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0:26
Feudalism, to any members of the general public who ever refer to it, stands for almost any hierarchical and oppressive system. Bosses or land-lords who bully their employees or tenants are being feudal. If they bully them fiercely they are worse: they are positively medieval. Medieval historians may dislike this hostile sidelight on their period but they are not on the whole much more precise in their use of the words feudal and feudalism.
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From Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted Popular notions of medieval society and institutions often combine anachronistic concepts and ideas. We see 15th-17th century aesthetics, 16th-17th century institutions, and 19th century projections onto 500 years before. Many myths, like those of cumbersome armor, dominance of the sword over other weapons, and a hatred of ranged weapons,
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have already been conclusively been debunked and refuted. However, only a few niche channels have ever discussed Medieval societal organization. In this introduction, we note that Medieval societies were heterogeneous, not just between but even within realms and domains. A king’s power was not absolute, elites and nobility were informal and were neither legally nor formally hereditary, and popular legitimacy formed an important role in succession. Beyond this top-bottom view,
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societies and communities were largely autonomous, had their own leaders chosen by whatever method, and relied more on their members than governance by a duke, or count, or even by the king.
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But to what ideal did the Medievals look up to? St Thomas of Aquino, a 13th-century Italian monk and philosopher, writes thus: For this is the best form of polity, being partly kingdom, since there is one at the head of all; partly aristocracy, in so far as a number of persons are set in authority; partly democracy, i.e. government by the people, in so far as the rulers can be chosen from the people, and the people have the right to choose their rulers.
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From the Summa Theologiae Q105 A1. Already in Early Medieval times, we find evidence of this best form of political organization widespread. The Anglo-Saxons followed Germanic custom regarding kingship: No man may make himself a king, for the people have the option to choose him for king who is agreeable to them: but after that he has been hallowed as king, he has power over the people, and they may not shake his yoke from their necks. From a homily of Aelfric of Eynsham.
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Most misconceptions of medieval times trace to discussions surrounding a dirty word in Medievalist scholarship: Feudalism. This word gives many connotations, some contradictory. One may imagine oppressive lords lording over peasant farmers, a king and hierarchical vassals ruling over allotted portions of land, redistribution of harvest and crops between a lord, his men, and peasants, knights fighting for honor and glory, manors dividing the kingdom and trading with each other.
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In this series, we will tackle myths and misconceptions regarding Feudalism and its associated institutions, including serfdom, peasant exploitation, social mobility, and more.
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Tyranny of a Construct
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On 31 March, 1973, a middle-aged man entered a lecture room with many anxiously awaiting his lecture. The man, Thomas N Bisson, was a noted medievalist, his reputation already well established. His informal lecture concerned peace movements, peace associations, and peace institutions in High Medieval Catalonia and Occitania areas. He discussed how Carolingian territorial order weakened through castle-based elites the past century,
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about how Languedoc faced disorder and turmoil, and how the Peace and Truce of God movement faced setbacks in controlling this violence. Before he began, however, Bisson made clear that he would not relate his findings to what historians then called “feudalism”.
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Already, historians had doubted whether terms like “feudalism” or “feudal order” held any value in analyzing Medieval institutions. Frederic William Maitland, an English constitutionalist, once wrote for his legal history lectures in 1887 the following:
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Now were an examiner to ask: who introduced the feudal system into England? One very good answer, if properly explained, would be Henry Spelman, and if there followed the question, what was the feudal system? A good answer to that would be, an early essay in comparative jurisprudence... If my examiner went on with his questions and asked me, when did the feudal system attain its most perfect development? I should answer, about the middle of the last century.
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In fact, the 17th century English antiquarian Henry Spelman never even used the word “feudalism”, or “feudal system”, yet Maitland’s points remain. Spelman held that the social and political relationships of medieval England had been uniform and systematic enough to be described adequately as regulated by a “‘feudal law’ [which] was a hierarchical system imposed from above as a matter of state policy.”
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Now after Bisson finished his lecture,
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another professor, John F Benton, came forward and demanded how medievalists could overlook so much evidence used in the lecture that could reshape Medieval Studies as a whole.
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Bisson, having lectured before further developments in Medievalist historiography, promised that he would elaborate once he got to writing the full journal article. The American Historical Review published said article four years later in Volume 82, April 1977, where Bisson kept his promise and made numerous references to “feudalism”.
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Only a few months after Bisson’s lecture, however, Elizabeth Brown presented a lecture in a meeting of Colombia University Medievalists. She titled her lecture, and subsequent journal article as “Feudalism: Tyranny of a Construct”. While historians before had held doubts, Brown was the first to jump in and tear down Medievalists’ prior assumptions about how Medieval times really worked.
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Brown first realized that historians did not account for Bisson’s data and evidence since they were so fixated on so-called “Feudalism”, whether as a Model or as an Ideal Type. For starters, scholars of England’s “feudal system” relied on 16th century editions of a 12th century book from Lombardy, the Libri Feudorum, to analyze and interpret pre-Tudor law. Quoting Brown, [It] gave... a precise and detailed “definition of the feudum whereby
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it could be recognized in any part of Europe,” or, as [a writer] says, “a systematic exposition of the principles of tenure, forfeiture and inheritance.” These criteria [Medievalists] employed to classify the evidence from Scottish and English sources, and their simplification and regimentation of phenomena notably offset the advantages to historical thought of their demonstration that the development of England and Scotland
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could be understood only in the context of the European experience.
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From this, an ideal form absent from concrete reality filled medievalists’ head: a uniform “feudal” system of government, with a clear pattern reliably present throughout Medieval Europe with local variations. These old scholars soon began using the term “feudal” to describe the state of society, which opened the door for the word “Feudalism” to include a wide range of meanings: Some used it to designate a system of government, some to refer to conditions that developed as
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public power disappeared. By 18oo the construct had been launched and the expression “feudal system” devised; by the mid-nineteenth century the word “feudalism” was in use.
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The way was prepared for future scholars to study feudalism-whatever it was conceived to be-scientifically and for others to employ the ism to refer, abusively, to those selected elements of the past that were to be overthrown, abolished, or inexorably superseded.
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Throughout the rest of her article, Brown admonishes Medieval studies in her day for using wildly different and divergent definitions and meaning for the word “Feudalism”. Out of many, however, two connotations in particular hold special weight in modern popular imagination. Two Feudal Connotations The word “Feudalism” has taken on different connotations with different people. They can be summarized as either one or a mix of the following two.
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First, we have the Marxian sense. Here, Feudalism is an exploitative economic arrangement, where nobles own lands and have serfs on them. The Marxian sense of Feudalism is one link in Karl Marx’s greater theory of Historical Materialism. This theory holds that after a time of primitive communism, a chain of command economy systems dominated in history: first, we had Slavery where the exploiters were masters, and the exploited were slaves – the relevant
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factor of production is labor. Next, we have Feudalism, where the exploiters were landowners, and the exploited were serfs – the relevant factor of production is land. Last, we have Capitalism, where the exploiters were/are capitalists, and the exploited were the proletariat – the relevant factor of production is capital. Common among these systems were that they were all command economies, in the vein of Adam Smith’s invisible hand:
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The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own convenience, though the sole end which they propose from the labors of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements.
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They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. From The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part 4, Chapter 1.
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Marx simply took Adam Smith’s central ideas of command economies and the labor theory of value, then took them to their logical conclusion. After Capitalism, the Leninist and Libertarian strands of Marxism disagree on what shall happen - the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, but that is beyond our video’s focus. What is important to understand is that Marx conceived of this feudal stage from
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French Revolutionary lawyers constructing a new legal system diametrically opposed to the pre-revolutionary one. Susan Reynolds expounds on this:
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To lawyers and intellectuals of the French Enlightenment it survived in France and would do so until les droits féodaux et censuels were abolished in 1789. For the German, von Justi, common sense demanded the abolition of a system that shortage of cash had made necessary in a bygone age. The French Revolution brought the package view of feudalism as a past stage of history to a wider public and accentuated the tendency to attribute to
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the middle ages whatever seemed most irrational and oppressive about the Ancien Régime, like the classification of society into distinct orders with a defined and legally privileged nobility.
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Ideas of progress suggested that such deplorable arrangements must have been archaic survivals. The package view of the middle ages as feudal and of feudalism as oppressive then got a new lease of life when Marx took it over, along with a newer version of the four-stage theory. He put new driving forces behind the beginning and end of what was now called simply feudalism, and concentrated on aspects of the middle ages that narrower or more romantic views
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had ignored or played down, but his knowledge of medieval history, despite wide reading, was still conditioned by the framework within which all scholars had seen it since the sixteenth century.
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To Marx, Feudalism ends with primitive accumulation of capital: state powers untying serfs from their lands, driving people from common pastures, and setting the state for the proletariat to become destitute workers with no means of production beyond themselves. Here, Marx breaks with Adam Smith, who posited that the primitive accumulation happened through sheer diligence. To wit: The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of the economic
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structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former. The immediate producer, the labourer, could only dispose of his own person after he had ceased to be attached to the soil and ceased to be the slave, serf, or bondsman of another. To become a free seller of labour power, who carries his commodity wherever he finds a market, he must further have escaped from the regime of the guilds,
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their rules for apprentices and journeymen, and the impediments of their labour regulations. Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production,
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and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire. From Capital, Volume 1, Part 8, Chapter 26. Of course, the Marxian view on Medieval times falls apart when one considers the Medieval reality. For starters, serfs comprised a relatively small population in any Medieval realm.
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In late Anglo-Saxon England, the Domesday Book records serfs composing 35% of households, with slaves composing another 9%. A little less than half of households being unfree seems excessive, until one considers that freeholders comprised 14% of households, and smallholding cottars another 30%, with the remainder of households being either townsfolk or land magnates. In economic terms, serfs are about on par with freeholders,
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holding 30 acres of land and two oxen on average, with the exception of tenured labor in exchange for their lands. In Carolingian France, polyptyques – or surveys of estates and lands – frequently record free households and tenants outnumbering servile ones.
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Marx himself acknowledges that serfdom in England ended by the late 14th century. However, he claims that the guilds took in these newly freed laborers until capitalist enterprise replaced handicrafts. As our previous video on guilds explains, capitalist enterprise was already a reality in Medieval Europe beyond a few Mediterranean areas. Machine rents were lucrative ventures, the decreasing number of farmers lent
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more importance to machines, and investment activities boomed as usury regulations still allowed fees for borrowed money to compensate the opportunity cost. The guilds themselves were simply brotherhoods and cooperatives of entrepreneurs, craftsmen, and their employees. Related to misconceptions about serfdom are a whole set of misconceptions regarding the Black Death. The Black Death, popular narratives say, allowed Europe to escape a potential Malthusian
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Trap from overpopulation, led to increased wages from the lower labor pool, and brought on serfdom’s end. These changes attributed to the Black Death in fact came from much longer-term trends in play from the past two centuries. While one may debate causality, population growth, urbanization, and economic improvements worked hand in hand together from the 12th century. In some regions, the late 13th and early 14th centuries saw this booming population stagger
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as migration increased. Cities grew more for one could find work here from increased Economic growth. The Great Famine, cooling climate, and war also contributed to the population slowdown. We find that certain regions began specializing in commodities, farmland went abandoned, and many of the rural and urban poor died off in the Great Famine. John Munro, who did research on the Black Death’s effect on wages, writes:
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One may conjecture that if labourers and artisans had enjoyed more bargaining power with presumed labour scarcities after the Black Death, they may have used that power to secure a reduction in the number of hours worked per day... For neither region did I find any convincing evidence that urban craftsmen sought to increase their leisure time, even after real wages had peaked in the mid-fifteenth century,
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by reducing either the work day or the work week, which was usually six full days. Munro, J. H. (2004). Before and after the Black Death: money, prices, and wages in fourteenth-century England. Indeed, one must remember that producers also act as consumers. The earnings that one has will go to either consumption or savings given time preference. Much of the population dying means that supply and demand both decrease by roughly equal measure,
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such that long term trends explain economic advances more than Malthusian theory. In fact, despite the increase in real wages continuing, taxes also increased to supplant treasuries. Too much emphasis has also been placed on wages per se, as Munro explains: Historians should recognize the fact that the proportion of the population living from money-wages alone was rather small. Many craftsmen and artisans receiving money
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wages had their own small agricultural holdings, if only vegetable gardens with their homes; and many masters if not laborers, were often also petty merchants in their professions, often earning profits that exceeded their wages. Munro, J. H. (2004). Before and after the Black Death: money, prices, and wages in fourteenth-century England. Serfdom itself became much rarer before the Black Death. The growing economy from the
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Commercial and proto-Industrial Revolutions made tenant agreements much more negotiable. The staggered population growth early in the 14th century also increased demands for labor, such that serfs became more physically mobile as they could contract with more employers. Landowners also found it more profitable to replace labor rents with cash tenancies, another pre-Black Death trend that kept growing. This aligns with the Commercial Revolution’s
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expansion, as liquid assets became favored over commodity goods in storing value. Ironically, serfdom blossomed further in Eastern Europe as the Black Death’s chaos made authorities clamp down on the citizenry, and the institution became more centrally regulated. A full discussion of the Black Death’s economic effects is beyond this video’s scope, and will be treated elsewhere. The so-called “Feudal” mode of production finally fails to stand up to scrutiny when one realizes
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how anachronisms dominate Marx’s thinking. Words like property, ownership, noble, and many more, as used in Medieval texts, meant different things from what people today are used to. These anachronisms shall be considered later on in this part.
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Next, we have the Weberian sense. This is the other connotation associated with “Feudalism”, bringing to mind a parade of dukes, counts, barons, and lords. Max Weber took Marx’s historical materialism and gave completely new definitions: “Feudalism” referred to the Middle Ages’ decentralized character, “Capitalism” referred to markets and property, and “Socialism” referred to centralized command economies. Today, the Marxian and Weberian
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definitions are often conflated and confused with each other, but this lies beyond our scope.
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With Weber’s sense of decentralized, fragmented authority, however, were assoicated a few institutions, and these eventually gained prominence when discussing Medieval society. Contrasting and diverging refinements to Weber’s concept emerged. François-Louis Ganshof gives the following definition of Feudalism:
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“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. The obligation of maintenance had usually as one of its effects the grant by the lord to his vassal of a unit of real property known as a fief.
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“a development pushed to extremes of the element of personal dependence in society, with a specialized military class occupying the higher levels in the social scale; an extreme subdivision of the rights of real property; a graded system of rights over land created by this subdivision and corresponding in broad outline to the grades of personal dependence just referred to; and a dispersal of political authority amongst a
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hierarchy of persons who exercise in their own interest powers normally attributed to the State and which are often, in fact, derived from its break-up.” Marc Bloch, on the other hand, gives this definition: A subject peasantry; widespread use of the service tenement (i.e. the fief) instead of a salary, which was out of the question; the supremacy of a class of specialized warriors; ties of obedience and protection which bind man to man
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and, within the warrior class, assume the distinctive form called vassalage; fragmentation of authority-leading inevitably to disorder; and, in the midst of all this, the survival of other forms of association, family and State, of which the latter, during the second feudal age, was to acquire renewed strength. From Bloch’s Feudal Society, p 446. Already we see how Medievalists used to have differences. Ganshof foregoes mentioning the
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subject peasantry and family, instead emphasizing the state’s dissolution with personal obligations more important. Bloch points to the survival of the State and the importance of association. While Brown makes short work of how too many definitions exist, however, all these definitions have common elements. Typical among them are the importance of fealty, obedience, fragmented authority,
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and military service, to the point that Medieval society was supposed to have been built on them. Susan Reynolds summarized these patterns as Fiefs and Vassals. The institutions of vassalage and fiefdom had become associated with Medieval society as a whole in Medieval Studies. This connotation is still dominant among popular history channels and websites, and is the one that Susan Reynolds systematically debunks. Vassals, Fiefs, and Feudal Things
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While these institutions no doubt existed in Medieval times, it is far from useful to study and analyze Medieval society in view of them alone. Susan Reynolds’s book Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted devotes three whole chapters to refuting the mainstream scholarly view at her time that Fiefs and Vassals provided the cornerstone of Medieval society. Reynolds even says that Brown did not go far enough in tearing down
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the tyranny of a construct just by pointing out the divergent definitions of Feudalism. Reynolds goes many steps further, and systematically tears down widely held assumptions that these institutions were more than what they really were: Brown, in her seminal article of 1974, thought that ‘feudal’ had some meaning when it had specific reference to fiefs because it was relatively easy to say what ‘fief’ meant… I shall
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argue that on that point she was too optimistic. Fiefs and vassalage, as they are generally defined by medieval historians today, are post-medieval constructs, though rather earlier than the construct of feudalism. Historians often refer to both fiefs and vassals when neither word is in their sources. They sometimes refer to them in ways that, irrespective of terminology, seem to me to distort the relations of property and politics that the sources record. Even when
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the historians follow the terminology of their documents and take pains to establish the phenomena recorded, they tend to fit their findings into a framework of interpretation that was devised in the sixteenth century and elaborated in the seventeenth and eighteenth. Reynolds now sets to explore how modern concepts of fiefs and vassals conformed to medieval property laws and documented socio-political relations. As mentioned above,
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the eighteenth-century idea of “Feudalism” came from 200 years’ worth of discussion over interplay between Roman and so-called “feudal” law, as compiled by Medieval bureaucrats and legal academics. This academic “feudal law” was based on a single treatise, the Libri Feudorum, which dealt only with Lombardy for a few decades. This treatise got attached to books tackling Roman law, compiled by legal academics who wrote commentaries on the Eastern Roman Code of Civil Law. What
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resulted concerned only the law for properties called fiefs, and its holders called vassals. In reality, this early academic notion of “feudal law” had little to do with law actually practiced in Medieval Europe. Only sometimes did lawyers use terminology from the academic feudal law, that they learned from university, for their local practice. Sometimes, these lawyers mixed these “feudal” terms with concepts from Roman law to prettify their arguments. Otherwise,
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practical Medieval legal procedure owed nothing to the law as taught in universities. Court realities and university lectures diverged more and more as the latter spread through Europe.
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To illustrate, while scholars still wrote about peer judgement and oaths in discussing court procedure, professional lawyers and judges had already become mainstay in late Medieval Europe, and the former had become an anachronism for practical legal procedure.
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Indeed, 16th century French legal historians dismissed the academic “feudal law” as unimportant to France, and saw the Libri Feudorum simply as recording local customs. However, these same French historians still relied on the academic “feudal law” for vocabulary and categories. The Lombard treatise was seen only as part of local variations in “feudal” customs. Indeed, the latter had a conjectural history of how fiefs and vassals came about,
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and this provided a good framework for the French legal historians to understand Medieval customs and practices. To them, the Medieval political order came about like so:
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Germanic barbarian soldiers owed loyalty to their leaders in warbands in exchange for property. These soldiers received “allodial”, or full rights to their property at first. In Carolingian times, these “allodes” became fiefs, and soldiers now had limited rights over them while retaining obligations to their leaders. Fiefs started as limited grants, and became hereditary over the course of French history. The relations between warbands and leaders carried over to
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the constitutional relations between kings and nobles in Medieval France.
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The Libri Feudorum saw Conrad II as the one who made fiefs hereditary, the 16th century legal historians saw it as Hugh Capet. Either way, the latter’s use of the academic “feudal law” had misled medievalists for centuries despite their denial of its applicability to France. The academic “feudal law”, only an invention of lawyers and bureaucrats, became seen as the concrete reality for Medieval times. Even worse, these legal historians invented
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the concepts of “fief” and “vassal”, which appear in almost no Medieval source beyond mentions which dealt with completely different meanings entirely. Hence, Reynolds proceeds to refute the notion that Medieval times rested on these concepts as cornerstone.
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Vassalage and Medieval Social Institutions
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We see that the popular idea of vassalage rests on three pillars: Vassalage as relations between lord and subordinate, and a defining feature of Medieval social institutions.
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Vassalage as representing Medieval society’s reliance on direct, private relations.
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Vassalage as the divider between nobility and commoner. In this section, we will explore how each pillar crumbles in face of documentary evidence.
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Medievalists before saw vassalage as a relation between a lord and his follower, the vassal. While unequal, both parties had voluntary and reciprocal obligations separating their relationship from that between a lord and his peasants or his subjects. The lord gave his followers land, the fief, and the followers pledged to be the lord’s vassals. Supposedly, this relationship came from Germanic warbands, where sworn brothers in a comitatus pledged loyalty to their leader.
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Most Medievalists agreed that this relationship had become widespread by Carolingian times, and great men became the kings’ vassals by undergoing rituals of commendation before taking an oath of fealty. These rituals and oaths bound them for life, broken only when a lord broke his promises.
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Since Medieval times valued formalism and rituals, Medievalists also thought that all vassals had to undergo this ritual. Popular depictions of vassals paying homage to their lord came from this old understanding of Medieval social relationships. Images of vassals putting their hands between their lord’s, kneeling, then taking oaths used to be Medievalists’ conception of the practice.
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In historiographical context, this old understanding came to be when Medieval Studies thought that individual, personal relations dominated society. Here ‘the main social bond [was] the relation between lord and man’, and no concept of impersonal, public relations existed. Hence it was also thought that kings treated the kingdom as their private property, and no notion of res publica—the public affair—existed until the Renaissance. This private, personal relation
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between lord and vassal was even supposedly expected to prevail over that between man and wife. Of course, obligations were not always fulfilled, and bonds sometimes failed to hold, but Medievalists thought that the norms and ideals of vassalage nonetheless held sway over institutions.
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Of course, this understanding, still dominant in popular consciousness, has many problems that fail to scrutiny with primary sources. As mentioned, the law of fiefs that supposedly governed how vassals behaved was an early modern invention: The idea of vassals as noble warriors who brought the ethos and solidarity of the warrior band into the structures of medieval government, who owed fidelity in return for the fiefs they
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were granted, and whose relation with their lords was contractual in a way that that of non-fiefholders was not—the whole idea, in short, of vassalage both as fiefholding and as the cement of medieval society—could be read between the lines of the texts of the law of fiefs, but only between the lines. It was the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars who found it. The ideals of commendation and vassalage, even in its supposed local variations,
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simply never existed for a good portion of Medieval society. Reynolds thus points out how “feudal tenure” only applied to a very small subset:
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To some extent, of course, [the law of fiefs] did develop out of earlier custom and law, but, in so far as it did, it was from the custom and law created by the arrangements made rather by great churches for the management of their lands than by lay nobles for theirs. The relation between a bishop or abbot and the tenants of his church's land was different from the relation of a king or lord and his warriors that is postulated by the idea of
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vassalage and the “union of vassal and fief”. The link between vassalage, as a relation that developed from that between kings or other lords and their warriors, and fiefs, as deriving from general grants of land made by lords in return for military service, cannot therefore explain the origin of the complex of rules that came to be understood as characteristic of ‘feudal tenure’.
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Most glaringly, the word ‘vassal’, in whatever translation, appears in only a few medieval sources. It appears frequently in Carolingian sources before going out of use in France and Germany, and only appeared again once Italian-trained lawyers appeared there. In England, which used a different legal practice, the word rarely appeared through the Middle Ages. Many Medieval French sources in fact use the word to mean “man of valor”,
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which the Song of Roland illustrates perfectly. To give only a few examples: And after him came Neimes out, the third, Better vassal there was not in the world; Stanza XVI When will time come that he from war draws back?" "Never," says Guene, "so long as lives Rollanz, From hence to the East there is no such vassal; Stanza LXII King Corsablis is come from the other part, Barbarian, and steeped in evil art. He's spoken then as fits a good vassal, Stanza LXXI
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In fact, many people thought to be “vassals” where more often called someone’s “men” or “faithful ones”. What Medievalists used to call “vassals” were in fact just generic subordinates who could be relied on for certain tasks. Indeed, many of these subordinates received no land from their employers for these services, as so many sources make clear. Going further, the notion of the vassal of a vassal is also an anachronism, with so-called vavassores—from Latin
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vassus vassorum—simply an informal social status for those near the lower end of military rungs. Of course, this social status varied between place and time, but it never took the anachronistic meaning until very late in Medieval times. The word “vassalage” itself referred to services rendered by a subordinate instead of anything more abstract. Many texts, including the Song of Roland, use it to mean virtues like courage and loyalty which a vassal—a man of valor—should have.
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This first problem concerns only the terminology used for the concept of “vassalage”. Deeper problems with it exist, especially those involving conceptions of Medieval nobility, society, and institutions. For one, the idea that “vassalage” came from Germanic customs fell apart once advancements in Late Antique studies sprung in the 1970s. These advancements already pointed to needed revisions in the idea of “Feudalism”, and
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helped Reynolds advance her thesis. The Germanic kingdoms, far from strange folk in Tacitus’s time, had already adopted Roman institutions by the 4th century. Roman institutions in fact survived much longer even with war and turbulence. Roman social structure and administrative framework carried on under Germanic rule, amphitheater events continued, and the same Roman families vied for political office. While war
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changed the rulers, the way they ruled afterwards could make one think that barely anything changed.
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An excellent ancient historian runs the risk of approaching the earliest centuries of the Middle Ages in the crudely negative terms inculcated into schoolboys of his generation. [This] point of view is at best out of date. The future of the medieval West was anything but dark.
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In addition to the Frankish kingdom… the Saxons in England, the Lombards and the popes in Italy, the Bavarians on the Danube, and the Goths in Spain all carried forward noteworthy parts of the Roman heritage. Even the idea of a universal empire went into abeyance in the West for only 250 years. Goffart, W. A. (2006). Barbarian tides: the migration age and the later Roman Empire. University of Pennsylvania Press.
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Thus sacral kings and warbands could never have been an important influence to a supposed “Feudalism”’s development, for they themselves were not as important as Roman institutions in the barbarian kingdoms. The Carolingians indeed attempted to restore a semblance of these same institutions, which had eroded in the 6th century. Noticeably, the Carolingian order saw a shift away from centralization and more towards coordination
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between different local power centers using common culture, symbols, and institutions:
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…the elite was interested in harnessing various kinds of forces to integrate a large empire and as a means of carrying out a political project, of bringing order to the world, by means of clarifying the communicative interaction that underwrites all authority: a kind of liturgisation of power. This mobilisation of forms of symbolic organisation of consensus and domination offered the Carolingian rulers a means of co-ordinating
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an empire without the mass taxation that was by the ninth century entirely unthinkable, and it offered the elite a means of sustaining its authority in the countryside too, on which control all political power ultimately rested in an agrarian economy. West, C. (2013). Reframing the feudal revolution: political and social transformation between Marne and Moselle, c. 800–c. 1100 (Vol. 90). Cambridge University Press.
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In the context of old ideas about personal and private relations dominating Medieval times, one should have no good reason exists to think that the Germanics failed to distinguish between public, community relations and direct, interpersonal ones. We now take on this point.
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Public and Private Affairs in Medieval Society The idea of Medieval society being a wholly private, individual affair stems from confused notions of Germanic society and post-Roman organization. The old understanding showed the Barbarian tribes relying more on interpersonal relations and kinship more than tribe welfare and collective, public affairs. The Roman notion of res publica, of affairs affecting all citizens, was thought not to exist among the Germanics.
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Changes in relations between rulers and ruled after the Roman bureaucracy’s erosion throughout the 6th century also helped further this image. Hence popular images of serfs individually pledging themselves to manor lords for protection and nobles pledging themselves as vassals spread, with the notion that Medieval monarchs had the entire realm as their property still in people’s minds. In this old understanding, Medievalists thought that Medieval peoples
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associated the ruler’s welfare with the land’s, for no separation between public and private meant that ruler and owner were one, and what happened to owner affected the owned afterwards. Of course, while Germanic societies outside the Empire did rely more on interpersonal relations than those in the Empire, notions of tribal—public—affairs did exist. There was no reason to think that the barbarians failed to distinguish between public, community
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relations and direct, interpersonal ones. Going further in the future, vassalage as a familial and aristocratic system instead of one of public interest becomes the root of this discontent. Early Medieval subordinates called vassals in the 9th century, in what few sources they were mentioned, were simply royal servants and bureaucrats handling government. Those vassals that held fiefs with rights of jurisdiction did so under public interest,
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not through personal or private relations with the king. Indeed, historians used to distinguish between Medieval times as relying on interpersonal relations in lordships, and Modern times as relying on territorial sovereignty in states.
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The question of private and public affairs in Medieval society ultimately rests on a bigger question regarding the nature of Medieval political societies.
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Of great importance even today is the question of Medieval statehood. The old standard of statehood rested on the idea of sovereignty as a “monopoly of violence”. Susan Reynolds was the first Medievalist to go against this grain and present her own idea of statehood: I offer the following, which is based on Max Weber, with some modification: a state is an organization of human society within a fixed territory that more or less successfully claims
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the control (not the monopoly) of the legitimate use of physical force within that territory. If one were to deny statehood on this definition to medieval kingdoms or lesser lordships in general, or even to those of the early middle ages, on grounds of the fluidity of their boundaries, the ineffectiveness of control within them, the autonomy, or partial autonomy, of lesser authorities within them, or their lack of sovereignty (however defined),
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one would have to deny it to a good many modern states as well.
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This question needs an entire part to tackle, however, and shall be the focus of this series’s next part. For now, however, we need only know that the public affair did exist, as late Medieval Catholic writers speaking of Christian Commonwealths could attest to. Collective agreements existed, impersonal bonds keeping society together existed, and . Most pressingly, so-called vassals had a public, political purpose more important
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than private ones in the king’s interest. Hence Reynolds also dispels the popular idea of Medieval nobles owing individual, contractual allegiances to the king: The suggestion, for instance, that all, or even most, of those who owed [beneficiaries] in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France, or their ancestors, had, ‘at least in principle’, made some sort of individual submission or request for protection, is based on a-priori ideas about
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the individual contractual basis of feudal ties in general and ‘commendation’ in particular. If people under [a beneficiary] sometimes complained that their lord was not protecting them in return for the dues that he received from them, that need not imply that their relation was modeled on the feudo-vassalic contract. It may show nothing more than a sense of the duties of government that is
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so common in traditional societies. One could, of course, argue that, while free peasants could have been put under [a beneficiary] without their consent, noble vassals would have expected to give it. But that only takes one back to the problem of drawing a line between those whom one considers to have been nobles and vassals and those that one does not: some of the people who are recorded as doing homage and taking oaths of fidelity before about 1200 look very unlike noble vassals.
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Indeed, the concept of nobility as we know it differed heavily from the medieval reality. One could only think that private interpersonal relations governed Medieval society if one had misleading ideas on nobility in the first place. We now take down the last, outdated pillar supporting vassalage. Nobility as an Informal Institution
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The concept of nobility in popular imagination as a formally hereditary institution had almost no basis in medieval reality. Reynolds explains thus:
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In the earlier middle ages legal and political conditions made it impossible for any definitions of nobility or freedom that anyone might make to be consistently maintained in individual lordships or kingdoms, let alone in ‘feudal society” as a whole. Nobility was a matter of wealth, prestige, and life-style—and, of course, as we meet it in the sources, it lay in the eye of the beholder. The petty local scribe who listed witnesses to a charter might describe someone as noble
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who would be nothing of the kind to a royal clerk. In the absence of full and reliable records ‘nobility of birth’ or ‘nobility of blood” might be equally subjective.
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In Carolingian times, a nobleman was a “noble man” – one who had a good family and good character. Perceptions of nobility relied more on character, kinship with good characters, and perceived prestige more than word of law. Acting like an aristocrat made one be seen as an aristocrat, rather than strict criteria:
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More generally, a hearty physicality was a central marker of elite status, which the occasional event such as the tragic death of Charles the Younger in 864, accidentally killed by a member of his own retinue in rough-and-tumble, allows us to glimpse... None of this suggests that these elites were necessarily uneducated: indeed, some took a positively unhealthy interest, from the church establishment’s point of view, in questions as abstruse as predestination.... It is simply to
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observe that being an aristocrat was at least in part a matter of acting like one, marking out the elite from the rest, in ways which transcended status definitions through office or ministry. West, C. (2013). Reframing the feudal revolution: political and social transformation between Marne and Moselle, c. 800–c. 1100 (Vol. 90). Cambridge University Press. Beyond nobles and commoners, the real highest elite in any Early Medieval Kingdom was the
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class of magnates, who owned great wealth and commanded great prestige. Kings needed their resources and popularity to lead armies, and had to flatter them for their support. Having wealth and prestige was the best way to get the king’s ear, and in exchange the king granted recognition that a magnate was worth listening to as a friend and peer. Not having the magnates’ support, however, led a king to trouble. King Edward I could not lead a campaign
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against the Basques in Gascony for England’s most powerful rejected his pleas for support.
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Nobility started becoming formally hereditary when knighthood itself became a formal institution. Before, knights were simply armed servants and soldiers – the word itself came from the Germanic kneht, meaning servant or employee, and also had cognate in the German knecht, as found in landsknecht. Knighthood became a formal title as wars needed fighting, and rulers needed fighting men. However, the title became subject to abuse since any knight could dub another a knight,
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and those rich enough could simply buy a knighting, then receive its privileges.
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It was finally in Early Modern times that absolute monarchs instituted hereditary peerage, so that nobility as a formal institution became set in stone. Reynolds now summarizes how unhelpful it is to classify Medieval society simply into noble and commoner: The problem is not only that each of these categories, and especially the top and middle, was very wide and contained people who would not have considered themselves remotely equal in
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social or political terms, but that the boundaries between them are so vague. Medieval society in most areas and at most times looks like one of infinite gradations or layers rather than one of wide social gulfs... The layers of society were more like those of a trifle than a cake: its layers were blurred, and the sherry of accepted values soaked through. Taking the whole of society, however... one has to see it as a very rich and deep trifle with a lot of layers.
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Similes and metaphors are dangerous because they are not falsifiable. Reynolds, however, meant to illustrate how the boundaries between nobles and peasants, or even between free and unfree, were less clear than most discussions of fiefs and vassals implied. Below the king and magnates, whoever was considered “noble” depended on the place and time. A Norman chronicler once gave a revealing list about whom 12th century society considered important:
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There is a particularly revealing list given by the Norman writer Wace of Bayeux around 1160. He also showed an awareness that there was a varied social middle ground. In describing the wasting of the land around Paris by the Vikings centuries earlier he said that the magnates—the dukes, counts and great men—were unable to protect the countryside. As a result the burden of local defence fell on the country knights, the free peasants, the
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tenant landowners, the village stewards, unfree peasants and servants—or serjeants in French. Crouch, D. (2015). The birth of nobility: constructing aristocracy in England and France, 900-1300. Routledge. Here we see the chronicler Wace determine the magnates by their kingdom-wide responsibilities, and other important men of local status in hazy relationships with each other. These could draw swords in a pinch, but focused on their communities, neighborhoods,
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and regional interests. Indeed, Medieval times’ localist character had each community dictate who was important and who was not. We illustrate such with another example: At some time between 1001 and 1020 the dominant land-holders of the Burgundian dioceses of Vienne and Bugey swore an oath to keep the peace. Comprehended within the twenty-six articles of the oath is a perception of the lay part of their
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society as made up of male and female peasants, prévôts (village administrators), merchants, knights of two levels of status (free and unfree), noblemen and noblewomen, as well as specialist freemen like the bargemen of the Rhône and the huntsmen employed in the forests. Crouch, D. (2015). The birth of nobility: constructing aristocracy in England and France, 900-1300. Routledge. Nobility could not have been readily defined in a time with little bureaucratic or administrative
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overhead. Even in England, which placed wergeld blood-prices on lost lives based on status, status still relied on wealth, standards of living, and specific responsibilities instead of birth per se. In fact, various wergeld rules even provide for the socially mobile. Of course, popular conceptions of “nobility” still mattered under law, and those thought to be noble received better treatment from community heads and judges:
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The provision in the emperor Frederick I’s peace ordinance of 1152 that knights needed fewer people to help them clear themselves of charges of breaking the peace than did peasants probably reflected older, if less formal and consistent, practice.” People of yet higher rank, who not merely wore swords and rode war-horses but commanded others who did, had yet more legal advantages. They might be effectively in charge of the
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local application of custom and law. Depending on political circumstances, they might also rely to a large extent on being left alone by more powerful but distant lords. However, these mentioned had no exclusive right to be called “noble”, and no formal noble jurisdictions came to be classified and organized from above at this time. A noble had power or privilege in so far as those thought noble had advantages in court or assembly. However, as Reynolds writes,
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His advantages would come, however, from the power he wielded as an individual or from his membership of the elite that would be influential in courts and assemblies. That is a different matter from enjoying a legal privilege that belongs to a defined class or status group. A witness to a local charter may be described as “noble” by the local scribe, yet would amount to nothing compared to a royal clerk or servant. Nobility, thus, lay in the eye of the beholder.
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One final quibble that Reynolds deals with is the popular myth that nobility had access to arms and weapons, while commoners had none. Reynolds thoroughly debunks this myth:
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One privilege that nobles do not seem to have enjoyed at this time was that of carrying arms, since that does not seem to have been regarded as a privilege or mark of status before the late middle ages. Peasants were more often called on to equip themselves for policing, defense, and military service than prohibited from having or carrying their equipment, though, of course, they might be in trouble if they swaggered about like nobles with expensive and showy arms.
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When efforts were made to discourage arms-bearing in the interests of peace they were often directed at people of higher status as well as at peasants. The anachronism of postulating rules about arms-bearing in a society where policing was a collective responsibility is matched by that of supposing that general rules about such matters could have been made or applied anyway.
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Reynolds now makes her most salient point: Medieval society valued the distinction between “noble” and “commoner” much less than the distinction between free and unfree. The description of someone as free or unfree was in some ways as subjective and dependent on context in the earlier middle ages as the description of someone as noble. People were free or unfree from different things or to do different things at different times.
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Nevertheless, however variously and inconsistently the line between freedom and unfreedom was drawn, it seems to have needed to be drawn more frequently before the later middle ages than was the line between noble and non-noble.
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An account of a certain French peasant becomes relevant here. Stabilis of Feury was a serf attached to a Benedictine abbey. He would leave Fleury for a while and make his fortune in the town of Troyes. He managed to own horses, falcons, and hounds, hire servants, and even marry a noblewoman. However, Stabilis thought that he could now forego paying dues and fees to the monks of Fleury. The Count of Troyes and an assembly of “noble men” gathered to judge the case.
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Stabilis demanded a judicial duel to settle the case, and the abbey brought up a free champion of noble lineage to fight him. The monk who wrote the account, some half a century after the event happened, claimed that an apparition of Saint Benedict intervened, and Stabilis finally decided to just pay his debts instead of fighting the duel. However noble Stabilis had become, his unfreedom defeated him in the end. Freedom
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allowed peasants to leave their estates, sell them, or resist new taxes or obligations. Free men could protest in the local lord’s court, and gain the support of those in the assembly. Free men could take cases and issues elsewhere, beyond the local level. Hence those in the middle of Medieval society could easily achieve nobility, whether in reality or in the eye of the beholder. Doing Away with Vassalage We must now conclude that the concept of ‘vassalage’
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is useless in analyzing Medieval society. In fact, vassalage refers to different kinds of relations when it appears in Medieval sources:
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ruler and subject, patron and client, landlord and tenant, employer and employee, commander and soldier, or even something like local bully and victim. Reynolds summarizes how vassalage is a useless concept: Distinctions between those who serve for wages, or for their keep, or just in hope of favours to come, also need to be made among those who might be considered either clients or employees. There may well be other distinctions that I have not thought of, while any of these could,
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of course, be combined together, but they were not invariably combined. The idea of the “union of vassal and fief” as introducing the age of ‘classic feudalism’ is at best little more than a neat but rather meaningless phrase.
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Many “vassals” thus had no fiefs, and many fiefholders owed no personal services. Those called vassals could be anyone from free subjects and subordinates to whole armies. This term is thus useless and unhelpful for any serious analysis of Medieval societal institutions beyond a general sense that someone was a subordinate. The union of vassal and fief only helps in making sense of Medieval Studies’ historiography, as Reynolds explains:
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it served to bridge the gap between Charlemagne's grants of benefices and the stage when the academic lawbooks called fiefholders vassals. Historians could go on writing about medieval lords and vassals as they had since the seventeenth century without having to rethink what they meant or might be thought to imply. As such, Reynolds proposes simply analyzing Medieval society through its norms, values, and cultural institutions. To start with, Medieval society embodied a
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conflict between hierarchy, obedience, and loyalty on one hand, and custom, subjective justice, mutual obligations, and collective justice on the other. The Medieval world accepted inequality as the foundation for all social and political thought. Everyone expected one’s obedience and loyalty to his immediate superior, and even beyond this arrangement. A hierarchy, no matter how ramshackle, did exist. Typically, a king existed at this hierarchy’s peak.
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These kings were not mere overlords, ruling over inferior lords. They made rules, decisions, and sometimes laws that held for their entire kingdoms. The concept of an ‘overlord’, or a lord who ruled over other lords who were vassals, who also had their own vassals, was an assumption based on another assumption: that Medieval realms followed “Feudalism”. A king’s power, while not absolute, was still seen as the final say over the kingdom’s policies and decisions.
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Conflicting with these norms of obedience and loyalty were customs and Medieval notions of justice. Rulers were supposed to protect those below them, not from oaths or ceremonies, but from the personal obligation of having more: Every ruler, everyone in a position of authority from the emperor or king down to the head of a household, was supposed to rule justly and according to custom. Every unit of government
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was assumed to be a community with its own customs and every ruler was supposed to consult with the senior members of the community about what was customary, right, and just. Those senior members who had the primary right and duty to declare the community's custom and advise its ruler were men who deserved respect for their high social status and wealth, and generally also for their age, and the length—or supposed length—of time that their
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families had been prominent in the community. In a kingdom they would be its greatest nobles and landowners, together of course with bishops and abbots, but in a village they might well be no more than the more prosperous peasants: either way they should be consulted.
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Of course, kings paid more attention to their magnates than local rulers did to other wealthy families out of practicality, but either way the principle held true often. Beyond consulting important and great men, bigger matters needed collective judgement as consultation from the body of a community: On important matters the wider the consultation was, the better—though there was, of course, no need to consult women, children, or servants.
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The idea of the ‘judgement of peers', as embodying the collective judgement of one's fellow subjects rather than the unilateral judgement of one's ruler, did not originate from the relations of lords with their warriors but from the relations of all lords with all subjects. At this stage it did not necessarily mean that the king or lord did not join in the judgement: hierarchy and authority needed to be balanced by consultation, not negated.6! Any ruler would
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meanwhile have closer links with individual subjects which would in practice impose greater obligations on both sides. These were often reinforced by individual agreements and oaths, but any ruler’s primary obligation was supposed to be to the whole community he ruled. While on paper, obedience and customary justice balanced rulers and subjects against other, in practice rulers had advantages over their subjects.
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While subordinates were supposed to be free from a superior who committed crimes and offenses, powerful enough superiors could definitely punish them: It would have been a brave [subordinate], or one with friends in a hostile kingdom nearby, who would have tried to justify leaving the service of his king by accusing him of any of the offences that were listed early in the eighth century as justifications for leaving a lord.
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If a ruler was unjust it was the job of the senior members of the community to remonstrate with him. At what stage lawful remonstrance turned into lawful or unlawful rebellion posed problems that could never be resolved within the traditional system of values. Additionally, conflicting loyalties also complicated matters. Ireland’s story of Cú Chulainn and his conflicting géasa prefigured these Medieval matters. Of course, different areas had different ways of dealing with this:
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In England, for instance, the maxim that ‘the man of my man is not my man’ would have been nonsensical if put in the mouth of the king, while the German Eike von Repgow would have rejected it. There can have been few places or times in which the maxim was obviously true at every level. It was the product of debate about real dilemmas, not a statement of an obvious truth. Conflicting loyalties became a worse problem once Medieval rule became subject to bureuacracy and
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centralization. Indeed, kings and other rulers wanted more efficient administration in the wake of developments in the 12th century. The institution of fiefdoms is one such topic very relevant to that time period. Fiefs and Medieval Property Institutions In both popular consciousness and the old Medieval Studies framework, a fief was a unit of property held with more restricted rights than modern property.
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Contrary to popular belief even now, this understanding of fiefs not always dealt with land, and could include structures, capital, and so on. A fief came to be either through a lord’s grant, or through someone surrendering to a lord his own property, held in his own right as an alod in allodial property. This understanding of the fief also saw peasants have limited and subordinate land rights, although different from those of fiefs.
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Fiefdoms supposedly began in Carolingian times, with Emperors granting land grants to vassals for life terms, before becoming hereditary. After the Carolingian Empire’s collapse, counts and other magnates would also give their own land as fiefdoms to their own vassals. This tenure of fiefs was supposed to be honorable, free, and noble, given in exchange for military service. This payment in services supposedly contrasted with rents owed in money and kind by peasants.
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Lastly, the ceremony of receiving fiefs supposedly took from those for vassalage,
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for only vassals were supposed to receive fiefs. Fiefs were supposed to have overtaken alods as the dominant property holding after Carolingian times.
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Lastly, we can never forget the so-called ‘feudal pyramid’, where landholdings formed a hierarchy involving everyone above the peasantry. On the top was king or emperor, with vassal tenants-in-chief next, then a whole range of undertenants, subvassals, rear-vassals, and other sorts of subordinate vassals above the peasantry. Social conventions that used to be associated with vassalage - chivalry, military service - supposedly marked one as worthy to own land.
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This old understanding of fiefs had property ownership divided between lord and vassal, with absolute ownership nonexistent, and property rights unprotected beyond one’s personal force of arms. Medievalists imposed blurred lines between property and government, following from them failing to distinguish between private and public, as discussed earlier. Rights and obligations between lords and vassals regarding fiefs
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were supposed to be more governmental than proprietary, similar to lords having legal jurisdiction over their peasants. Evolving Ideas of Property We must note, however, that Medieval Europe was a settled, agricultural, and hierarchical polity with little bureaucracy and few land markets. Here, rulers and landlords often did similar tasks and received similar payments. Property rights also often existed in divided form, with rulers ranging from village elders
1:00:06
to kings and emperors controlling their subjects’ use of the land. Indeed, societal customs thought little about differences between government hierarchies and control over land exploitation. The old Medievalist understanding contrasted so-called ‘feudal’ property, a primitive and cultural institution, with modern ‘ownership’, satisfying the three property rights:
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right to use,
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right to income, and right of ceasing ownership. This distinction first appears in 17th and 18th century England, when legal battles sought to defend property against government encroachment, and when landlords tried doing away with common rights to introduce agricultural improvements on their estates. The idea of ‘feudal property’ began in light of these events. On one hand, its supposed contractual nature was seen as
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free and voluntary, characterizing European civilization’s liberty. On the other hand, this liberty was seen as incomplete, and those centuries saw lawyers and courtiers battling perceived legal flaws supposedly inherited from the law on ‘feudal property’. Renewed study on Roman Civil Law fueled this growing understanding. Justinian’s code specifically mandates a separate law for persons and one for things,
1:01:16
from which we have the English idea of property rights as natural individual rights. However, Reynolds points out that property rights cannot exist without societal recognition of said rights as claimed in land or goods. One’s property in whatever society is simply what said society recognizes and in principle protects as property. Rights that are thought of as divided or protected by custom are not necessarily less secure
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than those recognized as such by formal, written statutes or constitutions. As Reynolds writes: Even in a laissez-faire capitalist society, and however little the man in the street may like to recognize the fact, property is to some extent limited by social controls. Modern property rights are less absolute and more liable to be divided and shared than those who stress the strange and incomplete nature of feudal property seem to imply. There are still landlords and tenants, who
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will share some rights and enjoy others against each other and against outsiders, while they each have obligations to each other and to outsiders, including both central and local government. An ‘owner’ of property, in other words, does not have absolute rights over it. The distinction between ‘ownership’ or ‘property’ on the one hand and ‘tenure’ on the other, or between ‘owner’ and ‘tenant’, is a distinction between words—our words. In so far as it bears any
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relation to legal realities, they are the realities of our particular legal system.
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All societies necessarily limit and regulate the use of property, whether the degree of exclusive use, the possibility of confiscation, and so on. Along with property rights also come societal obligations, whether or not anyone recognizes them. Most clearly, an obligation exists not to harm others with one’s property. Obligations to taxes or service also exist, whether modern bureaucratic taxes, or even mere voluntary and contractual gifts,
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which do not seem like obligations because they are not legally imposed. Modern Liberal regimes necessarily reduce one’s rights to use and earn from one’s property with their heavy taxation.
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Of course, a need exists to separate modern conceptualizations of property rights and obligations from those of a different society. The way a society conceptualizes them, like as voluntary gifts, reveals what political ideas said society values. Sometimes, no clear correspondence exists between property rights and obligations—they come in different packages, so to speak. However, a society having different
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packages gives no reason to dismiss the existence of true property rights:
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The contents of the packages in each society need to be examined in context, not lumped into crude categories constructed by noticing only one or two kinds of right or obligation and sticking a label on the package so that we do not need to look inside. The rights and obligations attached to land or other forms of property are likely to vary within a single culture or society, especially if it is one as large and varied as that of medieval Europe.
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Finding what is in any package is made more difficult by the fact that few people, even when they write defenses of property or compare the strange laws of other societies with their own, are concerned to work out anything like an analysis of all the rights and obligations of property even in a single society. For outsiders looking at a society, the rights or obligations to be mentioned are likely to be those that look unfamiliar.
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Of course, we will know more about a society’s property rights from that society’s members. Their focuses and priorities in what to write, however, change depending on their situations and conditions:
1:04:54
What they are interested in and mention are the rights that they think are under threat and the obligations that are contested. If, like Locke and others in the eighteenth century whose ideas are still so influential, they see property under threat of taxation or confiscation, then they write about the absolute rights of property-holders against government. Documents of title and records of disputes from any society, particularly if they are
1:05:18
not drawn up by professional lawyers (and even, sometimes, if they are), often omit information about a lot of items on my check-list and give a partial view of others. People who are bothered by the competing rights of their landlords or tenants will play them down and may imply that all property rights are of necessity undivided so that their own must be complete. If they want to sell property or give it away and are worried by the claims of their kin they will
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stress their free rights of disposition, while their kinsmen or heirs will stress the opposite.
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Doing away with 17th and 18th century legal curiosities, we must now discuss whether fiefs are a category of property, what rights and obligations they entailed, and how they differed from alods and peasant properties. Other than the three property rights listed above, Reynolds considers other aspects regarding property:
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an additional right to pass on property as inheritance, which may come in contradiction with the right to ceasing ownership.
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the term through which property rights and obligations exist, and the right to take over unowned property (the homestead principle).
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protection over one’s property, which Reynolds considers the most fundamental property right. She thus divides Medieval property law into two periods: before and after the Crisis of the Twelfth Century. Before the Twelfth Century Before the Crisis, property law varied widely between areas, and the neat threefold division between fiefs, alods, and unfree peasant holdings failed to hold. On paper,
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high status men had more rights in their property, and owed lighter and more honorable obligations. However, political favors, power politics, a growing land market, and changes in customs ensured little uniformity in how property rights were exercised. Customary law, despite having no formal status, had real force behind it. Despite seeming bound and fixed, its applications necessarily differed on the place and time.
1:07:16
In general, early medieval custom saw conflicting norms prevail over formal, authoritative discussion. Conflict resolution needed more nuance and discretion than later professional laws inspired by Roman examples. What statements of principles existed amounted only to maxims, and doubts and disagreements resolved in one way last year could be resolved another way this year.
1:07:37
Even in the next village, disputes could also be resolved in a completely different way. Like everything subject to customary law, rules for land saw variations. However, its importance to agricultural economies meant that land laws were particularly liable to variation depending on the place or time. Laws in spring could change in harvest, laws in colder areas differed from warmer areas, and customs in bounty time definitely changed in famine time. And of course, the
1:08:05
fundamental conflict between hierarchy, obedience, and loyalty on one hand, and custom, subjective justice, mutual obligations, and collective justice on the other pervaded rules for land.
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Inheritance to kin could anger a local noble who wanted more control over claimed land. Some subjects thought their land rights absolute, yet still owed obligations to the local ruler. Terms under which land was granted to an inferior could erode along with the sense of gratitude and obligation. Rulers wanted to maximize dues and controls, subjects wanted to minimize them. Individual fiefs would have become alods even when local rulers and magnates wanted to keep imposing dues.
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Of course, terms for fiefs and alods were also used infrequently and inconsistently in this time. One must take the meaning of a particular word referring to land property from context instead of a dictionary when going through Early Medieval sources.
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Later in her book, Reynolds lists multiple and different definitions for land property in different contexts, whether Carolingian lands, Italian City States, French polities, among many other examples. In summary, however, while nobles and free men before the twelfth century might acknowledge that they held specific estates from churches (or more rarely from kings or other nobles) as fiefs, neither they nor anyone
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else applied the word to the main body of their inheritances, at least in anything like the sense in which it would later be used. In the only context in which it was applied to noble property or lordships in general it did not have any connotations of dependence or restricted rights. Not until well after 1100 were the properties of nobles and other free men normally described as fiefs, nor did the word fief begin to denote anything like a consistent category
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of property—in so far, considering its aberrant use in England, as one can say that it ever did. Indeed, before the Crisis of the Twelfth Century, free men held their lands as full property. Regardless of what obligations they held, they thought to have absolute obligations over their lands. Of course, relatives and tenants restricted what property rights a free man had—including servile tenants. Wherever something resembling government existed, property owners owed their
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rulers obligations. Even Church lands owed obligations except for specifically granted exemptions. These obligations differed depending on the owner’s status or the estate’s size, although a mere farmer and a noble man at day’s end had the same rights on paper—in practice, however, the farmer had a harder time maintaining his rights. Furthermore, those with full property rights had governmental powers over their servile or less free tenants.
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As we have stated, these men with full property rights need not be ‘noblemen’ in the modern sense, yet may have seemed ‘noble’ to their tenants and neighbors. Separate from the question of property rights was having authority over free men, especially free men with their own property. Some parishes and dioceses exercised authority over free men holding parts of Church lands. They could do so for they had ‘immunity’ over
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their lands, or special privileges exempting them from dues and even external jurisdiction. These immunities’ existence also happen to violate the old Medievalist understanding that jurisdiciton over vassals was a lord’s natural right. Early medieval lords dealt with their followers’ concerns informally,
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but no reason exists to believe that they deal with property disputes regularly. This happened because other than a king, no one exercised a modern concept of governmental or coercive authority over free men without special authorization. Some realms, like the Carolingian Empire, delegated this to counts. Here, where the realm was big enough, a clear distinction existed between an official’s office and his own lands. A king being able to dismiss his counts,
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or being able to confiscate his counts’ property depended on custom and circumstance. Of course, poor communications infrastructure meant that kings were content to let local officials handle their own affairs as long as they kept loyal in crisis. Only if central government broke down could officials bully their lessers and embezzle crown property, such that confusion would exist between the officials’ property and their governmental
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authority. Otherwise, nobles held no ‘immunities’ similar to some parishes and dioceses, and later political fragmentation—so-called ‘feudal anarchy’—sprung from a different source. After the Carolingian Empire collapsed, lay lords got independent jurisdiction over free men through usurping the central government, rather than ‘immunities’. Turmoil from Viking, Hungarian, and Saracen raids, along with bands of robbers and bandits gave rise to local rulers who
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exercised governmental powers in their own right. These local rulers became seen as legitimate through customary law, the same way that property rights existed through customary law.
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Just as Medieval society existed in layers and gradations, so too did Medieval government: The king was supreme but not sovereign in the sense of being allowed to take and enforce decisions unilaterally. His obligation to justice and custom included a duty to respect the customary rights of his subjects, whether we would call them governmental or proprietary. His duty to protect the church and respect its rights was particularly strong.
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Churches held their property if anything more freely than laymen, though we have to bear in mind that a serious lay consensus about the property rights of churches might not have supported all the inferences that we draw from clerical sources. However that may be, the duty of any king or other lord to protect churches and their property was always, whether from motives of piety or power, likely to turn into controlling them. There does not seem to be any reason, however,
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to see control and interference as falling on the property side of the boundary between proprietary and governmental rights. To talk of ‘proprietary churches’ or talk of a ‘proprietary church system’ is to interpolate ideas of property into early medieval society that are strange to it. Now one must note that these elements of hierarchy are purely social and governmental, not a matter of property rights. Nobles and free men did not think that their property came from
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grants by the king or a lord, other than times that they did receive a grant in addition to inherited land. These grants, however, were permanent and did not constitute ‘fiefs’. Times where property was confiscated for loans or taxes due were no different from how repossession agencies act today. Confiscation as a punishment tells more about how valuable a lot of land was and how crude punishments were than does it say about a ‘feudal contract’.
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Besides inherited properties and alods, some free men did hold lands from kings or parishes or dioceses with restricted rights. Some counts and royal officials held parts of the king’s estates, some kings granted holdings to loyal followers and servants in return for special services, military or otherwise. Medievalists used to think that these royal grants constituted a classic lord-vassal relationship with accompanying fiefdom, but in reality little
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is known about these land grants. Most of what is known, however, comes from church records. These parishes and dioceses acted to safeguard their property, and while general custom ensured that a bishop or abbot worked diligently to keep terms and conditions clear, little uniformity existed beyond that imposed by canon law. However, these practices to secure Church property saw their failure after the Crisis of the Twelfth Century, and its following effects
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on Medieval governance and politics. Crisis, Bureaucracy, and Lawyers Before the Crisis of the Twelfth Century, property law was nothing but local customs reflecting social values. Property not held under lease was simply freehold property, similar to the modern idea of property.
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The Weberian and old Medievalist understanding of fiefs held for service did not exist at all. It was only after the Crisis of the Twelfth Century do we see fiefs exist in any form, and not in the popular understanding. Instead of societal custom, property law now depended on professional lawyers or rulers, such that stronger and more centralized bureaucracy and government helped the concept of ‘fiefs’ develop, not decentralization or so-called ‘feudal anarchy’.
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We must know the context for these changes. For one, economic development and a growing population led to disputes over land, more land clearances, and a growing land market. In fact, 1300s Medieval England saw periodic speculative bubbles on agricultural land for two centuries. Land speculation became a regular activity for even common folk: it became increasingly common for people to buy or sell property as part of a group,
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enabling the purchase of more extensive properties and increasing the opportunity for profit; a rising number of people were involved in multiple transactions; and many individuals (particularly those from London) had property interests at a distance from their places of residence, indicating purchase for means other than consumption. There are indications that those in certain occupations, such as soldiers, merchants, and legal professionals,
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were able to accumulate sufficient capital to engage in property speculation, and on occasion this effected their means of entry into the landed gentry. The apparent increase in the number of gentry freeholders in the fifteenth century should be interpreted within this context. Bell, A. R., Brooks, C., & Killick, H. (2019). Medieval property investors, ca. 1300–1500. Enterprise & Society, 20(3), 575-612.
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Beyond England, the Continent saw a diverse economy in terms of market orientation. Loose institutional controls existed with land markets, rulers promoted subdivisions and subholdings to promote dynamism in the land market, demesnes were reduced and dissolved to build new clearances, and administration became more complex to oversee more land transactions. lords took actions to increase the flexibility of rural land markets…
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With the gradual abolition or reduction of the demesne economy, lords aimed at a stabilization of manorial structure and at additional income from a rising number of subject holdings with the help of more flexible land markets that would allow subdivisions or the erection of smallholdings… Cerman, M. (2005, June). Social structure and medieval land markets in east-central Europe. Paper at the conference “The Rise, Organization,
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and Institutional Framework of Factor Markets” in Utrecht. Real estate, the growing need for machinery, the recent Commercial Revolution, and a growing market in rents for both land and capital gave cause for financial liquidity to increase. Thus, more gold and silver became available, especially for the real estate market. Lastly, the Investiture Controversy between the Catholic Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor
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gave rise to theoretical developments about the differences between office and property.
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All these changes gave cause for more powerful and bureaucratic governments to rise, and for a formal law and legal profession to exist. On top of social and economic developments, we must also touch on the Crisis of the Twelfth Century. We must save a deeper look into the Crisis for another video: it is a rich and interesting topic that rivals the Roman Crisis of the Third Century, or the Chinese Three Kingdoms
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Period, in the depth of knowledge we must discuss. One simply needs to know, however, that the Crisis saw a period of violence and war in Europe only to end with bureaucratic governments restoring peace and order through coercion on lords. Thomas N Bisson, the lecturer mentioned at this series’s start, gives this overview: What moved the crises of the twelfth century were not simply the designs and dynastic accidents of the powerful amidst growing populations and wealth,
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but chiefly the new customs of coercive lordship: the craving for status tied to banal powers and the possession of castles. How better to justify one’s superiority than by imposing on people? To speak of the crisis of the twelfth century is not simply to magnify the dilemma of castellans and the misfortunes of dynastic families. Nor is it that the truth of this history must somehow displace those of renaissance, reformation, and societal-economic growth. Yet the concept of
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crisis, however flabby in modern (non- medical) usage, has the metaphorical resonance to awaken the human meaning of an experience of power no less historic than changes of mind, belief, and wealth; a problematic experience in which justice for the masses was elusive at best, the violence of castles habitual, and the suffering of peasants and working people massively normal. Bisson, T. N. (2015). The Crisis of the Twelfth Century. Princeton University Press.
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With changes in government, any ruler who wanted effective governance now needed literate servants to help him maintain and extend power. These clerks kept records of subjects’ obligations, and argued in his stead the case for increasing them. Those with large estates also needed to employ people who knew about precedents, rights, and wrongs with respect to their rulers’ demands.
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Improvements in transport and communications infrastructure also let rulers, magnates, and kings copy each other’s practices. While custom varied between areas and had blurry boundaries regarding their jurisdiction, these new governments could extend obligations from one area to another. One example of a custom turned obligation was the ceremony of heirs paying homage to a lord, and sometimes also inheritance taxes.
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Where obligations increased, rights were not diminished, and even made more secure through regular jurisdictions and courts. Laymen who held land from the Church especially managed to secure claims and judgements in their favor in court. It is ironic that just as the Church reached its heights, its methods to secure its property among lay tenants finally failed.
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The profession of lawyers itself began in 12th century Northern Italy just as Lombard and Roman law saw renewed study. Disputes over church lands, Imperial German claims to authority, among other issues gave fuel for academics and professional lawyers to develop a convenient treatise of law. The Libri Feudorum and associated commentaries began in this context. By the 13th century, England already saw professional lawyers dominate royal courts and staff the judiciary.
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Semi-professional lawyers, who had enough training and experience in courts, taxation, and laws, also could advise landowners and other interested parties who could not afford advocates from royal courts. Meanwhile, France and Germany still saw dispersed jurisdictions and diverse legal systems such that the legal profession was not as standardized. The elite among lawyers employed by landowners studied the Roman law and applied it when advising. Practical applications, however,
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were still disconnected from the formal law studied in university. Government, litigation, and property still relied more on custom than on formal law. Lawyers became professionals from training, experience, and employment, not from studying the Roman law or the Libri Feudorum.
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Beyond these differences, legal systems shared a professionalism unseen with older customary law. They all dealt with charters, deeds, customs, government records, court records, and property-owner records far more the Roman law. If a formal legal code had any importance, it was canon law for canon lawyers. Canon law meant nothing, however, to lawyers to argued in secular courts—especially as secular
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courts now also handled cases on Church property. Ironically, the non-Roman law took on a codified, written form, and Roman law took on a customary role as the legal profession developed.
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With better records and closer arguments came more explicit rules. These more explicit rules paid attention to some words more than others, including the word ‘fief’. By the 13th century, lawyers applied the word ‘fief’ to the lands of knights, nobles, even those of great churches. Of course, this fashion spread faster in some areas. In England, ‘fief’ referred to all heritable free property, while in Germany,
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its use in referring to benefices took longer to spread. The legal profession’s spread and shared values also let the word ‘fief’ suddenly get applied to everything it could be applied to. This was a revolution in terminology that was only one example of the post-Crisis Medieval world showing greater cross-cultural influence and movement between lands.
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In some realms, academic lawyers suggested to rulers to turn alods into fiefs, basing their advice on Lombard custom. These conversions happened for political conditions gave free property owners no choice, especially with force and violence being feasible options after the Crisis. On the other hand, some property owners did accept converting their lands into fiefs, whether because they gave their lands to the king,
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or whether because a fief no longer seemed an inferior type of property. Knighthood’s formal rise after the Crisis also meant that knights held fiefs primary over other types of property.
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Some rights and obligations regarding fiefs still held semblances of customary law. While fief inheritance now required paying homage and dues, it still passed on similar to customary inheritance laws. Fiefdoms also required no military service, only imposing a regulated system of rights and obligations. However, the fiefdom was an entirely new category of property, and was the characteristic property of knights and resulting nobles.
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However, many differences in fiefs existed among realms, and even more pressing ones existed between the High and Late Middle Ages.
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While the former’s newly bureaucratic governments could not ignore custom, they took advantage of sufficiently ambiguous precedents and norms, along with respect for rulers, to excise a good many taxes and dues that they wanted. Where custom was strong, local rulers could be left to exercise authority. However, these local rulers were encouraged to secure grants and confirmations of their rights to rule locally. Thus, the academic law of fiefs found
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confirmation for its priestly-derived theory: that authority in a realm was delegated from above. Later on, the fiefdom went from being a benefice granted in favor to an imposed state of property by governments. Reynolds notes that society became increasingly formalized, such that clear class divisions found their start in this time: it was in this period that the noble fief and the feudal pyramid or feudal hierarchy of tenure that
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came to be considered the keystones of feudalism became established in anything like the form they are supposed to have had. They were the creation of the stronger, more centralized, more bureaucratic, and more effective government that developed after the twelfth century, and of the professional law that went with it, not of the age of customary law before it. Increases in centralization and bureaucracy continued through Medieval times, till they
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found their logical end in the 17th century’s Absolute Monarchies and Managerial Bureaucracies. However, we will save discussion on that topic for another time. For now, however, we shall synthesize what we have learned. Summary
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Just as popular notions of vassals and vassalage for service came from Church actions and not Medieval society in general, so to did popular notions of fiefs and fiefdoms come from Church land grants. The academic ‘feudal law’ also owed more to these practices than to any real societal or property laws existing in Early Medieval times. The old Medievalist understanding of fiefs and vassals thus came from this very specific
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subsection of Medieval society, clerical and priestly practices to maintain their property.
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Also contrary to popular belief, some traits of “Feudalism” that really existed came not from Medieval society’s decentralized nature, but from increasing centralization and bureaucracy after the Crisis of the Twelfth Century. These traits include among others: an increase in using violence for resolving disputes,
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fief tenures for governors and local rulers,
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increased focus on noble loyalty to the king, and the feudal pyramid of nobles from dukes and counts to lowly knights. These changes happened since society grew larger in scale and complexity from economic and cultural developments. With the twelfth century’s economic revolutions, renaissance, and church reformation also came violence, calamity, and conflict. Rulers needed more convenience and efficiency in dealing judgement and decisions.
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Thus formal bureaucracies developed, and with them came so-called ‘feudal’ policies.
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