Our third excerpt from this book of the week, preceded by an introduction and excerpts from Chapter 1.

All the World a Stage

Michael H. Goldhaber

Chapter 2 (Excerpts)

Feudalism’s Growth, Success and Consequent Fall

“I love the gay Eastertide, which brings forth leaves and flowers;….. But also I love to see, amidst the meadows, tents and pavilions spread; and it gives me great joy to see, drawn up on the field, knights and horses in battle array; and it delights me when the scouts scatter people and herds in their path; and I love to see them followed by a great body of men-at-arms; and my heart is filled with gladness when I see strong castles besieged, and the stockades broken and overwhelmed, and the warriors on the bank, girt about by fosses [moat-like ditches], with a line of strong stakes, interlaced…Maces, swords, helms of different hues, shields that will be riven and shattered as soon as the fight begins; and many vassals struck down together; and the horses of the dead and wounded roving at random..”

–a troubadour of the twelfth century, probably the knight Bertrand de Born from the Périgord region of what today is France, as quoted by Marc Bloch in Feudal Society, p. 293, (translated by L.A. Manyon, Routlege and Kegan Paul, London 1961 (Univ. of Chicago edition).

These bloodthirsty reflections, written down some 250 years after the birth of feudalism proper, seems to be a fairly accurate rendition of the most characteristic activity of that era — fighting to the death among armored men on horseback, each following the banner of a more powerful knight to whom he had pledged fealty, while sacking and besieging walled villages and castles.

Why should that strange behavior from long ago matter in a book about how the present may be changing without our noticing? Without some knowledge of history, we can easily confuse the way things are now or were when we were children with how they had always been. If we do that, it’s just one more easy step toward taking it for granted that that is how things always will be.

What is most important for us is to grasp the basis of the [feudal] system, its dynamics and structure. To do there is no better starting point than this view of knights in battle. Knights — also known as lords or nobles — were the rulers, the privileged class, the class around whom others had to organize their lives. And knights lived to fight. Battle was what they trained for, what determined the patterns of their own lives, what enabled the lucky ones to gain in strength and power.

By fighting or showing the ability to fight, a knight would have a chance of being granted a “feoff” (or “fief”) for life by some other knight, who became his “lord.” (Just what a feoff was will become clear shortly.) In return for the grant of the feoff, the knight would pledge homage to the lord, becoming his “vassal,” which primarily meant being willing to fight to the death at the lord’s beck and call. Mostly, but not always, the lord receiving homage was more powerful than the vassal, generally because he had several feoffs at his disposal, whereas the lowest level of knight would start out with just the one the lord had given him.

Fighting was the very essence of nobility. Through fighting you could enlarge your domain, which would mean being able to take additional knights into your service, since you would have more feoffs to hand out. Then you could fight even bigger battles, and, if lucky, win yourself even more domains, and so on endlessly. If unlucky, of course, you could lose everything — very definitely including your life.

Though the feudal system in a formal sense started out with each knight pledging homage to just one master and getting one feoff in return, every lord was anxious to have as many knights loyal to him as possible. This meant a skillful knight had opportunities to gain multiple feoffs by pledging homage to more than one lord. If he was lucky, these lords wouldn’t all demand his services at the same time, nor force him into an impossible bind by fighting each other.

… Most simply put, a feoff was some farmed land, populated by serfs — people who lived and fed their families through their own farming. The smallest size feoff would include something like maybe fifteen or twenty families of serfs, who each farmed for himself and his own family, but who generally cooperated with one another to some degree.

From the point of view of their daily lives, serfs lived with little thought of the knight on whose feoff they happened to live. The knight wouldn’t normally interfere with what they did for their own families on their own plots. Generally, however, there were two exceptions to this independence. Serfs were expected to hand over some of their personal harvests for the knight’s use. Also, every year they were each required to do a certain number of days’ work directly for him. This work would either be on the part of the feoff reserved for the lord’s own use, known as the demesne — from which he could feed his own family and any retainers, as well as his horses — or in his house, which usually took the form of some very primitive fortified castle.

Since a knight had to be prepared to fight at any time, he couldn’t occupy himself with too many other activities than fighting, staying in shape by hunting or taking part in tournaments, or engaging in the minimum of governance that he could get away with. That’s why the knight needed the semi-independent serfs to supply his wants and those of his family and his retainers — such as squires to accompany him in battle, old cronies, and young knights in training.

….

KNIGHTS IN MONKS’ CLOTHING

An oft-quoted medieval remark referred to the existence of three orders: those who fought, those who toiled, and those who prayed. In a way, it makes sense to view those who prayed — the priests, monks, and nuns of the era — as a kind of auxiliary knighthood. Like the regular knights, their role was protection, to hold at bay the vicissitudes of God’s wrath or the devil’s invasions — and for the afterlife, as well for this one.

A little like enemy knights conducting a siege, bishops and priests aggressively announced to their “flocks” the dangers awaiting them if the Church did not intercede to defend them from punishment for their many sins. Of course, attacks by raiders or opposing knights were among the greatest of the earthly dangers preached about.

Further, some priests, monks and bishops were in fact knights who fought in battle or led others. In later feudalism there were a series of orders of knight–monks, such as the Knights of Rhodes and the Knights Templar, who combined prayer with fighting as their official life’s work.

Even the most peaceful orders of monks or nuns held land that was peopled and farmed by serfs, who owed the monasteries the same sort of obligations as other serfs owed to knights. Often these church units also had regular knights as vassals to whom they awarded feoffs, and whom they could call on for protection just as other lords would. One slight difference: land-rich nobles tended to endow monasteries and other churches with feoffs in perpetuity, not ones that were intended to hold only for the life of the lord or the monastery’s lead monk. (The nobles did this because they took it for granted that they needed monks to pray for their souls, if not forever, then for at least as long as it took them to rise from purgatory into heaven.) However, clerical celibacy meant that ordinarily the clergy could not leave their positions or titles to their own children. This meant that, just as in the case of a lord having the (theoretical) right to select whomever he pleased as his vassal on the death of an incumbent, the same lord could very often appoint a priest, bishop or abbot (head monk) to any empty parish, diocese or monastery headship that was somehow connected with his own estates.

Once familial ties counted, that allowed another way for knight and serf alike to obtain new holdings: by marriage. In those uncertain times —with very poor hygiene and virtually nothing we would recognize now as medical care — one spouse would often outlive the other, and then widow or widower could re-marry, offering a chance to consolidate several feoffs or larger holdings, whether or not they were adjacent to or even near one another.

Ultimately, as the centuries passed, some of these holdings — assembled with a combination of conquest and careful dynastic marriage — became gigantic. William the Bastard (a reference to his birth out of wedlock, not his character), Duke of Normandy, famously conquered all England. Through subsequent marriages, his great-grandson Henry II claimed inheritance to vast swaths of France as well as England. A few centuries later a long series of conquests and marriages had left King Ferdinand of Aragon and his wife Queen Isabella of Castile in control of all Spain, and their daughter’s marriage to the heir of Austria and Burgundy left their grandson Charles V ostensible ruler of most of continental Europe except France. By then, however, the various parts of this personal inheritance were too widely separate in language, custom and loyalties to remain passive under common rule; Charles himself had the sense to abdicate and split his empire within his own lifetime. Besides, the role of even ultra-important knights like Charles himself had been to protect from attackers; if there were no attackers, why remain loyal these leaders? It seems likely that, had Europe slowly morphed at that time into a single domain under one sovereign, nascent capitalism might well have been stillborn, but the way feudalism itself had grown and developed helped make that unlikely. The divided jurisdictions of Western Europe allowed competitive markets room to grow.

A SHARP CONTRAST

This brief sketch should be enough to make clear that “feudalism” was a way of life with its own rules, its own key scarcities to address, its own dynamics, and yet that none of this had anything to do with what is meant today by the phrase “the economy.” Knights eager for battle, pledges of loyalty or fealty for life or even longer, and the great importance of marriage as means to power, were the fundamental source of change and “growth” in the feudal era. Security, represented by fighting (or praying) power, was what was truly scarce and most to be desired. Next were honor and — probably — loyalty. The relations between the relatively small group of nobles and the large group of serfs were very different from modern relations between either employers and employees or shareholders and workers (who often today are the same people). Nobles generally exercised neither direct nor indirect control over the daily work of the serfs, nor, apart from security, did they have any normal influence on how well how the serfs lived.

Markets, material goods, money and prices, were distinctly secondary, if that. Serfs in different villages were not in competition with one another. Today’s economists think of markets as means by which information on the desirability and availability of goods can be spread through knowledge of prices. At the height of feudalism that sort of social mechanism was of little importance, if not utterly non-existent. Knights were not interested in efficiency or returns to investments, or even having others seek to ensure these for them. Monks who prayed for the souls of the nobles who had handed over feoffs to establish their monasteries didn’t think of gaining in efficiency by using mechanical devices. (It’s not that in certain contexts such devices, for instance Tibetan prayer wheels, can’t “automate” prayer, it’s just that raising prayer productivity was not part of the thought processes at work in the European Middle Ages. It was the number of people praying that counted, not the number of prayers by themselves.)

FEUDALISM’S END

Feudalism is gone because it was so successful, not because it failed. It began because life in Western Europe was made very difficult by raiders from the north, east and south. But since about the year 1100, or so, no other civilizations have succeeded in raiding Western Europe. Instead, the territories controlled by knights of various sorts expanded outwards. Also, the areas controlled by single families kept expanding and consolidating, until a relative local peace prevailed. That provided an opening for trade to emerge, for towns to form, and eventually for industries to be born, grow and expand. An entirely new kind of economy, based on markets, money and industrial factories was able to grow up. This economy began in the interstices of feudal control. Knights, for the most part continued to live in the countryside, not in towns, so there was relative autonomy for the new town dwellers. And on the whole, the knightly class had different values and training than the new merchant and industrialist class. Knights had an ethic of fighting, reckless courage and glory, not of saving and investing. They could not be true to their own values and also master the contradictory new ones. Noble after noble eventually gambled away their fortunes or lost their estates through debt incurred from excessive expenditure for the luxuries they assumed was their due. They took themselves still to be the class that deserved to rule, and everyone else long took for granted that they were right. The new classes of industrialists and merchants continued to believe that real success involved becoming a noble and living as much a s possible like knights, even though without actually being them. Like Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of the cliff without noticing he should be falling, the nobles remained suspended in their own minds and that of the public for long after they had lost any real reason to survive, much less rule.

Meanwhile, the new employer class needed empoloyees. Serfs had never been employees, despite their part-time service to the knights. It was the knight’s duty to protect them and continue to make sure they could live on and farm their own portions of the feoffs. The new mercantile class introduced new concepts of land ownership, understanding land to be basically just another kind of good that could be bought and sold, and not assuming that hereditary rights to farm it could exist. Nobles and the merchants who had bought the nobles’ titles and estates as the knights went broke, now assumed they owned the land outright and could use it in what were newly seen as “productive” ways if they so chose. These new nobles no longer had any overriding obligations to the tenants on the land, who could be drive off or forced ot pay rent which they could only earn by going to work for the new industrialists and merchants.

The full transition from a world in which feudalism in its pure form dominated to one in which ht has pretty much disappeared form the scene, took many centuries. However, change occurs at a much faster pace now.