Mediæval Con

emperor, the church, as the highest authority binding men on earth, put kings under the interdict and released their subjects from their oaths of allegiance. This led, in the first place, to a weakening of the gravity of an oath and opened the door to treason, and that to a generation already prone to such things because it was justified at certain times in the eye of the church. Then there arose rival heads of the church who thundered anathemas at each other, who released their adherents from oaths taken to their opponents, and themselves set an example of hatred and deception. All these things tended to discount the value of truth and faithfulness. Moreover, this very lying was frequently indirectly recommended by the miracle stories of saints and others current in that period. If a man was a saint it would appear from the popular tales that he might say or do almost anything provided he was successful and was forgiven afterwards. The evils of falsehood appeared at their very worst in the second half of the eleventh century when all this trifling with truth and oaths was at its height.

Another element in this atmosphere is the rigid ventionalities. rule of ceremonial and conventionality in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. There was the conventional modesty and humility of ecclesiastics when elected to office. There were also the conventionalities of court life and knightly manners. These things are useful and advantageous when the ideal of life and manners is high, but when it is the conventional thing to act deceitfully and to do anything wrong provided you are successful, no amount

of chivalry will gloss over the evil thereby wrought. There were also the conventionalities of literature, particularly of poetry. In the poetry of that time love affairs were always with married women, and it was looked upon as the duty of the full-fledged knight to fall in love with the wife of some one else, and the more risks he ran in getting stolen pleasures from these adventures, the more perfect knight did he become, and the more popular in the minds of the poets and of the chivalry of that period.

The evidence of literature as to manners and rules Limitations of

dence.

of life is not without limitations. Poetry is apt to Literary Evifollow models, and these models are different in every period and one age may imitate another long past. The medieval poets may follow only such other writers as seemed to them the most interesting and piquant. In early French literature the ballads of a certain class always sing about flowers and the beauties of spring. One might think that those were forms of nature which appealed particularly to the poets of that period, but the reason is that their ballads were destined to be sung at spring festivals. So also in the poem of adventure the beloved lady was always married to another and the hoodwinked husband was always in the plot. These characters are found in the poems because the hearers always expected them. In other words, such minstrelsy was conventional, and conclusions as to the moral feelings or the moral sentiments of a given individual cannot be final when taken from the writings of the poets and romancers alone; yet the fact that such a conventional moral standard

Fictitious
Speeches.

was present in literature and was applauded by popularity is an indication of an unfavorable atmosphere for historical truth. A change in public sentiment in regard to verity and deception appears to have set in about the close of the twelfth century. The poems of this period begin to praise truth and to decry lying. A permanent change, however, does not seem to have been effected immediately, for we still occasionally hear of lying and deception.

Literary ideals have affected history in still other ways in other ages. In the classical period it was customary, for one thing, to make the prominent characters utter speeches on important occasions, whereby they expressed their sentiments upon politics or the course of events. It was of course impossible to offer a stenographic report of an address by a Fabius or a Marius, and the speech was necessarily an invention of the author. It was at best an attempt to put in what was appropriate to the occasion, or what might have been said. Such additions were historical fiction rather than history, yet were apparently always expected. Writers of the Renaissance were greatly moved by their classic models, and in attempting to imitate the periods of Cicero or Suetonius or Livy the speeches of the historical characters followed with the rest. Even the great historians of the new Italian language like Machiavelli and Guacciadim must make their generals and statesmen talk. Other writers in their descriptions of persons or their conduct in critical situations often used the language

applied by some classic author to an entirely different case. Truth gained nothing in this process.

History in the seventeenth and part of the eight- History as eenth century suffered because the authors of that Literature. day looked upon it as a branch of literature. The ideal was the perfection of form rather than exactitude in investigation. The consequence was an easygoing acceptance of earlier writers and more or less unconscious distortion of facts, in order to provide agreeable literature of the established standard. The nineteenth century went almost to the opposite The German schools of research started the historians in so vigorous pursuit of original facts that the manner of presentation was much neglected. The ideal of the age was the finding of the truth, and no man since that time has any hope of a hearing who does not prove his statements, or theories, at every step. It is evident, therefore, that the moral and literary standards of the period in which an author lived must be taken into consideration in estimating his value as a source of information.

extreme.

Consciously transmitted history is not confined to written documents. Chronologically speaking, the writer comes late, since the word of mouth for history was employed long before the book, but in common practice the investigator ordinarily looks to see whether the chronicle is confirmed by the tradition. We proceed then to oral report as the next important field of inquiry.

Oral Tradition
Possible.

CHAPTER XIII

EVALUATION OF ORAL TRADITION

It was pointed out in an earlier chapter that an oral tradition, as soon as it is recorded, is liable thereafter to all the vicissitudes of a document and is subject to the rules of criticism for written history. Except for the most modern history, traditions must be studied both before and after their appearance in writing. Our inquiry at this point is how far an account which is known to have been circulated orally is valuable as a source of history.

It must not be assumed that oral tradition is an impossible means of transmission of truth. Although subject to distortion and error it is quite reasonable to expect that facts may be carried for a long time in the memory. Instances will occur to almost every reader where anecdotes in which implicit confidence may be placed in the general statements have come down orally from father to son for more than one generation. Writers on historical method have been collecting such data since the beginning. Cases in point from ancient history are cited by Sir George Lewis.1 Thucydides says that Athenians reverted to the government of Peisistratos and his sons, which they knew by

1 G. C. Lewis, Methods of Observation and Reasoning in Politics, I, 272.