some of whose works we are discontented, was a necessary condition
of economic progress. With the coming of the national State the facile
internationalism of the Middle Ages had to disappear; and as economics
and politics ran into national channels, the life of the spirit,
hitherto an international life, suffered the same change, and national
religions, if such a thing be not a contradiction in terms, were duly
born. But a national economy, a national State, a national Church were
all things unknown to the Middle Ages. Its economy was a village
economy: its mental culture was an international culture bestowed by a
universal Church (a village culture there could not be, and with a
universal Church the only possible culture was necessarily
international); while, as for its politics, they were something betwixt
and between--sometimes parochial, when a local feudal lord drew to
himself sovereignty; sometimes national, when a strong king arose in
Israel; and sometimes, under a Charlemagne, almost international.

A consideration of the linguistic factor may help to throw light on the
point in question. Here again we may trace the same isolation and the
same uniformity which we have also seen in the world of economics. There
was an infinity of dialects, but a paucity of languages, in the Middle
Ages. One is told that to-day there are dialects in the Bight of
Heligoland and among the Faroes which are peculiar to a single family.
Something of the same sort must have existed in the Middle Ages. Just as
there were local customs of the manor, the town, and the fief, there
must have been local dialects of villages and even of hamlets. But here
again isolation was compatible with uniformity. There were perhaps only
two languages of any general vogue in the central epoch of the Middle
Ages, and they were confined by no national frontiers. First there was
Latin, the language of the Church, and since learning belonged to the
Church, the language of learning. Scholars used the same language in
Oxford and Prague, in Paris and Bologna; and within the confines of
Latin Christianity scholarship was an undivided unity. Besides Latin the
only other language of any general vogue in the middle of the Middle
Ages was vulgar Latin, or Romance. To Dante, writing at the close of
the thirteenth century, Romance was still one _idioma_--even if it were
_trifarium_, according as its 'yes' was _oil_, or _oc_, or _si_.[17] Of
the three branches of this _id