It was evidently the Emperor’s purpose to make the burden as light as possible for the small landholder, and at the same time the obligation to serve was extended to those who had no landed property. So we find it declared in 806 that “if there are six landless men who own each as much as the value of six silver pennies, i.e., a pound and a half of the metal, one has to serve and be equipped by the other five.” But the freemen alone were not sufficient to fill up the ranks; for, under the strict application of this system, no one was obliged to serve who held land in dependence, or as a “beneficium” from a wealthy landowner, nor did the obligation rest on those who had surrendered their lands to the Church, or to a powerful layman, in order to receive it back again under the conditions of a “beneficium.” This class were not wholly free, nor were they actually landowners. The problem of keeping up the war strength without oppressing the small landowner was solved in the following way: Charles called together, under the following conditions, those who were his own tenants. “Let every freeman,” he directed, “who owns absolutely four manses, or who holds them from another in the relation of a ‘beneficium,’ undertake to furnish his own equipment and join the army, either with his lord, if his lord is going there, or with the count.” These distributions enabled the Emperor to get recruits who otherwise would have escaped service; the other more remote result was that the “beneficium” system received legal recognition, and in this way the Emperor himself coöperated in the disintegrating tendencies by which the feudalized state finally destroyed the imperial system. The lot of the small landowner was made hard and unendurable under the terms of the imperial military regulations, despite the compromises intended by Charles to protect him. There was every inducement to the owner of a small holding to give it up. We find, for example, an imperial order forbidding freemen without permission from the Emperor to enter the clerical profession, “for we have heard,” he says, “that certain of them are not so much actuated by devotion as by a desire to escape service in the army, and other public duties to the sovereign.” The fact, too, that rules regulating this subject were extremely complicated, led to all kinds of abuses on the part of those who were intrusted with their execution. In a report made to the Emperor, we read that “the poor people claim that, if one of them is not willing to abandon his property to the bishop or abbot, or count, or ‘master of a hundred,’ these officials find occasion to have him condemned and compel him to go to the place where the army is mobilized, so that being reduced to misery he is forced, whether he wants to or not, to give up his property or sell it.” It was added that those who had made this sacrifice were not disturbed.