United States or Liberia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The charter of Henry I shows that in the case of lay fiefs the rights of the king, logically involved in the feudal system, had been stretched to their utmost limit, and even beyond. It would be very strange if this were not still more true in the case of ecclesiastical fiefs. The monks, we may be sure, had abundant grounds for their complaints.
Day in, day out, from rosy morn till dewy eve, it frowned upon Belsaye, a thing of doom whose grim sight should warn rebellious townsfolk to dutiful submission; by night it loomed, a dim-seen, brooding horror, whose loathsome reek should mind them how all rogues must end that dared lift hand or voice against my lord Duke, or those proud barons, lords, and knights who, by his pleasure, held their fiefs with rights of justice, the high, the middle and the low.
His answer to the Pope was that if Parma and Piacenza are Imperial fiefs integral parts of the State of Milan it would ill become the Emperor to alienate them from an empire which he holds merely in trust; whereas if they can be shown rightly to belong to the Holy See, why then the matter concerns him not, and the Holy See may settle it." Galeotto shrugged and his face grew dark.
It seemed equitable that one who had cultivated and sowed a field should reap the harvest: hence fiefs, which were at first entirely precarious, were soon made annual. A man who had employed his money in building, planting, or other improvements, expected to reap the fruits of his labour or expense: hence they were next granted during a term of years.
But in the Middle Ages most of the land was held by those who neither really owned it nor paid a regular rent for it and yet who could not be deprived of it by the original owner or his successors. Obviously the great vassals who held directly of the king became almost independent of him as soon as their fiefs were granted to them in perpetuity.
Stretching farther along this northern shore were various large seigneuries given chiefly to officers or former officers of the civil government, and now held by their heirs. La Valterie, Lanoraie, and Berthier-en-Haut, were the most conspicuous among these riparian fiefs.
By fortunate marriages and lucky windfalls the dukes of Burgundy had added a number of important fiefs to their original possessions, and Philip the Good ruled over Franche-Comté, Luxembourg, Flanders, Artois, Brabant, and other provinces and towns which lie in what is now Holland and Belgium.
Such confiscation and gifts were entirely in accord with existing usages, and the great alteration which took place in the principal fiefs was more a change of persons than of law.
The family of the count were subsequently reinstated in all his property, fiefs, and rights, which, by virtue of the sentence, had escheated to the royal treasury. Meanwhile a scaffold had been erected in the marketplace, before the town hall, on which two poles were fixed with iron spikes, and the whole covered with black cloth.
Through the feebleness of Charlemagne's successors these attempts were universally successful, and the Benefice gradually transformed itself into the hereditary Fief. But, though the fiefs were hereditary, they did not necessarily descend to the eldest son.