control over elections for a time long enough to enable its local leaders to hand down their power to their sons. Clearly, after the first disorder the change would cause, there would come a time when each “leader” of a community, no matter how dull, could not help seeing that it was to his own immediate personal benefit to see that his domain was prosperous. To a time like our own such a change would be disaster; to a time struggling doubtfully to keep alive some vestige of civilized living, it was salvation. Finally, as we have seen, the great step of abolishing the old slavery in favour of serfdom had been taken, and the average labourer was more than half a free man. These primitive arrangements had come into being through no set purpose but through the need of the miserable time for guarantees of any sort of defence and production. The men who established them (or rather fell into them) were not self-conscious, had no “political theory” whatsoever. Their actions were spontaneous, and all their simplicities came into and overspread the Roman order like weeds growing on a ruin. This same lack of self-consciousness helped to prevent any clear-cut break with the past. The local nobles, each all but a little king, continued to be called by the titles of imperial functionaries; the count was still the “comes.” Because they had no political theory, and lived in a world which had no memory of a time without kings and emperors, it never occurred to them to propose that kings and emperors should not be at all, although the homage of the local lord to the overlord would clearly be a far flimsier thing than the homage of their own needy little vassals to them. There was a tendency on the part of the secular rulers, emperors, kings, and nobles alike, to make of the officers of the Church the instruments and functionaries of their own power. The local noble wished to choose the village priest, his overlord wished to “invest” the bishop. What would have happened had this tendency been unchecked we cannot say. We know that only the Church stood for the preservation of the great past through scholarship, for a moral ideal, and above all for the unity of Europe. Therefore, it is just to call the effort of the secular powers against her independence a disintegrating tendency. There was, however, a protest against lay supremacy, coming principally from the monks and especially from the new order of Cluny, so that the whole effort is called the Cluniac movement. Meanwhile the Vikings who had settled in Normandy (alone of all the outland barbarians who had come into the Empire and then disappeared, sunk almost without a trace) had crossed with the native stock to breed a strong new race that was to fight and govern. In the year 1000 the monkish protest and the Norman energy were just sprouting above ground, and in the main the time was anarchic, formless.