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Reading Hall The Doors of Wisdom

BOOK V.

FEUDALISM, OR THE HISTORY OF THE KINGDOMS FORMED FROM THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE, DURING THE TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES.

CHAPTER XIII.

FRANCE AND ENGLAND (888-1108) ; DECLINE OF THE ROYAL POWER IN FRANCE. INCREASE OF THE NATIONAL POWER.—NORMAN CONQUEST OF ENGLAND (1066).

The struggle of a century between the last Carolingians and the first of the Capetian dynasty. The accession of Hugh Capet (987).—Weakness of the Capetian dynasty: Robert (996) ; Henry I. (1031); Philip I. (1060).—Activity of the French Nation.—Downfall of the Danish dynasty in England (1042); Eadward the Confessor. Harold (1066).—The French Invasion of England. Battle of Hastings (1066).—Revolts of the Saxons aided by the Welsh (1067) and the Norwegians (1069). Camp of Refuge (1072); Outlaws.—Spoliation of the Conquered.—Results of this Conquest.

UNITY of history for the peoples of the Carolingian Empire disappears with the unity of that empire. The following century is full of disorder; it was no longer the confusion of the great contests of barbarian invasion, which were in a sense dignified and imposing, but confusion in which personal interests and local ambitions played a leading part. But at the bottom of all these, two important questions were agitated : whether the Carolingian family, which earnestly insisted on its right not only to the imperial but also to the French throne, should be entirely excluded from both, and whether the royal authority, in whosoever's hands it should be placed, should continue powerless, with all its rights disregarded. The course of events was to answer in the affirmative first the one and then the other of these questions.

The new king of France, Eudes, wished to be recognized by Aquitaine, which had formerly repudiated the Carolingians, but which now pretended to defend their legitimacy, intending to resist the sovereignty of the king of France, whoever he might be. While Eudes was in the South, Charles III, the Simple, a posthumous son of Louis the Stammerer, had himself proclaimed king in a great assembly held at Rheims. The king of Germany, Arnulf, an illegitimate prince of the Carolingian house, in whom the imperial ambition still lived in spite of the revolution which overthrew Charles the Fat in 887, received the pretender in the Diet of Worms, and declaring himself his protector, commanded the counts and bishops on the banks of the Meuse to sustain his pretensions. Eudes defeated him, and ended this quarrel by granting several domains to his rival. This brave and active prince was carried off by premature death in 898. His brother Robert inherited the duchy of France, and Charles the Simple was recognized as king.

The most memorable deed which is connected with the name of this prince is the cession of Neustria to the Norse­men, which has already been mentioned.

His life and reign ended sadly. The nobles, jealous of the little power he had left, formed a conspiracy against him. Robert, Duke of France, assumed the title of king, and was consecrated at Rheims (922), and at his death in the following year, Rudolf, Duke of Burgundy, took his place on the throne. Thus, whether the king came from France or Burgundy, in either case the center of ancient Gaul seemed destined to retain the monarchy. The extremities, the north as well as the south, were hostile to these lords at the center. The Duke of Normandy and the Count of Vermandois supported the claims of Charles the Simple for a time, though they betrayed him later, and this unhappy descendant of Charlemagne died a prisoner in the castle of Peronne (929). Rudolf was recognized by the most powerful nobles and reigned till 936. During his reign the Hungarians penetrated into France as far as Toulouse.

At his death the crown was at the disposal of Hugh the Great, Duke of France, master of the richest abbeys of the kingdom, and supreme over the country to the north of the Loire. He preferred to make kings rather than to assume the title himself, and recalled Louis IV, called d'Outremer, a son of Charles the Simple, from England (936). But he soon deserted him, and formed against him a league in which Otto I, King of Germany, joined. When besieged in the city of Laon, his sole remaining possession, Louis was forced to take refuge in Aquitaine, where the nobles formed an army to defend him; the Pope's intervention reestablished him on his throne.

Soon after, everything was again changed. Upon a new quarrel between Hugh and Louis IV, the German king turned against his former ally instead of against the king. He laid waste the country as far as Paris, but gained no important success, and finally withdrew beyond the Rhine, followed by the descendant of Charlemagne, who, in the council of Ingelheim, humbly offered to defend himself from any accusations made against him, and who besought Otto to judge the case himself, or to order a decision by single combat. Although justified by the council, which excommunicated Hugh the Great, Louis spent the rest of his life in begging help on every side, and never regained the slightest shadow of authority.

Nevertheless the Carolingian dynasty had not quite come to an end. Lothaire succeeded Louis IV, thanks to the support of Hugh the Great, who was his uncle. His reign shows some evidences of strength; many of the great vassals were alarmed by Otto's pretensions to restore the empire, for their one policy was to prevent, whether in France or in Germany, the restoration of the old imperial sway, which would have obliged them to retrace the steps they had made in the path of usurpation since Charlemagne's time, and in consequence they rallied around the King of France. This was the case with the nobles of Lorraine, who summoned Lothaire to oppose Otto. Hugh the Great was no longer living, but his son, Hugh Capet, was devoted to the cause of Lothaire, who had paid well for the devotion of the Duke of France by giving him Burgundy, which he succeeded in maintaining, and Aquitaine, of which he did not even get possession. Lothaire penetrated as far as Aix-la-Chapelle and just missed taking the Emperor prisoner. Otto, in turn, marched as far as Paris, ravaging the country as he went, but he was forced to make a disastrous retreat, and the greater part of his army perished on the banks of the Aisne. It was a great triumph for Lothaire to have even held his own against so powerful a monarch, and though forced to give up Upper Lorraine (980), he at least obtained the duchy of Lower Lorraine for his brother Charles.

This last evidence of power ever shown by the Carolingian dynasty was due to the circumstances of the moment and to the aid given it by the House of France. The latter possessed a well-established feudal power; but the Carolingian dynasty, after a century of disturbances, was undermined to the very roots. The tree had no life left in it; the slightest push would send it over. And it was not long before this happened. Lothaire was so conscious of the real state of things that on his death-bed he implored Hugh Capet to protect his son Louis, and to allow him to be king. Hugh promised and kept his word—but Louis V, after reigning one year, died and left no children (987).

The Dukes of France for a century had been, in relation to the last Carolingians, what the Mayors of the Palace had been to the last Merovingians, but with certain differences. They had less splendor, less authority, and a narrower power, but also, perhaps, a more independent situation as they possessed a territorial power of their own. The Mayors were at once leudes, great proprietors, and royal ministers ; they drew much influence and consideration from these first two sources, from the last alone came all their political power : and this office in strict law, if not in fact, had something essentially subaltern about it. The first of the Capetians, on the contrary, had no office at court, and wielded only a narrow power, but they wielded it for themselves. In the case of Pippin the Short, a man raised himself above all the other men of the nation. In the case of Hugh Capet, a fief, that is a land governing itself in virtual independence, raises itself to a position of legal right above all the other fiefs. This is the characteristic nature of the revolution of 987, which Montesquieu especially emphasizes, when he says: "The title of king was joined to the most important fief." But the new king, also, governed hardly more than his own estates, while the Mayor of the Palace become king had succeeded to the still real prerogatives of the prince over the whole state.

Besides this there were certain other striking analogies. It was the Pope who again gave the signal of revolution, and in words which greatly resemble the famous response of Pope Zacharias, “Lothaire is king only in name”, said Silvester II, “Hugh has not the title, but is king both by his deeds and in very fact”. A second time the final sentence over a fallen dynasty was pronounced by the mouth of the sovereign pontiff. The owner of the abbeys of Saint Denis, Saint Martin of Tours, and Saint Germain well knew the efficacy of religious sanction for such a revolution, and he obtained it from the Pope, the bishops, and the saints. When he was building a tomb for Saint Valery, the latter said to him: “Thou and thy descendants shall be kings to the most distant generation”.

Hugh Capet received another sanction, and one without which no revolution can be permanent, the sanction of necessity and the very force of events. As long as the Carolingian empire lasted it extended from the Pyrenees to the Elbe; its center was somewhere near the Rhine, where, besides, the people who founded the empire lived, and where was situated the capital and the seat of government, Aix-la-Chapelle. After the division of the empire this city was no longer the center either of Germany or of France, but, on the contrary, was near the borders of both. France extended from the Pyrenees to the Meuse, and the national life was centered toward the middle of this territory, and there seemed to be a tendency to choose the ruler from the duchies of France and Burgundy. The memories of ancient Neustria, and the fact that Clovis and several of the Merovingians had resided at Paris, fixed attention particularly upon the Duchy of France. In this region, now that each group of peoples had separated, the Carolingians were considered foreigners, men from the Rhine, speaking the Teutonic language and not the Roman (Romance) idiom of the banks of the Seine and Loire, the language of Hugh Capet.

This is the character of the revolution which elevated him to the throne, and this is the argument which justifies it.

On July 1, 987, in an assembly held at Senlis, at which hardly more than the bishops and the nobles of the duchy of France were present, he was elected and proclaimed king. A few days later Adalbero, Archbishop of Rheims, consecrated him at Noyon.

The Carolingian race was, however, not yet extinct, and Charles, duke of Lower Lorraine, the brother of Lothaire, made an attempt to annul the election of Hugh Capet. His cause was sustained in the North and the South, in Flanders, Vermandois, and Aquitaine. But he was finally betrayed into the hands of Hugh Capet by the bishop of Laon, and was shut up in the tower of Orleans; his sons succeeded to his claims, but without being able to establish them. One of them died leaving no children, and we know nothing certain of the fate of the two others. To confirm his house in the possession of the throne, and to prevent the alternate succession of Carolingian kings and kings of a new race, which had frequently been the case since 887, Hugh Capet had his son Robert recognized as his heir in an assembly of the bishops and nobles held at Orleans, a practice which was followed by all the kings of France down to Philip Augustus.

Hugh Capet did not succeed in gaining recognition in the South. The Aquitanians dated their acts, "In the reign of God, until there shall be a king." He made war against the Count of Poitiers, and against the Count of Perigord, who having been asked by him, "Who made you a count?" replied, " Who made you king?" Brittany also remained entirely independent. But the countries bordering on the duchy of France were more submissive, and it was in these that the ascendency of the monarchy was in form most nearly established. The Count of Anjou and the Duke of Normandy paid homage to Hugh Capet.

Moreover, the king knew how to obtain the most substantial and important support by a close alliance with the Church; not so much with the head of the whole Church, like the first Carolingians (the connection no longer extended so far) as with the local clergy, whom he favored in every way, giving them complete freedom in their elections, and loading them with gifts. His successors followed the same method.

At the death of Hugh (996), his son Robert had no difficulty in succeeding him on the throne. He was a mild, pious, and docile man, occupied in writing hymns, singing in the choir, and wore the cope as well as the crown and sceptre. He fed more than a thousand poor people each day. He was ruled by his wife and by the priests. He was, however, excommunicated for desiring to continue to live with his first wife, Bertha, who was related to him, for the Church forbade marriage between relations as far as the seventh degree. He yielded and took Constance, daughter of the Count of Toulouse, for his second wife. “Then”, says the chronicler, Rodulfus Glaber, speaking of those who followed the new Queen to the court, “we find France and Burgundy overrun by a new kind of people, who were at once the vainest and most frivolous of men. Their mode of life, their clothes, their armor, and the trappings of their horses were all equally fantastic; true buffoons, whose shaven chins, small-clothes, ridiculous boots, and indeed their whole inharmonious exteriors, announced the disorder of their minds. They were men without honor, without law, and without shame, whose contagious example corrupted the whole French nation, which had formerly been well ordered, and threw it into every sort of debauchery and wickedness”. This curious passage shows what bitterness of hatred, and what antagonism of character, customs, and even of clothing, separated the north and the south of France.

This Robert, so peaceful a prince, and utterly without ambition, received the offer of a crown. The Italians wished to recognize him as king to avoid acknowledging the Emperor Conrad. He drew back before the dangers of this position, and refused. This policy was, after all, the most favorable for the new dynasty; the Carolingians had lost everything by trying to gain too much, and nominally to rule Western Europe, instead of planting themselves firmly in some corner of Europe and taking deep root there. Robert obtained, by the death of his uncle Henry (1002), an acquisition less splendid but more valuable than that of Italy, namely, the Duchy of Burgundy. Before he could take possession, however, he was forced to carry on a war for twelve years, aided by the Duke of Normandy, because the son of his uncle's wife, by a former marriage, disputed his succession. Such is the weakness of royalty. When Robert tried to interfere in the affairs of the Count of Champagne, the latter said to him : "I am hereditary Count by the grace of God; this is my rank. As to my fief, it comes to me by inheritance from my ancestors, and in no way is connected with your domain. Do not oblige me to do, in defense of my honor, things which will be displeasing to you; for God is my witness that I would rather die than live without honor."

We must notice the customs of this era of feudalism. The middle of the eleventh century is the time when the royal authority was least recognized, and when the independence of the nobles reached its highest point. They ruled their little states like kings; they tried to acquire others, and carried on wars in other lands on their own account. Such was preeminently Eudes (Odo) the Count of Blois and Champagne, who took possession of certain parts of the kingdom of Aries, which had been united to the empire at the death of Rudolf III (1032), and who died in an attempt to conquer Lorraine, with the hope of restoring the ancient kingdom of Lothaire I. If he should succeed in this he expected to accept the royal crown to be offered him by the Italians. His rival, the famous Fulk Nerra, Count of Anjou, was a man of the same order. After defeating his son Geoffrey, who had stirred up a revolt, he made him creep several miles on the ground with a saddle on his back. “You are vanquished”, said he, kicking him,— “You are vanquished at last”. “Yes”, replied Geoffrey, “but by my father; for every one else I am invincible”. This reply disarmed the severity, of the old man. Soon afterwards he started on foot for the Holy Land, and died, on his return, from the fatigue of the journey and from the penances he had inflicted on himself. Such traits are characteristic of the crude and savage energy of the times. Another active and dangerous neighbor was the Duke of Normandy. William II., the Bastard, came to the ducal throne in 1035, a child of seven years. The early years of his reign are filled with contests with the turbulent nobles and with France; later he conquered England, while some of his vassals subdued Southern Italy.

In the midst of these rough and turbulent nobles, who were as powerful and more warlike than the king, Henry I seemed quite cast in the shade. Without having much influence, he was mixed up in almost all their quarrels, as ally of one or the other. However, he was king, and there were attached to his title certain rights which proved valuable enough in time. The most remarkable event of Henry's reign was his marriage with a daughter of Jaroslaf, Duke of Russia. He went so far in search of his wife in order to be sure to avoid the mistake made by his father in marrying a relation.

The reign of Philip I, who succeeded his father Henry in 1060, was no more brilliant, though it was at the very time when Europe roused itself from its inactivity and its narrow life, and became the stage of great events. The first crusade took place, and the long quarrel between the Papacy and the Empire began between Gregory VII and the Emperor Henry IV. But Philip took no part in either. His reign was passed in petty wars with William the Conqueror who attacked Maine; with William Rufus who ravaged the French Vexin; with Robert the Frisian, whom he wished to prevent from taking possession of Flanders; and with Fulk Réchin, the Count of Anjou, who had ceded the Gatinais to him, and whom he repaid by robbing him of his wife Bertrade. On being excommunicated for this crime by Pope Urban II., at the Council of Clermont (1095), he gave up Bertrade, took her back again, then gave her up again, and once more took her back, until the Church, occupied with the greater events of the crusades, finally overlooked his conduct.

Philip I, with his vices and his indolence, with his sales of ecclesiastical benefices and his debasing of the coinage, an example often followed by his successors, failed to cause the royal authority either to be respected or to be feared. At the time of his death (1108) the power of the Capetian dynasty was at its lowest point.

But though the king slept indolently on his throne, the nation was energetic and full of earnest purpose, and Frenchmen were going forth in all directions in search of conquest. The spirit of adventure, so dear to the ancient Gauls, seemed to revive with a strength which had increased in the six centuries of enforced repose. Five hundred thousand men crossed the Alps and the Rhine, and marched eight hundred leagues farther to deliver the Holy Sepulchre. Norman cavaliers conquered principalities in Italy. A Burgundian prince of the house of the Capets founded the kingdom of Portugal beyond the Pyrenees; and finally 60,000 Frenchmen crossed the Channel and subjugated England. This last event was of the first consequence for the future and for the destiny of France.

After Cnut, the Scandinavian empire crumbled away, as did the Frankish empire, after Charlemagne. Cnut had apparently intended to leave Norway to Swein (Swegen), and Denmark and England to Harthacnut, the son of Emma. The latter was in Denmark at the death of his father, and the Danes of England proclaimed Harold, another son of Cnut's king. He was, however, only recognized north of the Thames. The people of the south upheld the cause of Harthacnut. It was fr’m the very start a question of race. Harold represented the Danes, Harthacnut the Saxons. The death of Harold left the whole country in the hands of Harthacnut, whose reign prepared the way for the return of the Saxon dynasty. Eadward III, or the Confessor, son of Ethelred and Emma, ascended the throne of his fathers in 1042.

Eadward was Saxon by his father, Norman by his mother. He himself preferred the Normans, as he had passed his childhood among them when in exile, and because they were the more civilized of the two. He drew many of them to his court, gave them the principal bishoprics, and showed great favor to his brother-in-law Eustace, Count of Boulogne. The Saxons were jealous. They were represented at court by Godwine, a man of great power and of Saxon origin, who, though for a time allied with the Danes, was always the protector of his countrymen. Godwine, either personally or through his son, governed a great number of counties. He took the side of the Saxons in a dispute between them and the Normans, and so fell into disgrace. He was absent from court when a new Norman visitor appeared—namely, William II, the illegitimate son of the Duke, Robert the Devil. William found Normans everywhere, at the head of the troops, in the fortresses, in the bishoprics, and all received him as a sovereign; it seemed to him that the conquest of England was almost accomplished, and he returned to his country thinking that a royal crown was much better worth having than a ducal crown. His journey at any rate made a strong impression upon the Saxons, and public opinion compelled the restoration of Godwine to favor, while the Normans were driven from the court.

Godwine died in 1053, and his oldest son Harold succeeded to his offices and influence. It is told us that somewhat later Harold was thrown by shipwreck into the hands of William, who compelled him to take an oath upon cunningly concealed relics of saints that he would aid him in gaining the throne of England.

Not long after Eadward died, and the Witenagemot elected Harold king. William immediately sent over to remind him of his promises “made on good and holy shrines”. Harold replied, “that as they were drawn from him by force they were of no value, and that, besides this, his royal authority belonged to the Saxon people”. William treated the Saxon as a usurper, and a person guilty of sacrilege, and appealed to the court of Rome, whose policy was now directed by Hildebrand. The pope, alleging that the Peter's pence had not been paid, excommunicated Harold, and invested William with the kingdom of England, and sent him a consecrated banner as symbol of military investiture, together with a ring containing a hair of St. Peter set under a diamond, as symbol of ecclesiastical investiture. The duke then published his proclamation of war. Throughout all France a crowd of adventurers responded, and on September 27, 1066, an army of 60,000 men in 1400 ships embarked from St. Valery-sur-Somme.

They disembarked at Pevensey (Sussex), while the Saxon fleet that was guarding the Channel had put in for supplies. Just at this time Harold was fighting his brother Tostig in the north, who had rebelled and joined the Norwegians. He was victorious and rapidly returned to the south, where, though his army was only a quarter the size of the enemy’s, he confronted it on an eminence in the neighborhood of Hastings. The Saxons made palisades with strong stakes. Mirth and disorder reigned in their camp, and it is said that they spent the night before the battle in singing and drinking; the Normans, on the other hand, spent it in praying and receiving the sacraments. The latter made the attack on the following day, but the Saxon axes dealt destruction to all that approached them. William vainly commanded his archers to aim in the air so as to avoid the palisades. Harold lost an eye, but the intrenchment was not forced. Finally a feigned retreat enticed the Saxons to break their lines, and they were then cut to pieces. Harold was killed, and the beautiful Edith, of the Swan's Neck, was the only one who could recognize the body of the last Saxon king (1066).

William marched against London, and soon received its submission. He entered, and at once began the construction of the famous Tower, the bridle of London as the inhabitants themselves called it. He was there crowned King with the usual ceremonies, though in the midst of a tumult excited by the setting on fire of some houses near the church.

William had obtained what he desired, the crown, together with the treasure of the former kings. It was now the turn of his companions. Their reward was adapted to their rank, and the services of each. Barons and cavaliers received castles, great domains, market-towns, and even cities. Some of them married the Saxon widows, with or without their consent, and installed themselves in the home whose master they had either driven away or killed. Those who on the continent were perhaps only ox-drivers or weavers, were now warriors and gentlemen, and possessed serfs, vassals, castles and manors. They transmitted to their descendants their coarse names indicative of their origin : Front du Boeuf, William le Chartier, Hugh le Tailleur, etc.

The Anglo-Saxon clergy was also treated with severity. Some of them, influenced by the Pope's bull, had gone over to the conquerors, but the majority, who were of Saxon origin, were devoted heart and soul to the national independence. Among the bodies found on the field of Hastings were those of thirteen monks; the abbot of Hida and his twelve companions. The Saxon clergy was despoiled and persecuted; the primate Stigand was driven from his archiepiscopal see of Canterbury and replaced by the celebrated Lanfranc whom Alexander II charged to reform the Anglo-Saxon clergy. The Normans pretended to have received this mission, and, if we believe Matthew Paris, the Saxon clergy had passed their days and nights in eating and drink­ing. Lanfranc asserted for the see of Canterbury not merely the slight supremacy of former times, but authority over all the bishoprics of England, in order that he might secure the foreign occupation of all the ecclesiastical benefices of the country. Normans, Frenchmen, and men of Lorraine were all provided for in some way or other. The Saxon clergy were persecuted. One of the new prelates is said to have forbidden those in his diocese the use of nourishing food and of instructive books, for fear lest they should gain too much physical and intellectual strength. Even the Anglo-Saxon saints did not escape the hatred of the conquerors, and perhaps nothing wounded the feelings of the vanquished so much as this.

All spirit of resistance had not died with Harold on the field of Hastings, but during the next six years revolts broke out all over the country. The first revolt took place during a journey of William's to the continent (1067); it was helped by the Welsh, and caused some stir in London. But William had already gained the favor of the inhabitants of the capital by promising them, in a charter in the English language, to give them back the laws of the times of King Eadward. He struck a blow at the rebels by the capture of Exeter, and by the destruction of from 300 to 700 houses in Oxford, besides the complete ruin of Leicester. He built fortresses and established garrisons on the ruins of these towns. The bravest of the Saxons fled before this military occupation, and took refuge in Scotland and Ireland, where they were well received. They sent from there an appeal for aid to their ancient foes the Scandinavians. Osbeorn; brother of the King of Denmark, landed at the mouth of the Humber, in the midst of provinces occupied by the ancient Danish population (1069). The Saxons rushed to his standard with their prince, Eadgar, and the other exiles, the untiring friends of liberty, at their head. But Osbeorn was bought over by the rich offers made him by William, and left the country, to be outlawed by his brother for his treachery. Thrown upon their own resources, the wretched Saxons were obliged to yield, after all Northumberland had been visited by fire and sword.

As the combined forces were defeated, the resistance now took another form. Between the outlets of the Ken and the Ouse, on the island of Ely, the Saxons opened what they called a camp of refuge, and thither hastened all who had been proscribed. This camp of refuge was finally surrounded by William’s troops, a causeway was constructed across the marsh which had been its protection, and it was taken in spite of the heroic defense of the Saxon Hereward. The latter even consented to be reconciled with the Norman king; but we are told that one day when he was resting after his dinner, he was attacked by a band of strangers and perished after killing fifteen of them with his own hand.

Though now without the power of combination and without their camp of refuge, the Saxons still resisted the Norman king. They resisted individually, in the forests, where like bandits they lived on the king’s game, and drew the bow of William Tell against any Norman noble who should pass. They were hunted and outlawed in vain; and this race of patriot poachers continued to exist for more than a century, and their popular hero Robin Hood was born about 1160. William made the following law: Whenever a Frenchman is killed or is found dead in any hundred the inhabitants of that hundred must seize and produce the murderer within five days; or else must jointly pay 46 silver marks. As after that decree the men of the hundred took pains to remove all means of identification from the bodies of their victims, the Norman judges declared that every man who was assassinated should be considered a Frenchman whose Englishry, as they called it, could not be proved.

These, with a revolt in Maine, and a Norman conspiracy, were the obstacles which William was forced to overcome. Even while he was combating them he was busy in regulating and organizing his conquered territory. Between 1080 and 1086 a register was prepared of all the properties occupied by the conquerors; the number of houses owned by each, the resources of the inhabitants, and the rents paid before the invasion were all taken down. This formed the great Survey of England called by the Saxons the Domesday-book, because it recorded the irrevocable sentence of their dispossession. On the lands thus divided and registered was established the most regular feudal body of all Europe : of 600 barons and under them 60,000 knights. At the head of all was the king, and with no feeble power like the French king. He was the chief of the conquest, the victorious captain : all others were only his lieutenants and soldiers. Thus the Anglo-Norman monarchy, reserving for itself much territory, 1462 manors and all the principal towns, and taking pains, by exacting a direct oath of allegiance from even the knights to attach all the vassals, no matter of whom they held their lands, to itself by the closest ties, was from the first so powerful that later the nobles and the commons were forced to combine in order to avoid being utterly crushed by it.

We must not be misled by the name of the Normans into thinking that they were Scandinavians. These conquerors were Frenchmen, and with them French civilization, customs, language, and feudal institutions all took root in the English soil. We can still find French names among the English peerage, and until the reign of Edward III, that is until the middle of the 14th century, French continued to be the language of the court and of the tribunals.

France paid dear for this conquest made by her arms, her customs, and her language. The dukes of Normandy, when kings of England, wielded a power that long held that of the French kings in check, and two centuries of war and eight of jealous hostility have been the results of this great event.

The new monarchy, by its very origin, was doomed to lasting disturbances. The Channel could not be filled up, and Normandy and England always continued two separate countries, a fact which was the cause of many disagreements in the Anglo-Norman kingdom and even in the royal family. Besides this, the manners of William the Conqueror and of his followers were rude and violent, and his sons were like him. They had many bitter quarrels, and even before the death of their father they began to try to over­reach each other. The Conqueror, himself, died during a a war with his eldest son, who wished to seize Normandy, and who was aided by the king of France (1087).

CHAPTER XIV.

GERMANY AND ITALY (888-1039).—REVIVAL OF THE EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE BY THE GERMAN KINGS.

Extinction of the Carolingian family in Germany (911).—Election of Conrad I. (911), and of Henry the Fowler (919); Greatness of the House of Saxony.—Otto I., or the Great (936); his power in Germany; he drives out the Hungarians (955)—Condition of Italy in the tenth century.—Otto reestablishes the Empire (962).—Otto II., Otto III., Henry II. (973-1024), and Conrad II. (1024-1039).

BY the treaty of Verdun in 843, which had divided Charlemagne's dominion between his three grandsons, the imperial crown had been bestowed upon Lothaire, together with Italy and the long strip of territory which separated France and Germany. When this unsubstantial empire was destroyed, the crown continued to be attached to Italy, in memory of the Roman empire. If a powerful state had been formed on the peninsula the imperial crown, defended by a strong arm, could no doubt have been permanently secured to it. But as the fall of Italy followed its division, this token of power over the whole world, and of the political unity of Europe, could not remain in the hands of a petty king,lord over a few provinces in Lombardy. It seemed as if it ought to belong by just rights to one of the two great States formed by the dismemberment of the Carolingian ;empire, to France, or to Germany. What we have seen of the history of France in the tenth and eleventh centuries shows us that the imperial sceptre was not for her. The dukes of France, who had, moreover, no claim to the empire, understood that it would be foolish for them to entertain such an ambition, and that, if they did, they would probably lose their own feudal royalty. The kings of Germany, on the other hand, were the real heirs of Charlemagne, primarily because their people gloried in everything that related to him, and also because the carrying out of his work devolved upon them by force of circumstances. The country over which they reigned had been brought into existence by Charlemagne, the nations surrounding them had first been encountered and subdued by Charlemagne. Everywhere within and without their domains they found and followed the traces of his footsteps.

Germany showed great love for his family. While France was choosing her kings from her native-born lords, Eudes, Robert, Rudolf, and Hugh Capet, Germany, on the deposition of Charles the Fat (887), chose one of Charle­magne's descendants, Arnulf, the illegitimate son of Karlmann, so that the Carolingian dynasty continued on the throne until it died out in 911. Arnulf was an able and warlike man, and his activity forms a strong contrast to the indolence of the other Carolingians. He assumed high prerogatives; he tried to restore the lately shattered empire by claiming suzerainty over all the new sovereigns who were appearing throughout Europe. He exacted recognition of this suzerainty of Eudes, king of France, of Rudolf, the Welf, king of transjurane Burgundy, of Louis, king of Aries and son of Boso, and of Berengar, king of Italy, formerly Duke of Friuli, who had assumed this crown after the deposition of Charles the Fat.

His soon claimed a more direct sovereignty over these countries. He appointed his son Zwentibold king of Lorraine, but he was not recognized, and, indeed, he met his death there. In 894 Arnulf was called by the pope to cross the Alps and protect him from Guido, duke of Spoleto, who had proclaimed himself emperor and king of Italy. In a second expedition Arnulf took possession of those two crowns for himself (896). Though they gave him nothing but a title, yet they pointed out the way to his successors. His power in Germany was a more firmly established one. The foreign tribes, against whom Charlemagne had fought, were also held in check and repulsed by Arnulf. The Norsemen in the north and the Slays in the east, like the waves of an angry ocean, were forever beating on the frontiers of Germany. Arnulf drove the Norse pirates from the banks of the Dyle, where they had settled. Since the victories of Louis the German, the Slavs had invaded Germany four times between the years 844 and 874. At their head were the Moravians under their formidable chieftain Zwentibold. Arnulf s success against these enemies was much less decisive than against the Norsemen, but on the death of Zwentibold, in 894, his kingdom fell to pieces, and the danger was removed. Christianity had shortly before been carried into the lands occupied by the Moravians by Methodius, and Cyrill, missionaries from the East. But other enemies, the Hungarians, speedily appeared, and once in Germany they could be driven out only by long and sustained efforts. During the reign of Louis the Child, son and successor to Arnulf (899-911), they won a great battle near Augsburg, and committed outrages which were never avenged.

The German branch of the Carolingian family became extinct on the death of Louis the Child, and Germany was obliged to choose a king from another family. At that time Germany, like France, consisted of a number of large fiefs; but it was divided into two parties, differing in their customs and character. One party included the old Alemannic and Austrasian federations, where the great towns were situated with the chief ecclesiastical sovereignties; the other party represented Saxon Germany, and still retained its barbarous and warlike characteristics. The difference between these two parts of the country gave rise to a spirit of antagonism later on. The territory formerly belonging to the Alemanni and the Boii went to form two duchies, Alemannia (Swabia) and Bavaria. Another duchy, Franconia, was in the Austrasia of the Frankish kingdom. Saxony included Thuringia and a part of Friesland. These were the four primitive grand-duchies of Germany.

In 911, the electoral system, which had only been temporarily banished by the glory of the Carolingians, was restored to its place among the political customs of Germany at the very time when it disappeared from those of France. As a result of this the fortunes of the two countries have been widely different. The great vassals of France saw the throne so weak and so stripped of all power, while they themselves were rich and strong, that they did not even think of taking away the hereditary descent and of territorial ownership, those two great sources of power. On the other hand, the vassals of Germany, who knew that the power of their kings was well sustained, did their best to undermine it by taking away that double advantage. So in the former case, the power of the crown, which had been weak, became strong, while in the latter, though strong at first, it became weak; and the two countries reached, the one an extreme centralization, the other an extreme division. It is noticeable in this connection that the family of Hugh Capet has existed for nine centuries, and still exists, while the German dynasties, by a singular fate, have died out very rapidly in the second or third generation; so that Germany, being constantly called upon to choose a new royal race, adopted the doctrine of succession by election, while France, on the contrary, adopted that of hereditary right.

Conrad I, who was elected in 911 by the three nations of Saxony, Thuringia, and Franconia, was a descendant of Charlemagne in the female line. He began the struggle between the king and the great feudal lords, which continued throughout the middle ages. The warlike dukes, rude representatives of the feudal spirit, endeavored to shake off the royal yoke from their unruly shoulders, and yet they continually placed royal authority over themselves in order to keep the glory of the imperial title in their country, and by union better to resist all acts from without.

Conrad was a Franconian; he tried to sap the strength of Saxony and to take Thuringia away from it, but was defeated by Duke Henry at Eresburg. The Duke of Lorraine, in the west, refused to acknowledge him, and gave his allegiance to the king of France; but Alsace remained under Conrad. To the south, those who held the power in Swabia also refused to him the name of king, and allied themselves with Arnulf, Duke of Bavaria. He defeated the latter and forced the former to appear before a national assembly; the diet of Altheim condemned them as felons, and had them beheaded. Conrad had succeeded in some, if not all, of his undertakings, when he died, mortally wounded, it is said, in a combat against the Hungarians in 918.

After the death of this Franconian emperor, the crown came into the possession of the House of Saxony, where it remained for more than a hundred years (919-1024). As Conrad was dying he designated his old enemy and conqueror, Henry, as the one most capable of defending Germany against the Hungarians, and it was this Saxon duke who was elected king.

The deputies who brought him the news found him busy catching birds ; thence, his surname. Henry I, or the Fowler, brought order into Germany, which, before, had been unorganized and defenseless. He has the credit of being the one to institute, in behalf of royal authority, the Pfalzgrafen or palatine counts, whom he placed in the provinces by the side of the dukes, and whom he entrusted with the oversight of the crown lands. In the object sought they were an imitation, on a smaller scale, of the missi dominici of Charlemagne. There was at that time no heerban, no Field of May, nor any assemblies of estates at regular intervals. Henry attempted to re-establish the heerban by renewing earlier laws, that whoever had passed his thirteenth year should be obliged to carry arms; if he did not appear within three days after the levy, he incurred the penalty of death.

To check his enemies from without he instituted a complete system of defense ; he formed the mark, [called after­wards] Schleswig, as a defense against the Danes, the north mark, or mark of northern Saxony, against the Slavs, and the Wends, the mark of Meissen, against the Hungarians and the Poles, and also the strongholds of Quedlinburg, Meissen, and Merseburg. The latter was made the center, as it were, of the whole defense; he put down there a colony of thieves and vagabonds, who were henceforth to defend the country they had formerly ravaged, and plunder only its enemies. He ordained that every ninth man of the district should be stationed in the nearest "burg" or fortress, while the others were to keep his fields in cultivation. He built also storehouses in the fortresses in which one-third of all the crops were to be deposited, and he required that their assemblies and markets, their public festivals and marriages, should be held within the walls.

The effect of these excellent institutions was felt even in Henry's reign. His great victory at Merseburg on the Saale (933) forced back the Hungarians, and the recovery of Lorraine for the German kingdom protected it on the west, as it was protected by Bohemia on the east and Schleswig on the north.

Henry had summoned a diet at Erfurt some time before his death, and had asked it to recognize his second son, Otto, as king. Otto proceeded to Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), where the dukes, princes, and all the great noblemen of the country, assembled in the “Hall of Columns”, where stood the throne of Charlemagne, proclaimed him king; after his election the archbishop of Mainz presented him to the people assembled in the church, with these words : “This is he who has been chosen, by God, designated by our late lord and king, Henry, and who has been raised to the throne by all the princes—the noble Lord Otto. If the choice pleases you, raise your right hands”. The people all raised their hands. It was a last remnant of the old custom of election by the whole tribe, and not by its chiefs alone.

The accession of another Saxon king raised opposition in the west and the south, as it had in the last reign. The dukes of Bavaria and Franconia joined Lorraine in resisting Otto, and obtained the assistance of Louis IV., king of France. Otto defeated the rebels and pushed into Champagne, with the help of his brother-in-law, the Duke of France, and the Count of Vermandois, then in arms against Louis IV. Finally, a treaty of peace was made between the kings (942). By a happy combination of circumstances the great duchies hostile to the king became vacant, and he succeeded in conferring them upon members of his own family. Bavaria was given to his brother Henry, Swabia to his son Ludolf, Lorraine to his son-in-law Conrad the Red, the archbishopric of Cologne to his other brother, Bruno, and that of Mainz to another son, Wilhelm. He strengthened his authority still more by extending the powers of the palatine counts, who were appointed in several of the great fiefs under the dukes to administer justice in the king's name, and to rule the royal domains ; he was further strengthened by the favor he showed the church in Germany. He bestowed counties and even duchies upon the bishops, with all the prerogatives of secular princes, though in many cases these prerogatives and the temporal jurisdiction were exercised not directly by the bishop, but by another officer called the Vogt (advocatus.) Later, the counts palatine either made themselves independent or were made subject by the dukes, and the bishops also became sovereigns of little states, virtually independent of the general government; but there was no reason why it should enter into Otto's calculations that his successors would not know how to rule.

The reign of Otto I is celebrated for a great, military feat, the "decisive victory, near Augsburg (955), over the Hungarians, who, it is said, lost 100,000 men, and after that their incursions into Germany ceased. Territory across the Enns, which was taken from them, was annexed to the East mark, and formed the foundation of the later Austria. In his external policy with regard to the Bohemians, the Poles, and the Danes, Otto followed the example of Charlemagne with the Saxons, in attempting to make them at once Christians and subjects of his empire. Thus in Bohemia, he forced Boleslav I, who was persecuting Christians, to pay him an annual tribute, and to encourage the religion he had been persecuting (950). The Duke of Poland was obliged to render homage to him and to allow the bishopric of Posen to be founded; the Danes, whom he pursued to the remotest parts of Jutland, obtained peace only when they had promised that their king and his son should be baptized. Charlemagne had founded the bishoprics of Saxony, in the valleys of the Weser; and Otto, following in his steps, established in the valleys of the Elbe and the Oder the archbishopric of Madgeburg and the bishoprics of Brandenburg, Havelborg, Meissen, Naumburg (Zeitz), Merseburg, and Posen; on the Cimbric peninsula, those of Schleswig, Ripen, and Aarhus; in Bohemia, that of Prague. It was a formal taking possession of those lands by Christianity and civilization, but the empire did not long retain its hold over them.

Germany’s claims upon Italy had lain dormant since the death of Arnulf. They were revived by Otto. From the beginning of the tenth century Italy had been given over to the most frightful disorders. The uniformity established by Roman conquest had disappeared with the imperial power, the country had lost all unity of character and customs; it was German on the north, where the Lombards and the Francs were settled; Roman at the center, where the Holy See protected the Roman spirit; Greek, and almost Saracenic in the south, where Constantinople's power was still supreme, and where the Arabs were now establishing themselves.

A host of little sovereign powers had sprung up. Among the lay nobility, the Duke of Friuli on the east, and the Marquis of Ivrea on the west of Lombardy, the Duke of Spoleto in the center, and the Dukes of Beneventum, Salerno, and Capua in the south. Among ecclesiastics, the pope, the archbishops of Milan and Ravenna, the bishops of Pavia, Verona, and Turin; and among free towns, Venice, Genoa, Gaeta, and Amalfi.

Of these, the Dukes of Friuli and Spoleto, and the Marquis of Ivrea, were most powerful, and they had long been contending for the throne among themselves and with the king of Provence. Intrigues, which bring the dagger and poison into play too often, soil the pages of Italy's history at this time and for many years after. Marozia, a dissolute woman, who was stained with the blood of many murders, had, at one time, the disposal of the crown of Italy and the papal tiara.

In 924, the imperial crown had fallen from the head of the assassinated King Berengar I, and in the prevailing confusion no one had taken possession of it. Rudolf, King of Burgundy, and Hugh, Count of Provence, followed by Lothaire, son of the latter, laid claim at least to the throne of Italy. In 951, Berengar II, Marquis of Ivrea, and grandson of the emperor of the same name, poisoned, it was said, Lothaire, took his place, and, to insure the succession to his own son, Adalbert, he tried to compel Lothaire's widow, Adelheid, to marry him. But she took refuge in the castle of Canossa, and called upon Otto for assistance.

Otto, who was victorious over all his enemies, holding uncontested authority within Germany and without, a supremacy founded on victory, needed nothing but the crown of iron and the imperial crown to enable him to re-establish almost exactly the empire of Charlemagne. He went in quest of these. In 951 he crossed the Alps. All the clergy of Lombardy came to meet him. The Peninsula was tired of having a sovereign always present with them, and imagined that the authority of an absent monarch, of a German king beyond the Alps, would be less oppressive. It was a mistake which Italy has made several times, to her misfortune. She thought she offered the kings of Germany a title only, but they, when masters of the title, claimed the authority also.

The King of Germany did not get possession of the crowns Italy had to offer on his first journey. He merely married Adelheid and received the homage of Berengar II. But when he returned in 961, and found that Berengar was trying to resist him, he caused himself to be proclaimed King of Italy, at Milan, and to be crowned Emperor at Rome (Feb. 2, 962). He agreed to respect the donations made by Charlemagne to the Holy See, and the Romans promised not to elect a pope save in the presence of envoys sent by the emperor, and with his consent.

By this act Otto restored the Empire in favor of those princes who should be elected kings of the Germans to the north of the Alps, and he established the German power in Italy. These measures were not put through without resistance. The Romans were indignant when they saw him disposing of the papal throne. They banished John XIII, appointed by him, and elected a prefect and twelve tribunes. For this, Otto punished them with severity. Rome and the Pope realized, for the third time, that they had found their master.

Otto had not yet gained possession of the southern part of Italy. He sent Bishop Luitprand as ambassador to Nicephorus, Emperor of the East, charged with the duty of asking the hand of the Princess Theophano for his son Otto. Nicephorus refused, and accompanied his refusal with outrageous behavior toward the ambassador; whereupon Otto ravaged the Grecian territories to such an extent that the new Emperor of Constantinople, John Zimisces, was induced to yield Theophano. The marriage took place, but the treaty with the eastern Emperor granted to the House of Saxony no rights in Southern Italy.

Otto's position resembled that of Charlemagne in some respects. They were both all-powerful at home, both conquered and Christianized the peoples to the north and the east, they both exalted the Empire of the West, both controlled Italy and the papacy, and both tried to negotiate a marriage under very unpleasant conditions with the Emperors of the East, who showed always a harsh and disdainful spirit toward the barbarian basileus. To the parallel must be added the wide renown of Otto and the numerous embassies, which he received even from the Saracens, after his victory over the Hungarians. He died in 973.

The last emperors of the Saxon line, Otto II (973), Otto III (983), and Henry II (1002), lost the ascendency gained by their predecessors. The first was detained. by insurrection in Germany, and by an expedition into France which took him as far as Paris, and he did not reach Italy till seven years from the beginning of his reign. The little feudal States, lay and ecclesiastic, had profited by the long absence of their sovereign, and had risen on all sides and made themselves practically independent. Moreover Otto II cared less about enjoying his authority in the northern or central part than he did about gaining possession of the south. He met a severe defeat in Calabria, and was taken prisoner by Greek pirates. He escaped from them by swimming, and died a few months after (983).

Otto III, who was possessed by romantic ideas of the Roman empire and by an ambition which had been nourished by his mother Theophano and his grandmother Adelheid, gave most of his thought to Italy, though his long minority prevented him from going thither to obtain the imperial crown until 996. He bestowed the papal office upon his relative Gregory V, who saw in the Germans the arm of Christianity, and afterwards upon Silvester II, his former teacher, whose dream it was to unite all Christendom under the two powers and to send it forth into Asia to the conquest of Jerusalem. The tribune Cresentius rebelled against the German domination in Rome, and assumed the titles of patrician and consul. Upheld by the court of Constantinople he tried to revive the Roman republic. Otto III. repressed the sedition with great cruelty; he imprisoned Cresentius in the castle of St. Angelo, and condemned him to be hanged on a gibbet 70 feet high (998), but his wife is said to have avenged him by poisoning the emperor (1002).

The cruel experiences which Italy had undergone during the period of German domination seemed to make the substitution of a national king advisable, and Arduin, Marquis of Ivrea, was proclaimed in Pavia. Henry of Bavaria, great-grandson of Henry the Fowler, had just succeeded Otto. He was a prince of such zealous piety that it is related of him that at one time he wished to abdicate and become a monk. His reign was none the less on this account a troubled one. He had to struggle in Germany against many of the great vassals and the King of Poland, and he crossed the Alps three times. The second time (1013) he overthrew Arduin, aided by internal rivalries, which were always the ruin of Italy. Milan had declared against Arduin because she was jealous of Pavia; her archbishop carried most of the prelates with him into the imperial party, for they saw that their power would be curtailed by a temporal sovereign near at hand. On his third trip (1014), Henry II attempted again, unsuccessfully, the conquest of the Greek dominions in the south of Italy, but his appearance did for the moment give to the church the preponderance of power in the peninsula.

On the death of Henry II, called Saint Henry (1024), the imperial crown was restored to the Franconian house, which had already possessed it once. This seemed to keep the balance between the two parties of Germany. But the change of dynasties did not bring a change of policy. The German royalty, represented for the most part by men of talents and energy, continued to grow stronger and to extend its power.

Germany was almost forced to maintain an offensive policy toward the east in order to keep the foreign tribes at a distance. Henry II. had been obliged to keep up a long struggle with the Poles, from whom he had taken Bohemia, but who forced him to renounce all right of sovereignty on the part of the empire over their country. Conrad II, the Salic, recovered this right, but he yielded the mark of Schleswig to the King of Denmark, Cnut the Great. He stopped, however, the attacks of the Slavs to the north of the Elbe, making them tributary to the Christians, and, to hold them in check, he rebuilt Hamburg, which they had destroyed.

Since the time of Otto I, the great vassals had been more directly under control. Conrad was able to secure the condemnation and imprisonment of the Duke of Swabia as a disturber of the public peace, in his efforts to get possession of the kingdom of Burgundy. This country Conrad kept for himself. By the treaty of Basel, which he induced Rudolf III, the old king of Aries, to sign, he annexed the Valley of the Rhone, Franche-Comté, and Switzerland, to the empire (1033).

Conrad, the Salic, managed affairs in Italy in much the same way as his predecessor; he depended for support upon the bishops, who were the soul of the German party, and especially upon Heribert (Aribert), archbishop of Milan, who had crowned him ; and he increased still more the power of their leading men. He thought himself sure of their dependence upon him, because they received from his hand their insignia of office, the crosier and the ring. But the great favor shown to bishops did not prove wise in the event; the bishops, who were the masters of Italy, believed that they were able to slight the imperial sovereignty on the one hand ; and on the other, to oppress the smaller vassals and the burgesses. The latter were not to be despised when they were found in the rich Italian communes. The burgesses and smaller vassals joined forces; but, following the usual inclination to secure the triumph of the moment rather than to think of the future, they called upon the emperor. Conrad came again, and this time in a very different frame of mind. He seized Heribert, with the Bishops of Vercelli, Piacenza, and Cremona, and in order to keep the episcopal power forever within bounds, he published his famous edict of 1037, which declared the fiefs of the vassals or valvassors to be irrevocable, hereditary, and practically immediate. This was the constituting act of Italian feudalism; but it was a peculiar feudalism, shorn of the hierarchical development which it had in other countries, because of this condition of immediateness which did away with the intermediary office of the great vassals between the emperor and the subordinate vassals.

Conrad II died in 1039, his son, Henry III, succeeded him, the most powerful of the German Caesars, but whose very power brought on the ruin of the second empire and the greatest conflict of the Middle Ages, namely, the struggle between the Church and the Empire.

CHAPTER XV.

FEUDALISM.

Beginning of the Feudal Regime.—Reciprocal Obligations of Vassal and Lord.—Ecclesiastical Feudalism.—Serfs and Villeins.—Anarchy and Violence ; frightful Misery of the Peasants ; several good Results.— Geographical Divisions of Feudal Europe.

THE real heirs of Charlemagne were from the first neither the kings of France or those of Italy or Germany; but the feudal lords. When Charles the Fat was deposed it was not only the empire that was dismembered, but also the kingdoms and the great fiefs. The dukes and counts had been as powerless as the kings against the Saracens, the Norsemen and the Hungarians, and equally incapable of keeping their vast territories under one government. The people, no longer led by their chiefs to common expeditions of war, had little by little become accustomed to rely only on themselves.

After they had for years been in the habit of taking refuge in their forests among the wild beasts at the approach of the pagan, at last some men of spirit made a stand and refused to abandon their whole substance without even at­tempting to defend it. Here and there in a mountain gorge, at the ford of a river, on a hill overlooking the plain, they built intrenchments and walls, which were defended by the bravest and strongest. An edict of 853 ordered the counts and vassals of the kings to repair the old castles and to build new ones. The country was soon covered with them, and the invaders often were repulsed. A few defeats made the latter more wary. They did not dare venture so far into the midst of the fortresses, which sprang from the ground on every side, and the new invasion, hindered and obstructed in this way, ceased in the following century. Later, the masters of these castles were the terror of the country, but they saved it at first, and though feudalism became so oppressive in the latter part of its existence, it had had its time of legitimacy and usefulness. Power always establishes itself through service and perishes through abuse.

But what was this new regime? We have seen the system of land tenure becoming more uniform throughout the barbarian world, through the confirmation of the right of hereditary transmission of the lands granted by the kings, and we have seen the law giving its sanction also to a usurpation of another kind, the hereditary transmission of the royal offices. Generally, the holders of these offices were also proprietors either of allodial or of royal lands, with the result that authority and landed property were united in the same hands. This union is the essential characteristic of feudalism.

Under the absolute monarchy of the Roman empire, all the appointments to public office, high or low, were in the hands of the monarch, and remained always at his direct disposal, so that he could recall them at will. And more than this, the public officer neither owned the soil of the province which he governed, nor did he have any rights of government over the landed properties which he might possess as a simple citizen. He was, therefore, amenable, as proprietor, to the civil law of the whole empire, and as governor to the arbitrary will of the sovereign. The feudal system was just the reverse of this. A lord who granted, as an inferior fief, a certain part of his own fief, made over to the grantee or vassal at the same time both the property and the sovereignty over it, neither of which he could reclaim unless the vassal failed in some of the services agreed to by him when he received the investiture.

If one lord wished to obtain land from another and become his vassal, he must seek him out, and then the ceremony of "homage" took place between the two; the would-be vassal must kneel before his future lord, and placing his hands in those of the latter, must declare in a loud voice that from that time forward he would be his man (homo), that is, that he would be devoted and faithful to him, and would defend him at the risk of his own life, much as the ancient Germans did in the comitatus relationship. After this declaration, which was really the "homage," he gave the lord his oath of fealty or of faith, and swore to perform all the duties which devolved upon him from his new relation of vassal of his lord. After the vassal had performed this double ceremony, the lord did not fear to entrust his land to the man who was so strongly bound to him, and granted it to him by investiture, which was often accompanied by some symbol, a clod of turf, a stone, a switch, a branch of a tree, or any other object, according to the custom of the fief. Otto of Freising says: “It is customary when a kingdom is delivered over to any one that a sword be given with it, when a province is transferred, a standard is given”.

In the first place, the vassal was under certain moral obligations to his lord, those of keeping his secrets, of disclosing to him the plots of his enemies against him, of defending him, giving him his horse in battle, if the latter were unhorsed, or of taking his place in captivity; of respecting his honor and causing others to do the same; of assisting him with good advice, etc. The material obligations or the services owed by the vassal were of various kinds :

I. Military service, which was the very foundation of the feudal relation, and the principle by which this state of society, which knew nothing of standing and paid armies, existed. The vassal was obliged, at the bidding of his lord, to follow him either alone or with a certain number of men, according to the importance of his fief. The duration of this service also varied in proportion to the size of the fief; in some cases it was sixty days, in some forty, and in others 20, a variation which made distant expeditions impossible, and made the forces thus raised available only for wars in the near vicinity, or for private wars. There were fiefs where military service could only be claimed within the limits of the feudal territory, or even only for defense.

II. The obligation to serve the suzerain in his court of justice. As under the feudal regime the lord filled the place of the State and was invested with the functions of the public power; he was obliged, in order to exercise these functions, to collect about him the powers divided by his vassals. Making war was one of his functions and the administration of justice another. The lord summoned his vassals to come to his courts, and it was their duty to come either to serve him with their counsel or to take part in judging the quarrels that were brought before him. They also promised to give their assistance in carrying out the sentences which they had pronounced.

III. The aids, some of which were legal or obligatory, the others gracious or voluntary. The legal aids were generally due in three cases; when the lord was made prisoner his ransom was to be paid, when he armed his eldest son as knight, and when he married his eldest daughter. The aids took the place of the public taxes of the ancient and modern States, but were of a very different character, as we have seen; they neither recurred at regular intervals nor were exacted by a general system for the public needs; but they had the appearance of a voluntary gift, given under especial circumstances. An annual impost would have seemed like an affront to the vassals.

In addition to these services we must mention certain feudal rights by which a lord, in virtue of his sovereignty, could interfere in any important changes occurring on a fief granted by him to a vassal. Some of these were sources of new revenues to him. The rights were those of relief, a sum of money paid by each heir on his succession to a fief, especially if his succession was not in the direct line; of alienation, which must be paid by anyone who should sell or in any way alienate his fief; of escheat and of confiscation, by which the fief returned to the possession of the suzerain if the vassal died without heirs, or if he had forfeited it and deserved to be deprived of it; of wardship, in virtue of which the lord during the minority of a vassal assumed his guardianship, the administration of his fief, and used the revenues; and finally the right of marriage, that is the right of proposing a husband to the heiress of a fief and of obliging her to choose one among the lords whom he presented to her.

The vassal who performed all his services with exactness was virtually master of his fief. He could grant either a part or the whole of it to others, and become in his turn suzerain lord of vassals of a lower rank or of vavassors (valvasors), who owed him services of the same kind that he had promised to his own suzerain. In this way a hierarchy was built up.

The suzerain had obligations as well as the vassal. He could not withdraw his fief from his vassal arbitrarily, or without good cause; he must defend him if he were attacked, and treat him with justice, etc.

We must notice that as the feudal system developed, everything became a fief; everything that could be granted, such as the right to hunt in a forest, to fish in a river, or to furnish an escort for merchants along the roads; the village oven, and in fact any useful privilege granted on the condition of fealty and homage became a fief. The lords multiplied these grants in order to multiply the number of men who owed them military service. But the fief itself to which rights of justice were attached, as a rule remained undivided, and the whole of it was inherited by the oldest son.

The obligation of the vassals to assemble at the court of justice of their lord, a court which they composed, shows us that judgment by peers was the principle of feudal justice, a principle equally marked in the German customs and institutions, where we saw free men judged by the assembly of free men. Peers (pares, equals) were the vassals of the same suzerain, established around him on the same territory and invested with fiefs of the same rank. Even the king had his peers, those who held their lands directly from him, as king, not as duke of France. Every vassal had a right to be judged by his peers and in the presence of his lord. If the latter refused him justice, or if the vassal considered that he had been unjustly judged, he preferred a charge of default of justice and appealed to his lord's suzerain. Whenever a disagreement arose between a lord and his vassal, it could always be brought before the next higher step in the hierarchy.

This right of appeal, however, did not content the spirit of individual independence which animated this warlike society. The lords reserved with jealous care another right of appeal, the appeal to arms. They preferred to take justice into their own hands rather than to wait for another. In this way the private wars arose, a practice which was so common among the early German peoples, that they had a special name for them. The formalities which should precede these wars, and give the party who was to be attacked sufficient warning, were established by law. Our international wars really arise from the same principle and are no more justifiable. The lords made war with their little armies just as it is now waged with our great armies, only then the hostilities had a narrower character, as the states were smaller. Such contests, like our duels, the combats of one man with one other man, were unknown to antiquity. In reality the duel itself was one of the procedures of justice, at this time, and the judicial combat fought in the lists, a practice handed down from the barbarians, was customary throughout the Middle Ages.

The courts held by the lords did not all have the same extent of jurisdiction. There were three different degrees in France, the haute, basse, and moyenne justice (the high, low, and mesne justice). The first alone could decide questions of life or death. Generally the largest fiefs had the most extended jurisdiction ; but sometimes a mere vavassor held one of the highest courts, and sometimes a lord, who only possessed the lower power, could punish with death a thief taken in the act. Within these variable limits the lord had the sole administration of justice over his fief; and when later the central government recovered this right, it amounted to a revolution.

Before finishing the enumeration of the sovereign rights that had fallen to the feudal lords, we must add two more. The first was, they acknowledged no legislative authority superior to their own throughout their fiefs. In the last capitularies of Charles the Simple, at the beginning of the tenth century, we see the final manifestation of a public legislative power; after that there were no more general laws, either civil or political, but there were everywhere local customs, which were isolated, independent of each other and different in different places, and above all, territorial as opposed to the personal character of the barbarian laws. The second of these rights was that of coining money, which is always a sign of sovereignty; even before Charlemagne it seems that certain private persons had the right to coin money. After his time this was one of the rights usurped by the nobles, and at the accession of Hugh Capet there were no less than 150 men in France who exercised this right.

Every political system displays its character by the place from which its power is exercised. The ancient republics had their agora and their forum; the great monarchy of Louis XIV had its palace of Versailles; the feudal lords had their castles; these were enormous buildings, either round or square, massive, without ornaments or any pretensions to architectural style, and generally built on a hill. They were pierced by a few loop­holes, from which arrows could be shot, and had a single gate opening on a moat which could only be crossed by a drawbridge; they were crowned with battlements and machicolations from which masses of rock, pitch, and melted lead were thrown upon any assailant who had been bold enough to approach the foot of the wall. These castles now look like gray, jagged, and broken crows' nests torn by storms, and, seen from a distance, these monuments at once of legitimate defense and of oppression, entirely eclipse our modern, small, and lightly built habitations. Nothing less than these impregnable fortresses would have been sufficient defense against the incursions of the Norsemen, or later, during the feudal wars, and all fled to them at any alarm. Those who had no right to live inside the castle itself, who were neither nobles or warriors, established themselves at the foot of its great walls under their mighty guardianship. In this way many of our cities were formed.

Even the clergy were included in this system of feudalism. The bishop, formerly defender"of the city, in many cases had become its count, either through a gradual usurpation or by express concession of the king, which united together the county and the bishopric, the ecclesiastical and the civil author­ity, and made the bishop the suzerain of all the lords in his diocese. The Church possessed, in addition to the tithes, immense estates which had been given her by the faithful. To defend these against the brigandage of the time, she resorted to secular means, and chose among the laymen men of judgment and courage, to whom she confided domains on the condition of their defending them with the sword, in case of need. These avoués (advocatus, vogt) of the monasteries and churches did just as the counts of the kings did, made their functions hereditary and took possession of the estates given to them to protect. They consented, however, to consider themselves vassals of those they had despoiled, to pay them fealty and homage, with the usual conditions of rents in kind and of personal services. Thus the abbots and the bishops became suzerains, and temporal lords, with many vassals ready to fight for their cause, with a court of justice, and in short all the prerogatives exercised by the great proprietors. There were bishop dukes, bishop counts, themselves vassals of other lords, and especially of the king, from whom they received the investiture of the lands attached to their churches, or as they were called, their temporalities.

This ecclesiastical feudalism was so extended and so powerful, that in the Middle Ages it possessed more than a fifth of all the lands in France and nearly one-third of those in Germany. There was this difference between the Church and the king, that the latter, after the conquest, gained nothing more but was always giving, so that finally he possessed nothing but the city of Laon; while the Church, though she might lose a few domains, which was however unlikely, as she had the ban of excommunication for a weapon of defense, was always acquiring more property, as few of the faithful died without leaving her some land, so that she was always receiving and gave little or nothing, and only when forced to do so.

Thus by the eleventh century the Europe of the Carolingian times was divided into innumerable fiefs, each of which formed a state with a life, laws, and customs of its own, and with an almost independent secular ecclesiastical chief.

We have now given a description of the social life and privileges of the suzerains; but it by no means applies to the whole feudal society. This was the life led by the war­like and fighting part of society, the part that rules, judges, punishes, and oppresses. Below this was a society which worked, supported the other, made clothing and armor for it, built its castles and baked its bread, the society of the serfs, or rather of the men under power (gens potestatis). Freemen were no longer to be found ; they had entirely disappeared, some having raised themselves and become the fortunate lords, and others having been pushed down into the lower ranks of society and become serfs or villeins. The class of simple freemen which had been almost entirely destroyed by the invasions in the Roman empire, had again been swallowed up. There were no longer any men who possessed freeholds (allodial lands), or at least so few that they are hardly worth mentioning.

The villeins were very numerous. The lord or noble had not only vassals but also subjects living on those parts of their estates that they had not made into fiefs, and from the first these serfs, or more properly men of the soil, [servi glebes] were completely at his mercy. Beaumanoir says: “The lords can deprive them of all they possess, imprison them as often as they please, whether justly or unjustly, and are responsible only to God for their acts”.

In spite of this the condition of the serf was better than that of the slave of antiquity. The improved condition of slaves at the end of the Roman empire survived the catastrophies of the invasion, and continued in feudal society.

The freeman in ancient times had been harder on the slave than was the barbarian, in whom a certain instinct of liberality had been cultivated by the moral teachings of the Christian religion. The serf was looked upon as a man, as having family relations and, like his lord, descended from the Father of all men, and like him made in the image of God. The serfs could also enter the clergy, and in that way often rose to a higher position than that of the most powerful lords.

Above the serfs were those who had their lands under a mortmain tenure, who, continues the old jurist Beaumanoir, were treated more kindly, for their lord can claim nothing from them unless they do some wrong, except the rents and services which custom has fixed for them to pay. But the mortmain tenant could not marry without the consent of his lord, and if he married a free woman or one born outside the seignorial lands he must pay a fine according to his lord's will. This is the right of formariage (forismaritagium). The children were to be divided equally between the two lords. If there were only one child it should belong to the lord of its mother. On the death of a mortmain tenant without heirs in the same domain, all possessions belonged to his lord. There was no way in which they could escape from these claims. No matter where they went, the right of pursuit followed their persons and their property; the lord always inherited his serf’s possessions.

One step higher than these were the free tenants, called villeins (roturiers). Their condition was less uncertain. Unlike the serfs, they had retained their liberty, and on condition of a yearly rent and of services (corvées) they held the lands granted by the proprietor of the domain, which lands and all they possessed they were able to transmit to their children. But while the beneficiary tenures or fiefs were guaranteed by a public and well determined law, these servile or censive tenures were under the absolute jurisdiction of the proprietor, and were only guaranteed by private agreements. Therefore the villeins, especially those of the country who did not need to be treated with as much consideration as those of the cities, were subject to a power that was often unbounded. We read in an ancient document in respect to the lords: “They are lords of the heavens and the earth, and they have jurisdiction over the land and what is under it, over body and soul, over the water, the winds, and the meadows”. The villein could not appeal from a sentence, because the feudal law said: “Between you, the suzerain, and you, the villein, there is no judge but God”.—“We acknowledge as belonging to our gracious suzerain”, says another formula, “both ban and summons, the great forest, the bird in the air, the fish in the running water, the animal in the thicket as far as our gracious lord or his servitors can hunt.—In return our gracious suzerain will take under his protection and care the widow and the orphan as well as the peasant”. Thus the lord possessed all rights, but owed, in return, protection to the weak. This was the principle of the feudal society in regard to its subjects. Royalty no longer performed the duties for which it was instituted, and the protection which could not be obtained from the nominal head of the State was now sought from the bishops, counts, barons, and all powerful men.

Everything belonged to the suzerain; but as neither industry nor commerce existed, nor that luxury which allows one person to consume in a few moments the result of the work of many, the demands of the lords were not at first oppressive, and these claims, as far as they respected the villeins, were as definitely fixed as the rights of a land-owner in regard to his tenants now are. Only, in considering the Middle Ages, we must always take into account that arbitrary and violent acts, which the law would not tolerate in the present times, could then be performed with impunity. The obligations of the villein toward his lord were either rents in kind, as provisions, grain, cattle, or poultry, products of the land and farm; or labor, or services of the body, the corvées in the fields or the vineyard of the lord, the building of the castle or cleansing of the moat, the repairing of roads and the making of furniture, utensils, horse-shoes, ploughshares, carriages, etc. In the cities and wherever the villein was prosperous the lord was not sparing in the exaction of rents in money and arbitrary taxes. But a change was to come in time, and one of the clergy had already spoken these words: “The lord who demands unjust dues from his villeins does so at the peril of his soul”. If the fear of heaven was not sufficient restraint, the communes were already appearing, and the law officers of the crown were close behind. There were also certain fantastic feudal dues to enliven this dreary life lived by the feudal lord, shut up between the dismal walls of his castle from one year's end to another. In Bologna, in Italy, the tenant of the Benedictines of Saint Proculus paid as a fine the fumes of a boiled capon. Each year he brought his capon to the abbot, placed between two plates, uncovered it, and as soon as it stopped smoking, his rent was paid and he carried off his capon. Elsewhere the peasants brought solemnly to their lords, on a cart drawn by four horses, a little bird, or perhaps a maypole decorated with ribbons. The lords themselves often condescended to take a part in these popular comedies. The Margrave of Juliers, when making his solemn entrance, must be mounted on a blind horse, with a wooden saddle and a bridle of linden bark, and wearing two spurs of hawthorn, and carrying a white staff. Whenever the abbot of Figeac entered the city the lord of Monbrun received him in a grotesque costume and with one leg bare.

So the feudal lords, wearied with the monotony of their lives, joined sometimes in the laugh of the common people, as the Church did also when she authorized the celebration of the feast of the ass in her basilicas. Surely the powerful and the happy, in these times of sadness and poverty, with misery everywhere and no security to be found, owed to their serfs and villeins, at least, these few moments of forgetfulness and gayety.

The Middle Ages were indeed hard ages for the poor, when, in spite of all rules and all agreements, the nobles recognized no right but that of force. Theoretically the principles of the feudal relations are very admirable, but in practice they led to anarchy; for the judicial institutions were so defective that the bonds of the vassal relation were continually disregarded. This was the cause of the interminable wars which sprang up throughout all feudal Europe and which were the greatest scourge of the period. As everyone at once appealed to the sword if he had suffered any wrong or if he considered any sentence pronounced against him unjust, this society was usually in a state of war. Every hill became a fortress, and every plain a battlefield. Fortified in their strong castles, covered with iron armor, surrounded by warriors, the feudal lords, tyrants as they were called by a monk of the eleventh century, delighted in combats and knew no other way of enriching themselves except by pillage. There was no more commerce, for the roads were unsafe, no industry, for the lords who were masters also of the cities, taxed the burghers the moment they saw the least sign of wealth. The customs were different everywhere, as there were no general" laws, and each noble possessed the whole legislative power over his fief; the profoundest ignorance also prevailed everywhere except inside the walls of a few monasteries. The clergy, the guardians of the moral laws, were not able to forbid the prevailing violence, but only to regulate it somewhat by establishing the truce of God, which prohibited private war from Wednesday evening till Monday morning.

To the question, upon whom weighed the heavy burden of these feudal wars, we may answer that they were exceedingly fatal to the noble, though he was armed with iron; but they were much more so to the serf who was almost without all protecting armor. At Brenneville, where a battle took place between the kings of France and of England, of the 900 knights who fought, only three were killed. At Bouvines Philip Augustus was unhorsed, and was left sometime without defense in the hands of the foot-soldiers of his enemy; but they sought in vain for some defect in his armor through which to thrust the point of a dagger, and they struck him with many weapons without being able to break his cuirass. His knights could take their time in coming to his rescue and in replacing him on a horse. After this he rushed with them into the midst of the turmoil, and their long lances and heavy axes never struck in vain. Besides, if a noble were taken prisoner, it was another calamity, for his ransom must be paid. But who would pay for the burned cottage and harvest of the serf? Who would bind up his wounds, and who would care for the many widows and orphans?

Two contemporary authors, historians of the crusades, describe these disastrous times in the following words. Guibert of Nogent says: “Before the Christians started for the lands beyond the sea, the kingdom of France was a prey to continual disturbances and quarrels. The one subject of conversation was the brigandage on the public ways. There were numberless fires and wars waged in every direction for no better cause than insatiable cupidity. In short, covetous men showed no respect for property, and gave themselves up to pillage with unbridled audacity”. William, the archbishop of Tyre, says: “No property was secure. If anyone was thought to be rich it was considered reason enough for imprisoning him, keeping him in irons, and subjecting him to cruel tortures. Brigands, armed with swords, beset the roads, lay in ambush, and spared neither foreigners or the men consecrated to the work of God. Even the cities and strong places were not safe from these evils, for hired assassins made the streets and squares dangerous for men of property”. During the seventy years from 970-1040 there were forty years of either famine or plague.

Nevertheless, the progress of civilization is never so completely obstructed that three centuries can pass without bringing some good to mankind. Among the men of the Church there was a renewed activity of thought, and in secular society poetry again made its appearance.

There was also some progress in morality, at least among the ruling class. In the isolation in which everyone lived the soul gained a new vigor with which to face the ever present perils. The consciousness of the dignity of man, which had been destroyed by despotism, was felt again, and this society, that shed blood with the most perfect freedom, often showed a moral elevation formed only during that epoch. The low vices and indolence, the cowardice of the Romans of the age of decline and of conquered peoples, were utterly unknown at this time ; and we have inherited from it our sense of honor. The nobles of the feudal ages knew how to die, and this is the first step toward knowing how to live.

Another happy consequence of this system was the reor­ganization of the family. In the ancient cities a man lived anywhere but in his own house, his life was spent in the fields, or in the forum; he hardly knew his wife and children, while he had the power of life and death over them. In the first age after the conquest, the custom of virtual polygamy and the ease with which divorces could be obtained prevented the family life from being reformed. In the feudal society, where men lived in isolation, the father drew nearer to his family. When he was not busy with combats he was idle in his castle, which was perched like eagle's nest on the top of some mountain, and had nothing but his wife and children to occupy his heart and life. The Church, which had succeeded in making these rude soldiers bow down at the feet of a virgin, and had made them respect in the Mother of the Saviour all the virtues of women, softened the wild spirits of these warriors and prepared them to feel the charm of the finer spirit and more delicate sentiments bestowed by nature on the weaker sex. Woman returned to her proper place in the family and in society, the place assigned her by the Mosaic law. And more than this, she became the object of a worship which created new feelings, which were celebrated by the troubadours and trouveres, and was practiced in chivalry. Thus, as in the beautiful legend of St. Christopher, the strong was overcome by the weak, the giant by .the child.

This can be seen in an institution of the times. Robert d'Arbrissel founded near Saumur, at Fontevrault, about the year 1100, an abbey which soon became famous, and in which were recluses of both sexes. The women were cloistered, and spent their lives in prayer. The men worked in the fields, drained marshes, cleared the land, and were the constant servitors of the women. The abbey was governed by an abbess, "because Jesus Christ at his death had given his best beloved disciple to his mother as her son," says the bull of confirmation.

Except as regards the family, the state was certainly badly organized. We must, nevertheless, in spite of all things to the contrary, carefully observe the political theory which this society represents. Though the serf had no rights, the vassal had, and very extended ones too. The feudal relation was never formed except on conditions which were well known to him and accepted by him; no new conditions could be imposed upon him without his consent. From this fact the following great maxims of public right, in spite of a thousand violations of them, have come down to us : that no tax can be imposed without the consent of the tax-payers, no law is valid unless accepted by those who are to owe it obedience, and that no sentence is lawful unless pronounced by the peers of the accused. These are the rights maintained by feudal society, which were discovered under the ruins of absolute monarchy by the States-General of 1789; and as a guarantee of these rights, the vassal could break the tie which bound him to his lord by giving up his fief, or he could answer a refusal of justice from his suzerain by war. This right of armed resistance, recognized even by Saint Louis, led, indeed, to anarchy, and made the individual strong at the expense of society in general. But this was the proper place at which to begin. Before the state could be well organized it was necessary to raise the individual and the family; and this double task was the work of the Middle Ages.

The Church did much toward this end by establishing the sanctity of the marriage tie, even for the serf, by preaching the equality of all men before God, which was a continual protest against the great inequalities on earth; by proclaiming, in applying the principle of election to her highest office, the rights of intelligence as opposed to the only rights recognized by the feudal world, the rights of force; and finally by crowning with her triple crown, and by installing in the chair of St. Peter, a position higher than that of the kings, a serf, as was, perhaps, Hadrian IV, or the son of a poor carpenter, as Gregory VII was said to be.

Such were the customs which ruled in all the countries comprised within the limits of the empire of Charlemagne; that is, in almost the whole of the Germanic world, in France, Germany, Italy, and the north of Spain. The political geography of all these counties was formed on the lines of their feudal organization. Since the words, no land without a lord were the fundamental axiom of feudalism, there was not a single domain, however small, that was not to some extent incorporated in the hierarchy. Among all these rising ranks of suzerainties the royal suzerainty was the only one whose limits in any way corresponded with those of the different nationalities, which were already showing themselves though in the vaguest outlines

It is on the basis of this suzerainty, an empty word enough at the time, but containing all the future of the royal power, that we comprise, under the name of France, countries not then known by the name, but which were under the suzerainty of the Duke of France, in his quality of king. The duchy was still the most valuable and substantial possession of the king, although even this great fief had been much diminished in extent. The former vassals of Robert the Strong, the counts of Anjou, of Blois, and of Chartres, had become powerful feudatories; and of the former duchy of France Philip I. possessed only the counties of Paris, Melun, Étampes, Orleans and Sens, and did not even possess the right of free passage from one of these cities to another. Between Paris and Étampes there was the chateau of the lord of Montlhéry; between Paris and Melun the city of Corbeil, whose count hoped sometime to be able to found a fourth dynasty; and between Paris and Orleans the chateau of Puiset, which was finally taken by Louis VI after a three years’ war. Still nearer to Paris were the lords of Montmorency and of Dammartin ; and to the west the counts of Montfort, of Meulan, and of Mantes, all of whom robbed merchants and pilgrims, even when armed with the safe conduct of the king. These were the domains of the Duke of France; he also had powerful vassals in the counties of Ponthieu between the Canche and the Somme, of Amiens, of Vermandois and of Valois, and of Soissons and Clermont in Beauvais.

Surrounding the Duchy of France, now a royal domain, and between the Loire, the ocean, the Scheldt, the upper part of the Meuse and the Saone, were vast feudal principalities whose possessors rivaled their suzerain, the king, in wealth and in power. These were the county of Flanders, which extended from the Scheldt to St. Omer or beyond, and which was held under the emperors, as well as the kings of France, as the count had bought in the tenth century several German fiefs on the farther side of the Scheldt; the duchy of Normandy, which extended from the Bresle to the Couesnon, and whose owner had been master of England since 1066, and also claimed to hold Brittany in his tenure; the county of Anjou, to which Saintonge and Maine had been added, and whose proprietors often leagued themselves with the kings of the Capetian dynasty against Normandy, and in this way gained the dignity of grand seneschal; they were also related to the Capetians by various intermarriages; the duchy of Burgundy, which had been held since 1032 by a younger branch of the family of France; and finally the county of Champagne, which was exceedingly powerful under Eudes II (1019-1037).

Between the Loire and the Pyrenees the ancient kingdom of Aquitaine was divided into four great fiefs (fiefs dominants), the duchy of Aquitaine at the north, belonging since 845 to the powerful counts of Poitiers, at the south­west, between the Garonne and the Pyrenees, the duchy of Gascony, the title to which had been bought by the count of Poitiers in 1052; the county of Toulouse, to which had been joined the marquisate of Provence; and finally the county of Barcelona which lay partly to the south and partly the north of the eastern Pyrenees. Thanks to their remoteness from their suzerain, most of the lords of these fiefs styled themselves dukes and counts by the grace of God.

The great feudatories, immediate vassals of the crown, were called the peers of the king. When the institution of the peerage was regulated in the twelfth century, there were six lay and six ecclesiastical peers. The former were the dukes of Burgundy, Normandy, and Aquitaine, and the counts of Flanders, Champagne, and Toulouse ; the latter, the archbishop-duke of Rheims, the two bishop-dukes of Laon and of Langres, and the three bishop-counts of Beauvais, Châlons, and Noyon.

Among the rear fiefs there were at least one hundred counties and a great number of vice-counties, signories, episcopal counties, seignoral abbeys, baronies, etc.

It will not do to try to simplify the aspect of Europe by attributing too great an extent to the imperial suzerainty. The emperor at times pretended to consider France as a vassal state, and was justified in this by the tradition of former times; but his right was never recognized. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, reconstituted by Otto the Great in 962, really only comprised the kingdoms of Germany, Italy, and Arles. The kingdom of Germany, on becoming an empire, was directly subject to the emperor, as was Arles since the union of 1033. The kingdom of Italy, which extended as far as and included Beneventum, had also been directly subject to him since 962, though the Pope and the other great feudal lords at the center were almost independent. The popes had themselves received the homage of the Normans of Southern Italy. The kingdom of Arles itself soon became completely separated from the empire. The kingdom of Germany was bounded on the west by the Meuse and the Scheldt; on the northwest by the North Sea; on the north by the Eider, the Baltic, and by the Slavic territory; on the east by the Oder, with the kingdoms of Hungary and Poland; and on the south by the Alps. It was divided into nine great territorial divisions, namely:

The great duchy of Saxony, which extended from the Oder almost to the right bank of the Rhine, and from Friesland and Denmark, at the north, to Thuringia and Bohemia at the south.

Thuringia, which lay between Bohemia, Franconia, and Saxony, and was regarded as a province of the latter.

Bohemia and Moravia, subject to the same hereditary duke who had recognized the suzerainty of the empire, and who often succeeded in having his own suzerainty recognized by the King of Poland.

The duchy of Bavaria, which lay between the Alps and the mountains of Bohemia, and included the East Mark, which later became Austria.

The duchy of Carinthia, on the upper part of the Drave and the Save.

Alemannia, which included Swabia, which latter name was beginning to predominate over the other, and which extended to the German Switzerland and to Alsace.

Franconia, which lay between Swabia to the south, the Bavarian Nordgau, and Thuringia to the east, Saxony to the north, and the Rhine to the west.

Lorraine, which extended from Franconia and Saxony to the Scheldt and beyond the upper part of the Meuse.

Friesland, which was situated on the shores of the North Sea, These were the eight great German duchies, for Thuringia, as dependent on Saxony, did not count. Besides these there were nine or ten marken (margravates), a great number of counties, and several prince-bishoprics, and seignorial abbeys. This German feudalism was as yet not very thoroughly organized, but it was to become powerful, while the royal house, which was at this time much richer and stronger than in France, was to lose all its domains and power. We shall see the causes that led to this result in later chapters.

The kingdom of Arles, lying between the south of France on the west, the Mediterranean on the south, and the Alps, the Reuss, the Rhine, and the southern part of the Vosges on the east and north, was at the same time within and without the boundaries of modern France, and extended over Languedoc, Provence, the Dauphine, Lyonnais, Franche-Comté, Savoy, and Switzerland. Like the others, it con­tained both ecclesiastical and lay principalities. The county of Savoy was destined eventually to have a brilliant career. The power of the kings of Aries disappeared, however, very early. It was first divided into two states, transjurane Burgundy and cisjurane Burgundy, then reunited in 933, and finally, a century later, was bequeathed to the King of Germany. He made it nominally a part of the German empire, but in reality it only belonged to its feudal chiefs, its bishops, and counts.

We have seen that, by his edict of 1037, Conrad prevented the formation of any extended feudal system in Italy, and as a result many of the cities had become virtually republics. The kingdom of Italy was composed of the following states and cities : Lombardy, in which were the two great cities of Milan and Pavia, around one or the other of which most of the other Lombard cities were grouped; on the coasts of the two seas there were situated three rich and powerful cities: Venice, which already possessed the coasts of Dalmatia across the Adriatic; Genoa, the mistress of Corsica ; and Pisa, the mistress of Sardinia ; the duchy or marquisate of Tuscany, the most powerful of all the Italian fiefs. In the center of the peninsula were situated the domains of the Church, in the ancient Exarchate which was claimed both by the Pope and the Archbishop of Ravenna, and also the republic of Rome, whose jurisdiction extended over the whole Roman Campagna, the ancient Latium. In the south the Lombard Dukes of Benevento at first kept a better hold on their duchy than did Charlemagne's successors on his crown, and the emperors of the Eastern Empire still retained various points on the coasts, which were continually harassed by the Arabs. The latter had landed in Sicily in 827.

Some newcomers, the Normans, were trying to reconcile these various masters of Southern Italy with each other by subjugating them all; and in the eleventh century they founded four states in Southern Italy, the principality of Capua and Aversa, the duchy of Apulia and Calabria, the principality of Tarentum, and the great county of Sicily.

Spain was engaged in bitter struggles with the Moors, but by the end of the century succeeded in conquering Oporto, Toledo, and Valencia; the kingdom of Oviedo became the kingdom of Leon. The Carolingian mark, at the source of the Ebro, had also become a part of the kingdom of Navarre; that of Barcelona, in Catalonia, the land of the Goths, had remained a county and was dependant on France, though very powerful. Since 1035 there had been a fourth kingdom, the kingdom of Aragon. 'We shall return to these Spanish kingdoms and give their history later on.

The feudal system had been carried to England by the Normans, but under conditions and with consequences which were peculiar to the country, and which impelled it in quite a different direction from the rest of feudal Europe. As feudalism arose from the institutions and the vicissitudes of the Carolingian empire, it did not exist, strictly speaking, in the Slavic and Scandinavian countries. We will, however, give a slight sketch of the political geography of these countries during the eleventh century.

The kingdom of England, conquered by William the Bastard in 1066, extended from the Channel to Carlisle and Bamborough in the north, which served as a bulwark against Scotland; the country of Wales was beyond the Norman dominion, and they were obliged to build a line of strong castles, which were given into the keeping of the lords of the frontiers (Marches), to arrest Welsh incursions; Scotland had lost Cumberland, which was now attached to England, and several of her peninsulas at the west and north were held by the King of the Isles. Ireland was still independent, and divided among several native kings.

Denmark was composed of Jutland, of the Danish Isles, and of Scania, on the coast of Sweden. Norway was com­posed of the county of Orkney, the Faroe Islands, etc.

Sweden had the islands of Aeland and of Gotland, a part of Lapland and the coasts of Finland. The piracy of the vikings had ceased in the three Scandinavian kingdoms, and monarchical unity was re-established; but the ambitions of the different families, internecine wars, and the geographical position of these countries, which seemed to put them outside the general range of the affairs of Christendom, prevented their inhabitants for a long time from taking any part in European politics.

There were Slavic states on the shores of the Baltic, and we have also the duchy of Poland; the state of the Prussians and that of the Lithuanians; the Grand Duchy of Russia, which was divided into a number of rival principalities, and the kingdom of Hungary, which was separated from Bohemia by the Moravian mark.

In Europe, the Empire of the East possessed the great peninsula to the south of the Danube and the Save, between the Archipelago, the Adriatic, and the Black Sea, with the exception of Croatia, which had been recently conquered by the Hungarians; and in Asia Minor it still held some fortified cities on the coast. Menaced by the Normans of Italy, who wished to get possession of Greece, by the Arabs of Egypt and Africa, who infested the Archipelago, by the Turks of Asia Minor, who were encamped on the opposite side of the Bosphorus, by the Russians, who had besieged Constantinople four times, and by the Petchenegs, who had quite recently taken possession of Thrace, and besides this, ill supported by the barbarians of every race who lived in his provinces or were in his pay, the Emperor Alexis was soon obliged to call the Christian peoples of the west to the aid of the last remains of the Roman empire.

CHAPTER XVI.

CIVILIZATION IN THE NINTH AND TENTH CENTURIES.

Charlemagne’s fruitless efforts in behalf of Literature.—Second Renaissance after the year 1000.—Latin language.—Language of the common People.—Chivalry, Architecture.

WE have seen how complete a dissolution of the social order of things followed Charlemagne’s death. Civilization shared the same fate, though its elements had begun to draw together and take shape under his hands. He had clearly seen that unity of ideas is the cement which is indispensable to political unity, and, like all great minds, he had a strong desire to reign over a civilized rather than a barbarian empire. Hence his letters and capitularies, in which he ordains that schools for children shall be formed, and the sons, not only of serfs but also of free men, shall be called in; that is to say, not only the children of the poor country people to whom the warriors disdainfully left the humble and peaceful career of the clerk and the monk, but also those who were one day to take the places of those warriors and carry the great swords of their fathers in battle. “You are counting”, he said to the sons of his noblemen, when, after examining them himself he found that they knew less than the children of the poor, “you are counting on the services rendered by your fathers, but I wish you to know that they have had their reward, and that the State owes nothing except to him who has deserved it by his own efforts”.

Mandates like those, uttered by such a man, could have no other result than to form an enlightened community of laymen which would have changed the character of the Middle Ages. Though he had to make a stubborn fight against the obstinacy and boorishness of his people, Charlemagne had already succeeded in opening public schools near every monastery and every cathedral church in the empire. The counts and knights sent their children to them whether they wished to do it or not. On his death there was, no doubt, a feeling of universal joy, as on the death of Louis XIV. All the school-going nobility threw their Latin and Teutonic grammars to the winds; they saw with joy a career of civil war opening before them, when every one could do as he chose, and where there was room for as much license as valor.

All hope was lost of forming an enlightened society. The ecclesiastical body at least had retained something of the impetus which Charlemagne had given to learning. Beneath the ruins of the great structure which he had raised, and which had not been entirely overthrown, a refuge was found for an intellectual development possessing a certain grandeur of its own. Alcuin’s place was filled by Hincmar, and Charles the Bald endeavored to imitate Charlemagne. In 855 the law and a council vied with each other in recommending instruction in both divine and humane literature; in 859 they made fresh attempts to restore the Carolingian schools, “because the suspension of study in this way leads to ignorance of the faith and to a dearth of all knowledge”. We find in the year 882 the first mention of the episcopal school at Paris, whose later career was so brilliant, and in the catalogue of the St. Requier library for the year 831, 256 volumes are noted, among which were the Eclogues of Virgil and the Rhetoric of Cicero, Terence, Macrobius, and perhaps Trogus Pompeius, which last is lost to us.

About that time there was a philosophical movement and disputes which foreshadowed those of the great centuries of the Middle Ages; the German monk Gottschalk believed that he had found the dogma of predestination in the writings of St. Augustine. After being opposed by the learned bishop of Mainz, Rabanus Maurus, a disciple of Alcuin, and being condemned by two councils, he was confined in a cloister by Hincmar, until his death, but he did not once show a desire to retract his words. The celebrated Irish­man, John Scotus Erigena, who was charged by Hincmar to reply to him, had to be in turn suppressed because his argument was so exclusively dialectic and philosophical, as he himself called it, and drawn, in fact, from the study of the ancient philosophers. But the political confusion was daily increasing; the empire was entirely broken up; the nobles were fighting, despoiling, and working havoc at their will. There was no room for scholarship in the midst of such confusion. So.it vanished, except in a few isolated monasteries where the last feeble rays of science found their only refuge from the fierce blasts of the tenth century. Outside these walls there reigned profound darkness; frightful misery, both physical and moral; plagues and famines, when human flesh, and flour mixed with chalk, brought their weight in gold. It seemed as if physical death was about to get possession of the world which had already been overcome by intellectual death ; indeed, mankind itself was persuaded of this fact. As the year 1000 approached no more building went on, no repairing, no laying by for a future day, at least for a future here below. They gave their lands and their houses to the clergy, mundi fine appropinquante, for the end of the world was at hand.

But, like all other hours, this hour of anguish and irrepressible terror passed by. The sun rose again on the first day of the year 1001. Suspended animation returned with new vigor. The world gave thanks to the God who had let them live, by conceiving a glorious thought of Christian unity and of religious heroism, which was expressed by the head of Christianity: “Soldiers of Christ”, cried Silvester II (999-1003), referring to the ruin of Jerusalem, “Soldiers of Christ, arise, you must fight in his cause”. A century had not elapsed before millions of men had responded to this call.

In the meantime, all went to work; the earth seemed to cast aside its age and to deck itself in a fine array of new churches. Basilicas were rebuilt, monasteries were founded. Only 1108 had been built in France in the space of eight centuries, while 326 sprang up in the eleventh, and 702 in the twelfth century. In the rest of Christian Europe the same pious duties were being performed, and in equal number, for in those two centuries the movement which put a fourth part of the soil into the hands of the clergy was at its height. It was at that time a useful measure, though it had bad results later on.

At the same time life returned to the intellectual world. Silvester II set the example. While yet a simple monk of Aurillac, under the name of Gerbert, he went to study liter­ature, algebra, and astronomy, among the Mohammedans of Spain, and to open up to Christian Europe a new source of knowledge, Arabian science; he collected a large library, constructed globes, and contrived a pendulum-clock, such a wonderful thing to the multitude, that he passed in their eyes for a magician who had sold himself to the devil. In 1022 heretical opinions made their appearance in Orleans: it was not a symptom of declining strength but of a new growth of religious feeling ; the human mind was anxious to be convinced of what it believed. Thirteen heretics, condemned by a council, perished at the stake.

Society had already grown tired of brigandage; by instinct it was led to emerge from the general confusion, to take its stand on the new foundations which had been formed in the midst of the chaos, to lead a more regular social life, and to develop with some security the new civilization born of the stormy elements and convulsions of the tenth century. As interpreter of the public need, whence she drew the authority for her commands, the Church was not afraid to place bounds upon the violence of the barons : she established the Truce of God (1041), which forbade all private warfare from Wednesday evening till Monday morning, and threatened all who transgressed this law with the most severe punishments, both temporal and spiritual.

The two societies, the ecclesiastic and the lay, the one owning as it did, but one master, obeying one idea, mature and well wrought out, and undertaking to correct and repress the other society; the latter of recent growth, developing spontaneously and having no guide but its passion and instincts, these two societies have henceforth their separate languages. The speech of the first had not changed; in its churches and convents, sheltered from the storms without, it had preserved the language of universal domination and of learning, the Latin language—not, it is true, in its pristine purity, but adapted to present needs, a living and national language, so to speak, in the domain of the Church. The second language, emerging from its infancy, brought with it many new idioms, still imperfect, rough, uncertain, and variable, but they were used by all, they had life and vigor, and were the expression of the thoughts and feelings which animated all men. In Germany the spoken language was Teutonic, confined, perhaps, after the tenth century, to the other side of the Meuse; in Italy, the Italian language, which had not yet produced anything, though, thanks to Dante and Petrarch, it was destined to reach its perfection sooner than the others; in France, the Romance language, which was already divided into the northern Romance, (langue d'oil), and the southern Romance or Provencal, (langue d’oc), following the different manners and characters of these two portions of Gaul. The Romance language developed from the Gallo-Roman language, which was spoken in the two Gauls at the time of the Roman empire, and which the barbarians of Germany and the north had modified, according as their genius or their ignorance led them. Its foundation is Latin; almost no changes occur except in the forms. Analysis takes the place of synthesis. Inflexion by terminations to indicate the case of substantives and the person of verbs was too subtle for the barbarian mind and gave way to articles, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs. The sonorous quality of the languages of the south took on a hard sound in the harsh voices of the north. The Normans, who adopted the language of the conquered nations among whom they settled, have been most active in the work of language formation. For instance, out of charitas they have made chariti, while the southern tribes stopped at the first transformation which this word underwent, namely, charitas. We have before us then the two instruments of the literature of the Middle Ages: first, the Latin, imposing in its unity; and second, the common and national idioms in all their diversity; one the organ of the spiritual, the other the organ of the temporal world. Debates on religious and philosophical subjects were held, and the chronicles were written in Latin, and no longer, as in Charlemagne’s time, was it the will of one man, but the needs of all, which caused this revival in letters. The monasteries were now the centers of learning.

All France joined in this second renaissance, and especially the province of Normandy, where the warlike spirit of feudal society had already showed itself in its highest form of expression. The magnificent abbey of Fontenelle or of St. Vandrille, restored by the duke in the year 1035, was a Norman possession; also that of Jumieges, whose imposing ruins can still be seen, and the Abbey of Bec, founded in 1040, which acquired fame at the very beginning of its existence owing to the presence of two great doctors there, Lanfranc and St. Anselm, not to mention the monasteries of St. Stephen of Caen, of Rouen, of Avranches, of Bayeux, of Fecamp, and of Mt. St. Michael, in the midst of the dangers of the deep (in periculo maris). William the Bastard was called the Conqueror, but he also earned the name of the great builder. If the noblemen did not know how to write, by right of birth, and "in the capacity of barons," the monks, in the retirement of the monasteries, were no longer content merely to copy the rare manuscripts which have survived the shipwreck of ancient civilization; they took an interest in the events going on about them, and wrote them down, or they made great efforts to strengthen their faith by theological discussions, which again showed signs of learning. Richer, who was a pupil of Silvester II, and a physician as well as a monk, wrote in the Abbey of St. Remi a history of the tenth century, in which he imitates Sallust, as Eginhard imitated Suetonius. Abbo, a monk of St. Germain, sings in rather limping verse the exploits of Count Eudes and the Parisians against the Norsemen, while another monk, William, at the abbey of Jumieges, wrote the history from the Norman point of view.

While some were writing others were teaching, and scholars flocked from far and near. More than four thousand gathered to listen to the Italian Lanfranc (1005-1089) at St. Stephen’s of Caen. He tried in vain to find a refuge in the solitude of Bee from the reputation which followed him even there; in spite of himself he was raised to the archbishopric of Canterbury. The intellectual activity thus reviving sometimes turned aside from the beaten track. The heresy which led thirteen unfortunate beings to the stake in 1022 has already been mentioned. Another heresy, stirred up by Berengar of Tours, troubled the Church for more than thirty years (1050-1080). Berengar, like Scotus Erigena, looked upon the Eucharist as a symbol merely, and subjected the articles of his faith to a process of reasoning. “You must, however, be resigned not to understand”, the Bishop of Liege, his friend, said to him “for can you ever understand the mystery of God?”

But Berengar wished to account to himself for his belief and boldly carried his reasoning powers into the midst of the mysteries. He is one of the forerunners of Luther, though Luther did not know any of his writings. Lanfranc was his principal adversary.

St. Anselm, an Italian like Lanfranc, and his successor at the Abbey of Bec and in the see of Canterbury, gave a fresh impulse to dogmatic theology, which had been almost neglected since the time of St. Augustine, that is, for six centuries. He took his stand upon the dogmas of Christianity, with an absolute faith in them, and employed all the force of his powerful intellect and all the resources of dialectics, that is to say, of the art of reasoning, to demonstrate their truth. He has sometimes Descartes’ power of close reasoning, and the famous proof of the existence of God, which was given by the father of modern philosophy when, starting from the sole fact of thought, he reached the absolute being who is in himself the cause and origin of thought, is in fact, one of St. Anselm's arguments.

Like Lanfranc, St. Anselm had to cope with bold innovators who, with the aid of dialectics, so dangerous an ally of theology, shook the foundations of the dogmas in their desire to submit them to the tests of reasoning according to the rules of Aristotle's logic. Berengar had attempted to interpret the mystery of the Eucharist; Roscelin, about the year 1085, attacked the mystery of the Trinity, and the growing scholasticism began with the quarrels between Realists and Nominalists, those subtle" discussions which wasted the efforts of many hard-working minds.

While the human mind was being led back by scholasticism to the exercises of its noble speculative functions, and while the cool shades of the cloisters of Bec and of St. Victor resounded with the Latin argumentations of Christian philosophers, other voices, other subjects, and another language roused the echoes in the castles or mingled with the clashing of arms on the field of battle.

The barbarian warriors loved the songs of their bards, which stimulated their courage, and doubtless, also, opened new fields to their imagination in the inevitable periods of repose. The feudal warriors, who were equally eager for battle and the adventures of war, but who were condemned sometimes to shut themselves up for long seasons in their dull castles, loved to hear tales of warlike deeds. They had their bards, called in the north trouveres, and in the south troubadours, and also their jongleurs. The trouvere and the troubadour, as their names indicate, invented and composed the poem, the jongleur (jocalator) recited it. Sometimes the same man combined both functions. The jongleurs are seen in very early times ; there were some attached to the court of Charlemagne and to that of Louis the Pious ; a capitulary of the year 789 forbade all bishops, abbots, and abbesses to have them in their service. Later, their numbers multiplied. They wandered from castle to castle with a musical instrument on their back or attached to their saddle bows, if they were able to afford a mount. The barons, the chatelains, the squires and noble ladies all welcomed the trouvere with joy; he brought diversion with him and romance, which shortened the long evenings when books were rare things, and usually he went away again richly rewarded. Such was the first noble use to which the popular language came.

The trouveres drew their songs from many sources, and their long epic poems, or chansons de gestes, of twenty, thirty, or fifty thousand verses each, may be classified in several cycles. First came the Carolingian cycle, of a religious and at the same time feudal character. Here the principal hero is Charlemagne, glorified in story. He is no longer the energetic and skillful leader of the Austrasians, who makes himself Emperor, fights the Saxons, and signs capitularies; he is a monarch for the fancy, like the figures in a confused dream, which extend and expand until their out­lines are lost in uncertainty. Charlemagne is the type conceived of by the popular imagination; other kings of earlier or later times are rarely if ever mentioned; and their great deeds are almost always imputed to him; according to them he gained the great victory at Tours. Hatred toward the Saracens is the ruling religious feeling of the eleventh century, the century which gave birth to the crusades. Accordingly the popular epic forgets Charlemagne's long-continued efforts to establish his markgrafen on the banks of the Ebro, but makes him victorious over the Saracens even as far as Asia, and leads him in triumph from Jerusalem to Constantinople. Nevertheless this colossus who bestrides the seas is at the same time a weak creature, almost a nonentity, and much abused ; it is his twelve peers who do the work. It is a picture of the rebellious feudal society of the eleventh century, a flattery of the lord of the castle by the trouvere. Though the monotonous prolixity of these poems is wearying, yet some of the passages which breathe of heroism can thrill us, even to this day. For instance, in the Chanson de Roland, to mention but one, where the hero, taken by surprise in the valley of Roncevaux and unable to make the sound of his olifant reach the ears of Charlemagne, bids farewell to his good sword Durandal, and lies down to die with his face toward Spain. Such passages, when sung with spirit, incited the warriors to great deeds. Thus at the battle of Hastings (1066), the jongleur Taillefer went before the army of William the Conqueror and

On a fleet-footed horse,

Before the Dukes he rode, and sang

Of Charlemagne and of Roland,

Of Oliver and of the vassals

Who died at Roncevals.

Another poem of the same cycle, the Roman des Lohérains, is remarkable for giving an energetic account of the struggle which we have already described between the two feudal races, namely, the Lorraine or German and the Picard or French races. The second epic cycle was the Armorican cycle, whose hero is Arthur, the famous defender of British independence. Robert Wace, in the twelfth century, collected the many legends scattered among the people, in his Roman de Brut, which gave expression to the sentiments and customs of the period.

A third cycle followed closely after, which took Alexander for its hero, and influenced by the revival in the study of the classics, transported the romance of chivalry over to the field of antiquity.

The epic poets addressed their verses to the chivalrous class of society. This class of men had been in existence in all its glory even as early as Philip I and the first crusade. Chivalry is one of those facts which seem to belong rather to romance than to real history. Nevertheless it really existed, in all its phases. Even in the customs of the German tribes we can trace its faint beginning, in that ceremony where the young man publicly received his shield and javelin, and became a warrior and a citizen by virtue of these insignia. Since then the sword had always been the symbol of a sort of investiture; in 791, at Ratisbon, Charlemagne with great solemnity girded his son Louis the Pious with the sword; in 838 Louis conferred the same honor on Charles the Bald, adding: "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." Here we see an element of religious consecration already added to the simple ceremony of arming.

Now it happened that the noble lords, who were cut off from the rest of the world and yet had sovereign power in their castles, took pleasure in forming little courts for themselves and drawing around them their vassals, who were expected to render personal services, which were not considered humiliating but rather a mark of distinction. These vassals formed a hierarchy, comprising constable, marshal, seneschal, chamberlain, butler, cup-bearer, etc. But the vassals did not come alone to the court of their sovereigns, but were accompanied by their sons, who were to receive there the education and accomplishments of the great castles, and to render services of a certain kind, as, for instance, those of a page, squire, etc. When a young man seemed to be sufficiently accomplished in the art of setting and serving a table and in that of clothing and arming the knight, he was himself made a knight, by a sort of ordination which he received at the hands of his feudal lord, in a solemn ceremonial.

First came a bath, the symbol of the purity which ought to distinguish a knight; a red robe, of the blood he ought to spill; a black robe, of the death that awaited him. A fast of twenty-four hours followed, and after that a night passed in prayer in the church. The next day, after the rites of confession, communion, and a sermon, a consecrated sword was hung about the neck of the applicant, who knelt down before his lord and begged for knighthood. Then the knights, or sometimes the ladies, invested him with spurs, and the hauberk or coat of mail, the cuirass, the armlets, the gauntlets, and finally the sword, after which the lord gave him the accolade, by striking him upon the shoulders three times with the flat of the sword and saying : "In the name of God, of St. Michael, and of St. George, I make thee a knight." The next minute the young cavalier sprang upon his courser, in the middle of the crowd assembled in the courtyard of the castle. A knight's duties were to pray, to avoid sin, to defend the church, the widow and the orphan, to protect the people, to travel far and wide, to make war loyally, to fight for his lady, to love his lord, and to listen to good and true men; "as of old King Alexander, so ought a knight to conduct himself."

The society of that time, though lawless, had been able to create an ideal of perfection for itself. The man of the Middle Ages looked up to his patron saint as a model in the religious life, and to the knight in civil and political life.

A new style of architecture had arisen by the side of the new science of scholasticism, the new poetry of the chansons de gestes and the new military regime of chivalry. "About three years after the year 1000," said Rodulf Glaber, " the churches were renovated almost throughout the whole world, especially in Italy and the Gauls, although the greater part were still in good enough condition not to need repairing." The public buildings, whose construction until then showed signs of ignorance and haste, with no thought of the future, were built more solidly and with grander proportions. Societies of builders were formed about this time, and their numbers included bishops and abbots; in the church, especially, the architectural art was cultivated, and the monks above all others lent their assistance; some artists from Italy, where the arts had never been completely neg­lected, took part, it is true, in the work and introduced the methods of Byzantine artists. In the south, especially, the Roman style of architecture, which had left many monuments there, exercised a great influence upon the conceptions of the period. The modern Greek, the Roman, and sometimes a mixture of the two, are the characteristic forms of Romance architecture, also called Byzantine, Lombard, Saxon, etc. Their buildings show the semicircular arch and columns, also the steep roofs, due to the climate, and great towers for the defense of the church.

Most of the churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries preserved the original arrangement of the Latin basilica. After that time, however, a change took place which ushered in a new period. Various new forms or combinations of forms were introduced. At the head of the church rose the bell tower, a marked characteristic of the western churches, at first broad and low, later slender and pointing heavenward. In the interior, the general system of vaulting was substituted for the ceilings and woodwork of the old Christian basilicas; the choir and galleries were extended beyond the cross, the passage ran around the apse, and accessory chapels came to be grouped about the sanctuary. These successive modifications lead us little by little to the arrangement of the so-called Gothic churches.

The state of society which we have been reviewing was complete in itself and new, for it lacked none of the qualifications necessary to social existence, and in each of its manifestations it showed an original character. Church and feudalism, the scholastic philosophy and the songs of the trouveres, chivalry and the Gothic churches all belong exclusively to this state of society, have never been seen in any other, and will never be seen again. It no longer resembled the abortive attempts even of a Theodoric or a Charlemagne; the strange joining of barbarism and civilization, the shafts of antique columns stolen from Ravenna and badly patched together in the imperial palace of Aix-la-Chapelle; it was a creative society and an organic period in the life of humanity.