The recriminations of the poor were directed against clerical and lay officers without distinction; and we hear of their grievances against bishops, abbots, and their legal representatives, as well as against the counts and other laymen. The Emperor’s efforts proved futile, and he not only could not resist the movement of his age, but he found himself promoting the evolution he criticised. He actually gave exemptions under his own seal to a certain number of religious houses. The counts, on their side, made a practice of giving exemptions and dispensations from military service. The landlord was allowed a kind of authority over the tenant in questions in which the holding of land was not involved. The rule that each landowner must be conducted to the place of mobilization by the count was broken, and the landed proprietors were allowed to appear ready for service, at the head of their tenants and dependents, a distinct anticipation of the later feudal custom. The mass of the people did not fail to let their sentiments be known when the Emperor proceeded to extend the privilege of quartering his functionaries on private individuals. The imperial officers were assaulted and their baggage stolen. There was much complaint, too, of the incessant calls to military service. Many sacrificed, therefore, their free status, which simply meant to them the constant obligation to be under arms, and they entered the ecclesiastical profession or became dependents of those who were more powerful. Carolingian legislation permitted the freeman to “commend” himself to whomsoever he would “after the death of his lord,” and so that process began by which the central authority was robbed of its own subjects, the small, free landowners. Thus it was that the medieval régime took definite shape as a governmental hierarchy based on the possession of landed estates, great and small, worked either by serfs or by tenants, related to their overlord by various kinds of dependent tenures. X THE CHURCH