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The rights which feudal law and custom gave him had been practically unquestioned, save by an always reluctant Church, and baronial opposition had taken the form of a resistance to his general power rather than of a denial of special rights. Now a change had silently begun which was soon to show itself openly and to lead to great results.
Familiar as it stands in the writer's recollection, for it has been an object of curiosity with him from boyhood, both as a specimen of the best and stateliest architecture of a longpast epoch, and as the scene of events more full of human interest, perhaps, than those of a gray feudal castle, familiar as it stands, in its rusty old age, it is therefore only the more difficult to imagine the bright novelty with which it first caught the sunshine.
The church, like that of Les Trois Maries, is feudal castle as much as cathedral, calculated, on occasion, to give refuge within to the inhabitants of the town, whilst the garrison stood on the flat roof and showered arrows, stones, molten sulphur and pitch upon the besiegers.
Even the highly feudal slave-holding "county family" traditions of Virginia and the South pass now out of memory. So that in a very real sense the past of the American nation is in Europe, and the settled order of the past is left behind there. This community was, as it were, taken off its roots, clipped of its branches, and brought hither.
He pointed out, with much truth, that if the feudal states would leave one another alone, families cease to quarrel, and thieves cease to steal, while sovereign and subject lived on terms of benevolence and loyalty, and fathers and sons on terms of kindness and filial piety then indeed the empire would be well governed.
"I am prepared," said Hilyard; "when the bombard explodes, the match has become useless; when the flame smites the welkin, the firebrand is consumed!" "Bold man! what seest thou in this rebellion that can profit thee?" "I see, looming through the chasms and rents made in the feudal order by civil war, the giant image of a free people."
Leger, had struck a fatal blow at clanship and Irish institutions in general, by bestowing on and compelling the chieftains to accept English titles, and by investing them with new deeds of their lands under feudal tenure.
It was, of course, manifest that the exemptions enormously increased the burden to be borne by the classes which did not enjoy such privileges. But, heavy as the grievance of these exemptions was, it was as nothing when compared with the feudal rights claimed by the greater nobles.
Stephen died in 1153, and Henry became king. The Feudal System, which obtained in England for four hundred years, was a good one for military purposes, for the king on short notice might raise an army by calling on the barons, who levied on their vassals, and they in turn levied on their dependants. A feudal castle was generally built in the Norman style of architecture.
The allowance of contractual remedies shows that rent and feudal services of that nature, although dealt with as things capable of possession, and looked at generally from the point of view of property rather than of contract, yet approach much nearer to the nature of the latter than a mere duty not to interfere with a way. Other cases come nearer still.
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