PRESENT PROBLEMS OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 127 



announcing somewhat revolutionary views, but he is making no 

 converts. The influence of economic factors in the growth of feudalism 

 and the relation of the economic institutions which they produced 

 to those more strictly political, produced chiefly by a different set 

 of causes, have long been a difficult puzzle and a source of confusion; 

 but these two great sides of feudalism have now been given their 

 proper place side by side and their proper share in the common 

 result. Their relation need no longer be a source of misunderstanding 

 to one who takes both sides equally into account. It is difficult to 

 see from what source or in what way the prevailing line of explana- 

 tion of the origin of feudalism is to be successfully attacked in any 

 essential point. Minor points remain to be cleared up, new light will 

 be thrown on many details, changes of emphasis will occur, but no 

 man can hope to undo the work of Waitz and Roth, of Fustel de 

 Coulanges and Brunner, or seriously reform the common result 

 which they have created. 1 It is agreement of this sort which I would 

 assert to be practically final, and disagreement of this sort which, I 

 would declare, does not affect practical unanimity of opinion. 



In view of this condition of things, which I believe will be more 

 clearly recognized the more carefully the situation is considered, 

 I should like in all earnestness to raise the question whether the 

 time has not now come when the main force of our vigorous and 

 advancing historical effort should be turned into some other portion 

 of the field; whether scholarly work in the first half of medieval 

 history is not likely to find itself more and more shut up to the study 

 of minute facts, which are, it may be, interesting in themselves, 

 but of no essential influence on the real current of affairs. If this is 

 true, and the students of medieval history continue in the future 

 as they have in the past to spend their chief effort in this field, are 

 we not running some risk of that danger which seems to threaten 

 every science at some period of its history, the danger of the develop- 

 ment of a more or less barren scholasticism, of magnifying method 

 into the all important thing without reference to the result to be 

 reached, of considering the establishment of the fact to be the end 

 of all effort, regardless of the use to which it can be put when we have 

 found out what it is. It is not the place here to call attention to the 

 few and not as yet important signs, which I think can even now be 

 detected, of the approach of this danger. Suggestion rather than 

 argument is the purpose of this paper. And the first suggestion 

 which I would make is this: have we not now reached the point 



1 Such a statement in regard to the probable results of future investigation will 

 be thought by many somewhat hazardous. In so far, however, as objection may 

 take a specific form, either now or in the future, it will be found, I think, to be 

 due to an opinion that some modification of detail ought to be considered a modi- 

 fication of fundamentals. My statement really means that such an opinion is 

 likely to remain individual and not to become general. 



