The Scandinavian settlements in England and France naturally invite comparison. In point of time they are little more than a generation apart. The colonies in eastern England were founded between 876 and 879. The beginning of the colony which became the duchy of Normandy cannot be dated so precisely. But there can be no serious doubt that the Scandinavian occupation of Upper Normandy had taken place by the year 918 and there is good reason for believing that it began soon after 911. It is also probable that a considerable number of veterans who had been campaigning in England between 892 and 896 took part in the foundation of Normandy, for there is a definite statement in the Chronicle to the effect that vikings who had made no profit in the recent war crossed to the Seine in the latter year. In any case, the movement from which the duchy of Normandy arose clearly belongs to the same phase of Scandinavian enterprise which had founded the English Danelaw and thrown the kingdom of the West Franks into confusion in the last third of the ninth century.

Although the cult of the saints was so prominent an element in medieval religion, decrees controlling it occupy a comparatively small place in the medieval canon law. In the Decretum of Gratian, composed about nineteen years before Alexander III became pope, there are only two decrees of importance which seem to concern the canonization of saints. They come from the two chief periods of legislation on this subject, the fifth and the ninth centuries. The first of them is a canon of the so-called fifth Council of Carthage (401 A.D.) which was perpetuated in the West in the Dionysian and Hispana collections, and was among the canons chosen from the Dionysiana by Charles the Great as specially relevant to his time. The second was passed in 813 by the Council of Mainz and under the influence of the same emperor. Together they appear in the collections of Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres and then in the Decretum of Gratian where they remained in effect the only written legislation on the subject until the time of the fourth Lateran Council.

The fourteenth century is an important period in the history of aristocratic retinues in England not only because it was a period of some considerable activity on their part, but because it was one in which their leaders, adapting themselves to the general change in the structure of society, began to develop new forms of retinue organised on the principle of personal contract in place of the old feudal principle of tenurial loyalty.

Few topics in ecclesiastical history have demanded so much revision and revaluation as the papal collation of benefices. Earlier generations of historians, even if they treated with reserve the criticism of provisions voiced by Matthew Paris, nevertheless regarded the successive general reservations from 1265 to 1362 as a glaring invasion of the rights of ordinary collators: juris ordinariorum locorum usurpacio, as Dietrich of Niem called them in 1410. Papal provisions of whatsoever category were represented as acts of administrative intervention which aroused national feeling, especially in this country, to statutory counter-measures; as an abuse, not only because they introduced the non-resident alien into the English dioceses, but also because they diverted the normally resident incumbent from his cure in order to defend his title at the Court of Rome.

The Alliance of the Three Emperors was Bismarck's attempt to escape from a dilemma which had led him to a typical crisis of nerves and irritability during the early months of 1879. He had soon recognized after 1871 that the interests of the new Germany could no longer be served by war. Could he secure the isolation of the unforgiving French without embarrassing commitments to his friends and potential allies? The maintenance of friendly relations with, and between, Austria and Russia seemed to him the indispensable basis of German predominance in Europe; the worsening of Austro-Russian relations during the long-drawn-out Near Eastern crisis after 1875 had, however, led both his neighbours to grumble at his limited support, although Russia had been very, much more open and indiscreet in her complaints than Austria. Accordingly he decided at the end of 1878 that the very nebulous Dreikaiserbündnis of 1872–3 no longer provided an adequate basis for German security; in October 1879 he formed a defensive alliance with Austria against Russia, and in June 1881 the new alliance of the three emperors was concluded, although the Austro-German alliance remained in force. The collapse of the three emperors' alliance in the first major crisis that it had to face, namely the Bulgarian crisis of 1885–6, suggests that the solution was hardly a happy one.