While scholars keep up a merry disputation as to the historical origin of the feudal system, the public imagination goes steadily on with its own curious picture of how that system lived and moved and had its being.  A prolix tale of origins would be out of place in this chronicle; but even the mind of the man in the street ought to be set right as regards what feudalism was designed to do, and what in fact it did, for mankind, while civilization battled its way down the ages.

Feudalism was a system of social relations based upon land.  It grew out of the chaos which came upon Europe in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire.  The fall of Roman power flattened the whole political structure of Western Europe, and nothing arose to take its place.  Every lord or princeling was left to depend for defence upon the strength of his own arm; so he gathered around him as many vassals as he could.  He gave them land; they gave him what he most wanted,—­a promise to serve and aid in time of war.  The lord gave and promised to guard; the vassal took and promised to serve.  Thus there was created a personal relation, a bond of mutual loyalty, wardship, and service, which bound liegeman to lord with hoops of steel.  No one can read Carlyle’s trenchant Past and Present without bearing away some vivid and altogether wholesome impressions concerning the essential humanity of this great mediaeval institution.  It shares with the Christian Church the honour of having made life worth living in days when all else combined to make it intolerable.  It brought at least a semblance of social, economic, and political order out of helpless and hopeless disorganization.  It helped Europe slowly to recover from the greatest catastrophe in all her history.

But our little systems have their day, as the poet assures us.  They have their day and cease to be.  Feudalism had its day, from dawn to twilight a day of picturesque memory.  But it did not cease to exist when its day of service was done.  Long after the necessity for mutual service and protection had passed away; long after the growth of firm monarchies with powerful standing armies had established the reign of law, the feudal system kept its hold upon the social order in France and elsewhere.  The obligation of military service, when no longer needed, was replaced by dues and payments.  The modern cash nexus replaced the old personal bond between vassal and lord.  The feudal system became the seigneurial system.  The lord became the seigneur; the vassal became the censitaire or peasant cultivator whose chief function was to yield revenue for his seigneur’s purse.  These were great changes which sapped the spirit of the ancient institution.  No longer bound to their dependants by any personal tie, the seigneurs usually turned affairs over to their bailiffs, men with hearts of adamant, who squeezed from the seigneuries every sou the hapless peasantry could yield.  These publicans of the old regime have much to answer for.  They and their work were not least among the causes which brought upon the crown and upon the privileged orders that terrible retribution of the Red Terror.  Not with the mediaeval institution of feudalism, but with its emaciated descendant, the seigneurial system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ought men to associate, if they must, their notions of grinding oppression and class hatred.