iety from which exact application of such a kind had all but
disappeared.[12]

In this way the just heritage of "our own kind" was preserved for us.
The great monasteries suffered severely in the Danish invasions, "the
pagan storm which all but repeated in Britain the disaster of the Saxon
invasions, which all but overcame the mystic tenacity of Alfred and the
positive mission of the town of Paris"; but they re-arose and were again
exercising a strong civilizing influence "when civilization returned in
fullness with the Norman Conquest."

The Conquest, in Mr. Belloc's view, is "almost as sharp a division in
the history of England as is the landing of St. Augustine ... though ...
the re-entry of England into European civilization 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." But it did not change the intimate philosophy of the
people:

The Conquest found England Catholic, vaguely feudal, and, though in
rather an isolated way, thoroughly European. The Normans organized
that feudality, extirpated whatever was unorthodox or slack in the
machinery of the religious system, and let in the full light of
European civilization through a wide-open door, which had hitherto
been half-closed.[13]

The organization of feudal government by the Normans brings us to a
consideration of the territorial system of England which can be traced
certainly from Saxon and conjecturally from Roman times.

In making the study of history, as does Mr. Belloc, living and organic,
it is of capital importance to seize the fact that the fundamental
economic institution of pagan antiquity was slavery. Before the coming
of the Christian Era, and even after its advent, slavery was taken for
granted. Mr. Belloc says:

In no matter what field of the European past we make our research,
we find, from two thousand years ago upwards one fundamental
institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that
fundamental institution is Slavery.... Our European ancestry, those
men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little
admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the
economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and
never doubted but that it was normal to all human society.[14]

With the growth of the Church, how