The Thirteenth Part 45

There is another side to the question of comparative happiness that may be stated in the words of William Morris, when he says, in "Hopes and Fears for Art," that a Greek or a Roman of the luxurious time (and of course _a fortiori_ a medieval of the Thirteenth Century) would {476} stare astonished could he be brought back again and shown the comforts of a well-to-do middle-cla.s.s house. This expression is often re-echoed, and one is p.r.o.ne to wonder how many of those who use it realize that it is a quotation, and, above all, appreciate the fact that Morris made the statement in order to rebut it. His answer is in certain ways so complete that it deserves to be quoted.

"When you hear of the luxuries of the Ancients, you must remember that they were not like our luxuries, they were rather indulgence in pieces of extravagant folly than what we to-day call luxury--which, perhaps, you would rather call comfort; well, I accept the word, and say that a Greek or a Roman of the luxurious time would stare astonished could he be brought back again and shown the comforts of a well-to-do middle-cla.s.s house.

"But some, I know, think that the attainment of these very comforts is what makes the difference between civilization and uncivilization--that they are the essence of civilization. Is it so indeed? Farewell my hope then! I had thought that civilization meant the attainment of peace and order and freedom, of good-will between man and man, of the love of truth and the hatred of injustice, and by consequence the attainment of the good life which these things breed, a life free from craven fear, but full of incident; that was what I thought it meant, not more stuffed chairs and more cus.h.i.+ons, and more carpets and gas, and more dainty meat and drink--and therewithal more and sharper differences between cla.s.s and cla.s.s.

"If that be what it is, I for my part wish I were well out of it and living in a tent in the Persian desert, or a turf hut on the Iceland hillside. But, however it be, and I think my view is the true view, I tell you that art abhors that side of civilization; she cannot breath in the houses that lie under its stuffy slavery.

"Believe me, if we want art to begin at home, as it must, we must clear our houses of troublesome superfluities that are forever in our way, conventional comforts that are no real comforts, and do but make work for servants and doctors. If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: 'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.'"

COMFORT AND HEALTH.

A comment on William Morris's significant paragraphs may be summed up in some reflections on the scornful expression of a friend who asked, how is it possible to talk of happiness at a time when there were no gla.s.s in windows and no heating apparatus except the open fireplace in the great hall of the larger houses, or in the kitchen of the dwelling houses. To this there is the ready answer that, in the modern time, we have gone so far to the opposite extreme as to work serious harm to health. When a city dweller develops tuberculosis, his physician now sends him out to the mountains, asks him to sleep with his window wide open, and requires him to spend just as much of his time as possible in the open air, even with the temperature below zero. In our hospitals, the fad for making patients comfortable by artificial heat is pa.s.sing, and that of stimulating them by cold, fresh air is gaining ground. We know that, for all the fevers and all the respiratory {477} diseases this brings about a notable reduction in the mortality.

Surely, what is good for the ailing must be even better to keep them well from disease. Many a physician now arranges to sleep out of doors all winter. Certainly all the respiratory diseases are rendered much more fatal and modern liability to them greatly increased by our shut-up houses. The medieval people were less comfortable, from a sensual standpoint, but the healthy glow and reaction after cold probably made them enjoy life better than we do in our steam-heated houses. They secured bodily warmth by an active circulation of their blood. We secure it by the circulation of hot water or steam in our houses. Ours may be the better way, but the question is not yet absolutely decided. A physician friend points to the great reduction in the death-rate in modern times, and insists that this, of course, means definite progress. Even this is not quite so sure as is often thought. We are saving a great many lives that heretofore, in the course of nature, under conditions requiring a more vigorous life, pa.s.sed out of existence early. It is doubtful, however, whether this is an advantage for the race, since our insane asylums, our hospitals for incurables and our homes of various kinds now have inmates in much greater proportion to the population than ever before in history.

These are mainly individuals of lower resistive vitality, who would have been allowed to get out of existence early, save themselves and their friends from useless suffering, and whose presence in life does not add greatly if at all to the possibilities of human accomplishment. Our reduced death-rate is, because of comfort seeking, more than counterbalanced by a reduced birth-rate, so that no advantage is reaped for the race in the end. These reflections, of course, are only meant to suggest how important it is to view such questions from all sides before being sure that they represent definite progress for humanity. Progress is much more elusive than is ordinarily thought, and is never the simple, unmistakable movement of advance it is often thought.

HYGIENE.

The objection that medical friends have had to the claims of The Thirteenth as the Greatest of Centuries is that it failed to pay any attention to hygiene. Here, once more, we have a presumption that is not founded on real knowledge of the time. It is rather easy to show that these generations were antic.i.p.ating many of our solutions of hygienic problems quite as well as our solutions of other social and intellectual difficulties. In the sketch of Pope John XXI., the physician who became Pope during the second half of the Thirteenth Century, which was published in Ophthalmology, a quarterly review of eye diseases (Jan., 1909), because Pope John wrote a little book on this subject which has many valuable antic.i.p.ations of modern knowledge, I called attention to the fact that, while a physician and professor of {478} medicine at the medical school of the University of Sienna, this Pope, then known as Peter of Spain, had made some contributions to sanitary science. Later he was appointed Archiater, that is, Physician in charge of the City of Rome. As pointed out in the sketch of him as enlarged for the volume containing a second series of Catholic Churchmen in Science (The Dolphin Press, Phila., 1909), he seems to have been particularly interested in popular health, for we have a little book, Thesaurus Pauperum--The Treasure of the Poor--which contains many directions for the maintenance of health and the treatment of disease by those who are too poor to secure physicians' advice. The fact that the head of the Bureau of Health in Rome should have been made Pope in the Thirteenth Century, itself speaks volumes for the awakening of the educated cla.s.ses at least to the value of hygiene and sanitation.

Their attention to hygiene can be best shown by a consideration of the hospitals. Ordinarily it is a.s.sumed that the hospitals provided a roof for the sick and the injured, but scarcely more. Most physicians will probably be quite sure that they were rather hot-beds of disease than real blessings to the ailing. That is not what we find when we study them carefully. These generations gave us a precious lesson by eradicating leprosy, which was quite as general as tuberculosis is now, and they made special hospitals for erysipelas, which materially lessened the diffusion of that disease. In rewriting the chapter on The Foundation of City Hospitals for my book, The Popes and Science (Fordham University Press, N. Y., 1908), I incorporated into it a description of the hospital erected at Tanierre, in France, in 1293, by Marguerite of Bourgogne, the sister of St. Louis. Of this hospital Mr. Arthur Dillon, from the standpoint of the modern architect, says:

"It was an admirable hospital in every way, and it is doubtful if we to-day surpa.s.s it. It was isolated, the ward was separated from the other buildings; it had the advantage we often lose, of being but one story high, and more s.p.a.ce was given to each patient than we now afford.

"The ventilation by the great windows and ventilators in the ceiling was excellent; it was cheerfully lighted, and the arrangement of the gallery s.h.i.+elded the patients from dazzling light and from draughts from the windows, and afforded an easy means of supervision, while the division by the roofless, low part.i.tions isolated the sick and obviated the depression that comes from the sight of others in pain.

"It was, moreover, in great contrast to the cheerless white wards of to-day. The vaulted ceiling was very beautiful; the woodwork was richly carved, and the great windows over the altars were filled with colored gla.s.s. Altogether, it was one of the best examples of the best period of Gothic architecture."

In their individual Hygiene there was, of course, much to be desired among the people of the Thirteenth Century, and it has been declared that the history of Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century might, from the hygienic standpoint, he summed up as a thousand years without a bath. The more we know about this period, however, the less of {479} point do we find in the epigram. Mr. Cram, in the Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain (Pott & Co., N. Y., 1907), has described wonderful arrangements within the monasteries (!) for the conduction of water from long distances for all toilet purposes. There was much more attention to sanitary details than we have been p.r.o.ne to think.

Mr. Cram, in describing what was by no means one of the greatest of the English abbeys of the Thirteenth Century, says:

"Here at Beaulieu the water was brought by an underground conduit from an unfailing spring a mile away, and this served for drinking, was.h.i.+ng and bathing, the supply of the fish ponds, and for a constant flus.h.i.+ng of the elaborate system of drainage. In sanitary matters, the monks were as far in advance of the rest of society as they were in learning and agriculture."

WAGES AND THE CONDITION OP WORKING PEOPLE.

What every reader of the Thirteenth Century seems to be perfectly sure of is that, whatever else there may have been in this precious time, at least the workmen were not well paid and men worked practically for nothing. It is confessed that, of course, working as they did on their cathedrals, they had a right to work for very little if they wished, but at least there has been a decided step upward in evolution in the gradual raising of wages, until at last the workman is beginning to be paid some adequate compensation. There is probably no phase of the life of the Middle Ages with regard to which people are more mistaken than this supposition that the workmen of this early time were paid inadequately. I have already called attention to the fact that the workmen of this period claimed and obtained "the three eights"--eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep and eight hours for recreation and bodily necessities. They obtained the Sat.u.r.day half-holiday, and also release from work on the vigils of all feast days, and there were nearly forty of these in the year. After the vesper hour, that is, three in Summer and two in Winter, there was no work on the Eves of Holy-days of Obligation. With regard to wages, there is just one way to get at the subject, and that is, to present the legal table of wages enacted by Parliament, placing beside it the legal maximum price of necessities of life, as also determined by Parliamentary enactment.

An Act of Edward III. fixes the wages, without food, as follows. There are many other things mentioned, but the following will be enough for our purpose:

[Price in s.h.i.+llings and Pence; s. d.] s. d.

A woman hay-making, or weeding corn for the day--0 1

A man filling dung-cart--0 3-1/2

A reaper--0 4

Mowing an acre of gra.s.s--0 4

Thres.h.i.+ng a quarter of wheat--0 4

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The price of shoes, cloth and provisions, throughout the time that this law continued in force, was as follows:

[Price in Pounds, s.h.i.+llings and Pence; s. d.] . s. d.

A pair of shoes--0 0 4

Russet broadcloth, the yard--0 1 1

A stall fed ox--1 4 0

A gra.s.s fed ox--0 16 0

A fat sheep unshorn--0 1 8

A fat sheep shorn--0 1 2

A fat hog two years old--0 3 4

A fat goose--0 0 2-1/2.

Ale, the gallon, by proclamation--0 0 1

Wheat, the quarter--0 3 4

White wine, the gallon--0 0 6

Red wine--0 0 4

An Act of Parliament of the fourteenth century, in fixing the price of meat, names the four sorts of meat--beef, pork, mutton and veal, and sets forth in its preamble the words, "these being the food of the poorer sort." The poor in England do not eat these kinds of meat now, and the investigators of the poverty of the country declare that most of the poor live almost exclusively on bread. The fact of the matter is, that large city populations are likely to harbor many very miserable people, while the rural population of England in the Middle Ages, containing the bulk of the people, were happy-hearted and merry.

When we recall this in connection with what I have given in the text with regard to the trades-unions and their care for the people, the foolish notion, founded on a mere a.s.sumption and due to that Aristophanic joke, our complacent self-sufficiency, which makes us so ready to believe that our generation _must_ be better off than others were, vanishes completely.

It is easy to understand that beef, pork, mutton, veal and even poultry were the food of the poor, when a workman could earn the price of a sheep in less than four days or buy nearly two fat geese for his day's wages. A day laborer will work from forty to fifty days now to earn the price of an ox on the hoof, and it was about the same at the close of the Thirteenth Century. When a fat hog costs less than a dollar, a man's wages, at eight cents a day, are not too low. When a gallon of good ale can be obtained for two cents, no workman is likely to go dry. When a gallon of red wine can be obtained for a day's wages, it is hard to see any difference between a workman of the olden time and the present in this regard. Two yards of cloth made a coat for a gentleman and cost only a little over two s.h.i.+llings. The making of it brought the price of it up to two s.h.i.+lling and six pence. These prices are taken from the Preciosum of Bishop Fleetwood, who took them from the accounts kept by the bursars of convents. Fleetwood's book is accepted very generally as an excellent authority in the history of economics.

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Cobbett, in his History of the Protestant Reformation, has made an exhaustive study of just this question of the material and economic condition of the people of England before and since the reformation.

He says:

"These things prove, beyond all dispute, that England was, in Catholic times, a real wealthy country; that wealth was generally diffused; that every part of the country abounded in men of solid property; and that, of course, there were always great resources at hand in cases of emergency." ... "In short, everything shows that England was then a country abounding in men of real wealth."

Fortesque, the Lord High Chancellor of England under Henry VI., king a century after the Thirteenth, has this to say with regard to the legal and economic conditions in England in his time. Some people may think the picture he gives an exaggeration, but it was written by a great lawyer with the definite idea of giving a picture of the times, and, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, we would say that there could be no better authority.

"The King of England cannot alter the laws, or make new ones, without the express consent of the whole kingdom in Parliament a.s.sembled. Every inhabitant is at his liberty fully to use and enjoy whatever his farm produceth, the fruits of the earth, the increase of his flock and the like--all the improvements he makes, whether by his own proper industry or of those he retains in his service, are his own, to use and enjoy, without the let, interruption or denial of any. If he be in any wise injured or oppressed, he shall have his amends and satisfactions against the party offending. Hence it is that the inhabitants are rich in gold, silver, and in all the necessaries and conveniences of life. They drink no water unless at certain times, upon a religious score, and by way of doing penance.