Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/132

122 FEUDALISM was gradual." In 843, the date of the great treaty of Verdun, two princes shared the land of France with Charles the Bold, namely, the king of Aquitaine and the duke of Brittany. 1 In 877 Charles was induced to publish a recognition of the hereditary character of benefices. By the end of the century nine-and-twenty provinces, or parts of provinces, had been erected into petty states ; by the year 1000 the list had swelled to fifty-five. 2 " The weakness of the Karoling kings gave room lor the speedy development of disruptive tendencies in a territory so extensive and so little consolidated. The duchies and counties of the 8th and 9th centuries were still official magistracies, the holders of which discharged the functions of imperial judges or generals. Such officers were of course men whom the kings could trust, in most cases Franks, courtiers or kinsmen, who at an earlier date would have been comitcs or atitrustions, and who were provided for by feudal benefices. The official magistracy had in itself the tendency to become hereditary, and when the benefice was recognized as heritable, the provincial governorship became so too. But the provincial governor had many opportunities of improving his position, especially if he could throw himself into the manners and aspirations of the people he ruled. By marriage or inheritance he might accumu late in his family not only the old alodial estates which, especially on German soil, still continued to subsist, but the traditions and local loyalties which were connected with the possession of them. 3 So in a few years the Frank magistrate could unite in his own person the beneficiary endowment, the imperial deputation, and the headship of the nation over which he presided. And then it was only necessary for the central power to be a little weakened, and the independence of duke or count was limited by his homage and fealty alone, that is, by obligations that depended on conscience alone for fulfilment. It is in Germany that the disruptive tendency most distinctly takes the political form ; Saxony and Bavaria assert their national independence, under Swabian and Saxon dukes who have identified the interests of their subjects with their own. In France, where the ancient tribal divisions had long been obsolete, and where the existence of the alod involved little or no feeling of loyalty, the process was simpler still ; the provincial rulers aimed at practical rather than political sovereignty ; the people were too weak to have any aspirations at all ; the disruption, was due more to the abeyance of central attraction than to any centrifugal force existing in the provinces. But the result was the sanie ; feudal government, a graduated system of jurisdiction based on land tenure, in which every lord judged, taxed, and commanded the class next below him ; in which abject slavery formed the lowest, and irre sponsible tyranny the highest grade ; in which private war, private coinage, private prisons, took the place of the imperial institutions of government." 4 This was the social system under which William the Conqiieror and his barons had been brought up. English indigenous feudalism had reached its height in 1017, when Cnut " deal t " all England into four earldoms " to himself the West Saxons, to Thorkell the East Anglians, to Eadric the Mercians, and to Eric the Northumbrians." 5 The four juris dictions are spoken of as co-ordinate. Such a system, with time, might easily have ripened into continental feudalism. But William had no mind to encourage feudalism as a system of government ; on the contrary, he took care to introduce that which England never before had enjoyed, a real central administration, and in that aspect he arrested the growth of feudalism in England. As a system of land tenure it was the only arrangement that he could have con ceived or understood ; and England was already so exten sively feudalized in fact that it seemed the merest change of 1 Guizot, Civ. France, ii. 430. 1 See the tables in Guizot, sup., 433, 437. 3 " Abundant proof of this position will be found in German history. The rise of the successive families of Saxon dukes and the whole history of Bavaria under the Saxon emperors furnish illustrations. The Saxon dukes of Bavaria carry out the Bavarian policy in opposition to their near kinsmen on the imperial throne. The growth of the Swabian Welfs into perfect identification with the Saxons whom they governed affords another striking instance. In a less degree, but still to some extent, this was the case in France also ; but the Gallic populations had lost before the Karoling period most of their national aspirations; cor did the Frank governors identify themselves at any time with the people. Hence the great difference in social results between French and German feudalism." 4 Stubbs, sup., 255-6. 5 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in anno. theory to make all subjects tenants, and the king the uni versal lord and sole alodial owner. The barons were allowed to take up the hereditary jurisdictions already existing on the estates on which they entered ; but the administrative func tions of the Anglo-Saxon earls were transferred to the king s sheriffs. The barons resisted, but William s strong arm kept them down ; again and again under his two sons the struggle was renewed. " The English, who might never have struggled against native lords, were roused by the fact that their lords were strangers as well as oppressors, and the Norman kings realized the certainty that if they would retain the land they must make common cause with the people." Under Stephen feudalism burst out in all its horrors; fortunately the conflagration burnt itself out. The English rallied again round Henry II. ; the great houses of the Conquest successively w suffered forfeiture or extinction;" the other Normans became Englishmen; and the legal and constitutional reforms of Henry II., with the help of the nation, " put an end to the evil." 7 In France the royal authority had been reduced to a shadow. But "the shadow is still .the centre round which the complex system, in spite of itself, revolves. It is recognized by that system as its solitary safeguard against disruption, and its witness of national identity ; it survives for ages, notwithstanding the attenuation of its vitality, by its incapacity for mischief. In course of time the system itself loses its original energy, and the central force gradually gathers into itself all the members of the nationality in detail, thus concentrating all the powers which in earlier struggles they had won from it, and incorporating in itself those very forces which the feudatories had imposed as limitations on the sovereign power. So its character of feudal suzerainty is exchanged for that of absolute sovereignty. The only checks on the royal power had been the feudatories ; the crown has outlived them, absorbed and assimilated their functions ; but the increase of power is turned, not to the strengthening of the central force, but to the personal interest of its possessor. Actual despotism becomes systematic tyranny, and its logical result is the explosion which is called revolution. The constitutional history of France is thus the. sum mation of the series of feudal development in a logical sequence which is indeed unparalleled in the history of any great state, but which is thoroughly in harmony with the national character, form ing it and formed by it." s (J. H. R.) Remains of Feudalism in English Land Laws. Feudalism, although it has ceased to exist as a system of political and social relations, still survives as the basis of the law relating to land, both in England and Scotland. The most elementary con ceptions of real property carry us back to the relations of lord and vassal, and cannot be understood without reference to them. Ownership of land, in the full sense of the phrase, is unknown to the law of England. There is no such thing as absolute property in land, says the chief English writer on that subject ; a man can only have an estate or interest in land. Every landowner, in the popular sense of the phrase, is, in the eye of the law, a tenant only ; and such is the case with the largest and most unlimited interest known to the law that of an estate in fee-simple. The owner in fee is the tenant of some one else, who in his turn is the tenant of another, and so on, until the last and only absolute owner is reached, viz., the king, from whom directly or indirectly all lands are held. The spirit of feudalism has, of course, entirely gone out of the system ; only the skeleton is left. Between a tenant in fee- simple and his lord there is no connexion whatever except in legal theory ; in point of fact, it is for the most part unknown who the lord of a particular tenant may be. There are, however, new contingencies, in which the feudal theory may still yield positive results. Such, for instance, is the case of ESCIIKAT (q.v. ), in which, on the failure of heirs of freeholders dying intestate, the land would go to the next lord, and in the absence of a mesne-lord to the crown. In the case of COPYHOLDS (q.v.), the incidents of feudal tenure survive in a more marked degree than in any other class of estates. They sprang from an inferior kind of feudal holding, and remained subject to the custom of the manor to which they be longed. With the exception of such cases, the feudal obligations and restrictions in which the virtue of the system resided have long disappeared. The establishment of the right of alienation, and at a later time of the testamentary disposition of fee-simple estates, the acquisition by collusive processes of the right of breaking entail, and 6 Stubbs, sup., 168. 7 Ib., 257. 8 Ib., 3-4.