John Mitchell Kemble

“ Disarmed, except when a jealous policy called for levies to be drafted into distant armies,—congregated into cities on the Roman plan, that they might forget the dangerous freedom of their forests,—attracted to share and emulate the feasts of the victors, that they might learn to abhor the hard but noble fare of a squalid liberty,—supported and encouraged in internal war, that union might not bring strength, and that the Roman slave-dealer might not lack the objects of his detestable traffic,—how should they develop the manly qualities on which the greatness of a nation rests? ”

“ Roman feelings, Roman views and modes of judging, the traditions of the empire and the city, the legislation of the emperors and the popes,—these were their sources both of opinion and action. The predominance of the kings must have appeared to them natural and salutary; the subordination of all men to their appointed rulers was even one of the doctrines of Christianity itself, as taught by the great apostle of the gentiles, and recommended by the example of the Saviour. ”

“ Without arms and discipline, and what is far more valuable than these, the spirit of self-reliance and faith in the national existence, the Britons perished as they stood: bowing to the inevitable fate, they passed only from one class of task-masters to another, and slowly mingled with the masses of the new conquerors, or fell in ill-conducted and hopeless resistance to their progress. ”

“ It would indeed be but slight philosophy to suppose that any one set of circumstances could account for the infinite variety which the history of towns presents: though there are features of resemblance common to them all, yet each has its peculiar story, its peculiar conditions of progress and decay; even as the children of one family, which bear a near likeness to each other, yet each has its own tale of joy and sorrow, of smiles and tears, of triumph and failure. ”

“ As a body the clergy in England were placed very high in the social scale: the valuable services which they rendered to their fellow-creatures,—their dignity as ministers and stewards of the mysteries of the faith,—lastly the ascetical course of life which many of them adopted, struck the imagination and secured the admiration of their rude contemporaries. ”

“ The wealth of the cultivator, that is, his superabundant bread, awakens the mechanic into existence; and the existence of the mechanic, speedily leading to the enterprise of the manufacturer, and the venture of the distributor, broker, merchant, or shopman, ultimately completes the growth of the town. It is unavoidable that the first mechanics—beyond the heroical weapon-smith on the one hand, and on the other the poor professors of such rude arts as the homestead cannot do without,—the wife that spins, the husbandman that hammers his own share and coulter—should be those who have no land ”

“ The giant march of commercial prosperity has crumbled into dust almost every trace of what our brave and good forefathers looked upon with pardonable pride: but the principles which animated them, still in a great degree regulate the lives of us their descendants; and if we exult in the conviction that our free municipal institutions are the safeguard of some of our most cherished liberties, let us remember those to whom we owe them, and study to transmit unimpaired to our posterity an inheritance which we have derived from so remote an ancestry. ”

“ The inhabitants of a potent and peaceful capital, who visit without an anxious thought the garden of the adjoining country, will faintly picture in their fancy the distress of the Romans; they shut or opened their gates with a trembling hand, beheld from the walls the flames of their houses, and heard the lamentations of their brethren, who were coupled together like dogs, and dragged away into distant slavery beyond the sea and the mountains. ”

“ The history of mediæval Europe show’s with what awful effect this tremendous power was wielded by unscrupulous popes and prelates, whenever it suited their purposes not to connive at marriages which, according to their teaching, were incestuous. But amidst the striking cases on record—the cases of kings and nobles—we look in vain for a true measure of the misery which these prohibitions must have entailed upon the humbler members of society, who possessed neither the influence to compel nor the wealth to purchase dispensations from an arbitrary and oppressive rule. ”

“ At one time terrified by the consciousness of sin, at another deluded by the cheap hope of ceremonial justification, the human race eagerly rushed to multiply the means of salvation, and franticly rejoiced in the establishment of a host of mediators between themselves and their crucified Redeemer, between the frightened but unconverted sinner, and his offended Lord and Maker. ”

“ Ridiculous as it would be to affirm that their influence was never exerted for mischievous purposes, or that this institution was always free from the imperfections and evils which belong to all human institutions, it would be still more unworthy of the dignity of history to affect to undervalue the services which they rendered to society. ”

“ Traitors and deserters they hang on trees; cowards, the unwarlike, and infamous of body they bury alive in mud and marsh, with a hurdle cast over them: the difference of the penalty has this intention as it were, that crimes should be made public, but infamous vices hidden, while being punished.... In the same councils also, princes are elected, to give law in the shires and villages. Each has a hundred comrades from among the people, both to advise him and add to his authority. ”

“ The existence of such a body as the English clergy could not possibly be ignored. As organized agents of a system which professed to exercise a right of rule over the most secret desires and motives of men,—as students distinguished by their knowledge, or remarkable for their piety,—as landlords, in the enjoyment of great wealth, and chiefs of numerous dependents,—lastly as advisers and ministers of the ruling class, or intermediaries in the intercourse with foreign states,—they formed a power whose claims to attention could not be neglected. ”

“ But it would have been too much to expect an impartial account of the events which led to the reformation of the Benedictine order in England; like Luther in the fifteenth, Dúnstán must be made the principal figure in the picture of the tenth century: throughout all great social struggles the protagonist stalks before us in gigantic stature,—glorious as an archangel, or terrible and hideous as Satan. ”

“ In countries which depend much upon the immediate produce of the soil for support, hunting is not a mere amusement to be purchased or rented by the rich as a luxury, but a very necessary means of increasing the supply of food; and where coal-mines have not been worked, the forest alone or the turf-heap can furnish the means of securing warmth, as indispensable a necessary of life as bread or flesh: we have seen moreover that it was essential to the comfort of a Saxon family to possess a right of masting cattle in the neighbouring woods. ”

“ Looking to the hill, crowned with its picturesque ruin, he sees the mansion of a noble citizen united with himself in zealous obedience to an equal law,—the peer who in the higher, or the burgess who in the lower house of parliament, consults for the weal of the community, and derives his own value and importance most from the trust reposed in him by his fellow-townsmen. ”

“ The power of the national institutions was too general, too deeply rooted, to be shaken by the efforts of a class; nor does it appear that that class itself attempted at any time an undue exercise of authority. One ill-advised duke did indeed raise a fierce rebellion by his misgovernment; but even here national feeling was probably at work, and the Northumbrians rose less against the bad ruler, than the intrusive Westsaxon: the interests of Morcar’s family were more urgent than the crimes of Tostig. ”

“ Nay, when the re-awakened spirit of self-government grew strong, and the whole mighty mass of mediæval society heaved and tossed with the working of this all-pervading leaven, we have even seen Seigneurs aiding their serf-townsmen to swear and maintain a “Communa,”—that institution so detested and savagely persecuted by popes, barons and bishops,—so hypocritically blamed, but so lukewarmly pursued by kings, who found it their gain to have the people on their side against the nobles [809] . ”

“ The condition of a serf or an outlaw from poverty is an abnormal one, but only so in a Christian community. In fact it seems to me that the State neither contemplates the existence of the poor, nor cares for it: the poor man’s right to live is derived from the moral and Christian, not from the public law: so little true is the general assertion that the poor man has a right to be maintained upon the land on which he was born. ”

“ They then, in many synods, decreed a bót for many human misdeeds; and in many synod-books they wrote, here one doom, there another.
“Then I, Ælfred the king, gathered these together, and commanded many of those which our forefathers held, and which seemed good to me, to be written down; and many which did not seem good to me, I rejected by the counsel of my witan, and commanded them in other wise to be holden; but much of my own I did not venture to set down in writing, for I knew not how much of it might please our successors. ”

“ They transact no business either of a public or private nature, without their weapons. But it is not the custom for any one to begin wearing them, before the state has approved of him as likely to be an efficient citizen. Then, in the public meeting itself, either one of the chiefs, or his father or a kinsman, decorates the youth with a shield and javelin. This is their Toga; this is the first dignity of their youth: before this they appear part of a household,—after it, of a state.”
Such then was the nature of a Teutonic parliament as Tacitus had learnt that it existed in his time ”

“ Every Poor Law is a protest against some wrong done: and in proportion to the wrong is the energy of the protest itself. Do not interfere with industry, and it will be very safe to leave poverty to take care of itself. It is quite possible to conceive a state of things in which crime and poverty shall be really convertible ideas, but of this the history of the world as yet has given us no example.
1007. The Roman poor-law was, consequently upon the Roman imperial institutions, of a strange, exceptional and most dangerous character. ”

“ The buildings of a centralized society are as little calculated for his use as their habits and institutions: as well might it have been proposed to him to substitute the jurisdiction of the praetor urbanus for the national tribunal of the folcmót. The spirit of life is totally different: as different are all the social institutions, and all the details which arise from these and tend to confirm and perpetuate them.
Nevertheless we cannot doubt that the existence of the British and Roman cities did materially influence the mode and nature of the German settlements ”

“ In our own day, when subdivision of labour has been carried to an unheard of extent, when property follows the natural law of accumulation in masses, and society numbers the proletarian as an inevitable unit among its constituents, the question presents itself in a threatening and dangerous form, with difficulty surrounding it on every side, and anarchy scowling in the background, hardly to be appeased or vanquished. ”

“ In this peaceable disposition Agricola saw the readiest means of producing a complete and radical subjection to Rome; and on this basis he formed his plan of rendering resistance powerless. He entirely relinquished the forcible method of his predecessors and applied himself to break down the national spirit by the spreading of foreign arts and luxuries among the people; judging rightly that the seductive allurements of ease and cultivation would ere long prove more efficient and less costly instruments than the constant and dangerous exercise of military coercion. ”

“ The lords were too weak, the people too strong, for a system like that of the French nobles and their towns ever to have become settled here; nor had our city populations, like the Gallic provincials, the habit and use of slavery. The first settlers on a noble’s land may have been unfree; serfs and oppressed labourers from other estates may have been glad to take refuge among them from taskmasters more than ordinarily severe; but in this unmixed state they did not long remain. There is no doubt that freemen gradually united with them under the lord’s protection or in his alliance ”