[Sidenote: Rise of the mayoralty.] The six years of civil war which followed the death of Pippin the Younger had undone most of the work of that great man, and Charles had to commence once more the task which had busied his father. He was, however, in a position of greater firmness and strength than Pippin had enjoyed, and was able to make his will felt all over the Frankish realms in a much more thorough fashion. It was his task to make the arm of the central government feared all over the kingdom, as much as it had been in the days of the earliest Merovingian kings. The task was hard, because a century and a half of feeble administration had taught the local counts and dukes all the arts of insubordination, more especially the trick of utilising the annual meetings of the great national council—what England would have called the Witan—for the purpose of overawing their ruler. They appeared at the ‘March-field,’ followed by great hosts of armed followers, and bound themselves together by family or party confederacies to withstand the central government. In this they succeeded as long as the feeble Merovings continued, and were able to elect the officers of state at their pleasure or to distribute the local governorships among each other. The great mayors put an end to this. The house of St. Arnulf had gathered such a great following of faithful partisans in Austrasia that, by their aid, it could face any combination of discontented counts. The other great houses of Austrasia seem to have gradually disappeared, and all the smaller nobility and freemen of the land between Meuse and Rhine had become the enthusiastic followers of Pippin and Charles. In return the great mayors planted Austrasians in office all over the kingdom, and trusted mainly to their aid in all crises. Their system was a domination of the Austrasians over the Neustrians, Burgundians, Aquitanians, and East Germans: their empire reposed on the fact that their own countrymen were loyal, united, and self-confident, while the other races were jealous, divided, and humbled by recent defeat. Yet the struggle was no easy one. It needed the repeated blows of Amblève, Vincy, and Soissons to crush the Neustrian spirit of separatism. Aquitaine was only kept down by campaign after campaign directed against its disloyal dukes. Neither south Gaul nor south Germany (Suabia and Bavaria) were really tamed till they had been deprived of their native dukes, and cut up into countships or _gaus_, administered by Austrasian chiefs. But the house of St. Arnulf continued to produce great men for generation after generation, and the taming was finally accomplished.