FEUDALISM

a social system of rights and duties based on land tenure and personal relationships in which land (and to a much lesser degree other sources of income) is held in fief by vassals from lords to whom they owe specific services and with whom they are bound by personal loyalty. In a broader sense, the term denotes feudal society, a form of civilization that flourishes especially in a closed agricultural economy and has certain general characteristics besides the mere presence of lords, vassals, and fiefs. In such a society, those who fulfill official duties, whether civil or military, do so not for the sake of an abstract notion of the state or of public service but because of personal and freely accepted links with their overlord, receiving remuneration in the form of fiefs, which they hold hereditarily. Because various public functions are closely associated with the fief rather than with the person who holds it, public authority becomes fragmented and decentralized. Another aspect of feudalism is the manorial or seignorial system in which landlords exercise over the unfree peasantry a wide variety of police, judicial, fiscal, and other rights. Several of the great civilizations of the world have passed through a feudal period in the course of their history. Some of these feudalismsfor instance, the Japanese (see daimyo)are indeed quite comparable with the feudalism of western Europe and of the Latin East. The origins of European feudalism are to be found in the early Frankish kingdom (8th century), when the granting of fiefs on the one hand and the establishment of personal vassal-lord bonds on the other were linked together. In earlier centuries one type of land grant had been the benefice, given for the lifetime of the tenant and at his request; but it was not until the second half of the 8th century that the benefice was linked generally with vassalage. Whereas previously grants of the Frankish kings to their followers had been in full ownership, the kings began to keep the ownership to themselves and to grant land only in benefice with a wide right of use and exploitation. Not only their own lands but also church lands were distributed. About the same time public functions were also being given in benefice to royal vassals. The king's example was quickly followed by various lesser lords. Feudalism spread with the Frankish conquests into northern Italy, Spain, and Germany and later into the Slavic territories. The Normans took it to England in 1066 and to southern Italy and Sicily a few years later. From England feudalism spread to Scotland and to Ireland. Finally the Near Eastern territories that the crusaders conquered were organized feudally. Internally the system developed greatly in the course of the 9th century. Of particular importance was the transformation of the benefice into a hereditary fief. Royal power declined and local dynasties became, in fact, independent and started to build up small territorial states for themselves; often they were at war with each other. The church was largely feudalized. Secular lords, in return for homage, would invest bishops and abbots with their ecclesiastical offices and with the temporalities that went with them. In return, the bishops and abbots owed the secular lord various services. In the field of law and justice, feudalism meant replacing the ancient courts of local dignitaries by courts composed of the vassals of a common lord. The consequent dispersal and multiplication of courts made the judicial apparatus extremely complex. From the 12th century onward feudalism came under attack from various rival forces. The centralized state with its salaried officials and its mercenary armies was being built on Roman ideas about sovereignty and the safeguard of public order; the relationship between subject and sovereign replaced that of vassal and lord as the basis of a well-ordered society. The towns, growing in economic power and even forming their own militias, were able to a large extent to impose their own concepts about society against those of the knights. Finally, the manorial system, the material basis of the knightly class, in the 12th and 13th centuries underwent a deep economic crisis. Although feudalism by the end of the 14th century was no longer a political and social force, it had left its mark on European society. It exercised its greatest influence in the elaboration of modern forms of constitutional government. Ideas about consent to taxes and resistance to and defiance of the lord and the whole balance of rights and duties between lords and vassals played a great role in colouring the outlook of early representative institutions.