after possessing Gaul and Spain, were reduced to the possession of a small territory at the junction of the two countries. The Ostrogoths, after possessing Italy, were compelled to yield to the Lombards, who gave their name to the northern part of that country. The Franks, who drove the Visigoths from Gaul, obtained complete possession of that country, and gave to it the name of France. The Burgundians settled in that province which has obtained its name from them. The Venedi took possession of the islands at the head of the Adriatic, to which they gave the name of Venice. The Huns gave their name to the country of Hungary, where they settled after a long career of rapine. The Sclavonians retained possession of Russia and Lithuania. The Vandals overran the south of Africa, and committed greater devastation than any other of the barbarous tribes; but they were afterwards conquered by Belisarius. Lastly, the Saxons, being invited by the Romans into Britain to assist them in driving out the Picts, conquered both Romans and Picts, and settled in the southern part of Britain.

These changes were not wrought without terrible suffering on the part of the original inhabitants of these several countries. The invaders being rude, fierce, and unacquainted with the amenities of civilized life, let loose their passions on the defenceless people without remorse, and in many cases with little obvious benefit to themselves. The Vandals were distinguished for fierceness even among so many who were fierce. They were the first of the barbarians who invaded Spain, which was one of the richest and most populous of the Roman provinces, and inhabited by a race distinguished for courage in the times when the Romans made their first attacks. But so entirely did they become enervated by their subjection to the Romans, that the Spaniards (then called Iberians) offered scarcely any resistance to the attacks of the Vandals, and consequently succumbed to them at a very early period of the barbarous irruption. The Vandals divided the country amongst them

selves by casting lots, but not before, with senseless barbarity, they had destroyed the whole face of that beautiful land. Famine and pestilence brought accumulated horrors on the poor inhabitants, and the living were in some instances forced to feed on the dead bodies of their countrymen. At a later period, when the Vandals had been some time in possession of Spain, and when the Goths attacked them, the inhabitants suffered redoubled miseries; for the country became then plundered by both parties, and what little yet remained from the ferocity of the Vandals was destroyed by the Goths.

When the Vandals were conquered by the Goths, and driven out of Spain, they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and landed in Africa, then a fertile province of the Roman empire, now the empire of Morocco. Here their ruthless cruelty was shewn as it had been in Spain. A contemporary writer, in giving an account of their proceedings, said: 'They found a province well cultivated, and enjoying plenty; the beauty of the whole earth. They carried their destructive arms into every corner of it; they dispeopled it by their devastations; exterminating every thing with fire and sword. They did not even spare the vines and fruittrees, that those, to whom caves and inaccessible mountains had afforded a retreat, might find no nourishment of any kind. Their hostile rage could not be satiated, and there was no place exempted from the effects of it. They tortured their prisoners with the most exquisite cruelty, that they might force from them a discovery of their hidden treasures. The more they discovered, the more they expected, and the more implacable they became. Neither the infirmities of age nor of sex; neither the dignity of nobility nor the sanctity of the sacerdotal office could mitigate their fury; but the more illustrious their prisoners were, the more barbarously they insulted them. The public buildings, which resisted the violence of the flames, they levelled with the ground. They left many cities without an inhabitant. When they approached any fortified place which

their undisciplined army could not reduce, they gathered together a multitude of prisoners, and putting them to the sword, left their bodies unburied, that the stench of their carcases might oblige the garrison to abandon it.'

The other tribes of barbarians carried similar destruction into other parts of what was once the Roman empire. The Huns were a very fierce race. They began to assail the empire in the fourth century, and the Romans, though accustomed to many tribes of barbarians, were said to have been more than usually struck with the wild ferocity of these people. They inhabited the flat country constituting modern Hungary, and made frequent incursions into what are now the southern and western provinces of the Austrian empire, at that time Roman provinces. Attila was a famous king of the Huns, and under him the barbarian armies were perpetually harassing the widely-extended provinces of the empire. He extorted enormous subsidies from the feeble emperors, as the price for a cessation of his depredations; but this was a remedy which only fed the disease, and it was not long before he attacked Gaul, Italy, and the more important parts of the empire.

Robertson remarks, that one of the best evidences of the mode in which the barbarians ravaged the invaded countries, was the state of Italy, and other countries, long after that period. Whenever any country is thinly inhabited, trees and shrubs spring up in the uncultivated fields, and spread by degrees into large forests; while, by the overflowing of rivers and the stagnating of waters, other parts of it become converted into lakes and marshes. Ancient Italy had been cultivated to the highest pitch, but so effectually did the devastations of the barbarians destroy all the effects of Roman industry and cultivation, that by the eighth century a considerable part of Italy appears to have been covered with forests and marshes of great extent.

These lamentable details would not occupy a place in our narrative, were it not that the rise of the feudal system was materially influenced by the exterminating policy of

SETTLEMENT OF THE BARBARIANS.

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the barbarians. If the inhabitants of the Roman provinces had suffered less by the change, and had been allowed to retain their commerce, their privileges, their social usages, the sub-stratum would have been wanting on which feudalism was founded, and therefore as one step, and an important one, in the progressive changes, these devastations demand our notice. Almost every part of Europe, from Scotland in the north to Italy in the south;-from Thrace in the east to Portugal in the west;—became by degrees overrun with various tribes of barbarians; and the permanent settlement of these tribes in the conquered countries gave rise to the FEUDAL SYSTEM, by steps which will next engage our attention.

CHAPTER II.

ESTABLISHMENT AND DIFFUSION OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM.

Modes of Partition of the conquered Territories by the Barbarians. Origin of the Feudal System. Meaning of the Term. The Feudal Chief and his Companions. Anecdote of Clovis King of the Franks. Two Modes of Feudal Tenure. Allodial and· Feudal Possessions. Practice of Sub-infeudalism.

WHEN the invading tribes settled in a country, those who had been least distinguished for rapine made a partition of the land between themselves and the original possessors; the principle of partition being different in different cases. Thus the Burgundians and the Visigoths took two-thirds of their respective conquests, leaving the remainder to the Roman proprietors; each Burgundian was quartered, under the name of 'guest,' upon one of the former tenants, who occupied the smaller portion of his former estate. The Vandals seized all the best lands in Northern Africa, without any regard to the former inhabitants. The Lombards in Italy took one-third part of the land. The Franks took possession, by public allotment or by private pillage, of a considerable part of the land in France, though it is not now known whether it was a definite and prescribed portion of the whole.

But the possession of a part of the conquered land does not give information as to the mode in which the conquerors shared this portion among themselves; we must look at the nature of the tie which bound them one to another. As they had their acquisitions to maintain, not only against such of the ancient inhabitants as had been spared, but against the more formidable inroads of new invaders, self-defence was in the first instance their chief care, and seems to have been the chief object of their first institutions and polity. The ties which bound them one to another had probably not been very stringent in