Theodoric, King of Italy, whose spirit and policy it was ever to distinguish himself from the other barbarian kings, upon sending an army into Gaul, wrote thus to the general:30 "It is my will that the Roman laws be followed, and that you restore the fugitive slaves to their right owners. The defender of liberty ought not to encourage servants to desert their masters. Let other kings delight in the plunder and devastation of the towns which they have subdued; we are desirous to conquer in such a manner that our subjects shall lament their having fallen too late under our government." It is evident that his intention was to cast odium on the kings of the Franks and the Burgundians, and that he alluded in the above passage to their particular law of nations. Yet this law of nations continued in force under the second race. King Pepin's army, having penetrated into Aquitaine, returned to France loaded with an immense booty, and with a number of bondmen, as we are informed by the annals of Metz.31

　　Here might I quote numberless authorities;32 and as the public compassion was raised at the sight of those miseries, as several holy prelates, beholding the captives in chains, employed the treasure belonging to the church, and sold even the sacred utensils, to ransom as many as they could; and as several holy monks exerted themselves on that occasion, it is in the Lives of the Saints that we meet with the best explanations on the subject.33 And, although it may be objected to the authors of those lives that they have been sometimes a little too credulous in respect to things which God has certainly performed, if they were in the order of his providence; yet we draw considerable light thence with regard to the manners and usages of those times.

　　When we cast an eye upon the monuments of our history and laws, the whole seems to be an immense expanse, a boundless ocean;34 all those frigid, dry, insipid, and hard writings must be read and devoured in the same manner as Saturn is fabled to have devoured the stones.

　　A vast quantity of land which had been in the hands of freemen35 was changed into mortmain. When the country was stripped of its free inhabitants, those who had a great multitude of bondmen either took large territories by force, or had them yielded by agreement, and built villages, as may be seen in different charters. On the other hand, the freemen who cultivated the arts found themselves reduced to exercise those arts in a state of servitude; thus the servitudes restored to the arts and to agriculture whatever they had lost.

　　It was a customary thing with the proprietors of lands, to give them to the churches, in order to hold them themselves by a quit-rent, thinking to partake by their servitude of the sanctity of the churches.

　　12. That the Lands belonging to the Division of the Barbarians paid no Taxes. A people remarkable for their simplicity and poverty, a free and martial people, who lived without any other industry than that of tending their flocks, and who had nothing but rush cottages to attach them to their lands,36 such a people, I say, must have followed their chiefs for the sake of booty, and not to pay or to raise taxes. The art of tax-gathering was invented later, and when men began to enjoy the blessings of other arts.

　　The temporary tax of a pitcher of wine for every acre,37 which was one of the exactions of Chilperic and Fredegonda, related only to the Romans. And indeed it was not the Franks that tore the rolls of those taxes, but the clergy, who in those days were all Romans.38 The burden of this tax lay chiefly on the inhabitants of the towns;39 now these were almost all inhabited by Romans.

　　Gregory of Tours relates40 that a certain judge was obliged, after the death of Chilperic, to take refuge in a church, for having under the reign of that prince ordered taxes to be levied on several Franks who in the reign of Childebert were ingenui, or free-born: Multos de Francis, qui tempore Childeberti regis ingenui fuerant, publico tributo subegit. Therefore the Franks who were not bondmen paid no taxes.

　　There is not a grammarian but would turn pale to see how the Abbé du Bos has interpreted this passage.41 He observes that in those days the freedmen were also called ingenui. Upon this supposition he renders the Latin word ingenui, by the words "freed from taxes"; a phrase which we indeed may use in French, as we say "freed from cares," "freed from punishments"; but in the Latin tongue such expressions as ingenui a tributis, libertini a tributis, manumissi tributorum, would be quite monstrous.

　　Parthenius, says Gregory of Tours,42 had like to have been put to death by the Franks for subjecting them to taxes. The Abbé du Bos finding himself hard pressed by this passage43 very coolly assumes the thing in question; it was, says he, a surcharge.

　　We find in the law of the Visigoths44 that when a Barbarian had seized upon the estate of a Roman, the judge obliged him to sell it, to the end that this estate might continue to be tributary; consequently the Barbarians paid no land taxes.45

　　The Abbé du Bos,46 who would fain have the Visigoths subjected to taxes,47 quits the literal and spiritual sense of the law, and pretends, upon no other indeed than an imaginary foundation, that between the establishment of the Goths and this law, there had been an augmentation of taxes which related only to the Romans. But none but Father Harduin are allowed thus to exercise an arbitrary power over facts.

　　This learned author48 has rummaged Justinian's Code49 in search of laws to prove that, among the Romans, the military benefices were subject to taxes. Whence he would infer that the same held good with regard to fiefs or benefices among the Franks. But the opinion that our fiefs derive their origin from that Institution of the Romans is at present exploded; it obtained only at a time when the Roman history, not ours, was well understood, and our ancient records lay buried in obscurity and dust.

　　But the Abbé is in the wrong to quote Cassiodorus, and to make use of what was transacting in Italy, and in the part of Gaul subject to Theodoric, in order to acquaint us with the practice established among the Franks; these are things which must not be confounded. I propose to show, some time or other, in a certain work, that the plan of the monarchy of the Ostrogoths was entirely different from that of any other government founded in those days by the other Barbarian nations; and that so far from our being entitled to affirm that a practice obtained among the Franks because it was established among the Ostrogoths, we have on the contrary just reason to think that a custom of the Ostrogoths was not in force among the Franks.

　　The hardest task for persons of extensive erudition is to seek their proofs in such passages as bear upon the subject, and to find, if we may be allowed to express ourselves in astronomical terms, the position of the sun.

　　The same author makes a wrong use of the capitularies, as well as of the historians and laws of the barbarous nations. When he wants the Franks to pay taxes, he applies to freemen what can be understood only of bondmen;50 when he speaks of their military service, he applies to bondmen what can never relate but to freemen.51

　　13. Of Taxes paid by the Romans and Gauls in the Monarchy of the Franks. I might here examine whether, after the Gauls and Romans were conquered, they continued to pay the taxes to which they were subject under the emperors. But, for the sake of brevity, I shall be satisfied with observing that, if they paid them in the beginning, they were soon after exempted, and that those taxes were changed into a military service. For, I confess, I can hardly conceive how the Franks should have been at first such great friends, and afterwards such sudden and violent enemies, to taxes.

　　A capitulary52 of Louis the Debonnaire explains extremely well the situation of the freemen in the monarchy of the Franks. Some troops of Goths or Iberians, flying from the oppression of the Moors, were received into Louis' dominions. The agreement made with them was that, like other freemen, they should follow their count to the army; and that upon a march they should mount guard and patrol under the command also of their count; and that they should furnish horses and carriages for baggage to the king's commissaries,53 and to the ambassadors in their way to or from court; and that they should not be compelled to pay any further impost, but should be treated as the other freemen.

　　It cannot be said that these were new usages introduced at the commencement of the second race. This must be referred at least to the middle or to the end of the first. A capitulary of the year 864 54 says in express terms that it was the ancient custom for freemen to perform military service, and to furnish likewise the horses and carriages above-mentioned; duties particular to themselves, and from which those who possessed the fiefs were exempt, as I shall prove hereafter.

　　This is not all; there was a regulation which hardly permitted the imposing of taxes on those freemen.55 He who had four manors was obliged to march against the enemy:56 he who had but three was joined with a freeman that had only one; the latter bore the fourth part of the other's charges, and stayed at home. In like manner, they joined two freemen who had each two manors; he who went to the army had half his charges borne by him who stayed at home.

　　Again, we have an infinite number of charters, in which the privileges of fiefs are granted to lands or districts possessed by freemen, and of which I shall make further mention hereafter.57 These lands are exempted from all the duties or services which were required of them by the counts, and by the rest of the king's officers; and as all these services are particularly enumerated without making any mention of taxes, it is manifest that no taxes were imposed upon them.

　　It was very natural that the Roman system of taxation should of itself fall out of use in the monarchy of the Franks; it was a most complicated device, far above the conception, and wide from the plan of those simple people. Were the Tartars to overrun Europe, we should find it very difficult to make them comprehend what is meant by our financiers.

　　The anonymous author of the life of Louis the Debonnaire,58 speaking of the counts and other officers of the nation of the Franks, whom Charlemagne established in Aquitania, says, that he entrusted them with the care of defending the frontiers, as also with the military power and the direction of the demesnes belonging to the crown. This shows the state of the royal revenues under the second race. The prince had kept his demesnes in his own hands, and employed his bondmen in improving them. But the indictions, the capitations and other imposts raised at the time of the emperors on the persons or goods of freemen had been changed into an obligation of defending the frontiers and marching against the enemy.

　　In the same history,59 we find that Louis the Debonnaire, having been to wait upon his father in Germany, this prince asked him, why he, who was a crowned head, came to be so poor: to which Louis made answer that he was only a nominal king, and that the great lords were possessed of almost all his demesnes; that Charlemagne, being apprehensive lest this young prince should forfeit their affection, if he attempted himself to resume what he had inconsiderately granted, appointed commissaries to restore things to their former situation.

　　The bishops, writing60 to Louis, brother of Charles the Bald, used these words: "Take care of your lands, that you may not be obliged to travel continually by the houses of the clergy, and to tire their bondmen with carriages. Manage your affairs," continue they, "in such a manner that you may have enough to live upon, and to receive embassies." It is evident that the king's revenues in those days consisted of their demesnes.