FEUDALISM
61
FEUDALISM
First it forced the kings to cease to surround tliom-
selves with an antiquated fyrd or national militia, that
had forgotten in its agricultural pursuits that rapidity
of movement was the first essential of mililary success,
and by beating the sword into the ploughshare had
lost every desire to beat back the iron into its old
form. In consequence a new military force was or-
ganized, a professional standing army. This army
had to be fed and housed in time of peace. As a re-
sult its individual members were granted lands and
estates, or lived with the king as his personal suite. At
any rate, instead of every able-bodied man being in-
dividually bound in person to serve his sovereign in
the field, the lords or landowners were obliged in virtue
of their tenure to furnish a certain quantity of fighting
men, armed with fi.xed and definite weapons, accord-
ing to the degree, rank, and wealth of the combatant.
Secondly, it gave another reason for commendation,
i. e. protection. The lord was now asked, not to pay a
tax, but to extend the sphere of his influence so as to
enable a lonely, solitary farmstead to keep off the at-
tacks of a foe, or at least to afford a place of shelter
and retreat in time of war. This the lord would do for
a consideration, to wit, that the protected man should
acknowledge himself to be judicially, politically,
economically, the dependent of his high protector.
Finally, the king himself was pushed up to the apex
of the whole system. The various lords commended
themselves to this central figure to aid them in times
of stress, for they saw the uselessness of trying singly
to repel a foe. They were continually being defeated
because "'shire would not help shire" (Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, ann. 1010). Thus the very reason why the
English left Ethelred the Unready to accept Sweyn as
full king (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ann. 1012) was
simply because Ethelred had no idea of centralizing
and unifying the nation; just as in the contrary sense
the successful resistance of Paris to the Northmen
gave to its dukes, the Lords of the Isle of France, the
royal titles which the Carlovingians of Laon were too
feeble to defend ; and the lack of a defensive national
war prevented any unification of the imwieldy Holy
Roman Empire. This is effectually demonstrated by
the real outburst of national feeling that centred
round one of the weakest of all the emperors, Freder-
ick III, at the siege of Neuss, simply because Charles
the Bold was thought to be threatening Germany by
his attack on Cologne. From these wars, then, the
kings emerged, no longer as mere leaders of their peo-
Ele out as owners of the land upon which their people ved, no longer as Reges Francorum but as Reges Francice, nor as Duces Normannorum but as Duces Norma nnicc, nor as Kings of the Anglecyn but of Engla-land. This exchange of tribal for territorial sovereignty marks the complete existence of feudalism as an organization of society in all its relations (eco- nomic, judicial, political), upon a basis of commenda- tion and land-tenure.
Essence. — We are now, therefore, in a position to understand what exactly feudalism was. Bearing in mind the double definition given at the beginning, we may, for the sake of clearness, resolve feudalism into its three component parts. It includes a territorial element, an idea of vassalage, and the privilege of an immunity.
(1) The territorial element is the grant of the en- feoffment by the lord to his man. At the beginning this was probably as well of stock and cattle as of land. Hence its etymology. Littrd makes the Low Latin feudum of Teutonic origin, and thus cognate with the Old High German fihu, Gothic jaihu, Anglo-Saxon jeoh (our jee), modern German vie.h. That is to say, the word goes back to the days when cattle was originally the only form of wealth; but it came by a perfectly natural prooess, when the race had passed from a nomadic life lo the fixity of abode neeessilaled by pas- toral pursuits, to signify wealth in general, and finally
wealth in Land. The cattle, stock, or land was there-
fore handed over by the lord to his dependent, to be
held, not in full ownership, but in usufruct, on condi-
tions originally personal but becoming hereditary.
(This whole process can be easily traced in Hector
Munro Chadwick's "Studies in Anglo-Saxon Institu-
tions", Cambridge, 1905, ix, 308-354; x, 378-411,
where a detailed account is given of how the thegn, a
personal servant of the king, developed into a land-
owner, possessing an average of five hides of land and
responsible to his sovereign in matters of war and ju-
risdiction.) The influence of the Church, too, in this
gradual transference of a personal to a territorial vas-
salage has been very generally admitted. The mo-
nastic houses would be the first to find it troublesome
(Liber Eliensis, 275) to keep a rout of knights within
their cloistral walls. Bishops, too, howsoever mag-
nificent their palaces, could not fail to wish that the
fighting men whom they were boimd by their barony
to furnish to the king should be lodged elsewhere than
close to their persons. Consequently they soon de-
veloped the system of territorial vassalage. Hence
the medieval legal maxim: nulle tcrre snns seigneur
(Vinogradoff, lOnglish Society in the Eleventh Cen-
tury, Oxford, 1!k')S, ii, 39-89). This enfeoffment of
the lord or lantlowner by the king and of the depen-
dent by the lord was partlj' in the nature of a reward for
past services, partly in the nature of an earnest for the
future. It is this primitive idea of the lord who gives
land to his supporter that is answerable for the feudal
incidents which otherwise seem so tyrannous. For
instance, when the vassal died, his arms, horse, mili-
tary e(|uipment reverted as heriot to his master. So,
too", when the tenant died without heirs, his property
escheateil to the lord. If, however, he died, with
heirs, indeed, but who were still in their minority,
then these heirs were in wardship to the feudal supe-
rior, who could even dispose of a female ward in mar-
riage to whom he would, on a plea that otherwise she
might unite herself and lands to an hereditary enemy.
All the way along it is clear that the ever-present idea
ruling and suggesting these incidents, was precisely a
territorial one. The origin, that is, of these incidents
went back to earlier da)'S when all that the feudal
dependent possessed, whether arms, or stock, or land,
he had received from his immediate lord. Land had
become the tie that knit up into one the whole of soci-
ety. Land was now the governing principle of life
(Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, Cam-
bridge, 1898, I, iii, 66-78). A man followed, not the
master whom he chose or the cause that seemed most
right, but the master whose land he held and tilled, the
cause favoured in the geographical linnts of his do-
main. The king was looked up to as the real possessor
of the land of the nation. By him, as representing the
nation, baronies, manors, knights-fees, fiefs were dis-
tributed to the tenants-in-chief, and they, in turn,
divided their land to be held in trust b}' the lower vas-
sals (Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh
Centurj', 42). The statute of Edward I, known from
its opening clause as Quia Emptores, shows the ex-
treme lengths to which this sub-infeudation was
carried (Stuhbs, Select Charters, 478). So much,
however, had this territorial idea entered into the
legal conceptions of the medieval polity, and been
passed on from .ige to age by the most skilful lawyers
of each generation, that, up to within the last half cen-
tury, there were not wanting some who taught that
the very peerages of England might descend, not by
means of blood only, nor even of will and bequest, but
by the mere possession-at-law of certain lands and
tenements. Witness the Berkeley Peerage case of
1861 (.\nson, Law and Custom of the Constitution,
Oxford, 1S97, Part 1, I, vi, 200-203).
(2) p'eudalisiii further implies the idea of vassalage. This is piirtly oorieurrent with, partly overlapping, the territorial conception. It is certainly prior to, more
