For all important affairs, the King generally consulted the grandees of his court; but as in the five or six first centuries of monarchy in France the royal residence was not permanent, it is probable the Council of State was composed in part of the officers who followed the King, and in part of the noblemen who came to visit him, or resided near the place he happened to be inhabiting. It was only under the Capetians that the Royal Council took a permanent footing, or even assembled at stated periods. In ordinary times, that is to say, when he was not engaged in war, the King had few around him besides his family, his personal attendants, and the ministers charged with the dispatch of affairs. As he changed from one of his abodes to another he only held his court on the great festivals of the year. [Illustration: Fig. 15.--The Lords and Barons prove their Nobility by hanging their Banners and exposing their Coats-of-arms at the Windows of the Lodge of the Heralds.--After a Miniature of the "Tournaments of King Réné" (Fifteenth Century), MSS. of the National Library of Paris.] Up to the thirteenth century, there was, strictly speaking, no taxation and no public treasury. The King received, through special officers appointed for the purpose, tributes either in money or in kind, which were most variable, but often very heavy, and drawn almost exclusively from his personal and private properties. In cases of emergency only, he appealed to his vassals for pecuniary aid. A great number of the grandees, who lived far from the court, either in state offices or on their own fiefs, had establishments similar to that of the King. Numerous and considerable privileges elevated them above other free men. The offices and fiefs having become hereditary, the order of nobility followed as a consequence; and it then became highly necessary for families to keep their genealogical histories, not only to gratify their pride, but also to give them the necessary titles for the feudal advantages they derived by birth. (Fig. 15). Without this right of inheritance, society, which was still unsettled in the Middle Ages, would soon have been dissolved. This great principle, sacred in the eyes both of great and small, maintained feudalism, and in so doing it maintained itself amidst all the chaos and confusion of repeated revolutions and social disturbances. We have already stated, and we cannot sufficiently insist upon this important point, that from the day on which the adventurous habits of the chiefs of Germanic origin gave place to the desire for territorial possessions, the part played by the land increased insensibly towards defining the position of the persons holding it. Domains became small kingdoms, over which the lord assumed the most absolute and arbitrary rights. A rule was soon established, that the nobility was inherent to the soil, and consequently that the land ought to transmit to its possessors the rights of nobility.