ower, of the
monastic system would appear: that gaps left uninfluenced by it in the
line of the Thames would be filled up, and all the old foundations
themselves would be reconstructed and become new things.

The Conquest is in its way almost as sharp a division in the history
of England as is the landing of St Augustine. In some externals it
made an even greater difference to this island than did the advent of
the Roman Missionaries, though of course, in the fundamental things
upon which the national life is built, the re-entry of England into
European civilisation in the seventh century must count as a far
greater and more decisive event than its first experience of united
and regular government under the Normans in the eleventh. Moreover
although the Conquest largely changed the language of the island,
introduced a conception of law in civil affairs with which the
Anglo-Saxon aristocracy were quite unfamiliar, and began to flood
England with a Gallic admixture which flowed .uninterruptedly for
three hundred years, yet it did not change the intimate philosophy of
the people, and it is only the change of the intimate philosophy of a
people which can have a revolutionary consequence. The Conquest found
England Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in rather an isolated
way, thoroughly European. The Normans organised that feudality,
extirpated whatever was unorthodox, or slack in the machinery of the
religious system, and let in the full light of European civilisation
through a wide-open door, which had hitherto been half-closed.

The effect, therefore, of the Conquest was exercised upon the visible
and mutable things of the country rather than upon the nourishing
inward things: but it was very great, and in nothing was it greater
than in its inception of new buildings and the use everywhere of
stone. Under the Normans very nearly all the great religious
foundations of England re-arose, and that within a generation. New
houses also arose, and the mark of that time (which was a second
spring throughout Europe: full of the spirit of the Crusades, and a
complete regeneration of social life) was the rigour of new religious
orders, and especially the transformation of the old Benedictine
monotony.

Chief, of course, of these religious movements, and the pioneer of
them all, was the institution of Cluny in Burgundy.

Cluny did not rise by design. It was one of those spontaneous growths
which are characteristic of vigorous