g at Charlemagne's time; 2080 of them were colonists, 35 lites,[36]
220 slaves and only 8 freeholders. The practice of the patrons to demand
the transfer of the land titles to themselves and give the former owners
the use of the land for life, denounced as ungodly by Salvianus, was now
universally practiced by the Church in its dealings with the peasants.
The compulsory labor that now came more and more into vogue, had been
moulded as much after the Roman angariae, compulsory service for the
state, as after the services of the German mark men in bridge and road
building and other work for common purposes. By all appearances, then,
the mass of the population had arrived at the same old goal after four
hundred years.

That proved two things: Firstly, that the social differentiation and the
division of property in the sinking Roman empire corresponded perfectly
to the contemporaneous stage of production in agriculture and industry,
and hence was unavoidable; secondly, that this stage of production had
not been essentially altered for better or worse during four hundred
years, and therefore had necessarily produced the same division of
property and the same classes of population. The town had lost its
supremacy over the country during the last centuries of the Roman
empire, and had not regained it during the first centuries of German
rule. This presupposes a low stage of agriculture and industry. Such a
general condition produces of necessity the domination of great
proprietors and the dependence of small farmers. How impossible it was
to graft either the slave labor of Roman latifundian economy or the
compulsory labor of the new large scale production into such a society,
is proved by Charlemagne's very extensive experiments with his famous
imperial country residences that left hardly a trace. These experiments
were continued only by the convents and brought results only for them.
But the convents were abnormal social institutions, founded on celibacy.
They could do exceptional work, but they had to remain exceptions
themselves for this very reason.

Yet some progress had been made during these four hundred years.
Although in the end we find the same main classes as in the beginning,
still the human beings that made up these classes had changed. The
ancient slavery had disappeared; gone were also the beggared freemen who
had despised work as slavish. Between the Roman colonist and the new
serf, there had been the free Fra