The feudal history of France is most interesting to recall in this late day when every man is for himself. Not all was oppression by any means, and the peasant landowner--as distinct from the _vilain_ and _serf_--was a real person, and not a supposition, even before the Revolution; though Thomas Carlyle on his furzy Scotch moor didn't know it. Feudal France consisted of seventy thousand fiefs or rere-fiefs, of which three thousand gave their names to their seigneurs. All seigneurs who possessed three _châtellenies_ and a walled hamlet (_ville close_) had the right of administering justice without reference to a higher court. There were something more than seven thousand of these _villes closes_, within which, or on the lands belonging to the seigneurs thereof, were one million eight hundred and seventy-two thousand monuments,--churches, monasteries, abbeys, châteaux, castles, and royal or episcopal palaces. It was thus that religious, civic and military architecture grew side by side and, when new styles and modifications came in, certain interpolations were forthwith incorporated in the more ancient fabrics, giving that mélange of picturesque walls and roofs which makes France the best of all lands in which to study the architecture of mediævalism. Among these mediæval relics were interspersed others more ancient,--Roman and Greek basilicas, temples, baths, arenas, amphitheatres and aqueducts in great profusion, whose remains to-day are considerably more than mere fragments. The hereditary aristocracy of France, the rulers and the noblesse of the smaller kingdoms, dukedoms and countships, were great builders, as befitted their state, and, being mostly great travellers and persons of wealth, they really surrounded themselves with many exotic forms of luxury which a more isolated or exclusive race would never have acquired. There is no possible doubt whatever but that it is the very mixture of styles and types that make the architecture of France so profoundly interesting even though one decries the fact that it is not _national_.