active emancipators everywhere were the parish priests and the
religious brotherhoods; but no name among them has survived and no man
of them has reaped his reward in this world. Countless Clarksons and
innumerable Wilberforces, without political machinery or public fame,
worked at death-beds and confessionals in all the villages of Europe;
and the vast system of slavery vanished. It was probably the widest work
ever done which was voluntary on both sides; and the Middle Ages was in
this and other things the age of volunteers. It is possible enough to
state roughly the stages through which the thing passed; but such a
statement does not explain the loosening of the grip of the great
slave-owners; and it cannot be explained except psychologically. The
Catholic type of Christianity was not merely an element, it was a
climate; and in that climate the slave would not grow. I have already
suggested, touching that transformation of the Roman Empire which was
the background of all these centuries, how a mystical view of man's
dignity must have this effect. A table that walked and talked, or a
stool that flew with wings out of window, would be about as workable a
thing as an immortal chattel. But though here as everywhere the spirit
explains the processes, and the processes cannot even plausibly explain
the spirit, these processes involve two very practical points, without
which we cannot understand how this great popular civilization was
created--or how it was destroyed.

What we call the manors were originally the _villae_ of the pagan
lords, each with its population of slaves. Under this process, however
it be explained, what had occurred was the diminishment of the lords'
claim to the whole profit of a slave estate, by which it became a claim
to the profit of part of it, and dwindled at last to certain dues or
customary payments to the lord, having paid which the slave could enjoy
not only the use of the land but the profit of it. It must be remembered
that over a great part, and especially very important parts, of the
whole territory, the lords were abbots, magistrates elected by a
mystical communism and themselves often of peasant birth. Men not only
obtained a fair amount of justice under their care, but a fair amount of
freedom even from their carelessness. But two details of the development
are very vital. First, as has been hinted elsewhere, the slave was long
in the intermediate status of a serf. This meant that whil