Once the worship ceremony was over, the lord and vassal were in a feudal relationship with agreed obligations to each other. The vassal`s main obligation to the Lord was “help” or military service. With whatever equipment the vassal could obtain from the revenues of the fief, he was charged with answering calls for military service in the name of the Lord. This security of military aid was the main reason the Lord entered into the feudal relationship. In addition, the vassal could have other obligations to his master, such as presence at his court, whether majestic or princely, or at the king`s court. These assemblies had different names: in Spain it was the Cortes; in France, the Estates General; in Germany the Landtag, in Scandinavia the Rigstag or Rikstag; and in England, Scotland, Ireland, Sicily, the Papal States, and the Kingdom of Naples they were parliaments. They all had similar origins, in the obligation of the rulers to consult their main vassals. Outside its European context,[4] the term feudalism is often used by analogy, most often in discussions of feudal Japan under the shoguns and sometimes in discussions of the Zagwe dynasty in medieval Ethiopia,[11] which had some feudal (sometimes called “semi-feudal”) characteristics. [12] [13] Some have further developed the analogy of feudalism, promoting feudalism (or its traces) in places as diverse as China during the spring and autumn periods (771-476 BC). AD), ancient Egypt, the Parthian Empire, the Indian subcontinent and the pre-war American South and Jim Crow. [11] In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, John Horace Round and Frederic William Maitland, both historians of medieval Britain, came to different conclusions about the character of English society before the Norman Conquest in 1066.
Round argued that the Normans had brought feudalism to England, while Maitland claimed that its foundations were already in place in Britain before 1066. The debate continues today, but a consensus is that England had praise before the conquest (which embodied some of the personal elements of feudalism), while William the Conqueror introduced a modified and stricter northern French feudalism in England, which (1086) included oaths of allegiance to the king of all those who were by feudal possession. even the vassals of his most important vassals (holding by feudal domination, that vassals had to provide the required quota of knights. by the king or a monetary payment in lieu thereof). Under these circumstances, the local dukes and counts (whom we will call “magnates” and who now regularly passed on their functions from father to son) filled the power vacuum and were able to organize resistance (or payment) against the invaders. They built local defenses around a growing network of castles – new defensive structures that provide much-needed protection in a violent and disorderly society. The term feudalism has also been applied – often inappropriately or pejoratively – to non-Western societies in which institutions and attitudes similar to those that existed in medieval Europe are perceived to be predominant. [14] Some historians and political theorists believe that the term feudalism has been stripped of its specific meaning by the many ways in which it has been used, prompting them to dismiss it as a useful concept for understanding society. [4] [5] Unlike Bloch, the Belgian historian François-Louis Ganshof defined feudalism from a narrow legal and military point of view, arguing that feudal relations existed only within the medieval nobility itself. Ganshof articulated this concept in What is Feudalism? (“What is feudalism?”, 1944).
His classical definition of feudalism is now widely accepted among medieval scholars,[43] although it is questioned both by those who see the concept in broader terms and by those who find insufficient uniformity in noble exchanges to support such a model. The term “feudal system” is used by historians to describe a socio-political structure that was an essential feature of medieval Europe. In the Roman villa, bands of slaves worked the owner`s land. As the supply of slaves declined between the fifth and eighth centuries, a new class, the serfs, emerged from the combination of free peasants and slaves. Faced with the shortage of slave agricultural laborers, landowners began granting serfs-owned plots of land, called leases or skins, in exchange for tithes on crops, services in the Lord`s fields, and various other types of taxes. In return, the Lord was obliged to provide military protection and justice to His tenants. Although serfs have no real status before the law, social customs prevent excessive exploitation. Combined with the cooperative agricultural styles that developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, these bonds of mutual personal dependence were defined as property. Even when the original feudal relations had disappeared, there were many institutional remnants of feudalism. Historian Georges Lefebvre explains how, at the beginning of the French Revolution, one night of August 4, 1789, the France abolished the long-term remnants of the feudal order.
She proclaimed: “The National Assembly completely abolishes the feudal system.” Lefebvre explains: In battle, these various vassals fought under the command of their masters. “In order not to make my sons a confused and unresolved dispute concerning the status of my whole kingdom, I have divided the whole body of the kingdom into three parts; The part that each of them must keep and control, I have described and determined. I did it so that everyone could be satisfied with their share in accordance with my decision. And that each one may strive to defend the frontiers of his kingdom against foreign peoples, and to preserve peace and charity with his brothers. 1. landed property, directly under the control of the Lord and his officials, the purpose of which was to provide for himself and his family; In the sixth and seventh centuries, there was the custom of individual suitors who did not belong to any protection group to place themselves under the protection of a more powerful free man. In this way, stronger men could build armies and become local political and judicial powers, and inferior men could solve the problem of security and protection.