Fused, after much warring with one another and with their Danish kin, into a nation of Englishmen, they lived, for five centuries, an isolated life, until their insular and independent character had become deeply ingrained, and the primitive system of their social and political organization--their Townships, their Hundreds, their Shires, and the popular Moots, or courts, which determined and administered law in each--was rooted fast; though their king's power waxed and the nobles and the common people drew farther apart. A. D. 1066.--Norman conquest. Then they were mastered (in the last successful invasion that their Island ever knew) by another people, sprung from their own stock, but whose blood had been warmed and whose wit had been quickened by Latin and Gallic influences in the country of the Franks. 11th-18th Centuries. A new social and political system now formed itself in England as the result:--Feudalism modified by the essential democracy inherent in Old English institutions--producing a stout commonality to daunt the lords, and a strong aristocracy to curb the king. A. D. 1215. Magna Oharta. English royalty soon weakened itself yet more by ambitious strivings to maintain and extend a wide dominion over-sea, in Normandy and Aquitaine; and was helpless to resist when barons and commons came together to demand the signing and sealing of the Great Charter of Englishmen's rights. A. D. 1265-1295--Parliament. Out of the conditions which gave birth to Magna Charta there followed, soon, the development of the English Parliament as a representative legislature, from the Curia Regis of the Normans and the Witenagemot of the older English time. A. D. 1337-1453--The Hundred Years War. From the woful wars of a hundred years with France, which another century brought upon it, the nation, as a whole, suffered detriment, no doubt, and it progress was hindered in many ways; but politically the people took some good from the troubled times, because their kings were more dependant on them for money and men. A. D. 1453-1485--War of the Roses So likewise, they were bettered in some ways by the dreadful civil Wars of the Roses, which distracted England for thirty years. The nobles well-nigh perished, as an order, in these wars, while the middle-class people at large suffered relatively little, in numbers or estate. A. D. 1348--The Great Plague. But, previously, the great Plague, by diminishing the ranks of the laboring class, had raised wages and the standard of living among them, and had helped, with other causes, to multiply the small landowners and tenant farmers of the country, increasing the independent common class. A. D. 1327-1377--Immigration of Flemish weavers.