical in its design. But it was later converted into this use and turned into a vehicle for chastising the faults of priests and monks.5 The Provençal bards were bold and

1 Literature of Europe, i. 150.

2 Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, i. 103.

8 Kurtz, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, i. 48 seq., where passages are given.

4 Vilmar, Gsch. d. deutsch. Lit., p. 296 seq.

5 See Gervinus, Gsch. d. deutschen Lit., i. 141.

unsparing in their treatment of the hierarchy until they were silenced by the Albigensian crusade. In Italy, Dante and Petrarch signalized the beginning of a national literature by their denunciation of the vices and usurpations of the Papacy; while in the prose of Boccacio the popular religious teachers are a mark for unbounded ridicule. English poetry begins with contemptuous and indignant censure of the monks and higher clergy, with the boldest manifestations of the anti-hierarchical tendency. "Teutonism," says Milman, "is now holding its first initiatory struggle with Latin Christianity." "The Vision of Piers' Ploughman," 1 by William Langland, which bears the date of 1362, is from the pen of an earnest reformer who values reason and conscience as the guides of the soul, and attributes the sorrows and calamities of the world to the wealth and worldly temper of the clergy, and especially of the mendicant orders. The poem ends with an assertion of the small value of popes' pardons and the superiority of a righteous life over trust in indulgences. "Pierce the Ploughman's Crede," is a poem from another hand, and supposed to have been written in 1394. The poet introduces a plain man who is acquainted with the rudiments of Christian knowledge and wants to learn his creed. He applies successively to the four orders of mendicant friars, who give him no satisfaction, but rail at each other, and are absorbed in riches and sensual indulgence. Leaving them, he finds an honest ploughman, who inveighs against the monastic orders and gives him the instruction which he desires.3 The author is an avowed

2

1 History of Latin Christianity, viii. 372. In this and in the three preceding chapters, Milman gives an interesting description of the early vernacular literatures. In ch, iv. he speaks of the satirical Latin poems that sprang up among the clergy and within the walls of convents.

2 The poem is among the publications of the Early English Text Society. It is analyzed in the preface of Part I. Text A. See also, Warton, History of English Poetry, sect. viii. (vol. ii. 44).

The poem is published by the Early English Text Society (1867). Warton, sect. ix. (ii. 87).

THE VERNACULAR LITERATURE.

35

Wickliffite. Chaucer, in the picture of social life which he has drawn in the "Canterbury Tales," shows himself in full accord with Wickliffe in the hostility to the mendicant friars. Chaucer reserves his admiration for the simple and faithful parish priest, "rich in holy thought and work;" the higher clergy he handles in a genuine anti-sacerdotal spirit. In the "Pardoner," laden with his relics, and with his wallet

"Brimful of pardons, come from Rome all hot,"

he depicts a character who even then excited scorn and reprobation.

It is curious to observe in many of the early writers who have been referred to, how reverence for religion and for the Church is blended with bitter censure of the arrogance and wealth of ecclesiastics; how the spiritual office of the Pope is distinguished from his temporal power. In the one character he is revered, in the other he is denounced. The fiction of Constantine's donation of his western dominions to Pope Silvester, which was current in the Middle Ages, accounted for all the evils of the Church, in the judgment of the enemies of the temporal power. There was the source of the pride and wealth of the popes. Dante adverts to it in the lines:

"Ah, Constantine, of how much ill was mother,

Not thy conversion, but that marriage-dower,
Which the first wealthy father took from thee." 1

And in another place, he refers to Constantine, who

"Became a Greek by ceding to the Pastor,"

and says of him in Paradise,

"Now knoweth he how all the ill deduced

From his good action is not harmful to him,
Although the world thereby may be destroyed." 2

We find a like lament respecting the fatal gift to Silvester, in the Waldensian poem, "The Noble Lesson." Walter von der Vogelweide makes the angels, when Constantine endowed Silvester with worldly power, cry out with grief; and justly, he adds, since the popes were to use that power to ruin the emperors and to stir up the princes against them. These bitter lamentations continue to be heard from advocates of reform, until the tale of the alleged donation was discovered to be destitute of truth.2

The anti-hierarchical spirit was powerfully reinforced by the legists. From the middle of the thirteenth century the University of Bologna rose in importance as the great seat of the revived study of Roman jurisprudence. As Paris was the seminary of theology, Bologna was the nursery of law. Law was cultivated, however, at other universities. That a class of laymen should arise who were devoted to the study and exposition of the ancient law was in itself a significant event. The legists were the natural defenders of the state, the powerful auxiliaries of the kings. Their influence was in opposition to feudalism and on the side of monarchy, and placed bulwarks round the civil authority in its contest against the encroachments of the Church. The hierarchy were confronted by a body of learned men, the guardians of a venerable code, who claimed for the kings the rights of Cæsar, and could bring forward in opposition to the canons of the Church canons of an earlier date.5

The effectual reaction against the Papacy dates from the reign of Boniface VIII., who cherished to the full

1 Kurtz, Gsch. d. deutsch. Lit., i. 50. The sonnet - "Der Pfaffen wahl " is given by Kurtz, p. 56.

2 The first public and formal exposure of the fiction was made by Laurentius Valla in the fifteenth century.

8 Savigny, Geschichte des röm. Recht., iii. 152 seq.

4 Laurent, Féodalité et l'Église, p. 630.

5 Milman, vi. 241.