A peculiar tax, which was called the due of _franc-fief_, had been levied from a distant period on the non-noble holders of noble lands. This tax established between lands the same distinction which existed between the classes of society, and the one constantly tended to increase the other. Perhaps this due of _franc-fief_ contributed more than any other cause to separate the _roturier_ and the noble, because it prevented them from mingling together in that which most speedily and most effectually assimilates men to each other--in the possession of land. A chasm was thus opened between the noble landowner on the one hand, and his neighbour, the non-noble landowner, on the other. Nothing, on the contrary, contributed to hasten the cohesion of these two classes in England more than the abolition, as early as the sixteenth century, of all outward distinctions between the fiefs held under the Crown and lands held in villenage.[46] In the fourteenth century this feudal tax of _franc-fief_ was light, and was only levied here and there; but in the eighteenth century, when the feudal system was well-nigh abolished, it was rigorously exacted in France every twenty years, and it amounted to one whole year’s revenue. A son paid it on succeeding his father. ‘This tax,’ said the Agricultural Society of Tours in 1761, ‘is extremely injurious to the improvement of the art of husbandry. Of all the imposts borne by the King’s subjects there is indisputably none so vexatious and so onerous to the rural population.’ ‘This duty,’ said another contemporary writer, ‘which was at first levied but once in a lifetime, is become in course of time a very cruel burden.’ The nobles themselves would have been glad that it should be abolished, for it prevented persons of inferior condition from purchasing their lands; but the fiscal demands of the State required that it should be maintained and increased.[47] The Middle Ages are sometimes erroneously charged with all the evils arising from the trading or industrial corporations. But at their origin these guilds and companies served only as means to connect the members of a given calling with each other, and to establish in each trade a free government in miniature, whose business it was at once to assist and to control the working classes. Such, and no more, seems to have been the intention of St. Louis.