III. CHAP. their walls, than for their helpless shrines. The descendants of Charlemagne had, however, an hereditary dislike for walled towns. They lived a nomad life, travelling with their court from farm to villa, and thus gained no fixed adherents amongst the lords of the soil: for whilst the royal court continued to be ambulatory, the noblesse grew more and more local and fixed, which made it the interest of one to repudiate the other. So that at last the Carlovingian princes shrunk into the mere lords of the tower of Laon, and patrons of the church of Rheims. Hugh Capet's elevation is generally considered the commencement or enthronement of feudalism. It certainly was the triumph of local sovereignty, and the formal division of the country into a group of principalities, of which the duchy of France had the great advantage of being the centre, in consideration of which, chiefly, its duke was allowed the title of king. But at this time that title scarcely meant supremacy. The Dukes of Normandy declared they held their possessions but from God. The Count of Flanders refused to acknowledge Hugh, until persuaded by his brother of Normandy that the dignity was but a name. The Count of Poictiers, who aspired to be independent in Aquitaine, refused to acknowledge even the title. The formation of independent principalities did not constitute feudalism. The enthronement of princes, and the military defence of provinces, each in its capital, were in some measure even antagonistic to feudalism, which was essentially a rustic organisation, based upon peasant and landlord, upon the dues of the one and the rights of the other. Civic organisation, on the contrary, based upon the townsman and the magistrate, formed the chief characteristic of the political and social condition of the ancient or Roman world. In this money had been the great instrument; it paid the landlord, the State, the soldier, the judge. But with the fall of the empire money ceased at least to circulate: It In legislation, in the founding of a political system, in judicial and fiscal regulations, the Norman took the lead; the conquest of England enabling them to render their system of fiefs universal. But even the Norman kings derogated from the spirit of feudalism. From the very first, they levied money in lieu of military service, and preferred rent to any other mode of satisfying monarch or landlord. From the first, too, they paid and employed armies of mercenary soldiers. The same love and need of money led them to compound with townsfolk, and to leave them in the enjoyment of separate and non-feudal laws and privileges, in return for which they paid.* Feudalism, as founded by the Normans, was not that exclusive system of monopoly and caste which it afterwards became. It was the Norman, too, who kept alive and in vigour the habit of the monarch's consulting his nobles and people previous to any great enterprise, craving their advice and their aid, and thus preserving the Teutonic principle of a great council of the nation. At the first the towns or towndues were let at ferm or farm, and the nobles had the fermage; but, by degrees, the citizens obtained the CHAP. III. CHAP. III. In all these ways and institutions, the kings of France were imitators of the Anglo-Normans. For of themselves, the early Capets conceived no great political aims. They appear to have had neither revenues nor army, and their councils were rather synods of bishops than gatherings of the noblesse. What they did, either in the way of defence or offence, was by means of the counts of Anjou, or of Flanders, or the dukes of Normandy, in whose courts and counties the age was advancing in a manner far more energetic and marked than in Paris or the duchy of France. That spirit, however, was restless and adventurous, and drove men to enterprise and expatriation. This was felt far more in other provinces, than at the court or in the duchy of France, where feudalism more quietly established itself; the baron strengthening himself in his castle, without embarking in far conquest or political struggles. The greatest change wrought by the introduction of the feudal system was not that of law, of sovereignty, or of social organisation. It was the new spirit which it introduced, the totally different sense of morality, motives of action, and grounds of judgment and appreciation, having no similarity or relation to those which had formerly prevailed. Civic life begat a sentiment of equality and of local patriotism. It produced the virtues and the vices of men who passed their existence in the presence of their fellows. It made men courteous and eloquent, clever in address, dissembling of thought. It demanded neither courage nor enthusiasm, especially when civism owned a despotic master. The task or the duty of warfare it devolved upon others, in general on the lowest of the population, a system which naturally resulted in discomfiture, and finally in total extinction. But whilst the character of civic life was that of social ease, the peculiarity of feudalism was isolation, accompanied by a love of turbulence and excitement. Each chief was pent up in his castle, living in solitude III. in the midst of his family and dependants, meeting CHAP equals and superiors only at rare intervals, these filled by ceremony and mistrust. No general or national authority existing or being effectual, each chief looked to himself for protection and maintenance. As he had learned to surround his dwelling with wall and moat, he covered his person with armour; and all arbitrage or judicial assembly being suspended or ignored, private war became the only mode of avenging injury or righting injustice. These circumstances and necessities. worked out in time a law of their own, and institutions to regulate them. Their basis was no doubt what has been since noted and lately stigmatised as individualism, a great value set on personal energy, a great respect for personal worth, a deep feeling of personal pride. These have been assumed to preclude generosity, and to be the very deification of the selfish principle. Nothing can be more untrue. Disinterestedness was as much the virtue of the knight as asceticism was of the monk. And by the side of that stern individual independence, which cast off all law and spurned all authority, there arose, what was almost unknown to the man of the ancient world, the voice of conscience, which perhaps was never so strong in any other age. It is difficult to account for that striving after excellence, that idealisation of man, his duties, his nature, and his mission, which came to constitute chivalry. It was partly, no doubt, in imitation of that ascetic striving after sanctity which animated the monks, and which was transferred with such beauty and advantage to the men of the world of those days. Antiquity had no example of the kind since the decay of the Stoics. Christianity, as understood and acted upon by the generation, and even by the more eminent men of the decaying empire, was abject and unmanly; almost incompatible, indeed, with public or political duties. The Teutonic race re-introduced into the modern world a stoicism of its own: it III. CHAP. reinstated the manly virtues; erected a high standard of honour, rendering courage and candour once more the attributes of the upper class; and raised woman to that degree of equality and consideration which has given the fair sex, with its gentler views of humanity, so large a share and influence in the public opinion and direction of the world. There can be no doubt that it created a code of morality not altogether that of the Gospel, and taught a religion of pride which it contrived, somehow or another, to amalgamate with the religion of humility. But the world was all the better for being saved from monkery; and since religion was doomed for some centuries to fall into the hands of a caste of priests, it became advantageous that there should be established a system of morality, a standard of private honour and of public virtue, independent of them. Another creation and peculiarity of the feudal system was the almost religious, at all events the poetical sentiment, which it threw into personal service or attachment. Indeed, when feudalism arose, there was nothing to which attachment was possible, save the person or the prince. There was not yet a France, and no longer a Gaul. What town was worthy of exclusive veneration? There was an interested as well as a sentimental motive. Princes gave fiefs; chiefs made conquests and distributed them. If a noble had himself appropriated or inherited church lands, it was only an emperor or a king who could by diploma validate the possession. Hence, the monarch grew in reverence, and attracted to him all that dignity and those prerogatives which were waifs for a time, and became the summit and the centre of that homage which all were willing to pay, because they were determined to exact it. But all this was inchoate at the commencement of the eleventh century. The patent fact was the existence of from a dozen to a score of almost independent |