one among themselves. The various sources from which they derived their origin, the close family connections, and personal interests, split them into factions, which, taking advantage of a disputed succession, brought their quarrel to the trial of the sword with such animosity that the nobility of England was virtually extinguished. But while this faction fight, and the great French war which preceded it, attract the attention chiefly during the third period of the history, a quiet advance of great importance had been going on, sheltered by the more obvious movements of the time. The same spirit which had found its expression in the establishment of the Constitution, had indirectly, if not directly, influenced every class of the nation. The exclusive merchant guild had given place to the craftsman’s guild. The wars in France, the alienation of property fostered by the legislation of Edward I., the Black Death, which had robbed the country of at least a third of its labouring hands, had sealed the fate of serfdom, and established in England the great class of free wage labourers. The same alienation, the gradual increase and importance of trade, and the formation and introduction of capital, had formed a middle class of gentry, from which the successful merchant was not excluded. Nor had this political growth been unaccompanied by an advance of thought. The failure of the crusades, the last great exhibition of material religion; the Franciscan revival; the philosophy of Bacon and his successors; the bold declaration of independence on the part of Wicliffe, and the grasping and repellent character of the Roman Court, had shaken the Church to its foundations. The storm which had shaken the surface of English society had left its depths unmoved and undisturbed by the great work of extermination proceeding overhead; these processes of growth had been gradually continuing their course during the whole of the third period. Thus, then, when Edward IV. emerged from the troubles of the Wars of the Roses as King of England, his position, though it might seem very similar to that of a king who had triumphed over his nobility, was yet considerably modified. The nobility were no doubt gone, but it was not the Crown which had crushed them. The Church, indeed, threw all its influence on the side of the Crown, but it was in the consciousness of the insecurity of its position in the hearts of the people that it did so. The King and his Commons stood face to face, with no intermediate class to check their mutual action, but the Commons were already free, and headed by a rapidly rising body of wealthy secondary landowners or merchants. Nevertheless, the immediate effect of the destruction of the nobility was completely to check constitutional growth, and to establish a government which was little short of arbitrary.