take from the whole Christian people pledges of faith in himself as
God’s agent on earth.^4 Ambitious kings would always seek liege homage
from the entire aristocracy,^5 but a man’s strongest loyalties were
directed to the immediate lord from whom he gained protection and
sustenance. A chronicler like Astronomus, the biographer of Louis the
Pious, looking back from the troubled times of the mid-ninth century to
the settlement of Frankish counts and abbots and their followings in
Aquitaine sixty years earlier, might bemoan the fact that these men
‘whom they popularly call vassals’ had always ignored the general
interest and turned public property to private ends (‘negligens autem
publicorum, perversa vice, dum publica vertuntur in privata’);^6 and the
emperor might insist in 808 that all free men with four mansiof land
should give him military service, under their lords (seniores, ‘seigneurs’)
if they had lords who were also serving, but otherwise under the
counts.^7 But kings knew that their rule depended on maintaining the
sanctity of lordship at all levels. At the end of the ninth century, King
Alfred declared a man’s treachery to his lord the one crime for which
there could be no compensation, ‘because Almighty God adjudged none
for those who scorned our Lord’.^8
Louis the Pious’s division of his lands between his sons cut through
the unifying bonds of loyalty to a single sovereign, just at the time that
the raids of the Vikings and Saracens upon the coasts of the empire
demanded a drawing-together of local communities under their
immediate lords. The old hierarchies of fidelity were put under strain,
and the aristocracy were alarmed as even groups of peasants formed
sworn associations for their mutual protection.^9 Attempts were made to
see that the division of the empire did not destroy vassalage as a stabi-
lizing force in society. The Ordinatio imperiiof 817 insisted that a
vassal should hold benefices from one lord only, ‘to avoid discords’. A
peace-agreement between the brother-kings in 847 reaffirmed both the
public administration of justice through missiand the responsibility of
lords for their men, Charles the Bald requiring that every freeman in his
realm should have himself or one of his fidelesas senior.^10
44 The Courts of Lords and Townsmen
(^4) Capitularia, i. 66 (c. 2), 92 (c. 2).
(^5) Cf. the oath taken by William the Conqueror at Salisbury in 1086 from ‘all the land-
holding men of any account throughout England, whosesoever men they were’: discussed by
F. M. Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism(Oxford UP, 1932), 111–13.
(^6) Astronomus, Vita Hludovici, ed E. Tremp, MGH Scriptores, 64 (Hanover, 1995), 302;
tr. as Son of Charlemagneby A. Cabaniss (Syracuse UP, 1961), 34, 38.
(^7) Capitularia, 137–8 (1, 9), 165 (7–9), 169 (7).
(^8) Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, i. 44–7 (49.7).
(^9) J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Frankish Gaul’, in France: Government and Society, ed.
Wallace-Hadrill and J. McManners (London, 1957), 44–6; Annales Bertiniani, ed. F. Grat,
J. Vieilliard, and S. Clemencet (Paris, 1964), s.a. 859, for the vulgus promiscuumwho formed
a coniuratio.
(^10) Capitularia, i. 128 (10), 272 (9), ii. 22 (6), 68, 71 (2).