Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/290

 246 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE the profit from the beehives, to another the catch from the fish-ponds and income from the mill. Church property was subdivided in a very minute and intricate manner, so that we hear of a parish church receiving from one estate "one eighteenth of the tithe of grain, one sixth of the tithe of wine, and one half of the small tithes, offerings, and lega- cies," and similar fractions of this or that from other lands. Feudalism existed in its most highly developed form in the north and east of what is now France, where by the Varying fourteenth century it had come to be the rule few-Stem in that there was no land without its lord, where different fa e f euc i a i aristocracy was most sharply marked Europe off from the rest of society, and where most of the peasants remained serfs into the thirteenth century. In some parts of Europe feudalism prevailed less universally and society was not divided so sharply into the two extremes of serfs at the bottom and feudal nobles at the top. In southern France, for instance, many landholders recognized no feudal lord and would not admit that their estates were fiefs. In Brittany serfdom had always been exceptional; in Normandy it early disappeared, and in both these prov- inces the word "fief" was applied to the free holdings of peasants as well as to the estates of nobles. In Germany powerful lords sometimes granted fiefs to their servile per- sonal attendants, called ministeriales, and thus made knights out of serfs or slaves. Many features of feudalism were found in England before the Norman conquest, but Wil- liam the Conqueror introduced it in a more developed state from the Continent. The chief extant monument of feudalism is the stone castle. Hundreds of these combined strongholds and aristo- The cratic residences still exist in ruins or with later feudal castle alterations, as evidence of the long prevalence of feudalism and of the enterprise and power of its many lords. Hardly any two castles are exactly alike, owing in part to the different dates at which they were built, in part to the varying resources and requirements of the feudal nobles for whom they were constructed, but most of all due to the