Yet within a hundred years there arose a reaction in
favour of the imperial idea - a reaction of which Germany was the apostle, which
Italy accepted, which made many converts in West Francia. There were new and sufficient
reasons for returning to the discarded system. The national hierarchies, who had
undermined the Frankish Empire to broaden the foundations of ecclesiastical
privilege and influence, were discovering that they had set up King Stork in
place of King Log; the exactions of an Augustus were as nothing compared with
the lawless pillaging of the new feudalism; and elective sovereigns, ruling by
the grace of their chief subjects, were powerless for good as well as harm.
The
lower ranks of laymen had no better cause to be content with the new order
under which the small freeholder was oppressed, the peasant enslaved, the merchant
robbed and held to ransom. The freedom of the aristocracy spelled misery for
every other class. These self-constituted tyrants passed their lives in
devastating faction fights. Worst of all, their divisions and their absorption
in petty schemes of personal aggrandisement left Europe at the mercy of
uncivilised invaders. In the ninth and tenth centuries, medieval society
experienced the same ordeal to which the Roman Empire had been subjected in the
fifth. From the North and from the East a new generation of barbarians,
perceiving the patent signs of weakness, began to break through the frontiers
in search of plunder and of settlements.
