ding an ideal
Commonwealth in a modern colony. A specialist on this period,
Colonel Conder of the Palestine Exploration, has written that the core
of the Code was founded on the recommendations of Godfrey himself
in his "Letters of the Sepulchre"; and he observes concerning it:
"The basis of these laws was found in Justinian's code, and they
presented features as yet quite unknown in Europe, especially in their
careful provision of justice for the bourgeois and the peasant,
and for the trading communes whose fleets were so necessary to the king.
Not only were free men judged by juries of their equals, but the same
applied to those who were technically serfs and actually aborigines."
The original arrangements of the Native Court seem to me singularly
liberal, even by modern standards of the treatment of natives.
That in many such medieval codes citizens were still called serfs is
no more final than the fact that in many modern capitalist newspapers
serfs are still called citizens. The whole point about the villein
was that he was a tenant at least as permanent as a peasant.
He "went with the land"; and there are a good many hopeless tramps
starving in streets, or sleeping in ditches, who might not be sorry
if they could go with a little land. It would not be very much
worse than homelessness and hunger to go with a good kitchen garden
of which you could always eat most of the beans and turnips;
or to go with a good cornfield of which you could take a considerable
proportion of the corn. There has been many a modern man would have been
none the worse for "going" about burdened with such a green island,
or dragging the chains of such a tangle of green living things.
As a fact, of course, this system throughout Christendom was already
evolving rapidly into a pure peasant proprietorship; and it will be
long before industrialism evolves by itself into anything so equal
or so free. Above all, there appears notably that universal mark
of the medieval movement; the voluntary liberation of slaves.
But we may willingly allow that something of the earlier success
of all this was due to the personal qualities of the first knights
fresh from the West; and especially to the personal justice
and moderation of Godfrey and some of his immediate kindred.
Godfrey died young; his successors had mostly short periods of power,
largely through the prevalence of malaria and the absence of medicine.
Royal marriages with the more oriental tr