Feudal France and Hugh Capet pt 1

XIII. Feudal France and Hugh Capet. PART I. The reader has just seen that, twenty-nine years after the death of Charlemagne, that is, in 843, when, by the Treaty of Verdun, the sons of Louis the Debonair had divided amongst them his dominions, the great empire split up into three distinct and independent kingdoms, the kingdoms of Italy, Germany, and France. The split did not stop there. Forty-five years later, at the end of the ninth century, shortly after the death of Charles the Fat, the last of the Carlovingians who appears to have reunited, for a while, all the empire of Charlemagne, this empire had begotten seven instead of three kingdoms, those of France, of Navarre, of Provence, or Susjuran-Burgundy, of Transjuran-Burgundy, or Lorraine, of Alemania, and of Italy. This is what had become of the factious and ephemeral unity of that empire of the West, which Charlemagne had wished to put in the place of the Roman empire. We will leave where they are, the three distinct and independent kingdoms, and turn our introspective gaze upon the kingdom of France. There we recognize the same fact. There the same work of dismemberment is going on. About the end of the ninth century there were already twenty-nine provinces or fragments of provinces which had become petty states, the former governors of which, under the names of Dukes, Counts, Marquises, and Viscounts, were pretty nearly real sovereigns. Twenty-nine great fiefs, which have played a special part in French history, date back to this epoch. These petty states were not all of equal importance or in possession of a perfectly similar independence. There were certain ties uniting them to other states, resulting in certain reciprocal obligations which became the basis, or, one might say, the constitution of the feudal community, but their prevailing feature was nevertheless isolation, personal existence. They were really petty states begotten from the dismemberment of a great territory, those local governments were formed at the expense of a central power. From the end of the ninth we pass to the end of the tenth century, to the epoch when the Capetians take the place of the Carlovingians. Instead of seven kingdoms to replace the empire of Charlemagne, there were then no more than four. The kingdoms of Provence and Transjuren-Burgundy had formed, by reunion, the kingdom of Arles. The kingdom of Lorraine was no more than a duchy in dispute between Alemania and France. The emperor, Otto the Great, had united the kingdom of Italy to the empire of Alemania. Overtures had produced their effects amongst the great states. But in the interior of the kingdom of France dismemberment had held on its course, and instead of the twenty-nine petty states or great fiefs observable at the end of the ninth century, we find at the end of the tenth, fifty-five actually established. VIDE GUISEAUSE HISTOIRE DE LA CIVILISATION. Pages 238 to 244. Now, how was this ever-increasing dismemberment accomplished? What causes determined it, and little by little made it the substitute for the unity of the empire? Two causes, perfectly natural and independent of all human calculation, one moral and the other political. They were the absence from the minds of men of any general and dominant idea, and the reflux, in social relations and manners, of the individual liberties but lately repressed or regulated by the strong hand of Charlemagne. In times of formation or transition, states and governments conformed to the measure, one had almost said to the height, of the men of the period, their ideas, their sentiments, and their personal force of character. When ideas are few and narrow, when sentiments spread only over a confined circle, when means of action and expansion are wanting to men, communities become petty and local, just as the thoughts and existence of their members are. Such was the state of things in the ninth and tenth centuries. There was no general and fructifying idea, save the Christian creed, no great intellectual movement, no great national feeling, no easy and rapid means of communication. Mind and life were both confined in a narrow space, and encountered, at every step, stoppages and obstacles well nigh insurmountable. At the same time, by the fall of the empires of Rome and of Charlemagne, men regained possession of the rough and ready individual liberties which were the essential characteristic of Germanic manners. Franks, Visigoths, Burgundians, Saxons, Lombards—none of these new peoples had lived as the Greeks and Romans had, under the sway of an essentially political idea—the idea of city, state, and fatherland. They were free men, and not citizens, comrades, not members of one and the same public body. They gave up their vagabond life, they settled upon a soil conquered by themselves and partitioned amongst themselves, and there they lived, each by himself, master of himself and all that was his—family, servitors, husbandmen, and slaves. The territorial domain became the fatherland, and the owner remained a free man, a local and independent chieftain at his own risk and peril. And this, quite naturally, grew up feudal France, when the newcomers, settled in their new abodes, were no more swayed or hampered by the vain attempt to re-establish the Roman empire. The consequences of such a state of things and of such a disposition of persons were rapidly developed. Territorial ownership became the fundamental characteristic of, and warranty for, independence and social importance. Local sovereignty, if not complete and absolute, at least in respect of its principal rights—right of making more, right of judicature, right of taxation, and right of regulating the police—became one with the territorial ownership, which, before long, grew to be hereditary, whether, under the title of iu it had been originally perfectly independent and exempt from any feudal tie, or, under the title of benefice, had arisen from grants of land made by the chieftain to his followers, on condition of certain obligations. The offices, that is, the diverse functions, military or civil, conferred by the king on his leisures, also ended by becoming hereditary. Having become established in fact, this heirship in lands and local powers was soon recognized by the law. A capitulary of Charles the Bald, promulgated in 877, contains the two following provisions. If, after our death, any one of our leges, moved by love for God and our person, desired to renounce the world, and if he have a son or other relative capable of serving the public wheel, 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 leges 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 leges, Wilhelm and Engelshock, held two countships on the confines of Bavaria, and at their death their offices were given to Count Arbeau, 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 Arbeau should give up the countship of their family. Heirship in territorial ownership 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 subordinate 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 the 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 woeful epics, 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 woeful. At the bottom, the feudal system was somewhat better, and it will presently be explained why. Meanwhile, it must be acknowledged that the 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 Fife's could not find consolation in the bosom of tranquillity, incessantly mixed up in the quarrels of their lord, a prey to his neighbor's 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 position, 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 Sineas 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 ask nobody's opinion about his conduct toward 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 the 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 open to the subject, population, and outlet, towards a better future. It could not, in fact, be otherwise, for, on the one hand, feudal society was not wanting indignity 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 head is turned, and that those who are beneath it dare scarcely to look upon it. The sovereign thinks himself a god, and the people fall down and worship him. But it was not so in society under the owners of fiefs. The grandeur was neither dazzling nor unapproachable. It was but a short step from vassal to suzerain. They lived familiarly one with another, without any possibility that superiority should think itself illimitable, or subordination think itself servile. Thence came that extension of the domestic circle, that ennoblement of personal service, from which sprang one of the most generous sentiments of the Middle Ages, fealty, which reconciled the dignity of the man with the devotion of the vassal. Further, it was not from a numerous aristocratic senate, but from himself, and almost from himself alone, that every possessor of fiefs derived his strength and his luster. Isolated as he was in his domains, it was for him to maintain himself therein, to extend them, to keep his subjects submissive and his vassals faithful, and to correct those who were wanting an obedience to him, or who ignored their duties as members of the feudal hierarchy. It was, as it were, a people consisting of scattered citizens, of whom each, ever armed, accompanied by his following or entrenched in his castle, kept watch himself over his own safety and his own rights, relying far more on his own courage and his own renown than on the protection of the public authorities. Such a condition bears less resemblance to an organized and settled society than to a constant prospect of peril and war. But the energy and the dignity of the individual were kept up in it, and a more extended and better regulated society might issue therefrom. And it did issue. This society of the future was not slow to sprout and grow in the midst of that feudal system so turbulent, so oppressive, so detested. For five centuries, from the invasion of the barbarians to the fall of the Carlovingians, presents the appearance of being stationary in the middle of chaos. Over this long, dark space of anarchy, feudalism is slowly taking shape, at the expense, at one time, of liberty, at another, of order, not as a real rectification of the social condition, but as the only order of things which could possibly acquire fixity, as, in fact, a sort of unpleasant but necessary alternative. No sooner is the feudal system in force than, with its victory scarcely secured, it is attacked in the lower grades by the mass of the people attempting to regain certain liberties, ownerships, and rights, and in the highest by royalty laboring to recover its public character, to become once more the head of a nation. It is no longer the case of free men in a vague and dubious position, unsuccessfully defending, against the nomination of the chieftains whose lands they inhabit, the wreck of their independence, whether Gallic or Roman or barbaric. It is the case of burgesses, agriculturalists, and serfs, who know well what their grievances and who their oppressors are, and who are working to get free. It is no longer the case of a king doubtful about his title and the nature of his power, at one time a chieftain of warriors, at another the anointed of the Most High, here a mayor of the palace, of some sluggard barbarian, there the heir of the emperors of Rome, a pagan, tossing about confusedly amidst followers or servitors, eager at one time to invade his authority, at another to render themselves completely isolated. It is the case of one of the premier feudal lords exerting himself to become the master of all, to change his suzerainty into sovereignty. Thus, in spite of the servitude into which the people had sunk at the end of the tenth century, from this moment the enfranchisement of the people makes way. In spite of the weakness, or rather nullity, of the regal power at the same epoch, from this moment the regal power begins to gain ground. That monarchical system which the genius of Charlemagne could not found, kings far inferior to Charlemagne will, little by little, make triumphant. Those liberties and those guarantees which the German warriors were incapable of transmitting to a well-regulated society, the commonality will regain one after another. Nothing but feudalism could have sprung from the womb of barbarism, but scarcely is feudalism established when we see monarchy and liberty nascent and growing in its womb.