Page:Cambridge Medieval History Volume 3.pdf/24

Rh supposed to be stable: thus, too, we may explain the eager study of old ecclesiastical legislation and the ready acceptance of Papal jurisdiction, even when it was in conflict with local freedom. The future, on the other hand, seemed full of dread, so men preferred precedent to revolution. In a world abounding in contrasts and fearful of surprise, strong men trained in a hard school were able to shape their own path and to lead others with them. So dynasties, like precedents, had peculiar value. And moreover from simple fear and pressing need, men were driven closer together into towns and little villages capable of some defence. In England some towns appear first, and others grow larger, under the influence of the Danes; in France it is the time of the villes neuves; Italy was thickly sown with castelli, around which houses clustered; in Germany, Nuremberg and Weissenburg, Rothenburg on the Taube with other towns are mentioned for the first time now; it was a period of civic growth in its beginnings. Socially too men were drawn into associations with common interests and fellowship of various kinds, beginning another great chapter of economic history. Thus in these centuries men were beginning to realise, first in tendency and afterwards in process, the power and attraction of the corporate life. This was to be, in later centuries, one great feature of medieval society. The old tie of kinship, with its resulting blood-feuds, was already weakening under the two solvents of Christianity and of more settled local seats. The attempt to combine in one society conflicting personal laws, Roman or barbarian at the choice of individuals (expressed, for instance, in the Constitutio Romana of Lothar in 824) was causing chaos. Hence, in our centuries, society was seeking for a more stable foundation, and out of disorder comparative order arose. Dynasties, precedents, traditions, and fellowships for protection and mutual help had already begun to shape the medieval world as we shall see it later in active work.

This general view gives significance to the constitutional and ecclesiastical side of the history, but it gives it perhaps even more to the history of education, of learning and of art. The new races brought new strength and were to make great histories of their own. But we see in our period how nearly all that brought high interests and ideals, nearly all that made for beauty and for richness of life, came from the old, although it was grasped with new strength and slowly worked out into a many-sided life beneath the pressure of new conditions. We have moved in a time of preparation, guided by the past but nevertheless working out a great and orderly life of its own.