in state offices or on their own fiefs, had establishments similar to that of the King.  Numerous and considerable privileges elevated them above other free men.  The offices and fiefs having become hereditary, the order of nobility followed as a consequence; and it then became highly necessary for families to keep their genealogical histories, not only to gratify their pride, but also to give them the necessary titles for the feudal advantages they derived by birth. (Fig. 15).  Without this right of inheritance, society, which was still unsettled in the Middle Ages, would soon have been dissolved.  This great principle, sacred in the eyes both of great and small, maintained feudalism, and in so doing it maintained itself amidst all the chaos and confusion of repeated revolutions and social disturbances.

We have already stated, and we cannot sufficiently insist upon this important point, that from the day on which the adventurous habits of the chiefs of Germanic origin gave place to the desire for territorial possessions, the part played by the land increased insensibly towards defining the position of the persons holding it.  Domains became small kingdoms, over which the lord assumed the most absolute and arbitrary rights.  A rule was soon established, that the nobility was inherent to the soil, and consequently that the land ought to transmit to its possessors the rights of nobility.

This privilege was so much accepted, that the long tenure of a fief ended by ennobling the commoner.  Subsequently, by a sort of compensation which naturally followed, lands on which rent had hitherto been paid became free and noble on passing to the possession of a noble.  At last, however, the contrary rule prevailed, which caused the lands not to change quality in changing owners:  the noble could still possess the labourers’s lands without losing his nobility, but the labourer could be proprietor of a fief without thereby becoming a noble.

To the comites, who, according to Tacitus, attached themselves to the fortunes of the Germanic chiefs, succeeded the Merovingian leudes, whose assembly formed the King’s Council.  These leudes were persons of great importance owing to the number of their vassals, and although they composed his ordinary Council, they did not hesitate at times to declare themselves openly opposed to his will.

[Illustration:  Fig. 16.—­Knight in War-harness, after a Miniature in a Psalter written and illuminated under Louis le Gros.]

The name of leudes was abandoned under the second of the then French dynasties, and replaced by that of fideles, which, in truth soon became a common designation of both the vassals of the Crown and those of the nobility.

Under the kings of the third dynasty, the kingdom was divided into about one hundred and fifty domains, which were called great fiefs of the crown, and which were possessed in hereditary right by the members of the highest nobility, placed immediately under the royal sovereignty and dependence.