The key elements were heavy cavalry, vassalage, enfeoffment, immunity, private castles, and chivalry.
Heavy cavalry, of a sort which demanded over-sized cataphracts or ‘great horses’ to carry armoured knights, came to the West from Persia and Byzantium. Charles Martel has been credited not only with their introduction but also with secularizing large amounts of Church land to support their upkeep. For this reason he has been called ‘the founder of European feudalism’.
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The stirrup was invented about the same time. By helping the horseman to stand firmly on his mount, and to carry a lance backed by the full momentum of horse and rider, the stirrup changed cavalry warfare from light, mobile skirmishing into heavyweight offence.
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The main problem, therefore, was to provide a social framework wherein a sizeable class of knights could permanently support both the psychological demands of their service and training and the enormous costs of their horses, their equipment, and their retinue. The upkeep of the knightly class—
cabalarii, chevaliers, Rittern, szlachta
—where landowning and the cavalry tradition went hand in hand, provided the central rationale of feudal society.
Vassalage grew out of the late Roman practice of
commendatio
, ‘commendation’, where a patron would seal an offer of protection by clasping the hands of his clients. In Carolingian times the lord began to be tied to his vassals or ‘subordinates’ by an oath of fealty, and by the act of homage sealed with a kiss. The two men embraced; the vassal knelt, and was invested with the symbols of his new status—a banner, a lance, a charter of agreement, a clod of earth. Thereafter they were bound for life in a mutual contract of reciprocal duties and obligations. The vassal was sworn to serve, the lord to protect and to maintain:
Berars de Monsdidier devant Karle est venuz;
A ses piez s’agenouille, s’est ses horn devenuz;
L’ampereres le baise, si l’a releve suz;
Par une blanche anisagne, li est ses fiez renduz.
(Berard of Montdidier came before Charlemagne, knelt at his feet, and became his man. The Emperor kissed him, when he had raised him up; and gave him his word by means of a white banner.)
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The
feodum
or ‘fief’, whence feudalism takes its name, grew out of the earlier practice of
beneficium
or ‘benefit’, where a patron would make a gift of land in vague expectation of some future advantage. In Carolingian times, such land grants began to be made explicitly as the ‘fee’ for military service. In due course the feudal tariff was refined and extended. It was originally calculated in terms of knight-service, that is, the number of knights to be provided in return for a given area of land. But it was stretched to include castle-guard and escort duties, judicial service in the lord’s court,
consilium
or ‘advice’ rendered in the lord’s council, and various forms of
auxilium
or ‘assistance’. The lords came to interpret assistance in the sense of financial ‘reliefs’, including a downpayment equivalent to one year’s income plus the ‘aids in four kinds’ which were payable for the lord’s ransom, for the knighting of his eldest son, for the dowry of his eldest daughter, and for crusade. They also reserved their rights of
custodia
(wardship of minors), of
gîte
(lodging), of
marriage
(permission to marry), and of
retrait
(buying out the contract). But in exchange for the dues the vassal or ‘tenant’ received both the income of the land and the jurisdiction over all its inhabitants. In the case of default, the land and its income reverted to the owner.
In principle the fief was indivisible and inalienable. The contract automatically lapsed on the death of either party—in German
Manfall
or
Herrenfall
. In practice vassals went to great lengths to secure the succession of their relations and the right to divide or dispose of the land. For their part, lords took elaborate precautions to control the succession of women, of minors, or of incompetents. Special terms and eccentric clauses abounded. The chief vassals of the bishop of Paris were contracted to carry the bishop on their shoulders during his consecration. Certain fiefs in Kent were held on condition that their tenant ‘held the king’s head in the boat’ during Channel crossings. The opportunities for financial extortion were enormous. When Ferrand of Portugal contracted with the King of France for the fief of Flanders in 1212, he paid a ‘relief’ of £50,000 for permission to marry the heiress.
Not surprisingly, legal wrangles were endemic. It was usual practice at an early date for all sovereign territories to create a separate code of feudal law, the
Lehnrecht
, and a separate system of courts, the
Lehnsgericht
, for trying feudal disputes. The prince customarily acted as court president, his chief vassals as assessors. Feudalism is generally judged to have come into operation when the practice of enfeoffment, or infeudation, became hereditary, and when it was merged with vassalage into one coherent whole. ‘It was the indissoluble union between the position of a vassal and the possession of a fief that constituted the feudal system.’
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In the last resort, however, vassalage and enfeoffment were incompatible. As vassals, the members of a knightly family were sworn to pursue the interests of their lord. As possessors of a fief, they were driven to pursue their own interests. Hence the characteristic tensions, and treacheries, of feudal society.
Feudal society consisted of a dense network of contractual relationships which linked the highest to the lowest in the realm. At the highest level, enfeoffment
involved a contract between the sovereign and his ‘tenants-in-chief’, that is, with the barons holding the principal provinces of the kingdom. But through ‘sub-infeudation’ the tenants-in-chief could enfeoff tenants of their own; and subtenants could then enfeoff further tenants; and so on, right down the line. Most men who were vassals in relation to their ‘superiors’ acted as lords in relation to their ‘inferiors’.
Feudal contracts were recorded for posterity in charters and indentures, though few from the early period survive:
In the name of the Trinity … Amen. I, Louis, by the Grace of God King of the French, hereby make known to all present and those to come that in our presence Count Henry of Champagne conceded the fief of Savigny to Bartholomew, Bishop of Beauvais, and to his successors. And for that fief, the said bishop has made promise and engagement for one knight, and justice and service to Count Henry … and has agreed that bishops to come will do likewise. Done at Mantes, in the year of the Incarnate Word 1167… and given by the hand of Hugh, the chancellor.
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At the local level, the fiefs of princes and barons were reflected in the arrangements of manorial estates. In this case, the lord of the manor granted a plot of land to each of his serf families in exchange for service in the form of unpaid labour on his demesne. Enserfment, being a bargain between free and unfree, lacked many of the reciprocities of enfeoftment. But in so far that it implied a contract trading land for service, and protection for loyalty, it was based on similar principles. It was not to be confused with common slavery. In some parts of Europe—in northern Italy, for instance—serfs swore an oath of loyalty to their master, like knights to their liege-lord.
Given this network of contractual relationships, feudal society became extremely hierarchical. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 had stated the principle that ‘every man should have a lord’. In theory at least, the only persons to possess absolute independence were the Pope and the Emperor, and they were vassals of God. Attempts to describe this state of affairs have led to concepts such as the ‘feudal ladder’ or the ‘feudal pyramid’, where the ruler of a country sits gaily atop neat layers of tenants and subtenants and subsubtenants … right down to the serfs at the bottom. Such models mislead by their artificial neatness and symmetry. In reality, feudal society was built on a confused mass of conflicting dependencies and loyalties, riddled with exceptions and exemptions, where the once clear lines of service were fouled up by generations of contested privileges, disputed rights, and half-forgotten obligations. It was certainly hierarchical, but it was anything but neat and regular.
The extent of the survival of
allodium
, ‘freehold land’, was also very uneven. In some regions, such as the future Switzerland, freehold was common; in others, such as northern France, it virtually disappeared. Most usually there was a terrible tangle of feudal and freehold estates, and of families holding part of their land in fief and part in full ownership. To the feudal mind freehold was an aberration. It was sometimes called
feodum solis
, a ‘fief of the sun.’ Psychologically, however, the
consequences were simple. Almost everyone was conditioned by their position in the social order, hemmed in by their legal and emotional ties of dependence. Those ties gave them a measure of security, and an unquestioned framework of identity, but they also made individuals vulnerable to exploitation, repression, and involuntary ignorance. ‘What characterizes mediaeval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom.’
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One might also presume that a feeling of powerlessness over their personal lives added to medieval people’s preoccupation with religion—in particular to their strong belief in the afterlife, and to their morbid cult of death.
Immunitas
or immunity concerned the granting of exemptions from taxes, or from other impositions due to the central authority. In the early days the Church was the chief beneficiary, but immunities of various sorts were gradually granted to a wide variety of individuals, institutions, and corporations. They stemmed from a recognition that rulers could no longer cope with all their responsibilities; and they fostered the fragmentation of political, jurisdictional, and economic authority. The result was a patchwork of authorities where each locality was governed not by any uniform obligations but by the specific terms of the charters and ‘liberties’ granted to the particular abbeys, districts, or cities. Particularism was a hallmark of the feudal order.
Stone castles, together with heavy cavalry, were one of the factors which eventually contained the damage inflicted by Viking, Saracen, and Magyar raiders. An impregnable fortress, perched on crag or coast, provided the inhabitants of the district with a place of refuge, and dominated the land over which its garrison could sally forth. Castle-building began in the ninth and tenth centuries, when royal and princely authority had reached its lowest ebb; and castles, once built, could be used to defy the king or prince long after the raiders had departed. In this way private castles became the bastions of local and feudal power, permanent obstacles to the resurgence of a centralized state. Many centuries later, when statesmen such as Cardinal Richelieu set out to break the feudal nobility, their first task lay in the razing of castles,
[MIR]
Chivalry, which derives from
chevalerie
, ‘knightly class’, refers in its narrowest sense to the ‘code of honour’ by which every knight was bound. It encompasses moral values such as honesty, loyalty, modesty, gallantry, fortitude. It commanded the knight to protect the Church, to succour the weak, to respect women, to love his country, to obey his lord, to fight the infidel, to uphold truth and justice, and to keep his word. By extension, chivalry referred to all the customs and practices associated with knighthood—and hence to their titles, orders, ceremonies, heraldry, vocabulary. In its widest sense, however, it refers to the prevailing ethos of feudal society as a whole, which was so completely dominated by the knights and all they stood for. With Christianity, it is one of the twin pillars of ‘the medieval mind’.
Although many elements of nascent feudalism were present in Carolingian times, their full fusion into a coherent social order did not really begin until later. The ‘classic age of feudalism’ is generally located in the tenth to thirteenth centuries.
The leading scholar of the subject distinguishes two feudal ages—the first from the ninth to the mid-eleventh centuries, where small-scale, caste-based arrangements prevailed between warlords and peasants, and a ‘second feudal age’, from the mid-eleventh to the mid-thirteenth century, which saw the flowering of feudal culture and the growth of hereditary nobility.
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Chivalry, in particular, was slow to emerge: its attitudes were not fully manifest until the era of the twelfth-century renaissance (see pp. 348–50).
Feudalism, rooted in the Carolingian débâcle, remained essentially a Western phenomenon. The Byzantine Empire made provision for hereditary land grants to soldiers; and the system of
pomest’ye
in early eastern Slavdom seems to have involved similar practices. But the state feudalism of the East, if that is what it was, lacked many of the basic ingredients. As far as the countries of central Europe are concerned, historians strongly disagree over the importance of feudal institutions. Marxists assume that feudalism had to be the basis for the social order; others, on the whole, argue that it did not.
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Everything depends on what definition of feudalism is used.
Feudalism deeply affected the life of the Church. It greatly weakened central ecclesiastical authority. It gave great power to local potentates, and put the clergy at their mercy. Counts and princes became accustomed to making and unmaking bishops at will. Lesser feudatories controlled the lesser clerics. ‘Bishops were in danger of becoming barons in mitres; kings looked on prelates as officials bound to do them service; and patrons sold [church] benefices to the highest bidder.’
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Not even the Papacy was exempt. With limited means of their own, the Popes stood to become puppets either of Roman noblemen, of Italian princes, or, at a later stage, of a reviving Empire.
Thanks to the Benedictine monastery at Cluny in Burgundy, Western monasticism adapted itself to the changing circumstances. Isolated abbeys and hermitages had been specially vulnerable to both raiders and to local barons. They felt a strong need for a collective effort to strengthen their position. Founded in 910 by Guillaume le Pieux, Count of Auvergne, Cluny was the source of reforms which answered that need. The Cluniacs modified the Benedictine rule to include stricter observances and services of inhuman length. More importantly, they raised their abbot to a position of strict authority over all the daughter houses which they founded or co-opted. In effect, they established the first monastic order. Their iron discipline and their independence from local concerns gave them a strong voice in Church politics. Above all, having secured the popes’ support for their reforms, they became the unwavering advocates of papal supremacy. Between 910 and 1157 seven long-lived Abbots of Cluny—Berno, Odo, Aymard, Majolus, Odilo, St Hugh, and Peter the Venerable—created a network of 314 monasteries from Spain to Poland. It was no accident that the principal architect of the ‘papal monarchy’, Urban II, was himself a Cluniac (see below).