Топики по английскому

UNIT 9

^UNIVERSITIES

In the reign of Henry III the English universities began to exercise a definite influence on the intellectual life of Englishmen. Of the early history of Cambridge little or nothing is known, but enough remains to enable us to trace the early steps by which Oxford gained its intellectual glory. The foundation of the great schools which were named Universities was everywhere throughout Europe a special mark of the new impulse that Christendom had got from the Crusades. A new desire for study sprang up in the West from its contact with the more cultured East. Travellers brought back the first rudiments of physical and mathematical science from the schools of Cordova or Bagdad. In the twelfth century a classical revival restored Caesar and Vergil to list of monastic studies. The scholastic philosophy sprang up in the schools of Paris. The Roman law was revived by the scholars of Bologna. The long mental inactivity of feudal Europe broke up like ice before a summer's sun. Wandering teachers crossed sea and land to spread the new power of knowledge. The same spirit of restlessness, of inquiry, of impatience with the older traditions of mankind, either local or intellectual, that had hurried half Christendom to the tomb of its Lord, crowded the roads with thousands of young scholars hurrying to the chosen Universities where teachers were gathered together. Poor as they were, sometimes even of servile race, the wandering scholars who lectured in every monastery were hailed as "masters". Many teachers were foes worthy of the menaces of parliament, of the thunders of the Church. The teaching of a single Lombard was of note enough in England to draw down the prohibition of a king. When Vacarius, probably a guest in the court of Archbishop Theobald opened lectures on the Civil Law at Oxford, he was silenced by the King, who was then at war with the Church, and jealous of the power which the destruction of the royal authority was throwing into Theobald's hands.

UNIT 8

^{THE THIRD CRUSADE}

The great rulers of Christendom all "took the cross" for a Holy War against Saladin. The Third Crusade was a Crusade of the princes. They seemed ill fated from the start. Henry II died at Chi-non before he could set out. Frederick Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, was drowned in an heroic attempt to swim a mountain torrent in Galicia. And when Philip Augustus of France and Richard Coeur de Lion eventually sailed for Palestine in 1189 they quarrelled. Philip made an excuse of illness and returned to France to set about raiding Richard's Duchy of Normandy. Richard was regarded as the perfect hero of Chivalry. The organization and discipline of his army and fleet were remarkable. By the seizure of two Saracene fortresses, Richard cut Saladin's Empire in two, but he could not defeat Saladin alone as he quarrelled with the other crusading princes.

The third Crusade failed. Looking back on the task the Crusaders had set themselves, it seems surprising that they ever won a single victory. They were fighting in a strange country thousands of miles away from their base, with no organization for the transport of supplies and reinforcements. The enemy, the Turks, were fine fighters. So were the Christian knights, individually; but they were utterly undisciplined, hi theory all knights were equal: a knight felt no obligations to obey orders; he joined the army when he pleased and left it when he pleased. The great princes who led the Crusade quarrelled. They were lacking in the blind faith which drove the mass of the Crusaders on. Even this inspiration of faith which had brought the knights flocking at Urban's call in 1095 died down in the later Crusades. For another three hundred years the Saracens held North Africa and part of Spain; in 1453 they captured Constantinople and dominated the Balkans; in 1683 they advanced through Hungary and were only checked at Vienna; as late as the seventeenth century they were a danger in the Mediterranean. The Holy Land remained in the hands of the Saracens until 1917. Neither land nor peace were gained by the Crusaders of the twelfth century.

UNIT 7

THE MILITARY ORDERS

Chivalry found its mission in the Crusades. They enabled the knights to combine the ideals of fighting and of doing God's will — ideals which seemed incompatible.

At Jerusalem, the Holy City, three great orders of knights were founded to combine military and religious activities. The first of these, the order of St John, was founded to tend the sick and shelter pilgrims in the hospitals of Jerusalem. The Knights of St John (Hospitallers) were monks as well as soldiers. They took the monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. They wore over their armour a black robe with a white cross on the shoulder. The second order, that of the Teutonic knights, was of similar constitution, but only open to Germans.

A more famous order was the third, the Knights Templar, who were so called from their house by the Temple in Jerusalem and were both the most ascetic of monks and the most implacable of warriors. They wore a white robe with a red cross. For two centuries they were the very flower of Chivalry, until their pride and jealousy of outsiders led to their being suppressed with horrible cruelty in 1312. It was said that Chivalry ended with the Templars.

Chivalry was at its best in the military orders. It must not be imagined that the world in the twelfth century was full of "very perfect gentle knights". Chivalry only concerned the ruling classes, and even the men who should have been its leaders were often far from chivalrous in practice. They were cruel; Bohemund, the leader of the First Crusade, sent to the Greek Emperor a boat loaded with noses and thumbs sliced off the Turks. They were idle; Peter of Blois, who was of an exaggerating turn of speech, said: "In these days of ours the Order of Chivalry is mere disorder. For he is accounted strongest and most illustrious among knights whose oaths are most hateful, and, who despises God, criticises the clergy and defies the Church". All this might be said of the soldiers of the last Great War; it would not alter the fact that they were heroes. No man attains his ideal. It is well to remember that the knights of the twelfth century were men.

UNIT 6

^{TWELFTH-CENTURY IDEALS}

Chivalry was an ideal. There can be no date for the "foundation" of Chivalry. The word meant the spirit of a rider (chevalier) or knight. The training of a knight began when he was seven, when the boy usually entered the service of a lord and his lady as a page. His education would be in the hands of the women of the household. At the age of fourteen the page would become a squire; he would now be in constant attendance on his lord, tending his war-horses and his armour, following him on his campaigns, and being trained in the use of lance and shield and battle-axe. At the age of twenty-one the squire was considered worthy to be "dubbed" a knight. The ceremony was long and solemn. He would spend a night in fasting and prayer; in the morning, after being bathed and robed symbolically in white, he would make his Communion and take the vows of Chivalry. He would swear to hear the Mass every day, to give his life, if need be, in defence of the Faith, to protect the oppressed and to honour women. The oath taken, he would be invested with the arms of a knight, then, clad in coat of mail, cuirass, armlets, gauntlets and spurs, he would receive an accolade (three taps of the sword on the shoulder or a blow of the fist on the neck) which would make him a knight. Usually after the ceremony a tournament was held. This was the great sport of Chivalry. A clearing of level grass would be chosen at either end of which the opposing knights would take their stand. After a blare of trumpets, heralds would announce to the lord on his dais and to the assembly gathered round, the titles of the combatants, who meanwhile would be closing their visors and fixing their lady's favours — glove, scarf or trinket — in their helms. At a signal from the trumpets the knights would charge down the lists with lances couched to meet with terrific impact in the middle. The skilful knight would unhorse his vis-a-vis without wounding him. More often, the lances of both sides would be splintered and the knights canter back to their squires and begin the joust again.

Fighting, in tournament or in real war, was the whole occupation of a medieval knight. Their fighting was governed by strict rules. The order of Chivalry would have degenerated into a mere society of free-booters if the Crusades had not come to give it a golden opportunity of realising its ideal.

UNIT 5

^{WILLIAM I}

After 1071 William's hold on England was fairly secure. The Welsh and the Scots gave him little trouble. Scandinavian rulers continued to look upon England with acquisitive eyes but the ever-present threat of another Viking invasion never quite materialised. To the end of his reign most of William's attention was taken up by war and diplomacy on the Continent. Normandy was his homeland and far more vulnerable to sudden attack than was his island kingdom. Several of William's neighbours were alarmed by his new power and took every opportunity to, diminish it. At their head was King Philip of France. His best opportunities were provided by William's eldest son Robert. Recognized as the heir to Normandy, he had never been allowed to enjoy either money or power. From 1078 onwards he became involved in a series of intrigues against his farther. In quarrels between the king of France and the duke of Normandy the natural battlefield was the Vexin, a disputed territory lying between Normandy and Paris. The county of Main, which William had conquered in 1063, played a similar role in hostilities between Normandy and Anjou. It remained a bone of contention for the next two generations. Thus already in William's reign it is possible to see the political pattern which was to dominate the next century: the intermingling of family dissension and frontier dispute. The garrison of the French fortress made a raid into Normandy. William revenged and while his troops sacked it he received the injury from which he died. Robert was in rebellion and chose to remain at the court of King Philip. His brother William dutifully was in attendance at his father's bedside.

UNIT 4

THE NORMAN CONQUEST

In that day of small feudal states, Normandy counted as a great European power. William prepared the way for his invasion of England by propaganda and diplomacy ably conducted in many countries. The French-speaking feudal world was eager to fight under the great chief.

The army that landed at Pevensey was not a feudal levy. William had no power under feudal law to call out his vassals to a campaign which must last longer than forty days. But many of the barons and knights had voluntarily engaged themselves to serve under his flag. William and his followers were building a fleet of transports during the spring and summer of 1066, for it was essential to carry across not only the armoured men but the trained war-horses.

William's army was not great. Its strength lay in its training and equipment rather than its size. Modern historians reckon that the expedition did not exceed 12, 000 men, of whom less than half were cavalry. It is certain that the number of English knights did not exceed 5000. Thus, that a country of a million and a half people was subdued, robbed and permanently held down by so small a band, shows the political and military backwardness of the English system.

There was also an element of luck by which William conquered at Hastings. Harold, the king of England, determined to give William battle at once. Since infantry fighting against cavalry must stand on the defensive, Harold resisted William from a well-chosen position on the top of the hill six miles north-west of Hastings. The hill, afterwards crowned by the village and Abbey of Battle, then bore no dwelling and no name. The storming of that hill proved a day's task almost beyond the power of the invaders, in spite of their great superiority in arms and tactics.

The English, leaving their horses in the rear, still fought on foot. The Normans fought from the saddle, casting with the spear and striking down with the sword. But even the shock tactics of their splendid cavalry proved unable to destroy the shield-wall on the top of the hill without the aid of another arm. The Normans as warriors had not only learnt the new but remembered the old tactics. When night fell, Harold and his warriors around him were lying dead on the hill-top.

UNIT 3

THE AGE OF THE SETTLEMENTS

There is no near-contemporary source of Anglo-Saxon origin. The reason is obvious enough: the Germanic peoples were illiterate during their first two centuries in Britain. So their early fortunes can only be glimpsed through the hostile eyes of Britons, through the ill-informed eyes of foreigners, and by means of their own half-remembered traditions. Until the late sixth century, informed guesswork must make do for history.

Archaeology provides the first clue, for it shows that there were Germanic warriors in Britain some years before 410. Late Roman cemeteries, especially along the Lower Thames Valley from Oxfordshire to the Essex coast, have produced burials with belt-fittings of a type worn by Frankish and Saxon mercenaries in the Roman army. If such troops were settled in Britain, as they certainly were in Gaul, the mid-fifth-century invaders may have joined relatives who had come two or three generations back. Sunken huts with gable-posts are characteristic of English settlement in the fifth and sixth centuries, and over two hundred of these have been found at a huge site near Mucking on the Thames estuary. It has been suggested that this complex housed mercenaries who were settled in 400 to guard the approach to London. If so, the continuous history of Anglo-Saxon settlement begins under Roman rule. The English of later centuries dated their ancestors' arrival some decades after this, and it does seem to have been from the 400s onwards that Germanic settlers arrived in large numbers. Before considering this remarkable process, it must be asked who the invaders were and what they were like.

UNIT 2

^{CELTIC RELIGION}

Of Iberian and Celtic religion we know next to nothing save what little can be deduced from the fairy folklore of Celts in Christian times. Local gods and goddesses haunted particular springs, caves, mountains, forests and other natural objects, and easily became the local fairies and water-spirits of later times. The most detailed account .of the old Celtic religion by a contemporary was written by Julius Caesar. His imagination was stirred by the power of the organized hierarchy of priestsc the Druids — strong in Gaul and strongest in Britain. They had all education in their hands and administered justice in the courts, and made a disobedient layman an outlaw. "Persons are held impious and accursed; men will not meet or speak with them", writes Caesar. The power of the Druids was distasteful to the Roman patrician, for Rome had not yet bowed her neck to the hierarchies from the East. "All the Gauls", he observes, "are as a nation much given to superstition, and, therefore, persons afflicted by severe illness or involved in wars and danger either make human sacrifices or vow to do so, and use the Druids as their ministers in these ceremonies". "The Germans", he adds, "differ much from the Gauls in these customs. For they have no Druids to preside over their religion". And if Caesar had known the Anglo-Saxons and the Norsemen he might have said the same of them. Thus, the paganism of the Celts in France and Britain was a religion of fear and priestcraft as compared to the paganism of those other barbarian races destined to wrest from them the supremacy of the island.

UNIT 1

THE COMING OF THE CELTS

From the seventh to the third centuries before Christ, the Celtic tribes, originally occupying North-western Europe, were moving across the Continent in many different directions. The Celts, in their earlier day, showed as much vigour in migration as any race that came after them. One great part of them settled in France and became an important element in the racial content of the Gaulish nation. A southern wing settled in the valley of the Po, put an end to the Etruscan hegemony in Italy, and about 387 ВС sacked Rome. Others pushed into Spain, others into the Balkans. During the same centuries a northern wing of this great world movement overran Britain and imposed Celtic rule and language on its inhabitants. The Celtic invaders of Britain came in successive tribal waves, each with a dialect of its own. At least two big wave* of Celtic invasion can be distinguished: first the Gaels or Goidels, still found in Ireland and Scotland; secondly the Cymri and Brythons still found in Wales. Among the Brythonic peoples were the Belgea and other tribes whom Caesar found spread over Southern England. These Britons seem to have been already settled in the island that is still called by their name, at the time when a Greek traveller recorded his visit to the "Pretanic isle" in the days of Alexander of Macedon. The Celts who overran so much of Europe in the last six centuries before Christ were tall, light-haired warriors, skilful in ironwork, which was then replacing bronze, and in arts and crafts of their own, much admired by modern archaeologists.