Honors or rights, as well as land, could be granted as fiefs. This formal procedure served to cement the personal relationship between lord and vassal after the ceremony the lord invested the vassal with the fief, usually by giving him some symbol of the transferred land. The vassal then swore an oath of fealty, vowing to be faithful to the overlord and to perform the acts and services due him. The fief was formally acquired following the ceremony of homage, in which the vassal, kneeling before the overlord, put his hands in those of the lord and declared himself his man, and the overlord bound himself by kissing the vassal and raising him to his feet. The Fief The feudal method of holding land was by fief the grantor of the fief was the suzerain, or overlord, and the recipient was the vassal. Under the manorial system the peasants, laborers, or serfs, held the land they worked from the seigneur, who granted them use of the land and his protection in return for personal services (especially on the demesne, the land he retained for his own use) and for dues (especially payment in kind). The political economy of the system was local and agricultural, and at its base was the manorial system. Beneath him was a hierarchy of nobles, the most important nobles holding land directly from the king, and the lesser from them, down to the seigneur who held a single manor. In an ideal feudal society (a legal fiction, most nearly realized in the Crusaders' Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem), the ownership of all land was vested in the king. Although some men held their land in alod, without obligation to any person, they were exceptions to the rule in the Middle Ages. Feudalism was based on contracts made among nobles, and although it was intricately connected with the manorial system, it must be considered as distinct from it. Characteristics of European Feudalism The evolution of highly diverse forms, customs, and institutions makes it almost impossible to accurately depict feudalism as a whole, but certain components of the system may be regarded as characteristic: strict division into social classes, i.e., nobility, clergy, peasantry, and, in the later Middle Ages, burgesses private jurisdiction based on local custom and the landholding system dependent upon the fief or fee. Although analogous social systems have appeared in other civilizations, the feudalism of Europe in the Middle Ages remains the common model of feudal society. The term feudalism is derived from the Latin feodum, for "fief," and ultimately from a Germanic word meaning "cow," generalized to denote valuable movable property. We must now direct our attention to the study of this second aspect of social organization then we shall at last be in a position to attempt to answer the question which it has been the main purpose of our inquiry to elucidate, namely: by what fundamental characteristics, whether or not peculiar to one phase of Western evolution, have these few centuries deserved the name which thus sets them apart from the rest of European history? What portion of their heritage has been transmitted to later times ?įeudalism feudalism (fyōō´dəlĬzəm), form of political and social organization typical of Western Europe from the dissolution of Charlemagne's empire to the rise of the absolute monarchies. From the second feudal age onwards, not only were the orders of society more and more strictly differentiated there was also an increasing concentration of forces round a few great authorities and a few great causes. Moreover, above the confused mass of petty chiefdoms of every kind, there always existed authorities of more far-reaching influence and of a different character. Men were also divided into groups, ranged one above the other, according to occupation, degree of power or prestige. (How such a distinctive structure arose and developed, what were the events and the mental climate that influenced its growth, what it owed to borrowings from a remoter past, we have endeavoured to show in Book I.) In the societies to which the epithet ‘feudal’ is traditionally applied, however, the lives of individuals were never regulated exclusively by these relationships of strict subjection or direct authority. THE most characteristic feature of the civilization of feudal Europe was the network of ties of dependence, extending from top to bottom of the social scale.
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