The Eighteen Christian Centuries — Background and Themes

Century-by-Century Structure and Moral Framing

White divides his work into eighteen chapters, each covering one century. The table of contents shows a consistent pattern: a list of rulers and authors precedes a narrative that often judges events morally. For the twelfth century, the heading promises 'Elevation of Learning' and 'Power of the Church,' but the excerpt focuses on Becket's murder as a crime against the nation. White calls Henry II's penitential pilgrimage 'but small compensation for so enormous a wickedness.' This moral lens is typical: centuries are not neutral periods but stages in a providential story. The first century is titled 'The Bad Emperors,' and the tenth is 'Darkness and Despair.' The structure thus imposes a value judgment on each era, making the work as much a sermon as a history.

Sympathy for the Saxon Peasantry

In the twelfth-century excerpt, White dwells on the plight of the English peasantry after the Norman Conquest. He notes that the 'bitterness of dispossession was increased' by the 'lowness of his dispossessor's birth,' since Norman conquerors included 'barbers and smiths, and tailors and valets.' The Church, he writes, offered 'succour and consolation' to the 'friendless and helpless outcasts.' Becket, as an Englishman and archbishop, becomes a symbol of resistance: 'To honour à-Beckett was to protest against the Conquest.' White's language is emotionally charged, describing Becket's name as 'a household word at the hearths of the English peasantry.' This focus on class and national identity suggests a political subtext that goes beyond mere chronicle.

Vivid Character Sketches and Rhetorical Flourishes

White enlivens his narrative with sharp character assessments. Richard I is reduced to 'the one sole virtue of animal courage,' while his brother John 'had no virtue at all.' The Plantagenet dynasty is portrayed as cursed: Henry II's 'children rebelled and died; the survivors were false and hostile.' The prose is rhetorical, with balanced clauses and moral conclusions: 'His mind, before he died, had lost the energy which kept the sceptre steady.' Such passages reveal White's debt to 19th-century literary history, where dramatic effect often trumps analytical rigor. The excerpts do not show sustained argument about causation; instead, they offer a series of vivid tableaux, each with a clear hero or villain.

Readers should approach The Eighteen Christian Centuries as a work of its time—a Victorian moral history that prioritizes narrative and national sentiment over scholarly neutrality. White's century-by-century framework provides a clear structure, but his judgments are often partisan. The excerpts suggest a book best read for its rhetorical energy and its insight into 19th-century British attitudes toward the medieval past, rather than as a balanced reference work.

That rainy afternoon, The Eighteen Christian Centuries kept drawing me back to its stained page about Becket’s murder, the violence so real I half-heard the swords. Then I found myself wondering idly what those carved ivory boxes The Ivory Workers of the Middle Ages — A Reader’s Guide might hold, and the afternoon quietly shifted.