that those first links from which some of the arguments of
religion, philosophy and politics begin are sound and of honest
metal. Objectivity is not impossible to any but historical poli-
ticians; where the period of study is remote and the subject so
free from emotional engagements as is the study of early in-
stitutions it should be invariable. There is, indeed, in this a
sovereign safeguard, the simple one of treating the records left
by Chancery, Treasury and Household purely as material in
the rough, a detritus of accounts and mandates without pre-
conceived shape, and to read and re-read them as such until they
begin to tell their own unprompted story, to flow into line and
relation and meaning of their own. So doing, we should not
greatly err.

Seen through the colourless medium of such an initial pas-
sivity, the temperament and behaviour of the twelfth century
are, indeed, so different from those of our own that, far from
being tempted to enlist them in our quarrels, we are often hard
put to it to establish that sympathy which can kindle into under-
standing at all. Seeing only the unfamiliar, we may see, not too
much, but nothing. Even the great persons of the royal house
and their courtiers are inscrutable, nearer to the habit of a Mogul
court than to anything like ourselves. To gather together the
authentic traits and sayings which lie scattered in writs and
chronicles and biographies might, momentarily, as knowledge
now stands, make a more significant contribution to our under-
standing of the Angevin kings and statesmen than any other
kind of quest. It might take monarchy out of the radiant un-
reality of the schoolmen and clear the princes as persons from
some of the denigration of ignorant and prejudiced con-
temporaries. Certainly it might give back something of its own
humanity to life as it was lived then.

That is, no doubt, a task for the psychologist. Years spent
with the English records from 1154 onwards have reinforced my
impression that the political realities of this archaic period are
not to be opened by any modern key, that they are often so far
disguised as to appear to us superficially as without historical
meaning. The very dramatis personae, even those with the most

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