PRESENT PROBLEMS OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 131 



other languages, the exception is not great enough to change the 

 rule. Fewer men have given themselves to the study of the second 

 than to that of the first half. Nor has there been any such converging 

 of effort on a single line of history as in the earlier field. Indeed, such 

 unity of interest is not possible in the later period. The nations, 

 whose appearance constitutes the dissolution of the Frankish Empire, 

 separated from one another because of differences of condition, and 

 these differences increased rather than diminished after their separa- 

 tion. The scholars of each nation have naturally found their proper 

 field in the study of their own national history. And while there is 

 a certain similarity in the larger features of these distinct lines of 

 national growth, there is not such a degree of likeness that what is 

 found to be true of one may with confidence be asserted of any other. 



It has naturally resulted from this fact, not only that there is 

 a larger range of unexplored or only partially explored territory in 

 the. later period, but that there has as yet been formed no such general 

 consensus of opinion, except upon here and there a single point, as I 

 have asserted to exist in the earlier. Here is a field in which the ardor 

 and enthusiasm of a whole generation of coming historical scholars 

 may find profitable employment in the investigation of the fact as 

 it really was, if the present generation will only have the courage to 

 confess that work of real importance in its own field is about finished, 

 and to turn the interests of the rising generation as completely as 

 possible into a new direction. 



The incomplete and fragmentary character of our present know- 

 ledge in the second half of medieval history as compared with the 

 first, I do not need, I am sure, even to illustrate. In narrative history 

 proper, in the merely political history of states and dynasties, how 

 many broad gaps are there not, like the reigns of Edward II, of 

 Henry VI, in English history, as yet practically unfilled by any 

 minutely critical study. How much of the whole field is still to all 

 intents virgin soil. And even in those portions which have been 

 carefully studied in detail, the reigns of William the Conqueror, of 

 John, of Henry IV, no one can believe the work to be yet complete. 

 However minute and painstaking may be the study of the man who 

 first breaks way for our knowledge of an age, it can never be final. 

 It must be subjected to the searching examination and criticism of 

 other scholars, turned to this light and to that, filled out, cut away, 

 and reshaped, before we reach a firmly fixed agreement on the age, 

 of which indeed the work of the bahn-brechenden scholar is likely 

 to form the solid foundation. What portion of the narrative, political 

 history of the later Middle Ages has yet reached this stage? 



If we turn to the institutional history of the period, the condition 

 of our knowledge is equally or even more backward. The constitu- 

 tions of modern states excite great interest and have been or are 



