But if the society with which we are concerned was predominantly a peasant society, it was also everywhere an aristocratic one; and the aristocracy imposed a unity of a different kind on the face of things. By the end of our period we may picture this unity as one of knightly and political ideals in which the aristocracy of the greater part of Europe concurred. But the way for this diffusion of rules of conduct and guides to statesmanship was prepared by something less intangible than ideals–it was prepared by the bond of marriage. Nothing was more effective in giving men the sense of belonging to a society beyond the horizon of their ordinary interests than the recollection of their distant kinsmen. Women were less rooted in the soil than men; they brought new influences from distant parts and established bonds between men of little or no identity of purpose or of interest.