The new post-Carolingian European order: feudalism

The Carolingians were not able to restore the Roman social/political structure. What happened was a new social structure based on landlord/vassal relationship, called feudalism, after the word “fief”, which meant land.  Feudalism lacked the impersonal structure and the centralized power of the Roman political process. It was based on a one to one mutual pledge of allegiance.

1. Feudalism: its origins

Feudalism formed the new social and political relationship in Europe. Its origins could be traced back to Roman, German, and Celtic traditions: 

• The Roman tradition of patron/client relationship, and practice of land donation (precarium).

• The German tradition of king/followers.

• The Celtic tradition of lord/vassal relationship.

2. Medieval social relationships

• The personal aspect of lord-vassal relationship: Instead of an impersonal relationship based on law, the king and his followers had a one-on-one relationship wherein the king would entrust his follower(s) with a piece of land (fief) and in return, his follower(s) would render services for the king, including raising an army for war. The land was to revert back to the king upon his follower (vassal)'s death, although this was not always the case. Patterned on the relationship between the king and his immediate followers were contractual relationships between his followers and their followers, and so on, leading to a hierarchical social order where any two adjacent social levels had mutual obligations. The modern bureaucracy could trace its origin to this feudal social hierarchy.

In some cases, such as in medieval England and in certain regions of France, where the king had strong control, they could make the hierarchy of vassals pledge allegiance to him directly. In this case, the lord was called the liege lord. But again, this happened only where the feudal king had strong control of a region.

• What if a vassal has to obey several lords? The creation of the noble ranking system (duke, marquis, count (earl), vis-count, baron, knight): In this hierarchy, the knight was the lowest level of the feudal nobility. He was the soldier, as in medieval Europe all warriors (except for the mercenaries that later came into being) were aristocrats. The knight was usually retained by his immediate lord, living and dining on the lord's manor. But in many cases, he could also live by himself on a manor, or own tens of manors, which might have been given to him by his lord in honor of his valor on the battlefield, or he acquired through marriage alliances, inheritance, etc.

• The contractual nature of the feudal social relationship: both parties, the lord and the vassal, held obligations toward each other. If either party violated the contract, such as a vassal not following the lord in a battle or rebelling against him, the lord would take his land away. On the other hand, vassals did not have to obey a lord who did not honor his part of the contract (e.g. exceeding the number of days of battle he asked of the vassals).

• Nature of the medieval manor: the manor was a self-sufficient unit of society, where villagers, of both free and unfree peasants, tilled the land and fed themselves and the lord. The land was divided into farmland and garden, house, mills, oil press, orchards, meadow/pasture.

• Status of peasants/serfs: Peasants were divided into two kinds: free and unfree. They were then subdivided into many other categories. The serf was a legacy of the late Roman empire, when the able bodied free peasants of the empire were almost all at the battlefront, and there were few left behind to till the land. Large numbers of slaves were freed then to become farmers, but because freeing them was so that they could till the field, they were not free to leave the land. Serfs in medieval Europe had to stay on the same manor even if the land changed hands. In addition to inability to leave the manor, they owed extra taxes to the manorial lord than the free peasants.
• Customary versus statutory laws: Statutory laws were a Roman tradition. Germans did not have statutory laws but in practice they did follow customs, which were called customary laws. Customs varied region by region, therefore laws were not uniform in the Germanic states. Eventually, they would try to establish uniform laws. In England, from King Henry II (r.1154-89), customs from different regions were collected to make the "Common Law" to be applied to the whole nation. In France, King Louis IX (Saint Louis) (r.1226-70) encouraged the French court to use Roman statutory laws to replace French customary laws. Eventually there developed a divergence between English and continental legal practices: while the English (and then the Americans) applied common law more often, the continental Europeans practiced statutory laws more.

3. The relationship between church and state:

Although church and state were separate at the beginning of feudalism, as time went on, both tried to penetrate into the other. Many churches were becoming large lords, owning large estates, many vassals and serfs. They also influenced and regulated society through controlling marriages, divorces, and abortion. On the other hand, many feudal lords also tried to control churches as the latter now became such lucrative estates.

• Nobles tried to appoint their relatives and friends into church positions, and even the position of the pope.
• Kings, or emperors tried to use their appointees to church positions to weaken the feudal nobles who owned the land around the church.
• kings, popes, and archbishops fought over the issue of whether laymen could make church appointments.
• kings tried to tax churches, which in theory could only be taxed by the pope.
• Kings and church's fight would culminate in a period of time when two (or even three) popes coexisted, each supported by one faction.

4. The breakdown of the feudal relationships

• Personal rule and personal ownership of landed property: In theory, the king owned the whole country. In reality, his ability to actually control the country very much depended on his personal power. With a weak king, the fief he assigned to his followers were often kept perpetually.

• The change of state borders with different marriage alliances: France/England; Poland/Lithuania; Bohemia/Holy Roman Empire. 

• Primogeniture and the popularization of last names: In both France and the Holy Roman Empire, for hundreds of years they elected their kings and picked the small nobles to rule as king, thereby keeping him weak and subdued by the other nobles. As the nobles started to perpetuate the fiefs down the generations, they started a new practice of inheritance,called premogeniture: instead of dividing up their property among all sons, they now passed all landed property to the eldest one, so that the property would remain big down the line. To legitimate their ownership of the fief, they also started to use last names more, often taken from the name of their property.

• The fate of the younger sons: younger sons who failed to inherit landed property often became knights, or clergymen. Some times if they were lucky enough, they could actually get married to an heiress and then settle down on a piece of land.

4. Other elements that adversely affected feudalism.

Two other elements also adversely affected feudalism: the growth of commerce and the gradual spread of pagan (Greek and Roman) ideas. After the 11th century, commerce started to pick up and cities began to grow. Professionals and merchants formed into guilds that protected trade from outsiders and regulated the trade of the guild members. Within guilds the relationship was equal, instead of hierarchical, like in the feudal countryside. Landed property did not matter much to the guild members, who cared more for their workshops and skills for the handicraftsmen, or money, for the merchants.

In the 11th to the 13th centuries, the Europeans had a series of military clashes with the Muslims in the Near East and North Africa, called the Crusades. The slogan behind the crusades was to recover the holy land of Jerusalem from the Muslims. While they ultimately achieved nothing with regard to land, the crusaders brought back from the former Greek and Roman realms large quantities of books by ancient Greek and Roman writers, who wrote about the importance of the human being, civic matters, literature, political treatises, and history. These human centered, instead of God centered writings, plus the Greek and Roman use of logic, which was dismissed by Europeans during the Middle Ages, led to debates of which comes first, faith or reason. Thomas Aquinas was one of the best in approaching this issue. But from the 13th century on, church scandals, the rise of the power of the secular kings, economic growth, and contact with the Greek and Roman worlds all helped the Europeans to open up new intellectual horizons.

 

5. Evaluating feudalism

Why do you think feudalism was called “operation survival”? 
What conditions do you think feudalism was a reaction to? 
Do you think feudalism was an effective system? 
How did feudalism differ from the Roman system?