Page:A general history for colleges and high schools (Myers, 1890).djvu/486

424, and aids. By Escheat was meant the falling back of the fief into the hands of the lord through failure of heirs. If the fief lapsed through disloyalty or other misdemeanor on the part of the vassal, this was known as Forfeiture. Aids were sums of money which the lord had a right to demand, in order to defray the expense of knighting his eldest son, of marrying his eldest daughter, or for ransoming his own person in case of captivity.

The chief return that the lord was bound to make to the vassal as a compensation for these various services, was counsel and protection—by no means a small return in an age of turmoil and insecurity.

Development of the Feudal System.—After the death of Charlemagne and the partition of his great empire among his feeble successors, it seemed as though the world was again falling back into chaos. The bonds of society seemed entirely broken. The strong oppressed the weak; the nobles became highway-robbers and marauders.

It was this distracted state of things that, during the ninth and tenth centuries, caused the rapid development of the Feudal System. It was the only form of social organization, the only form of government that it was practicable to maintain in that rude, transitional age. All classes of society, therefore, hastened to enter the system, in order to secure the protection which it alone could afford. Kings, princes, and wealthy persons who had large landed possessions which they had never parcelled out as fiefs, were now led to do so, that their estates might be held by tenants bound to protect them by all the sacred obligations of homage and fealty. Again, the smaller proprietors who held their estates by allodial tenure voluntarily surrendered them into the hands of some neighboring lord, and then received them again from him as fiefs, that they might claim protection as vassals. They deemed this better than being robbed of their property altogether. Thus it came that almost all the allodial lands of France, Germany, Italy, and Northern Spain were, during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, converted into feudal estates, or fiefs.