132 MEDIEVAL HISTORY 



being most thoroughly studied. The history of institutions from 

 Roman days to the. triumph of feudalism may be called, as I have 

 said, almost, or quite a completed science. Even of feudalism itself, 

 as it stood established in the thirteenth century on the eve of its fall, 

 we may assert almost as much. But what have we a right to say of 

 the age that follows. And yet under every modern constitution lies 

 feudalism. The age of feudal decay was the age when all modern 

 institutions took their form, when the direction of their growth was 

 fixed, and when those momentous differences which have controlled 

 the peculiar destinies of nations were determined. What can we 

 understand of the origins or peculiarities of our present constitutions 

 until we know surely under what conditions and into what forms the 

 feudal constitution of a given nation dissolved itself. Of the history 

 of England this is especially important, because of the wide conquests 

 in other lands which the English constitution has made and is still 

 destined to make; and yet the great bulk of English institutional 

 history as it exists in printed form traces the origins of that constitu- 

 tion back to theoretical, imaginary, or largely misunderstood begin- 

 nings in Saxon times. And if the judgment of the scholars of the 

 day is finding a sounder basis for English constitutional history in 

 Frankish rather than in Saxon institutions, this change of doctrine 

 has as yet made but little impression on popular opinion. The 

 process needs to go, however, a step further yet, and the real explana- 

 tion of the more important peculiarities of the English constitution 

 to be found not merely in Frankish institutions as introduced by the 

 Norman conquest, but in that thorough feudalism which accompanied 

 or shortly followed that event. 



May I be allowed one concrete example. The right of impeachment, 

 though it may be destined to longer life in the United States for 

 purposes different from those for which it was originally intended, 

 is practically obsolete in England itself, owing to the development 

 of the cabinet system, but it is of great historical interest for its 

 part in the establishment and defense of the constitution. If now 

 we look critically at the details of the impeachment process we shall 

 find, I think, so peculiar and astonishing a process, that we shall 

 feel justified in declaring that it could never have been invented de 

 novo by any absurd freak even of the human mind; but if we trace 

 it back into the feudal conditions and institutions from which modern 

 legislatures arose, we see at once how naturally and simply it came 

 into being. 



In the study which has already been given to the transition from 

 the medieval constitution to the modern, those features which seemed 

 the most striking have received the most attention, the position 

 of the king, the development of a legislative system, the growth of 

 the judiciary. But while we have collected on these subjects a 



