FRENCH, FLEMISH, ENGLISH, GERMAN TOWNS 371 of a single town like Florence, as we shall see later, one finds a bewildering variety and a series of kaleido- Variety of scopic constitutional changes, whose meaning it stitutions is almost impossible to follow to-day. But as the and customs Dutch historian Blok has said, "All these differences in the arrangement and the development of the medieval cities are new proofs of the inexhaustible riches of medieval life, of the infinite variety in the society of that time, deviating so much from the greater monotony of our epoch. The endeavor to find one form for the medieval cities is a mis- take against the very nature of the Middle Ages." Or, as Hare says of the cities of Italy, "They are wonderfully dif- ferent, those great cities, quite as if they belonged to differ- ent countries, and so indeed they have, for there has been no national history common to all, but each has its own in- dividual sovereignty, its own chronicle, its own politics, domestic and foreign, its own saints, its own phase of archi- tecture, often its own language, always its own proverbs, its own superstitions, and its own ballads."
