9
Some Phases of Evolution of European Life before the
Industrial Revolution
We have now glanced around all the chief language groups in Europe, and in the course of this rapid survey have noted that whereas the peoples of Romance and Teutonic speech have built up the organization known as the nation-state, in most cases on a basis of linguistic unity, the peoples of the Slavonic regions, with the partial exception of Bohemia, have hardly achieved this. The intermingling of peoples and the difference of tradition between town and country over wide areas are in part the cause of this, but it has also been suggested that, in the east of Europe, we have still surviving an earlier stage of the process of settlement in the cleared forest than farther west, while in the south-east we note the persistence of elements still hardly settled at all. It will therefore repay us if we now try to make a rapid survey of the evolution of the process of settlement with its variants in different regions and of the indications of persistence of different stages of the general process in various parts, chiefly of Eastern Europe.
All the evidence we have goes to show that after the Würm Ice Age the first European peoples were hunters apparently spreading up from the western Mediterranean basin. To them must be added the hunters who seem to have spread along the loess westwards. These two groups were bearers of the Aurignacian and Solutrean cultures of anthropologists. Hunting has remained a feature of European life ever since, but time has brought too many changes in the hunter's life and position to make it profitable to discuss possibilities of social survivals from so long ago. The partial regrowth of the glaciers (Bühl period) modified the hunting life; and associated with this cold-cycle civilization (Magdalenian Age of the anthropologists) was the great development of pictorial and sculptural art which has so astonished the world since its rediscovery. As the cold passed away, this time definitively, the sinking of the west converted Britain and Ireland into islands, and so brought maritime influences far into the Continent, with the result that forests spread far and wide with wolf, bear, boar, wild cats, and birds of prey to dispute them for a time with man. The zone of loess and some wind-swept or calcareous areas near the sea or on the hills remained relatively clear of forests and dry enough for occupation by man, and on these areas men practised the art of herding animals, moving from pasture to pasture, as circumstances required or, increasingly, with the cycle of the seasons. There were possibly already cultivators beginning to grow barley as a supplement to herding or hunting. We should, however, be careful not to argue that the beginning of cultivation necessarily implies settling down in one place; the Vlachs often sow and reap a barley crop without making more than a very temporary sojourn.
The development of civilization was not purely and simply a development of herding from hunting, nor was the herding purely analogous in social features to that of the tribe on the grasslands. The development was accompanied by differentiation, and it seems clear that herding was very early carried on with much greater restriction of movement than on the grass-lands and desert borders of Asia. There was quite early a tendency to a regular cycle of seasonal change (transhumance) rather than to broad wandering, and our territorial instinct is very old.
With this statement properly goes another to the effect that some kind of cultivation became a supplement to the herder's life almost at the outset, and we may further surmise that some part of the population would soon remain near the more cultivable lands to guard them. Thus restriction of seasonal wandering to a part of the population is another very old feature of life, one judges, in many, though not in all parts of Europe. In the Val d'Anniviers, so clearly marked that territorial disputes could hardly arise, and at the same time freed from ravages of wild beasts, practically the whole population still moves up and down with the change of the seasons, though it has permanent buildings at each of its four stations. Reference has already been made to the Vlach wanderers of the Balkan Peninsula, and one might also speak of the Lapps, whose movements along the moorlands of Scandinavia were formerly a source of frontier trouble between Sweden and Norway.
With the development of the phase of civilization called Neolithic in Europe goes the making of pottery, which implies tendencies to live in one place at least for a time, the utilizing of particular types of stone from particular spots suggesting a long-continued exploitation of the special source, the making of very definite settlements on the Swiss lakes, and the developing of crop-growing and weaving and so on by their inhabitants. Both settlement and trade seem indicated, but it is most probable that many of the lake-dwellers also used the spring pastures on the hills. The distribution of the great stone monuments and several other matters indicate the growth of long-distance sea trade about the end of the Neolithic Age and in the period when the use of copper and bronze was spreading round the coasts of Europe; and a recently discovered Mesopotamian tablet dated 2800 B.C. gives facts about tribute paid to Babylon from tin lands beyond the Great Sea (Spain). Development of settlement must have continued in the Bronze Age, still mainly on the naturally open lands rather than in the cleared forest, and it is a notable fact that, save in a very few areas with special explanations available, the regions of megaliths do not show examples of the kind of village, with strips once owned in common, which is so characteristic of regions of cleared forest, though not the only type there.
The hardening of bronze was one of the most important facts affecting man's advance in the Bronze Age, and we have abundant indications (see papers in archaeological and anthropological journals by H. J. E. Peake) of man's ability to attack the forest seriously ere bronze gave place to iron. The attack on the forest was undoubtedly redoubled when man acquired iron weapons, and so the Early Iron Age witnessed extensive settlement in forest clearings in Europe north of the Alps, and with that went increase of corn-growing. South of the Alps the warming of the climate after the Ice Age had helped to reduce the forest, especially in view of the large stretches of limestone and the sharp slopes which have always hindered regrowth of forest once destroyed.
The Mediterranean region, by reason of the long summer drought, has become with the establishment of its present climate less fit for pasturing of animals and more suited to the goat than to cattle or sheep. As a result of this the destructive goat has reduced the forests and hindered their regrowth. The difficulty of stock-raising encouraged efforts towards cultivation, which is certainly very old in the Mediterranean region, and has passed through several phases that need elucidation. It seems probable that barley cultivation was established very early, and bee and fruit culture were gradually gathered around it, the olive proving invaluable as a substitute for animal fat. But ere the olive could be grown in quantity there had to be a good deal of organization, for it does not begin to bear till it is almost eight years old, and is in full bearing when it is nearing its thirtieth year. To wait for the olive, therefore, meant possession of some reserves and assurance of food supplies, such as imported grain, ere much land could be turned into olive groves. War and unsettlement worked against olive culture, for the risks of destruction of an olive grove were then serious, and the consequences disastrous.
If, however, olive culture was, on the one hand, the result of a measure of peace and prosperity, it was also in most cases the presage of further growth of prosperity; the harvest was reasonably assured and immensely valuable, especially as it could be transported far and wide by sea. The relation of olive culture to the classical period in Greece is well known. We seem to have grounds for associating city growth in the Mediterranean with trade and the spread of large-scale olive culture as well as with the question of defence.
Both north and south of the Alps the dependence of man on cereals after he gave up his milk and flesh diet seems to have made him desire salt, and the Early Iron Age settlements of Gaul are closely related to sources of salt, while the Mediterranean coast-lands had ample opportunities of salt getting. The pig had been domesticated by this time, and the salting of bacon and fish gave a reserve for the winter, but it has been claimed that salt was also in request for forms of porridge, &c. In thinking of the early settlements we should remember that north of the Alps there was perpetual danger lurking in the dark forest, while in the south there were the rough goatherds of the mountains.
In the last millennium before Christ the worsening of the Scandinavian climate drove peoples southwards towards Gaul, and thus led to a growth of hill-fortress towns, of which the supreme examples were Alesia, Gergovia, and Bibracte, and from Gaul the building of these fortress towns spread, with sea commerce, up the west coast of Britain, where Tre'r Ceiri on Yr Eifl in Carnarvonshire furnishes us with one of the best examples of this type of settlement of the Iron Age or Romano-British times.
For the purposes of this sketch it is not necessary to go into great detail about the Roman efforts, but we should note that within the bounds of their Empire they spread wheat cultivation, road communications, and their legal system, and that along with this seems to have gone a cheapening of iron. All these changes helped to knit the people to the soil, to make neighbourhood take the place of kinship as a basis of association, to root a language in the people's hearts. It is the men who 'lacte et carne vivunt', as Caesar puts it, who organize on a kinship basis, move from place to place, and lack the written records which do so much for language fixation.
We thus see in Gaul villages of various types in regions of differing history and opportunity, but pre-Roman fortress towns and Roman cities between them networking the country and related to roads built or adapted by the conquering engineers, and we note the implanting of linguistic features that not all the shocks of later disruptions have contrived to uproot. In Britain again are villages of varying types, pre-Roman or Romano-British fortress towns, chiefly on the west coast headlands, Roman cities for the most part speedily ruined, and Roman roads. The difference in the vitality of the cities is to be correlated with the difference as to language; the Roman elements in our language are for the most part the result of reintroduction later on. The Roman element in Welsh is usually allowed to be important.
If the spread of the rural Franks and of the Anglo-Saxons into the erstwhile Roman domains led to the submergence of the old cities and to much village foundation, there is at any rate a growing opinion that it did not destroy all continuity in either Gaul or Britain, that a good deal in our rural life goes back, as above hinted, to the late Bronze Age. The system of the manor under which the villagers give service to a military protector is too easily mixed up with the village system in discussions. The manor, with complex origins, is characteristic of post-Roman days of movement and strife. The civilizing element promoting agriculture and the law is furnished by the Church, which, with the centuries, spread its work over the Rhine, beyond the bounds of the Empire, right away to the limits of Europe-of-the-Sea, that is of the lands near Baltic or Mediterranean, or west of a north-south line near the east ends of those seas.
With the settling down which heralded the Middle Ages after the Dark Centuries of movement and war, we thus find the following broad facts. In the Mediterranean, where fruit culture and the city-state and trade were already old, that type of life reasserted itself even though the division of life on the north and the south sides (characteristic long before in Phoenician times) of the sea made grave difficulties.
In Spain the conflict between Islam and Christians inhibited the development of both and delayed everything. In both cases the military organization was unhealthily important, and the Muslim of the south kept much of their old social scheme based on the tribe, whereas they should have been adapting themselves to the rich land of Andalusia which they held. The result of the inhibitions made the Muslim far more of a misfit in the Andalusian garden than were the Christians on the heights of northern Spain, where seasonal movement of flocks and herds (transhumance) is still very important. The Muslim of the south thus gradually declined both in value and in influence, and though in earlier times they had been far more cultured than their Christian foemen, they had dropped far behind in organization before their subjugation in the fifteenth century. One should nevertheless bear in mind possible valuable survivals from the Muslim in matters of detail or of individual work. In Gaul cultivation had spread and had improved under monastic leadership; markets were growing under protection of the cathedrals, and were becoming the town centres that have persisted as the highly characteristic market towns of the Paris basin. After years of rivalry with Frankish dialects the old Roman heritage of language triumphed with some compromises, and became the langue d'oïl, the speech of the Paris basin and upper Burgundy, and the progenitor of standard modern French. In Britain the rural element seems to have predominated until Gaulish influences again became strong in the eleventh century.
In the lands beyond the Rhine the abbeys were promoting agriculture, with towns growing some time after the corresponding phases were carried through in Gaul, and with the power of the war lord very strongly marked. In the Slavonic lands the phases of settlement and town growth are later still with the church and the war lord in close association, as is exemplified both by the Teutonic Knights in East Prussia and by the inclusion of the cathedral in the castle precincts in Prague and Cracow.
Growth of market towns and of communications, still largely mule tracks no doubt, was leading to fixation of language as discussed in an earlier chapter. One may mention, incidentally, that old mule tracks persist on lands in old-fashioned corners like the Channel Islands, where they are very numerous, and may form rings around the demesnes of the more important houses. The growth of markets was bringing neighbours together, weakening dialectal differences, and so helping to fuse local groups into nations on a basis of common language and common tradition expressed in growing poetry and prose in the evolving languages. Against these influences must be set that of the Roman heritage of universalism so vigorously represented by the Church, which the Holy Roman Empire tried so hard to imitate.
The poverty of the villagers and their weakness in face of the dangers of the forest and its wanderers, outlaws, and adventurers is an outstanding fact of the development of the next phase. There was insufficient freedom for agricultural experiment save to some extent in the monastery gardens, and insufficient knowledge for useful discussion, so cultivation methods remained in the grip of custom, with the modification due to the spread of the three-field system. Even the fallows could not keep the land up to a proper grade of fertility.
So traditional cultivation on lands owned or worked in common by the villagers was ever under threat of disruption, and doubtless the severities of climate and plague in the fourteenth century contributed their quota to the disintegration of the old mode of life. The complaint of diminished fertility made itself heard far and wide, and the end of the Middle Ages witnessed the breakdown of the old village system in the west. Trade and the voyages of discovery furnished supplementary sources of wealth, and the beginnings of larger industry grew out of this. In East-Central Europe change was delayed partly because there was still much forest land to be adapted, but largely because of the absorption of the people in struggles against Turk and Tatar. Even there, however, the old village system decayed in the end, and it is only in central Russia that it has maintained itself among the Slavonic peoples, who, almost to this day, from one point of view, may be looked upon as colonists spreading in the forests and their borders in Muscovy.
Of the lands north of the Mediterranean, France was most favoured agriculturally, and owed most to the Roman heritage of unity, and here grew la grande nation, while farther east national growth was delayed largely by attempts at an imperial unity, worked up as a device for defence against the Turk and Tatar. National growth in isolated or semi-isolated lands like the English plain, Holland, Sweden, and the central Scottish lowland was also a feature, while the diverse outlooks of the diverse coasts of Ireland and the weakness of that country's interior made the Green Isle the tragic type of the island which is so generally disunited.
Villagers with common lands gave place, with many a struggle, to landholding by proprietors with labourers under them, and if in Britain the labourer became landless and so fitted himself to become machine-fodder in the Industrial Revolution, in France he struggled to keep his link with the sacred soil of that sunny land, and ultimately won his position of ownership in the Revolution of the end of the eighteenth century. This change made itself felt as far as the Rhine, beyond which the peasant still remained subject to heavy seigniorial dues. It is claimed that during the recent war there has been a great move towards peasant proprietorship or something akin to it in the lands near the eastern border of Europe-of-the-Sea, carrying eastward, as it were, the work done one hundred years ago in France.
Facts about decline of the old village communities are legion, and cannot even be listed here, but attention may be drawn to the spread of root crops (for winter food for man and beast) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This helped materially to break down traditionalism, for it interfered with the old right of the villagers to free pasture of all the village cattle all over the stubble left after harvest: the lands with root crops had to remain enclosed. Of the new wealth brought in by individual proprietorship and root crops and other agricultural experiments, we have much evidence in the farmhouse buildings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; those of the years 1720-60 or so seem specially characteristic in Guernsey, Channel Islands. But the problem of fertility was not solved, even though leguminous crops were ploughed in and the chemical decomposition of the soil was speeded up by liming. Trade and long sea voyages loomed larger in the lives of the European peoples and industry grew ever larger, so that the urban element gained immensely in numbers and influence. We thus have a picture of the preface, as it were, to the Industrial Revolution, but another series of changes had been working to the same end.
The spread of the habit of sea trade from the Mediterranean to North-west Europe led to changes in the design and construction of ships. By the middle of the seventeenth century old difficulties about disease due to stinking bilge-water had largely been overcome, and ships were being built with better proportions for speed and manoeuvring, and in the early eighteenth century came the full adaptation of the fore-and-aft sail and the use of mahogany and other hard woods from the tropics for ship furniture, and so for house furniture too. With all this went increased size and speed of ships and ability to tack effectively, and so, broadly, to follow a course even if winds were variable. With all this new power and also the development of armaments, Europe found herself in a position to exploit the other parts of the earth inhabited by other races less well equipped. They gradually, nay almost suddenly, became the producers of raw materials, food-stuffs, and fertilizers for the vastly increasing populations of industrial Europe, which began to teem in the manufacturing cities when coal and steam machinery were added to the European equipment.
Along with this industrial development has gone the nationalist revival to which reference has already been made in several places, a cultural movement which in the nineteenth century became politically embittered, and which through its imperialistic outgrowths in England, Germany, France, and Russia has been a main factor of the recent war.