Struck by the contrast between their weakness and the commanding position of later French kings, historians have dwelt with almost exaggerated emphasis on the powerlessness of Hugh Capet and his first three successors. Yet the early Capetians were not so feeble as they are sometimes described. The French king was still the centre round which the feudal system revolved. He had a store of legal claims and traditions of authority, which at any favourable moment he could put into force. He was the only ruler whose authority extended even in name all over France. He inherited the traditions of the Carolingians and Merovingians, and, rightly or wrongly, was regarded as their successor. Moreover, the lay fiefs were, luckily for the monarchy, cut up by the great ecclesiastical territories, over which the king stood in a better position. Though feudal in a certain sense, the great Church dignitary was never a mere feudalist. His power was not hereditary. On his death the custody of the temporalities of his see passed into the royal hands, and it was the settled royal policy to keep churches vacant as long as possible. Only in a few favoured fiefs, like Normandy, Brittany, and Aquitaine, did the _regale_ slip altogether into the hands of the local dukes. Moreover, the disputes and the weakness of the chapters gave the king the preponderating voice in elections. Even stronger was the royal position in relation to the monasteries. The greatest abbeys throughout France were ‘royal abbeys,’ over which the king possessed the same right as over bishoprics. Weaker than the bishops, the abbots looked up even more than the secular prelates to the royal support against the grasping and simoniacal lay-lords. The king favoured the Cluniac reformers, knowing that the more earnest the Churchmen, the more they would be opposed to feudal influence. Thus it was that every great Church fief was a centre of royal influence. Over the Church lands of central France—the provinces of Sens, Reims, Tours, and Bourges—the early Capetian was a real king. Even from the point of view of material resources, the king was in every whit as favourable a position as any one of his chief vassals. His own domains were large, rich, and centrally situated. Though lavish grants to the chief monasteries, and the need of paying for each step of their upward progress by conciliating the feudal magnates, had eaten away much of the old Robertian domain; though the great Counts of Anjou and Blois had established themselves in virtual independence within the limits of the domain of Hugh the Great, Hugh Capet still held the country between the Seine and the Loire, including the county of Paris, Orléans and its district, Senlis, Etampes, and Melun, with scattered possessions in more distant places, Picardy, Champagne, Berri, Touraine, and Auvergne. Paris was not as yet so important a place as it afterwards became, and it is an exaggeration to make it the centre of his power. Hugh could only