FEUDALISM
62
FEUDALISM
primitive than, the notion of a landed enfeoffment.
The early banded hordes that broke over Europe were
held together by the idea of loj'alty to a personal chief.
The heretogas were leaders in war. Tactitus says
(Germania, vii): The leaders hold command rather
by the example of their boldness and keen courage
than by any force of discipline or autocratic rule." It
was the best, most obvious, simplest method, and
would always obtain in a state of incessant wars and
raids. But even when that state of development had
been passed, the personal element, though consider-
ably lessened, could not fail to continue. Territorial
enfeoffment did not do away with vassalage, but only
changed the medium by which that vassalage was
made evident. The dependent was, as ever, the per-
sonal follower of his immediate lord. He was not
merely holding land of that lord ; the very land that he
held was but the expression of his dependence, the
outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible
bond. The fief showed who the vassal was, and to
whom he owed his vassalage. At one time there was a
tendency among historians to make a distinction be-
tween the theory of feudalism on the Continent and
that introduced into England by William I. But
a closer study of both has proved their identif v (Tout,
Eng. Hist. Rev., Jan., 1905, 141-143). The Salisbury
Oath, even on the supposition that it was actually
taken by "all the land-owning men of accoimt there
were over all England" (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ann.
1068), wa.s nothing more than had been exacted by
the Anglo-Saxon kings (Stubbs, Select Charters,
Doom of Exeter, iv, 64; i, 67; but compare Vino-
gradoff, Growth of the Manor, Oxford, 1905, 294-
306). In Germany, too, many of the lesser knights
held directl}^ of the emperor; and over all, whether
immediately subject to him or not, he had, at least in
theory, sovereign rights. And in France, where feu-
dal vassalage was very strong, there was a TOya\ court
to which a dependent could appeal from that of his
lord, as there were also roval cases, which none but
the king could try. In fact it was perhaps in France,
earlier than elsewhere, that the centralizing spirit of
royal interference began to busy itself in social, eco-
nomic, judicial interests of the individual. Besides,
on the other hand, the anarchy of Stephen's reign that
spread over the whole country (Davis, Eng. Hist.
Rev., Oct., 1903) showed how slight even in England
was the roj'al hold over the vassal barons. Moreover,
if English feudalism did at all differ from the hier-
archic vassalage that caused so much harm abroad,
the result was due far more to Henry II and his suc-
cessors than to the Norman line of kings. And even
the work of the Angevins was to no small degree un-
done by the policy of Edward III. The Statutes of
Merton (127S), Slortmain (1279), Quia Emptores
(1290) all laid the foundations, though such, of course,
was foreign to their object, for the aggregations of
large estates. Then came the marriage of the
royal princes to great heiresses; the Black Prince
gained the lands of Kent; Lionel, the dowry of Ulster;
Thomas of Woodstock, the linked manors of Eleanor
Bohun. Henry IV, before he deposed Richard II, was
"Harry of Hereford, Lancaster and Derby", as well as
Leicester and Lincoln. The result was that England,
no less than France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, had
its feudal vassals that acquired ascendancy over the
crown, or were only prevented by their mutual jeal-
ousy from doing so. In England, too, the substitution
of a fi'mliilili' iip(i)ui(ii'r, or noliility of the blood roval,
for the old fi'mlalili lirn'Inriiilc worked the same mis-
chief as it did in !■' ranee; and the W.ars of the Roses
par.alleleil (he fatal feuds of Burgundians and Armagn-
acs, the horrors of the Praguerie and the anarchy of
the League of the Public Weal. It will be .seen, there-
fore, that all over Ivirope the same feudal system pre-
vailed of a liicrarchir arrangement of classes, as some
vast pyramid of which the apex, pushed high up and
separated by intervening layers from its base, repre-
sented the king.
(3) Feudalism lastly included the idea of an immu- nity or grants of the profits of justice over a fief or other piece of land (Vinogradoff, Eng. Soc. in the Eleventh Century, 177-207). We have already stated how by the land-books the Anglo-Saxon kings (and the like had been done, and was to be repeated all over the Continent) granted to others political ownership over certain territories that till that time had been, in the medieval phrase, "doing their own law". The result was that, apparently, private courts were set up, typified in England by the aUiterative jingle "sac and soc, tol and theam, and infangenthef". Sometimes the lord was satisfied by merely taking the judicial forfeitures in the ordinary courts, without troubling to establish anj' of his own. But, generally speaking, he seems to have had the right, and to have used it, of keeping his own separate courts. Feudalism, there- fore, includes not merely service (military and eco- nomic) but also suit (judicial). This suit was as minutely insisted upon as was the service. The king demanded from his tenants-in-chief that they should meet in his cvria regis. So William I had his thrice- yearly cro^^Ti-wearings, attended by "all the rich men over all England, archbishops and bishops, abbots and earls, thegns and knights" (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ad ann. 1087). So too in France, there was the cour du roy, dating from the earliest Capetian times, the court of the king's demesne or immediate tenants; at this royal court, whether in England or in France, all the tenants-in-chief, at any rate in the days of the full force of feudalism, were obliged to attend. The same court existed in the Holy Roman Empire and was of great importance, at least till the death of Henry V (Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, London, 1904, viii, 120- 129). All those who attended these courts did so in virtue of the tenurial obligations. Now, these royal councils were not constitutional bodies, for we have no evidence of any legislation by them. Rather, like the Parlement of France, they simply registered the royal edicts. But their real work was judicial, adjudicating causes too numerous or too complicated for the king alone to deal with. So Philip Augustus summoned John as a vassal prince to the cour du roy to answer the charge of the murder of Arthur of Brittany. Just as these royal courts were judicial bodies for dealing with questions relating to the tenants-in-chief, so these tenants-in-chief, and in a descending gradation every lord and master, had their private courts in which to try the cases of their tenants. The private criminal courts were not strictly feudal, but dependent on a royal grant; such were the franchises, or liberties, or regalities, as in the counties Palatine up and down Europe. Besides these, however, there were the librw curice, courts baron, courts leet. courts custom- ary, and, in the case of the Church, courts Christian (for details. Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, I, 571-594). The very complexity of these courts astonishes us; it astonished contemporaries no less, for Langland in "Piers Plowman" (Passus III, 11. 318-319) looks forward to a golden day when King's court and common court, consistory
and chapter. All shall be one court and one baron-judge.
CHT7RCH AND Feud.\lism. — The Church too had her place in the feudal system. She too was granted terri- torial fiefs, became a vassal, possessed immunities. It was the result of her calm, wide sympathy, turning to the new nations away from the Roman Empire, to which many Christians thought she was irrevocably bound. By the baptism of Clovis she showed the bap- tism of Constant ine had not tied her to a political system. So she created a new world out of chaos, created the paradox of barbarian civilization. In gratitude kings and emperors endowetl her with prop- erty; and ecclesiastical property has not infrequently
