ABSTRACT
In 1151 died Geoffrey, count of Anjou, in 1152 Conrad III; in 1153 Pope Eugenius and St Bernard, King David of Scotland and Count Eustace, King Stephen’s elder son; in 1154 King Stephen himself and Roger the Great. The stage was cleared for the rise of Count Geoffrey’s son and Eustace’s rival, Henry II of England, Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine. It was cleared for Frederick Barbarossa and the Indian summer of German monarchy. The Church found new leaders. With Bernard’s passing the storm of Cistercian success began to abate a little, and the theologians of Paris could breathe, perhaps, a little more freely. The age of monastic dominance in literature and scholarship was also passing. In some ways the most characteristic figure in this gallery was King David. Many aspects of the twelfth century were summarised in the career of this cultivated and attractive man, son of the learned Margaret, patron and friend of St Ailred, founder and benefactor of over half the monasteries in Scotland, and patron of the bloodless Norman conquest of Lothian, the man who girt the sword of knighthood on the young Henry of Normandy and Anjou. But it was an age of great variety, and in its variety lies its interest; it would be false to give it unreal unity by laying too much emphasis on any single man as its epitome. If we wish to understand it and to enjoy our study of it, we must not make a pilgrimage to a single shrine. We shall find the twelfth century as much in the splendour of Vézelay as in the austerity of Fountains, in the sophistication of the troubadours as in the simple pathos of the Song of Roland, in the violence of the crusades as in Anselm’s Bec or Ailred’s Rievaulx. It was an age which saw an intellectual, artistic and spiritual vision such as Europe had not seen for many centuries; but an age in which most of mankind lived in constant fear of famine and disease, and a very high proportion of Europeans were serfs or slaves.
