But if such was the independence of the feud-holder in his relations to the sovereign, those beneath him were in absolute dependence upon their lord. This is seen in the following obligations of feudal tenants to their superior:
(1) Reliefs: sums of money due from every one coming of age and taking a fief by inheritance; fines upon alienation or change of tenant ownership.
(2) Escheats: reversion to the lord of all property upon a tenant’s dying without natural heirs, or upon any delinquency of service.
(3) Aids: contributions levied in special emergency, as the lord’s expedition to the Holy Land, the marriage of his sister, eldest son, or daughter, his paying a “relief” to his overlord, making his son a knight, or redeeming his own person from captivity.
(4) Wardship of tenant during minority. This involved on the part of the lord the right to select a husband for a female dependent, which alliance could be declined only on payment of a fine equal to that which any one desiring the woman could be induced to offer for her.
If the feudal system pressed so harshly upon those who were themselves of high rank, it need not be said that the common people were utterly crushed by this accumulation of graded despotisms, whose whole weight rested ultimately on the lowest stratum. The mass of the lowly was divided into three orders:
(1) Freemen possessing small tracts of allodial land, so called because held by original occupancy and not yet merged in the larger holdings. There were many freemen in the fifth and sixth centuries, but in the tenth century nearly all the land of Europe had become feudal. The freemen, whose possessions were small, soon found it necessary to surrender land and liberty for the sake of protection by some neighboring lord.
(2) Villains or serfs, who were attached to the land and transferable with it on change of owners.
(3) Slaves. The degradation of the servile class was limitless, the master having the right of life and death, entire use of the property and wages of his people, and absolute disposal of them in marriage. Slavery was abolished in France by Louis the Gross (1108-37) so far as respected the inhabitants of cities; but it took nearly two centuries more to accomplish the abolition of servitude throughout the kingdom.
The cities were, indeed, rising to assert their communal, if not manhood, rights. The communes, as they were called, demanded and received privilege in certain places of electing any persons to membership as citizens who were guaranteed absolute ownership of property. But the communes were far from even suggesting anything like the modern democratic systems, and were opposed by clergy and nobility. “So that,” says Guizot, “security could hardly be purchased, save at the price of liberty. Liberty was then so stormy and so fearful that people conceived, if not a disgust for it, at any rate a horror of it.” Men had not evolved the morality which could make a commonwealth. Law was bound on men only by force. The wall of the castle, grand and impressive as wealth could build it, or only a rude addition to the natural rock, was the sole earthly object of reverence. To the strong man came the weak, saying, “Let me be yours; protect me and I will fight for you.”