These councillors were replaced by men whom Lewis had learnt to know while he was yet but king of Aquitaine. The chief were Ebbo, his own foster-brother, abbot Hildwin, and count Bernard of Septimania. Ebbo, though but the son of a serf, was dear to the emperor from early association; he had taken orders, and was made archbishop of Rheims by his patron at the earliest opportunity, amid the murmurs of many high-born Frankish ecclesiastics, who exclaimed that such preferment was not the meed of a man of servile extraction. Hildwin, the new chancellor, was a shameless pluralist, three abbots rolled into one, and ever seeking more preferment. Bernard, however, a clever, restless, intriguing Gascon, provoked even greater jealousy and bitterness among the old courtiers of Charles the Great, and seems to have been the best-hated man in the realm. But perhaps the most influential of all the advisers of Lewis was his wife, Hermengarde, the daughter of the count of the Hesbain, an ambitious and unscrupulous woman, who exercised such an influence over her uxorious spouse that she was even able to drive him once and again to deeds of ill-faith and cruelty very foreign to his mild and righteous disposition. Charles the Great had left the frontiers of his great realm so well secured that in the earliest years of Lewis the Pious there was no foreign war to call the emperor into the field. It was a characteristic sign of the new _régime_ that things ecclesiastical took precedence of all others at the first meetings of the magnates of the empire. We hear of legislation against carnally-minded bishops and abbots, who shocked the pious by riding with cloak and sword and golden spurs like secular nobles. A _modus vivendi_ was established between clerics of servile birth and their former lords, providing that on due compensation being paid the villein might go free. The emperor took the keenest interest in this question. Not only his favourite Ebbo, but several others of his counsellors had been serfs, and he was most anxious to defend them alike against claims of their ancient masters, and insults at the hands of the free-born clergy. [Sidenote: Ecclesiastical legislation.] Another decree of Lewis’ dealt with the tenure of the lands of monasteries. After stipulating that fourteen great houses owed both military service and aids in money to the empire, and sixteen more the financial duty alone, he declared that all the other monastic establishments in his wide dominion should hold their property on the simple undertaking that they should ‘pray for the welfare of the emperor and his children and the empire.’ This threw a vast quantity of estates into tenure by what later ages called ‘frank almoin,’ and relieved of its natural responsibility to the State more land than could prudently be suffered to go scot-free.