The roots of the real England are in the early Middle Ages, and no Englishman will ever understand his own language (or even his own conscience) till he understands them.  And he will never understand them till he understands this word “charter.”  I will attempt in a moment to state in older, more suitable terms, what a charter was.  In modern, practical, and political terms, it is quite easy to state what a charter was.  A charter was the thing that the railway workers wanted last Christmas and did not get; and apparently will never get.  It is called in the current jargon “recognition”; the acknowledgment in so many words by society of the immunities or freedoms of a certain set of men.  If there had been railways in the Middle Ages there would probably have been a railwaymen’s guild; and it would have had a charter from the King, defining their rights.  A charter is the expression of an idea still true and then almost universal:  that authority is necessary for nothing so much as for the granting of liberties.  Like everything mediaeval, it ramified back to a root in religion; and was a sort of small copy of the Christian idea of man’s creation.  Man was free, not because there was no God, but because it needed a God to set him free.  By authority he was free.  By authority the craftsmen of the guilds were free.  Many other great philosophers took and take the other view:  the Lucretian pagans, the Moslem fatalists, the modern monists and determinists, all roughly confine themselves to saying that God gave man a law.  The mediaeval Christian insisted that God gave man a charter.  Modern feeling may not sympathise with its list of liberties, which included the liberty to be damned; but that has nothing to do with the fact that it was a gift of liberties and not of laws.  This was mirrored, however dimly, in the whole system.  There was a great deal of gross inequality; and in other aspects absolute equality was taken for granted.  But the point is that equality and inequality were ranks—­or rights.  There were not only things one was forbidden to do; but things one was forbidden to forbid.  A man was not only definitely responsible, but definitely irresponsible.  The holidays of his soul were immovable feasts.  All a charter really meant lingers alive in that poetic phrase that calls the wind a “chartered” libertine.

Lie awake at night and hear the wind blowing; hear it knock at every man’s door and shout down every man’s chimney.  Feel how it takes liberties with everything, having taken primary liberty for itself; feel that the wind is always a vagabond and sometimes almost a housebreaker.  But remember that in the days when free men had charters, they held that the wind itself was wild by authority; and was only free because it had a father.

THE CONTENTED MAN