Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/238

 of later days; the discipline of Spain had been worked out within the walls of the peninsula; between France and Germany there had never been a great war; between Germany and Italy, as nationalities, no straggle had as yet been possible; and the border warfare of the border states had been carried on without any great amount of interest or interference from the greater or growing agglomerations of territory which under the name of nations, states or dynasties, now come to the front. The Crusades had been a common field of work and a common stage of action, but the nationalities which in the Crusades had fought side by side in union or in rivalry, had long retired from the uncongenial work, and all the zeal of the best popes and the most heroic kings had been unequal to the task of uniting Christendom again for the common emancipation.

There was, however, no great crash at the passing away of the old things and the coming in of the new. The new influences, many and various in character, quickly combine to produce the new actors and to clear the common stage. The concentration of power in the royal hands in France, under Charles VII and Lewis XI; the creation of a compact and solid kingdom out of a number of rival and hostile feudal provinces or dynastic appanages, a concentration for which, during the whole of the medieval period from Lewis VI onwards, the kings had been working, but which only became possible when the long struggle with England had made it necessary; a concentration of power which signified not only territorial union, but administrative autocracy; which reduced all powers except that of the crown, states general, parliament, clergy, feudatories, all to a shadow; a concentration in which, in the language of the time, France emerged from tutelage and attained to such maturity of manhood as might be expressed in the later formula 'The state, it is I myself.' This compactness, this concentration, equipped France for her part.

Just at the same moment England emerged from the terrible dynastic straggle in which, with the competing houses, the very bone and sinew of liberty seemed to have perished. The baronage, attenuated to a shadow of its former bulk, and with its power as attenuated as its numbers, the Commons wearied,