The Frankish conquerors of Gaul founded about a thousand years before the date of this narrative the first dynasty that reigned in the land. Clovis, the first of the kings, established and his successor followed the custom of almost yearly convoking their leudes, or chiefs of bands, to gatherings that they named Fields of May. At these assemblies, from which the Celtic or conquered people were wholly excluded and to which only the warrior ruler class was admitted, the Frankish chiefs or feudal lords deliberated with their supreme sovereign, the king, in their own or Germanic tongue upon new martial enterprises; or upon new imposts to be laid upon the subjected race. It was at these Fields of May that later, during the usurpatory dominion of the stewards of the palace, the do-nothing kings, those last scions of Clovis, unnerved and degenerate beings, appeared once a year with artificial beards as the grotesque and hollow effigies of royalty. These assemblies were continued under the reign of Charles the Great and the Carlovingian kings--the dynasty that in 752 succeeded that of Clovis. The bishops, accomplices of the conquerors, joined in these assemblies, where, accordingly, only the nobility, that is, the conquerors, and the clergy had seats. Under Hugh Capet and his descendants, the dynasty of the Capets, which succeeded that of the Carlovingians in 987, continued the practice of the Fields of May, but under a different name. At irregular intervals they held in their domains Courts or Parliaments--assemblies composed of seigneurs and prelates, but from which the newly shaping class of bourgeois or townsmen was excluded, along with the artisans and serfs, essentially as was the case under the previous dynasties. These assemblies represented exclusively the interests of the ruling class and its accomplices.