and where the great barons could make war upon each other without
authorization from the king, by the time this nominal head of the
entire system was reached there remained nothing for him to do. In
fact, there was not left one vestige of kingly authority, and
Carlovingian rulers were almost as insignificant as their Merovingian
predecessors. France had, instead of one great sovereign, one hundred
and fifty petty ones!

In A.D. 911 the Northmen were offered the province henceforth known as
Normandy, upon condition of their acceptance of the religion and
submission to the laws of the realm. Rollo, the disreputable
robber-chief, took the oath of fealty to the King of France, his
suzerain, and Christian baptism transformed him into respectable,
law-abiding Robert, Duke of Normandy.

So, the enemy had become a vassal. The pirate of the North Sea had
taken his place among the Christian chivalry of Europe, as one of the
twelve peers of France. It was less than a century since the death of
Charlemagne, and the office of king had grown almost as helpless as in
the period of the _Rois Fainéants_. Under the stress of the continuous
invasions, by perfectly natural process the central authority had
passed to the feudal magnates. Many of the feudal states had actually
organized into independent governing bodies. The struggle with the
Northmen ended, France, dismembered, exhausted, was lying prostrate. A
king stripped of every kingly attribute at one extreme of the social
system, and a people trampled into the very dust by feudal oppression
at the other. Owners of nothing, not even of themselves, they might
not fish in the streams, nor hunt in the forests, unless the privilege
was bestowed; and with their lives spent in fighting the incessant
private wars of their lords, there seemed no room for them in the