The Early Plantagenets
9781465679697
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The geographical area of that history which alone deserves the name has more than once changed. The early home of human society was in Asia. Greece and Italy successively became the theatres of the world’s drama, and in modern times the real progress of society has moved within the limits of Western Christendom. So, too, with the material history. At one period the growth of the life of the world is in its literature, at another in its wars, at another in its institutions. Sometimes everything circles round one great man; at other times the key to the interest is found in some complex political idea such as the balance of power, or the realization of national identity. The successive stages of growth in the more advanced nations are not contemporaneous and may not follow in the same order. The quickened energy of one race finds its expression in commerce and colonization, that of another in internal organization and elaborate training, that of a third in arms, that of a fourth in art and literature. In some the literary growth precedes the political growth, in others it follows it; in some it is forced into premature luxuriance by national struggles, in others the national struggles themselves engross the strength that would ordinarily find expression in literature. Art has flourished greatly both where political freedom has encouraged the exercise of every natural gift and where political oppression has forced the genius of the people into a channel which seemed least dangerous to the oppressor. Still, on the whole, the European nations in modern history emerge from somewhat similar circumstances. Under somewhat similar discipline, and by somewhat similar expedients, they feel their way to that national consciousness in which they ultimately diverge so widely. We may hope, then, to find, in the illustration of a definite section or well ascertained epoch of that history, sufficient unity of plot and interest, a sufficient number of contrasts and analogies, to save it from being a dry analysis of facts or a mere statement of general laws. Such a period is that upon which we now enter; an epoch which in the history of England extends from the accession of Stephen to the death of Edward II.; that is, from the beginning of the constitutional growth of a consolidated English people to the opening of the long struggle with France under Edward III. It is scarcely less well defined in French and German history. In France it witnesses the process through which the modern kingdom of France was constituted; the aggregation of the several provinces which had hitherto recognized only a nominal feudal supremacy, under the direct personal rule of the king, and their incorporation into a national system of administration. In Germany it comprises a more varied series of great incidents. The process of disruption in the German kingdom, never well consolidated, had begun with the great schism between North and South under Henry IV., and furnished one chief element in the quarrel between pope and emperor. During the first half of the twelfth century it worked more deeply, if not more widely, in the rivalry between Saxon and Swabian. Under Frederick I. it necessitated the remodelling of the internal arrangement of Germany, the breaking up of the national or dynastic dukedoms. Under Frederick II. it broke up the empire itself, to be reconstituted in a widely different form and with altered aims and pretensions under Rudolf of Hapsburg. This is by itself a most eventful history, in which the varieties of combinations and alternations of public feeling abound with new results and illustrations of the permanence of ancient causes.
