, however, of importance to note that this decline in
his prominence in civil life is commensurate with the diminished need
by the people of his protection, owing to the steady increase in the
security and independence of their position.

To sum up briefly the chief characteristics of the early and obscure
period which we have been considering, I think we can truly call it a
transition period, and its history a tottering bridge from the dead
Roman municipal system of the past, to the new state and city life of
the future; from a state of society where, as we have seen, the city
had changed from a political to an administrative division, to one
where the city was to prepare itself again to claim, and eventually,
by the growth of internal resources, to gain the lost function of
sovereignty. The condition of the people during this time we have seen
to be wretched in the extreme; the dismantled city but a bunch of
comfortless dwellings; its inhabitants but a semi-servile population,
with a small admixture of refugees of a better class; the city
occupying but a subordinate place as part of the rural holding within
whose limits it stood; whatever of wealth it contained an easy if not
a legitimate prey to the turbulent spirits, whose mutual contests kept
the surrounding country in a continual state of disturbance. The only
men of any influence in the community we have seen to be the bishops,
who, while steadily gaining in rank and power, stood forth as
defenders of the people. During all this time, however, the new sap
brought by the northern conquerors has been slowly but steadily
entering into and forming the constitution of the people. The chaste
and uncorrupted Northmen have by means of legitimate intermarriage
with the best of the enervated inhabitants of the land, raised up an
almost new race, who combine in their nature the humanizing effects of
the old civilization with the love of independence and the temperate
virtues of the northern conquerors, a race willing to benefit by the
experience of the past, and resolved to carve out for itself a new and
independent future.

PART II.

ELEMENTARY SOURCES OF MUNICIPAL UNITY IN LOMBARD AND FRANKISH TIMES.

In the second part of this paper we have to consider a period of
development rather than one of transition, of growth rather than of
change. We have before us the task of tracing the advance from a
period of barbarism to one when the feudal system had obtained an