its former conquerors, and adopting the very judicious policy or allowing the privileges of Franks to all who chose to live under the Salic and Ripuarian laws, made very little change in the property or possessions of those who chose to conform to that condition. It was only changing the superior or overlord, and exacting from the beneficiaries the same oath of allegiance and military service to their new conquerors which they had sworn to their former superiors, the emperors or governors. The Gentiles and Scutarii now became gentilshommes and ecuyers; the names by which we know the ancient beneficiaries to have been distinguished in the French monarchy.

馬

This hypothesis appears to afford a solution to all those difficulties which attend the history generally given of the origin of the feudal system. When we examine the accounts given by Pasquier, Mably, Condillac, and Robertson, we find the main difficulty to lie in this circumstance. The beneficia or feus are said, by these authors, to have been granted by the king or chief out of the conquered lands, to his chief captains or officers, as a reward of their services, and a tie to secure their aid and assistance when necessary in military expeditions. Yet it is at the same time allowed, and history will not permit the fact to be controverted, that these chiefs or kings had no land to bestow; for nothing is more certain than that, whatever conquest was made, whatever booty was gained, or lands acquired, the share of the chief was assigned to him by lot as well as that of the private men. Of this the anecdote of Clovis at the battle of Soissons furnishes a sufficient proof. The Abbé Mably, indeed, although he takes notice of this fact, and says at the same time that the first kings among the Franks had nothing to distinguish them from their subjects, unless the privilege of commanding the army, yet, when he comes to account for the origin of the beneficia, is forced to give them a portion of land, which he calls their domaine, and out of which, he says, they made gifts to such of the grandees as they wanted to secure to their interest. What this domaine was, however, he does not attempt to inform us. In fact, we have the best authority to say, that the lands which, during the Merovingian race, belonged to the king in patrimony, were a mere trifle, and could by no means be the subject of those gifts or benefices. Eginhart, in his Life of Charlemagne, speaking of the successors of Clovis, at the time when the mayors of the palace had begun to assume an ascendant, has these remarkable words :-"Regi, nihil aliud relinquebatur, quam ut, regio tantum nomine contentus, crine profuso, barbâ submissâ, solio resideret, ac speciem dominantis effingeret: cum præter inutile regis nomen, et precarium vitæ stipendium, quod ei præfectus aulæ, prout videbatur, exhibebat, nihil aliud proprii possideret quam unam, et eam perparvi redditus, villam, in qua domum, et ex quâ famulos sibi necessaria

ministrantes, atque obsequium exhibentes paucæ numerositatis habebat.”*

This passage gives a very complete idea of what was the extent of the king's domain at least, at the time when the mayors of the palace came to have authority, and we have no ground from history to presume that, before that period, it had ever been much more extensive. It seems, therefore, in every respect, a reason?ble hypothesis, that the beneficia, which could not have been created by the kings of the Franks out of their own property, were, in fact, not created by them at all, but subsisted in Gaul at the time of the invasion of the Franks. These conquerors, no doubt, dispossessed many of the Gauls of their lands, but they did not dispossess all. The Salic and Ripuarian laws establish many regulations with regard to the Romans and Gauls who possessed lands, subjecting them to the same burdens as the Franks, of furnishing horses, provisions, and carriages in time of war. Roman taxes and census being entirely abolished on the coming in of the Franks, the great ease which the Gauls found in being delivered from those burdens, to which their new services were comparatively light, very soon reconciled them to their new masters, and made them the most faithful of their subjects.

The

The authors who, according to the common supposition, hold these beneficia to have been granted by the kings of France out of their domain, involve themselves in another difficulty, for which they give but a very lame solution. The king, as may be supposed, being very soon divested of all his property, by the creation of a very few beneficia, it remains still to be accounted for, how these feudal tenures came to be universally prevalent, so that the whole property of the kingdom was held in that way for the fees created out of the domain could be divided only among a small number of the grandees; and the rest of the kingdom would be held as absolute and unlimited property. To account, therefore, for these tenures becoming universal, a very unnatural hypothesis is resorted to. Such of the subjects as held their lands in free property are supposed to have become sensible that it would be more for their advantage to hold them as beneficia, and to have surrendered them into the hands of the king, becoming bound to serve him in war, as the condition on which he was to restore them their property. The motive for this extraordinary

"

*"The king had no other marks of royalty than long hair and a long beard. He sat on his throne and mimicked the airs of a sovereign, but in reality he had nothing else but the name. His revenue, except a small country-seat and a few servants, was no more than the precarious bounty that was allowed him by the mayor of the palace."-Eginhart, Vit. Car. Magni.

"The domain of the Frank monarchs became afterwards more extensive, and their residences in different provinces of the kingdom more numerous; but we cannot attach any great ideas of magnificence to these establishments, when we find Charlemagne regulating the number of hens and geese which each is to maintain."-Gibbon, cap. 59, note 88.

proceeding is said to have been, that they found it necessary to have a powerful protection in the king or chief. But what protection could this king or chief afford them, who was a man, perhaps, poorer than themselves; and who, according to this notion, had no other certain dependence for assistance from his grandees, than from the few to whom he had granted benefices out of his domains? Had not these unlimited proprietors a much more powerful incitement to preserve their independence, which made each a sovereign within his own territory; and were they not better protected by that general equality which subsisted among them, as well as by that natural jealousy, which, being felt alike by all, would incite them to combine in preventing any one from attempting unjust encroachments?

When we further take into view, that these beneficia were, originally, only grants for life, and held to be revocable, at all times, at the will of the grantor, the supposition of any free and unlimited proprietor surrendering his possessions, to be held by such a tenure, is wholly incredible. The exchange would have been that of liberty for dependence; absolute property for precarious possession.

This power of disposing of the fortunes of their subjects, by the revocation of their benefices, could not long continue under such weak princes as those of the Merovingian race. The more pow

erful of the beneficiarii soon determined to render their situation more secure. A measure of this kind could not, it may be presumed, have been attempted, if all the beneficiarii had been, as at first, Romans and Gauls; but at this time, by the changes made by the sovereigns, a great part of the benefices must have come into the hands of Franks. These, taking advantage of the weakness of the monarchy, and of the disorders which occupied the kingdom, during the contests between Gontran and Childebert, determined to seize that opportunity of establishing themselves in their possessions. In a council held to treat of a peace between these princes, the beneficiarii obliged them to consent in a treaty, that the king should no longer be at liberty to revoke benefices once conferred. This innovation, however agreeable to the greater part of the beneficiaries, was a check to the ambition of such men as either had no land, or thought they had too little ; and these discontents afforded a pretext to succeeding princes for resuming their power of revocation. The treaty in question, however, was soon after solemnly confirmed in an assembly held at Paris.

Such was the state of the lands in France about the middle of the Merovingian period; part possessed in beneficia, or fiefs, which were now become hereditary, and part occupied by allodial, or absolute proprietors, the descendants of those Franks who received shares of land at the conquest. In that state of fluctuation, in which property of the former description remained, till it became

irrevocable n the manner mentioned, it is easy to perceive that allodial property was a much more valuable possession. Many of the allodial proprietors, during the perpetual civil wars of the Merovingian princes, found means greatly to increase the opulence and the extent of their territories. In those disorders, the castles and places of strength, where the more powerful lords resided, were naturally resorted to by the inhabitants of the territory. They were continually filled with retainers and dependents, who sought the protection of the lord or seigneur; which being of consequence in securing their possessions from invasion, they courted by making him annual presents, either of money or of the fruits of their lands. This connection became, in a very short time, that of vassal and superior; a tacit contract, by which the vassal was understood to hold his lands, upon the condition of paying homage to the superior, and military service when required-the symbol of which vassalage was a small annual present.

It was equally natural for the superior or seigneur to acquire a civil and criminal jurisdiction over his vassals. In those disorderly times, the dukes and counts, who were the judges in the provinces and districts, occupied with their own schemes of ambition, paid very little attention to the duties of their office. Many of them made a scandalous traffic of justice, oppressing the poor, and regulating their sentences according to the price paid for them. In this situation, the inferior ranks of the people naturally chose, instead of seeking justice through this corrupt channel, to submit their differences to the arbitration of their seigneurs, to whom they had sworn allegiance. By degrees, the vassals came to acknowledge no other judge than their superior; and, in the territory of these seigneurs, the public magistrates soon ceased to have any kind of jurisdiction.

The seigneurs were now the sole judges, as well as the commanders or military leaders, of all who resided within their territories. Even bishops and abbots who possessed seigneuries. exercised these powers, and led their men out to war. The whole kingdom was now divided between these seigneus and the beneficiarii-that is to say, all lands were held in feu either of the prince or of subject superiors.

CHAPTER III.

Charlemagne-The new Empire of the West-Manners, Government, and Customs of the Age-Retrospective View of the Affairs of the Church-Arian and Pelagian Heresies-Origin of Monastic Orders-Pillar-Saints-Auricular Confession.

THE Merovingian race of the kings of France having come to an end by the usurpation of Pepin, and the deposition of Childeric III., a new series of princes, the descendants of the illustrious Charles Martel, filled the throne of France for a period of 253

years.

The injudicious policy of Pepin in dividing between two ambitious princes, his sons, a kingdom already filled with intestine disorder, must soon have involved France in all the miseries of civil war, had not the fortunate death of Carloman averted this calamity. Charles was now acknowledged monarch of all France; and in the course of a glorious reign of forty-five years, this prince, who, in more respects than as a conqueror, deserved the surname of Great, extended the limits of his empire beyond the Danube, subdued Dacia, Dalmatia, and Istria; conquered, and rendered tributary to his crown, all the barbarous nations as far as the Vistula or Weser; made himself master of the greatest part of Italy, and alarmed the fears of the empire of the Saracens. The longest of his wars was that with the Saxons. It was thirty years before he reduced to subjection this ferocious and warlike people.

The motive of this obstinate war, on the part of Charlemagne, against a people who possessed nothing alluring to the avarice of a conqueror, was ambition alone; unless we shall suppose that the ardor for making proselytes had its weight with a prince, whose zeal for the propagation of Christianity was a remarkable feature in his character,-a zeal, however, which carried him far beyond the bounds which humanity ought to have assigned to it. Charlemagne left the Saxons but the alternative of being baptized or drowned in the Weser. Impartial history records with regret, that this conquest of the Saxons was stained with many instances of sanguinary ferocity on the part of the victor.

But the talents of Charlemagne were yet more distinguished in the civil and political regulation of his empire than in his extensive conquests. It was the misfortune of France, at this period, to be equally oppressed by the nobility and the clergy, two