house does homage and promises service in return for his appanage. More
common, and more important for the future, is the practice of treating
counts as vassals. All over the Frankish Empire the county was the
normal unit of local administration. The count led the military levies,
collected the royal dues, enforced the laws, maintained the peace, and
was a judge with powers of life and death. The Carolingians controlled
their counts by means of itinerant inspectors (_missi dominici_);
but with the disruption of their Empire this check was destroyed, while
the power of the count survived. By that time the office had often
become hereditary, on the analogy of the _beneficium_, and the
count appropriated to his own use the profits of his office. In such
cases his county became a small principality, classed by lawyers as a
fief, but often ruled without any reference to the interests of the
royal overlord. The fiefs of Anjou, Champagne and Flanders began in this
way as hereditary countships. Sometimes, again, we find that a great
vassal obtains, by grant of usurpation, the prerogatives of a count over
his own lands; examples are the prince-bishops of Trier (898 A.D.),
Hamburg (937), and Metz (945).

The first effect of this striking change in the nature of landed
property and of public office was to substitute for the centralised
state of the Carolingians a lax federal system, in which each unit was a
group of men attached to the person of a hereditary superior. This
nascent feudalism was often brutal, always summary and short-sighted, in
its methods of government. The feudal group was engaged in a perpetual
struggle for existence with neighbouring groups. Feudal policy was
aggressive; for every lord had his war-band, whom he could only hold
together by providing them with adventure and rich plunder; nor could
any lord regard himself as safe while a neighbour of equal resources
remained unconquered. Furthermore, as though the disintegration of