Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/297

 THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 253 much attention to dress, judging from the tirades of preach- ers against their long trains, false hair, and rouging. The , literature of chivalry made much of woman : but nobles, as well as peasants, sometimes beat their wives, and the con- i temporary chronicles tell many cases of lords and even ! kings who dealt shamefully with their wives. Divorce was I frequent among the upper classes despite its prohibition by the Church, and was secured by alleging that the married pair were too closely related and should not have been mar- ried to begin with. Feudalism seems to the modern observer who looks back on it an intricate and almost hopeless tangle. Such confused conditions were due not merely to war and vio- Continual lence and anarchy, nor further to the compli- f e udd g re°la- cated network of feudal relationships at any tionships given time, but also to the continual change and shifting and reshaping of those relations with passing years, making soci- ety assume new forms as when one shakes up the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. Death, inheritance, forfeiture, escheat, vassals' changing lords, partition of fiefs, subinfeudation, union of fiefs by marriage, conquests in war — all these changes kept the feudal world in almost as fluctuating a condition as the modern stock market.