radual.

The weakness of the Carlovingian kings and emperors gave room for the
speedy development of disruptive tendencies in a territory so extensive
and so little consolidated. The duchies and counties of the eighth and
ninth centuries were still official magistracies, the holders of which
discharged the functions of imperial judges or generals. Such officers
were of course men whom the kings could trust, in most cases Franks,
courtiers or kinsmen, who at an earlier date would have been _comites_
or antrustions, and who were provided for by feudal benefices. The
official magistracy had in itself the tendency to become hereditary, and
when the benefice was recognized as heritable, the provincial
governorship became so too. But the provincial governor had many
opportunities of improving his position, especially if he could identify
himself with the manners and aspirations of the people he ruled. By
marriage or inheritance he might accumulate in his family not only the
old allodial estates which, especially on German soil, still continued
to subsist, but the traditions and local loyalties which were connected
with the possession of them. So in a few years the Frank magistrate
could unite in his own person the beneficiary endowment, the imperial
deputation, and the headship of the nation over which he presided. And
then it was only necessary for the central power to be a little
weakened, and the independence of duke or count was limited by his
homage and fealty alone, that is, by obligations that depended on
conscience only for their fulfilment.

It is in Germany that the disruptive tendency most distinctly takes the
political form; Saxony and Bavaria assert their national independence
under Swabian and Saxon dukes who have identified the interests of their
subjects with their own. In France, where the ancient tribal divisions
had been long obsolete, and where the existence of the allod involved
little or no feeling of loyalty, the process was simpler still; the
provincial rulers aimed at practical rather than political sovereignty;
the people were too weak to have any aspirations at all. The disruption
was due more to the abeyance of central attraction than to any
centrifugal force existing in the provinces. But the result was the
same; feudal government, a graduated system of jurisdiction based on
land tenure, in which every lord judged, taxed, and commanded the class
next below him, of which abject slavery formed the