after our death, any one of our lieges, moved by love for God and our person, desire to renounce the world, and if he have a son or other relative capable of serving the public weal, let him be free to transmit to him his benefices and his honor, according to his pleasure.”
“If a count of this kingdom happen to die, and his son be about our person, we will that our son; together with those of our lieges who may chance to be the nearest relatives of the deceased count, as well as with the other officers of the said countship and the bishop of the diocese wherein it is situated, shall provide for its administration until the death of the heretofore count shall have been announced to us and we have been enabled to confer on the son, present at our court, the honors wherewith his father was invested.”
Thus the king still retained the nominal right of conferring on the son the offices or local functions of the father, but he recognized in the son the right to obtain them. A host of documents testify that at this epoch, when, on the death of a governor of a province, the king attempted to give his countship to some one else than his descendants, not only did personal interest resist, but such a measure was considered a violation of right. Under the reign of Louis the Stutterer, son of Charles the Bald, two of his lieges, Wilhelm and Engelschalk, held two countships on the confines of Bavaria; and, at their death, their offices were given to Count Arbo, to the prejudice of their sons. “The children and their relatives,” says the chronicler, “taking that as a gross injustice, said that matters ought to go differently, and that they would die by the sword or Arbo should give up the courtship of their family.” Heirship in territorial ownerships and their local rights, whatever may have originally been their character; heirship in local offices or powers, military or civil, primarily conferred by the king; and, by consequence, hereditary union of territorial ownership and local government, under the condition, a little confused and precarious, of subordinated relations and duties between suzerain and vassal—such was, in law and in fact, the feudal order of things. From the ninth to the tenth century it had acquired full force.
This order of things being thus well defined, we find ourselves face to face with an indisputable historic fact: no period, no system has ever, in France, remained so odious to the public instincts. And this antipathy is not peculiar to our age, nor merely the fruit of that great revolution which not long since separated, as by a gulf, the French present from its past. Go back to any portion of French history, and stop where you will; and you will everywhere find the feudal system considered, by the mass of the population, a foe to be fought and fought down at any price. At all times, whoever dealt it a blow has been popular in France.
The reasons for this fact are not all, or even the chief of them, to be traced to the evils which, in France, the people had to endure under the feudal system. It is not evil plight which is most detested and feared by peoples; they have more than once borne, faced, and almost wooed it, and there are woful epochs, the memory of which has remained dear. It is in the political character of feudalism, in the nature and shape of its power, that we find lurking that element of popular aversion which, in France at least, it has never ceased to inspire.
It was a confederation of petty sovereigns, of petty despots, unequal amongst themselves, and having, one towards another, certain duties and rights, but invested in their own domains, over their personal and direct subjects, with arbitrary and absolute power. That is the essential element of the feudal system; therein it differs from every other aristocracy, every other form of government.
There has been no scarcity in this world of aristocracies and despotisms. There have been peoples arbitrarily governed, nay, absolutely possessed by a single man, by a college of priests, by a body of patricians. But none of these despotic governments was like the feudal system.
In the case where the sovereign power has been placed in the hands of a single man, the condition of the people has been servile and woful. At bottom the feudal system was somewhat better; and it will presently be explained why. Meanwhile, it must be acknowledged that that condition often appeared less burdensome, and obtained more easy acceptance than the feudal system. It was because, under the great absolute monarchies, men did, nevertheless, obtain some sort of equality and tranquillity. A shameful equality and a fatal tranquillity, no doubt; but such as peoples are sometimes contented with under the dominance of certain circumstances, or in the last gasp of their existence. Liberty, equality, and tranquillity were all alike wanting, from the tenth to the thirteenth century, to the inhabitants of each lord’s domains; their sovereign was at their very doors, and none of them was hidden from him, or beyond reach of his mighty arm. Of all tyrannies, the worst is that which can thus keep account of its subjects, and which sees, from its seat, the limits of its empire. The caprices of the human will then show themselves in all their intolerable extravagance, and, moreover, with irresistible promptness. It is then, too, that inequality of conditions makes itself more rudely felt; riches, might, independence, every advantage and every right present themselves every instant to the gaze of misery, weakness, and servitude. The inhabitants of fiefs could not find consolation in the bosom of tranquillity; incessantly mixed up in the quarrels of their lord, a prey to his neighbors’ devastations, they led a life still more precarious and still more restless than that of the lords themselves, and they had to put up at one and the same time with the presence of war, privilege, and absolute power. Nor did the rule of feudalism differ less from that of a college of priests or a senate of patricians than from the despotism of an individual. In the two former systems we have an aristocratic body governing the mass of the people; in the feudal system we have an aristocracy resolved into individuals, each of whom governs on his own private account a certain number of persons dependent upon him alone. Be the aristocratic body a clergy, its power has its root in creeds which are common to itself and its subjects. Now, in every creed common to those who command and those who obey there is a moral tie, an element of sympathetic equality, and on the part of those who obey a tacit adhesion to the rule. Be it a senate of patricians that reigns, it cannot govern so capriciously, so arbitrarily, as an individual. There are differences and discussions in the very bosom of the government; there may be, nay, there always are, formed factions, parties which, in order to arrive at their own ends, strive to conciliate the favor of the people, sometimes take in hand its interests, and, however bad may be its condition, the people, by sharing in its masters’ rivalries, exercises some sort of influence over its own destiny. Feudalism was not, properly speaking, an aristocratic government, a senate of kings—to use the language used by Cineas to Pyrrhus; it was a collection of individual despotisms, exercised by isolated aristocrats, each of whom, being sovereign in his own domains, had to give no account to another, and asked nobody’s opinion about his conduct towards his subjects.
Is it astonishing that such a system incurred, on the part of the peoples, more hatred than even those which had reduced them to a more monotonous and more lasting servitude? There was despotism, just as in pure monarchies, and there was privilege, just as in the very closest aristocracies. And both obtruded themselves in the most offensive, and, so to speak, crude form. Despotism was not tapered off by means of the distant and elevation of a throne; and privilege did not veil itself behind the majesty of a large body. Both were the appurtenances of an individual ever present and ever alone, ever at his subjects’ doors, and never called upon, in dealing with their lot, to gather his peers around him.
And now we will leave the subjects in the case of feudalism, and consider the masters, the owners of fiefs, and their relations one with another. We here behold quite a different spectacle; we see liberties, rights, and guarantees, which not only give protection and honor to those who enjoy them, but of which the tendency and effect are to open to the subject population an outlet towards a better future.
It could not, in fact, be otherwise: for, on the one hand, feudal society was not wanting in dignity and glory; and, on the other, the feudal system did not, as the theocracy of Egypt or the despotism of Asia did, condemn its subjects irretrievably to slavery. It oppressed them; but they ended by having the power as well as the will to go free.
It is the fault of pure monarchy to set up power so high, and encompass it with such splendor, that the possessor’s
