In European feudal society, an individuals social status was generally determined by

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This article deals with the feudal system of Medieval Europe, focussing on western Europe.

The term “feudal system” is used by historians to describe a social-political structure which was a key feature of medieval Europe. Its significance goes far beyond its role in a few centuries in the European Middle Ages, however. It helped shape world history as a whole, by giving rise to early forms of representative government. It was on these foundations that modern democracy would be built.

Contents

Introduction

A pyramid of fiefs

How did the feudal system arise?

Manorialism

Feudal complexity

How did towns fit into the feudal system?

The rise of representative assemblies

The decline of feudalism

Further study

Introduction

Not all historians like the term. They regard it as inadequate in describing an extraordinarily complex situation. However, the alternative is to get bogged down in detailed descriptions and qualifications which risk overwhelming all but specialist medievalists. As a shorthand, feudalism will do as well as any other.

The word “feudal” derives from the word fief. In brief, a fief was a piece of property which a person was given on condition that he (and occasionally she) performed certain services to the one who gave it.

A person who received a fief was a vassal of the one who had given him the fief, who was his lord. In the agrarian society of medieval Europe, a fief was usually a specified parcel of land.

The services the vassal owed the lord commonly entailed military service for a set amount of time each year (40 days was normal). This would depend on the amount of land involved, which was calculated in multiples of knight’s fees. A knight’s fee was normal the smallest fiefs, a sufficient amount of land to support one knight – enough land, in other words, to support a warrior and his very expensive war-horses, armor and weapons, plus his family and servants (including at least one servant to aid him while on campaign).

So, if a vassal had been granted a fief worth 40 knight’s fees (a very large fief), he would be obliged to furnish his lord with 40 knights for 40 days a year. If he had only been given one knight’s fee, he would either undertake the service himself or (if old or frail) send a substitute.

A vassals was also obliged to provide his lord with money from time to time – for example, when the lord’s son came of age, or the lord’s daughter got married, or if the lord was captured in battle and needed ransoming (quite a common occurrence – a soldier would far prefer to take an enemy prisoner than kill him, as a defeated opponent was worth a lot more alive than dead). He also had a duty to provide his lord with advice. This last was very important for what it led on to (see below, Representative Government).

In return for these services, the lord would promise to protect his vassal (a very valuable commitment in violent times); and to “give him justice” (that is, support him in court).

All these promises and counter-promises were accompanied by solemn oaths, so that the whole was underpinned by strong religious sanctions – which, in a deeply religious age, counted for a great deal.

A pyramid of fiefs

The term “feudal system” came into use to describe a hierarchy of relationships which embraced medieval Europe, involving fief-holders of different ranks.

A fief-holder was able to hive off part of his fief to form a smaller fief for a vassal of his own (in exchange for the traditional obligations, of course). So, a powerful vassal of a king, say, who had a fief worth 40 knight’s fees, could grant his own vassals lesser fiefs of 5 knight’s fees each from his own fief. They in turn could grant a fief of one knight’s fee to vassals of their own.

In this way, most fief-holders were both lords and vassals; and kingdoms came to resemble, from top to bottom, pyramids of greater and lesser fiefs. Those who held just one knight’s fee were lords of the peasants who farmed the land in their small fief. In feudal society everyone was supposed to have a lord – except the king at the top, who had no lord (at least, not on Earth: he was regarded as God’s vassal).

The different ranks of fief-holders formed the aristocracy of medieval European society. A feudal kingdom was divided amongst several great “magnates” (leading nobles such as dukes and counts, who controlled large fiefs), who were the direct vassals of the king. These magnates had lesser barons as their vassals, and these in turn had the holders of individual knight’s fees as their vassals. Until the 9th or 10th centuries, this fief-holding was in theory for one lifetime only. It gradually became hereditary in practice, and from about 1000 was hereditary in law as well: fiefs were granted to a vassal and his heirs after him.

Privatized power

The main implication for all this was that power was widely distributed. A king was regarded as owning all the land of his kingdom, and to command its entire military and economic resources. However, he owned his land, and exercised his authority, through a large number of vassals.

Military power

For military purposes, the mechanism by which a feudal king could mobilize the military resources of his realm was to order his direct vassals, the magnates, to provide him with soldiers. The magnates in turn ordered their own vassals (the lesser barons) to provide them with soldiers to fight for the king. These barons then ordered their vassals to go and join the lord’s standard and fight for the king. All this gave the vassals and sub-vassals a great deal of power to raise troops, which they occasionally used against a king rather than on his behalf.

In battle, these various vassals would fight under their lords’ command.

Justice and administration

In terms of exercising justice, making laws, and overseeing administrative matters, a similar situation prevailed. The king presided over his magnates in the royal council. The magnates oversaw justice and administration within their own fiefs, and lesser vassals did likewise within their sub-fiefs. At the bottom of the pyramid, the holder of a knight’s fee presided over a manor courts, overseeing the affairs of the village. As lesser lords jealously guarded their legal jurisdictions against encroachment from above, feudal administration tended to be very fragmented and localized.

Private realms

From all this, it is clear that a fief was not just a piece of private property, in the sense that we would recognize today; it carried with it what we would now regard as public responsibilities, which are normally exercised by such public bodies as central government, local government, law courts and so on. In medieval Europe these public responsibilities had been granted away to individuals, along with the land over which they were exercised. The distinction between private and public matters was blurred to the point of non-existence.

How did the feudal system arise?

With the peace and stability of the Roman Empire gone, the Germanic invaders established several kingdoms but struggled to impose order and organization on their territories. One of these kingdoms, that of the Franks, conquered most of the others to rule a large area of western Europe. The Frankish kings appointed dukes and counts to rule the various districts into which their realm was divided.

From the early 9th century onwards, the lands of western Europe came under renewed attack, now from the Vikings in the north, the Arabs in the south, and the Magyars in the east. These invaders raided deep into the interior. Vikings sailed far up rivers to strike at unsuspecting towns, villages and monasteries, and bands of Magyars rode on their fast ponies on long raids from central Europe as far as western France.

Disintegration

At the same time, the Frankish realm was falling apart. Members of the royal family fought amongst themselves for territory, and the ceaseless civil wars created a disordered and fragmented society. At the best of times the kings would have found it hard to provide effective protection against the Vikings raiders, given the primitive communications of the day. In the anarchic conditions of the 9th and 10th centuries, they found it impossible.

In these circumstances the local dukes and counts (who we will call “magnates”, and who now routinely passed their offices on from father to son) filled the power vacuum and were able to organize resistance (or payment) to invaders. They built up local defenses around a growing network of castles – new defensive structures which give much-needed protection in a violent and disorderly society.

Within their territories, the magnates increasingly usurped the royal authority. Their own domains, however, were subject to the same process of fragmentation. Command of a castle gives its local lord strong protection against foreign raiders, against neighboring lords – and against his superior lord. Commanders of castles (“castellans”) increasingly treated their castles and the land around them as their own.

The result was that public authority at every level disintegrated, and the functions of government – military, judicial, administrative – became devolved and privatized in the hands of regional magnates and local lords. A kings’ direct power was confined to his own semi-private territories (royal domains). In the wider realms, he could no longer issue orders to officials obedient to his command; instead he had to win the cooperation of the magnates through a process of negotiation. When a king lost the support of his magnates, as happened on a regular basis, he lost control of his kingdom.

It is this devolution of power from king to count, and from count to local lord, that gave rise to the social-political phenomenon we call the “feudal system”. It was based on personal loyalties and mutual obligations between kings, magnates, local lords and their followers. It was only through these ties that some kind of order was able to prevail throughout the medieval realms, and that kings were able to mobilize the military resources of their kingdoms.

As feudal relationships became more established, the Church was called upon to give them religious sanction in the ceremonies of investiture in which lords and vassals swore solemn oaths to sanctified the agreements between them. The Church then played a major part in defining the ideal ethical behavior of the feudal nobility, and thus helped to give rise to the chivalric code of knighthood.

Knights

It can be seen from the above that feudalism arose as a response to circumstances in which endemic warfare was the order of the day. The feudal society was one organized for war; a central reason for its coming into being was the need for kings and great lords to call forth armies of mounted warriors. This is implicit in the fact that the entire fief-system was based on multiples of knights’ fees.

From the 10th century at the latest the central figure of medieval warfare was the mounted warrior. This figure is known by various names in different parts of Europe – chevalier in France, cavalier in Italy, caballero in Spain, ritter in Germany and knight in England.

The innovation which gave mounted warriors a distinct advantage over soldiers fighting on foot seems to have been the iron stirrup. This allowed them to put their whole weight behind their weapons – lances, battle axes, great swords – which combined with the height the horse to give them a decisive military superiority.

These mounted soldiers began life as rough henchmen of the magnates and local lords. However, with the increasing expense of their equipment – horses, armor and so on – lords found it more convenient to grant many of them their own small fiefs, so that they could pay their own expenses. This turned them into fully-fledged, albeit junior, members of the landed aristocracy. In most of Europe (the British Isles are the exemption here, as in much else) this knightly class gained all the legal privileges of the higher nobility.

Manorialism

Manors were economic and political units – blocs of farm land which formed the base on which the whole panoply of fief-holding was built. Fiefs consisted of one or more manors; and manors provided a fief-holder with income, status and power.

Manorialism had its origins in Roman times. The classical estates which had dominated the land-holding patterns of Greek and Roman society – large, slave-run farms surrounding villa complexes – evolved into proto-manors of the later Roman empire. This evolution took place for a number of reasons: sources of cheap slaves became less reliable; heavy taxation impoverished the class of independent peasant farmers, who sought protection by selling their lands to local landowners; new laws bound peasants to their hereditary farms, thus starting them down on the road to serfdom; and many lesser landowners, like the independent peasants, were crushed by the weight of taxation and so were forced to sell to larger landowners. In this way estates grew larger, and gangs of slaves were succeeded by peasant masses tied to the estate on an hereditary basis.

These large estates of the late Roman empire were much more economically self-sufficient than their predecessors had been. For example, workshops allowed the farming equipment to be maintained – and much of it probably made – on site. More of the food produced was for home consumption. The estates became less tied into the urban market economy, which was in any case shrinking drastically as trade routes were disrupted.

This self-sufficiency enabled these estates to survive much better than the towns during the anarchy of the years when the western Roman empire collapsed. In this period they became the dominant social and economic unit, their owners – Roman landowning families alongside newly arrived German chieftains, with the two gradually intermarrying to form a single elite: the new landed nobility.

Miniature states

The period of anarchy must also have forced the estates to function as so many little principalities, seeing to their own defense and administering their own law and order. From being merely landowners, estate owners became local lords. The new German kings did not maintain large professional armies, as the Romans had done, but continued to use the tribal levies. Under this system, German tribal nobles, who had been invested with some of these estates (theoretically a third of all land in conquered territories was given to the new German invaders), had to bring themselves and their warriors to the royal standard at the start of a campaign. For the rest of the time these followers lived in their lords’ halls, provided for out of the proceeds of the estate.

In the new disorders of the 9th and 10th centuries, these primitive arrangements were modified by the emergence of formal feudal lord/vassal relationships. At the same time the old tribal warrior, fighting on foot, became the mounted warrior, who was a much more expensive military asset. This led to the sub-infeudation of the larger estates as these mounted warriors received grants of land from which to support themselves. The old estates became lordships consisting of several knight’s fees, with much of their land now parceled out as new manors of one knight’s fee each.

Characteristics of manors

Traditionally, manors were at least the equivalent of one knight’s fee. Originally they were formed of single village communities, but over time, as pieces of land were given away here and acquired there, many manors came to be scattered through several neighboring villages; the corollary of this was that villages were often divided amongst more than one manor. Alternatively they could be lumped together with other villages into a large manor (of several knight’s fees).

The defining feature of a manor was that it was “held in the hand” (the word manor comes from the Latin for “hand”) by a lord. This lord could be a secular lord like a knight or a baron, or an ecclesiastical lord like a bishop, church or monastery. Whoever or whatever the lord was, he or it had control over the land and people of the manor. This power involved economic, judicial/administrative and military power: the lord had a right to a share in his people’s labor or income; the people of the manor were subject to the manorial court, presided over by the lord or his official, which ordered their lives; and the men of he manor were liable to be chosen to follow their lord to war, fighting under his orders.

 A manor usually consisted of three parts:

1. demesne land, directly under the control of the lord and his officials, the purpose of which was to support him and his household;

2. dependent land, which carried obligations to the lord, usually mainly labor service but often including contributions in kind, or even money gifts – this land was farmed by serfs; and

3. free lands, for which peasants paid money rent – this land was farmed by free peasants called  yeomen (in English).

Serfs

Dependent land was farmed by “serfs”: peasants who were bound to the manor on an hereditary basis, and had hereditary obligations to the lord. These usually involving working on his demesne land for a set number of days per week, and giving him gifts in kind or money on certain days. Serfs were not allowed to leave the manor without the lord’s permission. Nor were they allowed to marry without his permission; they usually had to pay a “fine” (or tax) for permission to marry. When a son inherited land from his father he also had to pay a fine, and most punishments in the manorial court were dealt out as fines (hence our association of the word “fine” with punishment).

The balance between demesne, dependent and free land varied from manor to manor, and more so from region to region (for example, there tended to be many more free peasants in southern Europe, whereas it has been estimated that serfs made up 90% of the peasants in 12th century England and northern France). It also varied over time, as a lord took more land into his demesne, or divided demesne land amongst his serfs and free peasants.

As well as labor services and rents in kind or money, lords could usually extract fees for the use of the manor’s mill, bakery or wine press.

collected by H. de Vielcastel from original documents in European libraries