Questions: Respond to the following in your notebook.
Feudalism is the term for the social pattern that developed fully in Western Europe in the last two hundred years of the Early Middle Ages (800-1000). The root of the word comes from the Old German word for land--feud, and, in the world of feudalism, land is the key. Your position in society was determined by your relationship to the land.
Origins. The earliest origins of the system trace back to the end of the Roman Empire. As Germanic tribes invaded the empire and people fled the cities, they sought safety on the old latifundias of the powerful nobles. Over the next several hundred years, powerful German chieftains attempted to create small kingdoms in Western Europe. The Franks, and the most powerful of their kings, Charlemagne, were the most successful at kingdom making. New invasions by the Viking from the north and others, after the year 800, caused even these kingdoms to collapse. Out of this chaos, full-blown feudalism developed.
Development. Feudalism developed in response to the inability of Germanic kings to defend their kingdoms. Slowly, kings began to grant large sections of their kingdoms to powerful lords in return for military service to the king. In granting away these large tracts of land, however, the kings lost control of their kingdoms, lost power, and became mere figureheads. The great lords, in turn, would give away parts of their land to lesser lords, called vassals, who would promise loyalty and military service in return for that land. The basic arrangement of a feudal society is the exchange of land for service, in the case of lords, the exchange is for military service. The king expected his greater lords to provide an army to defend the kingdom when the king asked. The greater lords expected the lesser lords to fight for them and to provide knights for his army. By the year 1,000 in France, where feudalism was most developed, the king was no more powerful than one of his greater lords, and France was divided and subdivided into over 10,000 tiny feudal "kingdoms."
One significant consequence of a feudal system was almost constant warfare among feudal lords. Since land was so valuable, disputes over land constantly broke out. Kings and greater lords called on their lesser lords to fight for their land rights. A significant source of confusion occurred when lesser lords accepted land from several greater lords. Now who were they loyal too? The were supposed to be loyal to the first or "liege" lord; often they were not. Feudal relationships could be very confusing. Loyalty was supposed to be the highest value in the code of chivalry, the code of honor among feudal lords. It was a value often violated.
Terms.
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Agriculture was the foundation
of medieval society and the overwhelming majority of people were farmers.
Feudal lords drew their wealth from the labor of peasants who lived on their
land. This practice had its roots in Roman times. In the last years of the
Roman Empire, townsmen fled to the relative safety of the countryside, and
many peasants had given their land to lords in return for protection.
While
feudalism was essentially a governmental and military system, the manorial
system became the economic system. The manor, a large estate
that included the manor house, pastures, fields, and a village, became the
economic unit of the early Middle Ages, just as the fief had become the
governmental unit. While a small fief had only one manor, large fiefs had
several.
Because no central authority or organized trade existed, each manor tried
to be self-sufficient—or able to produce everything it
needed. Most manors produced their own food, clothing, and leather goods.
Only a few items, such as iron, salt, and tar, were imported.
Each lord owned
at least one manor; great lords owned several. The Church also held many
manors. Neither the lord who warred nor the priest who prayed performed
economically productive work. The
lord kept about one-third of the manor land, called the domain,
for himself. The toil of peasant tenant farmers made their way of
life possible. The
peasants paid to use the remaining two-thirds of the land. In exchange
they gave the lord part of their crops, worked on his land, performed other
services on the manor—usually two or three days of unpaid labor on the
manor—, and paid many kinds of taxes.
Peasants lived in the manor village—a typical manor village, usually on
a stream chat furnished water-power for its mill, had houses clustered
together for safety a short distance away from the manor house or castle.
The land of the manor extended out from the village and included vegetable
plots, cultivated fields, pastures, and forests.
The cultivated land of the manor was often divided into three large
fields for growing grain. Only two of the three fields were planted each
year so that the third field could lie fallow, or unplanted, to regain its
fertility. This is called the three-field system of
agriculture. The three large fields in turn were divided into small strips.
Peasants had their own strips in each field.
Most
of the peasants on a manor were serfs, or people bound to the
land. Serfs could not leave the land without the lord's permission, and the
price of his permission was usually more money than they could afford. Serfs
were not slaves, for they could not be sold away
from the land. If the land was granted
to a new lord, the serfs became the new lord's tenants. As long as
serfs carried out their duties to their lord, they could live in their
cottages and farm their strips of land. Open rebellion by serfs was rare
until the fourteenth century. Lords simply had too much military and legal
power for serfs to oppose them effectively. Moreover, the serfs—like
everyone else—believed that God determined a person's place in society.
God decided that some should be nobles and others, serfs. Such an attitude
led serfs to accept their position in life and to place their hopes for a
better life on the world to come.
Manors had some free people who rented land from the lord. Freemen
included the skilled workers necessary to the village economy, such as
millers, blacksmiths, and carpenters. Most villages also had a priest to
provide for the spiritual needs of the villagers.
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