The Survival of Mediaeval Intellectual Interests into Early Modern Times

Abstract

T HOSE external conditions of life which we call mediaeval largely persisted into early modern times or even until the French Revolution or the nineteenth century. In most parts of Europe the life of the peasant and the land system were little altered. In most towns the picturesque walls and towers, streets and houses, remained essentially unchanged, except that with the falling-off in population whole quarters might be deserted, or with the decline in taste charming Gothic arches, windows, columns, and ornamentation might be walled up, plastered over, cut through, or otherwise concealed and disfigured. To a large extent, save in royal capitals and newcommercial centres, the old buildings were made to suffice. Thus, if a new school were opened, instead of occupying a new building, it would move into some half-ruined monastery or abandoned hospital. The feudal castles were battered down and dismantled only in the seventeenth century. If knighthood was not still in flower in the sixteenth century, nevertheless a captain of that time could say that a good cavalier on a good horse was as superior a being as there could be in this world.' The gild system was essentially the samie in the seventeenth century as in the thirteenth,2 and did not disappear on the continent of Europe until the French Revolution and the middle of the nineteenth century. Quaint old custom and procedure, popular festivals and liberties, had been reduced; artisans worked longer and were paid less; 3 in the gilds there was less charity4