decisively. The Parliamentary line was driven from the throne. The
Parliamentary title was set aside as usurpation. The House of York based
its claim to the throne on the incapacity of Parliament to set aside
pretensions which were based on sheer nearness of blood. The fall of the
House of Lancaster, the accession of the Yorkist kings, must have seemed
to the men who had witnessed the struggle a crushing defeat of the
Parliament.

[Sidenote: Ruin of Feudal Organization]

Weakened by failure, discredited by faction, no longer needful as a source
of supplies, it was easy for the Monarchy to rid itself of the check of
the two Houses, and their riddance at once restored the Crown to the power
it had held under the earlier kings. But in actual fact Edward the Fourth
found himself the possessor of a far greater authority than this. The
structure of feudal society fronted a feudal king with two great rival
powers in the Baronage and the Church. Even in England, though feudalism
had far less hold than elsewhere, the noble and the priest formed
effective checks on the monarchy. But at the close of the Wars of the
Roses these older checks no longer served as restraints upon the action of
the Crown. With the growth of Parliament the weight of the Baronage as a
separate constitutional element in the realm, even the separate influence
of the Church, had fallen more and more into decay. For their irregular
and individual action was gradually substituted the legal and continuous
action of the three Estates; and now that the assembly of the estates
practically ceased it was too late to revive the older checks which in
earlier days had fettered the action of the Crown. Nor was the growth of
Parliament the only cause for the weakness of these feudal restraints. The
older social order which had prevailed throughout Western Europe since the
fall of the Roman Empire was now passing away. The speculation of the
twelfth century, the scholastic criticism of the thirteenth, the Lollardry
and socialism of the fourteenth century, had at last done their work. The
spell of the past, the spell of custom and tradition, which had enchained
the minds of men was roughly broken. The supremacy of the warrior in a
world of war, the severance of privileged from unprivileged classes, no
longer seemed the one natural structure of society. The belief in its
possession of supernatural truths and supernatural powers no longer held
man in unquestioning awe of