Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/229

 great treasury of legal chicanery, but still a refuge against overbearing violence. The position of both empire and papacy is historically maintained by a public sense of law and right.

But perhaps the field in which the most abundant illustrations of the thesis will be found is that in which a priori we should be least inclined to look for it; in the region of war; in the drum and trumpet territory in which, according to the new reading of history, so little can be found to indicate the growth of human thought or the development of national character and life. Medieval wars are, as a rule, wars of rights: they are seldom wars of unprovoked, never wars of absolutely unjustifiable, aggression; they are not wars of idea, of liberation, or of glory, or of nationality, or of propagandism. Ah, you will say to me, you are wrong there; how about the Crusades, how about the Norman Conquest, how about Scottish independence, how about Lewis of Bavaria and John XXII, how about the Hundred Years' War? Not one of these was simply a war of aggression which those who waged it felt it to be without justification, except perhaps the Norman Conquest; and we all know what an amount of special pleading was thought necessary to justify that. Do not mistake me: if I had meant to say that law and right were the ruling ideas of medieval politicians, I should have said so at first; but I could only have proved my thesis by showing that there was no war at all. There was war in abundance, public war and private war: the Temple of Janus could not have been shut for all those centuries, if it had been still standing and put to its mythical purpose. What was meant was not that men loved law, but that they did so far respect it as to wish to seem to have it always on their side. They did not attack their neighbours because they wanted glory; or because they could not bear rivalry, or because their neighbours' armies were too strong for their safety, or because their neighbours' armies were so ill equipped that they might be an easy conquest; but they alleged a legal claim or a legal grievance; and in the majority of cases really legal claims and really legal grievances. Of course, if law had been supreme, the wrong-doer would have yielded at once, the false claimant