With the contemptuous title ‘The Sluggard Kings’ the last rulers of the Merovingian line have passed down to posterity. Few were endowed with any ability or even ambition to govern, the majority died before they had reached manhood looking already like senile old men; and the power that should have been theirs passed into the hands of the Mayors of the Palace who administered their demesnes. On state occasions, indeed, they were still shown to their subjects, as they jolted to the place of assembly in a rough cart drawn by oxen; but the ceremony over, they returned to their royal villas and insignificance. ‘Nothing was left to the king save the name of king, the flowing locks, the long beard. He sat on his throne and played at government, gave audiences to envoys, and dismissed them with the answers with which he had been schooled.’ [Sidenote: The Carolingians] It was a situation that could only last so long as the name ‘Meroveus’ retained its spell over the Franks; but the day came when the spell was broken, and a race of stronger fibre, the Carolingians, usurped the royal title. The heads of this family had for generations held the office of ‘Mayor of the Palace’ in the part of Gaul between the Meuse and the Lower Rhine, then called Austrasia. It was their duty to administer the royal demesnes in this large district, that is, to see that the laws were obeyed, to superintend the cultivation of the soil, and to collect a share of the various harvests as a revenue for the king. This was more important work than it may sound to modern ears; for in the early Middle Ages the majority of people, unlike men and women to-day, lived in the country. Ever since the decay of the Roman Empire, when the making of roads was neglected and the imperial grain-fleets disappeared from the Mediterranean, the problem of carrying merchandise and food from one part of Europe to another had grown steadily more acute. As commerce and industry languished, towns ceased to be centres of population and became merely strongholds where the neighbourhood could find refuge when attacked by its enemies. People preferred to spend their ordinary life in villages in the midst of fields, where they could grow corn and barley, or keep their own sheep and oxen, and if the crops failed or their beasts were smitten by disease a whole province might suffer starvation.