# Feudal Society

History II · Medieval History · https://tryals.app/learn/history-ii/feudal-society

## The Trouble With the Word

No term in medieval history is more contested than **feudalism**. Later lawyers and writers invented it after the French Revolution to describe the old order.

Historians offer competing definitions:
- **F. L. Ganshof** gave a narrow legal view: relations between lord and **vassal**, created by **homage** and **fealty**, and sealed with a **fief**.
- **Marc Bloch** defined a whole society of subject peasants, dispersed power, and warrior elites.
- **Susan Reynolds** argued in *Fiefs and Vassals* that Ganshof's tidy system never existed in reality.

What is not in doubt is the **seigneurie**, the rural estate as an economic unit:

| Element | What it was |
|---|---|
| Demesne | Land worked directly for the lord |
| Tenures | Peasant holdings owing rent or labour |
| Week-work | Fixed labour days on the demesne |
| *Banalités* | Compulsory paid use of the lord's mill or oven |
| Justice | Fines from the lord's private court |

A tenant owing three days of week-work gave roughly **43 per cent** (43) of their year to the lord.

## Orders and Revolutions

Contemporaries held a different view of society. Around 1025 and 1030, **Adalbero of Laon** and **Gerard of Cambrai** described the **three orders**:
- *Oratores*: those who pray
- *Bellatores*: those who fight
- *Laboratores*: those who work

Historians also debate the **feudal revolution**. Some argue public authority collapsed around the year 1000, turning free peasants into serfs. Reynolds and others see gradual change instead.

Church councils attempted to control the violence:
- **Peace of God** (from 989): protected non-combatants
- **Truce of God** (around 1027 or by 1030): banned fighting on holy days

> **Common pitfall:** using "feudal" to mean both the lord–vassal tie and the lord–peasant relation. One links armed elites; the other extracts labour from cultivators.

## Practice questions

11 of this lesson's 15 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. Susan Reynolds argued in Fiefs and Vassals that the "feudal system" is largely a construction of later lawyers. What is the core of that argument?

A. Medieval landholders never actually owed military service or labour obligations for their estates
B. Ceremonies of homage and fealty were completely unknown across continental Europe before the eleventh century
C. The terms fief and vassal are used loosely and inconsistently in the medieval sources themselves
D. The written legal codes describing systematic feudal tenures were entirely eighteenth-century fabrications

**Answer:** C. The terms fief and vassal are used loosely and inconsistently in the medieval sources themselves

**Why:** Her method is philological: read the documents rather than the textbooks, and the neat vocabulary dissolves into local variety. Land was certainly held in return for service, that is not in dispute. What is disputed is whether contemporaries had, or needed, a single coherent system of tenure, or whether academic lawyers built one afterwards and historians adopted it.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/feudal-society/susan-reynolds-argued-in-fiefs-and-vassals-that-the-feudal-system

### 2. Sort each item by whether it describes the LORD–VASSAL relation or the LORD–PEASANT relation.

**Answer:**

- Lord and vassal: Homage performed with hands between the lord’s hands, A fief granted in return for mounted military service, An oath of fealty sworn between armed men of similar rank
- Lord and peasant: Three days of week-work owed on the demesne, Compulsory paid use of the lord’s mill and oven

**Why:** Keeping the two apart is the single most useful discipline in this topic. They have different logics, one is a political tie between near-equals, the other an economic extraction from subordinates, and they are joined only in the textbook pyramid, which no medieval person drew.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/feudal-society/sort-each-item-by-whether-it-describes-the-lord-vassal-relation-or

### 3. Which claims about the "three orders" model are defensible?

A. It is a description of the lord–vassal relationship
B. It is prescriptive: it describes how society ought to be arranged
C. It appears just as townspeople and a money economy begin to make it inaccurate
D. It was set out by bishops around 1025 to 1030

**Answer:** B. It is prescriptive: it describes how society ought to be arranged; C. It appears just as townspeople and a money economy begin to make it inaccurate; D. It was set out by bishops around 1025 to 1030

**Why:** The scheme is a piece of ideological work by churchmen, and its timing is the giveaway: it asserts a stable tripartite order precisely when merchants, artisans and a cash economy are producing people who fit none of the three. It is also silent about lords and vassals, which is why it cannot be a description of "feudalism".

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/feudal-society/which-claims-about-the-three-orders-model-are-defensible

### 4. Marc Bloch’s definition of feudal society is narrower than F. L. Ganshof’s, being restricted to the legal tie between lord and vassal.

**Answer:** False

**Why:** **False**: the definitions are the other way round. Ganshof restricts feudalism to lord–vassal law: homage, fealty, fief. Bloch describes a whole social type: dependent peasantry, service in place of wages, the specialised warrior, dispersed authority, and personal ties of obedience.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/feudal-society/marc-blochs-definition-of-feudal-society-is-narrower-than-f-l

### 5. Complete the account of the seigneurie as an economic unit.

**Answer:** The lord worked part of the estate directly; this was the **demesne**. The rest was divided into peasant **tenures**, which owed rent and fixed labour days known as **week-work**. On top of that, tenants paid to use the lord’s mill and oven, a set of monopolies called **banalités**.

**Why:** The monopolies are easy to underrate and were not. Rent is taken once from a holding; the mill and oven charges are taken from every loaf a household eats, which makes them regressive, unavoidable and, in the fourteenth-century revolts, the grievance people actually destroyed things over.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/feudal-society/complete-the-account-of-the-seigneurie-as-an-economic-unit

### 6. The seigneurie extracted wealth through judicial fines and banalités alongside agricultural rents. What does this reveal about economic power on the medieval manor?

A. It rested on coercing peasant use of private monopolies
B. It derived from public charters granted by the monarchy
C. It was strictly regulated by customary peasant assemblies
D. It depended primarily upon commercial market competition

**Answer:** A. It rested on coercing peasant use of private monopolies

**Why:** Seigniorial authority combined landholding with compulsory jurisdiction and monopolies (such as mills or ovens), demonstrating that agrarian extraction was inherently extra-economic and enforced rather than commercially negotiated.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/feudal-society/the-seigneurie-extracted-wealth-through-judicial-fines-and-banalites

### 7. Arrange the stages of the argument for a "feudal revolution" around the year 1000, as its proponents present it.

**Answer:**

1. Carolingian public authority ceases to function effectively
2. Castellans build fortifications and command their surroundings from them
3. The power to command and punish passes into private hands
4. Distinctions among free peasants collapse into a common dependence
5. Bishops respond with the Peace and Truce of God

**Why:** Set out in order the case is coherent, which is why it held the field for a generation. The objection is not that any step is impossible but that the evidence for the suddenness is thin: Barthélemy argues the documents change form around 1000 — new kinds of charter, new scribal habits — and that historians have read a change in the record as a change in the world.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/feudal-society/arrange-the-stages-of-the-argument-for-a-feudal-revolution-around

### 8. The Peace of God movement from 989 is read by some historians as evidence of a sudden crisis of violence and by others as evidence of continuity.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True**, and it is a good illustration of how the same source serves two cases. To Duby and Bonnassie the Peace councils show churchmen reacting to a new castellan violence; to Barthélemy they show a church doing what it had long done, newly visible because the documents change. The evidence underdetermines the verdict.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/feudal-society/the-peace-of-god-movement-from-989-is-read-by-some-historians-as

### 9. A tenant owes three days of week-work in a six-day week, plus rent in kind, plus compulsory paid use of the mill and oven. Why do historians treat the mill and oven charges as more burdensome than their small size suggests?

A. They were calculated as a flat annual tax based on the total arable acreage of the holding
B. They fall on everything the household processes and eats, so they cannot be avoided or reduced
C. They directly replaced the demesne week-work obligations rather than supplementing them
D. They were payable exclusively in minted silver coin, which peasant households rarely held

**Answer:** B. They fall on everything the household processes and eats, so they cannot be avoided or reduced

**Why:** Rent is periodic and negotiable; a monopoly on grinding and baking is a levy on every meal, and it cannot be escaped by producing less for market. That is why banalités show up so consistently in the grievances of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century revolts, and why rebels made a point of destroying mills.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/feudal-society/a-tenant-owes-three-days-of-week-work-in-a-six-day-week-plus-rent-in

### 10. A tenant owes three days of week-work in a seven-day week. Estimate the percentage of the year’s days he owes to the lord’s demesne.

**Answer:** 43 (within ±3)

**Why:** About **43 per cent**. The number is the whole argument about the seigneurie in one figure: nearly half the tenant’s available labour, before rent, before the mill charge and before the tithe. Whether or not "feudalism" is a useful word, this arrangement existed and is measurable.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/feudal-society/a-tenant-owes-three-days-of-week-work-in-a-seven-day-week-estimate

### 11. Arrange these contributions to the debate about feudalism in the order they were made.

**Answer:**

1. The Libri Feudorum compiles Lombard law on fiefs
2. Early modern lawyers reconstruct a systematic law of tenure from it
3. Bloch describes feudal society as a whole social type
4. Brown attacks "the tyranny of a construct"
5. Reynolds argues the fief-and-vassal system is a later projection

**Why:** The shape of the historiography is a long construction followed by a fast demolition. The concept took five centuries to build and thirty years to be taken apart, and no agreed replacement has emerged, which is why careful writers now say "lordship", "seigneurie" or "vassalic ties" and reserve "feudal" for the thing they are explicitly arguing about.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/feudal-society/arrange-these-contributions-to-the-debate-about-feudalism-in-the