linked personal duties, and by consequence personal rights,
to the ownership of land. Whatever be the proper view of its origin
and legal nature, the best mode of vividly picturing to ourselves the
feudal organisation is to begin with the basis, to consider the
relation of the tenant to the patch of soil which created and limited
his services--and then to mount up, through narrowing circles of
super-feudation, till we approximate to the apex of the system.
Where that summit exactly was during the later portion of the dark
ages it is not easy to decide. Probably, wherever the conception of
tribe sovereignty had really decayed, the topmost point was always
assigned to the supposed successor of the Caesars of the West. But
before long, when the actual sphere of Imperial authority had
immensely contracted, and when the emperors had concentrated the
scanty remains of their power upon Germany and North Italy, the
highest feudal superiors in all the outlying portions of the former
Carlovingian empire found themselves practically without a supreme
head. Gradually they habituated themselves to the new situation, and
the fact of immunity put at last out of sight the theory of
dependence; but there are many symptoms that this change was not quite
easily accomplished; and, indeed, to the impression that in the nature
of things there must necessarily be a culminating domination
somewhere, we may, no doubt, refer the increasing tendency to
attribute secular superiority to the See of Rome. The completion of
the first stage in the revolution of opinion is marked, of course, by
the accession of the Capetian dynasty in France. When the feudal
prince of a limited territory surrounding Paris began, from the
accident of his uniting an unusual number of suzerainties in his own
person, to call himself _King of France_, he became king in quite a
new sense, a sovereign standing in the same relation to the soil of
France as the baron to his estate, the tenant to his freehold. The
precedent, however, was as influential as it was novel, and the form
of the monarchy in France had visible effects in hastening changes
which were elsewhere proceeding in the same direction. The kingship of
our Anglo-Saxon regal houses was midway between the chieftainship of a
tribe and a territorial supremacy; but the superiority of the Norman
monarchs, imitated from that of the King of France, was distinctly a
territorial sovereignty. Every subsequent dominion which wa