mediæval minds. The political behaviour of Tudor
statesmen was often enough stark, ruthless, and
amoral: it would have shocked the more devout of
mediæval rulers. Nevertheless these Tudor statesmen
paid lip-service at the very least to all the moral
platitudes of mediæval thought; and the intellectual
framework within which sixteenth-century thinkers
constructed their political philosophy was a framework
accepted, often uncritically, from mediæval Schoolmen.

Bates and Williams at their camp-fire were perplexed
but they were not more muddled than their betters had
been for several centuries. Precise and subtle minds,
the minds of trained lawyers and logicians, minds
passionately aspiring to clarity and system, had striven
to codify all the relevant maxims. Yet the legacy of the
Middle Ages in political philosophy, though it was often
profound and fruitful, was a legacy of disorder. The
Schoolmen had tried to be all-embracing, to exclude
nothing that the prophets, the evangelists, the fathers,
and the mystics had revealed and to include much of
Aristotle and a little of the Roman lawyers. Too many
ingredients had spoiled the broth. The Scholastics
were lacking in a sense of history and consequently
tried to reconcile with Catholic Christianity precepts
appropriate only to pre-Christian Jewry or to a church
still threatened by a Nero or a Diocletian. In the same
way later Schoolmen tried to graft upon a loosely
integrated feudal society political and legal precepts
which had been relevant to the centralized empires of
Trajan or Justinian or to Aristotle's compact city-state.
The apparent order and unity of Scholastic thought

-6-