may go he is to have the right of fetching them back.  From father to son they are his born domestics, applicable to any pursuit he pleases, taxable and workable at his discretion.  They are not allowed to transmit anything to a child unless the latter, “living from their pot,” can, after their death, continue their service.  “Not to be killed,” says Stendhal, “and to have a good sheepskin coat in winter, was, for many people in the tenth century, the height of felicity”; let us add, for a woman, that of not being violated by a whole band.  When we clearly represent to ourselves the condition of humanity in those days, we can comprehend how men readily accepted the most obnoxious of feudal rights, even that of the droit du seigneur.  The risks to which they were daily exposed were even worse.[12] The proof of it is that the people flocked to the feudal structure as soon as it was completed.  In Normandy, for instance, when Rollo had divided off the lands with a line, and hung the robbers, the inhabitants of the neighboring provinces rushed in to establish themselves.  The slightest security sufficed to repopulate a country.

People accordingly lived, or rather began to live once more, under the rude, iron-gloved hand which used them roughly, but which afforded them protection.  The seignior, sovereign and proprietor, maintains for himself under this double title, the moors, the river, the forest, all the game.  It is no great evil, since the country is nearly a desert, and he devotes his leisure to exterminating large wild beasts.  He alone possessed the resources.  He is the only one that is able to construct the mill, the oven, and the winepress; to establish the ferry, the bridge, or the highway, to dike in a marsh, and to raise or purchase a bull.  To indemnify himself he taxes for these, for forces their use.  If he is intelligent and a good manager of men, if he seeks to derive the greatest profit from his ground, he gradually relaxes, or allows to become relaxed, the meshes of the net in which his peasants and serfs work unprofitably because they are too tightly drawn.  Habits, necessity, a voluntary or forced conformity, have their effect.  Lords, peasants, serfs, and bourgeois, in the end adapted to their condition, bound together by a common interest, form together a society, a veritable corporation.  The seigniory, the county, the duchy becomes a patrimony which is loved through a blind instinct, and to which all are devoted.  It is confounded with the seignior and his family; in this relation people are proud of him.  They narrate his feats of arms; they cheer him as his cavalcade passes along the street; they rejoice in his magnificence through sympathy.[13] If he becomes a widower and has no children, they send deputations to him to entreat him to remarry, in order that at his death the country may not fall into a war of succession or be given up to the encroachment of neighbors.  Thus there is a revival, after a thousand years, of the most