Roger II of Naples was evidently a finer and more civilized character than William of England; but in both lay that Norman capacity for establishing and maintaining order that at first seems so strange an inheritance from wild Norse ancestors. Clear-sighted, iron-nerved, an adventurer with an instinct for business, the Norman of the Early Middle Ages was just the leaven that Europe required to raise her out of the indolent depression of the ‘Dark Ages’ that followed the fall of Rome.
Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. [368–73].
| The Emperor Lothar | 840–55 |
| Massacre of St. Brice’s Day | 1002 |
| William, Duke of Normandy | 1035–87 |
| William, King of England | 1066–87 |
| Edward the Confessor | 1042–66 |
| Domesday Book | 1086 |
| Pope Leo IX | 1048–54 |
| Battle of Civitate | 1053 |
| Pope Nicholas II | 1058–61 |
| Robert, Duke of Apulia | 1060–85 |
| Roger II, King of Naples | 1130 |
X
FEUDALISM AND MONASTICISM
Feudalism
Wherever in the course of history men have gathered together they have gradually evolved some form of association that would ensure mutual interests. It might be merely the tribal bond of the Arabians, by which a man’s relations were responsible for his acts and avenged his wrongs; it might be a council of village elders such as the Russian ‘Mir’, making laws for the younger men and women; it might be a group of German chiefs legislating on moonlit nights, according to the description of Tacitus, by their camp fires.
In contrast to primitive associations stands the elaborate government of Rome under Augustus and his successors; the despotic Emperor, his numberless officials, the senators with their huge estates, the struggling curiales, the army of legions carrying out the imperial commands from Scotland to the Euphrates. When Rome fell, her government, like a house whose foundations have collapsed, fell also. Barbarian conquerors, established in Italy and the Roman provinces, took what they liked of the laws that they found, added to them their own customs, and out of the blend evolved new codes of legislation. Yet legislation, without some method of ensuring its execution, could not save nations from invasion nor the merchant or peasant from becoming the victim of robberies and petty crimes.
Mediaeval centuries are sometimes called the Age of Feudalism, because during this time feudalism was the method gradually adopted for dealing with the problems of public life amongst all classes in nearly all the nations of Europe. There are two chief things to be remembered about feudalism—first that it was no sudden invention but a growth out of old ideas both Roman and barbarian, and next that it was intimately connected in men’s minds with the thought of land. This was natural, for after all, land or its products are as necessary to the life of every individual as air and water, and therefore the cultivation of the soil and the distribution of its fruits are the first problems with which governments are faced.