Briefly it was this: the passing of actual government from the hands of the old Roman provincial centres of administration into the hands of each small local society and its lord. On such a basis there was a reconstruction of society from below: these local lords associating themselves under greater men, and these again holding together in great national groups under a national overlord. In the violence of the struggle through which Christendom passed, town and village, valley and castle, had often to defend itself alone. The great Roman landed estates, with their masses of dependents and slaves, under a lord or owner, had never disappeared. The descendants of these Roman, Gallic, British, _owners_ formed the fighting class of the Dark Ages, and in this new function of theirs, perpetually lifted up to be the sole depositories of authority in some small imperiled countryside, they grew to be nearly independent units. For the purposes of cohesion that family which possessed most estates in a district tended to become the leader of it. Whole provinces were thus formed and grouped, and the vaguer sentiments of a larger unity expressed themselves by the choice of some one family, one of the most powerful in every county, who would be the overlord of all the other lords, great and small. Side by side with this growth of local independence and of voluntary local groupings, went the transformation of the old imperial nominated offices into hereditary and personal things. A _count_, for instance, was originally a _“comes”_ or “companion” of the Emperor. The word dates from long before the break-up of the central authority of Rome. A _count_ later was a great official: a local governor and judge—the Vice-Roy of a large district (a French county and English shire). His office was revocable, like other official appointments. He was appointed for a season, first at the Emperor’s, later at the local King’s discretion, to a particular local government. In the Dark Ages the _count_ becomes hereditary. He thinks of his government as a possession which his son should rightly have after him. He bases his right to his government upon the possession of great estates within the area of that government. In a word, he comes to think of himself not as an official at all but as a _feudal overlord_, and all society (and the remaining shadow of central authority itself) agrees with him. The second note, then, of the Dark Ages is the gradual transition of Christian society from a number of slave-owning, rich, landed proprietors, taxed and administered by a regular government, to a society of fighting _nobles_ and their descendants, organized upon a basis of independence and in a hierarchy of lord and overlord, and supported no longer by _slaves_ in the _villages_, but by half-free serfs or “_villeins_.”