ephemeral publications. In conjunction with William Hone’s scathing tracts, G. Cruikshank produced political satires to illustrate the series of facetiae and miscellanies, like The Political House that Jack Built (1819).
Of a more genially humoristic order are his well-known book illustrations, now so deservedly esteemed for their inimitable fun and frolic, among other qualities, such as the weird and terrible, in which he excelled. Early in this series came The Humorist (1819–1821) and Life in Paris (1822). The well-known series of Life in London, conjointly produced by the brothers I. R. and G. Cruikshank, has enjoyed a prolonged reputation, and is still sought after by collectors. Grimm’s Collection of German Popular Stories (1824–1826), in two series, with 22 inimitable etchings, are in themselves sufficient to account for G. Cruikshank’s reputation. To the first fourteen volumes (1837–1843) of Bentley’s Miscellany Cruikshank contributed 126 of his best plates, etched on steel, including the famous illustrations to Oliver Twist, Jack Sheppard, Guy Fawkes and The Ingoldsby Legends. For W. Harrison Ainsworth, Cruikshank illustrated Rookwood (1836) and The Tower of London (1840); the first six volumes of Ainsworth’s Magazine (1842–1844) were illustrated by him with several of his finest suites of etchings. For C. Lever’s Arthur O’Leary he supplied 10 full-page etchings (1844), and 20 spirited graphic etchings for Maxwell’s lurid History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798 (1845). Of his own speculations, mention must be made of George Cruikshank’s Omnibus (1841) and George Cruikshank’s Table Book (1845), as well as his Comic Almanack (1835–1853). The Life of Sir John Falstaff contained 20 full-page etchings (1857–1858). These are a few leading items amongst the thousands of illustrations emanating from that fertile imagination. As an enthusiastic teetotal advocate, G. Cruikshank produced a long series of pictures and illustrations, pictorial pamphlets and tracts; the best known of these are The Bottle, 8 plates (1847), with its sequel, The Drunkard’s Children, 8 plates (1848), with the ambitious work, The Worship of Bacchus, published by subscription after the artist’s oil painting, now in the National Gallery, London, to which it was presented by his numerous admirers.
See Cruikshank’s Water-Colours, with introduction by Joseph Grego (London, 1903). (J. Go.*)
CRUNDEN, JOHN (d. 1828), English architectural and mobiliary designer. Most of his early inspiration was drawn
from Chippendale and his school, but he fell later under the
influence of a bastard classicism. He produced a very large
number of designs which were published in numerous volumes;
among the most ambitious were ornamental centres for ceilings
in which he introduced cupids with bows and arrows, Fame
sounding her trumpet, and such like motives. Sport and natural
history supplied him with many other themes, and one of his
ceilings is a hunting scene representing a “kill.” His principal
works were Designs for Ceilings; Convenient and Ornamental
Architecture; The Carpenter’s Companion for Chinese Railings,
Gates, &c. (1770); The Joiner and Cabinet-maker’s Darling, or
Sixty Designs for Gothic, Chinese, Mosaic and Ornamental Frets
(1765); and The Chimney Piece Maker’s Daily Assistant (1776).
Much of his work was either absurd or valueless.
CRUSADES, the name given to the series of wars for delivering the Holy Land from the Mahommedans, so-called from the cross worn as a badge by the crusaders. By analogy the term “crusade” is also given to any campaign undertaken in the same spirit.
1. The Meaning of the Crusades.—The Crusades may be regarded partly as the decumanus fluctus in the surge of religious revival, which had begun in western Europe during the 10th, and had mounted high during the 11th century; partly as a chapter, and a most important chapter, in the history of the interaction of East and West. Contemporaries regarded them in the former of these two aspects, as “holy wars” and “pilgrims’ progresses” towards Christ’s Sepulchre; the reflective eye of history must perhaps regard them more exclusively from the latter point of view. Considered as holy wars the Crusades must be interpreted by the ideas of an age which was dominated by the spirit of otherworldliness, and accordingly ruled by the clerical power which represented the other world. They are a novum salutis genus—a new path to Heaven, to tread which counted “for full and complete satisfaction” pro omni poenitentia and gave “forgiveness of sins” (peccaminum remissio)[1]; they are, again, the “foreign policy” of the papacy, directing its faithful subjects to the great war of Christianity against the infidel. As such a novum salutis genus, the Crusades connect themselves with the history of the penitentiary system; as the foreign policy of the Church they belong to that clerical purification and direction of feudal society and its instincts, which appears in the institution of “God’s Truce” and in chivalry itself. The penitentiary system, according to which the priest enforced a code of moral law in the confessional by the sanction of penance—penance which must be performed as a condition of admission to the sacrament of the Eucharist—had been from early times a great instrument in the civilization of the raw Germanic races. Penance might consist in fasting; it might consist in flagellation; it might consist in pilgrimage. The penitentiary pilgrimage, which seems to have been practised as early as A.D. 700, was twice blessed; not only was it an act of atonement in itself, like fasting and flagellation; it also gained for the pilgrim the merit of having stood on holy ground. Under the influence of the Cluniac revival, which began in the 10th century, pilgrimages became increasingly frequent; and the goal of pilgrimage was often Jerusalem. Pilgrims who were travelling to Jerusalem joined themselves in companies for security, and marched under arms; the pilgrims of 1064, who were headed by the archbishop of Mainz, numbered some 7000 men. When the First Crusade finally came, what was it but a penitentiary pilgrimage under arms—with the one additional object of conquering the goal of pilgrimage? That the Pilgrims’ Progress should thus have turned into a Holy War is a fact readily explicable, when we turn to consider the attempts made by the Church, during the 11th century, to purify, or at any rate to direct, the feudal instinct for private war (Fehde). Since the close of the 10th century diocesan councils in France had been busily acting as legislatures, and enacting “forms of peace” for the maintenance of God’s Peace or Truce (Pax Dei or Treuga Dei). In each diocese there had arisen a judicature (judices pacis) to decide when the form had been broken; and an executive, or communitas pacis, had been formed to enforce the decisions of the judicature. But it was an easier thing to consecrate the fighting instinct than to curb it; and the institution of chivalry represents such a clerical consecration, for ideal ends and noble purposes, of the martial impulses which the Church had hitherto endeavoured to check. In the same way the Crusades themselves may be regarded as a stage in the clerical reformation of the fighting laymen. As chivalry directed the layman to defend what was right, so the preaching of the Crusades directed him to attack what was wrong—the possession by “infidels” of the Sepulchre of Christ. The Crusades are the offensive side of chivalry: chivalry is their parent—as it is also their child. The knight who joined the Crusades might thus still indulge the bellicose side of his genius—under the aegis and at the bidding of the Church; and in so doing he would also attain what the spiritual side of his nature ardently sought—a perfect salvation and remission of sins. He might butcher all day, till he waded ankle-deep in blood, and then at nightfall kneel, sobbing for very joy, at the altar of the Sepulchre—for was he not red from the winepress of the Lord? One can readily understand the popularity of the Crusades, when one reflects that they permitted men to get to the other world by fighting hard on earth, and allowed them to gain the fruits of asceticism by the ways of hedonism. Nor was the Church merely able, through the Crusades, to direct the martial instincts of
- ↑ Fulcher of Chartres, 1, i. For what follows, with regard to the Church’s conversion of guerra into the Holy War, cf. especially the passage—“Procedant contra infideles ad pugnam jam incipi dignam ... qui abusive privatum certamen contra fideles consuescebant distendere quondam.”
