w in the far distance a huge cross that
seemed to beckon as the voices later called to Joan of Arc. The Crusades
were a time when wars were holy because they were waged for a holy
thing. Six hundred years, so Chesterton tells us, had elapsed since
Christianity had arisen and covered the world like a dust-storm, when
there arose 'a copy and a contrary: the creed of the Moslems'; in a
sense Islam was 'like a Christian heresy.' Historians, so he thinks,
have not understood the Crusades. They have taken them to be
aristocratic expeditions with a Cross as the prey instead of a deer,
whereas really they were 'unanimous risings.' 'The Holy Land was much
nearer to a plain man's house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearer
than Runnymede.' But I am not sure that Chesterton has scored over the
orthodox historians who made a good deal out of the fact that Crusade
had a close affinity to _Crux_, which word meant a cross that was not
necessarily bound up with Calvary.

In dealing with the Middle Ages, he propounds the proposition that the
best way to understand history is to read it backwards--that is, if we
are to understand the Magna Charta we must be on speaking terms with
Mary. 'If we really want to know what was strongest in the twelfth
century, it is no bad way to ask what remained of it in the fourteenth.'
This is a very excellent method, as it demonstrates what were the
historical events and what were the mere local and temporary.

Becket was one of those queer people of history who was half a priest
and half a statesman, and he had to deal with a king who was half a king
and half a tyrant. Every schoolboy knows about Becket, and delights to
read of the wild ride to Canterbury, which began with the spilling of
Becket's brains and ended with the spilling of the King's blood by his
tomb.

For Chesterton, Becket 'may have been too idealistic: he wished to
protect the Church as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules
might seem to him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to
the king as capricious as those of Fairyland.' The tremendously
suggestive thing of the whole story of Becket is that Henry II submitted
to being thrashed at Becket's tomb. It was like 'Cecil Rhodes submitting
to be horsewhipped by a Boer as an apology for some indefensible death
incidental to the Jameson Raid.' Undoubtedly Chesterton has got at the
kernel of the story that made an Archbishop a saint (a rare occurrence)
and an Engl