society had not gone far enough, every great fief was in constant danger
of civil war and partition. As the lord had treated the King, so he in
turn was treated by his vassals. He endowed them with lands, he allowed
them to found families, he gave them positions of authority; and then
they defied him. In the eleventh century the great fief bristled with
castles held by chief vassals of the lord; in the small county of Maine
alone we hear of thirty-five such strongholds; generally speaking they
were centres of rebellion and indiscriminate rapine. Such feudalism was
not a system of government; it was a symptom of anarchy.

Yet feudalism had not always been a mere tyranny of the military class
over the unarmed population. Like the Roman Empire, that of the Franks
had forfeited respect and popularity by misgovernment, by feeble
government, by insupportable demands on the personal service of the
subject. The land-owner was a less exacting master than the Empire;
often he could defend his tenants from imperial exactions. During the
invasions of the Northmen and Hungarians, he was impelled by his own
interest to guard his estates to the best of his ability. Therefore
common men looked to their landlord, or looked about them for a
landlord, to whom they could commend themselves. The great estate was
the ark of refuge from the general flood of social evils. In the
eleventh century the situation changed. The Hungarian tide of invasion
was rolled back by a Henry the Fowler and an Otto the Great; the
Northmen enrolled themselves as members of the European commonwealth.
The petty feudal despot was no longer needed. From a protector he had
degenerated into a pest of society. The great political problem of the
age was to make him innocuous. It was taken in hand, and it was settled,
by a variety of means.

In France the Church took the lead of the repressive movement,