Servitudes

Chapter 11: Servitudes

The many servitudes in France towards the beginning of the third race led to the notion of a general regulation made at the time of the conquest

The continual progression of these servitudes was not attended to.

People imagined in an age of obscurity a general law which was never framed.

Towards the commencement of the first race, we meet with an infinite number of freemen, both among the Franks and the Romans.

But the number of bondmen increased that at the beginning of the third race, all the husbandmen and almost all the inhabitants of towns were bondmen.

Whereas at the first period there was very near the same administration in the cities as among the Romans; namely, a corporation, a senate, and courts of judicature.

At the other we hardly meet with any thing but a lord and his bondmen.

When the Franks, Burgundians, and Goths, made their several invasions, they seized upon gold, silver, moveables, cloaths, men, women, boys, and whatever the army could carry.

The whole was brought to one place, and divided amongst the army.

History shews, that after the first settlement, that is after the first devastations, they entered into an agreement with the inhabitants, and left them all their political and civil rights.

This was the law of nations in those days; they plundered every thing in time of war, and granted every thing in time of peace.

Were it not so, how should we find both in the Salic and Burgundian laws such a number of regulations absolutely contrary to a general servitude of the people?

The conquest did not immediately create servitude. But servitude arose nevertheless from the same law of nations which subsisted after the conquest.

Opposition, revolts, and the taking of towns, were followed by the slavery of the inhabitants.

And, not to mention the wars which the conquering nations made against one another, as there was this particularity among the Franks, that the different partitions of the monarchy gave rise continually to civil wars between brothers or nephews, in whichthis law of nations was constantly practised, servitudes of course became more general in Franee than in other countries.

This is one of the causes of the difference between our French laws and those of Italyand Spain, in respect to the right of seignories.

The conquest was soon over. The law of nations then in force was productive of some servile dependencies.

The custom of the same law of nations, which obtained for many ages, gave a prodigious extent to those servitudes.

Theodoric imagining that the people of Auvergne were not faithful to him, thus addressed the Franks of his division.

Follow me, and I will carry you into a country where you shall have gold, silver, captives, clothes, and flocks in abundance; and you shallremove all the people into your own country.

After the conclusion of the peace* between Gontram and Chilperic, the troops employed in the siege of Bourges having had orders to return, carried such a considerable booty away with them, that they hardly left either men or cattle in the country.

Theodoric, king of Italy, had a spirit and policy different from the other barbarian kings.

Upon sending an army into Gaul, he wrote to the General: I want the Roman laws to be followed, and that you restore the fugitive slaves to their right owners.

The defender of liberty should not encourage servants to desert their masters.

Let other kings delight in the plunder and devastation of the towns which they have subdued; we are desirous to conquer in such a manner, that our subjects shall lament their having fallen too late under our government.

His intention was to cast an odium on the kings of the Franks and the Burgundians, and that he alluded in the above passage to their particular law of nations.

Yet this law of nations continued in force under the second race.

King Pepin’s army penetrated into Aquitaine. It returned to France with an immense booty and many bondmen.

Here might I quote numberless authorities.

As the public compassion was raised at the sight of those miseries, as several holy prelates, beholding the captives in chains, employed the treasure belonging to the church, and sold even the sacred utensils, to ransom as many as they could.

As several holy monks exerted themselves on that occasion, it is in the=E2=80=A1 lives of the saints that we meet with the best eclaircissements on this subject.

Although it may be objected to the authors of those lives, that they have been sometimes a little too credulous in respect to things which God has certainly performed, if they were in the order of his providence; yet we draw considerable lights from thence, with regard to the manners and usages of those times.

When we cast an eye upon the monuments of our history and laws, the whole seems to be an immense expanse,=E2=80=A1 or a boundless ocean: all those frigid, dry, crude writings must be devoured in the same manner, as Saturn is fabled to have devoured the stones.

A vast quantity of land which had been in the hands of freemen, was changed into mortmain, when the country was stripped of its free inhabitants.

Those who had a great multitude of bondmen either took large territories by force, or had them yielded by agreement, and built villages, as may be seen in different charters. On the other hand, the freemen who cultivated the arts, found themselves reduced to exercise those arts in a state of servitude: thus the servitudes restored to the arts and to agriculture whatever they had lost.

It was a customary thing with the proprietors of land, to give them to the churches, in order to hold them themselves by a quit-rent, thinking to partake by their servitude of the sanctity of the churches.

Chapter 12: The lands belonging to thedivision of the Barbarians paid no taxes.

A PEOPLE remarkable for their simplicityand poverty, a free and martial people, who lived without any other industry than that of tending their flocks, and who had nothing but rush cottagesto attach them to their lands.

Such a people must have followed their chiefs for the sake of booty, and not to pay or to raise taxes. The art of tax-gathering is generally invented too late, and when men begin to enjoy the felicity of other arts.

The transient tax of a pitcher of wine for every acre, which was one of the exactions of Chilperic and Fredegonda, related only to the Romans.

It was not the Franks that tore the rolls of those taxes,but the clergy who in those days were all Romans. The burthen of this tax lay chiefly on the inhabitants of the towns; now these were almost all inhabited by Romans.

Gregory of Tours relates, that a certain judge was obliged after the death of Chilperic to take refuge in a church, for having under the reign of that prince ordered taxes to be levied on several Franks,who in the reign of Childebert were ingenui, or freeborn: Multos de Francis, qui tempore Childeberti regis ingenui fuerant, publico tributo subegit.

Therefore the Franks who werenot bondmen paid no taxes.

There is not a grammarian but would be ashamed to see how the Abbe du Bos has interpreted this passage. He observes, that in those days the freedmen were also called ingenui.

Upon this supposition he renders the Latin word ingenui, by freed from taxes; a phrase, which we indeed may use, as freed from cares, freed from punishments; but in the Latin tongue, such expressions as ingenui a tributis, libertini a tributis, manumissi tributorum, would be quite monstrous.

Parthenius, says Gregory of Tours had like to have been put to death by the Franks for subjecting them to taxes.

The Abbe du Bos finding himself hard pressed by this passage* very coolly supposes the thing in question:it was, he says, an extraordinary duty.

We find in the law of the Visigoths, that when a Barbarian had seized upon the estate of a Roman, the judge obliged him to sell it, to the end that this estate might continue to be tributary; consequently the Barbarians paid no taxes.

The Abbe du Bos who, to support his system, would fain have the Visigoths subject to taxes, quits the literal and spiritual sense of the law, and pretends upon no other indeed than an imaginary foundation, that between the establishment of the Goths and this law there had been an augmentation of taxes which related only to the Romans. But none but father Harduinare allowed thus to exercise an arbitrary power over facts.

This learned author has rumaged Justinian’s code, in search of laws, to prove that among the Romans the military benefices were subject to taxes. From whence he would infer that the same held good with regard to fiefs or benefices among the Franks. But the opinion that our fiefs derive their origin from that institution of the Romans, is at present exploded; it obtained only at a time when the Roman history, but not ours, waswell understood, and our ancient records lay buried in obscurity and dust.

But the Abbe is in the wrong to quote Cassiodorus, and to make use of what was transacting in Italy, and in the part of Gaul subject to Theodoric, in order to acquaint us with the practice established among the Franks; these are things which must not be confounded.

I will show in another work that the plan of the monarchy of the Ostrogoths was intirely indifferent from that of any other government founded in those days by the other Barbarian nations.

And so far are we entitled to affirm that a practice obtained among the Franks, because it was established among the Ostrogoths, that on the contrary we have just reason to think that a custom of the Ostrogoths was not in force among the Franks.

The hardest task for persons of extensive erudition, is to deduce their arguments from passages not foreign to the subject, and to find, if we may be allowed to express ourselves in astronomical terms, the true place of the sun.

The same author makes a wrong use of thecapitularies, as well as of the historians and laws of the barbarous nations. When he wants the Franks to pay taxes, he applies to freemen what can be understood only of* bondmen; when he speaks of their military service, he applies to bondmen what can never relate but to freemen.

Chapter 13: Taxes paid by the Romans and Gauls, in the monarchy of the Franks.

I MIGHT here examine whether after the Gauls and Romans were conquered, they continued to pay the taxes to which they were subject under the emperors.

But, for the sake of brevity, I shall be satisfied with observing that if they paid them in the beginning, they were soon after exempted, and that those taxes were changed into a military service. For I confess I cannot conceive how the Franks should have been at first such great friends, and afterwards such sudden and violent enemies, to taxes.

A capitulary* of Lewis the Debonnaire explains extremely well the situation of the freemen in the monarchy of the Franks. Some troops of Goths or Iberians, flying from the oppression of the Moors, were received into Lewis dominions.

The agreement made with them was, that like other freemen they should follow their count to the army; and that upon a march they should mount guard and patrol under the command also of their count; and that they should furnish horses and carriages for baggage to the king’s commissaries and to the ambassadors in their way to and from court; and that they should not be compelled to pay any further acknowledgment, but should be treated as the otherfreemen.

It cannot be said that these were new usages introduced towards the commencement of the second race. This must be referred at least to the middle or to the end of the first. A capitulary of the year* 864, says inexpress terms, that it was the ancient custom for freemen to perform military service, and to furnish likewise the horses and carriages above mentioned; duties particular to themselves, and from which those who possessed thefiefs were exempt, as we shall prove hereafter.

This is not all; there was a regulation which hardly permitted the imposing of taxes on those freemen. He who had sour manors was always obliged to march against the enemy: he who had but three, was joined with a freeman that had only one; the latter bore the fourth part of the others charges, and staid at home.

In like manner, they joined two freemen who had each two manors; he who went to the army had half his charges borne by him who staid at home.

There are so many charters, in which the privileges of fiefs are granted to lands or districts possessed by freemen, and of which I shall make farther mention hereafter.

These lands are exempted from all the duties or services, which were required of them by the counts, and by the rest of the king’s officers.

As all these services are particularly enumerated, without making any mention of taxes, it is manifest that no taxes were imposed upon them.

It was very natural that the Roman art of tax-gathering should fall of itself in the monarchy of the Franks: it wasa most complicate art, far above the conception, and wide from the plan, of those simple people. Were the Tartars to over-run Europe, we should find it very difficult to make them comprehend what is meant by our financiers.

The* anonymous author of the life of Lewis the Debonnaire, speaking of the counts and other officers of the nation of the Franks, whom Charlemaign established in Aquitania, says, that he intrusted them with the care of defending the frontiers, as also with the military power and the direction of the demesnes belonging to the crown.

This shews the state of the royal revenues under the second race. The prince had kept his demesnes in his own hands, and employed his bondmen in improving them.

But the indictions, the capitations, and other imposts raised at the time of the emperors onthe persons or goods of freemen, had been changed into an obligation of defending the frontiers, and marching against the enemy.

In the same history, we find that Lewis the Debonnaire having been to wait upon his father in Germany, this prince asked him, why he, who was a crowned head, came to be so poor: to which Lewis made answer, that he was only a nominal king, and that the great lords were possessedof almost all his demesnes; that Charlemaign, being apprehensive lest thisyoung prince should forfeit their affection, if he attempted himself to resume what he had inconsiderately Edition: current; Page: [380] granted, appointed commissaries to restore things to their former situation.

The bishops writings=E2=80=A1 to Lewis brother to Charles the Bald, use these words: Take care of your lands, that you may not be obliged to travel continually by the houses of the clergy, and to tire their bondmen with carriages. Manage your affairs, continue they, in such a manner, that you may have enough to live upon, and to receive embassies.

The king’s revenues in those days consisted of their demesnes.