at. The influence of the French tongue and French ideals
was wider than the political influence of the French monarchy. French
was the common language of knighthood, of policy, of the literature
that entertained lords and ladies, of the lighter and less technical
sides of the cosmopolitan culture which had its more serious
embodiments in Latin. To the Englishman of the thirteenth century the
French state was the enemy; but the English baron denounced France in
the French tongue, and leant a ready ear to those aspects of life
which, cosmopolitan in reality, found their fullest exposition in
France and among French-speaking peoples. In the age which saw
hostility to Frenchmen become a passion, a Frenchman like Montfort
could become the champion of English patriotism, English scholars could
readily quit their native land to study at Paris, the French vernacular
literature was the common property of the two peoples, and French words
began to force their way into the stubborn vocabulary of the English
language, which for two centuries had almost entirely rejected these
alien elements. In dwelling, however briefly, on the new features which
were transforming English civilisation during this memorable period, we
shall constantly see how England gained by her ever-increasing
intercourse with the continent, by necessarily sharing in the new
movements which had extended from the continent to the island, no
longer, as in the eleventh century, to be described as a world apart.
Neither the coming of the friars, nor the development of university
life and academic schools of philosophy, theology, and natural science,
nor the triumph of gothic art, nor the spread of vernacular literature,
not even the scholarly study of English law nor the course of English
political development-not one of these movements could have been what
it was without the close interconnexion of the various parts of the
European commonwealth, which was becoming more homogeneous at the same
time that its units were acquiring for themselves sped characteristics
of their own.

In the early days of Henry III.'s reign, a modest alien invasion
anticipated the more noisy coming of the Poitevin or the Provencal. The
most remarkable development of the "religious" life that the later
middle age was to witness had just been worked out in Italy. St.
Francis of Assisi had taught the cult of absolute poverty, and his
example held up to his followers the ideal of the thorough a