Friedrich Engels

The Frankish Period

The Transformation of Landed Property Relations under the Merovingians and Carolingians

The Gau and Military Constitution

Note: The Frankish Dialect

The Transformation of Landed Property Relations under the Merovingians and Carolingians

The mark constitution remained until the end of the Middle Ages the basis of almost the entire life of the German nation. After a thousand and five hundred years’ existence, it finally gradually perished on a purely economic path. It succumbed to the economic advances to which it no longer corresponded. We shall have to examine its decline and ultimate downfall later; we shall find that remnants of it still persist today.

But if it maintained itself for so long, this came at the cost of its political significance. For centuries it had been the form in which the freedom of the Germanic tribes had embodied itself. It now became the basis of a thousand years of popular bondage. How was this possible?

The oldest association, we saw, embraced the whole people. To it originally belonged all the land that had been taken into possession. Later the totality of the inhabitants of a Gau, more closely related among themselves, became the owners of the territory they had settled, and the people as such were left only the right of disposal over the still remaining tracts of unowned land. The inhabitants of the Gau in turn ceded their field and forest marks to the individual village associations—likewise formed from nearer kinship relations—the surplus land then again remaining with the Gau. The same occurred with the parent villages when sending out new village colonies endowed with land from the old mark of the original village.

The bond of blood, upon which, here as everywhere, the whole constitution of the people rested, fell more and more into oblivion with the increase of the population and the further development of the people.

This was the case first with regard to the totality of the people. Common descent was less and less felt to be actual blood relationship; the memory of it became ever weaker, only the common history and dialect remained. On the other hand, the consciousness of the blood bond of the Gau inhabitants, naturally, maintained itself longer. The people thereby reduced themselves to a more or less firm confederation of Gauen. The Germans appear to have been in this condition at the time of the migrations. Ammianus Marcellinus expressly relates this of the Alamanni; in the folk laws it still shines through everywhere; among the Saxons this stage of development still existed at the time of Charlemagne, among the Frisians until the downfall of Frisian freedom.

But the migration onto Roman soil also broke the blood bond of the Gau and had to break it. Even if settlement by tribes and kindreds was intended, it could not be carried through. The long treks had thrown together not only tribes and kindreds, but even whole peoples. Only with difficulty could the blood bond of the individual village associations still be held together; and these thereby became the real political units out of which the people composed itself. The new Gauen on Roman territory were from the outset more or less arbitrary—or conditioned by the existing circumstances—judicial districts, or became so very soon.

Therewith the people was dissolved into an association of small village communities, between which no, or almost no, economic connection existed, since each mark was self-sufficient, produced its own needs itself, and besides, the products of the individual neighbouring marks were almost exactly the same. Exchange between them was therefore fairly impossible. And such a composition of the people out of purely small communities, which have indeed equal, but precisely for that reason no common, economic interests, makes a state power not arising from them, confronting them as alien, and increasingly exploiting them, the condition of the continued existence of the nation.

The form of this state power is again conditioned by the form in which the communities find themselves at the time. Where—as among the Aryan peoples of Asia and among the Russians—it emerges at a time when the community still cultivates the land for common account, or at any rate assigns it to the individual families only temporarily, where therefore no private property in land has yet formed, the state power appears as despotism. In the Roman lands conquered by the Germans, on the contrary, we find, as we saw, the individual shares of arable and meadow already as allod, as free property of the possessors, subject only to the common mark obligations.

We must now examine how, on the basis of this allod, a social and state constitution arose which—with the usual irony of history—finally dissolved the state and, in its classical form, destroyed all allod.

With the allod, not only the possibility but the necessity was given that the original equality of landed property would turn into its opposite. From the moment of its establishment on formerly Roman soil, the German allod became what Roman landed property, which lay alongside it, had long been—a commodity. And it is an inexorable law of all societies resting on commodity production and commodity exchange that in them the distribution of property becomes ever more unequal, the antagonism of wealth and poverty ever greater, property ever more concentrated in a few hands; a law which, in modern capitalist production, indeed attains its full development, but by no means only begins to take effect in it. From the moment, therefore, that allod, freely alienable landed property, landed property as a commodity arose, from that moment the emergence of large landed property was only a question of time.

In the epoch with which we are dealing, however, agriculture and cattle-raising were the decisive branches of production. Landed property and its products constituted by far the greatest part of the wealth of that time. Whatever mobile wealth otherwise existed followed, by the nature of things, landed property, and found itself more and more in the same hands as the latter. Industry and trade had already been reduced under the Roman decline; the German invasion almost completely destroyed them. What still remained was mostly carried on by unfree persons and foreigners, and remained a despised occupation. The ruling class, which here, with the emerging inequality of property, gradually formed, could only be a class of large landowners; its political form of rule that of an aristocracy. When, therefore, we shall see how, in the emergence and development of this class, political levers, violence and fraud, are frequently, even apparently predominantly, at work, we must not forget that these political levers only serve to further and accelerate a necessary economic process. We shall, of course, just as often see how these political levers impede economic development; this happens often enough and each time where the various participants apply them in opposite or mutually intersecting directions.

How, then, did this class of great landowners arise?

First of all, we know that also after the Frankish conquest a mass of Roman large landowners maintained themselves in Gaul, who for the most part had their estates cultivated by free or dependent coloni against payment of a rent (canon).

Then, however, we have seen how kingship, through the wars of conquest among all the migrating Germans, had become a permanent institution and real power; how it transformed the old folkland into royal domains and likewise incorporated the Roman state lands into its possession. During the many civil wars that sprang from the divisions of the realm, this crown land continually increased through the mass confiscation of the estates of so-called rebels. But as quickly as it grew, it was just as quickly squandered in donations to the Church as well as to private individuals, Franks and Romans, retainers (antrustions) or other favourites of the king. When, during and through the civil wars, the beginnings of a ruling class of grandees and magnates—landowners, officials and army leaders—had already formed, their support was also bought by the partial princes through grants of land. That in by far the most cases all this involved genuine gifts, transfers into free, hereditary and alienable property, until a change occurred in this respect with Charles Martel, has been irrefutably proved by Roth
(1)
.

When Charles took the helm of the state, the power of the kings was completely broken, but that of the mayors of the palace was far from having been put in its place. The class of magnates created under the Merovingians at the expense of the crown favoured in every way the ruin of the royal power, but by no means in order to submit to the mayors of the palace, their peers. On the contrary, all Gaul was in the hands, as Einhard says, of these “tyrants who everywhere claimed dominion for themselves” (tyrannos per totam Galliam dominatum sibi vindicantes). Alongside the secular magnates this was also done by the bishops, who in many regions had appropriated rule over surrounding counties and duchies and were protected by immunity as well as by the firm organization of the Church. To the inner dissolution of the realm followed incursions of the external foe; the Saxons penetrated into Rhenish Franconia, the Avars into Bavaria, the Arabs across the Pyrenees into Aquitaine. In such a situation, a simple overthrow of the internal, a driving out of the external enemies could not help in the long run; a way had to be found to bind the humbled magnates, or the successors put in their place by Charles, more firmly to the crown. And since their previous power had rested on large landed property, the first condition for this was a total transformation of landed property relations. This transformation is the main work of the Carolingian dynasty. It is further distinguished by the fact that the means chosen to unite the realm, to bind the magnates forever to the crown and thereby to strengthen the latter, ultimately brought about the most complete powerlessness of the crown, the independence of the magnates and the dissolution of the realm.

In order to understand how Charles came to choose this means, we must first examine the property relations of the Church at that time, which cannot be passed over here as an essential element of the agrarian relations of the period.

Already in Roman times the Church had not insignificant landed property in Gaul, the yields of which were still increased by great privileges in respect of taxes and other dues. After the conversion of the Franks to Christianity, however, the golden age for the Gallic Church first dawned. The kings vied with one another as to who would make the most donations to the Church in land, money, jewels, church vessels, etc. Chilperic already used to say (Gregory of Tours):

“See how poor our fiscus has become, see how all our riches have been transferred to the Church.”

Under Guntram, the favourite and slave of the priests, the donations knew no bounds any longer. Thus the confiscated landed property of free Franks, accused of rebellion, flowed for the most part into the possession of the Church.

As the kings, so the people. Both small and great could not give enough to the Church.

“A wonderful healing from a real or supposed evil, the fulfilment of an ardent wish, e.g. the birth of a son, the rescue from a danger, brought a gift to the church whose saint had shown himself helpful. It was considered all the more necessary to keep one’s hand open, as the opinion was widespread among high and low that gifts to the church brought about the forgiveness of sins.” (Roth, p. 250.)

To this came the immunity, which protected the property of the church from violation in a time of incessant civil wars, plunderings, confiscations. Many a little man found it advisable to cede his property to the church, if the usufruct remained to him for a moderate rent.

All this, however, was not enough for the pious priests. By threats of eternal hell-punishment they extorted formally ever more extensive donations, so that Charlemagne, still in 811, in the Capitulary of Aachen, reproaches them for this and, furthermore, that they

“seduce people to perjury and false witness, in order to increase your wealth (that of the bishops and abbots)”.

Illegal donations were obtained by trickery in the confidence that the church, besides its privileged jurisdiction, still possessed means enough to thumb its nose at the law. Hardly a Gallic council passed in the 6th and 7th centuries that did not threaten any and every contestation of donations to the church with excommunication. Even formally invalid donations were to be transformed into valid ones by this means, the private debts of individual clergymen protected from collection.

“Truly despicable are the means which we see employed, in order to awaken the desire for donations again and again. When the depictions of heavenly beatitudes and hellish torments no longer pulled, relics were brought from distant regions, translations were held and new churches built; this was in the 9th century a regular branch of business.” (Roth, p. 254.) “When the envoys of the monastery of St. Medard of Soissons, in Rome, had with great effort begged the body of Saint Sebastian and had stolen that of Gregorius in addition and both were now laid in the monastery, so many people ran to the new saints that the region was as sown with locusts and those seeking help were healed not singly, but in whole herds. The consequence was that the monks measured the money in bushels, of which they counted 85, and that their supply of gold amounted to 900 pounds.” (p. 255.)

Fraud, conjuring tricks, apparitions of the deceased, especially saints, served to swindle riches for the church, finally however also and mainly – forgery of documents. This was – we let Roth speak again –

“carried on by many clergymen on a grand scale … this business began very early … The extent to which this trade was carried on is evident from the great number of forged documents which our collections contain. Among the 360 Merovingian diplomas in Bréquigny about 130 are decidedly false … The false testament of Remigius was already used by Hincmar of Reims to secure for his church a series of possessions of which the genuine says nothing, although the latter was never lost and Hincmar knew the falseness of the former very well.” Even Pope John VIII sought “to acquire the possession of the monastery of St. Denis near Paris through a document known by him to be false.” (Roth, p. 256 ff.)

Thus we cannot be surprised if the landed property of the church, scraped together by donation, extortion, trickery, swindle, forgery, and other penitentiary industries, assumed quite colossal proportions in a few centuries. The monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, now within the precincts of Paris, had at the beginning of the 9th century a landed property of 8,000 mansi or hides, whose area Guérard calculates at 429,987 hectares with an annual revenue of 1 million frs. = 800,000 marks. Laying down the same average of 54 hectares area and 125 frs. = 100 marks income for the hide, at that same time the monasteries of St. Denis, Luxeuil, St. Martin of Tours each, at about 15,000 mansi, had a landed property of 810,000 hectares and an income of 1
1
/
2
million marks. And this was
after
the confiscation of the church property by Pepin the Short! The entire church property in Gaul at the end of the 7th century is estimated by Roth (p. 249) rather over than under one third of the total land area.

These enormous masses of estates were cultivated partly by unfree, partly however also by free dependents of the church. Of the unfree, the slaves (servi) were originally subjected to unlimited services to their masters, since they were no legal persons; but it seems that also here for settled slaves a customary measure of dues and services soon established itself. The services of the other two unfree classes, the coloni and liti (about whose legal difference at that time no information exists), were, by contrast, fixed and consisted in certain manual and carting services as well as in a certain share of the produce of the estate. These were relations of dependence of long-traditional kind. By contrast, it was something new for Germans that free men sat on other than common or their own soil. Certainly the Germans found in Gaul and generally in the territory of Roman law often enough free Romans as tenants; but that they themselves did not need to become tenants, but could sit on their own land, for that had been provided for by the land-taking. Before, therefore, free Franks could become dependents of anyone, they had to have lost their allod obtained at the land-taking in some way, a separate class of landless free Franks had to have formed.

This class formed itself through the beginning concentration of landed property, through the same causes from which this proceeded; on the one hand through the civil wars and confiscations, on the other hand through the transfers of land to the church, largely owed to the pressure of the circumstances of the time, the demand for security. And the church found

soon yet a special means to promote such transfers, by leaving the donor not only his estate in usufruct against rent, but also giving him besides a piece of church land in rent. These donations took place namely in a double form. Either the donor reserved the usufruct of the estate for life, so that it passed only after his death into the property of the church (donatio post obitum); in this case it was customary and was later expressly fixed in the capitularies of the kings, that the donor received from the church the double of the donated estate to be granted in rent. Or the donation was effected immediately (cessio a die praesente), and then the donor received the triple in church land together with his own estate in rent by means of a so-called precaria, a document issued by the church, which transferred to him these plots, mostly for life, sometimes however for a longer or shorter period. Once the class of landless free men was created, many of these also entered into such a relation; the precariae granted to them seem at first to have been mostly issued for 5 years, but here too they soon became lifelong.

It is surely not to be doubted that already in the Merovingian period quite similar relations developed on the estates of the secular magnates as on church land, so that also there, alongside unfree, free dependents were settled for rent. They must have already been very numerous under Charles Martel, because otherwise the revolution in landed property relations begun by him, completed by his son and grandson, would remain inexplicable at least from one side.

This revolution rests in its foundation on two new institutions. Firstly, in order to bind the magnates of the realm to the crown, henceforth the crown land was as a rule no longer donated to them, but only granted for life, as a “beneficium”, and this under certain conditions to be observed under penalty of confiscation. They became in this way themselves dependents of the crown. And secondly, to secure the mustering of the free dependents of the magnates for military service, a part of the official powers of the count of the district over the free men settled on their estates was transferred to them, they were appointed as “seniors” over these. Of these two changes we have here for the time being to consider only the first.

In the subjugation of the rebellious small “tyrants” Charles – reports are lacking – according to old custom will have confiscated their landed property, but, as far as he later restored them to office and dignities, will have granted it again wholly or partly as a beneficium. With the

church property of recalcitrant bishops he dared not yet to proceed so; he deposed them and gave their posts to men devoted to him, of whom, it is true, many had of the ecclesiastic nothing but the tonsure (sola tonsura clericus). These new bishops and abbots now began, at his command, to transfer large tracts of church land to laymen as precariae; that had not been without example earlier, but now happened en masse. His son Pepin went significantly further. The church was decayed, the clergy despised, the pope pressed by the Lombards, reliant solely on the help of Pepin. This one helped the pope, favoured the expansion of his ecclesiastical dominion, held the stirrup for him. But he paid himself, by incorporating by far the greatest part of the church land into the crown land and leaving the bishops and monasteries only what was necessary for their maintenance. This first secularisation on a large scale the church suffered without resistance; the Synod of Lestines confirmed it, though with a limiting clause which, however, was never observed. This enormous mass of estates put the exhausted crown land on a respectable footing again and served largely for further grants, which in fact soon assumed the form of ordinary beneficia.

Let us insert here that the church knew how to recover very soon from this blow. Scarcely had the settlement with Pepin taken place, when the good men of God began the old practices again. Donations rained again from all sides, the small free peasants were continually in the same, bad situation between hammer and anvil as for 200 years; under Charlemagne and his successors things went still much worse for them, and many betook themselves with house and home under the protection of the crozier. The kings gave back a part of the booty to favoured monasteries, to others, especially in Germany, they donated enormous tracts of crown land; under Louis the Pious the blessed times of Guntram seemed to have returned for the church. The archives of the monasteries are especially rich in donations from the ninth century.

The beneficium, this new institution which we now have to examine more closely, was not yet the later fief, but indeed its germ. It was from the outset transferred for the joint lifetime of both the grantor and the grantee. If either died, it reverted to the owner or his heirs. For the renewal of the previous relation a new transfer to the recipient or his heirs had to take place. The beneficium was therefore, in the later mode of expression, subject to the falling of the throne as well as the falling of the home. The throne fall soon

fell into disuse; the great beneficiaries became indeed more powerful than the king. Early on, reversion not infrequently brought with it the re-granting of the estate to the previous beneficiary’s heir. An estate Patriciacum (Percy) near Autun, granted by Charles Martel to Hildebrannus as a benefice, remained in the family from father to son for four generations, until the king gave it to the brother of the fourth beneficiary as full ownership in 839. Other examples are not infrequent from the mid-eighth century onwards.

The benefice could be taken back by the grantor in all cases in which confiscation of property was in principle incurred. And such cases were plentiful enough, and more than enough, under the Carolingians. The uprisings in Alamannia under Pepin the Short, the conspiracy of the Thuringians, the repeated revolts of the Saxons led to ever new confiscations, whether of free peasants’ land or of the estates and benefices of the great. The same happened, in defiance of all contractual provisions to the contrary, during the internal wars under Louis the Pious and his sons. Moreover, certain non-political crimes entailed confiscations.

Furthermore, benefices could be taken back by the crown if the beneficiary neglected his general duties as a subject, e.g. failed to surrender a robber from the immunity, failed to bring his harness to the campaign, failed to respect royal letters, etc.

Then again, benefices were granted under special conditions whose breach entailed confiscation, which then, self-evidently, did not affect the beneficiary’s remaining property. Thus, for example, when former church estates were granted and the beneficiary neglected to pay the charges encumbering them to the church (nonae et decimae). Thus, if he allowed the estate to deteriorate, in which case a one-year warning period was usually set first, so that the beneficiary could protect himself from the otherwise ensuing confiscation by making improvements, etc. Furthermore, the transfer of the estate could also be tied to specific service obligations, and indeed it became more and more so to the extent that the benefice developed further into the fief proper. But originally this was by no means necessary; least of all where military service is concerned; a large number of benefices were granted to lower clerics, to monks, to ecclesiastical and secular women.

Finally, it is by no means impossible that in the beginning the crown also granted lands on revocable tenure or for a fixed period, thus as precaria. Individual reports and the practice of the church make it

probable. However, this ceased at any rate soon, since grant on terms of benefice in the 9th century became the general rule.

For the church – and we must assume the same of the great landowners and beneficiaries – the church, which had earlier transferred estates to its free dependants mostly only as precaria for a term, had to follow the impulse given by the crown. Not only did it begin to grant benefices as well, but this manner of grant even became so predominant that the already existing precaria became lifelong, imperceptibly assumed the nature of the benefice, until in the 9th century the former was almost completely absorbed into the latter. By the second half of the 9th century, the beneficiaries of the church and likewise those of the secular lords must already have assumed an important position in the state; some of them must have been people of considerable property, founders of the later lower nobility. Otherwise Charles the Bald would not have intervened so vigorously for those whose benefices Hincmar of Laon had taken away without cause.

We see that the benefice already has many features which are found again in the developed fief. Both have in common reversion upon the death of the grantor (Thronfall) and reversion upon the death of the beneficiary (Heimfall). Like the fief, the benefice is subject to confiscation only under specific conditions. In the social hierarchy created by the benefices, which descends from the crown via the great beneficiaries – predecessors of the imperial princes – to the middling beneficiaries – the later nobility – and from there to free and unfree peasants, by far the largest part of whom live in the Mark association, we see the basis of the later closed feudal hierarchy. If the later fief is under all circumstances a service estate and obliged to military service for the liege lord, the latter is admittedly not yet the case with the benefice, and the former is by no means necessary. But the tendency of the benefice to become a service estate is already unmistakably present and gains more and more scope in the 9th century; and to the same extent as this tendency freely unfolds, the benefice develops into the fief.

In this development, however, a second lever also plays a part: the change which the constitution of the gau and the army underwent, first under the influence of large landed property and later under that of the great benefices into which the earlier large landed property had increasingly transformed itself as a result of the incessant internal wars and the confiscations and re-grantings linked therewith.

It is understandable that in this chapter we are speaking only of the benefice in its pure, classical form, in which it was admittedly only

a vanishing form, not even appearing everywhere simultaneously. But such historical forms of appearance of economic relations can be understood only if one grasps them in this purity, and to have peeled this classical form of the benefice out of all the confused accretions is one of the chief merits of Roth.

Constitution of the Gau and the Army

The revolution in the condition of landed property just depicted could not remain without influence on the old constitution. It called forth equally significant changes in the latter, and these in their turn reacted back upon the relations of landed property. We leave aside for the time being the transformation of the general constitution of the state and restrict ourselves here to the influence of the new economic situation on the still surviving remnants of the old popular constitution in the gau and the army.

Already under the Merovingians we frequently find counts and dukes as administrators of crown land. Only in the 9th century, however, do we find it indubitable that certain crown estates were so connected with the office of count that the count for the time being drew the income from them. The earlier honorary office had turned into one remunerated by endowment. Alongside this we also find, as a matter of course under the conditions of the time, the counts in possession of royal benefices assigned to them personally. Thus the count became a powerful landed proprietor within his county.

First of all, it is clear that the count’s authority must have suffered by the rise of large landowners subordinate to him and alongside him; people who under the Merovingians and the early Carolingians often enough flouted the king’s commands were bound to show even less respect for the count’s order. Their free dependants, trusting in the protection of powerful landlords, just as frequently neglected to comply with the summons of the count to court or his levy for the army. This was precisely one of the causes that brought about the introduction of granting land as benefice instead of allodium, and the subsequent gradual transformation of most of the formerly free large landed property into benefice.

This alone did not yet secure the inclusion of the freemen settled on the estates of the great in the services to the state. A further change had to take place. The king found himself compelled to make the great landowners responsible for the appearance of their free dependants in court, in the army, and at other customary state services,

in the same way in which the count had until then been answerable for all free inhabitants of his county. And this could only happen by the king transferring to the great a part of the count’s official powers over their dependants. The landlord or beneficiary had to bring his people before the court; they therefore had to be summoned through his mediation. He had to lead them to the army; their levy therefore had to take place through him; in order to be answerable for them continuously, he had to have the command and the right of military discipline over them. But it was and remained king’s service on the part of the dependants; the refractory person was punished not by the estate owner but by the royal count; the penalty fell to the royal fisc.

This innovation too is attributed to Charles Martel. At least it is from his time onward that we first find the custom of great ecclesiastical dignitaries going into the field themselves, which according to Roth can be explained only by the fact that Charles had the bishops join the army at the head of their dependants in order to ensure the appearance of the latter. Without doubt the same thing happened with the secular lords and their dependants. Under Charlemagne the new arrangement already appears firmly established and universally implemented.

With this, however, an essential change had also taken place in the political position of the free dependants. They, who earlier were legally equal to their landlord, however much they might be economically dependent on him, now became his legal subordinates as well. The economic subjection received political sanction. The landlord becomes *senior*, *seigneur*, the dependants become his *homines*; the “lord” becomes the superior of the “man”. The legal equality of freemen is gone; the lowliest “man”, whose full freedom has already been severely impaired by the loss of his patrimony, moves yet another step closer to the unfree. By the same measure the new “lord” rises above the level of old common freedom. The economic foundation of the new aristocracy, already established, is recognised by the state, becomes one of the regularly co-operating driving wheels of the state machine.

Beside these *homines* consisting of free dependants there was, however, yet another kind. These were the impoverished freemen who had voluntarily entered into a service or retinue relationship with the great. The Merovingians had their retinue in the antrustions; the great of that period will likewise not have been without a retinue. Under the Carolingians the followers of the king are called *vassi*, *vasalli* or *gasindi*. Terms that in the oldest folk laws are still used for an unfree person,

but now have already assumed the meaning of a follower who is as a rule free. The same designations apply to the followers of the great, who now appear quite generally and become an ever more numerous and important element in society and state.

How the great came by such followers is shown by the old contractual formulas. In one such (Form. Sirmond. 44) it runs, for example:

“Seeing that it is known to all, that I have nothing with which to feed or clothe myself, I beseech Your” (the lord’s) “Piety, that I may give and commend myself into Your tutelage (*mundoburdum* – as it were, guardianship), in such wise, … that You shall be bound to assist me with food and clothing, according as I shall serve You and merit the same; and I, as long as I live, shall be bound to render You service and allegiance after the manner of a free man (*ingenuili ordine*); and that I shall not have the power to withdraw from Your authority and protection during my lifetime, but shall have to remain all my days under Your authority and protection.”

This formula gives complete information about the origin and nature of the simple following relationship, stripped of all extraneous admixtures, and all the more so because it represents the extreme case of a thoroughly down-at-heel poor devil. Entry into the following of the senior took place as a result of a free agreement between both parties – free in the sense of Roman and modern jurisprudence, often enough similar to the entry of a present-day worker into the service of a manufacturer. The “man” commended himself to the lord, and the lord accepted his commendation. This consisted of a handshake and an oath of fealty. The agreement was for life and was dissolved only by the death of one of the two contracting parties. The servant was obliged to all services compatible with the status of a free man that his lord might impose upon him. In return, he was maintained by the lord and rewarded at the lord’s discretion. A transfer of land was in no way necessarily connected with this, and in fact did not take place in all cases.

This relationship was not only tolerated under the Carolingians, especially since Charlemagne, but directly favoured, and finally, as it seems by a capitulary of 847, made a duty for all common freemen and regulated by the state. Thus, the servant could unilaterally dissolve the relationship with his lord only if the latter sought to kill him, beat him with a stick, dishonour his wife or daughter, or take away his inheritance (capitulary of 813). And indeed the servant was bound to the lord as soon as he had received from him the value of a solidus; from which it is once again clearly evident how little the vassalage relationship was then necessarily tied to the grant of land. The same provisions are repeated in a capitulary of 816, with the addition that the servant was released if his lord sought to bring him unlawfully into the state of unfreedom or could provide the promised protection but failed to provide it.

In relation to the state, the following lord now acquired the same rights and duties with respect to his followers as the landed proprietor or beneficiary had with respect to his dependants. They remained liable to serve the king, but here, too, the following lord interposed himself between the king and his counts. He presented the vassals in court, he summoned them, led them in war and maintained discipline among them, he answered for them and for their regulation equipment. Through this, however, the following lord obtained a certain punitive power over his subordinates, and this forms the starting point of the later developing jurisdiction of the feudal lord over his vassals.

In these two further institutions, in the development of the following system and in the transfer of comital, i.e. state, official authority to the landed proprietor, be he a crown vassal, beneficiary or following lord, over his subordinates – soon all grouped together as *vassi, vasalli, homines* –, both dependants and landless retainers –, in this state confirmation and reinforcement of the actual power of the lord over the vassals, we see the germ of the feudal system contained in the benefices already developing significantly further. The hierarchy of estates, from the king down through the great beneficiaries to their free dependants and finally down to the unfree, becomes a recognised element of the state order, co-operating in an official capacity. The state recognises that it cannot survive without their help. How this help was actually rendered will, of course, become apparent.

The distinction between retainers and dependants is only important at the outset, in order to demonstrate the double origin of the dependency of the free. Very soon both types of vassals merge indissolubly, in name as in fact. The great beneficiaries more and more adopted the custom of commending themselves to the king, thus becoming, alongside his beneficiaries, his vassals. The kings found it in their interest to have the oath of fealty sworn to them personally by the great men, bishops, abbots, counts and vassals (“Ann. Bertiniani” 837 and often in the 9th century), whereby the distinction between the general oath of allegiance and the particular vassal oath must soon have become blurred. Thus, gradually all the great men transformed themselves into royal vassals. With this, however, the slow development of the great landed proprietors into a distinct estate, into an aristocracy, was recognised by the state, incorporated into the state order, and became one of its officially functioning levers.

Similarly, the follower of the individual great landed proprietor gradually merges into the dependant. Apart from direct sustenance at the lord’s manor, which could only be provided for a small number of persons, there remained no other means of securing retainers than by settling them on land and soil, transferring land to them as a benefice. A numerous, warlike following, the main condition of existence for the great in that age of perpetual struggles, could thus be obtained only by granting land to the vassals. Hence the landless servants of the lord’s manor gradually disappear before the mass of those settled on the lord’s land.

But the more this new element thrust itself into the old constitution, the more the latter had to be shaken. The old, direct exercise of state power by the king and the counts gradually gave way to an indirect one; between the common freemen and the state stepped the senior, to whom they were bound by personal fealty in ever greater measure. The most effective moving part of the state machine, the count, had to recede more and more into the background, and did so in reality. Charlemagne proceeded here as he was wont to proceed everywhere. At first he favoured, as we have seen, the spread of the vassal relationship, until the independent small freemen almost disappeared; when then the weakening of his power brought about by this came to light, he tried to help it back on its feet through state intervention. This might succeed in some cases under so energetic and feared a ruler; under his weak successors the power of the facts created with his assistance broke its path forward irresistibly.

Charlemagne’s favourite means was the sending out of royal envoys (*missi dominici*) with extraordinary plenipotentiary power. Where the ordinary royal official, the count, could not check the spreading disorder, a special emissary was supposed to do it. (To be further substantiated and developed historically.)

Now, however, there was still another means, and this consisted in placing the count in such a position that he was at least equal in material power resources to the great men of his county. This was possible only if the count also joined the ranks of the great landed proprietors, which again could happen in two ways. Certain lands could be added to the comital office in the individual counties as an endowment, so that the incumbent count administered them *ex officio* and drew their revenues. Many examples of this are found especially in charters, and indeed as early as the end of the 8th century; from the 9th century on, this relationship is quite common. Such endowments naturally stemmed mostly from the royal fiscal property, just as we often find counts and dukes already in Merovingian times as administrators of the royal fiscal estates lying in their territory.

Curiously enough, there are also some examples (even a formulary for it) where bishops endow the comital office from church property, naturally, given the inalienability of church property, in some form of benefice. The liberality of the church is too well known to hold any other reason admissible for this than bitter necessity. Under the growing pressure of the neighbouring secular magnates, the church had no choice but to ally itself with the remnants of state power.

These pertinences (*res comitatus, pertinentiae comitatus*) connected with the comital offices are initially still sharply distinguished from the benefices that were personally transferred to the respective count. These latter were also usually granted liberally, so that, taken together, endowment and benefices, the comital offices, originally posts of honour, now became very lucrative posts and, since Louis the Pious, were bestowed, just like other royal favours, on people whom one wished to win over or whose support one wanted to secure. Thus it is said of Louis the Stammerer that he “*quos potuit conciliavit [sibi], dans els abbatias et comitatus ac villas*” |“at once sought to win over as many as possible for himself, by giving abbeys, counties and estates according to each one’s wish and desire”| (“Ann. Bertiniani” 877). The term *honor*, with which the office had earlier been designated with reference to the honour rights connected with it, acquires in the course of the 9th century exactly the same meaning as benefice. And with this, a significant change in the character of the comital office necessarily took place, a change rightly emphasised by Roth (p. 408). Originally the seniorate, in so far as it acquired a public character, was modelled on the comital office, endowed with comital powers. Now – in the second half of the 9th century – the seniorate had spread so universally that it threatened to overgrow the comital office, and the latter could only maintain its position of power by itself increasingly assuming the character of a seniorate. The counts usurped more and more, and not unsuccessfully, the position of a senior vis-à-vis the inhabitants of their county (*pagenses*), both as regards their private and public relations. Just like the other “lords” with the small people neighbouring them, the counts likewise sought, by kindness or by force, to induce the less well-to-do free inhabitants of the county to submit to them as vassals. This succeeded all the more easily as the mere fact that the counts could misuse their official authority in this way is the best proof of how little protection the still remaining common freemen could expect from the royal power and its organs. Abandoned on all sides to acts of violence, the smaller freemen had to be glad to find some protecting lord, even if it meant ceding their allod and regaining it as a mere benefice. Already the capitulary of 811 complains that bishops, abbots, counts, judges, centenars reduce small people by continuous legal chicanery or constantly repeated summons to the army to such a point that they transfer or sell their allod to them, that the poor loudly complain of the robbery committed upon their property, etc. In this way, already by the end of the 9th century the greatest part of free property in Gaul had fallen into the hands of the church, the counts and other great men (Hincmar of Reims 869), and somewhat later there were already some provinces where there was no longer any free landed property of small freemen at all. (Maurer, *Einleitung*, p. 212.) As soon as the benefices gradually became hereditary with the growing power of the beneficiaries and the declining power of the crown, the comital offices likewise became hereditary by custom. If we saw in the crowd of royal beneficiaries the beginnings of the formation of the later nobility, we see here the germ of the territorial sovereignty of the later territorial lords who arose from the county counts.

While the social and political order was thus completely transformed, the old military constitution, based on armed service — both a right and a duty — of all freemen, remained outwardly the same, except that, where the new relations of dependence existed, the lord interposed himself between his vassals and the count. But the common freemen were from year to year less capable of bearing the burden of army service. This did not consist solely of personal service; the man called up also had to equip himself and to provision himself at his own expense for the first six months, until at last the unceasing wars of Charlemagne brought matters to a head. The burden became so intolerable that, to escape it, the small freemen preferred, in large numbers, to transfer not only the remnant of their property, but their own persons and those of their descendants to the magnates, and particularly to the Church. That is how Charlemagne reduced the free, warlike Franks: they preferred to become bondmen and serfs, merely to avoid going to war. This was the consequence of Charlemagne’s insistence on upholding, and indeed pushing to the utmost extreme, a military constitution based on the universal and equal landed property of all freemen, even at a time when the great mass of freemen had entirely or largely lost their landed property.

The facts, however, were stronger than Charlemagne’s obstinacy and ambition. The old military constitution could no longer be maintained. To equip and provision the army at the state’s expense was quite impossible in that age of an almost moneyless and tradeless natural economy. Charlemagne was therefore compelled to restrict the service obligation in such a way that the equipment and provisioning of the man remained possible. This was done in the Capitulary of Aachen of 807, when the wars were limited to frontier struggles and the existence of the empire as a whole seemed secure. Above all, every royal beneficiary, without distinction, was to present himself; then, whoever possessed twelve hides (mansi) was to appear in armour, and thus presumably on horseback (the word caballarius — knight — appears in the same capitulary). Owners of three to five hides were liable. Of two owners of two hides each, of three with one hide, of six with half a hide, one had to be supplied each time and equipped by the others. Of entirely landless freemen, but possessing movable property to the value of five solidi, likewise the sixth man was to take the field and receive a money contribution of one solidus from each of the other five. Moreover, the obligation to march out for the different parts of the country, which applied in full for these neighbouring wars, was limited, for more distant wars, according to the distance, to half up to one-sixth of the manpower.

Here Charlemagne was obviously seeking to adapt the old constitution to the changed economic situation of those liable to service, to save what could still be saved. But even this concession did not help; soon afterwards he was compelled, in the Capitulare de exercitu promovendo |Capitulary on the summons for military service|, to grant new exemptions. This capitulary, usually dated earlier than that of Aachen, is, by its entire content, undoubtedly several years later than the latter. It increases the number of hides from which one man is to be supplied from three to four;
the owners of half hides and the landless appear as exempt from service, and for beneficiaries, too, the obligation to provide men is limited to one man for every four hides. Under Charlemagne’s successors, the minimum number of hides that supplied one man appears to have been raised even to five.

It is remarkable that the provision of the armoured twelve-hide men seems to have encountered the greatest difficulties. At least the order that they were to appear in armour is repeated countless times in the capitularies.

Thus the common freemen progressively disappeared. While their gradual separation from the land had driven one part into the vassalage of the new great landowners, the fear of direct ruin through army service drove the other part straight into serfdom. How rapidly this submission to bondage proceeded is attested by the Polyptichon (land register) of the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which then still lay outside Paris. It was compiled by Abbot Irminon at the beginning of the 9th century and shows among the dependants of the monastery: 2,080 families of coloni, 35 of liti, 220 of slaves (servi), as against only eight free families. The word colonus, however, in Gaul at that time definitely meant an unfree person. The marriage of a free woman with a colonus or a slave made her subject to the lord as one defiled (deturpatam) (Capitulary of 817). Louis the Pious commands that “colonus vel servus” (of a monastery at Poitiers) “ad naturale servitium velit noiit redeat” [“a colonus or slave, whether he will or not, shall return to his natural condition”]. They received beatings (capitularies of 853, 861, 864, 873) and were sometimes manumitted (Guérard, “[Polyptyque de l'abbé] Irminon”). And these serf peasants were not Romans, but, according to Jacob Grimm’s own testimony (“Geschichte der deutschen Sprache”, I), who examined the names, “almost exclusively Frankish, far outnumbering a small number of Romanic ones”.

Such an enormous increase in the unfree population in turn shifted the class relations of Frankish society. Alongside the great landowners, who were then rapidly forming into a distinct estate, alongside their free vassals, there now appeared a class of unfree persons that increasingly absorbed the remainder of the common freemen. But these unfree persons were partly those who had themselves still been free, partly children of freemen; those who had lived for three or more generations in hereditary bondage were by far the minority. Nor were they for the most part Saxon, Wendish, etc. prisoners of war dragged in from outside; on the contrary, the majority were native Franks and Romans. Such people, particularly when they were beginning to constitute the mass of the population, could not be dealt with as easily as inherited or foreign serfs. Bondage was still unfamiliar to them; the beatings which even the colonus received (Capitularies of 853, 861, 873) were still felt as a disgrace, not as a matter of course. Hence the many conspiracies and uprisings of the unfree and even of the peasant vassals. Charlemagne himself forcibly suppressed a rising of the dependants of the bishopric of Reims. Louis the Pious speaks in the Capitulary of 821 of conspiracies of the slaves (servorum) in Flanders and Menapiscus (on the upper Lys). In 848 and 866, uprisings of the service people (homines) of the bishopric of Mainz had to be suppressed. The orders to suppress such conspiracies recur in the capitularies from 779 onwards. The rising of the Stellinga in Saxony must also belong here. It was evidently a consequence of this menacing attitude of the unfree masses that, from the end of the 8th and the beginning of the 9th century, the dues of the unfree, even of the settled slaves, were increasingly fixed at a definite, unexceedable level, and that Charlemagne prescribes this in his capitularies.

This, then, was the price at which Charlemagne purchased his new Roman empire: the annihilation of the estate of the common freemen, which at the time of the conquest of Gaul had embraced the entire Frankish people; the division of the people into great landowners, vassals, and serfs. But with the common freemen the old military constitution fell, and with both fell the kingship. Charlemagne had destroyed the sole foundation of his own rule. He himself was still able to hold out; under his successors, however, it became apparent what in reality the work of his hands had been.

Note: The Frankish Dialect

Strange games have been played with this dialect by the linguists. While Grimm had let it dissolve into French and High German, more recent scholars give it an extension that reaches from Dunkirk and Amsterdam to the Unstrut, Saale, and Rezat, if not indeed to the Danube and, through colonisation, into the Riesengebirge. While even a philologist like Moritz Heyne constructs from a manuscript of the Heliand produced in Werden an Old Low Franconian language that is almost pure Old Saxon with a very slight Frankish tinge, Braune simply assigns all genuinely Low Franconian dialects partly to Saxon, partly to Low Dutch. And finally Arnold restricts the area of conquest of the Ripuarians to the region north of the watershed of the Ahr and Moselle and supposes all the territory lying south and south-west to have been occupied first by Alamanni, later exclusively by Chatti (whom he also counts among the Franks), and thus to have spoken Alamannic-Chattic.

Let us first of all reduce the Frankish linguistic area to its actual boundaries. Thuringia, Hesse, and Main-Franconia have absolutely no other claim to be included in it than that in Carolingian times they were comprised under Francia. The language spoken east of the Spessart, the Vogelsberg, and the Kahler Asten is anything but Frankish. Hesse and Thuringia have their own independent dialects, just as they are inhabited by independent tribes; in Main-Franconia a mixture of Slav, Thuringian, and Hessian population has been interspersed with Bavarian and Frankish elements and has developed its own separate dialect. Only if one applies the degree to which the High German sound shift has penetrated the dialects as the chief means of distinction can these three linguistic branches be assigned to Frankish. But, as we shall see, it is precisely this procedure that causes all the confusion in the assessment of the Frankish language by non-Franks.

Let us begin with the oldest monuments, and first of all place Moritz Heyne’s
(2)
so-called Old Low Franconian in its proper light. The so-called Cottonian manuscript of the Heliand, produced in Werden and now in Oxford, is supposed to be Old Low Franconian because it was produced in the monastery of Werden, still on Frankish soil but hard on the Saxon border. The old tribal boundary is here, even today, the boundary between Berg and Mark; of the abbeys lying between them, Werden belongs to Franconia, Essen to Saxony. Werden is bounded in the immediate vicinity, to the east and north, by indisputably Saxon localities; in the plain between the Ruhr and the Lippe, the Saxon language penetrates in places almost to the Rhine. The circumstance that a Saxon work was copied in Werden, and indeed evidently by a Frank, so that Frankish word-forms here and there flowed from this Frank’s pen, is by no means sufficient to declare the language of the copy to be Frankish. Besides the Cottonian Heliand, Heyne considers as Low Franconian some Werden fragments that show the same character, and the remnants of a translation of the Psalms, which according to him originated in the region of Aachen, but which Kern (Glossen in der Lex Salica) briefly declares to be Low Dutch. In fact, it has on the one hand entirely Low Dutch forms, but alongside them also genuine Rhenish Franconian and even traces of the High German sound shift. It evidently originated on the border between Low Dutch and Rhenish Franconian, perhaps between Aachen and Maastricht. Its language is considerably later than that of the two Heliand [manuscripts].

The Cottonian Heliand alone, however, suffices to establish beyond doubt, from the few Frankish forms occurring in it, some of the main differences between Frankish and Saxon.

I. All Ingvaeonic dialects end the three persons of the plural praesens indicativus alike, namely with a dental preceded by a vowel; Old Saxon in
d
, Anglo-Saxon in
dh
, Old Frisian in
th
(which probably also stands for
dh
). Thus in Old Saxon
hebbiad
means we have, you have, they have; similarly, from
fallan
,
gawinnan
all three persons alike are
fallad
,
winnad
. It is the third person that has taken possession of all three, but, it is well to note, with the specifically Ingvaeonic, and equally common to all three dialects mentioned, elision of the
n
before the
d
or
dh
. Of all living dialects, only the Westphalian has preserved this peculiarity; there one still says
wi
,
ji
,
se hebbed
, etc. The other Saxon dialects, as well as West Frisian, no longer know it; they distinguish the three persons.

The Left Rhenish psalms have, like Middle High German, for the I. person plural -
m
, II. -
t
, III. -
nt
. By contrast, the Cotton Heliand has, alongside the Saxon forms, several times forms of an entirely different kind:
tholônd
—they suffer,
gornônd
—you lament, and as imperative
mârient
—proclaim,
seggient
—say, where Saxon demands
tholôd
,
gornôt
,
mâriad
,
seggiad
. These forms are not only Frankish; they are even genuine Werden, Bergisch local dialect to this day. In the Bergisch region we likewise make all three plural persons of the present tense alike, but not saxonically in
d
, but francically in
nt
. As against Markish
wi hebbed
, right at the border one says
wi hant
, and analogously to the above imperative
seggient
one says
seient ens
—say once. Braune and others, on the simple observation that here in the Bergisch region the three persons are made alike, have forthwith declared the entire Bergisch hill country to be Saxon. The rule has indeed

pressed forward out of Saxony, but unfortunately it is carried out in Frankish, and thus proves the opposite of what it is supposed to prove.

The elision of
n
before dentals is not confined to this case in the Ingvaeonic dialects; it is less common in Old Frisian, but rather widespread in Old Saxon and Anglo-Saxon:
mudh
—mouth,
kudh
—known,
us
—us,
odhar
—another. The Frankish copyist of the Heliand in Werden writes the Frankish form
andar
twice instead of
odhar
. The Werden rent registers alternate between the Frankish name-forms
Reinswind
,
Meginswind
, and the Saxon
Reinswid
and
Meginswid
. In the Left Rhenish psalms, on the other hand, one finds everywhere
munt
,
kunt
,
uns
, only once do the so-called Lipsius glosses (extracted from the lost manuscript of these psalms) have
farkutha abominabiles
instead of
farkuntha
. The old Salian monuments have likewise preserved the
n
everywhere in the names
Gund
,
Segenand
,
Chlodosindis
,
Ansbertus
, etc., which is of no consequence. The modern Frankish dialects have the
n
everywhere (the sole exception in the Bergisch dialect is the form
os
—us).

II. The linguistic monuments from which the so-called Saxon grammar is usually constructed all belong to south-western Westphalia, Münster, Freckenhorst, Essen. The language of these monuments shows some significant deviations not only from the general Ingvaeonic forms, but also from those that have come down to us in proper names from Engern and Eastphalia as genuinely Old Saxon; on the other hand, they agree strikingly with Frankish and Old High German. The most recent grammarian of the dialect, Cosijn, therefore calls it outright Old West Saxon.

Since in this investigation we are almost entirely dependent on proper names in Latin charters, the demonstrable formal differences between West and East Saxon can only be few in number; they are confined to two, but very decisive cases.

1. Anglo-Saxon and Old Frisian have the genitive plural of all declensions in
a
. Old West Saxon, Old Frankish and Old High German, by contrast, have
o
. What, then, is the correct Old Saxon form? Is this dialect really to have abandoned the Ingvaeonic rule here?

The charters from Engern and Eastphalia provide the answer. In
Stedieraburg
,
Horsadal
,
Winethahûsen
,
Edingahûsun
,
Magathaburg
and many other names, the first element of the compound stands in the genitive plural and has
a
. Even in Westphalia the
a
has not yet entirely disappeared: the Freckenhorst register has once
Aningera-lô
and
Wernerâ-Holthûson
, and the
a
in
Osnabrück
is likewise an old genitive plural.

2. Likewise, the weak masculine in Frankish and in

Old High German ends in
o
, as against Gothic-Ingvaeonic
a
. For Old West Saxon,
o
is also established as the rule; thus again a deviation from Ingvaeonic usage. But this by no means applies to Old Saxon as a whole. Not even in Westphalia did
o
hold good without exception; the Freckenhorst register already has, alongside o, a whole series of names in
a
(
Sîboda
,
Uffa
,
Asica
,
Hassa
,
Wenda
, etc.); Paderborn monuments in Wigand yield almost always
a
, only very exceptionally
o
; in Eastphalian charters
a
predominates almost exclusively; so that Jakob Grimm (“History of the German Language”) already comes to the conclusion that it cannot be denied that
a
and
an
(in oblique cases) was the originally Saxon form common to all parts of the people. The advance of
o
for
a
was not confined to Westphalia either. At the beginning of the 15th century, the East Frisian men’s names in the chronicles, etc., have almost regularly
o
:
Fokko
,
Occo
,
Enno
,
Smelo
, etc., as against older
a
preserved in a few instances in West Frisian.

It may therefore be taken as established that both deviations of West Saxon from the Ingvaeonic rule are not originally Saxon, but have been caused by foreign influence. This influence is very simply explained by the fact that western Saxony
was previously Frankish territory
. Only after the withdrawal of the main body of the Franks did the Saxons, crossing the Osning and the Egge, gradually push forward to the line that still today separates the Mark and the Sauerland from the Bergisches Land and the Siegerland. The influence of the remaining Franks, now fused with the Saxons, is shown in those two instances of
o
instead of
a
; it is also still unmistakable in the present-day dialects.

III. A peculiarity of Rhine Frankish language extending from the Ruhr to the Moselle is the ending of the I. [person] praesens indicativus in -
n
, which is best preserved in the case [Engels noted in pencil in the margin: Otfried] where a vowel follows:
dat don ek
—I do that,
ek han
—I have (Bergisch). This verbal form holds good for the entire Lower Rhine and the Moselle region, at least as far as the Lorraine border:
don
,
han
. The same peculiarity is already found in the Left Rhenish psalms:
biddon
—I ask,
wirthon
—I become, though not consistently. The Salian dialect lacks this
n
; there already in the oldest document it says:
ec forsacho
,
gelôbo
. It is likewise missing in Dutch. Old West Saxon here differs from Frankish in that it knows this
n
only in a single conjugation (the so-called second weak one):
skawôn
—I look,
thionôn
—I serve, etc. To Anglo-

Saxon and Old Frisian it is entirely alien. We may therefore suppose that this
n
, too, is a Frankish remnant in Old West Saxon.

Apart from the numerous proper names preserved in charters, etc., and the glosses of the Lex Salica, often distorted beyond recognition, we have almost no remnants of the Salian dialect. However, Kern (“The Glosses in the Lex Salica”) has removed a considerable number of these distortions, and has restored the text, in some cases certain, in others highly probable, and demonstrated that it is written in a language that is the direct ancestor of Middle and Modern Dutch. Yet this material so reconstructed is of course not directly usable for grammar. Besides, we possess only the short abjuration formula appended to Carloman’s capitulary of the year 743 and probably composed at the council of Lestines, hence in Belgium. And here, right at the beginning, we encounter two characteristically Frankish words:
ec forsacho
—I renounce.
Ec
for I is still widespread today among the Franks. In Trier and Luxembourg
eich
, in Cologne and Aachen
ech
, in the Bergisch region
ek
. Though written Dutch has
ik
, one can still often enough hear
ek
in popular speech, particularly in Flanders. The old Salian names
Segenandus
,
Segemundus
,
Segefredus
unanimously show
e
for
i
.

In
forsacho
ch
stands for
g
between vowels: this also occurs elsewhere in the monuments (
rachineburgius
) and is still today a distinguishing mark of all Frankish dialects from the Palatinate to the North Sea. We shall return to these two principal characteristics of Frankish:
e
frequently for
i
, and
ch
between vowels for
g
, when dealing with the individual dialects.

As a result of the above investigation—to which one may compare what Grimm says about Old Frankish in the “History of the German Language” at the end of the first volume—we may advance the proposition, which today, by the way, can hardly still be contested: that Frankish was already in the 6th and 7th centuries an independent dialect, forming the transition between High German, hence initially Alemannic, and Ingvaeonic, hence initially Saxon and Frisian, and at that time still standing entirely on the Gothic-Low German stage of sound-shifting. But once this is granted, it is thereby also acknowledged that the Franks were not a hotchpotch of various tribes allied by external circumstances, but an independent chief German stem, the Iscaevones, who admittedly absorbed foreign elements at various times, but also had the power to assimilate them. And we may likewise regard it as proven that each of the two main branches of the Frankish stem already spoke a distinct dialect at an early date, that the dialect was divided into

Salian and Ripuarian, and that many separating peculiarities of the old dialects still live on in the popular speech of today.

Let us now pass on to these still living dialects.

I. There is now no longer any doubt that Salian lives on in the two Dutch dialects, Flemish and Dutch, and most purely in the regions that have been Frankish already since the 6th century. For since the great storm floods of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries destroyed almost the whole of Zeeland, formed the Zuiderzee, the Dollart and the Jade, and thereby broke the geographical and political cohesion among the Frisians, the remnants of the old Frisian freedom succumbed to the pressure of the surrounding territorial lords, and with it almost everywhere the Frisian language as well. In the west it was hemmed in or completely displaced by Dutch, in the east and north by Saxon and Danish, in all cases leaving strong traces in the intruding language. Old Frisian Zeeland and Holland became in the 16th and 17th centuries the core and mainstay of the Dutch struggle for independence, just as they had earlier been the seat of the country’s principal commercial cities. Here, then, modern written Dutch was formed above all, and absorbed Frisian elements, words and word-forms that must be carefully distinguished from the Frankish base. On the other hand, from the east Saxon language pushed into formerly Frisian and Frankish territory. Drawing the exact boundaries must be left to detailed research; purely Salian are only the Flemish-speaking parts of Belgium, North Brabant, Utrecht, as well as Gelderland and Overijssel, with the exception of the eastern, Saxon strips.

Between the French linguistic boundary on the Meuse and the Saxon boundary north of the Rhine, Salians and Ripuarians meet. We shall speak further below of the line of separation, which here too has first to be established in detail. Let us first deal with the grammatical peculiarities of Netherlandish.

Among the vowels, it is first noticeable that in genuinely Frankish fashion i is replaced by e: brengen – bringen, krep – Krippe, hemel – Himmel, geweten – Gewissen, ben – bin, stem – Stimme. This is far more frequently the case in Middle Netherlandish: gewes – gewiß, es – ist, selber – Silber, blent – blind, where New Netherlandish has gewis, is, zilver, blind. In the same way, I find two places in the vicinity of Gent: Destelbergen and Desteldonck, according to which even now Distel is still called Destel there. The Middle Netherlandish that grew up on purely Frankish soil here agrees exactly with Ripuarian, already less so the written New Netherlandish exposed to Frisian influence.

Furthermore, again agreeing with Ripuarian, o stands instead of u before m or n with a following consonant, though not as consistently as in Middle Netherlandish and Ripuarian. Alongside konst, gonst, kond, New Netherlandish has kunst, gunst, kund; on the other hand, both agree in: mond – Mund, hond – Hund, jong – jung, ons – uns.

In departure from Ripuarian, the long i (ij) has become ei in pronunciation, which does not yet appear to have been the case in Middle Netherlandish. But this ei is not pronounced like High German ei = ai, but like an actual e + i, though not quite as thin as, for example, ej in Danes and Slavs. The diphthong written not as ij but as ei sounds little different from this. Correspondingly, ou, ouw stands for High German au.

Umlaut has disappeared from inflection. In declension, singular and plural, in conjugation, indicative and subjunctive, have the same stem vowel. By contrast, umlaut occurs in word-formation in a double form: 1. in the [change] of a by i into e, common to all post-Gothic dialects; 2. in a form peculiar to Netherlandish, developed only later. Middle Netherlandish, like Ripuarian, still knows hus – Haus, brun – braun, rum – geräumig, tun – Zaun, pluralis huse, brune. New Netherlandish knows only the forms huis, bruin, ruim, tuin (ui = High German eu), which are foreign to Middle Netherlandish and Ripuarian. By contrast, eu for short o (High German u) already intrudes in Middle Netherlandish: jeughet beside joghet, New Netherlandish jeugd – Jugend; doghet – Tugend, dor – Tür, kor – Wahl, alongside which the forms with eu [or oe]; New Netherlandish now has only deugd, keur, deur. This agrees entirely with the eu developed in northern French since the 12th century for Latin stressed o. Kern draws attention to a third case: in New Netherlandish, ei is umlaut from ê (ee). All these three forms of umlaut are unknown to Ripuarian as to the other dialects and are a distinctive mark of Netherlandish.

Ald, alt, old, uld, ult change into oud, out. This transition is already found in Middle Netherlandish, where, however, guldin, hulde, sculde still occur alongside goudin, houde, scoude (should), so that the time when it was introduced is roughly established. It is likewise peculiar to Netherlandish, at least vis-à-vis all continental Germanic dialects; by contrast, it also exists in the English dialect of Lancashire: gowd, howd, owd for gold, hold, old.

As far as the consonants are concerned, Netherlandish has no pure g (the guttural Italian, French or English g). This consonant is pronounced like a strongly aspirated gh, which in certain sound combinations is indistinguishable from the deep guttural (Swiss, Modern Greek or Russian) ch. We saw that this transition from g to ch was already known to Old Salian. It is also found in a part of Ripuarian and in the Saxon dialects that developed on formerly Frankish soil, e.g. in the Münsterland, where, as also in the Bergisches Land, initial j, especially in loan-words, sounds under certain circumstances like ch, and one can hear Choseph and even Chahr (Jahr). Had M. Heyne taken this into account, he would have been largely spared the difficulty of the frequent confusion and mutual alliteration of j, g and ch in the Heliand.

In the initial sound, Netherlandish preserves wr in places: wringen – ringen, wreed – grausam, hart, wreken – rächen. A remnant of this also remains in Ripuarian.

The softening of the diminutive ken into tje, je is taken from Frisian: mannetje – Männchen, bietje – Bienchen, halsje – Hälschen, etc. Yet k is also preserved: vrouken – Frauchen, hoeteken – Hütchen. Flemish, at least in the popular speech, preserves the k better; the well-known little man in Brussels is called manneken-pis. Thus, the French borrowed their mannequin, the English their manikin, from Flemish. The plural of both endings is vroukens, mannetjes. We shall rediscover this s in Ripuarian.

Common to Netherlandish with Saxon and even Scandinavian dialects is the elision of d between vowels, especially between two e: leder and leer, weder and weer, neder and neer, vader and vaer, moeder and moer – Mutter.

The Netherlandish declension shows complete mixing of strong and weak forms, so that, since plural umlaut is also absent, the Netherlandish plural formations agree with the Ripuarian or Saxon ones only in the rarest of cases, and here too a very tangible mark of the language is present.

The loss of the nominative sign in er, der, wer is common to Salian, Ripuarian, and all Ingvaeonic dialects: Netherlandish hij, de (article) and die (demonstrative pronoun), wie.

Entering into the conjugation would lead too far. What has been said will suffice to allow the present-day Salian language to be distinguished everywhere from the neighbouring dialects. More exact investigation of the Netherlandish popular dialects will certainly bring much of importance to light.

II. Rhine Frankish. With this expression I designate all the remaining Frankish dialects. The fact that I do not here, in the old manner, oppose Ripuarian to Salian has a very good reason.

Arnold has already pointed out that the Ripuarians in the strictest sense occupied a relatively narrow district, whose southern boundary is more or less marked by the two places Reifferscheid near Adenau and near Schleyden. This is correct insofar as the purely Ripuarian area is thereby also linguistically delimited against the territories settled by genuine Ripuarians after or simultaneously with other German tribes. Since the name Low Frankish has now acquired a different meaning, one that also includes Salian, I am left with only the designation Ripuarian — in the narrower sense — for the group of closely related dialects spreading from the Salian linguistic boundary to this line.

1. Ripuarian. The dividing line of this group of dialects from Salian by no means coincides with the Dutch-German frontier. On the contrary, on the right bank of the Rhine, by far the greater part of the district of Rees still belongs to Salian, where in the area of Wesel Salian, Ripuarian and Saxon meet. On the left bank, the Cleves and Geldern districts are Salian, roughly up to a line drawn from the Rhine, between Xanten and Wesel, southwards to the village of Vluyn (west of Mörs) and from there south-westwards towards Venlo. More precise definition of the boundary is only possible on the spot, because through many years of Dutch administration not only of Geldern but also of the county of Mörs, many Ripuarian names have been preserved on maps in Salian-Netherlandish form.

Upwards from the area of Venlo, the greater part of the right bank of the Meuse seems to be Ripuarian, so that here the political frontier nowhere cuts through Salian territory but always Ripuarian, and this extends close to Maastricht. Place names in heim (not hem) and in the specifically Ripuarian ich occur here in great numbers on Dutch territory; further south, the shifted ones in broich (Dutch broek) already appear, e.g. Dallenbroich near Roermond; likewise in rade (Bingelrade near Sittard, together with Amstenrade, Hobbelrade and 6 or 7 others); the little piece of German territory on the right of the Meuse that has fallen to Belgium is entirely Ripuarian (cf. Krützenberg, 9 kilometres from the Meuse, with Kruisberg, north of Venlo). Indeed, on the left of the Meuse, in Belgian so-called Limburg, I find Kessenich near Maaseyk, Stockheim and Reckheim on the Meuse, Gellik near Maastricht, as proof that no purely Salian population lives here.

Towards Saxony, the Ripuarian boundary runs from the region of Wesel south-eastwards at an increasing distance from the Rhine, between Mülheim an der Ruhr and Werden on the Frankish side and Essen on the Saxon side, to the frontier of Berg and Mark, here still now the boundary between the Rhine Province and Westphalia. It leaves this boundary only south of Olpe, where it goes eastwards, separating the Siegerland as Frankish from the Saxon Sauerland. Further east, the Hessian dialect soon begins.

The above-mentioned southern boundary against the dialect I designate as Middle Frankish roughly coincides with the southern boundaries of the old counties of Avalgau, Bonngau and Eiflia, and from there runs westwards to the Walloon, keeping somewhat more to the south. The area thus circumscribed comprises the old great county of Ribuaria together with parts of the adjoining counties to the north and west.

As already said, Ripuarian agrees with Netherlandish in many respects, but in such a way that Middle Netherlandish is closer to it than New Netherlandish. With the latter, New Netherlandish, the Ripuarian pronunciation of ei = e + i and ou for au agrees, as does the transition of i into e, which goes much further in Ripuarian as in Middle Netherlandish than in New Netherlandish: the Middle Netherlandish gewes, es, blent, selver (Silber) are still good Ripuarian today. Likewise, and consistently, u before m or n with a following consonant changes into o: jong, lomp, domm, konst. If this following consonant is a d or t, then in some dialects this changes into g or k; e.g. honk – Hund, pluralis höng, where the softening to g is an after-effect of the stripped-off final vowel e.

By contrast, the umlaut relations of Ripuarian are sharply distinguished from the Netherlandish ones; on the whole they agree with High German, and in a few exceptions (e.g. hanen for Hähne) with Saxon.

wr in the initial sound has hardened to fr, preserved in fringen – to wring water out of a cloth, etc., and frêd (Dutch wreed) with the meaning hardened.

For er, der, wer stands hê, dê, wê.

The declension stands midway between High German and Saxon. Plural formations in s are frequent, but almost never agree with the Netherlandish ones; in the local High German, with correct recollection of the linguistic development, this s becomes r.

The diminutive ken, chen is transformed into schen after n, männschen; the plural has, as in Netherlandish, s (männsches). We shall pursue both forms as far as Lorraine.

r before s, st, d, t, z is dropped, the preceding vowel remains short in some dialects, in others it is lengthened. Thus hart becomes – hatt (Bergisch), haad (Cologne). In the process, through Upper German influence, st becomes scht: Durst – doascht Bergisch, dôscht Cologne.

Likewise, through High German influence, initial sl, sw, st, sp have become schl, etc.

Like Low Dutch, Ripuarian has no pure  
g. Some of the dialects situated along the Salian boundary, such as the Berg dialect, likewise have an aspirated  
gh for initial and medial  
g, though softer than the Low Dutch one. The rest have  
j. In final position,  
g is everywhere pronounced like  
ch, not, however, like the hard Low Dutch  
ch, but like the soft Rhine Franconian  
ch, which sounds like a hardened  
j. The essentially Low German character of Ripuarian is attested by expressions such as  
boven for oben.

The majority of the mute consonants are everywhere at the first stage of the sound shift. Only in the case of  
t, and of medial and final  
k and occasionally  
p, has the High German shift taken place in the southern dialects; they have  
lôsze for  
lôten — lassen,  
holz instead of  
holt,  
rîch instead of  
rîk — reich,  
êch instead of  
ek — ich,  
pief instead of  
pîpe — Pfeife. But  
et,  
dat,  
wat and a few others remain.

This is not even a consistently executed penetration of the High German shift in three cases, on which the usual demarcation between Middle and Low Franconian is founded. Yet in this way a group of dialects that, as has been shown, belong together by virtue of specific phonetic conditions, and that also see themselves as belonging together in the popular consciousness, is arbitrarily torn apart according to a feature that is here entirely accidental.

Entirely accidental, I say. The other Middle German dialects — the Hessian, Thuringian, Upper Saxon, etc. — each stand, taken by itself, at a generally definite stage of the High German shift. They may show a little less shifting along the Low Saxon boundary, a little more along the Upper German boundary, but at most this gives rise to local differences. By contrast, Franconian on the North Sea, the Maas and the Lower Rhine shows none at all, while on the Alemannic boundary it shows almost complete Alemannic shift; in between lie at least three intermediate stages. The shift thus penetrated into the already independently developed Rhine Franconian and tore it into several pieces. The last trace of this shift

by no means needs to disappear at the boundary of a pre-existing, distinct group of dialects; it can die out in the middle of such a group, and indeed it does. On the other hand, the really dialect-forming influence of the shift, as will be shown, does indeed cease at the boundary between two dialect groups that were already different earlier. And have not  
schl,  
schw, etc., and the final  
scht, likewise come to us from High German, and far later? But this—at least the former—still extends deep into Westphalia.

The Ripuarian dialects formed a firmly-established group long before some of them learned to shift  
t, medial and final  
k and  
p. How far this change could advance within the group was and remains purely accidental for the group. The dialect of Neuss is identical with that of Krefeld and München-Gladbach down to minor details that a stranger cannot hear at all. Nevertheless, one is supposed to be Middle Franconian, the other Low Franconian. The dialect of the industrial region of Berg passes imperceptibly into that of the south-west Rhine plain. Yet they are supposed to belong to two fundamentally different groups. To anyone at home in the country itself, it is obvious that here closet scholarship is forcing the living popular dialects, of which it knows little or nothing, into the Procrustean bed of a priori constructed diagnostic features.

And to what does this purely external distinction lead? To the lumping together of the South Ripuarian dialects into a so-called Middle Franconian, with other dialects from which, as we shall see, they diverge much further than from the so-called Low Franconian ones. And, on the other hand, to the retention of a narrow strip with which no one knows what to do, until one finally finds oneself compelled to declare one piece Saxon, another Low Dutch — which flatly contradicts the actual facts of these dialects.

Let us take, for example, the Berg dialect, which Braune summarily calls unquestionably Saxon. As we have seen, it forms all three plural persons of the present indicative alike, but in the Franconian manner, using the age-old form  
nt. It regularly has  
o instead of  
u before  
m and  
n with a following consonant, which, according to the same Braune, is decidedly un-Saxon and specifically Low Franconian. It agrees with the other Ripuarian dialects in all the Ripuarian features cited above. While it passes imperceptibly from village to village, from farmstead to farmstead, into the dialect of the Rhine plain, it is separated from the Saxon dialect at the Westphalian border with razor-sharp precision. Perhaps nowhere else in the whole of Germany can a language boundary be found that is drawn as abruptly as here. And what a difference in the

language! The entire vowel system is as if turned upside down; the sharp Low Franconian  
ei is starkly opposed to the broadest  
ai, just as  
ou is to  
au; of the many diphthongs and vocalic after-resonances, not a single one matches; here  
sch as in the rest of Germany, there  
s +  
ch as in Holland; here  
wi hant, there  
wi hebbed; here the dual forms used as plurals  
get and  
enk, you and you, there only  
ji,  
i and  
jü,  
ü; here the sparrow is called, in general Ripuarian,  
Môsche, there, in general Westphalian,  
Lüning. Not to mention other peculiarities specific to the Berg dialect, which likewise disappear suddenly here at the border.

To the foreigner, the distinctive character of a dialect becomes most apparent when the person concerned does not speak the dialect, but the High German which that foreigner understands, which, among us Germans, most often occurs under strong dialectal influence. But then the allegedly Saxon inhabitant of the industrial district of Berg is absolutely indistinguishable for the non-native from the inhabitant of the Rhine plain, who is supposed to be Middle Franconian, except for the somewhat harder aspirated  
gh, where the other speaks  
j. The Berg native of Heckinghausen (from Oberbarmen, left bank of the Wupper) and the Märkisch native of Langerfeld, who lives barely a kilometre further east, differ more from each other even in the local High German of everyday life than the Heckinghauser does from the man from Koblenz, let alone from the man from Aachen or Bonn.

To the Rhinelander himself, the penetration of the shift of  
t and final  
k makes so little impression of a language divide that, even on territory thoroughly familiar to him, he will first have to stop and think where the boundary between  
t and  
z,  
k and  
ch actually lies, and when he crosses this boundary the one form is almost as easy on his tongue as the other. This is facilitated still further by the many High German words with shifted  
sz,  
z,  
ch and  
f that have penetrated into the dialects. A striking example is provided by the old Berg judicial ordinance from the fourteenth century (Lacomblet, Archiv, I, p. 79 ff.). Here we find  
zo,  
uiss (aus),  
zween,  
bezahlen; alongside them in the same sentence  
setten,  
dat

nutteste (nützeste); likewise  
Dache,  
redelich next to  
reicket (reicht);  
upladen,  
upheven,  
hulper (Helfer) next to  
verkouffen. In another paragraph, p. 85,  
zo and  
tho — zu even appear alternately. In short, the dialects of the uplands and the plain constantly intermingle, without the slightest disturbance to the writer. As always, this last wave with which the High German shift floods the Franconian territory is also the weakest and shallowest. It is certainly of interest to trace the line as far as it reaches. But this line cannot be a dialect boundary; it is incapable of tearing apart a self-contained

group of old and closely related dialects and of furnishing the pretext by which these violently separated fragments are to be assigned, in defiance of all linguistic facts, to more remote groups.

2. Middle Franconian. From the foregoing, it goes without saying that I place the northern boundary of Middle Franconian considerably further south than is usually done.

From the fact that the left-bank Middle Franconian strip of land appears to have been in Alemannic possession at the time of Clovis, Arnold takes occasion to examine the local place names for traces of Alemannic settlement and arrives at the result that a pre-Frankish, Alemannic population can be demonstrated as far as the line Cologne-Aachen; whereby, as a matter of course, the traces, most numerous in the south, become ever rarer towards the north. The place names, he says, point to a temporary advance of the Alemanni beyond the region around Koblenz and Aachen, as well as to a more prolonged possession of the Wetterau and the southern areas in the Nassau region. For the names with the genuine Alemannic endings  
-ach,  
-brunen,  
-felden,  
-hofen,  
-ingen,  
-schwand,  
-stetten,  
-wangen and  
-weiler, which nowhere occur in purely Frankish territory, are to be found scattered from Alsace across the entire Palatinate, Rhenish Hesse and Rhenish Prussia, except that they become ever rarer towards the north and increasingly give way to the predominantly Frankish names in  
-bach,  
-berg,  
-dorf,  
-born,  
-feld,  
-hausen,  
-heim and  
-scheid (“Deutsche Urzeit”).

Let us first examine the allegedly Alemannic names of the Middle Franconian country. The endings  
-brunen,  
-stetten,  
-felden,  
-wangen have nowhere come to my attention on Reymann’s map (which, I may state once and for all, I am using here). The ending  
-schwand occurs once: Metzelschwander Hof near Winnweiler, and then again Schwanden north of Landstuhl. Both, then, in the Upper Franconian Palatinate, which does not concern us here yet. In  
-ach we have along the Rhine: Kreuznach, Bacharach, Hirzenach near St. Goar, Rübenach near Koblenz (Ribiniacus of the Spruner-Menke Gau map), Andernach (Antunnacum of the Romans), and besides these Wassenach. Now, since the Romanized Celtic ending  
-acum occurs generally on the whole left bank of the Rhine in Roman times — Tolbiacum — Zülpich, Juliacum — Jülich, Tiberiacum — Ziewerich near Bergheim, Mederiacum —, in most of these cases at most the choice of the form  
-ach instead of  
-ich could indicate Alemannic influence. Only the one Hirzenach (= Hirschenbach) is unquestionably German, and this, according to the Gau map, was earlier called Hirzenowce = Hirschenau, not Hirschenbach. How then

explain Wallach, which lies between Büderich and Rheinberg, hard on the Salian boundary? That is surely not Alemannic.

In the Moselle region a few  
-ach also occur: Irmenach east of Bernkastel, Waldrach, Crettnach near Trier, Mettlach on the Saar. In Luxembourg: Echternach, Medernach, Kanach; in Lorraine, only on the right bank of the Moselle: Montenach, Rodlach, Breitnach. Even if we were willing to concede that all these names point to Alemannic settlement, then only to a very sparsely scattered one, which moreover does not extend beyond the southernmost part of the Middle Franconian country.

There remain  
-weiler,  
-hofen and  
-ingen, which demand more detailed investigation.

The ending -
weiler
is at first sight not directly Alamannic, but rather the provincial Latin
villarium
,
villare
, and is found, at most quite exceptionally, outside the old boundaries of the Roman Empire. The Germanisation of
villare
into
weiler
was not the privilege of the Alamanni, but only the predilection with which they applied this ending on a massive scale to new settlements as well. Wherever Roman
villaria
occurred, the Franks too were obliged either to Germanise the ending as
wilare
, later
weiler
, or to drop it altogether. They probably did now the one, now the other, just as they surely will have given names in -
weiler
to new settlements here and there as well, only far more rarely than the Alamanni. North of
Eschweiler
near Aachen and
Ahrweiler
, Arnold can find no significant places in -
weiler
. But the present-day importance of the places has no bearing on the matter; the fact is that on the left bank of the Rhine the -
weiler
extend northwards nearly to the Salian border (
Garzweiler
and
Holzweiler
are not five miles from the nearest Dutch-speaking place in Gelderland) – north of the line
Eschweiler
and
Ahrweiler
there are at least twenty of them. Understandably, they are most frequent near the old Roman road from Maastricht via Jülich to Cologne, two of them,
Walwiller
and
Nyswiller
, even on Dutch territory; are these Alamannic settlements as well?

Further south they are almost entirely absent in the Eifel; the Malmedy section (No. 159 Reymann) has not a single instance. They are also rare in Luxembourg, likewise on the lower Moselle and up to the crest of the Hunsrück. On the other hand, they appear frequently on the upper Moselle on both sides of the river, becoming ever denser towards the east, and east of Saarlouis they increasingly become the dominant ending. Here, however, Old Franconian speech already begins, and here no one disputes that the Alamanni had occupied the land before the Franks.

For the Middle Franconian and Ripuarian territory, then, the -
weiler
prove Alamannic settlement no more than the many -
villers
in France.

Let us pass to -
hofen
. This ending is even less exclusively Alamannic. It occurs throughout the entire Frankish territory, including the present-day Westphalia later occupied by Saxons. On the right bank of the Rhine just a few examples:
Wehofen
near Ruhrort,
Mellinghofen
and
Eppinghofen
near Duisburg,
Benninghofen
near Mettmann, another
Eppinghofen
near Dinslaken, in Westphalia
Kellinghofen
near Dorsten,
Westhofen
near Castrop,
Wellinghofen
,
Wichlinghofen
,
Niederhofen
, two
Benninghofen
,
Berghofen
,
Westhofen
,
Wandhofen
, all on the Hellweg, etc. Dating back to the heathen period is
Ereshofen
on the Agger,
Martis villa
, and the very designation of the war-god as
Eru
shows that no Alamanni are conceivable here; they called themselves
Tiuwâri
, thus named the god not
Eru
but
Tiu
, later shifted to
Ziu
.

On the left bank of the Rhine matters stand even worse with the Alamannic descent of the -
hofen
. Here again is an
Eppinghofen
south-east of Xanten, thus perhaps already Salian, and from there southwards the whole Ripuarian territory teems with -
hofen
, alongside -
hof
for single homesteads. But if we go on to Salian land, it gets worse still. The Maas is accompanied on both sides, from the French linguistic border onwards, by -
hofen
. For brevity’s sake, let us go straight to the western bank. Here in Holland and Belgium we find at least seven
Ophoven
, in Holland
Kinckhoven
, etc.; for Belgium let us first take the Louvain section (No. 139 Reymann). Here there are
Ruykhoven
,
Schalkhoven
,
Bommershoven
,
Wintershoven
,
Mettecoven
,
Helshoven
,
Engelmanshoven
near Tongres;
Zonhoven
,
Reekhoven
,
Konings-Hoven
near Hasselt; further west
Bogenhoven
,
Schuerhoven
,
Nieuwenhoven
,
Gippershoven
,
Baulershoven
near St. Trond; furthest west
Gussenhoven
and
Droenhoven
east and north-east of Tirlemont (Thienen). The Turnhout section (No. 120) has at least 33 -
hoven
, the majority on Belgian territory. Further south-west the -
hove
(the dative
n
is here regularly suppressed) run along the whole French linguistic border; from
Heerlinkhove
and
Nieuwenhove
near
Ninove
, which is itself a Romanised -
hove
– I omit the intermediate links, roughly 10 counted – to
Ghyverinckhove
and
Pollinchove
near Dixmude and
Volkerinckhove
near St. Omer in French Flanders.
Nieuwenhove
occurs three times, which proves that the ending is still living in the speech of the people. Alongside this, very numerous single homesteads in -
hof
. From this the allegedly exclusively Alamannic character of the -
hofen
may be judged.

Finally, as to -
ingen
. The designation of common descent by
-ing
,
-ung
is common to all Germanic peoples. Since settlement took place lineage by lineage, this ending everywhere plays a significant role in place-names. Sometimes it is joined in the genitive plural with a locative ending:
Wolvaradingahusun
near Minden,
Snotingaham
(
Nottingham
) in England. Sometimes the plural stands alone for the place designation:
Flissinghe
(Vlissingen),
Phladirtinga
(Vlaardingen),
Crastlingi
in Dutch Friesland,
Grupilinga
,
Britlinga
,
Otlinga
in Old Saxony. These names are nowadays mostly reduced to the dative and end in -
ingen
, rarely -
ing
. Most peoples know and use both modes of application; the Alamanni, it seems, predominantly the latter, at least now.
Rümmingen
near Lörrach was formerly (764)
Romaninchova
, so that the Swabian -
ingen
are in some cases also of more recent origin (Mone, “Urzeit des badischen Landes”, I, p. 213). The Swiss -
kon
and -
kofen
are nearly all contracted from -
inghofen
:
Zollinchovon
-
Zollikofen
,
Smarinchowa
-
Schmerikon
, etc. Cf. F. Beust, “Historischer Atlas des Kantons Zürich”, where they are found by the dozen on Map 3, representing the Alamannic period. But since these also occur among Franks, Saxons, and Frisians, it is very hazardous to infer Alamannic settlement directly from the occurrence of place-names in -
ingen
.

The names just cited prove that names in -
ingas
(nominative plural) and -
ingum
, -ingon (dative plural) were nothing unusual among both Frisians and Saxons from the Scheldt to the Elbe. Even today the -
ingen
are no rarity throughout Lower Saxony. In Westphalia on both sides of the Ruhr, south of the Unna-Soest line, there are at least twelve -
ingen
alone, alongside -
ingsen
and -
inghausen
. And as far as Frankish territory extends, so far do we also find names in -
ingen
.

On the right bank of the Rhine we first find in Holland
Wageningen
on the Rhine and
Genderingen
on the IJssel (whereby we exclude all possibly Frisian names), in the Bergisches Land
Huckingen
,
Ratingen
,
Ehingen
(directly behind, on Saxon territory,
Hattingen
,
Sodingen
,
Ummingen
),
Heisingen
near Werden (which Grimm derives from the
Silva

Caesia
of Tacitus, which would thus be immensely old),
Solingen
,
Hasingen
,
Leichlingen
(on the gau map
Leigelingon
, hence about a thousand years old),
Quettingen
and on the Sieg
Bödingen
and
Röcklingen
, not counting two names in -
ing
.
Hönningen
near Rheinbrohl and
Ellingen
in Wied territory establish the connection with the region between Rhine, Lahn, and Dill, which yields, on a moderate count, 12 -
ingen
. To go further south serves no purpose, since here begins the country that undisputedly passed through a period of Alamannic settlement.

To the left of the Rhine we have
Millingen
in Holland above Nijmegen,
Lüttingen
below Xanten, again
Millingen
below Rheinberg, then
Kippingen
,
Rödingen
,
Höningen
,
Worringen
,
Fühlingen
, all further north than Cologne,
Wesselingen
and
Köttingen
near Brühl. From here the names in -
ingen
follow two directions. In the high Eifel they are rare; near Malmedy on the French linguistic border we find:
Büllingen
,
Hünningen
,
Mürringen
,
Iveldingen
,
Eibertingen
as a transition to the very numerous -
ingen
in Luxembourg and on the Prussian and Lorraine upper Moselle. Another connecting line runs along the Rhine and the lateral valleys (in the Ahr region 7 to 8), finally along the Moselle valley, likewise to the region above Trier where the -
ingen
predominate, but are first separated from the great mass of the Alamannic-Swabian -
ingen
by the

-
weiler
and then the -
heim
. If, therefore, in accordance with Arnold’s demand, we “consider all circumstances in their context”, we shall arrive at the conclusion that the -
ingen
of the upper German Moselle region are Frankish and not Alamannic.

How little we need Alamannic aid here becomes all the more clear as soon as we follow the -
ingen
from the Franco-Ripuarian linguistic border near Aachen onto Salian territory. Near Maaseyk, west of the Maas, lies
Geystingen
, further west near Brée
Gerdingen
. Then we find, if we again take up Section No. 139, Louvain:
Mopertingen
,
Vlytingen
,
Rixingen
,
Aerdelingen
,
Grimmersingen
,
Gravelingen
,
Ordange
(for Ordingen),
Bevingen
,
Hatingen
,
Buvingen
,
Hundelingen
,
Bovelingen
,
Curange
,
Raepertingen
,
Boswinningen
,
Wimmertingen
and others in the vicinity of Tongres, St. Trond, and Hasselt. The westernmost, not far from Louvain, are
Willebringen
,
Redingen
,
Grinningen
. Here the connection seems to break off. But if we go onto the territory that now speaks French but was contested between the two languages from the 6th to the 9th century, we find, starting from the Maas, a whole girdle of Frenchified -
ange
, a form that corresponds to -
ingen
in Lorraine and Luxembourg too, running from east to west:
Ballenge
,
Roclenge
,
Ortrange
,
Lantremange
,
Roclange
,
Libertange
,
Noderange
,
Herdange
,
Oderinge
,
Odange
,
Gobertang
,
Wahenges
; somewhat further west
Louvrenge
near Wavre and
Revelinge
near Waterloo establish the connection with
Huysinghen
and
Buisinghen
, the first outposts of a group of over 20 -
inghen
that are spread along the linguistic border south-west of Brussels from Hal to Grammont. And finally in French Flanders:
Gravelingen
,
Wulverdinghe
(thus exactly the Old Saxon
Wolvaradinges-hûsun
),
Leubringhen
,
Leulinghen
,
Bonninghen
,
Peuplingue
,
Hardinghen
,
Hermelinghen
, near St. Omer and as far as behind Boulogne
Herbinghen
,

Hocquinghen
,
Velinghen
,
Lottinghen
,
Ardinghen
, all sharply distinguished from the names in -
inghem
(-
ingheim
), which are still more numerous in the same region.

Thus the three endings that Arnold regards as specifically Alamannic have proved to be just as much Frankish, and the attempt to prove an Alamannic settlement prior to the Frankish one in the Middle Franconian territory on the basis of these names must be held to have failed. In which context the possibility of a not very strong Alamannic element in the south-eastern part of this territory can always be conceded.

From the Alamanni Arnold leads us to the Chatti. The latter are said to have occupied, to the exclusion of the Ripuarians proper, the territory south of the Gau Ribuaria, the same territory, therefore, that we call Middle and Upper Franconian, after and alongside the Alamanni. This, too, is grounded on the Hessian place-names found in this region alongside the Alamannic ones:

“The correspondence of place-names on this side and the far side of the Rhine as far as the Alamannic border is so remarkable and striking that it would be a true miracle if it were accidental, whereas it appears perfectly natural as soon as we assume that the immigrants bestowed their native place-names also on the new seats, as still happens every day in America.”

There is little to say against this proposition. All the more against the conclusion that the actual Ripuarians had nothing to do with the settlement of the whole Middle and Upper Frankish land, that we find here only Alemanni and Chatti. The majority of the Chatti who migrated westward from their homeland seem to have attached themselves from time immemorial (as did the Batavians, Canninefates and Chattuarii) to the Iscaevones; where else could they have turned? In the first two centuries of our era, the Chatti were linked with the other Herminones only in the rear, through the Thuringians; on one side they had Ingvaeonic Cherusci, on the other, Iscaevones, and in front of them, the Romans. The Herminonic tribes that later appear united as Alemanni came from the interior of Germania, had been separated from the Chatti for centuries by Thuringians and other peoples, and had become much stranger to them than the Iscaevonian Franks, with whom they were linked by centuries of brotherhood in arms. The participation of the Chatti in the occupation of the stretch of land in question is therefore not doubted. But the exclusion of the Ripuarians from it, however, is. This exclusion is proved only if no specifically Ripuarian names occur here. The opposite is the case.

Among the endings indicated by Arnold as specifically Frankish

is
-hausen common to Franks, Saxons, Hessians and Thuringians; -heim is called -ham in Salian, -bach Salian and Lower Ripuarian -beek; of the others, only -scheid is really characteristic. It is specifically Ripuarian, as are -ich, -rath or -rade, and -siepen. Common to both Frankish dialects, furthermore, are -loo (-loh), -donk and -bruch or -broich (Salian -broek).

-scheid occurs only in uplands and as a rule in places on the watershed. The Franks have left this ending throughout the Westphalian Sauerland as far as the Hessian border, where it appears only as a hill name to the east of Korbach. On the Ruhr the old Frankish -scheid is opposed by the Saxonised ending -schede: Melschede, Selschede, Meschede, and close by Langscheid, Ramscheid, Bremscheid. Frequent in the Bergisches Land, it is found right into the Westerwald, but no further south, on the right bank of the Rhine. On the left bank of the Rhine, by contrast, the -scheid endings understandably begin only in the Eifel (3); in Luxembourg there are at least 21 of them, and they are frequent in the Hochwald and Hunsrück. But just as south of the Lahn, here too on the east and south side of the Hunsrück and Soonwald, the form -schied appears alongside them, which seems to be a Hessian adaptation. Both forms together extend southward across the Nahe as far as the Vosges, where we find: Bisterscheid west of the Donnersberg, Langenscheid near Kaiserslautern, a plateau Breitscheid south of Hochspeyer, Haspelscheid near Bitsch, the Scheidwald north of Lützelstein, and finally as the southernmost outpost Walscheid on the northern slope of the Donon, still further south than the village of Hessen near Saarburg, the furthest Chatti outpost according to Arnold.

Furthermore, specifically Ripuarian is -ich, from the same root as Gothic -ahva- water, like -ach, both of them germanicise the Belgo-Roman -acum, as Tiberiacum proves, on the district map Civiraha, today Ziewerich. On the right bank of the Rhine it is not very frequent; Meiderich and Lirich near Ruhrort are the northernmost, from there they extend along the Rhine as far as Biebrich. The left-bank plain of the Rhine, from Büderich opposite Wesel onwards, is full of them; through the Eifel they extend into the Hochwald and Hunsrück, but disappear in the Soonwald and Nahe region, even before -scheid and -roth cease. In the western part of our area, by contrast, they continue to the French language frontier and beyond. We pass over the Trier region, which has a great many; in the Dutch part of Luxembourg I count twelve, and still further away in Belgian Törnich and Merzig (Messancy – the spelling -ig changes nothing, etymology and pronunciation are the same), in Lorraine Soetrich, Sentzich, Marspich, Daspich west of the Mosel; east of it Kintzich, Penserich, Kemplich, Destrich, twice Kerprich, Hibrich, Helsprich.

The ending -rade, -rad, on the left bank of the Rhine -rath, likewise extends far beyond the boundaries of its old Ripuarian homeland. It fills the whole Eifel and the middle and lower Mosel valley as well as its side valleys. In the same area where -scheid mixes with -schied, -rod and -roth appear on both banks of the Rhine alongside -rad and -rath, likewise of Hessian origin, except that on the right bank, in the Westerwald, -rod extends further north. In the Hochwald the northern slope has -rath as a rule, the southern slope -roth.

The least widespread is -siepen, shifted -seifen. The word means a small brook valley with a steep gradient and is still generally used for this. On the left bank of the Rhine it does not extend far beyond the old Ripuarian border; on the right it is found in the Westerwald on the Nister and still near Langenschwalbach (Langenseifen).

To go into the other endings would lead too far. At any rate, we may declare the countless -heim endings that accompany the Rhine upward from Bingen far into Alemannic territory and are found everywhere where Franks have settled, to be not Chatti, but Ripuarian. Their home is not in Hessen, where they occur rarely and appear to have penetrated later, but in the Salian land and the Rhine plain around Cologne, where they occur alongside the other specifically Ripuarian names in almost equal numbers.

The result of this investigation is, therefore, that the Ripuarians, far from having been held back at the Westerwald and Eifel by the flood of Hessian immigration, on the contrary themselves inundated the whole Middle Frankish territory; and indeed more strongly in the direction of the south-west, toward the upper Mosel region, than toward the south-east, toward the Taunus and the Nahe region. This is also confirmed by the language. The south-western dialects, right into Luxembourg and West Lorraine, stand much closer to Ripuarian than the eastern ones, especially those on the right bank of the Rhine. The former may be regarded as a more High German-shifted extension of Ripuarian.

The characteristic feature of the Middle Frankish dialects is, first of all, the penetration of the High German sound shift. Not the mere shift of some tenues to aspirates, which affects relatively few words and does not touch the character of the dialect, but the incipient shifting of the mediae, which brings about the peculiar Middle and Upper German confusion of b and p, g and k, d and t. It is only where the impossibility of sharply distinguishing b and p, d and t, g and k in initial position makes itself felt – that is, what the French understand particularly by accent allemand – that the great rift which the second sound shift has torn through the German language becomes perceptible to the Low German. And this rift runs between Sieg and Lahn, between Ahr and Mosel. Accordingly, Middle Frankish has an initial g that is absent from the more northern dialects; in medial and final position, however, it still pronounces soft ch for g. Furthermore, the ei and ou of the northern dialects pass into ai and au.

A few genuinely Frankish peculiarities: In all Salian and Ripuarian dialects Bach, unshifted Beek, is feminine. This also holds for at least the larger, western part of Middle Frankish. Like the countless other streams of the same name in the Netherlands and on the Lower Rhine, the Luxembourgish Glabach (Gladbach, Dutch Gladbeek) is feminine too. By contrast, girls’ names are treated as neuters: one says not only das Mädchen, das Mariechen, das Lisbethchen, but also das Marie, das Lisbeth, from Barmen right beyond Trier. Near Forbach in Lorraine, a map originally drawn by the French shows a Karninschesberg (Kaninchenberg). Thus the same diminutive -schen, plural -sches, that we found above as Ripuarian.

With the watershed between Mosel and Nahe and, on the right bank of the Rhine, with the hill country south of the Lahn, a new group of dialects begins:

3. Upper Frankish. Here we are on a stretch of land that was indisputably first Alemannic conquest territory (apart from the earlier occupation by Vangiones etc., of whose tribal affinity and language we know nothing), and where a stronger Chatti admixture may also readily be allowed. But here too the place-names, as we need not repeat, point to the presence of not inconsiderable Ripuarian elements, especially in the Rhine plain. And even more the language itself. Let us take the southernmost determinable dialect, which at the same time possesses a literature, the Palatinate dialect. Here we find again the general Frankish impossibility of pronouncing medial and final g other than as soft ch. (4) There one says: Vöchel, Flechel, geleche (gelegen), gsacht – gesagt, licht – liegt, etc. Likewise the general Frankish w instead of b in medial position: Bûwe – Buben, glâwe – glauben (but i glâb), bleiwe, selwer – selbst, halwe – halbe. The sound shift is far from as complete as it looks; in fact, particularly with foreign words, a reverse shift takes place, i.e., the mute consonant of the initial position is shifted not a step forward, but backward: t becomes d, p becomes b, as will be shown; d and p in initial position remain on the Low German level: dûn – tun, dag, danze, dür, dodt; however, before r: trinke, trage; paff – Pfaff, peife, palz – Pfalz, parre – Pfarrer. Since d and p here stand for High German t and pf, initial t in foreign words is also shifted back to d, but initial p to b: derke – Türke, dafel – Tafel, babeer – Papier, borzlan – Porzellan, bulwer – Pulver. Furthermore, the Palatinate dialect, coinciding here only with Danish, tolerates no tenues between vowels: ebbes – etwas, labbe – Lappen, schlubbe – schlupfen, schobbe – Schoppen, Peder – Peter, dridde – dritte, rodhe – raten. Only k forms an exception: brocke, backe. But in foreign words g: musigande – Musikanten. This is likewise a remnant of the Low German sound level, which has extended itself further by means of reverse shift (Engels noted in the margin in pencil: agrees with Otfried); only because dridde, hadde remained unshifted could Peter become Peder, and the corresponding High German t thus receive the same impartial treatment. Similarly, in halde – halten, alde – alte etc., d remains on the Low German level.

Despite the decidedly High German overall impression for Low Germans, the Palatinate dialect is therefore far from having adopted the High German sound shift even to the extent that our written language preserves it. On the contrary, by means of its reverse shift, Palatinate protests against the High German level that, having penetrated from outside, proves itself to be a foreign element in the dialect to this day.

This is the place to deal with a phenomenon that is commonly misapprehended: the confusion of d and t, b and p, even g and k on the part of those Germans in whose dialect the mediae have undergone the High German shift. This confusion does not occur as long as everyone speaks his own dialect. Quite the contrary. We have just seen that, for example, the Palatinate speaker distinguishes here very precisely, so much so that he even shifts foreign words backwards in order to adapt them to the requirements of his dialect. Foreign initial t becomes d to him only because standard German t corresponds to his d, foreign p becomes b because his p corresponds to standard German...

pf
corresponds. Just as little, in other Upper German dialects, are the mute consonants confused with one another as long as the dialect is spoken. Each of them has its own, consistently applied law of shift. The situation changes as soon as the written language or a foreign language is spoken. The attempt to apply the respective dialectal law of shift to these—and this attempt is made involuntarily—collides with the attempt to speak the new language correctly. In the process, the written b and p, d and t lose all fixed meaning, and thus it could happen that, for example, Börne, in his Paris Letters, complained that the French could not distinguish between b and p because they stubbornly insisted that his name, which he pronounced Perne, began with a p.

But back to the Palatinate dialect. The proof that the High German shift was, so to speak, forced upon it from without and has remained a foreign element to this day, and that it has not even reached the sound level of the written language (while the Alemanni and Bavarians on the whole preserve this or that Old High German stage, far beyond it)—this proof alone suffices to establish the predominantly Frankish character of Palatinate. For even in Hesse, lying much farther north, the shift is on the whole carried further, and thereby the allegedly predominantly Hessian character of Palatinate is reduced to modest proportions. In order to offer such resistance to the High German shift right on the Alemannic border, among backward Alemanni, at least as numerous Ripuarians must have been present alongside the Hessians, who are themselves essentially High German. And their presence is further proved—apart from the place names—by two generally Frankish peculiarities: the preservation of the Frankish w instead of b in medial position, and the pronunciation of g as ch in medial and final position. In addition, there are a host of individual cases of correspondence. With the Palatinate “Gundach”—“good day”—one gets as far as Dunkirk and Amsterdam. Just as in the Palatinate “a certain man” is called ein sichrer Mann, so in all the Netherlands een zekeren man. “Handsching” for glove agrees with the Ripuarian “Händschen”. Even g for j in “Ghannisnacht” (St. John’s Night) is Ripuarian and extends, as we see, as far as Münsterland. And baten (to better, to avail, from bat—better), common to all Franks, including the Netherlanders, is current in the Palatinate: ’s badd alles nix—everything is no use—where the t is not even shifted to High German tz, but is softened to d in Palatinate between vowels.

Footnotes by Friedrich Engels

(1) P. Roth, “History of the Benefice System”, Erlangen 1850. One of the best books of the pre-Maurer period, from which I borrow much in this chapter.

(2) “Little Old Saxon and Old Low Franconian Grammar” by Moritz Heyne, Paderborn 1873.

(3) (Note.) On the plain I find only Waterscheid, east of Hasselt in Belgian Limburg, where we have already observed strong Ripuarian admixture above.

(4) All quotations are from “Fröhlich Palz, Gott erhalt’s! Poems in Palatinate Dialect” by K. G. Nadler, Frankfurt a. M., 1851.