First, it increased the power of the
crown and the clergy, brought all England more than ever under one law,
and strengthened the feeling of nationality. It thus made England a
formidable military power, while at the same time it brought her into
closer relations with continental Europe than she had held since the
fourth century. Secondly, by superposing a new feudal nobility as the
upper stratum of society, it transformed the Old-English thanehood into
the finest middle-class of rural gentry and yeomanry that has ever
existed in any country; a point of especial interest to Americans, since
it was in this stratum of society that the two most powerful streams of
English migration to America--the Virginia stream and the New
England stream--alike had their source. [Sidenote: Primitive Teutonic
institutions less modified in England than in Germany]
By the thirteenth century the increasing power and pretensions of the
crown, as the unification of English nationality went on, brought about
a result unlike anything known on the continent of Europe; it brought
about a resistless coalition between the great nobles, the rural gentry
and yeomanry, and the burghers of the towns, for the purpose of curbing
royalty, arresting the progress of centralization, and setting up
representative government on a truly national scale.
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