lord’s castle, defied it first, attacked it next, and finally destroyed it.  The movement spread from spot to spot, involving every town on the surface of Europe, and in less than a hundred years free cities had been called into existence on the coasts of the Mediterranean, the North Sea, the Baltic, the Atlantic Ocean, down to the fjords of Scandinavia; at the feet of the Apennines, the Alps, the Black Forest, the Grampians, and the Carpathians; in the plains of Russia, Hungary, France and Spain.  Everywhere the same revolt took place, with the same features, passing through the same phases, leading to the same results.  Wherever men had found, or expected to find, some protection behind their town walls, they instituted their “co-jurations,” their “fraternities,” their “friendships,” united in one common idea, and boldly marching towards a new life of mutual support and liberty.  And they succeeded so well that in three or four hundred years they had changed the very face of Europe.  They had covered the country with beautiful sumptuous buildings, expressing the genius of free unions of free men, unrivalled since for their beauty and expressiveness; and they bequeathed to the following generations all the arts, all the industries, of which our present civilization, with all its achievements and promises for the future, is only a further development.  And when we now look to the forces which have produced these grand results, we find them—­not in the genius of individual heroes, not in the mighty organization of huge States or the political capacities of their rulers, but in the very same current of mutual aid and support which we saw at work in the village community, and which was vivified and reinforced in the Middle Ages by a new form of unions, inspired by the very same spirit but shaped on a new model—­the guilds.

It is well known by this time that feudalism did not imply a dissolution of the village community.  Although the lord had succeeded in imposing servile labour upon the peasants, and had appropriated for himself such rights as were formerly vested in the village community alone (taxes, mortmain, duties on inheritances and marriages), the peasants had, nevertheless, maintained the two fundamental rights of their communities:  the common possession of the land, and self-jurisdiction.  In olden times, when a king sent his vogt to a village, the peasants received him with flowers in one hand and arms in the other, and asked him—­which law he intended to apply:  the one he found in the village, or the one he brought with him?  And, in the first case, they handed him the flowers and accepted him; while in the second case they fought him.(13) Now, they accepted the king’s or the lord’s official whom they could not refuse; but they maintained the folkmote’s jurisdiction, and themselves nominated six, seven, or twelve judges, who acted with the lord’s judge, in the presence of the folkmote, as arbiters and sentence-finders.  In most cases the official had nothing left to him