he characteristics of the English race with
which we are familiar in historic times. The race, the language, the
law, and the political organization have remained fundamentally the
same as they became during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. No
considerable new addition was made to the population, and the elements
which it already contained became so thoroughly fused that it has
always since been practically a homogeneous body. The Latin language
remained through this whole period and till long afterward the
principal language of records, documents, and the affairs of the
church. French continued to be the language of the daily intercourse
of the upper classes, of the pleadings in the law courts, and of
certain documents and records. But English was taking its modern form,
asserting itself as the real national language, and by the close of
this period had come into general use for the vast majority of
purposes. Within the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Universities
of Oxford and Cambridge grew up, and within the fourteenth took their
later shape of self-governing groups of colleges. Successive orders of
religious men and women were formed under rules intended to overcome
the defects which had appeared in the early Benedictine rule. The
organized church became more and more powerful, and disputes
constantly arose as to the limits between its power and that of the
ordinary government. The question was complicated from the fact that
the English Church was but one branch of the general church of Western
Christendom, whose centre and principal authority was vested in the
Pope at Rome. One of the most serious of these conflicts was between
King Henry II and Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, principally on the
question of how far clergymen should be subject to the same laws as
laymen. The personal dispute ended in the murder of the archbishop, in
1170, but the controversy itself got no farther than a compromise. A
contest broke out between King John and the Pope in 1205 as to the
right of the king to dictate the selection of a new archbishop of
Canterbury. By 1213 the various forms of influence which the church
could bring to bear were successful in forcing the king to give way.
He therefore made humble apologies and accepted the nominee of the
Pope for the office. Later in the thirteenth century there was much
popular opposition to papal taxation of England.

In the reign of Henry II, the conquest of Ireland was