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The people looked back to the laws of Edward the Confessor, and forced them upon Edward II. But after passing the laws which prevented nobles from selling, and empowering FREEMEN to do so, Edward III. found it needful to assert his claims to the entire land of England, and enacted in the twenty-fourth year of his reign: "That the king is the universal lord and original proprietor of all land in his kingdom; that no man doth or can possess, any part of it but what has mediately or immediately been derived as a gift from him to be held on feodal service."
All the kingdoms on the continent of Europe were governed nearly in the same form; from whence arose a great similitude in the manners of their inhabitants. The feodal discipline extended itself everywhere, and influenced the conduct of the courts and the manners of the people with its own irregular martial spirit.
Those who obtained gifts of land, only held or had the use of them; the ownership rested in the Crown. Feodal service, the maintenance of armed men, and the bringing them into the field, was the rent paid. The wealth which came into England after the conquest of France influenced all classes, but none more than the family of the king. His own example seems to have affected his descendants.
All the kingdoms on the continent of Europe were governed nearly in the same form; from whence arose a great similitude in the manners of their inhabitants. The feodal discipline extended itself everywhere, and influenced the conduct of the courts, and the manners of the people, with its own irregular martial spirit.
* At Anet, a bronze stag, placed as a fountain in a large piece of water, was on the point of being demolished, because stags are beasts of chace, and hunting is a feodal privilege, and stags of course emblems of feodality. It was with some difficulty preserved by an amateur, who insisted, that stags of bronze were not included in the decree.
Let this be compared with the Irish peasant, shivering through three months of winter, and six months of wet, paying five pounds an acre for his swampy potatoes, and out of his holding paying tithe, tax, county rates, and all the other encumbrances of what the political economists call "a highly civilised state of society." We say "vive le systéme féodal, vive la sauvagerie Javannaise."
* At Anet, a bronze stag, placed as a fountain in a large piece of water, was on the point of being demolished, because stags are beasts of chace, and hunting is a feodal privilege, and stags of course emblems of feodality. It was with some difficulty preserved by an amateur, who insisted, that stags of bronze were not included in the decree.
On these shores have risen all that interests us in the past: Egypt and Palestine, Greece, Rome, and Carthage, Moorish Spain, and feodal Italy. These shores have yielded us our religion, our arts, our literature, and our laws. If all that we have gained from the shores of the Mediterranean was erased from the memory of man, we should be savages. Will the Atlantic ever be so memorable?
These exist and have always existed under the principles of feodal tenure and succession, under imperial constitutions, grants and concessions of sovereigns, family compacts, and public treaties, made under the sanction, and some of them guarantied by the sovereign powers of other nations, and particularly the old government of France, the author and natural support of the Treaty of Westphalia.
We're so ruled by the Jervaises here. And it's worse than that. Their their prestige sort of hangs over you everywhere. It's like being at the court of Louis Quatorze. The estate is theirs and they are the estate. Mother often says we are still féodal down here. It seems to me sometimes that we're little better than slaves." I smiled at the grotesqueness of the idea.
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