following this up by a distribution of offices and dignities right and left among his adherents. Léger was put to death in 678, and the Austrasians, commanded by the Carolingian Pippin II., with whom many of the chief Neustrians had taken refuge, were dispersed near Laon (680). But Ebroïn was assassinated next year in the midst of his triumph, having like Fredegond been unable to do more than postpone for a quarter of a century the victory of the nobles and of Austrasia; for his successor, Berthar, was unfitted to carry on his work, having neither his gifts and energy nor the powerful personality of Pippin. Berthar met his death at the battle of Tertry (687), which Battle of Tertry. gave the king into the hands of Pippin, as also the royal treasure and the mayoralty, and by thus enabling him to reward his followers made him supreme over the Merovingian dynasty. Thenceforward the degenerate descendants of Clovis offered no further resistance to his claims, though it was not until 752 that their line became extinct.
In that year the Merovingian dynasty gave place to the rule of Pippin II. of Heristal, who founded a Carolingian empire fated to be as ephemeral as that of the Merovingians. This political victory of the aristocracy was merely the consummation of a slow subterranean revolution which by innumerable reiterated blows had sapped the structure of the body politic, and was about to transfer the people of Gaul from the Roman monarchical and administrative government to the sway of the feudal system.
The Merovingian kings, mere war-chiefs before the advent of Clovis, had after the conquest of Gaul become absolute hereditary monarchs, thanks to the disappearance of the popular assemblies and to the perpetual state of warfare. They concentrated in their own hands all the powers Causes of the fall of the Merovingians. of the empire, judicial, fiscal and military; and even the so-called “rois fainéants” enjoyed this unlimited power, in spite of the general disorder and the civil wars. To make their authority felt in the provinces they had an army of officials at their disposal—a legacy, this, from imperial Rome—who represented them in the eyes of their various peoples. They had therefore only to keep up this established government, but they could not manage even this much; they allowed the idea of the common interests of kings and their subjects gradually to die out, and forgetting that national taxes are a necessary impost, a charge for service rendered by the state, they had treated these as though they were illicit and unjustifiable spoils. The taxpayers, with the clergy at their head, adopted the same idea, and every day contrived fresh methods of evasion. Merovingian justice was on the same footing as Merovingian finance: it was arbitrary, violent and self-seeking. The Church, too, never failed to oppose it—at first not so much on account of her own ambitions as in a more Christian spirit—and proceeded to weaken the royal jurisdiction by repeated interventions on behalf of those under sentence, afterwards depriving it of authority over the clergy, and then setting up ecclesiastical tribunals in opposition to those held by the dukes and counts. At last, just as the kingdom had become the personal property of the king, so the officials—dukes, counts, royal vicars, tribunes, centenarii—who had for the most part bought their unpaid offices by means of presents to the monarch, came to look upon the public service rather as a mine of official wealth than as an administrative organization for furthering the interests, material or moral, of the whole nation. They became petty local tyrants, all the more despotic because they had nothing to fear save the distant authority of the king’s missi, and the more rapacious because they had no salary save the fines they inflicted and the fees that they contrived to multiply. Gregory of Tours tells us that they were robbers, not protectors of the people, and that justice and the whole administrative apparatus were merely engines of insatiable greed. It was the abuses thus committed by the kings and their agents, who did not understand the art of gloving the iron hand, aided by the absolutely unfettered licence of conduct and the absence of any popular liberty, that occasioned the gradual increase of charters of immunity.
Immunity was the direct and personal privilege which forbade any royal official or his agents to decide cases, to levy taxes, or to exercise any administrative control on the domains of a bishop, an abbot, or one of the great secular nobles. On thousands of estates the royal government Immunity. gradually allowed the law of the land to be superseded by local law, and public taxation to change into special contributions; so that the duties of the lower classes towards the state were transferred to the great landlords, who thus became loyal adherents of the king but absolute masters on their own territory. The Merovingians had no idea that they were abdicating the least part of their authority, nevertheless the deprivations acquiesced in by the feebler kings led of necessity to the diminution of their authority and their judicial powers, and to the abandonment of public taxation. They thought that by granting immunity they would strengthen their direct control; in reality they established the local independence of the great landowners, by allowing royal rights to pass into their hands. Then came confusion between the rights of the sovereign and the rights of property. The administrative machinery of the state still existed, but it worked in empty air: its taxpayers disappeared, those who were amenable to its legal jurisdiction slipped from its grasp, and the number of those whose affairs it should have directed dwindled away. Thus the Merovingians had shown themselves incapable of rising above the barbarous notion that royalty is a personal asset to the idea that royalty is of the state, a power belonging to the nation and instituted for the benefit of all. They represented in society nothing more than a force which grew feebler and feebler as other forces grew strong; they never stood for a national magistracy.
Society no less than the state was falling asunder by a gradual process of decay. Under the Merovingians it was a hierarchy wherein grades were marked by the varied scale of the wergild, a man being worth anything from thirty to six hundred gold pieces. The different degrees were those Disruption of the social framework. of slave, freedman, tenant-farmer and great landowner. As in every social scheme where the government is without real power, the weakest sought protection of the strongest; and the system of patron, client and journeyman, which had existed among the Romans, the Gauls and the Germans, spread rapidly in the 6th and 7th centuries, owing to public disorder and the inadequate protection afforded by the government. The Church’s patronage provided some with a refuge from violence; others ingratiated themselves with the rich for the sake of shelter and security; others again sought place and honour from men of power; while women, churchmen and warriors alike claimed the king’s direct and personal protection.
This hierarchy of persons, these private relations of man to man, were recognized by custom in default of the law, and were soon strengthened by another and territorial hierarchy. The large estate, especially if it belonged to the Church, very soon absorbed the few fields of the freeman. The beneficium. In order to farm these, the Church and the rich landowners granted back the holdings on the temporary and conditional terms of tenancy-at-will or of the beneficium, thus multiplying endlessly the land subject to their overlordship and the men who were dependent upon them as tenants. The kings, like private individuals and ecclesiastical establishments, made use of the beneficium to reward their servants; till finally their demesne was so reduced by these perpetual grants that they took to distributing among their champions land owning the overlordship of the Church, or granted their own lands for single lives only. These various “benefactions” were, as a rule, merely the indirect methods which the great landowners employed in order to absorb the small proprietor. And so well did they succeed, that in the 6th and 7th centuries the provincial hierarchy consisted of the cultivator, the holder of the beneficium and the owner; while this dependence of one man upon another affected the personal liberty of a large section of the community, as well as the condition of the land. The great landowner tended to become not only lord over his tenants, but also himself a vassal of the king.
