Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/289

 THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 245 lationship with each other. Lord A, who could count on the service of a few vassals, would himself become the vassal of a much greater lord, B, and agree upon certain occasions to provide B with ten warriors. Or this great lord, B, having at his disposal vast estates sufficient to support several ! hundred knights, instead of trying to find all those men himself, would infeudate his land in two or three large par- I eels to two or three men on condition that each of them supply him with a number of knights. Thus they would each ! of it, as a modern bank pays its depositors four per cent in- ! Their vassals would be his subvassals, and he would be the j overlord of their men. In some parts of Europe, notably I France, land was subinfeudated in this way several times, ! so that as many as seven or eight persons might be owing I and receiving feudal service and payments from a single I manor. It would be hard, indeed, to say who owned the 1 land in such a case ; all had rights in it. Sometimes very complex situations were created in the course of time. Not only might the overlord of one estate be 1 the subvassal in the case of another villa, but he might even I be in some other lord's court the fellow vassal of one of his i own vassals. In short, lords and vassals were not two dis-
 * receive a large fief and then would subinfeudate a large part
 * terest and then loans out part of its deposits at a higher rate.
 * tinct classes ; the relationship of lord and vassal was a shif t-

This situation, however, can be paralleled in the modern business world, where one may buy stocks in any number of different companies, may be both a stockholder and a bond- holder, may be the president of one corporation and a director in another and a mere stockholder in a third. When a vassal subinfeudated his land, he of course did not alien- ate it, for he still owed his services to his lord from it and still himself had a lordship over it. Infeudation and sub- infeudation were sometimes carried so far, in the course of time, that estates were quite dismembered and some very small fiefs created. Sometimes the income from a single ! villa would be split, and to one man would be infeudated
 * ing one, and most feudal nobles were both lord and vassal.