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.