known as chevaliers-bannerets. These chevaliers had the privilege of exercising certain rights that other knights did not possess.
To be created chevalier-banneret one had to be twenty-one years of age. If a chevalier was already a bachelier, a grade inferior to that of a banneret, to become a full blown chevalier he had only to cut the points from his standard – a pennon– when it and he became a banneret; that is to say, he had the right to carry a banner, or to possess a fief de bannière.
There were three classes of fiefs in feudal France. First; the fief de bannière, which could furnish twenty-five combatants under a banner or flag of their own. Second; the fief de haubert, which could furnish a well-mounted horseman fully armed, accompanied by two or three varlets or valets. Third; the fief de simple écuyer, whose sole offering was a single vassal, lightly armed.
There was, too, a class of nobles without estates. They were known as seigneurs of a fief en l’air, or a fief volant, much like many courtesy titles so freely handed around to-day in some monarchies.
A vassal was a dweller in a fief under the control of the seigneur. The word comes from the ancient Frankish gessell.
The chevaliers, not the highest of noble ranks, but a fine title of distinction nevertheless, bore one of four prefixes, don, sire, messire, or monseigneur. They could eat at the same table with the monarch, and they alone had the right to bear a banner-lance in warfare, or wear a double coat of mail.
In 1481, Louis XI began to abolish the bow and the lance in France, in so far as they applied to effective warfare. The first fire-arms had already appeared a century before, and though the coulevrines and canons à main were hardly efficient weapons, when compared with those of to-day, they were far more effective than the bow and arrow at a distance, or the javelin, the pike and the lance near at hand. Then developed the arquebuse, literally a hand-cannon, clumsy and none too sure of aim, but a fearful death-dealer if it happened to hit.
The feudal lords, the seigneurs and other nobles, had the right of levying taxes upon their followers. These taxes, or impôts, took varying forms; such as the obligation to grind their corn at the mills of the seigneur, paying a heavy proportion of the product therefor; to press their grapes at his wine-press, and bake their bread in his ovens. At Montauban, in the Garonne, one of these old seigneurial flour mills may still be seen. The seigneurs were not ostensibly “in trade,” but their control of the little affairs of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker virtually made them so.
More definite taxes – demanded in cash when the peasants could pay, otherwise in kind – were the seigneurial taxes on fires; on the right of trade (the sale of wine, bread or meat); the vingtaine, whereby the peasant gave up a twentieth of his produce to the seigneur; and such oddities as a tax on the first kiss of the newly married; bardage, a sort of turnpike road duty for the privilege of singing certain songs; and on all manner of foolish fancies.
After the taxation by the seigneurs there came that by the clerics, who claimed their “ecclesiastical tenth,” a tax which was levied in France just previous to the Revolution with more severity, even, than in Italy.
Finally the people rose, and the French peasants delivered themselves all over the land to a riot of evil, as much an unlicensed tyranny as was the oppression of their feudal lords. One may thus realize the means which planted feudal France with great fortresses, châteaux and country houses, and the motives which caused their destruction to so large an extent.
It was the tyranny of the master and the cruelty of the servant that finally culminated in the Revolution. Not only the petty seigneurs had been the oppressors, but the Crown, represented by the figurehead of the Bourbon king in his capital, put the pressure on the peasant folk still harder by releasing it on the nobles. The tax on the people, that great, vague, non-moving mass of the population, has ever produced the greatest revenue in France, as, presumably, it has elsewhere. In the days before the Revolution it was le peuple who paid, and it was the people who paid the enormous Franco-German war indemnity in 1871.
The feudality in France, in its oppressive sense, died long years before the Revolution, but the aristocracy still lives in spite of the efforts of the Assembly to crush it – the Assembly and the mob who sang:
“Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,
Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,
Les aristocrates on les pendra!”
And the French noblesse of to-day, the proud old French aristocracy, is not, on the whole, as bad as it has frequently been painted. They may, in the majority, be royalists, may be even Bonapartists, or Orléanists, instead of republicans, but surely there’s no harm in that in these days when certain political parties look upon socialists as anarchists and free-traders as communists.
The honour, power and profit derived by the noblesse in France all stopped with the Revolution. The National Assembly, however, refused to abolish titles. To do that body justice they saw full well that they could not take away that which did not exist as a tangible entity, and it is to their credit that they did not establish the new order of Knights of the Plough as they were petitioned to do. This would have been as fatal a step as can possibly be conceived, though for that matter a plough might just as well be a symbol of knighthood as a thistle, a jaratelle, a gold stick or a black rod.
In France a whole seigneurie was slave to the seigneur. Under feudal rule the clergy (not the humble abbés and curés, but the bishops and archbishops) were frequently themselves overlords. They, at any rate, enjoyed as high privileges as any in the land, and if the Revolution benefited the lower clergy it robbed the higher churchmen.
Just previous to the Revolution, the clergy had a revenue of one hundred and thirty million livres of which only forty-two million five hundred thousand livres accrued to the curés. The difference represents the loss to the “Seigneurs of the Church.”
With the Revolution the whole kingdom was in a blaze; famished mobs clamoured, if not always for bread, at least for an anticipated vengeance, and when they didn’t actually kill they robbed and burned. This accounts for the comparative infrequency of the feudal châteaux in France in anything but a ruined state. Sometimes it is but a square of wall that remains, sometimes a mere gateway, sometimes a donjon, and sometimes only a solitary tower. All these evidences are frequent enough in the provinces of the Pyrenees, from the more or less complete Châteaux of Foix and of Pau, to the ruins of Lourdes and Lourdat, and the more fragmentary remains of Ultrera, Ruscino and Coarraze.
The mediæval country house was a château; when it was protected by walls and moats it became a castle or château-fort; a distinction to be remarked.
The château of the middle ages was not only the successor of the Roman stronghold, but it was a villa or place of residence as well; when it was fortified it was a chastel.
A castle might be habitable, and a château might be a species of stronghold, and thus the mediæval country house might be either one thing or the other, but still the distinction will always be apparent if one will only go deeply enough into the history of any particular structure.
Light and air, which implies frequent windows, have always been desirable in all habitations of man, and only when the château bore the aspects of a fortification were window openings omitted. If it was an island castle, a moat-surrounded château, – as it frequently was in later Renaissance times, – windows and doors existed in profusion; but if it were a feudal fortress, such as one most frequently sees in the Pyrenees, openings at, or near, the ground-level were few and far between. Such windows as existed were mere
