in the whole pages of history to find a society formed of more
heterogeneous or incompatible elements. On the one side might be placed
the Goths, Burgundians, Vandals, Germans, Franks, Saxons, and Lombards,
nations, or more strictly hordes, accustomed to rough and successful
warfare, and, on the other, the Romans, including those people who by long
servitude to Roman dominion had become closely allied with their
conquerors (Fig. 3). There were, on both sides, freemen, freedmen, colons,
and slaves; different ranks and degrees being, however, observable both in
freedom and servitude. This hierarchical principle applied itself even to
the land, which was divided into freeholds, tributary lands, lands of the
nobility, and servile lands, thus constituting the freeholds, the
benefices, the fiefs, and the tenures. It may be added that the customs,
and to a certain degree the laws, varied according to the masters of the
country, so that it can hardly be wondered at that everywhere diversity
and inequality were to be found, and, as a consequence, that anarchy and
confusion ruled supreme.

[Illustration: Figs. 1 and 2.--Costumes of the Franks from the Fourth to
the Eighth Centuries, collected by H. de Vielcastel, from original
Documents in the great Libraries of Europe.]

[Illustration: Fig. 3.--Costumes of Roman Soldiers. Fig. 4.--Costume of
German Soldiers. From Miniatures on different Manuscripts, from the Sixth
to the Twelfth Centuries.]

The Germans (Fig. 4) had brought with them over the Rhine none of the
heroic virtues attributed to them by Tacitus when he wrote their history,
with the evident intention of making a satire on his countrymen. Amongst
the degenerate Romans whom those ferocious Germans had subjugated,
civilisation was reconstituted on the ruins of vices common in the early
history of a new society by the adoption of a series of loose and
dissolute habits, both by the conquerors and the conquered.

[Illustration: Fig. 5.--Costumes of Slaves or Serfs, from the Sixth to the
Twelfth Centuries, collected by H. de Vielcastel, from original Documents
in the great Libraries of Europe.]

In fact, the conquerors contributed the worse share (Fig. 5); for, whilst
exercising the low and debasing instincts of their former barbarism, they
undertook the work of social reconstruction with a sort of natural and
innate servitude. To them, liberty, the desire for which caused them to
brave the greatest dangers, was simply the