by Will Durant
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel singes thu cuccu;
Ne swik thu naver nu;
Sing cuccu nu, sing cuccu,
Sing cuccu, sing cuccu, nu!
Summer is a-coming in,
Loudly sing cuckoo!
Groweth seed and bloweth mead,
And blossoms the woodland now:
Sing cuckoo!
Ewe bleateth after lamb,
Loweth after calf the cow;
Bullock leapeth, buck turns off;
Merry sing cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well singest thou
cuckoo;
Cease thou not, never now;
Sing cuckoo now, sing cuckoo,
Sing cuckoo, sing cuckoo, now!
Such a song must have been congenial to the minstrels or jongleurs who wandered from town to town, from court to court, even from land to land; we hear of minstrels from Constantinople singing in France, of English gleemen singing in Spain. A performance by minstrels was a usual part of any formal festivity; so Edward I of England engaged 426 singers for the wedding of his daughter Margaret.13 Such minstrel groups often sang part songs, sometimes of bizarre complexity. Usually the songs were composed—words and music—by troubadours in France, trovatori in Italy, minnesingers in Germany. Most medieval poetry before the thirteenth century was written to be sung; “a poem without music,” said the troubadour Folquet, “is a mill without water.”14 Of 2600 troubadour songs extant, we have the music of 264, usually in the form of neumes and ligatures on a four-or five-line staff. The bards of Ireland and Wales probably played instruments, and sang.
In the manuscripts that preserve the Cantigas or canticles collected by Alfonso X of Castile several illustrations show musicians in Arab dress performing on Arab instruments; the pattern of many of the songs is Arabic;15 possibly the music, as well as the early themes and poetic forms, of the troubadours was derived from Moorish songs and melodies passing through Christian Spain into Southern France.16 Returning Crusaders may have brought Arab musical forms from the East; it is to be noted that the troubadours appear about 1100, contemporary with the First Crusade.
Startling is the variety of medieval musical instruments. Percussion instruments—bells, cymbals, timbrels, the triangle, the bombulum, the drum; string instruments—lyre, cithera, harp, psaltery, noble, organistrum, lute, guitar, vielle, viola, monochord, gigue; wind instruments—pipe, flute, hautboy, bagpipe, clarion, flageolet, trumpet, horn, organ: these are a selection out of hundreds; everything was there for hand or finger, foot or bow. Some of them had survived from Greece, some had come, in form and name, from Islam, like the rebec, lute, and guitar; many were precious examples of medieval artistry in metal, ivory, or wood. The usual instrument of the minstrel was the vielle, a short violin played with an archer’s curved-back bow. Before the eighth century most organs were hydraulic; but Jerome in the fourth century described a pneumatic organ;17 and Bede (673–735) wrote of organs with “brass pipes filled with air from bellows, and uttering a grand and most sweet melody.”18 St. Dunstan (c. 925–88) was accused of sorcery when he built an Aeolian harp that played when placed against a crack in the wall.19 In Winchester Cathedral, about 950, an organ was installed having twenty-six bellows, forty-two bellows-blowers, and four hundred pipes; the keys were so Gargantuan that the organist had to strike them with fists protected by thickly padded gloves.20 Milan had an organ whose pipes were of silver; Venice had one with pipes of gold.21
All notion of medieval hell-stricken gloom vanishes before a collection of medieval musical instruments. What remains is again the picture of a people at least as happy as ourselves, full of the bounce and lust of life, and no more oppressed with fear of the end of the world than we with doubts whether civilization will be destroyed before we can complete its history.
CHAPTER XXXIV
The Transmission of Knowledge
1000–1300
I. THE RISE OF THE VERNACULARS
AS the Church had preserved in some measure that political unity of western Europe that the Roman Empire had achieved, so her ritual, her sermons, and her schools maintained a Roman heritage now lost—an international language intelligible to all the literate population of Italy, Spain, France, England, Scandinavia, the Lowlands, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the western Balkans. Educated men in these countries used Latin for correspondence, business records, diplomacy, law, government, science, philosophy, and nearly all literature before the thirteenth century. They spoke Latin as a living language, which almost daily developed a new word or phrase to denote the new or changing realities or ideas of their lives. They wrote their love letters in Latin, from the simplest billets-doux to the classic epistles of Héloïse and Abélard. A book was written not for a nation but for the continent; it needed no translation, and passed from country to country with a speed and freedom unknown today. Students went from one university to another with no thought of linguistic embarrassments; scholars could lecture in the same language at Bologna, Salamanca, Paris, Oxford, Uppsala, and Cologne. They did not hesitate to import new words into Latin, sometimes to the horror of the Petrarcan-Ciceronian ear; so Magna Carta ruled that no freeman should be dissaisiatus or imprisonatus. Such words make us wince, but they kept Latin alive. Many modern English terms—for instance instance, substantive, essence, entity—descended from medieval additions to the Latin tongue.
Nevertheless the disruption of international intercourse by the collapse of Rome, the introverting poverty of the Dark Ages, the decay of roads and the decline of commerce, developed in speech those variations which segregation soon expands. Even in its heyday Latin had suffered national modifications from diversities of climate and oral physiology. In its very homeland the old language had been changed. The abdication of literature had left the field to the vocabulary and sentence structure of the common man, which had always been different from those of the poets and orators. The influx of Germans, Gauls, Greeks, and Asiatics into Italy brought a multiformity of pronunciation; and the natural laziness of tongue and mind sloughed off the precise inflections and terminations of careful speech. H became silent in late Latin; V, classically pronounced like the English W, acquired the sound of the English V; N before S dropped away—mensa (table) was pronounced mesa-, the diphthongs Æ and Œ, classically pronounced like the English I and OI, were now like long English A or French E. As final consonants were slurred and forgotten (portus, porto, porte; rex, re, roi; coelum, cielo, ciel), case endings had to be replaced by prepositions, conjugational endings by auxiliary verbs. The old demonstrative pronouns ille and illa became definite articles—il, el, lo, le, la-, and the Latin unus (one) was shortened to form the indefinite article un. As declensions disappeared, it sometimes became difficult to tell whether a noun was the subject before, or the object after, the predicate. Viewing this continuous process of change over twenty centuries, we may think of Latin as the still living and literary language of Italy, France, and Spain, no more transformed from the speech of Cicero than his from that of Romulus, or ours from Chaucer’s.
Spain had begun to speak Latin as early as 200 B.C.; by Cicero’s time its dialect had diverged so far from the usage of Rome that Cicero was shocked by what seemed to him the barbarisms of Corduba. Contact with Iberian dialects softened the Latin consonants in Spain: T into D, P into B, K into G; totum into todo, operam into obra, ecclesia into iglesia. French also softened the Latin consonants, and while often keeping them in writing, frequently dropped them in speech: tout, oeuvre, église, est. The oath taken at Strasbourg in 842 by Louis the German and Charles the Bald was sworn in two languages—German and French*—a French still so Latin that it was called lingua romana; not till the tenth century was it sufficiently distinct to receive the name lingua gallica. The lingua romana in turn divided into what France called two languages: the langue d’oc of France south of the Loire, and the langue d’oil of northern France. It was a medieval custom to differentiate dialects by their way of saying yes: So
uth France said it with oc from the Latin hoc, this; the North used oil, a fusion of the Latin hoc ille, this-that. Southeastern France had a dialect of the langue d’oc called Provençal; it became a polished literary language in the hands of the troubadours, and was almost snuffed out by the Albigensian Crusades.
Italy formed her vernacular more slowly than Spain or France. Latin was her native speech; the clergy, who spoke Latin, were especially numerous in Italy; and the continuity of her culture and her schools kept the language from changing so freely as in lands with broken traditions. As late as 1230 St. Anthony of Padua preached to the common people in Latin; however, a Latin sermon delivered at Padua in 1189 by a visiting prelate had to be translated by the local bishop into the popular tongue.2 Italian hardly existed as a language at the beginning of the thirteenth century; there were merely some fourteen dialects continued and variously corrupted from the ancient Latin of the market place, each barely intelligible to the rest, and cherishing its differences with passionate atomism; sometimes different quarters of the same city, as at Bologna, had distinct dialects. The predecessors of Dante had to create a language as well as a literature. The poet, in a pleasant fancy, thought that the Tuscan troubadours chose Italian as their medium because they wrote of love, and the ladies they addressed might not understand Latin.3 Even so, about 1300, he hesitated between Latin and the Tuscan dialect as the language of The Divine Comedy. By the narrow margin of this choice he escaped oblivion.
While Latin was dividing reproductively into the Romance languages, Old German was splitting into Middle German, Frisian, Dutch, Flemish, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. “Old German” is merely a convenient phrase to cover the many dialects that exercised their tribal or provincial sovereignty in Germany before 1050: Flemish, Dutch, Westphalian, Eastphalian, Alemannic, Bavarian, Franconian, Thuringian, Saxon, Silesian…. Old German passed into Middle German (1050–1500) partly through the influx of new words with the coming of Christianity. Monks from Ireland, England, France, and Italy labored to invent terms to translate Latin. Sometimes they appropriated Latin words bodily into German—Kaiser, Prinz, Legende. This was legitimate thievery; tragic, however, was the influence of Latin sentence structure—keeping the verb to the end-in changing the once simple syntax of the German people into the stiff, inverted, and breath-taking periods of the later German style.4 Perhaps the finest German was the Middle High German written by the great poets of the thirteenth century—Walter von der Vogelweide, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried of Strasbourg, Wolfram von Eschenbach. Never again, except in Heine and the young Goethe, was German so simple, flexible, direct, clear.
The Teutonic speech of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes went with them to England in the fifth century, and laid the foundations of the English language—gave it almost all its short and racy words. French flooded the land with the Normans, and ruled the court, the courts, and the aristocracy from 1066 to 1362, while Latin continued to preside over religion and education, and (till 1731) remained de rigueur in official documents. Thousands of French words entered into English, above all in costume, cookery, and law; half the terminology of English law is French.5 For three centuries the literatures of France and England were one; and as late as Chaucer (1340–1400) the spirit and language of English letters were half French. After the loss of her French possessions England was thrown back upon herself, and the Anglo-Saxon elements in English speech triumphed. When the French domination passed, the English language had been immeasurably enriched. By adding French and Latin to its German base, English could triply express any one of a thousand ideas (kingly, royal, regal; twofold, double, duplex; daily, journal, diurnal, …); to this it owes its wealth of discriminating synonyms and verbal nuances. He who should know the history of words would know all history.
II. THE WORLD OF BOOKS
How were these diverse languages written? After the fall of Rome in 476 the conquering barbarians adopted the Latin alphabet, and wrote it with a “cursive” or running hand that bound the letters together and gave most of them a curved form instead of the straight lines that had been found convenient in writing upon hard surfaces like stone or wood. The Church preferred in those centuries a “majuscule,” or large-letter writing, to facilitate the reading of missals and books of hours. When the copyists of Charlemagne’s time preserved Latin literature by making many copies of the classics, they saved costly parchment by adopting a “minuscule,” or small-letter writing; they agreed on set forms for the letters, and created the “set minuscule” lettering that became for four centuries the usual medium of medieval books. In the twelfth century, as if in accord with the exuberant decoration then developing in Gothic architecture, the letters acquired flourishes, hairlines, and hooks, and became the “Gothic” lettering that prevailed in Europe till the Renaissance, and in Germany till our time. Very few medieval manuscripts were punctuated; this breath-guiding device, known to the Hellenistic Greeks, had been lost in the barbarian upheaval; it reappeared in the thirteenth century, but was not generally adopted till printing established it in the fifteenth century. Printing was in some measure prepared as early as 1147 by the use of woodcuts, in Rhenish monasteries, for printing initial letters or patterns upon textiles.6 Divers forms of shorthand were practiced, much inferior to the “Tironian notes” developed by Cicero’s slave.
Writing was upon parchment, papyrus, vellum, or paper, with quill or reed pens using black or colored inks. Papyrus disappeared from common use in Europe after the Islamic conquest of Egypt. Vellum, prepared from the skin of young lambs, was expensive, and was reserved for luxurious manuscripts. Parchment, made from coarse sheepskin, was the usual medium of medieval writing. Till the twelfth century paper was a costly import from Islam; but in 1190 paper mills were set up in Germany and France, and in the thirteenth century Europe began to make paper from linen.
Many parchments were scraped to erase an old manuscript and receive a second composition (“palimpsest”). Old works were lost by such erasures, by misplacement of manuscripts, by war and pillage, by fire or decay. Huns sacked monastic libraries in Bavaria, Northmen in France, Saracens in Italy. Many Greek classics perished in the plunder of Constantinople in 1204. The Church had at first discountenanced the reading of the pagan classics; in nearly every century some fearful voice—Gregory I, Isidore of Seville, Peter Damian—was raised against them; Theophilus, Archbishop of Alexandria, destroyed all pagan manuscripts that he could find; and Greek priests, according to Demetrius Chalcondylas,7 persuaded Greek emperors to burn the works of the Greek erotic poets, including Sappho and Anacreon. But in those same centuries there were many ecclesiastics who cherished a fondness for the old pagans, and saw to it that their works were preserved. In some cases, to disarm censure, they read the most Christian sentiments into pagan poetry, and by genial allegory turned even Ovid’s amatory art into moral verse. An abundant heritage of classical literature was preserved by monastic copyists.8 Tired monks were told that God would forgive one of their sins for every line they copied; Ordericus Vitalis informs us that one monk escaped hell by the margin of a single letter.9 Second only to the monks as copyists were private or professional scribes, who were engaged by rich men, or by booksellers, or by monasteries. Their labor was wearisome, and evoked from them strange requests on the final page:
Explicit hoc totum;
This completes the whole;
Pro Christo da mihi potum.
For Christ’s sake give me a drink.10
Another scribe thought he deserved more, and wrote, as his colophon: Detur pro penna scriptori pulchra puella—“For the [work of the] pen let the writer receive a beautiful girl.”11
The medieval Church exercised no regular censorship over the publication of books. If a book proved both heretical and influential, like Abélard’s on the Trinity, it would be denounced by a Church council. But books were then too few to be a prime peril to orthodoxy. Even the Bible was rare outside of monasteries; a year was required to copy it, a year’s
income of a parish priest to buy it; few clergymen had a full copy.12 The New Testament, and special books of the Old, had a wider circulation. Bibles of great size, magnificently decorated, were produced in the twelfth century; they could be handled only on a reading desk, usually in a monastic library, and might be chained to the desk for better preservation. The Church took fright when she found that the Waldensians and Albigensians were making and disseminating their own translations of scriptural books; and a Church council at Narbonne (1227), as we have seen, forbade laymen to possess any portion of the Scriptures.13 But in general, before the fourteenth century, the Church was not opposed to Bible reading on the part of the laity. She did not encourage it, for she distrusted popular interpretations of scriptural mysteries.
The size of a book and its pages was determined by the size of the available skins, each of which was folded to make a “folio.” After the fifth century books were no longer issued in rolls as in antiquity;* the skins were cut in rectangular sizes to make four (“quarto”), eight (“octavo”), twelve (“duodecimo”), or sixteen (“sextodecimo”) sheets to a folio. Some sextodecimos, written in a “fine Italian hand,” crowded long works into small compass to fit into the pocket or be a convenient manual. The binding might be of heavy parchment, cloth, leather, or board. Leather covers might be decorated by “blind tooling”—i.e., stamping uncolored designs into them with hot metal dies. Moslem artists settled in Venice introduced into Europe the technique of filling in such depressed parts with gold tints. Wood covers might be decorated with enamel or carved ivory, or inlaid with gold, silver, or gems. St. Jerome rebuked the Romans: “Your books are carved with precious stones, and Christ died naked!”14 Few modern volumes rival the sumptuous bindings of medieval books.
Even simple books were a luxury. An ordinary volume cost between $160 and $200 in the currency of the United States of America in 1949.15 Bernard of Chartres, a leader in the twelfth-century revival of the ancient classics, left a library of only twenty-four volumes. Italy was richer than France, and its famous jurist, the elder Accursius, collected sixty-three books. We hear of a great Bible being sold for ten talents—at least $10,000; of a missal exchanged for a vineyard; of two volumes of Priscian, the fifth-century grammarian, being paid for with a house and lot.16 The cost of books delayed the rise of a booksellers’ trade till the twelfth century; then the university towns engaged men as stationarii and librarii to organize corps of copyists to transcribe books for teachers and students; and these men sold copies to all who cared to pay. They seem never to have dreamed of paying a live author. If a man insisted on writing a new book, he had to pay its costs, or find a king or lord or magnate to grace his palm for a dedication or a laud. He could not advertise his book except by word of mouth. He could not publish it—make it public—except by getting it used in a school, or having it recited before whatever audience he could collect. So Gerald of Wales, on returning from Ireland in 1200, read his Topography of that country before an assemblage at Oxford.