Charlemagne had felt grave apprehensions of evil from these robber incursions, but could not have conceived of a result such as this, the most oppressive system ever fastened upon a nation, and one which would at the same time sap the foundations of royalty itself.

The theory was that the king was absolute owner of all the territory; the great lords holding their titles from him on condition of military service, their vassals pledging military service and obedience to them again on similar terms, and sub-vassals again to them repeating the pledge; and so on in descending chain, until at last the serf, that wretched being whom none looks up to nor fears, is ground to powder beneath the superimposed mass; no appeal from the authority, no escape from the caprice or cruelty of his feudal lord.  Could any scales weigh, could any words measure the suffering which must have been endured?  Is it strange that, with every aspiration thwarted, hope stifled, Europe sank into the long sleep of the Middle Ages?

It is easy to conceive that, under such a system, where all the affairs of the realm were adjusted by individual rulers with unlimited power, and where the great barons could make war upon each other without authorization from the king, by the time this nominal head of the entire system was reached there remained nothing for him to do.  In fact, there was not left one vestige of kingly authority, and Carlovingian rulers were almost as insignificant as their Merovingian predecessors.  France had, instead of one great sovereign, one hundred and fifty petty ones!

In A.D. 911 the Northmen were offered the province henceforth known as Normandy, upon condition of their acceptance of the religion and submission to the laws of the realm.  Rollo, the disreputable robber-chief, took the oath of fealty to the King of France, his suzerain, and Christian baptism transformed him into respectable, law-abiding Robert, Duke of Normandy.

So, the enemy had become a vassal.  The pirate of the North Sea had taken his place among the Christian chivalry of Europe, as one of the twelve peers of France.  It was less than a century since the death of Charlemagne, and the office of king had grown almost as helpless as in the period of the Rois Faineants.  Under the stress of the continuous invasions, by perfectly natural process the central authority had passed to the feudal magnates.  Many of the feudal states had actually organized into independent governing bodies.  The struggle with the Northmen ended, France, dismembered, exhausted, was lying prostrate.  A king stripped of every kingly attribute at one extreme of the social system, and a people trampled into the very dust by feudal oppression at the other.  Owners of nothing, not even of themselves, they might not fish in the streams, nor hunt in the forests, unless the privilege was bestowed; and with their lives spent in fighting the incessant private wars of their lords, there seemed no room for them in the world, nor for hope in their hearts.  With the king effaced, and the people effaced, there remained only bands of feudal barons trying to efface each other!