ory of Tours,
the terrible tale of their crimes, their brutal luxury, their lust for
blood, the {45} unbridled licence of their passions. That was the
record of the days of their decay. There was, however, even at the
best a great change from the times of Roman rule. For civilisation,
literary culture, law, we find substituted in the pages of Gregory of
Tours savagery, scenes of brutality, drunkenness, robbery. Law and
civilisation seem to sleep. It was in this state of the country, when
every man's hand was against his neighbour, when law was unheard amid
the strife, that feudalism arose, a natural development of the desire
for self-preservation, which led to associations to supply the mutual
protection which there was no strength behind the law to enforce. In
all these movements the Church had an active part. [Sidenote: The
influence of the Church.] It was her principles of association which
taught men the idea of unity, of bonds by which personal security
should be based on new guarantees amid the weakness of government and
the neglect of law. The Church held the tradition of a civilisation
the barbarians had never known, and in her own moral teaching she set
forth the way to an ideal state which should combine all the elements
of strength. The growth of the Frankish nation was guided almost
entirely by the Church.

Feudalism, Roman administration and law, Christian faith and
discipline--these three factors were at work throughout the Dark Ages
from the fifth to the ninth century: and they were all--the last two
most especially--under the direction of the Church. And first and most
obviously the monarchy of the Merwings was a patent imitation of the
Roman Empire. The clergy had maintained the imperial tradition. It
was they who taught the sovereigns to replace the emperors {46} and to
produce around them the illusion of a Roman rule. They employed
officers with the same titles, centred their administration in their
household, claimed and exercised unlimited power. No power above them
did they recognise, save only, when they would listen to their
teachers, the power of the love--more often the fear--of God. The
barbarian invasions that had swept over the land had destroyed the
local, as well as the central administration. At Arles survived the
relics of the old Roman functionaries of the prefecture; but in the
land of the Franks the whole system had to be reconstructed from the
tradition of which the