treaty, alliance parried with alliance, as industriously as at any time
in modern history. But the peoples seldom moved, and the agitation of
the ruling classes effervesced in words. It is altogether exceptional to
find two of the greater states uniting for the humiliation of a third,
as England and the Empire united against Philip Augustus of France. Few
medieval battles were so far-reaching in their consequences as Bouvines
(1214), to which England owes her Magna Carta, Germany the magnificent
and stormy autumn of the Hohenstauffen dynasty, France the consolidation
of her long-divided provinces under an absolutist monarchy.

At ordinary times there were in medieval Europe two groups of states
with separate interests and types of polity. They were divided from one
another by a broad belt of debatable territory, extending from Holland
to the coast of Provence--the northern lands of the Carolingian Middle
Kingdom.

To the west lay the monarchies of the Iberian peninsula, of France,
England, and Scotland; connected by their interest in the trade of the
Atlantic seaboard, by a common civilisation in which the best elements
were of French origin, but most of all by their preoccupation with the
political questions arising out of England's claim to a good half of the
territory of France. The rivalry of these two great powers, which dated
in a rudimentary form from the Norman Conquest of England, became acute
when Henry II, heir in his mother's right to England and Normandy, in
that of his father to Anjou and Touraine, married Eleanor the duchess of
Aquitaine and the divorced wife of Louis VII (1152). Developing from one
stage to another, it alternately made and unmade the fortunes of either
nation for four hundred years, until Charles VII of France brought his
wars of reconquest to a triumphant conclusion by crushing, in Guyenne,
the last remnants of the English garrison and of the party which clung