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II. Nationalism In The Middle Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 December 2011

G. G. Coulton
G. G. Coulton
Affiliation:
Fellow of St John's College
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Extract

At an International Historical Congress of some years ago, one speaker explained that, so long as Europe had possessed one Church and one learned language (the Latin), nationalism was suppressed. This dictum received both contradiction and support; but the occasion was unsuited for any but the most superficial discussion. Ever since, however, I have noted passages which seemed to bear upon this important question; and I print them here, with the minimum of comment, by way of assistance to other students who may find time and inclination to pursue the matter further. Professor Marcel Handelsman of Warsaw has surveyed the subject, in brief, with a refinement of philosophical analysis to which I make no pretence. I try to use the term nationalism consistently within my own rough limits, but without attempt at scientific definition. My main object is to present evidence for the reader's judgment, without disguising the direction in which I lean myself: evidence varying a good deal in cogency from case to case, but with variations which any careful reader can estimate. Only thus can one start any really fruitful discussion. The multiplicity of indications collected in this comparatively short time convinces me that these are no more than the merest fraction of that which might be revealed by a concentrated search; but even this fraction may be enough to give a general idea of the whole.

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Cambridge Historical Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , 1935 , pp. 15 - 40
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1935

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References

1 Le Rôle de la nationalité dans I'Histoire du Moyen Âge (extract from the Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, No. 7, Oct. 1929).

2 For the antiquity of this notion of progress from nationalism to internationalism, see Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind, pp. 20, 26 (Brit. Acad. Raleigh Lecture for 1933 by W. W. Tarn).

3 Continuity of English Prose, LXXXII; cf. LIX, “Native prose was choked, before it could spring up, by Latin competition” among the Teutonic tribes in general.

4 Ed. Pfeiffer, 1864, p. 221 (no. 115).

5 Defensor Pacis, ed. Previté-Orton, pp. 101, 108–9, 366, 374–422, 478; this Pope-Emperor quarrel is immortalis contentio et pugna

6 Discorsi, lib. I, c. 12: see especially the last sentences. After attributing the political wars which had ruined Italy to the fact that the key-position was held by a ruler, often ambitious, in Rome, he adds: “We owe all this to the Church, and to naught else. If any man would see the truth more clearly by certain experience, needs were that he should be powerful enough to send the Roman Curia (with all the authority that it has in Italy) to dwell in the land of the Swiss, who, at the present day, are the only people living after the fashion of the ancients, both in religion and in their military system. He would then see that, within a brief space, the vicious manners of that Court would stir more disorder in that province than any other accident which might at any time arise there.”

7 Here, again, Dr Tarn's Raleigh Lecture is specially suggestive: see p. 13.

8 Correspondence, ed. Figgis and Laurence, p. 217.

9 Migne,P.L.CLVI, 706. It is far less conclusive, though not without its own significance, that William of Malmesbury should have described the initial concord of this motley mass in nationalistic terms: “The Welshman abandoned his forest-hunting, the Scot [or Irishman] his familiarity with fleas, the Dane his constant drinking, and the Norwegian his raw fish” (Gesta Regum, R.S. 11, 399).

10 M.G.H., Scriptt. xxvi, 64.

11 Memorials of Richard I, R.S. pp. cxlii-clxxx.

12 Printed in C. L. Hugo, Antiquitatis Monumenta (1725), p. 4 (ep. ii). Cf. A. Luchaire, Innocent III et la question d'Orient, p. 298, and pp. 179–80 of my little volume on Crusades, Commerce and Adventure.

13 Baronius, Annales, 1198, §81. Compare the complaints of the Scottish barons to John XXII in 1320 (Fordun-Bower, Scotichronicon (1759), 11, 277).

14 Mayor, J. E. B., Early Statutes of St John's College, 1859, pp. 16, 18, 363.Google Scholar

15 Dr A. H. Lloyd points out to me that Fisher's statutes of 1506 for Christ's contain only the provision that half of the fellows must be drawn from the Northern Counties. He suggests the probability that Fisher's experience of Northerners and Southerners at Christ's, in those first ten years, suggested the stricter precautions he took for St John's in 1516.

16 Compare Rashdall (Univ. of Europe 11, 362), “there was an Irish question even then. The document reads like a treaty of peace between hostile nations rather than an act of University legislation“.

17 J. E. T. Rogers, Oxford City Documents, p. 148.

18 Maxwell Lyte, p. 49, from Martène, Thesaurus, IV, 1730–1.

19 Analecta Franciscana (Quaracchi, 1897), 111, 110.Google Scholar Cf. St Jerome, Ep. 82, § 10 (Migne, P.L. XXII 742)

20 H. Pez, Scriptt. Rer. Aust. 11, 632.

21 Chron. Abendon. R.S. 11, 284.

22 Gesta Abbatum, R.S. 1, 62.

23 Eadmer.Vita Anselmi, lib. 1, c. v, § XLII

24 Tr. Giles (Bohn) 457: cf. Dugdale-Caley, 1, 3. See also the evidence collected by Plummer in his edition of the A.S. Chronicle (1899), 11, 271 (where, however, he refers by a slip to the 1st vol. of Chron. Ab. instead of the 2nd. As against this Norman tyranny over the English, he quotes from the Farfa chronicle (M.G.H. Scriptt. XI, 528) the story of that abbot “Anglorum genere exortus” who was intruded upon this Italian abbey and “per XI menses exercuit tyrannidem”.

25 Customary St. Aug. (H. Bradshaw Soc), 11, 127.

26 Migne, P.L. CXLIX, 638.

27 Prior est bonus, sapiens, humilis et discretus, licet Anglicus. Duckett, Charters and Records, 11, 136, 138–9.

28 Taiémontré 1, 105–6.

29 See the excellent study by C. W.New (thesis privately distributed by the University of Chicago Libraries, 1916), on the Alien Priories in England.

30 Giraldus, Opp. R.S. IV, 30–4; Grosseteste, Epp. R.S. p. 168; Peckham, Epp. R.S.111, 904. “In this “(comments Mr New, 49) “we have a foregleam of the later expressions of objection to the alien priories on national grounds. And these expressions of opinion on the part of English prelates help us to understand why the English church raised no objection to Edward I's seizure of the alien priories”. Similarly the Scots were naturally troubled by the presence of English monks in their monasteries. This problem was specially acute at Coldingham, which was a cell to Durham (v. The Priory of Coldingham, Surtees Soc. [1841], pref. viii).

31 Reynerus, Apostolatus, app. 111, 148. Cf. K. L. Wood-Legh, Church Life in England, 13, for another instance of “the hostility between the English and French monks in the alien priories “.

32 W. de Gray Birch, Neath Abbey, p. 141.

33 I owe this to a verbal communication from Prof. Malecki of Warsaw.

34 “Probabiliter literatus.”

35 Reg. Walpole, f. 52 a.

36 A twelfth-century monk of Lyre in Normandy tells us how he feels the cloister as a sort of Scylla's cave; here are dogs barking around him: but outside are the fatal Acroceraunian rocks: “ubique pugnatur pro patria” (Ch. Guéry, Abbaye de Lyre, p. 365). Compare Pierre Dubois, De Recup. Terrae Sanctae (1891), 4: “We see that, when their fathers and grandfathers have been killed in such lawful war, the surviving grandsons and wives of the defunct prepare with all possible speed for renewal of the war and for headstrong victory.”

37 Const. Hist, (1875), 1, 212 ff.

38 Le Moine Guibert, Ch. iv.

39 P. 241: “L'intérêt de l'État s'y point á l'action du sentiment religieux”.

40 Handelsman, pp. 237–8.

41 Handelsman, pp. 244–5: “L'Élise, la première, devance I'évolution: d'organisation d'État elle se transforme en une organisation de nation. Elle donne á son organisation un nouveau caractère, elle l'adapte aux besoins de la société divisée, elle défend ses cadres contre l'invasion des étrangers, en imposant 'unité nationale d'une ‘province’ divisée territorialement, en Pologne, par exemple au XIIIesiècle, ou bien élevée au-dessus des divisions d'origine, de race, des langues, elle forme 1é, en créant une nouvelle nation, composée de divers éléments, dans le même cadre politique.”

42 M.G.H. Scriptt. XXXII, 533.

43 Muratori, Rer. It. Scriptt XVIII (1731), 1131.

44 Gesta Regum. R.S. 11, 474–5

45 Fordun-Bower (1759), 11, 259 ff.

46 Les Papes d' Avignon, 1912, pp. 264–7. Mollat admits (p. 264) that the financia aids given [by the Popes] to the French kings exceeded both in number and in value those which were given in favour of the sovereigns of other nations “. And he quotes the chronicler's picturesque phrase that Philip V triumphed over his Flemish enemies armis papalibus—i.e. with the help of the Pope's curse.

47

Or est le Pape devenu Franceys
E Jesu devenu Engleys
Ore serra veou que fra plus
Ly Pape ou Jesus.

Knighton, R.S. 11, 94. Compare the letter of 1471 in Lavisse, Hist, de France, IV, ii, 364: “The Burgundians were down at heart; they said that God was French this year, although in times past He has been Burgundian”

48 Apart, that is, from the freemasonry among the knighthood of both sides, as in Walsingham's story of the French and English knights on John of Gaunt's Portuguese campaign of 1389 (Historia, R.S. 11, 193). Yet Froissart definitely excepts the Germans from this freemasonry: “hitherto they have had neither pity nor mercy upon Christian gentlemen who fall into their hands as prisoners, but extort ransoms to the full of their estate and even beyond, and put them in chains, in irons, and in close prison like thieves and murderers; and all to extort the greater ransom” (ed. Luce, v, 289).

49 Lib. 1, c. x (Stubbs, Select Charters, 1895, p. 201).

50 Opera, R.S. 111, 27, 121–2, 338; cf. pp. 341, 361, 370.

51 Opera, R.S. v, 164–5.

52 F. F. Urquhart in Catholic Encyclopaedia 111, 702 (article “Christendom”).

53 P. Toynbee, Dante Dictionary, p. 346.

54 M.G.H. Scriptt, XXXII, 651. “Cum Trutannus in ir Pateram tenet, et sedet ad pir, Regem Capadocum Credit habere cocum.” Trutannus is the typical wastrel (Fr. truand, Eng. truant). Ir and pir stand for the Greek χείρ and πῦρ and the rest is explained by Horace, Epist. 1, 6, 39: “Mancipiis locuples eget aeris Cappadocum rex.”

55 P. 99; see the notes in which Langlois illustrates “the hatred of Dubois for Romans, Lombards and Italians in general”, adding “it is well known that Boniface VIII retorted this accusation of pride upon the French, and spoke freely of ‘that Gallic pride which recognises no superior upon earth’”.

56 Hist. Littéraire de France, XXXIII, 535.

57 Fr. Jarrett, Bede, Social Theories of the Middle Ages (1926), p. 227Google Scholar

58 M. Creighton, Hist, of the Papacy, 1, 64, 73.

59 F. F. Urquhart, loc. cit.

60 Origines de la Réforme (1905–14), 1, 4, 122–3, 200, 204–6, 334–6, 559; 11, 4–5, 55, 74–81; 111, 498.

61 Eileen Power and M. M. Postan, English Trade in the 15th Century, pp. 102, 104; cf. pp. 105, 145, and (for Anglo-Italian relations), 46. Dr Postan has kindly supplied me with a number of references to the Hansische Recessen: 1st series VII, no. 708, § 2–6; ibid. nos. 649, 821; 2nd series, 11, no. 76, § 25. The Germans report that the English confined themselves to “vele soter wort na older Engelschen gewohnheit”; see 2nd series, 1, nos. 383–5, 406–7, 421, 429–32, 535, 537.

62 Urquhart, loc. cit. p. 703.

63 “it would seem, then, that the growth of national divisions, the increased secularism of everyday life, the diminished influence of the Church and the Papacy, that all these interdependent influences had broken up the social unity of Christendom at least two centuries before the Reformation: yet it must not be forgotten that religious unity remained.” (Urquhart, loc. cit. p. 704.) Compare L. v. Pastor's emphasis on nationalism at the Council of Constance (Gesch. d. Päpste, B. I, c. 3 ad fin.) And we cannot altogether ignore even the fairly common belief among foreigners that English folk were born with tails, if only (as the popular encyclopaedist Fazio degli Uberti [1370] puts it) “short, such as the tail of a stag or some such beast”. (See G. Neilson's booklet, Caudatus Anglicus 1896, and two extracts printed in my Social Life in Britain, pp. 28–9.)