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 libraries burned or destroyed?  Why was classic literature utterly neglected?  Why did no great scholars arise even in the Church?  The new races looked in vain for benefactors.  Even the souvenirs of the old Empire were lost.  Nearly all the records of ancient greatness perished.  The old cities were levelled to the ground.  Nothing was built but monasteries, and these were as gloomy as feudal castles at a later date.  The churches were heavy and mournful.  Good men hid themselves, trying to escape from the miserable world, and sang monotonous chants of death and the grave.  Agriculture was at the lowest state, and hunting, piracy, and robbery were resorted to as a means of precarious existence.  There was no commerce.  The roads were invested with vagabonds and robbers.  It was the era of universal pillage