The battle began. The large numbers of the Franks, who covered the ground for some distance, dismayed the Britons, and many of them fled, seeking where they might hide themselves. Morvan, beside himself with rage, and at the head of his most devoted followers, rushed down upon the Franks as if to demolish them at a single stroke; and many fell beneath his blows. He singled out a warrior of inferior grade, towards whom he made at a gallop, and, insulting him by word of mouth, after the ancient fashion of the Celtic warriors, cried, "Frank, I am going to give thee my first present, a present which I have been keeping for thee a long while, and which I hope thou wilt bear in mind;" and launched at him a javelin, which the other received on his shield. "Proud Briton," replied the Frank, "I have received thy present, and I am going to give thee mine." He dug both spurs into his horse's sides, and galloped down upon Morvan, who, clad though he was in a coat of mail, fell pierced by the thrust of a lance. The Frank had but time to dismount and cut off his head, when he fell himself, mortally wounded by one of Morvan's young warriors, but not without having, in his turn, dealt the other his death-blow.

It spreads on all sides that Morvan is dead; and the Franks come thronging to the scene of the encounter. There is picked up and passed from hand to hand a head all bloody and fearfully disfigured. Ditcar the monk is called to see it, and to say whether it is that of Morvan; but he has to wash the mass of disfigurement, and to partially adjust the hair, before he can pronounce that it is really Morvan's. There is then no more doubt; resistance is now impossible; the widow, the family, and the servants of Morvan arrive, are brought before Louis the Debonnair, accept all the conditions imposed upon them, and the Franks withdraw with the boast that Brittany is henceforth their tributary. (Faits et testes de Louis le Picux, a poem by Ermold le Noir, in M. Guizot's Collection des Memoires relatifs L'Histoire de France, t. iv., p. 1-113.—Fauriel, Histoire de la Gaule, etc., t. iv., p. 77-88.)



On arriving at Angers, Louis found the Empress Hermengarde dying; and two days afterwards she was dead. He had a tender heart, which was not proof against sorrow; and he testified a desire to abdicate and turn monk. But he was dissuaded from his purpose; for it was easy to influence his resolutions. A little later, he was advised to marry again, and he yielded. Several princesses were introduced; and he chose Judith of Bavaria, daughter of Count Welf (Guelf), a family already powerful and in later times celebrated. Judith was young, beautiful, witty, ambitious, and skilled in the art of making the gift of pleasing subserve the passion for ruling. Louis, during his expedition into Brittany, had just witnessed the fatal result of a woman's empire over her husband; he was destined himself to offer a more striking and more long-lived example of it. In 823, he had, by his new empress Judith, a son, whom he called Charles, and who was hereafter to be known as Charles the Bald. This son became his mother's ruling, if not exclusive, passion, and the source of his father's woes. His birth could not fail to cause ill-temper and mistrust in Louis's three sons by Hermengarde, who were already kings. They had but a short time previously received the first proof of their father's weakness. In 822, Louis, repenting of his severity towards his nephew, Bernard of Italy, whose eyes he had caused to be put out as a punishment for rebellion, and who had died in consequence, considered himself bound to perform at Attigny, in the church and before the people, a solemn act of penance; which was creditable to his honesty and piety, but the details left upon the minds of the beholders an impression unfavorable to the emperor's dignity and authority. In 829, during an assembly held at Worms, he, yielding to his wife's entreaties and doubtless also to his own yearnings towards his youngest son, set at nought the solemn act whereby, in 817, he had shared his dominions amongst his three elder sons; and took away from two of them, in Burgundy and Allemannia, some of the territories he had assigned to them, and gave them to the boy Charles for his share. Lothaire, Pepin, and Louis thereupon revolted. Court rivalries were added to family differences. The emperor had summoned to his side a young Southron, Bernard by name, duke of Septimania and son of Count William of Toulouse, who had gallantly fought the Saracens. He made him his chief chamberlain and his favorite counsellor. Bernard was bold, ambitious, vain, imperious, and restless. He removed his rivals from court, and put in their places his own creatures. He was accused not only of abusing the emperor's favor, but even of carrying on a guilty intrigue with the Empress Judith. There grew up against him, and, by consequence, against the emperor, the empress, and their youngest son a powerful opposition, in which certain ecclesiastics, and, amongst them, Wala, abbot of Corbie, cousin-german and but lately one of the privy counsellors of Charlemagne, joined eagerly. Some had at heart the unity of the empire, which Louis was breaking up more and more; others were concerned for the spiritual interests of the Church which Louis, in spite of his piety and by reason of his weakness, often permitted to be attacked. Thus strengthened, the conspirators considered themselves certain of success. They had the empress Judith carried off and shut up in the convent of St. Radegonde at Poitiers; and Louis in person came to deliver himself up to them at Compiegne, where they were assembled. There they passed a decree to the effect that the power and title of emperor were transferred from Louis to Lothaire, his eldest son; that the act whereby a share of the empire had but lately beer assigned to Charles was annulled; and that the act of 817, which had regulated the partition of Louis's dominions after his death, was once more in force. But soon there was a burst of reaction in favor of the emperor; Lothaire's two brothers, jealous of his late elevation, made overtures to their father; the ecclesiastics were a little ashamed at being mixed up in a revolt; the people felt pity for the poor, honest emperor; and a general assembly, meeting at Nimeguen, abolished the acts of Compiegne, and restored to Louis his title and his power. But it was not long before there was revolt again, originating this time with Pepin, king of Aquitaine. Louis fought him, and gave Aquitaine to Charles the Bald. The alliance between the three sons of Hermengarde was at once renewed; they raised an army; the emperor marched against them with his; and the two hosts met between Colmar and Bale, in a place called le Champ rouge (the field of red). Negotiations were set on foot; and Louis was called upon to leave his wife Judith and his son Charles, and put himself under the guardianship of his elder sons. He refused; but, just when the conflict was about to commence, desertion took place in Louis's army; most of the prelates, laics, and men-at-arms who had accompanied him passed over to the camp of Lothaire; and the field of red became the field of falsehood (le Champ du mensonge). Louis, left almost alone, ordered his attendants to withdraw, "being unwilling," he said, "that any one of them should lose life or limb on his account," and surrendered to his sons. They received him with great demonstrations of respect, but without relinquishing the prosecution of their enterprise. Lothaire hastily collected an assembly, which proclaimed him emperor, with the addition of divers territories to the kingdoms of Aquitaine and Bavaria: and, three months afterwards, another assembly, meeting at Compiegne, declared the Emperor Louis to have forfeited the crown, "for having, by his faults and incapacity, suffered to sink so sadly low the empire which had been raised to grandeur and brought into unity by Charlemagne and his predecessors." Louis submitted to this decision; himself read out aloud, in the church of St. Medard at Soissons, but not quite unresistingly, a confession, in eight articles, of his faults, and, laying his baldric upon the altar, stripped off his royal robe, and received from the hands of Ebbo, archbishop of Rheims, the gray vestment of a penitent.

Lothaire considered his father dethroned for good, and himself henceforth sole emperor; but he was mistaken. For six years longer the scenes which have just been described kept repeating themselves again and again; rivalries and secret plots began once more between the three victorious brothers and their partisans; popular feeling revived in favor of Louis; a large portion of the clergy shared it; several counts of Neustria and Burgundy appeared in arms in the name of the deposed emperor; and the seductive and able Judith came afresh upon the scene, and gained over to the cause of her husband and her son a multitude of friends. In 834, two assemblies, one meeting at St. Denis and the other at Thionville, annulled all the acts of the assembly of Compiegne, and for the third time put Louis in possession of the imperial title and power. He displayed no violence in his use of it; but he was growing more and more irresolute and weak, when, in 838, the second of his rebellious sons, Pepin, king of Aquitaine, died suddenly. Louis, ever under the sway of Judith, speedily convoked at Worms, in 839, once more and for the last time, a general assembly, whereat, leaving his son Louis of Bavaria reduced to his kingdom in Eastern Europe, he divided the rest of his dominions into two nearly equal parts, separated by the course of the Meuse and the Rhone. Between these two parts he left the choice to Lothaire, who took the eastern portion, promising at the same time to guarantee the western portion to his younger brother Charles. Louis the Germanic protested against this partition, and took up arms to resist it. His father, the emperor, set himself in motion towards the Rhine, to reduce him to submission; but, on arriving close to Mayence, he caught a violent fever, and died on the 20th of June, 840, at the castle of Ingelheim, on a little island in the river. His last acts were a fresh proof of his goodness towards even his rebellious sons, and of his solicitude for his last-born. He sent to Louis the Germanic his pardon, and to Lothaire the golden crown and sword, at the same time bidding him fulfil his father's wishes on behalf of Charles and Judith.

There is no telling whether, in the credulousness of his good nature, Louis had, at his dying hour, any great confidence in the appeal he made to his son Lothaire, and in the impression which would be produced on his other son, Louis of Bavaria, by the pardon bestowed. The prayers of the dying are of little avail against violent passions and barbaric manners. Scarcely was Louis the Debonnair dead, when Lothaire was already conspiring against young Charles, and was in secret alliance, for his despoilment, with Pepin II., the late king of Aquitaine's son, who had taken up arms for the purpose of seizing his father's kingdom, in the possession of which his grandfather Louis had not been pleased to confirm him. Charles suddenly learned that his mother Judith was on the point of being besieged in Poitiers by the Aquitanians; and, in spite of the friendly protestations sent to him by Lothaire, it was not long before he discovered the plot formed against him. He was not wanting in shrewdness or energy; and, having first provided for his mother's safety, he set about forming an alliance, in the cause of their common interests, with his other brother, Louis the Germanic, who was equally in danger from the ambition of Lothaire. The historians of the period do not say what negotiator was employed by Charles on this distant and delicate mission; but several circumstances indicate that the Empress Judith herself undertook it; that she went in quest of the king of Bavaria; and that it was she who, with her accustomed grace and address, determined him to make common cause with his younger against their eldest brother. Divers incidents retarded for a whole year the outburst of this family plot, and of the war of which it was the precursor. The position of the young King Charles appeared for some time a very bad one; but "certain chieftains," says the historian Nithard, "faithful to his mother and to him, and having nothing more to lose than life or limb, chose rather to die gloriously than to betray their king." The arrival of Louis the Germanic with his troops helped to swell the forces and increase the confidence of Charles; and it was on the 21st of June, 841, exactly a year after the death of Louis the Debonnair, that the two armies, that of Lothaire and Pepin on the one side, and that of Charles the Bald and Louis the Germanic on the other, stood face to face in the neighborhood of the village of Fontenailles, six leagues from Auxerre, on the rivulet of Audries. Never, according to such evidence as is forthcoming, since the battle on the plains of Chalons against the Huns, and that of Poitiers against the Saracens, had so great masses of men been engaged. "There would be nothing untruthlike," says that scrupulous authority, M. Fauriel, "in putting the whole number of combatants at three hundred thousand; and there is nothing to show that either of the two armies was much less numerous than the other." However that may be, the leaders hesitated for four days to come to blows; and whilst they were hesitating, the old favorite not only of Louis the Debonnair, but also, according to several chroniclers, of the Empress Judith, held himself aloof with his troops in the vicinity, having made equal promise of assistance to both sides, and waiting, to govern his decision, for the prospect afforded by the first conflict. The battle began on the 25th of June, at daybreak, and was at first in favor of Lothaire; but the troops of Charles the Bald recovered the advantage which had been lost by Louis the Germanic, and the action was soon nothing but a terribly simple scene of carnage between enormous masses of men, charging hand to hand, again and again, with a front extending over a couple of leagues. Before midday the slaughter, the plunder, the spoliation of the dead—all was over; the victory of Charles and Louis was complete the victors had retired to their camp, and there remained nothing on the field of battle but corpses in thick heaps or a long line, according as they had fallen in the disorder of flight or steadily fighting in their ranks. . . . "Accursed be this day!" cries Angilbert, one of Lothaire's officers, in rough Latin verse; "be it unnumbered in the return of the year, but wiped out of all remembrance! Be it unlit by the light of the sun! Be it without either dawn or twilight! Accursed, also, be this night, this awful night in which fell the brave, the most expert in battle! Eye ne'er hath seen more fearful slaughter: in streams of blood fell Christian men; the linen vestments of the dead did whiten the champaign even as it is whitened by the birds of autumn!"

In spite of this battle, which appeared a decisive one, Lothaire made zealous efforts to continue the struggle; he scoured the countries wherein he hoped to find partisans: to the Saxons he promised the unrestricted re-establishment of their pagan worship, and several of the Saxon tribes responded to his appeal. Louis the Germanic and Charles the Bald, having information of these preliminaries, resolved to solemnly renew their alliance; and, seven months after their victory at Fontenailles, in February, 842, they repaired both of them, each with his army, to Argentaria, on the right bank of the Rhine, between Bale and Strasbourg, and there, at an open-air meeting, Louis first, addressing the chieftains about him in the German tongue, said, "Ye all know how often, since our father's death, Lothaire hath attacked us, in order to destroy us, this my brother and me. Having never been able, as brothers and Christians, or in any just way, to obtain peace from him, we were constrained to appeal to the judgment of God. Lothaire was beaten and retired, whither he could, with his following; for we, restrained by paternal affection and moved with compassion for Christian people, were unwilling to pursue them to extermination. Neither then nor aforetime did we demand ought else save that each of us should be maintained in his rights. But he, rebelling against the judgment of God, ceaseth not to attack us as enemies, this my brother and me; and he destroyeth our peoples with fire and pillage and the sword. That is the cause which hath united us afresh; and, as we trove that ye doubt the soundness of our alliance and our fraternal union, we have resolved to bind ourselves afresh by this oath in your presence, being led thereto by no prompting of wicked covetousness, but only that we may secure our common advantage in case that, by your aid, God should cause us to obtain peace. If, then, I violate—which God forbid—this oath that I am about to take to my brother, I hold you all quit of submission to me and of the faith ye have sworn to me."

Charles repeated this speech, word for word, to his own troops, in the Romance language, in that idiom derived from a mixture of Latin and of the tongues of ancient Gaul, and spoken, thenceforth, with varieties of dialect and pronunciation, in nearly all parts of Frankish Gaul. After this address, Louis pronounced and Charles repeated after him, each in his own tongue, the oath couched in these terms: "For the love of God, for the Christian people, and for our common weal, from this day forth and so long as God shall grant me power and knowledge, I will defend this my brother, and will be an aid to him in everything, as one ought to defend his brother, provided that he do likewise unto me; and I will never make with Lothaire any covenant which may be, to my knowledge, to the damage of this my brother."

When the two brothers had thus sworn, the two armies, officers and men, took, in their turn, a similar oath, going bail, in a mass, for the engagements of their kings. Then they took up their quarters, all of them, for some time, between Worms and Mayence, and followed up their political proceeding with military fetes, precursors of the knightly tournaments of the middle ages. "A place of meeting was fixed," says the contemporary historian Nithard, "at a spot suitable for this kind of exercises. Here were drawn up, on one side, a certain number of combatants, Saxons, Vasconians, Austrasians, or Britons; there were ranged, on the opposite side, an equal number of warriors, and the two divisions advanced, each against the other, as if to attack. One of them, with their bucklers at their backs, took to flight, as if to seek, in the main body, shelter against those who were pursuing them; then suddenly, facing about, they dashed out in pursuit of those before whom they had just been flying. This sport lasted until the two kings, appearing with all the youth of their suites, rode up at a gallop, brandishing their spears and chasing first one lot and then the other It was a fine sight to see so much temper amongst so many valiant folks, for great as were the number and the mixture of different nationalities, no one was insulted or maltreated, though the contrary is often the case amongst men in small numbers and known one to another."

After four or five months of tentative measures or of incidents which taught both parties that they could not, either of them, hope to completely destroy their opponents, the two allied brothers received at Verdun, whither they had repaired to concert their next movement, a messenger from Lothaire, with peaceful proposals which they were unwilling to reject. The principal was that, with the exception of Italy, Aquitaine, and Bavaria, to be secured without dispute to their then possessors, the Frankish empire should be divided into three portions, that the arbiters elected to preside over the partition should swear to make it as equal as possible, and that Lothaire should have his choice, with the title of Emperor. About mid June, 842, the three brothers met on an island of the Saone, near Chalons, where they began to discuss the questions which divided them; but it was not till more than a year after, in August, 843, that assembling all three of them, with their umpires, at Verdun, they at last came to an agreement about the partition of the Frankish empire, save the three countries which it had been beforehand agreed to except. Louis kept all the provinces of Germany of which he was already in possession, and received besides, on the left bank of the Rhine, the towns of Mayence, Worms, and Spire, with the territory appertaining to them. Lothaire, for his part, had the eastern belt of Gaul, bounded on one side by the Rhine and the Alps, on the other by the courses of the Meuse, the Saone, and the Rhone, starting from the confluence of the two latter rivers, and, further, the country comprised between the Meuse and the Scheldt, together with certain countships lying to the west of that river. To Charles fell all the rest of Gaul: Vasconia or Biscaye, Septimania, the marches of Spain, beyond the Pyrenees, and the other countries of Southern Gaul which had enjoyed hitherto, under the title of the Kingdom of Aquitaine, a special government subordinated to the general government of the empire, but distinct from it, lost this last remnant of their Gallo-Roman nationality, and became integral portions of Frankish Gaul, which fell by partition to Charles the Bald, and formed one and the same kingdom under one and the same king.

Thus fell through and disappeared, in 843, by virtue of the treaty of Verdun, the second of Charlemagne's grand designs, the resuscitation of the Roman empire by means of the Frankish and Christian masters of Gaul. The name of emperor still retained a certain value in the minds of the people, and still remained an object of ambition to princes; but the empire was completely abolished, and in its stead sprang up three kingdoms, independent one of another, without any necessary connection or relation. One of the three was thenceforth France.

In this great event are comprehended two facts; the disappearance of the empire and the formation of the three kingdoms which took its place. The first is easily explained. The resuscitation of the Roman empire had been a dream of ambition and ignorance on the part of a great man, but a barbarian. Political unity and central absolute power had been the essential characteristics of that empire. They became introduced and established, through a long succession of ages, on the ruins of the splendid Roman republic, destroyed by its own dissensions, under favor of the still great influence of the old Roman senate, though fallen from its high estate, and beneath the guardianship of the Roman legions and imperial pretorians. Not one of these conditions, not one of these forces, was to be met with in the Roman world reigned over by Charlemagne. The nation of the Franks and Charlemagne himself were but of yesterday; the new emperor had neither ancient senate to hedge at the same time that it obeyed him, nor old bodies of troops to support him. Political unity and absolute power were repugnant alike to the intellectual and the social condition, to the national manners and personal sentiments of the victorious barbarians. The necessity of placing their conquests beyond the reach of a new swarm of barbarians and the personal ascendency of Charlemagne were the only things which gave his government a momentary gleam of success in the way of unity and of factitious despotism under the name of empire. In 814, Charlemagne had made territorial security an accomplished fact; but the personal power he had exercised disappeared with him. The new Gallo-Frankish community recovered, under the mighty but gradual influence of Christianity, its proper and natural course, producing disruption into different local communities and bold struggles for individual liberties, either one with another, or against whosoever tried to become their master.

As for the second fact, the formation of the three kingdoms which were the issue of the treaty of Verdun, various explanations have been given of it. This distribution of certain peoples of Western Europe into three distinct and independent groups, Italians, Germans, and French, has been attributed at one time to a diversity of histories and manners; at another to geographical causes and to what is called the rule of natural frontiers; and oftener still to a spirit of nationality and to differences of language. Let none of these causes be gainsaid; they all exercised some sort of influence, but they are all incomplete in themselves and far too redolent of theoretical system. It is true that Germany, France, and Italy began, at that time, to emerge from the chaos into which they had been plunged by barbaric invasion and the conquests of Charlemagne, and to form themselves into quite distinct nations; but there were in each of the kingdoms of Lothaire, of Louis the Germanic, and of Charles the Bald, populations widely differing in race, language, manners, and geographical affinity, and it required many great events and the lapse of many centuries to bring about the degree of national unity they now possess. To say nothing touching the agency of individual and independent forces, which is always considerable, although so many men of intellect ignore it in the present day, what would have happened, had any one of the three new kings, Lothaire, or Louis the Germanic, or Charles the Bald, been a second Charlemagne, as Charlemagne had been a second Charles Martel? Who can say that, in such a case, the three kingdoms would have taken the form they took in 843?

Happily or unhappily, it was not so; none of Charlemagne's successors was capable of exercising on the events of his time, by virtue of his brain and his own will, any notable influence. Not that they were all unintelligent, or timid, or indolent. It has been seen that Louis the Debonnair did not lack virtues and good intentions; and Charles the Bald was clear-sighted, dexterous, and energetic; he had a taste for information and intellectual distinction; he liked and sheltered men of learning and letters, and to such purpose that, instead of speaking, as under Charlemagne, of the school of the palace, people called the palace of Charles the Bald the palace of the school. Amongst the eleven kings who after him ascended the Carlovingian throne, several, such as Louis III. and Carloman, and, especially, Louis the Ultramarine (d'Outremer) and Lothaire, displayed, on several occasions, energy and courage; and the kings elected, at this epoch, without the pale of the Carlovingian dynasty—Eudes in 887 and Raoul in 923—gave proofs of a valor both discreet and effectual. The Carlovingians did not, as the Merovingians did, end in monkish retirement or shameful inactivity even the last of them, and the only one termed sluggard, Louis V., was getting ready, when he died, for an expedition in Spain against the Saracens. The truth is that, mediocre or undecided or addle-pated as they may have been, they all succumbed, internally and externally, without initiating and without resisting, to the course of events, and that, in 987, the fall of the Carlovingian line was the natural and easily accomplished consequence of the new social condition which had been preparing in France under the empire.



CHAPTER XIII.——FEUDAL FRANCE AND HUGH CAPET.

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 Debonnair 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 re-united 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 Cisjuran Burgundy, of Trans-juran Burgundy, or Lorraine, of Allemannia, and of Italy. This is what had become of the factitious 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 pass we 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 Trans-juran Burgundy had formed, by re-union, the kingdom of Arles. The kingdom of Lorraine was no more than a duchy in dispute between Allemannia and France. The Emperor Otho the Great had united the kingdom of Italy to the empire of. Allemannia. 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 Guizot's Histoire de la Civilisation, t. ii., pp. 238-246.)

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 conform 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 vent; 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 new comers, 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 war, 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 alleu (allodium), 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 divers functions, military or civil, conferred by the king on his lieges, 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 lieges, moved by love for God and our person, desire to renounce the world, and if he have a son or other relative capable of serving the public weal, 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 lieges 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 lieges, Wilhelm and Engelschalk, held two countships on the confines of Bavaria; and, at their death, their offices were given to Count Arbo, 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 Arbo should give up the courtship of their family." Heirship in territorial ownerships 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 subordinated 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 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 woful epochs, 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 woful. At bottom the feudal system was somewhat better; and it will presently be explained why. Meanwhile, it must be acknowledged that that 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 fiefs could not find consolation in the bosom of tranquillity; incessantly mixed up in the quarrels of their lord, a prey to his neighbors' 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 condition, 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 Cineas 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 asked nobody's opinion about his conduct towards 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 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 to open to the subject population an outlet towards a better future.

It could not, in fact, be otherwise: for, on the one hand, feudal society was not wanting in dignity 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 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 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 lustre. 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 in 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 intrenched 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, France 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, agriculturists, 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 sovereign 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 commonalty 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.

From the end of the ninth to the end of the tenth century, two families were, in French history, the representatives and instruments of the two systems thus confronted and conflicting at that epoch, the imperial which was falling, and the feudal which was rising. After the death of Charlemagne, his descendants, to the number of ten, from Louis the Debonnair to Louis the Sluggard, strove obstinately, but in vain, to maintain the unity of the empire and the unity of the central power. In four generations, on the other hand, the descendants of Robert the Strong climbed to the head of feudal France. The former, though German in race, were imbued with the maxims, the traditions, and the pretensions of that Roman world which had been for a while resuscitated by their glorious ancestor; and they claimed it as their heritage. The latter preserved, at their settlement upon Gallo-Roman territory, Germanic sentiments, manners, and instincts, and were occupied only with the idea of getting more and more settled, and greater and greater in the new society which was little by little being formed upon the soil won by the barbarians, their forefathers. Louis the Ultra-marine and Lothaire were not, we may suppose, less personally brave than Robert the Strong and his son Eudes; but when the Northmen put the Frankish dominions in peril, it was not to the descendants of Charlemagne, not to the emperor Charles the Fat, but to the local and feudal chieftain, to Eudes, count of Paris, that the population turned for salvation: and Eudes it was who saved them.

In this painful parturition of French monarchy, one fact deserves to be remarked, and that is, the lasting respect attached, in the minds of the people, to the name and the reminiscences of the Carlovingian rule, notwithstanding its decay. It was not alone the lustre of that name, and of the memory of Charlemagne which inspired and prolonged this respect; a certain instinctive feeling about the worth of hereditary monarchy, as an element of stability and order, already existed amongst the populations, and glimpses thereof were visible amongst the rivals of the royal family in the hour of its dissolution. It had been consecrated by religion; the title of anointed of the Most High was united, in its case, to that of lawful heir. Why did Hugh the Great, duke of France, in spite of favorable opportunities and very palpable temptations, abstain perseveringly from taking the crown, and leave it tottering upon the heads of Louis the Ultramarine and Lothaire? Why did his son, Hugh Capet himself, wait, for his election as king, until Louis the Sluggard was dead, and the Carlovingian line had only a collateral and discredited representative? In these hesitations and lingerings of the great feudal chieftains, there is a forecast of the authority already vested in the principle of hereditary monarchy, at the very moment when it was about to be violated, and of the great part which would be played by that principle in the history of France.

At last the day of decision arrived for Hugh Capet. There is nothing to show that he had conspired to hasten it, but he had foreseen the probability of it, and, if he had done nothing to pave the way for it, he had held himself, so far as he was concerned, in readiness for it. During a trip which he made to Rome in 981, he had entered into kindly personal relations with the Emperor Otho II., king of Germany, the most important of France's neighbors, and the most disposed to meddle in her affairs. In France, Hugh Capet had formed a close friendship with Adalberon, archbishop of Rheims, the most notable and most able of the French prelates. The event showed the value of such a friend. On the 21st of May, 987, King Louis V. died without issue; and, after his obsequies, the grandees of the kingdom met together at Senlis. We will here borrow the text of a contemporary witness, Richer, the only one of the chroniclers of that age who deserves the name of historian, whether for the authenticity of his testimony or the extent and clearness of his narrative. "The bishop," he says, "took his place, together with the duke, in the midst of the assembly, and said to them, 'I come and sit down amongst you to treat of the affairs of the state. Far from me be any design of saying anything but what has for aim the advantage of the common weal. As I do not see here all the princes whose wisdom and energy might be useful in the government of the kingdom, it seems to me that the choice of a king should be put off for some time, in order that, at a period fixed upon, all may be able to meet in assembly, and that every opinion, having been discussed and set forth in the face of day, may thus produce its full effect. May it please you, then, all of ye who are here assembled to deliberate, to bind yourselves in conjunction with me by oath to this illustrious duke, and to promise between his hands not to engage yourselves in any way in the election of a Head, and not to do anything to this end until we be re-assembled here to deliberate upon that choice.' This opinion was well received and approved of by all: oath was taken between the hands of the duke, and the time was fixed at which the meeting should assemble again."

Before the day fixed for re-assembling, the last of the descendants of Charlemagne, Charles, duke of Lower Lorraine, brother of the late King Lothaire, and paternal uncle of the late King Louis, "went to Rheims in quest of the archbishop, and thus spake to him about his rights to the throne: 'All the world knoweth, venerable father, that, by hereditary right, I ought to succeed my brother and my nephew. I am wanting in nought that should be required, before all, from those who ought to reign, to wit, birth and the courage to dare. Wherefore am I thrust out from the territory which all the world knows to have been possessed by my ancestors? To whom could I better address myself than to you, when all the supports of my race have disappeared? To whom, bereft as I am of honorable protection, should I have recourse but to you? By whom, if not by you, should I be restored to the honors of my fathers? Please God things turn out favorably for me and for my fortunes! Rejected, what, can become of me save to be exhibited as a spectacle to all who look on me? Suffer yourself to be moved by some feeling of humanity: be compassionate towards a man who has been tried by so many reverses!'"

Such language was more calculated to inspire contempt than compassion. "The metropolitan, firm in his resolution, gave for answer these few words: 'Thou hast ever been associated with the perjured, the sacrilegious, and the wicked of every sort, and now thou art still unwilling to separate from them: how canst thou, in company with such men, and by means of such men, seek to attain to the sovereign power?' And when Charles replied that he must not abandon his friends, but rather gain over others, the bishop said to himself, 'Now that he possesses no position of dignity, he hath allied himself with the wicked, whose companionship he will not, in any way, give up: what misfortune would it be for the good if he were elected to the throne!' To Charles, however, he made answer that he would do nought without the consent of the princes; and so left him."

At the time fixed, probably the 29th or 30th of June, 987, the grandees of Frankish Gaul who had bound themselves by oath re-assembled at Senlis. Hugh Capet was present with his brother Henry of Burgundy, and his brother-in-law Richard the Fearless, duke of Normandy. The majority of the direct vassals of the crown were also there—Foulques Nerra (the Black), count of Anjou; Eudes, count of Blois, Chartres, and Tours; Bouchard, count of Vent-Mine and Corbeil; Gautier, count of Vexin; and Hugh, count of Maine. Few counts came from beyond the Loire; and some of the lords in the North, amongst others Arnulf II., count of Flanders, and the lords of Vermandois were likewise missing. "When those present were in regular assembly, Archbishop Adalheron, with the assent of Duke Hugh, thus spake unto them: 'Louis, of blessed memory, having been taken from us without leaving issue, it hath become necessary to engage seriously in seeking who may take his place upon the throne, to the end that the common weal remain not in peril, neglected and without a head. That is why on the last occasion we deemed it useful to put off this matter, in order that each of ye might come hither and submit to the assembly the opinion with which God should have inspired him, and that from all those sentiments might be drawn what is the general will. Here be we assembled: let us, then, be guided by our wisdom and our good faith to act in such sort that hatred stifle not reason, and affection distort not truth. We be not ignorant that Charles hath his partisans, who maintain that he ought to come to the throne transmitted to him by his relatives. But if we examine this question, the throne is not acquired by hereditary right, and we be bound to place at the head of the kingdom none but him who not only hath the distinction of corporeal nobility, but hath also honor to recommend him and magnanimity to rest upon. We read in the annals that to emperors of illustrious race, whom their own laches caused to fall from power, succeeded others, at one time similar, at another different; but what dignity could we confer on Charles, who hath not honor for his guide, who is enfeebled by lethargy, and who, finally, hath lost head so far that he hath no shame in serving a foreign king, and in misuniting himself to a woman taken from the rank of the knights his vassals? How could the puissant duke brook that a woman issuing from a family of his vassals should become queen, and have dominion over him? How could he walk behind her whose equals and even superiors bend the knee before him and place their hands beneath his feet? Examine carefully into the matter, and consider that Charles hath been rejected more through his own fault than that of others. Decide ye rather for the good than the ill of the common weal. If ye wish it ill, make Charles sovereign; if ye hold to its prosperity, crown Hugh, the illustrious duke. Let attachment to Charles seduce nobody, and let hatred towards the duke distract nobody, from the common interest. . . . Give us then, for our head, the duke, who has deeds, nobility, and troops to recommend him; the duke, in whom ye will find a defender not only of the common weal, but also of your private interests. Thanks to his benevolence, ye will have in him a father. Who hath had recourse to him and hath not found protection? Who, that hath been torn from the care of home, hath not been restored thereto by him?'

"This opinion having been proclaimed and well received, Duke Hugh was unanimously raised to the throne, crowned on the 1st of July by the metropolitan and the other bishops, and recognized as king by the Gauls, the Britons, the Normans, the Aquitanians, the Goths, the Spaniards, and the Gascons. Surrounded by the grandees of the kingdom, he passed decrees and promulgated laws according to royal custom, regulating successfully and disposing of all matters. That he might deserve so much good fortune, and under the inspiration of so many prosperous circumstances, he gave himself up to deep piety. Wishing to have a certainty of leaving, after his death, an heir to the throne, he conferred with his grandees, and after holding council with them he first sent a deputation to the metropolitan of Rheims, who was then at Orleans, and subsequently went himself to see him touching the association of his son Robert with himself upon the throne. The archbishop having told him that two kings could not be, regularly, created in one and the same year, he immediately showed a letter sent by Borel, duke of inner Spain, proving that that duke requested help against the barbarians. . . . The metropolitan, seeing advantage was likely to result, ultimately yielded to the king's reasons; and when the grandees were assembled, at the festival of our Lord's nativity, to celebrate the coronation, Hugh assumed the purple, and he crowned solemnly, in the basilica of Sainte- Croix, his son Robert, amidst the acclamations of the French."



Thus was founded the dynasty of the Capetians, under the double influence of German manners and feudal connections. Amongst the ancient Germans royal heirship was generally confined to one and the same family; but election was often joined with heirship, and had more than once thrust the latter aside. Hugh Capet was head of the family which was the most illustrious in his time and closest to the throne, on which the personal merits of Counts Eudes and Robert had already twice seated it. He was also one of the greatest chieftains of feudal society, duke of the country which was already called France, and count of Paris—of that city which Clovis, after his victories, had chosen as the centre of his dominions. In view of the Roman rather than Germanic pretensions of the Carlovingian heirs and of their admitted decay, the rise of Hugh Capet was the natural consequence of the principal facts as well as of the manners of the period, and the crowning manifestation of the new social condition in France, that is, feudalism. Accordingly the event reached completion and confirmation without any great obstacle. The Carlovingian, Charles of Lorraine, vainly attempted to assert his rights; but after some gleams of success, he died in 992, and his descendants fell, if not into obscurity, at least into political insignificance. In vain, again, did certain feudal lords, especially in Southern France, refuse for some time their adhesion to Hugh Capet. One of them, Adalbert, count of Perigord, has remained almost famous for having made to Hugh Capet's question, "Who made thee count?" the proud answer, "Who made thee king?" The pride, however, of Count Adalbert had more bark than bite. Hugh possessed that intelligent and patient moderation, which, when a position is once acquired, is the best pledge of continuance. Several facts indicate that he did not underestimate the worth and range of his title of king. At the same time that by getting his son Robert crowned with him he secured for his line the next succession, he also performed several acts which went beyond the limits of his feudal domains, and proclaimed to all the kingdom the presence of the king. But those acts were temperate and wise; and they paved the way for the future without anticipating it. Hugh Capet confined himself carefully to the sphere of his recognized rights as well as of his effective strength, and his government remained faithful to the character of the revolution which had raised him to the throne, at the same time that it gave warning of the future progress of royalty independently of and over the head of feudalism. When he died, on the 24th of October, 996, the crown, which he hesitated, they say, to wear on his own head, passed without obstacle to his son Robert, and the course which was to be followed for eight centuries, under the government of his descendants, by civilization in France, began to develop itself.



It has already been pointed out, in the case of Adalberon, archbishop of Rheims, what part was taken by the clergy in this second change of dynasty; but the part played by it was so important and novel that we must make a somewhat more detailed acquaintance with the real character of it and the principal actor in it. When, in 751, Pepin the Short became king in the place of the last Merovingian, it was, as we have seen, Pope Zachary who decided that "it was better to give the title of king to him who really exercised the sovereign power than to him who bore only its name." Three years later, in 754, it was Pope Stephen II. who came over to France to anoint King Pepin, and, forty-six years afterwards, in 800, it was Pope Leo III. who proclaimed Charlemagne emperor of the West. From the Papacy, then, on the accession of the Carlovingians, came the principal decisions and steps. The reciprocal services rendered one to the other by the two powers, and still more, perhaps, the similarity of their maxims as to the unity of the empire, established between the Papacy and the Carlovingians strong ties of gratitude and policy; and, accordingly, when the Carlovingian dynasty was in danger, the court of Rome was grieved and troubled; it was hard for her to see the fall of a dynasty for which she had done so much and which had done so much for her. Far, then, from aiding the accession of the new dynasty, she showed herself favorable to the old, and tried to save it without herself becoming too deeply compromised. Such was, from 985 to 996, the attitude of Pope John XVI., at the crisis which placed Hugh Capet upon the throne. In spite of this policy on the part of the Papacy, the French Church took the initiative in the event, and supported the new king; the Archbishop of Rheims affirmed the right of the people to accomplish a change of dynasty, and anointed Hugh Capet and his son Robert. The accession of the Capetians was a work independent of all foreign influence, and strictly national, in Church as well as in State.

The authority of Adalberon was of great weight in the matter. As archbishop he was full of zeal, and at the same time of wisdom in ecclesiastical administration. Engaging in politics, he showed boldness in attempting a great change in the state, and ability in carrying it out without precipitation as well as without hesitation. He had for his secretary and teacher a simple priest of Auvergne, who exercised over this enterprise an influence more continuous and still more effectual than that of his archbishop. Gerbert, born at Aurillac, and brought up in the monastery of St. Geraud, had, when he was summoned to the directorate of the school of Rheims, already made a trip to Spain, visited Rome, and won the esteem of Pope John XIII. and of the Emperor Otho II., and had thus had a close view of the great personages and great questions, ecclesiastical and secular, of his time. On his establishment at Rheims, he pursued a double course with a double end: he was fond of study, science, and the investigation of truth, but he had also a taste for the sphere of politics and of the world; he excelled in the art of instructing, but also in the art of pleasing; and the address of the courtier was in him united with the learning of the doctor. His was a mind lofty, broad, searching, prolific, open to conviction, and yet inclined to give way, either from calculation or attraction, to contrary ideas, but certain to recur, under favorable circumstances, to its original purpose. There was in him almost as much changeableness as zeal for the cause he embraced. He espoused and energetically supported the elevation of a new dynasty and the independence of the Roman Church. He was very active in the cause of Hugh Capet; but he was more than once on the point of going over to King Lothaire or to the pretender Charles of Lorraine. He was in his time, even more resolutely than Bossuet in the seventeenth century, the defender and practiser of what have since been called the liberties of the Gallican Church, and in 992 he became, on this ground, Archbishop of Rheims; but, after having been interdicted, in 995, by Pope John XVI., from the exercise of his episcopal functions in France, he obtained, in 998, from Pope Gregory V., the archbishopric of Ravenna in Italy, and the favor of Otho III. was not unconnected, in 999, with his elevation to the Holy See, which he occupied for four years, with the title of Sylvester II., whilst putting in practice, but with moderation and dignity, maxims very different from those which he had supported, fifteen years before, as a French bishop. He became, at this later period of his life, so much the more estranged from France in that he was embroiled with Hugh Capet's son and successor, King Robert, whose quondam preceptor he had been and of whose marriage with Queen Bertha, widow of Eudes, count of Blois, he had honestly disapproved.



In 995, just when he had been interdicted by Pope John X VI. from his functions as Archbishop of Rheims, Gerbert wrote to the abbot and brethren of the monastery of St. Geraud, where he had been brought up, "And now farewell to your holy community; farewell to those whom I knew in old times, or who were connected with me by blood, if there still survive any whose names, if not their features, have remained upon my memory. Not that I have forgotten them through pride; but I am broken down, and—if it must be said—changed by the ferocity of barbarians; what I learned in my boyhood I forgot in my youth; what I desired in my youth, I despised in my old age. Such are the fruits thou hast borne for me, O pleasure! Such are the joys afforded by the honors of the world! Believe my experience of it: the higher the great are outwardly raised by glory, the more cruel is their inward anguish!"

Length of life brings, in the soul of the ambitious, days of hearty undeception; but it does not discourage them from their course of ambition. Gerbert was, amongst the ambitious, at the same time one of the most exalted in point of intellect and one of the most persistent as well as restless in attachment to the affairs of the world.



CHAPTER XIV.——THE CAPETIANS TO THE TIME OF THE CRUSADES.

From 996 to 1108, the first three successors of Hugh Capet, his son Robert, his grandson Henry I., and his great-grandson Philip I., sat upon the throne of France; and during this long space of one hundred and twelve years the kingdom of France had not, sooth to say, any history. Parcelled out, by virtue of the feudal system, between a multitude of princes, independent, isolated, and scarcely sovereigns in their own dominions, keeping up anything like frequent intercourse only with their neighbors, and loosely united, by certain rules or customs of vassalage, to him amongst them who bore the title of king, the France of the eleventh century existed in little more than name: Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Poitou, Anjou, Flanders, and Nivernais were the real states and peoples, each with its own distinct life and history. One single event, the Crusade, united, towards the end of the century, those scattered sovereigns and peoples in one common idea and one combined action. Up to that point, then, let us conform to the real state of the case, and faithfully trace out the features of the epoch, without attempting to introduce a connection and a combination which did not exist; and let us pass briefly in review the isolated events and personages which are still worthy of remembrance, and which have remained historic without having belonged exactly to a national history. Amongst events of this kind, one, the conquest of England, in 1066, by William the Bastard, duke of Normandy, was so striking, and exercised so much influence over the destinies of France, that, in the incoherent and disconnected picture of this eleventh century, particular attention must first be drawn to the consequences, as regarded France, of that great Norman enterprise.

After the sagacious Hugh Capet, the first three Capetians, Robert, Henry I., and Philip I., were very mediocre individuals, in character as well as intellect; and their personal insignificance was one of the causes that produced the emptiness of French history under their sway. Robert lacked neither physical advantages nor moral virtues: "He had a lofty figure," says his biographer Helgaud, archbishop of Bourgcs, "hair smooth and well arranged, a modest eye, a pleasant and gentle mouth, a tolerably furnished beard, and high shoulders. He was versed in all the sciences, philosopher enough and an excellent musician, and so devoted to sacred literature that he never passed a day without reading the Psalter and praying to the Most High God together with St. David." He composed several hymns which were adopted by the Church, and, during a pilgrimage he made to Rome, he deposited upon the altar of St. Peter his own Latin poems set to music. "He often went to the church of St. Denis, clad in his royal robes and with his crown on his head; and he there conducted the singing at matins, mass, and vespers, chanting with the monks and himself calling upon them to sing. When he sat in the consistory, he voluntarily styled himself the bishops' client." Two centuries later, St. Louis proved that the virtues of the saint are not incompatible with the qualities of the king; but the former cannot form a substitute for the latter, and the qualities of king were to seek in Robert. He was neither warrior nor politician; there is no sign that he ever gathered about him, to discuss affairs of state, the laic barons together with the bishops, and when he interfered in the wars of the great feudal lords, notably in Burgundy and Flanders, it was with but little energy and to but little purpose. He was hardly more potent in his family than in his kingdom. It has already been mentioned that, in spite of his preceptor Gerbert's advice, he had espoused Bertha, widow of Eudes, count of Blois, and he loved her dearly; but the marriage was assailed by the Church, on the ground of kinship. Robert offered resistance, but afterwards gave way before the excommunication pronounced by Pope Gregory V., and then espoused Constance daughter of William Taillefer, count of Toulouse; and forth-with, says the chronicler Raoul Glaber, "were seen pouring into France and Burgundy, because of this queen, the most vain and most frivolous of all men, coming from Aquitaine and Auvergne. They were outlandish and outrageous equally in their manners and their dress, in their arms and the appointments of their horses; their hair came only half way down their head; they shaved their beards like actors; they wore boots and shoes that were not decent; and, lastly, neither fidelity nor security was to be looked for in any of their ties. Alack! that nation of Franks, which was wont to be the most virtuous, and even the people of Burgundy, too, were eager to follow these criminal examples, and before long they reflected only too faithfully the depravity and infamy of their models." The evil amounted to something graver than a disturbance of court-fashions. Robert had by Constance three sons, Hugh, Henry, and Robert. First the eldest, and afterwards his two brothers, maddened by the bad character and tyrannical exactions of their mother, left the palace, and withdrew to Dreux and Burgundy, abandoning themselves, in the royal domains and the neighborhood, to all kinds of depredations and excesses. Reconciliation was not without great difficulty effected; and, indeed, peace was never really restored in the royal family. Peace was everywhere the wish and study of King Robert; but he succeeded better in maintaining it with his neighbors than with his children. In 1006, he was on the point of having a quarrel with Henry II., emperor of Germany, who was more active and enterprising, but fortunately not less pious, than himself. The two sovereigns resolved to have an interview at the Meuse, the boundary of their dominions. "The question amongst their respective followings was, which of the two should cross the river to seek audience on the other bank, that is, in the other's dominions; this would be a humiliation, it was said. The two learned princes remembered this saying of Eclesiasticus: 'The greater thou art, the humbler be thou in all things.' The emperor, therefore, rose up early in the morning, and crossed, with some of his people, into the French king's territory. They embraced with cordiality; the bishops, as was proper, celebrated the sacrament of the mass, and they afterwards sat down to dinner. When the meal was over, King Robert offered Henry immense presents of gold and silver and precious stones, and a hundred horses richly caparisoned, each carrying a cuirass and a helmet; and he added that all that the emperor did not accept of these gifts would be so much deducted from their friendship. Henry, seeing the generosity of his friend, took of the whole only a book containing the Holy Gospel, set with gold and precious stones, and a golden amulet, wherein was a tooth of St. Vincent, priest and martyr. The empress, likewise, accepted only two golden cups. Next day, King Robert crossed with his bishops into the territories of the emperor, who received him magnificently, and, after dinner, offered him a hundred pounds of pure gold. The king, in his turn, accepted only two golden cups; and, after having ratified their pact of friendship, they returned each to his own dominions."



Let us add to this summary of Robert's reign some facts which are characteristic of the epoch. In A.D. 1000, in consequence of the sense attached to certain words in the Sacred Books, many Christians expected the end of the world. The time of expectation was full of anxieties; plagues, famines, and divers accidents which then took place in divers quarters, were an additional aggravation; the churches were crowded; penances, offerings, absolutions, all the forms of invocation and repentance multiplied rapidly; a multitude of souls, in submission or terror, prepared to appear before their Judge. And after what catastrophes? In the midst of what gloom or of what light? These were fearful questions, of which men's imaginations were exhausted in forestalling the solution. When the last day of the tenth and the first of the eleventh centuries were past, it was like a general regeneration; it might have been said that time was beginning over again; and the work was commenced of rendering the Christian world worthy of the future. "Especially in Italy and in Gaul," says the chronicler Raoul Glaber, "men took in hand the reconstruction of the basilicas, although the greater part had no need thereof. Christian peoples seemed to vie one with another which should erect the most beautiful. It was as if the world, shaking itself together and casting off its old garments, would have decked itself with the white robes of Christ." Christian art, in its earliest form of the Gothic style, dates from this epoch; the power and riches of the Christian Church, in its different institutions, received, at this crisis of the human imagination, a fresh impulse.

Other facts, some lamentable and some salutary, began, about this epoch, to assume in French history a place which was destined before long to become an important one. Piles of fagots were set up, first at Orleans and then at Toulouse, for the punishment of heretics. The heretics of the day were Manicheans. King Robert and Queen Constance sanctioned by their presence this return to human sacrifices offered to God as a penalty inflicted on mental offenders against His word. At the same time a double portion of ire blazed forth against the Jews. "What have we to do," it was said, "with going abroad to make war on Mussulmans? Have we not in the very midst of us the greatest enemies of Jesus Christ?" Amongst Christians acts of oppression and violence on the part of the great against the small became so excessive and so frequent that they excited in country parts, particularly in Normandy, insurrections which the insurgents tried to organize into permanent resistance. "In several counties of Normandy," says William of Jumieges, "all the peasants, meeting in conventicles, resolved to live according to their own wills and their own laws, not only in the heart of the forests, but also on the borders of the rivers, and without care for any established rights. To accomplish this design, these mobs of madmen elected each two deputies, who were to form, at the central point, an assembly charged with the execution of their decrees. So soon as the duke (Richard II.) was informed thereof, he sent a large body of armed men to suppress this audacity in the country parts, and to disperse this rustic assembly. In execution of his orders, the deputies of the peasantry and many other rebels were forthwith arrested; their feet and hands were cut off, and they were sent home thus mutilated to deter their fellows from such enterprises, and to render them more prudent, for fear of worse. After this experience, the peasants gave up their meetings and returned to their ploughs."



This is a literal translation of the monkish chronicler, who was far from favorable to the insurgent peasants, and was more for applauding the suppression than justifying the insurrection. The suppression, though undoubtedly effectual for the moment, and in the particular spots it reached, produced no general or lasting effect. About a century after the cold recital of William of Jumieges, a poet-chronicler, Robert Wace, in his Romance of Rou, a history in verse of Rollo and the first dukes of Normandy, related the same facts with far more sympathetic feeling and poetical coloring. "The lords do us nought but ill," he makes the Norman peasants say; "with them we have nor gain nor profit from our labors; every day is, for us, a day of suffering, toil, and weariness; every day we have our cattle taken from us for road-work and forced service. We have plaints and grievances, old and new exactions, pleas and processes without end, money-pleas, market-pleas, road-pleas, forest-pleas, mill-pleas, black-mail-pleas, watch-and-ward-pleas. There are so many provosts, bailiffs, and sergeants, that we have not one hour's peace; day by day they run us down, seize our movables, and drive us from our lands. There is no security for us against the lords; and no pact is binding with them. Why suffer all this evil to be done to us and not get out of our plight? Are we not men even as they are? Have we not the same stature, the same limbs, the same strength—for suffering? All we need is courage. Let us, then, bind ourselves together by an oath: let us swear to support one another; and if they will make war on us, have we not, for one knight, thirty or forty young peasants, nimble and ready to fight with club, with boar-spear, with arrow, with axe, and even with stones if they have not weapons? Let us learn to resist the knights, and we shall be free to cut down trees, to hunt and fish after our fashion, and we shall work our will in flood and field and wood."



Here we have no longer the short account and severe estimate of an indifferent spectator; it is the cry of popular rage and vengeance reproduced by the lively imagination of an angered poet. Undoubtedly the Norman peasants of the twelfth century did not speak of their miseries with such descriptive ability and philosophical feeling as were lent to them by Robert Wace; they did not meditate the democratic revolution of which he attributes to them the idea and almost the plan; but the deeds of violence and oppression against which they rose were very real, and they exerted themselves to escape by reciprocal violence from intolerable suffering. Thence date those alternations of demagogic revolt and tyrannical suppression which have so often ensanguined the land and put in peril the very foundations of social order. Insurrections became of so atrocious a kind that the atrocious chastisements with which they were visited seemed equally natural and necessary. It needed long ages, a repetition of civil wars and terrible political shocks, to put an end to this brutal chaos which gave birth to so many evils and reciprocal crimes, and to bring about, amongst the different classes of the French population, equitable and truly human relations.

So quick-spreading and contagious is evil amongst men, and so difficult to extirpate in the name of justice and truth!

However, even in the midst of this cruel egotism and this gross unreason of the tenth and eleventh centuries, the necessity, from a moral and social point of view, of struggling against such disgusting irregularities, made itself felt, and found zealous advocates. From this epoch are to be dated the first efforts to establish, in different parts of France, what was called God's peace, God's truce. The words were well chosen for prohibiting at the same time oppression and revolt, for it needed nothing less than law and the voice of God to put some restraint upon the barbarous manners and passions of men, great or small, lord or peasant. It is the peculiar and glorious characteristic of Christianity to have so well understood the primitive and permanent evil in human nature that it fought against all the great iniquities of mankind and exposed them in principle, even when, in point of general practice, it neither hoped nor attempted to sweep them away. Bishops, priests, and monks were, in their personal lives and in the councils of the Church, the first propagators of God's peace or truce, and in more than one locality they induced the laic lords to follow their lead. In 1164, Hugh II., count of Rodez, in concert with his brother Hugh, bishop of Rodez, and the notables of the district, established the peace in the diocese of Rodez; "and this it is," said the learned Benedictines of the eighteenth century, in the Art of Verifying Dates, "which gave rise to the toll of commune paix or pesade, which is still collected in Rouergue." King Robert always showed himself favorable to this pacific work; and he is the first amongst the five kings of France, in other respects very different,—himself, St. Louis, Louis XII, Henry IV., and Louis XVI.,— who were particularly distinguished for sympathetic kindness and anxiety for the popular welfare. Robert had a kindly feeling for the weak and poor; not only did he protect them, on occasion, against the powerful, but he took pains to conceal their defaults, and, in his church and at his table, he suffered himself to be robbed without complaint, that he might not have to denounce and punish the robbers. "Wherefore at his death," says his biographer Helgaud, "there were great mourning and intolerable grief; a countless number of widows and orphans sorrowed for the many benefits received from him; they did beat their breasts and went to and from his tomb, crying, 'Whilst Robert was king and ordered all, we lived in peace, we had nought to fear. May the soul of that pious father, that father of the senate, that father of all good, be blest and saved! May it mount up and dwell forever with Jesus Christ, the King of kings!"



Though not so pious or so good as Robert, his son, Henry I., and his grandson, Philip I., were neither more energetic nor more glorious kings. During their long reigns (the former from 1031 to 1060, and the latter from 1060 to 1108) no important and well-prosecuted design distinguished their government. Their public life was passed at one time in petty warfare, without decisive results, against such and such vassals; at another in acts of capricious intervention in the quarrels of their vassals amongst themselves. Their home-life was neither less irregular nor conducted with more wisdom and regard for the public interest. King Robert had not succeeded in keeping his first wife, Bertha of Burgundy; and his second, Constance of Aquitaine, with her imperious, malevolent, avaricious, meddlesome disposition, reduced him to so abject a state that he never gave a gratuity to any of his servants without saying, "Take care that Constance know nought of it." After Robert's death, Constance, having become regent for her eldest son, Henry I., forthwith conspired to dethrone him, and to put in his place her second son, Robert, who was her favorite. Henry, on being delivered by his mother's death from her tyranny and intrigues, was thrice married; but his first two marriages with two German princesses, one the daughter of the Emperor Conrad the Salic, the other of the Emperor Henry III., were so far from happy that in 1051 he sent into Russia, to Kieff, in search of his third wife, Anne, daughter of the Czar Yaroslaff the Halt. She was a modest creature who lived quietly up to the death of her husband in 1060, and, two years afterwards, in the reign of her son Philip I., rather than return to her own country, married Raoul, count of Valois, who put away, to marry her, his second wife, Haqueney, called Eleonore. The divorce was opposed at Rome before Pope Alexander II., to whom the archbishop of Rheims wrote upon the subject, "Our kingdom is the scene of great troubles. The queen-mother has espoused Count Raoul, which has mightily displeased the king. As for the lady whom Raoul has put away, we have recognized the justice of the complaints she has preferred before you, and the falsity of the pre-texts on which he put her away." The Pope ordered the count to take back his wife; Raoul would not obey, and was excommunicated; but he made light of it, and the Princess Anne of Russia, actually reconciled, apparently, to Philip I., lived tranquilly in France, where, in 1075, shortly after the death of her second husband, Count Raoul her signature was still attached to a charter side by side with that of the king her son.

The marriages of Philip I. brought even more trouble and scandal than those of his father and grandfather. At nineteen years of age, in 1072, he had espoused Bertha, daughter of Florent I., count of Holland, and in 1078 he had by her the son who was destined to succeed him with the title of Louis the Fat. But twenty years later, 1092, Philip took a dislike to his wife, put her away and banished her to Montreuil-sur-Mer, on the ground of prohibited consanguinity. He had conceived, there is no knowing when, a violent passion for a woman celebrated for her beauty, Bertrade, the fourth wife, for three years past, of Foulques le Roehin (the brawler), count of Anjou. Philip, having thus packed off Bertha, set out for Tours, where Bertrade happened to be with her husband. There, in the church of St. John, during the benediction of the baptismal fonts, they entered into mutual engagements. Philip went away again; and, a few days afterwards, Bertrade was carried off by some people he had left in the neighborhood of Tours, and joined him at Orleans. Nearly all the bishops of France, and amongst others the most learned and respected of them, Yves, bishop of Chartres, refused their benediction to this shocking marriage; and the king had great difficulty in finding a priest to render him that service. Then commenced between Philip and the heads of the Catholic Church, Pope and bishops, a struggle which, with negotiation upon negotiation and excommunication upon excommunication, lasted twelve years, without the king's being able to get his marriage canonically recognized; and, though he promised to send away Bertrade, he was not content with merely keeping her with him, but he openly jeered at excommunication and interdicts. "It was the custom," says William of Malmesbury, "at the places where the king sojourned, for divine service to be stopped; and, as soon as he was moving away, all the bells began to peal. And then Philip would cry, as he laughed like one beside himself, 'Dost hear, my love, how they are ringing us out?'" At last, in 1104, the Bishop of Chartres himself, wearied by the persistency of the king and by sight of the trouble in which the prolongation of the interdict was plunging the kingdom, wrote to the Pope, Pascal II., "I do not presume to offer you advice; I only desire to warn you that it were well to show for a while some condescension towards the weaknesses of the man, so far as consideration for his salvation may permit, and to rescue the country from the critical state to which it is reduced by the excommunication of this prince." The Pope, consequently, sent instructions to the bishops of the realm; and they, at the king's summons, met at Paris on the 1st of December, 1104. One of them, Lambert, bishop of Arras, wrote to the Pope, "We sent as a deputation to the king the bishops John of Orleans and Galon of Paris, charged to demand of him whether he would conform to the clauses and conditions set forth in your letters, and whether he were determined to give up the unlawful intercourse which had made him guilty before God. The king, having answered, without being disconcerted, that he was ready to make atonement to God and the holy Roman Church, was introduced to the assembly. He came barefooted, in a posture of devotion and humility, confessing his sin and promising to purge him of his excommunication by expiatory deeds. And thus, by your authority, he earned absolution. Then laying his hand on the book of the holy Gospels, he took an oath, in the following terms, to renounce his guilty and unlawful marriage: 'Hearken, thou Lambert, bishop of Arras, who art here in place of the Apostolic Pontiff; and let the archbishops and bishops here present hearken unto me. I, Philip, king of the French, do promise not to go back to my sin, and to break off wholly the criminal intercourse I have heretofore kept up with Bertrade. I do promise that henceforth I will have with her no intercourse or companionship, save in the presence of persons beyond suspicion. I will observe, faithfully and without turning aside, these promises, in the sense set forth in the letters of the Pope, and as ye understand. So help me God and these holy Gospels!' Bertrade, at the moment of her release from excommunication, took in person the same oath on the holy Gospels."