old heathen world working through the Roman church has exercised upon the new. The process that is started when barbarism is brought into contact with civilisation is not simple."
Here the great historian is speaking mainly of legal ideas and legal history which he taught us to understand. In a wider than a legal sense, it is the same process which this volume tries to trace and sketch. The steps and details of the process are to be read in the chapter on Feudalism and in the chapters on England. But once again it is here the preparatory stages with which we deal: the full process in English history, for instance, belongs to a later volume where William the Conqueror and his Domesday Book give us firmer ground for a new starting-point. But if it is more difficult, it is as essential, to study the stages of the more elusive preparation. It is the meeting-ground of old and new: the history in which the new, with toil and effort, with discipline and and suffering, grows stronger and richer as it masters the old and is mastered by it.
In these centuries, even more than in others, it is chiefly of kings, of battles and great events, or of purely technical things like legal grants or taxes, of which alone we can speak, because it is of them we are mostly told. We know but little of the general life of the multitude on its social and economic side. For that we must argue back from later conditions, checked by the scanty facts we have. Large local variations were more acute: economic differences between the great trading cities of the Rhineland and the neighbouring agricultural lands around Mayence, or again the differences between the east and west of the German realm, had greater political significance than they would have to-day. Contrasts always quicken the flow of commerce and the tide of thought: travel brought with it greater awakening then than now. Hence thought moved most quickly along the lines of trade, which were, for the most part, those of Roman rather than of later medieval days. We known something of the depopulation due to wars, and of the misery due to unchecked local tyranny, which drove men to welcome any fixity of rule and to respect any precedent even if severe and rough. The same causes made it easier for moral and religious laws to hold a stricter sway, even if they were often disregarded by passion or caprice. Under the working of all these forces a more settled life was slowly growing up, although with many drawbacks and frequent retrogressions.
Under such conditions men were little ready to question anything that made for fixity and peace. The reign of law, the control of principles, were welcome, because they gave relief from the tumultuous barbarism and violence that reigned around. The past had its legend of peace: therefore men turned to memories of Roman law and of a rule
