Feudalism.

Feudalism. The feudal system formed in medieval Europe the connecting link which united the primitive society, whose basis was entirely personal, with the modern reign of law and order. It may be described as a great military and social organisation based on the holding of land, yet containing, imbedded within itself, like fossils in the rocks, the relics of the earlier systems which in each different country had preceded it. The result of the system was the establishment of the various great European powers on the ruins of the Roman empire, and the preservation of order and discipline in the wild times of the disintegration of that empire. For a clear understanding of the feudal system, how it came to be introduced, and the changes it wrought, a glance is necessary at the social systems which preceded it, and which can for this purpose be classed under two leading types, the Teutonic and the Roman, known respectively as the Mark system and Emphyteusis. The industry of Stubbs, Seebohm, and others has thrown a flood of light on the working of the mark system in the primeval German forests, by which we can almost accurately reproduce the primitive society and trace its growth.

In the first century the tribes seem to have been purely nomadic, each kept together under the control of its head, having cattle and other belongings, but no idea of permanent possession of the land, or, indeed, of anything more than taking the pasture and fruits of the earth for the time being, and defending their temporary encampment as long as they remained there. Each chief had his personal following, called by the Romans his comitatus, composed principally of the younger sons of the chief families, and of men who preferred a life of adventure to peaceable cattle-feeding. The chief's council was composed of the heads of the chief families. In many of the larger tribes there were subordinate divisions, presided over by inferior chiefs, but the organisation, whether of the whole or of an individual part, was the same. Probably originally every man was free and equal, but by degrees a class rose up composed partly of prisoners taken in war and kept as slaves, partly of gamblers who, having lost all else, staked their freedom, and lost that; others, again, from mere poverty, might voluntarily surrender their freedom for subsistence, and thus a class of unfree men would gradually spring up. By degrees these nomadic tribes took to settling and cultivating the land, the influence of increasing wealth and civilisation and the knowledge of agriculture, derived from their Roman neighbours, tending largely to promote this result; but still the same broad principles obtained. A group of families would settle on an unoccupied tract of land, and the council of the heads would assign to each family a spot to build a homestead, and to put up cattle-sheds and stackyards; all the rest of the land they occupied in common. A fertile glade was chosen for a common meadow, and to each family the council allotted a share proportionate to its numbers. Each family cut and harvested its own hay, then the fences were thrown down, and the meadow became common pasture till the grass began to grow again next spring. Around the village and the meadow were the woods and wastes, always common, never divided or inclosed; these were called the 'mark,' a word meaning a boundary, and which yet lingers in the Scotch and Welsh Marches, and whence came the name of the Province of Mercia.

The next step in civilisation was the knowledge of tillage, and as arable ground could not well be re-allotted every year, a portion large or small came by degrees to be attached to each homestead, and not included in the yearly subdivision. Still, however, there was no ownership of land as we understand it. The head of each family was a member of the community, a freeman and a political unit, and in that capacity had a homestead assigned to him; this homestead was the outward badge or sign of his status as a freeman. This village was called the mark, a group of marks formed a district, called by Roman writers 'Pagus,' and by English writers a Hundred. The pagus elected a chief, who was a kind of local judge, and each pagus sent representatives to the national assembly, in whom the central power was vested. In war each pagus sent a hundred champions to the host, the nucleus of which was the chief of the tribe with his comitatus. Thus the host was simply the nation in arms, arranged according to the same divisions as in peace; and when a country was conquered they had merely to settle down in the order they stood, and recommence their mark life in a new place. The position of a Teutonic land-owner, then, was that he held his land not of any superior, but in token of his status as a freeman and head of a household; and on his death the assembly of the markmen would confer the homestead on the man on whom that headship devolved, which also, to some extent, they had the power of regulating. Such a system was it that in the 5th century the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes introduced into England; and its traces, notwithstanding the lapse of fourteen centuries, may still be found in village greens and many of the rights of common, whenever the latter are not manorial. Large grants of land were made to distinguished warriors of the comitatus, who settled down with their dependents and slaves, forming villages on their lands in analogy to the mark. The whole country was now looked upon as one great mark, the unallotted lands forming a sort of treasury out of which grants could be made to new-comers by the great council. Theoretically, the possession of land still was the badge of a freeman; yet, as these grants of land were alienable, and could be sold, a class of landless men gradually arose, and as these had no visible sign of their status it became the rule that every landless man must commend himself to some land-owner who should be responsible to the state for him. Also, the smaller land-owners would often commend themselves to some powerful lord for the sake of honour and protection. A second stage in the progress of social organisation was thus reached; the purely personal basis was no longer the sole foundation of society, the land-owner, not the freeman, became the unit; the host was the body of land-owners in arms; but still it was open to the landless man to select his own lord, and such selection created no indissoluble tie; besides this, the freeman was still in political theory the equal of the noble, and thus the personal basis, though obscured, was not entirely lost sight of.

In the meantime developments somewhat corresponding to these were taking place in the Roman empire; long or perpetual leases of lands taken in war were granted by the state in the tenure called Emphyteusis. About the time of Constantine this tenure was also adopted by private persons and corporations, and was extended from land to houses, the person to whom the grant was made being called Emphyteuta. It may be defined as a grant of land or houses for ever or for a long period on the condition that an annual sum (canon) shall be paid to the owner or his successors, and, if not paid, the grant shall be forfeited. The emphyteuta is not legal owner, nor a mere hirer; but the agreement is determined by the Lex Zenoniana to rest neither on letting nor on selling, but to be a peculiar contract depending on agreements of its own. The emphyteuta had the usufruct of the land, was entitled to its fruits, and under certain restrictions could alienate his possession, which on his death passed to his heirs; but the ownership remained with the dominus-emphyteuscos or lord, and the emphyteuta was bound to pay the agreed rent, to manage the property as a good paterfamilias, and to pay all the burdens and deliver the receipts to the lord. A good account of this tenure may be found in Hunter's Roman Law, pages 426-429. In the later empire, by a modification of this tenure, the frontier lands on the Rhine and Danube were granted to chiefs of the German tribes on condition of their being always ready to defend the integrity of the empire, this service being taken in lieu of the canon or rent of the ordinary emphyteusis. Thus the rival systems of the German mark and the Roman emphyteusis were brought into direct juxtaposition, and when the barbarians, who for so long had hung 'poised on the edge of the empire,' broke into the Roman world, carrying their ideas of social organisation with them, it was natural that the grants of conquered lands to great warriors should be made on terms analogous to emphyteusis rather than (as happened in the earlier conquest of Britain) on the older mark system. These grants were called beneficia, the beneficium being held on condition of the performance of certain services, of which the most important was naturally military. As in England also, so on the Continent the weaker and poorer would commend themselves to some powerful lord, surrendering their allodial lands (i.e. those held in absolute ownership) to him, to be received back in a sort of emphyteusis tenure on condition of the performance of military service. Hence arose fendalism. Littre makes the Low Lat. feudum of Teutonic origin, and thus cognate with Old High German fihu, Gothic faihu,

A.S. feoh (our fee), mod. Ger. vieh, cattle being originally the only wealth. It came subsequently to mean property of any kind, including land, the second part of the root being taken from the word od, also meaning property or pay; thus fee-od, feodum, or feudum means property held on condition of pay or services rendered. Gnzot in Civil. France, iv. 41, says: 'The word (feudalism) appeared for the first time in a charter of Charles the Fat in 884.'

So now the third stage of progress was reached, when land became the sole basis of society, the sacramental tie of all public relations; the poor man depended on the rich, not as his chosen patron, but as the owner of the land he cultivated, the lord of the court to which he did suit and service, the leader whom he was bound to follow in the field (see Stubbs, i. 167). The feudal theory was that the king was the sole allodial or absolute owner of all the land in the kingdom; the chief lords held their lands from him on condition of military service; their vassals from them on similar conditions; and sub-vassals from them again, and so on in an infinite chain; each vassal owing fealty to his own immediate lord, but being bound by no tie whatever to the lord's lord. Such was the leading principle of the system which prevailed over France and Germany at the time of the Norman Conquest, which was introduced into England by William the Conqueror and his Normans, and engrafted on the Saxon mark system, but modified by the genius of William I. to suit his own theories of statesmanship. It was introduced about the same period into Scotland by various adventurous Norman knights, and engrafted on the older clan system with such modifications as suited their purpose. Thus three distinct types of feudalism arose with marked differences, as we shall see. The disruptive tendency of the continental feudalism is obvious; the system was there pushed to its logical conclusion. Thus, for instance, the Duke of Brittany was vassal of the king of France, and owed him fealty, as did the vassals of the duke to him, but between the king and the vassals of the duke there was no tie whatever. When therefore the duke chose to throw off his allegiance and rebel against the king, his vassals were bound by their feudal obligations to support him. Such a system could only result in making France a mere congeries of powerful barons bound by slight ties to a nominal head. The weakness of the Carolingian kings and the early Capets largely conduced to this, as did also the degeneracy of the people, who seem to have forgotten that they ever had rights, and who became the ready tools and subservient slaves of the ambitious nobles. In Germany, though the disintegrating tendency was equally marked, the social development was different, owing to the sturdy independence of the German people making it necessary for any chief who aimed at independent power and throwing off the yoke of the central authority to identify himself with the nationality and the aspirations of his vassals. In this way the Gnelphs became practically independent lords of the vast fiefs in Swabia, and many another great chief threw off his feudal allegiance, and Germany became a collection of confederacies, the feudal lord of each being representative of the race of his vassals, as well as supreme land-owner.

William I. in introducing feudalism into England had no intention of becoming himself a mere roi-fainéant; he intended to be king of all England, lord of the lowest as well as the highest, not mere feudal lord of a number of practically independent chiefs. In this policy of course he had to face the opposition of his chief followers, whose object was to carve out large lordships for themselves, rendering a nominal homage to William, but practically independent of him. William's policy showed a grasp of the principles of statesmanship rarely equalled; being obliged to reward his chief followers handsomely, he soon saw that it would be dangerous not to make large grants of land, and equally dangerous to make such grants as would enable them to set up independent kingdoms. The plan he took was to make extensive grants, but to scatter them through various counties. For instance, his half-brother Odo of Bayeux got 439 manors, but they were scattered through 17 counties; Robert of Mortain had 793 manors scattered through 20 counties. Thus, had either of these been minded to rebel, no coherence or union was possible among vassals so scattered, and in each county an attempt to collect forces for rebellion would have resulted in a collision with a powerful sheriff at the head of his fyrd (the army of the shire), who, being a continuation of the Saxon and popular system of government, and being royal officers entirely, might be trusted to curb the lawless barons. This, however, was not all. No sooner was William I. firmly seated on the throne, and the Domesday survey completed, than in 1086 at Salisbury he took a step which was in direct violation of the elementary feudal principles; for he summoned a great meeting to which we are told there came 'all his witan and all the land-owners of substance in England, whose vassals soever they were, and they all submitted to him and became his men, and swore oaths of allegiance to him that they would be faithful to him against all others.' Thus there was provided a direct tie between the king and all the freeholders which no intermediate tie would justify them in breaking.

We may now consider the nature of the services on condition of which land was feudally held, premising that in English nomenclature the man who held land was called a tenant, the land holden was his tenement, and the conditions of holding his tenure. Tenures, then, were of three kinds, answering to the three chief classes of the community, viz. free, unfree or base, and religious; and each of these might be for certain services—i.e. a fixed amount of money or labour at fixed periods—or uncertain—i.e. such amounts and at such times as the lord might require. For example, the free and uncertain tenure, usually considered the noblest of all the tenures, was on condition of following the lord when he went to battle (which might of course be every year, or not at all for a number of years), with a body of men and for a number of days in the year accurately proportioned to the size and value of the holding; this was called Tenure in Chivalry or by Knight Service. The free and certain tenure was the payment of a fixed sum of money, or sometimes the performance of some service of a peaceful and usually agricultural nature, and this was termed Free and Common Socage. The base tenures were those which depended originally on the performance of menial offices, and were in fact the tenures by which serfs allowed to squat on the lords' land held their little patches at the will of the lord; a modernised and greatly modified form of this tenure still exists in England under the name of Copyhold (q.v.). The religious tenures, under which in early times all the church lands were held, were known as Frankalmoign and tenure by Divine Service, the theory being that the prayers of holy men were all they could be called on to give by way of service to men, and the difference between the two being simply that in the former the number and times of the prayers was left to the conscience of the tenant, in the latter a certain number of masses was laid down, and if they were not duly said the lord had his remedy by distress; this last tenure became obsolete at the Reformation. Frankalmoign or free alms is still the tenure whereby in England the parson holds the church and glebe, the nearest thing to allodial ownership known in England. The necessity, especially in military tenures, of knowing accurately who the tenant was, gave rise to a number of so-called 'incidents of tenure.' Thus, on death of a tenant, the custom of the particular manor, which was pretty much the same all over the country, pointed out who by descent became his rightful successor; if the heir was a minor, another incident gave the lord the wardship of his person and lands till his majority; if a female, the lord might dispose of her hand in marriage, lest she should marry a hereditary enemy; if the tenant wished to sell his land, the lord must accept the new-comer as his tenant; and if the tenant died altogether without heirs, the land escheated to the lord. Accordingly, the lord might always know who his tenant was, and where to look for his services.

In England, though the oath at Salisbury to a large extent took the sting out of feudalism and minimised its disruptive effect, all these results and incidents developed themselves with great luxuriance and symmetry; but in or about the time of Henry II. a custom arose of commuting all the services for money to be spent in pay of mercenary soldiers, and thus another blow was dealt at the personal relationship based on landholding which was of the essence of the feudal system. Later still, in the reign of Edward I., was passed the famous statute known as Quia Emptores (18 Ed. I. chap. 1), prohibiting any vassal from granting any land to be held in fee-simple under himself, and enacting that if he wished to sell it he must do so out and out, so that the purchaser thenceforth should hold of the same chief lord as the seller had held of before. Thus the formation of the infinite chain of lord, vassal, and sub-vassal was checked, till in process of time it has come about that nearly all freeholders in England hold directly from the crown. About the same time in France the influence of powerful kings began to absorb the semi-independent dukes and princes into the crown, but not till the following century was the result finally achieved by Louis XI. He broke the feudal power of the great Duke of Brittany, the last, as he was the most powerful of the feudatories of the crown. In this way French feudalism became a thing of the past by the absorption of all the mesne lords, finally bringing about the same end which William I. accomplished by masterly policy in England; but bringing it about by dint of the sacrifice of all the great nobles, and reducing France to the condition of a powerful king with a weak and servile people, a state of things necessarily leading to the greatest tyranny and to revolution and upheaval. Meantime in England the progress was steady and certain. Quia Emptores destroyed the disruptive force of feudalism; but the old military tenures remained in name, though in fact they were little more than excuses whereby the lord contrived to screw money out of the unlucky tenant in the guise of fines for alienation, reliefs on taking up the inheritance by the heir, heriots, first-fruits, prime seisins, &c. There were also the aids given by the tenant at certain expensive epochs of his lord's life, viz. when he was taken prisoner and required ransom, when his eldest son was dubbed a knight, and when his daughter was married—pur ransommer son corps, pur faire fitz chevalier, et pur marier sa fille. The extortion to which the feudal system finally degenerated, when all its original purpose was gone, was put an end to by the Statute abolishing Military Tenures, passed on the restoration of Charles II.; and from that time forward feudalism to all intents and purposes was dead in England, save only so far as it affected the forms of conveyance of land. A few of the old tenures were preserved, probably on account of their picturesqueness and of their being too light to be any real burden, such as the tenures of grand and petit sergeantry, under the latter of which the Dukes of Marlborough and Wellington hold their lands on condition of the presentation of a flag to the sovereign.

We have seen how in France the disruptive nature of the feudal system and its tendency to create a class of petty sovereigns more powerful than their feudal lord proved the destruction of the system itself in that country in the 15th century; and how the very introduction of it into England was marked by a violation of one of its essential features, so that feudalism in its integrity never existed in England. But probably the country where the system can be most advantageously studied in its development and decay is Scotland; into this country it was introduced not by a powerful monarch like William I., but by a number of restless and ambitious Norman knights journeying north in search of adventure, who by their good swords and their Norman talent for organisation made themselves chiefs of powerful clans. The process by which this was accomplished and its general good effect on the country have been well shown by the Duke of Argyll in Scotland as It Was and as It Is (2 vols. 1887). From these Norman knights the great houses of Bruce, Stewart, Fraser, Grant, Comyn, and many others take their rise; but the poverty of the country and the sparseness of population, constantly reduced by devastating wars, prevented the aggrandisement of the feudal lords, and checked the disruptive tendency of the system just sufficiently to preserve its vitality to a comparatively modern period. Indeed, in the rebellion of 1745, it became evident that sufficient of the feudal spirit remained to be a source of danger to any government which chanced to be unpopular with the Highland chieftains, and also sufficient of its disruptive and disintegrating tendencies to render any enterprise depending on their support extremely precarious. Accordingly, after the suppression of that rebellion, the military tenures were abolished by legislation very similar to that which at the Restoration had abolished them in England. Nothing analogous to the oath at Salisbury ever took place in Scotland; accordingly the development of the system which made every chieftain a king in miniature, whose little realm was a sort of microcosm of the whole kingdom, proceeded unchecked. No statute analogous to Quia Emptores ever prevented subinfeudation, and accordingly to this day there may be any number of links in the chain of superior and vassal and sub-vassal; while in England, since no sub-vassal could be created after 18 Edward I., the intermediate lords have for the most part gradually dropped out, and most land-owners now hold directly from the crown, which was one result aimed at by William I., resulting in the most complete consolidation of the country.

Those who wish to see the remains of the feudal system in visible, albeit dead and fossilised form, may do so more completely on the banks of the Rhine than almost anywhere else. The castle of the feudal baron towers on its height; the village of his dependents nestles at its foot, with the church whose priest was his tenant in frankalmoign, or maybe his chaplain; the pier, it may be, which paid his dues—in fact, all the machinery of a tiny kingdom. Between one baron and another there might be friendship; there was more often feud. Over a number of the barons was some feudal lord, a prince-bishop perhaps, or a duke, and over them again the king; and in legend and story as well as in visible remains of the ancient buildings may be traced all the ramifications of the system, till the eye of fancy can without much difficulty reconstruct it again.

See Hallam's Middle Ages (1818); Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England (1874-78); Seebohm, The English Village Community (1883); Guizot, Histoire de la Civilisation en France (1845); Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte (1843-78; new ed. 1879-86).