In theory, all the soil of the country was held by the king as a fief from God (in practice, the king's title was his good sword), granted on conditions of fealty to right and justice. Should the king be unjust or wicked, he forfeited the kingdom, and it might be taken from him and given to another. According to Papal theorists it was the Pope who, as God's vicar on earth, had the right to pronounce judgment against a king, depose him, and put another in his place. ”To illustrate the workings of the system, we will suppose the king or suzerain to be in need of an army. He calls upon his own immediate vassals for aid; these in turn call upon their vassals; and so the order runs down through the various ranks of retainers. The retainers in the lowest rank rally around their respective lords, who, with their bands, gather about their lords, and so on up through the rising tiers of the system, until the immediate vassals of the suzerain, or chief lord, present themselves before him with their graduated trains of followers. The array constitutes a feudal army,—a splendidly organized body in theory, but in fact an extremely poor instrument for warfare.Such was the ideal feudal state. It is needless to say that the ideal was never perfectly realized. The system simply made more or less distant approaches to it in the several European countries...