Essay on Feudalism

A lord would grant land to another noble in exchange for protection and military services. This grant was called a fief. Those who received fiefs were called vassals. Within the fief, the vassal was the highest authority. Fiefs could be various seizes. Some were single estates just big enough for a knight and his family. Others were large, as big as an entire country or province.

The serf provided material, military aid, and advice for the lord’s counsel. The lord provided protection for the serf, maintenance, and aid when the vassal requested. The land of the vassal, holder of he land through homage, was broken into strips of land called fief. After the homage ceremony, the lord then granted a fief to the serf. A man could then be a vassal to multiple lords and a lord could obtain multiple vassals, which thus introduced subinfeudation. This caused great complexity especially if the lords had different views and the vassals were divided. In this case, a contract was initiated swearing a serf to the main lord.

During the medieval times Kings had absolute power and the Catholic Church made sure God help the King retain this power. During this time feudalism was the structure that shaped society. In the feudalism structure the people that work the land the poor got cero power and live at the mercy of the barons. Barons where the owners of the land that people where let to work and make really low amounts of money while the baron sells and exchange the goods produced by the land and makes a fortune. At the end of the day the land belongs to the king and the king taxes the barons and collects money from all the land making him very, very wealthy and powerful.

To begin, Europeans lived under a system called feudalism which was important to their social status. “Feudalism was a political, economic, and social system in which nobles were granted to use of land that legally belonged to the king”(Doc1).The kings provided money for the knights(Doc1). Then the knights provided protection and military services for the serfs,nobles and kings(Doc1). The serfs farmed the land. Lastly the nobles gave land to the serfs, collected food from them, and reported to the king (Doc. 1). These roles were important because their rank in feudalism controlled their social status.

The feudal system originated in Europe during the eighth century was because of the collapse of the Roman Empire. The order that Rome had once brought to Europe had left with the absence of Rome's stability. Not only did political advancement recede but the advancement of infrastructure, such as waste systems and roads also declined. The lack of the innovation of technology created a major setback in Western Europe after Rome's fall. As big cities were relinquished to the dirt, many people moved to rural areas and set up small villages known as manors.

First, a vassal and fief holding is more than just someone of lower status being obedient to their ruler and using their land to pay them. According to Britannica, some vassals were apart of their lord’s court as household knights. Although, vassals who did not live in their lord’s court were required to have a fief in order to sustain his land and have a solid holding of his service for his lord and/or king. However, if the vassal did something to violate or break his allegiance to his lord then it could result is a felony. This could explain why Roland refused several times to use his horn to call Charlemagne. However, he mentioned several times that calling

This part of feudalism was just the beginning where Charlemagne appointed nobles to rule local areas, gave them land and in return they were expected to help with defense of his empire. “According to the feudal arrangements, vassals promised military service and loyalty to the nobles in return for land.” An answer to the question asked by document 2 , a stained glass picture of three vassals asking their noble for land. These pieces of land that each vassal owned was known as fief, and on those fiefs were serfs. Serfs were not slaves, but they were bound to the land- they could not leave without the lord permission.

The fact that it is a hierarchy, with one allegiance after the next, means that everyone in the end is loyal to the King. And indeed, a Knight's (the mounted riders that composed the nobility, and that were the mainstay of the army) first allegiance was to his King, and then his Lord. His family came last. Because everyone was loyal to the one above him, and he was the top, everyone was loyal to him. Therefore, even though he himself didn't really own much land anymore, he still had the loyalty of all of the army.

Between the years of 500 and 1400, Europe had evolved into the Middle Ages. The Dark Ages was a period of time where barbarians killed others and burned villages. The kings and nobility granted land to the knights and serfs in exchange for crops and military service this was known as the Age of Feudalism. The Age of Faith relates to how strong the christian church was, the church was an important part of life for the people in the community.The Dark Ages, the Age of Feudalism, the Age of Faith all describe the Middle Ages between the era of 500 and 1400.

Feudalism was a contrasting system dealing with political and military relationships existing among members of the higher social class, Kings, Lords and other owners of large lands in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. The Feudal system started by the granting of fiefs, chiefly in the form of land and labor, in return the lord would receive political and

Feudalism, as a decentralized political system, flourished in Medieval Europe. In this essay, the main political and economic characteristics of Feudalism will be mentioned, while discussing the main historical factors to the rise and fall of feudalism.

Monarchs owned the land and he would divide the land that he did not need up between the men who were called lords in return for loyalty to him in times of war. The lords enlisted soldiers who were called knights to be the fighting force in these wars. The lowest people in the feudal system were called peasants; these people farmed the land to provide food and provided other services for the kingdom in exchange for protection.

The feudal system of the time operated on the premise of peasants or serfs, and thanes, or lords. The lords owned the land, and the peasants worked on it. In turn, they received the protection

estates, could be rented out to one vassal who would then rent portions of the fief to three more,

Economic processes are those involving the production and distribution of goods and services. However, they do not alone determine this production and distribution. There is an interrelationship of economic, cultural, environmental, and political processes that all help to shape each other. Nothing that we do can be defined as a single process, for it is the interaction itself that helps to produce the final results that we observe. To understand this more fully the following basic definitions may be of use: