FEUDALISM

Feudalism was a set of legal and military customs in medieval Europe that flourished between the ninth and

fifteenth centuries

Feudalism as practiced in the Kingdom of England, in the traditional sense is a state of human society which is formally structured and stratified on the basis of land tenure

• Society was thus ordered around relationships derived from the holding of land, which landholdings are termed "fiefdoms, fiefs, or fees"

• The term "fee" of "fief" which is the basic root of the word "feudal" derived from an ancient Gothic source faihu signifying simply "property" which in its most basic sense was "cattle".[2] This can be compared to the very ancient classical Latin word pecunia, which means both cattle and money

legal and military obligations

• three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs

• A lord was in broad terms a noble who held land

• a vassal was a person who was granted possession of the land by the lord,

• the land was known as a fief.

service to the lord

• There were many varieties of feudal land tenure, consisting of military and non-military service. The obligations and corresponding rights between lord and vassal concerning the fief form the basis of the feudal relationship

the king

• All nobles, knights and other tenants, termed vassals, merely "held" land from the king, who was thus at the top of the "feudal pyramid".

• Below the king in the feudal pyramid was a tenant-in-chief(generally in the form of a baron or knight) who was a vassal of the king, and holding from him in turn was a mesne tenant (generally a knight)

• Below the mesne tenant further mesne tenants could hold from each other in series.

Manorialism • The organizing principle of rural economy

• Manorialism was characterised by the vesting of legal and economic power in a lord, supported economically from his own direct landholding and from the obligatory contributions of a legally subject part of the peasant population under his jurisdiction

Manors • Manors each consisted of up to three classes of land:• Demesne, the part directly controlled by the lord and

used for the benefit of his household and dependents; • Dependent (serf or villein) holdings carrying the

obligation that the peasant household supply the lord with specified labour services or a part of its output (or cash), subject to the custom attached to the holding;

• Free peasant land, without such obligation but otherwise subject to manorial jurisdiction and custom, and owing money rent fixed at the time of the lease.

• Additional sources of income for the lord included charges for use of his mill, bakery or wine-press, or for the right to hunt or to let pigs feed in his woodland, as well as court revenues and single payments on each change of tenant

Villeins • Though not free, villeins were by no

means in the same position as slaves: they enjoyed legal rights, subject to local custom, and had recourse to the law, subject to court charges which were an additional source of manorial income

• Villein land could not be abandoned