This time of fusion during which all direct traces of foreign conquest were got rid of, was naturally the time during which the political and social institutions of the country gradually took on that form which distinguishes modern England, the England of the last 600 years from the older England of the first 600 years of English history. ... By the time of Edward I, though the English tongue had not yet finally displaced French, it had assumed the main characters which distinguished its modern from its ancient form. In architecture a great change had taken place, by which the Romanesque style gave way to the so-called Gothic. The subordinate arts had taken prodigious strides. The sculpture of the thirteenth century is parted from that of the twelfth by a wider gap than any that parts these centuries, in law or language. _And in the root of the matter in our law and constitution itself those changes have been made which wrought the body politic of England into a shape which has left future ages nothing to do but to improve in detail_. (Italics ours.) In short the great destructive and creative age of Europe and civilized Asia passed over England as it passed over other lands. The age which saw the Eastern Empire fall beneath the arms of the Frank and the Eastern Caliphate before the arms of the Mogul--the age which saw the true power and glory of the Western Empire buried in the grave of the Wonder of the World--the age which ruled that the warriors of the Cross should work their will in Spain and in Prussia {xiv} and should not work their Will in the Holy Land itself--the age which made Venice mistress of the Eastern seas, and bade Florence stand forth as the new type of democratic freedom--the age which changed the nominal kingship of the Lord of Paris and Orleans into the mighty realm of Philip Augustus and Philip the Fair--this age of wonders did its work of wonder in England also.--Freeman, _The Norman Conquest_, Vol. V, page 606. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1876. * * *