Western European Feudalism

11 Key excerpts on "Western European Feudalism"

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  Daily Life in Medieval Europe

  • Jeffrey L. Forgeng(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Feudalism evolved as a hierarchical system of personal relationships in which land and military Medieval Society 5 • An aristocratic man and woman playing chess. He wears a sleeveless surcoat and highly decorated shoes and has his hood wrapped around his head as a hat; she has a loose overtunic. German, early fourteenth century. [Gay, after Manesse Manuscript] power were the principal commodities exchanged. An individual with military power to offer gave his services to a feudal lord. The lord in turn secured his subordinate in the possession of the land that financed his military service. The feudal subordinate was called a vassal, and the vassal's land was termed a fee or fief (feudum in Latin, which is the source of the term feudal). A vassal who held a great deal of land might in turn grant fiefs to his own feudal tenants, who helped him fulfill his military obligations to his lord. Long-term stability was provided by the principle of heredity, as the feudal relationships between individuals were ex- tended to apply to their heirs. Feudal landholding lay somewhere between modern tenancy and ownership. The holder was considered the tenant rather than the owner of the holding. In principle, the lord might grant the fief at his will when- ever it became empty. In practice, fiefs were treated as permanent and hereditary property, granted by the lord to the heir when the holder died, and only falling empty if there was no heir, or if the holder was forcefully dispossessed. Tenants regularly sold their tenancies, although the lord's permission had to be sought for the transaction. Heritability was advantageous for both lord and vassal, allowing the vassal to pass the property on to his heirs, and providing stability for the lord. 6 Daily Life in Medieval Europe The feudal transaction was more than a bartering of land for military service. The feudal tenant held some measure of legal jurisdiction and political authority over his holding and subtenants.

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  Economic History of Spain

  • Jaime Vicens Vives(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  And as for the Mediterranean econ- omy, Professor Henri Pirenne, in one of the most fundamental treatments of the history of medieval economy, has proved that until complete control of the island of Sicily by the Moslems, or well into the 9th century, total paralysis of trade was not possible. However, from the 8 th century onward we find a situation char- acterized by lack of money, the collapse of trade, and a rapid slide toward an agrarian economy. Therefore—and now we return to the question we formulated before—when insecurity led a man to make himself the vassal of a powerful lord, the latter could com- pensate him for his services only by offering land. It was land which became the basis of interpersonal relationships, involving the bene- fice, or act of giving land, the act of admitting a vassal into the circle of relationships of a lord. Gradually, in the course of the 9th and 10th centuries, this land received a name— fief. We shall not go into a philological investigation of the word here, but we do need to remember that many attribute it to a development of the early Germanic word vieh, meaning cattle, and thus we find ourselves from the outset within the same economic line of descent: fief always meant a payment to ensure that the recipient of com- mendatio (later vassal) would maintain his fealty to the lord who offered him protection. Thus we can define feudalism as an organization of the social and political structure of Western Europe during a period of great economic contraction, characterized by an economic system of a family, agrarian type. It is natural that this system should have evolved in the course of time, so that, in addition to becoming a specific social and economic form of agrarian structure in Europe, it was likewise a system of organization of labor. Feudalism en- closed the rural masses in a system of attachment to the land called service to the glebe.

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  Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism

  Essays in Medieval Social History

  • Rodney Hilton(Author)
  • 1985(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  The social and economic order of medieval Europe is sufficiently distinct and recognisable, with its own laws of motion, to require some term by which it can be distinguished from preceding and following social formations. If we do not use the word 'feudalism' we would have to invent one, and it would have to encompass within its definition both feodalite and seigneurie. The feudal organisation which is implied by the word feodalite had emerged by the eleventh century in France and England in different ways but with similar contours. Its coherence must not be exaggerated. Even in England, where the feudal institutions of the new aristocracy were formed quickly as a result of the conquest of 1066, and much less in France, there was no perfect, completed hierarchy of mutual obligation between barons and fief-holding vassals owing military service and expecting protection. One should imagine, especially in France, a series of untidy regional groupings dominated by one or two great land-owning families who derived most of their income from the rents and services of peasants. They also held jurisdictional power, not only over 228 Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism their peasants but over their free vassals—landowners, some of noble pretensions, whose male members were either warriors or destined for office in the Church. By this time personal relationships between the great lords and their vassals were assuming tenurial form, the rendering of homage and fealty and the promise of military service, financial aid and counsel in return for fiefs in land. In fact the mobilisation of military service on this basis, once presented as the essence of feudalism, was in practice by no means general. By the twelfth century, if not earlier, all the best wars were fought for pay in cash and the hope of booty. The persisting strength of 'feudalism' in the narrower sense of relations within the landowning class, was as much ideological as it was tenurial or jurisdictional.

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  The Birth of Europe

  • Jacques Le Goff(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The feudal domain designated the territory dominated by a castle and encompassed all its lord’s land and peasants. It thus included land, men and the income obtained both from the cultivation of the land and from the dues paid by the peasants. In addition, as the master in command, the feudal lord enjoyed a number of rights, known as the ‘‘ban.’’ Given that this system of organization operated throughout practically the whole of Christendom, some historians have suggested replacing the expression ‘‘feudal system’’ by ‘‘seigneurial system,’’ for feudalism designates a more limited organization in which the lord was the master of a fiefdom that was ceded to him, as a vassal, by his overlord. Strictly speaking, the meaning of the term ‘‘feudal-ism’’ was of a legal nature. Village and Cemetery Most seigneurial domains contained settlements of peasants and subjects known as villages. The village, which replaced the scattered rural settle-ments of antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, became a major feature of eleventh-century Christendom generally. In the Europe of today, the status of castles in the landscape is simply that of a memory and a symbol, frequently in a state of ruin. In contrast, the medieval village, as a form of habitat, survives throughout western Europe. The village originated from houses and fields that were grouped around two essential elements, a church and a cemetery. Robert Fossier rightly believes that the cemetery was the principal element here and may in some cases have antedated the church. Here we have evidence of one of the most deeply rooted characteristics that medieval society has bequeathed to Europe. It concerns the relations be-tween the living and the dead. In the West, one of the most important changes that distinguished antiquity and the Middle Ages was the way that the living took to making a place for the dead, first in their towns and later in their villages.

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  The Middle Ages without Feudalism

  Essays in Criticism and Comparison on the Medieval West

  • Susan Reynolds(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  23 Since historians do not agree about the phenomena they want to distinguish, or where to draw the line between them, none of these attempts to distinguish the words has eliminated misunderstandings and confusions. None of the terminological distinctions has shaken the old framework in which the interpersonal relations of vassalage and property rights derived from conditional grants are seen as distinguishing features of the society of the European Middle Ages. The framework bulges but for many it still seems strong enough to hold the essential features of medieval society.

  Most European historians of medieval Europe during the twentieth century concentrated in practice on the history of their own countries, interpreting the evidence of land-holding and political relations within the framework of feudal law and society embodied in something like the Bloch/Weber definition. Some have seen the feudalism of their own area as the most typical or complete, some have stressed its exceptional qualities, but relatively few have been ready to question whether the various phenomena they describe were all part of the same thing – whatever model or type of feudalism they accept or imply. As a result, where evidence of some supposedly feudal phenomenon in their own country is lacking they can either interpolate it from elsewhere or explain its absence as an exception that need not affect the general picture. In England and France historians have used different bits of the Ganshof and Bloch/Weber types to describe, and by implication to explain, quite different situations. Feudalism in England is characterized by a hierarchy of property (though the word tenure, which sounds more feudal, is generally preferred to “property”) and of military service owed from “knights’ fees” – what Bloch called “service tenements.” In England, however, these Blochian characteristics are associated with a strong central power that made noble jurisdiction over peasants relatively unimportant. Feudalism in France, on the other hand, as in Germany, has been seen in terms of fragmented power, with a weak monarchy and a nobility holding “immunities” of jurisdiction over their tenants, while noble obligations to military service have had, in the absence of much evidence, to be assumed.

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  Feudal America

  Elements of the Middle Ages in Contemporary Society

  • Vladimir Shlapentokh, Joshua Woods(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Penn State University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 The Feudal Model in Social Analysis: From Medieval Europe to Contemporary America “Feudalism” in Contemporary Social Analysis The term feudalism is used in the discourse on contemporary society in a num- ber of different ways. The “feudal perspective” cuts across a great deal of aca- demic terrain, bridging the work of journalists, sociologists, political scientists, international relations experts, and historians. One group of authors includes journalists and pundits who, overlooking the scholarly research on feudalism, apply the term loosely to a range of corrupt, unsavory, or backward aspects of society. Judging from an electronic search of major world newspapers, these authors are more likely to associate feudalism with developing nations than with Western ones (Glionna 2008; Matthews and Nemsova 2006). A second group offers a more cohesive conceptual framework and applies it to illustrate the problems of Western democracy and capitalism. A typical representative of this group is Farmer (2006), who paints a dark portrait of Walmart, the leading baron of big-box grocery stores. The founder of Walmart, Sam Walton, emerges as a “neo-feudal knight” who disregards social and legal standards and perpetuates a business climate “characterized by economic war- fare, gold, and certainly significant autonomy” (Farmer 2006, 157). The third group, composed mostly of American exceptionalists, is interested in how a society’s feudal heritage, or lack thereof, influences its development and contemporary circumstances.

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  Why Europe?

  The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path

  • Michael Mitterauer, Gerald Chapple(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  A few great military powers in previous centuries had structured their armies around an armored cavalry or integrated one into their forces, but none went so far as to create completely analogous feudal structures. Quite the opposite: the feudal system was a specific feature of the Carolingian Empire by virtue of its joining the feudum (as a real, in the sense of real property, component) with vassalage (as a personal component). The system can be further explained by the con-ditions encompassing the Carolingian military reforms. The new forms of lordship based on the agrarian revolution facilitated enough mate-rial provisions for the new armored mounted troops (unlike the Byzan-tine Empire). There was also recourse to imperial church property on a large scale—another situation found only in the Frankish Empire. The combining of high-ranking members of the laity and clergy with mili-tary and lordship structures created social rapports above and beyond T H E F E U D A L S Y S T E M A N D T H E E S TAT E S 113 those created within the lord’s retinue—links that were to be vital in the later formation of Estates systems. With regard to both laity and clergy, the Carolingian system represents a unique path of feudalism in the broader sense that was indeed triggered by the development of a military system, which of course cannot provide a single and complete explanation for that path. The spread of the feudal system and of the armored cavalry through-out post-Carolingian Europe progressed in lockstep. As a rule, modes of knightly combat would appear together with a culture of chivalry wherever the manorial system and bonds of vassalage existed. A new factor came into play in the tenth century: the castle as a fortified cen-ter of banal lordship ( Bannherrschaft ). The simultaneous dissemination of “Frankish weaponry” and the feudal system followed the expansion-ist territorial movements described earlier in the context of the growth of the agrarian system.

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  The Myth of 1648

  Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations

  • Benno Teschke(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Verso

    (Publisher)

  What was the structuring principle of ‘international’ organization in the European Middle Ages? As we saw in chapter 1, Waltz, Krasner, Ruggie, and Spruyt agree on the anarchic nature of the Middle Ages. We can now qualify this assertion and fine-tune the anarchy/hierarchy problematique by historicizing structures of lordship. By focusing on the changing forms of lordship that defined differentiated access to property, we gain a criterion for drawing out differences in the political constitution of medieval geopolitical orders without losing sight of their essential identity. For these alterations in lordly property rights flowed from the social relations that underlay changing geopolitical contexts: feudal empires (650–950), feudal anarchy (950–1150), and the feudal states-system (1150–1450). In other words, the degree to which political powers of extraction were wielded by the landholding class decisively conditioned feudal geopolitical orders. However, while changes in property relations explain differences in structuring principles, these principles do not determine geopolitical behaviour, but only mediate the logic of geopolitical accumulation.

  1. Banal, Domestic, and Landlordship

  The literature distinguishes between three dominant forms of lordship in the European Middle Ages (Duby 1974, 174–7).17 Banal lordship refers to what could most readily claim medieval public authority, namely royal powers of command, taxation, punishment, adjudication, and decree. Being authorized to wield the powers of the ban conferred the most encompassing form of domination and exploitation, constituting what Duby called the ‘master class’ within the medieval ruling class (Duby 1974: 176). Domestic lordship was the prevalent form of domination on the classical bipartite manor of Carolingian times. Here, the lord’s land was divided into a seigneurial demesne tilled by slave labour and specified peasant services, and surrounding peasant plots cultivated independently by tenured peasants. The ‘lord’s men’ had no access to public courts, nor did they have to pay public taxes. They were exclusively subject to manorial control (Bloch 1966a: 70). Landlordship

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  A History of the Crusades, Volume 1

  The First Hundred Years

  • Marshall W. Baldwin, Kenneth Meyer Setton, Marshall W. Baldwin, Kenneth Meyer Setton(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  The vassal was expected to aid his lord in every way possible. As a form of government feudalism had both advantages and disadvantages. It supplied a military force of heavy cavalry at every stage in the hierarchy. Thus each barony, each county, and each kingdom had its army. It also furnished vigorous and inter-ested local government. The extensive reclamation of land and the founding of towns were largely the result of the desire of feudal lords to increase their resources. It is highly doubtful that mere agents working for the benefit of a central government could have accomplished so much. But as a means of keeping peace and Ch. I WESTERN EUROPE ON THE EVE OF THE CRUSADES I ζ order the feudal system was no great success, for it was based on the assumption that there would be continual warfare. In theory, quarrels between lords and vassals and between vassals of the same lord were settled in the feudal courts. Actually when two vassals of a lord quarreled, they went to war and the lord did not intervene unless he thought one might be so seriously weakened that he could not perform his service. And no spirited vassal ac-cepted an unfavorable decision by his lord's court until he was coerced with armed force. Between vassals of different lords there was no hindrance to war. In short, in eleventh-century France, feudal warfare was endemic and it was a fortunate region that saw peace throughout an entire summer. The church tried to limit this warfare by declaring the Peace and Truce of God. The Peace of God forbade attacks on noncombatants, merchants, women, and peasants while the Truce prohibited fighting on weekends and on religious days. Unfortunately, neither Peace nor Truce was taken very seriously by the feudal lords. Fighting was the chief function of the feudal male. From early youth he was conditioned to bear the weight of knightly armor and drilled rigorously in the use of arms.

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  Toward a Marxist Anthropology

  Problems and Perspectives

  • Stanley Diamond(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The entire feudal system was a huge bureaucratic network governed by the principles of prebend and patrimony. CLIENTAGE . Fiefdom implied a form of clientage. The society was organ-ized in terms of individual subordination and supraordination. This prin-ciple ensured that no one was without a patron to whom he could attach Feudalism in Nigeria 343 himself for protection; and in return, the client rendered his master certain services. Studies in Abuja, Bornu, Nupe, and Igala have revealed the pattern described above. Northern feudalism was therefore conterminous with the clientage system. RULING CLASS AND COMMONERS . The entire society, hierarchically demar-cated, was split into two social ranks, the ruling class — the isarakim, and the commoners — talakawa. The ruling class consisted of those who held vital offices in the state, graded into various groups such as household and civil officials, hereditary and nonhereditary officials and royal officials who occupied higher status in the upper segment of the system. The rest of the people fell into the talakawa class, which was made up of the peasants, serfs, and the most debased class, the slaves. The commoners were the backbone of the feudal economy. Peasant production was expropriated through tribute, taxes, special levies, and forced labor. Forced labor implied that the peasants could be compelled to work on the farms of the lords under whom they sought protection. Since these lords were subordinate to the king, the feudal kings shared with the lords rights over the peasants' labor on their farms. The king had authority over boundary disputes within the kingdom, while the officials in the villages (the village chiefs) heard cases of land disputes within their communities. The kings purchased slaves who had to work for them on the farms (Smith 1960:2). The greatest sources of income for the king and the nobles were, then, tribute, taxation, levies, and forced labor service.

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  The History of Democracy

  A Marxist Interpretation

  • Brian S. Roper(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  being the post-Roman province with the least peasant subjection, in 700, to the land where peasant subjection was the completest and most totalizing in the whole of Europe, by as early as 900 in much of the country, and by the eleventh century at the latest elsewhere. The lordships of France based on private justice did not develop in England but they hardly needed to; peasants were already entirely subject to lords tenurially, and many were unfree and thus had not rights to public justice either.

  (Wickham, 2009: 469)

  This development at the very beginning of feudalism in England explains why ‘it became the European country where aristocratic dominance, based on property rights, was most complete, while also being the post-Carolingian country where kings maintained most fully their control over political structures, both traditional (assemblies, Armies) and new (oaths, taxation)’ (Wickham, 2009: 471).

  THE CRISIS OF FEUDALISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF ABSOLUTISM IN FRANCE AND CAPITALISM IN ENGLAND The crisis of feudalism

  As mentioned above, throughout most of the tenth to thirteenth centuries the feudal societies of Western Europe grew strongly both economically and demographically. By the end of the thirteenth century population growth, urbanisation, aristocratic consumption and spending on warfare, and the growing sophistication and size of royal administrations, had not been sufficiently matched by the growth of agricultural productivity and output. Indeed, agricultural output had started to decline and there were mounting signs of crisis even before poor crops resulting from adverse climatic conditions led to famine in much of Western Europe from 1315 to 1317 (Hilton, 1985: 131; Nicholas, 1992: 401–5). With malnutrition widespread the population was vulnerable to the epidemics that swept across Europe from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries. The worst of these was the Black Death, which ‘had spread through central France by the early summer of 1348, to southern England by that winter, and to the rest of England and the Low Countries by the end of 1349. It then moved northeast into Scandinavia and Slavic Europe’ (Nicholas, 1992: 404). Most regions lost from a quarter to a third of their populations, the cities generally lost more than this, and there were further outbreaks of bubonic plague ‘in 1358, 1361, one in 1368–69 that may have been more severe in the Low Countries than that of 1348–49 and another in 1374–75 that was especially virulent in England’ where as much as half the population may have perished (Nicholas, 1992: 404). From the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, ‘a hellish cycle’ unfolded in which the growth of population and output during the preceding centuries was followed by ‘ecological collapse and mass starvation’ (Callinicos, 1987: 165).

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