![arrested and prosecuted by the Chancellor Flotte, but when
delivered to the Archbishop of Narbonne for degradation, action was
suspended to await the sanction of Rome. Then Flotte was sent to
Italy to demand the surrender “of the child of perdition,” that Philip
might make of him “an excellent sacrifice to God.” The mission
necessarily failed, for it was a struggle for supremacy, and the issue
was well summed up in the final words of the stormy interview
which brought it to a close. “My power, the spiritual power,” cried
Boniface, “embraces and encloses the temporal.” “True,” retorted
Flotte, “but yours is verbal, the king’s is real.”
An ecclesiastical council was convoked for October, 1302, and Philip
was summoned to appear before the greatest prelates of
Christendom. But, not waiting the meeting of this august assembly,
Boniface, on December 5, 1301, launched his famous bull, “Ausculta,
fili,” which was his declaration of war.[168]
Listen, my son: do not persuade yourself that you have no superior,
and are not in subjection to the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy:
he who says this is mad, he who sustains it is an infidel. You devour
the revenues of the vacant bishoprics, you pillage churches. I do not
speak now of the alterations in the coinage, and of the other
complaints which arise on all sides, and which cry to us against you,
but not to make myself accountable to God for your soul, I summon
you to appear before me, and in case of your refusal shall render
judgment in your absence.[169]
A century before, the barons of France had abandoned Philip
Augustus, through fear of the incantations of Innocent, but, in the
third generation of the commercial type, such fears had been
discarded. In April, 1302, the estates of the realm sustained the
“little one-eyed heretic,” as Boniface called Flotte, in burning the
papal bull, and in answering the admonitions of the pope with
mockery.
“Philip, by the grace of God king of the French, to Boniface,
who calls himself sovereign pontiff, little greeting or none. Let
your very great foolishness know that we are subject to no one](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-36-320.jpg)
![for the temporalty; that the collation to the vacant churches
and prebends belongs to us by royal right; that their fruits are
ours; that collations which have been made, or are to be made
by us, are valid for the past and for the future, and that we will
manfully protect their possessors against all comers. Those
who think otherwise we hold fools or madmen.”[170]
The accepted theory long was that the bourgeoisie were neutral in
this quarrel; that they were an insignificant factor in the state, and
obeyed passively because they were without the power to oppose.
In reality, consolidation had already gone so far that money had
become the prevailing form of force in the kingdom of France;
therefore the monied class was on the whole the strongest class,
and Flotte was their mouthpiece. They accepted the papers drawn
by the chancellor, because the chancellor was their representative.
[171]
In July, 1302, Philip met with the defeat of Courtray, and the tone of
the ecclesiastical council, convened in October, shows that the clergy
thought his power broken. A priest relies upon the miracle, and, if
defied, he must either conquer by supernatural aid, or submit to
secular coercion. Boniface boldly faced the issue, and planted
himself by Hildebrand. In his bull, Unam Sanctam, he defined his
claim to the implicit obedience of laymen.
“We are provided, under his authority, with two swords, the
temporal and the spiritual; ... both, therefore, are in the power
of the Church; to wit, the spiritual and the material sword: ...
the one is to be used by the priest, the other by kings and
soldiers; sed ad nutum et patientiam sacerdotis.”[172]
A sentence of excommunication had also been prepared and sent to
France, which was to have been followed by deposition; but when it
arrived, Philip convened an assembly of prelates and barons at the
Louvre, and presented an indictment against Boniface, probably
without a parallel in modern history. The pope was accused of every
crime. He was an infidel, a denier of the immortality of the soul, a](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-37-320.jpg)
![scoffer at the eucharist, a murderer, and a sorcerer. He was guilty of
unnatural crimes and of robbery.[173]
The bearer of the bull was arrested, the property of the bishops who
had attended the council sequestered, and Philip prepared to seize
Boniface in his own palace. Boniface, too, felt the decisive hour at
hand. He tried to reconcile himself with his enemies, drew the bull of
deposition, and prepared to affix it to the church door at Anagni on
September 8, 1303. Before the day came he was a prisoner, and
face to face with death.
Flotte had been killed at Courtray, and had been succeeded by the
redoubtable Nogaret, whose grandfather was believed to have been
burned as a heretic. With Nogaret Philip joined Sciarra Colonna, the
bloodiest of the Italian nobles, and sent them together to Italy to
deal with his foe. Boniface had made war upon the Colonnas, and
Sciarra had been hunted like a wild beast. Flying disguised, he had
been taken by pirates, and had preferred to toil four years as a
galley-slave, rather than run the risk of ecclesiastical mercy by
surrendering himself to the vicar of Christ. At last Philip heard of his
misfortunes, bought him, and, at the crisis, let him slip like a mad
dog at the old man’s throat. Nogaret and Colonna succeeded in
corrupting the governor of Anagni, and entered the town at dead of
night; but the pope’s nephews had time to barricade the streets, and
it was not until the church, which communicated with the papal
apartments, had been fired, that the palace was forced. There, it
was said, they found the proud old priest sitting upon his throne,
with his crown upon his head, and men whispered that, as he sat
there, Colonna struck him in the face with his gauntlet.
Probably the story was false, but it reflected truly enough the spirit
of the pope’s captors. He himself believed them capable of poisoning
him, for from Saturday night till Monday morning he lay without food
or drink, and when liberated was exhausted. Boniface was eighty-
six, and the shock killed him. He was taken to Rome, and died there
of fever, according to the rumour, blaspheming, and gnawing his
hands in frenzy.[174]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-38-320.jpg)
![The death of Boniface was decisive. Benedict XI., who succeeded
him, did not attempt to prolong the contest; but peace without
surrender was impossible. The economic classes held the
emotionalists by the throat, and strangled them till they disgorged.
Vainly Benedict revoked the acts of his predecessor. Philip demanded
that Boniface should be branded as a heretic, and sent Nogaret to
Rome as his ambassador. The insult was more than the priesthood
could yet endure. Summoning his courage, Benedict
excommunicated Nogaret, Colonna, and thirteen others, whom he
had seen break into the palace at Anagni. Within a month he was
dead. Poison was whispered, and, for the first time since the monks
captured the papacy, the hierarchy was paralyzed by fear. No
complaint was made, or pursuit of the criminal attempted; the
consistory met, but failed to unite on a successor.
According to the legend, when the cardinals were unable to agree,
the faction opposed to Philip consented to name three candidates,
from whom the king should select the pope. The prelate he chose
was Bertrand de Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux. Boniface had been
his patron, but Philip, who knew men, knew that this man had his
price. The tale goes that the king visited the bishop at an abbey near
Saint-Jean-d’Angély, and began the conversation as follows: “My lord
Archbishop, I have that in my hand will make you pope if I like, and
it is for that I am come.” Bertrand fell on his knees, and the king
imposed five conditions, reserving a sixth, to exact thereafter. The
last condition was the condemnation of the Templars.[175]
Doubtless the picturesque old tale is as false in detail as it is true in
spirit. Probably no such interview took place, and yet there seems
little doubt that Clement owed his election to Philip, and gave
pledges which bound him from the day of his coronation. Certainly
he surrendered all liberty of action, for he established himself at
Avignon, whence the battlements of Ville-Neuve can still be seen,
built by Philip to overawe the town. Within an hour he could have
filled the streets with his mercenaries. The victory was complete.
The Church was prostrate, and spoliation began.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-39-320.jpg)
![For three years these miserable wretches languished in their
dungeons, and the imagination recoils from picturing their torments.
Finally Philip felt that an end must be made, and in March, 1310,
546 of the survivors were taken from their prisons and made to
choose delegates, for their exasperation was so deep that the
government feared to let them appear before the court in a body.
The precaution availed little, for the knights who conducted the
common defence proved themselves as proud and bold in this last
extremity of human misery, as they had ever been upon the day of
battle. They denied the charges brought against them, they taunted
their judges with the lies told them to induce them to confess, and
they showed how life and liberty had been promised them, under
the royal seal, if they would admit the allegations of the
government. Then they told the story of those who had been
steadfast to the end.
“It is not astonishing that some have borne false witness, but
that any have told the truth, considering the sorrows and
suffering, the threats and insults, they daily endure.... What is
surprising is that faith should be given to those who have
testified untruly to save their bodies, rather than to those who
have died in their tortures in such numbers, like martyrs of
Christ, in defence of the truth, or who solely for conscience
sake, have suffered and still daily suffer in their prisons, so
many torments, trials, calamities, and miseries, for this
cause.”[176]
The witnesses called confirmed their statements. Bernard Peleti,
when examined, was asked if he had been put to the torture. He
replied that for three months previous to his confession to the
Bishop of Paris, he had lain with his hands so tightly bound behind
his back that the blood started from his finger nails. He had beside
been put in a pit. Then he broke out: “If I am tortured I shall deny
all I have said now, and shall say all they want me to say. If the time
be short, I can bear to be beheaded, or to die by boiling water, or by
fire, for the honour of the order; but I can no longer withstand the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-42-320.jpg)
![torments which, for more than two years, I have endured in
prison.”[177]
“I have been tortured three times,” said Humbert de Podio. “I was
confined thirty-six weeks in a tower, on bread and water, quia non
confitebatur quae volebant.”[178]
Bernard de Vado showed two bones
which had dropped from his heels after roasting his feet.[179]
Such testimony was disregarded, for condemnation was necessary
as a preliminary to confiscation. The suppression of the Temple was
the first step in that long spoliation of the Church which has
continued to the present day, and which has been agonizing to the
victims in proportion to their power of resistance. The fourteenth
century was still an age of faith, and the monks died hard. Philip
grasped the situation with the intuition of genius, and provided
himself with an instrument fit for the task before him. He forced
Clement to raise Philip de Marigni to the See of Sens, and Marigni
was a man who shrank from nothing.
When made archbishop, he convoked a provincial council at Paris,
and condemned, as relapsed heretics, the knights who had
repudiated their confessions. Fifty-nine of these knights belonged to
his own diocese. He had them brought to a fenced enclosure in a
field near the Abbey of Saint Antoine, and there offered them pardon
if they would recant. Then they were chained to stakes, and slowly
burned to ashes from the feet upward. Not one flinched, but amidst
shrieks of anguish, when half consumed, they protested their
innocence, and died imploring mercy of Christ and of the Virgin.[180]
Devotion so superb might have fired the imagination of even such a
craven as Clement, but Philip was equal to the emergency. He had
caused scores of witnesses to be examined to prove that Boniface
was a murderer, a sorcerer, a debauchee, and a heretic. Suddenly he
offered to drop the prosecution, and to restore the Temple lands to
the Church, if the order might be abolished and the process closed.
Clement yielded. In October, 1311, the council met at Vienne. The
winter was spent in intimidation and bribery; the second meeting
was not held until the following April, and then the decree of](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-43-320.jpg)
![suppression was published. By this decree the corporation was
dissolved, but certain of the higher officers still lived, and in an evil
moment Clement bethought him of their fate. In December, 1313, he
appointed a commission to try them. They were brought before a
lofty scaffold at the portal of the Cathedral of Paris, and there made
to reiterate the avowals which had been wrung from them in their
dungeons. Then they were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment.
But at this supreme moment, when it seemed that all was over, de
Molay, the grand-master, and the Master of Normandy, broke into a
furious defence. The commissioners adjourned in a panic, but Philip,
thirsting for blood, sprang upon his prey.
He gave his orders to his own officers, without consulting any
prelate. On March 18, 1314, as night fell, the two crusaders were
taken from the provost, who acted as their gaoler, and carried to a
little island in the Seine, on which a statue of Henry of Navarre now
stands. There they were burned together, without a trial and without
a sentence. They watched the building of their funeral pile with
“hearts so firm and resolute, and persisted with such constancy in
their denials to the end, and suffered death with such composure,
that they left the witnesses of their execution in admiration and
stupor.”[181]
An ancient legend told how de Molay, as he stood upon his blazing
fagots, summoned Clement to meet him before God’s judgment-seat
in forty days, and Philip within a year. Neither survived the interval.
Philip had promised to restore the goods of the Temple to the
Church, but the plunder, for which this tremendous deed was done,
was not surrendered tamely to the vanquished after their defeat.
The gold and silver, and all that could be stolen, disappeared. The
land was in the end ceded to the Hospital, but so wasted that, for a
century, no revenue whatever accrued from what had been one of
the finest conventual estates in Europe.[182]
Such was the opening of that social revolution which, when it
reached its height, was called the Reformation.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-44-320.jpg)
![CHAPTER VII
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
Many writers have pointed out the relation between commerce and
scepticism in the Middle Ages, and, among others, Thorold Rogers
has a passage in his History of Agriculture and Prices so interesting
that it should be read entire:—
“The general spread of Lollardy, about which all the
theologians of the age complain, was at once the cause anti
the effect of progressive opulence. It cannot be by accident
that all the wealthiest parts of Europe, one district only
excepted, and that for very sufficient reasons, were suspected
during the Middle Ages of theological nonconformity. Before
the campaigns of Simon de Montfort, in the first half of the
thirteenth century, Provence was the garden and workshop of
Europe. The sturdiest advocates of the Reformation were the
burghers of the Low Countries.... In England the strength of
the Lollard party was, from the days of Wiklif to the days of
Cranmer, in Norfolk [the principal manufacturing county]; and I
have no doubt that ... the presence of students from this
district must have told on the theological bias of Cambridge
University, which came out markedly at the epoch of the
Reformation....
“English Lollardy was, like its direct descendant Puritanism,
sour and opinionative, but it was also moral and thrifty. They
who denounced the lazy and luxurious life of the monks, the
worldliness and greed of the prelates, and the gross and
shallow artifices of the popular religion, were pretty sure to
inculcate parsimony and saving. By voluntarily and sturdily
cutting themselves off from the circumstance of the old faith,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-45-320.jpg)
![they were certain, like the Quakers of more than two centuries
later, to become comparatively wealthy. They had nothing to
spare for monk or priest....”[183]
The Lollards were of the modern economic type, and discarded the
miracle because the miracle was costly and yielded an uncertain
return. Yet the mediæval cult was based upon the miracle, and many
of the payments due for the supernatural services of the
ecclesiastics were obligatory; beside, gifts as an atonement for sin
were a drain on savings, and the economist instinctively sought
cheaper methods of propitiation.
In an age as unscientific as the sixteenth century, the conviction of
the immutability of natural laws was not strong enough to admit of
the abrogation of religious formulas. The monied class, therefore,
proceeded step by step, and its first experiment was to suppress all
fees to middle-men, whether priests or saints, by becoming their
own intercessors with the Deity.
As Dr. Witherspoon has observed, “fear of wrath from the avenger of
blood” made men “fly to the city of refuge”;[184]
but, as the
tradesman replaced the enthusiast, a dogma was evolved by which
mental anguish, which cost nothing, was substituted for the offering
which was effective in proportion to its money value. This dogma
was “Justification by Faith,” the corner-stone of Protestantism.
Far from requiring an outlay from the elect, “Justification by Faith”
discouraged it. The act consisted in “a deep humiliation of mind,
confession of guilt and wretchedness ... and acceptance of pardon
and peace through Christ Jesus, which they have neither contributed
to the procuring, nor can contribute to the continuance of, by their
own merit.”[185]
Yet the substitution of a mental condition for a money payment, led
to consequences more far-reaching than the suppression of certain
clerical revenues, for it involved the rejection of the sacred tradition
which had not only sustained relic worship, but which had made the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-46-320.jpg)
![Church the channel of communication between Christians and the
invisible world.
That ancient channel once closed, Protestants had to open another,
and this led to the deification of the Bible, which, before the
Reformation, had been supposed to derive its authority from that
divine illumination which had enabled the priesthood to infallibly
declare the canon of the sacred books. Calvin saw the weak spot in
the position of the reformers, and faced it boldly. He maintained the
Scripture to be “self-authenticated, carrying with it its own evidence,
and ought not to be made the subject of demonstration and
arguments from reason,” and that it should obtain “the same
complete credit and authority with believers ... as if they heard the
very words pronounced by God himself.”[186]
Thus for the innumerable costly fetishes of the imaginative age were
substituted certain writings, which could be consulted without a fee.
The expedient was evidently the device of a mercantile community,
and the saving to those who accepted it enormous, but it
disintegrated Christendom, and made an organized priesthood
impossible. When each individual might pry into the sacred
mysteries at his pleasure, the authority of the clergy was annihilated.
Men of the priestly type among the reformers saw the danger and
tried to save themselves. The thesis which the early evangelical
divines maintained was the unity of truth. The Scriptures were true:
therefore if the whole body of Christians searched aright they could
not fail to draw truth from them, and this truth must be the creed of
the universal Church. Zwingli thus explained the doctrine:—
“Whoever hears the holy scriptures read aloud in church,
judges what he hears. Nevertheless what is heard is not itself
the Word through which we believe. For if we believed through
the simple hearing or reading of the Word, all would be
believers. On the contrary, we see that many hear and see and
do not believe. Hence it is clear that we believe only through
the word which the Heavenly Father speaks in our hearts, by
which he enlightens us so that we see, and draws us so that](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-47-320.jpg)
![we follow.... For God is not a God of strife and quarrel, but of
unity and peace. Where there is true faith, there the Holy Spirit
is present; but where the Holy Spirit is, there is certainly effort
for unity and peace.... Therefore there is no danger of
confusion in the Church since, if the congregation is assembled
through God, he is in the midst of them, and all who have faith
strive after unity and peace.”[187]
The inference the clergy sought to draw was, that though all could
read the Bible, only the enlightened could interpret it, and that they
alone were the enlightened. Hence Calvin’s pretensions equalled
Hildebrand’s:—
“This is the extent of the power with which the pastors of the
Church, by whatever name they may be distinguished, ought
to be invested; that by the word of God they may venture to
do all things with confidence; may constrain all the strength,
glory, wisdom, and pride of the world to obey and submit to his
majesty; supported by his power, may govern all mankind,
from the highest to the lowest; may build up the house of
Christ, and subvert the house of Satan; may feed the sheep,
and drive away the wolves; may instruct and exhort the docile;
may reprove, rebuke, and restrain the rebellious and obstinate;
may bind and loose; may discharge their lightnings and
thunders, if necessary; but all in the Word of God.”[188]
In certain regions, poor and remote from the centres of commerce,
these pretensions were respected. In Geneva, Scotland, and New
England, men like Calvin, Knox, and Cotton maintained themselves
until economic competition did its work: then they passed away.
Nowhere has faith withstood the rise of the mercantile class. As a
whole the Reformation was eminently an economic phenomenon,
and is best studied in England, which, after the Reformation, grew to
be the centre of the world’s exchanges.
From the beginning of modern history, commerce and scepticism
have gone hand in hand. The Eastern trade began to revive after the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-48-320.jpg)
![however, that the man who would sharply and fully expose this
error would be held for a manifest heretic by the image
worshippers and the greedy people who make gain of such
graves; for in the adoration of the eucharist, and such
worshipping of dead bodies and images, the Church is seduced
by an adulterous generation.”[189]
The laity paid the priesthood fees because of their supernatural
powers, and the possession of these powers was chiefly
demonstrated by the miracle of the mass. Wickliffe, with a leader’s
eye, saw where the enemy was vulnerable, and the last years of his
life were passed in his fierce controversy with the mendicants upon
transubstantiation. Even at that early day he presented the issue
with incomparable clearness: “And thou, then, that art an earthly
man, by what reason mayst thou say that thou makest thy
maker?”[190]
The deduction from such premises was inexorable. The mass had to
be condemned as fetish worship, and with it went the adoration of
relics.
“Indeed, many nominal Christians are worse than pagans; for it
is not so bad that a man should honour as God, for the rest of
the day, the first thing he sees in the morning, as that regularly
that accident should be really his God, which he sees in the
mass in the hands of the priest in the consecrated wafer.”[191]
Wickliffe died December 30, 1384, and ten years later the Lollards
had determined to resist all payments for magic. They presented
their platform to Parliament in 1395, summed up in their Book of
Conclusions. Some of these “conclusions” are remarkably interesting:
—
5th.—“That the exorcisms and hallowings, consecrations and
blessings, over the wine, bread, wax, water, oil, salt, incense,
the altar-stone, and about the church-walls, over the vestment,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-50-320.jpg)
![chalice, mitre, cross, and pilgrim-staves, are the very practices
of necromancy, rather than of sacred divinity.
· · · · · · · · · ·
7th.—“We mightily affirm ... that spiritual prayers made in the
church for the souls of the dead ... is a false foundation of
alms, whereupon all the houses of alms in England are falsely
founded.
8th.—“That pilgrimages, prayers, and oblations made unto
blind crosses or roods, or to deaf images made either of wood
or stone, are very near of kin unto idolatry.”[192]
When Lord Cobham, the head of the Lollard party, was tried for
heresy in 1413, Archbishop Arundel put him four test questions.
First, whether he believed, after the sacramental words had been
spoken, any material bread or wine remained in the sacrament;
fourth, whether he believed relic worship meritorious.
His answers did not give satisfaction, and they roasted him in chains,
in Saint Giles’s Fields, in 1418.
A hundred years of high commercial activity followed Cobham’s
death. The discovery of America, and of the sea passage to India,
changed the channels of commerce throughout the world, human
movement was accelerated, gunpowder made the attack
overwhelming; centralization took a prodigious stride, scepticism
kept pace with centralization, and in 1510 Erasmus wrote thus, and
yet remained in the orthodox communion:—
“Moreover savoureth it not of the same saulce [folly] (trow ye)
when everie countrey chalengeth a severall sainct for theyr
patrone, assignyng further to each sainct a peculiar cure and
office, with also sundrie ways of worshipping; as this sainct
helpeth for the tooth-ache, that socoureth in childbyrth; she
restoreth stolene goods; an other aydeth shipmen in tempests;
an other taketh charge of husbandmens hoggs; and so of the
rest; far too long were it to reherse all. Then some saincts](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-51-320.jpg)
![there be, that are generally sued for many thynges; amongst
whom chiefly is the virgin Mother of God, in whom vulgar folke
have an especiall confidence, yea almost more than in her
Sonne.”[193]
When Erasmus wrote, the Reformation was at hand, but the attack
on Church property had begun in England full two centuries before,
contemporaneously with Philip’s onslaught on the Temple. All over
Europe the fourteenth century was a period of financial distress; in
France the communes became bankrupt and the coinage
deteriorated, and in England the debasement of the currency began
in 1299, and kept pace with the rise of Lollardy. In 1299 the silver
penny weighed 22 1
⁄2 grains; Edward I. reduced it to 22 1
⁄4 grains;
Edward III. to 18 grains; Henry IV. to 15 grains; and Henry VI.,
during his restoration in 1470, to 12 grains.
As the stringency increased, the attack on the clergy gained in
ferocity. Edward I. not only taxed the priesthood, but seized the
revenues of the alien priories; of these there might have been one
hundred and fifty within the realm, and what he took from them he
spent on his army.
Edward II. and Edward III. followed the precedent, and during the
last reign, when the penny dropped four grains, these revenues
were sequestered no less than twenty-three years. Under Henry IV.
the penny lost three grains, and what remained of the income of
these houses was permanently applied to defraying the expenses of
the court. Henry V. dissolved them, and vested their estates in the
crown.
In the reign of Henry IV., when the penny was on the point of losing
three grains of its silver, the tone of Parliament was similar to that of
the parliaments of the Reformation. On one occasion the king asked
for a subsidy, and the Speaker suggested that without burdening the
laity he might “supply his occasions by seizing on the revenues of
the clergy”;[194]
and in 1410 Lord Cobham anticipated the Parliament
of 1536 by introducing a bill for the confiscation of conventual](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-52-320.jpg)
![revenues to the amount of 322,000 marks, a sum which he averred
represented the income of certain corporations whose names he
appended in a schedule.[195]
Year by year, as society consolidated, the economic type was
propagated; and, as the pressure of a contracting currency
stimulated these men to action, the demand for cheap religion grew
fiercer. London, the monied centre, waxed hotter and hotter, and a
single passage from the Supplicacyon for Beggers shows how bitter
the denunciations of the system of paying for miracles became:—
“Whate money pull they yn by probates of testamentes, priuy
tithes, and by mennes offeringes to theyre pilgrimages, and at
theyre first masses? Euery man and childe that is buried, must
pay sumwhat for masses and diriges to be song for him, or
elles they will accuse the dedes frendes and executours of
heresie. whate money get they by mortuaries, by hearing of
confessions ... by halowing of churches, altares, superaltares,
chapelles, and bells, by cursing of men and absoluing theim
agein for money?”[196]
One of the ballads of Cromwell’s time ridiculed, in this manner, all
the chief pilgrimages of the kingdom:—
“Ronnying hyther and thyther,
We cannot tell whither,
In offryng candels and pence
To stones and stockes,
And to olde rotten blockes,
That came, we know not from whense.
“To Walsyngham a gaddyng,
To Cantorbury a maddyng,
As men distraught of mynde;
With fewe clothes on our backes,
But an image of waxe,
For the lame and for the blynde.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-53-320.jpg)
![“Yet offer what ye wolde,
Were it otes, syluer, or golde
Pyn, poynt, brooche, or rynge,
The churche were as then,
Such charitable men,
That they would refuse nothyng.”[197]
But the war was not waged with words alone. At the comparatively
early date of 1393, London had grown so unruly that Richard
assumed the government of the city himself. First he appointed Sir
Edward Darlington warden, but Sir Edward proving too lenient, he
replaced him with Sir Baldwin Radington. Foxe, very frankly,
explained why:—
“For the Londoners at that time were notoriously known to be
favourers of Wickliff’s side, as partly before this is to be seen,
and in the story of Saint Alban’s more plainly doth appear,
where the author of the said history, writing upon the fifteenth
year of King Richard’s reign, reporteth in these words of the
Londoners, that they were ‘not right believers in God, nor in
the traditions of their forefathers; sustainers of the Lollards,
depravers of religious men, withholders of tithes, and
impoverishers of the common people.’
“... The king, incensed not a little with the complaint of the
bishops, conceived eftsoons, against the mayor and sheriffs,
and against the whole city of London, a great stomach;
insomuch, that the mayor and both the sheriffs were sent for,
and removed from their office.”[198]
By the opening of the sixteenth century a priest could hardly collect
his dues without danger; the Bishop of London indeed roundly
declared to the government that justice could not be had from the
courts.
In 1514 the infant child of a merchant tailor named Hun died, and
the parson of the parish sued the father for a bearing sheet, which
he claimed as a mortuary. Hun contested the case, and got out a](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-54-320.jpg)
![writ of præmunire against the priest, which so alarmed the clergy
that the chancellor of the diocese accused him of heresy, and
confined him in the Lollard’s tower of Saint Paul’s.
In due time the usual articles were exhibited against the defendant,
charging that he had disputed the lawfulness of tithes, and had said
they were ordained “only by the covetousness of priests”; also that
he possessed divers of “Wickliff’s damnable works,” and more to the
same effect.
Upon these articles Fitzjames, Bishop of London, examined Hun on
December 2, and after the examination recommitted him. On the
morning of the 4th, a boy sent with his breakfast found him hanging
to a beam in his cell. The clergy said suicide, but the populace cried
murder, and the coroner’s jury found a verdict against Dr. Horsey,
the chancellor. The situation then became grave, and Fitzjames
wrote to Wolsey a remarkable letter, which showed not only high
passion, but serious alarm:—
“In most humble wise I beseech you, that I may have the
king’s gracious favour ... for assured am I, if my chancellor be
tried by any twelve men in London, they be so maliciously set,
‘in favorem hæreticæ pravitatis,’ that they will cast and
condemn any clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel.”[199]
The evidence is conclusive that, from the outset, industry bred
heretics; agriculture, believers. Thorold Rogers has explained that
the east of England, from Kent to the Wash and on to Yorkshire, was
the richest part of the kingdom,[200]
and Mr. Blunt, in his Reformation
of the Church of England, has published an analysis of the
martyrdoms under Mary. He has shown that out of 277 victims, 234
came from the district to the east of a line drawn from Boston to
Portsmouth. West of this line Oxford had most burnings; but, by the
reign of Mary, manufactures had spread so far inland that the
industries of Oxfordshire were only surpassed by those of Middlesex.
[201]
In Wickliffe’s time Norwich stood next to London, and Norwich
was infested with Lollards, many of whom were executed there.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-55-320.jpg)
![ten miles without pain, and found the church door open,
according to the blind talk of the ignorant people: for there
durst no unfaithful body shut it. This happened well for their
purpose, for they found the idol, which had as much power to
keep the door shut, as to keep it open; and for proof thereof,
they took the idol from his shrine, and carried him quarter of a
mile from the place where he stood, without any resistance of
the said idol. Whereupon they struck fire with a flint-stone, and
suddenly set him on fire, who burned out so brim, that he
lighted them homeward one good mile of the ten.
“This done, there went a great talk abroad that they should
have great riches in that place; but it was very untrue; for it
was not their thought or enterprise, as they themselves
afterwards confessed, for there was nothing taken away but his
coat, his shoes, and the tapers. The tapers did help to burn
him, the shoes they had again, and the coat one Sir Thomas
Rose did burn; but they had neither penny, halfpenny, gold,
groat, nor jewel.
“Notwithstanding, three of them were afterwards indicted of
felony, and hanged in chains within half a year, or thereabout.
· · · · · · · · · ·
“The same year, and the year before, there were many images
cast down and destroyed in many places: as the image of the
crucifix in the highway by Coggeshall, the image of Saint
Petronal in the church of Great Horksleigh, the image of Saint
Christopher by Sudbury, and another image of Saint Petronal in
a chapel of Ipswich.”[202]
England’s economic supremacy is recent, and has resulted from the
change in the seat of exchanges which followed the discovery of
America and the sea-route to India; long before Columbus, however,
the introduction of the mariner’s compass had altered the paths
commerce followed between the north and south of Europe during
the crusades.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-57-320.jpg)
![or Carcassonne existed, and the Tower of London itself was
insignificant beside the Château Gaillard, which Cœur-de-Lion
planted on the Seine.
The population was scanty, and increased little. When Henry VIII.
came to the throne in 1509, London may have had forty or fifty
thousand inhabitants, York eleven thousand, Bristol nine or ten
thousand, and Norwich six thousand.[203]
Paris at that time probably
contained between three and four hundred thousand, and Milan and
Ghent two hundred and fifty thousand each.
But although England was not a monied centre during the Middle
Ages, and perhaps for that very reason, she felt with acuteness the
financial pressure of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She had
little gold and silver, and gold and silver rose in relative value; she
had few manufactures, and manufactures were comparatively
prosperous; her wealth lay in her agricultural interests, and farm
products were, for the most part, severely pinched.
Commenting on the prices between the end of the thirteenth century
and the middle of the sixteenth, Mr. Rogers has observed:—
“Again, upon several articles of the first importance, there is a
marked decline in the price from the average of 1261–1400 to
that of 1401–1540. This would have been more conspicuous, if
I had in my earlier volumes compared all prices from 1261 to
1350 with those of 1351–1400. But even over the whole range,
every kind of grain, except wheat and peas, is dearer in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than it is in the first
hundred and forty years of the present period [1401–1582];
and had I taken the average price of wheat during the last fifty
years of the fourteenth century, it would have been (6s. 1
1
⁄2d.) dearer than the average of 1401–1540 (5s. 11 3
⁄4d.),
heightened as this is by the dearness of the last thirteen
years.”[204]
The tables published by Mr. Rogers make it possible to form some
idea of the strain to which the population of Great Britain was](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-59-320.jpg)
![Immediately before the French war the penny lost two grains, and
between 1346 and 1351, during the Black Death, it lost two grains
and a quarter more, a depreciation of four grains and a half in fifty
years; then for half a century an equilibrium was maintained. Under
Henry IV. there was a sharp decline of three grains, equal to an
inflation of seventeen per cent, and by 1470, under Henry VI., the
penny fell to twelve grains. Then a period of stability followed, which
lasted until just before the Reformation, when a crisis unparalleled in
severity began, a crisis which probably was the proximate cause of
the confiscation of the conventual estates.
In 1526 the penny suddenly lost a grain and a half, or about twelve
and a half per cent, and then, when further reductions of weight
would have made the piece too flimsy, the government resorted to
adulteration. In 1542, a ten-grain penny was coined with one part in
five of alloy; in 1544, the alloy had risen to one-half, and in 1545,
two-thirds of the coin was base metal—a depreciation of more than
seventy per cent in twenty years.
Meanwhile, though prices had fluctuated, the trend had been
downward, and downward so strongly that it had not been fully
counteracted by the reductions of bullion in the money. Rogers
thought lath-nails perhaps the best gauge of prices, and in
commenting on the years which preceded the Reformation, he
remarked:—
“From 1461 to 1540, the average [of lath-nails] is very little
higher than it was from 1261 to 1350, illustrating anew that
significant decline in prices which characterizes the economical
history of England during the eighty years 1461–1540.”[205]
Although wheat rose more than other grains, and is therefore an
unfavourable standard of comparison, wheat yields substantially the
same result. During the last forty years of the thirteenth century, the
average price of the quarter was 5s. 10 3
⁄4d., and for the last
decade, 6s. 1d. For the first forty years of the sixteenth century the
average was 6s. 10d. The penny of 1526, however, contained only](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-61-320.jpg)
![about forty-seven per cent of the bullion of the penny of 1299. “The
most remarkable fact in connection with the issue of base money by
Henry VIII. is the singular identity of the average price of grain,
especially wheat, during the first 140 years of my present period,
with the last 140 of my first two volumes.”[206]
After a full examination of his tables, Rogers concluded that the
great rise which made the prosperity of Elizabeth’s reign did not
begin until some “year between 1545 and 1549.”[207]
This
corresponds precisely with the discovery of Potosi in 1545, and that
the advance was due to the new silver, and not to the debasement
of the coinage, seems demonstrated by the fact that no fall took
place when the currency was restored by Elizabeth, but, on the
contrary, the upward movement continued until well into the next
century.
Some idea may be formed from these figures of the contraction
which prevailed during the years of the Reformation. In 1544,
toward the close of Henry’s reign, the penny held five grains of pure
silver as against about 20.8 grains in 1299, and yet its purchasing
power had not greatly varied. Bullion must therefore have had about
four times the relative value in 1544 that it had two hundred and
fifty years earlier, and, if the extremely debased issues of 1545 and
later be taken as the measure, its value was much higher.
Had Potosi been discovered a generation earlier, the whole course of
English development might have been modified, for it is not
impossible that, without the aid of falling prices, the rising capitalistic
class might have lacked the power to confiscate the monastic
estates. As it was, the pressure continued until the catastrophe
occurred, relic worship was swept away, the property of the nation
was redistributed, and an impulsion was given to large farming
which led to the rapid eviction of the yeomanry. As the yeomen were
driven from their land, they roamed over the world, colonizing and
conquering, from the Mississippi to the Ganges; building up, in the
course of two hundred and fifty years, a centralization greater than
that of Rome, and more absolute than that of Constantinople.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-62-320.jpg)
![Changes so vast in the forms of competition necessarily changed the
complexion of society. Men who had flourished in an age of
decentralization and of imagination passed away, and were replaced
by a new aristocracy. The soldier and the priest were overpowered;
and, from the Reformation downward, the monied type possessed
the world.
Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, was the ideal of this type, and he
was accordingly the Englishman who rose highest during the
convulsion of the Reformation. He was a perfect commercial
adventurer, and Chapuys, the ambassador of Charles V. at London,
thus described his origin to his master:—
“Cromwell is the son of a poor farrier, who lived in a little
village a league and a half from here, and is buried in the
parish graveyard. His uncle, father of the cousin whom he has
already made rich, was cook of the late Archbishop of
Canterbury. Cromwell was ill-behaved when young, and after
an imprisonment was forced to leave the country. He went to
Flanders, Rome, and elsewhere in Italy. When he returned he
married the daughter of a shearman, and served in his house;
he then became a solicitor.”[208]
The trouble which drove him abroad seems to have been with his
father, and he probably started on his travels about 1504. He led a
dissolute and vagabond life, served as a mercenary in Italy, “was
wild and youthful, ... as he himself was wont ofttimes to declare
unto Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; showing what a ruffian he
was in his young days ... also what a great doer he was with Geffery
Chambers in publishing and setting forth the pardons of Boston
everywhere in churches as he went.”[209]
These “pardons” were indulgences he succeeded in obtaining from
the pope for the town of Boston, which he peddled about the
country as he went. He served as a clerk in the counting house of
the Merchant Adventurers at Antwerp, and also appears to have
filled some such position with a Venetian merchant. On his return to](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/67275-250425044248-bf2badb4/85/NTA-UGC-NET-Paper-1-34-Solved-Papers-2019-to-2004-3rd-Edition-Dr-Rashmi-Singh-63-320.jpg)
NTA UGC NET Paper 1 34 Solved Papers 2019 to 2004 3rd Edition Dr. Rashmi Singh
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- 6. CONTENTS 1. Solved Paper 6 December 2019 (I Shift) ����������������������������������������������2019-1–2019-9 2. Solved Paper 6 December 2019 (II Shift) ������������������������������������������2019-10–2019-18 3. Solved Paper 26 June 2019 ��������������������������������������������������������������������2019-1–2019-8 4. Solved Paper 25 June 2019 �������������������������������������������������������������������2019-9–2019-16 5. Solved Paper December 2018 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������1-7 6. Solved Paper July 2018 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������8-16 7. Solved Paper November 2017 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������17-24 8. Solved Paper January 2017 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������25-32 9. Solved Paper August 2016 (Retest) ��������������������������������������������������������������������33-40 10. Solved Paper July 2016 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������41-48 11. Solved Paper December 2015 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������49-56 12. Solved Paper June 2015 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������57-64 13. Solved Paper December 2014 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������65-73 14. Solved Paper June 2014 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������74-81 15. Solved Paper December 2013 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������82-88 16. Solved Paper September 2013 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������89-97 17. Solved Paper June 2013 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������98-105 18. Solved Paper December 2012 �������������������������������������������������������������������������� 106-113 19. Solved Paper June 2012 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 114-120 20. Solved Paper December 2011 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������121-127 21. Solved Paper June 2011 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������128-134 22. Solved Paper December 2010 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������135-141 23. Solved Paper June 2010 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������142-148 24. Solved Paper December 2009 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������149-155 25. Solved Paper June 2009 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������156-161 26. Solved Paper December 2008 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������162-167 27. Solved Paper June 2008 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������168-173 28. Solved Paper December 2007 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������174-178 29. Solved Paper June 2007 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������179-183 30. Solved Paper December 2006 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������184-189 31. Solved Paper June 2006 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������190-195 32. Solved Paper December 2005 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������196-201 33. Solved Paper June 2005 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������202-208 34. Solved Paper December 2004 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������209-214
- 7. ABOUT THE UGC-NET EXAM • The UGC-NET exam for Junior Research Fellowship/Eligibility for Assistant Professor, earlier conducted by the CBSE, is being conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) in online mode from Dec 2018. There is no change suggested in the syllabus for June 2019 exam, but the exam pattern has been revised. • There will be two papers with a total of 300 marks. Paper 1 General Aptitude 1 hour 50 Qs 100marks Paper 2 Optional Subject 2 hours 100 Qs 200 marks • All questions, worth 2 marks each, will be compulsory; and, there will be no negative marking. 1. (Five questions each carrying 2 marks are to be set from each Unit-The details of syllabus as below) SYLLABUS Unit-I Teaching Aptitude ● Teaching: Concept, Objectives, Levels of teaching (Memory, Understanding and Reflective), Characteristics and basic requirements. ● Learner’s characteristics: Characteristics of adolescent and adult learners (Academic, Social, Emotional and Cognitive), Individual differences. ● Factors affecting teaching related to: Teacher, Learner, Support material, Instructional facilities, Learning environment and Institution. ● Methods of teaching in Institutions of higher learning: Teacher centered vs. Learner centered methods; Off-line vs. On-line methods (Swayam, Swayamprabha, MOOCs etc.). ● Teaching Support System: Traditional, Modern and ICT based. ● Evaluation Systems: Elements and Types of evaluation, Evaluation in Choice Based Credit System in Higher education, Computer based testing, Innovations in evaluation systems. Unit-II Research Aptitude ● Research: Meaning, Types, and Characteristics, Positivism and Post- positivistic approach to research. ● Methods of Research: Experimental, Descriptive, Historical, Qualitative and Quantitative methods. ● Steps of Research. ● Thesis and Article writing: Format and styles of referencing. ● Application of ICT in research. ● Research ethics. Unit-III Comprehension ● A passage of text to be given. Questions to be asked from the passage to be answered. UGC-NET EXAM EBD_8067
- 8. Unit-IV Communication ● Communication: Meaning, types and characteristics of communication. ● Effective communication: Verbal and Non-verbal, Inter-cultural and group communications, Classroom communication. ● Barriers to effective communication. ● Mass-Media and Society. Unit-V Mathematical Reasoning and Aptitude ● Types of reasoning. ● Number series, Letter series, Codes and Relationships. ● Mathematical Aptitude (Fraction, Time Distance, Ratio, Proportion and Percentage, Profit and Loss, Interest and Discounting, Averages etc.). Unit-VI Logical Reasoning ● Understanding the structure of arguments: argument forms, structure of categorical propositions, Mood and Figure, Formal and Informal fallacies, Uses of language, Connotations and denotations of terms, Classical square of opposition. ● Evaluating and distinguishing deductive and inductive reasoning. ● Analogies. ● Venn diagram: Simple and multiple use for establishing validity of arguments. ● Indian Logic: Means of knowledge. ● Pramanas: Pratyaksha (Perception), Anumana (Inference), Upamana (Comparison), Shabda (Verbal testimony), Arthapatti (Implication) and Anupalabddhi (Non-apprehension). ● Structure and kinds of Anumana (inference), Vyapti (invariable relation),Hetvabhasas (fallacies of inference). Unit-VII Data Interpretation ● Sources, acquisition and classification of Data. ● Quantitative and Qualitative Data. ● Graphical representation (Bar-chart, Histograms, Pie-chart, Table-chart and Line-chart) and mapping of Data. ● Data Interpretation. ● Data and Governance. Unit-VIII Information and Communication Technology (ICT) ● ICT: General abbreviations and terminology. ● Basics of Internet, Intranet, E-mail, Audio and Video-conferencing. ● Digital initiatives in higher education. ● ICT and Governance.
- 9. Unit-IX People, Development and Environment ● Development and environment: Millennium development and Sustainable development goals. ● Human and environment interaction: Anthropogenic activities and their impacts on environment. ● Environmental issues: Local, Regional and Global;Air pollution, Water pollution, Soil pollution, Noise pollution, Waste (solid, liquid, biomedical, hazardous, electronic), Climate change and its Socio-Economic and Political dimensions. ● Impacts of pollutants on human health. ● Natural and energy resources: Solar, Wind, Soil, Hydro, Geothermal,Biomass, Nuclear and Forests. ● Natural hazards and disasters: Mitigation strategies. ● Environmental Protection Act (1986), National Action Plan on Climate Change, International agreements/efforts -Montreal Protocol, Rio Summit,Convention on Biodiversity, Kyoto Protocol, Paris Agreement, International Solar Alliance. Unit-X Higher Education System ● Institutions of higher learning and education in ancient India. ● Evolution of higher learning and research in Post Independence India. ● Oriental, Conventional and Non-conventional learning programmes in India. ● Professional, Technical and Skill Based education. ● Value education and environmental education. ● Policies, Governance, and Administration. EBD_8067
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- 33. Another Random Scribd Document with Unrelated Content
- 34. What a hold the dazzling dream of omnipotence, through the possession of the Sepulchre, had upon the twelfth century, can be measured by the gifts showered upon the crusading orders, for they represented a prodigious sacrifice. At Paris the Temple had a capital city over against the capital of the king. Within a walled enclosure of sixty thousand square metres, stood the conventual buildings and a gigantic donjon of such perfect masonry that it never needed other repairs than the patching of its roof. Beyond the walls the domain extended to the Seine, a property which, even in 1300, had an almost incalculable value. On every Eastern battle-field, and at every assault and siege, the knights had fought with that fiery courage which has made their name a proverb down to the present day. In 1265, at Safed, three hundred had been butchered upon the ramparts in cold blood, rather than renounce their faith. At Acre, whose loss sealed the fate of Palestine, they held the keep at all odds until the donjon fell, burying Christians and Moslems in a common grave. But skill and valour avail nothing against nature. Step by step the Templars had been driven back, until Tortosa surrendered in 1291. Then the Holy Land was closed, the enthusiasm which had generated the order had passed away, and, meanwhile, economic competition had bred a new race at home, to which monks were a predestined prey. In 1285, as the Latin kingdom in Syria was tottering towards its fall, Philip the Fair was crowned. Subtle, sceptical, treacherous, and cruel, few kings have left behind them a more sombre memory, yet he was the incarnation of the economic spirit in its conflict with the Church. Nine years later Benedetto Gaetani was elected pope: a man as completely the creation of the social revolution of the thirteenth century as Philip himself. Trained at Bologna and Paris, a jurist rather than a priest, his faith in dogma was so scanty that his belief in the immortality of the soul has been questioned. A thorough worldling, greedy, ambitious, and unscrupulous, he was suspected of having murdered his predecessor, Celestin V.
- 35. When Boniface came to the throne, the Church is supposed to have owned about one-third of the soil of Europe, and on this property the governments had no means of enforcing regular taxation. Toward the close of the thirteenth century the fall of prices increased the weight of debt, while it diminished the power of the population to pay. On the other hand, as the system of administration became more complex, the cost of government augmented, and at last the burden became more than the laity could endure. Both England and France had a permanent deficit, and Edward and Philip alike turned toward the clergy as the only source of supply. Both kings met with opposition, but the explosion came in France, where Clairvaux, the most intractable of convents, appealed to Rome. Boniface had been elected by a coalition between the Colonna and the Orsini factions, but after his coronation he turned upon the Colonnas, who, in revenge, plundered his treasure. A struggle followed, which ended fatally to the pope; but at first he had the advantage, sacked their city of Præneste, and forced them to fly to France. On the brink of this war, Boniface was in no condition to rouse so dangerous an adversary as Philip, and, in answer to Clairvaux’s appeal, he confined himself to excommunicating the prince who should tax the priest and the priest who should pay the impost. Nevertheless, the issue had to be met. The Church had weakened as terror of the unknown had waned, and could no longer defend its wealth, which was destined to pass more and more completely into the hands of the laity. Philip continued his aggressions, and, when peace had been established in Italy, the rupture came. Not realizing his impotence, and exasperated at the royal policy, Boniface sent Bernard de Saisset, Bishop of Pamiers, to Paris as his ambassador. Bernard had recently been consecrated in defiance of Philip, and they were bitter enemies. He was soon dismissed from court, but he continued his provocations, calling the king a false coiner and a blockhead, and when he returned to Pamiers he plotted an insurrection. He was
- 36. arrested and prosecuted by the Chancellor Flotte, but when delivered to the Archbishop of Narbonne for degradation, action was suspended to await the sanction of Rome. Then Flotte was sent to Italy to demand the surrender “of the child of perdition,” that Philip might make of him “an excellent sacrifice to God.” The mission necessarily failed, for it was a struggle for supremacy, and the issue was well summed up in the final words of the stormy interview which brought it to a close. “My power, the spiritual power,” cried Boniface, “embraces and encloses the temporal.” “True,” retorted Flotte, “but yours is verbal, the king’s is real.” An ecclesiastical council was convoked for October, 1302, and Philip was summoned to appear before the greatest prelates of Christendom. But, not waiting the meeting of this august assembly, Boniface, on December 5, 1301, launched his famous bull, “Ausculta, fili,” which was his declaration of war.[168] Listen, my son: do not persuade yourself that you have no superior, and are not in subjection to the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy: he who says this is mad, he who sustains it is an infidel. You devour the revenues of the vacant bishoprics, you pillage churches. I do not speak now of the alterations in the coinage, and of the other complaints which arise on all sides, and which cry to us against you, but not to make myself accountable to God for your soul, I summon you to appear before me, and in case of your refusal shall render judgment in your absence.[169] A century before, the barons of France had abandoned Philip Augustus, through fear of the incantations of Innocent, but, in the third generation of the commercial type, such fears had been discarded. In April, 1302, the estates of the realm sustained the “little one-eyed heretic,” as Boniface called Flotte, in burning the papal bull, and in answering the admonitions of the pope with mockery. “Philip, by the grace of God king of the French, to Boniface, who calls himself sovereign pontiff, little greeting or none. Let your very great foolishness know that we are subject to no one
- 37. for the temporalty; that the collation to the vacant churches and prebends belongs to us by royal right; that their fruits are ours; that collations which have been made, or are to be made by us, are valid for the past and for the future, and that we will manfully protect their possessors against all comers. Those who think otherwise we hold fools or madmen.”[170] The accepted theory long was that the bourgeoisie were neutral in this quarrel; that they were an insignificant factor in the state, and obeyed passively because they were without the power to oppose. In reality, consolidation had already gone so far that money had become the prevailing form of force in the kingdom of France; therefore the monied class was on the whole the strongest class, and Flotte was their mouthpiece. They accepted the papers drawn by the chancellor, because the chancellor was their representative. [171] In July, 1302, Philip met with the defeat of Courtray, and the tone of the ecclesiastical council, convened in October, shows that the clergy thought his power broken. A priest relies upon the miracle, and, if defied, he must either conquer by supernatural aid, or submit to secular coercion. Boniface boldly faced the issue, and planted himself by Hildebrand. In his bull, Unam Sanctam, he defined his claim to the implicit obedience of laymen. “We are provided, under his authority, with two swords, the temporal and the spiritual; ... both, therefore, are in the power of the Church; to wit, the spiritual and the material sword: ... the one is to be used by the priest, the other by kings and soldiers; sed ad nutum et patientiam sacerdotis.”[172] A sentence of excommunication had also been prepared and sent to France, which was to have been followed by deposition; but when it arrived, Philip convened an assembly of prelates and barons at the Louvre, and presented an indictment against Boniface, probably without a parallel in modern history. The pope was accused of every crime. He was an infidel, a denier of the immortality of the soul, a
- 38. scoffer at the eucharist, a murderer, and a sorcerer. He was guilty of unnatural crimes and of robbery.[173] The bearer of the bull was arrested, the property of the bishops who had attended the council sequestered, and Philip prepared to seize Boniface in his own palace. Boniface, too, felt the decisive hour at hand. He tried to reconcile himself with his enemies, drew the bull of deposition, and prepared to affix it to the church door at Anagni on September 8, 1303. Before the day came he was a prisoner, and face to face with death. Flotte had been killed at Courtray, and had been succeeded by the redoubtable Nogaret, whose grandfather was believed to have been burned as a heretic. With Nogaret Philip joined Sciarra Colonna, the bloodiest of the Italian nobles, and sent them together to Italy to deal with his foe. Boniface had made war upon the Colonnas, and Sciarra had been hunted like a wild beast. Flying disguised, he had been taken by pirates, and had preferred to toil four years as a galley-slave, rather than run the risk of ecclesiastical mercy by surrendering himself to the vicar of Christ. At last Philip heard of his misfortunes, bought him, and, at the crisis, let him slip like a mad dog at the old man’s throat. Nogaret and Colonna succeeded in corrupting the governor of Anagni, and entered the town at dead of night; but the pope’s nephews had time to barricade the streets, and it was not until the church, which communicated with the papal apartments, had been fired, that the palace was forced. There, it was said, they found the proud old priest sitting upon his throne, with his crown upon his head, and men whispered that, as he sat there, Colonna struck him in the face with his gauntlet. Probably the story was false, but it reflected truly enough the spirit of the pope’s captors. He himself believed them capable of poisoning him, for from Saturday night till Monday morning he lay without food or drink, and when liberated was exhausted. Boniface was eighty- six, and the shock killed him. He was taken to Rome, and died there of fever, according to the rumour, blaspheming, and gnawing his hands in frenzy.[174]
- 39. The death of Boniface was decisive. Benedict XI., who succeeded him, did not attempt to prolong the contest; but peace without surrender was impossible. The economic classes held the emotionalists by the throat, and strangled them till they disgorged. Vainly Benedict revoked the acts of his predecessor. Philip demanded that Boniface should be branded as a heretic, and sent Nogaret to Rome as his ambassador. The insult was more than the priesthood could yet endure. Summoning his courage, Benedict excommunicated Nogaret, Colonna, and thirteen others, whom he had seen break into the palace at Anagni. Within a month he was dead. Poison was whispered, and, for the first time since the monks captured the papacy, the hierarchy was paralyzed by fear. No complaint was made, or pursuit of the criminal attempted; the consistory met, but failed to unite on a successor. According to the legend, when the cardinals were unable to agree, the faction opposed to Philip consented to name three candidates, from whom the king should select the pope. The prelate he chose was Bertrand de Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux. Boniface had been his patron, but Philip, who knew men, knew that this man had his price. The tale goes that the king visited the bishop at an abbey near Saint-Jean-d’Angély, and began the conversation as follows: “My lord Archbishop, I have that in my hand will make you pope if I like, and it is for that I am come.” Bertrand fell on his knees, and the king imposed five conditions, reserving a sixth, to exact thereafter. The last condition was the condemnation of the Templars.[175] Doubtless the picturesque old tale is as false in detail as it is true in spirit. Probably no such interview took place, and yet there seems little doubt that Clement owed his election to Philip, and gave pledges which bound him from the day of his coronation. Certainly he surrendered all liberty of action, for he established himself at Avignon, whence the battlements of Ville-Neuve can still be seen, built by Philip to overawe the town. Within an hour he could have filled the streets with his mercenaries. The victory was complete. The Church was prostrate, and spoliation began.
- 40. Clement was crowned in 1305, and after two years of slavery he began to find his compact heavy upon him. He yielded up the patronage, he consented to the taxation of the clergy, and he ordered the grand-masters of the crusading orders to return to Europe, all at Philip’s bidding. But when he was commanded to condemn Boniface as a heretic, he recoiled in terror. Indeed, to have rejected Boniface as an impostor, and a false pope, would have precipitated chaos. His bishops and cardinals would have been set aside, Clement’s own election would have been invalidated; none could foresee where the disorganization would end. To gain time, Clement pleaded for a general council, which the king morosely conceded, but only on the condition that the excommunications against his agents, even against Nogaret, should be withdrawn. Clement assented, for he was practically a prisoner at Poitiers, a council at Vienne was agreed to, and the Crown seized the Templars without opposition from the Church. Criticism has long ago dispelled the mystery which once shrouded this bloody process. No historian now suggests that the knights were really guilty of the fantastic enormities charged against them, and which they confessed under torture. Scepticism doubtless was rife among them, as it was among the cardinals, but there is nothing to show that the worst differed materially from the population about them, and the superb fortitude with which they perished, demonstrates that lack of religious enthusiasm was not the crime for which they died. When Philip conceived the idea of first murdering and then plundering the crusaders, is uncertain. Some have thought it was in 1306, while sheltered in the Temple, when, he having suddenly raised his debased money to the standard of Saint Louis, the mob destroyed the house of his master of the mint. Probably it was much earlier, and was but the necessary result of the sharpening of economic competition, which began with the accelerated movement accompanying the crusades.
- 41. After Clement’s election, several years elapsed before the scheme ripened. Nothing could be done until one or both of the grand- masters had been enticed to France with their treasure. Under pretence of preparing for a new crusade this was finally accomplished, and, in 1306, Jacques de Molay, a chivalrous Burgundian gentleman, journeyed unsuspectingly to Paris, taking with him his chief officers and one hundred and fifty thousand florins in gold, beside silver “enough to load ten mules.” Philip first borrowed all the money de Molay would lend, and then, at one sudden swoop, arrested in a single night all the Templars in France. On October 13, 1307, the seizure was made, and Philip’s organization was so perfect, and his agents so reliable, that the plan was executed with precision. The object of the government was plunder, but before the goods of the order could be confiscated, legal conviction of some crime was necessary, which would entail forfeiture. Heresy was the only accusation adapted to the purpose; accordingly Philip determined to convict the knights of heresy, and the best evidence was confession. To extort confession the Inquisition had to be set in motion by the pope, and thus it came to pass that, in order to convey to the laymen the property of ecclesiastics, Christ’s soldiers were tormented to death by his own vicar. In vain, in the midst of the work, Clement, in agonies of remorse, revoked the commissions of the inquisitors. Philip jeered when the cardinals delivered the message, saying “that God hated the lukewarm,” and the torture went on as before. When he had extorted what he needed, he set out for Poitiers; Clement fled, but was arrested and brought back a prisoner. Then his resolution gave way, and he abandoned the knights to their fate, reserving only the grand-master and a few high officials for himself. Still, though he forsook the individuals, he could not be terrified into condemning the order in its corporate capacity, and the final process was referred to the approaching council. Meanwhile, a commission, presided over by the Archbishop of Narbonne, proceeded with the trial of the knights.
- 42. For three years these miserable wretches languished in their dungeons, and the imagination recoils from picturing their torments. Finally Philip felt that an end must be made, and in March, 1310, 546 of the survivors were taken from their prisons and made to choose delegates, for their exasperation was so deep that the government feared to let them appear before the court in a body. The precaution availed little, for the knights who conducted the common defence proved themselves as proud and bold in this last extremity of human misery, as they had ever been upon the day of battle. They denied the charges brought against them, they taunted their judges with the lies told them to induce them to confess, and they showed how life and liberty had been promised them, under the royal seal, if they would admit the allegations of the government. Then they told the story of those who had been steadfast to the end. “It is not astonishing that some have borne false witness, but that any have told the truth, considering the sorrows and suffering, the threats and insults, they daily endure.... What is surprising is that faith should be given to those who have testified untruly to save their bodies, rather than to those who have died in their tortures in such numbers, like martyrs of Christ, in defence of the truth, or who solely for conscience sake, have suffered and still daily suffer in their prisons, so many torments, trials, calamities, and miseries, for this cause.”[176] The witnesses called confirmed their statements. Bernard Peleti, when examined, was asked if he had been put to the torture. He replied that for three months previous to his confession to the Bishop of Paris, he had lain with his hands so tightly bound behind his back that the blood started from his finger nails. He had beside been put in a pit. Then he broke out: “If I am tortured I shall deny all I have said now, and shall say all they want me to say. If the time be short, I can bear to be beheaded, or to die by boiling water, or by fire, for the honour of the order; but I can no longer withstand the
- 43. torments which, for more than two years, I have endured in prison.”[177] “I have been tortured three times,” said Humbert de Podio. “I was confined thirty-six weeks in a tower, on bread and water, quia non confitebatur quae volebant.”[178] Bernard de Vado showed two bones which had dropped from his heels after roasting his feet.[179] Such testimony was disregarded, for condemnation was necessary as a preliminary to confiscation. The suppression of the Temple was the first step in that long spoliation of the Church which has continued to the present day, and which has been agonizing to the victims in proportion to their power of resistance. The fourteenth century was still an age of faith, and the monks died hard. Philip grasped the situation with the intuition of genius, and provided himself with an instrument fit for the task before him. He forced Clement to raise Philip de Marigni to the See of Sens, and Marigni was a man who shrank from nothing. When made archbishop, he convoked a provincial council at Paris, and condemned, as relapsed heretics, the knights who had repudiated their confessions. Fifty-nine of these knights belonged to his own diocese. He had them brought to a fenced enclosure in a field near the Abbey of Saint Antoine, and there offered them pardon if they would recant. Then they were chained to stakes, and slowly burned to ashes from the feet upward. Not one flinched, but amidst shrieks of anguish, when half consumed, they protested their innocence, and died imploring mercy of Christ and of the Virgin.[180] Devotion so superb might have fired the imagination of even such a craven as Clement, but Philip was equal to the emergency. He had caused scores of witnesses to be examined to prove that Boniface was a murderer, a sorcerer, a debauchee, and a heretic. Suddenly he offered to drop the prosecution, and to restore the Temple lands to the Church, if the order might be abolished and the process closed. Clement yielded. In October, 1311, the council met at Vienne. The winter was spent in intimidation and bribery; the second meeting was not held until the following April, and then the decree of
- 44. suppression was published. By this decree the corporation was dissolved, but certain of the higher officers still lived, and in an evil moment Clement bethought him of their fate. In December, 1313, he appointed a commission to try them. They were brought before a lofty scaffold at the portal of the Cathedral of Paris, and there made to reiterate the avowals which had been wrung from them in their dungeons. Then they were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. But at this supreme moment, when it seemed that all was over, de Molay, the grand-master, and the Master of Normandy, broke into a furious defence. The commissioners adjourned in a panic, but Philip, thirsting for blood, sprang upon his prey. He gave his orders to his own officers, without consulting any prelate. On March 18, 1314, as night fell, the two crusaders were taken from the provost, who acted as their gaoler, and carried to a little island in the Seine, on which a statue of Henry of Navarre now stands. There they were burned together, without a trial and without a sentence. They watched the building of their funeral pile with “hearts so firm and resolute, and persisted with such constancy in their denials to the end, and suffered death with such composure, that they left the witnesses of their execution in admiration and stupor.”[181] An ancient legend told how de Molay, as he stood upon his blazing fagots, summoned Clement to meet him before God’s judgment-seat in forty days, and Philip within a year. Neither survived the interval. Philip had promised to restore the goods of the Temple to the Church, but the plunder, for which this tremendous deed was done, was not surrendered tamely to the vanquished after their defeat. The gold and silver, and all that could be stolen, disappeared. The land was in the end ceded to the Hospital, but so wasted that, for a century, no revenue whatever accrued from what had been one of the finest conventual estates in Europe.[182] Such was the opening of that social revolution which, when it reached its height, was called the Reformation.
- 45. CHAPTER VII THE ENGLISH REFORMATION Many writers have pointed out the relation between commerce and scepticism in the Middle Ages, and, among others, Thorold Rogers has a passage in his History of Agriculture and Prices so interesting that it should be read entire:— “The general spread of Lollardy, about which all the theologians of the age complain, was at once the cause anti the effect of progressive opulence. It cannot be by accident that all the wealthiest parts of Europe, one district only excepted, and that for very sufficient reasons, were suspected during the Middle Ages of theological nonconformity. Before the campaigns of Simon de Montfort, in the first half of the thirteenth century, Provence was the garden and workshop of Europe. The sturdiest advocates of the Reformation were the burghers of the Low Countries.... In England the strength of the Lollard party was, from the days of Wiklif to the days of Cranmer, in Norfolk [the principal manufacturing county]; and I have no doubt that ... the presence of students from this district must have told on the theological bias of Cambridge University, which came out markedly at the epoch of the Reformation.... “English Lollardy was, like its direct descendant Puritanism, sour and opinionative, but it was also moral and thrifty. They who denounced the lazy and luxurious life of the monks, the worldliness and greed of the prelates, and the gross and shallow artifices of the popular religion, were pretty sure to inculcate parsimony and saving. By voluntarily and sturdily cutting themselves off from the circumstance of the old faith,
- 46. they were certain, like the Quakers of more than two centuries later, to become comparatively wealthy. They had nothing to spare for monk or priest....”[183] The Lollards were of the modern economic type, and discarded the miracle because the miracle was costly and yielded an uncertain return. Yet the mediæval cult was based upon the miracle, and many of the payments due for the supernatural services of the ecclesiastics were obligatory; beside, gifts as an atonement for sin were a drain on savings, and the economist instinctively sought cheaper methods of propitiation. In an age as unscientific as the sixteenth century, the conviction of the immutability of natural laws was not strong enough to admit of the abrogation of religious formulas. The monied class, therefore, proceeded step by step, and its first experiment was to suppress all fees to middle-men, whether priests or saints, by becoming their own intercessors with the Deity. As Dr. Witherspoon has observed, “fear of wrath from the avenger of blood” made men “fly to the city of refuge”;[184] but, as the tradesman replaced the enthusiast, a dogma was evolved by which mental anguish, which cost nothing, was substituted for the offering which was effective in proportion to its money value. This dogma was “Justification by Faith,” the corner-stone of Protestantism. Far from requiring an outlay from the elect, “Justification by Faith” discouraged it. The act consisted in “a deep humiliation of mind, confession of guilt and wretchedness ... and acceptance of pardon and peace through Christ Jesus, which they have neither contributed to the procuring, nor can contribute to the continuance of, by their own merit.”[185] Yet the substitution of a mental condition for a money payment, led to consequences more far-reaching than the suppression of certain clerical revenues, for it involved the rejection of the sacred tradition which had not only sustained relic worship, but which had made the
- 47. Church the channel of communication between Christians and the invisible world. That ancient channel once closed, Protestants had to open another, and this led to the deification of the Bible, which, before the Reformation, had been supposed to derive its authority from that divine illumination which had enabled the priesthood to infallibly declare the canon of the sacred books. Calvin saw the weak spot in the position of the reformers, and faced it boldly. He maintained the Scripture to be “self-authenticated, carrying with it its own evidence, and ought not to be made the subject of demonstration and arguments from reason,” and that it should obtain “the same complete credit and authority with believers ... as if they heard the very words pronounced by God himself.”[186] Thus for the innumerable costly fetishes of the imaginative age were substituted certain writings, which could be consulted without a fee. The expedient was evidently the device of a mercantile community, and the saving to those who accepted it enormous, but it disintegrated Christendom, and made an organized priesthood impossible. When each individual might pry into the sacred mysteries at his pleasure, the authority of the clergy was annihilated. Men of the priestly type among the reformers saw the danger and tried to save themselves. The thesis which the early evangelical divines maintained was the unity of truth. The Scriptures were true: therefore if the whole body of Christians searched aright they could not fail to draw truth from them, and this truth must be the creed of the universal Church. Zwingli thus explained the doctrine:— “Whoever hears the holy scriptures read aloud in church, judges what he hears. Nevertheless what is heard is not itself the Word through which we believe. For if we believed through the simple hearing or reading of the Word, all would be believers. On the contrary, we see that many hear and see and do not believe. Hence it is clear that we believe only through the word which the Heavenly Father speaks in our hearts, by which he enlightens us so that we see, and draws us so that
- 48. we follow.... For God is not a God of strife and quarrel, but of unity and peace. Where there is true faith, there the Holy Spirit is present; but where the Holy Spirit is, there is certainly effort for unity and peace.... Therefore there is no danger of confusion in the Church since, if the congregation is assembled through God, he is in the midst of them, and all who have faith strive after unity and peace.”[187] The inference the clergy sought to draw was, that though all could read the Bible, only the enlightened could interpret it, and that they alone were the enlightened. Hence Calvin’s pretensions equalled Hildebrand’s:— “This is the extent of the power with which the pastors of the Church, by whatever name they may be distinguished, ought to be invested; that by the word of God they may venture to do all things with confidence; may constrain all the strength, glory, wisdom, and pride of the world to obey and submit to his majesty; supported by his power, may govern all mankind, from the highest to the lowest; may build up the house of Christ, and subvert the house of Satan; may feed the sheep, and drive away the wolves; may instruct and exhort the docile; may reprove, rebuke, and restrain the rebellious and obstinate; may bind and loose; may discharge their lightnings and thunders, if necessary; but all in the Word of God.”[188] In certain regions, poor and remote from the centres of commerce, these pretensions were respected. In Geneva, Scotland, and New England, men like Calvin, Knox, and Cotton maintained themselves until economic competition did its work: then they passed away. Nowhere has faith withstood the rise of the mercantile class. As a whole the Reformation was eminently an economic phenomenon, and is best studied in England, which, after the Reformation, grew to be the centre of the world’s exchanges. From the beginning of modern history, commerce and scepticism have gone hand in hand. The Eastern trade began to revive after the
- 49. reopening of the valley of the Danube, about 1000, and perhaps, in that very year, Berenger, the first great modern heretic, was born. By 1050 he had been condemned and made to recant, but with the growth of the Fairs of Champagne his heresy grew, and in 1215, just in the flush of the communal development, the Church found it necessary to define the dogma of transubstantiation, and declare it an article of faith. A generation later came the burning of schismatics; in 1252, by his bull “Ad extirpanda,” Innocent IV. organized the Inquisition, and the next year Grossetête, Bishop of Lincoln, died, with whom the organized opposition of the English to the ancient costly ritual may be said to have opened. In Great Britain the agitation for reform appears to have been practical from the outset. There was no impatience with dogmas simply because they were incomprehensible: the Trinity and the Double Procession were always accepted. Formulas of faith were resisted because they involved a payment of money, and foremost among these were masses and penances. Another grievance was the papal patronage, and, as early as the fourteenth century, Parliament passed the statutes of provisors and præmunire to prevent the withdrawal of money from the realm. The rise of the Lollards was an organized movement to resist ecclesiastical exactions, and to confiscate ecclesiastical property; and, if 1345 be taken as the opening of Wickliffe’s active life, the agitation for the seizure of monastic estates started just a generation after Philip’s attack on the Temple in France. There was at least this difference in the industrial condition of the two nations, and probably much more. Wickliffe was rather a politician than a theologian, and his preaching a diatribe against the extravagance of the Church. In one of his Saints’ Days sermons he explained the waste of relic worship as shrewdly as a modern man of business:— “It would be to the benefit of the Church, and to the honour of the saints, if the costly ornaments so foolishly lavished upon their graves were divided among the poor. I am well aware,
- 50. however, that the man who would sharply and fully expose this error would be held for a manifest heretic by the image worshippers and the greedy people who make gain of such graves; for in the adoration of the eucharist, and such worshipping of dead bodies and images, the Church is seduced by an adulterous generation.”[189] The laity paid the priesthood fees because of their supernatural powers, and the possession of these powers was chiefly demonstrated by the miracle of the mass. Wickliffe, with a leader’s eye, saw where the enemy was vulnerable, and the last years of his life were passed in his fierce controversy with the mendicants upon transubstantiation. Even at that early day he presented the issue with incomparable clearness: “And thou, then, that art an earthly man, by what reason mayst thou say that thou makest thy maker?”[190] The deduction from such premises was inexorable. The mass had to be condemned as fetish worship, and with it went the adoration of relics. “Indeed, many nominal Christians are worse than pagans; for it is not so bad that a man should honour as God, for the rest of the day, the first thing he sees in the morning, as that regularly that accident should be really his God, which he sees in the mass in the hands of the priest in the consecrated wafer.”[191] Wickliffe died December 30, 1384, and ten years later the Lollards had determined to resist all payments for magic. They presented their platform to Parliament in 1395, summed up in their Book of Conclusions. Some of these “conclusions” are remarkably interesting: — 5th.—“That the exorcisms and hallowings, consecrations and blessings, over the wine, bread, wax, water, oil, salt, incense, the altar-stone, and about the church-walls, over the vestment,
- 51. chalice, mitre, cross, and pilgrim-staves, are the very practices of necromancy, rather than of sacred divinity. · · · · · · · · · · 7th.—“We mightily affirm ... that spiritual prayers made in the church for the souls of the dead ... is a false foundation of alms, whereupon all the houses of alms in England are falsely founded. 8th.—“That pilgrimages, prayers, and oblations made unto blind crosses or roods, or to deaf images made either of wood or stone, are very near of kin unto idolatry.”[192] When Lord Cobham, the head of the Lollard party, was tried for heresy in 1413, Archbishop Arundel put him four test questions. First, whether he believed, after the sacramental words had been spoken, any material bread or wine remained in the sacrament; fourth, whether he believed relic worship meritorious. His answers did not give satisfaction, and they roasted him in chains, in Saint Giles’s Fields, in 1418. A hundred years of high commercial activity followed Cobham’s death. The discovery of America, and of the sea passage to India, changed the channels of commerce throughout the world, human movement was accelerated, gunpowder made the attack overwhelming; centralization took a prodigious stride, scepticism kept pace with centralization, and in 1510 Erasmus wrote thus, and yet remained in the orthodox communion:— “Moreover savoureth it not of the same saulce [folly] (trow ye) when everie countrey chalengeth a severall sainct for theyr patrone, assignyng further to each sainct a peculiar cure and office, with also sundrie ways of worshipping; as this sainct helpeth for the tooth-ache, that socoureth in childbyrth; she restoreth stolene goods; an other aydeth shipmen in tempests; an other taketh charge of husbandmens hoggs; and so of the rest; far too long were it to reherse all. Then some saincts
- 52. there be, that are generally sued for many thynges; amongst whom chiefly is the virgin Mother of God, in whom vulgar folke have an especiall confidence, yea almost more than in her Sonne.”[193] When Erasmus wrote, the Reformation was at hand, but the attack on Church property had begun in England full two centuries before, contemporaneously with Philip’s onslaught on the Temple. All over Europe the fourteenth century was a period of financial distress; in France the communes became bankrupt and the coinage deteriorated, and in England the debasement of the currency began in 1299, and kept pace with the rise of Lollardy. In 1299 the silver penny weighed 22 1 ⁄2 grains; Edward I. reduced it to 22 1 ⁄4 grains; Edward III. to 18 grains; Henry IV. to 15 grains; and Henry VI., during his restoration in 1470, to 12 grains. As the stringency increased, the attack on the clergy gained in ferocity. Edward I. not only taxed the priesthood, but seized the revenues of the alien priories; of these there might have been one hundred and fifty within the realm, and what he took from them he spent on his army. Edward II. and Edward III. followed the precedent, and during the last reign, when the penny dropped four grains, these revenues were sequestered no less than twenty-three years. Under Henry IV. the penny lost three grains, and what remained of the income of these houses was permanently applied to defraying the expenses of the court. Henry V. dissolved them, and vested their estates in the crown. In the reign of Henry IV., when the penny was on the point of losing three grains of its silver, the tone of Parliament was similar to that of the parliaments of the Reformation. On one occasion the king asked for a subsidy, and the Speaker suggested that without burdening the laity he might “supply his occasions by seizing on the revenues of the clergy”;[194] and in 1410 Lord Cobham anticipated the Parliament of 1536 by introducing a bill for the confiscation of conventual
- 53. revenues to the amount of 322,000 marks, a sum which he averred represented the income of certain corporations whose names he appended in a schedule.[195] Year by year, as society consolidated, the economic type was propagated; and, as the pressure of a contracting currency stimulated these men to action, the demand for cheap religion grew fiercer. London, the monied centre, waxed hotter and hotter, and a single passage from the Supplicacyon for Beggers shows how bitter the denunciations of the system of paying for miracles became:— “Whate money pull they yn by probates of testamentes, priuy tithes, and by mennes offeringes to theyre pilgrimages, and at theyre first masses? Euery man and childe that is buried, must pay sumwhat for masses and diriges to be song for him, or elles they will accuse the dedes frendes and executours of heresie. whate money get they by mortuaries, by hearing of confessions ... by halowing of churches, altares, superaltares, chapelles, and bells, by cursing of men and absoluing theim agein for money?”[196] One of the ballads of Cromwell’s time ridiculed, in this manner, all the chief pilgrimages of the kingdom:— “Ronnying hyther and thyther, We cannot tell whither, In offryng candels and pence To stones and stockes, And to olde rotten blockes, That came, we know not from whense. “To Walsyngham a gaddyng, To Cantorbury a maddyng, As men distraught of mynde; With fewe clothes on our backes, But an image of waxe, For the lame and for the blynde.
- 54. “Yet offer what ye wolde, Were it otes, syluer, or golde Pyn, poynt, brooche, or rynge, The churche were as then, Such charitable men, That they would refuse nothyng.”[197] But the war was not waged with words alone. At the comparatively early date of 1393, London had grown so unruly that Richard assumed the government of the city himself. First he appointed Sir Edward Darlington warden, but Sir Edward proving too lenient, he replaced him with Sir Baldwin Radington. Foxe, very frankly, explained why:— “For the Londoners at that time were notoriously known to be favourers of Wickliff’s side, as partly before this is to be seen, and in the story of Saint Alban’s more plainly doth appear, where the author of the said history, writing upon the fifteenth year of King Richard’s reign, reporteth in these words of the Londoners, that they were ‘not right believers in God, nor in the traditions of their forefathers; sustainers of the Lollards, depravers of religious men, withholders of tithes, and impoverishers of the common people.’ “... The king, incensed not a little with the complaint of the bishops, conceived eftsoons, against the mayor and sheriffs, and against the whole city of London, a great stomach; insomuch, that the mayor and both the sheriffs were sent for, and removed from their office.”[198] By the opening of the sixteenth century a priest could hardly collect his dues without danger; the Bishop of London indeed roundly declared to the government that justice could not be had from the courts. In 1514 the infant child of a merchant tailor named Hun died, and the parson of the parish sued the father for a bearing sheet, which he claimed as a mortuary. Hun contested the case, and got out a
- 55. writ of præmunire against the priest, which so alarmed the clergy that the chancellor of the diocese accused him of heresy, and confined him in the Lollard’s tower of Saint Paul’s. In due time the usual articles were exhibited against the defendant, charging that he had disputed the lawfulness of tithes, and had said they were ordained “only by the covetousness of priests”; also that he possessed divers of “Wickliff’s damnable works,” and more to the same effect. Upon these articles Fitzjames, Bishop of London, examined Hun on December 2, and after the examination recommitted him. On the morning of the 4th, a boy sent with his breakfast found him hanging to a beam in his cell. The clergy said suicide, but the populace cried murder, and the coroner’s jury found a verdict against Dr. Horsey, the chancellor. The situation then became grave, and Fitzjames wrote to Wolsey a remarkable letter, which showed not only high passion, but serious alarm:— “In most humble wise I beseech you, that I may have the king’s gracious favour ... for assured am I, if my chancellor be tried by any twelve men in London, they be so maliciously set, ‘in favorem hæreticæ pravitatis,’ that they will cast and condemn any clerk, though he were as innocent as Abel.”[199] The evidence is conclusive that, from the outset, industry bred heretics; agriculture, believers. Thorold Rogers has explained that the east of England, from Kent to the Wash and on to Yorkshire, was the richest part of the kingdom,[200] and Mr. Blunt, in his Reformation of the Church of England, has published an analysis of the martyrdoms under Mary. He has shown that out of 277 victims, 234 came from the district to the east of a line drawn from Boston to Portsmouth. West of this line Oxford had most burnings; but, by the reign of Mary, manufactures had spread so far inland that the industries of Oxfordshire were only surpassed by those of Middlesex. [201] In Wickliffe’s time Norwich stood next to London, and Norwich was infested with Lollards, many of whom were executed there.
- 56. On the other hand, but two executions are recorded in the six agricultural counties north of the Humber—counties which were the poorest and the farthest removed from the lines of trade. Thus the eastern counties were the hot-bed of Puritanism. There, Kett’s rebellion broke out under Edward VI.; there, Cromwell recruited his Ironsides, and throughout this region, before the beginning of the Reformation, assaults on relics were most frequent and violent. One of the most famous of these relics was the rood of Dovercourt. Dovercourt is part of Harwich, on the Essex coast; Dedham lies ten miles inland, on the border of Suffolk; and the description given by Foxe of the burning of the image of Dovercourt, is an example of what went on throughout the southeast just before the time of the divorce:— “In the same year of our Lord 1532, there was an idol named the Rood of Dovercourt, whereunto was much and great resort of people: for at that time there was great rumour blown abroad amongst the ignorant sort, that the power of the idol of Dovercourt was so great, that no man had power to shut the church-door where he stood; and therefore they let the church-door, both night and day, continually stand open, for the more credit unto their blind rumour. This once being conceived in the heads of the vulgar sort, seemed a great marvel unto many men; but to many again, whom God had blessed with his spirit, it was greatly suspected, especially unto these, whose names here follow: as Robert King of Dedham, Robert Debnam of Eastbergholt, Nicholas Marsh of Dedham, and Robert Gardner of Dedham, whose consciences were sore burdened to see the honour and power of the almighty living God so to be blasphemed by such an idol. Wherefore they were moved by the Spirit of God, to travel out of Dedham in a wondrous goodly night, both hard frost and fair moonshine, although the night before, and the night after, were exceeding foul and rainy. It was from the town of Dedham, to the place where the filthy Rood stood, ten miles. Notwithstanding, they were so willing in that their enterprise, that they went these
- 57. ten miles without pain, and found the church door open, according to the blind talk of the ignorant people: for there durst no unfaithful body shut it. This happened well for their purpose, for they found the idol, which had as much power to keep the door shut, as to keep it open; and for proof thereof, they took the idol from his shrine, and carried him quarter of a mile from the place where he stood, without any resistance of the said idol. Whereupon they struck fire with a flint-stone, and suddenly set him on fire, who burned out so brim, that he lighted them homeward one good mile of the ten. “This done, there went a great talk abroad that they should have great riches in that place; but it was very untrue; for it was not their thought or enterprise, as they themselves afterwards confessed, for there was nothing taken away but his coat, his shoes, and the tapers. The tapers did help to burn him, the shoes they had again, and the coat one Sir Thomas Rose did burn; but they had neither penny, halfpenny, gold, groat, nor jewel. “Notwithstanding, three of them were afterwards indicted of felony, and hanged in chains within half a year, or thereabout. · · · · · · · · · · “The same year, and the year before, there were many images cast down and destroyed in many places: as the image of the crucifix in the highway by Coggeshall, the image of Saint Petronal in the church of Great Horksleigh, the image of Saint Christopher by Sudbury, and another image of Saint Petronal in a chapel of Ipswich.”[202] England’s economic supremacy is recent, and has resulted from the change in the seat of exchanges which followed the discovery of America and the sea-route to India; long before Columbus, however, the introduction of the mariner’s compass had altered the paths commerce followed between the north and south of Europe during the crusades.
- 58. The necessity of travel by land built up the Fairs of Champagne; they declined when safe ocean navigation had cheapened marine freights. Then Antwerp and Bruges superseded Provins and the towns of Central France, and rapidly grew to be the distributing points for Eastern merchandise for Germany, the Baltic, and England. In 1317 the Venetians organized a direct packet service with Flanders, and finally, the discoveries of Vasco-da-Gama, at the end of the fifteenth century, threw Italy completely out of the line of the Asiatic trade. British industries seem to have sympathized with these changes, for weaving first assumed some importance under Edward I., although English cloth long remained inferior to continental. The next advance was contemporaneous with the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope. On July 8, 1497, Vasco-da-Gama sailed for Calicut, and in the previous year Henry VII. negotiated the “Magnus Intercursus,” by which treaty the Merchant Adventurers succeeded for the first time in establishing themselves advantageously in Antwerp. Thenceforward England began to play a part in the industrial competition of Europe, but even then her progress was painfully slow. The accumulations of capital were small, and increased but moderately, and a full century later, when the Dutch easily raised £600,000 for their East India Company, only £72,000 were subscribed in London for the English venture. Throughout the Middle Ages, while exchanges centred in North Italy, Great Britain hung on the outskirts of the commercial system of the world, and even at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. she could not compare, either in wealth, refinement, or organization, with such a kingdom as France. The crown had not been the prize of the strongest in a struggle among equals, but had fallen to a soldier of a superior race, under whom no great nobility ever grew up. No baron in England corresponded with such princes as the dukes of Normandy and Burgundy, the counts of Champagne and Toulouse. Fortifications were on a puny scale; no strongholds like Pierrefonds or Vitré, Coucy
- 59. or Carcassonne existed, and the Tower of London itself was insignificant beside the Château Gaillard, which Cœur-de-Lion planted on the Seine. The population was scanty, and increased little. When Henry VIII. came to the throne in 1509, London may have had forty or fifty thousand inhabitants, York eleven thousand, Bristol nine or ten thousand, and Norwich six thousand.[203] Paris at that time probably contained between three and four hundred thousand, and Milan and Ghent two hundred and fifty thousand each. But although England was not a monied centre during the Middle Ages, and perhaps for that very reason, she felt with acuteness the financial pressure of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She had little gold and silver, and gold and silver rose in relative value; she had few manufactures, and manufactures were comparatively prosperous; her wealth lay in her agricultural interests, and farm products were, for the most part, severely pinched. Commenting on the prices between the end of the thirteenth century and the middle of the sixteenth, Mr. Rogers has observed:— “Again, upon several articles of the first importance, there is a marked decline in the price from the average of 1261–1400 to that of 1401–1540. This would have been more conspicuous, if I had in my earlier volumes compared all prices from 1261 to 1350 with those of 1351–1400. But even over the whole range, every kind of grain, except wheat and peas, is dearer in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than it is in the first hundred and forty years of the present period [1401–1582]; and had I taken the average price of wheat during the last fifty years of the fourteenth century, it would have been (6s. 1 1 ⁄2d.) dearer than the average of 1401–1540 (5s. 11 3 ⁄4d.), heightened as this is by the dearness of the last thirteen years.”[204] The tables published by Mr. Rogers make it possible to form some idea of the strain to which the population of Great Britain was
- 60. exposed, during the two hundred and fifty years which intervened between the crisis at the close of the thirteenth century, and the discovery of the mines of Potosi in 1545, which flooded the world with silver. Throughout this long interval an expanding commerce unceasingly enlarged the demand for currency, while no adequate additions were made to the stock of the precious metals; the consequence was that their relative value rose, while the value of commodities declined, and this process had a tendency to debase the coinage. The latter part of the Middle Ages was a time of rapid centralization, when the cost of administration grew from year to year but in proportion as the necessities of the government increased, the power of the people to pay taxes diminished, because the products which they sold brought less of the standard coin. To meet the deficit the same weight of metal had to be cut into more pieces, and thus by a continued inflation of the currency, general bankruptcy was averted. The various stages of pressure are pretty clearly marked by the records of the Mint. Apparently the stringency which began in France about the end of the reign of Saint Louis, or somewhat later, did not affect England immediately, for prices do not seem to have reached their maximum until after 1290, and Edward I. only reduced the penny, in 1299, from 22.5 grains of silver to 22.25 grains. Thenceforward the decline, though spasmodic, on the whole tended to increase in severity from generation to generation. The long French wars, and the Black Death, produced a profound effect upon the domestic economy of the kingdom under Edward III.; and the Black Death, especially, seems to have had the unusual result of raising prices at a time of commercial collapse. This rise probably was due to the dearth of labour, for half the population of Europe is said to have perished, and, at all events, the crops often could not be reaped through lack of hands. More than a generation elapsed before normal conditions returned.
- 61. Immediately before the French war the penny lost two grains, and between 1346 and 1351, during the Black Death, it lost two grains and a quarter more, a depreciation of four grains and a half in fifty years; then for half a century an equilibrium was maintained. Under Henry IV. there was a sharp decline of three grains, equal to an inflation of seventeen per cent, and by 1470, under Henry VI., the penny fell to twelve grains. Then a period of stability followed, which lasted until just before the Reformation, when a crisis unparalleled in severity began, a crisis which probably was the proximate cause of the confiscation of the conventual estates. In 1526 the penny suddenly lost a grain and a half, or about twelve and a half per cent, and then, when further reductions of weight would have made the piece too flimsy, the government resorted to adulteration. In 1542, a ten-grain penny was coined with one part in five of alloy; in 1544, the alloy had risen to one-half, and in 1545, two-thirds of the coin was base metal—a depreciation of more than seventy per cent in twenty years. Meanwhile, though prices had fluctuated, the trend had been downward, and downward so strongly that it had not been fully counteracted by the reductions of bullion in the money. Rogers thought lath-nails perhaps the best gauge of prices, and in commenting on the years which preceded the Reformation, he remarked:— “From 1461 to 1540, the average [of lath-nails] is very little higher than it was from 1261 to 1350, illustrating anew that significant decline in prices which characterizes the economical history of England during the eighty years 1461–1540.”[205] Although wheat rose more than other grains, and is therefore an unfavourable standard of comparison, wheat yields substantially the same result. During the last forty years of the thirteenth century, the average price of the quarter was 5s. 10 3 ⁄4d., and for the last decade, 6s. 1d. For the first forty years of the sixteenth century the average was 6s. 10d. The penny of 1526, however, contained only
- 62. about forty-seven per cent of the bullion of the penny of 1299. “The most remarkable fact in connection with the issue of base money by Henry VIII. is the singular identity of the average price of grain, especially wheat, during the first 140 years of my present period, with the last 140 of my first two volumes.”[206] After a full examination of his tables, Rogers concluded that the great rise which made the prosperity of Elizabeth’s reign did not begin until some “year between 1545 and 1549.”[207] This corresponds precisely with the discovery of Potosi in 1545, and that the advance was due to the new silver, and not to the debasement of the coinage, seems demonstrated by the fact that no fall took place when the currency was restored by Elizabeth, but, on the contrary, the upward movement continued until well into the next century. Some idea may be formed from these figures of the contraction which prevailed during the years of the Reformation. In 1544, toward the close of Henry’s reign, the penny held five grains of pure silver as against about 20.8 grains in 1299, and yet its purchasing power had not greatly varied. Bullion must therefore have had about four times the relative value in 1544 that it had two hundred and fifty years earlier, and, if the extremely debased issues of 1545 and later be taken as the measure, its value was much higher. Had Potosi been discovered a generation earlier, the whole course of English development might have been modified, for it is not impossible that, without the aid of falling prices, the rising capitalistic class might have lacked the power to confiscate the monastic estates. As it was, the pressure continued until the catastrophe occurred, relic worship was swept away, the property of the nation was redistributed, and an impulsion was given to large farming which led to the rapid eviction of the yeomanry. As the yeomen were driven from their land, they roamed over the world, colonizing and conquering, from the Mississippi to the Ganges; building up, in the course of two hundred and fifty years, a centralization greater than that of Rome, and more absolute than that of Constantinople.
- 63. Changes so vast in the forms of competition necessarily changed the complexion of society. Men who had flourished in an age of decentralization and of imagination passed away, and were replaced by a new aristocracy. The soldier and the priest were overpowered; and, from the Reformation downward, the monied type possessed the world. Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, was the ideal of this type, and he was accordingly the Englishman who rose highest during the convulsion of the Reformation. He was a perfect commercial adventurer, and Chapuys, the ambassador of Charles V. at London, thus described his origin to his master:— “Cromwell is the son of a poor farrier, who lived in a little village a league and a half from here, and is buried in the parish graveyard. His uncle, father of the cousin whom he has already made rich, was cook of the late Archbishop of Canterbury. Cromwell was ill-behaved when young, and after an imprisonment was forced to leave the country. He went to Flanders, Rome, and elsewhere in Italy. When he returned he married the daughter of a shearman, and served in his house; he then became a solicitor.”[208] The trouble which drove him abroad seems to have been with his father, and he probably started on his travels about 1504. He led a dissolute and vagabond life, served as a mercenary in Italy, “was wild and youthful, ... as he himself was wont ofttimes to declare unto Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; showing what a ruffian he was in his young days ... also what a great doer he was with Geffery Chambers in publishing and setting forth the pardons of Boston everywhere in churches as he went.”[209] These “pardons” were indulgences he succeeded in obtaining from the pope for the town of Boston, which he peddled about the country as he went. He served as a clerk in the counting house of the Merchant Adventurers at Antwerp, and also appears to have filled some such position with a Venetian merchant. On his return to
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