the priesthood. The strength of the Church was
sapped alike by theological and moral revolt, while the growth of new
classes, the new greed of peace and of the wealth that comes of peace, the
advance of industry, the division of property, the progress of centralized
government, dealt fatal blows at the feudal organization of the state.

[Sidenote: Weakness of the Baronage]

Nor was the danger merely an external one. Noble and priest alike were
beginning to disbelieve in themselves. The new knowledge which was now
dawning on the world, the direct contact with the Greek and Roman
literatures which was just beginning to exert its influence on Western
Europe, told above all on these wealthier and more refined classes. The
young scholar or noble who crossed the Alps brought from the schools of
Florence the dim impression of a republican liberty or an imperial order
which disenchanted him of the world in which he found himself. He looked
on the feudalism about him as a brutal anarchy, he looked on the Church
itself as the supplanter of a nobler and more philosophic morality.
Besides this moral change, the barons had suffered politically from the
decrease of their numbers in the House of Lords. The statement which
attributes the lessening of the baronage to the Wars of the Roses seems
indeed to be an error. Although Henry the Seventh, in dread of opposition
to his throne, summoned only a portion of the temporal peers to his first
Parliament, there were as many barons at his accession as at the accession
of Henry the Sixth. Of the greater houses only those of Beaufort and
Tiptoft were extinguished by the civil war. The decline of the baronage,
the extinction of the greater families, the break-up of the great estates,
had in fact been going on throughout the reign of the Edwards; and it was
after Agincourt that the number of temporal peers sank to its lowest ebb.
From that time till the time of the Tudors they numbered but fifty-two. A
reduction in the numbers of the baronage however might have been more than
compensated by the concentration of great estates in the hands of the
houses that survived. What wrecked it as a military force was the
revolution which was taking place in the art of war. The introduction of
gunpowder ruined feudalism. The mounted and heavily-armed knight gave way
to the meaner footman. Fortresses which had been impregnable against the
attacks of the Middle Ages crumbled before the new artillery. Although