THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 245 lationship with each other. Lord A, who could count on the service of a few vassals, would himself become the vassal of a much greater lord, B, and agree upon certain occasions to provide B with ten warriors. Or this great lord, B, having at his disposal vast estates sufficient to support several ! hundred knights, instead of trying to find all those men himself, would infeudate his land in two or three large par- I eels to two or three men on condition that each of them supply him with a number of knights. Thus they would each
- receive a large fief and then would subinfeudate a large part
! of it, as a modern bank pays its depositors four per cent in- | terest and then loans out part of its deposits at a higher rate. ! Their vassals would be his subvassals, and he would be the j overlord of their men. In some parts of Europe, notably I France, land was subinfeudated in this way several times, ! so that as many as seven or eight persons might be owing I and receiving feudal service and payments from a single I manor. It would be hard, indeed, to say who owned the 1 land in such a case ; all had rights in it. Sometimes very complex situations were created in the course of time. Not only might the overlord of one estate be 1 the subvassal in the case of another villa, but he might even I be in some other lord's court the fellow vassal of one of his i own vassals. In short, lords and vassals were not two dis-
- tinct classes ; the relationship of lord and vassal was a shif t-
- ing one, and most feudal nobles were both lord and vassal.
This situation, however, can be paralleled in the modern business world, where one may buy stocks in any number of different companies, may be both a stockholder and a bond- holder, may be the president of one corporation and a director in another and a mere stockholder in a third. When a vassal subinfeudated his land, he of course did not alien- ate it, for he still owed his services to his lord from it and still himself had a lordship over it. Infeudation and sub- infeudation were sometimes carried so far, in the course of time, that estates were quite dismembered and some very small fiefs created. Sometimes the income from a single ! villa would be split, and to one man would be infeudated
