Feudal Europe (Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries)

Agricultural Progress

Feudal Europe was rural, essentially a Europe of the soil. Europe was to be a world of bread. It was also a world in which two beverages predominated. One was wine; the other beverage was the ancestor of beer, ale. In the West, a third drinking Europe also emerged, the Europe of cider. From ad 1000 onward a number of important techniques were developed. The archaic swing-plow was superseded by a plow equipped with an asymmetrical plowshare and a moldboard and that plowshare was made of iron rather than wood, horses began to replace oxen. change made to the system of crop rotation,

 

Four fundamental cells structured the society of the time. One was clearly the Castle, but there were three others: the feudal domain, the village, and the Parish. The feudal domain designated the territory dominated by a castle and encompassed all its lord’s land and peasants. The village, which replaced the scattered rural settlements of antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, became a major feature of eleventh-century Christendom generally. In the Middle Ages, the relations between the living and the dead became ever closer.

 

Society’s Upper Crust: The Nobility after ad 1000, an upper layer emerged within the group of seigneurial lords: the nobility. Nobility was linked to power and wealth, but was essentially a matter of blood. It enjoyed certain political and legal privileges and commanded great social respect. Around ad 1000, a more clearly defined social type appeared in large numbers, positioned in the social hierarchy immediately below the nobility. An elite group of fighters usually attached to a particular castle and its lord. These men specialized in combat on horseback and, as well as fighting genuine battles in the service of their lord.

 

Marriage, which until then had been a civil contract, now increasingly became a religious matter controlled by the Church. The latter managed to reduce the number of ‘‘arranged’’ marriages by ruling that union must be by mutual consent, and thereby improved the status of women. A profusion of military orders appeared in the 11th and 12th century feudal Europe, chief of which were the orders of the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem The purpose of these orders was essentially to use the sword, prayer, and conversion as means to combat infidels and pagans.

Gregorian reform was named after the pope who inspired it, Gregory VII, pope from 1073 to 1087. What it brought about, more generally, was a separation between the clergy and the laity, between God and Caesar, pope and Emperor. Let the laymen devote themselves solely to their own particular task, secular affairs, and let the clergy devote themselves to theirs, that is to say the affairs of the Church.

 

Popular culture, money and charters and pilgrimage

The emergence or re-emergence of popular culture in areas where the Church failed to offer cultural practices of a more satisfying nature. One of the main obstacles in trade was the absence of a single uniform or dominant currency. The year 1000 saw the introduction of new currencies across the board. ’’ Charters in Christendom were texts that carried a legal authority that was the basis of rights held over land, buildings, individuals, and income.  These were another means of communications and diffusion off power.

 

Pilgrimages frequently paved the way for new trading activities, but little by little both functions came to be carried out by the same men, or at any rate, pilgrims and traders travelled the same routes, side by side.

 

Feudal Fragmentation and Monarchical Centralization

In the political domain, eleventh- and twelfth-century Christendom presented an apparently contradictory spectacle, On the one hand, a feudal society was becoming established that was partly characterized by a weakening of the central power. On the other hand, the people of Christendom were trying to regroup around central leaders who were finding ways of reconciling the power that remained to them with the feudal fragmentation. Compromise political systems were introduced; these may be called feudal monarchies. Two powers were recognized to be superior to the kings who headed the monarchies-the pope and the emperor.

 

Weakness of the emperor and the feudal kings

The new kings paid him homage in a number of theoretical respects, but independence from the empire and the emperor was a major political development in this period. The medieval kings were tri-functional. The first function was the dispensation of justice. As king, he also possessed the second, military, function, for he was a noble and a warrior. The third function was the king’s responsibility for the economy and performance of compassionate acts. However, a medieval king was not an absolute ruler.

 

The Feudal Monarchies

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the kingdom of England experienced changes of fortune. Royal agents, in the form of sheriffs, now appeared in the English counties, while around the king a bureaucracy of specialists was set up, most notable for the activities of financial officers centred on the Exchequer, where they kept the kingdom’s accounts. Henry II’s England was the first ‘‘modern’’ kingdom of Christendom. This remarkable king clashed not only with his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, but also with his sons, Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland.  The feudal custom of dividing up property between the king’s sons had been retained in England, whereas in France the Capetians resolved the problem with a system of appanages whereby property reverted to the royal domain when a prince died.

 

The other monarchy that became as stable as the English monarchy Its stability stemmed, in the first place, from the dynastic continuity of its kings: the Capetian dynasty had reigned in France ever since 987. It was strengthened by the fact that women were excluded from the throne, and that, by a biological fluke, the kings of France produced a continuous string of male heirs right down to 1328. First, the French kings disciplined the lords, and then got the support of the clergy and the minor nobility thus keeping the higher aristocracy away from power. Finally they made Paris their capital and built a palace there.

 

The Diaspora of the Normans was the medieval name given to the Scandinavians, who represented one of the period’s important elements. The last Norman king of Sicily, William II (1154–1189), died childless, and the crown passed to his aunt Constance, along with her husband, the son of Frederick Barbarossa, who in 1191 became Emperor Henry VI. His son, the future Frederick II Frederick turned his kingdom into one of the best organized of the feudal monarchies.

 

The Birth of a Europe of Persecution

The history of Christianity was accompanied by that of heresy (a number of different ‘‘choices’’). What the Church could not accept were heresies that brought its power into question, A Europe of protest now appeared. Some heretics also refused to revere the crucifix and even the Cross itself. Laymen similarly challenged the Church’s monopoly over the interpretation of the Gospels and the way that they used them in their preaching. Finally, the increasing wealth accumulated both individually and collectively within the Church attracted virulent criticism.  The struggle against such heresies was prepared by the great institution that dominated Christendom, namely the order of Cluny, which also organized the Crusades. In 1232, Pope Gregory IX set up, alongside the Episcopal Inquisition, a pontifical Inquisition which passed judgment on heretics throughout Christendom, in the name of the Church and the pope.  It consisted in interrogating the accused in order to obtain a confession of his or her culpability.

 

The Persecution of the Jews and homosexuals.

The Jews constituted the second group persecuted by the Church and the Christian princes.  When feudalism became established in Christendom, the status of the Jews was assimilated to that of the serfs. This state of servitude placed them under at once the domination and the protection of their lords, and of the Christian princes. In the course of the tenth century, Christians became more and more obsessed by the image of Jerusalem and this led to the crusades. The enthusiasm for Jerusalem and its evocation of Christ’s Passion as a victim of the Jews produced a huge wave of hatred and hostility directed against the latter.  They were persecuted as usurers by the Church..  

 

The third category of people persecuted and excluded was that of homosexuals. It was tolerated up to a point, particularly in monasteries. However, the twelfth-century wave of reform affected sodomites, the more so because the evolution of the notion of nature had made sexual sins seem worse because they were sins against nature.

 

Crusading Europe

The word ‘‘Crusades’’ designates the military operations in Palestine undertaken by Christians in order to wrest from the Muslims the Holy Sepulchre, Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem, and also the territories said to be where Christianity first began. Jerusalem had passed from Roman domination into the hands of the Byzantines (its only Christian occupiers), and thence into the hands of the Muslims. Christianity’s conversion to warfare was one of the reasons for the crusade. The most important development was the establishment of the theory of a just war, the bases of which were laid by Saint Augustine. A just war was one decided upon and waged not by an ordinary individual but by a leader invested with supreme authority, such as that of the Christian emperor, and later the princes and kings of the Middle Ages. The first crusade eventually, in 1099, achieved the capture of Jerusalem, which was marked by a terrible Christian massacre of Muslims and the establishment of Christian states in Palestine, foremost among them the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. ‘‘The Crusades, as preached by Urban II, were presented as a war to liberate Palestine and also as a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. However, that struggle was deflected so as to win many other battles for the Church, or rather for the papacy, battles waged against not only external enemies but also internal ones. The Crusades, for their part, were depleting both the manpower and the resources of Europe.

 

 

Thirteenth Century

The thirteenth century is regarded as the high point of the medieval West. Its successes appeared in four main domains. The first was constituted by a surge in the creation of towns. The second success was the revival of trade and the rise of the merchants. The third success was in the domain of learning.  Finally, the fourth success, which supported and fuelled the other three, was the creation and extraordinary diffusion, within the space of 30 years or so, of new religious figures who lived in the towns and were mainly active there: these were the members of the mendicant orders.

 

1.    urban success: a europe of town-dwellers

Medieval towns, even those built on the sites of ancient towns, changed very much in their appearance and even in their functions. In a medieval town, the military function was only of secondary importance, A medieval town was organized around a number of centres, but the market was generally the most visible and the most important of them. the peasant masses were made up of people called, throughout Christendom, ‘‘villeins,’’ and for a long time they were relegated to a nonfree status, first as slaves, later as serfs.  The towns of this period repaired walls and roads and developed a concern for cleanliness.

 

Episcopal towns

The first type of town to become established in medieval Europe was the Episcopal town. In fact, the presence of a bishop became the distinguishing sign of a town. ‘Big’’ towns extension of a few big ones. In the West, a town of any importance would have comprised between ten and twenty thousand inhabitants. The largest town of all was unquestionably Paris, which has been shown to have had probably 200,000 inhabitants in about 1300.

 

The hierarchy of towns as classified not only according to size but also by politics. Two types of towns with political importance emerged. The first type was capitals, the seat of the supreme political authority. Very few medieval towns attained the status of a capital. As a capital, the greatest success was Paris. State-towns. The other type of developed town was one that had grown into a state. Most such towns were in Italy. Yves Renouard has distinguished three phases in the evolution of the Italian towns of the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. The first phase saw the establishment of an aristocratic commune that seized power from the local count and bishop. Next, faced with the conflicts that developed between the various factions of the aristocracy in power (the most famous opposition was between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, in Florence), the town would turn to an outsider whom it would endow with limited powers, as a podesta`. Eventually, government would be taken over by the trades and corporations of elite groups of merchants and craftsmen, the ‘‘well-to-do,’’ who would then come increasingly into conflict with the common people.

 

Towns and feudalism

Rodney Hilton, among others, has shown how, in the cases of England and France, the medieval towns not only came to terms with feudal structures in general, but were even part of them. The towns grew thanks to the immigration of peasants. The inhabitants of medieval towns were more or less recent peasants. The development of craftsman like and economic activities of the towns were fuelled by agricultural surpluses.

 

The Character of a European Town

What characterized a medieval town, was above all the constitution of a type of society and government which, while coming to terms with feudal structures, at the same time manifested remarkable differences and proceeded to evolve in its own particular way. in many cases the bishops themselves officially performed the functions of those counts. Greater and lesser degrees of inequality rapidly came to mark this more or less autonomous urban society, and urban elite groups of ‘‘notables’’ soon appeared. The members of these elite groups were increasingly distinguished by their wealth. . Apart from the money earned by a man’s business ventures, the honor of his profession could be the basis of his distinction in urban society. Eventually, only usury and prostitution continued to be condemned absolutely. The ‘‘well-to-do’’ made up the councils that governed the town, which were led by consuls in southern Europe and by municipal magistrates in northern Europe.  According to Jacques Rossiaud: A medieval town was primarily a bustling society, concentrated in a small space surrounded by vast, sparsely inhabited expanses. It was a centre of production and trade in which craftsmanship and trade were both fuelled by a monetary economy. Maurice Lombard sees the medieval merchant-townsman as a man in a network, linking different centres together, a man open to the outside world, receptive to the influences.

 

Inequality and trades were the 2 main sources from which power in the towns gradually came to stem. In Italy, where the organization of trades was strongest, a definite gulf separated the ‘‘major arts’’ from the ‘‘minor arts’’. It was trade that was born from industry, not the other way around.’’ Industry meant textiles. A Europe of textiles brought forth a Europe of merchants.

 

 2 commercial success: a europe of merchants

It was a time of commercial revival and expansion that was closely linked with the rise of the towns.

 

It has been described as a ‘‘commercial revolution.’’ Three great commercial centres emerged. The two poles of international trade were the Mediterranean and the North. Hence the predominance of two groups of merchants, the one Italian, the other Hanseatic. But between those two regions a zone of contacts developed, the outstanding feature of which was that, as well as facilitating exchanges between the other two commercial areas, it very early on became a centre of industrial productivity-this area consisted of north-western Europe.

 

The only significant trading improvement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the construction of many bridges spanning rivers. a Europe of the sea made its appearance in the Middle Ages. The capacity of ships was increased. The progress made in the thirteenth century was mainly due to the diffusion of the stern-post rudder, the lateen sail, the compass, and cartography.

 

The Byzantine besant played this role up until the twelfth century, but once European trade took off it was no longer satisfactory. The West now reverted to the minting of gold coins that Charlemagne had abandoned. From 1266 on, France was minting gold ecus, but it was the great Italian commercial towns that took the lead here. In 1284 Venice began minting its gold ducats. But despite the prestige and wide use of florins and ducats, the multiplicity of currencies remained one of the hindrances that held back the medieval economy.

 

A Europe of Merchants

Itinerant merchants were increasingly being replaced by sedentary ones who ran their businesses through the intermediary of a team of accountants, commissioners, representatives, and employees, all known as factors. the Church gradually came to justify the profits made by merchants and drew a somewhat vague distinction between profits that were allowable and profits that were not. The prestige and growing power of the merchants brought about great changes in European attitudes. New religious practices, provided other justifications for the activities of merchants. They involved themselves in many charitable works (as the Church called them), in particular the distribution of alms.By the end of the thirteenth century, the merchants had acquired two fundamental gains, one material, the other spiritual, which until then had been incompatible. He could have his purse and  everlasting life.

 

Lubeck was to become the head of the urban and merchant empire known as the Hanseatic League. . Lubeck dominated a powerful maritime and commercial network that was dependent on new towns.

 

3 the success of schools and universities

century of schools and universities, and these too were centered on the towns. encouraged by the bourgeoisie, schools had been multiplying in towns ever since the twelfth century. These ‘‘primary and secondary’’ schools provided the essential basis of learning in Europe, but the most spectacular creation was that of the ‘‘advanced chools’’ known as universities, The demand for books increased as urban schools and above all universities multiplied. religious matter and prayers continued to fill many manuscripts. But in the thirteenth century a type of devotional book designed especially for women began to be produced.

 

Latin had remained the language of learning, and its prestige was strengthened by the fact that the Christian liturgy was also expressed in Latin. The Church recognized the legitimacy of these new languages. The Church Fathers had distinguished three main languages: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. After the year 1000, the vernacular languages came to form a small number of linguistic groups, according to their origins. French emerged as an alloy of Latin and the Germanic language of the Franks.

 

4 the success of the mendicant friars

A Europe of charity, the third order

Clerics of a new type, whose activities marked European society for many years to come. They belonged to the Mendicant Orders, the chief of which were the Order of the Friars Preachers (Dominicans, also known as the Black Friars) and the Order of the Friars Minor (Franciscans). , their members lived out in the community amid ordinary town-dwellers.  These orders were so successful that by the beginning of the thirteenth century they were multiplying fast. On the one hand they were admired, honored, and followed. On the other hand, in some quarters they were attacked and became the objects of hostility or even hatred. The mendicants’ takeover of functions belonging to the secular clergy (i.e. nonmonastic clergy), such as the bestowal of the sacraments and the administration of churches, which drew attention to the money to be earned from religion, shocked a number of the faithful and above all stirred up many of the secular clergy against the Mendicants.

 

They also brought to life a Europe of charity, and were thus the ancestors of a Europe of social security. The system that they set in place in the thirteenth century was known as ‘‘works of mercy.’’ They founded the Third Orders, groups of lay people from a variety of walks of life, many of whom were quite well off, who, while remaining with their families and continuing to practice their respective professions, at the same time endeavored to lead a life as close as possible to that of the friars.

The thirteenth century was a great period for art, particularly architecture. one of the elements that cemented Christendom together. Gothic art, sometimes known as French art, for its part flooded the whole of Christian Europe.

 

Europe, the Mongols, and the East

As usually happens, a European identity took shape in reaction to enemies or ‘‘others.’’ In antiquity the ‘‘others’’ were the Persians, then they were barbarians and pagans as a whole, eventually the Muslims. The final permutation of the ‘‘other’’ was added, in the thirteenth century, when ‘‘the other’’ was identified with the Mongols. The Mongol invasion of 1241, which advanced as far west as Silesia, but then pulled back eastward, produced severe shock and panic-stricken fear among the Christians. Fear of the Mongols fueled a change in attitudes that was already quite pronounced anyway and that led to the abandonment of the Crusades. The   Christian countries that established this new view of Europe were first Hungary, then Poland. These two presented themselves as the ramparts of Christendom against the pagan barbarians, primarily Mongols,

 

The Autumn of the Middle Ages or the Spring of a New Age?

fifteenth centuries are traditionally considered as the end of the Middle Ages. They are also represented as a period of crisis following the relative stability and prosperity of thirteenth-century Europe.

 

Famine and War

a worsening of the climate, particularly in northern Europe. Long periods of extreme cold and successive waves of torrential rain caused a return of famine on an unprecedented scale. It lasted from 1315 to 1322.  When warfare erupted virtually everywhere in the fourteenth century, what must have struck people at the time was the fact that it took new forms. Its most visible sign was the appearance of cannons and gunpowder, but siege techniques also improved Furthermore, warfare now became diluted and a matter for professionals. Finally, monarchies, particularly the French monarchy, raised armies of permanent soldiers who received regular pay (in cash); and meanwhile mercenaries,  hired themselves out to towns and princes. . Among the wars were the Hundred Years’ War, the wars of succession in Brittany, In the fourteenth century in Engand, feudal service was replaced by the establishment of national and voluntary militias. In the fifteenth century, every community and parish in the realm had to supply independent archers and crossbow-men whenever the monarchy called for them. In the fifteenth century virtually all the European powers set up permanent armies.

 

The Black Death

In the mid-fourteenth century, one of the most catastrophic events of medieval Europe occurred: the Black Death. It was characterized by the appearance of swellings, known as buboes, in the groin. These were filled with black blood, from which the disease and the epidemic took their name. it had ravaged the east and the west in the 6th century and then declined in the west but continued to remain in the east. It now made its appearance in the west again. The Black Death was a catastrophic phenomenon that did not die out in the West until 1720 . In England, the population fell by 70 percent; by 1400 it had dropped from 7 to about 2 million inhabitants. The catastrophic effects of the plague were furthermore increased by more or less regular and more or less severe recurrences of the epidemic. the battle against contagion was fiercely waged.

 

A Europe of Violence

Jews, seen as scapegoats; Furthermore, the relative weakness of political authorities – monarchies undermined by dynastic conflicts, threatened by popular revolts, and unable to rely upon the necessary fiscal resources – is indicative of political deficiencies the appearance of a new type of punishable behaviour, namely crime, which was quite different from the feudal types of violence. the repression of witchcraft. Many were burnt at the stake.

 

Outstanding among the incidents of violence at the end of the Middle Ages were workers’ revolts involving peasants and also urban workers and craftsmen. Peasant revolts, demonstrations made not by poor peasants but, on the contrary, by well-to-do, privileged ones who felt that those privileges were threatened.

 

Urban revolts

After 1260, the extraordinary urban boom weakened and was replaced by crisis. Unemployment, fluctuating wages, and the increasing numbers of poverty stricken and marginal people gave rise to virtually incessant bouts of rioting and revolts.

 

The Shattering of the Unity of the Church: The Great Schism

French pope Clement V, archbishop of Bordeaux, who was elected in 1305 and crowned in Lyon, did not then proceed to Rome. in 1309 installed himself in Avignon, in the minds of most Europeans at this time was their attachment to all the symbolism represented by the town of Rome.  Cola di Rienzo, a modest but highly educated man, he won the support of the masses and, with their aid, he gained control of the municipal headquarters of Rome, the Capitol. However, the hostility of the great Roman families, combined with that of the pope, forced Cola di Rienzo into exile and in 1354 was assassinated. His premature death led to a conclave that developed into a riot. The new pope, Urban VI, who was elected in this troubled situation, aroused fierce hostility. A majority in the conclave annulled his election and elected Clement VII in his place. But Urban VI refused to stand down. There were thus two popes simultaneously in office. As both Benedict XIII and Gregory XII persisted in clinging to their positions, there were now not just two popes, but three. The Great Schism put a great strain on Christian Europe. unifying power had been deeply undermined.

 

The New Heretics: Wycliffites and Hussites

new heresies, generally considered to be ‘‘modern’’, now emerged. The two main ones were that of John Wycliffe and the Lollards, in fourteenth century England, and that of Jan Hus and the Hussites, in Bohemia in the early fifteenth century. He denied the validity of all Church decisions that did not originate in and correspond to the Holy Scriptures. His ideas continued to be diffused after his death,  Jan Hus, a student at the recently established university of Prague, He called for a moral reform of the Church and strict obedience to God’s word, and so found himself in conflict with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He left Prague and went into voluntary exile,  In 1414, he accepted an invitation to go and justify himself before the Council of Constance. But upon arrival, he was immediately thrown into prison and, despite all his denials of the charges brought against him in a public assembly, on July 5, 1415 he was condemned and burnt at the stake. Most Czechs rejected his condemnation and clung to his ideas.

 

The Birth of National Feeling

In the Late Middle Ages, the words used as synonyms for ‘‘nation’’ were ‘‘race,’’ ‘‘country,’’ and ‘‘kingdom.’’ In the fifteenth century the term ‘‘nation’’ was applied to two specific kinds of gatherings: universities and councils.  In the interest of the smooth running of the institution, universities grouped their many students of different origins into nations. The great councils of the early fifteenth century, above all the Council of Constance, also used and diffused such national divisions.

 

An Expanding and Flowering Europe

This evolution of Europe, marked by growth and openness, bloomed into what is traditionally called the Renaissance, which blossomed in dazzling fashion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. a period of great expansion for the European economy.  Fifteenth-century Florence became the most illustrious example of an Italian city-state developing into an enlightened tyranny. It was the creation of the great families of merchant-bankers there, foremost among them the Medicis.

 

The Waning of the Empire?

But historians have certainly noted its decadence and even waning, or at least the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire. In the course of the fifteenth century, three new powers, flanking the Electors, arose in eastern Germany. These were Brandenburg, Saxony, and Austria. The most successful of these three new powers was Austria.

the political map of Europe was redrawn in the fifteenth century, and, instead of following the German trend toward fragmentation, was, on the contrary, somewhat simplified. the Catholic monarchs launched an attack against the last remaining Muslim kingdom in Spain, the kingdom of Granada.

 

The Turkish Threat

Since the mid-fourteenth century the threat of an attack on the European Balkans by the Ottoman Turks had been growing ever more acute. They had captured Gallipoli and southern Thrace between 1353 and 1356, Salonica in 1387, At the instigation of Emperor Sigismund, a crusade against the Turks was launched.  This was the last crusade.  on July 21, 1453 Pius II wrote to Nicholas of Cusa. ‘‘The Turkish sword is now suspended over our heads, yet meanwhile we are engaging in internal wars, harassing our own brothers, and leaving enemies of the Cross to unleash their forces against us.’’

 

Europe Encountering the Outside World

the most striking development in late fifteenth-century Europe was its rapidly increasing expansion beyond European territory. Apart from the ephemeral Latin states of Palestine, the only truly expansionist medieval European ventures were undertaken by merchants from the great Italian ports.

 

 The Attraction of the Atlantic and Africa

By the end of the fifteenth century Europe was increasingly looking toward the Atlantic. Initially this interest in the Atlantic was directed toward western Africa. The image of Africa among Christian Europeans had been unfavorable ever since antiquity and its negative aspect increased in the Middle Ages. Because of the color of their skin, In the fourteenth century, the Europeans’ image of Africa underwent considerable modification. Africa became an object of covetous greed. Earlier efforts to exploit it had failed. activity speeded up once the Portuguese became interested.

 

 

The Feudal Mode of Production

 

The feudal mode of production that emerged in Western Europe was characterized by a complex unity.It was a mode of production dominated by the land and a natural economy, in which neither labour nor the products of labour were commodities. The immediate producer -the peasant -was united to the means of production – the soil – by a specific social relationship. The peasants who occupied and tilled the land were not its owners. Agrarian property was privately controlled by a class of feudal lords, who extracted a surplus from the peasants by politico-legal relations of compulsion.

 

This extra-economic coercion, taking the form of labour services, rents in kind or customary dues owed to the individual lord by the peasant, was exercised both on the manorial demesne attached directly to the person of the lord, and on the strip tenancies. The peasant was subject to the jurisdiction of his lord.

 

The Manorial Estate

 

In the Manorial system the scalar structure of property was expressed in the characteristic division of estates into the lord’s demesne, directly organized by his stewards and tilled by his villeins, and the peasant virgates, from which he received a complementary surplus but in which the organization and control of production was in the hands of the villeins themselves.

 

Sud feudation and military services.  The monarch, in other words, was a feudal suzerain of his vassals, to whom he was bound by reciprocal ties of fealty, not a supreme sovereign set above his subjects. His economic resources would lie virtually exclusively in his personal domains as a lord, while his calls on his vassals would be essentially military in nature. He would have no direct political access to the population as a whole, for jurisdiction over it would be mediatized through innumerable layers of subinfeudation. The concrete Social formations of mediaeval Europe were always composite systems, in which other modes of production survived and intertwined with feudalism proper. It was here that serfdom first emerged; a manorial system was developed; seigneurial justice was most pronounced; and hierarchical subinfeudation became thickest. The other half of the peasantry tilled lands owned by the monarchy, the church and the nobility owing feudal rents and services to its respective landlords.)

 

Feudalism in Western Europe emerged in the 10th century, expanded during the 11th century, and reached its zenith in the late 12th and 13th centuries. . The first and most fundamental of them was the great jump forward in the agrarian surplus yielded by feudalism. For the new rural relations of production had permitted a striking increase in agricultural productivity.

 

Feudal mode of production was characterized by a scalar gradation of property, it determined the division of land into the demesne and peasant virgates, over which the lord’s rights were in their turn differentiated by degree.

 

The level of organization achieved by the feudal noble on his demesne was of often critical importance for the application of new techniques: the most obvious example of this, amply documented by Bloch, was the introduction of the water-mill, which needed a catchment of a certain size to be profitable, and so gave rise to one of the first and most long-lived of all exploitative monopolies – the obligation of the local peasantry to take their grain to be ground in the lord’s mill. The typical peasant had to provide labour rents on the seigneurial demesne – often up to three days a week – and numerous additional dues; he was nevertheless free to try to increase output on his own strips in the rest of the week. At the same time, however, as population grew with the expansion of the mediaeval economy, the average size of peasant holdings steadily diminished because of fragmentation, dropping from perhaps some 100 acres in the 9th century to 20 or 30 acres in the 13th century. However, both prosperous and pauper peasants were structurally opposed to the lords who battened on them, and constant, silent rent struggles between the two were waged throughout the feudal epoch.

The lords, whether lay or ecclesiastical, for their part resorted to the peasant resistances through legal fabrication of new dues, straightforward coercive violence to secure rent increases or seizure of communal or disputed lands. Duby’s calculation is that between the 9th and the 13th centuries, average harvest seed yields increased at a minimum from 2.5 : I to 4: I, and that the portion of the harvest at the disposal of the producer thus effectively doubled. The dramatic quickening of the forces of production in turn set off a corresponding demographic boom. The total population of Western Europe probably more than doubled between 950 and 1348, from some 20,000,000 to 54,000,00. On the one hand, demesne lands contracted and labor services on them diminished in most regions, while leasing of manorial reserves to peasant tenants increased greatly at the expense of direct home cultivation. , in the later 12th and 13th centuries

 

 

By definition feudalism is the social system which existed during the Middle Ages in Europe in which people were given land and protection by a nobleman and had to work and fight for him in return. ) early feudalism (6th century AD to 11thcentury) and 2) later feudalism (11thto 15th century AD).

Politico-religious structure

 

Many of the characteristics of the first phase were altered and new trends appeared. But in between the two phases there is an important century which can be called as the classical age of feudalism which was the 10th century or the year 1000 AD. Jacques Le Goff elaborately dealt with the creation of an imperial Ottonian or the Holy Germanic Roman Empire after the Carolingians, its kings and their attempts at the unification of Europe where north was separated from south by the Alps, the economic developments which boosted the trade sector, the spread of Christianity, etc.

 

Rural economy and feudal society

. Most of the lands were taken care by a small number of men in power. They were the heads of Churches, great religious houses, secular princes, warlords, members of military aristocracy. They commanded and exploited the working mass of people, either because of the surviving degraded forms of slavery, or because of the monopoly of political power. The climate was optimum for the Europeans which favoured the agrarian sector a lot during 900-1300 AD. After 1000 AD, nobility emerged as an upper layer within the group of seigneurial lords. They were a class with high prestige socially and religiously. Nobility was conferred with judicial and military power to govern different counties into which the empire was divided. The feudal lord enjoyed a number of rights known as ‘ban’. Some historians replace the word ‘feudal system’ with ‘seigneurial system’. The word feudalism designates a more limited organization in which the lord was the master of the fiefdom that was ceded to him, as a vassal, by his overlord. , in the later 12th and 13th centuries while leasing of manorial reserves to peasant tenants increased greatly at the expense of direct home cultivation.  the same epoch also witnessed a renewed wave of enserfment, which deprived previously free social groups of theirliberty and lent a new hardness and precision to the juridical definitionsof lack of freedom, from the late 11th century onwards. These conflicting agrariantrends were all manifestations of the silent social struggle for landwhichgave its economic vitality to the age.

 

Economy and urbanism

After 1000AD the feudal economy became technologically stagnant for some time till the Mediterranean commerce rose. Generally,there were more hands for work on the demesne than before. Consequently instead of taking rent in the form of labour services the lords began to demand dues either in kind or money. But according to March Bloch, trade and monetary exchange was not entirely absent from the feudal economy. The peasants used to keep some amount of money with them but the lords had always used their power to take away these petty monetary savings from these peasants by various means like fines or tailles.

 

Soon after this period recovery began. A big change was taken place in the character of feudalism by the 15th century and trade, monetary exchange and handicraft production was expanded in this period. The expansion was associated with the development of towns and rise of merchant class. But another problem I would like to mention here is about the population which was very high at that time, so many people remained landless and jobless. So they were hired by land owners and big peasants and they were paid wages in money. Monetary exchange in the countryside became frequent and there started a wide range of economic activities.

 

Feudal crisis

Even though Europe survived it up to a mark, till that time the new cycle of growth of population, followed by massive demographic expansion, occupation of marginal lands, declining productivity, higher feudal rent, food scarcity, famine and starvation culminated in another crisis. Historians coined this using the term ‘general crisis of fifteenth century’ which affected most of Europe.

 

Naval supremacy was established in the western Mediterranean, while the domination of eastern Mediterranean was ensured after the victory of 1st crusade and opening of Atlantic land routes.Commerce and industry had by now become an independent profession. The problem thus started with overpopulation and increasing landless peasants. The lords preferred to split the demesne into small holdings and rent these out to peasants and kept a small holding of land themselves. Due to the reduction in the sizes of their demesnes, the lords had only very little use for labour services. The productivity of marginal lands was very low. So there was a decline in productivity. So agricultural production stagnated and eventually declined. By the beginning of 14th century a serious scarcity of food happened in Europe. This led to the misery of those who hired out their labour for a wage. Wages were coming down while prices of essential commodities were going up. The food shortages led to famine during 14th century. The famine deaths caused a decline in population and this trend was accelerated by large scale deaths caused by terrible plague which swept throughout Europe.