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 FEUDALISM

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FEUDALISM

First it forced the kings to cease to surround tliom- selves with an antiquated fyrd or national militia, that had forgotten in its agricultural pursuits that rapidity of movement was the first essential of mililary success, and by beating the sword into the ploughshare had lost every desire to beat back the iron into its old form. In consequence a new military force was or- ganized, a professional standing army. This army had to be fed and housed in time of peace. As a re- sult its individual members were granted lands and estates, or lived with the king as his personal suite. At any rate, instead of every able-bodied man being in- dividually bound in person to serve his sovereign in the field, the lords or landowners were obliged in virtue of their tenure to furnish a certain quantity of fighting men, armed with fi.xed and definite weapons, accord- ing to the degree, rank, and wealth of the combatant. Secondly, it gave another reason for commendation, i. e. protection. The lord was now asked, not to pay a tax, but to extend the sphere of his influence so as to enable a lonely, solitary farmstead to keep off the at- tacks of a foe, or at least to afford a place of shelter and retreat in time of war. This the lord would do for a consideration, to wit, that the protected man should acknowledge himself to be judicially, politically, economically, the dependent of his high protector. Finally, the king himself was pushed up to the apex of the whole system. The various lords commended themselves to this central figure to aid them in times of stress, for they saw the uselessness of trying singly to repel a foe. They were continually being defeated because "'shire would not help shire" (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ann. 1010). Thus the very reason why the English left Ethelred the Unready to accept Sweyn as full king (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ann. 1012) was simply because Ethelred had no idea of centralizing and unifying the nation; just as in the contrary sense the successful resistance of Paris to the Northmen gave to its dukes, the Lords of the Isle of France, the royal titles which the Carlovingians of Laon were too feeble to defend ; and the lack of a defensive national war prevented any unification of the imwieldy Holy Roman Empire. This is effectually demonstrated by the real outburst of national feeling that centred round one of the weakest of all the emperors, Freder- ick III, at the siege of Neuss, simply because Charles the Bold was thought to be threatening Germany by his attack on Cologne. From these wars, then, the kings emerged, no longer as mere leaders of their peo-

Ele out as owners of the land upon which their people ved, no longer as Reges Francorum but as Reges Francice, nor as Duces Normannorum but as Duces Norma nnicc, nor as Kings of the Anglecyn but of Engla-land. This exchange of tribal for territorial sovereignty marks the complete existence of feudalism as an organization of society in all its relations (eco- nomic, judicial, political), upon a basis of commenda- tion and land-tenure.

Essence. — We are now, therefore, in a position to understand what exactly feudalism was. Bearing in mind the double definition given at the beginning, we may, for the sake of clearness, resolve feudalism into its three component parts. It includes a territorial element, an idea of vassalage, and the privilege of an immunity.

(1) The territorial element is the grant of the en- feoffment by the lord to his man. At the beginning this was probably as well of stock and cattle as of land. Hence its etymology. Littrd makes the Low Latin feudum of Teutonic origin, and thus cognate with the Old High German fihu, Gothic jaihu, Anglo-Saxon jeoh (our jee), modern German vie.h. That is to say, the word goes back to the days when cattle was originally the only form of wealth; but it came by a perfectly natural prooess, when the race had passed from a nomadic life lo the fixity of abode neeessilaled by pas- toral pursuits, to signify wealth in general, and finally

wealth in Land. The cattle, stock, or land was there- fore handed over by the lord to his dependent, to be held, not in full ownership, but in usufruct, on condi- tions originally personal but becoming hereditary. (This whole process can be easily traced in Hector Munro Chadwick's "Studies in Anglo-Saxon Institu- tions", Cambridge, 1905, ix, 308-354; x, 378-411, where a detailed account is given of how the thegn, a personal servant of the king, developed into a land- owner, possessing an average of five hides of land and responsible to his sovereign in matters of war and ju- risdiction.) The influence of the Church, too, in this gradual transference of a personal to a territorial vas- salage has been very generally admitted. The mo- nastic houses would be the first to find it troublesome (Liber Eliensis, 275) to keep a rout of knights within their cloistral walls. Bishops, too, howsoever mag- nificent their palaces, could not fail to wish that the fighting men whom they were boimd by their barony to furnish to the king should be lodged elsewhere than close to their persons. Consequently they soon de- veloped the system of territorial vassalage. Hence the medieval legal maxim: nulle tcrre snns seigneur (Vinogradoff, lOnglish Society in the Eleventh Cen- tury, Oxford, 1!k')S, ii, 39-89). This enfeoffment of the lord or lantlowner by the king and of the depen- dent by the lord was partlj' in the nature of a reward for past services, partly in the nature of an earnest for the future. It is this primitive idea of the lord who gives land to his supporter that is answerable for the feudal incidents which otherwise seem so tyrannous. For instance, when the vassal died, his arms, horse, mili- tary e(|uipment reverted as heriot to his master. So, too", when the tenant died without heirs, his property escheateil to the lord. If, however, he died, with heirs, indeed, but who were still in their minority, then these heirs were in wardship to the feudal supe- rior, who could even dispose of a female ward in mar- riage to whom he would, on a plea that otherwise she might unite herself and lands to an hereditary enemy. All the way along it is clear that the ever-present idea ruling and suggesting these incidents, was precisely a territorial one. The origin, that is, of these incidents went back to earlier da)'S when all that the feudal dependent possessed, whether arms, or stock, or land, he had received from his immediate lord. Land had become the tie that knit up into one the whole of soci- ety. Land was now the governing principle of life (Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, Cam- bridge, 1898, I, iii, 66-78). A man followed, not the master whom he chose or the cause that seemed most right, but the master whose land he held and tilled, the cause favoured in the geographical linnts of his do- main. The king was looked up to as the real possessor of the land of the nation. By him, as representing the nation, baronies, manors, knights-fees, fiefs were dis- tributed to the tenants-in-chief, and they, in turn, divided their land to be held in trust b}' the lower vas- sals (Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Centurj', 42). The statute of Edward I, known from its opening clause as Quia Emptores, shows the ex- treme lengths to which this sub-infeudation was carried (Stuhbs, Select Charters, 478). So much, however, had this territorial idea entered into the legal conceptions of the medieval polity, and been passed on from .ige to age by the most skilful lawyers of each generation, that, up to within the last half cen- tury, there were not wanting some who taught that the very peerages of England might descend, not by means of blood only, nor even of will and bequest, but by the mere possession-at-law of certain lands and tenements. Witness the Berkeley Peerage case of 1861 (.\nson, Law and Custom of the Constitution, Oxford, 1S97, Part 1, I, vi, 200-203).

(2) p'eudalisiii further implies the idea of vassalage. This is piirtly oorieurrent with, partly overlapping, the territorial conception. It is certainly prior to, more