4.1 An Introduction to Feudalism

This chapter studies the social, economic and political changes that transformed western Europe between roughly 900 and 1500 CE. After the western half of the Roman Empire dissolved in the fifth century, fresh waves of Germanic people from eastern and central Europe — Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks, Angles and Saxons — settled in the former imperial provinces of Italy, Spain, France and Britain. With no single ruler able to keep the peace, small wars became frequent. Local communities had to gather their own resources and find their own protectors, and so social organisation came to be centred on the control of land. The new order drew on Roman administrative habits, on Germanic tribal customs and on a shared Christian faith. Christianity^?, the official religion of the Roman Empire from the fourth century, survived the empire's collapse and steadily spread further into central and northern Europe; the Church soon became one of the largest landholders and one of the most powerful political forces in the continent.

The chapter focuses on the famous three orders^? — three social categories of Christian priests, landowning nobles and peasants. The shifting relations among these three groups shaped European history for several centuries. Over the last hundred years European historians have studied this period in remarkable detail, often village by village, because medieval communities left a great deal of material — land deeds, price registers, court records, parish registers of births, marriages and deaths, inscriptions about traders' associations, songs and stories about festivals and community life. From these sources historians can recover both slow trends (such as long-run growth in population) and short bursts of crisis (such as peasant revolts).

The term feudalism^? itself is used by historians to describe the economic, legal, political and social relationships that prevailed in medieval Europe. It is derived from the German word feud, meaning "a piece of land", and refers to the kind of society that took shape first in medieval France and later in England and southern Italy. Economically, feudalism was a system of agricultural production based on the relationship between lords and peasants: peasants cultivated their own holdings as well as the lord's fields; in return for labour-services they received military protection. The lord also enjoyed extensive judicial power over his peasants. Feudalism therefore went well beyond economics — it shaped social and political life as well. Its roots ran back to practices of the late Roman Empire and the age of the Frankish king Charlemagne^? (742–814 CE), but feudalism as a fully established way of life across large parts of Europe really emerged from the eleventh century onwards. The "medieval era^?" itself refers to the period of European history between roughly the fifth and the fifteenth centuries.

4.1.1 France and England — The Geography of the Story

Two regions sit at the centre of this chapter. The first is Gaul — a province of the old Roman Empire — with two long coastlines, mountain ranges, broad rivers, deep forests and large fertile plains well suited to agriculture. From the sixth century the Franks^?, a Germanic tribe, gave their name to Gaul, turning it into France. Frankish kings became Christian and forged strong ties with the Church. In 800 CE the Pope crowned King Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor to secure his support for the papacy — much as the head of the Eastern Church in Constantinople enjoyed a similar relationship with the Byzantine emperor.

The second region is England, lying just across a narrow channel of sea. In the eleventh century England (then linked with Scotland) was conquered by a duke from the French province of Normandy — William, who became William I. The intertwined fates of France and England, joined by conquest and divided by war, run through the rest of the chapter.

4.2 The Three Orders — A Society Imagined as a Body

French priests in the eleventh century explained their world through a striking idea: people were members of one of three "orders" depending on the work they did. As a contemporary bishop put it, "Here below, some pray, others fight, still others work…". The three orders were therefore the clergy, the nobility and the peasantry. Each owed something to the other two; together, in theory, they made up a single Christian commonwealth willed by God.

4.3 The First Order — The Clergy and the Catholic Church

The Catholic Church was a state within the state. It had its own laws, owned vast estates given to it by rulers, and could levy its own taxes. It thus did not depend on the king. At its head sat the Pope^?, who lived in Rome. Christians across western Europe were guided by the bishops in the cathedrals and the clerics in the parishes — together they made up the first order. Most villages had their own church, where every Sunday people gathered for prayer and to listen to the priest's sermon^?.

Not everyone could become a priest. Serfs were banned. The physically challenged were also excluded. Women could not become priests at all. Men who became priests could not marry. The senior clergy — the bishops — were a kind of religious nobility. Like great lords with vast landed estates, the bishops too enjoyed enormous lands and lived in grand palaces. The Church was entitled to one-tenth of everything peasants produced from their land each year, a tax called the tithe^?. Money also flowed in through endowments — gifts made by rich people for their own salvation and for the welfare of their deceased relatives in the afterlife.

Many of the Church's own ceremonies copied formal customs of the feudal elite. Kneeling to pray, with hands joined and head bowed, was an exact replica of the way a knight conducted himself when taking vows of loyalty to his lord. Even the use of the title "Lord" for God was a borrowing from feudal vocabulary. The religious and the lay worlds of feudalism therefore shared many symbols and habits.

4.3.1 Monks, Monasteries and the Benedictine Rule

Apart from the parish Church, devout Christians had a second kind of organisation: the monastery^? or abbey^?. Some deeply religious people chose to live separated from the world, in religious communities often founded far from human settlement. Two of the most famous early monasteries were the one set up by St Benedict in Italy in 529 CE and the abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, founded in 910 CE. The very word "monastery" comes from the Greek monos, meaning "someone who lives alone". An "abbey" comes from the Syriac abba, meaning "father"; an abbey was governed by an abbot^? (or abbess, if it was a community of women).

Monks took vows to remain in the abbey for life and to spend their time in prayer, study and manual labour, such as farming. Unlike priesthood, monastic life was open to both men and women: men became monks, women became nuns. Almost every abbey was single-sex — men and women lived in separate houses. Like priests, monks and nuns did not marry. From small communities of ten or twenty, monasteries grew into large institutions with several hundred members, big buildings and landed estates, and often attached schools, colleges and hospitals. They also contributed to the development of the arts. Hildegard, mentioned earlier, was a gifted musician who developed the practice of community singing of prayers in church. From the thirteenth century, some groups of monks called friars^? chose not to be based in a monastery — instead they moved from place to place preaching to ordinary people and living on charity.

4.3.2 Doubt, Dissent and Friars

By the fourteenth century, doubts had begun to grow about the value of monasticism itself. In England the poet William Langland (in Piers Plowman, c. 1360–70) contrasted the comfortable lives of some monks with the "pure faith" of "simple ploughmen, shepherds and poor common labourers". The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, painted comic portraits of a nun, a monk and a friar — a sign that the public was no longer prepared to take the religious orders entirely on trust.

4.3.3 The Church and Society — Festivals, Parishes and Tithe

Although Europeans had become Christian, they still kept many of their old beliefs in magic and folk traditions. Christmas and Easter became major Christian dates from the fourth century. The birth of Christ, fixed on 25 December, replaced an older pre-Roman solar festival; Easter — marking the crucifixion of Christ and his rising from the dead — replaced an older lunar festival of spring. On that day villagers traditionally walked round their lands; once they were Christianised they continued to do so but called the area a parish^?, the territory under one priest's care. Overworked peasants welcomed these "holy days", which became "holidays": days meant for prayer often turned into feasting and fun.

Pilgrimage was an important part of every Christian's life. Many people travelled long distances to reach shrines of martyrs or great cathedrals — pilgrim journeys vividly described by Chaucer in the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales, which list pilgrims of every kind making their way to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury.

4.3.4 Hildegard of Bingen and Women in Monasteries

Although women were excluded from priesthood, the convent gave them an unusual degree of authority. The abbess of a major monastery wielded power over land, finances, education and worship — sometimes rivalling that of a bishop. The most remarkable medieval abbess was Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), abbess of a Benedictine community on the Rhine. Hildegard was a composer, theologian, natural philosopher, healer and adviser to kings and popes. She wrote works on medicine and natural science, composed sacred music still performed today, and described mystical visions in three major books of theology. As we saw above, she also offered her own justification for the inequality of the three orders.

4.3.5 The Crusades

From the late eleventh century onwards, the Church organised a series of long-distance military campaigns called the Crusades^?, urging Christian knights to march east and recapture the holy city of Jerusalem from Muslim rulers. The First Crusade was launched in 1095 by Pope Urban II. Knights from across western Europe took the cross — promised remission of their sins in return for the journey. The Crusades produced new contacts between western Europe, the eastern Mediterranean and the Islamic world, encouraged trade with West Asia, and gave rise to military religious orders such as the Templars and Hospitallers. They also revealed how fully the Church could direct the energies of the second order — the nobility — towards goals defined by Rome.

4.4 The Second Order — The Nobility

Priests placed themselves at the top of the order; nobles followed in second place. In reality, the nobility had a central role in social life because they controlled the land. This control rested on a practice called vassalage^?.

The kings of France were tied to the rest of society through vassalage — a custom rooted in older Germanic practice. Big landowners, the nobles, were vassals of the king; peasants in turn were vassals of those landowners. In the central ceremony, a nobleman accepted the king as his seigneur (senior, lord) and the two made a mutual promise: the seigneur would protect the vassal, who in turn would be loyal to him. The English word "lord" comes from a word meaning "one who provides bread" — the lord was thus literally the bread-giver.

The relationship was sealed by elaborate rituals and oaths sworn on the Bible in a church. At the ceremony the vassal received a written charter, a staff, or even a clod of earth as a symbol of the land granted to him by his master. The noble enjoyed a privileged status: he had absolute control over his property, in perpetuity; he could raise troops called "feudal levies"; he held his own courts of justice and could even coin his own money.

The noble was the lord of all the people settled on his land. He owned vast tracts of land that contained his own dwellings, his private fields and pastures, and the homes and fields of his tenant-peasants. His house was called a manor^?. His private lands (the demesne) were cultivated by peasants, who were also expected to fight as foot-soldiers when required, in addition to working their own farms.

4.4.1 The Manorial Estate

A lord lived in his own manor-house. He also controlled villages — some lords controlled hundreds of villages — where peasants lived. A small manorial estate could contain a dozen families; larger ones might include fifty or sixty. Almost everything needed for daily life was found on the estate: grain was grown in its fields; blacksmiths and carpenters maintained the lord's implements and repaired his weapons; stonemasons looked after his buildings; women spun and wove fabric; children worked in the lord's wine-presses. The estate also had extensive woodlands and forests where the lord hunted, and pastures for his cattle and horses. There was a church on the estate and a castle for defence. From the thirteenth century, some castles were enlarged for use as residences for a knight's family. In England, castles were practically unknown before the Norman Conquest of 1066; under feudalism they developed as centres of political administration and military power.

Despite all this, a manor could not be completely self-sufficient. Salt, millstones and metalware had to be brought in from outside. Lords who wanted a luxurious lifestyle and were keen to buy rich furnishings, musical instruments and ornaments not produced locally had to obtain these from elsewhere. Trade therefore continued, even in the most "self-contained" countryside.

4.4.2 The Knights and the Fief

From the ninth century onwards, frequent local wars made the older system of amateur peasant-soldiers inadequate. What was now needed was good cavalry — heavy armoured horsemen. This requirement gave rise to a new social group, the knights^?. Knights were bound to lords just as lords were bound to the king. The lord granted the knight a piece of land called a fief^? and promised to protect it. The fief could be inherited.

The fief might extend to between 1,000 and 2,000 acres or more, including a house for the knight and his family, a church and other buildings to lodge his dependants, plus a watermill and a wine-press. As on the feudal manor, the fief's land was cultivated by peasants. In return the knight paid his lord a regular fee and promised to fight for him in war. To maintain their fighting skill, knights spent part of every day fencing and practising combat tactics with dummies. A knight might serve more than one lord, but his foremost loyalty was to his own lord.

In France from the twelfth century onwards, minstrels travelled from manor to manor singing songs that told stories — partly historical, partly invented — about brave kings and knights. In an age when not many people could read and manuscripts were few, these travelling bards were very popular. Many manors had a narrow balcony above the great hall where the household gathered for meals — the "minstrels' gallery" — from which singers entertained the nobles while they feasted.

4.5 Putting It Together — A Society Locked in Place

By the close of the eleventh century the bones of the feudal world were everywhere visible across western Europe. The Pope and his bishops bound the spiritual world together. Kings, dukes and counts in their castles bound the political world together through interlocking oaths of homage and fealty. Peasants on the manor produced the food that kept everyone fed. Each of the three orders had its place, its duty and its prayers; movement between them was rare. Yet, as we shall see in the next part, this apparently unchanging society was already changing. Climate, agricultural technology, population growth and the rise of new towns would soon begin to transform the inherited order.