CHAPTER XXL
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL INFLUENCES AT THE CLOSE
OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
454. Plan of the chapter.—455. Variations of the political balance through-
out English History.—456. The Kings :—popular regard for the
Plantagenets.—457. Growth of loyalty.—458. Doctrine of legitim-
ism.—459. Material and legal securities.—460. Extent of the royal
estates.—461. Keligious duty of obedience.—462. Fealty, homage,
and allegiance.—463. Law of Treason.—464. The Clergy.—465. Weak-
ness of their spiritual position.—466. Weakness of their temporal
position.—467. The Baronage :—their wealth and extent of property.
—468. Their territorial distribution.—469. Class distinctions—470.
Liveryandmaintenance.—471. Heraldicdistinctions.—472. Fortified
houses and parks.—473. Greathouseholds.—474. Service by indenture.
—475. Good and evil results of baronial leadership.—476. Baronial
position of the bishops.—477. The Knights and Squires.—478. Their
relation to the barons.—479. Independent attitude of the knights in
parliament.—480. The Yeomanry.—481. Expenditure of the squire
and tenant farmer.—482. The valetti in parliament.—483. The yeo-
men electors.—484. The Boroughs.—485. The merchant guild and
its developments.—486. Constitution of London.—487* Importance
and growth of Companies.—488. Other municipalities.—489. Politics
in the boroughs, and of their representatives.—490. Political capa-
bilities of country and town, merchant, tradesman, and artificer.—
491. Thelife of the burgher.—492. Connexion with the country and
with other classes.—493. Artisans and labourers.—494. The poor.—
495. The villeins.—496. Thechance of rising in the world. Education.
—497. Class antagonisms.—498. Concluding reflexions. National
character.—499. Transition.—500. Some lessons of history.
Factorsof 454. The great changes which diversify the internal history
history. of a nation are mainly due to the variations in the condition
and relations of the several political factors which contribute
to that history : their weight, their force and vitality, their
TJie National Balance.
519
mutual attraction and repulsion, their powers of expansion and Tiwoauses
. , ɪ , that produce
contraction. Γhe great snip of the state has its centre of gravity the changes
, 1 , ., of national
as well as its apparatus ɪor steering and sailing, its machinery history.
of defence, and its lading. And it is upon the working of
these factors that every great crisis of national life must ulti-
mately turn. Great men may forestall or delay such critical
changes ; the greatest men aspire to guide nations through
them ; sometimes great men seem to be created by or for such
conjunctures; and, without a careful examination of the lives of
such men, history cannot be written. But they do not create
the conjunctures : and the history which searches no deeper is
manifestly incomplete. In the reading of constitutional history
this is a primary condition: we have to deal with principles
and institutions first, and with men, great or small, mainly as
working the institutions and exemplifying the development of
the principles. As institutions and principles, however much Method of
they may in the abstract be amenable to critical analysis, can adopted.
be traced in their operation and development only in the con-
crete, it is necessary to divide and rule out the design of his-
torical writing by the epochs of reigns of kings and the lives of
other great men. A perpetual straining after the abstract idea
or law of change, the constant ‘ accentuation,’ as it is called, of
principles in historical writing, invariably marks a narrow view
of truth, a want of mastery over details, and a bias towards
foregone conclusions. In adopting the method which has been
used, however imperfectly, in this work, of proceeding histori-
cally rather than philosophically, this has been kept in view.
We have attempted to look at the national institutions as they
grew, and to trace the less permanent and essential influences
only so long as they have a bearing on that growth. The
necessity of finding one string, by which to give a unity to the
course of so varied an inquiry, has involved the further neces-
sity of long narrative chapters and of much unavoidable repe-
tition. The object of the present chapter will be to examine Objectof
into the condition and relation of the factors which produced chlpterΓ'
the critical changes indicated in the preceding narrative, in
those points in which they come less prominently forward, and