Assassination was common, and was unavenged by law. Every man was
his own avenger of crime, and his bloody weapons were his only law.

Nor were there seen among the barbaric chieftains the virtues of
ancient Pagan Rome and Greece, for Christianity was nominal. War
was universal; for the barbarians, having no longer the Romans to
fight, fought among themselves. There were incessant irruptions of
different tribes passing from one country to another, in search of
plunder and pillage. There was no security of life or property,
and therefore no ambition for acquisition. Men hid themselves in
morasses, in forests, on the tops of inaccessible hills, and amid
the recesses of valleys, for violence was the rule and not the
exception. Even feudalism was not then born, and still less
chivalry. We find no elevated sentiments. The only refuge for the
miserable was in the Church, and it was governed by men who shrank
from the world. A cry of despair went up to heaven among the
descendants of the old population. There was no commerce, no
travel, no industries, no money, no peace. The chastisement of
Almighty Power seems to have been sent on the old races and the new
alike. It was a desolation greater than that predicted by Jeremy
the prophet. The very end of the world seemed to be at hand.
Never in the old seats of civilization was there such a
disintegration; never such a combination of evils and miseries.
And there appeared to be no remedy: nothing but a long night of
horrors and sufferings could be predicted. Gaul, or France, was
the scene of turbulence, invasions, and anarchies; of murders, of
conflagrations, and of pillage by rival chieftains, who sought to
divide its territories among themselves. The people were utterly
trodden down. England was the battlefield of Danes, Saxons, and
Celts, invaded perpetually, and split up into petty Saxon kingdoms.