Our conceptions of the nature of Henry II’s public work have been in certain respects modified as the result of modern research. It has become clear, in the first place, that he was an administrator rather than a legislator, and that such of his legislation as has reached us belongs in the category of instructions to his officers rather than in that of general enactments. These measures lack the permanence of statutes; they are supplemented, modified, withdrawn, in accordance with the will of a sovereign whose restless temper showed itself in a constant series of legal and administrative experiments. Many of his changes seem to have been effected through oral command rather than written instructions. In the second place, Henry’s originality has been somewhat diminished by a more careful study of the work of his predecessors, notably of Henry I, in whose reign it is now possible to trace at work some of the elements that were once supposed to have been innovations of his grandson. As a whole, however, the work of Henry II stands the test of analysis and gives him an eminent place in the number of mediæval statesmen. * * * * * Precocious in many ways as was the political organization of Henry’s dominions, it was conditioned by the circumstances of its time, and we must be careful to conceive it in terms of the twelfth century and not of the fifteenth or the twentieth. The Norman sovereign had at his disposal none of the legal or bureaucratic traditions which were still maintained at Constantinople and were not without their influence upon the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Nor was the time ripe for the creation out of hand of a strong central government for his various territories, such as became possible in the Burgundian state of the fifteenth century and in the Austrian state which was modelled upon it. Henry was in the midst of a feudal society and had to make the best of it. He had to reckon with the particularistic traditions of his several dominions as well as with the feudal opposition to strong government, and western Europe was still a long way from the economic conditions which lie at the basis of modern bureaucracies.