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Rh change in character, though he always claimed to be the successor of the Roman emperor. It gradually assumed that

domestic or personal character that, among the Germans, marked most of the relations between men. The household of the king gained in political importance, by reason that the heads of the principal offices in the palace became at the same time high public officials. There was, moreover, a body of men more especially attached to the king, the  (q.v.) and the commensals (convivae regis) whose weregeld (i.e. the price of a man’s life in the system of compensation then prevalent) was three times greater than that of the other subjects of the same race.

The Frankish monarch had also the power of making laws, which he exercised after consulting the chief men of the kingdom, both lay and ecclesiastical, in the placita, which were meetings differing from the Campus Martius and apparently modelled principally on the councils of the Church. But throughout the kingdom in many places the direct authority of the king over the people ceased to make itself felt. The immunitates, granted chiefly to the great ecclesiastical properties, limited this authority in a curious way by forbidding public officials to exercise their functions in the precinct of land which was immunis. The judicial and fiscal rights frequently passed to the landowner, who in any case became of necessity the intermediary between the supreme power and the people. In regard to this last point, moreover, the case seems to have been the same with all the great landowners or potentes, whose territory was called potestas, and who gained a real authority over those living within it; later in the middle ages they were called homines potestatis (hommes de poeste).

Other principles, arising perhaps less from Germanic custom strictly speaking than from an inferior level of civilization, also contributed towards the weakening of the royal power. The monarch, like his contemporaries, considered the kingdom and the rights of the king over it to be his property; consequently, he had the power of dealing with it as if it were a private possession; it is this which gave rise to the concessions of royal rights to individuals, and later to the partitions of the kingdom, and then of the empire, between the sons of the king or emperor, to the exclusion of the daughters, as in the division of an inheritance in land. This proved one of the chief weaknesses of the Merovingian monarchy.

In order to rule the Gallo-Romans, the barbarians had had inevitably to ask the help of the Church, which was the representative of Roman civilization. Further, the Merovingian monarch and the Catholic Church had come into close alliance in their struggle with the Arians.

The result for the Church had been that she gained new privileges, but at the same time became to a certain extent dependent. Under the Merovingians the election of the bishop a clero et populo is only valid if it obtains the assent (assensus) of the king, who often directly nominates the prelate. But at the same time the Church retains her full right of acquiring property, and has her jurisdiction partially recognized; that is to say, she not only exercises more freely than ever a disciplinary jurisdiction, but the bishop, in place of the civil power, administers civil and criminal justice over the clergy. The councils had for a long time forbidden the clergy to cite one another before secular tribunals; they had also, in the 6th century, forbidden secular judges under pain of excommunication to cite before them and judge the clergy, without permission of the bishop. A decree of Clotaire II. (614) acknowledged the validity of these claims, but not completely; a precise interpretation of the text is, however, difficult.

The Merovingian dynasty perished of decay, amid increasing anarchy. The crown passed, with the approval of the papacy, to an Austrasian mayor of the palace and his family, one of those mayors of the palace (i.e. chief officer of the king’s household) who had been the last support

of the preceding dynasty. It was then that there developed a certain number of institutions, which offered themselves as useful means of consolidating the political organism, and were in reality the direct precursors of feudalism. One was the royal benefice (beneficium), of which, without doubt, the Church provided both the model and, in the first instance, the material. The model was the precaria, a form of concession by which it was customary for the Church to grant the possession of her lands to free men; this practice she herself had copied from the five-years leases granted by the Roman exchequer. Gradually, however, the precaria had become a concession made, in most cases, free and for life. As regards the material, when

the Austrasian mayors of the palace (probably Charles Martel) wished to secure the support of the fideles by fresh benefits, the royal treasury being exhausted, they turned to the Church, which was at that time the greatest landowner, and took lands from her to give to their warriors. In order to disguise the robbery it was decided—perhaps as an afterthought—that these lands should be held as precariae from the Church, or from the monastic houses which had furnished them. Later, when the royal treasury was reorganized, the grants of land made by the kings naturally took a similar form: the beneficium, as a free grant for life. Under the Merovingians royal grants of land were in principle made in full ownership, except, as Brunner has shown, that provision was made for a revocation under certain circumstances. No special services seem to have been attached to the benefice, whether granted by the king or by some other person, but, in the second half of the 9th century at least, the possession of the benefice is found as the characteristic of the military class and the form of their pay. This we find clearly set forth in the treatise de ecclesiis et capellis of Hincmar of Reims. The beneficium, in obedience to a natural law, soon tended to crystallize into a perpetual and hereditary right. Another institution akin to the beneficium was the senioratus; by the commendatio, a form of solemn contract, probably of Germanic origin, and chiefly characterized by the placing of the hands between those of the lord, a man swore absolute fidelity to another man, who became his senior. It became the generally received idea (as expressed in the capitularies) that it was natural and normal for every free man to have a senior. At the same time a benefice was never granted unless accompanied by the commendatio of the beneficiary to the grantor. As the most important seniores were thus bound to the king and received from him their benefices, he expected through them to command their men; but in reality the king disappeared little by little in the senior. The king granted as benefices not only lands, but public functions, such as those of count or dux, which thus became possessions, held, first for life, and later as hereditary properties. The Capitulary of Kiersy-sur-Oise (877), which was formerly considered to have made fiefs legally and generally hereditary, only proves that it was already the custom for benefices of this kind, honores, to pass from the father to one of the sons.

Charlemagne, while sanctioning these institutions, tried to arrest the political decomposition. He reorganized the administration of justice, fixing the respective jurisdictions of the count and the centenarius, substituting for the rachimburgii permanent scabini, chosen by the count in the

presence of the people, and defining the relations of the count, as the representative of the central authority, with the advocati or judices of immunitates and potestates. He reorganized the army, determining the obligations and the military outfit of free men according to their means. Finally, he established those regular inspections by the missi dominici which are the subject of so many of his capitularies. From the De ordine palatii of Hincmar of Reims, who follows the account of a contemporary of the great emperor, we learn that he also regularly established two general assemblies, conventus or placita, in the year, one in the autumn, the other in the spring, which were attended by the chief officials, lay and ecclesiastical. It was here that the (q.v.) and all important measures were first drawn up and then promulgated. The revenues of the Carolingian monarch (which are no longer identical with the finances of the state) consisted chiefly in the produce of the royal lands (villae), which the king and his suite often came and