09 - Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton

In Short History of England, Gilbert Keith Chesterton offers a captivating exploration of history through the lens of human interaction, framing it as an enduring struggle between civilization and barbarism. His insightful critique reveals the stark contrast between the narratives of recent centuries and the rich tapestry of the medieval era, which is often overlooked in popular histories. Chesterton‚As sharp intellect and mastery of paradox illuminate the absurdities in conventional arguments, making his reflections both thought-provoking and entertaining. This is not just a study of dates and events; it is a profound journey that challenges modern misconceptions while remaining relevant to today‚As world. (Summary by Ray Clare)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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visit LibriVox dot org. A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton,

(00:25):
Chapter nine, Nationality and the French Wars. If anyone wishes
to know what we mean when we say that Christendom
was and is one culture or one civilization, there is
a rough but plain way of putting it. It is
by asking what is the most common, or rather the

(00:46):
most commonplace, of all the uses of the word Christian.
There is, of course the highest use of all, but
it has nowadays many other uses. Sometimes a Christian means
an eva evangelical. Sometimes, and more recently, a Christian means
a Quaker. Sometimes a Christian means a modest person who

(01:08):
believes that he bears a resemblance to Christ. But it
has long had one meaning in casual speech among common people,
and it means a culture or a civilization. Ben Gunn
on Treasure Island did not actually say to Jim Hawkins,
I feel myself out of touch with a certain type
of civilization. But he did say I haven't tasted Christian food.

(01:34):
The old wives in a village looking at a lady
with short hair and trousers, do not indeed say we
perceive a divergence between her culture and our own, But
they do say why can't she dress like a Christian?
That the sentiment has thus soaked down to the simplest
and even stupidest daily talk is but one evidence that

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Christendom was a very real thing. But it was also,
as we have seen, a very localized thing, especially in
the Middle Ages, and that very lively localism the Christian
faith and affections encouraged led at last to an excessive
and exclusive parochialism. There were rival shrines of the same saints,

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and a sort of duel between two statues of the
same divinity. By a process it is now our difficult
duty to follow, a real estrangement between European peoples began.
Men began to feel that foreigners did not eat or
drink like Christians, and even when the philosophic schism came

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to doubt if they were Christians. There was indeed much
more than this involved. While the internal structure of Medievalism
was thus parochial and largely popular, in the great affairs
and especially the external affairs such as peace and war. Most,
though by no means all of what was medieval was monarchical.

(03:06):
To see what the kings came to mean, we must
glance back at the great background, as of darkness and daybreak,
against which the first figures of our history have already appeared.
That background was the war with the Barbarians. While it lasted,
Christendom was not only one nation, but more like one city,
and the besieged city Wessex was but one wall, or Paris,

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one tower of it, and in one tongue and spirit
deed might have chronicled the Siege of Paris, or Abbo
sung the Song of Alford. What followed was a conquest
and a conversion. All the end of the Dark Ages
and the dawn of Medievalism is full of the evangelizing
of barbarism. And it is the paradox of the Crusades

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that though the Saracen was superficially more civilized than the
Christian it was a sound instinct which saw him also
to be in spirit a destroyer. In the simpler case
of Northern Heathenry, the civilization spread with simpler progress, but
it was not until the end of the Middle Ages
and close on the Reformation, that the people of Prussia

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the wild land lying beyond Germany were baptized at all.
A flippant person, if he permitted himself for profane confusion
with vaccination, might almost being inclined to suggest that for
some reason it didn't take. Even then, the barbarian peril
was thus brought under bit by bit, and even in

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the case of Islam, the alien power, which could not
be crushed, was evidently curbed. The crusades became hopeless, but
they also became needless. As these fears faded, the princes
of Europe, who had come together to face them, were
left facing each other. They had more leisure to find

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that their own captaincies clashed, but this would easily have
been overruled, or would have produced the petty riot had
not the true creative spontaneity of which we have spoken
in the local life tended to real variety. Royalties found
they were representatives almost without knowing it, and many a king,

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insisting on a genealogical tree or a title deed, found
he spoke for the forests and the songs of a
whole countryside. In England especially, the transition is typified in
the accident which raised to the throne one of the
noblest men of the Middle Ages, Edward the First, came

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clad in all the splendors of his epoch. He had
taken across and fought the Saracens. He had been the
only worthy foe of Simon de Montfort in those baronial wars, which,
as we have seen, were the first sign, however, faint
of a serious theory that he Englynn should be ruled
by its barons rather than its kings. He proceeded, like

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Simon de Montfort and more solidly to develop the great
medieval institution of a parliament. As has been said, it
was superimposed on the existing parish democracies, and was first
merely the summoning of local representatives to advise on local taxation. Indeed,
its rise was one with the rise of what we
call taxation, and there is thus the thread of theory

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leading to its latter claims to have the sole right
of taxing. But in the beginning it was an instrument
of the most equitable kings, and notably an instrument of
Edward the First. He often quarreled with his parliaments, and
may sometimes have displeased his people, which has never been
at all the same thing. But on the whole he

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was supremely the representative sovereign. In this connection, one curious
and difficult question may be considered here. Though it marked
the end of a story that began with the Norman conquest,
it is pretty certain that he was never more truly
a representative king, one might say, a republican king, than
in the fact he expelled the Jews. The problem is

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so much misunderstood and mixed with notions of stupid spite
against a gifted and historic race, as such that we
must pause for a paragraph upon it. The Jews in
the Middle Ages were as powerful as they were unpopular.
They were the capitalists of the age, the men with

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wealth banked ready for use. It is very tenable that
in this way they were useful. It is certain that
in this way they were used. It is also quite
fair to say that in this way they were ill used.
The ill usage was not indeed that suggested at random romances,
which mostly revolve on the one idea that their teeth

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were pulled out. Those who know this as a story
about King John generally do not know the rather important
fact that it was the story against King John. It
is probably doubtful. It was only insisted on as exceptional,
and it was by that very insistence obviously regarded as disreputable.

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But the real unfairness of the Jew's physician was deeper
and more distressing to a sensitive and highly civilized people.
They might reasonably say that Christian kings and nobles, and
even Christian popes and bishops used, for Christian purposes such
as the Crusades and the cathedrals, the money that could
only be accumulated in such mountains by a euchery, they

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inconsistently denounced as Unchristian, and then, when worse times came,
gave up the Jew to the fury of the poor
whom that useful eucharie had ruined. That was the real
case for the Jew, and no doubt he really felt
himself oppressed. Unfortunately, it was the case for the Christians
that they, with at least equal reason, felt him as

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the oppressor, and that mutual charge of tyranny is the
Semitic trouble. In all times, it is certain that in
popular sentiment this anti Semitism was not excused as uncharitableness,
but simply regarded as charity. Chaucer puts his curse on
Hebrew cruelty into the mouth of the soft hearted prioress,

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who wept when she saw a mouse in a trap.
And it was when Edward, breaking the rule by which
the rulers had hitherto fostered their banker's wealth, flung the
alien financiers out of the land, that his people probably
saw him most plainly at once as a knight errant
and a tender father of his people. Whatever the merits

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of this question, such a portrait of Edward was far
from false. He was the most just and conscientious type
of medieval monarch, and it is exactly this fact that
brings into relief the new force which was to cross
his path and in strife with which he died. While
he was just, he was also eminently legal, and it

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must be remembered, if we would not merely read back
ourselves into the past, that much of the dispute of
the time was legal, the adjustment of dynastic and feudal
differences not yet felt to be anything else. In this spirit,
Edward was asked to arbitrate by the rival claimants to
the Scottish crown, and in this sense he seems to

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have arbitraated quite honestly, but his legal or as some say,
pedantic mind made the provisal that the Scottish King as
such was already under the susanity, and he probably never
understood the spirit he called up against him, for that
spirit had as yet no name. We call it to

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day Nationalism. Scotland resisted, and the adventures of an outlawed
knight named Wallace soon furnished it with one of those
legends which are more important than history, in a way
that was then at least equally practical. The Catholic priests
of Scotland became, especially the patriotic and anti English party,

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as indeed they remained even throughout the Reformation. Wallace was
defeated and executed, but the heather was already on fire,
and the espousal of the new national cause by one
of Edward's own knights named Bruce, seemed to the old
king a mere betrayal of feudal equity. He died in

(11:43):
a final fury at the head of a new invasion
upon the very border of Scotland. With his last words,
the great King commanded that his bones should be borne
in front of the battle, and the bones which were
of gigantic size, were eventually buried with the u S.
The epithet here lies Edward the Tall, who was the

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hammer of the Scots. It was a true epithet, but
in a sense exactly the opposite to its intention. He
was their hammer, But he did not break but make them,
For he smelt them on an anvil, and he forged
them into a sword. That coincidence, or course of events,

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which must often be remarked in this story, by which
for whatever reason our most powerful kings did not somehow
leave their power secure, showed itself in the next reign,
when the baronial corals were resumed on the Northern Kingdom
under Bruce, cut itself finely free by the stroke of

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bennock Burn. Otherwise, the rain is a mere interlude, and
it is with the succeeding one that we find the
new national tenancy yet further developed. The great French Wars
in which England won so much glory, were opened by
Edward the Third and grew more and more nationalist. But

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even to feel the transition of the time, we must
first realize that the Third Edward made as strictly legal
and dynastic a claim to France as the first Edward
had made to Scotland. The claim was far weaker in substance,
but it was equally conventional. In form he sought were
said he had a claim on a kingdom, as the

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squire might say he had a claim on an estate. Superficially,
it was an affair for the English and French lawyers.
To read into this that the people were sheep, bought
and sold is to misunderstand all medieval history. Sheep have
no trade union. The English arms owed much of their
force to the class of the free yeomen, and the

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success of the infantry, especially of the archery, largely stood
for that popular element which had already unhorsed the high
French chivalry at courtry. But the point is this that
while the lawyers were talking about the Salic law, the soldiers,
who would once have been talking about guild law or

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glebe law, were already talking about English law and French law.
The French were first in this tendency to see something
outside the township, the trade brotherhood, the feudal dues, or
the village common The whole history of the change can
be seen in the fact that the French had early

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begun to call the nation the greater land. France was
the first of nations, and has remained the norm of nations,
the only one which is a nation and nothing else.
But in the collision the English grew equally corporate and
a true patriotic applause probably hailed the victories of Trecis

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and Poitiers, as it certainly hailed the later victory. The
latter did not indeed occur until after an interval of
internal revolutions in England, which will be considered on a
later page. But as regards the growth of nationalism, the
French Wars were continuous, and the English tradition that followed

(15:18):
after Egincourt was continuous. Also. It is embodied in rude
and spirited ballads before the Great Elizabethans. The Henry the
Fifth of Shakespeare is not indeed the Henry the fifth
of history. He is more historic. He is not only
a saner and more genial, but a more important person.

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For the tradition of the whole adventure was not that
of Henry, but of the populace, who turned Henry into Harry.
There were one thousand Harris in the army at Agincourt,
and not one for the figure that Shakespeare framed out
of the legends of the Great Victory, is largely the
figure that all men saw as the Englishman of the

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Middle Ages. He did not really talk in poetry, like
Shakespeare's hero, but he would have liked to, not being
able to do so, he sang, and the english people
principally appear in contemporary impressions as the singing people. They
were evidently not only expansive but exaggerative. And perhaps it

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was not only in battle that they drew the long bow.
That fine, farcical imagery, which has descended to the comic
songs and common speech of the English poor even to day,
had its happy infancy when England thus became a nation.
Though the modern poor, under the pressure of economic progress,
have partly lost the gaiety and kept only the humor.

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But in that early april of patriotism, the new unity
of the state still sat lightly upon them. And a
cobbler in Henry's army, who would at home have thought
first that it was the day of Saint Crispin of
the cobblers, might truly as well as sincerely, have hailed
the splintering of the French lances in a storm of arrows.

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And cried Saint George, for merry England. Human things are
uncomfortably complex, and while it was the april of patriotism,
it was the autumn of medieval history. In the next
chapters I shall try to trace the forces that were
disintegrating the civilization, and even here, after the first victories,

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it is necessary to insist on the bitterness and barren
ambition that showed itself more and more in the later stages,
as the Long French Wars dragged on. France was at
the time far less happy than England, wasted by the
treason of its nobles and the weakness of its kings,
almost as much by the invasion of the Islanders. And

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yet it was this very despair and humiliation that seemed
at last to rend the sky and let in the
light of what it is hard for the coldest historian
to call anything but a miracle. It may be this
apparent miracle that has apparently made nationalism eternal. It may
be conjectured, through the question is too difficult to be

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developed here, that there was something in the great moral
change which turned the Roman Empire into Christendom, by which
each great thing to which it afterwards gave birth was
baptized into a promise, or at least into a hope
of permanence. It may be that each of its ideas was,
as it were, mixed with immortality. Certainly something of this

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kind can be seen in the conception which turned marriage
from a contract into a sacrament. But whatever the cause,
it is certain that even for the most secular types
of our own time, their relationship to their native land
has become not contractual but sacramental. We may say that
flags are rags, that frontiers are fictions, but the very

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men who have set it for half their lives are
dying for a rag and being read in pieces for
a fiction. Even as I write, when the battle trumpet
blue in nineteen fourteen, modern humanity had grouped itself into
nations almost before it knew what it had done. If

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the same sound is heard a thousand years, hence, there
is no sign in the world to suggest to any
rational man that humanity will not do exactly the same thing.
But even in this great and strange development be not enduring.
The point is that it is felt as enduring. It
is hard to give a definition of loyalty, but perhaps

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we come near it if we call it the thing
which operates where an obligation is felt to be unlimited,
and the minimum of duty or even decency asked of
a patriot is the maximum that is asked by the
most miraculous view of marriage. The recognized reality of patriotism

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is not mere citizenship. The recognized reality of patriotism is
for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in
sickness than in health, in national growth and glory, and
in national disgrace and decline. It is not to travel
in the ship of state as a passenger, but if
need be to go down with the ship. It is

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needless to tell here again the tale of that earthquake episode,
in which a clearance in the earth and sky above
the confusion and abasement of the crowns showed the commanding
figure of a woman of the people. She was, in
her own living loneliness, a French revolution. She was the
proof that a certain power was not in the French

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kings or in the French knights, but in the French.
But the fact that she saw something above her that
was other than the sky, the fact that she lived
the life of a saint and died the death of
a martyr probably stamped the new national sentiment with the
sacred seal. And the fact that she fought for a

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defeated country, and even though it was victorious, was herself
ultimately defeated, defines that darker element of devotion of which
I spoke above, which makes even pessimism consistent with patriotism.
It is more appropriate in this place to consider the
ultimate reaction of this sacrifice upon the romance and the

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realities of England. I have never counted a patriotic part
to plaster my own country with conventional and unconvincing compliments.
But no one can understand England who does not understand
that such an episode as this, in which she was
so clearly in the wrong, has yet been ultimately linked
up with a curious quality in which she is rather

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unusually in the right. No one candidly comparing us with
other countries can say we have specially failed to build
the sepulchers of the province we stoned, or even the
prophets who stoned us. The English historical tradition has at
least a loose, large mindedness which always finally falls into
the praise not only of great foreigners, but great foes.

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Often along with much injustice, it has an illogical generosity.
And while it will dismiss the great people with mere ignorance,
it treats a great personality with hearty hero worship. There
are more examples than one even in this chapter, or
our books may well make out Wallace a better man
than he was, as they afterwards assigned to Washington an

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even better cause than he had. Thackeray smiled that Miss
Jane Porter's picture of Wallace going into war weeping with
the Cambric pocket handkerchief. But her attitude was more English
and not less accurate. For her idealization was, if anything,
nearer the truth than Thackeray's own notion of a medievalism

(23:02):
of hypocritical hubs and armour. Edward, who figures as a tyrant,
could weep with compassion, and it is probable enough that
Wallace wept with or without a pocket handkerchief. Moreover, her
romance was a reality, the reality of nationalism, and she
knew much more about the Scottish patriots ages before her

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time than Thackeray did about the Irish patriots immediately under
his nose. Thackeray was a great man, but in that
matter he was a very small man, and indeed an
invisible one. The cases of Wallace and Washington, and many
others are here only mentioned, however, to suggest an eccentric

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magnanimity which surely balances some of our prejudices. We have
done many foolish things, but we have at least done
one fine thing. We have whitewashed our worst enemies. If
we have done this for a bold Scottish reader and
a vigorous Virginian slaveholder, it may at least show that
we are not likely to fail in our final appreciation

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of the one white figure in the Motley processions of war.
I believe there to be in modern England something like
a universal enthusiasm on this subject. We have seen a
great English critic write a book about his heroine in
opposition to a great French critic, solely in order to
blame him for not having praised her enough. And I

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do not believe there lives an Englishman now who, if
he had the offer of being an Englishman, then would
not discard his chance of writing as the crowned conqueror
at the head of all the spears of Agincourt. If
he could be that English common soldier of whom tradition
tells that he broke his spear asunder to bind it

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into a cross for joan of our end of Chapter nine.