What especially fixes our attention on this reign, is the rank which, the clergy enjoyed. Charlemagne availed himself of them as a political instrument; Louis submitted to them as a mighty power. The one enriched the popes in order to purchase their gratitude, together with the homage and obedience of the people; the other made them temporal princes, and prostrated himself at the feet of those very men who had bowed at the footstool of his father. From this reign we may chiefly date the arrogant pretensions of the tiara over crowns, and that despotism of a false theocracy which became terrible under Innocent III. The bishops at this time arrogated to themselves the only legitimate right to power; they possessed immense riches, wore armor like the military, and were scandalously luxurious. An instance is cited of one abbot who alone had 20,000 vassals. Louis wished to reform these abuses, so contrary to the doctrine of the gospel; and this drew on him the wrath and vengeance of the clergy. To undertake the reform of a class of men, whose supremacy we at the same time acknowledge, is a dangerous project.

Justice was at this time perverted by the most ignorant barbarism. It was believed, that God would sooner work a miracle, than suffer an innocent person to perish; in order, therefore, to wipe off an accusation it was necessary to plunge the arms into boiling water, or walk over red-hot iron, &c.; if no injury resulted from it, the person was acquitted. At other times their differences were decided and crimes judged by single combat; the parties pleaded by battle; women and infirm persons were represented by a champion whose thumb was cut off if he was conquered. Every monastery had one of these to defend its interests; the clergy, however, preferred the trial by ordeal. Charles ordered the stick to be substituted for the sword, and this order was renewed five centuries after; but for a long time serfs were the only persons who fought with sticks. Witnesses and even the judges themselves were often obliged to fight duels. Religious ceremonies preceded these decisions, which, though they may be traced to the Hindoos and the Greeks, were immediately derived from the Burgundians, a German nation.

The Romans had rendered the Latin language popular among the Gauls; and the Franks and other barbarians corrupted it. From this sprung a dialect called Romance, a mixture of Celtic, Teutonic, and Gothic, in which the Latin predominated. This is the language which, after the polish of eight centuries, forms the basis of the French tongue.

Under Louis the Meek, the monarchy, though torn with divisions within, yet maintained itself without; under his son, Louis the Bald, every thing went to ruin. He was a weak and cowardly prince, and his reign was a long series of calamities. After the death of their father, the three brothers again made war upon each other. He who held the title of emperor was conquered at the battle of Fontenay in Burgundy, where 100,000 men perished. The bishops, who then disposed of the crown, dethroned him, and made a new partition of the empire. At that time the

Danes, or Normans, were a terrible scourge to France; they pillaged one-half of the country; burned Paris, and, after the custom of the emperors of degraded Rome, Charles lavished upon his enemies that treasure, which was to them only a new motive for returning Every year fresh fleets of robbers landed on the coasts, and the king crushed the people with taxes to satisfy them. During this confusion (A.D. 846) the lords and bishops disputed for power; the former prevailed in an assembly, from which the people were excluded; the latter revenged themselves by deposing the king, in order to give the crown to his brother the German, and afterwards excommunicated the latter. Thus the priests and the grandees were occupied only in sharing among them, or disputing for, the spoils of the people, while the pirates were invading France. The king of Lorrain narrowly escaped being deprived of his kingdom by excommunication, because he had been divorced. It was about this period that Bardouin, a French lord, who had also been excommunicated for having carried off Charles's daughter, received from him the earldom of Flanders, which he transmitted to his posterity. We must now, however, explain, how a government came to be established, which rendered the people so miserable, and yet contributed so much to the abolition of slavery.

At the time of the conquest the provinces were governed by Roman officers, sometimes called counts, or companions of the emperor, and sometimes dukes or generals. The king afterwards continued to appoint these military and civil functionaries. During the confusion of the reign of Charles the Bald, they rendered themselves independent of the royal power, and even wrested from its feebleness the hereditary possession of their offices. By these means a new government was established, or rather the government was divided into as many parts as there were provinces. The king was considered as the supreme head; but his power was an illusion; force still prevailed, and the exercise of force is the origin of continual war. This political system was founded on fidelity. The inferior was called a vassal; the superior a suzerain or lord. The king, as king, was the vassal of none but God, as they were accustomed to speak; and his vassals had others under them, over whom they were lords; these subdivisions were endless. The fief was a kind of temporary payment; the lord gave the fief to the vassal, on the condition that the latter should follow him to the war; and in return he guaranteed him security and protection. There could be but little regularity in such a system, only as the conditions of this treaty were well fixed and reciprocally guarded; it was indeed organised insubordination. The plebeians, vulgar, or rustics, were not vassals, but subjects of the lord, and constrained, on a requisition from him, to march under his banner. In this political and social scale, each degree had no direct authority, but over the rank immediately below it. Such is, in substance, that political system which has been called the feudal govern

ment.

The royal power could not thus exist for a long period. Charles the Bald was exceeded in

Hugues died at Paris, much regretted by the priests and the army, whom he had equally cherished: the people, however, held no rank in the state. The elevation of the Capetians may be attributed to the feudal anarchy: feudality ascended the throne with king Hugues. He sent one day the following question to an earl who had revolted, who made thee an earl?' The latter replied, who made thee a king?'

Robert was a prince of great devotion and mildness, very charitable and very unfortunate. He was related to his wife in the fourth degree, and had been her god-father; relationships which the pope, notwithstanding the dispensations of the bishops, judged so incompatible, that he annulled the marriage and suspended the prelates who had allowed it. The latter, on this, excommunicated the king, who was refractory; although he constantly chaunted at the reading desk; and from this time, if we may believe the recitals of the priests, he was abandoned by all his lords, and avoided by his domestics. The same prince, after a penance, caused to be condemned and burnt at Orleans, with great pomp, some unfortunate creatures who were called heretics and Manicheans. His second wife, Constance, was a sort of fury, who stirred up her sons to revolt. He had one of them crowned, whose name was Henry; but he was not the eldest, which proves that the right of primogeniture was not yet acknowledged. Under his melancholy reign, which, moreover, had nothing to do with ninetenths of France, there was a dreadful famine, during which human flesh was devoured by the people.

Henry I. (A. D. 1031) had at first to struggle against Constance, the queen-mother, who stirred up his brother against him. He then endeavoured to wrest Normandy from duke William, at whose father's he had found an asylum; but he was defeated in this project. At this period the hierarchical supremacy of the popes was first solemnly proclaimed, and Leo IX. held a council in France, contrary to the wish of Henry. The king, wishing to have his son crowned, assembled the bishops, monks, and lords; among whom the archbishop of Rheims at that time had the right of consecrating him, and the legates granted him their suffrages in the name of the pope. The Capetians thus transmitted their crown as far downward as to Philip Augustus, who married a princess of the house of Lorrain (a branch of the Carlovingians), and who thought himself sufficiently powerful not to need the coronation of his son.

Let us pause here: this is the middle epoch of pure feudalism; of that frightful system which burdened France for almost three centuries, and reduced mankind to the lowest depths of misery. The whole nation had become serfs or slaves; the condition of the people was little better than that of brutes. Any one might strike, mutilate, or even kill, a serf, with impunity. Almost all the freemen had given up their liberty of their own accord, that they might be less harassed by the lords; who, in return, condemned, taxed, and plundered them at pleasure. The feudal axiom, No land without a lord,' was established every where; and there existed no asylum or appeal

from its decisions. It was necessary to be either the oppressor or the oppressed. The churchmen and the lords pillaged each other by turns, while each contributed to the ruin of the people, and natural strength or religious authority were the only prevailing forces. The use of cavalry, of which the Franks were almost entirely ignorant, was become, together with that of bearing arms, the exclusive privilege of the nobles; and a lord on horseback, clad in iron armour, made a whole canton tremble. The serfs, who composed the main strength of the army, fought on foot. Overwhelmed with services, tells, and subsidies of all sorts, imposed by the military or the ecclesiastics, humbled by seignioral claims which were revolting to nature and modesty, they knew not whom to obey, and fought only to rivet their chains more firmly. Those who lived in the country were called villeins, those of the cities and towns bourgeois. Neither of them could labor but for the advantage of their lords, who often came to live upon them with their men, their serjeants, and varlets. The latter were the candidates for the profession of cavaliers or men at arms. Valets have, it thus appears, rather a noble origin.

Among themselves the lords were equally arbitrary and ferocious; their declarations of war extended to relations and allies, and the quarrel of a single family was sufficient to deluge a whole district with blood for thirty years together. It was a state of constant war; all the castles and abbeys were fortresses, or rather retreats, where 100,000 tyrants shut themselves up with their booty. France became one vast field of blood, and perpetual carnage at length wearied even ferocity itself. It was thought, by means of a council, to impose on these factious spirits what was called the peace of God. The bishops ordained fasts and penances, during which humanity breathed; but this peace, as well as the truce of God,' which forbad their fighting on Saturday evening or Monday morning, soon fell into disuse. Such was the feudal system, as it has been called, in France; a state of real anarchy, in which force was only tempered by anathema.

He

The long reign of Philip I., son of the preceding king, is an epoch of remarkable events. William the Bastard, duke of Normandy, crossed the channel (A. D. 1066), and effected the conquest of England, where he established his own rigorous modification of the feudal regime. had the firmness to refuse homage to the pope. A jest of the king of France on the excessive fatness of William kindled a war, from which we may date a long-continued enmity between France and England: Normandy and the Beauce were at first the scene of the contest. About this time also began the quarrels of the em perors and the popes about investitures. imperious and turbulent Hildebrand (Gregory VII.) was the originator of them. It was this pontiff who made emperors and kings his dependents, who established despotism in the church, and a Christian theocracy throughout Europe.

The

The king tired of his wife, Bertha, attempted to prove that she was related to him, and under this pretext divorced her, according to the

abuses of the times. He then seized on the person of Bertrade, countess of Anjou, and married her: but was intimidated in his career by the papal see. Being excommunicated by Urban II. he at first separated from Bertrade: then took her again, on which the pope proceeded to Poitiers to repeat his anathema in a council, at which the bishops and lords are said literally to have pelted each other with stones. An insurrection ensued, in which several noblemen, who had divorced their wives, took part with the king. The latter associated his son Louis with him, in order the better to resist the storm; but Bertrade became jealous of the prince, and attempted to poison him. In fine, the bishops found it was for their interest to grant the king absolution; and he came, by the consent of the pope, in the winter and barefooted, to receive it at a council held in Paris.

From this state of degradation and brutality, in which the feudal system held the human race, the ambition of ecclesiastics was at last destined to deliver it. A French pope, the celebrated Gerbert, conceived the idea of conquering the Holy Land, or Palestine; and a hermit realised the project. Returning from the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which was then so much in vogue, Peter travelled through Europe, preaching in courts and cities and councils; he inflamed the minds of men with zeal for the holy sepulchre, and indignation against the Mussulmans, who held it in their polluted grasp. All classes heard him with attention, and entered with ardor into the undertaking he proposed. The serfs, to avoid the grinding slavery of the soil; the vassals to escape the despotism of their lords, and debtors, in order to free themselves by indulgences; old men, women, children, princes, monks, lords, bishops, set out on the expedition, crying out, It is the will of God.' They bore on their garments a cross of red stuff, and thus were called croisés. An undisciplined multitude, with Peter for their general, now carried devastation through some of the finest parts of Europe: they massacred the Jews, wherever they found them, and at last found a tomb for themselves in Hungary. Thirty thousand men, the remains of a regular feudal army, however, took Jerusalem in the year 1099, and made Godfrey of Bouillon, one of their chiefs, king. This was called the first crusade. These follies, devoutly warlike, were useful to the cause of humanity, though they were the cause of much bloodshed. The people were delivered from the presence of many of their lords; the latter sold part of their estates to the king or the clergy to defray the expenses of the expedition; and the royal power, freed from many of its fetters, began in some measure to re-establish itself.

The dominions of the French kings did not extend farther at this time than about fifteen or twenty leagues round Paris. Louis the Fat displayed his activity in making war in Orleans, in Normandy, and in the Isle of France, against his vassals the barons, powerful brigands, who rifled the passing traveller. To reduce one of them, he laid seige three times to a little feudal fort. In a war against the king of England, Louis showed considerable personal courage. When

The

the emperor, the son-in-law of the former, took part with him and determined on the invasion of France, Louis called together the great vassals of the crown, whose duty it was to march under the royal standard against a foreign power; and an army of 100,000 men was raised. Germans passed the Rhine. The French were soon able to attack the Normaus; but the counts and dukes, fearing to render the king too powerful, returned home, and left him without an army. Peace however was concluded between the two monarchs in 1128, and Louis applied himself to the internal regulation of his kingdom. Notwithstanding his piety Louis could not escape, being excommunicated even by the bishop of Paris. He died after having procured the coronation of his son.

This reign forms a very important epoch of French history. The miserable people began now to emerge from their nothingness, and to become of some importance in the state. Various insurrections took place in several of the towns possessed by the clergy and the barons, as wel! as within the domains of the king; who, being unable or unwilling to repress them, gradually found his advantage in recognising the liberty of the inferior classes. They were allowed to institute their own civil governments; to name their own magistracy; to assess themselves in the annual rent, which they had engaged to pay their former tyrants; to raise their own militia, &c. These little democracies, independent under certain conditions of the lords, were called communes. It is true, that the king sold them charters, by which he granted them these rights of nature; but it was a great advancement of the public liberty that they were to be thus obtained, and greatly to the mortification of the barons, the bishops, and the monks. Afterwards several of the feudal sovereigns imitated the king, and, in order to recruit their finances, sold their liberty to the serfs of the cities and boroughs. But in many places the citizens, rising against the barons, established the communes by their own power.

Louis, surnamed the Young, by marrying Eleanora, the heiress of Aquitaine and Poitou, made a temporary addition to the domains of the crown. In a war against the earl of Champagne, he set fire to a church, in which 1300 persons were burned to death. St. Bernard an enthusiast, who perhaps possessed some portion of genius, having preached up a second crusade, Louis, penetrated with remorse, inflamed himself with pious zeal and enlisted in the cause with his court, his queen, and 200,000 men. This crusade produced no other result than numerous pillages along the road; it was, however, useful. A foundling, who had risen to the post of abbot of St. Dennis, in this period, in which the abbots of this monastery were the king's counsellors, became regent of the kingdom, and continued the work of liberty begun under Louis the Fat, whose minister he had been; his name was Suger. He was born for this station; and took that interest in the welfare of the people which rendered the provinces of the royal territory the most flourishing part of France. On his return, however, the king, contrary to Suger's

advice, committed the fault of repudiating his wife. She married Henry, duke of Plantagenet, who already possessed Anjou and Normandy, and had become king of England. As her dowry she brought him a third part of France; and thus the antipathy of husband and wife changed the face of the two kingdoms. The sons of the king of England had revolted against their father; Louis abetted them, but without success. He died (A. D. 1180), after having proved himself a weak devotee and an imprudent sovereign.

His son, Philip II. surnamed the August, commenced his reign by an act which, even in those times of superstition and rapine, was thought outrageous. The Jews were masters of the little commerce that existed, their political situation having forced them to become industrious, and the king drove them out of the kingdom by an edict. He was capable, however, of better deeds: he exterminated the banditti called Brabantins, and withstood the pope's legate. He overcame the king of England, who was in possession of the half of France, and went on the crusade with his successor Richard, the Lion-hearted, to rescue Jerusalem from the Saracens. The two kings succeeded only in taking St. Jean d'Acre; and Philip, on his return, invaded Normandy during Richard's absence. Having divorced himself from his wife, he was excommunicated by the pope, and the kingdom put under an interdict; that is to say, masses and divine worship were suspended; meat was not allowed to be eaten; marriages were put off, &c. Philip had the good sense to laugh at this interdict, and he seized on the temporalities of the bishops. Another bold action distinguished his reign: John, surnamed Lackland, king of England, had murdered young Arthur, his competitor; and Philip caused him to be tried by his peers, as his vassal, declaring Normandy, Anjou, Tourain, &c., on his conviction, to be forfeited to the crown of France. He executed this judgment at the head of an army. Thus the French monarchy, which had been dismembered by the feudal government, began to recover its unity. Philip Augustus, we may add, was the first of the French kings who kept a standing army, and this was a new blow to the feudal system.

A fourth crusade, which was set on foot at this time, (A.D. 1204), produced only a short-lived conquest over the Greek empire. The crusaders crowned their chief, Badouin of Flanders, at Constantinople. A more lamentable crusade was directed against the Christians of the south of France, called the Albigenses. Myriads of them were exterminated, and many burned, because they entertained doubts, as their adversaries alleged, on some mysterious doctrines. It was to this prince that Pope Innocent III. offered the crown of England; John, on his Dart, surrendered his kingdom to the pope, who upon this became his protector. A powerful league was formed against Philip. John, earl of Flanders and emperor, assembled 200,000 men, and they were already partitioning France, when Philip with 50,000 defeated them in the plains of Bovines. A French bishop signalised himself in this famous battle; he

killed his enemies with an iron club, that he might not infringe the canons of a council, which prohibited priests to shed blood. The English barons, after having compelled John to sign their great charter, rose against him, when he retracted it; upon which some of them acknowledged Louis, the son of Philip Augustus, as their king; and this young and very warlike prince kept his ground for some time in England. In looking back on this twelfth century, we observe several efforts of the human mind to break through its vassalage to lords and priests. On the one hand we see an increasing multitude of monastic orders, and begging friars, the devourers of the nation, and the militia of the pope; and we see laymen, the dupes of their interpretations of the apocalypse, and various parts of Scripture, leaving their wealth to pious foundations. But we behold also some men, driven to extremity by the luxury and pomp, pride and rapacity of the clergy, coming forward as reformers, or shaking off the yoke of credulity. We may notice also in this account a vicissitude that has frequently occurred; the clergy, at first poor and austere, enriching themaselves by abusing the terrors of the people; when rich, arriving at a high pitch of corrup tion; then falling into contempt, and disgracing religion; spoiled, and growing rich again, only to be despoiled afresh. The popes exacted of the nations of Christendom taxes of every description, and proclaimed themselves infallible; upon this arose Berenger and Arnold of Brescia, those forerunners of the Reformation. Unto the time of Luther, the same causes produced the same effects. Every thing in human affairs tends to abuse, and abuse leads to resistance and revolution.

Schools began at this time to be established in the bishoprics. That of Paris soon became the most famous in Europe, although the course of instruction pursued in it was very imperfect. 3000 students listened in the open air to the lectures of the logician Abelard the lover of Heloise, names which seem hardly to belong to so rude an age. But truth was sought for, not in nature and reason, but in the distorted doctrines of Aristotle; men did not reason, they wrangled. During this period, chivalry flourished in castles and tournaments, while the people were oppressed by the most gallant of its votaries. The troubadours were incessantly singing of beauty and love; and these men opened the path for the career of Dante and Petrarch, those fathers of modern literature in Italy, where insurrections, like those which had produced the communes in France, were just beginning to lay the foundation of republics. The crusaders had brought a dreadful malady from Asia; and France was filled with leprous people. Contagious and pestilential diseases were in this age also as frequent as want. Perpetual war, by interrupting the cultivation of the country, brought on famine and mortality; the dead corpses, lying unburied, produced the plague.

Louis VIII., called the Lion, defeated the king of England in France, where he was endeavouring to establish himself; after which, as the agent of the Inquisition, founded by Innocent