was, he and not any human creature, who had nailed Christ upon the
cross. Like the hunger and sores of a fox or a wolf, his hunger and his
sores are forgotten, never noticed. Were it not that legal and
ecclesiastical narratives of trials (not of feudal lords for crushing
and contaminating their peasants, but of peasants for spitting out and
trampling on the consecrated wafer) give us a large amount of
pedantically stated detail; tell us how misery begat vice, and filth and
starvation united families in complicated meshes of incest, taught them
depopulation as a virtue and a necessity; and how the despair of any joy
in nature, of any mercy from God, hounded men and women into the
unspeakable orgies, the obscene parodies, of devil worship; were it not
for these horrible shreds of judicial evidence (as of tatters of clothes
or blood-clotted hairs on the shoes of a murderer) we should know little
or nothing of the life of the men and women who, in mediaeval France and
Germany, did the work which had been taught by Hesiod and Virgil. About
all these tragedies the literature of the Middle Ages, ready to show us
town vice and town horror, dens of prostitution and creaking,
overweighted gibbets, as in Villon's poems, utters not a word. All that
we can hear is the many-throated yell of mediaeval poets, noble and
plebeian, French, Provencal, and German, against the brutishness, the
cunning, the cruelty, the hideousness, the heresy of the serf, whose
name becomes synonymous with every baseness; which, in mock grammatical
style, is declined into every epithet of wickedness; whose punishment is
prayed for from the God whom he outrages by his very existence; a
hideous clamour of indecent jibe, of brutal vituperation, of senseless
accusation, of every form of words which furious hatred can assume,
whose echoes reached even countries like Tuscany, where serfdom was well
nigh unknown, and have reached even to us in the scraps of epigram still
bandied about by the townsfolk against the peasants, nay, by the
peasants against themselves.[1] A monstrous rag doll, dressed up in
shreds of many-coloured villainy without a recognizable human feature,
dragged in mud, pilloried with unspeakable ordure, paraded in mock
triumph like a King of Fools, and burnt in the market-place like
Antichrist, such is the image which mediaeval poetry has left us of the
creature who was once the pious rustic, the innocent god-beloved
husbandman, on whose threshold