Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/346

 When this inevitable process had set in, the decay of feudalism was a mere question of time. The lord paramount had to sell his authority fragment by fragment for the service which he required; the mesne lords passed from the attitude of guaranteeing protection to that of relying on those who fought, worked, and paid for them. The ultimate essentials of human society—the valour, the sinews, the taxes of the multitude—assured for them the final mastery. That seems to be the central law of historical development, under every species of government from the highest to the lowest; and to struggle against it—save for purposes of delay—is as futile as it is puerile. Before the end of the thirteenth century, Englishmen had seen this process in active operation. De Montfort and his friends may not have been philosophers, and may not have felt the full significance of their acts; but at the moment when they created a new instrument of government out of the English Commons they were giving effect to the fundamental law, under which the power of feudalism was now rapidly dwindling away.

It has been pointed out that the growth of the farming and merchant classes, the expansion of the towns, the increasing powers of chartered governments and guilds—successively effects and causes of feudal decay—brought into existence a middle class of new-rich men, whether rising from below or descending from the classes of barons and knights. City men like the Fitzwarrens, Fitzwalters, Whittingtons, Philipots, and Walworths, and their parallels in the sea-ports and manufacturing towns,