that period in
the tale of those two mighty friends, one of whom struck too hard and
slew the other. It may even have been so early as this that something
was judged in silence; and for the multitude rested on the Crown a
mysterious seal of insecurity like that of Cain, and of exile on the
English kings.

VIII

THE MEANING OF MERRY ENGLAND

The mental trick by which the first half of English history has been
wholly dwarfed and dehumanized is a very simple one. It consists in
telling only the story of the professional destroyers and then
complaining that the whole story is one of destruction. A king is at the
best a sort of crowned executioner; all government is an ugly necessity;
and if it was then uglier it was for the most part merely because it was
more difficult. What we call the Judges' circuits were first rather the
King's raids. For a time the criminal class was so strong that ordinary
civil government was conducted by a sort of civil war. When the social
enemy was caught at all he was killed or savagely maimed. The King could
not take Pentonville Prison about with him on wheels. I am far from
denying that there was a real element of cruelty in the Middle Ages; but
the point here is that it was concerned with one side of life, which is
cruel at the best; and that this involved more cruelty for the same
reason that it involved more courage. When we think of our ancestors as
the men who inflicted tortures, we ought sometimes to think of them as
the men who defied them. But the modern critic of mediaevalism commonly
looks only at these crooked shadows and not at the common daylight of
the Middle Ages. When he has got over his indignant astonishment at the
fact that fighters fought and that hangmen hanged, he assumes that any
other ideas there may have been were ineffectual and fruitless. He
despises the monk for avoiding the very same activities which he
despises the warrior for cultivating. And he insists that the arts of
war were sterile, without even admitting the possibility that the arts
of peace were productive. But the truth is that it is precisely in the
arts of peace, and in the type of production, that the Middle Ages stand
singular and unique. This is not eulogy but history; an informed man
must recognize this productive peculiarity even if he happens to hate
it. The melodramatic things currently called mediaeval are much older and
more universal; such as the sport of tournament or the use of