Beneath the various episodes which have been described beneath the great names of Clovis, of Dagobert, of Charles Martel, of Pepin, of Charlemagne, of the Robertian House of Paris, whose principal descendant, Hugh, we have seen crowned, a slow but complete molecular change in society had taken place. The old Roman order had not only decayed, it had also been internally transformed in the 500 years which intervene between the invasion, of Clovis and the crowning of the first French king. The slaves of the old Roman landed estates, though still legally slaves, welt no longer bought and sold; they had become Chris tian freemen; the old Roman landed estate had become Christian village and parish; in the breakdown of communications and of learning, agriculture had become, as it were, the sole in dustry of men. This agriculture had grown to be neither an individual nor a servile, nor what we should call to-day a capitalistic industry, but a co-operative one. The old Roman land lord was now no longer the possessor of the whole territory of a village; only a portion was reserved to himself and the village population beneath him had grown by centuries of custom and of cohesion to security of tenure and to fixed and customary payments of labor in the place of that surrender of all their energies which their former servile condition had im plied. The vast mass of the population, there fore, lived as perpetual holders of land at a fixed and customary due of labor or what-not paid to a local superior; they cultivated the fields together, but apportioned the result in proportion to their respective holdings. The lord, with his much larger holding, as he , was the richest among them, was also their pro tector and, in a modified way, controlled by tradition and by the assessment of his own tenants, their judge. The village so organized was a microcosm of the whole of society. For Centuries the noble class, the men descended from the old Gallo-Roman owners of land and of slaves, had tended more and more to ret Bard themselves also as tenants whose absolute ownership, though absolute, was part of a social system involving superiority, social and execu tive, in some greater man among their number. They had coalesced in groups, usually under the largest landowner of the district, during the pressure of the barbarians wars; the man owning but one or two villages would "recom mend to some local man owning 10. or more, and he in turn to some very wealthy personage of the countryside who had accumu lated by marriage or inheritance the dues and the lord's portion of, let us say, a hundred vil lages. And long before the Carlovingian line wad extinguished or the new Capetian line was acknowledged, society had become a compli cated territorial system with the tenants of the village dependent upon but secure under the village lord, and with the village lords forming indeed one noble class, but arranged in a hier archy of dependence from the small man, who was but lord of one village, through the big local man of the countryside, up to the over lord of a whole province. What determined the size of these provinces it would be im possible to say; some, like Normandy, were but old Roman divisions which had maintained its boundaries; others, like the March, in the centre of France, were vague to a degree, built up of intricate local traditions and customs, and in dispute with their neighbors for all ex cept the very centre of their dominion. Some were quite small, little more or less than a bishopric in extent; others were virtually in dependent kingdoms,' like Brittany; but of all it was true that they formed the true sub units in the general national unity. The par ticular house which had been given the sym bolical and nominal headship of the nation un der the title of king were the dukes or local overlords of the Isle de France; a territory of which Paris is the centre (they were the lords of Paris, as we have seen), and which extend* roughly speaking, for three days' march round the city. To this house, once the head of it was crowned, the other great houses swore fealty, thus completing the hierarchy system which in its complete later and legal form was called feudal. It must not be imagined that the system was as yet symmetrical, even in theory. Not all the efforts of the lawyers during the next three centuries, the 1 1th, 12th and 13th, while it was still quite vigorous, could make a thing of such obscure and natural origin sym metrical. But the general arrangement of so ciety, the small farmer secure on his holding under his lord, that lord under a wealthier man of the same countryside, he again under a duke or count of the whole province, and he again swearing fealty to the king, Who was the sym bol of the national unity, is the great social fact we must, keep in view if we are to appre ciate the development of modern France out of the Dark into the Middle Ages.
This family, the overlords of the Parisian centre who had been crowned king, for a cen tury did nothing but accumulate in their hands more and mote manors and cultivate by an in stinct those remaining forces of civilization, the tnunicipalities and the Church, which every where unconsciously strove to reproduce the old Roman order which had so nearly disappeared in the Dark Ages. To Hugh, in 996, succeeded his son Robert; to Robert again, in 1031 his son Henry', to Henry, in 1060, his son Philip, and to Philip, at the opening of the 12th century, succeeded, first in actual and next in theoretical kingship as well, his son Louis, ethe with whom a new expansion of the power of the Crown begins.
Thus four men, each in direct succession, each crowned coadjutor during his father's life time, each arriving at the throne in the vigor of his manhood, for well over a hundred years secured the continuity of the new experiment. None save Hugh was remarkable for domina tion; Robert rather for piety; Henry for a quiet tenacity, Philip for debauch; but all, to some extent in spite of themselves, were accu mulators of territorial wealth and influence and every social influence of the new time worked upon their side. That time, the llth century, was one in which the energies of Christendom suddenly awoke. No new forms were discovered for it, the old architecture continued, the old customs were observed; but everything from the Rhine to the Atlantic and from the Tagus to the Channel was boiling with a vigorous and novel life destined to bring forth the Middle Ages. The advance from the Pyrenees against the Mohammedan begins in the generation just after Hugh Capet's crowning, and the entry of the Christians into Toledo is effected within that hundred years. It is the time when the curious phenomenon of cross breeding, the vigorous, unique but ephemeral °Normans race comes into being, spreads civilization through England, conquers, unites, administers and forever attaches to Europe and separates from Oriental influence the south of Italy and Sicily. It is the time when con sonant to the necessities of such new vigors and such new light, the Christian Church re defines its unity,, cleanses and organizes all its machinery and imposes a working discipline under the advice and, at last, the papacy, of Gregory VII.
Many new phenomena advance in parallel, all connected with the general advance of the time, but each following its own path. Architecture does not change, but is everywhere pursued with magnitude and vigor; men are still igno rant of the world outside the Western Christian unity, but although definite learning has not yet been organized, curiosity is wide-awake; and the municipalities which had remained so long anomalies in the agricultural system, osseous relics, as it were, of the old Roman structure, begin again to live everywhere by an inde pendent life. The new roads are not yet built; men still march along the old decayed Roman highways, or make use of the river systems or of the sea; land is not yet bought and sold; no universities are yet in existence; no Gothic arch has yet been built; vernacular speech is but a tentative beginning unknown in England, very local and disparate in France, in the Span ish kingdoms and in northern Italy; no repre sentative system has yet met (save among the clergy), but all these things, the representative system, the Gothic architecture, the universities, vernacular literature, are in seed and are germi nating during the 1 lth century. The outcome of these various energies, their climax and at the same time the events by which they were to be made fruitful, was the Crusade. The long example of the fighting in Spain, coupled with the unrest of the multitude and with the criti cal condition of the Eastern pilgrimage, had kindled a flame, and there poured out in suc cessive hordes, mainly from Gallic territory, a host on the march for Jerusalem, the latter and organized portion of which must have been as numerous as that with which Napoleon invaded Russia, the unorganized forerunners of which may have numbered a million souls. Estab lished by the papal sermon of Urban II in 1095, equipped in the next year in the summer, they trailed out in a prodigious raid of over 2,000 miles, and three years later, 15 July 1099, the remnant that had survived or persevered stormed Jerusalem and established for close upon a century the curious French experiment of a Christian outpost against Asia, established in French castles, defended (in such a climate!) by French armor mounted upon French horses, in the isolated belt of Palestine and of the Le vantine coast.