Feudal Custom in the West Prior to the Eleventh Century

Before the great upheavals of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the peoples of Europe were organized politically in a loose, complex, and overlapping structure of (1) local units, (2) lordship units, (3) tribal (clan) units, (4) large territorial units such as duchies or principalities, which might include a number of tribes (clans), and (5) kingdoms, of which the Frankish kingdom, from the year 800, was also called an empire.

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bishops, of whom the Bishop of Rome was by tradition the most important.

Within this general classification, there were very wide differences from locality to locality, lordship unit to lordship unit, tribal unit to tribal unit, and so on. The economy of Europe before the eleventh century was largely local and agrarian. There was very little intercommunication; apart from monks and some others of the clergy and a small number of merchants, and except for military campaigns, only the higher nobility and kings traveled. There were practically no permanent representatives of the central authorities in the localities. Efforts to place them there were generally frustrated. Not only power but also culture was widely dispersed. The customs of one place might differ substantially from the customs of another place fifty miles away.

Nevertheless, the political organization of the peoples of Europe in the period from the sixth to the eleventh centuries reveals a common pattern of development.

The smallest local political units were generally called villae ("villages," or "vills"); these were grouped into centenarii ("hundreds"), which were grouped, in turn, into comitatus ("counties"). These local units first came into being when the wandering tribes from western Asia, having swallowed up what was left of the Roman Empire in the West, finally settled down in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries.

The second type of unit, lordship units, came into being soon thereafter. Their number increased as settlers "commended themselves" to leading personages among them and promised to render services in return for food and clothing as well as for protection against enemies. The person who commended himself became "the man" of the lord. He might live in the lord's household, or the lord might provide him with land to work for himself.

Lordship units also came into being when leading personages, and especially clan chiefs and kings, granted a benefice (beneficium, "benefit"), that is, land or other property, or an office or other privileges, to be held in return for services. The term "benefice," which at first connoted that the tenant was to receive the grant on relatively easy terms, was eventually confined chiefly to grants to a church; in the late eighth and ninth centuries it was largely replaced by the Germanic term feod. Feod, which was rendered feudum in Latin (hence the English word "feudalism" and the French word feodalite), originally meant cattle (as the German cognate Vieh still means "cow"); then it came to signify valuable moveable goods (compare the English word "chattels," derived from "cattle"); and finally it came to mean a form of land tenure, rendered "fief " or "fee" in Norman English. (Thus to speak of a lawyer's or doctor's "fee" is to perpetuate the concept of a grant of a form of tenure that carries the obligation to render services.)

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In the nineteenth century, many historians traced the remote origins of the first kind of lordship unit, formed by commendation, to the Gefolgschaft ("following") of the Germanic tribes, which was a band of trusted soldiers surrounding the war chief.

Today it is generally accepted that neither the Gefolgschaft nor the patrocinium survived even the Frankish period, much less the Papal Revolution. In the late eighth and ninth centuries, commendation and the granting of a fief were often merged. Moreover, in the ninth century the fief, with its obligations of service, often descended to the heirs of the tenant-then usually called by the Celtic term "vassal" -- upon the renewal of their oaths of commendation.

The oaths were part of a solemn rite. The vassal, bareheaded and unarmed, went down on his knees, placed his hands together and put them (pointing upwards) between the hands of the lord, and acknowledged himself to be the lord's "man" (homme, homo). By the tenth century it had become a widespread practice for the two then to kiss each other on the mouth. By this ritual of homage the vassal became the lord's "man of mouth and hands." But with the linking of commendation and land tenure, a second part was added to the ceremony, namely, a religious oath of fidelity ("fealty") by the vassal. Laying his hand on the Bible or on relics, the vassal pledged his faith (fides, fidelitas) to his lord. Often the lord would then perform a symbolic investiture of the vassal, handing over some object, such as a flag or a cross or a key, to symbolize infeudation, that is, the granting of a fief.

The linking of vassalage with fiefs through the oath of fealty became characteristic of Frankish feudal custom, though there were wide variations in that custom, both in time and in space. The Frankish kings carried this "feudo-vassalitic" (as modern historians call it) custom to all parts of their domains, including northern Italy (down to Rome), Spain, Hungary, and Poland. Only Scandinavia, Friesland, and a part of the Netherlands that borders on the North Sea remained immune. In England, feudal custom developed along different but parallel lines: the institutions of vassalage and fiefs were known, but in a less systematized

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form and without the same linkage between the two. However, the Norsemen, who had settled in the western part of the Frankish Empire in the early 900s and had absorbed Frankish feudal custom, carried it with them to England in 1066 and to Sicily and southern Italy in the 1070s and 1080s. The Crusaders carried it to Palestine in 1099. eventually founding there the Norman Kingdom of Jerusalem, whose Assizes of Jerusalem created a model system of serfdom, knighthood, lordship, and fiefs. 2 _

Feudal lordship units and local political units (vills, hundreds, counties) could and often did exist side by side. The vill, the hundred, and the county each had its own governing body, which was a court (in England, "moot") consisting of an assembly of free men. Each assembly met at regular intervals to transact the public affairs of the vill, hundred, or county. This included (but was by no means confined to) the resolution of what would today be called criminal and civil disputes. Each lordship unit, which in the tenth century very often took the form of a manor, had its own court, consisting of the periodic assembly of all freemen and serfs of the manor, but not the slaves. The manorial court also resolved criminal and civil disputes.

In the western parts of the Frankish Empire, but not in the eastern and southern parts (especially not in Germany and Italy), local government was absorbed to a considerable extent by feudal manors in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Above the level of the manor and the hundred or county, government in the period prior to the late eleventh century was greatly hampered by difficulties of communication. The lords of lords -- clan chiefs, dukes, princes, and other leading nobility -- were victims not only of the local character of the economy but also of the sparseness of settlement in Europe from the sixth to the early eleventh centuries, which was accentuated by a generally stationary or declining population throughout the period. The Roman cities had virtually disappeared; there were only a small number of important towns, and hardly any of them had more than a few thousand inhabitants. Travel was difficult; twenty to twentyfive miles a day was the normal rate of speed for a nobleman moving with his entourage from one vassal's estate to another. Such visits were necessary for the nobleman, not merely to supervise the administration of his estates but also to support himself and his household. Food had to be consumed on the spot; to transport it to a central location would have been too expensive. For the same reason, durable goods had to be pro- 300- cured on the spot and carried with one or left on deposit, so to speak. Such merchants as existed were chiefly peddlers, pieds poudreux ("men of dusty feet"), since there were generally not enough customers assembled in one place to justify selling through local representatives.

Kings and emperors also lived by travelling. In the course of the year 1033, for example, Emperor Conrad II journeyed from Burgundy to the Polish frontier, thence back again across Europe to

Champagne, and eventually to his native Saxony -- a distance of some 1500 miles as the crow flies! 3 The empire, as well as those kingdoms (like the Anglo-Saxon kingdom) that were outside the empire, had virtually no central administration, virtually no centrally administered fiscal system, virtually no central judiciary, virtually no representatives whatsoever in the localities; emperors and kings carried their government, for the most part, with them, in their imperial or royal households, as they "rode circuit" through their domains.

The story of the peripatetic emperor or king, always on the move, and of peripatetic dukes, earls, princes, and other high noble lords, most of them on the move most of the time, with an immobilized agricultural population living in sparsely settled villages and manors, almost completes the foundation for an analysis of the transformation of feudal custom into a system of feudal law in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. What is missing is the military aspect, which in some ways was the most important.

In fact, throughout the entire period prior to the eleventh century, war was the dominant daily concern of emperors, kings, and nobility. Constantly attacking the periphery of Europe, and always ready to swoop into the central parts, were the Norsemen, the Saracens, the Magyars. 4Within Europe itself there were continual wars among the clans. The Carolingian kings sought, with some success, to induce the leaders of the various clan and territorial units to send foot soldiers to form a "popular," that is, an imperial army. Similarly, the Anglo-Saxon kings relied on a general levy (fyrd). However, these were not standing armies but rather reserves available for a common emergency. In time, the vast majority of people came more and more to think of themselves as peasants rather than as soldiers. They resisted conscription, and eventually they were supported in this by the church; the Cluniac Reform of the tenth and eleventh centuries proclaimed the Peace of God, whereby clergy and peasantry were to be exempted from military attack. The other side of the coin was the fact that the peasantry increasingly diminished in military value as the foot soldier gave way to the heavily armed horseman.

Various explanations have been given for the fateful emergence of the armed horseman in Frankish military history. The example of the Arab

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enemy in the eighth_century wars in Spain and southern France was one factor. The importation of the stirrup and the horseshoe from Eurasian tribes in the East also seems to have played an important role. There were undoubtedly other causes of a social nature. In any event, the consequences for feudal custom were momentous. It was extremely expensive to produce an armed horseman, not to mention a horse capable of carrying him. Since hitherto almost all soldiers had had to furnish their own equipment, it took a very wealthy man to provide himself with heavy armor plus a fighting horse, and it also took a man with leisure to undergo the necessary training in the use of them. In th e year 1000 the price of a knight's armor alone would buy a good piece of farm

land. 5

Very gradually, in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, a warrior class of armed horsemen, called knights (milites in Latin; chevaliers in French, from cheval, "horse"; Ritter, "riders," in German), emerged in the Frankish Empire, whose sole occupation was to serve their lords in battle. The peasants gradually came to be used only rarely for combat -- chiefly for defense in emergencies -- although they were often required to deliver provisions to the knights and food for the horses. In the tenth century the warrior knights were generally supported by their lords in the two-story wooden castles that came to be built on hills, surrounded by moats, for defense against marauders -- and as bastions for marauding.

Thus in many parts of Europe, though not everywhere, the knight came to have a virtual monopoly of the military art. At the same time, by the practice of vassalage he was incorporated into (1) the system of land tenure and (2) the system of government. This manifested itself in various ways. The knight, having pledged fealty to a lord, might be invested with a fief, in which case he himself became a lord; if the fief included a manor and serfs, the knight was both landlord and governor. More often, the knight served in the household of his lord, keeping himself in readiness for combat. He might fight for his lord directly, or his lord might send him to his own superior lord in fulfillment of the feudal obligation of service which attached to his fief. A fief which carried the obligation to provide upkeep of one knightly family was called a knight's fee. A fief which carried the obligation to provide a superior lord with one or more knights was said to be held in knight's service. As the military significance of armed cavalry increased during the tenth and eleventh centuries, more and more land throughout Europe came to be held in knight's service.

In economic terms, it has been calculated that in the eleventh century one knightly household was worth about fifteen to thirty peasant families: that is, it took that number of peasants on the lord's estate to produce the wealth necessary to procure a horse and armor and to support a professional warrior and his family. Thus it was not accidental

302- that the spread of knighthood across Europe was accompanied by the spread of manorial estates in which the labor force consisted largely of a peasantry bound economically, and in many places legally, to the land.