ts
communal-holding and free men with equal rights on the basis of the
village organization--rights which with every century the peasant felt
more and more slipping away from him. The place of this tradition was
now taken by an ideal of individual freedom, apart from any social
bond, and on a basis merely political, the way for which had been
prepared by that very conception of individual proprietorship on the
part of the landlord, against which the older revolutionary sentiment
had protested. A most powerful instrument in accommodating men's minds
to this change of view, in other words, to the establishment of the
new individualistic principle, was the Roman or Civil law, which, at
the period dealt with in the present book, had become the basis
whereon disputed points were settled in the Imperial Courts. In this
respect also, though to a lesser extent, may be mentioned the Canon
or Ecclesiastical law--consisting of papal decretals on various points
which were founded partially on the Roman or Civil law--a juridical
system which also fully and indeed almost exclusively recognized the
individual holding of property as the basis of civil society (albeit
not without a recognition of social duties on the part of the owner).

Learning was now beginning to differentiate itself from the
ecclesiastical profession, and to become a definite vocation in its
various branches. Crowds of students flocked to the seats of learning,
and, as travelling scholars, earned a precarious living by begging or
"professing" medicine, assisting the illiterate for a small fee, or
working wonders, such as casting horoscopes, or performing
thaumaturgic tricks. The professors of law were now the most
influential members of the Imperial Council and of the various
Imperial Courts. In Central Europe, as elsewhere, notably in France,
the civil lawyers were always on the side of the centralizing power,
alike against the local jurisdictions and against the peasantry.

The effects of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the
consequent dispersion of the accumulated Greek learning of the
Byzantine Empire, had, by the end of the fifteenth century, begun to
show themselves in a notable modification of European culture. The
circle of the seven sciences, the Quadrivium, and the Trivium, in
other words, the mediaeval system of learning, began to be antiquated.
Scholastic philosophy, that is to say, the controversy of the Scotists
and the Thomists, was now