Dictionary:

feudalism

  (fyūd'l-ĭz'əm)

1. A political and economic system of Europe from the 9th to about the 15th century, based on the holding of all land in fief or fee and the resulting relation of lord to vassal and characterized by homage, legal and military service of tenants, and forfeiture.
2. A political, economic, or social order resembling this medieval system.

A system, common in Europe in the Middle Ages, where access to farm land was gained by service to the owner: the feudal lord. Initially, no money was involved in transactions between the serf and the lord, although the payment of cash in lieu of service became common in the later Middle Ages.

Feudalism was a system of society in which vassals acknowledged and fought for a lord in return for his protection for their persons and land tenure. The lord in turn paid allegiance to a king in return for his granting of their status, though this was very often a disputed relationship. Feudalism was thus a comprehensive social system which defined authority and property rights. It is most closely associated with France between the ninth and thirteenth centuries ad, but most parts of Europe experienced something like a feudal system at some stage of their history and there were similar social systems as far away as Japan. England was subjected to a strong version of the feudal system after the Norman invasion of 1066, but it was always opposed by and compromised with non-feudal English institutions.

In the developmental theories of history offered by Marx and others, feudalism is portrayed as a stage of history made necessary by the breakdown of the economic and military-political systems of antiquity, but itself necessarily spawning its successor, commercial capitalism.

— Lincoln Allison

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An abstract term commonly used to highlight those features believed to be characteristic of western European society during the Middle Ages. It is based on the Latin noun feudum (or feodum) which is now usually translated as ‘fief’ and understood to mean property held by a tenant in return for service. This notion of feudal tenure was used by 16th-cent. French legal historians as a key to understanding the origins of aristocratic rights in France in the centuries after the fall of Rome. In the 17th cent. Sir Henry Spelman argued that it was imported into England by the Normans. Hence Maitland's crack that it was Spelman who introduced the feudal system into England. The view that the Normans brought ‘feudalism’ to England, and that during the next two centuries French and English invaders and settlers took it to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, remains widely held—and also widely disputed. Since it is clear that rulers before 1066 expected political and military service from their landed élites, those historians who believe that William the Conqueror feudalized England have had to define feudalism in terms of precisely those features which they believe he introduced: castles, the ‘feudal quota’, and the ‘feudal incidents’.

One problem with feudalism is that the ‘facts’ on which it is said to be based—e.g. that fiefs became hereditary in 9th-cent. France, or that William I introduced ‘feudal incidents’ and the quota—are themselves contentious. So many different definitions of feudalism have been offered—or, worse, simply assumed—that a degree of confusion has been the inevitable result. The adjective ‘feudal’ is commonly used to denote almost any social system regarded as being oppressive or backward. In these circumstances it is not surprising that some American and British medieval historians believe that both word and concept are past their sell-by date.

Feudalism was not a term used in the medieval period; but the adjective ‘feodalis’ was found in the 12th c., and the noun ‘feudum’ went back to Carolingian times. Recent research on the vocabulary and institutions regarded as feudal has revealed so wide a range of often-conflicting ideas, both among medieval people and among historians, as to lead to a call for the abandonment of the category in historical research. But there can be no justification for abandoning the study of words actually used in the medieval period. And as for ‘feudalism’, it seems better to define it clearly and continue to use it, rather than to let a term that has played so rich a part in historiographical tradition become incomprehensible to future generations.

To economic historians, feudalism is the exploitation of dependent peasants' labour by an aristocratic landowning class. To lawyers and constitutional historians, it implies the enforcement of law and exaction of taxes, not by the state, but by landowners. And to social historians, it is a system of social relations dependent on vassalage and fiefs. Because these conceptions differ so markedly, it is scarcely surprising that there has long been disagreement as to when, if ever, feudalism existed. On the other hand, though not confined to the medieval world, all three types of feudalism were found at different times and to different degrees in medieval societies. And the conceptions continue to be useful in highlighting distinctive aspects of medieval life, even if historians no longer regard any of them as either adequate or precise descriptions. Though the two great authoritative studies of the subject, Marc Bloch's La Société féodale and F. L. Ganshof's Qu'estce que la féodalité?, now seem over-schematic, they still contain material of great value. It would be unfortunate if the search for ideal categories led to the destruction of the traditional ones before better had been established.

For those interested in medieval literature, feudalism usually refers to the networks of relationships between lords and their men that flourished in the High Middle Ages, and were extensively described in the chansons de geste. In Raoul de Cambrai, for example, Raoul's acceptance of Bernier into his household and his gift of arms to the youth creates an obligation on Bernier which transcends his duty to his mother. The poem investigates the point at which the lord's ill-treatment of his man justifies the man's disloyalty, and whether the slaying of a lord by his man should be regarded as treason, even after a formal renunciation of fealty. The connection between this theme and the historical realities either of the late 12th c., when the poem was composed, or of the 10th c., when the historical Raoul de Cambrai lived, has been much debated.

Historians are hampered by a relative absence of sources in their attempts to aid literary experts on so contentious a question. Lord-man relationships, which had their roots in both the Roman and the Germanic worlds, were commonplace in the Carolingian empire. Yet they apparently acquired new vigour and definition in the later 9th and the 10th c., which saw the development of a more militarized society, of castles, and of bands of professional soldiers employed to defend great churches and comital palaces, and tied to their employers' service by bonds of vassalage. Most historians would therefore agree with Marc Bloch in seeing this as the ‘first feudal age’. But because the social ties under investigation bound laymen, they were discussed in the vernacular and not recorded. The Latin texts that survive for the period before 1200 cast only a partial and sometimes distorting light on the issue. Nevertheless, because they are all we have apart from the vernacular poems, they have to be exploited. Most of these sources fall into two categories: didactic writings by the clergy, and charters or other legal documents.

There is a famous description of the obligations of a man towards his lord in the letter written in 1020 by Bishop Fulbert of Chartres to the duke of Aquitaine (see F. Behrends (ed.), The Letters and Poems of Fulbert of Chartres (1976), no. 51). Fulbert declared that a man must not injure his lord, must keep his secrets and his castles secure, must maintain his judicial rights and all his possessions, and must not hinder him in the fulfilment of any of his plans. The bishop concluded that these somewhat negative commands should be complemented by helpful counsel and support on all occasions. And in return the lord should similarly aid his man. What he described was a bond of mutual insurance between unequals. The letter was deliberately constructed in mnemonic form, proof that its writer regarded it as of immediate relevance.

Legal records offer a rather different picture. To take one example, Norman charters show aristocrats holding castles of the duke of Normandy in return for services that, by the beginning of the 12th c., were normally restricted to castle guard, campaigning, and suit of court, but in emergencies could be far more exacting; these castellans then enfeoffed knights on much the same terms to help them fulfil their duties. This relationship has often been regarded as classically feudal—binding members of the military aristocracy, defining military obligations, involving the bestowal of a fief held contractually, and taking for granted the existence of a court for thrashing out disputes between lords and their men. But in the Anglo-Norman realm this was combined with two other features that do not fit well into the classical picture: an army that was largely composed of soldiers paid for their services (i.e. not fighting in return for fiefs); and a ruler who not only maintained tight control over his tenants-in-chief but also intervened in the affairs of their tenants. In other words, feudalism here, far from conferring state rights on landowners, offered the state an alternative means of controlling its lesser subjects.

Fulbert's letter and the Norman charters mark the two poles of feudal discourse: the one concerned essentially with personal relations based on loyalty, very loosely and rather negatively defined; the other regulated by contract and law. It used to be thought that the first was expressed by a promise of fealty, suitable for free men, while the second demanded homage and an oath of vassalage, which in origin were exacted only from the unfree, though by the High Middle Ages they had largely lost their servile connotations. The difference was, therefore, not just a matter of perception, but of legal fact. But more intensive research on the lord-man relationship in various parts of France suggests that this is something of an oversimplification. Historians have tended to regard the south as less feudalized in the 11th and 12th c. than the north. But the content of lordship depended less on the form of oath demanded (which was determined by geography and custom), than on the ability of the lord to command obedience. And the contract was not usually irrevocable: an aggrieved man normally claimed the right publicly to renounce his loyalty to his lord, provided he also gave up any benefit he had received in return.

In the later 12th and the 13th c. French feudalism became more coherent, yet less relevant to spheres of life other than politics and law. The French kings tightened vassalic discipline, not only within the royal demesne, but also over their great princes, whom they constrained to submit to the decisions of the royal court [see Monarchy]. The princes likewise attracted to their courts local lords who had hitherto preferred independence. But at the same time the fiefs of knights and lesser lords became hereditary, thus depriving great men of an element of their dominion. And local courts increasingly came under the control of local communities. With greatly improved communications, the rapid intensification of the money economy, the development of a land market, increasing reliance on mercenaries for warfare, and the declining military significance of local defences, by 1300 the conditions in which feudalism had flourished were fast disappearing. [See also Feudal Dues].

[Jean Dunbabin]

Bibliography

• M. Bloch, La Société féodale (1939-40)
• F. L. Ganshof, Qu'est-ce que la féodalité? (1944):
• E. A. K. Brown, ‘The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe’, American Historical Review, 89 (1974), 1063-88

The origins of European feudalism are in eighth-century France, where estates were granted in exchange for military service. In England, feudalism evolved into the manorial system, in which a bound peasantry was subject to the rule of landlords. English feudalism was a system of rights and duties binding an upper class (nobility) in loyalty and responsibility to a king or lord in exchange for land (fiefs) worked by peasant labor (serfs). In exchange for their labor, peasants received the protection and rule of the landowner. This system benefited the nobility, as they essentially held public power privately, and the monarchy, to whom the nobles were bound in both civil and military capacities. The peasant class functioned as a slave labor force. Under feudalism, public authority, privilege, and power were tied to land ownership as much as lineage, and service to the state was rendered not out of duty to a throne or flag but out of individual relationships between the noble and the ruling lord.

In colonial America, feudalism began as an extension of the English manorial system. In addition to the Puritans and the Protestants, who came from England to the New World seeking religious freedom, some early colonists came to expand their estates by establishing feudal domains. While the Puritans and the Protestants established colonies in New England, the Anglicans established the proprietary colonies of Maryland, the Carolinas, and Delaware, and the Dutch brought similar systems to New Amsterdam (later New York) and New Jersey. Similar systems came to the Americas in the seigneurial system of New France (Canada) and the encomienda system of the Spanish colonies of Latin America.

The Dutch established a system of patroonship, closely resembling traditional feudalism, in which large tracts of land were granted by Holland's government to anyone bringing fifty or more settlers to the area. The settlers then became tenants subject to the landlord's rule. The system did not thrive, however, and eventually the English took over the Dutch colonies.

Proprietary colonies originally resembled the European feudal system only in part. New settlers were a mix of self-sufficient farmers who did not own their land and wealthy planters who brought serfs with them. These settlers brought feudalistic customs that strongly influenced the society, culture, and economy developing in the southern colonies, which, in true feudal style, were organized around a mercantile economy while the northern colonies slowly industrialized. Feudalism depends on plentiful free labor, and the southern colonies quickly began to rely on slavery. Despite the apparent conflict with America's emerging democracy, feudal elements such as local rule, a class system dictated by social customs, and an economy based on forced labor survived in the South well after the American Revolution (1775–1783). Slavery continued to be a linchpin of the U.S. economy until the Fourteenth Amendment ended the institution after the Civil War (1861–1865). Slavery was then replaced with sharecropping, a system in which former slaves and other poor farmers, though theoretically free, were still bound to landowners.

Bibliography

Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society: Social Classes and Political Organization. Translated by L. A. Manyon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Orren, Karen. Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

—Deirdre Sheets

According to the nearly unanimous consensus of Western scholars, pre - Soviet Russian scholars, and most Soviet scholars until the mid - to late - 1930s, feudalism never appeared in Russia. By the end of the 1930s, however, it became the entrenched dogma in the Soviet Union that Russia had experienced a feudal period. Post - Soviet Russian historians have been unable to rid themselves of this erroneous interpretation of their own history, in spite of Western arguments to the contrary that have been advanced since 1991.

The fundamental issue is whether the term "feudalism" has any meaning other than "agrarian regime," that is, that most of the population lives in the countryside and makes its living from farming and that most of the gross domestic product is derived from agriculture. If that is all it means, then Russia was feudal until after World War II. Most definitions of feudalism, however, involve other criteria as well, which, as defined by George Vernadsky and others, typically encompass: (1) a fusion of public and private law; (2) a dismemberment of political authority and a parcellization of sovereignty; (3) an interdependence of political and economic administration; (4) the predominance of a natural, i.e., nonmarket, economy; (5) the presence of serfdom. Presumably all of these criteria, not just one or two, should be present for there to be feudalism in a locality.

The first historian to posit the existence of feudalism in Russia was Nikolai Pavlov - Silvansky (1869-1908), who based his theory primarily on the political fragmentation of Russia from the collapse of the Kievan Russian state in 1132 to the consolidation of Russia by Moscow by the early sixteenth century. The basic problem with that thesis is that there was no serfdom until the 1450s. Moreover, there were no fiefs. In 1912 Lenin defined feudalism as "land ownership and the privileges of lords over serfs." Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868-1932) worked out a "Soviet Marxist" understanding of Russian feudalism and traced its origin and major cause (large landownership) to the thirteenth century. "Feudalism" was necessary to legitimize the October Revolution and Soviet power. According to Marx, human history went through the stages of (1) primordial/primitive communism;(2) slave - owning; (3) feudalism; (4) capitalism; (5) imperialism; (6) socialism; (7) communism. The fact that Russia in reality never experienced "stages" two through five made it difficult to claim that the October Revolution was historically inevitable and therefore legitimate. Inventing "stages" three through five was therefore politically necessary.

A major problem for the Soviets was that Russia never knew a slave - owning stage (as in Greece and Rome). This "problem" was worked out in the early 1930s by a Menshevik historian, M. M. Tsvibak (who was liquidated a few years later in the Great Purges), with the claim that Russia had bypassed the slave - owning period entirely, that feudalism arose about the same time as the Kievan Russian state during the ninth century, or even earlier. Boris Grekov, the "dean" of Soviet historians between 1930 and 1953 (he allegedly had no use for Stalin), earlier had alleged that Russia had passed through a slave - owning stage, but he took the Tsvibak position in the later 1930s, and that remained the official dogma to the end of the Soviet regime. As a result, nearly all of Russian and Ukrainian history was deemed feudal and succeeded by "capitalism" with the freeing of the serfs from seignorial control in 1861.

Bibliography

Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vernadsky, George. (1939). "Feudalism in Russia." Speculum 14:302-323.

—RICHARD HELLIE

Strictly speaking, feudalism refers to the medieval dependency/service relationship between lords and their vassals or to the political subordination and service of lesser lords to higher lords or princes. These medieval relationships faded in the early modern centuries as princes developed institutionally complex states and replaced unreliable feudal levies with mercenaries and, eventually, standing armies. Although the properties of lords and knights, called fiefs, often retained distinct laws that governed their transmission, feudalism in the strict sense survived only as a vestigial institution in the early modern centuries.

What most commentators and detractors called feudalism between 1500 and 1800 was technically lordship. Karl Marx and modern Marxist historians considered feudalism an oppressive economic system, a means of production. While feudalism in some settings assumed the appearances of an economic system, notably in the large noble and ecclesiastical estates of eastern Germany, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary that were worked by serf labor, feudalism was actually a much broader institution. It was both a fiscal system for the support of the governing classes and a system of local governance. One of the oldest and most durable institutions in European history, feudalism emerged in the early medieval centuries, reproduced and reshaped itself century after century, and spread into newly colonized regions. Retaining many of its medieval features until its violent demise in the wake of major political revolutions, feudalism survived in France until the Revolution of 1789 and in much of central and eastern Europe until the Revolutions of 1848.

Feudalism in the Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages, feudalism/lordship was the institutional and territorial expression of the unlimited governing authority of lords: princes, high aristocrats, bishops, and abbots. Lords exercised governing authority by birthright or by office, and the inhabitants of the lords' domains were their subjects. Feudalism expressed itself in many institutions, which, like a fine net, covered the entire landmass of urban centers, rural villages, mountain ranges, rivers, and roads. Feudalism was a fiscal system that supported the governing class. Lords in turn assigned part of their fiscal assets to agents as remuneration for their administrative tasks and to knights for military service. The fiscal burdens of feudalism took any form deemed suitable by the lords: payments in cash, in kind, in labor services, or in military services. There were direct taxes on men and land as well as a variety of indirect taxes such as tolls on rivers or roads and taxes assessed in markets and fairs. Lords collected taxes when property changed hands, mortuary fees when old tenants died, and entrance fees when new tenants assumed possession of landholdings. There were fees for the obligatory use of feudal grain mills, grape and olive presses, and ovens.

Feudalism was also a system of local governance. All-purpose agents of the lords, such as mayors in the villages and towns, not only collected the lord's taxes but supervised the communal assembly and administered justice with the cooperation of the most notable residents. Above the mayors there were intermediate agents such as provosts, then higher officials often called bailiffs, and a corresponding hierarchy of fiscal, judicial, and administrative offices. At the apex stood the lord with his household and central administration. Although kings and princes such as dukes and counts normally had more extensive and complex lordships than bishops, abbots, barons or lesser lords, these lordships were all remarkably similar.

Regional Patterns of Feudalism

Feudalism was absolutely unassailable in law in the early modern centuries. Normally the king or prince himself was the principal lord and still derived significant revenues from his feudal holdings. Rent rolls, urban and village charters, the day-to-day administrative, fiscal, and judicial records of lords, as well as the publicly verifiable custom of the lordships were upheld in both the lowliest and the highest courts. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, judicial officials of kings and princes held public inquiries and assembled written compilations of provincial customary law in France and in the western parts of the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy. In Prussia, the codifications appeared later in the eighteenth century. In England, manorial records served the same purpose.

By the beginning of the early modern era, about 1450 or 1500, feudalism already had a thousand years of history behind it in the core lands of the old Roman Empire and at least two or three hundred years in the most recently settled areas. At the end of the Middle Ages there were already distinct regional patterns of feudalism, which became more pronounced between 1500 and 1800. These regional variations affected feudalism mainly as a fiscal system, while feudalism as a system of local government survived almost everywhere in Europe. The feudal systems of Europe in their fiscal expressions fell into three broad zones that extended from west to east. These regional variations were the result of differences in economic development, population density, and political organization.

The first zone included England, the Netherlands, and the lower Rhineland area of Germany as well as France, Spain, and Italy. This first zone encompassed the most densely populated, the most economically developed, and the most politically advanced areas of Europe. The customary laws viewed the holdings under the feudal authority of lords as secure, usually perpetual, tenures. Consequently, those who actually possessed the land and used it had rights tantamount to property ownership. Lords could not dismiss their tenants and confiscate their property without due cause, such as the failure to pay annual dues for a number of years, and even then only with formal judicial procedures. Likewise, once established, the regular annual feudal taxes were normally viewed as immutable. Kings, princes, and central governments generally reserved for themselves the right to assess new taxes and to increase rates. In most of this part of Europe, serfdom had largely disappeared by 1500. The most common burdens of medieval serfdom had been restrictions on transfer of tenures except in the direct line of succession (mortmain), prohibition of marriage outside the lordship, mandatory residence, and unregulated taxes and labor services. Although remnants of these practices survived here and there, they were largely governed by the provisions of customary law.

Powerful economic forces that emanated from expanding urban centers and international trade produced significant changes in property ownership and land use in this zone in the early modern era, but these changes occurred slowly at a pace measured in generations and even centuries. Nobles, well-to-do urban residents, state officials, and even prosperous peasants bought perpetual tenures near cities, in rural villages, even in remote areas with easy access to commercial routes. From piecemeal purchases of land that often stretched over generations, they assembled large farms and vineyards that produced for the expanding markets. The physical appearance of the landscape changed as consolidated capitalist farms partially replaced peasant villages. Economically, the newly created or expanded farms of the better-off classes were market-oriented, capitalist enterprises worked by tenant farmers or sharecroppers on short-term leases.

Although the new owners of former peasant lands sometimes cleared their lands of the old feudal taxes by paying for their abolition, more often than not they simply stacked short-term market leases over the perpetual tenures. The network of feudal fiscal rights assigned to landed property were so deeply imbedded in law, especially when they belonged to ecclesiastical lords, charitable organizations, or towns, that the old feudal burdens survived but took on an increasingly archaic appearance. In heavily urbanized northern Italy, the partial elimination of the perpetual tenures and the more widespread stacking of short-term renewable leases over preexisting tenures were already very advanced by 1500. Elsewhere, the changes occurred mainly between 1500 and 1750 or 1800. Roughly half the land held by peasant perpetual tenants in 1500 passed into the hands of nonpeasants by the 1780s. In England this process was called enclosure. Enclosure began in the late Middle Ages and peaked in the eighteenth century. Normally, English enclosure brought with it the elimination of the feudal fiscal rights. In the areas of England unaffected by enclosure, feudal tenures, called copyholds, survived until 1922.

The second zone encompassed the most anciently settled core lands of the Holy Roman Empire, those areas that had been settled prior to the thirteenth century, with the notable exception of the lower Rhineland (Cologne, Mainz, the Rhenish Palatinate, etc.), which belonged to the first zone. This zone included Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden, Alsace, Hesse, Brunswick, Saxony, Thuringia, and Franconia. The determining factor here was the modesty or mediocrity of any force, whether demographic, economic, or political, that could have produced significant change. Although there was a dense network of rural villages, the cities and towns were very small and quite undynamic between 1500 and 1800. Most of Germany lay well outside the major trade routes in Europe. Politically the area was fragmented into hundreds of small states.

Feudal estates here consisted of clusters of peasant villages or scattered peasant holdings subject to an array of feudal taxes. Lords rarely had directly held farms of notable size in 1500 or in 1800. The forces that partially transformed the landscape in the first zone were too weak to produce similar results here. Upper-class investors such as nobles, ecclesiastical institutions, and burghers lent money to peasant tenants and piled new rents on old feudal taxes. They even bought up feudal tenures, often by foreclosing on bad peasant debts. But they did not disturb peasant farming. Although much of the land in many peasant villages near the larger towns technically belonged to burghers who were legally the tenants, the investors almost always immediately retroceded the foreclosed lands to the existing peasant farmers. Capitalist, freestanding farms worked by tenant farmers on short-term leases were very uncommon. In the absence of strong market forces, the short-term leases or life leases that multiplied in the rebuilding of this part of Germany after the Thirty Years' War faded into perpetual arrangements by the eighteenth century. Lords were content to retain peasants to farm their tenures and pay feudal taxes generation after generation.

The third zone extended eastward along the Baltic from Denmark and Holstein through the German states of Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, and the two Pomeranias to Prussia and then south through Poland, Silesia, Bohemia, and Hungary, ending with Austria and the other possessions of the Habsburgs in the southeastern Alps. This entire zone was very lightly populated and both economically and politically underdeveloped. Central governments of kings and princes were weak, while nobles were comparatively strong and independent. Plagues and ruinous wars repeatedly devastated the fragile network of settlement in this zone between 1300 and 1700. Although the feudal practices here were the same as those in use everywhere in Europe, the whiplash effects of cyclical devastation did not allow feudalism to develop much beyond the stages characteristic of parts of western Europe in the Carolingian era of 750 to 950.

Lords in this third zone, whether princes, ecclesiastical institutions, barons, or knights, had an abundance of land but could find little peasant labor. They made heroic efforts century after century to colonize their lands, but no sooner had settlement begun to produce its first fruits than some fresh calamity undermined it. Out of necessity, lords relied primarily on their own directly held lands to support themselves. Such farms expanded between 1500 and 1800, not principally through consciously planned depopulating enclosure, but because abandoned peasant tenures and entire villages fell back into the hands of the lords. The most heavily damaged regions in the era of the Thirty Year's War, for example, lost on average half their population.

To work their directly held lands, lords in this zone hired landless day laborers as permanent staff and as temporary wage labor, and they relied on feudal labor services assessed on peasant farmers and cottagers. Normally, lords did not simply impose arbitrary labor services on their existing subjects, but rather offered lands to new colonists with labor services as a condition of tenure. With each new wave of devastation, feudal labor services became more important. To retain labor, lords also multiplied restrictions on the personal movement and land transfers of their subjects. The result was a new form of serfdom, born of insurmountable poverty and underpopulation. It was only after 1750 that the positive pull of markets for grain and livestock had much of an impact on these eastern European forms of feudalism.

Feudal Courts

Everywhere in Europe, lords retained wide rights of local jurisdiction and local governance. Although the polemical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries painted a very unflattering portrait of the feudal courts, in fact they performed indispensable services as lower courts of first instance with jurisdiction over civil and criminal affairs. They survived because the states had neither the political need to abolish them nor the revenues to replace them. From at least the sixteenth century in the more advanced states and from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries elsewhere, the men who staffed the feudal courts were legally trained professionals who received an annual salary. The feudal courts were incorporated into the judicial hierarchy of the state with rights of appeal in western Europe by 1500 or shortly thereafter, but in Austria, Bohemia, and Brandenburg-Prussia this did not occur until the middle of the eighteenth century. Feudalism also survived as a system of local governance. Feudal officials retained their traditional supervisory role in the administration of the smaller towns and the rural villages, while royal or princely officials usually controlled the important cities.

The Demise of Feudalism

Opposition to the feudal system grew steadily from the middle of the eighteenth century. Peasants had always hated both the system and the tithe, the obligatory feudal tax for the support of the church. While most nobles everywhere understandably defended feudalism, members of the non-noble elite were of two minds. On the one hand, anyone who aspired to assimilation into the nobility routinely purchased feudal rights and estates since they were the socially indispensable prestige properties of the aristocracy. On the other hand, the non-noble elites were increasingly aware that the feudal system and the legal nobility were hopelessly antiquated institutions. Opposition to feudalism among the non-noble elites was based on the overall transformation of society, not on the economic burden of feudalism per se. Consequently, opposition was much more vocal in France and Italy than in Prussia, Austria, or Bohemia.

Enlightened reformers began to eliminate feudalism here and there from the middle of the eighteenth century. The task was monumentally difficult. Rulers such as Frederick II of Prussia could abolish personal serfdom or improve conditions of tenure on their own domain lands, but not on the lands of other lords. Lords had legitimate property rights that could not simply be dismissed without compensation. The reforms began timidly with the removal of restrictions on personal freedom that were degrading but that produced little revenue for the lords. In 1778 Louis XVI of France abolished all forms of serfdom on directly held royal estates and the right of pursuit of serfs for the entire realm. From the 1770s, enlightened rulers in Denmark, Piedmont-Sardinia, and Austria promoted the liquidation of feudal fiscal rights with elaborate and costly schemes to make redemption payments to lords that were financially beyond the means of most peasants. Political revolutions eventually swept aside the remnants of the feudal system.

Bibliography

Aymard, Maurice. "From Feudalism to Capitalism in Italy." Review 6 (1982): 131–208.

Blanning, T. C. W. Joseph II. London and New York, 1994.

Blum, Jerome. The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe. Princeton, 1978.

Carsten, F. L. The Origins of Prussia. Oxford, 1954. Repr. Westport, Conn., 1981.

Clay, C. G. A. Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500–1700. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1984.

Doyle, William. "Was There an Aristocratic Reaction in Pre-Revolutionary France?" Past and Present 57 (1972): 97–122.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France. Ithaca, N.Y., 1976.

Goubert, Pierre. The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by Ian Patterson. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1986.

Ritter, Gerhard. Frederick the Great: A Historical Profile. Berkeley, 1968.

Thirsk, Joan, ed. Chapters from the Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1500–1750. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.

—JAMES L. GOLDSMITH

A series of contractual relationships between the upper classes, designed to maintain control over land.

Feudalism flourished between the tenth and thirteenth centuries in western Europe. At its core, it was an agreement between a lord and a vassal. A person became a vassal by pledging political allegiance and providing military, political, and financial service to a lord. A lord possessed complete sovereignty over land, or acted in the service of another sovereign, usually a king. If a lord acted in the service of a king, the lord was considered a vassal of the king.

As part of the feudal agreement, the lord promised to protect the vassal and provided the vassal with a plot of land. This land could be passed on to the vassal's heirs, giving the vassal tenure over the land. The vassal was also vested with the power to lease the land to others for profit, a practice known as subinfeudation. The entire agreement was called a fief, and a lord's collection of fiefs was called a fiefdom.

The feudal bond was thus a combination of two key elements: fealty, or an oath of allegiance and pledge of service to the lord, and homage, or an acknowledgment by the lord of the vassal's tenure. The arrangement was not forced on the vassal; it was profitable for the vassal and made on mutual consent, and it fostered the allegiance necessary for royal control of distant lands.

The bond between a lord and a vassal was made in a ceremony that served to solemnize the fief. The vassal knelt before the lord and placed his hands between those of the lord as a sign of subordination. Immediately afterward, the lord raised the vassal to his feet and kissed him on the mouth to symbolize their social equality. The vassal then recited a predetermined oath of fealty, and the lord conveyed a plot of land to the vassal.

In the seventeenth century, more than three centuries after the death of this particular social practice, English scholars began to use the term feudalism to describe it. The word was derived by English scholars from foedum, the Latin form of fief. The meaning of feudalism has expanded since the seventeenth century, and it now commonly describes servitude and hierarchical oppression. However, feudalism is best understood as an initial stage in a social progression leading to private ownership of land and the creation of different estates, or interests in land.

Before feudalism, the European population consisted only of wealthy nobility and poor peasants. Little incentive existed for personal loyalty to sovereign rulers. Land was owned outright by nobility, and those who held land for lords held it purely at the lords' will. Nevertheless, the feudal framework was preceded by similar systems, so its exact origin is disputed by scholars. Ancient Romans, and Germanic tribes in the eighth century, gave land to warriors, but unlike land grants under feudalism, these were not hereditary.

In the early ninth century, control of Europe was largely under the rule of one man, Emperor Charlemagne (771-814). After Charlemagne's death, his descendants warred over land ownership, and Europe fell apart into thousands of seigniories, or kingdoms run by a sovereign lord. Men in the military service of lords began to press for support in the late ninth century, especially in France. Lords acquiesced, realizing the importance of a faithful military.

Military men, or knights, began to receive land, along with peasants for farmwork. Eventually, knights demanded that their estates be hereditary. Other persons in the professional service of royalty also began to demand and receive hereditary fiefs, and thus began the reign of feudalism.

In 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England from France and spread the feudal framework across the land. The feudal relationship between lord and vassal became the linchpin of English society. To become a vassal was no disgrace. Vassals held an overall status superior to that of peasants and were considered equal to lords in social status. They took leadership positions in their locality and also served as advisers for lords in feudal courts.

The price of a vassal's power was allegiance to the lord, or fealty. Fealty carried with it an obligation of service, the most common form being knight service. A vassal under knight service was obliged to defend the fief from invasion and fight for a specified number of days in an offensive war. In wartime, knight service also called for guard duty at the lord's castle for a specified period of time. In lieu of military service, some vassals were given socage, or tenure in exchange for the performance of a variety of duties. These duties were usually agricultural, but they could take on other forms, such as personal attendance to the lord. Other vassals were given scutage, in which the vassal agreed to pay money in lieu of military service. Priests received still other forms of tenure in exchange for their religious services.

A lord also enjoyed incidental benefits and rights in connection with a fief. For example, when a vassal died, the lord was entitled to a large sum of money from the vassal's heirs. If the heir was a minor, the lord could sell or give away custody of the land and enjoy its profits until the heir came of age. A lord also had the right to reject the marriage of an heiress to a fief if he did not want the husband as his vassal. This kind of family involvement by the lord made the feudal relationship intimate and complex.

The relationship between a lord and a vassal depended on mutual respect. If the vassal refused to perform services or somehow impaired the lord's interests, the lord could file suit against the vassal in feudal court to deprive him of his fief. At the same time, the lord was expected to treat the vassal with dignity, and to refrain from making unjust demands on the vassal. If the lord abused the vassal, the vassal could break faith with the lord and offer his services to another lord, preferably one who could protect the vassal against the wrath of the defied lord.

Predictably, the relationship between lord and vassal became a struggle for a reduction in the services required by the fief. Lords, as vassals of the king, joined their own vassals in revolt against the high cost of the feudal arrangement. In England, this struggle culminated in the Magna Charta, a constitutional document sealed by King John in 1215 that signaled the beginning of the end for feudalism. The Magna Charta, forced on King John by his lords, contained thirty-eight chapters outlining demands for liberty from the Crown, including limitations on the rights of the Crown over land.

Other circumstances also contributed to the decline of feudalism. As time passed, the power of organized religion increased, and religious leaders pressed for freedom from their service to lords and kings. At the same time, the development of an economic wealth apart from land led to the rise of a bourgeoisie, or middle class. The middle class established independent cities in Europe, which funded their military with taxes, not land-based feudal bonds. Royal sovereigns and cities began to establish parliamentary governments that made laws to replace the various rules attached to the feudal bond, and feudal courts lost jurisdiction to royal or municipal courts. By the fourteenth century, the peculiar arrangement known as feudalism was obsolete.

Feudalism is often confused with manorialism, but the two should be kept separate. Manorialism was another system of land use practiced in medieval Europe. Under it, peasants worked and lived on a lord's land, called a manor. The peasants could not inherit the land, and the lord owed them nothing beyond protection and maintenance.

Feudalism should also be distinguished from the general brutality and oppression of medieval Europe. The popular understanding of feudalism often equates the bloody conquests of the medieval period (500-1500) with feudalism because feudalism was a predominant social framework for much of the period. However, feudalism was a relatively civil arrangement in an especially vicious time and place in history. The relationship of a vassal to a lord was servile, but it was also based on mutual respect, and feudalism stands as the first systematic, voluntary sale of inheritable land.

The remains of feudalism can be found in contemporary law regarding land. For example, a rental agreement is made between a landlord and a tenant, whose business relationship echoes that of a lord and a vassal. State property taxes on landowners resemble the services required of a vassal, and like the old feudal lords, state governments may take possession of land when a landowner dies with no will or heirs.

A system of obligations that bound lords and their subjects in Europe during much of the Middle Ages. In theory, the king owned all or most of the land and gave it to his leading nobles in return for their loyalty and military service. The nobles in turn held land that peasants, including serfs, were allowed to farm in return for the peasants' labor and a portion of their produce. Under feudalism, people were born with a permanent position in society. (See fief and vassal.)