Under Charlemagne, public order and protection to the free tenants, serfs and chattels, existed to as high a degree as was possible at that epoch; but with his death all this disappeared. The crisis which then occurred and which ended in consolidating the feudal social structure, was even more terrible than the epoch of invasions. The poor classes and the serfs and chattels, as we might suppose, suffered most. The tenth century marks the triumph of the feudal _régime_, and with this triumph chattelhood (_mancipium_) disappears from the laws and the usage of the oppressive masters. The chattels now became hereditary bondmen or serfs, and were no longer objects of sale or of traffic. They could not be separated from their families, but were established in villages; and the slave traffic was carried on solely in Saracens and other heathen. In all other respects serfdom preserved almost all the most revolting features of ancient domestic slavery. The feudal lord employed the serfs as tillers of his soil, and the harvests they raised were the chief sources of his income; while they likewise formed his followers in his feuds with feudal neighbors or with his lords paramount--the counts, dukes, and kings. The feudal lord did not sell his serfs--as the churches, synods, and councils all united in condemning the traffic in Christians. The present serf, tiller, and laborer, all over Western Europe, was the younger, outlawed member of the human family, and so now are our Southern chattels. For a long time the difference between serfdom and ancient chattelhood was discernible only with great difficulty. The collar worn by chattels since the time of Augustus remained on the necks of the serfs (and these, too, not _adscripti glebæ_), with the expression--"I BELONG," or with the name of the master cut thereon. This was the custom in England with the Anglo-Saxon serfs of the Athelstanes and the Cedrics, so that the ancestry of the haughty Anglo-Saxon slaveholding American barons of the present day wore collars! The feudal order was firmly established. Below the social hierarchy, composed of free fiefs, and estates belonging to nobles, churches, and monasteries (all of them free from taxation and public servitude), descend another social grade, whose only badges were humiliations, sufferings, toils, and martyrdom. Servitude and serfdom had similar gradations among the peasantry and workmen bound to the soil of their feudal master as existed among the barons, nobles, abbots, etc., in _their_ various relations and duties of vassalage.