Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/92

 FEUDUM

64

FEUILLANTS

estates for themselves on condition that each landlord, whether secular baron, churchman, even abbess, ren- dered suit and service to his overlord and demanded them in return from each and every vassal. This effectually taught the principle that owners of land, precisely as such, had to perform in exchange govern- mental work. Not that there was exactly land- nationalization (though many legal and theological e.xpressions of medieval literature seem to imply the existence of this), but that the nation was paid for its land by service in war and by judicial, adminis- trative, and, later, legislative duties.

Decline of Feudalism. — This was due to a multi- plicity of causes acting upon one another. Since feudalism was based on the idea of land-tenure paid for by governmental work, every process that tended to alter this adjustment tended also to displace feudalism.

(1) The new system of raising troops for war helped to substitute money for land. The old system of feudal levy became obsolete. It was found imprac- ticable for the lords to retain a host of knights at their service, waiting in idleness for the call of war. Instead, the barons, headed by the Church, enfeoffed these knights on land which they were to own on conditions of service. Gradually these knights too found military service exceedingly inopportune and commuted for it a sum of money, paid at first to the immediate lord, eventually demanded directly by the king. Land cea.sed to have the same value in the eyes of the mon- arch. Money took its place as the symbol of power. But this was further increased by a new development in military organization. The system by which sher- iffs, in virtue of royal writs, summoned the county- levy had taken the place of the older arrangements. These commissions of array issued to the tenants-in- chief, or proclaimed for the lesser vassals in all courts, fairs, and markets were now exchanged for indentures, by which the king contracted with individual earls, barons, knights, etc., to furnish a fixed number of men at a fixed wage ("They sell the pasture now to buy the hor.se." — "Henry V", prologue to Act II). The old conception of the feudal force had completely disap- peared. Further, by means of artillery the attacking force completely dominated the defensive, fortified castles declined in value, archers and foot increased in importance, heavily armoured knights were becoming useless in battle, and on the Continent the supremacy of harquebus and pike was assured. Moreover as part of this military displacement the reaction against livery and maintenance (cf. Lingard, History of Eng- land, IV, V, 139-140, London, 1854) must be noted. The intense evils occasioned all over Europe by this bastard feudalism, or feudalism in caricature, pro- voked a fierce reaction. In England and on the Conti- nent the new monarchy that sprang from the "Three Ma^i" of Bacon stimulated popular resentment against the great families of king-makers and broke their power.

(2) \ second cause of this substitution was due to the Black Death. For some years the emancipation of villeinage had, for reasons of convenience, been gradually extending. A system had grown up of ex- changing tenure by rent for tenure by service, i. e. money was paid in exchange for service, and the lord's fields were tilled by hired labourers. By the Great Pestilence labour was rendered scarce and agriculture was disorganized. The old surphis population that had ever before (Vinogradoff m Eng. Hist. Rev., Oct., 1900, 775-81; April, 190G, .356) drifted from manor to manor no longer existed. The lords pur- sued their tenants; capital was begging from labour. All statutory enactments to chain labour to the soil proved futile. Villeins escaped in numbers to manors, not of their own lords, and entered into service this time as hired labourers. That is, the lord became a landlord, the villein became a tenant-farmer at will or

a landless labourer. Then came the Peasant Revolt over all Europe, the economic complement of the Black Death, by which the old economy was broken up and from which the modern social economy began. On the Continent the result was the metayer system or division of national wealth among small landed proprietors. In England under stock-and-land leases the same system prevailed for close on a century, then disappeared, emerging eventually after successive ages as our modern "enclosed" agriculture.

(3) As in things military and economic, so also in things judicial the idea of landed administrative sinks below the horizon. All over Europe legal kings, Al- fonso the Wise, Philip the Fair, Charles of Bohemia, Edward I of England, were rearranging the constitu- tions of their countries. The old curia regis or cour du roy ceases to be a feudal board of tenants-in-ehief and becomes at first partly, then wholly, a body of legal advisers. The king's chaplains and clerks with their knowledge of civil and canon law, able to spell out the old customaries, take the place of grim warriors. The Ptacita Regis or cas royaux get extended and simpli- fied. Appeals are encouraged. Civil as well as criminal litigations come into the royal courts. Fi- nance, the royal auditing of the accounts of sheriffs, bailiffs, or seneschals, increases the royal hold on the country, breaks down the power of the landed classes, and draws the king and people into alliance against the great nobles. The shape of society is no longer a pyramid, but two parallel lines. It can no longer be represented as broadening down from king to nobles, from nobles to people ; but the apex and base have withdrawn, the one from completing, the other from supporting, the central block. The rise to power of popular assemblies, whether as States-General, Cortes, Diets, or Parliaments, betokens the growing importance of the middle class; and the triumph of the middle cla.ss fi. e. of the moneyed, not landed, pro- prietors) is the overthrow of feudalism. The whole literature of the fourteenth century and onward wit- nesses to this triumph. Henceforward till the Re- naissance it is eminently bourgeois. Song is no longer an aristocratic monopoly ; it passes out into the whole nation. The troubadour is no more; his place is taken by the ballad writer composing in the vulgar tongue a dolce stil nuovo. This new tone is especially evident in "Renard le Contrefait" and "Branche des Royaux Lignage". These show that the old rever- ence for all that was knightly and of chivalry (q. v.) was passing away. The medieval theory of life, thought, and government had broken down.

Stubbs, Constitutional History (Oxford, 1897} ; Seebohm, English Village Community (London, 1883); Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law (Cambridge, 1898); Mait- ij^ND, Constitutional History (Cambridge, 1908), 141-164; Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century (Oxford, 1908); Round, Feudal England (London, 1895), 225-314; Baldwin, Scutage and Knight Service (Chicago, 1897); Roth, Geschichte des Beneficialwesens (Eriangen. 1850); Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte (Berlin, 1880); LtppERT, Die deutschen Lehnbucher (Leipzig, 1903); Rhamen, Die GrossAu/en der Nordgermanen (Brunswick, 1905); Luchaihe, Histoire des Institutions (Paris. 1883-85); Petit-Dutaillis, Histoire Con- stitutionelle (1907). tr. Rhodes (1908); Seignobos in Lavissb AND Rambaud, Histoire General. II (Paris, 1893), i. 1-64; GuiL- meroz, Essai sur V origine dela noblesse en France (Paris, 1902); Flach, Les originea de VAncienne France, III (Paris, 1904). Bede Jarrett.

Feudum. See Tenure, Ecclesiastical.

Feuillants. — The Cistercians who, about 1145, founded an abbey in a shady valley in the Diocese of Rieux (now Toulouse) named it Fuliens, later Les Feuillans or Notre-Dame des Feuillans (Lat. folium, leaf), and the religious were soon called Feuillants (Lat. Fulienses). Relaxations crept into the Order of Citeaux as into most religious congregations, and in the sixteenth century the Feuillant monastery was dishonoured by unworthy monks. A reform was soon to be introduced, however, by Jean de la Bar- ridre, b. at Saint-C^r6, in the Diocese of Cahors, 29