SECOND LECTURE.

Necessity for studying the progressive formation of the feudal system-It is often forgotten that social facts form themselves but slowly, and in forming themselves, undergo many vicissitudes-Analysis of the feudal system in its essential elements. They are three in number: 1. The nature of territorial property; 2. Amalgamation of sovereignty and property; 3. Hierarchical organization of the feudal association-State of territorial property from the 5th to the 10th century-Origin and meaning of the word feodum-It is synonymous with beneficium-History of benefices, from the 8th to the 10th century-Examination of the system of Montesquieu concerning the legal gradation of the duration of benefices-Causes of the increase of the number of benefices-Almost all landed property became feudal.

IT has been shown that the feudal period embraces the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Before entering upon it, before studying it in itself and according to the plan which I have drawn out, it is necessary that we should have some distinct idea of the origins of feudalism; it is necessary to follow it, and to present it to our minds in all the various phases of its progressive formation, from the fifth to the tenth century.

I intentionally say, its progressive formation. No great fact, no social state, makes its appearance complete and at once; it is formed slowly, successively; it is the result of a multitude of different facts, of different dates and origins, which modify and combine themselves in a thousand ways before constituting a whole, presenting itself in a clear and systematic form, receiving a special name and standing through a long life.

This is so simple, so evident a truth, that, at first sight, it seems useless to call it to mind; it is, however, necessary to do so, for it has been and is constantly forgotten. An historical epoch is generally studied when it has ceased, a social condition when it has disappeared. It is, then, in their entirety, under their complete and definitive form that that epoch and that condition are presented to the mind of the observer or the historian. He is easily led to suppose that it has always been thus; he easily forgets that those facts, which he contemplates in all their development, commenced,

increased, and while increasing underwent numerous metamorphoses; and he proposes to see, and everywhere seeks them, such as he knew and conceived them at the time of their full maturity.

Numerous and various errors arise from this inclination, in the history even of beings whose unity and whose permanence is the greatest and most visible in the history of men. Why are there so many contradictions and uncertainties concerning the character and moral destinies of Mahomet, of Cromwell, or of Napoleon? Why those problems concerning their sincerity or hypocrisy, their egoism or patriotism? Because people want to see them, as it were, simultaneously, and as having co-existent in them dispositions and ideas which were successively developed; because they forget that, without losing their essential identity, they greatly and constantly changed; that the vicissitudes of their external destiny corresponded to internal revolutions, often unseen by their contemporaries, but real and powerful. If they followed them step by step, from their first appearance in the world until their death, if they were present at that secret work of their moral nature amidst the mobility and activity of their life, they would perceive many of those incoherences, those absurdities which surprise them, disappear, or at least become attenuated; and then only would they truly know and understand them.

If it be thus in the history of individual beings, the most simple of all, and whose duration is so short, with how much more reason is it in the history of societies, of those general facts, so vast, so complex, and which extend through so many centuries! It is here especially that there is danger of overlooking the variety of origins, the complication and slowness of formation. We have a striking example of this in the matter which occupies us. Few historical problems have been more differently and eagerly debated than that as to when and how the feudal system commenced. To speak only of French scholars and publicists, Chantereau-Lefevre, Salvaing, Brussel, de Boulainvilliers, Dubos, Mably, Montesquieu, and many others: each forms a different idea of it. Whence arises this diversity? It is that they have almost all proposed to find the feudal system entire even in its very cradle, to find it such as they see it is at the epoch of its full development. Feudalism has, as it were, entered at once into their mind; and it is in this condition, at this stage of

its history, that they have everywhere sought it. And as, notwithstanding, each of them has applied himself more particularly to such and such a characteristic of the feudal system, and has made it to consist in one particular element rather than another, they have been led into immensely different ideas of the epoch and mode of its formation; ideas which may be easily rectified and reconciled as soon as people will consent not to forget that feudalism took five centuries in forming, and that its numerous elements, during this long epoch, belong to very different elements and origins. It is according to this idea, and never losing sight of it, that I shall endeavor to trace the history of its progressive formation, rapidly and as a preparation to the study of feudalism itself.

To succeed in this, it is necessary-first, to determine the principal facts, the essential elements of this social condition; I mean the facts which properly constitute it, and distinguish it from all others. Secondly, to follow these facts through their successive transformations, each isolately and in itself, and in the junctions and combinations which at the end of five centuries resulted in feudalism.

The essential facts, the constituent elements of the feudal system may, I think, be reduced to three.

1. The particular nature of territorial property, real, full, hereditary, and yet derived from a superior, imposing certain personal obligations on its possessor, under pain of forfeiture, in a word, wanting in that complete independence which is now its characteristic.

2. The amalgamation of sovereignty with property, I mean the attribution to the proprietor of the soil over all the inhabitants of that soil, of the whole or nearly the whole of those rights which constitute what we now call sovereignty, and which are now possessed only by the government, the public power.

3. The hierarchical system of legislative, judicial, military institutions, which united the possessors of fiefs among themselves, and formed them into a general society.

These, if I am not mistaken, are the truly essential and constitutive facts of feudalism. It would be easy to resolve it into a larger number of elements, to assign to it a greater number of characteristics; but these, I think, are the principal, and contain all the others. I shall therefore confine myself to them, and sum them up by saying, that properly to

comprehend the progressive development of feudalism, we have to study: first, the history of territorial property, that is, the state of lands; secondly, the history of sovereignty and of the social state, that is, the state of persons; thirdly, the history of the political system, that is, the state of insti

tutions.

I enter at once into the matter; the history of territorial property will now occupy us.

At the end of the tenth century, when feudalism was definitively constituted, its territorial element, as you know, bore the name of fief, (feodum, feudum.) A writer replete with sense and learning, Brussel, in his Examen de l'usage général des Fiefs aux 11, 12, 13, et 14 siècles, says, that the word fief (feodum) did not originally mean the land itself, the body of the domain, but only what in feudal language is called the tenure of the land, that is, its relation of dependence towards such or such a suzerain:

"Thus," says he, "when king Louis le Jeune notifies by a charter of the year 1167, that count Henry of Champagne has granted the fief of Savegny to Bartholomew, bishop of Beauvais, it is only to be understood from this, that count Henry had granted the dependence of Savegny to the bishop of Beauvais; so that this land which had hitherto been held immediately from the count of Champagne was thenceforward only to hold of him as a sub-fief."

I think that Brussel is mistaken. It is very improbable that the name of feudal property meant at first only the quality, the attribute of that property, and not the thing itself. When the first lands which became fiefs were given, it was not suzerainty alone which was conferred; the donors evidently gave the land itself. At a later period, when the feudal system and its ideas had gained some firmness and development, then they might have distinguished the tenure of the domain, have given one apart from the other, and designated it by a particular word. It may be that at this epoch the word fief was often used for the tenure, independently of the body of the land. But such could not have been the primitive meaning of feodum; the domain and the tenure were surely originally confounded in language as in fact.

However this may be, the word is only found at a late period in the documents of our history. It appears for the first time in a charter of Charles le Gros, in 884. It is there

repeated three times, and almost at the same epoch it is also met with elsewhere. Its etymology is uncertain; many have been assigned to it. I shall point out but two of them, as those alone which I consider probable. According to some, (and this is the opinion of most of the French jurisconsults, of Cujas among others,) the word feodum is of Latin origin; it comes from the word fides, and means the land in consideration of which people were bound to fidelity towards a suzerain. According to others, and especially according to German writers, feodum is of German origin, and comes from two ancient words, of which one has disappeared from the German languages, while the other still exists in many, particularly in the English, from the word fe, fee, reward, recompense, and from the radical od, property, goods, possession; so that feodum means a property given in recompense, by way of pay or reward.

The Germanic origin seems to me far more probable than the Latin origin: first, because of the very construction of the word, and next, because that, at the time when it was introduced into our territory, it was from Germany that it came; lastly, because, in our ancient Latin documents, this kind of property bears a different name— e-that of beneficium. The word beneficium very frequently occurs in our historical documents from the fifth to the tenth century, and these evidently indicate the same condition of territorial property which, at the end of the eleventh century, took the name of feodum. For a long time after this epoch, the two words are synonymous; so that in the very charter referred to, of Charles le Gros, down to a charter of the emperor Frederic I., of 1162, feodum and beneficium are used indifferently.

In order, therefore, to the study of the history of the feoda from the fifth to the tenth century, it is necessary to Look at that of the beneficia. What we say of benefices will apply to fiefs, because the two words, at different dates, are the expression of the same fact.

From the earliest times of our history, immediately after the invasion and establishment of the Germans upon Gallic soil, we find benefices appear. This kind of territorial property is contradistinguished from another, which bears the name of alodium. The word alod, alodium, means an estate which the possessor holds of no one, which imposed no obligation upon him towards any one.