114 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



rule became possible. Spain on the other hand, with its long fight foi 

 Roman Catholicism against Islam, developed nationalism earlier, and 

 naturally gave it an intensely zealotic flavour. That this feature has 

 limited its growth seems beyond doubt. 



In west, north-west and parts of central Europe early development was 

 slow because the food-plants and animal breeds had to be acclimatised, 

 and the problem of soil exhaustion was serious even if mitigated where the 

 subsoil was of loess or related material. Nevertheless, there can be no 

 doubt that settled populations in central and western Europe practising 

 agriculture and living in villages were much more numerous in far pre- 

 Roman times than it was customary to think a generation ago. It would 

 appear that the languages in use in those days changed from time to time 

 with conquests or migrations, and that Roman influence affected language 

 far and wide. Thus, in west, north-west and central Europe, language 

 up to Roman times appears to have played at most only a minor part in 

 developing durable consciousness of kind. The centuries following the 

 fall of the Roman Empire are dubbed the Dark Ages, and it is as they pass 

 away that the germs of the future linguistic national groups become clear, 

 with attempts to organise governments that were more than local in the 

 small sense, while leaving the fundamental village units in large measure 

 to themselves. 



The spread of Islam in the Mediterranean region cut old trade routes 

 for a time, and this increased the poverty following the decline of the 

 Roman Empire, so that towns and cities went through a bad time, but 

 apparently in several areas there was a marked increase of rural settlement, 

 notably in central Europe, where this is called the Rodungszeit from the 

 amount of forest clearing. Apparently the large plough worked by an 

 ox team came into use, or, at any rate, wider use, at this time, and helped 

 to develop the three-field in place of the two-field system — that is, a 

 scheme in which two-thirds, as against one-half previously, of the village 

 lands bore crops in each year. The unsettled state of affairs as well as 

 this more elaborate system of communal cultivation made the village a 

 very self-contained unit with a very definite routine. Neighbourhood in 

 many cases came to mean as much as, or more than, kinship. The spread 

 of clerical celibacy meanwhile caused the Church to recruit the clergy from 

 the people, and thus the clergy often belonged to the locality in which they 

 functioned, so the structure of society came to be built around local units, 

 the majority of them rural. 



As a hierarchy of social units re-established itself, growing mainly from 

 local roots instead of from an external influence such as that of Rome, 

 it is natural that such hierarchies should spring up where there was mutual 

 comprehension of language in groups of villages and their focal market 

 towns, and cathedral cities in France. Moreover, charters and grants 

 and agreements written in the vernacular came to be increasingly im- 

 portant, while the use of the vernacular in courts of first instance developed 

 folk-speech. It is apparently a combination of all these factors that has 

 maintained the distribution of the peasant languages of Europe without 

 any change of great importance since the Middle Ages. 



The idea of the city can be traced eastwards and northwards from 



