The literary sources and documentary evidence for the Carolingian period are much more voluminous than they are for any era since the fourth century. Whereas our knowledge of sixth-century France is drawn heavily from the information supplied by Gregory of Tours, and the sources for the seventh-century Merovingian kingdom are extremely fragmentary, there survive from the period 750 to 900 hundreds of pages of chronicles, letters, government documents, and treatises. The improvement in literacy is indicative of the advance of civilization, of the partial overcoming of the effects of the Germanic invasions and the expansion of Islam, and of the emergence of a new distinct culture and society in western Europe. In A.D. 400 western Europe was merely a geographic expression. Roman civilization was centered on the Mediterranean, and France, England, and the Rhine valley were mere adjuncts of the Mediterranean world. In 800 Europe signified a new civilization that was coextensive with the area of Latin Christianity and created by the confluence of Germanic traditions and Latin-Christian culture. Compared to Byzantium and Islam, Europe was still poor and backward, but it had developed particular ideas and institutions of its own, had found leadership within its own ranks, and had become conscious of its own distinct existence and destiny.
The first Europe included France, England, western Germany, Ireland, central and northern Italy, and the mountain regions of northern Spain. The vital centers of civilization were not on the Mediterranean coast, but in the river valleys of northern France and the Rhineland. The culture of the first Europe was unified by the universal language of churchmen, kings, and the aristocracy—Latin. Latin was the language of both ecclesiastical and secular governments and the tongue in which all intellectual matters were discussed or written down. In all cases, whether on behalf of monarchy, church, or duke, the Latin writing was actually executed by clerical scholars who were nearly all products of the flourishing monastic schools of the Carolingian empire. The everyday language of ordinary people, including most of the nobility, varied from region to region. In England Anglo-Saxon was spoken, and in the eighth and ninth centuries it even became a literary language. In Ireland the Celtic tongue was perpetuated. On the Continent the north and east were German-speaking areas, while the south and west contained a variety of dialects derived from the vulgar (that is, popular) Latin, the language actually spoken by ordinary people in the Roman Empire. These derivatives of vulgar Latin were the precursors of the Romance languages. By the middle of the ninth century German and French were emerging as distinct languages. In the Oath of Strasbourg of 842 the kings of the eastern and western parts of the Carolingian empire subscribed in what were recognizable French and German dialects. Thus, by the middle of the ninth century there was a growing separation of vernacular tongues between the eastern and western parts of the Carolingian empire. The emergence of French and German contributed to the disintegration of the Carolingian empire, whereas Latin was a strong force in uniting the various regions of the first Europe in a common higher culture.
In 400 the church was under the domination of the Roman emperor. By 800 it was freed from the last vestiges of Byzantine control, but the clergy in western Europe were strongly under the influence of the Carolingian rulers and identified their interests with those of the Frankish kingship. The Carolingians did not interfere in matters of doctrine, but they were concerned with the improvement of church discipline and aimed to use the intellectual and even the financial resources of the church in the service of the monarchy. The Carolingians recognized the Petrine theory and the more conservative aspects of the Gelasian doctrine. They conceded that the church belonged to the bishops, but they thought that the bishops belonged to the Carolingians. The clergy of the Frankish realm, in view of the Carolingian ruler’s position as anointed king, Christian emperor, and patron of the church, was inclined to agree with this attitude. Typical of the ninth-century higher clergy was Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims (died 876), who was the friend, adviser, and chief propagandist of Charles the Bald, an expert on government and court ceremonial, and an aggressive advocate of the privileges of his see and of the episcopal office in general. The secular obligations and interests of the Carolingian clergy and the spiritual claims of the eighth- and ninth-century kings signified the interpenetration of the church and the world, which was to be the distinguishing quality of medieval civilization over the next three centuries.
Urban life was still important in A.D. 400, but it played no part in the first Europe. The Carolingian world was an underdeveloped, thinly populated, intensely rural society. Communications were almost incredibly bad, far worse than in the Roman Empire, and at least 80 percent of the population never moved more than ten miles from the place where they were born. Famine was a constant danger, violence a fact of everyday life, and the average life expectancy no more than thirty years. The people of the Carolingian world had little knowledge of science and hardly any knowledge of medicine. Under these conditions it is not surprising that magic proliferated among the populace and that the miraculous powers of local saints were the only recourse that ordinary people had against the ravages of nature and physical illness. The educated clergy struggled to moderate superstition and tried to limit the continual emergence of new cults of local saints by requiring episcopal canonization, but to little effect.
The centers of Carolingian life were the castle, the cathedral, and the monastery. Even the so-called cities of the Frankish kingdom, such as Charlemagne’s capital at Aachen or the cathedral city of Rheims, consisted only of a governmental edifice surrounded by a few houses and encircled by a wall. There were remains of great Roman cities in northern Italy, such as the Eternal City itself, but many of the streets of the Italian towns were deserted, the houses falling into ruin, and the great Roman systems for water and sewage abandoned. Even the governmental, military, and ecclesiastical buildings of the Carolingian world were extremely modest. The Carolingian castle was usually a wooden stockade, and the churches and other buildings erected in stone were low and squat, modeled ultimately on Roman bathhouses.
At least half of western Europe in 800 either was covered with dense forests or consisted of swampy land unsuited to agriculture. The topography of the agricultural regions and the form of rural economy had been determined by the heavy-wheeled plow, drawn by oxen, that the Germans had brought with them. The furrow driven by the German plow was much deeper than that made by the light plow used in the Roman world. A day’s work for the Carolingian peasant would consist of a single long, narrow strip. Consequently, the countryside came to be dominated by large open fields, divided into the strips driven by the heavy plow. Because of the lack of fertilizer, it was necessary to leave each field fallow every two or three years. By no means all, or even a great majority, of the peasants of the first Europe were dependent serfs, bound to the land and subordinated to the manorial lord Especially in Germany and in eastern England, villages of free peasants, who held the open fields in common, sharing the strips, were the rule. Here the original Germanic social structure persisted, characterized by a large mass of free peasants.
In the Frankish kingdom west of the Rhine and in the wealthy agricultural midlands of England the medieval manor was already the basic unit of the economic system. In manoralism, the lord would retain part of the arable land of the village as his demesne, which would similarly be divided into strips. The peasant-serfs were given strips in the open fields in return for working the lord’s demesne. They were bound to the land and subject to the lord’s judicial authority and various servile dues, such as an inheritance tax called the heriot. The open field divided into strips was to remain the basis of the economic system of a great part of rural Europe until the fourteenth century. It was an unprogressive agrarian system of meager productivity, but it was the only one possible in terms of the technology available.
Of necessity, the manor was a self-sufficient economic unit in view of the overwhelming difficulties of transportation in the period. International trade was carried on only to serve the demands of the wealthy, and it was largely in the hands of aliens—Greeks, Jews, Moslems. Local society made almost no use of money. To the extent that local exchange was carried on, it was conducted by barter. The small amount of international trade precluded the need for gold coinage. The Carolingians minted only silver coins, which were all that was usually necessary when the smallest silver coin could buy a cow. When gold coins were needed, Byzantine and Moslem currency was used.
The poverty and localism characteristic of the first Europe made it appear insignificant in comparison with the Roman Empire and the contemporary civilizations of Byzantium and Islam. But the Carolingian world was marked by the beginnings of the application of intelligence to the problems of society, and although relatively the achievements in this connection may not appear to be great, this development was of the greatest importance in medieval civilization, for it marked the starting point for the political and intellectual growth of later centuries.
The work of the Carolingians secured a substantial literate class in Germanic society to do the work of church and monarchy. The leader in this great educational movement was the Englishman Alcuin (died 804), whom Charlemagne had brought from England to improve the monastic schools of his realm and to continue the work that Boniface had begun. Alcuin was eminently successful in accomplishing the tasks that Charlemagne set for him. He established and expanded schools, libraries, and scriptoria in monasteries all over France. He wrote textbooks, prepared word lists, and made the trivium and quadrivium a firm part of the curriculum of the Carolingian school. The impact of his work can be seen in the great increase of literary and documentary materials surviving from the Carolingian period. It can be seen in the number of classical texts whose manuscripts are in the Carolingian hand. It can be seen in the spread of Roman liturgy to the French church and in some original contributions made by the Frankish churchmen themselves in this field. It can be seen by the fact that the earliest large collections of canon law, albeit not systematic and containing many forged decretals, date from the middle of the ninth century.
The educational work of Alcuin was decisive for the ninth and tenth centuries. Never again would Europe face the perils of barbarism, illiteracy, and the possible extinction of Latin culture that had been the danger in the seventh century. Alcuin completed the work that Boniface began: Latin Christianity became identical with western Europe not only in theory but in practice. An important test of the deep penetration of Latin Christianity into the life of the Carolingian world is the effect that the disintegration of the empire and the Viking invasions had upon education. There was some effect—a decline of some monastic schools because of disturbed local conditions or Viking marauders—but by and large the monastic schools continued their work successfully during this difficult period. Where the Vikings did not penetrate, in the eastern part of the German kingdom, the schools flourished increasingly and took over cultural leadership from the more western monasteries.
We can see, through the ninth century, as one generation of monastic scholars succeeded another, a steady increase in the extent and depth of their learning. Alcuin had been fighting to impose a basic literacy on the Carolingian church; by the middle of the ninth century this was no longer a problem, and with the first line of culture having been gained and secured, the monastic scholars could go on to more profound studies. What they consciously sought to achieve was the recovery of the whole biblical-patristic tradition of the fourth century, and they achieved this aim by the end of the ninth century. In a dozen or more great monastic schools in all parts of the Carolingian realm, especially in communities that had been founded or at least invigorated by Anglo-Saxon or Irish monks in the seventh and eighth centuries, there were extensive and active writing offices that preserved and spread the texts of the Bible and all the patristic writers. Augustine, especially, was carefully studied. The care and devotion that the ninth-century scholars gave to Bible study are indicated by the magnificent illuminated manuscripts they prepared. The influence of Byzantine iconography is evident in the Carolingian illuminations. But their artistic style is marked by a greater degree of classical naturalism and less of the disembodied symbolism of the Byzantine models.
The Carolingian monks’ motive for the study of Latin literature was at first exclusively pragmatic, as had been the case with Alcuin following the programs of Cassiodorus and Augustine. By the second half of the century, in isolated cases the monastic scholars went beyond a utilitarian attitude to the classical texts and developed something of a humanist attitude: They admired the style and even the ideas of Cicero and especially Virgil for their own sakes. Such monastic scholars, it must be emphasized, were always a small minority, but the fact that they appeared in the ninth century attests to the degree of the penetration of Latin culture into the life of the French church.
The small currents of humanism that occasionally rose to the surface in the monastic schools joined with what was in the beginning a different stream of culture in the Carolingian age. Charlemagne had gathered around him in his “palace school” a group of eminent scholars, including several from Italy. Alcuin was the leader of this group. They devoted themselves to turning out reams of Latin poetry and playing little court games with the emperor. There were similar groups of court scholars in the reigns of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald. A note of conscious antiquarianism and imitation of classical motifs runs through their work. This movement has been called the Carolingian Renaissance. The Carolingian court scholars were a small group of educated men who gave an aura of Roman culture to the Carolingian court and were well rewarded for their services. They included only one thinker with any important degree of originality—John the Scot, an Irishman who worked at the court of Charles the Bald. John translated the Neoplatonic philosophy of the fifth-century Syrian monk who wrote under the name Dionysius and added some Neoplatonic speculations of his own. But he did not inaugurate a philosophic movement; he had no one to continue his work, and his importance is limited.
Yet, if many of the most learned Carolingian scholars devoted themselves to literary exercises and did not try to deal with the problems of society, we can nevertheless see in the Carolingian period the beginnings of the application of intelligence to social problems. Charlemagne and his clerical advisers were not content to rely upon Germanic political tradition; they consciously set out to improve the institutional and technical aspects of government. After three centuries of disorder and drift the Carolingian world exhibited sharply contrasting instances of planning and ingenuity. Carolingian script itself is an example. Merovingian handwriting is almost impossible to read, but anyone who can read Latin can read most Carolingian documents after a couple of hours’ instruction. The Carolingian script is so sensible and clear that it was used by the first book publishers of the fifteenth century for their type and is therefore substantially in use today. In a sense Carolingian script is even an improvement over the Roman, which employs only capital letters. The Carolingian scribes invented minuscule script, that is, lower-case letters.
The same intelligence is revealed in the operations of the Carolingian monetary and legal systems. After three hundred years of numismatic confusion, the Carolingian government established a new and reliable currency based on the simplest principles. They instructed their minters to take a pound of silver and divide it into 240 pieces, out of which the Carolingian coins were manufactured. The name denarius was given to this kind of coin, after one of the units in Constantine’s monetary system. The Carolingian coinage worked so well that it was imitated by the English, who retained it as the basis for their monetary system until recently. A similar element of rationalization enters into the Carolingian impact on the development of the Germanic law. As a way around the inadequacies of Germanic methods of proof, the Carolingian courts devised the inquest, by which a panel of sworn men from the neighborhood gave their opinion in disputes about the possession of land. The inquest was perpetuated in tenth- and eleventh-century Normandy and was carried to England in the latter part of the eleventh century by William the Conqueror, where it developed into the jury of English common law.
The Carolingian government reveals in many ways the application of intelligence and rationalization to the problems of Germanic kingship. Charlemagne in particular was not satisfied with his position as either warlord or theocratic monarch, so he attempted to establish an effective administration, and he had the best bureaucracy since Theodoric the Ostrogoth. The first step in the reform of the Carolingian government involved the establishment of a chancery staffed by monastic scholars and the issuing of documents on several aspects of the life of lay and ecclesiastical society in which the king was interested. The Carolingian royal documents take the form of capitularies, each dealing in turn with various problems of government; the capitularies are reminiscent of Roman imperial decrees. A capitulary on the church ordered ecclesiastics to undertake educational obligations and to live up to the discipline and rule required of them. Another capitulary addressed to the stewards of the royal manors instructed them on the management of the estates under their responsibility; this instruction was necessary in view of the fact that the Carolingian king’s domainal lands were his chief source of income. Still another capitulary applied intelligence to the problem of raising an army. The military system of the Frankish empire was still based on the principle of the Germanic folk-in-arms; when the king, as war leader, summoned them, all able-bodied men were supposed to join the royal army. Charlemagne and his ministers sensed the wastefulness and general unsatisfactory nature of this system. Hence the king published a capitulary allowing villages to band together to support one knight on horseback who would be much more useful than a motley mob of peasants carrying sticks and scythes.
Perhaps the most important of all Charlemagne’s decrees dealt with the problem of local government. When the king, with his chancery, court, and army, was in a given area, there was no problem of obtaining the loyalty of the local population. But given the bad communications and the atomized nature of social relations, the problem was to maintain royal influence in areas beyond the possible impact of the king’s personality. How were the duke (the local military official) and the count (the king’s local representative in matters of law and finance) to be controlled in the areas away from the immediate influence of the royal court? This question had bedeviled the Merovingians, and their inability to solve it greatly contributed to the collapse of royal power in the sixth and seventh centuries. It remained a stumbling block to the Carolingians. Indeed, it may be said to be the most continuous, difficult problem of medieval monarchy. The Carolingian solution was to send representatives from the royal court, the missi, on periodic tours of inspection in the provinces in the hope of maintaining control over the local royal officials and preventing their integration into the provincial aristocracy.
The system of the missi was a highly intelligent and plausible innovation in Carolingian government and a tribute to the administrative skill of the ecclesiastics, such as Alcuin and Einhard, who served Charles the Great. But already in Charlemagne’s later years, the central government was having trouble preventing the rise of a new provincial aristocracy. Nobles might be sent out from the royal court to act as dukes or counts, and they would be carefully chosen from among loyal men, but once they got to Aquitaine or some other distant province, they tended to strike roots in the local society and turn their title and the royal estates that were bound to it into hereditary property. This process of political disintegration was greatly intensified after Charlemagne’s death, and the missi or any other expedient could not have countered the new factors that brought about the decline of Carolingian power in the ninth century.
Charlemagne’s surviving legitimate son and successor, Louis the Pious (814–840), was an intelligent and well-meaning man, but unable to serve as the leader of a Germanic society. He was completely inept as a soldier, and this lost him the respect of the lay nobility, who felt themselves free to do what they wanted and so set about expanding their patrimonies. The situation was made worse by the bitter struggles of Louis’ children for the royal title, which were well under way before his death. It was in many ways a repetition of the worst moments of the Merovingian monarchy. Finally, in 843 the three sons of Louis the Pious decided on the partition of the empire by the Treaty of Verdun. There were to be three Carolingian realms: the western, the eastern, and an anomalous middle kingdom that stretched a thousand miles from the Low Countries, along the Rhine, and over the Alps to include northern Italy. The middle kingdom almost immediately collapsed, leaving a maze of petty principalities from Flanders to Lombardy. Remnants of the middle kingdom along the Rhine were to be incorporated into the German empire in the tenth and eleventh centuries; their conquest was to be attempted by the powerful French monarchy of the thirteenth century, and they were thence to be the cause of frequent wars between France and Germany well into the twentieth century.
The Carolingian line did not end in Germany until 911, and in France the Carolingians held on until 987, but from the last quarter of the ninth century the Carolingian king was a nonentity. The power in Germany was in the hands of tribal chieftains whose position had been strengthened by the Carolingians, who gave them the title of dukes. In France the power of the central government had been usurped by the dukes and the counts, who were to remain the leaders of French society until the middle of the twelfth century.
The situation in the west Carolingian kingdom was acerbated by the incursion of Viking marauders up the Loire and Seine valleys. The Scandinavian attack on western Europe was the consequence of obscure struggles in Denmark and Norway that resulted in the expulsion of the defeated war bands. The latter either escaped into Russia or took to their long ships and pillaged the river valleys of western Europe. Some went through the straits of Gibraltar and attacked ports in Italy. But it was northern France that, except for the British Isles, felt the brunt of the Viking invasion most heavily. The Scandinavians had nothing to contribute to western European civilization. Their level of culture was no higher than that of the more primitive tribes among their German kinsmen who invaded western Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries. The unit of Scandinavian society was the same kind of war band that is depicted in Beowulf. The bounty-giving chieftain alone could gain the loyalty of these savage warriors. The Danish and Norwegian kings had little authority; in fact, the Scandinavians had a penchant for drowning their rulers in wells. The Northmen were untouched by Latin Christianity until the tenth century; they were heathens who were particularly fond of sacking great monasteries, which they soon discovered were very wealthy.
The later Carolingians were incapable of dealing with these new invaders. These descendents of Charlemagne were pious and frequently sophisticated men but nearly always cowards as well. In most cases they did not even attempt to engage the Vikings in battle, but offered the invaders bribes, which only satisfied them for a short while. The Scandinavians who attacked France in the ninth century were small in number, and their incursion did not represent a cataclysmic event comparable to the Germanic invasions. But their attacks produced fear and disorder, which further encouraged men to look to the most powerful lord in their own neighborhood for protection and to offer him loyal service in return for security. The Scandinavian invasions further emphasized what had been apparent since the 830s—that the Carolingians were no longer great warriors and that the provincial aristocracy need not concern themselves any longer with obeying the royal capitularies.
The Frankish churchmen who witnessed these lugubrious events were deeply chagrined and disappointed. The literature of the last three quarters of the ninth century is extremely pessimistic and bitter in tone, not because of the complete collapse of the social order, but because the world that the bishops found coming into existence was so strongly at variance with their high ideals. The bishops had dreamed of the political unity of Christian Europe under the Carolingian empire, in which a sacred and beneficent king, in accordance with their understanding of Augustinian teaching, would establish earthly peace and dispense justice with the advice of ecclesiastical leaders. This dream had been shattered. The empire was divided, real power had passed into the hands of the aristocracy, and the Carolingian kings were less and less able either to maintain control over government and law within their realm or to withstand the incursion of savage invaders from without who pillaged churches with impunity. The disillusioned and embittered churchmen of the ninth century resorted to desperate expedients. Some tried to gain new prestige for the monarchy by heightening its sacred qualities and by elaborating the ceremonial aspects of kingship. Others turned in disgust from the impotent Carolingians and threw in their lot with the papacy. They published a vast compendium of canon law, including many forged decretals attributed to St. Isidore, exalting papal authority over the kings and metropolitans in accordance with the Donation of Constantine. This expedient was of course no help to the Frankish clergy, in view of the growing domination of the Roman nobility over the papacy.
After 900 the ecclesiastics’ despairing and bitter tone subsided. The churchmen of what had been the east Carolingian realm associated themselves with the creation of the new German monarchy and found in the Ottonian dynasty worthy successors to Charlemagne. The bishops and abbots of France in the tenth century turned away from imperial dreams and came to terms with the new feudal order.
The great English legal historian F. W. Maitland was wont to amuse his classes at Cambridge by remarking that feudalism was introduced to England in the eighteenth century. By this he meant that the word feudalism was not a medieval term; it was invented by English and French lawyers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was popularized by the political philosopher Montesquieu. At the time of the French Revolution the word was often identified with the ancien régime and the privileges of the French aristocracy, which aroused the wrath of the French bourgeoisie. The term feudalism, therefore, was frequently used in the late eighteenth century in a pejorative sense. From the French radicals it was adopted by Karl Marx, who used the term to signify precapitalistic economy. In the late nineteenth century medieval scholars, particularly in France and Germany, began to define feudalism with reference to western Europe in the Middle Ages and tried to work out its history. In view of the fact that feudalism was not a medieval term and that it had already been given certain meanings by modern social philosophy, it might have been wise for medieval historians to avoid using the term and to substitute medieval words, such as vassalage and lordship. They were not, however, able to be so reticent on this matter; the educated public demanded a scholarly definition of feudalism, and a host of authorities came forward with their interpretations.
In the vast scholarship of the past half century on the nature of feudalism, there have been sharply conflicting interpretations. One school regards feudalism as a group of political and legal institutions, as a system of decentralized government—“public power in private hands,” in J. R. Strayer’s excellent phrase. It maintains that feudalism emerged in the second half of the ninth century with the disintegration of the Carolingian empire. This school does not believe that feudalism was necessarily bound up with any specific kind of economic system. It points out that there were still feudal institutions in the expanding money economy of the thirteenth century and that instead of being rewarded with real estate, vassals received fief-rentes, or money fiefs, that is, pensions. This view sharply distinguishes feudalism from manorialism. It points out that feudalism was a system of political and legal relationships involving freemen, while manorialism was an agrarian system involving dependent peasants. The advocates of the political-legal interpretation of feudalism, or the strict interpretation, as it may be called, tend to be skeptical about the use of the term feudalism with reference to non-European history. Feudalism is a specific kind of decentralized government that prevailed in western Europe from the ninth century into the thirteenth.
The alternative prevailing interpretation of feudalism was largely the work of Marc Bloch and his Annales disciples in France. As a product of the French School of Sociology and Anthropology, Bloch was not prepared to define feudalism purely in political and legal terms. He regarded it rather in terms of a whole system in which all aspects of life—not only political but economic, ecclesiastical, and cultural—were centered on lordship. Feudalism was a political system, an economic system, and a system of values. We can speak of feudal economy, a feudalized church, and a feudal literature in much the same way as we can use the term capitalism to refer not only to a certain kind of production and exchange, but to government, thought, and culture. Those who lean toward Bloch’s broad definition of feudalism are inclined to regard it as a stage in social development that has existed at various times in non-western European parts of the world, such as Japan, Byzantium, and Russia.
Lordship is the indispensable element in feudalism, which is a form of social organization in which most, or at least a great part, of the political, economic, and military power is in the hands of a hereditary nobility. The economic power of the nobility is based primarily on their lordship over large estates and a dependent peasant class. The political and military power of the nobility is based on the control that they gain over freeman soldiers and decentralized governmental and legal institutions. This is the form of social organization that was characteristic of France from the late ninth to the late twelfth century. It did not appear in England until the late eleventh century and not in Germany until about 1100, and it never emerged in Italy. This does not mean that in the nonfeudal areas of western Europe there were no lords, but it does mean that the lords did not gain an almost exclusive control of political, economic, and military power. Nor does the definition imply that the hereditary nobility was no longer important in Europe after 1200. On the contrary, the nobility continued to be important in political, economic, and military life, and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the great aristocrats throughout Europe enjoyed an enormous amount of political influence. But the power of the nobility was no longer based primarily on its lordship over serfs and manors and its control over decentralized governmental and legal institutions. In medieval history feudalism existed at certain times and in certain places. It is plausible that feudalism has existed in other areas of the world, but the validity of this hypothesis must be based on empirical evidence assessed by the historians of these civilizations.
How did feudalism as we have defined it come to exist in tenth-century France? In the classical feudalism of tenth- and eleventh-century France three elements can be distinguished: the personal element (lordship and vassalage), the real or property element (fief), and the decentralization of government and law. The development of feudalism until the tenth century involved the process by which the latter two elements were associated with lordship and vassalage. In addition feudalism came to comprise a system of social ideals and values.
Nineteenth-century historians wasted a great deal of energy and paper debating whether feudal institutions were German or Roman in “origin.” Most scholars today would say that this is a badly conceived, and essentially false, problem. The nexus of feudal institutions of the tenth century developed out of certain political, legal, and economic forms, in some cases German, in some cases Roman, in response to social need after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West.
Lordship was the basic social and political institutions in Germanic society. The comitatus, or gefolge, the Germanic war band as described by Tacitus and in Beowulf, was based on the loyalty of warriors to their chieftain in return for the latter’s protection and generosity; it was the embryo of medieval feudalism. The perpetuation of this kind of loyalty in the fifth and sixth centuries was made easier by the existence of a similar institution in the later Roman Empire, the patrocinium (clientage). In the disturbed conditions of the late empire, certain aristocrats gathered around them young men of fighting age whom they rewarded and protected in return for their loyalty and service. The vassals of the sixth and seventh centuries were simply the perpetuation of the German gefolge and the Latin patrocinium. They were freemen who voluntarily subjected themselves to some prominent warlord in their locality, but otherwise their only quality was their fighting ability. The term vassal comes from the Celtic word meaning “boy.” As is implied by the etymology, the vassals of the sixth and seventh centuries were simply “the boys,” gangs of thugs who fought on behalf of certain big men in the neighborhood, beating up people and destroying property at the behest of their warlord in return for protection, maintenance, and a share of the booty. They were as far removed as possible from the chivalric knights pictured in the romantic literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The social status of the vassals, beyond the basic fact that they were all freemen, depended on the lord they served. Those, for instance, who comprised the personal bodyguards of the Merovingian kings had greater prestige and wealth and were dignified by the special appellation of antrustiones.
As yet, vassalage had nothing to do with holding land; the vassals lived in a stockade provided by the lord and were fed, clothed, and armed by him. The next stage in the emergence of feudal institutions involved the association between vassalage and landed wealth, which was intended to reward the vassals for their service and support them. It is a fact of the greatest importance that this “realization of the feudal relationship,” as it has been called by F. L. Ganshof, was an extremely slow and far from uniform development. Even in the tenth century the majority of vassals in France held no land and continued to live in their lord’s household, and even in the early twelfth century, in the intensely feudalized areas of northern France and England, there were many landless vassals, although by this time they were definitely in the minority. In Merovingian times it appears that the only vassals who received estates were very prominent men in society. The Frankish dukes and counts were given “benefices” (benefits), gifts of land, by the Merovingian rulers to secure their loyalty and maintain them while they performed their services to the royal government. But the great aristocrats who received these benefices proceeded to treat them as hereditary estates. This practice was the beginning of the association of hereditary estates with loyalty and service to the lord. The system of benefices was imitated on a smaller scale in the relationship between some of the great aristocrats and their more important vassals.
A slow but fundamental change in military methods between the fifth and eighth centuries increased the necessity for associating vassalage with the benefice, or the fief as it came to be called after the eighth century. The Germans had used mostly infantry, and they had followed the military principle of the folk-in-arms, with the king summoning the mass of free peasantry to come to his aid in war. But the superiority of the armed cavalry, which had already been employed during the period of the Germanic invasions by the Roman emperor, the Huns, and some of the Germanic tribes, became more and more evident. By the eighth century more enlightened warlords in western Europe were seeking to build their armies around the mailed and mounted soldier—the chevalier, or cniht (knight). The introduction of the stirrup into western Europe from the Mediterranean world in the early eighth century markedly increased the effectiveness of the cavalry. But the knight’s equipment was a heavy expense, and a lord who wanted a formidable army of knights among his vassals found it expedient to enfeoff (invest) his chevaliers with manorial estates from which they might obtain the income necessary to array themselves for battle.
The granting of a fief did not involve giving the vassal complete property rights over the estate. The vassal had the use of the income of the land as a reward for service and to make it possible to outfit himself as a knight. But technically the ultimate ownership of the land was still the lord’s, who could recover it if the vassal ceased to be loyal, and when the vassal died, the fief automatically reverted to the lord. It is believed that the precedent for feudal tenure was a system of landholding called the precarium, which existed especially on church lands in the seventh and eighth centuries. By this precarious tenure an abbot or a bishop who had more land than he could profitably manage himself allowed laymen to have the use of such lands, usually on the payment of a rent and with the understanding that the estate was recoverable at will.
With their accustomed intelligence and ingenuity, the Carolingian family early realized the military advantages accruing from the enfeoffment of their vassals. Thus, when Charles Martel raised an army to encounter the invading Arabs in the fourth decade of the eighth century, he sought to obtain as large a knightly contingent as possible. He succeeded in carving out fiefs for his vassals from church lands, probably on the basis of precarious tenures. During the second half of the eighth century, the Carolingian ruler was rewarding his aristocratic vassals with large fiefs granted from the royal demesne itself. And the great lords of the western part of the Carolingian realm were quick to imitate the king and transformed some of their own vassals into enfeoffed knights. This growing association of fief and vassalage had the effect of generally elevating the social status of the vassal. From the hired thug, the vassal was himself becoming, in many instances, an important local lord, enjoying control over one or more manors. There was, of course, a great disparity between the duke or count, who was the vassal of the king, and the common run of knightly vassals, who were, for many centuries to come, violent and uncouth people.
The increasing involvement of vassalage and fief inspired a land hunger on the part of all vassals in feudal society that persisted well into the twelfth century. Whereas previously the fief was regarded as a reward for loyalty, now vassals sought out lords who were prepared to offer them landed estates. Those vassals who already had fiefs set about obtaining more and sought to assure the hereditary character of the land that they held of their lord. Although technically the fief was not inheritable and reverted back to the lord at the vassal’s death, by the middle of the tenth century the fief had already become a hereditary patrimony for all practical purposes. On payment of an inheritance tax called the “relief,” the deceased vassal’s son professed his loyalty to the lord and took possession of the fief. The land hunger of the ninth- and tenth-century vassals is well illustrated by the great feudal epic Raoul de Cambrai, which, although it has come down to us in a twelfth-century version, dimly reflects a true incident that occurred in the ninth century and admirably mirrors the mores of the feudal class of that period. In the poem the emperor neglects to give Raoul the fief that his father had held, whereupon Raoul takes up arms against his lord in an attempt to force him to grant what he considers his rightful inheritance.
The final stage in the development of feudalism was the passing of governmental and legal authority to the king’s great feudal vassals, who, in turn, passed some of this authority on to their own vassals. This stage is the product of the ninth century and was the consequence of the inability of the later Carolingians to maintain control over the dukes and counts who usurped the royal power over their duchies and counties and turned them into enormous hereditary fiefs. Lordship over manorial estates had always involved political and legal control over the dependent peasantry, but this authority was negligible compared to the passing of public power into private hands in the ninth century. The feudal princes won from the feeble monarchy the right to collect taxes and to hold courts to hear important pleas—the right of “high justice,” the power to hang criminals—in their duchies and counties. Similarly, all lesser lords strove to gain pieces of public power and to exercise some political and legal authority within their own fiefs. By the middle of the tenth century in France, the powers of the Carolingian king had been swallowed up in the private feudal courts, which exercised overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions in a crazy patchwork of decentralized authority.
The emergence of the feudal kind of social organization was followed by the refinement and rationalization of several aspects of lordship and the entrenchment of a group of social values based on the ideal of loyalty. An involved ceremony by which the vassal declared his loyalty or homage to the lord was worked out. The candidate for vassalage knelt before the lord, who clasped his hands around the vassal’s. The church added the usual Christian façade in the appended ceremony of fealty by which the vassal made a sacred vow of loyalty to his lord.
In enfeoffing his vassal, the lord usually handed over a symbol of the estate, such as a stalk of grain or a knife. It became customary (in a society where literacy was increasing) to attest to the grant of land by a deed called simply a “charter” (document). The medieval charter generally had five parts: the salutation, usually addressed to the leading men of the neighborhood in which the fief lay; the harangue, which gave the reason for the grant and was often elaborate if the grantee was an ecclesiastic; the dispository clause, which listed, often in great detail, the location and boundaries of the estate or estates granted; then the curse, which inflicted an ecclesiastical anathema on anyone who dared to contravene the terms of the charter, again very elaborate if the beneficiary was an ecclesiastic; and finally, the witness list, to which those who had witnessed the grant attested their private seals. In royal charters the scribe frequently wrote down the names of everyone present at court until he came to the end of the parchment. The medieval charter was thus an impressive document that, at least until the twelfth century, was apt to be decisive evidence in a lawsuit over the possession of land; it is not surprising that ecclesiastics frequently forged charters to help their claim to an estate. It is surprising how negligent lay lords were about preserving charters. They rarely could produce them when they had to, which encouraged interminable lawsuits over the possession of estates.
By the end of the tenth century the respective rights and duties of lord and vassal had been fully worked out. The vassal owed military service to his lord, not to exceed forty days a year. If he was an important vassal who held a large fief, he owed in addition the military service of a contingent of knights to his lord’s army. Furthermore, the vassal owed suit at court—that is, he had to turn up at the lord’s private court to participate in lawsuits between his peers, the other vassals of the lord, and to give the lord advice if the latter asked for it. In addition, the vassal was subject to feudal taxation—the relief, the money obtained from the vassal’s property through wardship when the vassal died leaving no male heirs of age, and the regular “feudal aids,” which the vassal had to pay the lord when the latter knighted his eldest son, married off his eldest daughter, or had to be ransomed from captivity. In return the lord was to maintain his vassal, but by no means did he have to give him a fief, and he was not to “disparage” the vassal by insulting him in one way or another. When the vassal failed to fulfill his vow of loyalty to the lord, he was subject, after trial in the lord’s court, to forfeiture of his fief. If the lord acted improperly toward the vassal, the latter had the right of diffidatio, the dissolution of the feudal bond, usually inaugurated by the breaking of the symbolic stalk of grain or knife that represented the transfer of the fief. The former eventuality usually, and the latter always, meant war, but war was in any case a fact of everyday life in feudal society.
By the end of the tenth century subinfeudation—the process by which a vassal enfeoffed part of his own fief—had become common and had been frequently carried down through several degrees in the feudal scale from king or duke to lowly “vavasour,” as the humblest subvassal was called. It was a question of whether the subvassals owed loyalty to the ultimate lord or only to their immediate overlords. There was no general answer to this question; it was a matter of whether the original lord was sufficiently strong and energetic to compel the subvassals to take oaths of homage and fealty to him as their liege, or chief, lord. A similar problem arose out of the fact that land-hungry knights became the vassals of two or more lords to gain additional fiefs. The anomaly might be solved by one of the lords asserting his rights to be the liege lord. If he did not and if the vassal’s two lords should go to war against each other and summon the vassal to render them military service, the vassal would solve his predicament by joining the lord who seemed most likely to win.
The Carolingian churchmen had initially been bitterly critical of the advance of lordship, which they believed, with justice, to be a cause of the disintegration of the Christian empire. But they were not long in coming to terms with the new social order by integrating themselves within it. The bishops and abbots became lords and vassals like the lay nobility and were involved in all aspects of the life of feudal society, except personal participation in feudal warfare. The churchmen did their best to pacify feudal society and to Christianize and idealize the feudal relationship. They added the religious ceremony of fealty to the act of homage and became adept at enumerating the mutual obligations of lord and vassal in terms that presupposed a level of conduct far more civilized and moral than the rough fighters who still composed 95 percent of the feudal class were capable of achieving. The church tried its best to limit war in feudal society during the eleventh century by the spread of the Peace of God movement, by which the feudal nobility were to form leagues to preserve the peace and to promise not to fight on certain days. Generally the peace movement was a failure; it was successful only when a strong ruler got behind it because he saw in it advantages for himself.
As a general rule feudalism was antagonistic to royal power. As we have seen, it involved decentralized government and the passing of public power into private hands. The king of France in the tenth and eleventh centuries was indeed the nominal lord over the great feudal princes, but he had no real power over the dukes and counts who were his vassals because he was not the liege lord over their subvassals. As long as he could not defeat the duke of Normandy or the count of Toulouse, the king in Paris had no control over them, although he had a right to their formal homage. The duke of Normandy had a much better army than the king had, and the Norman knights did not recognize the king as their overlord in any way. For all practical purposes, the monarch of France, whether he was a Carolingian or, after 987, of the new Capetian house, was only the duke of Paris. A similar situation prevailed in the feudal organization of Germany in the twelfth century.
Where the feudal pyramid with the king at the pinnacle actually did operate was in England after the Norman Conquest in 1066. It did so because the Norman duke in the tenth and the first half of the eleventh centuries learned how to use feudal institutions in a special way—to increase the power of the central government, which was not the way feudalism had worked in the later Carolingian empire.
All social systems are founded upon a set of assumptions about what is good and what is bad in human relationships, and these assumptions tend to be perpetuated and adhered to long after the precise social needs they served have ceased to operate. The values that served feudalism and the feudal lords were these three: first, that military prowess is a social good because only the strong man can provide peace and protection; second, that the bonds of personal loyalty are the sinews of the social order and only the relationship of one man to another can give sanction to political and legal obligations; third, that these bonds of loyalty are arranged in an ascending and descending order, stretching through society and on to heavenly regions.
The third assumption allowed feudal relationships to receive the approval of ecclesiastics who were trained in the old doctrines of hierarchy. Indeed, it is likely that churchmen placed a much greater emphasis on this feudal value and made hierarchy both more central and more rigid in feudal society. Although French ecclesiastics were initially wary of the growth of feudal lordship, by the end of the tenth century, they were often ideological advocates of feudalism as part of the divinely ordained hierarchical order of the world.
The second assumption, that of loyalty, was useful to ambitious kings and dukes who sought to impose a sovereign power over the landed society in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The ideal of loyalty also inspired, to a degree, a new sensitivity to personal relationships, a sentimental view of the attachment of one human being to another; it became a constituent of the medieval idea of love and an inspiration for the romantic movement of the twelfth century.
The first assumption, on the social value of military prowess, became transmuted into the ideal of aristocratic leadership in society and the belief that the man on horseback was the natural leader, whereas others stood and served. Feudal recognition of the intrinsic goodness of physical strength was perpetuated in the moral sanction of the stronger over the weaker that became essential to the operation of the European states system from the twelfth to the twentieth century.