History
Feudal Government
Feudal government was a political system prevalent in medieval Europe, characterized by a hierarchical structure of power and land ownership. It was based on the exchange of land for military service and loyalty, with kings granting fiefs to nobles in exchange for their support and protection. This system led to decentralized authority and the emergence of local lords as powerful figures within their territories.
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10 Key excerpts on "Feudal Government"
eBook - ePub- Roderick Martin(Author)
- 2024(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
But the core of the system comprised two personal relationships, that of crown and vassal or lord, and that of vassal and peasant. The essential characteristic of the feudal system was the surrender of one man into the hands of another, in return for which he received protection and maintenance, usually through the grant of a fief over land, in the case of king and vassal, or the direct grant of land, in the case of vassal and peasant. This surrender occurred at two levels of society: the king received the surrender of his vassal, the lord, and the lord received the surrender of his vassal, the peasant. 3 Essentially, ‘feudalism may be regarded as a body of institutions creating and regulating the obligations of obedience and service – mainly military service – on the part of a free man (the vassal) towards another free man (the lord), and the obligations of protection and maintenance on the part of the lord with regard to his vassal.’ 4 Such ties were personal, particular and diffuse. This dual submission formed the central relationship in feudal society, endowed with economic, political, religious, and in the widest sense, social significance. As Marc Bloch summarized the relationship between lord and peasant: 5 To this lord. . . the cultivators of the soil owed, first, a more or less important part of their time; days of agricultural labour devoted to the cultivation of the fields, meadows, or vineyards of his demesne; carting and carrying services; and sometimes service as builders and craftsmen. Further, they were obliged to divert to his use a considerable part of their own harvests, sometimes in the form of rents in kind and sometimes by means of taxes in money. . . . The very fields that they cultivated were not held to be theirs in full ownership, nor was their community – at least in most cases – the full owner of those lands over which common rights were exercised
eBook - ePub- H. W. Carless (Henry William Carless) Davis(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
The first effect of this striking change in the nature of landed property and of public office was to substitute for the centralised state of the Carolingians a lax federal system, in which each unit was a group of men attached to the person of a hereditary superior. This nascent feudalism was often brutal, always summary and short-sighted, in its methods of government. The feudal group was engaged in a perpetual struggle for existence with neighbouring groups. Feudal policy was aggressive; for every lord had his war-band, whom he could only hold together by providing them with adventure and rich plunder; nor could any lord regard himself as safe while a neighbour of equal resources remained unconquered. Furthermore, as though the disintegration of society had not gone far enough, every great fief was in constant danger of civil war and partition. As the lord had treated the King, so he in turn was treated by his vassals. He endowed them with lands, he allowed them to found families, he gave them positions of authority; and then they defied him. In the eleventh century the great fief bristled with castles held by chief vassals of the lord; in the small county of Maine alone we hear of thirty-five such strongholds; generally speaking they were centres of rebellion and indiscriminate rapine. Such feudalism was not a system of government; it was a symptom of anarchy.Yet feudalism had not always been a mere tyranny of the military class over the unarmed population. Like the Roman Empire, that of the Franks had forfeited respect and popularity by misgovernment, by feeble government, by insupportable demands on the personal service of the subject. The land-owner was a less exacting master than the Empire; often he could defend his tenants from imperial exactions. During the invasions of the Northmen and Hungarians, he was impelled by his own interest to guard his estates to the best of his ability. Therefore common men looked to their landlord, or looked about them for a landlord, to whom they could commend themselves. The great estate was the ark of refuge from the general flood of social evils. In the eleventh century the situation changed. The Hungarian tide of invasion was rolled back by a Henry the Fowler and an Otto the Great; the Northmen enrolled themselves as members of the European commonwealth. The petty feudal despot was no longer needed. From a protector he had degenerated into a pest of society. The great political problem of the age was to make him innocuous. It was taken in hand, and it was settled, by a variety of means.In France the Church took the lead of the repressive movement, endeavouring to mitigate the horrors of private war by certain restrictions upon the combatants. During the eleventh century it was not unusual for the bishop of a diocese to secure the co-operation of representative men, from all classes of society, in proclaiming a local Truce of God (Treuga Dei). This Truce, which all men were invited to swear that they would observe, forbade the molestation of ecclesiastics, peasants and other non-combatants; provided that cultivated land should not be harried or cattle carried off; and named certain seasons when no war should be waged. A typical agreement of this kind enjoins that all private hostilities shall be suspended from Wednesday evening to Monday morning in each week; from the beginning of Advent till a week after the Epiphany; from the beginning of Lent till a week after Easter; from the Rogation Days till a week after Pentecost. The Truce of God was approved by the Crown both in France and in Germany; even in the twelfth century it was still recommended by church councils as a useful expedient. But it was seldom effectual. There was no machinery for enforcing it; and those who swore to uphold it were so divided by conflicting class interests that they could not co-operate with any cordiality. The second of these defects, though not the first, can also be perceived in the German system of the Land-peace. Periodically we find an Emperor constraining a particular province, or even the whole German kingdom, to accept a set of rules which are partly modelled on those of the Treuga Dei
eBook - ePubThe Middle Ages without Feudalism
Essays in Criticism and Comparison on the Medieval West
- Susan Reynolds(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
23 Since historians do not agree about the phenomena they want to distinguish, or where to draw the line between them, none of these attempts to distinguish the words has eliminated misunderstandings and confusions. None of the terminological distinctions has shaken the old framework in which the interpersonal relations of vassalage and property rights derived from conditional grants are seen as distinguishing features of the society of the European Middle Ages. The framework bulges but for many it still seems strong enough to hold the essential features of medieval society.Most European historians of medieval Europe during the twentieth century concentrated in practice on the history of their own countries, interpreting the evidence of land-holding and political relations within the framework of feudal law and society embodied in something like the Bloch/Weber definition. Some have seen the feudalism of their own area as the most typical or complete, some have stressed its exceptional qualities, but relatively few have been ready to question whether the various phenomena they describe were all part of the same thing – whatever model or type of feudalism they accept or imply. As a result, where evidence of some supposedly feudal phenomenon in their own country is lacking they can either interpolate it from elsewhere or explain its absence as an exception that need not affect the general picture. In England and France historians have used different bits of the Ganshof and Bloch/Weber types to describe, and by implication to explain, quite different situations. Feudalism in England is characterized by a hierarchy of property (though the word tenure, which sounds more feudal, is generally preferred to “property”) and of military service owed from “knights’ fees” – what Bloch called “service tenements.” In England, however, these Blochian characteristics are associated with a strong central power that made noble jurisdiction over peasants relatively unimportant. Feudalism in France, on the other hand, as in Germany, has been seen in terms of fragmented power, with a weak monarchy and a nobility holding “immunities” of jurisdiction over their tenants, while noble obligations to military service have had, in the absence of much evidence, to be assumed.
eBook - ePubThe Myth of 1648
Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations
- Benno Teschke(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Verso(Publisher)
What was the structuring principle of ‘international’ organization in the European Middle Ages? As we saw in chapter 1, Waltz, Krasner, Ruggie, and Spruyt agree on the anarchic nature of the Middle Ages. We can now qualify this assertion and fine-tune the anarchy/hierarchy problematique by historicizing structures of lordship. By focusing on the changing forms of lordship that defined differentiated access to property, we gain a criterion for drawing out differences in the political constitution of medieval geopolitical orders without losing sight of their essential identity. For these alterations in lordly property rights flowed from the social relations that underlay changing geopolitical contexts: feudal empires (650–950), feudal anarchy (950–1150), and the feudal states-system (1150–1450). In other words, the degree to which political powers of extraction were wielded by the landholding class decisively conditioned feudal geopolitical orders. However, while changes in property relations explain differences in structuring principles, these principles do not determine geopolitical behaviour, but only mediate the logic of geopolitical accumulation.1. Banal, Domestic, and Landlordship
The literature distinguishes between three dominant forms of lordship in the European Middle Ages (Duby 1974, 174–7).17 Banal lordship refers to what could most readily claim medieval public authority, namely royal powers of command, taxation, punishment, adjudication, and decree. Being authorized to wield the powers of the ban conferred the most encompassing form of domination and exploitation, constituting what Duby called the ‘master class’ within the medieval ruling class (Duby 1974: 176). Domestic lordship was the prevalent form of domination on the classical bipartite manor of Carolingian times. Here, the lord’s land was divided into a seigneurial demesne tilled by slave labour and specified peasant services, and surrounding peasant plots cultivated independently by tenured peasants. The ‘lord’s men’ had no access to public courts, nor did they have to pay public taxes. They were exclusively subject to manorial control (Bloch 1966a: 70). Landlordship
eBook - ePub- Leo Huberman(Author)
- 1936(Publication Date)
- Monthly Review Press(Publisher)
They arc the key to an understanding of the feudal set-up. The “custom of the manor” meant then what laws passed by a city or county government would mean today. Custom in the feudal period had the force that laws in the twentieth century have. There was no strong government in the Middle Ages that was able to take charge of everything. The whole organization was based on a system of mutual obligations and services from top to bottom. Possession of the land did not mean that you could do with it what you pleased to the extent that you can today. Possession implied obligations to some one that had to be carried out. If not, the land could be taken away from you. The services which the serf owed the lord, and those which the lord owed the serf—for example, protection in case of war—were all agreed upon and enforced according to custom. It happened, of course, that the custom was sometimes broken, just as laws are broken today. A quarrel between two serfs would be settled in the lord’s court—according to custom. A quarrel between serf and lord was very apt to be decided in favor of the lord, since he would be judge of the dispute. Nevertheless, there are cases on record where a lord who violated the custom too often, was called to account by his overlord. This was particularly true in England, where peasants might be heard in the king’s court. What would happen in case of a dispute between one lord of a manor and another? The answer to that question is a clue to another interesting fact about the feudal organization. The lord of the manor, like the serf, did not own the land, but was himself a tenant of another lord higher up in the scale. The serf, villein, or freeman “held” his land from the lord of the manor, who in turn “held” the land from a count, who in turn “held” the land from a duke, who in turn “held” the land from the king
No longer available |Learn moreComplete Works by David Hume. Illustrated
Treatise of Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and others
- David Hume(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing(Publisher)
These conditions were too precarious to satisfy the Norman barons, who enjoyed more independent possessions and jurisdictions in their own country; and William was obliged, in the new distribution of land, to copy the tenures which were now become universal on the continent. England of a sudden became a feudal kingdom, [ 2 ] and received all the advantages, and was exposed to all the inconveniences, incident to that species of civil polity. According to the principles of the feudal law, the king wa the supreme lord of the landed property: all possessors, who enjoyed the fruits or revenue of any part of it, held those privileges, either mediately or immediately, of him; and their property was conceived to be, in some degree, conditional. [ 3 ] The land was still apprehended to be a species of benefice, which was the original conception of a feudal property; and the vassal owed, in return for it, stated services to his baron, as the baron himself did for his land to the crown. The vassal was obliged to defend his baron in war; and the baron, at the head of his vassal, was bound to fight in defence of the king and kingdom. But besides these military services, which were casual, there were others imposed of a civil nature, which were more constant and durable. [ 1 The ideas of the Feudal Government were so rooted, that even lawyers in those ages could not form a notion of any either constitution. Regnum (says Braeton, lib. ii. ca) quod ex comitatibus et baronibus dicitur esse constitutum.] [ 2 Coke, Comm. on Lit. , 2, ad sect. 1.] [ 3 Somner of Gavelk. , Smith de Rep. lib. iii
- Evan Evans(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
But to return to the feudal system strictly so called, we find the Lords and Barons were all-powerful within their dominions, and had the power of giving or taking away the life, liberty, and property of their retainers and vassals. They often made war upon each other, the consequences of which were frequently awful in the streams of blood which flowed, and the murder, rapine, and spoliation which ensued. Evidences of these internal wars are seen in the ruined castles and dismantled towers which cover our own country and the continent of Europe. The Barons would frequently league together, and make war upon the King or Sovereign, in which they often triumphed. A remarkable instance of this is found in English History, when the Barons joined in opposing King John, and wrested from him Magna Charta at Runnymede. The De Veres, Bohuns, Mowbrays, Nevilles, Howards, Percys, and Somersets often overshadowed their sovereign lieges in England; while the powerful families of Douglas and Scott for ages held the Kings of Scotland in awe. The Kings and Sovereigns were more in fear and had greater apprehensions of the feudal Barons, than from the mass of their subjects, and were therefore often completely obsequious to their wills. But ever and anon would arise an Edward or a James, who, defying the enmity of the feudal chiefs, diminished their powers and restrained their excesses. Yet this was never done, or even attempted, without the greatest opposition and danger, and never but by a brave and formidable Prince.Each of the great Barons kept a Court, and indulged in a style of pageantry corresponding in an inferior degree to that of Royalty, of which he occasionally affected independence. When the great Earl Warrenne was questioned respecting the right to his vast land possessions, he drew his sword, saying that was his title, and that William did not himself conquer England, but that his ancestor with the rest of the Barons were joint adventurers in the enterprise. As the Barons were so powerful, the Sovereign never made war or undertook any other great enterprise without first convoking and consulting them, as their co-operation was necessary to his success. In fact, such was their position in the realm, that no change in the laws or government, nor any great act of administration, could be accomplished without their advice and consent. Hence they formed with the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the sole and supreme legislative council of the Sovereign. Independently of the necessity for their advice and co-operation in national enterprises, the Sovereign
eBook - ePubThe State
Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically
- Franz Oppenheimer(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
CHAPTER VThe Development of the Feudal State
(A) THE GENESIS OF LANDED PROPERTY
WE now return, as stated above, to that point where the primitive feudal State gave rise to the city State as an offshoot, to follow the upward growth of the main branch. As the destiny of the city State was determined by the agglomeration of that form of wealth about which the State swung in its orbit, so the fate of the territorial State is conditioned by that agglomeration of wealth which in turn Controls its orbit, the ownership of landed property.In the preceding, we followed the economic differentiation in the case of the shepherd tribes, and showed that even here the law of the agglomeration about existing nuclei of wealth begins to assert its efficacy, as soon as the political means comes into play, be it in the form of wars for booty or still more in the form of slavery. We saw that the tribe had differentiated nobles and common freemen, beneath whom slaves, being without any political rights, are subordinated as a third class. This differentiation of wealth is introduced into the primitive state, and sharpens very markedly the contrast of social rank. It becomes still more accentuated by settlement, whereby private ownership in lands is created. Doubtless there existed even at the time when the primitive feudal state came into being, great differences in the amount of lands possessed by individuals, especially if within the tribe of herdsmen the separation had been strongly marked between the prince-like owners of large herds and many slaves, and the poorer common freemen. These princes occupy more land than do the small freemen.At first, this happens quite harmlessly, and without a trace of any consciousness of the fact that extended possession of land will become the means of a considerable increase of social power and of wealth. Of this, there is at this time no question, since at this stage the common freemen would have been powerful enough to prevent the formation of extended landed estates had they known that it would eventually do them harm. But no one could have foreseen this possibility. Lands, in the condition in which we are observing them, have no value. For that reason the object and the spoils of the contest were not the possession of lands, but of the Und and its peasants, the latter being bound to the soil (glebœ adscripti
eBook - ePubPeriodization and Sovereignty
How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time
- Kathleen Davis(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- University of Pennsylvania Press(Publisher)
indistinction in sovereign discourse, the paradox evident in Suárez’s discussion of sovereign power, and soon to be taken up by Hobbes and Locke. Because the historiographical concept of “feudal law” emerged as a means of negotiating the paradox of sovereignty, it—like the “Middle Ages” to which it will soon be firmly attached—has always been both privileged origin and condemned past, the double bind, and the shibboleth that divides.TIME AND THE SHIBBOLETH
The seventeenth-century English debates regarding the Norman Conquest and feudal law, like the earlier continental struggles, were essentially over the location of the sovereign exception, the merum imperium —sheer power, or the “power of the sword”—now marvelously literalized in the figure of William the Conqueror. Like the continental legists, too, the English battled on the field of periodization, the narrative space of the origin or foundation of the law. As Selden and Spelman’s attempts to control the narrative of “feudal law” make clear, and as judicial reliance upon this narrative emphasizes, the form of its remembrance was becoming crucial, as it already had on the continent, to the structure by which sovereignty was situated in the present. In the tradition examined here, “feudal law,” historicized in a debate over origins and simultaneously mapped onto conquered territory, negotiates the difference in the exercise of the sovereign exception between its presence (spatial and temporal) and its imagined foundation.To the degree that it has succeeded in its “Augean” task, to borrow Hotman’s term, the narrative of “feudal law” has effaced the process of its own emergence and thus become “real.” We can trace the structure of this effacement in the work of J. G. A. Pocock as he assesses seventeenth-century British legal historiography. Pocock criticizes English common law historians, especially Edward Coke, for a blinkered insular mindset—specifically “their ignorance of the feudum and feudalism”—that prevented their recognition of the legal inheritance connecting England with the continent. To an astonishing degree, this analysis replicates the linguistic emphasis of the feudists themselves. Pocock remarks of Coke, just as Spelman had, “in fact, it could well be maintained that he knew all there was to know about feudal law in England, except the single fact that it was feudal.”35 For Pocock, scholars such as Spelman “rediscovered” feudalism, and therefore the roots of English legal history: “The common law was above all a law regulating the tenure of land, and the rules of tenure it contained in fact presupposed the existence of those military and feudal tenures which had been imported by the Normans; but this fact had been forgotten and could only be rediscovered by comparing English law with those continental laws which were avowedly feudal—since even the meaning of the word had been largely forgotten in England.”36 Pocock’s learned study has been enormously influential and an invaluable catalyst in its field, and for this reason its rhetorical method and historical assumptions are important. I single out his work because in its complexity, and through its obviously legitimate point regarding the introduction of Norman tenures, his analysis illustrates the process by which the performance of “feudal law” in the negotiation of sovereignty is made to disappear.37
eBook - ePubRevolution and History
Origins of Marxist Historiography in China, 1919-1937
- Arif Dirlik(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- University of California Press(Publisher)
It is worth reiterating in this context, however, that those who claimed China to be feudal ignored all aspects of the social structure but the question of exploitation in an agrarian economy, which obviously does not suffice to distinguish social formations since through most of the historical period agriculture has provided the basis of economic existence and the degree and nature of exploitation has depended on a number of contingent factors that were not necessarily products of agriculture itself. 92 “There is nothing in petty peasant production,” Leff has noted, “which of itself gives rise to the property relations of serf and lord.” 93 What distinguished feudal society from others founded upon an agrarian economy was the unique social organization that tied the peasant to the land as a serf dependent on the lord. The legal-political system of feudalism expressed and enforced this relationship. To reject all these relations as mere aspects of the superstructure resulted in an obscurantism that ruled out all change in Chinese history and eliminated all distinctions between Chinese society and other agrarian societies. Feudalism, Commerce, and Social Change The debate over feudal society involved two interrelated problems with theoretical implications: What was feudalism, and what were the dynamics of the transition from feudalism to capitalism? The protagonists in the debate accepted the validity of Marxist propositions with regard to these questions; the complexity of those propositions, on the other hand, afforded them some choice in the priority they assigned to the characteristics Marx and later Marxists had associated with feudal society and its evolution into capitalism. The definition of feudalism was crucial to the whole debate because on it hinged the question of the placement of the feudal stage in Chinese history and, therefore, the question of China’s historical development as a whole
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