For as long as that society could endure, that society was organised; and in Sussex the organisation, or, to use a better word, the sense of authority, is to be discovered in the great “Rape” overlordships, Hastings, Pevensey, Lewes, Bramber, Arundel, and Chichester, whose growth has been already sketched. It so happened that that mediæval system grew old and failed. The period of time between its failure and the present day is comparatively short, as the history of mankind goes. Its break-down is only apparent to the historian with the middle of the fourteenth century; it is not suspected by its own victims till the middle of the fifteenth. We are to-day but in the beginning of the twentieth. It may be said, roughly, that four hundred years of change alone separate us from that organic unity which had survived for fifteen hundred years from the civilisation that the Mediterranean brought us. We feel a world away from that organic unity of the Middle Ages, because these last four centuries have been so full of an active intelligence and of an increasing material knowledge, that these take up nearly the whole horizon of our minds; but our detachment is but apparent and illusory. At bottom our morals, in so far as they are permanent, our conception of civic life, our modern appetite for economic justice, are all rooted in the Middle Ages; and the more a modern man learns of them the more he feels that they are his native place. The process of disintegration which the mediæval system suffered took in Britain a peculiar form, and in this most typical district of Britain, in Sussex, that form is clearly to be traced. The village, which was the unit of mediæval life, was essentially co-operative. As the segregation of individual industry arose, either the lord was certain [Sidenote: THE RISE OF THE SQUIRES] to become, from the head official of a corporation, a proprietor of the whole, or the villein, his tenant, was bound to become, from a member of a co-operative society, a proprietor of his part. There was not room for both. Elsewhere, in all northern France, and to some extent in the valley of the Rhine, the break-up of the mediæval system is the attack of the peasant upon his lord. It is (spread over a much longer period) something like the campaign which the Irish have inaugurated in our own time. It is a movement towards peasant proprietorship.