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31.1. 1. Changes in the Offices and in the Fiefs.

The counts at first were sent into their districts only for a year; but they soon purchased the continuation of their offices. Of this we have an example in the reign of Clovis' grandchildren. A person named Peonius was count in the city of Auxerre; [1] he sent his son Mummolus with money to Gontram, to prevail upon him to continue him in his employment; the son gave the money for himself, and obtained the father's place. The kings had already begun to spoil their own favours.

Though by the laws of the kingdom the fiefs were precarious, yet they were neither given nor taken away in a capricious and arbitrary manner: nay, they were generally one of the principal subjects debated in the national assemblies. It is natural, however, to imagine that corruption crept into this as well as the other case; and that the possession of the fiefs, like that of the counties, was continued for money.

I shall show in the course of this book, [2] that, independently of the grants which the princes made for a certain time, there were others in perpetuity. The court wanted to revoke the former grants; this occasioned a general discontent in the nation, and was soon followed by that famous revolution in French history, whose first epoch was the amazing spectacle of the execution of Brunehault.

That this queen, who was daughter, sister and mother of so many kings, a queen to this very day celebrated for public monuments worthy of a Roman dile or proconsul, born with an admirable genius for affairs, and endowed with qualities so long respected, should see herself of a sudden exposed to so slow, so ignominious and cruel a torture, [3] by a king whose authority was but indifferently established in the nation, [4] would appear very extraordinary, had she not incurred that nation's displeasure for some particular cause. Clo-tharius reproached her with the murder of ten kings; but two of them he had put to death himself; the death of some of the others was owing to chance, or to the villainy of another queen; [5] and a nation that had permitted Fredegunda to die in her bed, [6] that had even opposed the punishment of her flagitious crimes, ought to have been very different with respect to those of Brunehault.

She was put upon a camel, and led ignominiously through the army; a certain sign that she had given great offence to those troops. Fredegarius relates that Protarius, [7] Brunehault's favoureite, stripped the lords of their property, and filled the exchequer with the plunder; that he humbled the nobility, and that no person could be sure of continuing in any office or employment. The army conspired against him, and he was stabbed in his tent; but Brunehault, either by revenging his death, or by pursuing the same plan, [8] became every day more odious to the nation. [9]

Clotharius, ambitious of reigning alone, inflamed moreover with the most furious revenge, and sure of perishing if Brunehault's children got the upper hand, entered into a conspiracy against himself; and whether it was owing to ignorance, or to the necessity of his circumstances, he became Brunehault's accuser, and made a terrible example of that princess.

Warnacharius had been the very soul of the conspiracy formed against Brunehault. Being at that time mayor of Burgundy, he made Clotharius consent that he should not be displaced while he lived. [10] By this step the mayor could no longer be in the same case as the French lords before that period; and this authority began to render itself independent of the regal dignity.

It was Brunehault's unhappy regency which had exasperated the nation. So long as the laws subsisted in their full force, no one could grumble at having been deprived of a fief, since the law did not bestow it upon him in perpetuity. But when fiefs came to be acquired by avarice, by bad practices and corruption, they complained of being divested, by irregular means, of things that had been irregularly acquired. Perhaps if the public good had been the motive of the revocation of those grants, nothing would have been said; but they pretended a regard for order while they were openly abetting the principles of corruption; the fiscal rights were claimed in order to lavish the public treasure; and grants were no longer the reward or the encouragement of services. Brunehault, from a corrupt spirit, wanted to reform the abuses of the ancient corruption. Her caprices were not owing to weakness; the vassals and the great officers, thinking themselves in danger, prevented their own by her ruin.

We are far from having all the records of the transactions of those days; and the writers of chronicles, who understood very nearly as much of the history of their time as our peasants know of ours, are extremely barren. Yet we have a constitution of Clotharius, given in the council of Paris, [11] for the reformation of abuses, [12] which shows that this prince put a stop to the complaints that had occasioned the revolution. On the one hand, he confirms all the grants that had been made or confirmed by the kings his predecessors; [13] and on the other, he ordains that whatever had been taken from his vassals should be restored to them. [14]

This was not the only concession the king made in that council; he enjoined that whatever had been innovated, in opposition to the privileges of the clergy, should be redressed; and he moderated the influence of the court in the election of bishops. [15] He even reformed the fiscal affairs, ordaining that all the new censuses should be abolished, [16] and that they should not levy any toll established since the deaths of Gontram, Sigebert, and Chilperic; [17] that is, he abolished whatever had been done during the regencies of Fredegunda and Brunehault. He forbad the driving of his cattle to graze in private people's grounds; [18] and we shall presently see that the reformation was still more general, so as to extend even to civil affairs.

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