So here was this King Clovis of the Franks ruling over this large Empire. He found the Roman law and the Roman system of government in use there; and the Franks adopted as much as they could of the Roman customs into their own. But it was difficult. {81} The Roman official who had represented the government of the Empire was called the "comes," or "count," and the Merovingian kings of the Franks seem to have tried to continue to govern through the "count." One of his duties was to collect taxes, but the Franks do not seem to have understood taxation as it was understood by the Romans. The Romans made assessment, that is to say calculations, from time to time, to find out how much money was needed for the government of a province, and they exacted from the people of the province as much as was required to meet that need. Under the Franks the tax came to be a fixed amount on property. The duty of the Count in levying the tax cannot have been easy, for these Franks were one and all fighting men. In their own country the practice had been to hold an assembly of the tribe for the making of laws and judging cases. That was their idea of government. It was a plan which might work well for a small tribe. It was not suitable for a large empire. The consequence is that we soon see the Count, and other men of rank and of large possessions in land, becoming more and more independent of the king, who really could not make his authority felt. One of the difficulties that the king found, arose from the custom, which was a Roman custom, of granting "immunities," as they were called, to certain persons and institutions. They were granted especially to institutions connected with the Church. They provided that the lands to which they were given should be "immune from" visits by the king's officials. The great man, or the great institution, to whom or to which the immunity was granted thus became like a small king, within his own kingdom. He could do almost as he pleased. So there was always this trouble, and it grew greater as time went on, that the king's authority {82} was more and more disputed, more and more weakened; and in this weakening of authority the security for life and for property grew weaker. The poorer people found that their best hope for a secure life was to put themselves under the protection of some rich and powerful man; that rich and powerful man found that his best hope for safety was to take under his protection as many as possible of these people, who, in return for the protection, would fight for him on occasion. And this, shortly put, was, in the main, what brought about the state of society known as the feudal system. It was the more easy for the lesser men, the vassals, and the great man, the lord, to make these terms with each other, because something of the kind was already in existence, both in the Germany from which the Franks came and in the Roman and Gothic society into which they had come as conquerors.