Rouergue left in his will a castle which was held from him as a fief
(a feo). In Catalonia a fevumor fevum comitaleor ‘public land which is
commonly called feudal’ (alodem curialem quem vulgo dicitur fevalem)
appears to have been a portion of the king’s property (fiscus regis)
which was converted into the fiscus comitisand parcelled out to the
count’s vicarii. Whether as ‘fiefs’, ‘alods’ or ‘benefices’, lands from
which tax had been collected for the king came to be regarded as
belonging to counts and viscounts, who might demand for themselves
the dues and service which these erstwhile officials had once received for
the king.^17 The successors of the cavalrymen of Charles Martel and
Charlemagne were the knights who garrisoned castles for the new race
of counts, independent princes like the counts of Anjou, or the Viking
counts of Rouen who became ‘dukes of Normandy’.^18 Above all the
exercise of justice was parcelled out into the hands of private lords.
Castles were the new element in the control of the land. ‘It was the
invasions of the Northmen or the Hungarians’, Marc Bloch wrote,
‘which, from the Adriatic to the plains of northern England, led not only
to the repair or rebuilding of town ramparts, but also to the erection on
every hand of the rural strongholds which were destined to cast a per-
petual shadow over the fields of Europe’.^19 These fortifications were
often just palisades enclosing villages or monasteries and providing
refuge for the peasants and artisans who worked for the landlords, lay
or ecclesiastical. In 911, the year in which he was later said to have
conceded the country about Rouen to Hrolf’s Norsemen in return for
service ‘by land and sea’, King Charles the Simple permitted the bishop
of Cambrai to build a castle and have a market and a mint, all with
46 The Courts of Lords and Townsmen
a.d. 922), 160 (col. 341), 173 (col. 362). E. Magnou, ‘Note sur le sens du mot fevumen
Septimanie et dans la marche d’Espagne a la fin du xeet au début du xiesiècle’, Annales du
Midi, 76 (1964), 149, 152.
(^17) Devic and Vaissete, Histoire générale de Languedoc, v. no. 111, col. 248, for the will of
the Count of Rouergue: ‘et illo castello de Parisio teneat Malbertus a feo de Hugone et de
Ermengaudo dummodo vivit: et post discessum illorum, isti alodes remaneant.. .’; cf. ibid.
nos. 77, 100, 106, 122 (col. 269: a.d. 972), 126 (col. 277), 132 (col. 290), 150 (col. 318: a.d.
990), 175 (cols. 366–8: a.d. 1018), 212 (col. 429: a.d. 1037), 278 (col. 546): the viscount of
Narbonne acknowledges to the count of Barcelona: ‘Habemus autem predictum fevum et
omnia ad illud pertinentia per vestrum beneficium, sicut habuimus retroactis temporibus per
comitem Barchinonensem.. .’; in Catalonia, the fevumor fevum comitalewas a portion of the
fiscus regis(royal treasure) which was converted into the fiscus comitisand parcelled out by
the count amongst his vicarii: see J.-M. Font Rius, ‘Détention des châteaux en catalogne’, Les
Structures sociales de l’Aquitaine, du Languedoc et de l’Espagne au premier âge féodal
(Colloque International du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Toulouse, 1968:
Paris, 1969), 67.
(^18) Niermeyer, lexicon minus, s.v. miles.
(^19) M. Bloch, Feudal Society, tr. L. A. Manyon (London, 1961), 300; for the evidence that
seignorial castles were proliferating by the 860s, see Capitularia, ii. 328.20, 360–1 (caps. 26,
27); cf. Recueil des Actes de Charles II le Chauve, 3 vols., ed. F. Lot and G. Tessier (Paris,
1943–55), i. 192. 3 , 241. 7 , for exemptions from tolls at civitatesand castellaon the Loire and
Seine.