E.— GEOGRAPHY. 103 



could be extended almost iiulefmitcly on the level, while leaving the 

 woods on the rising ground lo supiily thi^ nect'ssary fuel, building mate- 

 rial, and paimago for the swini'. This was a great advantage, but it 

 meant that the necessary protection was soon lost. 



Now, in North-Western Europe that protective influence was 

 peculiarly necessary for one geographical reason, as it was on 

 the eastern margin of the continent for another. It was necessary in 

 the west especially, because the sea-coasts, owing to the local wealth 

 of fish, early attracted population. But in many regions those coasts, 

 exposed to the oceanic type of climate in its most pronounced form, 

 were unsuited to cultivation. At the same time, on account of their 

 sheltered inlets, parts of those coasts were well fitted to breed a sea- 

 faring folk. Unable, or able only to a very small degree, to supple- 

 ment their natural resources by cultivation, having at the same time 

 command of the sea, those seafai'ers tended constantly to raid ttie 

 painfully cleared and cultivated lands of their more fortunately situated 

 neigl'ibours. These, as many old tales inform us, did, time and again, 

 find their encircling woods a protection. We must suppose, therefore, 

 that the tendency to clear more and more land would be checked by 

 this need for the shelter of the woods. 



But it seems to me that we may regard the growth of feudalism, 

 from one point of view, as an adaptive device by which the growing 

 agricultural settlements obtained, at a price, the necessary protection. 

 Feudalism in the form, for example, in which it grew up in England 

 before the coming of the Normans was a means of ensuring the exist- 

 ence of a kind of organisation which permitted clearing di forest 

 land to go on indefinitely, while diminishing the risk of perpetual 

 )'aiding. 



It was also, more especially in Eastern Europe, something more, 

 for it tended to fix tlie cultivator to the land. The tendency to wander 

 may be said to be almost universal in the case of forest-dwellers carry- 

 ing on primitive agriculture. Its wide distribution is due to the great 

 dil'ficulty of maintaining there the fertility of the land, more especially 

 when exhausting crops, like the diffei-ent kinds of grain and flax, are 

 grown. To tliis day, when we contrast the advanced agricultm-e of 

 Western Europe with the more primitive type practised in the Eastern 

 part, we have to remember that the Western Europeans have largely 

 evaded their problem by using their easy access to the great ocean to 

 draw upon all parts of the world for feeding-stuffs for their large 

 herds of cattle, and mineral fertilisers for their arable lands. In early 

 days the difficulty of keeping many cattle through the winter scarcity, 

 combined with the merely moderate fertility of the deforested lands, 

 made the restoration of material taken out by the crops a matter of 

 great difficulty, got over by a variety of devices, including, of course, 

 fallowing. 



Feudalism helped in the solution of this problem by checking the 

 natural tendency of the cultivator to abandon exhausted lands and 

 move on to new ones. But even apart from this particular device, 

 the ]iroblem of maintaining fertility had to be tackled early in the 

 West, because the relief made the forest far less continuous, far less 

 uniform, tlian in the East. It must have been obvious quite early 



