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wards by the name of feudal, and developed principles of fixity and independence in large landed proprietors, unknown under the ancient system. Charlemagne had but a vague idea of the change that was taking place, and which he laboured partly to consult and admit, as well as partly to control. He acted upon the old tradition of the Merovingians, who sought to counterbalance the landed aristocracy by a life and a functionary But he rather attempted to make the two classes and the two principles co-exist, than to supersede the one by the other. He saw the necessity, and struggled for the maintenance, of a certain unity and supremacy of command. But he was not for forcing the Teutonic elements around him into a system and into a form of absolutism repugnant to them.

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Nothing paints more strongly his incertitude and mistrust of the permanence of the imperial dignity than his passing it over in silence on the first testamentary division of his territories. Assigning Italy to Pepin, the South of France to Louis, and the north to Charles, he established no supremacy in one over the other, and seemed to think that whilst each enjoyed independence in his kingdom, all should share the supremacy of the Frank suzerainty over subject lands. The deaths of Charles and Pepin, leaving Louis the only prince of mature age to succeed him, naturally led to the transmission of the imperial crown, which Charles placed solemnly on the head of Louis in the assembly held at Aix in 813.

This was the last act of Charlemagne, who expired in the February of the following year, after a glorious reign of well nigh half a century. His character could scarcely be summed up better than in the words of Nithard:"Terribilis, amabilis, pariterque et admirabilis videretur."

Charlemagne's son and successor Louis, surnamed the Pious, or the Easy (as the epithet Debonnaire may be

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rendered), was a prince well fitted to wear the title of CHAP. Emperor, and enhance it in outward seeming by the dignity of his demeanour and the purity of his life. He was greatly shocked at the licence of his father's court, which he immediately reformed. He had spent his youth in the Latin province of Aquitaine, amidst a Frank aristocracy, which his father had settled there, and who, following their tendencies and habits, stripped the young and generous prince of his fisc lands and farms, so that he had not wherewithal to live. Charlemagne had sent missi to set this to rights, and restore the crown lands to his son, forbidding at the same time the military, or in other words, the noblesse, from levying tribute and allowances. Charlemagne could not cure his son of his generous propensities; Louis, after he came to the throne, giving away, as Thegan records, "lands which had belonged to his family for three generations in sempiternal property to his followers." Louis, whilst tenacious of the imperial authority, thus squandered the revenues which at that epoch could alone have supported it. The records of his reign, whilst full of proofs of the monarch's assertion of supremacy, manifest in a remarkable manner the rise of a landed and feudal aristocracy, whose interests were decidedly at variance with Latin Imperialism.

Feudalism begins already to assume shape. The Capitularies speak of vassi and vassali. Charlemagne had sought to generalise vassalage, and to attach the large class of free and allodial proprietors, however small their holdings, by requiring of them an oath of personal homage, as well as military service. In the insecure times which followed, it proved no protection whatever to the humble proprietor to hold directly of the emperor. He was obliged to choose some local magnate as his senior, and march to war as his man, rather than as the man of the emperor, in which capacity he was slighted and oppressed. And so came to

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CHAP. be practically established in the north the maxim of no land without a lord.* Instead of a nation of great and small proprietors with equal rights and unequal wealth, there came to prevail a nation, at the summit of which was an aristocracy holding large estates or domains, either in their own right or nominally and immediately from the sovereign, whilst beneath them others held lands from them, and became their lieges, personally dependent on the aristocracy, not upon the crown.

Here again was a great point of departure between civic and rustic organisation: here branched off in two directions feudalism and antiquity. The old world had come to deny almost all hereditary right in dignity or caste. The favour of the prince, shown by elevating to office, constituted a life and functionary aristocracy. Beneath these all citizens were the same. The law recognised no inequalities in society, which stretched in a low and unbroken level before the emperor. There was indeed a lower level, that of slavery of the race which conquest had condemned to be the hewers of wood and hoers of earth for another race happening to be uppermost. But this slave caste kept out of sight; all persons were supposed to be equals of each other from the rise of Athens to the fall of Rome. We can conceive why this feeling should have been implanted in the Greeks, for example, who had learned what to shun, as well as what to adopt, in the civilisation of the east, and who brought with them a horror of caste, that institution which so fettered the human race, or rather which had developed it to a certain point and then condemned it to be stationary.

The Teutonic tribes introduced into society the same medium principle which they brought into political or

A capitulary of the time enjoins judicial authorities not to treat as of a servile condition those freemen who lived on the crown-lands.

The capitulary orders that their testimony be received; in fact, vindicates their right to be treated as free.

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ganisation. They had none of the Latin horror of CHAP. inequality. They admitted all degrees of it in human condition. And as these inequalities became identified with the land, they became hereditary with it, and so far partook of the injustice of caste. But the Teutons, in admitting inequality of rank, strove to secure to each grade those distinct and inalienable rights which preserve the sense of dignity and of manhood even in inferiority of condition. If the vassal did homage and promised military service, the lord was bound to respect as well as protect the vassal. The rights on both sides were clearly defined. And as early as Louis the Pious, a capitulary sets down five reasons which give a vassal the right to throw off allegiance to his lord.

This distribution of obedience and authority, this establishment of even political relations between men of the same locality, leaving little reference to a distant monarch, gave a severe blow to the imperial dignity, and reduced it to a shadow. Instead of being the head of a living trunk, to which it sent nerve and muscle, and upon which it impressed volition and action, the Emperor became but the capital of a column, which it crowned but could not animate. Feudalism grew up, until it gradually disowned the authority of a monarch, or until it succeeded in forming or in procuring a local one, with those limited pretensions and views which suited a kingdom rather than an empire.

Monarchs thus constituted were brought into the same system of law and mutual obligation which bound together inferior and superior. The worship of the sovereign as divine, or as something approaching to it, that acme of heathen and classic servility, was abolished; and the king, like any of his subjects, came to have duties as well as privileges, and to be bound by the laws of feudalism. It was this system of rights, even political rights, in the midst of inequalities of condition, which led to those essays of constitutional government

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which met with such various fortune in the different states of Europe.

It may be remarked, even thus early, that countries of the Latin race have ever shown, and even at present continue to show, a predilection for the Latin principle of social equality, even though purchased by the loss of political freedom, whilst countries of the Teutonic race have known how to mitigate feudalism without destroying noblesse, and have thus been able to develope freedom without placing the various grades of society at variance and at strife.

Whilst the great transition from ancient to modern life and law was accomplished by substituting the principle of rights in inequality for that of equality without right, a still more beneficial change was taking place in the lower world, which the ancients condemned to slavery. With many Christianity is considered an all sufficient cause; others as urgently deny its emancipating tendencies. M. Guizot thinks the world at this time. was embarrassed by the overwhelming number of its slaves. Through code and capitulary are traced a series of facts, from which may be deduced the true cause of the cessation of slavery. This is the great rise in the value of man, and the demand for him as a free agent. During the last years of the empire's decline, men born within the pale of civilisation were a drug. The barbarians were the only soldiers, slaves the only labouring cultivators. But after the settlement of the Gothic and Frank tribes, the supply of slaves ceased; whilst their rude masters, unskilled in scientific cultivation, instead of personally inspecting a farm and working it by slaves, preferred leaving the latter as coloni, free to till as they pleased, and to pay what rent they could, no doubt in kind.

The class above the slave, and to which the slave was promoted, was that of the lidi or letes, the difference between whom and the coloni probably was that the letes

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