CHAPTER III

THE TRANSITION FROM THE CLASSICAL TO THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD.

ANCIENT civilisation used to be considered as the direct parent of modern society, with nothing between them but a chaos of merely negative lapse of time, as is sufficiently indicated by the name given to the latter period-the Middle Ages.

But it is now recognised that this supposed chaos had an order of its own, and was an integral and necessary part of the evolution of primitive into modern life. And it may here be said that the close resemblance on many points between the pre-classical period of antiquity, the epoch of the Homeric poems, and the

Middle Ages is very noteworthy. We have now to inquire into the transition which brought about the change from the one system to the other.

First as to the economical side. The classical system of production was founded on chattel-slavery, the mediæval on serfdom, and it was the change from the one labour-system to the other which was the special characteristic of the transition.

Agriculture was the dominating industry of the classical world, and this part of labour was almost entirely the work of chattel-slaves, the property of the great landowners. As long as the Empire was at peace about its great centres, this system went on without serious check, since the servile insurrections belong to the times of civil brawl before the Empire; though it is true that a reflection of the miseries of the slaves is to be found in the chronic brigandage and piracy that infested ancient civilisation during its whole period. But as the Empire contracted its boundaries, and actual war drew near its centre, while its grasping and corrupt tax

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gathering bureaucracy dried up its resources, destroyed its markets, and withered its population, the approach of sheer ruin shattered the foundation of chattel-slavery on which it rested. And it must be remembered, once for all, that neither prosperity nor adversity, neither good emperors nor bad, neither peace nor war, could release Roman society from this plague of tax-gathering, any more than any increasing sense of the responsibility of the rich for the lives of the poor, or any fresh aspirations towards individual righteousness, can free modern society from the thraldom of the hunt for profit.

The great commercial estates of the Romans, under the name of Latifundia, had absorbed all the agricultural industry of the earlier Roman state, which had once been in the hands of the blood relations and household slaves of the paterfamilias. But now the profit of working these lands by the instrument of wellorganised slavery was vanishing, owing to the break up of the ancient world-market, and the consequently impending ruin. Nothing now remained for the masters

of these slaves but to shake off the responsibility for their livelihood, and allow them to cultivate the land in a rough and unorganised way, as partially independent peasants, paying rent in kind and service to the landowners. This seems to have been one of the methods of the merging of the chattel-slave into the mediaval serf.

At the same time, not only did this go on very gradually, but domestic slavery and the servile condition of the craftsmen was synchronous with it.

The other element towards the birth of the feudal system was added by the tribal barbarians who broke in on the last days of the Empire. These bore with them ideas and customs that differed in detail rather than in essence from those of the earlier classical epoch ; and though they no doubt had "thralls,' i.e. chattel-slaves, yet those thralls at the worst were in as good a position as the household slaves of the peasantlords of early Rome, were frequently manumitted, and remained the freedmen of their former masters, still doing service to them.

And this idea of service in return for protection, which had been once a Roman idea, was still an essential part of the life of the barbarian tribes, and they imported it into the society that was gradually growing up from the débris of classical society.

Thus met the two elements necessary for the social life of the new epochone the result of the internal decay of the old system; the other, the growth of the unbroken original barbaric constitution.

But the ethical and religious conditions were also changing, along with the economical: the break-up of the constitution of the cities destroyed the social religion of city-worship; and though some of the forms of the old ancestorreligions and nature-cults of the ancient tribes still survived, the real characteristics of that religion had vanished.

To fill the void so created in men's minds after the fall of this public faith, there arose another that concentrated the interest on the individual personality, now completely dissociated from its old social ties; concentrated it indeed on this individuality as being something