by
hanging their Banners and exposing their Coats-of-arms at the Windows of
the Lodge of the Heralds.--After a Miniature of the "Tournaments of King
Rene" (Fifteenth Century), MSS. of the National Library of Paris.]

Up to the thirteenth century, there was, strictly speaking, no taxation
and no public treasury. The King received, through special officers
appointed for the purpose, tributes either in money or in kind, which
were most variable, but often very heavy, and drawn almost exclusively
from his personal and private properties. In cases of emergency only, he
appealed to his vassals for pecuniary aid. A great number of the grandees,
who lived far from the court, either in state offices or on their own
fiefs, had establishments similar to that of the King. Numerous and
considerable privileges elevated them above other free men. The offices
and fiefs having become hereditary, the order of nobility followed as a
consequence; and it then became highly necessary for families to keep
their genealogical histories, not only to gratify their pride, but also to
give them the necessary titles for the feudal advantages they derived by
birth. (Fig. 15). Without this right of inheritance, society, which was
still unsettled in the Middle Ages, would soon have been dissolved. This
great principle, sacred in the eyes both of great and small, maintained
feudalism, and in so doing it maintained itself amidst all the chaos and
confusion of repeated revolutions and social disturbances.

We have already stated, and we cannot sufficiently insist upon this
important point, that from the day on which the adventurous habits of the
chiefs of Germanic origin gave place to the desire for territorial
possessions, the part played by the land increased insensibly towards
defining the position of the persons holding it. Domains became small
kingdoms, over which the lord assumed the most absolute and arbitrary
rights. A rule was soon established, that the nobility was inherent to the
soil, and consequently that the land ought to transmit to its possessors
the rights of nobility.

This privilege was so much accepted, that the long tenure of a fief ended
by ennobling the commoner. Subsequently, by a sort of compensation which
naturally followed, lands on which rent had hitherto been paid became free
and noble on passing to the possession of a noble. At last, however, the
contrary rule prevailed, which caused the lands not to change quality in
chang