Doubtless it happened more often than otherwise that the man who received a piece of land made himself a vassal of the man who gave it to him, but the two states finally became much confused. One might be at the same time both beneficiary and vassal, and take upon himself the very narrow obligations of one and the other condition. Indeed after a property had been held for several generations by men who inherited their obligations together with the land, it seemed as if the fief carried its rights and duties with it and communicated them to those that held it. In the end the property, which always remained, was considered rather than the men, who came and went. It was no longer the weak man who bound himself to the strong one but the little acreage to the great domain, and certain formalities symbolised this new relation. The land became his in a manner to replace itself in the hands of the great landlord, in the shape of a clod of sod or the branch of a tree, which the petty proprietor brought himself. This land, so burdened with obligations, was the fief. When France became covered with fiefs each property had its own organisation; it had its lord, great or small, and there was no land without its lord. Whoever had no land had no condition, for there was no lord without his land. Certain relations were established between the different fiefs--there were some which were dominant and others which were dominated. The dominant fiefs were those of the dukes and the counts, who assumed all the power which royalty had delegated them and who ruled as petty kings over their duchies and counties. Their vassals and the latters’ sub-vassals depended upon them before depending upon the king. As for the dukes and counts, they were the vassals of the king, but as the feudal hierarchy developed, the obligation of the vassal became, as a matter of fact, less strict. The duke of Burgundy’s vassals obeyed him; of course the duke of Burgundy would not make the mistake of disobeying the king. Such was the great revolution accomplished at the end of the ninth and in the tenth century. After the deposition of Charles the Fat appeared the great fiefs whose names we find over and over again throughout the whole of French history. The duke of Gascony owned all the country south of the Garonne, and the counts of Toulouse, Auvergne, Périgord, Poitou, and Berri, the district between the Garonne and the Loire. To the east and north of the latter river everything belonged to the count of Forez, the duke of Burgundy, the duke of France, and to the counts of Flanders and Brittany who exercised their royal rights over the land. To the kings remained only a few towns which he had not yet been constrained to give away in fiefs. THE CHURCH