The feudal system

[Jack_Pholph]

I need someone to tell me WHY the feudal system was created. this is urgent!!!

[Ryan]

The social and economic system which characterized most European societies in the Middle Ages goes by the name of feudalism. The system, in its most basic essence, is the granting of land in return for military service.

The center of the feudal system in medieval Europe was the king, and a medieval king was, above everything else, a warrior. From the 9th to the 14th centuries—the heyday of feudalism—the most important element in making war was the armored and mounted knight. To maintain a retinue of knights was, however, very expensive. In return for providing the king with warriors, tenants-in-chief were granted large holdings of land. A grant of land was known as a feud or a fief, hence the term feudalism. The tenants-in-chief (commonly called barons in England) received their lands directly from the king and, in turn, leased parts of their estates to the knights, who in their turn gave leases to yeomen. This idealized description was subject to many variations. In some areas feudalism scarcely gained a hold. In Germanic areas allodial ownership of land was more common.[citation needed] In the Italian peninsula, Roman law remained the more important organizing structure.

Feudalism, by its very nature, gave rise to a hierarchy of rank, to a predominantly static social structure in which every man knew his place, according to whom it was that he owed service and from whom it was that he received his land. In order to preserve existing relationships in perpetuity, rights of succession to land were strictly controlled by various laws, or customs, of entail. The most rigid control was provided by the custom of primogeniture, by which all property of a deceased landholder must pass intact to his eldest son.

Every man was the vassal, or servant, of his lord. The man swore fealty to his lord, and in return the lord promised to protect him and to see that he received justice. Feudalism was the expression of a society in which every man was bound to every other by mutual ties of loyalty and service. Feudal society was characterized by military landholders and working peasants. The nobility included bishops, for the church was one of the greatest of medieval landowners. Near the bottom of the social pyramid were the agricultural laborers, or villeins, and beneath them, the serfs.

Until the rise of powerful monarchies with central bureaucracies, it was the lord of the manor who was the real ruler of society. The peasant worked the land for him and owed him a number of feudal dues (increasingly commuted to money payments over time); justice was dispensed in the manorial courts. Customs varied, but it was common for a peasant to have a small plot, or to share a communal plot, on which to grow food for himself and his family and to be entitled to gather firewood from forest land for the hearth fire. More common than single plots, however, was the system of dividing the land into strips, with each household's strips scattered about the manor.

Western feudalism, evolving in turbulent eighth-century France, offered aristocratic landowners potential security in the absence of law and order. By concession or usurpation, major landowners assumed substantial legal and governmental power from the central government and proceeded through private arrangements with lesser landowners to create local militias for defensive purposes. Inherently particularism and initially undisciplined, feudalism enveloped the monarchy itself. Feudalism evolved its own system of law and code of ethics for its members as it spread throughout Europe to assume a dominant role in the political and cultural history of the Middle Ages. Introduced to England in 1066 by William the Conqueror, who substantially curbed the powers of all feudal vassals while retaining considerable central authority, feudalism incorporated three elements: personal, property, and governmental. All members, including the monarchs who headed the feudal system, enjoyed specific rights but were also bound by feudal law to perform fixed obligations.

This is what i found when i researched it.

[Crim]

When the German invaders conquered the western Roman Empire in the 5th century, they destroyed the professional Roman army and substituted their own armies, made up of warriors who served their chieftains for honor and booty. The warriors fought on foot and lived off the countryside. As long as they fought one another, they needed no cavalry. But when the Muslims, the Vikings, and the Magyars invaded Europe in the 8th, 9th, and 10th centuries, the Germans found themselves unable to deal with these rapid-moving armies. First, Charles Martel in Gaul, then King Alfred in England, and finally Henry the Fowler of Germany provided horses for some of their soldiers to repel the raids into their lands. It is not certain that these troops fought on horseback, but they could pursue their enemies faster mounted than on foot, and as stirrups were then coming into use, it is probable that cavalry actions began to take place in this same period. They were certainly occurring in the 11th century.

"Feudalism," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2009
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2009 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

[Jack_Pholph]

thanks guys

[Ryan]

no prob. Always trying to help.