30.14. 14. Of what they called Census.
After the Barbarians had quitted
their own country, they were desirous of reducing their usages into
writing; but as they found difficulty in writing German words with Roman
letters, they published these laws in Latin.
In the confusion and rapidity of the conquest, most things changed
their nature; in order, however, to express them, they were obliged to
make use of such old Latin words as were most analogous to the new
usages. Thus, whatever was likely to revive the idea of the ancient
census of the Romans they called by the name of census tributum,
[62]
and
when things had no relation at all to the Roman census, they expressed,
as well as they could, the German words by Roman letters; thus they
formed the word fredum, on which I shall have occasion to descant in the
following chapters.
The words census and tributum having been employed in an arbitrary
manner, this has thrown some obscurity on the signification in which
these words were used under our princes of the first and second race.
And modern authors
[63]
who have adopted particular systems, having found
these words in the writings of those days, imagined that what was then
called census was exactly the census of the Romans; and thence they
inferred this consequence, that our kings of the first two races had put
themselves in the place of the Roman emperors, and made no change in
their administration.
[64]
Besides, as particular duties raised under the
second race were by change and by certain restrictions converted into
others,
[65]
they inferred thence that these duties were the census of
the Romans; and as, since the modern regulations, they found that the
crown demesnes were absolutely unalienable, they pretended that those
duties which represented the Roman census, and did not form a part of
the demesnes, were mere usurpation. I omit the other consequences.
To apply the ideas of the present time to distant ages is the most
fruitful source of error. To those people who want to modernize all the
ancient ages, I shall say what the Egyptian priests said to Solon, "O
Athenians, you are mere children!"
[66]
Footnotes
[62]
The census was so generical a word, that they made use of it to
express the tolls of rivers, when there was a bridge or ferry to pass.
See the third Capitulary, in the year 803, edition of Baluzius, p. 395,
art. 1; and the 5th in the year 819, p. 616. They gave likewise this
name to the carriages furnished by the freemen to the king, or to his
commissaries, as appeals by the Capitulary of Charles the Bald in the
year 865, art. 8.
[63]
The Abbé du Bos, and his followers.
[64]
See the weakness of the arguments produced by the Abbé du Bos, in
the Establishment of the French Monarchy, tome iii, book VI, chap. 14; especially
in the inference he draws from a passage of Gregory of Tours, concerning
a dispute between his church and King Charibert.
[65]
For instance, by enfranchisements.
[66]
Plato, Timæus. — ED.
