It continued thus with little intermission until the thirteenth century, when from various causes, economic and otherwise, matters began to improve in the interests of the common man, till in the fifteenth century the condition of the peasant was better than it has ever been, either before or since within historical times, in Northern and Western Europe.

But with all this, the oppressive power of the lord of the soil was by no means dead.

It was merely dormant, and was destined to spring into renewed activity the moment the lord's necessities supplied a sufficient incentive.

From this time forward the element of territorial power, supported in its claims by the Roman law, with its basis of private property, continued to eat into it until it had finally devoured the old rights and possessions of the village community.

The executive power always tended to be transferred from its legitimate holder, the village in its corporate capacity, to the lord; and this was alone sufficient to place the villager at his mercy.
At the time of the Reformation, owing to the new conditions which had arisen and had brought about in a few decades the hitherto unparalleled rise in prices, combined with the unprecedented ostentation and extravagance more than once referred to in these pages, the lord was supplied with the requisite incentive to the exercise of the power which his feudal system gave him.