FRENCH ARCHITECTURE. 1 — V.
TRANSFORMATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
I
N the second half of the twelfth century the Gothic style had freed itself wholly from its Romanesque sources; it reached full maturity in the thirteenth century, which witnessed the erection of our noblest cathedrals. The type was created, its special proportions were determined and its decorative principle clearly defined: was it destined to live and to force itself upon coming generations?
The respective styles of Egypt, Greece and Imperial Rome, once fixed within immutable lines, were perpetuated for centuries without undergoing any perceptible alteration. Nothing of the kind, however, is true of Gothic art; it unquestionably possessed characteristic forms — the more or less elevated pointed arch, and especially the groined vault, flying-buttress and buttress, which survived for a long period — but the very proportions of these constituent parts of the new architecture varied within extraordinarily wide limits; the pillars supporting the vaults, which were short, squat columns at the end of the Romanesque age, were soon transformed into clusters of light colonnettes, and later their primitive character was completely lost and they became mere sheaves of ribs springing from the ground and shooting up in a single stem to the summit of the vaults. As time went on, the vaults, which were originally formed of two simple intersecting barrel-vaults borne on the arches of intersection, were cut up in all directions; the diagonal arches branched out into liernes and tiercerons, and, at the point of intersection of the manifold ribs, stalactite-like keys were introduced. The flying-buttresses soared higher and higher in superimposed stages, while at the same time they grew continually lighter and more airy. The decoration, which was at first sober, assumed a more and more complicated character; the mouldings became more and more ornate; the gables developed gradually into veritable aerial edifices carved over with trefoils and roses; and pinnacles, finials and crossettes appeared in profusion. Ensemble and details, everything was so transformed that, but for a constructive disposition whose principle at least was maintained throughout, the productions of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would seem to belong to radically different styles.
We find that the farther down the centuries we move, and the more complex the beginnings of each new style are, the more intimately blended the races have become; the more fluctuating and transient likewise are the social institutions, manners and artistic tendencies of the generations formed and transformed in the bosom of this ever increasing complexity. Egypt preserved her theocratic and despotic constitution for thousands of years; for centuries Greece maintained her republican organization of small rival and hostile cities, which united but once, and that in the golden age of her history; and we know how long Imperial Rome guarded her centralized power, both administrative and military, and that Byzantium, though much weakened, prolonged the same for some centuries after the downfall of Roman supremacy in the west.
The Middle Ages offer no analogous conditions. Scarcely had the barbarian conquerors set about their social task, namely, the establishment of the feudal regime, before feudalism was assailed by a rising power which was destined to found, after a long and violent struggle, the French monarchy and at the same time create French national unity. Hardly had the feudal institutions been endowed with life before they were shaken and enfeebled and began to give way to totally dissimilar institutions. It is this process of transformation which we will now trace as briefly as possible.
At the beginning of the eleventh century the kingdom embraced five great territorial divisions in the north and two in the south; namely: the duchy of France, which carried with it the royal prerogative, the duchies of Normandy and Burgundy, and the counties of Flanders and Champagne, on the one hand; on the other, the duchy of Aquitaine and the county
of Toulouse. Each of these great fiefs was divided into secondary holdings which were themselves very powerful, as for example, the counties of Maine, Anjou, Hainault and Brabant, the duchy of Gascony, the county of Auvergne and the viscounties of Narbonne and Beziers. These last were in turn subdivided into city viscounties, baronies or chatellanies, each comprising a large number of parishes and villages; and finally there were still lesser mesne-feuds held by feudatories, or simple proprietors of castles, whose subjects were confined to the peasantry and the serfs.
ʽʽ As yet no tie adequate to bind these various territorial divisions together existed; anarchy was at its height. There being no recognized central authority, constant warfare was waged between province and province, city and city, chateau and chateau. ” For several centuries the royal power was occupied in the work of evolving unity out of this chaos. We will briefly note the various steps of the transformation, century by century.
The eleventh century was devoted to the task of bringing the barons of the Duchy of France into subjection to the king; and establishing throughout the royal domains a formal and recognized code of laws fixing the relationship of all the members of the new society, from the simple castellan to the king himself. For a money consideration the cities and communes purchased partial independence; the right to elect their mayors and councillors was granted them, while they were to recognize the supreme sovreignity of the king; their soldiers marched under the royal banner, in the general wars, and furnished the firmest and most reliable support to the incipient monarchy.
During the twelfth century the king, since the royal authority was thenceforth assured within his original territorial holdings, sought to extend his sway to neighboring divisions. The conquest of England by the Normans had just raised up for him a powerful and dangerous rival; the conquerors, strengthened by the possession of a foreign kingdom, retained in France, Anjou, Maine and Touraine; Aquitaine, Poitou, Bordelais and Gascony; and Brittany. As the French king was not yet strong enough to assail such an adversary openly, he worked indefatigably to stir up feudal insurrections on the enemy’s territory and turn these to the profit of royalty. He, in fact, succeeded in conquering some of the provinces, but this menacing extension of kingly rule roused the feudal lords at home, and they turned against the monarchy.
The thirteenth century found the north and east allied; the coalition suffered defeat at Bouvines, but was soon after reformed, with still greater power and numerical strength; this time it was supported by the South and by the kings of England and Aragon. The alliance was once more vanquished at Taillebourgh. Then through inheritances and skilfully drawn treaties the royal authority was consolidated and extended; from that time it was clear that it would fall heir to the various local powers — that it was destined to outlive and supplant them all.
Formidable obstacles still remained to be surmounted, and the work was fraught with the greatest dangers. Feudal tradition made it incumbent upon the king to divide his possession among his heirs, and create vast appanages for them. By this means the kingdom, after having been painfully welded together, was soon parcelled out once more, and the princes holding these great fiefs became the redoubtable chiefs of feudal coalitions that brought the monarchy to the brink of ruin.
Nevertheless, the work of internal unification went on. Louis IN joined more closely to the crown the three classes — ecclesiastics, bourgeois and feudatories — whose independent legislation tended too strongly to isolation, and he prepared the way for their early consolidation into the States-general. He made the clergy national by a pragmatic sanction which set bounds to the authority exercised over them and to the taxes imposed upon them by the court of Rome, and which made the king their temporal head and support. Though not interfering with the right of the towns to the free election of their magistrates and the administration of their internal affairs, the king nevertheless made them subject to his officers in all judiciary and military matters. To bring the feudal nobility into greater dependence upon the crown, their tribunals were subordinated to the royal jurisdiction.
For judicial combats St. Louis substituted inquests and the custom of summoning witnesses; he established the right of appeal from the feudal courts to his own jurisdiction; for this
1 From the French of P. Planat, in Planat’s “Encylopédie de lʽArchitecture
et de la Construction. ” Continued from page 65, No. 801.
TRANSFORMATION OF THE SOCIAL STATE IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
I
N the second half of the twelfth century the Gothic style had freed itself wholly from its Romanesque sources; it reached full maturity in the thirteenth century, which witnessed the erection of our noblest cathedrals. The type was created, its special proportions were determined and its decorative principle clearly defined: was it destined to live and to force itself upon coming generations?
The respective styles of Egypt, Greece and Imperial Rome, once fixed within immutable lines, were perpetuated for centuries without undergoing any perceptible alteration. Nothing of the kind, however, is true of Gothic art; it unquestionably possessed characteristic forms — the more or less elevated pointed arch, and especially the groined vault, flying-buttress and buttress, which survived for a long period — but the very proportions of these constituent parts of the new architecture varied within extraordinarily wide limits; the pillars supporting the vaults, which were short, squat columns at the end of the Romanesque age, were soon transformed into clusters of light colonnettes, and later their primitive character was completely lost and they became mere sheaves of ribs springing from the ground and shooting up in a single stem to the summit of the vaults. As time went on, the vaults, which were originally formed of two simple intersecting barrel-vaults borne on the arches of intersection, were cut up in all directions; the diagonal arches branched out into liernes and tiercerons, and, at the point of intersection of the manifold ribs, stalactite-like keys were introduced. The flying-buttresses soared higher and higher in superimposed stages, while at the same time they grew continually lighter and more airy. The decoration, which was at first sober, assumed a more and more complicated character; the mouldings became more and more ornate; the gables developed gradually into veritable aerial edifices carved over with trefoils and roses; and pinnacles, finials and crossettes appeared in profusion. Ensemble and details, everything was so transformed that, but for a constructive disposition whose principle at least was maintained throughout, the productions of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would seem to belong to radically different styles.
We find that the farther down the centuries we move, and the more complex the beginnings of each new style are, the more intimately blended the races have become; the more fluctuating and transient likewise are the social institutions, manners and artistic tendencies of the generations formed and transformed in the bosom of this ever increasing complexity. Egypt preserved her theocratic and despotic constitution for thousands of years; for centuries Greece maintained her republican organization of small rival and hostile cities, which united but once, and that in the golden age of her history; and we know how long Imperial Rome guarded her centralized power, both administrative and military, and that Byzantium, though much weakened, prolonged the same for some centuries after the downfall of Roman supremacy in the west.
The Middle Ages offer no analogous conditions. Scarcely had the barbarian conquerors set about their social task, namely, the establishment of the feudal regime, before feudalism was assailed by a rising power which was destined to found, after a long and violent struggle, the French monarchy and at the same time create French national unity. Hardly had the feudal institutions been endowed with life before they were shaken and enfeebled and began to give way to totally dissimilar institutions. It is this process of transformation which we will now trace as briefly as possible.
At the beginning of the eleventh century the kingdom embraced five great territorial divisions in the north and two in the south; namely: the duchy of France, which carried with it the royal prerogative, the duchies of Normandy and Burgundy, and the counties of Flanders and Champagne, on the one hand; on the other, the duchy of Aquitaine and the county
of Toulouse. Each of these great fiefs was divided into secondary holdings which were themselves very powerful, as for example, the counties of Maine, Anjou, Hainault and Brabant, the duchy of Gascony, the county of Auvergne and the viscounties of Narbonne and Beziers. These last were in turn subdivided into city viscounties, baronies or chatellanies, each comprising a large number of parishes and villages; and finally there were still lesser mesne-feuds held by feudatories, or simple proprietors of castles, whose subjects were confined to the peasantry and the serfs.
ʽʽ As yet no tie adequate to bind these various territorial divisions together existed; anarchy was at its height. There being no recognized central authority, constant warfare was waged between province and province, city and city, chateau and chateau. ” For several centuries the royal power was occupied in the work of evolving unity out of this chaos. We will briefly note the various steps of the transformation, century by century.
The eleventh century was devoted to the task of bringing the barons of the Duchy of France into subjection to the king; and establishing throughout the royal domains a formal and recognized code of laws fixing the relationship of all the members of the new society, from the simple castellan to the king himself. For a money consideration the cities and communes purchased partial independence; the right to elect their mayors and councillors was granted them, while they were to recognize the supreme sovreignity of the king; their soldiers marched under the royal banner, in the general wars, and furnished the firmest and most reliable support to the incipient monarchy.
During the twelfth century the king, since the royal authority was thenceforth assured within his original territorial holdings, sought to extend his sway to neighboring divisions. The conquest of England by the Normans had just raised up for him a powerful and dangerous rival; the conquerors, strengthened by the possession of a foreign kingdom, retained in France, Anjou, Maine and Touraine; Aquitaine, Poitou, Bordelais and Gascony; and Brittany. As the French king was not yet strong enough to assail such an adversary openly, he worked indefatigably to stir up feudal insurrections on the enemy’s territory and turn these to the profit of royalty. He, in fact, succeeded in conquering some of the provinces, but this menacing extension of kingly rule roused the feudal lords at home, and they turned against the monarchy.
The thirteenth century found the north and east allied; the coalition suffered defeat at Bouvines, but was soon after reformed, with still greater power and numerical strength; this time it was supported by the South and by the kings of England and Aragon. The alliance was once more vanquished at Taillebourgh. Then through inheritances and skilfully drawn treaties the royal authority was consolidated and extended; from that time it was clear that it would fall heir to the various local powers — that it was destined to outlive and supplant them all.
Formidable obstacles still remained to be surmounted, and the work was fraught with the greatest dangers. Feudal tradition made it incumbent upon the king to divide his possession among his heirs, and create vast appanages for them. By this means the kingdom, after having been painfully welded together, was soon parcelled out once more, and the princes holding these great fiefs became the redoubtable chiefs of feudal coalitions that brought the monarchy to the brink of ruin.
Nevertheless, the work of internal unification went on. Louis IN joined more closely to the crown the three classes — ecclesiastics, bourgeois and feudatories — whose independent legislation tended too strongly to isolation, and he prepared the way for their early consolidation into the States-general. He made the clergy national by a pragmatic sanction which set bounds to the authority exercised over them and to the taxes imposed upon them by the court of Rome, and which made the king their temporal head and support. Though not interfering with the right of the towns to the free election of their magistrates and the administration of their internal affairs, the king nevertheless made them subject to his officers in all judiciary and military matters. To bring the feudal nobility into greater dependence upon the crown, their tribunals were subordinated to the royal jurisdiction.
For judicial combats St. Louis substituted inquests and the custom of summoning witnesses; he established the right of appeal from the feudal courts to his own jurisdiction; for this
1 From the French of P. Planat, in Planat’s “Encylopédie de lʽArchitecture
et de la Construction. ” Continued from page 65, No. 801.