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 FEUDALISM

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FEUDALISM

many. — They are thus answered by the Teutonic School (Elton, Eng. Hist. Rev., July, 1886; Vinogra- doff, "Growth of the Manor", London, 1905, 87; Maitland, "Domesday Book and Beyond", Cam- bridge, 1897, 222, 2.32, 327, 337): (1) the name mark may not be applied in England, but the thing existed. (2) It is not denied that there are analogies between the Roman mil and the later manor, but analogies do not necessarily prove derivation. (3) The manor was not an agricultural unit only, it was also judicial. If the manor originated in the Roman vill, which was composed of a servile population, how came it that the suitors to the court were also judges? or that villagers had common rights over waste land as against their lord? or that the community was represented in the hundred court by four men and its reeve? (4) See- bohm's evidence is almost entirely drawn from the position of villas and villeins on the demesnes of kinf;s, great ecclesiastical bodies, or churchmen. Such vil- lages were admittedly dependent. (5) Most of the evidence comes through the tainted source of Norman and French lawyers who were inclined to see serfdom even where it did not exist. On the whole, the latest writers on feudalism, taking a legal point of view, incline to the Teutonic School.

Cause.s. — The same cause that produced in the later Roman Empire the disappearance of a middle class and the confronted lines of bureaucracy and a servile population, operated on the teutonized Latins and latinized Teutons to develop the complete system of feudalism.

(1) Taxation, whether by means of feorm-Jultum, danegelt, or gabelle, forced the poorer man to commend himself to a lord. The lord paid the tax, but de- manded in exchange conditions of service. The ser- vice-doing dependent therefore was said to have " taken his land " to a lord in payment for the tax, which land the lord restored to him to be held in fief, and this (i. e. land held in fief from a lord) is the germ-cell of feudalism.

(2) Another, and more outstanding, cause was the royal grant of folc-land. Around this, too, historians at one time ranged in dispute. The older view was that folc-land was simply private land, the authorita- tive possession of which was based upon the witness of the people as opposed to the bok-land, with its written title deeds. But in 1830 John Allen (Rise and Growth of Royal Prerogative) tried to show that folc-land was in reality public property, national, waste, or unappro- priated land. His theory was that all land-books (con- veyances of land) made by the Anglo-Saxon kings were simply thefts from the national demesne, made for the benefit of the king, his favourites, or the Church. The land-book was an ecclesiastical instru- ment introduced by the Roman missionaries, first used by that zealous convert, Ethelbert of Kent, though not becoming common till the ninth century. Allen based his theory on two groimds: (a) the king occa- sionally books land to himself, which could not there- fore have been his before; (b) the assent of the Witan was necessary to grants of folc-land, which, therefore, was regarded as a national possession. To this Professor Vinogradoff (Eng. Hist. Rev., Jan., 1893, 1-17) made answer: (a) that even the village knew nothing of common ownership, and that k fortiori the whole nation would not have had such an idea; (b) that the king in his charters never speaks of terram gentis but tcrrnm juris sui; (c) that the land thus conveyed away is often expressly described as being inhabited, cultivated, etc., and therefore cannot have been un;)ppn)pri:itod or waste land. Finally, Professor Maithind (Doiriosday Book and Beyond, Cambridge, 1S'.I7, 211) clearly explains what hap- pened, by distiiiguisliiiig two sorts of ownership, economic and political. Economic ownership is the right to share \n the agricultural returns of the land, as does the modern landlord, etc. Political ownership

is the right to the judicial returns from the soil — ownership, therefore, in the sense of governing it or exercising jurisdiction over it. By the land-bok, there- fore, land was handed over to be owned, not economi- cally, but politically; and the men suing on the courts of justice, paying toll, etc., directed their fines, not to the royal exchequer, but to the newly-intruded lord, who thus possessed suzerainty and its fiscal results. In consequence the local lord received the privilege of the feorjn-fullum, or right to be entertained for one night or more in progress. So, too, in Ireland, tUI the seventeenth century, the chieftains enjoyed "coigne and livery" of their tribesmen; and m medieval France there was the lord's droit de gele. This land-tax in kind, not unnaturally, helped in villeinizing the freemen. Moreover the king surrendered to the new lord the profits of justice and the rights of toll, mak- ing, therefore, the freeman still more dependent on his lord. However, it must also be stated that the king nearly always retained the more important criminal and civil cases in his own hands. Still the result of the king's transference of rights over folc-land was easy enough to foresee, i. e. the depression of the free vil- lage. The steps of this depression may be shortly set out: (a) the Church or lord entitled to food-rents established an overseer to collect this rent in kind. Somehow or other this overseer appropriated land for a demesne, partly in place of, partly alongside of, the food-rents; (b) the Church or the lord entitled by the land-bok to jurisdictional profits made the tenure of land by the villagers depend upon suit to his court; the villagers' transfers came to be made at that court, and were finally conceived as having their validity from the gift or grant of its president.

(3) Meanwhile the action of the State extended this depression (a) by its very endeavour in the tenth- century Capitularies to keep law and order in those rude cattle-lifting societies. For the system evolved was that men should be grouped in such a manner that one man should be responsible for another, especially the lord for his men. As an example of the former may be taken the Capitularies of the Frankish kings, such as of Childebert and Clotaire, and of the English King Edgar (Stubbs, Select Charters, 69-74) ; and of the latter the famous ordinance of Athelstan (Cone. Treatanlea, c. 930, ii ; Stubbs, Select Charters, Ox- ford, 1900, 66): "And we have ordained respecting those lordless men of whom no law can be got, that the hundred be commanded that they domicile him to folk right and find him a lord in the folk-moot"; (b) another way was by the institution of central taxa- tion in the eleventh century — in England by means of danegelt, abroad by various gabelles. These were monetary taxes at a time when other payments were still largely made in kind. Accordingly, just as under the later Roman Empire, the poorer man commended himself to a lord, who paid for him, but demanded instead payment in service, a tributum soli. The de- pendent developed into a retainer, expecting, as in the Lancastrian days of maintenance, to be protected by his lord, even in the royal courts of justice, and repay- ing his master by service, military and economic, and by the feudal incidents of heriot, wardship, etc. (for details of feudal aids, cf. Maitland, Constitutional His- tory, 27-30).

(4) Nor should it be forgotten that a ceorl or mer- chant could "thrive" (Stubbs, Select Charters, 65; probably of eleventh-century date), so as to amass wealth to the loss of his neighbours, and gradually to become a master of villeins — possessing a church, a kitchen where the said villeins must bake their bread (jus furmi), a semi-fortified bell-house, and a burgh- gate, where he could sit in judgment.

(5) The last great cause that developed feudalism was war. It is an old saying, nearly a dozen cent uries old, that "war begat the king". It is no liss liue that war, not civil, but international, begat feudalism.