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Feudalism - A Political System of Medieval

Europe and Elsewhere
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A coat of arms on the alter of Henry V's secret chapel at Westminster Abbey on September 15, 2015 in London, England.
To mark the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, Westminster Abbey will conduct special tours of Henry V's chantry
chapel. Ben Prouchne / Getty Images News / Getty Images

by K. Kris Hirst
Updated December 13, 2018

Feudalism is defined by different scholars in different ways, but in general, the term
refers to a sharply hierarchical relationship between different levels of landowning
classes.
 Key Takeaways: Feudalism Ad

Feudalism is a form of political organization with three distinct social classes:

king, nobles, and peasants.

In a feudal society, status is based on land ownership.

In Europe, the practice of feudalism ended after the Black Plague decimated
the population.

A feudal society has three distinct social classes: a king, a noble class (which could
include nobles, priests, and princes) and a peasant class. Historically, the king owned all
the available land, and he portioned out that land to his nobles for their use. The nobles,
in turn, rented out their land to peasants. The peasants paid the nobles in produce and
military service; the nobles, in turn, paid the king. Everyone was, at least nominally, in
thrall to the king, and the peasants' labor paid for everything.

A Worldwide Phenomenon
The social and legal system called feudalism arose in Europe during the Middle Ages, but
it has been identified in many other societies and times including the imperial
governments of Rome and Japan. American founding father Thomas Jefferson was
convinced that the new United States was practicing a form of feudalism in the 18th
century. He argued that indentured servants and slavery were both forms of yeoman
farming, in that access to land was provided by the aristocracy and paid for by the
tenant in a variety of ways.

Throughout history and today, feudalism arises in places where there is an absence of
organized government and the presence of violence. Under those circumstances, a
contractual relationship is formed between ruler and ruled: the ruler provides access to
the required land, and the rest of the people provide support to the ruler. The entire
system allows the creation of a military force that protects everyone from violence
within and without. In England, feudalism was formalized into a legal system, written
into the laws of the country, and codifying a tripartite relationship between political
allegiance, military service, and property ownership.

Roots
English feudalism is thought to have arisen in the 11th century CE under William the
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Conquerer, when he had the common law altered after the Norman Conquest in 1066.
William took possession of all of England and then parcelled it out among his leading

supporters as tenancies (fiefs) to be held in return for services to the king. Those
supporters granted access to their land to their own tenants who paid for that access by
a percentage of the crops they produced and by their own military service. The king and
nobles provided aid, relief, wardship and marriage and inheritance rights for the
peasant classes.

That situation could arise because Normanized common law had already established a
secular and ecclesiastical aristocracy, an aristocracy that relied heavily on the royal
prerogative to function.

A Harsh Reality
The upshot of the takeover of the land by the Norman aristocracy was that peasant
families who had for generations owned small farmsteads became renters, indentured
servants who owed the landlords their allegiance, their military service and part of their
crops. Arguably, the balance of power did allow for long-term technological progress in
agricultural development and kept some order in an otherwise chaotic period.

Just before the rise of the black plague in the 14th century, feudalism was firmly
established and working across Europe. This was a near-universality of family-farm
tenure by conditionally hereditary leases under noble, ecclesiastical or princely
lordships who collected cash and in-kind payments from their subject villages. The king
essentially delegated the collection of his needs—military, political and economic—to the
nobles.

By that time, the king's justice—or rather, his ability to administer that justice—was
largely theoretical. The lords dispensed the law with little or no kingly oversight, and as
a class supported each other's hegemony. Peasants lived and died under the control of
the noble classes.

The Deadly End

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Plague Victims Blessed by a Priest (14th Century Illuminated Manuscript).

http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/1/. Quibik

An ideal-typical medieval village was comprised of farms of about 25–50 acres (10–20
hectares) of arable land managed as open-field mixed farming and pasturage. But, in
reality, the European landscape was a patchwork of small, medium, and large peasant
holdings, which changed hands with the fortunes of the families.

That situation became untenable with the arrival of the Black Death. The late-medieval
plague created catastrophic population collapse among rulers and ruled alike. An
estimated number of between 30–50 percent of all Europeans died between 1347 and
1351. Eventually, the surviving peasants in most of Europe achieved new access to larger
land parcels and gained enough power to shed the legal shackles of medieval servility.

Sources
Clinkman, Daniel E. "The Jeffersonian Moment: Feudalism and Reform in Virginia, 1754–1786." University of
Edinburg, 2013. Print.
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Hagen, William W. "European Yeomanries: A Non-Immiseration Model of Agrarian Social History, 1350–1800."
Agricultural History Review 59.2 (2011): 259–65. Print.

Hicks, Michael A. "Bastard Feudalism." Taylor and Francis, 1995. Print.

Pagnotti, John, and William B. Russell. "Exploring Medieval European Society with Chess: An Engaging
Activity for the World History Classroom." The History Teacher 46.1 (2012): 29–43. Print.

Preston, Cheryl B., and Eli McCann. "Llewellyn Slept Here: A Short History of Sticky Contracts and Feudalism."
Oregon Law Review 91 (2013): 129–75. Print.

Salmenkari, Taru. "Using Feudalism for Political " Studia Orientalia 112 (2012): 127–46. Print.Criticsm and for
Promoting Systemic Change in China.

English manor houses and elds National Assembly session for the
abolition of privileges and feudal rights,
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