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]
