The Historians' History of the World 08

To complete the enumeration of rights inherent in the sovereignty of the lords it is necessary to mention two: first, that of recognising throughout the whole extent of the fief no higher legislative power. We find in the last collection of laws made in the ninth century by Charles the Simple the final manifestation of law-bearing public power. After that, there were no laws, civil or political, to be applied generally, but only local customs, isolated, independent, and differing one from the other, in fact possessing a territorial character in distinction from those of the barbaric nations, which were entirely personal.

Second, the right to coin money, which was always a sign of lordship. Before Charlemagne it seems that some private individuals, who doubtless possessed the privilege, coined money. After him this was one of the prerogatives of the lords, and at the advent of Hugh Capet there were no less than 150 who exercised this right.

Every political régime may be characterised by the place where the exercise of power is bestowed. Ancient republics had their agora and fora. The great monarchy of Louis XIV had its palace of Versailles. The feudal lords had their castles. They were, as a usual thing, enormous edifices, situated on high places, massive, round, or square, without architecture or ornamentation, the walls pierced by a few loopholes for the discharge of arrows. There was a single entrance giving on a great moat which could only be passed by a drawbridge. The castle was crowned with parapets and battlements, from which rocks, molten pitch, and lead could be thrown down on the heads of too venturesome assailants at the foot of the walls. To-day the gaping gray masses are but nests for crows, crumbled and eaten away by time. Seen from afar they quite eclipse the small and light habitation of modern days—these monuments at once of legitimate defence and oppression. But they could have been nothing less than they were to provide shelter from the northern incursions and the feudal wars. Everyone sought refuge in them. Those who had not the right to live within the castle, who were neither lords nor warriors, settled around its great walls, under their powerful protection. This was the nucleus of many towns.

ECCLESIASTICAL FEUDALISM

Even the clergy had their place in this system. The bishop, formerly “defender of the city,” had often become its count, by traditional usurpation or by express royal concession when the king had united the county and the bishopric, the temporal and the spiritual authority. This made the bishop sovereign of all the lords of his diocese.

Besides her tithes the church possessed, through the donation of the faithful, immense wealth, and in order to protect this from the brigandage of the times she had recourse to secular arms. She chose laymen, men of courage and wisdom, to whom she confided her property that they might defend it, if necessary at the point of the sword. But these attorneys of the monasteries and churches did as the counts of the king—made their functions hereditary, and took for themselves the wealth entrusted to their care. They condescended, however, to regard themselves as the vassals of those whom they had despoiled, and to swear faith and homage under ordinary conditions of natural right and personal service.

Abbés and bishops in consequence became suzerains, temporal lords having numerous vassals ready to take up arms for their cause, courts of justice—in fact all the prerogatives exercised by the great landlords. There were bishops, dukes, and bishop-counts, vassals themselves of greater lords and especially of the king, from whom they received the investiture of the property attached to their churches, or, as it was called, their temporal domain.

This ecclesiastical feudalism was so extensive, so powerful, that in France and England it possessed during the Middle Ages more than a fifth of all the land; in Germany nearly a third. For there was this difference between the church and king, that the latter, a conquest once made, received nothing more, but on the contrary constantly gave away until it came to pass that he possessed nothing but the town of Laon; while the church, if she did lose some of her land (a difficult thing since she had excommunication to defend it with), was acquiring more every day, since few of the faithful died without leaving her something. And so it was that she constantly got more and never or very rarely gave anything up, and then only when it was wrested from her by force.i

The manner in which the church often lost her property in feudal times is described by Carl Spannagel:

THE CHURCH AND THE FEUDAL ARMY