ABSTRACT
THE object of this book is to show how the monarchy was preserved and developed, in France and England, in a period when the reorganization of political society into seignorial and feudal forms seemed to be condemning it to destruction. We have not sought to trace once more all the political history of France and England from the tenth to the thirteenth century; in an epoch when the annals of the royal house, at least in France, are often more scanty and less interesting than those of some Duchy or County, we have, nevertheless, devoted our attention to them alone. The causes, material and moral, for its weakness in the time of an Edward the Confessor or a Hugh Capet, the conditions which have enabled it to persist and expand, the machinery it has established, profiting by the very principles of Feudalism itself, the failure of the attempts made in England to impose upon it an aristocratic control, these are the problems we have tried to explain.
