Volume 53 — THE BRITISH QUARTERLY JANUARY 1871 (continued 4)

We thus see Paris, well-nigh unheard of during the reign of Charles the Great, suddenly rise into importance under his son. Under Charles the Bald its importance becomes greater still, and it begins to assume the peculiar function which raised it to the head place in Gaul. The special wretchedness of the time was fast showing the great military importance of the site. Under the rule of the Austrasian Mayors and Kings there had been endless wars, but they had been wars waged far away from Paris. Above all, no hostile fleet had for ages sailed up the Seine. Lutetia on her island must, under the Frankish power, have enjoyed for some generations a repose almost as unbroken as she had enjoyed in the days of the Roman Peace. Now all was changed. The Empire was torn in pieces by endless civil wars, wars of brother against brother, and the fleets of the Northmen, barely heard of in the days of Charles the Great, were making their way up the months of all its rivers. Men now began to learn that the island city, encompassed by the broad Seine, with its bridges and its minsters, and the Roman palace on the left bank, was at once among the most precious possessions and among the surest bulwarks of the realm. It is not without significance that the one time when the Great Charles himself visited Paris, it was in the course of a progress in which he had been surveying the shores of the Northern Ocean.[54] He came to Paris as a mourner and as a pilgrim, yet we may believe that neither his grief nor his devotion hindered him from marking the importance of the post. His eye surely marked the site as one fated to be the main defence, if not of his whole Empire, at least of its western portion, against the pirate-barks by which the Ocean was beginning to be covered. And probably it was not mere accident that it was in the course of an expedition against Brittany that Paris became the centre of the conspiracy of 830. In a Breton war, a land war, Paris would not be of the same pre-eminent importance as it was in the invasion of the Northmen. Still the island stronghold would be of no small moment in case of a Breton inroad, and in the days of Lewis the Pious a Breton inroad was again a thing to be dreaded. Among the troubles of the next reign the pre-eminent importance of Paris begins to stand out more and more strongly. By the last partition under Lewis the Pious, his youngest son, Charles the Bald, became King of a kingdom formed by the accidental union of Neustria and Aquitaine. The kingdom so formed answered to nothing which had been thought of in earlier divisions, but it answered in a kind of rough way to modern France. Far smaller as a whole, it took in districts at both ends, in Flanders and in Catalonia, which have long ceased to be looked upon as French. But it nowhere came near to the coveted frontier of the Rhine and the Alps. Of this kingdom it seemed at first that Paris was at once to become the capital; no other city filled so prominent a place in the early history of the reign of Charles the Bald. In the very beginning of his reign we find Charles making use of the position of the city and its bridge: to bar the progress of his brother, the Emperor Lothar. We find him dwelling for a long time in the city, and giving the citizens the delight of a spectacle by appearing among them in royal pomp at the Easter festival.[55] Four years later, the city began to appear in its other character as the great mark for Scandinavian attack. The northern pirates were now swarming on every sea, and the coasts of Britain, Gaul, and Germany were all alike desolated by their harryings. But they instinctively felt that, while no shore lay more temptingly for their objects than the shores of Northern Gaul, there was no point either of the insular or of the continental realm where their approach was better guarded against. The island city, with its two bridges and its strongly fortified Roman suburb on the mainland, blocked their path as perhaps no other stronghold in Gaul or Britain could block it.[56] In the very year of the fight of Fontenay, as if they had scented the mutual slaughter from afar, the Northmen had sailed up the stream and had harried Rouen and the surrounding lands with the sternest horrors of fire and sword.[57] Four years later they pressed on yet further into the heart of the defenceless realm; Paris was attacked; in strange contrast with the valour of its citizens forty years later, no one had the heart to resist; the city was stormed and sacked; and King Charles, finding his forces unequal to defend or to avenge, was driven to forestal the wretched policy of Æthelred, and to buy a momentary respite from the invaders.[58] Other attacks, other harryings followed. One more terrible than all, in the year 857, was specially remembered on account of the frightful havoc wrought among the churches of the city. The church of Saint Genoveva, on the left bank of the river—better known to modern ears as the Pantheon—was burned, Saint Stephen's, afterwards known as Nôtre Dame, Saint Germans, and Saint Denis, bought their deliverance only by large ransoms.[59] In the minds of the preachers of the time the woes of Paris suggested the woes of Jerusalem and a wail of sorrow went up from the Jeremiah of the age for the havoc of the city and its holy places.[60]

When we remember the importance to which Paris was plainly beginning to rise under Lewis the Pious, we may perhaps be led to think that it was the constant attacks to which the city was exposed which hindered it from becoming the permanent dwelling-place of royalty under Charles the Bald. That the city held a place in his affections throughout his life is shown by his choosing Saint Denis as the place of his burial. But it never became the royal city of the Kings of his house. We need hardly look on it as a mark of personal cowardice in Charles that he preferred to fix the ordinary seat of his government in some other place than the most exposed fortress of his kingdom. Compiègne now often appears as a royal dwelling-place; but the home and centre of Carolingian royalty in the Western Kingdom gradually fixed itself on a spot the most opposite to Paris in position and feeling which the Western Kingdom could afford. Paris and Laon were in every sense rivals; their rivalry is stamped upon their very outward appearance. Each is a representative city. Paris, like Châlons and Bristol, is essentially an island city; the river was its defence against ordinary enemies, however easily that defence might be changed into a highway for its attack in the hands of the amphibious Northmen. But Laon is the very pride of that class of towns which out of Gaulish hill-forts grew into Roman and mediæval cities. None stands more proudly on its height; none has kept its ancient character so little changed to our own day. The town still keeps itself within the walls which fence in the hill-top, and whatever there is of suburb has grown up at the foot, apart from the ancient city. Paris again was the home of the new-born nationality of the Romance speech,[61] the home of the new French nation. Laon stood near the actual German border, in a land where German was still spoken; it was fitted in every way to be, as it proved, the last home of a German dynasty in the West. There can be little doubt that, by thus moving eastward, by placing themselves in this outlying Teutonic corner of their realm, the Carolingian Kings of the West threw away the opportunity of putting themselves at the head of the new national movement, and of reigning as national Kings, if not of the whole Romance-speaking population of Gaul, at least of its strictly French portion north of the Loire.

Of such a mission we may be sure Charles the Bald and his successors never dreamed. The chances are that those to whom that mission really fell dreamed of it just as little. We must never forget that the national movements of those days were for the most part instinctive and unconscious; but they were all the more powerful and lasting for being instinctive and unconscious. An act of Charles the Bald, one of the ordinary grants by a King to one of his vassals, created the French nation. The post from which the King himself shrank was entrusted to a valiant subject, and Robert the Strong, the mightiest champion of the land against the heathen invader, received the government of the whole border land threatened by the Breton and the Northman.[62] We may be sure that the thoughts of the King himself did not reach at the most beyond satisfaction at having provided the most important post in his realm with a worthy defender. To shield himself from the enemy by such a barrier as was furnished by Robert's country, it was worth while to sacrifice the direct possession even of the fair lands between the Loire and the Seine. His dominion was a mark;[63] his truest title a marquis. But the Mark of France, like the Mark of Brandenburg and the Mark of Austria, was destined to great things. Robert no doubt, like the other governors and military chiefs, who were fast growing from magistrates into Princes, rejoiced in the prospect of becoming the source of a dynasty, a dynasty which could not fail to take a high place among the princes of Gaul. But he hardly dreamed of founding a line of Kings, and a line of Kings the most lasting that the world ever saw. Still less did he dream of founding a nation. But he did both. The Counts who held the first place of danger and honour soon eclipsed in men's eyes the Kings who had retired to the safer obscurity of their eastern frontier. The city of the river became a national centre in a way in which the city of the rock could never be. The people of the struggling Romance speech of northern Gaul found a centre and a head in the rising city and its gallant princes. That Robert was himself of German descent, the son of a stranger from some of the Teutonic provinces of the Empire,[64] mattered not a whit. From the beginning of their historic life the Parisian Dukes and Kings have been the leaders and representatives of the new French nationality. No royal dynasty has ever been so thoroughly identified with the nation over which it ruled, because no royal dynasty could be so truly said to have created the nation. Paris, France, and the Dukes and Kings of the French are three ideas which can never be kept asunder. A true instinct soon gave the ruler of the new state a higher and a more significant title. The Count of Paris was merged in the Duke of the French, and the Duke of the French was soon to be merged in the King. The name of Francia, a name whose shiftings and whose changes of meaning have perplexed both history and politics—a name which Eastern and Western writers seem to have made it a kind of point of honour to use in different meanings[65]—now gradually settles down, as far as the Western Kingdom is concerned, into the name of a territory, answering roughly to the Celtic Gaul of the elder geography.[66] It has still to be distinguished by epithets like Occidentalis and Latina, from the Eastern Francia of Teutonic speech, but, in the language of Gaul, Francia and Franci for the future mean the dominion and the subjects of the lord of Paris. We need not say that the lands beyond the Rhone, the Saône, and the Maes, which formed no part of the Western Kingdom, are not included under the name of Francia. But neither are the lands held, like the French Duchy, in fief of the common sovereign, Brittany, Flanders, Aquitaine, and the ducal Burgundy. To these must be added Normandy, the land wrested from the French Duchy to form the inheritance of the converted Northman. France is still but one among the principalities of Gaul; but, like Wessex in England, like Castile in Spain, like Prussia in Germany and Piedmont in Italy, it was the one destined, by one means or another, to swallow up the rest. From the grant of 861, from the foundation of the Parisian Duchy, we may date the birth of the French state and nation. From that day onwards France is whatever can, by fair means or foul, be brought into obedience to Paris and her ruler.

Count Robert the Strong, the Maccabæus of the West-Frankish realm, the patriarch of the old Capets, of the Valois, and of the Bourbons, died as he had lived, fighting for Gaul and Christendom against the heathen Dane.[67] But his dominion and his mission passed to a son worthy of him—to Odo, or Eudes,[68] the second Count of his house, presently to be the first of the Kings of Paris. In his day came the great struggle, the mighty and fiery trial, which was to make the name of Paris and her lord famous throughout the world. On the great siege of Paris by the Northmen, the turning-point in the history of the city, of the Duchy, and in truth of all Western Europe, we may fairly dwell at somewhat greater detail than we have done on the smaller events which paved the way for it. We must bear in mind the wretched state of all the countries which made up the Carolingian Empire. The Northmen were sailing up every river, and were spreading their ravages to every accessible point. Every year in the various contemporary annals is marked by the harrying of some fresh district, by the sack of some city, by the desecration of some revered monastery.[69] Resistance, when there was any, was almost wholly local; the invaders were so far from encountering the whole force of the Empire that they never encountered the whole force of any one of its component kingdoms. The day of Saul-court, renowned in that effort of old Teutonic minstrelsy which may rank alongside of our own songs of Brunanburh and Maldon,[70] the day when the young king Lewis led the West-Frankish host to victory over the heathen,[71] stands out well-nigh alone in the records of that unhappy time. While neither realm was spared, while one set of invaders ravaged the banks of the Seine and the Loire, while another more daring band sacked Aachen, Köln, and Trier,[72] the rival Kings of the Franks were mainly intent on extending their borders at the expense of one another. Charles the Bald was far more eager to extend his nominal frontier to the Rhine,[73] or to come back from Italy adorned with the Imperial titles,[74] than he was to take any active step to drive out the common enemy of all the kindred realms. At last the whole Empire, save the Burgundian Kingdom of Boso, was once more joined together under Charles the Fat. Paris was again under the nominal sovereignty of an Emperor whose authority, equally nominal everywhere, extended also over Rome and Aachen. Precarious and tottering as such an Empire was, the even nominal union of so many crowns on a single head, however unfit that head was to bear their weight, does seem to have given for the moment something like a feeling of greater unity and thereby of greater strength. Paris, defended by its own Count and its own Bishop, was defended by them in the name of His Emperor, Lord of the World.[75] The sovereigns alike of East and West were appealed to for help, and at least a show of help was sent in the name of both parts of the Frankish realm.[76] The defence of Paris was essentially a local defence, waged by its own citizens under the command of their local chiefs. Still the great check which the invaders then received came nearer to a national act on the part of the whole Frankish Empire than anything which had happened since the death of Charles the Great.

Our materials for the great siege are fairly abundant. Several of the contemporary chronicles, in describing this gallant struggle, throw off somewhat of their usual meagreness, and give an account conceived with an unusual degree of spirit and carried out with an unusual amount of detail.[77] And we have a yet more minute account, which, even as it is, is of considerable value, and which, had it been a few degrees less wearisome and unintelligible, would have been of the highest interest. Abbo, a distinguished churchman of those times, a monk of the house of Saint German, and not only a contemporary, but a spectator and sharer in the defence,[78] conceived the happy idea of writing a minute narrative of the exciting scenes which he had witnessed. But he unhappily threw his tale into the shape of hexameters which have few rivals for affectation and obscurity. The political biographer of Lewis the Pious at all events writes Latin; Abbo writes in a Babylonish dialect of his own composing, stuffed full of Greek and other out-of-the-way words, and to parts of which he himself found it needful to attach a glossary. Still with all this needless darkness, he gives us many details, and he especially preserves many individual names which we should not find out from the annalists. A fervent votary of Saint German, a loyal citizen of Paris, a no less loyal subject of the valiant Count who, when he wrote, had grown into a King, Abbo had every advantage which personal knowledge and local interest could give to a narrator of the struggle. Only we cannot help wishing that he had stooped to tell his tale, if not in his native tongue, whether Romance or Teutonic, yet at least in the intelligible Latin of Nithard in a past generation and of Richer in a future one.[79]

The poet begins with a panegyric on his city, in which he may, while dealing with such a theme, be forgiven for somewhat unduly exalting its rank among the cities of the world.[80] Its position, the strength of the island-fortress, connected with the mainland by its castles on either side, is plainly set forth.[81] The defenders of the city are clearly set before us; Odo the Count, the future King, as we are often reminded,[82] and Gozlin the Bishop, stand forth in the front rank. Around the two great local chiefs are gathered a secondary band of their kinsfolk and supporters, clerical and lay. There is Odo's brother Robert, himself to wear a crown in the city which he defended, but in days to which the foresight of the poet did not extend. There is the valiant Count Ragnar; there is the warlike Abbot Ebles of Saint Germans, whose exploits are recorded with special delight by the loyal monk of his house.[83] A crowd of lesser names are also handed down to us, names of men who had their honourable share in the work, but with whose bare names it is hardly needful to burthen the memories of modern readers. A great object of attack on the part of the Northmen was the castle which guarded the bridge on the right bank of the river, represented in after times by the Grand Châtelet. The watchful care of the Bishop had been diligent in strengthening this and the other defences of the city; but the last works which were to guard this important point were not fully finished.[84] The Danish fleet now drew near, a fleet manned, so it was said, by more than thirty thousand warriors.[85] As in the tale of our own Brihtnoth,[86] the invaders began with a peaceful message. The leader of the pirates, Sigefrith, the sea-king,—a king, as the poet tells us, without a kingdom[87]—sought an interview with Count Odo, and demanded a peaceful passage through the city. Odo sternly answers that the city is entrusted to his care by his lord the Emperor, and that he will never forsake the duty which was laid upon him. The siege now began; the Northmen strove to storm the unfinished tower. After two days of incessant fighting, and an intervening night spent in repairing the defences, the valour of the defenders prevailed. The Count and the Bishop, and the Abbot who could pierce seven Danes with a single shot of his arrow,[88] finally drove back the heathen to their ships; and instead of the easy storm and sack which they doubtless looked for on this, as on earlier occasions, the Northmen were driven to undertake the siege of the city in form.[89]

One is a little surprised at the progress in the higher branches of the art of war which had clearly been made by the enemy who now assaulted Paris. The description of their means of attack, if not intelligible in every detail, at least shows that the freebooters, merciless heathens as they were, were at all events thorough masters of the engineering science of their age.[90] But, through the whole winter of 885, all their attempts were unavailing. The skill and valour of the defenders were equal to those of the besiegers, and their hearts were strung by every motive which could lead men to defend themselves to the last. But early in the next year, in February 886, accident threw a great advantage into the hands of the besiegers. A great flood in the Seine swept away, or greatly damaged, the lesser bridge, the painted bridge, that which joined the island to the fortress on the left bank of the river.[91] That fortress and the suburb which it defended, the suburb which contained the Roman palace and the ministers of Saint Genoveva and Saint German, were thus cut off from the general defences of the city. The watchful care of the Bishop strove to repair the bridge by night. But the attempt was forestalled by the invaders; the tower was isolated and surrounded by the enemy. The Bishop and the other defenders of the city were left to behold, to weep, and to pray from the walls, at the fate of their brethren whom they could no longer help.[92] The tower was fiercely attacked; the gate did not give way till fire was brought to help the blows of the Northmen; the defenders of the tower all perished either by the flames or by the sword, and their bodies were hurled into the river before the eyes of their comrades.[93] The conquerors now destroyed the tower, and from their new vantage ground they pressed the siege of the island city with increased vigour.

The chances of war seemed now to be turning against the besieged. The stout heart of Bishop Gozlin at last began to fail; he saw that Paris could no longer be defended by the arms of its citizens only. He sent a message to Henry, the Duke of the Eastern Franks, praying him to come to the defence of the Christian people. The Duke came; we are told that his presence did little or nothing for the besieged city;[94] yet in the obscure verses of the poet we seem to discern something like a night attack on the Danish camp on the part of the Saxon Duke and his followers.[95] But in any case the coming of the German allies did nothing for the permanent relief of the city. They went back to their own land; Paris was again left to its own resources, and at last the Bishop, worn out with sorrow and illness, began to seek the usual delusive remedy. He began to enter into negotiations with Sigefrith, which were cut short by the prelate's death. The news was known in the Danish camp before it was commonly known within the walls of Paris, and the mass of the citizens first learnt from the insulting shouts of the besiegers that their valiant Bishop was no more.[96]

The Bishop, as long as he lived, had been the centre and soul of the whole defence, yet it would seem that, at the actual moment of his death, his removal was a gain. We hear no more, at least on the part of the men of Paris, of any attempts at treating with the enemy. One bitter wail of despair from the besieged city reaches our ears, and the hero of the second act of the siege now stands forth. The spiritual chief was gone; the temporal chief steps into his place, and more than into his place. Count Odo appears as cheering the hearts of the people by his eloquence, and as leading them on to repeated combats with the besiegers.[97] At last hunger began to tell on the strength of the defenders; help from without was plainly needed, and this time it was to be sought, not from any inferior chief, but from the common sovereign, the Emperor and King of so many realms. Count Odo himself went forth on the perilous errand; he called on the princes of the Empire for help in the time of need, and warned the sluggish Augustus himself that, unless help came speedily, the city would be lost for ever.[98] Long before any troops were set in motion in any quarter for the deliverance of Paris, the valiant Count was again within its walls, bringing again a gleam of joy to the sad hearts of the citizens, both by the mere fact of his presence and by the gallant exploit by which he was enabled to appear among them. The Northmen knew of his approach, and made ready to bar his way to the city. Before the gate of the tower on the right bank, the tower which still guarded the northern bridge, the lines of the heathen stood ready to receive the returning champion. Odo's horse was killed under him, but, sword in hand, he hewed himself a path through the thick ranks of the enemy; he made good his way to the gate, and was once more within the walls of his own city, ready to share every danger of his faithful people.[99]

Such a city, we may well say, deserved to become the seat of Kings, and such a leader deserved to wear a royal crown within its walls. Eight months of constant fighting passed away after the return of Odo before the lord alike of Rome, of Aachen, and of Paris appeared before the city where just now his presence was most needed. Towards the last days of summer Duke Henry again appeared, but it was fully autumn before the Emperor himself found his way to the banks of the Seine.[100] Duke Henry came, with an army drawn from both the Frankish realms, Eastern and Western.[101] With more show of prudence than he had shown at his former coming, Henry began by reconnoitring both the city and the camp of the enemy, to judge at what point an attack might be made with least risk.[102] But the Northmen were too wary for him. They had surrounded their whole camp with a network of trenches, three feet deep and one foot wide, filled up with straw and brushwood, and made to present the appearance of a level surface.[103] A small party only were left in ambush. As the Duke drew near, they sprang up, hurled their javelins, and provoked him with shouts. Henry pressed on in wrath, but he was soon caught in the simple trap which had been laid for him; his horse fell, and he himself was hurled to the ground. The enemy rushed upon him, slew him, and stripped him in the sight of his army.[104] One of the defenders of the city, the brave Count Ragnar, of whom we have already heard, came in time only to bear off the body, at the expense of severe wounds received in his own person.[105] The corpse of the Duke was carried to Soissons and was buried in the Church of Saint Médard. The army of Henry, disheartened by the loss of their chief, presently returned to their own homes. Paris was again left to its own resources, cheered only by such small rays of hope as might spring from the drowning of one of the besieging leaders in the river.[106]

The news of the death of Henry was brought to the Emperor. Notwithstanding his grief—perhaps an euphemism for his fear—he pressed on towards Paris with his army; but even the chronicler most favourable to him is obliged to confess that the lord of so many nations, at the head of the host gathered from all his realms, did nothing worthy of the Imperial majesty.[107] All in truth that the Emperor Charles did was to patch up a treaty with the barbarians, by virtue of which, on condition of their raising the siege of Paris, they received a large sum as the ransom of the city, and were allowed to ravage Burgundy without let or hindrance.[108] We are told indeed that this step was taken because the land to be ravaged—are we to understand the Kingdom of Boso?—was in rebellion.[109] At all events, the Christian Emperor, the last who reigned over the whole Empire, handed over a Christian land as a prey to pagan teeth, and left Paris without striking a blow. Charles went straight back into Germany, and there spent the small remnant of his reign and life in a disgraceful domestic quarrel.[110] One act however he did which concerns our story. Hugh the Abbot, the successor of Robert the Strong in the greater part of his Duchy, had died during the siege. The valiant Count of Paris was now, by Imperial grant, put in possession of all the domains which had been held by his father.[111]

But the Count was not long to remain a mere Count; the city and its chief were alike to receive the reward of their services in the cause of Christendom. Presently came that strange and unexampled event by which the last Emperor of the legitimate male stock of the Great Charles was deposed by the common consent of all his dominions. The Empire again split up into separate Kingdoms, ruled over by Kings of their own choice. The choice of the Western realm fell, as it well deserved to fall, upon the illustrious Count of Paris. The reign of Odo indeed was not undisturbed, nor was his title undisputed. He had to struggle in the beginning of his reign with a rival in the Italian Guy, and in latter years he had to withstand the more formidable opposition of a rival King of the old Imperial line. And chosen as he was by the voice of what we may now almost venture to call the French people, hallowed as King in the old royal seat of Compiègne by the hands of the Primate of Sens, the Metropolitan of his own Paris,[112] Odo had still to acknowledge the greater power and higher dignity of the Eastern King. He had to confess himself the man of Arnulf, to receive his crown again at Arnulf's hands, while Arnulf was not as yet a Roman Emperor, but still only a simple King of the East Franks.[113] Still the Count had become a King; the city which his stout heart and arm had so well defended had become a royal city. The rank indeed both of the city and its King, was far from being firmly fixed. A hundred years of shiftings and changings of dynasties, of rivalry between Laon and Paris, between the Frank and the Frenchman, had still to follow. But the great step had been taken; there was at last a King of the French reigning in Paris. The city which by its own great deeds had become the cradle of a nation, the centre of a kingdom, was now placed in the foremost rank at their head. The longest and most unbroken of the royal dynasties of Europe had now begun to reign. And it had begun to reign, because the first man of that house who wore a crown was called to that crown as the worthiest man in the realm over which he ruled.

But we must go back to the enemy before Paris. By the treaty concluded with the Emperor, they were to raise the siege, but they were left at liberty to harry Burgundy and other lands. The citizens of Paris, however, steadfastly refused to allow them to pass up the Seine; so the Northmen ventured on a feat which in that age was looked on as unparalleled.[114] They saw, we are told, that the city could not be taken; so they carried their ships for two miles by land, and set sail at a point of the river above the city.[115] While the Empire was falling in pieces, while new kingdoms were arising and were being struggled for by rival kings, the Northmen were harrying at pleasure. Soissons was sacked;[116] after a long and vain attack on the mighty walls of Sens, the enemy found it convenient to retire on a payment of money.[117] Meaux also, under the valiant Count Theodberht, stood a siege; but after the death of their defender, the citizens capitulated. The capitulation was broken by the Northmen; the city was burned, and the inhabitants were massacred.[118] By this time Odo was King. Meanwhile the Northmen, after their retreat from Sens, had made another attempt on Paris, and had been again beaten off by the valiant citizens.[119] The King now came to what was now his royal city, and established a fortified camp in the neighbourhood to secure it from future attacks.[120] Yet when the Northmen once more besieged Paris in the autumn of 889, even Odo himself had to stoop to the common means of deliverance, The new King, the first Parisian King, bought off the threatened attack by the payment of a Danegeld, and the pirates went away by land and sea to ravage the Constantine peninsula, the land which, a generation or two later, was to become the special land of the converted Northmen.[121]

Paris was finally secured against Scandinavian attack by the establishment of the Duchy of Normandy. By the treaty of Clair-on-Epte in 913, Rolf Ganger, changed in French and Latin mouths into Rou and Rollo, became the man of the King of Laon for lands which were taken away from the dominion of the Duke of Paris. Charles the Simple, the restored Karling, was now King; Robert, the brother of Odo, was Duke of the French, and there can be no doubt that the tottering monarchy of Laon gained much by the dismemberment of the Parisian Duchy and by the establishment at the mouth of the Seine of a vassal bound by special ties to the King himself. The foundation of the Rouen Duchy at once secured Paris against all assaults of mere heathen pirates. France had now a neighbour to the immediate north of her—a neighbour who shut her off from the sea and from the mouth of her own great river—a neighbour with whom she might have her wars, as with other neighbours—but a neighbour who had embraced her creed, who was speedily adopting her language and manners, and who formed, part of the same general political system as herself. The shifting relations between France and Normandy during the tenth and eleventh centuries form no part of our subject, but it will be well to bear in mind that Paris was at once sheltered and imprisoned through the Norman possession of the lower course of the Seine.

It follows then that the next besiegers of Paris came from a different quarter; and these next besiegers came from the quarter from which its last besiegers have come. In the course of the tenth century, the century of so many shifting relations between Rouen, Laon, and Paris, while the rivalry between King and Duke sometimes broke forth and sometimes slumbered, Paris was twice attacked or threatened by German armies. Both the First and the Second Otto at least appeared in the near neighbourhood of the city. In 946, the first and greatest of the name, not yet Emperor in formal rank, but already exercising an Imperial pre-eminence over the kingdoms into which the Frankish Empire had split up, entered the French Duchy with two royal allies or vassals in his train. One was the Burgundian King Conrad, Lord of the realm between the Rhone and the Alps; the other was the nominal King of Paris and its Duke, Lewis, alike the heir of all the Karlings and the descendant of our own Ælfred, whose nominal reign over the Western Kingdom was practically well nigh confined to the single fortress of Compiègne. Among the shifting relations of the Princes of the Western Kingdom, Hugh the Duke of the French and Richard the Duke of the Normans were now allied against their Carolingian over-lord. He had lately been their prisoner, and had been restored to freedom and kingship only by the surrender of the cherished possession of his race, the hill and tower of Laon. Otto, the mighty Lord of the Eastern realm, felt himself called on to step in when Teutonic interests in the Western lands seemed to be at their last gasp. The three Kings united their forces against the two Dukes, and marched against the capitals both of France and Normandy. But never were the details of a campaign told in a more contradictory way. There can be little doubt that Rouen was besieged, and besieged unsuccessfully. Thus much at least the German historian allows;[122] in Norman lands the tale swells into a magnificent legend.[123] What happened at Paris is still less clear. Laon, for the moment a French possession, was besieged unsuccessfully, and Rheims successfully.[124] Then, after a vain attempt on Senlis, the combined armies of the Kings of Aachen, Arles, and Compiègne drew near to the banks of the Seine. Flodoard, the canon of Rheims, the discreetest writer of his age, leaves out all mention of Paris and its Duke; he tells us merely that the Kings crossed the river and harried the whole land except the cities.[125] The Saxon Widukind tells us how his King, at the head of thirty-two legions, every man of whom wore a straw hat[126] besieged Duke Hugh in Paris, and duly performed his devotions at the shrine of Saint Denis.[127] From these two entries we are safe in inferring that, if Paris was now in any strict sense besieged, it was at least not besieged successfully. But Richer, the monk of Saint Remigius, one of the liveliest tale-tellers of any age, is ready with one of those minute stories which, far more than the entries of more solemn annalists, help to bring us face to face with the men of distant times. The Kings were drawing near to the Seine. In order that the enemy might be cut off from all means of crossing, the Duke of the French, Hugh the Great, aware of their approach, had bidden all vessels, great and small, to be taken away from the right bank of the river for the space of twenty miles. But his design was hindered by a cunning stratagem of the invaders. Ten young men, who had made up their mind to brave every risk,[128] went in advance of the army of the Kings, having laid aside their military garb and provided themselves with the staves and wallets of pilgrims. Protected by this spiritual armour, they passed unhurt and unchallenged through the whole city of Paris, and crossed over both bridges to the left bank of the river. There, not far from the suburb of Saint German, dwelt a miller, who kept the mills which were turned by the waters of the Seine.[129] He willingly received the comely youths who professed to have crossed from the other side of the river to visit the holy places. They repaid his hospitality with money, and moreover purchased wine, in the consumption of which a jovial day was spent. The genial drink opened the heart and the lips of the host, and he freely answered the various questions of his guests. He was not only a miller; he was also the Duke's head fisherman, and he moreover turned an occasional penny by letting out vessels for hire. The Germans praised the kindness which he had already shown them, which made them presume to ask for further favours. They had still other holy places to pray at, but they were wearied with their journey. They promised him a reward of ten shillings—no small sum in the tenth century—if he would carry them across to the other side. He answered that, by the Duke's orders, all vessels were kept on the left bank to cut off all means of crossing from the Germans. They told him that it might be done in the night without discovery. Eager for his reward, he agreed. He received the money, and, accompanied by a boy, his step-son, he guided them to the spot where seventy-two ships lay moored to the river side. The boy was presently thrown into the river, the miller was seized by the throat, and compelled by threats of instant death to loose the ships. He obeyed, and was presently bound and put on board one of the vessels. Each of the Germans now entered a ship and steered it to the right bank. The whole body then returned in one of the vessels, and each again brought across another. By going through this process eight times, the whole seventy-two ships were brought safely to the right bank. By daybreak the army of the Kings had reached the river. They crossed in safety, for all the inhabitants of the country had fled, and the Duke himself had sought shelter at Orleans. The land was harried as far as the Loire, but of the details of the siege of Rouen and of the siege of Paris, if any siege there was, we hear not a word.[130]

The military results of the first German invasion of France and Normandy were certainly not specially glorious. Laon, Senlis, Paris, and Rouen, were, to say the least, not taken. All that was done was to take Rheims and to ravage a large extent of open country. But, in a political point of view, the expedition was neither unsuccessful nor unimportant. From that time the influence of the Eastern King in the affairs of the Western Kingdom becomes of paramount importance, and under his protection, the King of the West Franks, King of Compiègne and soon again to be King of Laon, holds a far higher place than before in the face of his mighty vassals at Paris and Rouen. The next German invasion, forty years later, found quite another state of things in the Western Kingdom. The relations between King Lothar and Duke Hugh Capet were wholly different from the relations which had existed between their fathers, King Lewis and Duke Hugh the Great. No less different were the relations between Lothar and Otto the Second from those which had existed between their fathers, Lewis and Otto the Great. The elder Otto had been a protector, first to his brother-in-law and then to his nephew; the younger Otto was only a rival in the eyes of his cousin.[131] On the other hand, it was the policy of Hugh Capet to keep up the dignity of the Crown which he meant one day to wear, and not to appear as an open enemy of the dynasty which he trusted quietly to supplant. For a while then the rivalry between Laon and Paris was hushed, and the friendship of Paris carried with it the friendship of Rouen and Angers. Thus, while Lewis, a prince than whom none ever showed a loftier or more gallant spirit, was hunted from one fortress or one prison to another, his son, a man in every way his inferior, was really able to command the forces of the whole land north of the Loire. Again the King of Gaul looked Rhine-wards; the border land of Lotharingia kindled the ambition of a prince who might deem himself King both of Laon and Paris. That border land, after many times fluctuating to and fro, had now become an acknowledged portion of the Eastern Kingdom. But a sudden raid might win it for the King of the West, and the Duke of Paris would be nothing loth to help to make such an addition to the Kingdom which he meant one day to possess. The raid was made; the hosts of the King and the Duke crossed the frontier, and burst suddenly on the Imperial dwelling-place of Aachen. The Emperor, with his pregnant wife, the Greek princess Theophanô, had to flee before the approach of his cousin, and Lothar had the glory of turning the brazen eagle which his great forefather had placed on the roof of his palace in such a direction as no longer to be a standing menace to the western realms.[132] As in a more recent warfare, the Gaul began with child's play, and the German made answer in terrible earnest. The dishonour done to their prince and his realm stirred the heart of all Germany, and thirty thousand horsemen—implying no doubt a far larger number of warriors of lower degree—gathered round their Emperor to defend and avenge the violated Teutonic soil. Lothar made no attempt to defend his immediate dominions; he fled to crave the help of his mighty vassal at Paris.[133] The German hosts marched, seemingly without meeting any resistance, from their own frontier to the banks of the Seine. Everywhere the land was harried; cities were taken or surrendered, but the pious Emperor, the Advocate of the Universal Church, everywhere showed all due honour to the saints and their holy places.[134] In primatial Rheims, in our own days to be the temporary home of another German King, the German Cæsar paid his devotions at the shrine of Saint Remigius, the saint who had received an earlier German conqueror still into the fold of Christ.[135] At Soissons Saint Médard received equal worship, and when the church of Saint Bathild at Chelles was burned without the Emperor's knowledge, a large sum was devoted to its restoration. But if the shrines of the saints were reverenced, the palaces of the rival King were especially marked out for destruction. Attigny was burned, and nearly equal ruin fell upon Compiègne itself. Meanwhile the King had fled to Etampes, in the immediate territory of the Duke, while Hugh himself was collecting his forces at Paris. At last the German host came within sight of the ducal city. Otto now deemed that he had done enough for vengeance. He had shown that the frontiers of Germany were not to be invaded with impunity; he had come to Paris, not to storm or blockade the city, but to celebrate his victorious march with the final triumph of a pious bravado. He sent a message to the Duke to say that on the Mount of Martyrs he would sing such a Hallelujah to the martyrs as the Duke and people of Paris had never heard. He performed his vow; a band of clergy were gathered together on the sacred hill, and the German host sang their Hallelujah in the astonished ears of the men of Paris. This done, the mission of Otto was over, and after three days spent within sight of Paris, the Emperor turned him to depart into his own land.[136]

Such, at least, is the tale as told by the admirers of the Imperial devotee. In the hands of the monk of Rheims the story assumes quite another shape, and in the hands of the panegyrist of the house of Anjou it inevitably grows into a legend.[137] Richer tells us how the Emperor stood for three days on the right bank of the river, while the Duke was gathering his forces on the left; how a German Goliath challenged any man of France to single combat, and presently fell by the dart of a French, or perhaps Breton, David;[138] how Otto, seeing the hosts which were gathering against him, while his own forces were daily lessening, deemed that it was his wisest course to retreat.[139] As for the details of the retreat, our stories are still more utterly contradictory. One loyal French writer makes Lothar, at the head of the whole force of France and Burgundy, chase the flying Emperor to the banks of the Maes, whose waters swallowed up many of the fugitives.[140] The monk of Rheims transfers the scene of the German mishap to the nearer banks of the Aisne,[141] while the Maes is with him the scene of a friendly conference between the two Kings, in which Lothar, distrusting his vassals at Paris, deems it wiser to purchase the good-will of the Emperor by the cession of all his claims upon Lotharingia.[142] The most striking details come from the same quarter from which we get the picture of the Hallelujah on Montmartre. The Emperor, deeming that he had had enough of vengeance, departed on the approach of winter;[143] he reached the Aisne and proposed to encamp on its banks. But by the advice of Count Godfrey of Hennegau, who warned him of the dangers of a stream specially liable to floods, he crossed with the greater part of his army, leaving only, on the dangerous side, a small party with the baggage.[144] It was on this party that Lothar, hastening on with a small force, fell suddenly, while a sudden rise of the stream hindered either attack or defence on the part of the main armies.[145] Otto then sends a boat across with a challenge, proposing that one or the other should allow his enemy to cross without hindrance, and that the possession of the disputed lands should be decided by the result of the battle which should follow.[146] 'Nay rather,' cried Count Geoffrey, probably the famous Grisegonelle of Anjou, 'let the two Kings fight out their differences in their own persons, and let them spare the blood of their armies.'[147] 'Small then, it seems,' retorted Count Godfrey in wrath, 'is the value you put upon your King. At least it shall never be said that German warriors stood tamely by while their Emperor was putting his life in jeopardy.'[148] At this moment, when we are looking for some scene of exciting personal interest, the curtain suddenly falls, and this, our most detailed narrator, turns away from the fortunes of Emperors and Kings to occupy himself with his immediate subject, the acts of the Bishops of Cambray.[149]

Putting all our accounts together it is hard to say whether, in a military point of view, the expedition of Otto the Second was a success or a failure. If his design was to take Paris, he certainly failed. If he simply wished to avenge his own wrongs and to show that Germany could not be insulted with impunity, he undoubtedly succeeded. In either case the political gain was wholly on the German side. King and Duke acted together during the campaign; but each, in its course, learned to distrust the other, and each found it expedient to seek the friendship of the Emperor as a check against his rival.[150] And more than all, the Imperial rights over Lotharingia were formally acknowledged by Lothar, and were not disputed again for some ages.[151]

This campaign of 976 has a special interest just now, as its earlier stages read, almost word for word, like a forestalling of the events of the present year of wonders. How far its later stages may find their counterpart in the great warfare now going on, it is not for us to guess. But it is a campaign which marks a stage in the history of Europe. It is the first war that we can speak of—a war waged between Germany and anything which has even the feeblest claim to be called an united France. When Otto the Great marched against Paris and Rouen, he was fighting in the cause of the King of the West Franks, the lawful over-lord of the Dukes against whom he was fighting. When Otto the Second marched against Paris, he was fighting against King and Dukes alike, and King and Dukes between them had at their call all the lands of the strictly French speech, the tongue of oil. Aquitaine of course, and the other lands of the tongue of oc, had no part or lot in the matter; then, as in latter times, there were no Frenchmen south of the Loire. But if the expedition of Otto was in this sense the first German invasion of France, it was also for a long time the last. It is not often that Imperial armies have since that day entered French territory at all. The armies of Otto the Fourth appeared in the thirteenth century at Bouvines, and the armies of Charles the Fifth appeared in the sixteenth century in Provence. But Bouvines, lying in the dominions of a powerful and rebellious vassal, was French only by the most distant external allegiance, and Provence, in the days of Charles the Fifth, was still a land newly won for France, and the Imperial claims over it were not yet wholly forgotten. Both invasions touched only remote parts of the kingdom, and in no way threatened the capital. Since the election of Hugh Capet made Paris for ever the head of France and of all the vassals of the French Kingdom, the city has been besieged and taken by pretenders, native and foreign, to the Capetian Crown, but it has never, till our own century, been assailed by the armies of the old Teutonic realm. The fall of the first Buonaparte was followed by a surrender of Paris to a host which called up the memories alike of Otto of Germany and of Henry of England. The fall of the second Buonaparte is followed before our own eyes by the siege of Paris, the crowning point of a war whose first stages suggest the campaign of the Second Otto, but which, for the mighty interests, at stake, for the long endurance of besieger and besieged, rather suggests the great siege at the hands of Sigefrith. But all alike are witnesses to the position which the great city of the Seine has held ever since the days of Odo. Paris is to France not merely its greatest city, the seat of its government, the centre of its society and literature. It is France itself; it is, as it has been so long, its living heart and its surest bulwark. It is the city which has created the kingdom, and on the life of the city the life of the kingdom seems to hang. What is to be its fate? Is some wholly different position in the face of France and of Europe to be the future doom of that memorable city? Men will look on its possible humiliation with very different eyes. Some may be disposed to take up the strain of the Hebrew prophet, and to say, 'How hath the oppressor ceased, the golden city ceased!' Others will lament the home of elegance and pleasure, and what calls itself civilization. We will, in taking leave of Paris, old and new, wind up with the warning, this time intelligible enough to be striking, of her own poet—

Art. VI.—The Established Church in Wales.

(1.) An Essay on the Causes which have Produced Dissent from the Established Church in Wales. By Arthur James Johnes. Third Edition.

(2.) Letters on the Social and Political Condition of Wales. By Henry Richard. London: Jackson, Walford, and Hodder.

(3.) History of Nonconformity in Wales. By Thomas Rees, D.D. London: John Snow.

(4.) Hanes y Methodistiaid Calfinaidd gan. John Hughes.

(5.) Llyfryddiaeth y Cymry, gan y diweddar Barch. William Rawlands. Llanidloes: John Pryse.

(6.) The Church of the Cymry. A Letter to the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P., from Henry S. Edwards, B.A. Oxon., Vicar of Carnarvon. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.

(7.) The Church of England in Wales, in Seven Letters to the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, M.P. By the Rev. William Rees, Liverpool.

The Act for the Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Irish Church was one of great importance for what it did, but of still greater importance for what it implied; for in that measure there was a distinct legislative recognition of certain general principles, which are susceptible of far wider application than to the particular case they were invoked to sustain. It disposed, once for all, of the fond fantasy that the State is bound in its collective capacity to have a conscience, and in obedience to the dictates of that conscience, to impose its own creed upon the community, as the established faith of the country, to be supported by the authority, and enforced by the sanction of law. It acknowledged the principle that where an established church never has been, or has ceased to be the church of the nation, and fails, therefore, in its professed function as the religious instructor of the people, it has no longer any raison d'être, and ought to be swept away as an anomaly and encumbrance. It recognised the fact, if not for the first time, at least with more distinctness and emphasis than was ever done before, that ecclesiastical property is national property, which the nation has a perfect right through its legitimate organ, the legislature, to apply to any purpose it may think fit, whether sacred or secular.

We need not wonder that when the Irish Establishment was abolished, men's minds should turn almost instinctively to the sister institution in Wales, as furnishing a case in many respects parallel, but in other respects still less admitting of justification. The discussion of this subject in Parliament last session, on the motion of Mr. Watkin Williams, did not take place, perhaps, under the most favourable auspices. But it was at least attended with this advantage, that it obliged those who oppose the Disestablishment of the Welsh Church to show their hand. As Mr. Gladstone, in addition to his many other merits as an orator, is the most accomplished debater in the House of Commons, we may safely assume that whatever could be said in defence of the Church in Wales, and in deprecation of its proposed severance from the State, was said by him with the utmost degree of plausibility and point. But certainly on a calm review of the arguments he used on that occasion, they do not appear to be very formidable.

It may be said, indeed, that the Prime Minister made no attempt to defend the Welsh Church. He abandoned it to the strongest condemnation pronounced upon it by its adversaries, for the 'gross neglect, corruption, nepotism, plunder,' to use his own words, by which it has been marked; and only tried to account for these evils by laying them all to the charge of 'Anglicizing prelates.' He admitted that, even granting what Churchmen claimed, namely, about one-fourth of the population as belonging to the Establishment,—a claim, let us say in passing, which in the face of notorious facts is simply preposterous—'the disproportion is very remarkable in the case of a Church purporting to be the Church of the nation.' He admitted, moreover, as a circumstance seriously militating against the Welsh Church, that 'so large a proportion of her members belong to the upper classes of the community, the classes who are most able to provide themselves with the ministrations of religion, and therefore, in whose special and peculiar interest it is most difficult to make any effectual appeal for public resources and support.' But while acknowledging all this, he resists the proposal for its disestablishment. On what grounds? First, on this ground—that there is no hostility in Wales to the Church Establishment, and that its existence does not, as in Ireland, produce alienation or bitterness of feeling between different classes of the community. But this argument, if it were well founded in fact, which unhappily it is as far as possible from being, does not address itself in the least to the reason or justice of the case. Even if the Welsh people were so devoid of spirit and self-respect as to feel it no grievance to have a costly Church Establishment, which exists almost exclusively for the benefit of the rich, saddled upon their necks, surely that is no proof that it is right to perpetuate the privileges of a body, whose history for generations has been marked by 'gross neglect, corruption, and nepotism,' and which, purporting to be the Church of a nation, does not pretend, even according to the claims of its most audacious advocates, to number among its adherents more than one-fourth of the nation. But Mr. Gladstone is wholly misinformed as to the fact. Because the Nonconformists of Wales are an eminently peaceable, loyal, and orderly people, and do not proclaim their grievances with clamour and menace, it is imagined that they do not feel the gross injustice and indignity of the position they occupy. They do feel it deeply, and they are made to feel it, by events continually occurring in their social and political life, which all spring from this one root of bitterness. We need only refer in illustration of what we mean to the circumstances which attended and followed the last general election. Every form of unfair pressure was brought to bear upon the people to induce them to vote against their convictions, and many of those who had the courage to resist, were mercilessly evicted from their holdings, or otherwise injured and persecuted. All this sprang from the existence of the Established Church, as is evidenced by the fact, that in every instance we believe without a single exception—the oppressors were Churchmen and the sufferers Nonconformists.

The other, and the only other, argument of Mr. Gladstone is this—that except for conventional purposes, there is really no Church in Wales, that the Welsh Church is only a part of the Church of England, and cannot therefore be dealt with separately. We confess we are not very much dismayed by this difficulty; for we can remember the time when the same reason was urged to show the impossibility of touching the Irish Church. Properly speaking, we were told there was no Church of Ireland, but only the united Church of England and Ireland—the two churches having, at the time of the Union, been joined together by a compact so solemn and binding, that Her Majesty the Queen could not give her consent to any measure for dissolving that compact, without incurring the danger of committing perjury and bringing her crown into jeopardy. And as for providing legislation for Ireland distinct from that of England, the suggestion was scouted as an absurdity. Ireland was as much a part of the United Kingdom as Yorkshire or Lancashire, and must be governed by the same laws. The sense of justice, however, and the urgent necessities of the case, triumphed over these foregone conclusions.

There is one fact that gives a sort of sinister unity to the religious history of Wales through all its vicissitudes. It is this: that the influence of its relations with England, whether they were hostile or friendly, whether under Saxon or Norman rule, whether in Catholic or Protestant times, has been, in this respect, uniformly disastrous. We can only glance very briefly at the proofs of this allegation. Without raising again the controversial dust which envelopes the discussion as to the time and manner of the first introduction of Christianity into this island, we may at least assume it as an admitted historical fact, that early in the second century the Gospel had been planted here, and that long before the Saxon invasion there was a flourishing Christian Church in Britain. In the records of the first three or four hundred years of its existence, we find that many large collegiate establishments were formed and dedicated to religion and literature. From these institutions went forth men thoroughly instructed in the learning of their times, some of them bearing the fame of their country's piety and erudition to the uttermost parts of Europe. In the œcumenical councils summoned under Constantine the Great and his sons, in the third and fourth centuries, at Arles, at Nice, and at Sardica, to decide the great Donatist and Arian controversies that disturbed the unity of the Catholic faith, we are told that the British Churches were represented by men who bore an honourable part in the defence of sound doctrine; for Athanasius himself testifies that Bishops from Britain joined in condemnation of the heresy of Arius, and in vindication of himself. But when, in the sixth century, the Pope sent the celebrated Augustin, as a missionary, to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of this island to Christianity, there came on the British Church a time of terrible persecution. Having resolutely refused to recognise the papal authority, Augustin and his successors, in accordance with the policy of that persecuting Church which they represented, incited their Saxon converts to make war upon the British recusants, exasperating the national animosities, already sufficiently bitter between the two races, by adding to it the fanatical frenzy of religious bigotry. For many ages, therefore, the Britons were liable to frequent incursions from their Saxon neighbours, who, instigated by the councils of Rome, invaded their country, destroying their churches, burning their monasteries, and putting to death the pious and learned monks, who, in the seclusion of those establishments, were pursuing the peaceable occupations of literature and religion.[153] This struggle between the ancient British Church on the one side, and that of Rome, backed by the Saxon sword, on the other, continued for centuries. And when the Saxon conquerors had in their turn to succumb to the Norman invaders, that struggle was renewed with greater fierceness than ever. Religion was again unscrupulously used as an instrument of State, the Norman princes forcing ecclesiastics of their own race into all the higher offices of the Church in Wales, not from any regard for the spiritual interests of the people, but that they might aid in extinguishing the national spirit of the Cymri, and in subjugating the country to the Norman yoke. This policy, of course, failed, as it richly deserved to fail. The bishops and other dignitaries thus intruded upon the country were only safe when surrounded by bodies of armed retainers, and whenever the Cymric arms won a victory in the field, the interlopers had to flee to England to save themselves from popular indignation. About the end of the twelfth century, the Welsh princes appealed to the Pope for a redress of these intolerable wrongs. A petition couched in eloquent language was presented to his Holiness from Llywelyn, Prince of Gwynedd; Gwenwynwyn and Madoc, Princess of Powys; Gruffydd, Maelgwn, Rhys, and Meredith, sons of Rhys, Prince of South Wales. It is curious, in reading this document, to observe that some of the ecclesiastical grievances of which the British princes complain, are precisely those which the friends of the Church in Wales are still reiterating in our own day:—

'And, first, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as a matter of course, sends us English bishops, ignorant of the manners and language of our land, who cannot preach the word of God to the people, nor receive their confessions but through interpreters.

'And besides, these bishops that they send us from England, as they neither love us nor our land, but rather persecute and oppress us with an innate and deep-rooted hatred, seek not the welfare of our souls; their ambition is to rule over us and not to benefit us; and on this account they do not but very rarely fulfil the duties of their pastoral office among us.

'And whatever they can lay their hands upon or get from us, whether by right or wrong, they carry into England, and waste and consume the whole of the profits obtained from us, in abbeys and lands given to them by the king of England. And like the Parthians, who shoot backwards from afar as they retreat, so do they from England excommunicate us as often as they are ordered so to do....

'Besides these things, when the Saxons (English) rush into Wales, the Archbishop of Canterbury puts the whole land under an interdict, and because we and our people defend our country against the Saxons and other enemies, he places us and our people under judgment of excommunication, and causes those bishops whom he sent among us to proclaim this judgment, which they are ready to do on all occasions. The consequence is, that every one of our people who falls on the field of blood, in defence of the liberty of his country, dies under the curse of excommunication.'

When the Reformation came, the influence of the connection with England was, if possible, still more disastrous on the religious interests of Wales. 'The robbery in times of peace,' says Mr. Johnes, 'proved worse than the spoliation in the times of war, and the rapacity of the Reformation was added to the rapacity of Popery.' He then describes, in language of eloquent indignation, how the ecclesiastical endowments of the Principality were pitilessly plundered by being bestowed upon laymen, the descendants of the Norman invaders, or by being alienated from the Church of Wales to endow English bishoprics and colleges! For the last century and a half, again, the policy of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in dealing with the Welsh Church has, it would seem, been steadily directed to the extinction of the Welsh language and nationality by the appointment of Englishmen to bishoprics, canonries, deaneries, and most of the richest livings in Wales, in utter contempt of all decency. And now when, by the legitimate operation of a State establishment of religion, nearly the whole nation has been alienated from the Church, so that it has become a mere encumbrance in the land, we are told that Wales is so inseparably united with England that it cannot expect to be rid of the incubus until England has made up its mind to deal with its own Church Establishment.

But what we have to do with most especially at present is the Protestant Church Establishment in Wales, and our indictment against it is this, that at no period of its history has it fulfilled, in anything approaching to a satisfactory manner, its proper function as the religious instructor of the Welsh people. We have a chain of testimonies in support of this allegation that are unimpeachable as to their quality, and of overwhelming force in their concurrence and cumulation of evidence. We are anxious to make this point clear, because the line of defence that has been lately taken by the friends of the Church of England in Wales is to this effect. It is true, they say, that towards the middle of the last century the Church had fallen into a deep sleep, and so afforded occasion, and to some degree excuse, for the rise of Nonconformity, which was previously almost unknown in Wales. And then they point in vague and sounding phrases to the golden age that preceded that period of spiritual torpor, when the Church, alive to her high mission, ruled by native bishops, who understood the language and commanded the confidence and veneration of the country, comprehended and cared for within her ample fold the whole population of the Principality. Dissent, we are assured, is in Wales an exotic of quite modern growth, which, it is further implied, will prove to have a very ephemeral life, like Jonah's gourd, which came up in a night and perished in a night. Now all this is pure fiction. Dissent is not a thing of modern growth in Wales. It has existed more or less for 230 years, and whatever of vital religion has existed there during the whole of that period, has been owing far more to its influence than to that of the Established Church. It is not correct to say that the Church 'fell asleep' in the last century, simply because it had never been awake. 'The wisest thing, in my opinion, that our Church friends can do,' said Mr. Henry Richard, in his address at the opening of Brecon College—

'instead of pluming themselves on their antiquity, would be to cut off, so far as they can, all connection with and all memory of their past history in Wales. The succession through which they derive their ecclesiastical lineage, in this country at least, is about as unapostolical a succession as can be conceived—a succession of simony, pluralism, nepotism; of ignorance, incompetence, and utter indifference to the duties of their own high office and the claims of the unfortunate people left to their charge, on the part of those who called themselves the priests of God.'

And to begin with what must surely be considered as the first and most solemn duty of a Protestant Church, that of supplying the people of whom it professes to take charge with the Word of God in their own language, how does the account stand with the Welsh Established Church in this respect? Dr. Llewellyn, the learned author of the 'Historical Account of the Welsh Versions of the Bible,' states

'that for upwards of seventy years from the settlement of the Reformation by Queen Elizabeth, for near one hundred years from Britain's separation from the Church of Rome, there were no Bibles in Wales, but only in the cathedrals of parish churches and chapels. There was no provision made for the country or the people in general; as if they had nothing to do with the word of God, at least no further than they might hear it in their attendance on public worship once in the week.'

But how did the ecclesiastical authorities act in reference to the translation of the Scriptures into the Welsh language, even for use in the churches? In the year 1563, an Act of Parliament (5 Eliz. c. 28) was passed, ordering this work to be done. In the preamble it is recited,—

'That her Majesty's most loving and obedient subjects inhabiting within her Majesty's dominion and country of Wales, being no small part of this realm, are utterly destitute of God's Holy Word, and do remain in the like or rather more darkness and ignorance than they were in the time of Papistry.'

It was therefore enacted that the Bible, consisting of the New Testament and the Old, together with the book of Common Prayer and the Administration of the Sacraments, should be translated into the British or Welsh tongue. The duty of seeing this done was devolved upon the Bishops of St. Asaph, Bangor, St. David's, Llandaff, and Hereford, and they were subjected to a penalty of £40 each if the work were not accomplished by March, 1566. The New Testament was translated within the given period, principally by William Salesbury, a lay gentleman, with some help from the Bishop and Precentor of St. David's; but there was no version of the Old Testament for twenty years later, and that was done not by the initiative or at the instigation of the bishops, but by the spontaneous piety and patriotism of one individual, Dr. William Morgan, vicar of Llanshaidr-yn-Mochnat, Denbighshire, whose name ought to be held in everlasting veneration by all Welshmen. This was published in 1588. He acknowledges, indeed, that he received some encouragement and help from the Bishops of St. Asaph and Bangor. Ingenious apologies have been urged for the gross neglect of the bishops in fulfilling their commission. But Dr. Morgan, in the Latin dedication of his Bible to Queen Elizabeth, ascribes it to what, no doubt, was the true cause, mere 'idleness and sloth.'[154] There was no other edition of the Welsh Bible for thirty-two years. But in the year 1620, Dr. Parry, Bishop of St. Asaph, brought out a new issue. This also seems to have been the result of individual zeal, for in his preface Dr. Parry says, that the former edition having been exhausted, and many or most of the churches being either without any or with only worn-out and imperfect copies, and nobody, so far as he could learn, even thinking of a republication, he was moved to undertake the work.[155] This, likewise, was exclusively for use in the churches. The first edition of the Bible for popular use was published in an octavo form in 1630, but does not seem to have originated with the Church in any way. 'The honour,' says Dr. Llewellyn, 'of providing for the first time a supply of this kind for the inhabitants of Wales, is due to one or more citizens of London,' namely Mr. Alderman Heylin, 'sprung from Wales,' and Sir Thomas Middleton, also a native of the Principality, and an alderman of London.[156] For the next half century there was only one edition of the Scriptures in Welsh published by Churchmen, a large folio of 1,000 copies, for the pulpits of the churches. But during the same period the persecuted Nonconformists—Walter Cradock, Vavasor Powell, Stephen Hughes, Thomas Gouge, and David Jones—published nine editions, consisting of about 30,000 copies of the whole Bible, and above 40,000 of the New Testament separately. During the subsequent half-century (from 1718 to 1769) we acknowledge with cordial gratitude that several large editions were issued by the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge, two of them at the instigation of the Rev. Griffith Jones, and one at the instigation of Dr. Llewellyn, a dissenting minister. But let it be observed that the former period, from the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the beginning of the eighteenth century, synchronises as nearly as possible with the golden age which some members of the Welsh Church fondly believe to have existed in the history of that institution.

But let us now enquire how, in other respects, the Established Church in Wales discharged its duties as the teacher of the people. In the absence of the Bible there was, of course, all the more need for personal earnestness and activity on the part of its ministers in preaching the word and catechising, and the regular and solemn administration of all religious ordinances. But how was it in this respect during the beatific period, when, as some of the modern advocates of the Church exultingly declare, there was 'no dissent in Wales?' We will begin our inquiries with the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In the year 1560, Dr. Meyrick, Bishop of Bangor, writes that he had only two preachers in his diocese. Strype, in his 'Life of Archbishop Parker,' describes the condition of the bishoprics of Llandaff and Bangor, one in South and the other in North Wales, about the year 1563, as follows. The former had been two or three years, in effect, void, and wanted a vigilant bishop to manage that diocese. But the great dilapidations had so impoverished that see, that few who were honest and able would be persuaded to meddle with it.

As for Bangor (he continues), the diocese was also much out of order, there being no preaching used, and pensionary concubinacy openly continued, which was allowance of concubines to the clergy, by paying a pension, notwithstanding the liberty of marriage granted.

... So that Wales being in an evil condition as to religion, 'the inhabitants remaining still greatly ignorant and superstitious, the Queen left it particularly to the care of the Archbishop to recommend fit persons for those two sees now to be disposed of.'

In 1588, John Penry published his 'Exhortation unto the People and Governors of Her Majesty's Country of Wales,' every line of which was aflame with the fire of a righteous and eloquent indignation at the negligent bishops and 'unpreaching ministers,' to whose tender mercies his 'poor country of Wales' was abandoned. We need not quote at large from the melancholy picture he gives in this and his other pamphlets of the state of the Principality in that day, as his writings have been rendered familiar to many of our readers by Dr. Waddington's 'Life of Penry,' and Dr. Rees's 'History of Nonconformity in Wales.' We will therefore cite only one or two pregnant sentences:—

'This I dare affirm and stand to, that if a view of all the registries of Wales be taken, the name of that shire, that town, or of that parish, cannot be found, where, for the space of six years together within these twenty-nine years, a godly and learned minister hath executed the duty of teacher, and approved his ministry in any mean sort.... If I utter an untruth let me be reproved, and suffer as a slanderer; if a truth, why should not I be allowed.'

The Rev. Henry T. Edwards, the author of the very able and vigorous pamphlet mentioned at the head of this article, has permitted himself, in an evil moment, and in stress of argument and information, in defence of the Welsh Church of those days, to describe this noble-minded and devoted Christian and patriot in very opprobrious terms, as 'a sour-minded Puritan, recognising no truth save in his own interpretation of the written Word,' &c., &c. But Strype, at least, cannot be called 'a sour-minded Puritan.' Let us then revert to his testimony in reference to precisely the same period. In his 'Annals of the Reformation'[157] he makes the following statement. We borrow Dr. Rees's summary:—

'Dr. William Hughes, Bishop of St. Asaph, was accused, in the year 1587, the year before the publication of Penry's "Exhortation," of misgoverning his diocese and of tolerating the most disgraceful abuses. When the case was inquired into, it was found that the Bishop himself held sixteen rich livings in commendam; that most of the great livings were in possession of persons who lived out of the country; that one person who held two of the greatest livings in the diocese boarded in an alehouse; and that only three preachers resided upon their livings viz., Dr. David Powell, of Ruabon; Dr. William Morgan, of Llanrhaidr-yn-Mochnat, the translator of the Bible; and the parson of Llanvechan, an aged man, about eighty years old.'

We will now follow the history of the Welsh Church into the reign of James I. At that time, there lived and laboured in Wales a very remarkable man, the Rev. Rees Pritchard, Vicar of Llandovery, in Carmarthenshire, the author of a work which has had a larger circulation in the Principality than any book except the Bible. It is entitled 'Canwyll y Cymry,' or, 'The Welshman's Candle,' a series of moral and religious poems, most simple in their language, and even slovenly in their metrical composition, but full of poetry and feeling, and thoroughly saturated with evangelical truth. He flourished between the years 1616 and 1644. John Penry, in his most vehement remonstrances, does not employ stronger language to portray the utter ignorance, irreligion, and immorality in which the people were sunk, than does this excellent clergyman. But what we have specially to do with now is the testimony he bears as to the condition of the Church, a testimony all the more unimpeachable, as he continued through life a member and a minister of that Church. In one of his poems, after describing all classes as wholly given up to every species of depravity, he adds that the clergy were asleep, leaving the people to wallow in their sins, and to live as they liked, unwarned and unrebuked.[158] In another poem, he puts the clergy at the head of various classes, whom he enumerates, who were 'contending with each other, which of them should most daringly affront the Most High.' There is evidence still more conclusive, if possible, in the reports presented to the King by Archbishop Laud, between the years 1633 and 1638, which are still extant among the Lambeth MSS. This bigoted prelate had, it seems, in those years, been specially instigating the Bishops of St. David's and Llandaff to persecute without mercy those in their dioceses who were guilty of 'inconformity;' that is, who refused to read 'The Book of Sports,' and other similar obligations which were laid on the consciences of the clergy. After commemorating the success with which the Bishop of St. David's had silenced one Roberts, a lecturer, for inconformity, and reduced three or four others to submission, he adds: 'He complains much, and surely with cause enough, that there are few ministers in those poor and remote places that are able to preach and instruct the people.' And the Bishop of St. Asaph tells Laud that 'they were not anywhere troubled with inconformity; but that he heartily wished that they might as well be acquainted with superstition and profaneness.'

In the year 1651, there was published a translation in the Welsh language of the once celebrated 'Marrow of Modern Divinity.' This translation was by the Rev. John Edwards, one of the clergy ejected by the Parliamentary Commission appointed under the Commonwealth. In the preface, he deplores the neglect into which the Welsh language had fallen, and declares that, 'among the Church clergy (y Dyscawdwyr Eglwysig), scarcely one in fifteen knew how to read and write Welsh.' The reader will observe that we are following our chain of evidence link by link. In 1677, a work was published in Welsh entitled 'Carwr y Cymry,' that is, 'The Welshman's Friend; an Exhortation to his dear countrymen for the sake of Christ and their own souls, to search the Scriptures according to Christ's command, John v. 39.' This is supposed to have been written by a clergyman of the name of Oliver Thomas. The introduction is in the form of an earnest and affectionate address to 'Welsh Churchmen.' In this he says:—

'Often does sorrow beyond measure strike my heart in observing and reflecting upon the great deficiency and the utter neglect which prevails among us Welsh Churchmen, in taking pains to teach our flocks conscientiously, through our not giving ourselves with full purpose of heart to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine. We are ourselves, many of us, unskilful in the word of righteousness, and therefore incompetent to direct others.... Yea, my dear brethren, give me permission to say, what it pains me to be obliged to say, that in each of the Welsh bishoprics forty or sixty churches may be found without any one in them on Sundays, even in the middle of summer, when the roads are driest, and the weather finest.'[159]

We have brought our chain of testimonies down to near the end of the seventeenth century. But from that time to our own they are still more abundant.

In 1721 was published, 'A View of the State of Religion in the Diocese of St. David's, about the beginning of the Eighteenth Century,' by Dr. Erasmus Saunders. It contains a most deplorable picture of the condition of the Church, as regards both its material and spiritual interests. He describes some churches as totally decayed; they

'do only serve for the solitary habitations of owls and jackdaws; such are St. Daniel's, Castelhan, Kilvawyr, Mountain, Capel Colman, and others in Pembrokeshire; Mount Llechryd, in Cardiganshire; Aberllynog, in Breconshire; Nelso, in Gower, Glamorganshire, and others in Carmarthenshire. And it is not to be doubted, but as there are districts of land, so there were originally just endowment of tythes that did belong to all those several churches; but whatever they were, they are now alienated, the churches, most of them, demolished, the use for which they were intended almost forgotten, unless it be at Llanybrec, where, I am told, the improprietor or his tenant has let that church unto the neighbouring Dissenters, who are very free to rent it for the desirable opportunity and pleasure of turning a church into a conventicle'—(pp. 23, 4.)

'As the Christian service is thus totally disused in some places, there are other some that may be said to be but half served, there being several churches where we are but rarely, if at all, to meet with preaching, catechising, or administering of the Holy Communion. In others, the service of the prayers is but partly read, and that perhaps but once a month, or once in a quarter of a year.... The stipends are so small, that a poor curate must sometimes submit to serve three or four churches for £10 or £12 a-year.'

He then refers, though with great forbearance and tenderness, to the low type of character which such a state of things produced among the clergy; and then exclaims, sorrowfully, 'Such is the faint shadow that remains among us of the public service of religion!'

'And now,' continues the author, 'what Christian knowledge, what sense of piety, what value for religion are we reasonably to hope for in a country thus abandoned, and either destitute of churches to go to, or of ministers to supply them, or both? Or how can it well consist with equity and conscience to complain of the ignorance and errors of an unhappy people in such circumstances? They are squeezed to the utmost to pay their tithes and what is called the church dues (though, God knows, the Church is to expect little from it), and, at the same time, most miserably deprived of those benefits of religion which the payment of them was intended to support, and delivered up to ignorance and barbarity, which must be the certain consequence of driving away the ministers of religion, or of depressing or incapacitating them for their duty'—(p. 26.).

To aggravate the evils of all kinds already sufficiently rife in the Welsh Church, the English Government, about the beginning of the eighteenth century, adopted the practice, which it has continued ever since, of appointing Englishmen utterly ignorant of the Welsh language to Welsh bishoprics.[160] And the bishops, following the example thus set by those acting for the head of the Church, inundated the Principality with English clergymen, their own relatives and connections, to whom all the highest dignities and the richest livings were, almost without exception, assigned. A more monstrous abuse than this it is difficult to conceive, and yet it has been persevered in for 150 years in the face of all complaint and remonstrance, and in the teeth of the express judgment of the Church itself, which declares in its 26th Article that 'it is a thing plainly repugnant to the word of God, and to the custom of the primitive Church, to have public prayer in the church, or to minister the sacraments in a tongue not understanded of the people.' We need not wonder, therefore, that great prominence should be henceforth given by the friends of the Church to this, as one of the causes, if not, indeed, the sole cause, of its inefficiency and decay. How far they are justified in attaching such supreme importance to it we shall consider hereafter. But we shall for the present resume our series of testimonies to the matter of fact. Most of our readers will doubtless have heard of the Rev. Griffith Jones, of Llanddowror, the founder of the remarkable circulating schools, which, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, rendered such inestimable service to the people of the Principality. We cannot here enter upon the history of the life and labours of this admirable clergyman. If one man could have saved the Church in Wales, he would have saved it. But as Mr. Johnes has remarked with great sagacity—though he does not appear to see the inevitable inference to be drawn from the remark—'it is a truth but too well sanctioned by experience, that a few pious ministers are the weakness, and not the strength, of an establishment, when the majority of its ministers are sunk in indifference to their sacred duties.' Our object now, however, is merely to cite the Rev. Griffith Jones as a witness to the condition of the Church about the middle of the eighteenth century. In the year 1749 he published a letter in Welsh, on the 'Duty of Catechising Ignorant Children and People.' In that letter he observes that the

'peasantry cannot understand from sentences of deep learning in sermons the Articles of Faith without being catechised in them, which, at present, is more necessary, because there is among us such monstrosity (anferthwch) and such evil and barefaced craft in some places, as the frequent preaching of English to the Welsh people, not one jot more edifying or less ridiculous than the Latin service of the Papists in France. One author states that he could not help rebuking such clergymen, in spite of the spleen and wrath it was likely to bring upon him, viz., the lazy vicars and rectors, who have led a careless life from their youth, and have set their mind on keeping company, and going unsteadily from tavern to tavern, and not minding their books; in consequence of which they are as ignorant of their mother tongue as they are of Greek and Hebrew, and therefore read the service and preach in English, without sense or shame, in the most purely Welsh assemblies throughout the country. Not much better, if any, are those who patch up a sermon of mixed language and jargon sounds, inconsonant, dark, and unintelligible, to the great scandal and disgrace of the ministry, and to the grief, damage, and weariness of the congregation.'

There is one other eminent Welsh clergyman whom we must add to this cloud of witnesses before we speak of the rise of Methodism in Wales. The Rev. Evan Evans, better known, perhaps, by his Bardic name, Ieuan Brydydd Hir, was a man of learning and genius, a friend and correspondent of Bishop Percy and other literati of that age. He was especially well versed in ancient British literature, and published a Latin essay, Dissertatio de Bardis, containing Latin translations from the poems of Aneurin, Taliesin, and Llywarch Hen. In 1776, he published two volumes of Welsh sermons. To the first volume he prefixed a dedication to Sir W. W. Wynn in English, and an address to the reader in Welsh, in both of which he describes in bold and burning language the miserable state of the Church in Wales at that time. Here is one out of many extracts we might have given. After complaining that most of the gentry had 'thrown away all regard for religion and morality,' and that 'the ignorance and immorality of the lower class of the people was pitiful, owing to the slothfulness and neglect of many of the clergy,' he thus proceeds: