McCracken-McFarland House

THE present volume of the Cambridge Medieval History covers the stormy period of about three hundred years from Justinian to Charles the Great inclusive. It is a time little known to the general reader, and even students of history in this country seldom turn their attention to any part of it but the Conversion of the English. Hence, English books are scarce - Dr Hodgkin's Italy and her Invaders is the brilliant exception which proves the rule - and the editors have had to rely more on foreign scholars than in the former volume. Some indeed of the chapters treat of subjects on which very little has ever been written in English, such as the Visigoths in Spain, the organisation of Imperial Italy and Africa, the Saracen invasions of Sicily and Italy, and the early history and expansion of the Slavs.

Passage source: Cambridge Medieval History V 2, published 1913.

Taking all this for granted, then, we pass to the separate history of the individual countries just growing into states. For a time, they grow within the common mould of the Empire, and Carolingian traditions bind them to the past. Dimly to begin with, but with growing plainness, the realms of France, Germany, Italy, Lorraine, and Burgundy are seen taking their later territorial and constitutional shapes. England lay somewhat apart, insular, and therefore separated from the Empire, but by this very insularity everywhere exposed to Northmen and Danes. Here, too, as on the continent, statesman-like kings and far-sighted ecclesiastics worked together. The growth of territorial unity is easiest of all to trace, for it can be made plain in maps. But the growth of unity of thought and interests, of constitutions and social forms, is harder to see and to express; it is easier to estimate the work of Ecgbert, Edward the Elder, and Aethelstan than the more many-sided achievements of Alfred and Dunstan, or the more pervasive influence of the great Northern school which gave us Bede and Alcuin. But the peculiarity of England's position and history is most significant for constitutional growths, and it is, therefore, in connexion with English affairs that the origins of Feudalism are best investigated and discussed. Scientific history begins with the observation of resemblances and with classification by likeness. Then it passes on to detect differences, and to note their significance. Nowhere is there more need to remember these twin methods than in the study of Feudalism, where the Cambridge scholar Maitland was our daring and yet cautious guide. Processes and details which we notice in English history have their parallels elsewhere. If the centuries we traverse here have a large common inheritance, they also have at the same time, in spite of differences in place and character, something of a common history. What is said, therefore, as to the origins of English Feudalism also applies, with due allowance for great local differences, to Germany, France, and Italy ; even indeed to Spain, although there the presence and the conquests of the Muslims impressed a peculiar stamp upon its institutions.

Passage source: Cambridge Medieval History V 3, published 1922.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

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