The Truce of God by George Henry Miles

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THE TRUCE OF GOD

_A Tale of the Eleventh Century_

By
George Henry Miles

With an Introduction By
John C. Reville, S.J., Ph.D.

New York
Joseph F. Wagner, Inc.
London: B. Herder

CONTENTS

CHAP.
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.

INTRODUCTION

"The Truce of God" by our American novelist and dramatist, George Henry
Miles, is not only a romantic and interesting story, it recalls one of
the most striking achievements of the Middle Ages.

After the tide of barbarian invasion, Goths and Vandals, Heruli,
Burgundians and Franks had swept away the edifice of Roman civilization,
had it not been for the regenerating influence of Christianity, another
empire as cruel would have risen on the ruins of Rome. No other power
would then have ruled but the sword. The sword was king, and received
the worship of thousands. Now and then a ruler appeared like Theodoric,
Charlemagne, the Lombard Luitprand, who used the sword on the whole for
just and beneficent ends. And because these warrior kings, even in the
midst of their conquests, brought some of the blessings of peace to
their subject peoples, these peoples welcomed their sway. Peace was,
then as now, one of the world's needs.

Although the eighth, ninth and succeeding century were not without their
brighter sides and were not those totally Dark Ages they have been
represented by the enemies of the Church, nevertheless, seeds of evil
passions, which in spite of her endeavors the Church had been unable
completely to stifle, lingered in the hearts of those strong-limbed,
strong-passioned Teutonic races which had succeeded to the tasks and
responsibilities of pagan Rome. Those races did not have Rome's
organizing power. By force, it is true, in a great measure, but force
intelligently applied, but also by patience, by an instinct for justice
and for order, Rome had welded her vast empire into a coherent whole.
Rome really, and effectively ruled. She had authority, she had prestige,
she was respected and feared, until the fatal day when, for her vices
and tyranny, she began to be hated. That day her fate was sealed.

The Teutonic races lacked the power of organization. They were strong
and comparatively free from the vices of Rome; they had a rude sense of
justice. But that very sense and instinct for that one essential of
ordered life drove the individual to take the execution of the law and
of justice into his own hands and to claim his rights at the point of
the sword. The result can be easily imagined. The sword was never for a
long time thrust back into the scabbard. Incessant wars, not at the
bidding of the ruler, nor sanctioned by the voice of public authority or
for the public welfare, but for private ends, for revenge, for greed and
booty, were waged throughout the length and breadth of Europe.

The civil government, or the empty simulacrum that went under the name,
seemed powerless, for the simple reason that the strong arm of either a
Charlemagne or a Charles Martel too seldom appeared to check the
culprits, or because the civil government itself only added fuel to the
flame, by the encouragement it gave to license and violence by its own
evil example.

But society had to protect itself. Conscious of its danger, and that it
was doomed to destruction, if some remedy were not found, it evolved in
the tenth and the following century, not an absolutely efficacious
remedy, but one which enabled it to pass in comparative safety that
dangerous period and carried European civilization to the full glories
of the age of Dante, St. Louis and the Angel of the Schools. The remedy
was feudalism.

That institution has been misunderstood. It was called forth by special
needs, and when the conditions which it met in an almost providential
manner changed, it quietly passed away. But it rendered an important
and never-to-be forgotten service to war-torn Europe. Feudalism can
scarcely be called a complete and rounded system. For it was constantly
undergoing modification. It was not the same north as south of the
Loire. It was one thing on the west, and quite another on the east of
the Rhine. In general it was, as Stubbs described it ("Constitutional
History." Vol. 1, pp. 255, 256), "a regulated and fairly well graduated
method of jurisdiction, based on land tenure, in which every lord, king,
duke, earl or baron protected, judged, ruled, taxed the class next below
him; ... in which private war, private coinage and private prisons took
the place of the imperial institutions of power." Land, "the sacramental
tie" then, "of all relations," and not money, was the chief wealth of
those ages. For services rendered, therefore, fiefs or landed estates
were the reward. Feudalism thus rested on a contract entered into by the
nation represented by the king, which let out its lands to individuals
who paid the rent not only by doing military service, but by rendering
such services to the king as the king's courts might require. The bond
was frequently extremely loose, and it was hard then to say which of the
two was in reality the stronger, the feudal lord or the technically
lower, but sometimes in reality stronger, vassal.

The feudal lord was bound to support his vassal, and in return, had a
right to expect his help in the hour of danger. The feudal lord owed his
vassals justice, protection, shelter and refuge. If certain privileges,
claimed by the feudal lord, were onerous, the vassal was not without
some guarantee that he would be shown fair play; for it was evident that
unless in some way rights and obligations were fairly well balanced, and
there was a fair return for service rendered, the whole system would
soon crumble to pieces.

The "system," if it can be called one, was, as we have said, by no means
perfect, but it bridged the historic gap which stretches between the
fall of the Carolingian power and the full dawn of the Middle Ages. It
saved Europe from anarchy. Its blessings cannot be denied. It helped to
foster the love of independence, of self-government, of local
institutions, of communal and municipal freedom. The vassal that lived
under the shadows of the strong towers of a feudal lord did not look
much further beyond, to the king in his palace or in his courts of
justice, for protection. He found it closer at home. The vassal,
moreover, began to think of his own rights and privileges, to value them
and to ask that they be enforced. The idea of right and law, one of the
most deeply engraved in the Christian conscience in the Middle Ages,
grew and developed. The barons were the first to claim these rights;
gradually the whole nation imitated them. Even when they claimed them,
primarily for themselves, the whole nation participated sooner or later
in their blessings. The Barons of Runnymede were fighting the battles of
every ploughboy in England when they wrenched _Magna Charta_ from King
John.

Although many a feudal lord was a proud and hard-driving master, yet the
vassal and the serf knew that there were limits which his lord dared not
transgress; that the very spirit of his "caste", for such to a certain
extent was the social rank to which the feudal lord belonged, would not
tolerate any too flagrant a violation of his privileges. A bond of
united interests was found between feudal noble and his vassal. They
were found side by side in war; their larger interests were the same in
peace. Loyalty, honor, fidelity took deep root in the society which they
represented.

As the aristocracy of feudalism was founded, not on wealth or money, but
on land tenure, one of the most stable titles to prestige and authority
found in history, there was in the underlying concept of society in
those days a feeling of stability and permanency, which for a time made
feudalism, in spite of its flaws, a bulwark of order. It fostered even
a strong family spirit. Baron, count or earl, behind the thick ramparts
of his castle, lived a patriarchal life. He was, with his retainers and
men-at-arms, his chaplains, to watch over his spiritual needs, his wife
and children and vassals, dependent upon him for protection and safety,
impelled by every sense of honor, duty and chivalry to make them feel
that he was their sword and buckler. They were closely knit to him.
There was a patriarchal bond between them. Family spirit grew strong
and, under the teaching of the Church, it became pure.

Feudalism had its flaws. It was strictly an aristocratic institution. It
fostered the spirit of pride and bore harshly at times upon the serf and
the man of low degree. But its harsher features were softened by the
teachings of the Church. When it was at its height, voices of Popes like
Alexander III and of Doctors like St. Thomas Aquinas, were lifted to
proclaim the equality of all men in the sight of God. At the altar, serf
and master, count or cottier, knelt side by side. In the monasteries and
convents, the poor man's son might wear the Abbot's ring and in the
assemblies and councils of the realm, the poor clerk of former days,
might speak with all the authority of a Bishop to sway the destinies of
both Church and State.

One of the greatest evils of feudalism was that it fostered to excess
the warlike spirit. Of its very nature, the system was a complex one. It
gave rise to countless misunderstandings between the various grades of
its involved hierarchy. The opportunities and plausible pretexts for
misunderstandings, quarrels and war were many. A petty quarrel in
Burgundy, in Champagne, in the Berry in France, involved not only the
duke and count of these territories but almost every vassal or feudal
lord in the province. The same might be said of the German nobles in
Suabia, Thuringia and Franconia. Private wars were frequent, and though
the barbarism of the past ages had almost completely disappeared under
the teaching of the Gospel, these contests, as might be expected, were
both sanguinary and wasteful.

The Church fought manfully against these private wars. It took every
possible means to prevent them entirely. When in the nature of things,
it found it impossible to do away with them altogether, it tried to
mitigate their horrors, to limit their field of operation, to diminish
their savagery. If the kingly authority was flouted, save perhaps when a
sturdy ruler like William the Conqueror in England, or Hugh Capet in
France, showed that there was a man at the helm, who meant to rule and
was not afraid to quell rebellious earls and make them obey, there was
one power these mail-clad warriors respected. They respected the
Apostles Peter and Paul, they respected My Lord the Pope, and the
Bishops of France and Normandy and England who shared in their
authority. They flouted a king's edict, but none but hardened criminals
among them laughed at an episcopal or a Papal excommunication.

These rude men, and it places their rude age high in the scale of
civilization, respected religion. They lowered the sword before the
Cross. The Church had for the disobedient and the refractory one
terrible weapon, which she was loath to use, but which she occasionally
used with swift and tragic effect, the weapon of excommunication. Many a
modern historian or philosopher has smiled good-naturedly and in mild
contempt at this weapon used by the Church to frighten her children,
much as children are frightened by flaunting some horrid tale of ogre or
hobgoblin before them. Yet the student of history might profitably study
the use which the Church has made of such an instrument, and find in it
one of the most effective causes of social regeneration in the Middle
Ages.

The Church, in order to fight the military and armed excesses of
feudalism, employed many means. It is to her that we owe what is known
as the "Truce of God," or the enforced temporary suspension of
hostilities usually, from the sunset of each Wednesday to Monday
morning. Under pain of excommunication, during that interval, which at
several times was further extended so as to comprise the seasons of
Advent and Lent, and some of the major feasts, the sword might not be
drawn in private quarrel. From a decree of the Council of Elne, in the
South of France, we find that the "Truce of God," the "_Treuga Dei_" as
it was technically called, was in full honor and had reached the height
of its beneficent power in 1207. But long before, in the days when
Gregory VII was Pope, and William of Normandy had just won his English
crown, and Henry III ruled in Germany and Henry I in France, in the days
when feudalism was making its first attempts to bring order out of
chaos, several councils of the Church in France and in Normandy had
traced out the plan and the outlines of the "Truce of God." Earlier
even, at the Councils of Charroux (989), Narbonne (990), Le Puy and Anse
(990), severe penalties were pronounced against those who wantonly in
time of war destroyed the poor man's cattle or harried his fields, or
carried off his beasts of burden. "Leagues of Peace" were formed to
diminish the horrors of war, to protect the helpless, to enforce order.
The Council of Poitiers, where there is one of the earliest mentions of
these "Leagues of Peace," was held 1223 years ago. The Council of
Bourges in 1031 created a species of national militia to police the
rural districts and prevent war. Our ancestors believed in leagues with
"teeth in them." From France where the movement had its origin and
culminated at Elne (1207) in the full organization of the "Truce of
God," it spread eastward into Germany and Thuringia. The German duchies
and the Austrian marches submitted soon after to its humanitarian and
Christian code. In 1030, the Pope, the French and German princes united
their efforts for the development of the forerunners of the "Truce of
God," the conventions known as the "Peace of God." The Peace, the
earlier institution of the two, exempted from the evils of war,
churches, monasteries, clerics, children, pilgrims, husbandmen; the
cattle, the fields, the vineyards of the toiler; his instruments of
labor, his barns, his bakehouse, his milch cows, his goats and his fowl.
The Truce forbade war at certain "closed seasons." It gave angry
passions time to subside, and endeavored to discredit war by making
peace more desirable and its blessings more prolonged. It is probable
that the Council of Charroux already mentioned laid the germs of the
Truce. At the Council of Elne we see it fully organized. In 1139 the
Tenth General Council, the Second Lateran, gave in its eleventh Canon
its official approbation to what must be considered one of the most
beautiful institutions of the Middle Ages.

Under the guidance of our American author, George Henry Miles, we are
led back to the days of the eleventh century. He is an accurate and
picturesque chronicler of that iron, yet chivalrous age. If on the one
hand, we see the sinister figure of Henry IV of Germany, on the other we
find the austere but noble monk Hildebrand, who became Pope St. Gregory
VII. We hear the clash of swords drawn in private brawl and vendetta,
but see them put back into the scabbard at the sound of the church bells
that announce the beginning of the "Truce of God." The tale opens
beneath the arches of a Suabian forest, with Gilbert de Hers and Henry
de Stramen facing each other's swords as mortal foes; it closes with
Gilbert and Henry, now reconciled, kneeling at the tomb of the fair and
lovely Lady Margaret, their hates forgotten before the grave of
innocence and maidenly devotion, and learning from the hallowed memory
of the dead, the lesson of that forgiveness that makes us divine.

The American novelist, like the Italian Manzoni, teaches the lesson
inculcated in "The Betrothed" ("_I Promessi Sposi_"). It is a lesson
of forgiveness. It is noblest to forgive. Forgiveness is divine. Forgive
seventy times seventy times, again and again. In Manzoni's story, the
saintly Frederick Borromeo preaches and acts that sublime lesson in his
scene with the _Innominato_ with compelling eloquence. In "The Truce of
God," the Lady Margaret, the monk Omehr, the very woes of the Houses of
Hers and Stramen, the tragic madness of the unfortunate Bertha, the
blood shed in a senseless and passionate quarrel, the bells of the
sanctuary bidding the warring factions sheathe the sword, incessantly
proclaim the same duty. In writing his story, George Henry Miles was not
only painting for us a picture aglow with the life of olden times, but
pointing out in a masterly way, the historic role of the Church in
molding the manners of an entire generation.

The reader of "The Truce of God," in spite of the fact that the romance
seems to be sketched only in its broadest outlines, gets a distinct
knowledge of its chief actors. They live before his eyes. De Hers and
Stramen are not mere abstractions. They have the rugged, clear-cut
character, the sudden passions, the quick and at times dangerous and
savage impulses of the men of the eleventh century. In them the
barbarian has not yet been completely tamed. But neither has he been
given full rein. Somewhere in these hearts, there lurks a sentiment of
honor, of knighthood, which the Church of Christ has ennobled, and to
which the helpless and the innocent do not appeal in vain.

The American has caught this sentiment and plays upon it skillfully. His
setting is in keeping with his story. The wandering minstrel, the
turreted castle, the festive board, the high-vaulted hall with its oaken
rafters, the chase, the wide reaches of the forests of Franconia, the
beetling ramparts of old feudal castles by the Rhine or the lovely
shores of the Lake of Constance, the vineyards on the slopes of sunny
hills, the bannered squadrons, the din of battle, the crash of helm and
spear, are brought before us with dramatic power. Historic figures
appear on the scene. Close to the principal actors in the story, we see
the gallant Rodolph of Arles, Godefroi de Bouillon, Berchtold of
Carinthia, Hohenstaufen and Welf, acting their life drama at the council
board or on the field of battle. We see a woman and an old man, Mathilda
of Tuscany and Pope St. Gregory VII, slowly but surely building on the
foundations of a half-molded civilization the ramparts of the City of
God. "The Truce of God" is true to the requirements of the historical
romance. It summons before us a forgotten past, and makes it live. We
forget in the vitality and artistic grouping of the picture, in the
nobility of the author's purpose and the lasting moral effect of the
story, the occasional stiffness of the style. It is the style of the
refined scholar, perhaps also of the bookman and the too conscious
critic. Occasionally it lacks spontaneity, directness and naturalness.
It might unbend more and forget ceremony. But it is picturesque,
forcible, clear, and bears us along with its swing and dramatic
movement.

American Catholics must not forget the excellent work done by George
Henry Miles for the cause of Catholic literature, the more so as his
name is not infrequently omitted from many popular histories of American
literature. Yet the author of "The Truce of God" had mastered the story
teller's and the dramatist's art. "If there was ever a born
_litterateur_," writes Eugene L. Didier, in _The Catholic World_ for
May, 1881, "that man was George Henry Miles. His taste was pure,
exquisite and refined, his imagination was rich, vivid, and almost
oriental in its warmth." Moreover, he consecrated his life and his
talents to the cause of Catholic education, identifying himself for many
years with Mount St. Mary's College, Emmitsburg, Maryland, with whose
annals so much of the early history of the Catholic Church in the
United States, is closely linked.

The author of "The Truce of God" was born in Baltimore, July 31, 1824;
he died at Emmitsburg, July 23, 1872. In his twelfth year the lad
entered Mount St. Mary's College. Here he became a Catholic and had
afterwards the happiness of seeing his family follow him into the
Church. The studies at the "Mountain" in those days were still under the
magic and salutary spell of the venerable founder, Bishop Dubois, and
his followers. They were old fashioned, but they were solid, with the
classics of Greece and Rome, mathematics, philosophy and religion as
their foundation. They were eminently calculated to mold thinkers,
scholars and cultured Catholic gentlemen. They left a deep impression on
the young Marylander. After his graduation at the end of the scholastic
year, 1843, the law for a short while lured him away, to its digests,
its quiddits and quillets, abstracts and briefs. But it was putting
Pegasus in pound. Miles at a lawyer's task was as much out of place as
Edgar Allan Poe was when mounting guard as a cadet at West Point, or
Charles Lamb with a quill behind his ear balancing his ledger in India
House. The Mountain and the Muses lured him back to Emmitsburg, where a
short distance from the college gate, in the quiet retreat of
Thornbrook, he settled to his books and a professor's tasks at the
Mount. Close by were the lovely haunts of La Salette, Hillside, Loretto,
Tanglewood, Andorra, Mt. Carmel, every little cottage and garden,
eloquent, it has been said, of the faith and piety of the builders of
the Mount, who breathed the spirit that thus baptized them ("The Story
of the Mountain. Mount St. Mary's College and Seminary, Emmitsburg,
Maryland." By the Rev. E. McSweeny. Vol. II, p. 102). For its historic
associations, its panorama of hills, wooded slopes and fields, the spot
could scarcely be matched within the wide amphitheater of the hills of
Maryland.

To Emmitsburg, to his "boys", the young professor of English literature
gave his enthusiasm, his idealism, his love of all that was fair in art
and the world of books. His enthusiasm inspired them with a love of
artistic excellence, which, neither in his own work, nor in that of his
pupils would tolerate anything commonplace. Before coming to Thornbrook,
he had written "The Truce of God," first published as a serial in the
_United States Catholic Magazine_, established by John Murphy of
Baltimore, and which under the editorship of Bishop Martin John Spalding
and the Rev. Charles I. White achieved a national reputation. Two other
tales, "Loretto," and the "Governess," had also been published and were
extremely popular. Like "The Truce of God," they were of the purest
moral tone, elegant in diction, the work of a thorough literary
craftsman. In 1850, the American actor, Edwin Forrest, offered a prize
of $1,000.00 for the best drama written by an American. Miles easily
carried off the reward with his play "Mohammed." Rich with all the
colors of the East, glowing with the warmth and poetry of Arabian
romance and story, "Mohammed" was rather the work of a thinker and a
poet than of a master dramatist. It was never acted, Forrest himself
judging that it had not that ebb and flow of passion, nor that strong
presentation of character which of all things are so necessary for the
stage. Yet in other plays, notably in "_Senor Valiente_" and especially
in "_De Soto_," and "Mary's Birthday," Miles showed that in him the
dramatic note was not lacking, and in both he scored remarkable
successes.

From Baltimore, after he had left the pursuit of the law, and from
Thornbrook, close to the academic halls in which from 1859 he passed his
entire life, Miles seldom emerged into public notice. Twice he visited
Europe, his impressions of the second journey (1864) being recorded in
"Glimpses of Tuscany." In 1851 President Fillmore sent him on a
confidential mission to Madrid. That same year, John Howard Payne, the
loved singer of "Home, Sweet Home," was reinstated in his consulship of
Tunis. Like Miles, that wandering bard was a convert to the Catholic
Faith. But unlike Miles, he did not enter the Church until the very end
of his life, practically on his death bed. Catholics will be glad to
know that the song, "Home, Sweet Home," whose underlying melody Payne
caught from the lips of an Italian peasant girl, was written by one who,
after many strange wanderings, found "Home" at last in that Church which
is the mistress and inspirer of art. Like Payne, Miles captured the
fancy of his countrymen with one song, "Said the Rose," which at one
time was the most popular song in the United States. It has not the
depth and the melting tenderness of "Home, Sweet Home," but its quaint
fancy and melodious verse struck a responsive chord. In his "Inkerman,"
a stirring ballad, which every American boy of a former age knew by
heart, there was an echo of the "Lays of Ancient Rome," of the "Lays" of
Scott and Aytoun, while in the more ambitious "Christine" (1866), there
was the accent of the genuine poet, something that recalled the
"Christabel" of Coleridge. Miles had projected a series of studies on
the characters and plays of Shakespeare. Judging from two remaining
fragments, "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," the latter a mere outline, we regret
that the writer was not able to finish the task. To beauty of language
his study of "Hamlet" adds keen analytical powers and original views.
("An American Catholic Poet," _The Catholic World_. Vol. XXXIII, p. 145
ff.)

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