From Norman F. Cantor, Medieval History, pp 214-223 (10 pages)

II. The Feudal Organization of Society

The great English legal historian F. W. Maitland was wont to amuse his classes at Cambridge by remarking that feudalism was introduced to England in the eighteenth century. By this he meant that the word ”feudalism” was not a medieval term. It was invented by English and French lawyers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was popularized by the political philosopher Montesquieu. At the time of the French Revolution the word was often identified with the ancien regime and the privileges of the French aristocracy, which aroused the wrath of the French bourgeoisie. The term ”feudalism,” therefore, is frequently used in the late eighteenth century in a pejorative sense. From the French radicals it was adopted by Karl Marx, who used the term to signify pre-capitalistic economy. In the late nineteenth century medieval scholars, particularly in France and Germany, began the definition of feudalism with reference to western Europe in the middle ages and tried to work out its history. In view of the fact that feudalism was not a medieval term and that it had already been given certain meanings by modern social philosophy, it might have been wise for medieval historians to avoid using the term and use instead medieval words such as ”vassalage” and ”lordship.” They were not, however, able to be so reticent on this matter; the educated public demanded a. scholarly definition of feudalism, and a host of authorities came forward with their interpretations.In the vast scholarship of the past half century on the nature of feudalism there have been sharply conflicting interpretations. One school regards feudalism as a group of political and legal institutions, as a system of decentralized government-public power in private hands, in J. R. Strayer’s excellent phrase. It maintains that feudalism emerged in the second half of the ninth century with the disintegration of the Carolingian empire. This school does not believe that feudalism was necessarily bound up with any specific kind of economic system. It points out that there were still feudal institutions in the expanding money economy of the thirteenth century and that, instead of being rewarded with real estate, vassals received fief-rentes, or money fiefs, that is, pensions. This view very sharply distinguishes feudalism from manorialism. It points out that feudalism was a system of political and legal relationhips involving free men, while manorialism was an agrarian system involving dependent peasants. The advocates of the political-legal interpretation of feudalism, or the strict interpretation, as it may be called, tend to be skeptical about the use of the term ”feudalism” with reference to non-European history. Feudalism is a specific kind of decentralized government which prevailed in western Europe from the ninth century into the thirteenth. The outstanding scholars who have adopted this interpretation of feudalism have been Heinrich Mitteis in Germany, F. L. Ganshof in Belgium, F. M. Stenton in England, and C. H. Haskins, J. R. Strayer, and Bryce Lyon in the United States.The alternative prevailing interpretation of feudalism was largely the work of Marc Bloch and his disciples in France. This view was presented in Bloch’s classic study, Feudal Study, published in 1940. As an economic and social historian Bloch was not prepared to define feudalism purely in political and legal terms. He regarded it rather in terms of a whole system in which all aspects of life -not only political but also economic, ecclesiastical, and cultural- were centered on lordship. Feudalism was a political system, an economic system,

and a system of values. We can speak of feudal economy, a feudalized church, and a feudal literature in much the same way as we can use the term capitalism to refer not only to a certain kind of production and exchange, but also to government, thought, and ”spirit.” Bloch’s broad interpretation of feudalism comes close to the Marxist view, but it differs fundamentally from the latter in making the determinant of the nature of feudalism not the economic system but rather a multiplicity of factors of which manorialism was only one. Those who lean toward this broad definition of feudalism are inclined to regard it as a stage in social development which at various times has existed in nonEuropean parts of the world, such as Japan, Byzantium,’ and Russia.Drawing upon the intensive scholarship of the past half century and relying upon the work of both schools of interpretation, but leaning more in the direction of Bloch’s view, we may identify lordship as the indispensable element in feudalism and attempt a definition. Feudalism is a form of social organization in which most, or at least a great part, of the political, economic, and military power is in the hands of an hereditary nobility. The economic power of the nobility is based primarily on their lordship over large estates and a dependent peasant class. The political and military power of the nobility is based on the control which they gain over freeman soldiers and decentralized governmental and legal institutions. This is the form of social organization which was characteristic of France from the later ninth century to the later twelfth. It did not appear in England until the later eleventh century and not in Germany until about 1100. It never emerged in Italy at all. This does not mean that in the nonfeudal areas of western Europe there were not any lords, but it does mean that they did not gain an almost exclusive control of political, economic, and military power. Nor does the definition imply that the hereditary nobility was no longer important in Europe after 1200. On the contrary, the nobility continued to be important in political, economic, and military life, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the great aristocrats enjoyed throughout Europe an enormous amount of political influence. But the power of the nobility was no longer based primarily on its lordship over serfs and manors and its control over decentralized governmental and legal institutions. In medieval history feudalism existed at certain times and in certain places. As to whether feudalism has existed in other areas of the world, this is entirely plausible, but the validity of this hypothesis must be based on empirical evidence assessed by the historians of these civilizations.How did feudalism as we have defined it come to exist in tenth-century France? This is a very difficult question to answer. It is hard to trace the origins and rise of feudal institutions because of fragmentary evidence before the ninth century, which in turn was the result partly of the general illiteracy of European society and partly of the fact that the arrangements made by lords were often initially temporary expedients, not permanent legal establishments attested by documents. In the classical feudalism of tenth- and eleventh-century France three elements can be distinguished: the personal (lordship and vassalage), the real or property element (fief), and the decentralization of government and law. The development of feudalism until the tenth century involves the process by which the latter two elements were associated with lordship and vassalage. In addition feudalism came to comprise a system of social ideals and values.Nineteenth-century historians wasted a great deal of energy and paper debating whether feudal institutions were German or Roman in ”origin.” Most scholars today would say that

this is a badly conceived, and essentially false, problem. The nexus of feudal institutions of the tenth century developed out of certain political, legal, and economic forms, in some cases German, in some cases Roman, in response to social need after the collapse of the Roman empire in the West. Lordship was the basic social and political institution in Germanic society. The comitatus, or gefolge, the Germanic war band as described by Tacitus and in Beowulf, was based on loyalty of warriors to their chieftain in return for the latter’s protection and generosity. This is the embryo of medieval feudalism. The perpetuation of this kind of loyalty in the fifth and sixth centuries was made easier by the existence of a similar institution in the later Roman empire, the patrocinium. (clientage). In the disturbed conditions of the later empire, certain aristocrats gathered around them young men of fighting age whom they rewarded and protected in return for their loyalty and service. The vassals of the sixth and seventh centuries were simply the perpetuation of the German gefolge and the Latin patrocinium. The vassals were free.men who voluntarily subjected themselves to some prominent warlord in their locality, but otherwise their only quality was their fighting ability. The term ”vassal” comes from the Celtic word meaning ”boy.” As is implied by the etymology, the vassals of the sixth and seventh centuries were simply ”the boys,” gangs of thugs who fought on behalf of certain big men in the neighborhood. They were as far removed as possible from the chivalric knights pictured in the romantic literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These vassals were simply toughs who beat up people and destroyed property at the behest of their warlord in return for protection, maintenance, and a share of the booty. The social status of the vassals, beyond the basic fact that they were all freemen, depended on the lord they served. Those, for instance, who comprised the personal bodyguards of the Merovingian kings had greater prestige and wealth and were dignified by the special appellation of antrustiones.As yet, vassalage had nothing to do with holding land; the vassals lived in a stockade provided by the lord and were fed, clothed, and armed by him. The next stage in the emergence of feudal institutions involved the association between vassalage and landed wealth, which was intended to reward the vassals for their service and support them. It is a fact of the greatest importance that this ”realization of the feudal relationship,” as it has been called by Ganshof, was an extremely slow and far from uniform development. Even in the tenth century the majority of vassals in France held no land and continued to live in their lord’s household, and even in the early twelfth century, in the intensely feudalized areas of northern France and England, there were many landless vassals, although by this time they were definitely in the minority. In Merovmgum times it appears that the only vassals who received estates were men very prominent in society. The Frankish dukes and counts were given ”benefices” (benefits), gifts of land, by the Merovingian rulers in order to secure their loyalty and maintain them while they performed their services to the royal government. But the great aristocrats who received these benefices proceeded to treat them as hereditary estates. This is the beginning of the association of hereditary estates with loyalty and service to the lord. The system of benefices was imitated on a smaller scale in the relationship between some of the great aristocrats and their more important vassals. A slow but fundamental change in military methods between the fifth and eignth centuries increased the necessity for associating vassalage with the benefice, or the fief as it came to be called after the eighth century. The Germans had used mostly infantry, and they had

followed the military principle of the folk-in-arms, with the king summoning the mass of free peasantry to come to his aid in war. But the superiority of the armed cavalry, which had already been employed during the period of the Germanic invasions by the Roman emperor, the Huns, and.some of the Germanic tribes, became more and more evident. By the eighth century more enlightened warlords in western Europe were seeking to build their armies around the mailed and mounted soldier -the chevalier, or cniht (knight). The introduction of the stirrup into western Europe from the Mediterranean world in the early eighth century markedly increased the effectiveness of cavalry. But the knight’s equipment was a heavy expense, and a lord who wanted a formidable army, of knights among his vassals found it expedient to enfeoff (invest) his chevaliers with manorial estates from which they might obtain the income necessary to array themselves for battle.The granting of a fief did not involve the giving of complete property rights over the estate to the vassal. He had the use of the income of the land as a reward for service and in order to make possible his outfitting as a knight. But technically the ultimate ownership of the land was still the lord’s, who could recover it if the vassal ceased to be loyal, and when the vassal died, the fief automatically reverted to the lord. It is believed that the precedent for feudal tenure was a system of landholding called the precarium, which existed especially on church lands in the seventh and eighth centuries. By this precarious tenure an abbot or a bishop who had more land than he could profitably manage himself allowed laymen to have the use of such lands, usually on the payment of a rent and with the understanding that the estate was recoverable at will.With their accustomed intelligence and ingenuity the Carolingian family early realized the military advantages accruing from the enfeoffment of their vassals. Thus, when Charles Martel raised an army to encounter the invading Arabs in the fourth decade of the eighth century, he sought to obtain as large a knightly contingent as possible. He succeeded in carving out fiefs for his vassals from church lands, probably on the basis of precarious tenures. During the second half of the eighth century the Carolingian ruler was rewarding his aristocratic vassals with large fiefs granted from the royal demesne itself. And the great lords of the western part of the Carolingian realm were quick to imitate the king and transformed some of their own vassals into enfeofred knights. This growing association of fief and vassalage had the effect of generally elevating the social status of the vassal. From the hired thug he was himself becoming, in many instances, an important local lord, enjoying control over one or more manors. There was, of course, a great disparity between the duke or count, who was the vassal of the king, and the common run of knightly vassals, who were, for many centuries to come, violent and uncouth people.The increasing involvement of vassalage and fief inspired a land hunger on the part of ail vassals in feudal society which persisted well into the twelfth century. Whereas previously the fief was regarded as a reward for loyalty, now vassals sought out lords who were prepared to offer them landed estates. Those vassals who already had fiefs set about obtaining more and sought to assure the hereditary character of the land which they heldof their lord. Although technically the fief was not inheritable and reverted back into the lord’s hands at the vassal’s death, by the middle of the tenth century the fief had already become an hereditary patrimony for all practical purposes. On payment of an inheritance tax called the “relief”, the deceased vassal’s son professed his loyalty to the lord and entered into possession of the fief. The land hunger of the ninth- and tenth-century vassals is well illustrated by the great feudal epic Raoul de Cambrai, which, while it has come

down to us in a twelfth-century version, dimly reflects a true incident which occurred in the ninth century and admirably mirrors the mores of the feudal class of that period. In the poem the emperor neglects to give Raoul the fief which his father had held, whereupon Raoul takes up arms against his lord in an attempt to force him to grant what he considers his rightful inheritance.The final stage in the development of feudalism was the passing of governmental and legal authority to the king’s great feudal vassals, who in turn passed some of this authority on to their own vassals. This stage is the product of the ninth century and was the consequence of the inability of the later Carolingians to maintain control over the dukes and counts who usurped the royal power over their duchies and counties and turned them into enormous hereditary fiefs. Lordship over manorial estates had always involved political and legal control over the dependent peasantry, but this authority was negligible compared to the passing of public power into private hands in the ninth century. The feudal princes won from the feeble monarchy the right to collect taxes and to hold courts for the hearing of important pleas-the right of ”high justice,” the power to hang criminals -in their duchies and counties. Similarly, all lesser lords strove to gain pieces of public power and to exercise some political and legal authority within their own fiefs. By the middle of the tenth century in France the powers of the Carolingian king had been swallowed up in the private feudal courts, which exercised overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions in a crazy patchwork of decentralized authority.The emergence of the feudal kind of social organization was followed by the refinement and rationalization of several aspects of lordship and the entrenchment of a group of social values based on the ideal of loyalty. An involved ceremony by which the vassal declared his loyalty or homage to the lord was worked out. The candidate for vassalage knelt before the lord and the latter clasped his hands around the former’s. The church added the usual Christian facade in the appended ceremony of fealty by which the vassal made a sacred vow of loyalty to his lord.In enfeoffing his vassal, the lord usually handed over a symbol of the estate, such as a grain stalk or a knife. It became customary (in a society where literacy was increasing) to attest the grant of land by a deed called simply a ”charter,” i.e., document. The medieval charter generally had five parts: the salutation, usually addressed to the leading men of the neighborhood in which the fief lay; the harangue, which gave the reason for the grant and which was often elaborate if the grantee was an ecclesiastic; the dispository clause, which listed, often in very great detail, the location and boundaries of the estate or estates granted; and then the curse, which inflicted an ecclesiastical anathema on anyone who dared to contravene the terms of the charter, again very elaborate if the beneficiary were an ecclesiastic; and finally the witness list, to which those who had witnessed the grant attested their private seals. In royal charters the scribe frequently wrote down the names of everyone present at court until he came to the end of the parchment. The medieval charter was thus an impressive document which, at least until the twelfth century, was apt to be decisive evidence in a lawsuit over possession of land; it is not surprising that ecclesiastics frequenciy forged charters to help their claim to an estate. It is surprising how negligent lay lords were about preserving them. They rarely could produce the charter when they had to, which encouraged interminable lawsuits over possession of estates.

By the end of the tenth century the respective rights and duties of lord and vassal had been fully worked out. The vassal owed military service to his lord, not to exceed forty days in a year. If he was an important vassal who held a large fief, he owed in addition the military service of a contingent of knights to his lord’s army. Furthermore, the vassal owed suit at court -that is, he had to turn up at the lord’s private court to participate in lawsuits between his peers, the other vassals of the lord, and to give the lord advice if the latter asked for it. In addition, the vassal was subject to feudal taxation -the relief, the money obtained from the vassal’s property through; wardship when the vassal died leaving no male heirs of age, and the regulars’feudal aids, which the vassal had to pay the lord when the latter knighted his eldest son, married off his eldest daughter, or had to be ransomed from captivity. In return the lord was to maintain his vassal, but by no means did he have to give him a fief, and he was not to ”disparage” the vassal by insulting him in one way or another. When the vassal failed to fulfill his vow of loyalty to the lord, he was subject, after trial in the lord’s court, to forfeiture of his fief. If the lord acted improperly toward the vassal, the latter had the right of diffidatio, the dissolution of the feudal bond, usually inaugurated by the breaking of the symbolic grain stalk or knife that represented the transfer of the fief. The former eventuality usually, and the latter always, meant war, but war was in any case a fact of everyday life in feudal society.By the end of the tenth century subinfeudation -the process by which a vassal enfeoffed part of his own fief- had become common and had been frequently carried down through several degrees in the feudal scale from king or duke to lowly ”vavasour,” as the humblest subvassal was called. It was a question of whether the subvassals owed loyalty to the ultimate lord or only to their immediate overlords. There was no general answer to this; it was a matter of whether the original lord was sufficiently strong and energetic to compel the subvassals to take oaths of homage and fealty to him as their liege, or chief, lord. A similar problem arose out of the fact that land-hungry knights became the vassals of two or more lords in order to gain additional fiefs. The anomaly might be solved by one of the lords asserting his rights to be the liege lord.( If this did not happen and if the vassal’s two lords should go to war against each other and summon the vassal to render them military service, he would solve his predicament by joining the lord who seemed most likely to win. The Carolingian churchmen had initially been bitterly critical of the advance of lordship, which they believed, and with justice, to be a cause of the disintegration of the Christian empire. But they were not long in coming to terms with the new social order by integrating themselves within it. The bishops and abbots became lords and vassals like the lay nobility and were involved in all aspects of the life of feudal society, except personal participation in feudal warfare. The churchmen did their best to pacify feudal society and to Christianize and idealize the feudal relationship. They added the religious ceremony of fealty to the act of homage and became adept at enumerating the mutual obligations of lord and vassal in terms which presupposed a level of conduct far more civilized and moral than the rough fighters who still composed 95 per cent of the feudal class were capable of achieving. The church tried its best to limit war in feudal society during the eleventh century by the spread of the Peace of God movement, by which the feudal nobility were to form leagues to preserve the peace and to promise not to nght on certain days. Generally the peace movement was a failure; it was only successful when a strong ruler got behind it because he saw in it advantages for himself.

As a general rule feudalism was antagonistic to royal power. As we have seen, it involved decentralized government and the passing of public power into private hands. The feudal pyramid beloved by textbook writers, with the king on the pinnacle, actually gives a false impression of the nature of feudalism. The king of France in the tenth and eleventh centuries was indeed the lord over the great feudal princes, but he had no real power over the dukes and counts who were his vassals, because he was not the liege lord over their subvassals. As long as he could not defeat the duke of Normandy or the count of Toulouse, the king in Paris had no control over them, although he had a right to their formal homage. The duke of Normandy had a much better army than the king had, and the Norman knights did not in any way recognize the king as their overlord. For all practical purposes, the monarch of France, whether he was a Carolingian or, after the new Capetian house, was only the duke of Paris. A similar situation prevailed in the feudal organization of Germany in the twelfth century. Where the feudal pyramid actually did operate was in England after the Norman conquest in 1066. This was because the Norman duke in the tenth and the first half of the eleventh centuries learned how to use feudal institutions in a special way to increase the power of the central government, which was not the way feudalism had worked in the later Carolingian empire.All social systems are founded upon a set of assumptions about what is good and what is bad in human relationships, and these assumptions have a tendency to be perpetuated and adhered to long after the precise social needs they served have ceased to operate. The values that served feudalism and the feudal lords were these three: first, that military prowess is a social good because only the strong man can provide peace and protection; second, that the bonds of personal loyalty are the sinews of the social order and onlythe relationship of one man to another can give sanction to political and legal obligations; third, that these bonds of loyalty are arranged in an ascending and descending order, stretching; through society and on to heavenly regions.The third of these assumptions allowed feudal relationships to receive the approval of ecclesiastics trained in the old doctrines of hierarchy. Indeed, it is likely that the churchman gave a much greater emphasis to this feudal value and made hierarchy both more central and more rigid in feudal society. The second of these assumptions, that of loyalty, was useful to ambitious kings and dukes who sought to impose a sovereign power over landed society in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The ideal of loyalty also inspired, to a degree, a new sensitivity to personal relationships, a sentimental view of the attachment of one human being to another; it became a constituent of the medieval idea of love and an inspiration for the romantic movement of the twelfth century. The first assumption, on the social value of military prowess, became transmuted into the ideal of aristocratic leadership in society and the belief, which prevailed into the twentieth century, that the man on horseback was the natural leader, whereas others stood and served. Feudal recognition of the intrinsic goodness of physical strength was perpetuated in the moral sanction of the stronger over the weaker that became essential to the operation of the European states system from the twelfth century to the twentieth. And this vestige of feudality still lingers to work its cursed mischief and grind down the arts of peace and deprive mankind of peace and happiness.