the peculiarly Teutonic character of English civilization.  Between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, when the formation of English nationality was approaching completion, it received a fresh and powerful infusion of Teutonism in the swarms of heathen Northmen or Danes who occupied the eastern coasts, struggled long for the supremacy, and gradually becoming christianized, for a moment succeeded in seizing the crown.  Of the invasion of partially romanized Northmen from Normandy which followed soon after, and which has so profoundly 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 Revolution;