The confusion in
all social and economic relations consequent on the combination of the
old and the new elements in European life, had led to a state of
disintegration that could not continue. A new regulative force was
required which would at the same time have power sufficient to control
the various warring elements with which it had to deal and reduce them
to some sort of harmony, and yet which would not in its nature be in
opposition to the decentralizing spirit and the idea of individual
independence, which formed the most marked characteristic of the
dominant element of the new society. Feudalism sprang from the midst
of barbarism not by a sudden birth, but by a growth at once natural
and necessary: natural, because it was but a regulation by law of
conditions produced by the character of the people and their mode of
life; necessary, because the progress of civilization was carrying
society ahead of the stage of anarchy and barbarism in which the
overthrow of the old regime had left it.
The economic changes which were produced by the transition to the new
principles represented by the feudal system, are as great and in their
way as important as the political ones. When we say that feudalism
represents the transfer of the dominant power from a central head to
scattered members, from the capital to the castles, we speak of it in
its most prominent, its political character.
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