Article Outline
Feudalism, contractual system of political and military relationships existing among members of the nobility in Western Europe during the High Middle Ages. (It had nothing to do with blood feuds; the two words came to be spelled alike in the 17th century, but have no etymological relationship.) Feudalism was characterized by the granting of fiefs, chiefly in the form of land and labor, in return for political and military services—a contract sealed by oaths of homage and fealty (fidelity). The grantor was lord of the grantee, his vassal, but both were free men and social peers, and feudalism must not be confused with seignorialism, the system of relations between the lords and their peasants in the same period. Feudalism joined political and military service with landholding to preserve medieval Europe from disintegrating into myriad independent seigneuries after the fall of the Carolingian Empire.
When the German invaders conquered the western Roman Empire in the 5th century, they destroyed the professional Roman army and substituted their own armies, made up of warriors who served their chieftains for honor and booty. The warriors fought on foot and lived off the countryside. As long as they fought one another, they needed no cavalry. But when the Muslims, the Vikings, and the Magyars invaded Europe in the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries, the Germans found themselves unable to deal with these rapid-moving armies. First, Charles Martel in Gaul, then King Alfred in England, and finally Henry the Fowler of Germany provided horses for some of their soldiers to repel the raids into their lands. It is not certain that these troops fought on horseback, but they could pursue their enemies faster mounted than on foot, and as stirrups were then coming into use, it is probable that cavalry actions began to take place in this same period. They were certainly occurring in the 11th century. See also Chivalry.
War horses were expensive, and training in their use took years of practice. To support his cavalry soldiers, Martel gave them estates of land farmed by dependent laborers, which he took from the church. Such estates, called benefices, were given for the duration of the soldiers’ service. The soldiers were called vassals (from a Gaelic word meaning servant). The vassals, however, being selected soldiers with whom the Carolingian rulers surrounded themselves, became models for the aristocrats who followed the court. With the breakup of the Carolingian Empire in the 9th century, many powerful men strove to assemble their own bands of mounted vassals, giving them benefices in return for their services. Some of the weaker landowners then found themselves obliged to enter into vassalage and to concede their lands to the lordship of the more powerful, receiving them back as benefices. The greater lords were expected to protect their vassals, as the vassals were expected to serve their benefactors.
These military relationships of the 8th and 9th centuries are sometimes described as Carolingian feudalism, but they lack some of the essential features of classical feudalism, which developed in and after the 10th century. It was only toward the year 1000 that the term fief began to be used instead of benefice, and the change of term reflected a change in the institution. Now the estate given a vassal was commonly understood to be hereditary, provided the vassal’s heir was satisfactory to the lord, and provided he paid an inheritance tax called a relief. The vassal not only took the oath of fealty, which everyone owed to his lord, but also a special oath of homage to the feudal lord who invested him with a fief. Thus, feudalism was a political as well as military institution, one based upon a contract between two individuals, both of whom held rights in the fief.
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