INTRODUCTIONS - THE UNIT OF HISTORICAL STUDY 18/1/2022

this glance backwards from the present day over the general course of the english history would appear to show that the farther back we look the lees evidence do we find of self - sufficiency or isolation. the conversion, which was really the beginning of all things in english history, was the direct antithesis of that ; it was an act which merged half dozen isolated communities of barbarians in the common weal of a nascent western society. as for the feudal system, vinograndoff has brilliantly demonstrated that the seed of it had already sprouted on english soil before the norman conquest. yet, even so, the sprouting was stimulated by an external factor, the danish invasions; these invasions were part of the scandinavian volkerwan - derung which was stimulating simultaneously a similar growth in france, and the norman conquest undoubtedly brought the harvest to rapid maturity. as for the renaissance, in both its cultural and its political aspect it is universally admitted to have been a breath of life from northern italy. if in northern italy humanism, absolutism and the balance of power had not been bedded cultivated in miniature, like seedlings in a sheltered nursery garden, during two centuries that fall approximately between 1275 and 1475,they could never have been bedded out north of the alps from about 1475 onwards. the reformations, again, was not a specifically english phenomenon, but a general movement of north-western europe for emancipation from the south, where the western mediterranean held the eyes fixed upon words that were dead and gone. in the reformation, england did not take the initiative, nor did she take it in the competition between the european nations of the atlantic seaboard for the prize of the new worlds overseas. she won that prize as a comparativly late comer, in a series of struggles with powers that were before her in the field.