TION. INTRODUC- of universal pursuit. The winepress and the haram present attractions to which no one, how illiterate soever, is insensible; and the race of northern conquerors melts away as rapidly amidst the wines and women of the south, as the Iroquois perishes beside the spirit-cask, or the Scotch or Swedish manufacturer amidst the riot of the spirit-cellar. 30. nobles. The private wars of the nobles with each other was Effects of the first circumstance which renewed the courage and the private wars of the revived the energy of the feudal barons. The inconsiderate historians of modern times have stigmatised these domestic contests as things of unmixed evil, merely because they produced extensive bloodshed and suffering; but the more reflecting observer, who has traced the workings of corruption, whether on the individual or the national heart, will arrive at a different conclusion. He will recollect the necessity of suffering to individual reformation; he will reflect on the virtues which spring out of disaster. Regarding this world as not a scene of enjoyment so much as a school of improvement, he will not lightly estimate those circumstances, apparently ruinous, which extricate the human mind from the meshes of sensual gratification, which draw forth the manly virtues by the force of suffering, and elevate the character even when they embitter the life. It is to this cause, joined to the fortification of the castles, and the constant use of arms by the retainers of the landowners, that the restoration of the military courage of France is to be ascribed. The Spanish barons were trained to courage in the stern school of necessity, and regained, in the mountains of Galicia, the valour which their conquerors were losing amidst the luxuries of Cordova. The English military spirit, which had decayed from the 296. Sism. Same causes, was restored by the private wars of the nobles France. iii. during the reign of Stephen; and, through all the havoc Condé, ii. and ruin of the country, that courage was elicited which 1 Hume, i. 374, 451. 126, 368, 494. was destined to lay the foundation of British liberty in a happier age.1 But the feudal liberty was at length destroyed by the INTRODUC- Causes of the feudal Spain. change of manners, and the natural progress of opulence. Being confined to a limited class of society, it expired with the virtue of those who alone were interested in its 31. defence conferring little upon the great body of the the decay of people, it derived nothing from the talents which lay liberty in buried among them. Wealth enervated its possessors, and no inferior class existed to supply their place; the rich became corrupted, while the poor did not cease to be slaves. The progress was different in different states, but in all the result was the same. The kingdoms both of Aragon and Castile were governed, in their early history, by more limited monarchs than the Plantagenets of England, and their nobles did not yield to the barons of Runnymede in zeal for the preservation of their privileges; but it was in vain that they extorted concessions from their sovereigns, and confirmed them on occasion of every renewal of the coronation oath. The spirit of freedom, and with it the liberties of the nation, died away upon the decay of the feudal aristocracy, from the selfishness and degradation of the great body of the people. When Charles V. had suppressed, in 1548, the formidable revolt of the communeros, he excluded not the deputies of the cities and boroughs, but of the grandees and prelates, from the representation, and the result showed that he knew human nature well when he did so. Deprived of their natural leaders, the commons were never afterwards able to resist the authority of government. The Cortes 1 Blanca's maintained its nominal rights; and the "Great Privilege," Hal. Mid. the Magna Charta of Aragon, was never repealed; but 45, 67. Ma the cities neglected sending representatives to its assemblies, and many suffered their right to a place in its los Cortes, deliberations to fall into abeyance. The nobles, cut off Sciences from political power, became attached to the splendour 365. of a court, and, with the forms of a limited, Spain became a despotic monarchy.1 In France, the nobility, during the period of their feudal vigour, reduced the crown to nearly the same limited Com. 669. Ages, ii. 38, riana, 395. Sism. Sociales, i. TION. 32. Its decline and Ger many. INTRODUC- Sway as prevailed in England, insomuch that, for nearly half a century, it was a general opinion, confirmed by several solemn acts of the throne, that no tax could be in France levied without the consent of the three estates. But the skeleton of a free government perished with the decay of feudal manners: the influence of the crown, and the attractions of a metropolis, drew the nobility to Paris; and liberty in the country, deprived of its only supporters, speedily fell to the ground. The progress was somewhat different in Germany, although there, as elsewhere in the European monarchies, the feudal system at first established the rudiments of a free government, the illegality of taxes without the consent of the people, and the sharing of the legislative sovereignty with the states of the kingdom. The power of the great barons rendered the empire lam, ii. 130. elective, and broke down into separate states the venerParl. Hist. able fabric of the Germanic confederacy; but their sway de France, within their own domains, being not restrained by the 1 Schmidt, vi. 8. Hal Mabl. Obs. s. v. c. i. 256, 270, 391. Hallam, i. vigour or intelligence of the people, gradually became unlimited, and the restraints of liberty were obliterated in the rising ambition of military power.1 33. And in Notwithstanding the long and hereditary attachment of the English people to free institutions-notwithstanding the diffusion of this spirit by the establishment of trial by jury, and its preservation by the protection of insular situation- the usual causes of decline had begun to operate, and the feudal independence of the barons in the middle ages had yielded to the corrupted subservience of opulent times. The desolating wars of York and Lancaster thinned the ranks of the nobles; the increase of luxury, by changing the direction of their expenditure, sapped the foundations of their power. Under the Tudor princes, the indifference of parliament to the liberties of the people had already commenced. Europe could not exhibit a monarch who governed his people with more absolute sway than Henry VIII., nor is any thing in modern times more instructive than the pliant servility with which both the parliament and the people obeyed his despotic commands. History can hardly exhibit an example of a reign in which a greater number of violent invasions were made, not only on public rights, but on private property-in which justice was more disgracefully prostituted in courts of law, liberty more completely abandoned in the proceedings of parliament, or caprice more tyrannically exerted on the throne. Those who INTRODUC TION. 1 Henry's Britain, xi. ascribe the freedom of England solely to the feudal institutions, would do well to consider the condition of the country, the pliancy of the legislature, and the servility of the people, during the reign of this ferocious tyrant who confiscated the property of one-third of the landholders of his kingdom, and executed seventy-two thou- 94, 389; iv. sand persons in his single lifetime-or even perhaps during that of his more prudent and popular daughter.1 Admirably adapted, therefore, as the feudal system was 260, 372. Hume, iii. 275; v. 263, 363, 470. 34. fitted for a for preserving an independent spirit during the middle It was only ages; gratefully as we must acknowledge its influence in barbarous restraining the power of the northern conquerors, and age. preventing the very name of right or privilege from being swept away, as in the Asiatic monarchies, by the desolating hand of power; fully as we must admit that tyranny would have rioted without control, if, when the people were poor and disunited, the nobles had not been brave and free; still it is obvious that it was an institution suited only to a barbarous age, and alike incapable of being moulded according to the changes which society undergoes, or of providing for the freedom of civilised times. With the institution of standing armies, the progress of luxury, the invention of gunpowder, and the rise of cities, it necessarily decayed. The liberty which was built on no other foundation than the feudal institutions, has every where long since fallen to the ground. That system was in its vigour during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When the barons dwelt in fortified castles on their estates, surrounded by a tenantry trained to warlike TION. INTRODUC- exercises, and attached alike by habit and interest to the fortunes of their chief, cased in armour from head to foot, and leading on a body of warlike and devoted retainers, they were alike formidable to the throne and oppressive to the cottage. If they extorted privileges in their own favour from the sovereign, they gave none to their enslaved vassals. With a merciless hand and unsparing severity, they checked the first struggles of the people for a share of that freedom which they so strenuously asserted for themselves. The insurrections of the Jacquerie in France, of the peasants under Wat Tyler in England, and of the Flemings under the Brewer of Ghent, were repressed with a cruelty of which history affords few examples. The courage and enthusiasm of the multitude in vain contended for victory against steel-clad warriors, trained to arms from their earliest years. The knights broke through the ranks of the peasants with the same ease as they would have traversed an unarmed assembly; and the 5,7, Hal. degraded serf, incapable of those efforts of heroism which animated the free shepherds of the Alps, sank beneath xi. 434, 435. the stroke of fate with the resignation of a martyr rather than the spirit of a warrior.1 1 Hume, iii. i. 321. Sism. x. 233, 540; 35. undermined of the nobles. But the power of the nobles, incapable of being subOpulence verted by force, was undermined by opulence; and the the power emancipation of the people, for which so many thousands had perished in vain, arose at length through the desires. and follies of their oppressors. The baron was formidable when his life was spent in arms, and when he headed the feudal array which had grown up under the shadow of his castle walls: when his years were wasted in the frivolities of a court, his ambition centred in the smiles of a sovereign, and his fortune was squandered in the luxuries of a metropolis, he became contemptible. His tenantry ceased either to venerate or follow a chief whom they seldom beheld: the seductions of cities became omnipotent to those who no longer valued their rural dependents; the desires of wealth insatiable among persons who had the |