Next the gradual transformation of our Catholic civilization from the majestic order of our pagan origin to the splendid spring of the twelfth century was represented with incredible insufficiency as the conquest of the Occident by barbarian Germans, who, though barbarians, possessed I know not what fund of strength and virtue. Institutions which we now know to be of Roman origin were piously referred to these starved heaths of the Baltic and to the central European wilds. Their inhabitants were endowed with every good quality. Whatever we were proud of in our inheritance was referred to the blank savagery of outer lands at no matter what expense of tortured hypothesis or bold invention. This warping of truth was indulged in because the northern part of Europe stood (in the nineteenth century when this false “Teutonic” school had its greatest vogue) for a successful opposition to the rest of Christendom, and for a schism within the body of civilized men. But the worst fault of all, worse even than the superficial folly of Gibbon’s tradition in our treatment of the great Christian foundation and worse than the Teutonic nonsense, was the misunderstanding of those four great centuries in which our race attained the summit of its happiness and stable culture—the twelfth, the thirteenth, the fourteenth and the fifteenth. And of these, the greatest, the thirteenth, was in particular ignored. Men did indeed (partly because it enabled them to “turn” the position of true history by concession to, partly from the unavoidable effect of, increasing historical knowledge) pay lip service in England, during the later part of the nineteenth century, to the greatness of the true Middle Ages. In his early period, Ruskin is a conspicuous example of a writer who, without in the least understanding what the Middle Ages were like, hating yet ignorant of the faith that was their very soul, could not remain blind to the vivid outward effect of their expression. Even Carlyle, far more ignorant than Ruskin and far more of a player to the gallery, could not altogether avoid the strong blast of reality which blew from those times. But these concessions, these partial admissions, did but deepen the blindness of such historians and their readers towards the formation and the climax of our race; upon the Dark and the Middle Ages, history as written in the English language was warped beyond recognition. Then came the reaction towards historical truth: it has already far advanced and the book for which I have the honour here to write a Preface is a notable example of that progress.