Feudalism

Wherever in the course of history men have gathered together they have gradually evolved some form of association that would ensure mutual interests. It might be merely the tribal bond of the Arabians, by which a man’s relations were responsible for his acts and avenged his wrongs; it might be a council of village elders such as the Russian ‘Mir’, making laws for the younger men and women; it might be a group of German chiefs legislating on moonlit nights, according to the description of Tacitus, by their camp fires.

In contrast to primitive associations stands the elaborate government of Rome under Augustus and his successors; the despotic Emperor, his numberless officials, the senators with their huge estates, the struggling curiales, the army of legions carrying out the imperial commands from Scotland to the Euphrates. When Rome fell, her government, like a house whose foundations have collapsed, fell also. Barbarian conquerors, established in Italy and the Roman provinces, took what they liked of the laws that they found, added to them their own customs, and out of the blend evolved new codes of legislation. Yet legislation, without some method of ensuring its execution, could not save nations from invasion nor the merchant or peasant from becoming the victim of robberies and petty crimes.

Mediaeval centuries are sometimes called the Age of Feudalism, because during this time feudalism was the method gradually adopted for dealing with the problems of public life amongst all classes in nearly all the nations of Europe. There are two chief things to be remembered about feudalism—first that it was no sudden invention but a growth out of old ideas both Roman and barbarian, and next that it was intimately connected in men’s minds with the thought of land. This was natural, for after all, land or its products are as necessary to the life of every individual as air and water, and therefore the cultivation of the soil and the distribution of its fruits are the first problems with which governments are faced.

Feudalism assumed that all the land belonging to a nation belonged in the first place to that nation’s king. Because he could not govern or cultivate it all himself he would parcel it out in ‘fiefs’ amongst the chief nobles at his court, promising them his protection, and asking in return that they should do him some specified service. This system recalls the ‘villa’ of Roman days with its senator, granting protection to his tenants from robbery and excessive taxation, and employing them to plough and sow, to reap his crops, and build his houses and bridges.

In the Middle Ages the service of the chief tenants was nearly always military: to appear when summoned by the king with so many horsemen and so many archers fully armed. In order to provide this force the tenant would be driven in his turn to grant out parts of his lands to other tenants, who would come when he called them with horsemen and arms that they had collected in a similar way. This process was called ‘sub-infeudation’. Society thus took the form of a pyramid with the king at the apex, immediately below him his tenants-in-chief, and below them in graded ranks or layers the other tenants.

This brings us to the base of the pyramid, the people who could not fight themselves, having neither horses nor weapons, and who certainly could not lend any other soldiers to their lord’s banner. Were they to receive no land?

In the Roman ‘villa’ the bottom strata was the slave, the chattel with no rights even over his own body. Under the system of feudalism the base of the pyramid was made up of ‘serfs’, men originally free, with a customary right to the land on which they lived, who had lost their freedom under feudal law and had become bound to the land, ascripti glebae, in such a way that if the land were sub-let or sold they would pass over to the new owner like the trees or the grass. In return for their land, though they might not serve their master with spear or bow, they would work in his fields, build his bridges and castles, mend his roads, and guard his cattle.

From top to bottom of this pyramid of feudal society ran the binding mortar of ‘tenure’ and ‘service’; but these were not the only links which kept feudal society together. When a tenant did ‘homage’ for his land, and ‘with head uncovered, with belt ungirt, his sword removed’, placed his hands between those of his lord, and took an oath, after the manner of the thegns of Wessex to their king, ‘to love what he loved and shun what he shunned both on sea and on land’, there entered into this relationship the finer bond of loyalty due from a vassal to his overlord. It was the descendant of the old Teutonic idea of the comitatus described by Tacitus,7 the chief destined to lead and guide, his bodyguard pledged to follow him to death if necessary.

Put shortly, then, feudalism may be described as a system of society based upon the holding of land—a system, that is, in which a man’s legal status and social rank were in the main determined by the conditions on which he held (i.e. possessed) his land. Such a system, to return to our example of the pyramid, grew not only from the apex, by the sovereign granting lands, as the King of France did to Rollo ‘the Ganger’, but from the middle and base as well.

One of the chief feudal powers in mediaeval times was the Church, for though abbots and bishops were not supposed to fight themselves, yet they would often have numbers of lay military tenants to bring to the help of the king or their overlord. Some of these tenants were men whom they had provided with estates, but others were landowners who had voluntarily surrendered their rights over their land in return for the protection of a local monastery or bishopric, and thus become its tenants. A large part of the Church land was, however, held, not by military or lay tenure, but in return for spiritual services, or free alms as it was called, i.e. prayers for the soul of the donor. Perhaps a landowner wished to make a pious gift on his death-bed, or had committed a crime and believed that a surrender of his property to the Church would placate God. For some such reason, at any rate, he made over his land, or part of it, to the Church, which in this way accumulated great estates and endowments, free from the usual liabilities of lay tenure. All over Europe other men, and even whole villages and towns, were taking the same steps, seeking protection direct from the king, or a great lord, or an abbot or bishop, offering in return rent, services, or tolls on their merchandise.

Feudalism at its best stood for the protection of the weak in an age when armies and a police force as we understand the terms did not exist. Even when the system fell below this standard, and it often fell badly, there still remained in its appeal to loyalty an ideal above and beyond the ordinary outlook of the day, a seed of nobler feeling that with the growth of civilization and under the influence of the Church blossomed into the flower of chivalry.

Such are the vows that Tennyson puts in the mouth of Arthur’s knights, who with Charlemagne and his Paladins were the heroes of mediaeval romance and dreams. King Henry the Fowler, who ruled Germany in the early part of the tenth century, instituted the Order of Knighthood, forming a bodyguard from the younger brothers and sons of his chief barons. Before they received the sword-tap on the shoulder that confirmed their new rank, these candidates for knighthood took four vows: first to speak the truth, next to serve faithfully both King and Church, thirdly never to harm a woman, and lastly never to turn their back on a foe. Probably many of these half-barbarian young swashbucklers broke their vows freely; but some would remember and obey; and so amid the general roughness and cruelty of the age, there would be established a small leaven of gentleness and pity left to expand its influence through the coming generations. It is because of this ideal of chivalry, often eclipsed and even travestied by those who claimed to be its brightest mirrors, but never quite lost to Europe, that strong nations have been found ready to defend the rights of the weak, and men have laid down their lives to avenge the oppression of women and children.

Of the evil side of feudalism much more could be written than of the good. The system, on its military side, was intended to provide the king with an army; but if one of his tenants-in-chief chose to rebel against him, the vassals who held their lands from this tenant were much more likely to keep faith with the lord to whom they had paid immediate homage than with their sovereign. Thus often the only force on which a king could rely were the vassals of the royal domain.

Again, feudalism, by its policy of making tenants-in-chief responsible for law and order on their estates, had set up a number of petty rulers with almost absolute power. Peasants were tried for their offences in their lord’s court by his bailiff or agent, and by his will they suffered death or paid their fines. Except in the case of a Charlemagne, strong enough to send out Missi8 and to support them when they overrode local decisions, the lord’s justice or injustice would seem a real thing to his tenants and serfs, the king’s law something shadowy and far away.

As Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror had been quite as powerful as his overlord the King of France. When he came to England he was determined that none of the barons to whom he had granted estates should ever be his equal in this way. He therefore summoned all landowning men in England to a council at Salisbury in 1086, and made them take an oath of allegiance to himself before all other lords. Because he was a strong man he kept his barons true to their oath or punished them, but during the reign of his grandson Stephen, who disputed the English throne with his cousin Matilda and therefore tried to buy the support of the military class by gifts and concessions, the vices of feudalism ran almost unchecked.

‘They had done homage to him and sworn oaths,’ says the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, ‘but they no faith kept ... for every rich man built his castles and defended them against him, and they filled the land with castles.... Then they took these whom they suspected to have any goods by night and by day, seizing both men and women, and they put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable.... I cannot and I may not tell of all the wounds and of all the tortures that they inflicted upon the wretched men of this land; and this state of things lasted the nineteen years that Stephen was king and ever grew worse and worse.’

Stephen was a weak ruler struggling with a civil war; so that it might be argued that no system of government could have worked well under such auspices; but if we turn to the normal life of the peasant folk on the estates of the monastery of Mont St. Michael in the thirteenth century, we shall see that the humble tenants at the base of the feudal pyramid paid dearly enough for the protection of their overlords.

‘In June the peasants must cut and pile the hay and carry it to the manor-house ... in August they must reap and carry in the Convent grain, their own grain lies exposed to wind and rain.... On the Nativity of the Virgin the villein owes the pork due, one pig in eight ... at Xmas the fowl fine and good ... on Palm Sunday the sheep due ... at Easter he must plough, sow, and harrow. When there is building the tenant must bring stone and serve the masons ... he must also haul the convent wood for two deniers a day. If he sells his land he owes his lord a thirteenth of its value, if he marries his daughter outside the lord’s demense he pays a fine,—he must grind his grain at the lord’s mill and bake his bread at the lord’s oven, where the customary charges never satisfy the servants.’

Certainly the peasant of the Middle Ages can have had little time to lament even his own misery. Perhaps to keep his hovel from fire and pillage and his family from starvation was all to which he often aspired. ‘War’, it has been said, ‘was the law of the feudal world’, and all over Europe the moat-girt castles of powerful barons, and walled towns and villages sprang up as a witness to the turbulent state of society during these centuries. To some natures this atmosphere of violence of course appealed.

So sang a ProvenÇal baron of the twelfth century, and we find an echo of his spirit in Spain as late as the fifteenth, when a certain noble, sighing for the joys and spoils of civil war, remarked, ‘I would there were many kings in Castile for then I should be one of them.’

The Church, endeavouring to cope with the spirit of anarchy, succeeded in establishing on different occasions a ‘Truce of God’, somewhat resembling the ‘Sacred Months’ devised by the Arabs for a like purpose. From Wednesday to Monday, and during certain seasons of the year, such as Advent or Lent, war was completely forbidden under ecclesiastical censure, while at no time were priests, labourers, women, or children to be molested.

The defect of such reforms lay in the absence of machinery to enforce them; and feudalism, the system by which in practice the few lived at the expense of the many, continued to flourish until foreign adventure, such as the Crusades, absorbed some of its chief supporters, and civilization and humanity succeeded in building up new foundations of society to take its place. It would seem as if the lessons of good government had to be learned in a hard school, generally through bitter experience on the part of the governed.

Monasticism

If the study of feudalism is necessary to a knowledge of the material life of the Middle Ages, its spirit is equally a closed book without an understanding of monasticism. What induced men and women, not just a few devout souls, but thousands of ordinary people of all nations and classes from the prince to the serf to forsake the world for the cloister; and, far from regretting this sacrifice, to maintain with obvious sincerity that they had chosen the better part? If we would realize the mediaeval mind we must find an answer to this question.

Turning to the earliest days of monasticism, when the ‘Fathers of the Church’ sought hermits’ cells, we recall the shrinking of finer natures from the brutality and lust of pagan society; the intense conviction that the way to draw nearer God was to shut out the world; the desire of a Simon Stylites to make the thoughtless mind by the sight of his self-inflicted penance think for a moment at any rate of a future Heaven and Hell.

Motives such as these continued to inspire the enthusiastic Christian throughout the Dark Ages following the fall of Rome; but, as Europe became outwardly converted to the Catholic Faith, it was not paganism from which the monk fled, but the mockery of his own beliefs that he found in the lives of so-called Christians. The corruption of imperial courts, even those of a Constantine or Charlemagne, the cunning cruelty of a baptized Clovis, the ruthless selfishness of a feudal baron or Norman adventurer fighting in the name of Christ: all these were hard to reconcile with a gospel of poverty, gentleness, and brotherhood.

Even the light of pure ideals once held aloft by the Church had begun to burn dim; for men are usually tolerant of evils to which they are accustomed, and the priest who had grown up amid barbarian invasions was inclined to look on the coarseness and violence that they bred as a natural side of life. As a rule he continued to maintain a slightly higher standard of conduct than his parishioners, but sometimes he fell to their level or below.

The great danger to the Church, however, was, as always in her history, not the hardships that she encountered but the prosperity. The bishops, ‘overseers’ responsible for the discipline and well-being of their dioceses, became in the Middle Ages, by reason of their very power and influence, too often the servants of earthly rulers rather than of God. Far better educated and disciplined than the laymen, experienced in diocesan affairs, without ties of wife and family, since the Church law forbade the clergy to marry, they were selected by kings for responsible office in the state. Usually they proved the wisdom of his choice through their gifts of administration and loyalty, but the effect on the Church of adding political to ecclesiastical power proved disastrous in the end.

Their great landed wealth made the bishops feudal barons, while bishoprics in their turn came to be regarded as offices at the disposal of the king; a bad king would parcel them out amongst his favourites or sell them to the highest bidders, heedless of their moral character. Thus crept into the Church the sin of ‘simony’ or ‘traffic in holy things’ so strongly condemned by the first Apostles, and, following hard on the heels of simony, the worldliness born of the temptations of wealth and power. The bishop who was numbered amongst a feudal baronage and entertained a lax nobility at his palace was little likely to be shocked at priests convicted of ignorance or immorality, or to spend his time in trying to reform their habits.

It was, then, not only in horror of the world, but in reproach of the Church herself that the monk turned to the idea of separation from man and communion with God. In the earliest days of monasticism each hermit followed his special theory of prayer and self-discipline; he would gather round him small communities of disciples, and these would remain or go away to form other communities as they chose, a lack of system that often resulted in unhealthy fanaticism or useless idleness.

In the sixth century an Italian monk, Benedict of Nursia (480–543), compiled a set of regulations for his followers, which, under the name of ‘the rule of Benedict’, became the standard Code of monastic life for all Western Christendom. Benedict demanded of his monks a ‘novitiate’ of twelve months during which they could test their call to a life of continual sacrifice. At the end of this time, if the novice still continued resolute in his intention and was approved by the monastic authorities, he was accepted into the brotherhood by taking the perpetual vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, the three conditions of life most hostile to the lust of possession, turbulence, and sensuality that dominated the Middle Ages. To these vows were added the obligation of manual labour—seven hours work a day in addition to the recitation of prayers enjoined on the community.

The faithful Benedictine at least could never be accused of idleness, and to the civilizing influence of the ‘regulars’, as the monks were called because they obeyed a rule (regula), in contrast to the ‘secular’ priests who lived in the world, Europe owed an immense debt of gratitude.

Sometimes it is said contemptuously that the monks of the Middle Ages chose beautiful sites on which to found luxurious homes. Certainly they selected as a rule the neighbourhood of rivers and lakes, water being a prime necessity of life, and in such neighbourhoods raised chapels and monasteries that have become the architectural wonder of the world. Yet many of these wonders began in a circle of wooden huts built on a reclaimed marsh, and it was the labour of the followers of St. Benedict that replaced wood by stone and swamps by gardens and farms.

Where the barbarian or feudal anarchist burned and destroyed, the monk of the Middle Ages brought back the barren soil to pasturage or tillage; and just as he weeded, sowed, and planted as part of his obligation to God, so from the produce of his labours he provided for the destitute at his gate, or in his cloister schools supplied the ignorant with the rudiments of knowledge and culture. The monasteries were centres of mediaeval life, not, like the castles, of death. In his quiet cell the monk chronicler became an historian; the copyist reproduced with careful affection decaying manuscripts; the illuminator made careful pictures of his day; the chemist concocted strange healing medicines, or in his crucibles developed wondrous colours.

‘Good is it for us to dwell here, where man lives more purely, falls more rarely, rises more quickly, treads more cautiously, rests more securely, is absolved more easily, and rewarded more plenteously.’ This is the saying of St. Bernard, one of the later monastic reformers; and his ideal was the general conception of the best life possible as understood in the Middle Ages. To the monasteries flocked the devout seeking a home of prayer; but also the student or artist unable to follow his bent in the turbulent world, and the man who despised or feared the atmosphere of war. Even the feudal baron would pause in his quarrels to make some pious gift to abbey or priory, a tribute to a faith he admired but was too weak to practise. Sometimes he came in later life, a penitent who, toiling like his serf, sought in the cloister the salvation of his soul. ‘In the monasteries,’ says a mediaeval German, ‘one saw Counts cooking in the kitchen and Margraves leading their pigs out to feed.’

Monasticism, with its belief in brotherhood, was a leveller of class distinctions; but, like the rest of the Church, it found in the popular enthusiasm it aroused the path of temptation. Men, we have seen, entered the cloister for other reasons than pure devotion to God; and the rule of Benedict proving too strict they yielded secretly to sins that perhaps were not checked or reproved because abbots in time ceased to be saints and became, like the bishops, feudal landlords with worldly interests. In this way vice and laziness were allowed to spread and cling like bindweed.

Throughout the Middle Ages there were times of corruption and failure amongst the monastic Orders, followed by waves of sweeping reform and earnest endeavour, when once again the Cross was raised as an emblem of sacrifice and drew the more spiritual of men unto it.

In 910 the monastery of Cluni was founded in Burgundy, and, freed from the jurisdiction of local bishops by being placed under the direct control of the Pope, was able to establish a reformed Benedictine Order. Its abbot was recognized not only as the superior of the monastery at Cluni but also of ‘daughter’ houses that sprang up all over Europe subject to his discipline and rule.

Other monastic Orders founded shortly after this date were those of the Carthusians and Cistercians.

In their desire to combat worldliness the early Carthusians, or monks of the monastery of Chartreux, carried on unceasing war against the pleasures of the world. Strict fasting for eight months in the year; one meal a day eaten in silence and alone; no conversation with other brethren save at a weekly meeting; this was the background to a life of toil and prayer.

The monastery of Citeaux in southern France, from which the Cistercians take their name, was another attempt to live in the world but not of it. ‘The White Monks’, so called from the colour of their woollen frocks, sought solitudes in which to build their houses. Their churches and monasteries remain among the glories of architecture; but through fear of riches they refused to place in them crosses of gold and silver or to allow their priests to wear embroidered vestments. No Cistercian might recite the service of the Mass for money or be paid for the cure of souls. With his hands he must work for his meagre fare, remembering always to give God thanks for the complete self-renunciation to which he was pledged by his Order.

Chief amongst the Cistercian saints is Bernard (1090–1153), a Burgundian noble, who in 1115 founded a daughter monastery of his Order at Clairvaux, and as its head became one of the leaders of mediaeval thought. When he was only twenty he had appeared before the Abbot of Citeaux with a band of companions, relations and friends whom his eloquence had persuaded to enter the monastery with him. Throughout his life this power over others and his fearlessness in making use of this influence were his most vivid characteristics. ‘His speech’, wrote some one who knew him, ‘was suited to his audience ... to country-folk he spoke as though born and bred in the country, and so to other classes as though he had been always occupied with their business. He adapted himself to all, desiring to gain all for Christ.’

In these last words lie his mission and the secret of his success. Never was his eloquence exerted for himself, and so men who wished to criticize were overborne by his single-minded sincerity. Severe to his own shortcomings, gentle and humble to his brethren, ready to accept reproof or to undertake the meanest task, Bernard was fierce and implacable to the man or the conditions that seemed to him to stand in the way of God’s will.

‘I grieve over thee, my son Geoffrey,’ he wrote to a young monk who had fled the austerities of Clairvaux.... ‘How could you, who were called by God, follow the Devil, recalling thee?... Turn back, I say, before the abyss swallows thee ... before bound hand and foot thou art cast into outer darkness ... shut in with the darkness of death.’

To the ruler of France he sent a letter of reproof ending with the words: ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God even for thee, O King!’ and his audacity, instead of working his ruin, brought the leading clergy and statesmen of Europe to the cells of Clairvaux as if to some oracle’s temple, to learn the will of God.

From his cell St. Bernard preached the Second Crusade, reformed abuses in the Church, deposed an Anti-Pope, and denounced heretics. In his distrust of human reason, trying to free itself from some of the dogmatic assertions of early Christian thought, he represented the narrow outlook of his age: but in his love of God and through God of humanity he typifies the spiritual charm that like a thread of gold runs through all the dross of hardness and treachery in the mediaeval mind.

‘Do not grieve,’ he wrote to the parents of a novice ... ‘he goes to God but you do not lose him ... rather through him you gain many sons, for all of us who belong to Clairvaux have taken him to be a brother and you to be our parents.’

To St. Bernard self-renunciation meant self-realization, the laying down of a life to find it again purified and enriched; and this was the ideal of monasticism, often misunderstood and discredited by its weaker followers, like all ideals, but yet the glory of its saints.