very strong and very much the other way. It was
full of local affections, which found form in that system of _fences_
which runs like a pattern through everything mediaeval, from heraldry to
the holding of land. There was a shape and colour in all their customs
and statutes which can be seen in all their tabards and escutcheons;
something at once strict and gay. This is not a departure from the
interest in external things, but rather a part of it. The very welcome
they would often give to a stranger from beyond the wall was a
recognition of the wall. Those who think their own life all-sufficient
do not see its limit as a wall, but as the end of the world. The Chinese
called the white man "a sky-breaker." The mediaeval spirit loved its part
in life as a part, not a whole; its charter for it came from something
else. There is a joke about a Benedictine monk who used the common grace
of _Benedictus benedicat_, whereupon the unlettered Franciscan
triumphantly retorted _Franciscus Franciscat_. It is something of a
parable of mediaeval history; for if there were a verb Franciscare it
would be an approximate description of what St. Francis afterwards did.
But that more individual mysticism was only approaching its birth, and
_Benedictus benedicat_ is very precisely the motto of the earliest
mediaevalism. I mean that everything is blessed from beyond, by something
which has in its turn been blessed from beyond again; only the blessed
bless. But the point which is the clue to the Crusades is this: that for
them the beyond was not the infinite, as in a modern religion. Every
beyond was a place. The mystery of locality, with all its hold on the
human heart, was as much present in the most ethereal things of
Christendom as it was absent from the most practical things of Islam.
England would derive a thing from France, France from Italy, Italy from
Greece, Greece from Palestine, Palestine from Paradise. It was not
merely that a yeoman of Kent would have his house hallowed by the
priest of the parish church, which was confirmed by Canterbury, which
was confirmed by Rome. Rome herself did not worship herself, as in the
pagan age. Rome herself looked eastward to the mysterious cradle of her
creed, to a land of which the very earth was called holy. And when she
looked eastward for it she saw the face of Mahound. She saw standing in
the place that was her earthly heaven a devouring giant out of the
deserts, to whom all places were the sam