A sound proof that in the tenth century the feudal system was necessary, and the only social state possible, lies in the universality of its establishment.  Everywhere society was dismembered; everywhere there was formed a multitude of small, obscure, isolated societies, consisting of the chief, his family, his retainers, and the wretched serfs over whom he ruled without restraint, and who had no appeal against his whim.  The power he exercised was the power of individual over individual, the domination of personal will and caprice; and this is perhaps the only kind of tyranny that man, to his eternal honour, is never willing to endure.  Hence the prodigious and invincible hatred that the people have at all times entertained for feudal rule, for the memories of it, for its very name.

The narrow concentrated life of the feudal lord lent, undoubtedly, a great preponderance to domesticity in his affairs.  The lord had his wife and children for his permanent society; they continually shared his interests, his destiny.  It was in the bosom of the feudal family that woman gained her importance in civilisation.  The system excited development of private character and passion that were, all things considered, noble.  Chivalry was the daughter of feudalism.

But from the social point of view feudalism failed to provide either legal order or political security.  It contained elaborate obligations between the higher and the lower orders of the feudal hierarchy, duties of protection on the one side and of service on the other.  But these obligations could never be established as institutions.  There was no superior force to which all had to submit; there was public opinion to make itself respected.  Hence the feudal system was without political guarantee to sustain it.  Might alone was right.  Feudalism was as much opposed to the establishment of general order as to the extension of general liberty.  It was indispensable for the reconstruction of European society, but politically it was in itself a radically bad system.

III.—­The Church

Meanwhile the Church, adhering to its own principles, had steadily advanced along the route that it had marked out for itself in the early days of its organisation.  It was during the feudal epoch the only power that made for civilised development.  All education was ecclesiastical; all the arts were in the service of the Church.  It had, during the Dark Ages, won the Barbarians to its fold by the gorgeous solemnity of its ritual; and, to protect itself against secular interference, it had declared the spiritual power to be independent of the temporal—­the first great assertion, in the history of European civilisation, of the liberty of thought.