benefices, he expected through them to command their men; but in reality the king disappeared little by little in the _senior_. The king granted as benefices not only lands, but public functions, such as those of count or _dux_, which thus became possessions, held, first for life, and later as hereditary properties. The Capitulary of Kiersy-sur-Oise (877), which was formerly considered to have made fiefs legally and generally hereditary, only proves that it was already the custom for benefices of this kind, _honores_, to pass from the father to one of the sons. Reforms of Charlemagne. Carolingian fiscal system. The Church under Charlemagne. Charlemagne, while sanctioning these institutions, tried to arrest the political decomposition. He reorganized the administration of justice, fixing the respective jurisdictions of the count and the _centenarius_, substituting for the _rachimburgii_ permanent _scabini_, chosen by the count in the presence of the people, and defining the relations of the count, as the representative of the central authority, with the _advocati_ or _judices_ of _immunitates_ and _potestates_. He reorganized the army, determining the obligations and the military outfit of free men according to their means. Finally, he established those regular inspections by the _missi dominici_ which are the subject of so many of his capitularies. From the _De ordine palatii_ of Hincmar of Reims, who follows the account of a contemporary of the great emperor, we learn that he also regularly established two general assemblies, _conventus_ or _placita_, in the year, one in the autumn, the other in the spring, which were attended by the chief officials, lay and ecclesiastical. It was here that the capitularies (q.v.) and all important measures were first drawn up and then promulgated. The revenues of the Carolingian monarch (which are no longer identical with the finances of the state) consisted chiefly in the produce of the royal lands (_villae_), which the king and his suite often came and consumed on the spot; and it is known how carefully Charlemagne regulated the administration of the _villae_. There were also the free gifts which the great men were bound, according to custom, to bring to the _conventus_, the contributions of this character from the monasteries practically amounting to a tax; the regular personal or territorial dues into which the old taxes had resolved themselves; the profits arising from the courts (the royal _bannus_, and the _fredum_, or part of the compensation-money which went to the king); finally, numberless requisitions in kind, a usage which had without doubt existed continuously since Roman times. The Church was loaded with honours and had added a fresh prerogative to her former privileges, namely, the right of levying a real tax in kind, the _tithe_. Since the 3rd century she had tried to exact the payment of tithes from the faithful,