of the nation, as well as of those who have taught unselfishness as a social doctrine to individuals. That great Englishman William Marshal will be noted as a patriot of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Wallace will be remembered with Bruce; Sir Edmund Verney and Falkland will outweigh Cromwell; and those who have studied history away from the political enthusiasm of man worship will put that most perfect of all English-speaking men on any continent, Robert E. Lee, on a far higher plane than the man who camped outside the Constitution.

Whichever class he takes for the hero of his story, the historian might with very little deviation from historical justice adopt the language of Disraeli when speaking on political consistency: "The truth is, a statesman is the creature of his age, the child of circumstance, the creation of his time. A statesman is essentially a practical character; and when he is called upon to take office, he is not to inquire what his opinions might or might not have been upon this or that subject-he is only to ascertain the needful and the beneficial, and the most feasible manner in which affairs can be carried on."

This was the dictum of an opportunist politician, and of one subject to the degrading influence of the party system. It is well to support it by another weighty utterance of a former age from a man who could by no dreams of possibility use language approving departure from the highest ideals from self-interest or low motives, as showing the difficulties which in all times accompany the efforts of those who seek to mould or lead or combine the atoms of a society:

"He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favourable hearers; because they know the manifold defects whereunto every kind of regiment is subject, but the secret lets and difficulties which in public proceedings are innumerable and inevitable, they have not ordinarily the judgment to consider. Such as openly reprove supposed disorders of state are taken for principal friends to the common benefit of all, and for men that carry singular freedom of mind that which wanteth in the weight of their speech

is supplied by the aptness of men's minds to accept and believe it."

This volume deals for the most part with the changes within the society, often of a violent character, which go on without cessation; sometimes very slowly, at a pace almost unnoticed, at other times at great speed, so long as a society exists. Such changes occur as the ideal which the society has acquired progresses or decays. They are in great part connected with the user of the land by the community as by different classes of an unequal society, but this does not by any means exhaust the subject, which deals with other social relations beyond the land.

Whether or not we have now any society in any sense or any national or historical ideal I forbear to inquire here. The question may be raised elsewhere in this volume; but I would point out that, as an essential ground foundation for any society, there must be a bond of union, an ideal which calls for common effort, common sacrifice, and that no society can long exist without visible degradation, in which the rights of the individuals are not accompanied by corresponding responsibilities to the society.

The communities of which this volume treats have little or nothing in common with the modern forms of political society. Their political shaping, as well as their social frame, was broad-based upon the morality expressed in unity of Christian faith as it was understood in those days; even where those who acknowledged it disputed, when Rome claimed a temporal authority, the political results of her claim, or refused to conform to her discipline, or acted in contradiction to her precepts.

All European society was founded on the faiths of the Christian religion, which were accepted by all.

Such communities had nothing whatever in common with the modern theory of State Socialism; on the contrary, the struggle by each little community to free itself from the absorbent power of federal authority, to hold to its local customs formed for its own convenience, to exert its own

private authority over its members, was in direct opposition to the modern idea of the State enforcing an authority, resting on superior force only, from outside.

Their weakness in war came from the lack of obedience to a federal power, their local authority being only progressive when natural conditions favoured progress or change.

They were democracies in the only true sense in which democracy can exist, small self-governing communities with a close bond of union presided over by a local aristocracy -communities in which all in their several stations took part in the management of the common property and acknowledged common responsibility for the public good.

The whole community (as the population was small, an essential for such a condition) had a common interest in the soil, while admitting private ownership of land for cultivation or for improvement by individuals or by families.

It is not needful to dwell on all the drawbacks. Such societies suffered from all the forces which promote decay and degeneracy, and felt fully the weakness of human nature, which disturbs all the calculations of the theorists. I doubt very much if their people were any more disorderly or less thoughtful than we are. Possibly something may be learnt from a study of their character for ourselves. There is a likeness in some particulars between the relations of these medieval societies to their federal powers and of our colonial possessions to the king, which may be instructive.

CHAPTER II

THE TWELFTH CENTURY. LOOKING BACKWARD

THE story of the social and political conditions of the British Islands from the first Roman invasion to the accession of Henry II. to the throne of England in 1154 has been briefly sketched by the author.1

The Islands in the Day of Henry II.-The subject is now resumed at a time when Europe was in a ferment of mental activity resulting from the First Crusade. The rediscovery of the East, with the accompanying outburst of trade and travel, had led to a reconsideration by thinkers of the accepted facts which had hitherto formed the basis of social and political theories of the age. The British Islands had been brought, through Henry's marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, in contact with all that was most attractive and most valuable in the suggestions of this contemporary thought, and of the political consequences which arose from and accompanied a vigorous naval and commercial empire in close touch with the trade of the Mediterranean and the East and with the fast-growing authority of Rome. Besides its political and material effects, the connection with Aquitaine influenced England by turning the eyes of all definitely and permanently to France as the country of alliance and example, while the close connection with the highest form of national literature then existing, apart from the classical tongues, assisted in making French for two centuries the official tongue and the literary language of England, in the place of the Saxon and Scandinavian dialects which had hitherto struggled to hold their own against the Norman French. When Henry comes to the throne the Saxon Chronicle expires as a monastic record. For a very slight sketch of the conditions of affairs at the accession of Henry II., the reader is referred to chapter xxix. of my former work. It is sufficient here to restate a few necessary links in the story.

In May 1152 Henry had married Eleanor, formerly the wife of Louis VI. of France, a woman eleven years older than himself. She had obtained from the Pope a divorce from Louis, on the pretext that as his fourth cousin they were within the degrees of kinship in which marriage was prohibited by the Church. As a matter of fact, apart from the inter-connection of their territories, neither party wished the continuance of the marriage, and they parted with mutual

consent.

As Eleanor was possessed of the greater part of Southern France, and as Henry inherited Normandy, Anjou, Maine,

and Touraine through his mother Matilda and his father Geoffrey of Anjou, he became possessed of about a third of France, including practically all the eastern seaboard and the mouths of all the great rivers.2 When on Stephen's death he became in addition King of England, a situation was created which amounted to a revolution in the balance of power in the Islands and in Western Europe. The King of England suddenly became not only the most powerful ruler, naval and military, but what was even of more importance, one of the richest kings of his time.

His position as controller of the seaboard on both sides of the Channel had a far-reaching effect which cannot be estimated by documents or incidents of history. At that time of swelling trade the tramp merchant ships which carried the world's merchandise to the West, both those from the Baltic and those from the Mediterranean, timidly hugged the indentures of the shores, sailing only with the most favourable winds which filled their turgida vela, always on the look-out for the Norse or Barbary pirate who was in waiting round the next promontory for a heavy, slow-sailing ship with a rich cargo. As a result it was hardly possible, in the short set season for sea travel from late spring to early autumn, for the men of the Baltic to bring raw material by sea to the Mediterranean ports of Spain and Italy to be exchanged for the riches of the East, the valuables which came by way of Arabia and Asia Minor. Still less could the Southern trader reach the North.

Flanders formed a convenient halfway house where both could meet and exchange products; Bruges grew into the greatest of wholesale markets and exchanges; the towns along the coast on both sides profited by the compromise; Bordeaux and Caen and Southampton and Winchelsea and London had the benefit; and the king who controlled the whole seaboard on both sides of the Channel south of Bruges as far as Spain, and the island seaboard to the north, who made his disposition of the wines of Gascony and the corn and wool of England, and of the cattle and other products of Normandy and Anjou and Ireland, was a power out of all proportion to any other Western king or group of kings.