by Max Barry

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Region: Laissez Faireholm

The Dark Ages were indeed a terrible time - but Roman civilisation has been in DECLINE for centuries before it collapsed.

The Empire was a time of stagnation - nothing much new was invented, and in the later centuries of the Empire things actually decayed.

The new states that grew up in Europe had many grievous faults - but they also had advantages over the Empire.

In 877 it was formally accepted by Charles the Bald that even a King of France could not take land from one family and give it to another.

That was not isolated to France - it became normal to think in a "Feudal" way that government was LIMITED that there were things that government was not ALLOWED to do.

No Roman Emperor (or Islamic ruler or Oriental Despot) would accept such limits on their power.

Under the Roman Empire ordinary people were unarmed and untrained.

In "Feudal" Europe most people (and most people were NOT serfs) were used to weapons - owning them and using them.

And the idea of "the law" was that it applied even to the King himself - that the law was not just the "will of the ruler" as with Roman Law.

Building out of nothing at the end of the Dark Ages - medieval Europe made vast progress - there were inventions, the European lands of the 1400s were vastly different to the lands of the 900s or 1000s(there was no stagnation).

Europe slipped back in its legal ideas - with the return to the Roman Law concept of law being the "will of the ruler" and nothing being beyond the ruler.

However, in some places (such as England) the idea that the law was NOT the "will or the ruler of rulers" remained - the liberty of the subject, unknown in the Roman Empire.

See Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke (of Doctor Bonham's case and so on) and (even more) Chief Justice Sir John Holt of the 1688 period.

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