The greater princes, who remained at home, besides establishing peace in their dominions by giving occupation abroad to the inquietude and martial disposition of their subjects, took the opportunity of annexing to their crown many considerable fiefs, either by purchase, or by the extinction of heirs.

The papacy, lately a hereditary fief of the counts of Tusculum, was utterly ruined; the dominium temporale, the ominous gift of the Carlovingians, the box of Pandora in the hands of the Pope from which a thousand evils had arisen, had disappeared, since the Church could scarcely command the fortresses in the immediate neighborhood of the city.

Poictesme being now a vacant fief, King Ferdinand ennobled Manuel, and made him Count of Poictesme.

" "What say you then of Yen Yu?" "As for Yen," he replied, "in a city of a thousand families, or in a secondary fief, he might be charged with the governorship; but I cannot answer for his good-naturedness.

The sovereigns could not at discretion, or by the want of it, play the bloody game of war for their mere amusement; and the emperor putting in his claim at this epoch to his ancient rights of sovereignty over Brabant, as an imperial fief, the council and the people treated the demand with derision.

The great inheritance of honor, of valor and of all martial virtues is, as Professor Cramb very fitly expresses it, "but ours on trust, the fief inalienable of the dead and of the generation to come," and the summons of the present is to guard this heritage, nor to bate one jot of the ancient spirit; the summons of the future will be so to widen its scope as to apply it in all walks and relations of life.

While he daily advanced new pretensions to secure the possession of his superior fief, they expected to find the same advantage, in acquiring stability to their subordinate ones; and they zealously opposed the intrusion of a new lord, who would be inclined, as he was fully entitled, to bestow the possession of their lands on his own favourites and retainers.

The territorial fief, which was given to those soldlers who had deserved it by their military services, involved from the holders a personal service to the King.

Switzerland was divided at this period into small sovereignties and baronial fiefs; and there were, besides, also the Imperial cities of Bern and Basel and Zürich.

When the counts in attendance admonished him to comply with this usual form of accepting so valuable a fief, he still declined, exclaiming in pure Anglo-Saxon, "Not He, By God,"Ne se bigoth; "quod interpetatur," says the chronicler, "non [ille] per Deum."

His purpose seems to have been to acquire the sovereignty of the ecclesiastical and baronial fiefs, and, having thus encompassed the free cities and the Three Cantons, to compel submission to his authority.

One of them took possession of Rabat and Azemmour, and preached the Holy War; other "feudal fiefs" (as M. Augustin Bernard has well called them) were founded at Tameslout, Ilegh, Tamgrout: the tombs of the marabouts who led these revolts are scattered all along the west coast, and are still objects of popular veneration.

It was strange, though, that in this glorious fief of his so many persons should, as yet, live day by day as cattle live, suspicious of all other moving things (with reason), and roused from their incurious and filthy apathy only when some glittering baron, like a resistless eagle, swept uncomfortably near as he passed on some by-errand of the more bright and windy upper-world.