by Will Durant
A feudal lord could own more than one manor or estate. In such case he appointed a “seneschal” to supervise his “domain”—i.e., all his manors—and a steward or bailiff for each; and he would move from manor to manor with his household to consume their products on the spot. He might have a castle on each of his estates. Descended from the walled camp (castrum, castellum) of the Roman legions, from the fortified villa of the Roman noble, or from the fortress or burg of the German chieftain, the feudal castle or château was built less for comfort than for security. Its outermost protection was a wide, deep fosse or moat; the earth thrown up and inward from the moat formed a mound into which were sunk square posts bound together to form a continuous stockade. Across the moat a cleated drawbridge led up to an iron gate or portcullis, which protected a massive door in the castle wall. Within this wall were stables, kitchen, storehouses, outhouses, bakery, laundry, chapel, and servants’ lodgings, usually all of wood. In war the tenants of the manor crowded with their cattle and movables into this enclosure. At its center rose the donjon, the house of the master; in most cases it was a large square tower, also of wood; by the twelfth century it was built of stone and took a rounded form as easier for defense. The lowest story of the donjon was a storehouse and dungeon; above this dwelt the lord and his family. From these donjons, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, developed the castles and châteaux of England, Germany, and France, whose impregnable stones were the military basis of the lord’s power against his tenants and the king.
The interior of the donjon was dark and confined. Windows were few and small, and seldom glazed; usually canvas, oiled paper, shutters, or lattices kept out most rain and much light; artificial light was provided by candles or torches. In most cases there was but one room to each of the three stories. Ladders and trap doors, or winding stairs, connected the floors. On the second story was the main hall, serving as the baron’s court of justice, and as dining room, living room, and bedroom for most of his household. At one end there might be a raised platform or dais, on which the lord, his family, and his guest ate their meals; others ate from removable tables placed before benches in the aisles. At retiring time mattresses were laid upon the floor or upon low wooden bedsteads in the aisles; all the household slept in this one room, with screens providing privacy. The walls were whitewashed or painted; they were adorned with banners, weapons, and armor, and the room might be protected from drafts by hangings or tapestries. The floor, paved with tile or stone, was covered with rushes and boughs. In the middle of the room a kind of central heating was generated by a wood fire in a hearth. Till the later Middle Ages there was no chimney; smoke escaped through a louver or “lantern” in the roof. Behind the dais a door opened into a “solar,” where the lord, his family, and his guest might take their ease and the sun; furniture was more comfortable there, with a carpet, a fireplace, and a luxurious bed.
The lord of the manor dressed himself in a tunic, usually of colored silk, adorned with some geometrical or floral design; a cape covering the shoulders, and loose enough to be raised over the head; short drawers and breeches; stockings that reached up the thighs; and long shoes with toes curled up like prows. At his belt swung a scabbard and sword; from his neck usually hung some pendant like a cross. To distinguish one helmeted and armored knight from another in the First Crusade,36 European nobles adopted the Islamic practice37 of marking their garments, livery, standards, armor, and equipage with heraldic devices or coats of arms; henceforth heraldry developed an esoteric jargon intelligible only to heralds and knights.* Despite all adornments the lord was no parasitic idler. He rose at dawn, mounted his tower to detect any approaching peril, hastily breakfasted, perhaps attended Mass, had “dinner” at 9 A.M., supervised the multifarious operations of the manor, shared actively in some of them, gave orders of the day to steward, butler, groom, and other servitors, received wayfarers and visitors, had “supper” with them and his family at five, and usually retired at nine. On some days the routine was broken by hunting, more rarely by tournaments, now and then by war. He entertained frequently, and exchanged presents lavishly with his guests.
His wife was almost as busy as himself. She bore and reared many children. She directed the many servants (with an occasional box on the ear), kept an eye on bakery, kitchen, and laundry, superintended the making of butter and cheese, the brewing of beer, the salting down of meat for the winter, and that major household industry of knitting, sewing, spinning, weaving, and embroidery, which made most of the family’s clothing. If her husband went to war she took over the military and economic management of the estate, and was expected to supply his financial needs as he campaigned; if he was taken prisoner she had to squeeze a ransom for him out of the toil of his serfs or from the sale of her finery and gems. If her husband died sonless she might inherit the seigneury, and become its domina, dame; but she was expected to remarry soon to provide the estate and her suzerain with military protection or service; and the suzerain limited her choice to a few candidates capable of meeting these obligations. In the privacy of the castle she could be an amazon or a termagant, and give her husband blow for blow. In her leisure hours she dressed her vigorous body in flowing fur-hemmed robes of silk, dainty headgear and footwear, and gleaming jewelry—an ensemble fit to send a troubadour into amorous or literary ecstasy.
Her children received an education quite different from that of the universities. The sons of the aristocracy were rarely sent to public schooling; in many cases no effort was made to teach them how to read. Literacy was left to clerks or scribes who could be hired for a pittance. Intellectual knowledge was scorned by most feudal knights; du Guesclin, one of the most honored figures of chivalry, trained himself in all the arts of war, and learned to face all weathers stoutly, but never bothered to learn how to read; only in Italy and Byzantium did the nobles carry on a literary tradition. Instead of going to a school, the boy of knightly family was sent, about the age of seven, to serve as page in another aristocratic household. There he learned obedience, discipline, manners, dress, the knightly code of honor, and the skills of joust and war; perhaps the local priest added some training in letters and reckoning. Girls were taught a hundred useful or pretty arts by merely seeing and doing. They took care of guests, and of the knight returning from battle or tournament; they unbuckled his armor, prepared his bath, laid out clean linen and raiment and perfumes for him, and waited on him at table with modest courtesy and tutored grace. They, rather than the boys, learned to read and write; they provided most of the audience for troubadours, trouvères, and jongleurs, and for the romantic prose and poetry of the time.
The baron’s household often included some vassals or retainers. The vassal was a man who, in return for his military service, personal attendance, or political support, received from the lord some substantial boon or privilege—usually a tract of land with its serfs; in such cases usufruct belonged to the vassal, ownership remained with the lord. A man too proud or strong to be a serf, yet too limited to provide his own military security, performed an act of “homage” to a feudal baron: knelt bareheaded and weaponless before him, placed his hands in the hands of the seigneur, declared himself that lord’s homme or man (while retaining his rights as a freeman), and by an oath on sacred relics or the Bible pledged the lord eternal fealty. The seigneur raised him, kissed him, invested him with a fief,* and gave him, in symbol thereof, a straw, stick, lance, or glove. Thenceforward the seigneur owed his vassal protection, friendship, fidelity, and economic and legal aid; he must not, says a medieval lawyer, insult his vassal, or seduce his vassal’s wife or daughter;39if he does, the vassal may “throw down the glove” as a de-fy—i.e., as a release from fealty—and yet keep his fief.
The vassal might “subinfeudate” part of his land to a lesser vassal, who would then bear the same relation and responsibility to him that he bore to his lord. A man might hold fiefs from several lords, and owe them “simple homage” and limited service; but to one “liege” lord he pledged “lie
ge homage”—full allegiance and service in peace and war. The lord himself, however great, might be vassal to another lord by holding property or privilege in fief from him; he might even be vassal to—hold a fief from—the vassal of another lord. All lords were vassals of the king. In these intricate relationships the prime bond was not economic but military; a man gave or owed military service and personal fealty to a lord; property was merely his reward. In theory feudalism was a magnificent system of moral reciprocity, binding the men of an endangered society to one another in a complex web of mutual obligation, protection, and fidelity.
5. The Feudal Church
Sometimes the lord of the manor was a bishop or an abbot. Though many monks labored with their hands, and many monasteries and cathedrals shared in parish tithes, additional support was necessary for great ecclesiastical establishments; and this came mostly from kings and nobles in gifts of land, or shares in feudal revenues. As these gifts accumulated, the Church became the largest landholder in Europe, the greatest of feudal suzerains. The monastery of Fulda owned 15,000 small villas, that of St. Gall had 2000 serfs;40 Alcuin at Tours was lord of 20,000 serfs.41 Archbishops, bishops, and abbots received investiture from the king, pledged their fealty to him like other feudatories, carried such titles as duke and count, minted coin, presided over episcopal or abbey courts, and took on the feudal tasks of military service and agricultural management. Bishops or abbots accoutered with armor and lance became a frequent sight in Germany and France; Richard of Cornwall, in 1257, mourned that England had no such “warlike and mettlesome bishops.”42 So enmeshed in the feudal web, the Church found herself a political, economic, and military, as well as a religious, institution; her “temporalities” or material possessions, her “feudalities” or feudal rights and obligations, became a scandal to strict Christians, a talking point for heretics, a source of consuming controversy between emperors and popes. Feudalism feudalized the Church.
6. The King
Just as the Church was in the twelfth century a feudal and hierarchical structure of mutual protection, service, and fealty, sanctioned by benefices and topped by a suzerain pope, so the secular feudal regime demanded for its completion a lord of all vassals, a suzerain of all secular suzerains, a king. Theoretically the king was the vassal of God, and governed by divine right in the sense that God permitted, and thereby authorized, his rule. Practically, however, the king had been elevated by election, inheritance, or war. Men like Charlemagne, Otto I, William the Conqueror, Philip Augustus, Louis IX, Frederick II, and Louis the Fair enlarged their inherited power by force of character or arms; but normally the kings of feudal Europe were not so much the rulers of their peoples as the delegates of their vassals. They were chosen or accepted by the great barons and ecclesiastics; their direct power was limited to their own feudal domain or manors; elsewhere in their kingdom the serf and vassal swore fealty to the lord who protected them, rarely to the king whose small and distant forces could not reach out to guard the scattered outposts of the realm. The state, in feudalism, was merely the king’s estate.
In Gaul this atomization of rule proceeded furthest because the Carolingian princes weakened themselves by dividing the empire, because the bishops subdued them to ecclesiastical subservience, and because the Norse attacks broke most violently upon France. In this perfected feudalism the king was primus inter pares; he stood an inch or two above the princes, dukes, marquises, and counts; but in practice he was, like these “peers of the realm,” a feudal baron limited for revenue to his own lands, forced to move from one royal manor to another for sustenance, and dependent in war and peace upon the military aid or diplomatic service of rich vassals who seldom pledged him more than forty days of armed attendance in the year, and spent half their time plotting to unseat him. To win or reward support, the crown had granted estate after estate to powerful men; in the tenth and eleventh centuries too small a domain remained to the French king to give him secure ascendancy over his vassal lords. When they made their estates hereditary, established their own police and courts, and minted their own coinage, he lacked the force to prevent them. He could not interfere with the jurisdiction of these vassals over their own lands except in the capital cases that appealed to him; he could not send his officers or tax collectors into their domains; he could not stop them from making independent treaties or waging independent war. In feudal theory the French king owned all the lands of the lords who called him their sovereign; in reality he was merely a great landlord, not necessarily the greatest; and never did his holdings equal those of the Church.
But as the inability of the kings to protect their realm had generated feudalism, so the inability of feudal lords to maintain order among themselves, or to provide a uniform government for an expanding commercial economy, weakened the barons and strengthened the kings. The zeal for martial contests absorbed the aristocracies of feudal Europe in private and public wars; the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, the Wars of the Roses, and finally the wars of religion drank up their blood. Some of them, impoverished and recognizing no law, became robber barons who pillaged and murdered at will; and the excesses of liberty called for a unified power that would maintain order throughout the realm. Commerce and industry generated a growing and wealthy class outside the feudal bond; merchants resented feudal tolls and the insecurity of transport through feudal domains; and they demanded that private law should be superseded by a central government. The king allied himself with their class and the rising towns; they provided the finances for the assertion and extension of his authority; and all who felt oppressed or injured by the lords looked to the king for rescue and redress. The ecclesiastical barons were usually vassal and loyal to the king; the popes, however often at odds with royalty, found it easier to deal with a monarch than with a scattered and half-lawless nobility. Upheld by these diverse forces, the French and English kings made their power hereditary, instead of elective, by crowning a son or brother before their own death; and men accepted hereditary monarchy as the alternative to feudal anarchy. The improvement of communication and the increased circulation of money made regular taxation possible; the mounting royal revenue financed larger royal armies; the rising class of jurists attached themselves to the throne, and strengthened it by the centralizing influence of revived Roman law. By the year 1250 the jurists asserted the royal jurisdiction over all persons in the realm; and by that time the oath of allegiance was taken by all Frenchmen not to their lord but to their king. At the end of the thirteenth century Philip the Fair was strong enough to subdue not only his barons, but the papacy itself.
The French kings softened the transition for the aristocracy by replacing the rights of private coinage, judgment, and war with titles and privileges at the royal court. The greater vassals formed the curia regis, or king’s court; they became courtiers instead of potentates; and the ritual of the baronial castle graduated into a ceremonious attendance upon the audiences, the table, and the bedchamber of the king. The sons and daughters of the nobility were sent to serve the king and queen as pages or maids of honor, and learned the courtesies of the court; the royal household became the school of the aristocracy of France. The culminating ceremony was the coronation of the French king at Reims, of the German emperor at Aachen or Frankfort; then all the elite of the land gathered in awesome raiment and equipage; the Church extended all the mystery and majesty of her rites to solemnize the accession of the new ruler; his power became thereby a divine authority, which no man could gainsay except through brazen blasphemy. The feudal lords crowded to the court of the monarchy that had subdued them, and the Church conferred divine right upon the kings who would destroy her European leadership and power.
III. FEUDAL LAW
In the feudal regime, where the judges and executors of civil law were usually illiterate, custom and law were largely one. When question rose as to law or penalty, the oldest members of the community were asked what had been the custom thereon in their youth. The community itself was therefore the ch
ief source of law. The baron or king might give commands, but these were not laws; and if he exacted more than custom sanctioned he would be frustrated by universal resistance, vocal or dumb.43 Southern France had a written law as a Roman heritage; northern France, more feudal, preserved for the most part the laws of the Franks; and when in the thirteenth century these laws too were put into writing, they became even harder to change than before, and a hundred legal fictions rose to reconcile them with reality.
The feudal law of property was complex and unique. It recognized three forms of land possession: (1) the allod, unconditional ownership; (2) the fief—land whose usufruct, but not ownership, was ceded to a vassal on condition of noble service; and (3) tenure—where the usufruct was ceded to a serf or tenant on condition of feudal dues. In feudal theory only the king enjoyed absolute ownership; even the loftiest noble was a tenant, whose possession was conditional on service. Nor was the lord’s possession completely individual; every son had a birthright in the ancestral lands, and could obstruct their sale.44 Usually the whole estate was bequeathed to the eldest son. This custom of primogeniture, unknown to Roman or barbarian law,45 became advisable under feudal conditions because it put the military protection and economic management of the estate under one head, presumably the most mature. Younger sons were encouraged to venture forth and carve out new estates in other lands. Despite its limitations on ownership, feudal law yielded to no other in reverence for property, and in severity of punishments for violating property rights. A German code held that if a man removed the bark from one of the willow trees that held a dyke, “his belly shall be ripped up, and his bowels shall be taken out and wound around the harm he has done”; and as late as 1454 a Westphalian ordinance held that a man who had criminally removed his neighbor’s landmark should be buried in the earth with his head sticking out, and the land should then be plowed by oxen and men who had never plowed before; “and the buried man may help himself as best he can.”46