as more and more limited to the meeting of the subcommanders of
the army and the rising nobles.

Just as formerly, the Roman farmers during the last period of the
republic, so now the free land-owning peasants, the mass of the Frank
people, were exhausted and reduced to penury by continual civil feuds
and wars of conquest. They who once had formed the whole army and, after
the conquest of France, its picked body, were so impoverished at the end
of the ninth century that hardly more than every fifth man could go to
war. The former army of free peasants, convoked directly by the king,
was replaced by an army composed of dependents of the new nobles. Among
these servants were also villeins, the descendants of the peasants who
had acknowledged no master but the king and a little earlier not even a
king. Under Charlemagne's successors the ruin of the Frank peasantry was
aggravated by internal wars, weakness of the royal power and
corresponding overbearance of the nobles. The latter had received
another addition to their ranks through the installation by Charlemagne
of "Gau"[35] (district) counts who strove to make their offices
hereditary. The invasions of the Normans completed the wreck of the
peasantry. Fifty years after the death of Charlemagne, France lay as
resistless at the feet of the Normans, as four hundred years previous
the Roman empire had lain at the feet of the Franks.

Not only was the external impotence almost the same, but also the
internal order or rather disorder of society. The free Frank peasants
found themselves in a similar position as their predecessors, the Roman
colonists. Ruined by wars and robberies, they had been forced to seek
the protection of the nobles or the church, because the royal power was
too weak to shield them. But they had to pay dearly for this protection.
Like the Gallic farmers, they had to transfer the titles of their land
to their patrons, and received it back from them as tenants in different
and varying forms, but always only in consideration of services and
tithes. Once driven into this form of dependence, they gradually lost
their individual liberty. After a few generations most of them became
serfs. How rapidly the free peasants sank from their level is shown by
the land records of the abbey Saint Germain des Pres, then near, now in,
Paris. On the vast holdings of this abbey in the surrounding country
2788 households, nearly all of them Franks with German names, were
livin