Related Research Articles
Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of legal, economic, military, cultural, and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.
An oath of fealty, from the Latin fidelitas (faithfulness), is a pledge of allegiance of one person to another.
A fief was a central element in medieval contracts based on feudal law. It consisted of a form of property holding or other rights granted by an overlord to a vassal, who held it in fealty or "in fee" in return for a form of feudal allegiance, services, and/or payments. The fees were often lands, land revenue or revenue-producing real property like a watermill, held in feudal land tenure: these are typically known as fiefs or fiefdoms. However, not only land but anything of value could be held in fee, including governmental office, rights of exploitation such as hunting, fishing or felling trees, monopolies in trade, money rents and tax farms. There never existed a standard feudal system, nor did there exist only one type of fief. Over the ages, depending on the region, there was a broad variety of customs using the same basic legal principles in many variations.
The Kingdom of France in the Middle Ages was marked by the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire and West Francia (843–987); the expansion of royal control by the House of Capet (987–1328), including their struggles with the virtually independent principalities, and the creation and extension of administrative/state control in the 13th century; and the rise of the House of Valois (1328–1589), including the protracted dynastic crisis against the House of Plantagenet and their Angevin Empire, culminating in the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453), which laid the seeds for a more centralized and expanded state in the early modern period and the creation of a sense of French identity.
Robert I, known as Robert the Old and "Old French: Tête-Hardi, lit. 'the Headstrong'", was Duke of Burgundy from 1032 to his death. Robert was the son of King Robert II of France and Constance of Arles. His brother was Henry I of France.
John I, known as John the Red due to the colour of his beard, was Duke of Brittany from 1221 to his death and 2nd Earl of Richmond in 1268.
In medieval and early modern Europe, a tenant-in-chief was a person who held his lands under various forms of feudal land tenure directly from the king or territorial prince to whom he did homage, as opposed to holding them from another nobleman or senior member of the clergy. The tenure was one which denoted great honour, but also carried heavy responsibilities. The tenants-in-chief were originally responsible for providing knights and soldiers for the king's feudal army.
Odo II was the count of Blois, Chartres, Châteaudun, Champagne, Beauvais and Tours from 1004 and count of Troyes and Meaux from 1022. He twice tried to make himself a king: first in Italy after 1024 and then in Burgundy after 1032.
Carucage was a medieval English land tax enacted by King Richard I in 1194, based on the size—variously calculated—of the taxpayer's estate. It was a replacement for the danegeld, last imposed in 1162, which had become difficult to collect because of an increasing number of exemptions. Carucage was levied just six times: by Richard in 1194 and 1198; by John, his brother and successor, in 1200; and by John's son, Henry III, in 1217, 1220, and 1224, after which it was replaced by taxes on income and personal property.
A heerlijkheid was a landed estate that served as the lowest administrative and judicial unit in rural areas in the Dutch-speaking Low Countries before 1800. It originated as a unit of lordship under the feudal system during the Middle Ages. The English equivalents are manor, seigniory and lordship. The German equivalent is Herrschaft. The heerlijkheid system was the Dutch version of manorialism that prevailed in the Low Countries and was the precursor to the modern municipality system in the Netherlands and Flemish Belgium.
Li livres de jostice et de plet(z) is an Old French legal treatise compiled by the postglossators of the school of Orléans in the mid-thirteenth century. It was influenced by canon law, Roman law, the customary law of the Orléanais, and the legislation of the Capetian Kings of France. It does not have the sense of a finished work, possesses lacunae, and is somewhat disorganised, being possibly the work of a student of the University of Orléans.
De Iniusta Vexacione Willelmi Episcopi Primi is a late 11th-century historical work detailing the trial of William de St-Calais, a medieval Norman Bishop of Durham from 1081 to 1096. It is the first surviving detailed account of an English trial before the king, and as such is an important source for historians.
Henry I was King of the Franks from 1031 to 1060. The royal demesne of France reached its smallest size during his reign, and for this reason he is often seen as emblematic of the weakness of the early Capetians. This is not entirely agreed upon, however, as other historians regard him as a strong but realistic king, who was forced to conduct a policy mindful of the limitations of the French monarchy.
The Book of Fees is the colloquial title of a modern edition, transcript, rearrangement and enhancement of the medieval Liber Feodorum which is a listing of feudal landholdings or fief, compiled in about 1302, but from earlier records, for the use of the English Exchequer. Originally in two volumes of parchment, the Liber Feodorum is a collection of about 500 written brief notes made between 1198 and 1292 concerning fiefs held in capite or in-chief, that is to say directly from the Crown.
Feudalism as practiced in the Kingdoms of England during the medieval period was a state of human society that organized political and military leadership and force around a stratified formal structure based on land tenure. As a military defence and socio-economic paradigm designed to direct the wealth of the land to the king while it levied military troops to his causes, feudal society was ordered around relationships derived from the holding of land. Such landholdings are termed fiefdoms, traders, fiefs, or fees.
Enguerrand IV, Lord of Coucy was the son of Enguerrand III, Lord of Coucy and Marie de Montmirail. He succeeded his older brother Raoul II, Lord of Coucy, serving as the Sire de Coucy from his brother's death in 1250 until his own in 1311.
Feudalism in the Holy Roman Empire was a politico-economic system of relationships between liege lords and enfeoffed vassals that formed the basis of the social structure within the Holy Roman Empire during the High Middle Ages. In Germany the system is variously referred to Lehnswesen, Feudalwesen or Benefizialwesen.
Feudal duties were the set of reciprocal financial, military and legal obligations among the warrior nobility in a feudal system. These duties developed in both Europe and Japan with the decentralisation of empire and due to lack of monetary liquidity, as groups of warriors took over the social, political, judicial, and economic spheres of the territory they controlled. While many feudal duties were based upon control of a parcel of land and its productive resources, even landless knights owed feudal duties such as direct military service in their lord's behest. Feudal duties were not uniform over time or across political boundaries, and in their later development also included duties from and to the peasant population, such as abergement.
Ralph IV was a northern French nobleman who amassed an extensive array of lordships lying in a crescent around the Île-de-France from the border of the Duchy of Normandy in the northwest to Champagne in the southeast.
From the Norman Conquest of 1066 to the death of King John in 1216, England was governed by the Norman and Angevin dynasties. The Norman kings preserved and built upon the institutions of Anglo-Saxon government. They also introduced new institutions, in particular, feudalism. For later developments in English government, see Government in late medieval England.
References
- Bloch, Marc (1964). Feudal Society Volume 1: The Growth of Ties of Dependence . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-05978-2.
- Coredon, Christopher (2007). A Dictionary of Medieval Terms & Phrases (Reprint ed.). Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer. ISBN 978-1-84384-138-8.
- Hallam, Elizabeth M.; Everard, Judith (2001). Capetian France 987-1328 (Second ed.). New York: Longman. ISBN 0-582-40428-2.
- Lyon, Bryce Dale (1980). A Constitutional and Legal History of Medieval England (Second ed.). New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-95132-4.
- Reynolds, Susan (1994). Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-820458-2.
- Zacour, Norman (1969). An Introduction to Medieval Institutions . Toronto: MacMillan of Canada. OCLC 61977.