community of tradition which still made the rule of Rome, whether in Church or State, a living reality.  In the thirteenth century the papal tradition was still at its height.  The jurisdiction of the papal curia implied a universal Christian commonwealth.  World-wide religious orders united alien lands together by ties more spiritual than obedience to the papal lawyers.  The academic ideal was another and a fresh link that connected the nations together.  To the ancient reasons for union—­symbolised by the living Latin speech of all clerks, of all scholars, of all engaged in serious affairs-were added the newer bonds of connexion involved in the common knightly and social ideals, in the general spread of a common art and a common vernacular language and literature.

As Latin expressed the one series of ties, so did French represent the other.  The France of St. Louis meant two things.  It meant, of course, the French state and the French nationality, but it meant a great deal more than that.  The influence of the French tongue and French ideals was wider than the political influence of the French monarchy.  French was the common language of knighthood, of policy, of the literature that entertained lords and ladies, of the lighter and less technical sides of the cosmopolitan culture which had its more serious embodiments in Latin.  To the Englishman of the thirteenth century the French state was the enemy; but the English baron denounced France in the French tongue, and leant a ready ear to those aspects of life which, cosmopolitan in reality, found their fullest exposition in France and among French-speaking peoples.  In the age which saw hostility to Frenchmen become a passion, a Frenchman like Montfort could become the champion of English patriotism, English scholars could readily quit their native land to study at Paris, the French vernacular literature was the common property of the two peoples, and French words began to force their way into the stubborn vocabulary of the English language, which for two centuries had almost entirely rejected these alien elements.  In dwelling, however briefly, on the new features which were transforming English civilisation during this memorable period, we shall constantly see how England gained by her ever-increasing intercourse with the continent, by necessarily sharing in the new movements which had extended from the continent to the island, no longer, as in the eleventh century, to be described as a world apart.  Neither the coming of the friars, nor the development of university life and academic schools of philosophy, theology, and natural science, nor the triumph of gothic art, nor the spread of vernacular literature, not even the scholarly study of English law nor the course of English political development-not one of these movements could have been what it was without the close interconnexion of the various parts of the European commonwealth, which was becoming more homogeneous at the same time that its units were acquiring for themselves sped characteristics of their own.