lity.
A well-known illustration of this is the incident of the vase taken
from the Cathedral of Rheims, and of Chlodowig's efforts to rescue it
from his independent comrade-in-arms.

The process of the development of the feudal polity of the Middle Ages
is, of course, a very complicated one, owing to the various strands
that go to compose it. In addition to the German tribes themselves,
who moved _en masse_, carrying with them their tribal and village
organization, under the overlordship of the various military leaders,
were the indigenous inhabitants amongst whom they settled. The latter
in the country districts, even in many of the territories within the
Roman Empire, still largely retained the primitive communal
organization. The new-comers, therefore, found in the rural
communities a social system already in existence into which they
naturally fitted, but as an aristocratic body over against the
conquered inhabitants. The latter, though not all reduced to a servile
condition, nevertheless held their land from the conquering body under
conditions which constituted them an order of freemen inferior to the
new-comers.

To put the matter briefly, the military leaders developed into barons
and princes, and in some cases the nominal centralization culminated,
as in France and England, in the kingly office; while, in Germany and
Italy, it took the form of the revived Imperial office, the spiritual
overlord of the whole of Christendom being the Pope, who had his
vassals in the prince-prelates and subordinate ecclesiastical holders.
In addition to the princes sprung originally from the military leaders
of the migratory nations, there were their free followers, who
developed ultimately into the knighthood or inferior nobility; the
inhabitants of the conquered districts forming a distinct class of
inferior freemen or of serfs. But the essentially personal relation
with which the whole process started soon degenerated into one based
on property. The most primitive form of property--land--was at the
outset what was termed _allodial_, at least among the conquering
race, from every social group having the possession, under the
trusteeship of his head man, of the land on which it settled. Now,
owing to the necessities of the time, owing to the need of protection,
to violence, and to religious motives, it passed into the hands of the
overlord, temporal or spiritual, as his possession; and the
inhabitants, even in the case of popu