We see (to reconstruct his story or picture, with some rearrangement) in the Middle Ages groups of dwellings everywhere springing up on the mountains, each dominated by its fortress as in the divine age of the "Cyclopes"; for the unhappy people, ground down by the violence of barbarian invasions and intestine strife, had no other means of defence. The most ancient cities built in the Middle Ages and almost all capitals of states are as a matter of fact placed upon heights; all new seigneuries formed at the time were called "castella" by the Italians; and this perhaps is also the reason why nobles were called men "born in a high or conspicuous position" (_summo, illustri loco nati_) while the plebeians living in the plains below were "born in a low or obscure place" (_imo, obscuro loco nati_). We find asyla or sanctuaries again open especially with the ecclesiastical lords, who were in humanity in advance of their savage times; here took refuge the oppressed and the terrified, to seek protection for person or property. Hence in Germany, a country which must have been wilder than the other parts of Europe, there remained almost more ecclesiastical than secular lords. A famous example of these political formations was the Abbey of St. Laurence at Aversa in the kingdom of Naples, with which was incorporated that of St. Laurence at Capua. This monastery governed either directly or by abbots or monks dependent upon it no less than a hundred and ten churches in Campania, Samnium, Apulia and the ancient Calabria, from the river Volturnus to the gulf of Tarentum; the abbots of St. Laurence were lords or barons of almost the whole of this country. The small chapels which they built in mountainous and remote places for the celebration of the mass and other religious offices became natural sanctuaries for the population, and they built their houses round them: and this is the reason why in Europe so many cities, lands and castles bear the names of saints, and why the churches are the most ancient monuments of this period. Consequently we also find feudalism, not establishing itself in Europe for the first time, but appearing once more. It has been mistakenly believed to be a relic of Roman law after its destruction by the barbarians (such is the theory of Oldenorp and all other jurists) whereas really Roman law itself arose out of the ruins of the feudalism of early Latin barbarism, and mediaeval feudalism was not a new law of the European nations, but a very ancient law renewed by the last barbarism. This feudalism is far from being the "vile matter" which Cujas calls it: it is a heroic matter, one worthy to be celebrated by the most erudite and profound learning of Greece and Rome. And to what is it due, if not to this essential unity of nature, that the choicest expressions of Roman law, which Cujas himself allows to mitigate the barbarism of feudalistic learning, are so precisely adequate to express the properties and