After the fall of the Roman Empire, from the fifth to the tenth century, the towns were in a state neither of liberty nor of servitude. In the use of words, we run the same chance of error as I previously remarked took place in the description of men and of events. When a society has endured for a long period, and also its language, words take a complete, determinate, and precise meaning, a legal and official sense, as it were. Time has introduced into the meaning of each term a multitude of ideas which are awakened as soon as it is pronounced, but which, not being all included at the same date, are not all applicable to one period. For example, the words slavery and liberty arouse ideas in our minds at the present day infinitely more precise and perfect than correspond to the facts existing in the eighth, ninth, or tenth centuries. If we say that the towns were in a state of liberty in the eighth, we say far too much, for we attach at present a meaning to the word 'liberty' which does not portray the state of things in that century. We fall into the same error if we say that the towns were in servitude, for this word implies something very different from the municipal conditions of the period. Thus, I repeat, the towns were not then in a state either of servitude or of liberty; they suffered all the evils which befall weakness, and were a prey to the continual violence and depredations of the strong; but in spite of so many and such frightful disorders, in spite of their impoverishment and depopulation, they never lost a certain degree of importance. In the major part there was a clergy or a bishop who exercised considerable power, having influence over the inhabitants, and serving as a link between them and their conquerors, thus maintaining the town in a species of independence, and covering it with the shield of religion.
Considerable remnants of the Roman institutions likewise lingered in the towns. Frequent instances of the convocations of the senate and the curia are met with at this epoch, and many facts of that nature have been collected by Messrs de Savigny and Hulmann, Mademoiselle de Lezardière, &c. There is some doubt concerning public assemblies and municipal magistrates. But the affairs of civil life, testaments, donations, and a multitude of other acts, are legalised in the curia by its officers, as took place in Roman municipalities. Yet barbarism, and an always increasing disorder, hastened the depopulation of towns, and gradually undermined all that remained of urban activity and freedom. The establishment of the masters of the land in the country districts, and the growing preponderance of the rural life, were additional causes of decay to the towns. The bishops themselves, when they had entered into the feudal frame, attached much less importance to their municipal ties. Finally, when feudalism had completely triumphed, the towns, without falling into the slavery of the serfs, found themselves under the sway of liege lords, and comprised within fiefs, in consequence of which they lost that share of independence which had been left to them in times even more barbarous, in the first ages of the invasion. So that from the fifth century to the period of the complete organisation of feudalism, the state of towns was continually getting worse.
When feudalism was once fairly established, when each man had taken up his station, and planted himself on an estate, and the wandering life had finally ceased, the towns, after a certain interval, began again to acquire some importance, and to deploy a renewed activity. Human activity is like the fecundity of the earth; as soon as the storm ceases, it reappears, germinates, and bears fruit. Whenever there is the least glimpse of order and peace, mankind resumes hope, and with hope labour. Thus it happened in the towns: so soon as the feudal system was well fixed, there sprang up amongst the fief-holders new wants and a certain taste for advancement and amelioration, to satisfy which a little commerce and industry took root in the towns of their domains, and wealth and population returned to them; slowly, I admit, but still they returned. Amongst the circumstances which hastened that result, may be reckoned one not hitherto much regarded—namely, the right of sanctuary in churches. Even before the boroughs were constituted, and before their force and ramparts enabled them to hold out an asylum to the wretched population of the fields, the protection which could be found in the church alone was sufficient to attract a great many fugitives into the towns. They came to shelter themselves either in the church itself, or around the church; and they were not confined to men of the inferior class, serfs and boors, but were frequently men of consideration and wealth who had been proscribed. The chronicles of the epoch are full of such examples. We see men, formerly powerful, pursued by a neighbour yet more powerful, or by the king himself, abandoning their domains, carrying off all their movables, and flying to a town to put themselves under the protection of a church. These men became burgesses; and such refugees were, in my opinion, of some influence on the progress of towns, as they brought into them both wealth and the elements of a population superior to the bulk of the former inhabitants. Besides, is it not probable that when anything like a considerable association had been formed in any quarter, men would flock to it not only on account of the greater security afforded by it, but also from the mere spirit of sociability which is so natural to them?
By dint of all these causes, the towns acquired a certain degree of strength after the feudal system had become somewhat regulated. But security was not gained in the same proportion. It is true the wandering life had ceased, yet this wandering life had been to the conquerors and new proprietors of the soil a great means of gratifying their passions. When urged by a craving for plunder, they had made a foray, or gone to a distance in search of fresh fortune or a fresh domain. But when each had fixed himself, and it was necessary to renounce the conquering vagabond life, the taste for it was far from ceasing, or brutish appetites, or fierce desires, from abating. Their weight fell upon that part of the population lying most at the mercy of those possessed of power, upon the towns. Instead of going to a distance to pillage, they pillaged near their own homes. The extortions of the lords upon the burgesses redoubled from the beginning of the tenth century. Every time that the proprietor of a domain in which a town was included had any lust of pelf to satisfy, the burgesses were sure to feel its worst effects. It was at this epoch, more than at any other, that the complaints of the boroughs were loud and repeated, in consequence of the absolute want of security to commerce. The merchants, after making their rounds, were unable to return in peace into their towns; the roads and avenues were incessantly blocked up by the lord and his followers. The period in which industry recommenced its exercise was thus precisely that in which security was most deficient. Nothing frets men more than to be thus troubled in their labours, and despoiled of the fruits which they had thence anticipated. They are thereby much more annoyed and enraged than when they are subjected to suffering in a course of life for a long time fixed and monotonous, or when that of which they are deprived is not the result of their own activity, exerted in the reasonable hope of drawing sure returns. In the progressive movement which lifts up a man or a population to a new fortune, there is a principle of abhorrence for iniquity and violence much more energetic than in any other situation.
This, then, was the condition of the towns in the course of the tenth century. Their strength, importance, and riches had increased; and these acquisitions rendering them every day objects of greater envy to the lords, it became more than ever necessary to be able to defend them. The danger and the evil grew in magnitude with the means of resisting them. Indeed the feudal system offered to all its participators the continual example of resistance; it presented to the mind, under no modification, the idea of an organised government, capable of regulating and controlling all by its intervention alone. On the contrary, the spectacle of individual will, refusing to submit to any restraint, was unceasingly displayed. The greater number of the fief-holders was in this position with regard to their lords-paramount, and the small lords with regard to the great; so that, at the very time when the towns were oppressed and tormented, and they began to have new and important interests to maintain, they had under their eyes a continual lesson of insurrection. Feudalism has certainly done this service to humanity, that it has given a perpetual exhibition of individual will acting in all its energy. The lesson was not thrown away, for notwithstanding their weakness, and the prodigious inequality of condition between them and their lords, the towns became insurgent on all sides.
It is difficult to assign a precise date to the event. It is generally said that the enfranchisement of the boroughs commenced in the eleventh century; but in all great events, how many unknown and unsuccessful efforts are made before that which finally prevails! In all things, Providence, to accomplish its designs, lavishes courage, virtues, sacrifices man himself; and it is only after a countless multitude of unknown labours, in appearance utterly lost, after numberless noble hearts have sunk under discouragement, and the painful conviction of the hopelessness of their cause, that the triumph is achieved. This was doubtless the case with the boroughs. There can be little question but that very many attempts at resistance and struggles for enfranchisement were made in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, which not only did not succeed, but the memory of which remained without renown, because unfortunate. But these endeavours most assuredly exercised an influence upon posterior events; they gave animation and prevalence to the spirit of liberty, and laid the train for the great insurrection of the eleventh century.
I call it insurrection designedly. The enfranchisement of the boroughs, in the eleventh century, was the result of a veritable insurrection, of a real war declared by the inhabitants of towns against their lords. The first fact which is always met with in such histories, is a levy of the burghers, who arm themselves with any weapon they can catch, the expulsion of the officers of the superior, who had come to make exactions, or an enterprise against his castle; the characteristics of war are always there. If the insurrection is suppressed, what is the first act of the conqueror? He orders the destruction of the fortifications raised by the burghers, not only around their town, but around each house. We find that at the formation of the confederacy, after undertaking to act in common, and swearing the borough as a whole, the first proceeding of each burgher was to place his house in a state of defence. Some boroughs, whose names are at the present day buried in obscurity—for example, the petty borough of Vézelai in Nivernais—maintained a prolonged and energetic contest with their lords. In the case of Vézelai, victory fell to its abbot, and he instantly enjoined the demolition of the fortified houses of the burgesses. The names of several of those whose houses were thus destroyed have been preserved.