and Cossa.[4] Haney, in his History of Economic Thought,[5] says:  ’It seems more nearly true to regard the years about 1500 as marking the end of mediaeval times....  On large lines, and from the viewpoint of systems of thought rather than systems of industry, the Middle Ages may with profit be divided into two periods.  From 400 down to 1200, or shortly thereafter, constitutes the first.  During these years Christian theology opposed Roman institutions, and Germanic customs were superposed, until through action and reaction all were blended.  This was the reconstruction; it was the “stormy struggle” to found a new ecclesiastical and civil system.  From 1200 on to 1500 the world of thought settled to its level.  Feudalism and scholasticism, the corner-stones of mediaevalism, emerged and were dominant.’

[Footnote 1:  Op. cit., p. 35.]

[Footnote 2:  Memoires sur les commencements de l’economie politique dans les ecoles du moyen age, Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, vol. 28.]

[Footnote 3:  Geschichte zur National-Oekonomik in Deutschland.]

[Footnote 4:  Introduction to the Study of Political Economy.]

[Footnote 5:  P. 70.]

We shall not continue the study further than the beginning of the sixteenth century.  It is true that, if we were to refer to several sixteenth-century authors, we should be in possession of a very highly developed and detailed mass of teaching on many points which earlier authors left to some extent obscure.  We deliberately refrain nevertheless from doing so, because the whole nature of the sixteenth-century literature was different from that of the fourteenth and fifteenth; the early years of the sixteenth century witnessed the abrogation of the central authority which was a basic condition of the success of the mediaeval system; and the same period also witnessed ’radical economic changes, reacting more and more on the scholastic doctrines, which found fewer and fewer defenders in their original form.’[1]

[Footnote 1:  Cossa, op. cit., p. 151.  Ashley warns us that ’we must be careful not to interpret the writers of the fifteenth century by the writers of the seventeenth’ (Economic History, vol. i. pt. ii. p. 387).  These later writers sometimes contain historical accounts of controversies in previous centuries, and are relevant on this account.]

Sec. 2. Economic.

It must be clearly understood that the political economy of the mediaevals was not a science, like modern political economy, but an art.  ’It is a branch of the virtue of prudence; it is half-way between morality, which regulates the conduct of the individual, and politics, which regulates the conduct of the sovereign.  It is the morality of the family or of the head of the family, from the point of view of the good administration of the patrimony, just as politics is the morality of the sovereign, from the point of view of the good