PRESENT PROBLEMS OF MEDIEVAL HISTORY 133 



large body of knowledge which seems firmly established, yet it will 

 be found on careful analysis that considerable portions of it are 

 based on general views rather than built up from an exact knowledge 

 of detailed fact. Current ideas of the origin of the representative 

 system are based mainly on the surface appearance of things, and 

 need to be subjected to the test of a minute analysis of sources. 

 Scarcely an attempt has been made as yet to trace scientifically the 

 growth of what may be called the national feeling, the sense of a 

 corporate unity in the community as over against the king, or over 

 against the government of the state. The transformation of the 

 feudal baronage into a social nobility is popularly set much too late 

 in time and is hardly at all understood. These are but examples of 

 numerous fields that remain to be worked, but it is plain that we 

 must be in possession of the results of the study of them before we 

 can say anything final of the origins of modern constitutions. The 

 three things which I have mentioned constitute indeed the very 

 essence of the transformation of the medieval into the modern state. 

 If this is true of those subjects which have naturally attracted the 

 first attention of students, it is yet more true of other sides of the 

 process. Almost the whole administrative system for instance, 

 the rise of the modern governmental departments, the development 

 of modern out of feudal taxation is practically unknown territory. 

 Is there in truth a single institution of this transition period of which 

 we can say with confidence that we know its history as thoroughly 

 as we do most of the institutions of the Carolingian or of the early 

 feudal age? 



There is also another line of study, representing a second stage 

 in our knowledge, since it must be based on a considerable body of 

 already established fact, in which only a beginning has been made 

 - 1 mean the comparative study of institutions. I have just said 

 that history in the second half of the Middle Ages divides into sepa- 

 rate fields along national lines which have not much in common with 

 one another, and that we cannot assert with confidence that what we 

 find true in one field exists in another. This is certainly a fact. The 

 comparative method itself has also been attacked as unsound and un- 

 safe, and it must be admitted that it leads easily to abuses, especially 

 when it is used to establish the unknown. If, however, it is employed 

 with care and less to prove what was the fact than to assist us to 

 understand what we already partly know, it has an important and 

 even necessary service to render. The feudalism of the kingdom of 

 Jerusalem throws much light on the feudalism of the kingdom of 

 England. The curia regis was transformed in many states and in the 

 same general age into the beginnings of the modern legislature. 

 At the same time in the various states and in much the same way, 

 the judicial system, the administrative machinery, the financial 



