The problem was no doubt mainly economic, but it possessed its legal aspect. A brilliant analysis of Anglo-Saxon _diplomata_, which could hardly have been accomplished save by a practised lawyer, revealed the fact that the Anglo-Saxon kings had been freely alienating public powers, fiscal and jurisdictional, to churches and private persons. The Saxon land-book does not transfer land, but superiorities over land. It may be true that the gift has all the appearance of being unconditional, "granted as a reward for past services, not as a condition for the performance of future services"; but the contrast between the deeds of the Saxon and Norman period is one rather of form than of substance. Every Saxon grant of "immunities" reserves the "trinoda necessitas," that fundamental military obligation which lay upon every freeman, and if that service was not performed the land was forfeit to the king. Then again land-loans were not uncommon, and land-loans and land-gifts shaded imperceptibly into one another. All the lineaments of the feudal land system are already visible in the later Anglo-Saxon period. The feudal formula of dependent tenure is known; the exercise of jurisdictional rights by private persons is a familiar fact; in places one could even see, "a four-storied feudal edifice." No large historical transformation is matter for unqualified regret. Feudalism was a necessary stage in the education and development of the barbarian world. "There are indeed historians who have not yet abandoned the habit of speaking of feudalism as though it were a disease of the body politic. Now the word feudalism is and always will be an inexact term, and, no doubt, at various times and places there emerge phenomena which may with great propriety be called feudal, and which come of evil and make for evil. But if we use the term, and often we do, in a very wide sense, then feudalism will appear to us as a natural and even a necessary stage in our history. If we use the term in this wide sense, then (the barbarian conquests being given to us as an unalterable fact) feudalism means civilisation, the separation of employment, a division of labour, the possibility of national defence, the possibility of art, science, literature and learned leisure; the cathedral, the scriptorium, the library are as truly the work of feudalism as is the baronial castle."