Church, the schools and the cloister there was an open road for the son
of a peasant to achieve the Papacy, so through the guilds, chivalry, war
and the court, the layman, if he possessed ability, might from an humble
beginning travel far. An epoch of real liberty, of body, soul and mind,
and the more real in that limits, differences and degrees were
recognized, accepted and enforced.

This condition existed roughly for five centuries in its swift rise, its
long dominion and its slow decline, that is to say, from 1000 A.D. to
1500 A.D. There was still the traditional aristocracy, now feudal rather
than patriarchal or military; there was still a servile class, now
reduced to a small minority. In between was the great body of men of a
degree of character, ability and intelligence, and with a recognized
status, the like of which had never been seen before. It was not a
bourgeoisie, for it was made up of producers,--agricultural, artisan,
craft, art, mechanic; a great free society, the proudest product of
Christian civilization.

With the sixteenth century began a process of change that was to
overturn all this and bring in something radically different. The
Renaissance and the Reformation worked in a sense together to build up
their own expressive form of society, and when this process had been
completed we find still an aristocracy, though rapidly changing in the
quality of its personnel and in the sense of its relationship to the
rest of society; a servile class, the proletariat, enormously increased
in proportion to the other social components; and two new classes, one
the bourgeoisie, essentially non-producers and subsisting largely either
on trade, usury or management, and the pauper, a phase of life hitherto
little known under the Christian regime. The great body of free citizens
that had made up the majority of society during the preceding epoch, the