Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/232

 of the rightful king; the existence of the .king de facto a? a bar to the recognition of the king de jure; the solemn character of the ties that unite the baronage to the head, which they are determined to disown, but will not disown without a formal legal sentence; the parallels furnished by the cession of Edward II and Richard II, the curious pedantic circumstantiality of processes which, before they reached the stage of reality, had cost the lives of thousands; all these mark not merely the legal character and instinct of Englishmen, but the characteristic of the long medieval centuries, the conscience that war is justifiable only by law.

If we turn to Germany, the great struggle of the Investitures is in its outer aspect a struggle about legal forms: there were deeper causes at work, the national schism between Saxony and Swabia, caused by the legal wrongs which the Saxons believed themselves to have endured from Henry III, and the religious schism which arose from the rival ambitions, personal and ideal, of Henry IV and the popes; but the bone of contention was a legal claim. The struggle of the Welf and the Hohenstaufen was a legal struggle; although the weaker went to the wall, his cause was capable of very definite defence; the sentence under which he fell, although unrighteous, was formally legal. Other illustrations are furnished by the dealings of the Hohenstaufen with the popes; the great house fells by manœuvres and expedients of much the same sort as those by which it had destroyed the Welfs: the papacy expands the principles on which it had claimed the inheritance of the countess Matilda, and at the same time formulates the claims by which in the fourteenth century it was to cripple the central power of Europe and reduce, itself an exile, the rival influence to the shadow of a shade.

Let these, however, suffice for the pattern wars; the same characteristics belong in varying intensity to all the minor quarrels, down to the lowest grades of recognised private wars; war for the right of a bridge-toll, a mill or a pigeon-cote. War was, in one aspect, a sublime ordeal, but, like the ordeal, it was attended with all the forms and ceremonies of law: public war was an ordeal resorted to when all inferior tribunals had failed