![]() If the land was small, then the vassal usually had to fight on the battlefield himself. The larger the land, the more troops (that is, knights) the vassal had to provide if the lord required warriors in battle. This was similar to the Frankish benefices, and the military service required by the lord depended on the size of the land allotted to the vassal. In the agrarian society of medieval Europe, a fief was usually a specified parcel of land.” ( source) A person who received a fief was a vassal of the one who had given him the fief, who was his lord. “a piece of property which a person was given on condition that he (and occasionally she) performed certain services to the one who gave it. A fief, which may contain one or more manors, was “Feudal” comes from the word fief (also source of the word “ fee“, or what we pay for a service), says Matthew A. Thompson says it was a foreign term imported into England, and feudalism a foreign system that had taken hold in the Frankish Carolingian empire, adopted by the Norman duchy, and now imposed on the former territory of the Anglo-Saxons. Hamilton Thompson, “manor” comes from the Latin manere–“to remain, to dwell”, and the French word manoir is used to refer to the “chief house in a village”. The 913-page Domesday Book which surveyed England and parts of Wales was released in 1086, and painted a picture of a land now governed by feudal relationships.Īccording to A. ![]() ![]() William also commissioned a survey and audit to establish “who held what, in the wake of the Norman Conquest itself” and to “clarify what rights and dues were owed to the King”. Shortly after the victory of Duke William of Normandy against the Anglo-Saxon king Harold II at the Battle of Hastings, William–now styled King William the Conqueror–ordered the redistribution of land to his followers, causing the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy to lose its assets. The Normans were descended from the Vikings who had settled in the area of what would become Normandy (northern France). This changed after the Norman Conquest of 1066. Land was gifted and purchased, but there was no expectation of service. The manorial system, or manorialism, existed in Britain under the Anglo-Saxons in some form, but only as an economic arrangement. The manors, much like the Roman Villa, were the economic and political units of the feudal system that flourished in medieval Europe. Thus the manorial system was born in Europe, which in turn supported the feudal hierarchy of lords and vassals. According to Mark Cartwright (2018) Frankish kings in the 8th century gave parcels of land (benefices) to loyal nobles in exchange for military service, and the nobles then gave the right to the peasantry to work and live on his land in exchange for their service. When the Franks, a Germanic tribe, invaded the western Roman Empire in the 5th century (the eastern imperial arm would survive as the Byzantine Empire until the 15th century), they also adopted this practice. In the new Roman villa system, those with small farms and those with no land at all exchanged their land or their labour in exchange for protection. The poor and the defenceless also found benefit in siding with the landowners. However, as the empire declined and “barbarian” raids continued, the Roman landowners felt the need to consolidate their property and their labourers. (As Carolyn McDowall notes, we are not so different from the ancients, with our idealisation of country life.) They were also centres of agricultural production, with labourers and servants attending to the land and the lavish home. The villa–either the villa urbana which could be easily reached from Rome or the farmhouse villa rustica in the countryside–was where the Roman elite retired to take a break from urban life. Ruins of Villa Adriana or Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli, Italy The system can be traced to the Roman villa that formed in the midst of infighting and foreign invasions that afflicted the declining Roman Empire in the 5th century. Turbulent circumstances push people to look for security, even at the cost of certain liberties, and this was how the manorial system began. The Middle Ages was a tumultuous period in British history, marked by foreign invasions, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years’ War.
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