The important point which it is necessary to emphasize in this connection is the fact that the gastald held his tenure, not from the dux as his subordinate, but from the king in person, and for this reason can more fitly be compared with the later count than with the dux of the Lombards.  Consequently it is in the matter of tenure that I think is to be found the difference in power between the two officers.  In addition to his official authority, the dux was possessed of a power and an influence entirely his own, derived quite as much from the number of his vassals and his position in the civitas as from the grant he received from the king.  At home he was a powerful lord, and though he, of course, owed fealty and service to the king, he was by no means a king’s servant, like his successor the Carlovingian count.  The gastald, on the other hand, was eminently a servant of the central power; and whether or not he was engaged exclusively in looking after the fiscal interests of the masters who employed him, he had no power and no influence except such as he derived from the source of his authority.  He was a king’s minister and nothing more, and we can easily appreciate that the amount of power he was enabled to exercise could never exceed the amount of influence in local affairs possessed at any particular time by the central government, whose representative he was.

But the very nature of the source from which the power of his office is derived is what connects it vitally with the subject of our enquiry.  We have seen the dux as head—­in the earliest times almost independent head—­of the whole civitas, including rural and city jurisdiction.  We have seen him as an official, depending from the king, it is true, and holding the king’s placita and executing the law, but also holding placita of his own; appearing as a powerful local lord, and exercising almost arbitrary power in the regulation and the distribution of the public property of the commonwealth over which he ruled; in fact, a descendant of the old duces of the Lombard barbarian host, who, perhaps, even antedating the royal office, held their power and their position as princes and chosen leaders of the people, rather than as appointees or dependents of any higher authority.  In the gastald, on the other hand, we have an official of an entirely different type—­one not belonging to a powerful class of lords or leaders which traces its origin to the spontaneous choice of the people or army, but one who gets his appointment at the will and in the interests of the central government, and is commissioned to exercise certain functions of the administration as an assistant to, perhaps even as a check on, the power of the local head.