Only one institution of the old Greco-Roman world withstood the waves, uprose above the yeasty flood in indestructible sovereignty--the Roman Catholic Church. Out of the welter of overrunning barbarism--no law, no government, no protection except by superior force--the feudal system arose. The deep instinct for order and peace asserted itself. The strong man found a following. His tribe or clan, if he were a chieftain, his neighborhood, in any case, gave him service and maintenance, and he on his part gave the fullest measure of protection he was able to furnish. He became the feudal lord of a district. Through those stormy centuries that followed, when the savage people fought each other, and western Europe as it slowly struggled into order again was assailed by the Viking pirates on the North and West, by Hun-like Magyars on the East, and by the Saracens on the South, the feudal system was the only method by which over large areas any measure of security could be achieved. The strong man with his fighting force lived in his castle, and huddled under its walls lived the tillers of the soil, whom he at once in varying ratio protected and oppressed. Some kind of relationship established itself among these feudal lords. One who by conquest or marriage had secured possession of specially large territories might out of these allot subordinate holdings to faithful followers, or by the same methods establish an overlordship over other lords. Eventually the deep and irrepressible instinct for unity and order lifted one of these families to the kingship of a group of feudal districts. The feudal system was a varying system, the theory of which was never fully carried out, a system that had different origins in different countries and underwent different developments. The chief characteristic of it, as far as this reference to it is concerned, was its aristocratic character. Those men only counted who had enough land to support themselves and a body of fighting men. Whatever authority there was lay in their hands. The men who tilled the soil and practised the rude handicrafts of the age and carried on such beginnings of commerce as were possible, could find such imperfect security as there was only in accepting the despotic rule of one of these lords, knight or baron or count or duke as it might be, or more happily for them, in some respects, a bishop or monastery abbot. All sovereignty was in the mailed hands of these men or in those of the king, who in most of the countries slowly but surely established his control over his turbulent and recalcitrant feudatories.