which they involved the princes and their barons, furthered the
upward movement of the classes that lay below the feudal vassals,
great and little; the principal opportunity for which movement,
however, in England, was given by the continuous struggle between the
Crown and the Church and Baronage.

The early Norman kings, even immediately after the death of the
Conqueror, found themselves involved in this struggle, and were
forced to avail themselves of the help of what had now become the
inferior tribe--the native English, to wit. Henry I., an able and
ambitious man, understood this so clearly that he made a distinct bid
for the favour of the inferior tribe by marrying an English princess;
and it was by means of the help of his English subjects that he
conquered his Norman subjects, and the field of Tenchebray, which put
the coping-stone on his success, was felt by the English people as an
English victory over the oppressing tribe with which Duke William had
overwhelmed the English people. It was during this king's reign and
under these influences that the trading and industrial classes began
to rise somewhat. The merchant gilds were now in their period of
greatest power, and had but just begun, in England at least, to
develop into the corporations of the towns; but the towns themselves
were beginning to gain their freedom and to become an important
element in the society of the time, as little by little they asserted
themselves against the arbitrary rule of the feudal lords, lay or
ecclesiastical: for as to the latter, it must be remembered that the
Church included in herself the orders or classes into which lay
society was divided, and while by its lower clergy of the parishes
and by the friars it touched the people, its upper clergy were simply
feudal lords; and as the religious fervour of the higher clergy,
which was marked enough in the earlier period of the Middle Ages (in