"T. H. White - The Once and Future King" - читать интересную книгу автора (White T.H)

goldsmiths of Lorraine, who made shrines in the shape of little churches, with aisles, statues, transepts
and all, like dolls' houses: remember the enamellers of Limoges, and the champlev├й work, and the
German ivory carvers, and the garnets set in Irish metal. Finally, if you are willing to picture the ferment
of creative art which existed in our famous ages of darkness, you must get rid of the idea that written
culture came to Europe with the fall of Constantinople. Every clerk in every country was a man of
culture in those days тАФit was his profession to be so. "Every letter written," said a medieval abbot, "is a
wound inflicted on the devil." The library of St. Piquier, as early as the ninth century, had 256 volumes,
including Virgil, Cicero, Terence and Macrobius. Charles the Fifth had no less than nine hundred and
ten volumes, so that his personal collection was about as big as the Everyman Library is today.
Lastly there were under the window the people thelmselves тАФthe coruscating mixture of oddities who
reckoned that they possessed the things called souls as well as bodies, and who fulfilled them in the most
surprising ways. In Silvester the Second a famous magician ascended the papal throne, although he was
notorious for having invented the pendulum clock. A fabled King of France called Robert, who had
suffered the misfortune to be excommunicated, ran into dreadful troubles about his domestic
arrangements, because the only two servants who could be persuaded to cook for him insisted on
burning the saucepans after meals. An archbishop of Canterbury, having excommunicated all the
prebendaries of St. Paul's in a pet, rushed into the Priory of St. Bartholomew and knocked out the sub-
prior in the middle of the chapelтАФwhich created such an uproar that his own vestments were torn off,
revealing a suit of armour underneath, and he had to flee to Lambeth in a boat. The Countess of Anjou
always used to vanish out of the window at the secreta of the mass. Madame Trote de Salerno used her
ears as a handkerchief and let her eyebrows hang down behind her shoulders, like silver chains. A
bishop of Bath, under the imaginary Edward the First, was considered after due reflection to be an
unsuitable man for the Archbishopric, because he had too many illegitimate childrenтАФnot some, but too

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many. And the bishop himself could hardly hold a candle to the Countess of Henneberge, who suddenly
gave birth to 365 children at one confinement.
It was the age of fullness, the age of wading into everything up to the neck. Perhaps Arthur imposed this
idea on Christendom, because of the richness of his own schooling under Merlyn.
For the King, or at least this is how Malory interprets him, was the patron saint of chivalry. He was not a
distressed Briton hopping about in a suit or woad in the fifth centuryтАФnor yet one of those nouveaux
riches de la Poles, who must have afflicted the last years of Malory himself. Arthur was the heart's king
of a chivalry which had reached its flower perhaps two hundred years before our antiquarian author
began to work. He was the badge of everything that was good in the Middle Ages, and he had made
these things himself.
As Malory pictures him, Arthur of England was the champion of a civilization which is misrepresented
in the history books, The serf of chivalry was not a slave for whom there was no hope. On the contrary,
he had at least three legitimate ways of rising, the greatest of which was the Catholic Church. With the
assistance of Arthur's policies this churchтАФstill the greatest of all corporations free to learned men on
earthтАФhad become a highway open to the lowest slave. A Saxon peasant was Pope in Adrian IV, the
son of a carpenter in Gregory VII. In those despised Middle Ages of theirs you could become the
greatest man in the world, by simply having learning. And it is a mistake to believe that Arthur's
civilization was weak in this famous science of ours. The scientists, although they happened to call them
magicians at the time, invented almost as terrible things as we have inventedтАФexcept that we have
become accustomed to theirs by use. The greatest magicians, like Albertus Magnus, Friar Bacon, and
Raymond Lully, knew several secrets which we have lost today, and discovered as a side issue what still
appears to be the chief commodity of civilization, namely gunpowder. They were honoured for their