The establishment of the feudal system produced one of these changes of grave import; it completely altered the distribution of the population on the face of the land. Previously, the masters of the territory, the conquering population, had lived in masses more or less numerous, either sedentary in the interior of towns, or roving in bands over the country. By the feudal system, these men came to live isolated, each in his habitation, at great distances from each other. This change of course exercised material influence upon the character and course of civilisation. The social preponderance, the government of society, passed at once from the towns to the country; private property necessarily became of greater importance than public property, and in the same manner public life was absorbed in private life. Such was the first effect, a purely physical effect, of the triumph of the feudal society. The farther we investigate it, the more will the consequences of this single fact be unveiled.
In order to get more unequivocally at the part borne by this system in the history of civilisation, let us first of all take it in its most simple phase, in its primitive and fundamental element; let us contemplate a possessor of a fief in his domain, and inquire what becomes of all those who compose the petty society around him.
He establishes himself in an isolated and elevated locality, which he takes care to render sure and strong; he builds there what we shall call his castle. With whom does he establish himself? With his wife and children: perhaps some free men, who are not proprietors, are attached to his person, and continue to live with him and frequent his table. These are the occupiers of the interior of the castle. Around its base is grouped a small population of colonists and serfs, who cultivate the domain of the owner of the fief. In the midst of this inferior population religion erects a chapel, which attracts a priest. In ordinary cases, during the first period of the feudal government, this priest was at once the chaplain of the castle and the curate of the village; in time these two characters were separated, and each village had its minister, who dwelt beside his church. Such was the elementary, the atomic state (so to speak), of the feudal society. This is the condition that we have first to examine; and we will subject it to the double question that it is expedient for us to address to all facts—What resulted from it towards the development, 1st, of man himself, 2d, of society?
We are strictly correct in submitting this narrow society to the double analysation, and in relying on the result, for it is the faithful type and image of the feudal society in its full extent. The lord, the people of his domains, and the priest, represent feudalism on the large scale as well as on the small, when it is severed from royalty and the towns, which were distinct and foreign elements.
The first fact which strikes us in considering this petty association, is the prodigious importance which the possessor of the fief must have had in his own eyes, and in the eyes of those who surrounded him. The sentiment of personality, of individual liberty, was the predominant one of the barbarian life. But here the matter was quite altered; there was not only the independence of the man or warrior, but also the importance of a proprietor, of a family chief; of a master. From this position must have sprung an impression of immense superiority, a superiority altogether peculiar, and greatly different from anything perceptible in the course of other civilisations. I will give an illustration of this. I take a high aristocratic condition in the ancient world; a Roman patrician, for example. Like the feudal lord, he was the head of a family, a master, a superior. He was the priest, the pontiff, in the interior of his family. Now his importance as a religious magistrate came to him from without; it was not an importance purely personal or individual; he received it from above, as the delegate of the Divinity, the interpreter of the religious doctrines attached to that idea. The Roman patrician was, furthermore, the member of a corporation which was gathered into one place, the senate, giving him an additional importance derived from without, received and borrowed from his corporation. The grandeur of the ancient aristocrats, associated as it was with a religious and political character, belonged to the station, to the corporation in general, rather than to the individual. That of the possessor of a fief was purely personal; he drew nothing from any one; all his rights and all his power came to him from himself alone. He was not a religious magistrate, he made part of no senate; in his own person, in his individual self, all his importance resided, and all that he was he was by himself, and in his own right. How great an influence must such a position have exercised upon him who occupied it! How much of individual haughtiness, what prodigious pride—let us not mince the word—what insolence, must have been generated in his mind! Above him was no superior whose representative and interpreter he might be; near him, no equals; no powerful and general system of law restraining him, no external control shackling his will, and no curb upon him but the limitations of his strength and the presence of danger. Such was the moral result of the situation on the character of the man.
I proceed to a second consequence, also of grave moment, and too little noticed—the particular tone of the feudal family spirit.
Let us cast a glance upon the various systems of family, taking first of all the patriarchal, of which the Bible and the eastern records sketch the model. Here the family was very numerous; it formed a tribe. The chief or patriarch lived in common with his children, his near relatives, the different generations which had sprang up around him; in a word, his whole kindred, together with his servants; and not only did he live with them, but he had the same interests and occupations, and his existence was in all things the same as theirs. Was this not the situation of Abraham, of all the patriarchs, and of the Arab chiefs who still present the image of the patriarchal life?