constitute Society through the federation of individuals, villages, and towns, was an absolute negation of that centralising spirit of ancient Rome which penetrates all historical conceptions of present-day university teaching.
The uprising of the twelfth century cannot even be attributed to any personality of mark, or to any central institution. It is a natural, anthropological phasis of human development; and, as such, it belongs to human evolution, like the tribe and the village-community periods, but to no nation in particular, to no special region of Europe, and it is the work of no special hero.
This is why university science, which is based upon Roman law, centralisation, and hero-worship, is absolutely incapable of understanding the substance of that movement, which came from beneath. In France, Augustin Thierry and Sismondi, who both wrote in the first half of this century and who had really understood that period, have had no followers up to the present time; and now only M. Lachaire timidly tries to follow the lines of research indicated by the great historian of the Merovingian and the communalist period (Augustin Thierry). This is why, in Germany, the awakening of studies of this period and a vague comprehension of its spirit are only just now coming to the front. And this is why, in England, one finds a true comprehension of the twelfth century in the poet William Morris rather than amongst the historians,—Green (in the later part of his life) having been the only one who was capable of understanding it at all.
The commune of the Middle Ages takes its origin, on the one hand, from the village community, on the other from those thousands of fraternities and guilds which were constituted outside territorial unions. It was a federation of these two kinds of unions, developed under the protection of the fortified enclosure and the turrets of the city. In many a region it was a natural growth. Elsewhere—and this is the rule in Western Europe—it was the result of a revolution. When the inhabitants of a borough felt themselves sufficiently protected by their walls, they made a "con-juration." They mutually took the oath to put aside
