Those results, however, belong to a later volume. For the present we are in the period of formation, watching processes mostly beneath the surface and sometimes tending towards, if not actually in, opposition among themselves. Thus, the Imperial protection of the Church, working superficially for its strength, tended, as a secondary result, to weaken and secularise it, and therefore in the end, to produce a reaction. And, when it came, that reaction was caused as much by the inner history of the leading nations as by the central power of Rome and the Papacy itself. It was one side of the complicated processes which, in the period dealt with here, moulded the Age of Feudalism.
It is well to recall the words of Maitland about Feudalism (Domesday Book and beyond, pp. 223–5). “If we use the term in this wide sense, then (the barbarian conquests being given us as an unalterable fact) feudalism means civilisation, the separation of employments, the division of labour, the possibility of national defence, the possibility of art, science, literature and learned leisure; the cathedral, the scriptorium, the library, are as truly the work of feudalism as is the baronial castle. When therefore, we speak, as we shall have to speak, of forces which make for the subjection of peasantry to seignorial justice and which substitute the manor with its villeins for the free village, we shall—so at least it seems to us—be speaking not of abnormal forces, not of retrogression, not of disease, but in the main of normal and healthy growth. Far from us indeed is the cheerful optimism which refuses to see that the process of civilisation is often a cruel process; but the England of the eleventh century is nearer to the England of the nineteenth than is the England of the seventh, nearer by just four hundred years.” And again he says: “Now, no doubt, from one point of view, namely that of universal history, we do see confusion and retrogression. Ideal possessions which have been won for mankind by the thought of Roman lawyers are lost for a long while and must be recovered painfully.” And “it must be admitted that somehow or another a retrogression takes place, that the best legal ideas of the ninth and tenth centuries are not so good, so modern, as those of the third and fourth.” Historians, he points out, often begin at the wrong end and start with the earlier centuries, and yet “if they began with the eleventh century and thence turned to the earlier time[1], they might come to another opinion, to the opinion that in the beginning all was very vague, and that such clearness and precision as legal thought has attained in the days of the Norman Conquest has been very gradually attained and is chiefly due to the influence which the
- ↑ Maitland here refers to the Barbarian ideas and institutions, say from the seventh century onwards.
