Feudalism and Manorialism of the Middle Ages

(Jody Gray) this Blog Post is part of my personal research -Origins -understanding how what exists today came to exist. This topic, relates to Feudalism and Manorialism of the medieval ages which preceded modern economic systems…

*Feudalism [https://en.wikipedia.] -a combination of legal and military customs in medieval Europe (9th-15th centuries) -a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. Classic feudalism describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior nobility, revolving around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs. A lord was in broad terms a noble who held land, a vassal was a person who was granted possession of the land by the lord, and the land was known as a fief.  In exchange for the use of the fief and the protection of the lord, the vassal would provide some sort of service to the lord. A vassal pledged an oath of fealty and homage. The vassal promised to fight for the lord at his command, whilst the lord agreed to protect the vassal from external forces. Feudalism decayed and effectively disappeared in most of Western Europe by about 1500, partly since the military power of kings shifted from armies consisting of the nobility to professional fighters (effectively reducing the nobility’s power), but also because the Black Death reduced the nobility’s hold on the lower classes. Peasantry bound by manorialism, and the estates of the Church. The feudal system was defined by inherited social ranks, each of which possessed inherent social and economic privileges and obligations -wealth was derived from agriculture, which was arranged not according to market forces but on the basis of customary labor service owed by serfs to landowning nobles. Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned the land. In return they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence. Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord’s fields, but also in his mines and forests and to labor to maintain roads… The Black Death (1347, Europe) caused massive fatalities (75 to 200 million people in Eurasia), disrupting society… A serf “worked for all” while a knight or baron “fought for all” and a churchman “prayed for all”. The serf was the worst fed and rewarded, but at least he had his place and, unlike slaves, had certain rights in land and property… If a lord chose to dispose of a parcel of land, the serfs associated with that land stayed with it to serve their new lord (a serf could not abandon his lands without permission).

(illustration, left) Medieval Manor. 3 classes of land: 1) demesne, directly controlled by the lord and used for the benefits of his household and dependents. 2) dependent (serf or villein) holdings carrying the obligation that the peasant household supply the lord with specified labor services. 3) free peasant land, without such obligation but otherwise subject to manorial jurisdiction and custom, and owing money rent fixed at the time of the lease. Additional sources of income for the lord included charges for use of his mill bakery or wine-press, or the right to hunt or to let pigs feed in his woodland, as well as court revenues and single payments on each change of tenant.

*Manorialism [https://en.wikipedia.] was an essential element of feudal society… characterized by the vesting of legal and economic power in a Lord of the Manor, supported economically from his own direct landholding in a manor (aka fief), and from the obligatory contributions of a legally subject part of the peasant population under the jurisdiction of himself and his manorial court…

History. Antecedents of the system can be traced to the rural economy of the later Roman Empire. With a declining birthrate and population, labor was the key factor of production. Successive administrations tried to stabilize the imperial economy by freezing the social structure into place: sons were to succeed their fathers in their trade, councilors were forbidden to resign, and coloni, the cultivators of the land, were not to move from the land they were attached to. The workers of the land were on their way to becoming serfs… As the Germanic kingdoms succeeded the Roman authority in the West in the 5th century, Roman landlords were often simply replaced by Germanic ones, with little change to the underlying situation or displacement of populations…

  The word derives from traditional inherited divisions of the countryside, reassigned as local jurisdictions known as manors or seigneuries; each manor being subject to a lord, usually holding his position in return for undertakings offered to a higher lord. The lord held a manorial court, governed by public law and local custom. Not all territorial seigneurs were secular; bishops and abbots also held lands that entailed similar obligations.

  (generic) plan of a medieval manor: strips of individually worked land in the open field system; the manor house set slightly apart from the village.

  Manorialism was slowly replaced by the advent of a money-based market economy and new forms of agrarian contract.

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