has been exaggerated; but as a manifesto of the central power, a declaration of a policy consistently pursued by William and his successors, the Salisbury oath merits all the importance that has been assigned to it. William prevented the accumulation of big, connected fiefs under single owners, and where he gave lands, he gave them scattered, except in the exceptional case of the Lords of the Marches. Thus, from the very first, the hand of the King was heavy upon the nobles, and a central power took shape which, except for the interlude of Stephen's reign, was to go on developing in experience and complexity under his successors. It is no wonder that some of the more adventurous barons preferred to carve out for themselves Irish possessions, where the hand of the King could not easily touch them.

Thus was England saved from the plague of disunion which ravaged her neighbours. The magnates, as a class, were destined to give infinite trouble, and even to bring her healthy development to a standstill, but there was at no time any danger of her being split up into provinces, as almost certainly would have been her fate if the Saxon monarchy had conquered at Hastings. Forces were already at work, which were to blend the foreign garrison with the subject population into one self-conscious whole, and make the unity, which was imposed from the outside, gradually become implicit and spiritual.

The Norman baron was little inclined to own his kinship with a people he despised. He was hardly touched by considerations of patriotism, and if he had owned to a Motherland, it would have been Normandy or France. But ere the first generation of conquerors had passed away, causes were at work which were, in course of time, to make this barrier between Norman and Englishman a thing of the past. Curiously enough, it was one of the very incidents of feudalism which notably

contributed to this end. For the Conqueror, though the foremost statesman of his age, did not hesitate to pull his own fabric to pieces, by leaving England to one son and Normandy to another. The uneasy union was, indeed, patched up again under a third son; but twenty years of war and separation had tended to decrease the number of barons holding estates in both lands, and to weaken the tie which bound the Anglo-Norman baron to the land of his fathers. When, a hundred years later, the bond was snapped once and for all, the barons had already ceased to regard themselves as foreigners, and a De Burgh or a De Montfort was as thoroughgoing an Englishman as Alfred himself. Intermarriage had blurred and often obliterated the old rigid distinctions.

While the Norman strain was thus being continuously weakened as a separate factor in the national being, the old Saxon spirit, which had been well-nigh broken by William, was not dead. It had received a smashing blow, and such literature or beginnings of art as there were before Hastings, seemed to have been rooted out altogether. The educated class regarded the native tongue as only fit for boors, and in the centres of learning and in the greater part of the monasteries it went out altogether. The result of this process was apparent in the language itself. All the finer shades of meaning, all but the rough and ready medium of everyday conversation, went out of use. And so, when the vernacular came gradually back, it was necessary to borrow freely from the Latin tongues, in order to make good its deficiencies. During the period of transition the literature of the upper class was cosmopolitan, after the manner of feudalism. Minstrels of chivalry and romance were able to wander without let over the greater part of polite Europe; their stock of legends, and even the language in which they were sung, were common property. It was while they were reading the tale of Launce

lot and Guinevere, that Paolo kissed Francesca on the mouth.

While the English language was in abeyance, inhabitants of this island were establishing her position in the forefront of European culture. In all the lore of the Middle Ages, England was hardly second even to Italy. But these triumphs were in the sphere of thought, and not of letters in the strict sense of the word. In the "doctor subtilis" of Merton College, St. Thomas might find an opponent worthy his steel, but without a language and without the glow of a mature patriotism there could be no rival for Dante.

Saxon institutions shared much the same fate as the language. They were roughly handled, but there was no absolute breach of continuity. In the country districts, for instance, it is improbable that the new lords understood, or wanted to understand, the finer distinctions in methods of land tenure, and there seems to have been a general levelling down in the direction of villeinage. But it did not suit the Conqueror's policy to destroy more than was necessary, for he regarded himself as the lawful heir of the English kings, and it was more convenient to make use of the customs he found established, than to improvise or transport new ones. He and his successors had soon an additional motive for fostering native institutions, for after the first risings had been suppressed, the real danger to the Crown came not from the people, but from the magnates. And hence we find the Red King calling out the old shire levy against his rebel barons. The central government, which had been the weak point of the old system, was indeed practically reconstituted, and gradually extended its power over local franchises; but the old machinery of shire and hundred was preserved, if not intact, at least without revolutionary change.

It was upon the towns, or big villages dignified with

that name, that the Conquest had least permanent effect, in spite of the havoc wrought amongst them during its first few years. London, in particular, survived intact, and such was its importance, that the hostility of its citizens was largely responsible for the failure of Matilda after Lincoln. In the reign of Henry I begins the series of royal charters to towns, and even earlier than this we find the first mention of a gild merchant. Thus England came to be dotted with a number of little communities, each realizing to some extent the scholastic idea of a microcosmus. As yet they only comprised a fraction of the whole population—according to the estimate of Professor Ashley a hundred and fifty thousand out of a million and a half-but their importance in the national development was out of all proportion to their numbers. They were to provide an element of strength no less essential to permanent greatness, than the splendour and discipline of chivalry. For the military and industrial factors bear the same relation to one another, as the fighting force and the transport of a modern army. Spain was an army that neglected its transport, and even the decline and fall of Rome may perhaps be traced to this cause. Holland, on the other hand, was a nation that weakened its fighting force for the sake of wealth.

At the time of which we are writing, England's industrial greatness only existed in embryo. A certain amount of trade had been carried on even before the Conquest, but it had been in raw materials-as far at least as exports were concerned and especially in the wool which for many years to come was to be the staple product of British industry. This was at present sent abroad for foreign artisans to work up, and hence we find a trading class coming into existence, before industry had advanced beyond the crude methods and requirements of family life. A gild merchant, or association of traders, was the first form of business organization, and we have evidence

of its existence in the majority of the towns, though in some of the most important, including London, it does not appear. It is in the twelfth century that we first hear of associations of artisans, or craft gilds, beginning with such necessary functions as those of baker and weaver, though as yet English cloth was a poor and coarse product. But in this trade in wool is first exemplified a truth, which has held good, with a strange persistency, from the Middle Ages to our own century-that the key to England's foreign policy is the Netherlands.

We have spoken of the early medieval town as a microcosmus, and we may look upon it as a kind of corporate fief. It tended to be self-sufficient, and was more occupied with its own interests than those of the whole community. The gilds merchant and municipal bodies carried on independent negotiations with those of other towns; they had their own protective tariffs, which were modified by a series of treaties similar to those which are now concluded between sovereign powers. In such negotiations national barriers counted for little. "The Norwich man," says Dr. Cunningham, "who visited London was as much of a foreigner there as the man from Bruges or Rouen.. we find the same sort of communications sent to the Bailiff and Good Folk of Gloucester as went to the Échevins of Sluys." Such a state of things tended to produce a number of petty patriotisms, local and exclusive, but capable of being some day fused into a higher unity.

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The Crown exercised the same restraining influence over this burgher exclusiveness, as over the great barons. In neither case was the feudal idea allowed to run to its logical extreme. By this means two dangers were avoided which the experience of Continental nations, and even of Scotland, showed to be inherent in the medieval town system. The English towns never had the chance to break away altogether from the Government, to raise their