Feudalism
Wherever in the course of history men have gathered together they have gradually evolved some form of association that would ensure mutual interests. It might be merely the tribal bond of the Arabians, by which a man’s relations were responsible for his acts and avenged his wrongs; it might be a council of village elders such as the Russian ‘Mir’, making laws for the younger men and women; it might be a group of German chiefs legislating on moonlit nights, according to the description of Tacitus, by their camp fires.
In contrast to primitive associations stands the elaborate government of Rome under Augustus and his successors; the despotic Emperor, his numberless officials, the senators with their huge estates, the struggling curiales, the army of legions carrying out the imperial commands from Scotland to the Euphrates. When Rome fell, her government, like a house whose foundations have collapsed, fell also. Barbarian conquerors, established in Italy and the Roman provinces, took what they liked of the laws that they found, added to them their own customs, and out of the blend evolved new codes of legislation. Yet legislation, without some method of ensuring its execution, could not save nations from invasion nor the merchant or peasant from becoming the victim of robberies and petty crimes.
Mediaeval centuries are sometimes called the Age of Feudalism, because during this time feudalism was the method gradually adopted for dealing with the problems of public life amongst all classes in nearly all the nations of Europe. There are two chief things to be remembered about feudalism—first that it was no sudden invention but a growth out of old ideas both Roman and barbarian, and next that it was intimately connected in men’s minds with the thought of land. This was natural, for after all, land or its products are as necessary to the life of every individual as air and water, and therefore the cultivation of the soil and the distribution of its fruits are the first problems with which governments are faced.
Feudalism assumed that all the land belonging to a nation belonged in the first place to that nation’s king. Because he could not govern or cultivate it all himself he would parcel it out in ‘fiefs’ amongst the chief nobles at his court, promising them his protection, and asking in return that they should do him some specified service. This system recalls the ‘villa’ of Roman days with its senator, granting protection to his tenants from robbery and excessive taxation, and employing them to plough and sow, to reap his crops, and build his houses and bridges.
In the Middle Ages the service of the chief tenants was nearly always military: to appear when summoned by the king with so many horsemen and so many archers fully armed. In order to provide this force the tenant would be driven in his turn to grant out parts of his lands to other tenants, who would come when he called them with horsemen and arms that they had collected in a similar way. This process was called ‘sub-infeudation’. Society thus took the form of a pyramid with the king at the apex, immediately below him his tenants-in-chief, and below them in graded ranks or layers the other tenants.
This brings us to the base of the pyramid, the people who could not fight themselves, having neither horses nor weapons, and who certainly could not lend any other soldiers to their lord’s banner. Were they to receive no land?
In the Roman ‘villa’ the bottom strata was the slave, the chattel with no rights even over his own body. Under the system of feudalism the base of the pyramid was made up of ‘serfs’, men originally free, with a customary right to the land on which they lived, who had lost their freedom under feudal law and had become bound to the land, ascripti glebae, in such a way that if the land were sub-let or sold they would pass over to the new owner like the trees or the grass. In return for their land, though they might not serve their master with spear or bow, they would work in his fields, build his bridges and castles, mend his roads, and guard his cattle.
From top to bottom of this pyramid of feudal society ran the binding mortar of ‘tenure’ and ‘service’; but these were not the only links which kept feudal society together. When a tenant did ‘homage’ for his land, and ‘with head uncovered, with belt ungirt, his sword removed’, placed his hands between those of his lord, and took an oath, after the manner of the thegns of Wessex to their king, ‘to love what he loved and shun what he shunned both on sea and on land’, there entered into this relationship the finer bond of loyalty due from a vassal to his overlord. It was the descendant of the old Teutonic idea of the comitatus described by Tacitus,[7] the chief destined to lead and guide, his bodyguard pledged to follow him to death if necessary.
Put shortly, then, feudalism may be described as a system of society based upon the holding of land—a system, that is, in which a man’s legal status and social rank were in the main determined by the conditions on which he held (i.e. possessed) his land. Such a system, to return to our example of the pyramid, grew not only from the apex, by the sovereign granting lands, as the King of France did to Rollo ‘the Ganger’, but from the middle and base as well.
One of the chief feudal powers in mediaeval times was the Church, for though abbots and bishops were not supposed to fight themselves, yet they would often have numbers of lay military tenants to bring to the help of the king or their overlord. Some of these tenants were men whom they had provided with estates, but others were landowners who had voluntarily surrendered their rights over their land in return for the protection of a local monastery or bishopric, and thus become its tenants. A large part of the Church land was, however, held, not by military or lay tenure, but in return for spiritual services, or free alms as it was called, i.e. prayers for the soul of the donor. Perhaps a landowner wished to make a pious gift on his death-bed, or had committed a crime and believed that a surrender of his property to the Church would placate God. For some such reason, at any rate, he made over his land, or part of it, to the Church, which in this way accumulated great estates and endowments, free from the usual liabilities of lay tenure. All over Europe other men, and even whole villages and towns, were taking the same steps, seeking protection direct from the king, or a great lord, or an abbot or bishop, offering in return rent, services, or tolls on their merchandise.
Feudalism at its best stood for the protection of the weak in an age when armies and a police force as we understand the terms did not exist. Even when the system fell below this standard, and it often fell badly, there still remained in its appeal to loyalty an ideal above and beyond the ordinary outlook of the day, a seed of nobler feeling that with the growth of civilization and under the influence of the Church blossomed into the flower of chivalry.
I made them lay their hands in mine and swear
To reverence the King as if he were
Their conscience, and their conscience as their King:
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander; no! nor listen to it,
To honour his own word as if his God’s,
To live sweet lives in purest chastity.
Such are the vows that Tennyson puts in the mouth of Arthur’s knights, who with Charlemagne and his Paladins were the heroes of mediaeval romance and dreams. King Henry the Fowler, who ruled Germany in the early part of the tenth century, instituted the Order of Knighthood, forming a bodyguard from the younger brothers and sons of his chief barons. Before they received the sword-tap on the shoulder that confirmed their new rank, these candidates for knighthood took four vows: first to speak the truth, next to serve faithfully both King and Church, thirdly never to harm a woman, and lastly never to turn their back on a foe.
Probably many of these half-barbarian young swashbucklers broke their vows freely; but some would remember and obey; and so amid the general roughness and cruelty of the age, there would be established a small leaven of gentleness and pity left to expand its influence through the coming generations. It is because of this ideal of chivalry, often eclipsed and even travestied by those who claimed to be its brightest mirrors, but never quite lost to Europe, that strong nations have been found ready to defend the rights of the weak, and men have laid down their lives to avenge the oppression of women and children.
Of the evil side of feudalism much more could be written than of the good. The system, on its military side, was intended to provide the king with an army; but if one of his tenants-in-chief chose to rebel against him, the vassals who held their lands from this tenant were much more likely to keep faith with the lord to whom they had paid immediate homage than with their sovereign. Thus often the only force on which a king could rely were the vassals of the royal domain.
Again, feudalism, by its policy of making tenants-in-chief responsible for law and order on their estates, had set up a number of petty rulers with almost absolute power. Peasants were tried for their offences in their lord’s court by his bailiff or agent, and by his will they suffered death or paid their fines. Except in the case of a Charlemagne, strong enough to send out Missi[8] and to support them when they overrode local decisions, the lord’s justice or injustice would seem a real thing to his tenants and serfs, the king’s law something shadowy and far away.
As Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror had been quite as powerful as his overlord the King of France. When he came to England he was determined that none of the barons to whom he had granted estates should ever be his equal in this way. He therefore summoned all landowning men in England to a council at Salisbury in 1086, and made them take an oath of allegiance to himself before all other lords. Because he was a strong man he kept his barons true to their oath or punished them, but during the reign of his grandson Stephen, who disputed the English throne with his cousin Matilda and therefore tried to buy the support of the military class by gifts and concessions, the vices of feudalism ran almost unchecked.
‘They had done homage to him and sworn oaths,’ says the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, ‘but they no faith kept ... for every rich man built his castles and defended them against him, and they filled the land with castles.... Then they took these whom they suspected to have any goods by night and by day, seizing both men and women, and they put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable.... I cannot and I may not tell of all the wounds and of all the tortures that they inflicted upon the wretched men of this land; and this state of things lasted the nineteen years that Stephen was king and ever grew worse and worse.’
Stephen was a weak ruler struggling with a civil war; so that it might be argued that no system of government could have worked well under such auspices; but if we turn to the normal life of the peasant folk on the estates of the monastery of Mont St. Michael in the thirteenth century, we shall see that the humble tenants at the base of the feudal pyramid paid dearly enough for the protection of their overlords.
‘In June the peasants must cut and pile the hay and carry it to the manor-house ... in August they must reap and carry in the Convent grain, their own grain lies exposed to wind and rain.... On the Nativity of the Virgin the villein owes the pork due, one pig in eight ... at Xmas the fowl fine and good ... on Palm Sunday the sheep due ... at Easter he must plough, sow, and harrow. When there is building the tenant must bring stone and serve the masons ... he must also haul the convent wood for two deniers a day. If he sells his land he owes his lord a thirteenth of its value, if he marries his daughter outside the lord’s demense he pays a fine,—he must grind his grain at the lord’s mill and bake his bread at the lord’s oven, where the customary charges never satisfy the servants.’
Certainly the peasant of the Middle Ages can have had little time to lament even his own misery. Perhaps to keep his hovel from fire and pillage and his family from starvation was all to which he often aspired.
‘War’, it has been said, ‘was the law of the feudal world’, and all over Europe the moat-girt castles of powerful barons, and walled towns and villages sprang up as a witness to the turbulent state of society during these centuries. To some natures this atmosphere of violence of course appealed.
I, Sirs, am for war,
Peace giveth me pain,
No other creed will hold me again.
On Monday, on Tuesday,—whenever you will,
Day, week, month, or year, are the same to me still.
So sang a Provençal baron of the twelfth century, and we find an echo of his spirit in Spain as late as the fifteenth, when a certain noble, sighing for the joys and spoils of civil war, remarked, ‘I would there were many kings in Castile for then I should be one of them.’
The Truce of God
The Church, endeavouring to cope with the spirit of anarchy, succeeded in establishing on different occasions a ‘Truce of God’, somewhat resembling the ‘Sacred Months’ devised by the Arabs for a like purpose. From Wednesday to Monday, and during certain seasons of the year, such as Advent or Lent, war was completely forbidden under ecclesiastical censure, while at no time were priests, labourers, women, or children to be molested.
The defect of such reforms lay in the absence of machinery to enforce them; and feudalism, the system by which in practice the few lived at the expense of the many, continued to flourish until foreign adventure, such as the Crusades, absorbed some of its chief supporters, and civilization and humanity succeeded in building up new foundations of society to take its place. It would seem as if the lessons of good government had to be learned in a hard school, generally through bitter experience on the part of the governed.