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Updated: June 6, 2025
The work of civilization was violently interrupted. The work of national unity was all but undone. The Highlanders were parted by a sharp line of division from the Lowlanders, while within the Lowlands themselves feudalism overmastered the Crown. The nobles became almost wholly independent. The royal power, under the immediate successors of Bruce, sank into insignificance.
In one of the towers there was a room whose ceiling was painted a royal blue over-strewn with exquisite gold tracery and blazonry. In no place have I realized feudalism so well as in that tower.
The Executive power, with its tremendous bureaucratic and military organization; with its wide-spreading and artificial machinery of government an army of office-holders, half a million strong, together with a military force of another million men ; this fearful body of parasites, that coils itself like a snake around French society, stopping all its pores, originated at the time of the absolute monarchy, along with the decline of feudalism, which it helped to hasten.
And a better illustration is found in the operation of the seigneurial system upon which Canadian society was based. In France a belated feudalism still held the common man in its grip, and in Canada the forms of feudalism were at least partially established. Yet the Canadian habitant lived in a very different atmosphere from that breathed by the Norman peasant.
The English kings had been vassals since feudalism had existed in England, though not for the kingdom, and only a few years before Richard had made even that a fief of the empire. There is no evidence that John's right to take this step was questioned by any one, or that there was any general condemnation of it at that time.
How could she thus triumph over all the inequalities of feudalism unless divinely commissioned? How could she work what seemed to be almost miracles if she had not a supernatural power to assist her? Like the regina angelorum, she was virgo castissima. And if she was unlike common mortals, perhaps an inspired woman, what she promised would be fulfilled.
Since the downfall of feudalism and the establishment of modern centralized monarchy, the church has been robbed of the greater part of her temporal possessions, and deprived, in most countries, of all civil functions, and treated by the state either as an enemy or as a slave.
Mention of the form of government had by the Madagascar people and which is now being superseded by occupancy of the French and the introduction of laws of a civilized nation, may not be out of place. As far back as tradition will carry, there existed in Madagascar a kind of feudalism.
The total abolition of feudalism may be said to have now come in sight, but the leading progressists adopted all precautions to consummate their programme without disturbance. They resolved to preserve, at the outset, the semblance of the old system, and to that end the ex-feudatories were nominated to the post of governor in the districts where they had formerly exercised autonomic power.
All lords were vassals either of the king or of other lords, and consequently all were bound together by solemn engagements to be loyal to one another and care for one another's interests. Feudalism served thus as a sort of substitute for the state. Private arrangements between one landowner and another took the place of the weakened bond between the subject and his king.
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