What first gave rise to the notion
of a general regulation made at the time of the conquest was our meeting
with an immense number of forms of servitude in France, towards the
beginning of the third race; and as the continual progression of these
forms of servitude was not perceived, people imagined in an age of
obscurity a general law which was never framed.
Towards the commencement of the first race we meet with an infinite
number of freemen, both among the Franks and the Romans; but the number
of bondmen increased to that degree, that at the beginning of the third
race all the husbandmen and almost all the inhabitants of towns had
become bondmen:
[25]
and whereas, at the first period, there was very
nearly the same administration in the cities as among the Romans,
namely, a corporation, a senate, and courts of judicature; at the other
we hardly meet with anything but a lord and his bondmen.
When the Franks, Burgundians, and Goths made their several
invasions, they seized upon gold, silver, movables, clothes, men, women,
boys, and whatever the army could carry; the whole was brought to one
place, and divided among the army.
[26]
History shows that after the
first settlement, that is, after the first devastation, they entered
into an agreement with the inhabitants, and left them all their
political and civil rights. This was the law of nations in those days;
they plundered everything in time of war, and granted everything in time
of peace. Were it not so, how should we find both in the Salic and
Burgundian laws such a number of regulations absolutely contrary to a
general servitude of the people?
But though the conquest was not immediately productive of servitude,
it arose nevertheless from the same law of nations which subsisted after
the conquest.
[27]
Opposition, revolts and the taking of towns were
followed by the slavery of the inhabitants. And, not to mention the wars
which the conquering nations made against one another, as there was this
peculiarity among the Franks, that the different partitions of the
monarchy gave rise continually to civil wars between brothers or
nephews, in which this law of nations was constantly practised,
servitudes, of course, became more general in France than in other
countries: and this is, I believe, one of the causes of the difference
between our French laws and those of Italy and Spain, in respect to the
right of seigniories.
The conquest was soon over, and the law of nations then in force was
productive of some servile dependences. The custom of the same law of
nations, which obtained for many ages, gave a prodigious extent to those
servitudes.
Theodoric
[28]
imagining that the people of Auvergne were not
faithful to him, thus addressed the Franks of his division: "Follow me,
and I will carry you into a country where you shall have gold, silver,
captives, clothes, and flocks in abundance; and you shall remove all the
people into your own country."
After the conclusion of the peace between Gontram and Chilperic, the
troops employed in the siege of Bourges, having had orders to return,
carried such a considerable booty away with them that they hardly left
either men or cattle in the country.
[29]
Theodoric, King of Italy, whose spirit and policy it was ever to
distinguish himself from the other barbarian kings, upon sending an army
into Gaul, wrote thus to the general:
[30]
"It is my will that the Roman
laws be followed, and that you restore the fugitive slaves to their
right owners. The defender of liberty ought not to encourage servants to
desert their masters. Let other kings delight in the plunder and
devastation of the towns which they have subdued; we are desirous to
conquer in such a manner that our subjects shall lament their having
fallen too late under our government." It is evident that his intention
was to cast odium on the kings of the Franks and the Burgundians, and
that he alluded in the above passage to their particular law of nations.
Yet this law of nations continued in force under the second race. King
Pepin's army, having penetrated into Aquitaine, returned to France
loaded with an immense booty, and with a number of bondmen, as we are
informed by the annals of Metz.
[31]
Here might I quote numberless authorities;
[32]
and as the public
compassion was raised at the sight of those miseries, as several holy
prelates, beholding the captives in chains, employed the treasure
belonging to the church, and sold even the sacred utensils, to ransom as
many as they could; and as several holy monks exerted themselves on that
occasion, it is in the Lives of the Saints that we meet with the best
explanations on the subject.
[33]
And, although it may be objected to the
authors of those lives that they have been sometimes a little too
credulous in respect to things which God has certainly performed, if
they were in the order of his providence; yet we draw considerable light
thence with regard to the manners and usages of those times.
When we cast an eye upon the monuments of our history and laws, the
whole seems to be an immense expanse, a boundless ocean;
[34]
all those
frigid, dry, insipid, and hard writings must be read and devoured in the
same manner as Saturn is fabled to have devoured the stones.
A vast quantity of land which had been in the hands of freemen
[35]
was changed into mortmain. When the country was stripped of its free
inhabitants, those who had a great multitude of bondmen either took
large territories by force, or had them yielded by agreement, and built
villages, as may be seen in different charters. On the other hand, the
freemen who cultivated the arts found themselves reduced to exercise
those arts in a state of servitude; thus the servitudes restored to the
arts and to agriculture whatever they had lost.
It was a customary thing with the proprietors of lands, to give them
to the churches, in order to hold them themselves by a quit-rent,
thinking to partake by their servitude of the sanctity of the churches.
