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Feudalism, a term first used in the early modern period (17th century), in its most classic sense refers to a Medieval European political system composed of a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals, and fiefs. Although derived from the Latin word feodum (fief), then in use, the term feudalism and the system it describes were not conceived of as a formal political system by the people living in the Medieval Period.

There is no broadly-accepted modern definition of feudalism. Use of the term in a political context is the most senior, but other definitions of feudalism exist. Since at least the 1960s, many medieval historians have included a broader social aspect, adding the peasantry bonds of manorialism, referred to as a "feudal society". Still others since the 1970s have re-examined the evidence and concluded that feudalism is an unworkable term^{[clarification needed]} and should be removed entirely from scholarly and educational discussion, or at least used only with severe qualification and warning.

Outside of a European context, the concept of feudalism is normally used only by analogy (called semi-feudal), most often in discussions of Japan under the shoguns, and sometimes medieval and Gondarine Ethiopia. However, some have taken the feudalism analogy further, seeing it in places as diverse as ancient Egypt, Parthian empire, India and Pakistan, to the antebellum American South.[1] The term feudal has also been applied—often inappropriately or pejoratively—to non-Western societies where institutions and attitudes similar to those of medieval Europe are perceived to prevail.[2] Ultimately, the many ways the term feudalism has been used has deprived it of specific meaning, leading many historians and political theorists to reject it as a useful concept for understanding society.

Overview

The social and economic system which characterized most European societies in the Middle Ages goes by the name of feudalism. The system, in its most basic essence, is the granting of land in return for military service.

The center of the feudal system in medieval Europe was the king, and a medieval king was, above everything else, a warrior. From the 9th to the 14th centuries—the heyday of feudalism—the most important element in making war was the armored and mounted knight. To maintain a retinue of knights was, however, very expensive. In return for providing the king with warriors, tenants-in-chief were granted large holdings of land. A grant of land was known as a feud or a fief, hence the term feudalism. The tenants-in-chief (commonly called barons in England) received their lands directly from the king and, in turn, leased parts of their estates to the knights, who in their turn gave leases to yeomen. This idealized description was subject to many variations. In some areas feudalism scarcely gained a hold. In Germanic areas allodial ownership of land was more common.^{[citation needed]} In the Italian peninsula, Roman law remained the more important organizing structure.

Feudalism, by its very nature, gave rise to a hierarchy of rank, to a predominantly static social structure in which every man knew his place, according to whom it was that he owed service and from whom it was that he received his land. In order to preserve existing relationships in perpetuity, rights of succession to land were strictly controlled by various laws, or customs, of entail. The most rigid control was provided by the custom of primogeniture, by which all property of a deceased landholder must pass intact to his eldest son.

Every man was the vassal, or servant, of his lord. The man swore fealty to his lord, and in return the lord promised to protect him and to see that he received justice. Feudalism was the expression of a society in which every man was bound to every other by mutual ties of loyalty and service. Feudal society was characterized by military landholders and working peasants. The nobility included bishops, for the church was one of the greatest of medieval landowners. Near the bottom of the social pyramid were the agricultural laborers, or villeins, and beneath them, the serfs.

Until the rise of powerful monarchies with central bureaucracies, it was the lord of the manor who was the real ruler of society. The peasant worked the land for him and owed him a number of feudal dues (increasingly commuted to money payments over time); justice was dispensed in the manorial courts. Customs varied, but it was common for a peasant to have a small plot, or to share a communal plot, on which to grow food for himself and his family and to be entitled to gather firewood from forest land for the hearth fire. More common than single plots, however, was the system of dividing the land into strips, with each household's strips scattered about the manor.

Western feudalism, evolving in turbulent eighth-century France, offered aristocratic landowners potential security in the absence of law and order. By concession or usurpation, major landowners assumed substantial legal and governmental power from the central government and proceeded through private arrangements with lesser landowners to create local militias for defensive purposes. Inherently particularistic and initially undisciplined, feudalism enveloped the monarchy itself. Feudalism evolved its own system of law and code of ethics for its members as it spread throughout Europe to assume a dominant role in the political and cultural history of the Middle Ages. Introduced to England in 1066 by William the Conqueror, who substantially curbed the powers of all feudal vassals while retaining considerable central authority, feudalism incorporated three elements: personal, property, and governmental. All members, including the monarchs who headed the feudal system, enjoyed specific rights but were also bound by feudal law to perform fixed obligations.

Characteristics

See also Examples of feudalism

Three primary elements characterized feudalism: lords, vassals and fiefs; the structure of feudalism can be seen in how these three elements fit together. A lord was a noble who owned land, a vassal was a person who was granted possession of the land by the lord, and the land was known as a fief. In exchange for the fief, the vassal would provide military service to the lord. The obligations and relations between lord, vassal and fief form the basis of feudalism.

Lords, vassals and fiefs

Before a lord could grant land (a fief) to someone, he had to make that person a vassal. This was done at a formal and symbolic ceremony called a commendation ceremony composed of the two-part act of homage and oath of fealty. During homage, the lord and vassal entered a contract in which the vassal promised to fight for the lord at his command. Fealty comes from the Latin fidelitas and denotes the fidelity owed by a vassal to his feudal lord. "Fealty" also refers to an oath that more explicitly reinforces the commitments of the vassal made during homage. Such an oath follows homage. Once the commendation was complete, the lord and vassal were now in a feudal relationship with agreed-upon mutual obligations to one another.

The lord's principal obligation was to grant a fief, or its revenues, to the vassal; the fief is the primary reason the vassal chose to enter into the relationship. In addition, the lord sometimes had to fulfill other obligations to the vassal and fief. One of those obligations was its maintenance. Since the lord had not given the land away, only loaned it, it was still the lord's responsibility to maintain the land, while the vassal had the right to collect revenues generated from it. Another obligation that the lord had to fulfill was to protect the land and the vassal from harm.

The vassal's principal obligation to the lord was to provide "aid", or military service. Using whatever equipment the vassal could obtain by virtue of the revenues from the fief, the vassal was responsible to answer to calls to military service on behalf of the lord. This security of military help was the primary reason the lord entered into the feudal relationship. In addition, the vassal sometimes had to fulfill other obligations to the lord. One of those obligations was to provide the lord with "counsel", so that if the lord faced a major decision, such as whether or not to go to war, he would summon all his vassals and hold a council. The vassal may have been required to yield a certain amount of his farm's output to his lord. The vassal was also sometimes required to grind his own wheat and bake his own bread in the mills and ovens owned and taxed by his lord.

The land-holding relationships of feudalism revolved around the fief. Depending on the power of the granting lord, grants could range in size from a small farm to a much larger area of land. The size of fiefs was described in irregular terms quite different from modern area terms (see medieval land terms). The lord-vassal relationship was not restricted to members of the laity; bishops and abbots, for example, were also capable of acting as lords.

There were thus different 'levels' of lordship and vassalage. The King was a lord who loaned fiefs to aristocrats, who were his vassals. The aristocrats, through subinfeudation, were lords to their own vassals, Knights who were in turn lords of the manor to the peasants who worked on the land. Ultimately, the Emperor was a lord who loaned fiefs to Kings, who were his vassals. This traditionally formed the basis of a 'universal monarchy' as an imperial alliance and a world order.

Feudal society

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Feudal society is a sometimes-debated term used to describe the social order in the Western Europe, Central Europe, and sometimes Japan and other regions in the Middle Ages, characterized by the legal subjection of a large part of the peasantry to a hereditary landholding elite exercising administrative and judicial power on the basis of reciprocal private undertakings.

The term's validity is questioned by many medieval historians who consider the description "feudal" appropriate only to the specifically voluntary and personal bonds of mutual protection, loyalty and support among members of the administrative, military or ecclesiastical elite, to the exclusion of involuntary obligations attached to tenure of "unfree" land. This stricter concept is discussed under feudalism, and the bonds which it excludes under manorialism. Examples of feudalism are helpful to fully understand feudalism and feudal society.

Conception of feudal society

In the broader conception of feudal society, as developed in the 1930s by the French Annaliste historian Marc Bloch, the prevailing features include:[3]

1. The absence of a strong central authority, and the diffusion of governmental power through the granting of administrative and legal authority over particular lands (fiefs) by higher lords (including the king) to vassals sworn by voluntary oath to support or serve them, usually (though not exclusively) by military means.
2. The obligation attached to particular holdings of land that the peasant household should supply the lord with specified labour services or a part of its output (or cash in lieu thereof) subject to the custom of the holding.

Common features of feudal societies

Features common among feudal societies, but which do not necessarily define them, include:

1. An overwhelmingly agrarian economy, with limited money exchange, necessitating the dispersion of political authority and the substitution of arrangements involving economic support from local resources;
2. The strength of the Roman Catholic Church as an ally and counterpart to the civil-military structure, supported by its right to a share (tithe) of society's output as well as substantial landholdings, and endowed with specific authority and responsibility for moral and material welfare.
3. The existence of structures and phenomena not of themselves explicitly feudal (urban and village organisations, royal executive power, free peasant holdings, financial and commercial activity) but each incorporated into the whole.

Alongside such broad similarities, it is important to note the divergences both within and between feudal societies (in forms or complexity of noble association, the extent of peasant dependency or the importance of money payments) as well as the changes which occurred over time within the overall structure (as in Bloch's characterisation of the 11th-century onset of a "second feudal age").

In particular, one should avoid envisaging the social order in terms of a regular "feudal pyramid" with each man bound to one superior lord and the rank of each clearly defined, in a regular chain of allegiances extending from the king at the top to the peasantry at the bottom: aside from the contrast between free and unfree obligation, allegiance was often given to more than one lord, while an individual might possess attributes of more than one rank.

Nor should the medieval theory of the "estates of the realm" or the "three orders" of feudal society—"those who make war" (miles, knights), "those who pray" (priests, monks) and "those who labour" (peasants, serfs)" (bellatores, oratores, et laboratores)—be considered a full description of the social order: while those excluded from the first two came over time to be counted among the third, nobles and clerics alike assumed administrative functions in the feudal state, while financial support was relied upon increasingly as a substitute for direct military service. Nobles were defined by the occupation they obtained and no longer by right of birth and are placed in power by the investiture.