The Historical Works of Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc
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started in the boiling energies of the Crusades:—young Louis VI. the fighter, St. Bernard, the man that would put all into order, young Abelard, who again, after so many silent centuries, began to answer the riddle of the sphinx—when this argosy of youth was launched, the first task of the Church was to attempt to steer it. We know that the Church succeeded, as she succeeded in saving all that could be saved of the Mediterranean civilisation when the Roman Empire bowed, and all that could be saved of our common moral tradition when, after the terrors of the fifteenth century, Europe of the sixteenth threatened to fall into dust.
In the twelfth century the Church captured and rode the new energies, but in that storm of creation a very great deal went down. How much we do not know. It is probable that Rome was still Roman until the Normans sacked it at the beginning of this era. It is certain that the walls surrounding our English cities and those of the northern French and the western Germans were unchanged since the Pagan time, until the expansion of the twelfth century came to break them. I say what relics of primeval learning, what verbal inheritance of primeval experience, were lost in the new violence of Europe, cannot be known. It is enough for us that the essence of civilisation was saved; that if we let go the history of the tribal past with one hand we at least beat off Asia with the other; that if the Romanesque gave up its last spark in that gale, at least the Gothic replaced it.
For the purpose of this book one great loss must be noted: most of the prehistoric roads disappeared.
The unity of Europe, a thing hitherto highly conscious, fully existent, but inactive like the soul of a man in a reverie, sprang into expression and permeated outward things. Men travelled. Inter-communication became within fifty years from a pastime a habit, and from a habit a necessity. Not only the Crusades had done this, but something anterior, some passion for new horizons, which of itself had helped to produce the Crusades. The orders and appeals of a united Church began to circulate throughout Christendom. The universities had arisen, and were visited almost as nomads would visit them: the students crowding now Bologna, now Salerno, now Oxford, and fixing themselves at last, like a swarm of bees, in Paris. The Benedictines had already sketched the idea of the representative system—it was beginning to invade political life. The justice of the central kings went touring on assize. Some say that the cathedral builders themselves were like the soul of Europe wandering from place to place.
With all this the cross-roads developed. Every little village was linked up with every other; the main vague ways, older than history, which joined not even towns directly, but followed only the dry and open of the high lands, necessarily decayed. Some few kept their place. The Watling Street was a necessity; it led from the Straits of Dover to London, and from London to the corner which is the triple gate to Ireland, to Wales and to Strathclyde—the only road by which you can outflank Snowdon if you are going west, the Pennines if you are going west and north. It is still, on the whole, the line of our principal railway. But the Fosse Way began to lose its meaning. The Ermine Street maintained some eminence, for Lincoln was a great town, but the Icknield Way fell into broader and broader gaps. A man would with difficulty discover that the Stane Street was still used.
The road of which this book treats would have disappeared more certainly than any of these.
Winchester was decaying (for England was now quite united, and the north counted in a way), London was becoming more and more—for with intercommunication commerce was arising, and with the harsh efforts of the German against the eastern heathen the Baltic was acquiring a civilisation; with travel the sea was becoming familiar to others than to pirates, and with the sea the port was growing in position—London was becoming more and more, and was already almost the capital of England. Henry II. was perhaps the last king who thought of Winchester as his chief town. London was to overawe his son; his great-grandson was to make Westminster the centre of the constitution.
From Southampton to London the road would remain; the roads from London to Canterbury and to the ports of Kent would grow in importance; but our road, the base of that triangle, would necessarily have decayed: there was less traffic than ever before from west to east, from the Mendips and Cornwall to the Straits. The metals of the Devonian peninsula, and of the Severn valley had lost their economic position, the iron of the Sussex Weald had taken their place. The expeditions to Ireland and the new Scottish problem had removed to Chester and to Lancaster the centres of strategical importance; the same commerce which was giving London its hegemony—I mean the commerce of the Baltic and the North Sea—was developing Orford and King's Lynn, and all East Anglia, and, to a lesser degree, the Humber. The Germanic states had spread so eastward as to draw the life of Gaul also eastward, and to bleed its western promontory; the crossing of the sea between the Cornwalls had lost its old political importance: all combined to kill Winchester, and with Winchester the road from that old capital to Canterbury, when an accident came to preserve that way.
This accident was the murder of Thomas à Becket.
I will not deny that an effect always mingles with its cause; for things that happen are realities, whereas time is not real at all. Not only does the saint make the shrine, but the shrine also the saint. A saint must have come to Canterbury. A primeval site will sooner or later bring to fruit a primeval sacredness. But a study of this kind cannot lose itself in such mysteries. It must confine itself to definite history. In that moment, when the spiritual vision of Europe was at its keenest, when stone itself was to be moulded like clay by the intense vision of things beyond the world, when Suger had conceived the pointed arch at St. Denis, and the gem upon St. Michael's Hill was being cut into its facets, when the Church was most determined to fashion the new world, and to give it a philosophy, and when that task was at its most difficult, from the necessary quarrel between the Soul and the State: that is, between things eternal, personal, inward, and things civic, communal—when the world was fully engaged in such a tangle outward, and the nerves of men, citizens and Christians, were wrought as are those of antagonists in a wrestling match, there fell this blow. For the first time in all these centuries (and at what a time) violence, our modern method, attempted to cut the knot. At once, and as it always must, fool violence produced the opposite of what it had desired. All the West suddenly began to stream to Canterbury, and à Becket's tomb became, after Rome, the chief shrine of Christendom.
Ireland of the saints, South Wales still tribal, still in a way unfixed, lending its population to far adventures and to the attraction of distant places, all the south-western peninsula of England, Brittany for ever mystic, the mountain masses of the Asturias which had themselves preserved an original sanctity, the western ports from Vigo to recently conquered Lisbon—the only ports by which the Christian enthusiasm of the Spaniards conquering Islam could take to the newly opened sea and to the north—all these sent their hordes to converge on Winchester, and thence to find their way to Canterbury.
The whole year came at last to see the passing and re-passing of such men. It was on the 29th of December that St. Thomas had been struck down. For fifty years his feast had been kept upon that day, and for fifty years the damp English winter had grudged its uneasy soil to the pilgrims: the same weather in which we ourselves traversed it during the journey of exploration which is the subject of this work.
With the jubilee the body was translated in the flush of early summer, and the date of this translation (the 7th of July) became the new and more convenient day upon which Canterbury was most sought. But the habit of such a journey had now grown so general that every season saw some example of it. The spring, as we know from Chaucer, the winter as we know from the traditional dates preserved upon the Continent, the summer as we know from the date of the chief gatherings: and there must have been a constant return past the stubble and the new plough of the autumn.
It was not only the directness of the Old Road between Winchester and Canterbury that reconstituted its use for the purpose of these pilgrimages: it was also that peculiar association of antiquity and of religion which mingles the two ideas almost into one thing.
The pilgrim set out from Winchester: 'You must pass by that well,' he heard, 'it is sacred.' … 'You must, of ritual, climb that isolated hill which you see against the sky. The spirits haunted it and were banished by the faith, and they say that martyrs died there.' … 'It is at the peril of the pilgrimage that you neglect this stone, whose virtue saved our fathers in the great battle.' … 'The church you will next see upon your way is entered