om. Nothing was safe from their insolent
courage and rapacity.

The rich could intrench themselves in stone fortresses, with moats and
drawbridges, and be in comparative security, but the poor were utterly
defenceless against this perennial destroyer. The result was a compact
between the powerful and the weak, which was the beginning of the
feudal system. It was in effect an exchange of protection for service
and fealty.

You give us absolute control of your persons--your military service
when required, and a portion of your substance and the fruit of your
toil--and we will in exchange give you our fortified castles as a
refuge from the Northmen. Such was the offer. It was a choice between
vassalage, serfdom, or destruction outright.

Simple enough in its beginnings, this became a ramified system of
oppression, a curious network of authority, ingeniously controlling an
entire people. The conditions upon which was engrafted this compact
were of great antiquity, had indeed been brought across the Rhine by
the German conquerors; but the Northmen were the impelling cause of the
swift development of feudalism in France.

Charlemagne had felt grave apprehensions of evil from these robber
incursions, but could not have conceived of a result such as this, the
most oppressive system ever fastened upon a nation, and one which would
at the same time sap the foundations of royalty itself.

The theory was that the king was absolute owner of all the territory;
the great lords holding their titles from him on condition of military
service, their vassals pledging military service and obedience to them
again on similar terms, and sub-vassals again to them repeating the
pledge; and so on in descending chain, until at last the serf, that
wretched being whom none looks up to nor fears, is ground to powder
beneath the superimposed mass; no appeal from the authority, no escape
from the caprice or cruelty of his feudal lord. Could any scales
weigh, could any words measure the suffering which must have been
endured? Is it strange that, with every aspiration thwarted, hope
stifled, Europe sank into the long sleep of the Middle Ages?

It is easy to conceive that, under such a system, where all the affairs
of the realm were adjusted by individual rulers with unlimited power,
and where the great barons could make war upon each other without
authorization from the king, by the time this nominal head of the
entire system was reached