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 anticipating 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 anticipations of modern knowledge, I called attention to the fact that, while a physician and professor of 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 classes 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 assumed 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 surpass 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 space 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 shielded 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 partitions 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 glass. 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 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 prone 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, washing and bathing, the supply of the fish ponds, and for a constant flushing 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 Saturday 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:
The price of shoes, cloth and provisions, throughout the time that this law continued in force, was as follows:
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 assumption 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 shillings. The making of it brought the price of it up to two shilling 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.
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 circumstances, 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 assembled. 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. They are fed in great abundance, with all sorts of flesh and fish, of which they have plenty everywhere; they are clothed throughout in good woollens, their bedding and other furniture in the house are of wool, and that in great store. They are also well provided with all sorts of household goods and necessary implements for husbandry. Every one, according to his rank, hath all things which conduce to make mind and life easy and happy."
INTEREST AND LOANS
A number of commercial friends have been interested in the wonderful story of business organizations traced in the chapter on Great Beginnings of Modern Commerce. They have all been sure, however, that it is quite idle to talk of great commercial possibilities at a time when ecclesiastical regulations forbade the taking of interest. This would seem to make it quite impossible that great commercial transactions could be carried on, yet somehow these people succeeded in accomplishing them. A number of writers on economics in recent years have suggested that possibly one solution of the danger to government and popular rights from the accumulation of large fortunes might be avoided by a return to the system of prohibition of interest taking. There is much more in that proposition than might possibly be thought by those who are unfamiliar with it from serious consideration. They did succeed in getting on without it in the Thirteenth Century, and at the same time they solved the other problem of providing loans, not alone for business people, but for all those who might need them. We are solving the "loan shark" evil at the present time in nearly the same way that they solved it seven centuries ago. Abbot Gasquet, in his "Parish Life in England Before the Reformation," describes the methods of the early days as follows:
"The parish wardens had their duties towards the poorer members of the district. In more than one instance they were guardians of the common chest, out of which temporary loans could be obtained by needy parishioners, to tide over persons in difficulties. These loans were secured by pledges and the additional security of other parishioners. No interest was charged for the use of the money, and in case the pledge had to be sold, everything over and above the sum lent was returned to the borrower."
THE EIGHTEENTH
LOWEST OF CENTURIES
There is no doubt that the nineteenth century, and especially the latter half of it, saw some very satisfactory progress over immediately preceding times. With the recognition of this fact, that the last century so far surpassed its predecessor there has been a tendency to assume, because evolution occupies men's minds, that the eighteenth must have quite as far surpassed the seventeenth, and the seventeenth the sixteenth, and so on, so that of course we are far ahead in everything of the despised Middle Ages. In recent years, indeed, we have dropped the attitude of blaming the earlier ages, for one of complacent pity that they were not born soon enough, and, therefore, could not enjoy our advantages. Unfortunately for any such conclusion as this, the term of comparison nearest to us, the eighteenth century is without doubt the lowest hundred years in human accomplishment, at least during the past seven centuries.
This is true for every form of human endeavor and every phase of human existence. Prof. Goodyear, of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science, the well-known author of a series of books on art and history, in one of the chapters of his Handbook on Renaissance and Modern Art (New York, The McMillan Co.), in describing the Greek revival of the latter part of the eighteenth century says: "According to our accounts so far throughout this whole book, either of architecture, painting, or sculpture, it will appear that the earlier nineteenth century represents the foot of a hill, whose gradual descent began about 1530." As a matter of fact, in every department of artistic expression the taste of the eighteenth century was almost the worst possible. The monuments that we have from that time, in the shape of churches and municipal buildings, are few, but such as they are, they are the least worthy of imitation, and the art ideas they represent are most to be deprecated of any in the whole history of modern art.
Perhaps the most awful arraignment of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century that was ever made is that of Mr. Cram, in the Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain, from which I have already quoted. He calls attention to the fact that, during this century, some of the most beautiful sculptured work that ever came from the hand of man was torn out of the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey, York, to serve no better purpose than to make lime. His description of the sculpture of the Abbey will give some idea of its beauty and render all the more poignant the loss that was thus inflicted on art. He says:
"Most wonderful of all amongst a horde of smaller statues, a mutilated fragment of a statue of Our Lady and the Holy Child, so consummate in its faultless art that it deserves a place with the masterpieces of sculpture of every age and race. Here in this dim and scanty undercraft is an epitome of the English art of four centuries, precious and beautiful beyond the power of words to describe.
"York Abbey was a national monument, the aesthetic and historic value of which was beyond computation. It is with feelings of horror and unutterable dismay that, as we stand beside the few existing fragments, realizing the irreparable loss they make so clear, we call into mind Henry's sacrilege in the sixteenth century, and his silly palace doomed to instant destruction, and the crass ignorance and stolidity of the eighteenth century with its grants of building material, and the mercenary savagery of the nineteenth century when, from smoking lime kilns rose into the air the vanishing ghosts of the noblest creations that owed their existence to man.
"Nothing is sadder to realize than the failure of appreciation for art of the early nineteenth and the eighteenth century. Men had lost, apparently, all proper realization of the value of artistic effort and achievement. It was an era of travel and commerce and, unfortunately, of industrial development. As a consequence, in many parts of Europe, and especially of England, art remains of inestimable value suffered at the hands of utilitarians who found them of use in their enterprises. We are accustomed to rail against the barbarians and the Turks for their failure to appreciate the remains of Latin and Greek art and for their wanton destruction of them, but what shall we say of modern Englishmen, who quite as ruthlessly destroyed objects of art of equal value at least with Roman and Greek, while the great body of the nation made no complaint, and no protest was heard anywhere in the kingdom."
What is so true of the arts is, as might be reasonably expected, quite as true of other phases of intellectual development. Education, for instance, is at the lowest ebb that it has reached since the foundation of the Universities at the end of the twelfth century. In Germany, there was only one university, that of Göttingen, in which there was a professorship of Greek. When Winckelmann introduced the study of Greek into his school at Seehausen, no school-books for this language were available, and he was obliged to write out texts for his students. What was the case in Germany was also true, to a great degree, of the rest of Europe. Leading French critics ridiculed the Greek authors. Homer was considered a ballad singer and compared to the street singers of Paris. Voltaire thought that the AEneid of Virgil was superior to all that the Greek writers had ever done. No edition of Plato had been published in Europe since the end of the sixteenth century. Other Greek authors were almost as much neglected, and of true scholarship there was very little. When Cardinal Newman, in his Idea of a University, wants to find the lowest possible term of comparison for the intellectual life of the university, he takes the English universities of the middle of the eighteenth century.
With this neglect of education, and above all of the influence that Greek has always had in chastening and perfecting taste, it is not surprising that literature was in every country of Europe at a very low ebb. It was not so feeble as art, but the two are interdependent, much more than is usually thought. Only France has anything to show in literature that has had an enduring influence in the subsequent centuries. When we compare the French literature of the eighteenth with that of the seventeenth century, however, it is easy to see how much of a descent there has been from Corneille, Racine, Moliêre, Boileau, La Fontaine, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Fénelon to Voltaire, Marivaux, Lesage, Diderot, and Bernardin de St. Pierre. This same decadence of literature can be noted even more strikingly in England, in Spain, and in Italy. The seventeenth, especially the first half of it, saw the origin of some of the greatest works of modern literature. The eighteenth century produced practically nothing that was to live and be a vital force in aftertimes.
What is true in art, letters and education is, above all, true in what men did for liberty and for their fellow-men. Hospital organization and the care of the ailing was at its lowest ebb during the eighteenth century. Jacobson, the German historian of the hospitals, says:36
"It is a remarkable fact that attention to the well-being of the sick, improvements in hospitals and institutions generally and to details of nursing care, had a period of complete and lasting stagnation after the middle of the seventeenth century, or from the close of the Thirty Years' War. Neither officials nor physicians took any interest in the elevation of nursing or improving the conditions of hospitals. During the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, nothing was done to bring either construction or nursing to a better state. Solely among the religious orders did nursing remain an interest, and some remnants of technique survive. The result was that, in this period, the general level of nursing fell far below that of earlier periods. The hospitals of cities were like prisons, with bare, undecorated walls and little dark rooms, small windows where no sun could enter, and dismal wards where fifty or one hundred patients were crowded together, deprived of all comforts and even of necessaries. In the municipal and state institutions of this period, the beautiful gardens, roomy halls, and springs of water of the old cloister hospital of the Middle Ages were not heard of, still less the comforts of their friendly interiors."
As might be expected, with the hospitals so badly organized, the art of nursing was in a decay that is almost unutterable. Miss Nutting, of Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Superintendent of Nurses, and Miss Dock, the Secretary of the International Council of Nurses, have in their History of Nursing a chapter on the Dark Period of Nursing, in which the decadence of the eighteenth century, in what regards the training of nurses for the intelligent care of the sick, is brought out very clearly. They say:37
"It is commonly agreed that the darkest known period in the history of nursing was that from the latter part of the seventeenth up to the middle of the nineteenth century. During the time, the condition of the nursing art, the well-being of the patient, and the status of the nurse, all sank to an indescribable level of degradation."
Taine, in his History of the Old Regimé of France, has told the awful story of the attitude of the so-called better classes toward the poor. While conditions were at their worst in France, every country in Europe saw something of the same thing. In certain parts of Germany conditions were, if possible, worse. It is no wonder that the French Revolution came at the end of the eighteenth century, and that a series of further revolutions during the nineteenth century were required to win back some of the rights which men had gained for themselves in earlier centuries and then lost, sinking into a state of decadence out of which we are only emerging, though in most countries we have not reached quite the level of human liberty and, above all, of Christian democracy that our forefathers had secured seven centuries ago.
With these considerations in mind, it is easier to understand how men in the later nineteenth century and beginning twentieth century are prone to think of their periods as representing an acme in the course of progress. There is no doubt that we are far above the eighteenth century. That, however, was a deep valley in human accomplishment, indeed, a veritable slough of despond, out of which we climbed; and, looking back, are prone to think how fortunate we are in having ascended so high, though beyond our vision on the other side of the valley the hills rise much higher into the clouds of human aspiration and artistic excellence than anything that we have attained as yet. Indeed, whenever we try to do serious work at the present time, we confessedly go back from four to seven centuries for the models that we must follow. With Renaissance art and Gothic architecture and the literature before the end of the sixteenth century cut out of our purview, we would have nothing to look to for models. This phase of history needs to be recalled by all those who would approach with equanimity the consideration of The Thirteenth as the Greatest of Centuries.