Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/862

 LAND-TENURE

780

LAND-TENURE

Under the Merovingian Dynasty, which saw a con- tinued decline of central authority, the institution flourished exceedingly. It became normal and almost universal for the small man with one or two estates to be attached, he and his heirs, in a permanent fashion, to the larger local man with many estates. This new link between the greater and the lesser landowners of a district bore various names. Sometimes the lesser man was said to be "in feu" to the greater; the Latin word ^ries, i. e. "the bond of honour", was a technical word employed. Sometimes the old Latin term "patronage" was used to signify the same thing. In the sixth century men were already taking it for granted; in the seventh, though it had not yet ap- peared in written law, it had appeared in many a written document, and was almost universal. To- wards the end of the seventh century and the begin- ning of the eighth a special political movement was apparent in society which not only accepted and sanc- tioned such arrangements, but actively and con- sciously favoured them. The great oflicers of the Crown, and notably their chief, the mayor of the palace, had become stronger than the Crown itself. Now these great officers were also the great land- owners who formed the head of this hierarchy of in- numerable individual contracts or understandings or customary relationships. And as these mayors of the palace came nearer and nearer to grasping the supreme power in the State, the chief force behind them was the crowd of men who owed to them and the great officers, their followers, this "fidehty".

The eighth century witnessed a political revolution which finally confirmed and established, brought into the region of positive law, and launched on its career through the Middle Ages, the full institution of "pat- ronage", or, as it was now called, of "seniority". The link of "fidelity" had become the nexus which bound the State together, and feudalism henceforward was the characteristic of society.

This political revolution consisted in the advent to supreme power of the old Roman family of Fer- reolus. It was one of the great senatorial families of Roman Gaul estabhshed in the district of Narbonne in the fifth century. After many adventures, during which the head of the family at one moment migrated into the German-speaking limits of Gaul, and during which more than one German marriage brought into the old paternal Gallo-Roman stock a mixture of blood on the female side, the descendants of the Ferreoli occupied the highest office of state in the eastern portion of the monarchy. A certain Pepin (the Gallic name is characteristic) was mayor of the palace— head, that is, of the landed hierarchy and chief officer of state in the eastern half — when, at the end of a series of confused quarrels between the great nobles, he conquered, at the battle of Testry (687), hia rival, the other mayor of the palace, the chief officer of the western half of the monarchy. No racial division is apparent in this confused business, but what is now the wealthiest landed family in all Gaul becomes, under Pepin, the head of all Gaul — the mas- ter of the whole State. Pepin's son Charles broke the invasion of the Saracens; his grandson, another Pepin, was at la,st crowned king of the whole French State in 757, and it may be said that from that moment the new system of tenure has definitely replaced the old social organization of Rome. For, though Pepin's son Charlemagne recovered, and in a sense made per- petual, the idea of European unity which is summed up in the word empire, yet he never perinitted the centralized law, which (so far as was possible in so barbaric a society) he established, to interfere with the natural growth of feudalism. On the contrary, he fostered it. And in the capitularies of Charlemagne the institution takes on the force of law. The mon- arch orders them to be observed, and himself con- cludes arrangements upon the basis of seniorilas or

fidelitas at the very moment when he is attempting to revive the old, impersonal and anti-fe\Klal idea of the Empire.

Such was the gradual growth of feudal tenure from below. A brief outline must now Ix; given of the second branch of its development, its growth from above.

The Roman Casar in the later times of the Em- pire entrusted the government of various districts to officials whose military titles sufficiently indicate their origin. Adux (the word we translate by "duke"), or leader, was established over one district; a comes (the word we translate by "count"), or companion of the sovereign, over another. And in the nature of things these offices of state were revokable and de- pendent upon the will of Government. But the process of society we have just described associated such offices, even towards the end of the Empire, with large estates in land. When the Empire had broken down, and the chieftains of tribes or the generals of armies had seized upon the powers of local govern- ment, this association of political power with landed estate tended to tecome universal; and the confusion of ideas was further aided by the institution of the beneficium. As is still the case in all modern Euro- pean states with the exception of England, very large tracts of each province were public land. Nor did these tracts necessarily diminish with alienation, sale, etc., for they were recruited by conquest, confiscation, lapse for lack of heirs, and merger. Under the insti- tution of the beneficium, a great landowner, desiring to attach to himself the services of some important per- son or institution, gave over to such person or insti- tution the usufruct of a certain part of his land on condition of receiving in return services and fidelity, or, as it was later called, "vassalage". After the breakdown of the Empire, the declining local mon- archies — and notably the Prankish monarchies of the North — began to grant such beneficia on a large scale, and by the time of Charlemagne they made in- roads into the greater part of the public domain. For generations it was understood that a beneficium was a purely personal contract entered into under the strict conceptions of the Roman law, and, if no term were mentioned, terminable at the latest at the death of the grantor.

It is self-evident, however, that, under the pressure of institutions round it, the beneficium would tend to become feudal and hereditary like the rest; and so it did. We have, then, under the Merovingian Kings of France, thoroughly established in custom, and, under the Carlovingian Dynasty, openly appar- ent in law, a multitude of royal acts which — whether they are a grant to a faithful servant or the appoint- ment of a trusted man to an office, especially to a local command, or the nomination of one to such a position who is too strong to be refused — all become daily less and less the voluntary and revokable act of an abso- lute government, more and more the recognition of an estalilished landed system.

Out of these two currents — the growth of feudalism from IjcIow by voluntary interdependence of smaller owners and greater, the growth of feudalism from above by the increasing strong analogy which makes of office and of royal grant a permanent tenure in duty and in honour — the whole feudal .system had been welded when the storm of the ninth century broke upon Christendom.

In that storm our civilization nearly disappeared. Its symbol, the imperial name, wholly disappeared; for the establishment of the German Empire in the tenth century and its ;M0 years' quarn-l with Italy was not universal: it left on one sideCiaul, Britain, and the re-conquest of Spain, which was characteristically a n.ational, and as cliaracteristically not a European, affair. Itsuffered the fateof all mere names.

The violent Barbaric assault upon Christendom