Aug. Thierry, while protesting against the exaggerations of eighteenth-century systems, considered the development of European nations almost entirely as a national struggle culminating in conquest, but underlying most facts in the history of institutions. He began, for the sake of method, by tracing the conflict on English ground where everything resolved itself to his eye into open or hidden strife between Norman and Saxon. But William the Bastard's invasion led him by a circuitous way to the real object of his interest -- to the gradual rise of Gallo-Roman civilisation against the Teutonic conquest in France: historical tendencies towards centralised monarchy and municipal bourgeoisie were connected by him with the present political condition of France as the abiding legacy of Gallo-Roman culture Men of great power and note, from Raynouard and B. Guerard down to Fustel de Coulanges in our own days, have followed the same track with more or less violence and exaggeration. They are all at one in their animosity towards Teutonic influence in the past, all at one in lessening its effects, and in trying to collect the scattered traces of Romanism in principle and application. The Germans did not submit meekly to the onslaught, but went as far as the Romanists on the other side. Lobell, Waitz, and Roth -- to speak only of the heads of the school -- have held forth about the mighty part which the Teutons have played in Europe; they have enhanced the beneficial value of Germanic principles, and tried to show that there is no reason for laying to their account certain dark facts in the history of Europe. The Germanist school had to fight its way not only against Romanism, but against divers tenets of the Romantic school as represented by Savigny and Eichhorn, of which Romanists had availed themselves. The whole doctrine was to be reconsidered in the light of two fundamental assumptions. The foundations of social life were sought not in aristocracy, but in the common freedom of the majority of the people: the German middle class, the 'Burgers,' who form the strength of contemporary Germany, looked to the past history of their race as vouching for their liberty.
The destinies of that particular class became the test of social development. Then again the disruptive tendency of German national character was stoutly denied, and all the historical instances of disruption were demonstrated to be quite independent of any leaning of the race. In the great fermentation of thought which led indirectly to the unification of Germany, the best men in the country refused to believe that Western Europe had fallen to pieces into feudalism because Teutonic development is doomed to strife and helplessness by deeply engrained traits of character. German scholarship found a most powerful ally in this period of its history in the literature of kindred England:
German and English investigators stood side by side in the same ranks. Kemble, K. Maurer, Freeman, Stubbs, and Gneist form the goodly array of the Germanist School on English soil.
Kemble's position is, strictly speaking, an intermediate one:
in some respects he is very near to Eichhorn and Grimm; although his chief work was published in 1849, he was not acquainted with Waitz's first books. But Kemble is mostly in touch with those parts of Eichhorn's theory which could be accepted by later Germanists; other important tenets of the Romantic School are left in the shade or rejected, and as a whole Kemble's teaching is essentially Germanistic. Kemble's 'Saxons in England' takes its peculiar shape and marks an epoch in English historical literature, mainly because it presents the first attempt to utilise the enormous material of Saxon Charters, in the collection of which Kemble has done such invaluable work. With this copious and exact, but very one-sided, material at his disposal, our author takes little notice of current tales about the invasion of Great Britain by Angles and Saxons. Such tales may be interesting from a mythological or literary point of view, but the historian cannot accept them as evidence. At the same time one cannot but wish to try and get certain knowledge of an historical fact, which, as far as the history of England is concerned, appears as the first manifestation of the Teutonic race in its stupendous greatness. Luckily enough we have some means to judge of the invasion in the names of localities and groups of population. Read in this light the history of Conquest appears very gradual and ancient. It began long before the recorded settlements, and while Britain was still under Roman sway. The struggle with the Celts was a comparatively easy one;the native population was by no means destroyed, but remained in large numbers in the lower orders of society. Notwithstanding such remnants, the history of the Anglo-Saxon period is entirely Teutonic in its aspect, and presents only one instance of the general process by which the provinces of the Empire were modified by conquerors of Teutonic race.
The root of the whole social system is to be found in the Mark, which is a division of the territory held jointly by a certain number of freemen for the purposes of cultivation, mutual help and defence. The community began as a kinship or tribe, but even when the original blood ties were lost sight of and modified by the influx of heterogeneous elements, the community remained self-sufficient and isolated. The whole fabric of society rested on property in land: as its political divisions were based on the possession of common lands, even so the rank of an individual depended entirely on his holding. The Teutonic world had no idea of a citizen severed from the soil. The curious fact that the normal holding, the hide, was equal all over England (33 1/2acres) can be explained only by its origin; it came full-formed from Germany and remained unchanged in spite of all diversities of geographical and economical conditions.
