ofoundly affected English society and English speech, we need notice
here but two conspicuous features. First, it increased the power of the
crown and the clergy, brought all England more than ever under one law,
and strengthened the feeling of nationality. It thus made England a
formidable military power, while at the same time it brought her into
closer relations with continental Europe than she had held since the
fourth century. Secondly, by superposing a new feudal nobility as the
upper stratum of society, it transformed the Old-English thanehood into
the finest middle-class of rural gentry and yeomanry that has ever
existed in any country; a point of especial interest to Americans, since
it was in this stratum of society that the two most powerful streams of
English migration to America--the Virginia stream and the New
England stream--alike had their source. [Sidenote: Primitive Teutonic
institutions less modified in England than in Germany]

By the thirteenth century the increasing power and pretensions of the
crown, as the unification of English nationality went on, brought about
a result unlike anything known on the continent of Europe; it brought
about a resistless coalition between the great nobles, the rural gentry
and yeomanry, and the burghers of the towns, for the purpose of curbing
royalty, arresting the progress of centralization, and setting up
representative government on a truly national scale. This grand result
was partly due to peculiar circumstances which had their origin in
the Norman conquest; but it was largely due to the political habits
generated by long experience of local representative assemblies,--habits
which made it comparatively easy for different classes of society to
find their voice and use it for the attainment of ends in common. On the
continent of Europe the encroaching sovereign had to contend with
here and there an arrogant vassal, here and there a high-spirited and
rebellious town; in England, in this first great crisis of popular
government, he found himself confronted by a united people. The fruits
of the grand combination were _first_, the wresting of Magna Charta from
King John in 1215, and _secondly_, the meeting of the first House of
Commons in 1265. Four years of civil war were required to secure these
noble results. The Barons' War, of the years 1263 to 1267, was an
event of the same order of importance as the Great Rebellion of the
seventeenth century and the American R