privileges secured, their property inviolable, their duties limited,
the Frisons were altogether free from the servitude which weighed
down France. It will soon be seen that these special advantages
produced a government nearly analogous to that which Magna Charta
was the means of founding at a later period in England.

The successors of Charlemagne chiefly signalized their authority
by lavishing donations of all kinds on the church. By such means
the ecclesiastical power became greater and greater, and, in those
countries under the sway of France, was quite as arbitrary and
enormous as that of the nobility. The bishops of Utrecht, Liege,
and Tournay, became, in the course of time, the chief personages
on that line of the frontier. They had the great advantage over
the counts, of not being subjected to capricious or tyrannical
removals. They therefore, even in civil affairs, played a more
considerable part than the latter; and began to render themselves
more and more independent in their episcopal cities, which were
soon to become so many principalities. The counts, on their parts,
used their best exertions to wear out, if they had not the strength
to break, the chains which bound them to the footstool of the
monarch. They were not all now dependent on the same sovereign;
for the empire of Charlemagne was divided among his successors:
France, properly so called, was bounded by the Scheldt; the country
to the eastward of that river, that is to say, nearly the whole
of the Netherlands, belonged to Lorraine and Germany.

In the state of things, it happened that in the year 864, Judith,
daughter of Charles the Bald, king of France, having survived
her husband Ethelwolf, king of England, became attached to a
powerful Flemish chieftain called Baldwin. It is not quite certain