tion. In the place of the former councils of
chiefs, now stood the lieutenants of the army and of the newly formed
nobility.

Gradually, the mass of the freemen, members of the once free
communities, lapsed into exhaustion and poverty, due to the continuous
wars of conquest and the strifes among the great, whose burdens they had
to bear. They could no longer meet the obligation of furnishing the army
requisitions. In lieu thereof, Princes and high nobility secured
servants, while the peasants placed themselves and their property under
the protection of some temporal or spiritual lord--the Church had
managed, within but few centuries, to become a great power--wherefor
they paid rent and tribute. Thus the thitherto free peasant's estate was
transformed into hired property; and this, with time, was burdened with
ever more obligations. Once landed in this state of dependence, it was
not long before the peasant lost his personal freedom also. In this way
dependence and serfdom spread ever more.

The landlord possessed the almost absolute right of disposal over his
serfs and dependents. He had the right, as soon as a male reached his
eighteenth year, or the female her fourteenth, to compel their marriage.
He could assign a woman to a man, and a man to a woman. He enjoyed the
same right over widows and widowers. In his attribute of lord over his
subjects, he also considered the sexual use of his female serfs and
dependents to be at his own disposal,--a power that finds its expression
in the "jus primae noctis" (the right of the first night). This right
also belonged to his representative, the stewart, unless, upon the
payment of a tribute, the exercise of the right was renounced. The very
names of the tribute betray its nature.[37]

It is extensively disputed that this "right of the first night" ever
existed. The "right of the first night" is quite a thorn in the side of
certain folks, for the reason that the right was still exercised at an
age, that they love to hold up as a model,--a genuine model of morality
and piety. It has been pointed out how this "right of the first night"
was the rudiment of a custom, that hung together with the age of the
mother-right, when all the women were the wives of all the men of a
class. With the disappearance of the old family organization, the custom
survived in the surrender of the bride, on the wedding night, to the men
of her own community. But, in the course of time, the right is ever