Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/180

 168 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES LEADING NAMES Clovis — Theoderic — Justinian — Belisarius — Narses — Alboin — Gregory the Great — Heraclius — Mohammed — Leo the Isaurian — Charles Martel— Pepin the Short— Harun al Raschid— Charlemagne —Alfred— Henry the Fowler— Otto the Great— Hugh Capet— Mahmud of Ghazni — Canute— Emperor Henry III. — Emperor Henry IV. — William the Conqueror— Gregory VII. — Robert Guiscard. Monasticism. The clergy were divided into two main sections, called 'Regular' and ' Secular.' The term Regular means 'under a rule ' (Latin, regula), that is, vowed to obey the particular rules of a monastic order. We should have a fair equivalent to Regular and Secular, if we spoke instead of monks and parish clergy. The monks lived together in monasteries. Bishops, who were the heads of the Secular clergy, did not control the monasteries, though they might themselves be chosen from members of the monastic orders. The abbots at the head of the greater monasteries were on an equality with bishops. Monks were always under a vow not to marry ; the Seculars were forbidden by the ' Canons ' or ecclesias- tical laws to take wives, but were not under a special vow ; so that whenever and wherever Church discipline was lax, it was not unusual for them to have wives. Fiefs. When a vassal held a fief from an overlord, it continued, in the natural order of things, in his hands and those of his heirs. On failure of heirs, the fief lapsed to the overlord. This was one way in which kings, who were necessarily overlords of all the landowners, increased the estates in their own hands. Estates also reverted to the Crown, when a vassal forfeited them by treason or otherwise. When the inheritance of an estate passed to a woman, her marriage added it to her husband's estates ; thus marriage was one of the means by which vast estates accumulated in the hands of particular families. On the other hand, great estates got broken up where law and custom permitted them to be divided among several sons. This was common throughout the earlier Middle Ages : in the later Middle Ages it was stopped in some countries, notably in England, by the establishment of the law of primogeniture — that is, the eldest son alone inherited.