ism had to be parochial; for men had no country, but
only a countryside. In such cases the lord grew larger than the king;
but it bred not only a local lordship but a kind of local liberty. And
it would be very inadvisable to ignore the freer element in Feudalism in
English history. For it is the one kind of freedom that the English have
had and held.

The knot in the system was something like this. In theory the King owned
everything, like an earthly providence; and that made for despotism and
"divine right," which meant in substance a natural authority. In one
aspect the King was simply the one lord anointed by the Church, that is
recognized by the ethics of the age. But while there was more royalty in
theory, there could be more rebellion in practice. Fighting was much
more equal than in our age of munitions, and the various groups could
arm almost instantly with bows from the forest or spears from the smith.
Where men are military there is no militarism. But it is more vital that
while the kingdom was in this sense one territorial army, the regiments
of it were also kingdoms. The sub-units were also sub-loyalties. Hence
the loyalist to his lord might be a rebel to his king; or the king be a
demagogue delivering him from the lord. This tangle is responsible for
the tragic passions about betrayal, as in the case of William and
Harold; the alleged traitor who is always found to be recurrent, yet
always felt to be exceptional. To break the tie was at once easy and
terrible. Treason in the sense of rebellion was then really felt as
treason in the sense of treachery, since it was desertion on a perpetual
battlefield. Now, there was even more of this civil war in English than
in other history, and the more local and less logical energy on the
whole prevailed. Whether there was something in those island
idiosyncracies, shapeless as sea-mists, with which this story began, or
whether the Roman imprint had really been lighter than in Gaul, the
feudal undergrowth prevented even a full attempt to build the _Civitas
Dei_, or ideal mediaeval state. What emerged was a compromise, which men
long afterwards amused themselves by calling a constitution.

There are paradoxes permissible for the redressing of a bad balance in
criticism, and which may safely even be emphasized so long as they are
not isolated. One of these I have called at the beginning of this
chapter the strength of the weak kings. And there is a complement of it,
even