The country in which feudalism reached its fullest perfection was France and most of the passages here given to illustrate the subject have to do with French life and institutions. In France, speaking generally, feudalism took shape during the ninth and tenth centuries, developed steadily until the thirteenth, and then slowly declined, leaving influences on society which have not yet all disappeared. When the system was complete--say by the tenth century--we can see in it three essential elements which may be described as the personal, the territorial, and the governmental. The personal element, in brief, was the relation between lord and vassal under which the former gave protection in return for the latter's fidelity. The territorial element was the benefice, or fief, granted to the vassal by the lord to be used on certain conditions by the former while the title to it remained with the latter. The governmental element was the rights of jurisdiction over his fief usually given by a lord to his vassal, especially if the fief were an important one. At one time it was customary to trace back all these features of the feudal system to the institutions of Rome. Later it became almost as customary to trace them to the institutions of the early Germans. But recent scholarship shows that it is quite unnecessary, in fact very misleading, to attempt to ascribe them wholly to either Roman or German sources, or even to both together. All that we can say is that in the centuries preceding the ninth these elements all existed in the society of western Europe and that, while something very like them ran far back into old Roman and German times, they existed in sixth and seventh century Europe primarily because conditions were then such as to _demand_ their existence. Short extracts to illustrate the most important of these old feudal elements are given below. It should constantly be borne in mind that no one of these things--whether vassalage, the benefice, or the immunity--was in itself feudalism. Most of them could, and did, exist separately, and it was only when they were united, as commonly became the case in the ninth and tenth centuries, that the word feudalism can properly be brought into use, and then only as applied to the complete product. (1) VASSALAGE