Such a period is that upon which we now enter; an epoch which in the history of England extends from the accession of Stephen to the death of Edward II.; that is, from the beginning of the constitutional growth of a consolidated English people to the opening of the long struggle with France under Edward III. It is scarcely less well defined in French and German history. In France it witnesses the process through which the modern kingdom of France was constituted; the aggregation of the several provinces which had hitherto recognized only a nominal feudal supremacy, under the direct personal rule of the king, and their incorporation into a national system of administration. In Germany it comprises a more varied series of great incidents. The process of disruption in the German kingdom, never well consolidated, had begun with the great schism between North and South under Henry IV., and furnished one chief element in the quarrel between pope and emperor. During the first half of the twelfth century it worked more deeply, if not more widely, in the rivalry between Saxon and Swabian. Under Frederick I. it necessitated the remodelling of the internal arrangement of Germany, the breaking up of the national or dynastic dukedoms. Under Frederick II. it broke up the empire itself, to be reconstituted in a widely different form and with altered aims and pretensions under Rudolf of Hapsburg. This is by itself a most eventful history, in which the varieties of combinations and alternations of public feeling abound with new results and illustrations of the permanence of ancient causes. [Sidenote: The Empire.] In the relations of the Empire and the Papacy the same epoch contains one cycle of the great rivalry, the series of struggles which take a new form under Frederick I. and Alexander III., and come to an end in the contest between Lewis of Bavaria and John XXII. It comprises the whole drama of the Hohenstaufen, and the failure of the great hopes of the world under Henry VII., which resulted in the constituting of a new theory of relations under the Luxemburg and Hapsburg emperors. Whilst these greater actors are thus preparing for the struggle which forms the later history of European politics, Spain and Italy are passing through a different discipline. In the midst of all runs the history of the Church and the Crusades, which supplies one continuous clue to the reading of the period, a common ground on which all the actors for a time and from time to time meet. [Sidenote: An epoch of great men. ] [Sidenote: Manners and religion. ] [Sidenote: Moral lessons. ]