How easy it was for the civilian to effect the abolition of feudal institutions may be readily imagined by those cognizant of the principles of Roman law.

For example, the Roman law, of course, making no mention of the right of the mediaeval "estates" to be consulted in the levying of taxes or in other questions, the jurist would explain this right to his too willing master, the prince, as an abuse which had no legal justification, and which, the sooner it were abolished in the interest of good government the better it would be.

All feudal rights as against the power of an overlord were explained away by the civil jurist, either as pernicious abuses, or, at best, as favours granted in the past by the predecessors of the reigning monarch, which it was within his right to truncate or to abrogate at his will.
From the preceding survey will be clearly perceived the important role which the new jurisprudence played on the Continent of Europe in the gestation of the new phase which history was entering upon in the sixteenth century.

Even the short sketch given will be sufficient to show that it was not in one department only that it operated; but that, in addition to its own domain of law proper, its influence was felt in modifying economical, political, and indirectly even ethical and religious conditions.

From this time forth Feudalism slowly but surely gave place to the newer order, all that remained being certain of its features, which, crystallized into bureaucratic forms, were doubly veneered with a last trace of mediaeval ideas and a denser coating of civilian conceptions.