FEUDAL SYSTEM.

* * * * *

ABOUT A.D. 800-1300.

There is no great character with whom Feudalism is especially
identified. It was an institution of the Middle Ages, which grew out of
the miseries and robberies that succeeded the fall of the Roman Empire.

Before I present the mutual relation between a lord and his vassal, I
would call your attention to political anarchies ending in political
degradation; to an unformed state of society; to semi-barbarism, with
its characteristic vices of plunder, rapine, oppression, and injustice;
to wild and violent passions, unchecked by law; to the absence of
central power; to the reign of hard and martial nobles; to the miseries
of the people, ground down, ignorant, and brutal; to rude agricultural
life; to petty wars; to general ignorance, which kept society in
darkness and gloom for a thousand years,--all growing out of the eclipse
of the old civilization, so that the European nations began a new
existence, and toiled in sorrow and fear, with few ameliorations: an
iron age, yet an age which was not unfavorable for the development of
new virtues and heroic qualities, under the influence of which society
emerged from barbarism, with a new foundation for national greatness,
and a new material for Christianity and art and literature and science
to work upon.

Such was the state of society during the existence of feudal
institutions,--a period of about five hundred years,--dating from the
dismemberment of Charlemagne's empire to the fifteenth century. The era
of its greatest power was from the Norman conquest of England to the
reign of Edward III. But there was a long and gloomy period before
Feudalism ripened into an institution,--from the dissolution of the
Roman Empire to the eighth and ninth centuries. I would assign this
period as the darkest and the dreariest in the history of Europe since
the Roman conquests, for this reason,--that civilization perished
without any one to chronicle the changes, or to take notice of the
extinction.

From Charlemagne there had been, with the exception of brief intervals,
the birth of new ideas and interests, the growth of a new civilization.
Before his day there was a progressive decline. Art, literature,
science, alike faded away. There were no grand monuments erected, the
voice of the poet was unheard in the universal wretchedness, the monks
completed the destruction which the barbarians began. Why were libr