index of rank and importance. Until we find the cities fulfilling
certain obligations required by a higher power, we can learn little to
tell of their condition or of their internal history. On the other
hand, when we find the time come for fulfilling certain obligations,
we can safely argue that the cities have acquired certain functions
which put them in a position to meet the obligations which their
growing importance has caused to be exacted of them. To trace these
steps accurately and satisfactorily is impossible, but by the aid of
collateral evidence a rough idea of the epochs at least of their
progress can be gained.

For this first period, then, we see the towns reduced to the lowest
depths of wretchedness and disintegration; critically speaking hardly
existing, but simply holding together. In studying institutions and
tracing the course of their development, we must always remember that
the uninterrupted continuance of their history may depend as much on
the moral force of their existence as on the more limited and defined
fact of their accurate and legal recognition by others. In every
society a state of fact must in time become a state of law, as wise
legislation is more the recognition by law of existing conditions than
the formulating of new codes. So the towns, even at the period
immediately succeeding their conquest by the Lombards, though their
corporate existence cannot be claimed, nevertheless cannot be said in
any measure to have ceased to exist; for as collections of individuals
and of dwellings they were there, with an individuality uneffaced
though as yet unrecognized.

It was a period of utter stagnation, of suspension of life, but the
source remained intact, from which, by the evolution of events and the
progress of time, seeds were to spring that only needed external