Word Finder - feudalism

definition

A social system based on personal ownership of resources and personal fealty between a suzerain (lord) and a vassal (subject). Defining characteristics are direct ownership of resources, personal loyalty, and a hierarchical social structure reinforced by religion.

Feudalism was not at any time a national institution.

Feudalism formed the starting-point also of the later social nobilities of Europe.

The uniting of the personal and the land sides of feudalism came long after the conquest, and in a different way.

In studying the origin and growth of political feudalism, the distinction is easy to make.

Feudalism could not be established, however, until the great of the land had adopted them for themselves, and had begun to enter the clientage of others and to hold lands by the precarium tenure.

During these wars feudalism made rapid advance in Germany.

They were willing enough to admit the abstract claims of the Empire; but in the world of feudalism there was a multitude of established customs and rights which rudely conflicted with these claims, and in action, remote and abstract considerations gave way before concrete and present realities.

But the history of France during the 11th and 12th centuries does not entirely consist of these painful struggles of the Capet dynasty to shake off the fetters of feudalism.

Despite the queens express prohibition, the insurrectionary assembly of the Chambre Saint Louis criticized the whole financial system, founded as it was upon usury, claimed the right of voting taxes, respect for individual liberty, and the suppression of the intendants, who were a menace to the new bureaucratic feudalism.

When this great convention met the king must show himself ready to recognize that great changes have taken place, that feudalism and absolutism have for ever disappeared, and that a new relation between king and people has arisen, which must be loyally observed on both sides for the future.

And thus the conception of knighthood as of something distinct from feudalism both as a social condition and a personal dignity arose and rapidly gained ground.

In this manner the feudal tenure of land began to prevail in almost all parts of Germany, and the elaborate social system which became known as feudalism was gradually built up. The dukes became virtually independent, and when Louis the Child died in 911, the royal authority existed in name only.

For the time, feudalism in truth meant that lands and offices were held on condition of service; the kinf was the genuine ruler, not only of freemen, but of the highest vassals in the nation.

Great kings and emperors came after him, but none of them possessed the direct, absolute authority which he freely wielded; even in the case of the strongest the forms of feudalism more and more interposed themselves between the monarch and the nation, and at last the royal authority virtually disappeared.

It is the prose epic of feudalism, and its romantic spirit, its high ideals, its fantastic gallantry, its ingenious adventures, its mechanism of symbolic wonders, and its flowing style have entranced readers of such various types as Francis I.

In 1904 appeared the third volume, La Renaissance de Petal, in which the author describes the efforts of the Capetian kings to reconstruct the power of the Frankish kings over the whole of Gaul; and goes on to show how the clergy, the heirs of the imperial tradition, encouraged this ambition; how the great lords of the kingdom (the "princes," as Flach calls them), whether as allies or foes, pursued the same end; and how, before the close of the 12th century, the Capetian kings were in possession of the organs and the means of action which were to render them so powerful and bring about the early downfall of feudalism.

He owed little to the historians of feudalism who knew what feudalism was, but not how it came about.

The whole of the administration was in the hands of the king with his vizier and other court officials; no trace of the feudalism of the Middle Kingdom survived.

During the whole course of the 16th century the monarchical form of government was in every large country, with the single exception of Poland, rising on the ruins of feudalism.

Feudalism was not yet dead, and in the north and west there were medieval franchises in which the royal writ and common law hardly ran at all.

David, educated in England by Normans, was the maker of a Scotland whereof the anglicized part at least was now ruled by Anglo-Norman feudalism and Anglo-Norman municipal David I.

Surrounded by men like these Louis fought the last great battle of French royalty with feudalism.

The Germanic tribes were still adjusting themselves and slowly learning to combine their primitive institutions with the remains of those of Rome; the premature union under Charlemagne gave way before new invasions, and anarchy became crystallized in feudalism.

These qualities she owed to her material prosperity, to her freedom from feudalism, to her secularized church, her commercial nobility, her political independence in a federation of small states.

Henry's reign marks the height of feudalism.

The purpose of the French Revolution was to abolish feudalism in order to establish capitalism.

Feudalism, as the antithesis of this orderly treatment, had to be overthrown before national finance could become established.

Florence affords an instructive specimen; but the passage from feudalism to the national state under the authority of monarchy made the cities and country districts parts of a larger whole.

At length, in the 12th century, the inevitable conflict came between the republicanism of the Lombard cities and the German feudalism which still claimed their allegiance in the name of the Empire.

Originally and properly applicable to a status recognized by feudalism, the term vassal state has been used to describe the subordinate position of certain states once parts of the Ottoman Empire, and still loosely connected therewith.

Feudalism died hard, but since 1860 has been practically extinct; and so far as the Maronites own a chief of their own people it is the "Patriarch of Antioch and the whole East," who resides at Bkerkeh near Beirut in winter, and at a hill station (Bdiman or Raifun) in summer.

Villeins and serfs in France rise gradually in the social scale, redeem many of the onerous services of feudalism and practically acquire tenant-right on most of the plots occupied by them.

On the whole serfdom appears as a characteristic corollary of feudalism.

With the new monarchy there had come into England the anarchic spirit of continental feudalism.

Nothing proves more conclusively the strength of the Angevin monarchy, and the decreasing power of feudalism, than that an unpopular king like John.

We find that the power of the petty king has made a very considerable advance, and that all the elements of feudalism are present, save that there was no central authority strong enough to organize the whole of Irish society on a feudal basis.

He not only terminated a disastrous civil war and brought under control the spirit of ancient feudalism, but with a clear survey of the conditions of foreign powers he secured England in almost uninterrupted peace while he developed her commerce, strengthened her slender navy and built, apparently for the first time, a naval dock at Portsmouth.

His increased power came rather from moral value, from the prestige attaching to one who had given proof of it, than from actual authority over men or centralization; this is shown by the division between the Empire and feudalism.

The very multiplication of offices, so noticeable at this time, furthered this triumph of feudalism by multiplying the links of personal dependence, and neutralizing more and more the direct action of the central authority.

Hence the sixty years of terror and confusion which came between Charlemagne and the death of Charles the Bald suppressed the direct authority of the king in favor of the nobles, and prepared the way for a second destruction of the monarchy at the hands of a stronger power (see FEUDALISM).

If they acknowledged the kings authority feudalism, at the assemblies of Ytz (near Thionville) in 844,

In the disordered state of society official stability was a valuable warrant of peace, and the administrative hierarchy, lay or spiritual, thus formed a mould for the hierarchy of feudalism.

This event completed the evolution of the forces that had produced feudalism, the basis of the medieval social system.

Feudalism had gained ground in the 8th century; feudalism it was which had raised the first Carohingian to the throne as being the richest and most powerful person in Austrasia; and Charlemagne with all his power had been as utterly unable as the Merovingians to revive the idea of an abstract and impersonal state.

Feudalism claimed its new rights in the capitulary of Quierzy-surOise in 857; the rights of the monarchy began to dwindle in 877.

Philip Augustus was not satisfied with the destruction of a turbulent feudalism; he wished to substitute for it such unity and peace as had obtained in the Roman Empire; Adminisand just as he had established his supremacy over the tration of feudal lords, so now he managed to extend it over the Philip clergy, and to bend them to his will.

By virtue of all these organs of government the throne guaranteed peace, justice and a secure future, having routed feudalism with sword and diplomacy.

As Paris had taken her Bastille, it remained for the towns and country districts to take theirsall the Bastilles of feudalism.

Public opinion became republican from an excess of patriotism, and owing to the propaganda of the Jacobin club; while the decree of the 25th of August 1792, which marked the destruction of feudalism, now abolished in principle, caused the peasants to rally definitely to the Republic. -

Sometimes they were sent to organize and govern a march, sometimes they were rewarded with benefices, and as, with the growth of feudalism, these developed into hereditary fiefs, the word vassus or vassallus was naturally retained as implying the relation to the king as overlord, and was extended to the holders of all fiefs whether capital or mediate.