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Between the hamlets the Roman roads crumbled under the onslaught of

bracken and bush. With no movement from one place to another, there was

little point in maintaining them. The dwindling members of the population

subsisted on what they could grow in the forest clearings, or 'assarts', as they

were called, which poked like hesitant fingers into the shadows of the forest.

Only the well armed, or those protected by spiritual courage, ventured into the

woods.

Gradually, however, as the forest was pushed back, the small communities

grew, and by the eighth century some were loosely linked in the manorial

system. The manor was a totally autonomous entity, seldom covering more than

a few square miles, its illiterate serfs ruled by an equally illiterate lord, whose

duty it was to protect his manor in return for payment in kind. There was no

money. The manor had to be self-sufficient, as no help could be expected from

elsewhere. Life expectancy at the time was about forty years.

Several hundred such small manors might be held in sway by one overlord,

administering them as he saw fit. All transactions were conducted in terms of

land: ownership, tenure or rent. Each man paid his debts in acreage, produce or

service. Only the seasons changed. The routine of daily life was an unvaried

cycle of sleeping, eating, working and sleeping again. The mental horizons of

even the most inquisitive were limited by the forest wall. Customs, clothes,

dialect, food and laws, all were local. And there was no way of knowing if

things were any different elsewhere, for a small community might be fortunate

to see one visitor a year.

A pen drawing from

the margin of a

twelfth-century

psalter. Women are

shown shearing

sheep, spinning the

wool into thread, and

weaving it into

rough, broadweave

cloth on a medieval

vertical loom . The

threads are held in

position by a weight

at the bottom of the

frame.

In every monastery and cathedral in France Charlemagne established schools

whose task it was to teach the basics of literacy, for only in this way could he

ensure the continued existence ofthe knowledge ofthe past. To achieve his aim,

Charlemagne made use of Capella's seven liberal arts, maintained over the

centuries in monastic libraries. From the middle of the eighth century onwards,

the liberal arts were taught all over Europe. The English scholar Alcuin was

brought over from York to head the Palace School at Aachen, Charlemagne's

glittering capital. It was probably Alcuin who standardised writing through the

development of Carolingian minuscule, a tiny, clear script which was one day to

become the model for modern upper and lower case lettering..

The cathedral schools also taught psalms, the chant and how to compute the

seasons. After Alcuin's death it was decreed that all parish priests should

provide this minimal education free. The main cathedral schools and centres of

intellectual activity were at Paris, Chartres, Laon and Reims, in northern

France. Later, on the Royal Portal of the cathedral at Chartres, sculptors would

place an allegory of the trivium and quadrivium, as the three-and four-subject

divisions of the curriculum became k;nown, to show to the illiterate wor

shippers the power and importance of the intellect in the service of God.

The Royal Portal of

Chartres Cathedral,

added to the building

by the Chancellor,

Thierry, one of a

group of new

thinkers who called

themselves 'the

modern ones'. In

placing the figures of

the liberal arts so

close to the Virgin

and Child, Thierry

was proclaiming the

power of reason in

faith.

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Thus began the first cautious stirrings of commerce, as each hamlet with a The medieval

surplus went in search of buyers. Markets were set up in the lee of ruined economic recovery

Roman town walls, or at monastery gates. Merchants began to travel small was stimulated by

distances to barter goods. The discovery of silver at Rammelsberg, in Saxony, at the horseshoe, an

the end of the tenth century put a tiny amount of coin into circulation. Small import from the

towns, which we would now call villages, grew up around the market-places, Middle East which

following the contours ofthe land. The houses were built in terraces for warmth improved the

performance of the

and the streets were

curved to blunt the

effect of the wind.

animal over rough

But the philosophical

viewpoint at the time of

the resurgence of the

cities in ground and helped to

the tenth and eleventh

centuries left their

citizens ill-prepared for

the new protect it from foot

problems now

demanding solution.

There was no concept of

progress. In the rot.

early Middle Ages men

were aware only ofthe

greatness that had been

lost. 'We

stand on the shoulders

of giants,' theysaid. The

past held all that was

great and

glorious. It was the

source of all authority.

The purpose of any

intellectual

activity was not to

question this past world,

but to add respect for it.

The trivium provided skills only for administration. What little arithmetic

the quadrivium offered was clumsy. The use of roman numerals made

multiplication and division nearly impossible. In 1050 in Liege, people worked

out geometry problems by cutting pieces of parchment into triangles. On the

spot reckoning was done with what was called 'finger maths'. For numbers

higher than 9000, said the Venerable Bede, echoing Capella, you needed the

skills of a dancer!

Word spread in Europe of the culture beyond the Pyrenees. The northern

part of Spain, round Barcelona and along the foothills of the northern

mountains, was Christian; it had never been fully settled by the invading

Arabs, who had arrived in Spain in 711, landing at Gibraltar. By 720 they had

taken Cordoba, Toledo, Medina, Zaragoza and all of southern Spain from the

Visigoths, barbarians-in-residence. The Arabs named their new territory Al

Andalus, the land of the Vandals, from which comes the modern name

Andalusia.

For two hundred years after the invasion Al-Andalus was a backwater of

Islam, far to the west of the centres of learning and commerce in Baghdad and

Damascus. Gradually, however, the land bloomed and became rich. By 932,

when the Umayyad Caliphate took power, with its capital in Cordoba, Spain

was the jewel in the crown of Islam.

Irrigation systems imported from Syria and Arabia turned the dry plains of

Andalusia into an agricultural cornucopia. Olives and wheat had always grown

there. The Arabs added pomegranates, oranges, lemons, aubergines, artichokes,

cumin, coriander, bananas, almonds, palms, henna, woad, madder, saffron,

sugar-cane, cotton, rice, figs, grapes, peaches, apricots, rice. The Muslim

peasants who worked the land were given shares in the property. The most

spectacular Arab innovations, however, were formal gardens like those of the

Generalife (from jannat-al-arif, the Inspector's paradise) in the Alhambra,

Granada.

The astrolabe, with

which the Arabs

could tell the date

and hour from the

position of certain

stars. Movable

sights on the

instrument were

aligned with the star

and the relevant

numbers and signs

were read off from

windows (left) or at

the circumference

(right) .

Below: In a culture

which did not permit

realism in art,

Spanish Arab

patterned ceramic

work reached heights

of artistic expression

unequalled anywhere

in Europe.

Andalusia became rich and elegant. In the capital, Cordoba, where the

enlightened and intellectual Hakam, the second ruler of the new dynasty,

founded the great mosque, there were half a million inhabitants, living in

113,000 houses. There were 700 mosques and 300 public baths spread

throughout the city and its twenty-one suburbs. The streets were paved, and

lit. There were bookshops and more than seventy libraries. The boast of Arab

Spain was the great central library of Cordoba, built in the Alcazar, or Royal

Palace, around 970. The catalogue alone filled forty-four volumes, each fifty

pages long. There were over 400,000 titles in the library, more than in the whole

of France.

The Arabs used paper, a material still unknown in the West. Here, its

availability encouraged the development of a highly literate community with

regular postal services delivering correspondence as far away as India. They

also used paper money for their transactions. Most of the Caliphate revenue

came from export and import duties. By the ninth century the country was

producing wool and silk (in Almeria and Malaga), glass and brass (in Almeria),

pottery (in Paterna, near Valencia), gold and silver (in Jaen), iron and lead

(Cordoba), rubies. (Malaga) and swords (Toledo). There was a major tanning

industry in Cordoba, employing over 13,000 workers. Textiles were also

produced there, as were ceramics and crystal.

Without formal

marriage, the

passage of landed

property was

insecure. Here a

father transmits his

feudal rights through

his daughter to her

new husband, with

his wife's approval.

From a manuscript

written at the order

of Alfonso II of

Aragon (1162-96).

Then, in 1140, the great Bolognese

jurist Gratian produced his

Decretum, a

lawyer's textbook embodying all the

new techniques. The Decretum was

heavily influenced by Abelard's Sic

et Non. It came in two parts. The

first gave

the main outlines of all law. The

second took hypothetical cases and

reconciled

the pros and cons using what is

essentiaily the modern technique of

cross

examination, incorporating

Aristotle's rules of argument and

deduction. This

technique was particularly valuable

in dealing with conflicting

arguments

about the

law itself. In

such cases

Gratian

would also

apply the

rules

ofgrammar

to find the

true meaning

of the

terminology

being used.

By this time

law had

become so

important

and so

attractive as

a career that

it

had been

split into

two types,

civil and

canon law.

John of

Salisbury

noted the

increasingly

common

problems

with which

the new,

codified law

dealt. In the

late 1150s a

major area

of difficulty

in canon law

was that

ofmarriage,

the key to

inheritance

and a

hazardous

venture, as

death by one

or other

party was

common. A

woman

might marry

several

times, each

time taking

with her a

complicated

dowry of

property that

had

originally

belonged to

one of her

husbands'

families.

The act of

marriage

itself was

extremely

informal.

More

often than

not it was

not even

conducted in

church.

What then

ofthe

legitimacy

of any heirs

born to the

union?

There is a

record of the

case of

Richard of

Anstey, who

went to his

Archbishop's

court

eighteen

times and

twice more

to

the court of

the Pope

before his

affairs were

settled.

advance due to the Islamic vaulted arch and, later, the flying buttress, but it A detail from a

also gave people in the late Middle Ages the chance to express their new-found Chartres window

power. They did so by building giant cathedrals that thrust into the sky all over shows the work of two

Europe. of the guilds which

Between 1140 and 1220 they built cathedrals in Sens, Noyons, Senlis, Paris, contributed to the costs

Laon, Chartres, Reims, Amiens and Beauvais. The buildings were encyclopedias of the cathedral: top, a

in stone, ornamented with sculptures and windows that told stories from the cobbler; below, a

Bible. In both glass and stone a new naturalism in illustration appeared. While stonemason.

piece of parchment with a pinhole through it, Theodoric discovered what

caused the rainbow.

Shining sunlight through the pinhole on to the droplet of his container of

water and raising and lowering them, and measuring the effects he observed,

Theodoric saw that the colour of the rainbow spectrum depended on the angle

at which the light entered the droplet and on the position of the observer.

Calculating the rainbow mechanism thus, Theodoric was conducting the first

properly scientific experiment in Western European history and completing a

change in thinking that had begun with the fall of Toledo.

Where men had once said, 'Credo ut intelligam' (understanding can come only

through belief), they now said, 'Intelligo ut credam' (belief can come only

through understanding). In 1277, Roger Bacon was imprisoned for an indefinite

period for holding these opinions. Free and rational investigation of nature was

to come hard in the clash between reason and faith which would echo down to

our own time.

One of Theodoric of

Freiburg' s sketches

showing how the

rainbow was formed,

which clearly

demonstrates his

understanding of

reflection and

refraction. The sun

shines, from the left,

on to the droplets,

and the eye perceives

the colours, in order,

at bottom centre.