The Ancient Regime eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 652 pages of information about The Ancient Regime.

The Ancient Regime eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 652 pages of information about The Ancient Regime.

One more trait serves to complete the picture.  This head of the State, a proprietor of man and of the soil, was once a resident cultivator on his own small farm amidst others of the same class, and, by this title, he reserved to himself certain working privileges which he always retained.  Such is the right of banvin, still widely diffused, consisting of the privilege of selling his own wine, to the exclusion of all others, during thirty or forty days after gathering the crop.  Such is, in Touraine, the right of préage, which is the right to send his horses, cows and oxen “to browse under guard in his subjects’ meadows.”  Such is, finally, the monopoly of the great dove-cot, from which thousands of pigeons issue to feed at all times and seasons and on all grounds, without any one daring to kill or take them.  Through another effect of the same qualification he imposes quit-claims on property on which he has formerly given perpetual leases, and, under the terms cens, censives (quit-rents), carpot (share in wine), champart (share in grain), agrier (a cash commission on general produce), terrage parciere (share of fruits).  All these collections, in money or in kind, are as various as the local situations, accidents and transactions could possibly be.  In the Bourbonnais he has one-quarter of the crop; in Berry twelve sheaves out of a hundred.  Occasionally his debtor or tenant is a community:  one deputy in the National Assembly owned a fief of two hundred casks of wine on three thousand pieces of private property.[29] Besides, through the retrait censuel (a species of right of redemption), he can “retain for his own account all property sold on the condition of remunerating the purchaser, but previously deducting for his benefit the lord’s dues (lods and ventes).”  The reader, finally, must take note that all these restrictions on property constitute, for the seignior, a privileged credit as well on the product as on the price of the ground, and, for the copyholders, an unprescriptive, indivisible and irredeemable debt.-Such are the feudal.  To form an idea of them in their totality we must always imagine the count, bishop or abbot of the tenth century as sovereign and proprietor in his own canton.  The form which human society then takes grows out of the exigencies of near and constant danger with a view to local defense.  By subordinating all interests to the necessities of living, in such a way as to protect the soil by fixing on the soil, through property and its enjoyment, a troop of brave men under the leadership of a brave chieftain.  The danger having passed away the structure became dilapidated.  For a pecuniary compensation the seigniors allowed the economical and tenacious peasant to pick off it a good many stones.  Through constraint they suffered the king to appropriate to himself the public portion.  The primitive foundation remains, property as organized in ancient times, the fettered or exhausted land supporting a social conformation that has melted away, in short, an order of privileges and of thralldom of which the cause and the purpose have disappeared. [30]

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The Ancient Regime from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.