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30.12. 12. That the Lands belonging to the Division of the Barbarians paid
no Taxes.

A people remarkable for their simplicity and poverty, a free and martial people, who lived without any other industry than that of tending their flocks, and who had nothing but rush cottages to attach them to their lands, [36] such a people, I say, must have followed their chiefs for the sake of booty, and not to pay or to raise taxes. The art of tax-gathering was invented later, and when men began to enjoy the blessings of other arts.

The temporary tax of a pitcher of wine for every acre, [37] which was one of the exactions of Chilperic and Fredegonda, related only to the Romans. And indeed it was not the Franks that tore the rolls of those taxes, but the clergy, who in those days were all Romans. [38] The burden of this tax lay chiefly on the inhabitants of the towns; [39] now these were almost all inhabited by Romans.

Gregory of Tours relates [40] that a certain judge was obliged, after the death of Chilperic, to take refuge in a church, for having under the reign of that prince ordered taxes to be levied on several Franks who in the reign of Childebert were ingenui, or free-born: Multos de Francis, qui tempore Childeberti regis ingenui fuerant, publico tributo subegit. Therefore the Franks who were not bondmen paid no taxes.

There is not a grammarian but would turn pale to see how the Abbé du Bos has interpreted this passage. [41] He observes that in those days the freedmen were also called ingenui. Upon this supposition he renders the Latin word ingenui, by the words "freed from taxes"; a phrase which we indeed may use in French, as we say "freed from cares," "freed from punishments"; but in the Latin tongue such expressions as ingenui a tributis, libertini a tributis, manumissi tributorum, would be quite monstrous.

Parthenius, says Gregory of Tours, [42] had like to have been put to death by the Franks for subjecting them to taxes. The Abbé du Bos finding himself hard pressed by this passage [43] very coolly assumes the thing in question; it was, says he, a surcharge.

We find in the law of the Visigoths [44] that when a Barbarian had seized upon the estate of a Roman, the judge obliged him to sell it, to the end that this estate might continue to be tributary; consequently the Barbarians paid no land taxes. [45]

The Abbé du Bos, [46] who would fain have the Visigoths subjected to taxes, [47] quits the literal and spiritual sense of the law, and pretends, upon no other indeed than an imaginary foundation, that between the establishment of the Goths and this law, there had been an augmentation of taxes which related only to the Romans. But none but Father Harduin are allowed thus to exercise an arbitrary power over facts.

This learned author [48] has rummaged Justinian's Code [49] in search of laws to prove that, among the Romans, the military benefices were subject to taxes. Whence he would infer that the same held good with regard to fiefs or benefices among the Franks. But the opinion that our fiefs derive their origin from that Institution of the Romans is at present exploded; it obtained only at a time when the Roman history, not ours, was well understood, and our ancient records lay buried in obscurity and dust.

But the Abbé is in the wrong to quote Cassiodorus, and to make use of what was transacting in Italy, and in the part of Gaul subject to Theodoric, in order to acquaint us with the practice established among the Franks; these are things which must not be confounded. I propose to show, some time or other, in a certain work, that the plan of the monarchy of the Ostrogoths was entirely different from that of any other government founded in those days by the other Barbarian nations; and that so far from our being entitled to affirm that a practice obtained among the Franks because it was established among the Ostrogoths, we have on the contrary just reason to think that a custom of the Ostrogoths was not in force among the Franks.

The hardest task for persons of extensive erudition is to seek their proofs in such passages as bear upon the subject, and to find, if we may be allowed to express ourselves in astronomical terms, the position of the sun.

The same author makes a wrong use of the capitularies, as well as of the historians and laws of the barbarous nations. When he wants the Franks to pay taxes, he applies to freemen what can be understood only of bondmen; [50] when he speaks of their military service, he applies to bondmen what can never relate but to freemen. [51]

Footnotes