Note 442 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

In northern France of the fourteenth century, as in Provence and Italy and England, there was a manifold stir of innovation and heresy: there as elsewhere the insubordinate Franciscans, with their Eternal Gospel, the Paterini, the Beghards, fought their way against the Dominican Inquisition. But the Inquisitors burned books as well as men; and much anti-ecclesiastical poetry, some dating even from the Carlovingian era, shared the fate of many copies of the Talmud, translations of the Bible, and, à fortiori, every species of heretical writing. In effect, the Inquisition for the time “extinguished freethought”442 in France. As in England, the ferment of heresy was mixed with one of democracy; and in the French popular poetry of the time there are direct parallels to the contemporary English couplet, “When Adam delved and Eve span, Where was then the gentleman?”443 Such a spirit could no more prosper in feudal France than in feudal England; and when France emerged from her mortal struggle with the English, to be effectively solidified by Louis XI, there was left in her life little of the spirit of free inquiry. It has been noted that whereas the chronicler Joinville, in the thirteenth century, is full of religious feeling, Froissart, in the fourteenth, priest as he is, exhibits hardly any; and again Comines, in the fifteenth, reverts to the orthodoxy of the twelfth and thirteenth.444 The middle period was one of indifference, following on the killing out of heresy:445 the fifteenth century is a resumption of the Middle Ages, and Comines has the medieval cast of mind,446 although of a superior order. There seems to be no community of thought between him and his younger Italian contemporaries, Machiavelli and Guicciardini; though, “even while Comines was writing, there were unequivocal symptoms of a great and decisive change.”447