Feudalism and the nobility

This chapter looks at western Europe between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. After Rome fell, Germanic groups occupied Italy, Spain and France. With no unifying power and frequent wars, society came to be organised around the control of land, mixing Roman traditions and Germanic customs. Christianity survived Rome and spread north, and the Church became a great landholder and political power.

Historians have rich sources for this period: records of land, prices and legal cases; church registers of births, marriages and deaths; inscriptions about traders' associations; songs and stories. One of the earliest scholars of feudalism was the French historian Marc Bloch (1886 to 1944). He argued that history is much more than politics and great people; he stressed geography and the collective behaviour of groups. His book Feudal Society describes French society between 900 and 1300 in remarkable detail. He was shot by the Nazis during the Second World War.

What is feudalism? The word comes from the German 'feud', meaning 'a piece of land'. It describes the society that grew up in medieval France, and later in England and southern Italy:

• Economically, it was farming based on the relationship between lords and peasants. Peasants worked their own land and the lord's, and performed labour services; in return the lord gave military protection.
• Lords also had wide judicial control over their peasants, so feudalism shaped social and political life too.
• Its roots go back to Roman times and the age of Charlemagne, but it became an established way of life in the eleventh century.

France took its name from the Franks, a Germanic tribe who ruled the old Roman province of Gaul from the sixth century as Christian kings. In 800 the Pope crowned their king Charlemagne 'Holy Roman Emperor', binding the kings and the Church closely together. Across the Channel, England was conquered in the eleventh century by a duke from Normandy.

The three orders. French churchmen believed everyone belonged to one of three 'orders' according to their work. A bishop put it simply: 'Here below, some pray, others fight, still others work.' These were the clergy, the nobility and the peasantry.

The nobility held the real power because they controlled land, through vassalage. The great landowners were vassals of the king, and the peasants were vassals of the landowners. A noble accepted the king as his seigneur (lord), and they made a mutual promise: the lord would protect the vassal, and the vassal would be loyal. This was sealed in an elaborate ceremony with vows taken in a church. The noble had great privileges:

• absolute control over his property, passed down through his family;
• the right to raise his own troops (feudal levies);
• his own courts of justice, and even the right to coin money;
• lordship over everyone settled on his land.

The manor. A lord's house was his manor, and he controlled villages around it, sometimes hundreds. A small estate might hold a dozen families, a large one fifty or sixty. Almost everything was produced there: grain in the fields, repairs by blacksmiths, carpenters and stonemasons, cloth spun and woven by women, wine pressed with children's help. There were woods and forests for the lord's hunting, pastures, a church and a castle for defence. In England, castles were almost unknown before the Norman Conquest. But the manor could not be wholly self-sufficient: salt, millstones and metalware had to come from outside, as did any luxuries.

Knights. Frequent local wars from the ninth century needed good cavalry, not just part-time peasant soldiers. So knights became important. A lord gave a knight a fief, land of 1,000 to 2,000 acres or more, with a house, a church, a watermill and a wine-press, which could be inherited. In return the knight paid the lord a regular fee and promised to fight for him. Knights practised daily with swords and dummies. From the twelfth century, wandering minstrels sang half-true stories of brave kings and knights in the halls of manors, to people who mostly could not read.