uled by virtue of a bargain made between him and his people, and that if
he broke his contract he justly forfeited his authority. The routine of
silent and submissive councils had been broken through, and the earliest
signs of discussion and deliberation had discovered themselves, while the
Church, exerting in its assemblies an authority which the late king had
helplessly laid down, formed a new and effective centre of organized
resistance to tyranny in the future Even the rising towns had seized the
moment when the central administration was paralysed to extend their own
privileges, and to acquire large powers of self-government which were to
prove the fruitful sources of liberty for the whole people.

We see everywhere, in fact, signs of the great contest which in one form
or another runs through the whole of the twelfth century, and gives its
main interest in our eyes to the English history of the time,--the
struggle between the iron organization of medieval feudalism and those
nascent forces of modern civilization which were fated in the end to
shatter and supersede it. In spite of the cry of lamentation which the
chroniclers carry down to us over the misery of a land stricken by plague
and famine and rapine, it is still plain that even through the terrible
years of Stephen's reign England had its share in the universal movement
by which the squalor and misery of the Middle Ages were giving place to a
larger activity and a better order of things A class unknown before was
fast growing into power,--the middle class of burghers and traders, who
desired above all things order, and hated above all things the medieval
enemy of order, the feudal lord. Merchant and cultivator and wool-grower
found better work ready to their hand than fighting, and the appearance
of mercenary soldiers marked everywhere the development of peaceful
industries. Amid all the confusion of civil war the industrial activities
of the country had developed with bewildering rapidity; while knights and
barons led their foreign hirelings to mutual slaughter, monks and canons
were raising their religious houses in all the waste places of the land,
and silently laying the foundations of English enterprise and English
commerce. To the great body of the Benedictines and the Cluniacs were
added in the middle of the twelfth century the Cistercians, who founded
their houses among the desolate moorlands of Yorkshire in solitary places
which had known no inhabita