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31.30. 30. The same Subject continued.

It is mentioned in the books of fiefs, that when the Emperor Conrad set out for Rome, the vassals in his service presented a petition to him that he would please to make a law that the fiefs which descended to the children should descend also to the grandchildren; and that he whose brother died without legitimate heirs might succeed to the fief which had belonged to their common father. [196] This was granted.

In the same place it is said (and we are to remember that those writers lived at the time of the Emperor Frederick I) [197] "that the ancient jurists had always been of opinion [198] that the succession of fiefs in a collateral line did not extend farther than to brothers-german, though of late it was carried as far as the seventh degree, and by the new code they had extended it in a direct line in infinitum." It is thus that Conrad's law was insensibly extended. All these things being supposed, the bare perusal of the history of France is sufficient to demonstrate that the perpetuity of fiefs was established earlier in this kingdom than in Germany. Towards the commencement of the reign of the Emperor Conrad II in 1024, things were upon the same footing still in Germany, as they had been in France during the reign of Charles the Bald, who died in 877. But such were the changes made in this kingdom after the reign of Charles the Bald, that Charles the Simple found himself unable to dispute with a foreign house his incontestable rights to the empire; and, in fine, that in Hugh Capet's time the reigning family, stripped of all its demesnes, was no longer in a condition to maintain the crown.

The weak understanding of Charles the Bald produced an equal weakness in the French monarchy. But as his brother, Louis, King of Germany, and some of that prince's successors were men of better parts, their government preserved its vigour much longer.

But what do I say? Perhaps the phlegmatic constitution, and, if I dare use the expression, the immutability of spirit peculiar to the German nation made a longer stand than the volatile temper of the French against that disposition of things, which perpetuated the fiefs by a natural tendency, in families.

Besides, the kingdom of Germany was not laid waste and annihilated, as it were, like that of France, by that particular kind of war with which it had been harassed by the Normans and Saracens. There were less riches in Germany, fewer cities to plunder, less extent of coast to scour, more marshes to get over, more forests to penetrate. As the dominions of those princes were less in danger of being ravaged and torn to pieces, they had less need of their vassals and consequently less dependence on them. And in all probability, if the Emperors of Germany had not been obliged to be crowned at Rome, and to make continual expeditions into Italy, the fiefs would have preserved their primitive nature much longer in that country.

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