ide for a moment the personal
action of Charlemagne and of his counsellors, the general assemblies,
to judge by appearances and to believe nearly all the modern historians,
occupied a prominent place in it. They were, in fact, during his reign,
numerous and active; from the year 776 to the year 813 we may count
thirty-five of these national assemblies, March-parades and May-parades,
held at Worms, Valenciennes, Geneva, Paderborn, Aix-la-Chapelle,
Thionville, and several other towns, the majority situated round about
the two banks of the Rhine. The number and periodical nature of these
great political reunions are undoubtedly a noticeable fact. What, then,
went on in their midst? What character and weight must be attached to
their intervention in the government of the State? It is important to
sift this matter thoroughly.

There is extant, touching this subject, a very curious document. A
contemporary and counsellor of Charlemagne, his cousin-german Adalbert,
abbot of Corbic, had written a treatise entitled _Of the Ordering of the
Palace (De Ordine Palatii),_ and designed to give an insight into the
government of Charlemagne, with especial reference to the national
assemblies. This treatise was lost; but towards the close of the ninth
century, Hincmar, the celebrated archbishop of Rheims, reproduced it
almost in its entirety, in the form of a letter or of instructions,
written at the request of certain grandees of the kingdom who had asked
counsel of him with respect to the government of Carloman, one of the
sons of Charles the Stutterer. We read therein,

"It was the custom at this time to hold two assemblies every year. . .
In both, that they might not seem to have been convoked without motive,
there were submitted to the examination and deliberation of the grandees
. . . and by virtue of orders from the king, the fragments of law
called _capitula,_ which the king himself had drawn up under the
inspiration of God or the necessity for which had been made manifest to
him in the intervals between the meetings."

Two striking facts are to be gathered from these words: the first, that
the majority of the members composing these assemblies probably regarded
as a burden the necessity for being present at them, since Charlemagne
took care to explain their convocation by declaring to them the motive
for it and by always giving them something to do; the second, that the
proposal of the capitularies, or, in modern