FEUDALISM.

SEE the TENTH CENTURY, page 241.

THE close of the ninth century witnesses a decided progress towards more stable forms of government and greater security of social order.

We begin at this time to see the wandering life decline; populations became fixed; estates and landed possessions became settled; the relations between man and man no longer varied from day to day under the influence of force or chance. The interior and moral condition of man himself began to undergo a change; his ideas, his sentiments, began, like his life, to assume a more fixed character. GUIZOT.

In the ninth century we trace the first dawnings of the restoration of science. GIBBON.

Charlemagne in France, and Alfred the Great in England, endeavored to dispel this darkness, and gave their subjects a short glimpse of light and knowledge. But the ignorance of the age was too powerful for their efforts and institutions. The darkness returned, and settled over Europe, more thick and heavy than before. ROBERTSON.

The ninth century shows us Europe divided into two political zones: one comprehended the countries still remaining under the ancient dominion, founded by the conquests of Rome; the other contained the countries recently invaded by the Northmen, conquerors of the Roman subjects. The relative conditions of these men, either as masters or subjects, conquerors or conquered, differed very much in those two different regions. On one side, all the power acquired by centuries of conquest was the property of a single person, who dispensed it around him at his own pleasure; on the other, that power was the regular share of all the families sprung from the conquerors. The Saxons in Britain, the Franks in Gaul, and the

Lombards in Italy were all singly proprietors of a portion of the territory which their ancestors had invaded, all governors and sovereign arbitrators of the men conquered by their ancestors. In Greece there was but one master, and under that master different degrees of service; in the West there were thousands of masters free, under a chief who was but the first among equals. — THIERRY.