Gregory VII, with his precursors and companions, had given decisive impulses towards change in the life of the church and of Christendom. Yet their ideas could not be realised in pure form and their aims could not be fully reached; the first attempt to do so failed. The structures of the preceding period turned out to have a remarkable capacity for survival, and the prevailing values of the earlier period continued to influence the course of events under the surface. It would in any case run counter to all historical experience to assume that the traditions of centuries might have just rapidly faded away. And can we in any sense suppose that an older period of church history can be completely superseded or made obsolete by a younger one? The judgements of recent scholarship about the changes in the relationship between clergy and laity, between spiritual and secular power, have often relied too one-sidedly on the statements of great popes and theologians and on the doctrines of canon lawyers. It is important to take into account historical reality at the same time, to note both the practice of government and the survival of a monarchistic view of the world and of a continuing belief in the direct relationship of the king by the grace of God to God himself, all things which emerged rather later and found less literary articulation than the much-discussed ideologies of popes and canonists.