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On Warfare and the Threefold Path
of the Jerusalem Pilgrimage

This volume will provide the frst English translation of Ralph Niger’s
critical refection on military pilgrimage, written in the late 1180s in
response to the calling of the Third Crusade. Long known to scholars as
early and highly idiosyncratic critique of crusading, On Warfare and the
Threefold Path of the Jerusalem Pilgrimage provides a sustained refection
on penance, the meaning of Jerusalem, and the challenges of military expe-
ditions to the Levant. After the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, Ralph resisted the
calls to crusade and instead exhorted Christians to look inward and build
Jerusalem in their hearts. Throughout the four books of the work, Ralph
looks to scripture for precedents for crusading and fnds none. However, by
ranging widely over examples of Old Testament violence and considering
the Heavenly and Earthly Jerusalem together, On Warfare offers a unique
perspective on how the Bible informed contemporary views of the Crusades.
Methodically examining pilgrimage through the lens of scripture, Ralph
surveys the entire semantic feld of crusading, and concludes that Christian
knights could do more good by staying home than by going on a military
adventure to the Holy Land.

John D. Cotts (PhD Berkeley, 2000) is a professor of history and the Chair of
the Division of Social Sciences at Whitman College (USA). A cultural and
intellectual historian of twelfth-century England and France, he has pub-
lished two books: The Clerical Dilemma: Peter of Blois and Literate Culture
in the Twelfth Century (2009), and Europe’s Long Twelfth Century: Oder,
Anxiety and Adaptation 1095–1229 (2013).
Crusade Texts in Translation
Editorial Board
Peter Edbury (Cardiff), Norman Housley (Leicester), Peter Jackson (Keele)

The crusading movement, which originated in the 11th century and lasted
beyond the 16th, bequeathed to its future historians a legacy of sources
which are unrivalled in their range and variety. These sources document
in fascinating detail the motivations and viewpoints, military efforts and
spiritual lives, of the participants in the crusades. They also narrate the
internal histories of the states and societies which crusaders established or
supported in the many regions where they fought. Some of these sources
have been translated in the past but the vast majority have been availa-
ble only in their original language. The goal of this series is to provide a
wide-ranging corpus of texts, most of them translated for the frst time,
which will illuminate the history of the crusades and the crusader-states
from every angle, including that of their principal adversaries, the Muslim
powers of the Middle East.

Titles in the series include

Baybars’ Successors
David Cook

The Conquest of the Holy Land by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn

Keagan Brewer and James H. Kane

The Chronicle of Arnold of Lübeck

Graham Loud

The Chanson des Chétifs and Chanson de Jérusalem

Carol Sweetenham

The Old French Chronicle of Morea

Anne Van Arsdall and Helen Moody

On Warfare and the Threefold Path of the Jerusalem Pilgrimage

A Translation of Ralph Niger’s De re militari et triplici via peregrinationis
Ierosolimitane
John D. Cotts
On Warfare and the Threefold
Path of the Jerusalem
Pilgrimage
A Translation of Ralph Niger’s De re
militari et triplici via peregrinationis
Ierosolimitane

John D. Cotts
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 John D. Cotts
The right of John D. Cotts to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Radulfus, Niger, approximately 1140– | Cotts, John D.,
translator, editor.
Title: On warfare and the threefold path of the Jerusalem pilgrimage :
a translation of Ralph Niger’s De Re Militari et Triplici via Ierosolimitane
peregrinationis / John D. Cotts. Other titles: De re militari et triplici via
peregrinationis Ierosolimitane. English | Translation of Ralph Niger’s De
Re Militari et Triplici via Ierosolimitane peregrinationis
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |
Series: Crusade texts in translation | Includes bibliographical references
and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022035795 (print) | LCCN 2022035796 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367254520 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032234977 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780429287893 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Crusades—Third, 1189–1192. | Bible—Criticism,
interpretation, etc.—History—Middle Ages, 600–1500. | Pilgrims and
pilgrimages.
Classification: LCC D163 .R3413 2023 (print) | LCC D163 (ebook) |
DDC 940.1/82—dc23/eng/20220809
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035795
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035796

ISBN: 978-0-367-25452-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-23497-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-28789-3 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9780429287893
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
For Afton, Mary Caroline, and Dad
Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations and short titles in the notes xi

Introduction 1
Ralph Niger’s life and career 4
Ralph Niger’s extant writings 9
On Warfare: manuscripts, dating and synopsis 12
On Warfare as ‘crusade criticism’ 17
A note on the translation 26

Prologue 28

Book I 35

Book II 75

Book III 111

Book IV 158

Bibliography 191
Index 197
Acknowledgements

In 2014, the International Medieval Congress at Leeds featured a series of

sessions on “The Uses of the Bible in Crusades Sources.” At one of the pan-
els (I do not recall which one), an audience member (I do not recall who)
remarked that to study the crusades properly, ‘we all need to be exegetes.’ At
many times while preparing this translation, I became concerned about how
far away from crusading Ralph Niger seemed to wander in his exegetical
forays into spiritual pilgrimage, and I worried acutely that readers would be
disappointed as they pored over Ralph’s meticulous analysis of every part
of the tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant. In those moments, I would
return to this comment to remind myself that, in a very real way, Ralph
provides the very intellectual DNA of the crusades (as the clergy understood
them). Whoever he was, then, I thank him profusely.
Fortunately, although I was not able to share ideas as easily and frequently
as I would have liked because of the disruptions that COVID-19 visited
upon the scholarly community, I do know the identities of many people who
helped out in the last several years as well as they were able while I worked
on the project. Nicolas Morton initially suggested that De re militari et tri-
plici via Ierosolimitane was ripe for translation, while Philippe Buc, both in
personal correspondence and in his published work, helped convince me
of the text’s importance. For very specifc comments on this translation, I
am grateful to Katherine Allen Smith and Winston Black. Others who have
given me insights in one way or another, or simply opportunities to dis-
cuss the intellectual history of the crusades (or in some cases, Ralph Niger
himself), include Anne Duggan, Matthew Gabriele, Elizabeth Lapina, Mia
Münster-Swendsen, Nicholas Paul, Jason Roche, Jay Rubenstein, Kristin
Skottki, and Susanna Throop. Long ago, Grover Zinn frst introduced me
to twelfth-century mystical interpretations of scripture, and his work con-
tinues to help me to understand the thought-worlds of authors like Ralph
Niger.
Thanks to the world pandemic, I fnished much of this book in a base-
ment offce, which was only possible because of the work of Jen Pope and
the Interlibrary Loan staff at Whitman College’s Penrose Library, and
because Bill North had earlier lent me his microflms of Ralph Niger’s
x Acknowledgements
biblical commentaries (Ben Murphy of the Pacifc Northwest Archive at
Whitman also kindly allowed me to use its microflm reader). Prior to 2020,
some early work for this project was completed in the British Library, the
Institute of Historical Research, and the Warburg Institute, all in London.
As always, I thank the staff of each of these institutions. Special thanks go
to Claire Arrand at Lincoln Cathedral Library for granting access to (and
the ability to photograph) several manuscripts of Ralph’s works.
Since I did so much of the work for this project at home while juggling
Zoom teaching and home-schooling during the lockdown, I must especially
thank my personal ‘pod’. My wife Afton Truscott supported this work while
dealing with her considerably more pressing responsibilities as a night-shift
ICU nurse during all the various ‘surges’ of the pandemic. I hope that this is
not inappropriate venue in which to call her my hero. Finally, my daughter
Mary Caroline Cotts amazed me with her resilience and I thank her for the
endless stream of drawings of rainbows, unicorns, and dragons she made for
my home offce wall.
Abbreviations and short titles in the notes

CCCM Corpus Christianorum Continutatio Mediaevalis.

Codex Bruce W. Frier, ed., The Codex of Justinian:
A New Annotated Translation with Parallel Latin and
Greek Text, 3 vols., Cambridge, 2016.
Decretum Decretum Magistri Gratiani, in Corpus Iuris Canonici,
ed. Emil Friedberg (1879), vol. 1.
Digest The Digest of Justinian, ed. Alan Watson
(Philadelphia, 1998), 4 vols.
Schmugge, DRM Radulfus Niger—De Re Militari et Triplici Via
Peregrinationis Ierosolimitane (1187/88), ed.
Ludwig Schmugge, Beitrage zur Geschichte und
Quellenkunde des Mittelalters 6 (Berlin, 1977).
Institutes Justinian’s Institutes, trans. Peter Birks and Grant
McLeod (Ithaca, NY, 1987).
PL J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Latinae Cursus
Compeltus.
Introduction

In the fall of 1187, the newly elected Pope Gregory VIII had to confront a
political, military, and spiritual catastrophe. The Muslim general Saladin
had destroyed the army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem on 4 July at the
Battle of Hattin and then accepted the surrender of the city of Jerusalem
itself on 2 October. Gregory channeled his grief into the papal bull Audita
tremendi, which described the series of calamities emotionally but suc-
cinctly: the ‘Saracens’ had captured the king, slaughtered bishops and
knights alike, and, perhaps worst of all, had seized the relic of the True
Cross. Finding a biblical precedent for current events, he quoted Psalm 73:
O God, the gentiles have invaded your inheritance, they have sullied your holy
temple, they have laid waste Jerusalem.1 History was repeating itself, with
Saladin reprising Nebuchadnezzar’s role as the destroyer of the Holy City.
This time, Christians had lost Jerusalem because of their own sins, and so
Gregory explained that the only proper response was penance, followed by
an expedition to recover it from Muslim control.2
Other intellectuals of the Latin West, drawing on their theological and
legal educations in the twelfth-century schools, elaborated on Gregory’s
message in a series of emotional appeals for princes and knights to embark
on what they described as a ‘pilgrimage’, and which would take the form
of the military adventure that scholars now call the Third Crusade. Tasked
with ‘preaching the cross’, that is, encouraging Christians to sew the cross
to their clothing to identify themselves as pilgrims on the path to Jerusalem,
Cardinal Henry of Albano gave sermons in Germany, while Baldwin, arch-
bishop of Canterbury, journeyed to Wales. While attending the papal court

1 Psalms 78:1. Here and in the translation, the Latin Vulgate’s numbering is used for the
Psalms. For a good recent translation of the bull, see ‘Pope Gregory VIII, Audita tremendi,
October 29, 1187’, in Crusade and Christendomz: Annotated Documents in Translation from
Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291, ed. Jessalynn Bird, Edward Peters, and James
M. Powell (Philadelphia, 2013), 4–9.
2 For an important recent assessment of Audita tremendi, see Thomas W. Smith, ‘Audita
tremendi and the Call for the Third Crusade Reconsidered, 1187–1188’, Viator 49. (2018):
63–101.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429287893-1
2 Introduction
in Ferrara on business for the same Baldwin, the French cleric Peter of Blois
began writing a series of tracts lamenting that the princes and knights were
too slow to respond. Nearly all of these crusade propagandists started by
largely replicating Gregory VIII’s list of disasters in the Holy Land, and
then made emotional calls for a pilgrimage that would cleanse not only the
pilgrim’s soul but Christendom as a whole.3
At almost exactly the same time, but perhaps a bit later, a relatively
obscure English scholar named Ralph Niger agreed that the fall of
Jerusalem was a catastrophe that required a penitential response, but came
to radically different conclusions in the work translated here, On Warfare
and the Threefold Path of the Jerusalem Pilgrimage (Latin: De re militari et
triplici via peregrinationis Ierosolimitane). Yes, the king was captured, the
bishops and knights slaughtered, and the True Cross was seized. Yes, the
sins of Christendom were to blame for the crisis, and penitential pilgrimages
were necessary to resolve it. In contrast to his fellow clerics, however, Ralph
argued that ‘these pilgrimages can be undertaken privately at home, just
as well as openly and in public’.4 A military expedition was not necessary
for true penance, and could be both physically and spiritually dangerous.
In any case, Christian knights should probably not embark. Throughout the
four books of On Warfare, Ralph builds a powerful case that traveling to
Palestine to kill Muslims would do little solve to the problems of individual
Christian souls, or of the Latin West in general.
Apparently, Ralph’s message did not resonate. Few scribes seem to have
copied On Warfare, as it survives in only two manuscripts. The library of
Lincoln Cathedral has one of them, along with fve other codices that include
Ralph’s commentaries on several books of the Bible, a guide to the meaning
of Hebrew names in scripture, and a series of liturgies for the Virgin Mary
complete with musical notation. Nineteenth-century scholars edited and
published a universal chronicle found in the On Warfare manuscript, along
with a shorter chronicle from a different manuscript tradition.5 They mostly
ignored the rest of Ralph’s writings, and historians who bothered to think

3 For good summaries of this period of crusade preaching, see Penny J. Cole, The Preaching
of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095–1270 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 62–179; and Jay
Rubenstein, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream: The Crusades, Apocalyptic Prophecy, and the End of
History (Oxford, 2019), 167–80. For the texts themselves, see Henry of Albano, De peregi-
nante civitate Dei, PL 204, 251–402, esp. 351–61; Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae et
Descriptio Kambriae, ed. James F. Dimock, Rolls Series 21.6 (London, 1868), trans. Lewis
Thorpe, The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales (London, 1978); Peter of
Blois, Conquestio de dilatione vie Ierosolimitane, in Petri Blesensis Tractatus Duo, ed. R. B.
C Huygens, CCCM 194 (Turnhout, 2002), 75–95.
4 See Ralph’s prologue, below.
5 Radulf Nigri Chronica: The Chronicles of Ralph Niger, ed. Robert Anstruther (London,
1851); Radulf Nigri Chronica universali, ed. R. Pauli and F. Liebermann, Monumenta
Germaniae Historica Scriptores 27 (Hannover, 1885).
 Introduction 3
about him, with a few exceptions, considered Ralph to be little more than a
minor English chronicler until the 1940s.
During that decade, the Canadian scholar George Flahiff wrote two
important articles that introduced Ralph’s life and works but also praised
his ‘consistently critical attitude toward the Third Crusade.’ Indeed, Flahiff
portrayed Ralph as a lonely but poignant voice of dissent amidst a wave of
crusading enthusiasm:

At a moment when cardinals like Henry of Albano, archbishops like

Baldwin of Canterbury and innumerable clerics at all levels were
preaching in favor of the crusade, it is strange indeed to catch this one
clerical voice raised to argue against it. The traditional Deus vult [‘God
wills it,’ the rallying cry of crusaders since 1095] must have been on
many Christian lips as Niger dared for the frst time to cut across it and
proclaim: Deus non vult.6

Although the phrase ‘Deus non vult’ appears nowhere in On Warfare, Flahiff
found Ralph’s discomfort with the crusading both unmistakable and critical
for understanding twelfth-century attitudes toward penance and violence.
Appointed archbishop of Winnipeg in 1961 (and elevated to cardinal in
1969), Flahiff became a conciliar father of the Second Vatican Council
(1962–65), where he called for the assembled clerics to embrace ecumen-
ism, because the ‘history of salvation which begins in Israel and reaches its
peak in Jesus Christ, still continues today in the pilgrim Church.’7 In Ralph
Niger, he may well have found a medieval source for some of the values of
Vatican II.
Through these careful and erudite works, Flahiff brought this previously
under-studied cleric to the attention of crusades historians. Ralph Niger has
fgured prominently in discussions of the criticism of crusading ever since,
especially after 1977, when Ludwig Schmugge published a fne, scholarly
edition of the Latin text of On Warfare. While most scholars have continued
to acknowledge Ralph as a relatively rare critic of the crusading movement,
they have also cautioned that he was clearly not a pacifst (since he sup-
ported violence against heretics), that elements of his work are quite clearly
derived from mainstream theology and contemporary social criticism, and
that much of On Warfare seems to have little or no direct relationship to

6 George F. Flahiff, ‘Deus non vult: A Critic of the Third Crusade’, Mediaeval Studies 9
(1947): 162–88, here at 178. The other piece is Flahiff, ‘Ralph Niger: An Introduction to His
Life and Works’, Mediaeval Studies 2 (1940): 104–26.
7 George Flahiff, ‘Man’s Disorder and God’s Design’, in Council Speeches of Vatican II, ed.
Hans Küng, Yves Congar, and Daniel O’Hanlon (Glen Rock, NJ, 1964), 185–87, here at
186. On Flahiff’s life and thought, see P. Wallace Platt, Gentle Eminence: A Life of Cardinal
Flahiff (Montreal, 1999).
4 Introduction
crusading.8 Ralph, moreover, was not uniformly hostile to crusading in
his other writings. He acknowledged and lamented the calamitous failure
of the Second Crusade, but he did not judge the Third Crusade harshly
in his chronicles. He even praised the often reviled Reynald of Châtillon,
whom many blamed for provoking Saladin’s attacks on the Latin Kingdom
of Jerusalem, as a hero and martyr (just as crusade propagandist Peter of
Blois did).9
The present translation is informed by the conviction that Ralph’s
critique of crusading deserves to be taken seriously, and that, despite its
digressions, On Warfare offers a unique survey of the semantic feld within
which medieval intellectuals understood military pilgrimage and holy war.
He brings together contemporary currents in exegesis from the schools of
Paris and elsewhere, as well as canon and civil law, and demonstrates a typ-
ical twelfth-century knack for fnding myriad spiritual meanings in scrip-
ture and everyday objects alike, bringing what has been rightly termed the
‘symbolist mentality’ to bear on warfare.10 Even when his symbolic readings
of scripture and warfare alike seem far removed from the concerns of the
crusade, they offer insights into the diffusion of the exegetical ideas of the
schools (and are often quite conceptually fascinating in their own right).
Ralph explores military pilgrimage from historical, sacramental, legal, and
exegetical perspectives—that is, in all the ways that a school-trained cleric
was supposed to think about them—and concludes that it was both danger-
ous and unnecessary. Before returning to the problem of what Ralph truly
thought about the Third Crusade, and military pilgrimage in general, this
introduction will summarize what is known of Ralph’s life, and provide a
synopsis of the text.

Ralph Niger’s life and career

Like most twelfth-century writers other than Abelard, Ralph Niger wrote lit-
tle about his own background, and scholars have been able to trace only the
most general outlines of his life and career. Scattered references in his extant
works, along with a few mentions of his name in epistolary, chronicle, and
documentary sources, together have given them frustratingly little to work
with. The generally accepted estimate of his birth date as circa 1140 depends
almost entirely on his having earned the title of ‘master’ (Latin magister)

8 For Ralph’s reputation as a ‘crusade critic’, see below.

9 Radulfus Niger—Chronica: Eine englische Weltchronik des 12. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hanna
Krause (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 288–93 (hereafter, Chronica); Peter of Blois, Passio
Raginaldi Principis Antiochie, in Petri Blesensis Tractatus Duo, 31–73.
10 See M.-D. Chenu, ‘The Symbolist Mentality’, in Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth
Century, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (repr. Toronto, 1997), 99–145.
 Introduction 5
11
by 1166, when John of Salisbury addressed him as such in a letter. Later
university ordinances required that masters be 20 years of age, and John
portrays Ralph as well established in ecclesiastical and scholastic circles by
the 1160s, which makes it likely that he was in his mid-twenties or older at
that time.12 Frédérique Lachaud has pointed out that Ralph, in one of his
biblical commentaries, referred to ‘the times of my father’ as witnessing the
reigns of the emperors Henry IV (d. 1106) and Henry V (d. 1125), which
could suggest an earlier date for Ralph’s birth.13 Marco Meschini takes
Ralph’s later claims to have witnessed ‘sieges and tournaments’ as evidence
that Ralph had a military career before becoming a secular cleric, which
would mean Ralph was a bit older when he became a master. This, in turn,
would mean that he could have been born considerably earlier. Since Ralph
could well have witnessed military exploits as a clerical observer, however,
this must remain conjectural.14
In his exegetical Remediarius in Ezram, Ralph refers to the Venerable
Bede, whose example he followed as an exegete and historian, as ‘my fel-
low Englishman’ (coanglicus meus), and this, combined with his contin-
ual interest in English political affairs and his return to England around
1189, establishes his English origins with reasonable certainty.15 As for the
rest of his early life, it is probable that, like many of his countrymen at the
time, he traveled to the continent for his education. When he appeared in
the historical records as a ‘master’ in 1166 he had necessarily studied in
at least one of the main continental schools, most likely Paris. In the pro-
logue to his Moralia Regum (‘Moral Commentary on Kings’), he claims
that ‘I have had as my examples the venerable John of Salisbury, bishop
of Chartres, and my master Gerard of Pucelle.’ Both John (c. 1115–80) and
Gerard (c. 1117–84) taught at Paris in the 1160s, with the later moving to
Cologne in 1166, and both seem to have been in close contact with Ralph
in the late 1160s. Mia Munster-Swensen has argued, on the basis of Ralph’s
German connections, that Cologne could have been the primary site of his

11 The Letters of John of Salisbury. Vol. II: The Later Letters (1163–1180), ed. W. J. Millor
and C. N. L. Brooke (Oxford, 1979), 198–205 (letter 181).
12 On customs regarding the ages of students and masters at Paris, see Ian P. Wei, Intellectual
Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c.1100–1330 (Cambridge, 2012),
esp. 93–96.
13 Frédérique Lachaud, ‘Ralph Niger and the Books of Kings’, Anglo Norman Studies, 40
(2018), 135–46, here at 126. The reference to his father is found in Ralphs Moralia Regum,
Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 25, fols. 166vb–167ra.
14 Marco Meschini, ‘Penser le croisade après le chute de Jérusalem (1187). Le De re militari
et triplici via peregrinationis Ierosolimitane de Radulgus Niger’, in Les Projets de croisade.
Géostrategie et diplomatie européenne du XIVe au XVVIIe siècle, ed. Jacques Paviot
(Toulouse, 2014), 31–59, here at 56. The reference is to Ralph’s prologue, below.
15 For coanglicus meus, see In Paralipomenon, Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library, MS 27,
fol. 3ra.
6 Introduction
education.16 Poitiers also was home to an important school at the time, and
(as noted below), Ralph had ties to that city, so it is not impossible that he
studied there.17 Although the precise itinerary or content of Ralph’s studies
in France or Germany cannot be reconstructed, his extant writings indi-
cate that he studied theology as well as both canon and civil law, and On
Warfare shows that he had internalized much of the vocabulary of the early
scholastic world.18
Whatever the details of his subsequent career (which are mostly unknown),
Ralph continually presented himself as a theologian interpreting the polit-
ical world around him. ‘The mysteries of scripture’, he later wrote, ‘seem to
me to the echo in the things which I heard and saw in the courts of kings and
prelates.’19 By 1165, he was apparently important enough to introduce one
such prelate, Conrad of Wittelsbach, archbishop-elect of Mainz, to Thomas
Becket, the exiled archbishop of Canterbury, during the latter’s confict with
King Henry II of England. Becket’s close friend John of Salisbury wrote
two extant letters to Ralph, one in 1166 and the other in 1168. In the frst
letter, John advises Ralph on how to negotiate with Henry’s ally Richard
of Ilchester, archdeacon of Poitiers, and weighs the dangers and rewards
of Ralph going ‘to court’ (ad curiam). This could mean that Ralph had ties
to Henry’s entourage through Richard. John’s letters urge him to fght for
the Church’s interest in the circle of earthly power, imploring him to ‘act
like Lot in Sodom, Joseph in Pharaoh’s hall, Hushai in the conferences
and counsel of Absalom, Obadiah in Ahab’s following and Jezebel’s house-
hold, or Daniel in Babylon.’20 Eventually, Ralph would emerge as a devoted
admirer of Becket and ferce critic of Henry. Later correspondence suggests
that Ralph had established relationships with some of the leading ecclesias-
tical fgures of the period, most of whom are known to have spent time in
the schools of Paris.21
By the late 1160s, then, Ralph had emerged from the schools and into
some kind of curial service with Richard of Ilchester, and perhaps with

16 Mia Münster-Swendsen, ‘How to Stop a War with a Theologico-Legal Treatise: The

Intellectual Strategies of Sigebert of Gembloux and Ralph Niger’, in Liber Amicorum
Ditlev Tamm: Law, History Culture, ed. Per Andersen, Pia Letto-Vanamo, Kjell Åke
Modéer, and Helle Vogt (Copenhagen, 2011), 199–216, here at 205–06.
17 Lachaud, ‘Ralph Niger and the Book of Kings’, 127.
18 On the lack of a clear distinction between these branches of study, see Atria A. Larson,
‘The Reception of Gratian’s Tractatus de penitentia and the Relationship between Canon
Law and Theology in the Second Half of the Twelfth Century’, Journal of Religious
History, 37 (2014), 457–73.
19 ‘ea que in curiis regum et prelatorum audieram et vidieram consonare mihi videntur’:
Moralia Regum I, Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 25, fol. 2va.
20 The Letters of John of Salisbury, ii, 205.
21 On Ralph’s activities during the Becket controversy, see Ludwig Schmugge, ‘Thomas
Becket und König Heinrich II. in der Sicht des Radulfus Niger’, Deutsches Archiv für
Erforschung des Mittelalters, 32 (1976), 572–57.
 Introduction 7
Henry II himself, since Ralph later regretted that he ‘had attended on
[Becket’s] persecutor to no good purpose while serving at court.’22 At some
point, Ralph entered the court of Henry’s son and heir, Henry ‘the Young
King’ (1153–83), who was in near constant rebellion against his father dur-
ing the last decade of his life. Ralph was at Limoges in 1173, when the two
Henrys fell out and the younger one defected to an alliance with the king of
France.23 Later, Ralph wrote glowingly of the young heir Henry, referring
to him as ‘the most beautiful of the men of our age, vigorous in arms and
distinguished in the gifts of youth’ (the elder king, in contrast, was variously
‘the Ahab of our time’ or ‘the king under whom the blessed martyr Thomas
suffered’).24 Gervase of Tilbury fondly recalled Ralph’s time in the Young
King’s entourage in his Otia imperialia, referring to him as ‘that learned
man of our time, Master Ralph Niger, a fellow courtier of mine in the ser-
vice of my lord the Young King’, before quoting some lines he claims that
Ralph included in a lost (and otherwise unattested) verse commentary on
Aristotle’s Topica and Elenchi.25
The younger Henry died in 1183, and by this time Ralph was probably
working on his exegetical books and no longer traveling in the courts of
secular princes. He frequently related his exegesis to contemporary political
events, and this provides some internal evidence indicating that he wrote a
great deal of his voluminous exegetical writings in the 1180s. At this time, he
may well have worked as a master, perhaps teaching somewhere in France.
Paris would have been a likely location given his connections, but no evi-
dence conclusively places him there. Around 1182, he wrote to Conrad of
Wittelsbach, now Archbishop of Salzburg, to ask that his writings (presum-
ably one or more of his biblical commentaries) be shared with the cardinals
at Rome and, if possible, approved by the pope.26 However he earned an
income, Ralph was almost certainly engaged as a busy scholar with contacts
in high places. Perhaps because of his support for Becket’s party or his ser-
vice in the rebellious Young King’s court, he had run afoul of Henry II, and
he likely could not have returned to England had he wanted to do so. An
anonymous continuator of one of his chronicles wrote (somewhat apologet-
ically) that Ralph had

been denounced and driven into exile by the aforementioned prince

[Henry II]. On account of the injustice of this expulsion, he wrote, more

22 Moralia Regum II, Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 26, fol. 100vb.

23 Moralia Regum II, fol. 77rb.
24 Moralia Regum I, fol. 167ra.
25 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford,
2002), 186. On Ralph’s service with the Young King, Matthew Strickland, Henry the Young
King 1155–1183 (New Haven, 2016), 12, 147, 156, 241–46, 324.
26 Edited in Martin Preiss, Die politische Tätigkeit und Stellung der Cisterciensier im Schisma
von 1159-177 (Berlin, 1934), 261.
8 Introduction
harshly than was ftting about such a great and most serene king, and
with a stinging pen.27

No records suggest where he lived, but a few prominent French ecclesiastics

took an interest in his theological writings, and this suggests that did much
of his writing (and one suspects, teaching) in France.
In the prologue to On Warfare, Ralph asked William ‘of the White Hands’,
a cardinal and the archbishop of Rheims, to seek out apostolic approval for
his writings—not only On Warfare but also ‘certain others which I have
completed on the books of Moses’—by having them ‘examined by wiser men
before they are brought to the public by myself or anyone else.’ He specifed
that in the past Bishop Maurice of Paris had been recruited to emend his
works, but that the bishop was both too advanced in years and too unfamil-
iar with canon law to help him at that point. Then, on February 7, 1191, Pope
Clement III commissioned the archbishop of Sens, Guy of Noyers, to have
several volumes of Ralph Niger’s theology examined for orthodoxy by suit-
able men of his province. After Clement’s death the following month, some-
one in Rome copied the charge verbatim and re-issued it in the name of the
next pope, Celestine III. An additional notice, which later would be copied
into the fyleaf of the Moralia Regum manuscript along with the two papal
letters, indicates that Guy received the commentaries on Kings, Chronicles,
Ezra-Nehemiah, and Numbers. Another set of volumes was sent to the
aforementioned Archbishop William at Rheims (who had previously served
as archbishop of Sens).28 The province of Sens included several of the era’s
most important centers of learning, including Paris, Chartres, and Orleans;
that two successive archbishops of Sens were chosen to examine the works
could indicate that Ralph wrote them somewhere within its boundaries dur-
ing the 1180s.29
Like many exiled English clerics, Ralph probably intended to return to
England when circumstances allowed. Henry II died on June 6, 1189, and
before long Ralph had entered the circle of Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, for
whom he witnessed a charter for St Andrews, Northampton sometime
before the end of March 1190.30 Hugh of Avalon (c. 1130–1200) presided
over one of England’s great cathedral schools at Lincoln, and luminaries
like Walter Map, Gerald of Wales, and William de Montibus held benefces
there.31 Hugh was in France in late 1189, and it is tempting to speculate

27 Radulf Nigri Chronica, ed. Anstruther, 169.

28 These letters are printed in W. Holtzamann, Papsturkunden in England, vol.2 (Berlin,
1935), 453–55.
29 See Flahiff, ‘Ralph Niger: An Introduction’, 110.
30 English Episcopal Acta IV: Lincoln 1186–1206, ed. David M. Smith (London, 1986), 88.
31 On Lincoln as an intellectual center, see Frans van Liere, ‘The Study of Canon Law and
the Eclipse of the Lincoln Schools. 1175–1225’, in History of Universities 18, ed. Mordechai
Feingold (Oxford, 2003), 1–13.
 Introduction 9
32
that Ralph accompanied him back to Lincoln. Since he witnessed the
St Andrews charter along with three other ‘masters’ who were canons of the
cathedral, it has been assumed that Ralph too held a prebend there, but it
is not clear which benefce he held. Court records from 1194 list him as the
plaintiff in a legal case whose record referred to him as a canon, but the top-
onym for the canonry is illegible in the manuscript.33 In the late 1190s, a man
named Ralph served as the succentor (sub-chanter) of Lincoln Cathedral.
Ralph Niger composed music around the same time, and it is possible that
he indeed served in this capacity (but this, again, is a highly speculative
claim).34 His longer chronicle discusses events well into the 1190s, and two
court records mention him during the same decade: one describes a case
about two men who robbed Ralph Niger’s servant in 1194–95, and another
involves a lawsuit that Ralph brought against King John relating to the
property connected to his Lincoln canonry.35 A fnal bit of evidence, how-
ever, suggests that he died by 1199. In that year King John gifted what is
described as Ralph’s old house in London to a man named Roger Crispus,
and after this he disappears from our written sources.36

Ralph Niger’s extant writings

Whatever position he occupied there in the 1190s, the members of the cathe-
dral chapter at Lincoln took care to preserve his writings, which he helpfully
listed near the end of his universal chronicle:

Ralph Niger wrote seven digests on the Heptateuch. He also wrote

Moralia Regum, and epitomes of the Old Testament on Chronicles and
Ezra. He also wrote a book On Warfare and the Threefold Route of the
Jerusalem Pilgrimage, a book on the four feasts of the Virgin Mary,
along with a book on the interpretation of Hebrew names. He also
wrote this chronicle.37

This list corresponds neatly to the writings preserved at Lincoln:

32 See Hugh’s itinerary in English Episcopal Acta IV, 209.

33 Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1066–1300 III: Lincoln, ed. John Le Neve and Diana Greenway
(London, 1977), 136.
34 The Registrum Antiquissimum of the Cathedral Church of Lincoln, vol. IV, ed. Kathleen
Major, Publications of the Lincoln Record Society 41 (Hereford, 1950), 72–73; Schmugge,
DRM, 10.
35 Three Rolls of the King’s Court n the Reign of King Richard the First: A. D. 1194–1195, ed.
F. W. Maitland, Publications of the Pipe Roll Society 14 (London, 1891), 88; Rotuli Curiae
Regis, I (London, 1835), 87. Both cited in Flahiff, ‘Ralph Niger: An Introduction’, 113.
36 Rotuli Chartarum in Turri londinensi asservati, ed. T. D. Hardy (London, 1837), 22, also
cited in Flahiff, ‘Ralph Niger: An Introduction’, 113.
37 Chronica, 287. I follow Schumgge, DRM, 11–13 and Flahiff, ‘Ralph Niger: An Introduction’,
116–23, in organizing this survey of Ralph’s works according to the passage from the
chronicle.
10 Introduction
Seven digests on the Heptateuch
Of these, only three have survived: the commentaries on Leviticus, Numbers,
and Deuteronomy.38 The others might have been loaned out from Lincoln’s
library but never returned.39 In On Warfare, Ralph relied heavily on these
commentaries, which concern themselves with literal historical meaning
of the texts, their relationship of biblical stories to more recent and cur-
rent events, and their moral implications.40 Much of On Warfare consists of
extended commentary on these books, and of Book II is obviously derived
from his earlier work on Leviticus and Numbers. Given his careful com-
mentary on Genesis, Exodus, and Joshua (although not so much on Judges)
in On Warfare, there is reason to believe Ralph did write those books even
though they are not extant. Given how closely Ralph adheres to his com-
mentaries in other parts of On Warfare, it is also likely that the contents
of those other commentaries can be at least vaguely reconstructed from its
treatment of the other books of the Heptateuch.

Epitomes of the Old Testament on Chronicles and Ezra

In the manuscripts, these works are titled In Paralipomenon [On Chronicles]
and Remediarius Ezrae, with the later comprising a moral commentary on
the books now typically referred to as Ezra and Nehemiah.41 The ideas of
the Remediarius are central to On Warfare, as it recounts the return of the
Israelites from Babylon as a journey of the soul from sin to redemption.
Because of this close connection, Schmugge edited the prologue to the
Remediarius as part of his edition of the Latin text of On Warfare.42

Moralia Regum
Ralph’s colossal commentary on the four books of Kings (now generally
referred to as 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings) occupies 362 double-sided folios
in Lincoln Cathedral Library MSS 25 and 26. Ostensibly a moral reading
of these historical books, Moralia Regum sprawls across biblical, Roman,
and earlier Christian history, and is populated with many leading fgures
of eleventh- and twelfth-century Christendom. The work holds immense
interest for the study of canon law as well as political theology, and scholars

38 Digestum Levitici, Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 24, fols. 1r–66v; Digestum Numerorum,
Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 23, fols. 5r–80v; Commentum in Deuteronomium, Lincoln
Cathedral Library, MS 24, fols. 67r–100v.
39 This is suggested by Flahiff, ‘Ralph Niger: An Introduction’, 112n.46.
40 On the history of the manuscripts, see R. M. Thomson, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of
Lincoln Cathedral Library (Woodbridge, 1989), 18–19.
41 In Paralipomenon, Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 27, fols. 1r–112v; Remediarius in
Esdram, Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 27, fols. 113r–163v.
42 Schmugge, DRM, 75–77.
 Introduction 11
43
are increasingly appreciating its unique characteristics. Ralph devoted
several chapters of On Warfare to episodes from Samuel and Kings, and as
a result Schmugge chose to include some passages from Ralph’s treatment
of 1 Kings, Chapter 22, in his edition.44

On Warfare
This will be discussed below.

On the four feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Preserved in the same manuscript as one of the two extant copies of On
Warfare, this is a series of Latin offces composed to celebrate the four feast
days of St Mary, complete with gorgeously rendered musical notation.45
Given how emphatically Ralph praised the sacramental life, and the role of
the clergy in it in On Warfare, it is appropriate that he left behind his own
contribution to the liturgy.

On the Interpretation of Hebrew Names

Also given the title Philippicus in the manuscripts (in tribute to a converted
Jew named Philip), this work consists of a list of etymologies of Biblical
names, and fts into a tradition of such lists going back at least to St Jerome’s
The Interpretation of Hebrew Names.46 Although Ralph acknowledged that
he drew heavily on Jerome’s earlier work, some of Ralph’s etymologies are
uniquely his, and makes liberal use of these etymologies throughout On
Warfare. In his prologue to Philippicus, Ralph claims to have been assisted
by Philip in his endeavors, but several scholars have argued persuasively
that Ralph had acquired at least a basic working knowledge of Hebrew him-
self.47 Because Ralph relies so heavily on these etymologies in On Warfare,
Schmugge included the prologue to this work in his edition.48

43 For a recent study, see Lachaud, ‘Ralph Niger and the Books of Kings’.
44 Schmugge, DRM, 77–80.
45 De quttuor festivitatibus beatae Virginis Mariae, Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 15, fols.
33r–43r. For a brief discussion of the work, with a lovely image from the manuscript, see
Hugh M. Thomas, The Secular Clergy in England, 1066–1216 (Oxford, 2014), 303 and
plate 3.
46 Philippicus, Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 15, fols. 59v–85v.
47 Flahiff, ‘Ralph Niger: An Introduction’, 121; Avrom Saltman, ‘Supplementary Notes on
the Works of Ralph Niger’, Bar-Ilan Studies in History, ed. Artzi Pinhas (Ramat Gan,
1978), 103–13, here at 110–11; Deborah Goodwin, “Take Hold of the Robe of a Jew”: Herbert
of Bosham’s Christian Hebraism (Leiden, 2006), 48–50.
48 Schmugge, DRM, 80–82.
12 Introduction
Chronicle
Two extant chronicles are attributed to Ralph Niger, and scholars have
referred to them as ‘longer’ and ‘shorter’. The longer chronicle appears in
the same manuscript as the Lincoln version of On Warfare, and the shorter
version is the only extant work of Ralph’s not preserved at Lincoln (it tends
to be found in manuscripts along with the chronicle of Ralph Coggeshall).
The English scholar Robert Anstruther published both together in 1851,
and parts of the longer chronicle appeared again in 1880, this time edited
by L. Pauli and F. Lieberman for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica.49
In 1986, Hanna Krause produced a scholarly edition of the longer and
more interesting piece, which was almost certainly composed after On
Warfare.50
Scholars have not identifed any other works by Ralph Niger, and there
is no trace of the verse commentary on Aristotle that Gervase of Tilbury
attested in his Otia Imperialia.51

On Warfare: manuscripts, dating, and synopsis

Manuscripts
On Warfare survives in only two manuscripts, and it seems unlikely that
very many more ever existed. Perhaps this is because Ralph’s message was
not popular, or simply because of his own relative obscurity. For whatever
reason, it seems likely that few medieval scribes saw ft to copy it. Ludwig
Schmugge based his 1977 edition of the Latin text on these two manuscripts
and detailed the differences between two scribes.52

Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 15 (folios 2–30)

On Warfare is the frst of Ralph’s works collected in this handsome manu-
script, which was produced in an excellent hand around the year 1200. All
86 parchment folios contain works by Ralph; this manuscript is dedicated to
his non-exegetical writings, including his offces on the feasts of the Virgin
Mary, his longer chronicle, and the book on the interpretation of Hebrew
names. It is possible that the volume was compiled specifcally to include
Ralph’s later works. The unknown scribe who wrote the entire manuscript
produced it with great care, although some of the capitals were left blank,
suggesting that planned decorations were never added.53

49 See above, note 5.

50 See above, note 9.
51 See above, note 25.
52 Schmugge, DRM, 17–19.
53 See Thomson, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Library, 13–14.
 Introduction 13
Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 27 (folios 119–156)
Also produced in a high-quality hand in the early thirteenth century, this
manuscript passed to Pembroke College from the library of the abbey of
Bury St Edmunds. Here, On Warfare appears along with two works of
Ralph’s contemporary Peter Comestor, who like Ralph was concerned with
the moral interpretation of history. Their combination here indicates that
On Warfare could be viewed primarily as an exercise in moral exegesis and
the meaning of biblical events, irrespective of what it claimed about the
Third Crusade.54

Dating
In On Warfare, Ralph Niger vividly describes the excitement generated by
preparations for what scholars since the nineteenth century have called the
‘Third Crusade’, and he alludes to princes and knights enthusiastically sew-
ing the cross to their clothing as they prepare to travel to Palestine. It is also
clear, however, that Philip II Augustus of France, to whom Ralph addresses
Book II and Book III, has not yet embarked, and perhaps has not even
taken the cross, which he did on 21 January 1188. In Book III, Ralph tells
Phillip: ‘I freely dare to commend your prudence and patience, for you do
not thoughtlessly commit yourself to the obligation of pilgrimage.’55 On this
basis, Schmugge suggested that Ralph began working on his treatise as early
as the winter of 1187/88, when crusade propagandists like Peter of Blois and
Henry of Albano were composing their exhortations to military pilgrimage,
but certainly before Philips departed for the Holy Land on 4 July 1190.56
Most scholars have followed Schmugge in assigning this early date for the
work, and this is supported by Ralph’s complete silence on matters related
to the actual events of the crusade, which he would later discuss in his his-
torical writing. As discussed above, Ralph seems to have left France by
March 1190, and many aspects of On Warfare indicate that it was written in
a French context. Ralph directly addresses both King Philip and his uncle,
Archbishop William of Rheims (‘William of the White Hands’), and refers
elsewhere to ‘our own lands, those held by the king under whom suffered the
blessed Thomas, martyr of the English, where innumerable heretics profess
their heresies openly.’57 Although the only frm termini post and ante quem
are the calling of the crusade on October 29, 1187 and the events of the cru-
sade itself beginning in mid-1190, it seems probable that Ralph wrote On
Warfare sometime in 1188 or 1189.

54 See Montague Rhodes James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of
Pembroke College, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1905), 30–31.
55 Below, Book III, chapter 97.
56 Schmugge, DRM, 16.
57 Book III.81, below.
14 Introduction
A brief synopsis of On Warfare
In his prologue, Ralph adopts the Augustinian conceit of life itself as a
pilgrimage, and explains that he has looked to his exegetical work to guide
him on the morality of military pilgrimage to Palestine (‘according to what
we gathered from scripture’, as he would put in the prologue to Book IV). He
also promises to take his own observations of ‘sieges and tournaments’, and
‘transform them into a mystical meaning.’ It is worth noting at this point
that Ralph certainly derived his title from the Roman military theorist
Vegetius, who wrote his own De re militari in the frst half of the ffth cen-
tury.58 Although Vegetius’s text seems to have been commonly read among
twelfth-century intellectuals (Ralph’s correspondent John of Salisbury
refers to it in his Policraticus), Ralph does not seem to have consciously
structured On Warfare according to it, and he employs little of the earlier
work’s military terminology. Instead, it seems that we can take Ralph at his
word when he claims to be drawing on personal observations.59
The result is a moral and symbolic reading of not only the Bible, but also
the equipment and military tactics of twelfth-century warfare. Exegetically,
Books I–III center themselves around three clusters of biblical interpre-
tation: the frst is the Israelites’ escape from Egypt in Exodus and their
desert wanderings in Leviticus and Numbers; the second is the return of the
Israelites from Babylon in Ezra-Nehemiah; and the third is St Peter’s escape
from Herod’s prison in Acts 12:4-14. In between, Ralph draws extensively on
his commentary on Samuel and Kings. A brief overview of the structure of
On Warfare shows how Ralph weaves together exegesis with the symbolic
interpretation of military images.

Book I
In the frst book, Ralph insists that human life is not just a pilgrimage, but a
‘warfare’, in the words of the book of Job. Before turning to the three ‘paths
of legitimate pilgrimage’, he interprets the mystical meaning of the arms
and weapons of a ‘knight of Christ’. Although monks had long embraced
military imagery in describing the monastic like, here Ralph applies this to
all Christian souls.60
Chapters 1–22. Ralph begins by endowing knightly arms and armor with
spiritual meanings, beginning with the spurs, and proceeding the mail-
coat, helmet, sword, lance, and so on, even offering a detailed description

58 See Vegetius: Epitome of Military Science, trans. N. P. Milner (Liverpool, 1993).

59 On John’s use of Vegetius, see Christopher Allmand, The De Re Militari of Vegetius:
The Reception, Transmission and Legacy of a Roman Text in the Middle Ages (Cambridge,
2011), 84–91.
60 See Katherine Allen Smith, War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture
(Woodbridge, 2011).
 Introduction 15
of equestrian armor. Throughout these chapters, the visible weapons of a
knight are interpreted mystically with the help of scripture (e.g., the ‘shield
of faith’ from Ephesians 6:16, the ‘helmet of salvation’ from Ephesians 6:17,
and the ‘sword of the word of God’ from Hebrews 14:12).
Chapters 23–42. Having armed and equipped his knight of Christ, Ralph
places him in harm’s way, and depicts him as attacked by worldly temp-
tations and pleasures, which one by one destroy or seize his armor and
­weapons and leave him exposed to sin, and so to spiritual death.
Chapters 43–79. When the knight of Christ has been captured by sin, he is
effectively in the ‘Egypt of the world’, and needs to help to escape from it. At
this point, Ralph turns from the symbolic interpretation of arms and armor
to moral exegesis, as he explores his first biblical model for pilgrimage: the
escape of the Israelites from Egypt. Chapters 47–79 consist of an extended
commentary on Chapters 2–34 of Exodus, following the Israelites out of
slavery in Egypt to Mt Sinai, with an extended reflection on the spiritual
significance of the tabernacle and the Ark of Covenant, apparently based
on exegetical traditions from the school of St Victor in Paris.61 After the
prologue, Book I makes no direct references to the pending crusade, but
uses an evocative account of spiritual warfare to lay the foundation for his
later critique.

Book II
In the prologue of Book II, Ralph addresses a ‘renowned king’, who must be
Phillip II Augustus of France (r. 1180–1223). Royal regalia and royal power
command a great deal of attention throughout the book, as Ralph deploys
ideas from his commentaries on Leviticus, Numbers, and 1–2 Samuel.
Ralph recounts the formation of a sacramental community of Israelites in
the desert, under the leadership of priests and military commanders, before
concluding with a warning about the impermanence of human institutions.
Ralph constructs a body politic in which the clergy, as well as the king, need
to purify themselves and do penance before they can enter either the earthly
or the heavenly Jerusalem.
Chapters 1–21. Ralph begins by praising the privileges and responsibili-
ties of kingship, before moving on to interpret the spiritual meaning of royal
regalia (just as he had done with arms and armor earlier). In Chapters 4–9,
Ralph presents a lapidary, an exposition of the moral and medicinal proper-
ties of the gemstones in the breastplate of Aaron (Exodus 28:16–20), which
he argues are also found in a royal diadem. He thus endows the prospective
crusader Philip Augustus with the attributes of Old Testament priests and
kings alike.

61 See Schumgge, DRM, 36–38.

16 Introduction
Chapters 22–65. Having completed the interpretation of Exodus that
began in Book I, Ralph now spends 44 chapters discussing sin and its
expiation through a moral exegesis of Leviticus and then Numbers (again,
drawing on his unpublished commentaries). Identifying the clergy with the
Levites, Ralph shows the importance of clerical leadership in the sacramen-
tal and cultic practices of the Israelites in the desert.
Chapters 66–75. Turning his attention to the books of Joshua and Samuel,
Ralph follows the Israelites up to their entry into Jerusalem, and concludes
by comparing the Saracen occupiers of contemporary Jerusalem to the
biblical Jebusites who occupied the holy city before David occupied it. In
his frst direct allusion to the political background to the Third Crusade,
Ralph claims that the Saracens not only recall the Jebusites as occupiers
of Jerusalem; they also serve as symbols of the human sins that led to its
conquest.

Book III
In the longest book of On Warfare, Ralph combines exegesis of the books
of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Acts with a spiritual reading of military equipment
and siege tactics. He then warns of the dangers posed by contemporary her-
etics and implores kings and princes to fght against them, while also going
into some detail about how to argue with heretics in ecclesiastical courts.
He concludes by warning strongly against engaging with the Saracens in
Palestine. The prologue and the fnal chapter address a ‘most beloved lord
and ‘serene king’—again, certainly Philip Augustus—whom Ralph praises
for not hastening off an ‘unadvised pilgrimage’.
Chapters 1–25. Ralph likens the soul’s restoration through penance to the
return of the Israelites from their exile in Babylon, having left behind his
exegesis of the Heptateuch. Chapters 6–25 consist of a moral interpretation
of the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, in which he maps out the journey of the
soul returning from its exile in the shadows of sin, and through the gates of
the heavenly Jerusalem.
Chapters 26–40. Now Ralph explains the fnal biblical example of
‘legitimate pilgrimage’: St Peter’s escape from Herod’s prison in Acts 12:4-
14, with the help of an angel. Here the soul sneaks past a series of guards
and watchmen that again represent the snares and temptations of worldly
pleasures.
Chapters 41–64. Once again, the focus shifts from scriptural exegesis back
to Ralph’s military metaphor, as the Christian soul builds Jerusalem within
its heart and surrounds it with a grand fortress before deploying military
tactics to defend it from the evils of the world.
Chapters 65–97. Having explained how to defend the Jerusalem that is
within the soul, Ralph now explores the meaning of Saladin’s recent con-
quest of the earthly Jerusalem, placing blame for it squarely on the sins of
Christians in both the east and west. He also uses imagery of siege warfare
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carcass and come back to devour it in the cool of the evening.

The products of fermentation are so repulsive to the higher animals

that only the distress of actual starvation would tempt a monkey to
touch a rotten apple or quench his thirst with acidulated grape-juice.
Poppy fields need no fence; tobacco leaves are in no danger of
being nibbled by browsing cattle. Nature seems to have had no
occasion for providing instinctive safeguards against such out-of-the-
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though not violently repulsive (like that of the more common, and
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attractive, but rather insipid, and a short experience seems to
supplement the defects of instinct in that respect. Trappers know that
poisoned baits after a while lose their seductiveness, and old rats
have been seen [59]driving their young from a dish of arsenic-
poisoned gruel.

Certainly no animal would feel any natural inclination to seek arsenic

or alcohol for its own sake, and there is no reason to suppose that
man, in that respect, differs from every known species of his fellow-
creatures. Our clerical temperance lecturers rant about “the lusts of
the unregenerate heart,” the “weakness of the flesh,” the “danger of
yielding to the promptings of appetite,” as if Nature herself would
tempt us to our ruin, and the path of safety could be learned only
from preternatural revelation. But the truth is that to the palate of a
child, even the child of a habitual drunkard, the taste of alcohol is as
repulsive as that of turpentine or bitterwood. Tobacco fumes and the
stench of burning opium still nauseate the children of the habitual
smoker as they would have nauseated the children of the patriarchs.
The first cigar demonstrates the virulence of nicotine by vertigo and
sick headaches; the first glass of beer is rejected by the revolt of the
stomach; the fauces contract and writhe against the first dram of
brandy. Nature records her protest in the most unmistakable
language of instinct, and only the repeated and continued disregard
of that protest at last begets the abnormal craving of that poison-
thirst which clerical blasphemers ascribe to the promptings of our
natural appetites. They might as well make us believe in a natural
passion for dungeon air, because the prisoners of the Holy
Inquisition at last lost their love of liberty and came to prefer the
stench of their subterranean [60]black-holes to the breezes of the free
mountains.

The craving for hot spices, for strong meats, and such abominations
as fetid cheese and fermented cabbage have all to be artificially
acquired; and in regard to the selection of our proper food the
instincts of our young children could teach us more than a whole
library of ascetic twaddle. Not for the sake of “mortifying the flesh,”
but on the plain recommendation of the natural senses that prefer
palatable to disgusting food, the progeny of Adam could be guided in
the path of reform and learn to avoid forbidden fruit by the symptoms
of its forbidding taste.

[Contents]

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

There is a tradition that the ancient Thessalians made it a rule that

the guests of their banquets must get drunk on pain of expulsion. To
let anyone remain sober, they argued, would not be just to the
befuddled majority, of whose condition he might be tempted to take
all sorts of advantage. If the evils of drunkenness were undeserved
afflictions, it would certainly be true that sobriety would give an
individual an almost unfair advantage over the rest of his fellow-men.
He would be an archer trying his skill against hoodwinked rivals, a
runner challenging the speed of shackled competitors. There is not a
mechanical or industrial avocation in which sobriety does not give a
man the advantage which health and freedom confer over crippling
disease. For the baneful effects of intemperance are by no means
limited [61]to the moments of actual intoxication, but react on the half-
lucid intervals, and even on the after years of the reformed toper.
Temperance, in the widest sense, of abstinence from unfit food and
drink, would be the best gift which the fairies could bestow on a
favorite child, for the blessing of frugal habits includes almost all
other blessings whatever. Spontaneous gayety, the sunshine of the
unclouded soul, is dimmed by the influence of the first poison-habit,
and the regretful retrospects to the “lost paradise of childhood” are
founded chiefly on the contrast of poison-engendered distempers
with the moral and physical health of earlier years. Temperance
prolongs that sunshine to the evening of life. By temperance alone
the demon of life-weariness can be kept at bay in times of fiercest
tribulation: Undimmed eyes can more easily recognize the gleam of
sunshine behind the cloudy. The prisoners of the outlawed
Circassian insurgents admitted that, in spite of hunger, hardships,
and constant danger, their captors contrived to enjoy life better than
their enemies in the brandy-reeking abundance of their
headquarters. The myth of the Lotos-eaters described a nation of
vegetarians who passed life so pleasantly that visitors refused to
leave them, and renounced their native lands. The religion of
Mohammed makes abstinence from intoxicating drinks a chief duty
of a true believer, and that law alone has prevented the physical
degeneration of his followers. With all their mental sloth and the
enervating influence of their harem life, the Turks are still the finest
representatives of physical manhood. At the horse [62]fairs of
Bucharest I saw specimens of their broad-shouldered, proud-eyed
rustics, whose appearance contrasted strangely with that of the
sluggish boors and furtive traffickers of the neighboring natives. After
twelve hundred years of exhaustive wars, alternating with periods of
luxury and tempting wealth, the descendants of the Arabian
conquerors are still a hardy, long-lived race, physically far superior to
the rum-drinking foreigners of their coast towns. For more than six
hundred years the temperate Moriscos held their own in war and
peace against all nations of Christendom. Their Semitic descent
gave them no natural advantage over their Caucasian rivals; but they
entered the arena of life with clear eyes and unpalsied hearts, and in
an age of universal superstition made their country a garden of
science and industry. Their cities offered a refuge to the scholars and
philosophers of three continents, and in hundreds of pitched battles
their indomitable valor prevailed against the wine-inspired heroism of
their adversaries.

Frugality has cured diseases which defied all other remedies. For
thousands of reformed gluttons it has made life worth living, after the
shadows of misery already threatened to darken into the gloom of
approaching night. Luigi Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman of the
sixteenth century, had impaired his health by gastronomic excesses
till his physicians despaired of his life, when, as a last resort, he
resolved to try a complete change of diet. His father, his uncles, and
two of his brothers had all died before the attainment of their fiftieth
year; but [63]Luigi determined to try conclusions with the demon of
unnaturalism, and at once reduced his daily allowance of meat to
one-tenth of the usual quantity, and his wine to a stint barely
sufficient to flavor a cup of Venetian cistern-water. After a month of
his new regimen he regained his appetite. After ten weeks he found
himself able to take long walks without fatigue, and could sleep
without being awakened by nightmare horrors. At the end of a year
all the symptoms of chronic indigestion had left him, and he resolved
to make the plan of his cure the rule of his life. That life was
prolonged to a century—forty years of racking disease followed by
sixty years of unbroken health, undimmed clearness of mind,
unclouded content. Habitual abstinence from unnatural food and
drink saves the trials of constant self-control and the alternative
pangs of repentance. “Blessed are the pure, for they can follow their
inclinations with impunity.”

[Contents]

C.—PERVERSION.

The poison-habit, as we might call the craving for the stimulus of

unnatural diet, is the oldest vice, and in some of its forms has been
practiced by almost every nation known to history or tradition.
Thousands of years before Lot got drunk on home-made wine, the
ancestors of the Brahmans fuddled with soma-juice; Zoroaster
enacts laws against habitual intoxication; the art of turning grape-
juice from a blessing into a curse seems to have been known to the
nations of Iran, to the Parsees, and to the [64]first agricultural
colonists of the lower Nile. Nunus, the Arabian Noah, is said to have
planted vineyards on the banks of the Orontes; the worship of
Bacchus was introduced into Asia Minor several centuries before the
birth of Homer. The origin of the opium habit antedates the earliest
records of Chinese history; for immemorial ages the Tartars have
been addicted to the use of Koumis (fermented mare’s milk), the
Germanic nations to beer, the natives of Siam to tea and sago-wine.
Intoxication and the excessive use of animal food were prevalent
vices, especially in the larger cities, of pagan Greece and Rome.

Yet the ancients sinned with their eyes half open. Their recognition of
dietetic abuses was expressed in the word frugality, which literally
meant subsistence on tree fruits—or, at least, vegetable products—
in distinction from the habitual use of flesh-food. The advantages of
temperate habits were never directly denied; the law of Pythagoras
enjoins total abstinence from wine and flesh, and the name of a
“Pythagorean” became almost a synonym of “philosopher.” In all but
the most depraved centuries of Imperial Rome, wine was forbidden
to children and women. The festival of the Bona Dea commemorated
the fate of a Roman matron who had yielded to the temptation of
intoxicating drink, and was slain by the hand of her stern husband.
Lycurgus recommends the plan of letting the pupils of the military
training-schools witness the bestial conduct of a drunken Helot, in
order to inspire them with an abhorrence of intoxication. The bias of
public opinion [65]always respected the emulation of patriarchal
frugality and frowned upon the excesses of licentious patricians.

But the triumph of an anti-physical religion removed those

safeguards. Mistrust in the competence of our natural instincts
formed the keystone of the Galilean dogma. The importance of
physical welfare was systematically depreciated. The health-laws of
the Mosaic code were abrogated. The messiah of Antinaturalism
sanctioned the use of alcoholic drinks by his personal example—nay,
by the association of that practice with the rites of a religious
sacrament. The habit of purchasing mental exaltation—even of a
fever-dream—at the expense of the body, agreed perfectly with the
tendencies of a Nature-despising fanaticism, and during the long
night of the Middle Ages monks and priests vied in an
unprecedented excess of alcoholic riots. Nearly every one of the
thick-sown convents from Greece to Portugal had a vineyard and a
wine cellar of its own. The monastery of Weltenburg on the upper
Danube operated the largest brewery of the German empire. For
centuries spiritual tyranny and spirituous license went hand in hand,
and as the church increased in wealth, gluttony was added to the
unnatural habits of the priesthood, and only the abject poverty of the
lower classes prevented intemperance from becoming a universal
vice. As it was, the followers of the Nature-despising messiah lost no
opportunity to drown their better instincts in alcohol. They could
plead the precedence of their moral exemplars, and vied in sowing
the seeds of bodily diseases [66]which their system of ethics
welcomed as conducive to the welfare of a world-renouncing soul.

Among the slaves of the Scotch kirk-tyrants the long-continued

suppression of all healthier pastimes contributed its share to the
increase of intemperance. On the day when the laboring classes
found their only chance of leisure, outdoor sports were strictly
prohibited. Dancing was considered a heinous, and on the Sabbath
almost an unpardonable, sin. The tennis-halls were closed from
Saturday night to Monday morning. Bathing was sinful. Mountain
excursions, strolls along the beach, or in the open fields, were not
permitted on the day of the Lord. Dietetic excesses, however,
escaped control, and thus became the general outlet for the cruelly
suppressed craving for a diversion from the deadly monotony of
drudgery and church-penance. For “Nature will have her revenge,
and when the most ordinary and harmless recreations are forbidden
as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in indulgences which no
moralist would be willing to condone, … and the strictest observance
of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regulations was
found compatible with consecrating the day of rest to a quiet but
unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does not
cheer” (Saturday Review, July 19, 1879). “Everyone,” says Lecky,
“who considers the world as it really exists, must have convinced
himself that in great towns public amusements of an exciting order
are absolutely necessary, and that to suppress them is simply to
plunge an immense portion of the population into the lowest depths
of vice.” [67]
Clerical despotism is still a potent ally of intemperance. In hundreds
of British and North American cities the dearth of better pastimes
drives our workingmen to the pot-house. They drink to get drunk, as
the only available means of escaping tedium and the consciousness
of their misery. Nature craves recreation, and the suppression of that
instinct has avenged itself by its perversion.

[Contents]

D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

Dietetic abuses have contributed more to the progress of human

degeneration than all other causes taken together. Our infants are
sickened with drastic drugs. The growth of young children is stunted
with narcotic beverages; the suppression of healthier pastimes
drives our young men to the rum-shop; intemperance has become
the Lethe in which the victims of social abuses seek to drown their
misery. The curse of the poison-habit haunts us from the cradle to
the grave, and for millions of our fellow-men has made the burdens
of life to outweigh its blessings. There is a doubt if the “years” of
Genesis should be understood in the present meaning of the word;
but historians and biologists agree that the average longevity of our
race has been enormously reduced within the last twenty centuries,
and intemperance is the chief cause of that decrease. Our average
stature has been reduced even below that of the ancient natives of
an enervating climate, like that of the lower Nile, as proved by
D’Arnaud’s measurements of the Egyptian mummy-skeletons. On
our own continent, outdoor life in the struggle with the [68]perils of the
wilderness has somewhat redeemed our loss of physical manhood;
but what are the men of modern Europe compared with their iron-
fisted ancestors, the athletic Greeks, the world-conquering Romans,
the Scandinavian giants, the heroic Visigoths? Like a building
collapsing under the progress of a devouring fire, the structure of the
human body has shrunk under the influence of the poison-habit; and
there is no doubt that the moral vigor of our race has undergone a
corresponding impairment—appreciable in spite of the recent revival
of intellectual activity and the constant increase of general
information.

The tide is turning; the victims of anti-physical dogmas are

awakening to the significance of their delusion; the power of public
opinion has forced the dupes of the alcohol-brewing Galilean to join
the crusade of the temperance movement; diet-reform has become a
chief problem of civilization; but the upas-tree of the poison-habit is
too deeply rooted to be eradicated in a single generation, and the
task of redemption will be the work of centuries. As yet the probing of
the wound has only revealed the appalling extent of the canker-sore.
The statistics of the liquor traffic have established the fact that the
value of the resources wasted on the gratification of the poison-vice
far exceeds the aggregate amount of the yearly expenditure for
educational, charitable, and sanitary purposes—nay, that the
abolition of that traffic would save a sum sufficient for all reforms
needed to turn earth into a physical and social paradise. And yet that
waste expresses only the indirect [69]and smaller part of the damage
caused by the curse of the poison-habit. The loss in health and
happiness cannot be estimated in coin; but if the sum thus expended
in the purchase of disease were devoted to the promotion of arson
and robbery, the utmost possible extent of the consequent mischief
would probably fall short of the present result. The stimulant habit in
all its forms clouds the sunshine of life like an all-pervading poison-
vapor. Alcohol undermines the stamina of manhood; narcotic drinks
foster a complication of nervous diseases; opium and tobacco impair
the vigor of the cerebral functions. The excessive use of animal food,
too, avenges itself in all sorts of moral and physical disorders. It
inflames passions which no prayer can quench. “Alas! what avails all
theology against a diet of bull-beef?” Father Smeth wrote from the
Sioux missions; and the almost exclusive use of flesh food has,
indeed, afflicted our Indians with the truculence of carnivorous
beasts. The same cause has produced the same effects in western
Europe. The carnivorous saints of medieval Spain delighted in
matanzas and heretic-hunts, as their carnivorous ancestors in the
butcher sports of the circus, and their British contemporaries in bear-
baits and Tyburn spectacles.

[Contents]

E.—REFORM.

The consequences of intemperance have at all times provoked

protests against the more ruinous forms of the poison-habit, but the
advance from special to general principles is often amazingly slow;
and even now the cause of temperance is hampered by the
[70]shortsightedness of reformers who hope to eradicate the Upas-
tree by clipping and hacking its more prominent branches. They
would limit prohibition to the more deadly stimulants, not dreaming
that the fatal habit is sure to reproduce its fruit from the smallest
germs; that the poison-vice, in fact, is infallibly progressive, ever
tending to goad the morbid craving of the toper to stronger and
stronger poisons or to a constant increase in the quantity of the
wonted stimulant: from cider to brandy, from laudanum to morphine,
from tonic bitters to rum, from a glass of wine to a dozen bottles,
from beer and tobacco to the vilest tipples of the dram-shop.
“Principiis obsta” (Resist the beginnings) was a Latin maxim of deep
significance. The cumulative tendency of the stimulant vice may be
resisted, but only by constant vigilance, constant self-denial,
constant struggles with the revivals of a morbid appetency, all of
which might be saved by the total renunciation of all abnormal
stimulants whatever, for only in that sense is it true that “abstinence
is easier than temperance.”

We must accustom our boys to avoid the poison-vice as a loathsome

disease, rather than as a forbidden luxury which could ever be
indulged without paying the penalty of Nature in a distressing
reaction, far outweighing the pleasures of the morbid and momentary
exaltation. We must teach them that the artifice by which the toper
hopes to cheat Nature out of an access of abnormal enjoyment is
under all circumstances a losing game, which at last fails to produce,
even for the moment of the fever-stimulus, a [71]glimpse of happiness
at all comparable to the unclouded sunshine of temperance.

But before we can hope to redeem the victims of the poison-vender,

we must learn to make virtue more attractive than vice. We must
counteract the attractions of the rum-shop by inviting reforming
topers, not to the whining conventicles of a Sabbath-school, but to
temperance gardens, resounding with music (dance music, if “sacred
concerts” should pall) and the jubilee of romping children, and
shortening summer days with free museums, picture galleries,
swings, ball grounds, and foot-race tracks. The gods of the future will
contrive to outbid the devil.

It would be unfair, though, to depreciate the services of the Christian

ministers who in a choice between dogma and reform have bravely
sided with Nature, and, defying the wrath both of spiritual and
spirituous poison-mongers, of rum-sellers and heretic-hunters, are
trying their utmost to undo the mischief of their antinatural creed, by
frankly admitting that a man can be defiled by “things that enter his
mouth,” and that the sacrament of eucharistic alcohol should be
abandoned to the rites of devil-worshipers.

But the religion which pretends to inculcate a peace-making spirit of

meekness has been strangely remiss in opposing the excessive use
of a diet which is clearly incompatible with the promotion of that
virtue. In Christians, as in Turks, Tartars, and North American
Redskins, a chiefly carnivorous diet engenders the instincts of
carnivorous beasts, and a Peace Congress celebrating its banquets
with sixteen courses of flesh food might as well treat a vigilance
[72]committee to sixteen courses of opium. “Frugality” should again
be promoted in the ancient sense of the word; in a community of
reformants temperance and vegetarianism should go hand in hand.
Or rather, the word “temperance” should be used in the extended
sense that would make it a synonym of Abstinence from all kinds of
unnatural food and drink; and Dr. Schrodt’s rule should become the
canon of every dietetic reform league. “Avoid,” he says, “all drinks
and stimulants repulsive to the palate of an unseduced child, but
also all comestibles that need artificial preparation to make them
palatable.” The first part of that rule would exclude opium, tobacco,
alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee, absinthe, fetid cheese, and caustic
spices. The second would abolish many kinds of animal food, but
sanction milk, butter, eggs, honey, and other “semi-animal”
substances, condemned by the extreme school of vegetarians.
“From the egg to the apple,” is an old Latin phrase which proves that
the frugality of the ancient Romans never went to such extremes.
Milk, eggs, and vegetable fats, in their combination with farinaceous
dishes, might amply replace the flesh food of the northern nations,
and, considering the infinite variety of fruits and vegetables known to
modern horticulture, there seems no reason why a vegetarian diet
should necessarily be a monotonous one. The Religion of Nature will
require the renunciation of several deep-rooted prejudices, but its
path of salvation will in no sense be a path of thorns. [73]
[Contents]
CHAPTER V.
 SKILL.

[Contents]

A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

The organic faculties of each species of animals are marvelously

adapted to its peculiar mode of life, but only in the lower creatures
the skilful exercise of those faculties appears to be an inborn gift.
The young bee builds its first hexagon with mathematical precision.
The young ant needs no instructor to aid her choice of proper
building-material, of proper food to be stored for winter use or
distributed in the nurseries of the larvæ. The young butterfly, an hour
after issuing from the shell of the chrysalis, can use its wings as well
as at the end of the summer, and displays the same skill in steering
its way through the maze of a tangled forest.

Young birds, on the other hand, have to acquire such

accomplishments by long practice. Instead of driving them back to
their nests, their parents encourage their attempts at longer and
longer flights, and seem to know that occasional mishaps will prove
a useful lesson for future emergencies. The mother fox carries half-
crippled game to her burrow and sets her cubs a-scampering in
pursuit, allowing the best runner to monopolize the tidbits. Young
kittens practice mouse-catching by playing with balls; puppies run
after grasshoppers, young squirrels play at nest-building by
gathering handfuls of leaves and moss. A British naturalist, who had
domesticated a young beaver, one day caught his pet building a dam
across the floor of his study. The little engineer [74]had dragged up a
cartload of books, papers, sticks of wood, etc., and piled them up to
best advantage, placing the heavier volumes in the bottom stratum
and the lighter ones higher up, and filling out the interspaces with
letters and journals. Every now and then he would “stand off” to
scrutinize the solidity of the structure and return to mend a
misarrangement here and there.

Children manifest early symptoms of a similar instinct. Infants of two

or three years can be seen squatting in the sand, excavating tunnels,
or building prairie-dog towns. Young Indians insist on the privilege of
breaking colts; the youngsters of the Bermuda Islanders straddle a
plank and paddle around with a piece of driftwood, if their parents
are too poor to afford them a canoe of their own. To a normal
American boy a tool-box is a more welcome present than a velvet
copy of Doré’s Illustrated Bible. Swiss peasant lads practice sharp-
shooting with self-constructed cross-bows. The old English law
which required the son of a yeoman to practice archery for three
hours a day was probably the most popular statute of the British
code. On new railroads, bridges, etc., artisans, plying their trade in
the open air, are generally surrounded by crowds of young rustics,
who forego the pleasures of nutting and nest-hunting for the sake of
watching the manipulations of a new handicraft. Even in after years
the instinct of constructiveness frequently breaks the shackles of
etiquette, and princes and prelates have defied the gossip of their
flunkeys by getting a set of tools and passing whole days in the
retirement of an [75]amateur workshop. The emperor Henry I.
invented a number of ingenious hunting-nets and bird-traps.
Mohammed II., the conqueror of Constantinople, forged his own
chain-armor. Charles V., the arbiter of Europe, preferred
watchmaking to every other pastime. Cardinal de Retz delighted in
the construction of automatons. Peter the Great was the best ship-
carpenter of his empire.
[Contents]

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The English word king, like Danish kong and German König, are
derived from können (practical knowledge), and the first ruler was
the most skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill,
whether in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness,
established the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is
still in many respects a test of precedence between man and man.
Supreme physical dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in
war, in the sports of princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in
the adventures of travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the
wilderness and on the sea, as well as in smithies and workshops.
Conscious skill and agility form the basis of a kind of self-reliance
which wealth can only counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of
western Europe I once overheard a controversy on the comparative
value of protective weapons. Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-
shots, and bowie knives found clever advocates, but all arguments
yielded to the remark of an old sea-captain, who had faced danger in
four different continents. “There’s a use for all that, no [76]doubt,” said
he, “but, I tell you, mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely
upon is a pair of quick fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best
weapons, depends to a large degree on the expertness of the
handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofitable as the
library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is often only the outcome of
such expertness, and in sudden emergencies theories are shamed
by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war the issue of a
doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the superior
constructiveness of an army that could bridge a river while their
opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of
Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a
plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the
Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a
Turkish engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased
planks, as an overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention
of the chain grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the
Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome.

Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of

mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work
gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft even
an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving
exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular
system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains
the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the
disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet [77]Goethe, whose
intuitions of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin,
records the opinion that every brain-worker should have some
mechanical by-trade in order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental
as well as physical debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of
Nature which no cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a
school of practical wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the
English language happily expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a
prerogative of farmers and mechanics far, far oftener than of
speculative philosophers.

Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth

could dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best
safeguard against the chief bane of wealth: ennui, with its
temptations to folly and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the
example of Carlo Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his
philanthropic life in practical landscape gardening, and turned a large
and once barren lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern
Europe. “Heroum filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be
nuisances,” would be less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by
our fashionable educators, and the benefits of his plan would extend
to emergencies for which fashionable accomplishments afford only a
dubious safeguard. “A mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques
Rousseau, “is the best basis of safety against the caprices of
fortune. Classical scholarship may go begging, where technical skill
finds its immediate reward. A distressed savant may recover his loss
in the course of years; a skilful mechanic need only enter the next
workshop and show [78]a sample of his handiwork. ‘Well, let’s see
you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch in.’ ”

Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against

numberless perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by
keeping him at home and guarding him from the rough sports of his
playmates, forgets that her apron-strings cannot guide him through
the perils of after years; and a better plan was that of Cato, the
statesman, warrior, and philosopher, who, in the midst of his
manifold duties, found time to instruct his young sons in leaping
ditches, and swimming rapid rivers, in order to “teach them to
overcome danger that could not be permanently avoided.”

[Contents]

C.—PERVERSION.

The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly

to the direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect
tendency of that caste spirit which has for ages fostered the
antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient
Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the
children of toil that a Sudra was not permitted to approach a priest
without ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful
entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-
caste believers. The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute
articles of food to such an extent that a Brahman had always to take
his meals alone.

The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed

antagonism of body and soul and the imagined necessity of
emphasizing that contrast by [79]constant insults to the
representatives of physical interests and occupations. For in Europe,
too, the propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand in hand with
the systematic depreciation of secular work, excepting, perhaps, the
trade of professional manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as
in India, found always means to enforce respect by methods of their
own. During the most orthodox centuries of the Middle Ages
industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers; peasants were
treated little better than beasts of burden—in many respects
decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable master,
the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a little bread
for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any manual
occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would have
been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of
Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French
nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the
secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him?
You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The
manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of
employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a chief
and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a foot-
bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an
incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the
same Ritter who would have starved rather than put his hand to a
plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by [80]highway