relation between the lord of the soil and him who had only the enjoyment, and that limited, of its fruits, there were others which grew out of the vassal's allegiance and dependence upon the superior.

Of these, aids were the chief. They were sums, like a tax or contribution, levied upon all the vassals, to defray expenses of the lord on certain extraordinary occasions—such as a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; the costs of his own relief to an over lord; the making his eldest son a knight; the portioning his eldest daughter; and his ransom, if taken in battle.

These three last are alone permitted by Magna Charta; and by the laws of France and other Continental monarchies, ward or wardship and marriage were not so universally established as the aids of which we have just been speaking. But in England they existed, and to an oppressive extent, as they also did in Germany and in Normandy. On the ground of training the infant vassal to arms after his father's death, and because he lost his service during his minority, the lord took possession of his estate until he became of age; and an abuse of a vexatious kind soon crept in— the lord bestowing the guardianship and possession of the laud upon strangers, from favor or for money. This was called, in English law, guardianship in chivalry, and was only abolished first during the Commonwealth, and then by a perpetual act at the Restoration, after having been the source of extreme oppression down to that late period.

Marriage (maritagium) was the right to marry a ward, and receive a price for the match. The custom was still more rigorous in Jerusalem, where the Crusaders introduced the feudal system; for there, maiden or widow, in order that there might never be wanting a male vassal to perform service, was compelled to take one of three husbands presented to her by the lord, unless she was sixty years old, and resolved to die single. In some parts of Germany and France, and in Scotland till the eleventh century, it is certain that a custom more outrageous still prevailed, the lord having a right to enjoy the person of the vassal's bride. This, in France, was called droit du seigneur, and in Scotland the fine paid for it was termed woman's mark; but it is doubtful whether it existed in respect of the vassals who held by military service, or

was only incident to other tenures of a baser kind. Of these it is now necessary to speak.

We have hitherto confined our attention to those persons who, being soldiers, companions in arms of the chief, freemen and warriors, shared the fruits of the conquests made, and obtained land either freely and unconditionally, or on the condition of certain allegiance and service-the holders of the former or allodial land gradually becoming holders by feudal tenure. There existed, however, in all the provinces overrun by the northern nations, a twofold division of the inhabitants, some being freemen and some being slaves. In all parts of the Roman Empire the legal right and the practice was established of holding persons in absolute slavery; and that the barbarians found the people in this state is plain, among other things, from the laws of the Burgundians, which mention their having, on their settlement in France, seized two thirds of the land, and one third of the slaves or serfs.

But the northern nations had also slavery as a part of their own customs, although their domestic slaves were in an easy condition, and did not much differ in their circumstances from the other poorer classes of the community. Captives made in war; persons who sold themselves, or who were sold by their parents from poverty; convicts condemned to pay fines, and made slaves on default; gamesters who staked their personal liberty upon the issue of play, to which the Germans were passionately addictedall these classes increased the number of slaves among those rude nations. Upon conquering any district, they sometimes reduced all the people to slavery, except such as could ransom themselves. Subsequently, revolt or other acts of violence extended the numbers of the slaves. Another reason operated in the same direction. The violence of the early feudal times, and the consequent dangers in which poor men were placed, made it highly desirable to obtain protection from the more powerful members of the community. Personal protections were obtained from these lords, called commendations, resembling the patronage of the Romans, or the relation in which the upper classes stood toward their clients. For this protection, payments in money were made, called salvamenta, or salvages, and many who could pay nothing, became serfs or slaves to

such as would not be content with mere allegiance or with occasional service. Allodial proprietors used at first to obtain commendations, as they had no law to protect them, until by degrees the tenure of their land became feudal, as we have already seen. Men who had no land were deprived of this resource, and very often became serfs. Many, too, in those superstitious ages, parted with their liberty to monasteries and churches in return for their prayers and masses, together with some small share of their temporal possessions. It thus happened that, as all the land became feudal, and the maxim of the law arose, "Nulle terre sans seigneur "No land without a lord”—so almost every one was either a vassal in respect of his land, or a serf in respect of his person, and the common people came to be almost universally in a state of slavery.

But land in those countries constituted the whole, or nearly the whole, wealth of the community. It was in some sort, too, the currency in which services of every kind were paid. A proprietor desiring to retain the services of any one, gave him a rent issuing out of his land; and this constituted him a vassal; for it was by a refinement of the feudal law reckoned (not feudum, but) quasi feudum a kind of fief, or an improper fief-a fee or feud of land. In order to obtain inferior services, or to support serfs, they were settled on small portions of land in the neighborhood of the lord's residence, and these allotments were entirely held at will by the serfs, whom the lord could at any time dispossess. Thus, to obtain. land, needy freemen became serfs-another source of domestic slavery. But this kind of contract had very important consequences; for as the servitude of these voluntary slaves only could. last as long as they held the land, they and their children came no longer to be regarded as tenants at will, and liable to be dispos sessed; and so the slaves, who had no rights at all, but were merely settled on their owner's land as the best way of supporting them and securing their services, came gradually to be considered like the others, and were allowed first to retain their allotments for life, afterward to transmit them to their children, and finally to their collateral heirs. No uniform rule, however, was established as to these rights or permissions. Different lords gave different rights and different courses of succession; different rights of alienation

by conveyance or by will were established in different districts or lordships, and different sums were paid to the lord as fines upon descent or alienation. One thing, however, was common originally to the whole-some service was exacted by the lord, and this service was of an inferior or base kind; never the military service by which free land was held by the freemen, vassals of the lord. These were the freeholders of each manor or lordship, owed suit service to the freeholders' court, and were bound to follow the lord in war. But the serfs, even when established in their rights of property, only attended customary courts of an inferior kind, and served the lord in a humbler way.

Thus, throughout the whole of what was once the Empire of the West, the feudal system was effectually established; and thus, from the degraded serf, who eked a miserable sustenance from the allotment made him by the holder of a knight's fee, who, perhaps, was vassal to a baron holding from some count, who was retainer to a duke, who was tenant in capite, or the immediate vassal of the king himself, until we reach the royal head of this vast system of servitude, we find not one freeman. True, the terms of the relationship were made to seem sufficiently inviting. Nominally "the feudal relation of lord and vassal was one of mutual support and assistance. Heavy burdens were laid upon the one, but they demanded corresponding duties and obligations from the other. If the vassal was bound to furnish an uncertain amount of personal military attendance to his superior, in his wars, public or private, and in later times to contribute much money, the lord was in turn obliged to warrant and secure his dependant in the quiet possession of his land, and to defend him against all enemies." No language, however, can conceal the fact that the whole system was one of petty despotisms, rising to an irresponsible and central military head; that it was emphatically a system of brute force; that it gave no defence from lawlessness but by submission to a lawless tyranny; that it reduced the poor man to a state of slavery, and that the best it could make any man was the bound vassal of a higher lord than he.

Such was the substitute for the free Saxon institutions, brought to England by the Norman conqueror, and we repeat what we

asserted in the first page of the present chapter-that it was a rising series of consolidated military powers, reaching its climax in a central monarchy which tolerated not one true freeman. But fortunately for the liberties of England, William made himself too powerful. The royal power in France had been reduced almost into contempt by the immense power of the immediate feudatories of the crown. The counts and dukes-though nominally vassals of the kingholding enormous territories, and, by the practice of sub-infeudation, having multitudes of military followers, had become in reality all but independent sovereigns. William himself, as duke of Normandy, had been too powerful to pay much respect to his French suzerain; but in distributing the lands of his defeated Saxon subjects among the Norman knights whose swords had won his crown, he saw to it that none should be so powerful as to dare, in any case, contest the royal will. He thus made tyranny over the barons possible whenever he or his successors should desire to play the tyrant. The result could not be doubtful. Tyranny, when possible, is always certain. He had made the individual barons too weak individually to make an issue with the king. When, therefore, royal tyranny became intolerable, the resistance to it necessarily assumed the best form of resistance to a tyranny -that of a united and determined coalition. Better still, it made the Saxon commons an important element in the baronial contests with the crown; and hence the charters, wrung from kings in England by the hands of nobles, have invariably been charters of the people's rights much more than of baronial privileges. Thus, through generation after generation, the united lords and commons, making common cause for rights and liberties dear to them both, have gradually won back to the people from the royal power what, but for the insatiable rapacity and keen sagacity of William, they might never have united to achieve. How the first great step of this mighty march was made we shall proceed to tell hereafter.3