owed to transmit anything to a child
unless the latter, "living from their pot," can, after their death,
continue their service. "Not to be killed," says Stendhal, "and to
have a good sheepskin coat in winter, was, for many people in the tenth
century, the height of felicity"; let us add, for a woman, that of not
being violated by a whole band. When we clearly represent to ourselves
the condition of humanity in those days, we can comprehend how men
readily accepted the most obnoxious of feudal rights, even that of the
droit du seigneur. The risks to which they were daily exposed were even
worse.[1112] The proof of it is that the people flocked to the feudal
structure as soon as it was completed. In Normandy, for instance, when
Rollo had divided off the lands with a line, and hung the robbers,
the inhabitants of the neighboring provinces rushed in to establish
themselves. The slightest security sufficed to repopulate a country.

People accordingly lived, or rather began to live once more, under the
rude, iron-gloved hand which used them roughly, but which afforded
them protection. The seignior, sovereign and proprietor, maintains for
himself under this double title, the moors, the river, the forest, all
the game. It is no great evil, since the country is nearly a desert,
and he devotes his leisure to exterminating large wild beasts. He alone
possessed the resources. He is the only one that is able to construct
the mill, the oven, and the winepress; to establish the ferry, the
bridge, or the highway, to dike in a marsh, and to raise or purchase a
bull. To indemnify himself he taxes for these, for forces their use. If
he is intelligent and a good manager of men, if he seeks to derive the
greatest profit from his ground, he gradually relaxes, or allows to
become relaxed, the meshes of the net in which his peasants and serfs
work unprofitably because they are too tightly drawn. Habits, necessity,
a voluntary or forced conformity, have their effect. Lords, peasants,
serfs, and bourgeois, in the end adapted to their condition, bound
together by a common interest, form together a society, a veritable
corporation. The seigniory, the county, the duchy becomes a patrimony
which is loved through a blind instinct, and to which all are devoted.
It is confounded with the seignior and his family; in this relation
people are proud of him. They narrate his feats of arms; they cheer
him as his cavalcade passes along the street; they rejoic