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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
The great hall at Penshurst Place, Kent, built in the mid 14th century. 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. It also varied over time, as a lord took more land into his demesne, or divided demesne land amongst his serfs and free peasants. Costumes of slaves or serfs, from the sixth to the twelfth centuries collected by H. Manors usually attempted to be as self-sufficient as possible. The work of making and repairing equipment, for example, was carried out as far as practicable within the manor.
Towns were few and far between, and transporting goods to and from them was slow and expensive, so self-sufficiency was a sensible aim. It is common in school text books for feudalism to be depicted as a pyramid — and we have done the same here. However, it should be borne in mind that feudalism could give rise to fiendish complexity; spaghetti might represent it better. We have seen how the original manors covered singe villages, but often came later to be scattered over several.
As in this case, most complexities arose after fief-holding had become hereditary. For example, a vassal of one lord might marry the heiress of the vassal of another lord, thus acquiring obligations to a different lord. What happened if these lords became enemies?
This was not an unusual situation. The most famous case is probably that of the dukes of Burgundy, who in the 15th century held lands from both the king of France and the emperor of Germany , who were hereditary rivals. Things could get more complicated still. The counts of Anjou, vassals of the king of France , acquired by marriage, inheritance and a good bit of skulduggery several surrounding fiefs including of Aquitaine and Normandy.
They thus came to rule more of France than his nominal superior, the king — and this was before he inherited the throne of England as king Henry II reigned Fiefs and manors were essentially blocks of land from which income could be drawn, in the form of a share in the labor of the peasantry, or in the produce of the soil, or of money revenue from these. It was a system for a rural economy. This made sense when, in the centuries after the fall of Rome, towns were few and far between, and those which did still exist were tiny.
The inhabitants of towns did not fit neatly into the feudal scheme of things. Many early towns were located in areas between manors. They formed no part of any fief and were answerable directly to the king. The rise of powerful monarchs in France, Spain, and England broke down the local organization. Another disruptive force was the increase of communication, which broke down the isolated manor, assisted the rise of towns, and facilitated the emergence of the burgess class.
This process was greatly accelerated in the 14th cent. The system broke down gradually. It was not completely destroyed in France until the French Revolution , and it persisted in Germany until and in Russia until Many relics of feudalism still persist, and its influence remains on the institutions of Western Europe. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. All rights reserved.
Enter your search terms:. FEN Learning is part of Sandbox Networks, a digital learning company that operates education services and products for the 21st century. Bennett, Judith M. Warren Hollister. Medieval Europe: A Short History.
Boston: McGraw-Hill, Visiting The Met? Viking Sword. Aquamanile in the Form of a Mounted Knight. A Knight of the d'Aluye Family.
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