England, in place of King of the English. Throughout his reign he is closely connected with Wales, and until the Welsh princes are released from their allegiance in the time of the interdict his relations with them are peaceful and even cordial, and his authority as overlord admitted.

After the first year of his reign he was on good terms with William the Lion; in 1209, while England was under the interdict, William made a treaty with John giving John his two daughters to be married by him, with a sum of £13,000, and the sons of nobles as hostages for the fulfilment of the treaty; in 1212 Alexander II., William's son, received knighthood at John's hands.

For Ireland John did much, reducing the occupied portion to order, conciliating the Irish kings (Cathal Crovderg, King of Connaught, came into his house," F.M.), dividing that part of the country which was under English rule into shires, and arranging for the administration in these parts of English law.

When he went back to England, John left behind him one of the greatest rulers of Ireland in early times, John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, who had been John's nominee for the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and had been set aside by Innocent for Stephen Langton. John de Grey built churches; he guaranteed quiet by the erection of fortresses in the centre of Ireland from which the king's authority could be quickly enforced in every direction; he united the AngloIrish against the chiefs of the West, and, like his master, encouraged commerce by every means.

I would ask readers to remember, when considering the occurrences of the times when the Angevin kings of England, Henry II., Richard, and John, reigned, that governing is a trade. A man who inherits the trade, and has been brought up to follow it, will generally try to do his best at it, and have a pride in his good management. It is not needful to think of either of these kings as earnestly desiring the welfare of their people, as being in the least influenced by theoretical moral considerations, or as being selfish or inhuman tyrants. They were fairly good workmen, with all the imperfection of view which came from not being able to see the events

of their time from the standpoint of the Whigs of the Victorian era.

It is very convenient, no doubt, to adopt the belief of former times that plagues and misfortunes were the direct results of the wickedness of the leaders of the people, the belief that a people may through a scapegoat 5 free themselves from the consequences of their own wrong. But such a belief bars the way to our seeing the natural causes of which misfortunes are the result.

The death of John may be said to mark the end of this period of swift transition, which is well worth study from all points of view. As the thirteenth century progresses, the leaning again of the English kings towards France and Flanders ever widened the chasm between the communal system which obtained in Ireland and in the West of Scotland and Wales, and the social organisation which followed the establishment of centralised government on the basis of what is known as the feudal system in England and South-Eastern Scotland.

Tracing the Foundations.-The object of this volume is to describe these two systems and to trace some of their effects then and in later times. An explanatory narrative will accompany the description from time to time.

In most aspects of the subject called History we are compelled for convenience to assign a definite date for the beginning of any social or political change. This putting of a period is frequently misleading, as we may be deceived as to the agencies responsible for the early growth. To use an agricultural figure, the historical plant makes masses of roots underground before growth shows above, forming unseen fibres necessary for germination, which may decay when their work is done and mix with the soil unseen.

The object of this book is to trace these fibres to set out shortly, and in as simple language as possible, the conditions relating to social life which in the light of what we know or of what we may conjecture from the past we may

believe to have obtained in the British Islands from the twelfth century onwards.

It is necessary for everyone to use common sense to correct false conclusions, as in dealing with these early times a great deal of the story is argument from the known to the unknown, and any writer's statement of social conditions, though he may call it history, may be to some extent guesswork, or the enlargement of local and special inquiry to a general principle.

One difficulty in treating of the social history of all parts of the Islands is the wilderness of local terms in which the historians of each nationality have embedded its institutions. It is necessary often either to use one general word to express a dozen, all of which may have slightly different shades of meaning and slightly different historical devolution, by which one is laid open at once to the charge of inaccuracy, or to coin or employ some word not used in early days which may express the essence, if not the exactitude, of all.

Inaccurate general terms always are; but they are inevitable with our limited language, and for the general reader more useful than a learned disquisition on the exceptions; he must learn the exceptions as he would learn them when he has been impressed with the rule as to leading trumps.

As an example of this difficulty, there is an unfree class in all parts of the Islands, a class comprising broken men, criminals, vagabonds, debtors, captives in war, outlaws, bankrupts, as well as strangers from across the stream or other boundary, and slaves by inheritance, men who cannot be trusted with arms. In the sane days of human society it was only the freeman to whom was given the privilege of defending the country which he owned. All this disconnected collection of men, who for some reason or other had lost caste or never acquired it, is not only differently named in each part of the Islands, but has a varying and an uncertain history in each part. The class includes the Scandinavian trader and the Jew, who would in Welsh story be called alltud, the foreigner who had no tribal connection entitling him to a share of the tribe land, but was dependent on the king or some chief

for land and for protection, as well as the more slavish labourer called the aillt and the tæog, the steelbow tenants of Eastern Scotland, the daer ceiles of Ireland and the Western Isles, and the class called by the Norman monastic lawyers by the general term villani or villeins.

If one were to take one of these names to express all the varying history of each grade of the class, it would require frequent explanation-for each grade has a different development. As commerce breaks into the stationary society the trader gradually becomes more important and his status improves; he goes always armed in bands and must be treated with respect. The Jew's position varies with the necessities of the king and of the great church corporations and the opportunities for raising money without his assistance, and the position of the general body of men not wholly free varies as they fall under the influence of feudalism or retain their rights as members of a tribal society. I have used as far as possible for this class in all parts the clumsy term the unfree. Further references will be found to this class below.

The Pastoral Life.--We refer all our history of very early times to the Roman Empire, as it is only through Roman records that we have any knowledge of the movements across Europe of other peoples. As each wandering horde of tribes moved across the plains of Asia to seek new homes in the forests of Northern Europe, or on the shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, they took with them droves of horses and herds of cattle, which were to them both food and motion and means of barter. By its promise of advantage to their cattle (which was their substance, their capital, their money), as much as, or more than, to themselves, their place of settlement was decided. When they came to good pasturage, sweet water, wood for shelter and fuel, they rested; sometimes settling as abiding occupants of the land, sometimes as a respite for a year or two before they again pressed forward, urged on sometimes by hope, the great emigration agent, to some spot represented by fancy as more fertile, but more often by pressure from behind of others as hardy and as warlike as themselves, fighting for the spot on which they had rested.

In these pauses, whether for a breathing space or for a longer time, the horde probably grew some small crops of breadstuffs. They must have been very small for several reasons. Unless the land had been cultivated before their arrival, corn was grown under two very great disadvantages: they had to do the pioneer work of forest clearance with a few primitive tools among trees and stumps and interlacing roots and growths of weeds, as pioneers do now in colonial outposts-work which would ensure very partial and costly crops, even with the unpaid labour of women and slaves; and they had to carry the seed with them, no small matter when the yield was seldom sufficient to allow a surplus, apart from seasons of distress and famine. It is most improbable that on the march they carried with them tools to be used in a science of which they knew little or nothing, on the chance that they might be wanted. The parable of the knight in Through the Looking-Glass, who rode through the forest with a knife and a plate at his saddle bow in case he might meet with a cake, though highly applicable to our present "education," was out of place in a society in which self-preservation was an instinct, and in which the morrow took thought for the things of itself. It is unlikely that at first they knew or practised any system of farming. Their knowledge of the management of land, of rotation of crops, of the value of manure, of the admeasurement of fields, of tools, of the breeds of seeds and animals, must have been learnt either, as Mr Seebohm suggests in his Village Communities, from their neighbours the Romans, or from Babylonian or Phoenician farmers whose lands they had crossed on their way.

NOTES.1 The First Twelve Centuries of British Story, by J. W. Jeudwine. Longmans, 1912. 2 See Map at end. 3 De Nugis Curialium, Camden Society's Publications. 4 See the notes and prefaces of M. Bémont to Rôles Gascons, par Francisque Michel, transcrits et publ. par Charles Bémont. Leviticus, chap. xvi.

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