The Historians' History of the World 08

The bishops and abbots as land proprietors went into the battle-field at the head of their contingents. They often wore armour under their priestly garments, and they did not shrink from actual fighting in action. The care for souls (if such an expression can be used with regard to a priestly dignitary of the Middle Ages) which even in peace made but a slight demand upon them, must have nearly vanished under such circumstances in the field. The account of Bishop Daniel of Prague attending to the wounded and administering them spiritual comfort has a modern foreign tone about it. Only special royal permission could exempt the bishops and their respective abbots from appearing at the head of their men.

But the king did not make such frequent demands upon the participation of the spiritual dignitaries in campaigns as we are inclined to think. This idea arose from the command of Otto II in 981, which demanded the personal command of their contingents of seven bishops and the seven abbots, whilst twelve bishops and three abbots are told only to send their loricati to the emperor. Substitutes for the bishops and abbots in this case would be priests or vassals of rank of their diocese, or abbotship.

It is worthy of note that the immunity, the purport of which had so increased in extent since the Carlovingian time, exercised no influence on the military obligations of the churches to which it was addressed. In most of the immunity documents military duty is not touched upon, so it was considered something quite independent. In some it is expressly mentioned that no index publicus should exercise the arrière-ban over the particular cloister, but this made no change in the obligation of the abbots themselves. On the contrary, in a privilege of Otto I for the bishopric of Worms, the sentence from a document of Louis the Pious is retained which commands that the military followers of the men of the church are only to be called upon in the interest of the kingdom. The transfer of their service to the princes was of greater import to the military obligations of the church than the immunity.

Such transfers, however, only refer to monasteries and not also to bishoprics. There were two different kinds of exemption—either the king gives the cloister in question to a lord of his kingdom as a favour or as his property, so that (forever or for a time) it ceases to be a royal cloister, or he takes away a part of its landed property and makes it over to lay princes who thenceforward undertake the military duties hitherto pertaining to the cloister. By this means the cloister remains royal, only it is exempt from military obligations. A third possibility was added to these two. Very often the great lords did not wait for the king’s initiative to enrich themselves with church property, but they seized it on their own account and obtained possession of the longed-for cloister by any means.

With such measures by force there was certainly no legal adoption of the obligation which the cloister owed the kingdom. But there is no doubt that the property thus gained was taken into account in the valuation of the service due to the kingdom by the new owner. The documental protection of the king generally proved most inefficient against such seizures. In more ancient times, particularly under the later Carlovingians, we find taxations of abbotships. The cases became rarer later on without quite disappearing. The kingdom evidently did not depend upon increasing the power of the princes which was continually developing by such means, so that the seizures of the princes increased with the feudal system.d

SERFS AND VILLEINS

In the eleventh century, Carlovingian Europe was divided into a multitude of fiefs which formed each its own state, having its own life, laws, customs, and its almost perfectly independent lay or ecclesiastical chief.

We have described the community of the lords, but they were not the only feudal community. That was the fighting and war-making community, the community that ruled, judged, punished, and oppressed. Below this was the community that worked, by which the other lived, got its clothes, its arms, its castles, and its bread—the community of serfs, or rather craftsmen (gens potestatis). We must not now look for free men, for they have disappeared. Some have raised themselves and become the fortunate lords; others have been pushed back into the lower regions of society and have become serfs and villeins. That class of simple freemen which had been nearly swept away in the invasion of the Roman Empire had been engulfed a second time. There were no longer any freehold owners, or so few that their mention is not worth while.