h the process of its replacement:
for example, the gradual disappearance of pagan slavery, and its
replacement by the self-governing peasantry of the Middle Ages, with
all the consequence of that change, affords some of the best reading
in Continental records. But the Dissolution of the English monasteries
has this added interest, that it was an immediate, and therefore an
overwhelming, change; there was hardly a warning, there was no delay.
Suddenly, not within the lifetime of a man, but within that of a
Parliament, from one year to another, a good quarter of the whole
economic power of the nation was utterly transformed. Nothing like it
has been known in European history.

What filled the void so made? The answer to this question is, the
Oligarchy: the landed class which had been threatening for so long to
assume the Government of England stepped into the shoes of the great
houses, and by this addition to their already considerable power
achieved the destruction of the monarchy and within 100 years
proceeded to the ordering of the English people under a small group of
wealthy men, a form of Government which to this day England alone of
all Christian nations suffers or enjoys.

This general statement must not be taken to mean that the oligarchic
system, whose basis lies in the ownership of land, was immediately
created by the Dissolution of the great monasteries. The development
of the territorial system of England, of which system the banks of the
Thames afford as good a picture as any in England, can be traced
certainly from Saxon, and conjecturally from Roman, times.

The Roman estate was, presumably, the direct ancestor of the manor,
and the Saxon thegns were perhaps most of them in blood, and nearly
all of them in social constitution, descended from the owners of the
Roman Villas which had seen the petty but recurrent pirate invasions
of the fifth and sixth centuries.

But though the manorial arrangement, with its village lords and their
dependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West, and could be
found on the Rhine, in Gaul, and even in Italy, in Saxon England it
had this peculiarity, that there was no systematic organisation by
which the local land-owner definitely recognised a feudal superior,
and through him the power of a Central Government. Or rather, though
in theory such recognition had grown up towards the end of the Saxon
period, in practice it hardly existed, and when William landed the
whole