Gneist, after deciding that the number of the unfree population "erscheint nicht übergross," admits that the dependent stratum of the population must needs always increase, "as a result of the land system. In time of war the class increased through the ruin of the small holdings; in time of peace through the increase of the landless members of families. The favourable effects of a new acquisition through conquest and booty were a gain only to the possessing class" (Geschichte des englischen Self-Government, 1863, p. 7). He concludes that "the social structure of the Anglo-Saxons appears to be on the whole unchanging, advancing only in the multiplication of the dependent classes." Among the symptoms of degeneration may be noted the retirement of nearly thirty kings and queens into convents or reclusion during the seventh and eighth centuries. This was presumably a result of clerical management.
In Normandy itself, however, half a century before the Conquest, there had arisen a state of extreme tension between the peasantry and their lords; and a projected rising was crushed in germ with horrible cruelty.[998] William's enterprise thus stood for a pressure of need among his own subjects, as well as for an outburst of feudal ambition; and in making up his force he offered an opportunity of plunder to all classes in his own duchy, as well as to those of other provinces of France. Domesday Book, says one of its keenest students, "is a geld book"—a survey made to facilitate taxation on the lines of the old Danegeld.[999] William was repeating a Roman process. His invasion, therefore, hardly represented the full play of the existing forces of civilisation. These, indeed, had to be renewed again and again in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the conditions of the Conquest were important for the direction of English political evolution. Its first social and psychological effect was to set up new class relations, and in particular a marked division between aristocracy and people, who spoke different languages. This involved a relation of distrust and close class union. When the people's speech began to compete with that of their masters, and the nobles separately began to be on good terms with their people, there would arise wide possibilities of strife as between neighbouring nobles and their retainers; and in Scotland the weakness of the crown long gave this free play. But in England, especially after the period of anarchy under Stephen, when the early baronage was much weakened and many estates were redivided,[1000] the strength of the crown, rooted in military custom and constantly securing itself, tended to unite the nobles as a class for their own aggrandisement and protection. King after king, therefore, sought the support of the people[1001] against the baronage, as the baronage sought their help against the king; while the Church fought for its own share of power and privilege.
The history of Christendom, indeed, cannot be understood save in the light of the fact that the Church, a continuous corporation owning much property as such, is as it were a State within the State,[1002] representing a special source of strife, although its non-military character limits the danger. What the Church has repeatedly done is to throw in its lot with king or nobles, or with the democracy (as in Switzerland and Protestant Scotland), according as its economic interests dictate. The famous case of Becket, transformed from the king's friend into the king's antagonist, is the most dramatic instance of the Church's necessary tendency to fight for its own hand and to act as an independent community. And it is in large part to the check and counter-check of a church, crown, and baronage, all jealously standing on their rights as against each other, that the rise of English constitutionalism is to be traced; the baronage and the Church, further, being withheld from preponderance by the strifes arising within their own pale. For even the Church, unified at once by its principle, its celibacy, its self-interest, and the pressure of outside forces, exhibits in its own sections, from time to time, the law of strife among competing interests.[1003]
The mere strife of interests, however, could not evolve civilisation in such a polity without a constant grafting-on of actual civilising elements from that southern world in which the ancient seeds were again flowering. Mere mixing of Norman with Saxon blood, one Teutonic branch with another, could avail nothing in itself beyond setting up a useful variability of type; and the element of French handicraft and culture introduced in the wake of the Conquest, though not inconsiderable,[1004] could ill survive such a pandemonium as the reign of Stephen. Like Henry I, Stephen depended on the English element as against the baronage; but the struggle brought civilisation lower than it had been since the Conquest. With the accession of Henry II (1154) came a new influx of French culture and French speech,[1005] albeit without any departure from the monarchic policy of evoking the common people as against the nobles. Thenceforward for over a hundred years the administrative methods and the culture are French, down to the erection of a French-speaking Parliament by the southern Frenchman Simon de Montfort. The assumption that some inherent "Teutonic" faculty for self-government shaped the process is one of the superstitions of racial and national vanity.
Dr. C.H. Pearson's reiteration of the old "race" dogma (History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, i, 277) is its sufficient reductio ad absurdum. In the English manner, he connects with old Welsh usages of revenge the late Irish tradition of "lynch law" that has been "transplanted to America"—as if it were Irishmen who are to-day lynching negroes in the southern States. He explains in the same way "the contrast of French progress by revolutionary movements with the slow, constitutional, onward march of English liberty." On his own showing there was not progress, but deterioration, as regards liberty among the Saxons; and the later history of the English common people is largely one of their efforts to make revolutions. In France the revolutions were rather fewer. In Denmark and Germany, again, there was long relapse and then revolution. For the rest, Mr. Pearson has contrasted Welsh usage of the sixth century with Saxon usage of the eleventh, this while admitting the lateness of the latter development (pp. 275, 276). We should require only to go back to the blood-feud stage in Teutondom to prove the ineradicable tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon to the Faustrecht, which in Germany survived till the sixteenth century, and to the fisticuffs which occurred in 1895 in the English Parliament. The reasoning would be on a par with Mr. Pearson's.
Mr. J.H. Round's way of taking it for granted (The Commune of London, 1899, pp. 138-40) that a tendency to strife is permanently and "truly Hibernian," belongs to the same order of thought. Irishmen are represented as abnormal in inability to unite against a common foe, when just such disunion was shown through whole centuries in Saxondom and in Scandinavia and in Germany; and they are further described as peculiar in leaving their commerce in foreign hands, when such was the notorious practice of the Anglo-Saxons.
One of the most remarkable reversions to the racial way of reasoning is made by Mr. H.W. C. Davis in his England under the Normans and Angevins (1905). After setting out with the avowal that the Anglo-Saxons at the Conquest were "decadent," he reaches (p. 223) the conclusion that the Teutonic races "climb, slowly and painfully it is true, but with a steady and continued progress, from stage to stage of civilisation," while the Celtic, "after soaring at the first flight to a comparatively elevated point, are inclined to be content with their achievement, and are ... passed by their more deliberate competitors." How a Teutonic race, given these premises, could be "decadent," and be surpassed and finally uplifted by a "Latin civilisation" (id. p. 2), the theorist does not attempt to explain.
To no virtue in Norman or English character, then,[1006] but to the political circumstances, was it due that there grew up in island England, instead of an all-powerful feudal nobility and a mainly depressed peasantry, as in continental France, a certain balance of classes, in which the king's policy against the nobility restrained and feudally weakened them, and favoured the burghers and yeomen, making sub-tenants king's liegemen; while on the other hand the combination of barons and Church against the king restrained him.[1007] A tyrant king is better for the people than the tyranny of nobles; and the destruction of feudal castles by regal jealousy restrains baronial brigandage. Regal prestige counts for something as against baronial self-assertion; but aristocratic self-esteem also rests itself, as against a reckless king, on popular sympathy. On the other hand, the town corporations, originating in popular interests, became in turn close oligarchies.[1008] Even the class tyranny of the trade gilds, self-regarding corporations in their way,[1009] looking to their own interests and indifferent to those of the outside grades beneath them,[1010] could provide a foothold for the barons in the town mobs, whom the barons could patronise.[1011] What was done by the Parliaments of Edward III to allow free entrance to foreign merchants was by way of furthering the interests of the aristocracy, who wanted to deal with such merchants, as against the English traders who wished to exclude them. Yet again, the yeomanry and burghers, fostered by the royal policy, develop an important military force, which has its own prestige.
Nothing can hinder, however, that foreign wars shall in the end aggrandise the upper as against the lower classes, developing as they do the relation of subjection, increasing the specifically military upper class, and setting up the spirit of force as against the spirit of law. In particular, the king's power is always aggrandised when nobility and people alike are led by him to foreign war.[1012] Edward III, indeed, had to make many legislative concessions to the Commons in order to procure supplies for his wars; and the expansion of commerce in his reign,[1013] furthered by the large influx of Flemish artisans[1014] encouraged by him,[1015] strengthened the middle classes; but all the while the "lower orders" had the worst of it; and the jealousy between traders and artisans, already vigorous in the reign of John, could not be extinguished. And when, after nearly eighty years without a great external war, Edward I invaded Scotland, there began a military epoch in which, while national unity was promoted, the depressed class was necessarily enlarged, as it had been before the Conquest during the Danish wars;[1016] and the poor went to the wall. Instinct made people and baronage alike loth at first to support the king in wars of foreign aggression; but when once the temper was developed throughout the nation, as against France, the spirit of national union helped the growth of class superiority by leaving it comparatively unchecked. In the period between the Conquest and Edward I the free population had actually increased, partly by French and Flemish immigration in the train of the Conquest; partly by Norman manumissions; partly through the arrivals of Flemish weavers exiled by domestic war;[1017] partly by the new growth of towns under Norman influence; partly by reason of the development of the wool export trade, which flourished in virtue of the law and order at length established under the Angevin kings, and so stimulated other industry. But from the beginning of the epoch of systematic national war the increase was checked; and save for the period of betterment consequent on the destruction of population by the Black Death, the condition of the peasantry substantially worsened.[1018] Frenchmen were struck by the number of serfs they saw in southern England as compared with France, and by the stress of their servitude.[1019]
An apparently important offset to the general restriction of freedom is the beginning of a representative parliamentary system under the auspices of Simon de Montfort (1265). It is still customary to make this departure a ground for national self-felicitation, though our later historians are as a rule content to state the historical facts, without inferring any special credit to the "Anglo-Saxon race."[1020] As a matter of fact, Simon de Montfort's Parliament was the application by a naturalised Frenchman, under stress of the struggle between his party in the baronage and the king, of an expedient set up a generation before by the Emperor Frederick II in Sicily, and a century before in Spain. There, and not in England, arose the first Parliaments in which sat together barons, prelates, and representatives of cities. Simon de Montfort, son of the leader of the crusade against the Albigenses, may well have known of the practice of Spain, where in the twelfth century the householders in the cities elected their members. But he must at least have been familiar with the details of the system set up in Sicily, to which English attention had been specially called by the effort of Henry III to obtain the Sicilian crown for his son Edmund; and Simon imitated that system in England, not on any exalted principle of justice, but because the smallness of his support among the barons forced him to make the most of the burgher class, who had stood by him in the struggle. He may even, indeed, have taken his idea proximately from the practice of the rebels in Normandy before the Conquest, when deputies from all the districts met in general assembly and bound themselves by a mutual oath.[1021] Thus accidentally[1022] introduced, under a French name,[1023] the representative system is one more of the civilising factors which England owed to Southern Europe; and, as it was, baronage and burgesses alike failed to maintain Simon against the power of the crown, the monarchic superstition availing to divide even the malcontents, as had previously happened after the granting of Magna Carta by King John.