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History of Feudalism

FEUDALISM (Fr. féodalisme, Sp., Portug., It. feudalismo, from ML. feudum, Eng. feud, from OHG. fihu, AS. feoh, cattle, Lat. pecu, Skt. paśu, cattle). The name used for a group of customs, embracing the political and economic sides of life, which gave to society its characteristic shape during the greater part of the Middle Ages. The rise of the institutions which we call feudal became noticeable shortly after the Germanic invasions, and they attained their highest development from the ninth to the thirteenth century. With the beginning of the fourteenth century certain nonfeudal institutions appeared, and gradually a more modern type of society began to take form. These changes, slow at first, became more rapid and fundamental until eventually the feudal system, as such, was quite overthrown, though certain customs lingered far down into modern times and in some few respects still exercise considerable influence in various countries. Feudalism, therefore, must be studied in its origin, its period of highest development, and its decline; and in the examination of the chief features of the system attention must be paid to the way in which it affected (1) personal relationship, (2) landholding, and (3) the distribution of political power.

The Origins of Feudalism. 1. Personal Relationship.- Amid the disorders and insecurity of the early mediæval period it became very usual for men of low rank and little strength to "commend" themselves to men of higher position and greater power. This "commendation" might be to the King, in which case an additional and closer bond was created than that between ruler and subject; or it might be to a noble or a church corporation, or even merely from one freeman to another. Commendation tended to become a formal procedure accompanied by an oath of fealty and service from the inferior to the superior. The relationship thus established was known as that between vassal and suzerain, or man and lord, and the ceremony as "homage and fealty."

2. Landholding Relationships.- Landed estates were frequently granted by kings, or other possessors of extensive landed property, to persons who should hold these estates for their own use, but should, in acknowledgment of having received them, perform certain services, or make certain payments, to the grantor. In early times such grants do not seem to have been considered as hereditary, but they tended to become so. Rulers obtained lands to be thus disposed of by conquest and confiscation; men of lower rank received such extensive royal grants that they were in a position to make similar grants on a smaller scale to others. During the same period many holders of land in full ownership gave it to powerful persons or bodies, especially to the Church, taking it back for possession during their own lifetime or during the lives of a certain number of heirs. Such a grant was called a "precarium" and was often held in practically hereditary tenure by the original donor and his successors, although the ultimate title to it was vested in a third person or corporation. In these ways there came to be but little land that was actually owned by the person who occupied it, and but little that was directly claimed by the person who received payments from it. Land had come to be "held" by one man from another, and land "tenure" had taken the place of land "ownership." A piece of land held in this way was called at first a "benefice," later a "fief," a "fee," or a "feud"; the procedure by which it was granted was known as "enfeoffment," and the relation between the person holding it and the person from whom it was held as that between landlord and tenant. See FEE; FEOFFMENT.

Next, it is to be noted that the personal bond of homage and fealty and the relation of landlord and tenant tended to run together, Men usually commended themselves to the lord from whom they held their land; a person receiving a fief from the King was both his tenant and his vassal; and when a landholder enfeoffed a tenant he usually received an oath of homage and fealty from him. The conception of vassalage and tenancy became inseparably bound up together. Sometimes, it is true, a fief consisted of something else than land. It might be an office or even a regular income, held on condition of fealty, homage, and feudal service; but after the tenth century, in most western countries of Europe, the possession of any considerable holding of land without the accompaniment of personal homage and fealty to some lord was almost unknown.

3. Powers of Government.- Large monarchies, under the conditions existing in the early Middle Ages, could only be governed by placing their different sections or provinces under governors or viceroys. In the Empire of the Franks these were known as counts; in England, as ealdorsmen; later, earls. When the King was a strong man, and his government well organized and orderly, the governors were appointed officials with limited powers and a temporary, or at most a life, tenure of office. During the disorders of the ninth and tenth centuries, however, the provincial rulers obtained extensive local powers. They exercised such functions of government as taxation, the raising of military forces, the administration of justice, and the coinage of money. Moreover, their positions came to be looked upon and treated as hereditary. In many cases their power was strengthened by the fact that the district over which the count ruled bad been occupied earlier by an independent race or tribe and had been brought into the monarchy only by conquest or annexation. The surviving race feeling, therefore, now attached itself to the local ruler. In addition the semi-independent political powers of these rulers over whole districts were closely combined with the personal and landholding relationships already described. Men naturally commended themselves to the nearest powerful lord and performed the services due for their land to him. Ecclesiastical bodies, bishoprics, and abbeys, which were the holders of such a large proportion of the land, and whose estates were considered as being held feudally, were naturally dependent upon the good will of the local ruler to defend them from the attacks of others and to refrain from aggression upon them himself. These rulers also had lands in their possession which they granted out as fiefs to be held from themselves by persons who were thus alike their subjects, their tenants, and their vassals. Thus, in the case of these great lords of whole districts, political powers, the rights of a feudal landlord, and personal lordship were inseparably combined. It is this close union of the powers included under the modern conception of government with a system of landholding and with personal relations of fealty that forms the fundamental character of feudalism and lies at the base of the legal institutions of the Middle Ages. In the great lordships, at first, a fief involved not only the possession of land and of personal claims and duties, but of most of the important rights of government over the persons dwelling on the land.

In the course of time the same conditions came to prevail in a partial degree in smaller lordships too. When the King gave away land, he frequently granted to the new holder all kinds of claims which he possessed over the people dwelling on the land. In the ninth and tenth centuries, e.g., the King in many cases, especially in land granted to the Church, promised that royal officials should not intrude, in the future, upon the land for purposes of taxation, administration of justice, or military levy. This left it open to the landholder to exercise those rights upon his tenants, who thus became practically his subjects as well. Such royal grants were known as "grants of immunity," or "immunities." In England similar grants were made in late Anglo-Saxon times, reciting the privileges of "sac and soc," "toll and team," and other franchises now imperfectly understood. Sometimes only partial rights of government were given in the immunities, as where the King granted all pecuniary profits from court jurisdictions over a certain district, but did not give any other powers. Ultimately, as feudal conditions became so nearly universal, it was considered that landholding in itself involved the possession of certain political rights over the tenants of the land, the extent of these rights being dependent on the customs, or circumstances of each particular case; and in this manner, in the lower as well as in the higher grades of holding of landed estates, there was the same union of proprietorship of the land, lordships over vassals, and rights of sovereignty over inhabitants. In the creation of this complex mass of personal and territorial relations, there was much that was a matter of voluntary choice, but still more that was the result of the exercise of compulsion. The early Middle Ages were a period of violence and disorder, and feudalism was rather a resultant from the conflict of different forces than any planned or logical scheme. Nevertheless a certain equilibrium was reached, If it was only the recognition of the common interests of oppressor and oppressed, of the powerful and the weak; in spite of a thousand variations, from country to country, from estate to estate, from person to person, there was a certain amount of uniformity. It is this degree of consistency which has suggested and partially justified the use of the term "feudal system," and, taking it in this sense, it is possible to give an approximate description of this general body of feudal customs.

The Feudal System. About the thirteenth century a number of treatises or codifications of feudal law and customs were drawn up, such as that of Beaumanoir and other similar Coutumiers in France, the Sachsenspiegel and Schwabenspiegel in Germany, and the Libri Feudorum in Italy. The appearance of these feudal codes, as well as other facts arising from a direct study of institutions, seems to point to the thirteenth century as the culminating period of feudalism, though the course of its development was very different in different countries. From the point of view of landholding, feudalism was most complete in England, owing doubtless to the occurrence, just in the constructive period of feudal institutions, of the Norman Conquest with its accompanying confiscations and regrants. Independent political powers were developed most completely in Germany or Italy, but, on the whole, feudalism may be said to have had its most symmetrical development in France, and it is there studied most satisfactorily as a complete system.

The base of the whole structure was the fief. A fief was a body of land, it might be made up of a large stretch of contiguous territory or of many separate tracts, or it might be a single estate, or even possibly a comparatively small number of acres in a certain manor or township, which a tenant held from his lord on condition of certain "feudal" services. When the fief was first granted, or when it was obtained by inheritance, or when a new lord succeeded to the suzerainty, a ceremonial "investiture" took place according to the traditional forms of the ceremony of fealty and homage. The tenant kneeled before the lord, placed his clasped hands between the hands of his lord, and in this attitude swore to be his man and to preserve fidelity to him in all things. The lord accepted the fealty and homage by kissing the tenant and inferentially promising him his protection and patronage, and by conveying to him, frequently by some symbolic action, the fief of which the vassal now became possessor.

The services owed by the tenant were of the following general classes: Military service was the duty of serving his lord in war with a certain number of men for a certain time; according to a widespread custom, once a year and for 40 days. So general was this duty that feudal tenure is frequently called military tenure. Court service was the twofold duty of coming when summoned to be a member of a body to decide in cases concerning one of his "peers" or fellow vassals of the same lord, and of submitting himself to the jurisdiction of such a court or of his lord. "Wardship" is the term applied to the right of the lord to assume the guardianship of the minor heir of a deceased tenant and the income from the estate during the minority, with the requirement, however, that the proper support and education of the heir be provided for from the estate. "Marriage" similarly was the right of the lord to control the choice of a husband for the heiress or the widow of a tenant and frequently of a wife for the heir. These last two forms of service reduced themselves practically to the imposition of a money fee proportionate to the value of the estate concerned. Military service also was frequently transformed into a money payment. There were other direct money payments, although usually at quite uncertain intervals. Of these, "relief" was a money fee due from an heir on the acquisition of his property. It was very commonly estimated at a sum equal to the value of one year's income of the estate. "Aids" were payments of an amount settled by custom under certain contingencies; the three most generally recognized were: (1) to defray the expenses of knighting the lord's eldest son; (2) of the marriage of his daughter; (3) of his ransom in case he were captured in war. These were not usually exacted by any feudal lord except the King, and by him only from his direct tenants or tenants in chief; but these in such a case might call upon their tenants to reimburse them for what they had paid to the King. Finally, "escheat" and "forfeiture" were the conditions in which the fief could be taken back by the lord- the former in the case where there was no heir, the latter in the case where the tenant had failed in the performance of his feudal obligations. "Subinfeudation" is a term used to describe the grant of a portion of a tenant's holding to another person, to hold from him on terms similar to those on which the first tenant holds from his lord. Generally speaking all the land of a country was held from the King by a comparatively small number of direct tenants, known as tenants in capite, or in chief. Many of these had very large fiefs, consisting of a vast number of estates. They granted some portions of their holdings, as lesser fiefs, to others, and these a still further portion to others below them, and so on till there were frequently six, eight, or more mesne or "mean" lords between the actual tenant of a certain estate and the King from whom it was ultimately held. All tenants below those in capite were known as "subtenants."

Feudal Society. The people were divided, according to contemporary writers, into three classes: those who did the fighting, the nobles; those who did the praying, the clergy; and those who did the work. The nobles were necessarily warriors. In order to be able to devote themselves to fighting, they were obliged to have an income sufficient for their support, and for equipping themselves and their followers when they went to battle. They were the holders of the estate, which will be described below when the workers are treated of. The rank of a noble depended upon the extent of his possessions. The rulers of provinces who could lead immense bands to war were designated as dukes, marquises, or counts. Below these were barons and knights, who held varying amounts of property which enabled some to lead large troops of followers to battle; others were under the necessity of serving in the following of some more wealthy noble, usually the one from whom they held their fief. Lowest of all were the squires, or attendants upon the knights, who at first had no land, but later acquired large estates. They formed the great mass of the nobility in the thirteenth century. The home of the noble was his castle. There he lived as a petty monarch, exercising authority over his vassals and tenants. When he was not engaged in war, he devoted himself to the management of his fief or to hunting. The management involved more than merely looking after the property; for the lord had the executive, judicial, and administrative powers all in his own hands. He had to hold courts, administer justice, and police his fief. Hunting was not merely a pastime, but one of the chief means of supplying food for the table.

The noble's wife (châtelaine) had charge of the household and superintended the work of the maids, who did the spinning and weaving, She had to know something of medicine and nursing, as the care of the wounded and sick devolved upon her. In her husband's absence she was obliged frequently to take his place in defending the castle or administering the fief. In her leisure moments she might embroider tapestries or play chess; such are the occupations generally depicted in the chansons; but in reality. the lady usually was busy with her household duties or in making clothes. The bunch of keys which she wore at her girdle was the fitting emblem of her duties. The education of the daughter of a noble was devoted wholly to giving her a knowledge of the duties which she would be expected to perform. (The education of the son has been discussed under CHIVALRY.) With the acquisition of wealth, after the twelfth century, games, minstrelsy, and tournaments became common. Prodigality was the prevailing characteristic of the age and soon impoverished most of the nobles. Even in this age, which is glorified by the poets, luxury and lack of comfort went hand in hand. At the gorgeous festivals in the castles many things which we now consider necessaries were wholly lacking.

The members of the clergy were originally either nobles or peasants. Their duty was to pray, and to care for the moral welfare of the society. As a rule, they were somewhat better educated than the other members of the community. The bishops and the abbots were great landholders and had the same responsibilities as the lay nobles, from whose life their own often differed but little. At the other extreme of the clerical body were the village priests, who had sprung from the people and shared the lot of the latter.

Those who did the work were the peasants. They were obliged to support not merely themselves, but also the nobles, by whom they were generally despised as inferiors. They lived usually in villages, about which stretched the lands which they cultivated. Some of the peasants were freemen; others, serfs. In fact, there were many gradations in social rank according to the amount of freedom which each class possessed. Here we can notice only the two general classes. The freemen held land from the lord of the fief which could not legally be taken from them. For this they paid a fixed rent which could not be increased by the lord. The serfs also had holdings of lands which could not be taken from them; but as payment for their lands they owed personal services and a part of their crops to the lord of the fief. He, or his representative, lived in a castle or fortified house a little apart from the village. Near the castle was a tract of land which the lord kept in his own possession, to be worked by the peasants for his profit. The remainder of the land was divided into long, narrow strips held by the peasants, no peasant, however, being allowed to hold a number of adjacent strips. The cultivation of the land was carried on in common by the holders of neighboring strips. The villagers were bound closely together by their common work and mutual responsibility, for each village was collectively responsible for the order within its limits. See MANOR.

Some of the villages grew into towns by the erection of fortresses or because of their favorable location for trade. The towns were, like the villages, the property of some lord or lords. But the townspeople were usually engaged in manufacturing or trade and thus obtained wealth. Consequently they were able to form effective associations (see GUILDS), which bought or usurped the rights which the lords possessed to collect payments from them. Many obtained charters of liberties and became almost self-governing communities. Individual merchants acquired wealth and vied with the nobles in luxury and ostentation. The members of the "third estate," as the townspeople came to be called, secured representation in the national assemblies and gradually emerged from their despised condition to become the real backbone of the nations.

Military Organizations. The element of personal relationship, which is the main characteristic of the feudal system, affected to a marked degree the organization even of the mediæval army. The fighting force under feudal conditions was marked by four main characteristics: (1) its members were a military class; (2) they fought as cavalry; (3) they were grouped in small irregular units; and (4) they fought almost without strategy or tactics. The first of these characteristics arose from the fact that all military service was provided as a return made by a vassal for the grant of land. When land was granted by kings and great nobles to vassals on condition of military service, the capacity to furnish this service when demanded was requisite, and therefore men with military training and equipment were a necessity. Military service was also doubtless a source of pleasure and a matter of pride, since the fighting class was also the landholding and the ruling class. (2), The fact that a feudal army was a mounted body arose from the nature of the times in which feudalism arose. In the ninth and tenth centuries Northmen, Magyars, and Saracens were in the various parts of Europe making rapid forays into the old settled regions, and to meet them successfully it was necessary to have a force that could move as rapidly as they. Therefore the counts and kings who were engaged in defending their territory against these invaders substituted mounted troops for the foot soldiers employed formerly in the civil wars or in the invasions of the Roman Empire. There were some foot troops usually included in a feudal army, but their employment in fighting was quite subordinate. An important exception to this, however, was the case of England, where the archers from a very early time constituted a valuable part of the field forces and repeatedly showed themselves superior to the chivalry of France. (3) The third characteristic, the lack of a hierarchy of leaders, and of a series of divisions and subdivisions of the parts of an army, arose from the way in which it was recruited. Each count, baron, or gentleman brought with him a smaller or larger group of knights and continued to act as the leader of his group during the fighting. The only regularity was in cases where the lesser knights and esquires were brought to an engagement in squads under the leadership of royal officials. But in most countries these were only a small part of the whole body of fighting men. Any such arrangement as the modern divisions of brigades, regiments, and companies was entirely unknown and inapplicable to the prevalent style of fighting. (4) With this organization, or lack of organization, there could be no system of tactics. There was usually some crude grouping of the whole body of troops into two or three "battles," under different leaders; but as a matter of fact the fighting men usually began the onset as soon as they came in sight of the enemy, and the engagement rapidly became a mere mêlée, or series of separate encounters. Fine personal valor and great personal skill and strength were often displayed in such contests; but the army as a whole was very ineffective. Similarly strategy or planning for a large campaign usually consisted simply in passing into the enemy's country and, while rather languidly seeking an engagement, burning and plundering the property of the enemy's subjects. The great feudal weapons were the lance and the battle-axe, with some use of the sword. (See BATTLE-AXE.) There was a development of body protection from the mere coat of mail and headpiece to full plate armor. See ARMOR; BREASTPLATE; CHAIN MAIL; HELMET; SHIELD.

Such feudal armies were characteristic of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. The Crusades made less change in warfare than might have been anticipated, the Western armies remaining much the same in organization. By the fourteenth century, however, some new  elements were grafted on this system. Hired bands of mercenaries were largely employed (see BRAIBANÇONS; CONDOTTIERI), and these were somewhat better organized and handled. Certain new troops were used, or old forms brought into a new prominence. The Swiss pikemen and halberdiers, fighting in a solid phalanx, frequently overwhelmed a more purely feudal army of armored cavalry, especially when the fighting was in a mountainous country. The English bowmen, armed with the rapidly discharged and effective longbow, were used in connection with heavy-armed cavalry and men at arms. Their rapid and deadly flight of arrows threw into confusion any stationary body of feudal troops opposed to them and put this body at the mercy of the knights whom the archers were supportIng. If the opposing cavalry force was charging, the arrows retarded their advance so much as to make its onset ineffective. The effort to meet these new conditions or to utilize them to the best advantage, along with the other influences of the time, gradually led to a diversification of tactics and eventually to the organization of the modern type of armies, The invention of gunpowder and its gradual introduction in warfare was rather an element in the development of modern military systems than a source of any sudden change.

The Decay of Feudalism. Feudalism was in its very nature anarchic.  The possession of military power was an incitement to its use in the settlement of private feuds; the imperfect subjection of vassals only slightly less powerful than their lords led to frequent resistance on their part; the absence of a strong central government, resulting from the possession of sovereign rights by the nobles, diminished the salutary power of enforcing order from above. The feudal castle, fortified and guarded, held in the name of the ruler, but frequently used as a base of operations to despoil and tyrannize over the surrounding country, and to wage petty warfare with other feudal nobles, was as characteristic an element of feudalism as were the legal and economic features which have been described above. During the latter part of the Middle Ages, from the thirteenth century onward, other institutions were being developed which did not fit into the feudal system. Town life, trade, and commerce, a well-to-do free middle class, and strong centralized monarchies grew up in the various western countries, so that feudalism became restricted to a less and less extensive proportion of human interests. Even in those fields in which feudalism had been dominant, in landholding, personal relations, and the powers of government, fundamental changes were taking place. Land came to be generally held on condition of mere pecuniary payments and became a subject of purchase, sale, and bequest. Contractual relations, and those of subject and sovereign, took the place of the personal bond of earlier times. Military powers, the right of taxation, the right of coinage, even the right of court jurisdiction, were withdrawn by the national governments from the feudal barons. During the thirteenth century in England, the fourteenth in France, and the fifteenth in Germany, the kings were able to put an end to private warfare and to reduce feudal jurisdiction to a definite inferiority to that of the King. Notwithstanding the decay of feudalism in these, respects, however, class distinctions based upon it, certain privileges of taxation, and peculiarities of landholding continued to exist until in France they were swept away by the Revolution, in 1789, while in Germany and England traces of their influence may still be found.