Feudalism

all right so we've been talking about monks in their arts for a while it's time to move to another aspect of medieval society there's an old quip that's you found in the reader that there were three classes of people in the Middle Ages those who work those who fight and those who pray we spent a lot of time talking about those who pray and what goes on in their cloisters and monasteries now some talk about the other classes of society those who work and those who fight who make up a good majority of the people of the Middle Ages that are often invisible to us in terms of the documents that they were not able to leave behind this kind of a society that emerges after the fall of Rome we call feudalism a feudal society and medieval Esquivel with each other over the strict meaning the definition of feudalism and the fact is it is a hugely complicated and often not terribly interesting thing to study the documents by which we define and observe a feudal society are a lot of contracts about rights and reciprocal responsibilities and you know this farm arose so many chickens and his wife of so many eggs and it's it's pretty tedious stuff to weed through it but it's important to understand what happens with the fall of Rome and how society gets restructured and so we call this a feudal society and I just want to talk about some of the general aspects of it keeping in mind that if you go on to a higher level to study this the way it is in France or in England or an Ireland or in Italy it's all gonna be very different from each other so this is just sort of a general overview thing now in college you're all taking political science courses and so you're learning about capitalism and socialism and communism and fascism and all these isms that come in our political jargon but from a medievalist point of view there's really only two kinds of society there are feudal societies in there are states you live in a status the way that you interact with your government is as a citizen and how do citizens support the state governments such as the one you live in you pay taxes so you pay taxes to the state what do you get in return for your taxes why do you pay taxes well there are punishments for not paying your taxes yeah you get services and so what kind of services are we talking about what do you expect to get for your taxes roads what else security so you need to have military and a police force now health care that's something that we're currently in the midst of having a national debate over whether health care should be something that is basically paid for by taxes through the government or whether we should maintain private health insurance or through our employer most of the other advanced countries of the world first world countries have what we call socialized medicine it's part of the services that you get so I'm gonna I'll put that down there in parentheses because we're in the midst of this argument right now mm-hmm okay so a post office of our male schools and sanitation part of infrastructure and about a fire department taxes as well now that's interesting because it wasn't always that way fire departments used to be privately owned organizations and you had to basically pay a fee to have firefighting insurance and if you haven't paid the fee your fire might not get put out in the 19th century in fact going all the way back to ancient Rome there was a fire department they had siphon pumps to spray water on things and was owned by the Roman Emperor Nero member famously kept his firefighters you know withheld when Rome was burning and then reclaimed all that land and that's why people were suspicious and blamed the Emperor personally for the fact that that fire went on for days and days the emperor owned the fire department in our country as it developed basically little you know farms and villages there was a fire all your neighbors came out made a bucket brigade from the well to the fire and tried to put it out when cities began to develop firefighting was something necessary in cities you have fire hazards and cities but these were privately owned firefighting departments and it got problematic sometimes there be a fire to rival firefighting departments or show up at the same time getting fistfights with each other over who gets to put out the fire and then submit the bill for doing so and this is what led governors in the late 19th century in New York and other major cities to say this is ridiculous we should simply have a service a firefighting that's supported by taxes Teddy Roosevelt was one of the governors in New York that was behind getting that done so firefighting used to be privately owned right in today's rhetoric we would say that what they were advocating was socialized firefighting I suppose imagine all kinds of ills that go along with that do you think we should maybe go back to that have your own high quality firefighting insurance you could you know shop on the firefighting insurance exchange program find the best deal policy that suits your needs and the possibility that do you want to think about all that or just know that you pay taxes and you have services like that supported all right so it's a process all states are there to basically maintain military to protect the borders that's a central in to build roads these other things begin to develop as states get more high-level more more complex so this is what ancient Athens was it's what ancient Rome was it's what America is today it's what France in the nation states of Europe are so this is one kind of government a state a state is an abstraction it's an agreement that we all have that were better off pooling our money through taxes and having a central authority administer them efficiently to get things done rather than everybody having to fend for themselves for everything but when a state breaks down has happened when the Roman Empire broke down what emerges is the original kind of human society the other way that human beings have organized themselves with each other and lived as a group and that's called a feudal society we all begin this way back in the Paleolithic we were tribes of hunter-gatherers there was a boss there was the other good warriors that hunters that you know traveled around with them and then there was everybody else States begin to emerge in antiquity and then at the end of the Classical period the state disintegrates and we go back to what we had before the elements of a feudal society first of all rather than having this abstract understanding that we the citizens pay taxes and receive services in return we have instead a hierarchical organization of society at the top of all of this is the Lord not Deus Lord but the chief boss the king essentially the land Lord in fact we still use the word landlord today for similar reasons so we have the lord of the manor of his domain this is a guy who probably began as a war chieftain of some Germanic tribe as Rome was disintegrating and the Germanic tribes were carving out territories for themselves this guy had a cadre of other warriors that helped him in battle and eventually they'd come in and settle into the the remnants of the Roman Empire which was already disintegrating under its own economic problems in the late Roman Empire taxation was incredibly high there was very little opportunity to make money the economy was stagnating because the Romans had never figured out how to adapt to a post conquest world they never had an industrial revolution they never developed our kind of capitalist systems and so when conquest stopped things began to erode taxes went up and the poorest people are paying the most taxes and they couldn't do it and so these folks who were free land holders voluntarily gave up their rights to their land to some local strongman who could protect them and shield them from the taxes going to Rome in Rome wasn't doing much to provide these services anymore as the state was disintegrating anyway and the Germanic warriors come in and they integrate themselves into this system as well here's what emerges the guy who is that war chieftain becomes a king some high-level baron or duke beneath him are his soldiers his warriors in the standard term for them are his vassals so these could be low-level knights that could be barons Dukes there's all kinds of titles for various levels of them but all of them owe allegiance to the guy that they're fighting for so they owe him loyalty in military service when he says it's time for war their job is to be ready to go off to war in return this Lord gives them a place in society he supports them these vassals to the head honcho are themselves you might call them sub Lords sometimes vide will talk about sub infants overly technical term I think but they're basically sub Lords they are going to be the boss of a small Manor they're going to hold a fief from their higher lord which is basically a plantation farm that's going to be worked by peasants by farmers and there's various names for them the most common one probably being serfs so we have lords vassals and serfs these are the people that do the physical labor these are the people that do the fighting and apply military violence in the protection of society or just against each other because they're trying to get more land and stuff for themselves these peasants are there to basically support the sub Lord the knight that you know is the Lord over their Manor and so they owe him basically food and services and in return he gives them protection and so this is a hierarchical society at the bottom are 90% of the people of the European Middle Ages who are just peasant farmers they do all the brac making back-breaking labor they're the ones that make the land productive and a good chunk of their labor in the produce of their labor is going to flow upwards to those that are part of a military caste and they are there to basically receive the support and provide protection in return these guys in turn are there to provide loyal military service to the guy that actually conducts and makes war and return they're given this place in society what's missing here from what you had in a state are things like paperwork you don't need a bureaucracy to really keep a society like this going it's all about who knows who everybody knows who's loyal to who who is a vassal of who who is above and who is beneath it's a more local kind of look at government and feudalism works okay in a small society it's hard to run a giant Empire in this way so you don't need a lot of paperwork for any of this and there's not a whole lot of cash not on a currency going around because these folks rather than paying cash taxes to a state who then pays for the services they are directly supporting their vassals by providing the food and building him as house and everything else he needs so that the vassal this night has free time to practice military arts his job is just to go hunting and Hawking to practice horseback riding and galloping through the woods and maneuvers and exercising and you know practicing with the spear and a sword so that when he's called a battle he's fit and able and ready to go so there's very little currency in there is very little paperwork in this kind of a world another way that you might support your state is by joining the military right and when you join the army you sign some contracts you receive a salary that comes from taxes in the first place and you serve a state and its priorities and its concerns and in exchange you're also getting something else particularly in America what do you get free military service along with a paycheck in education and health care right you're getting the GI Bill and so you're getting support in that way as well to give you a leg up in life in exchange for extra support of your state beyond just paying your taxes you give them personal service all right and again that's how a state system works right in this it's all about who knows who now in a state system like this who actually owns all the tax money does the president own that money do state governors own it when you take the expressway to get to school and you throw money in the Tollbooth does the mayor is that his money who owns the money yeah nobody owns the money okay so it goes to a system we elect people who administer this system we elect mayors and governors and presidents but they don't personally own this money neither do they own the functions of government they are placeholders that are put there by us the people and if we don't like the job they do we can go vote and take them back out again replace them with somebody else right in a feudal system it's very different first of all I'm going to need I'm gonna need a a vassal here I need I'm gonna be King George here Joe you're looking particularly medieval today can you come up here and help me out Joe all right so I'm king Brooks and this is Joe a warrior that has exhibited prowess on the battlefield and he's shown his loyalty to me he's followed with me on several campaigns and I'm now ready to make him my personal vassal he's gonna become a knight in service to me okay now we're going to have to have a ceremony to show this because he's not gonna sign a contract joining the army he's simply joining my band of warrior types and so everybody knows who is who because we've done some ritualistic ceremony right so Joe you've done well you ready to join my band all right on your knees swear your loyalty to me swear to be loyal hands up like this you're my man in the late Middle Ages they started doing that thing with a sword where they W on the shoulder and all that kind of stuff the oath of fealty was the central ritualistic act by which medieval society was bound together publicly performed it made clear to all on lookers the line of authority from the Lord to his vassals it was practiced widely in the Middle Ages and still exist today in the way people kissed the Pope's ring upon meeting them that is a very late medieval overly artsy version of it it's when they start really stylizing all of this stuff but nearly days are a bunch of warriors and everybody knows who is who ok so now all the other words have seen it he's now joined the gang now I've got to support Joe I don't want him living in my castle with me ok i I want him out somewhere else so I've got to support him now I don't have enough cash to pay him a salary to do this so his support is going to come in land and services of the peasants who work that land all right so we're gonna gallop out to some peasant plantation somewhere you guys are all going to be the illiterate dirt farmers ok yeah I'll do that for me all right so let's gallop out here we are now we gather all the peasants around this is the most exciting thing that's happened in years by the way because you guys never leave your farm right you never go more than seven miles in the place you were born you live on the same little piece of ground farm in the same land and then more interesting people do stuff politically all you think about really is farming is staying ahead of starvation okay so it's pretty exciting when we come out we're dressed better than you we smell a little bit better than you not much but a little bit right and you can tell by the clothing our garments and the fact that we're riding horses that were of a higher station than you guys are so all you guys come and gather around say okay this is a surge oh he's now a Vasa warrior in my army you guys are gonna be his serfs and I need you to understand that he's now the boss of your land and your property and I could put up a written Proclamation that my monk writes up for me but none of us can actually read it what would be the point of that instead I'm just gonna show you visually cup your hands like this take a clump of dirt off the ground that you guys all farm he's your man right get it this land is in his hands so if you got a problem couple of your peasants are squabbling over who owns this cow don't bother me talk to him he is also the judge of the manor court any conflict you have once a month he's going to hold a court day and all the conflicts and squabbles you're having you're gonna presented before him and he'll make a judgment and his decision is final there is no Court of Appeals because he owns the court he owns the law if there's a river running through this property and there's a bridge over that river and the occasional merchant needs to cross that bridge he's gonna have a toll booth there and the money that goes in that toll booth that's his money he can do what he wants with it maybe he'll be an enlightened despot who will use the money to to build a care facility or to increase the quality of life for you peasants most likely he's going to a brothel with it right pretty much no of course so that's another faction of feudalism things that we consider to be functions of government that we simply elect placeholders to manage are actually privately owned by people the right to put a toll on this bridge the right to collect this tax are owned by individual people who use it as they see fit okay thank you sir Joe I will call you around May 20th I'll have a monk come out with a note for you there we'll have somebody read it to you because you're as well but be ready to come into battle alright see a battle time instantly battle time happens for about forty days in the middle of the summer all the crops are planted and not a whole lot to do on the farm harvest time is until a few months away and that's when you got about forty days in which summer campaigns happen that's when warfare happens in the original name for this medieval forty days in which Joe doesn't get to be the top head honcho on his property doing whatever he wants where he now has to come and serve me he separated away from his land for forty days you know the word for that is think about the French word for forty currant quarantine the original name of the word quarantine are those forty days when which he is corn and tinned off away from his farm because he's now part of my army providing the services that he promises he'll always loyally and efficiently carry out for me okay so it's a different kind of a world everything is based on who knows who everybody knows your place in the hierarchy and essentially all the functions of government are owned by people who manage it and run it it basically convinced the vast majority of the population to knuckle under under the system because that's the only protection they have from violence you living in a state count on a police force to maintain the peace in a professional standing army to protect the borders in a feudal society this is society that emerges when states break down when states become dysfunctional when the economy tanks this emerges because when people no longer trust that their taxes are getting a return from them from the state they start looking more locally to find some other way to have essential protections and usually people voluntarily surrender some of their freedoms for the security that comes with knowing there's a military force that's going to spring into action should there be an invasion mostly they didn't have to be conquered and thrown into this position they gave it up voluntarily these peasants on the bottom are not slaves not like in the ancient Roman world they are semi-free they are in one expression bound to the soil by obligations and customs which does not mean like you might have thought in grade school that they are chained to the soil bound to the soil means that there's a piece of land and by traditional contracts and inheritances that have been passed down since the end of Rome this family works this land and you really wouldn't want to ask them from that land because they know the land better than anybody without farmers this land is not worth much of anything it's not productive unless there's people there that know how to work it and produce the only real wealth and that is productive land okay most you know well basically is in farmland in a world like this you don't have a lot of redress for your grievances because another strange aspect of this society is that different laws apply to different people if you're a peasant there's one body of common law that applies to you if your nobility there's a different court and a different set of laws that are going to apply to you if you're a member of the church then there's ecclesiastical law and if some you know priest commits a violent crime he's not going to the town court where he committed the crime he's going to go to some church court where it's gonna be his own friends and stuff that are gonna probably give him an e-zpass on what he's done now you live in a state where at least in theory everyone is equal under the law right all are equal in the eyes of the law that is a high-level abstract philosophical principle and we do our best to apply it but is that always the case no absolutely not anybody remember the story of that son of a Texas billionaire who was like 15 or 16 years old driving drunk three times over the limit and he mows down in his car for people and kills them in this Texas billionaires son what do you think happened - exactly you remember this was the affluenza defense the attorney argued that this kid has grown up in a billionaire's household and is so wealthy and so coddled that he doesn't understand right from wrong so we can't apply the same laws to him as we would apply to you so he was too affluent the affluenza defense and it worked he was sentenced he had he got probation and he was sentences some time in one of those high-level Country Club resort kinds of prisons where he was sentenced to horseback riding in meditation so he could ponder how to be a better person they did take his videogames away so there was some punishment there now if you're driving drunk three times over the limit and you mow four people down and kill him are you gonna be sentenced to meditation or horseback riding no you're going to jail you're going to jail you gonna do hard time so there's an element to feudalism that always exists no matter how high-level and efficient the state is people would look at our world and say that there are still some differences some shortcomings to the high ideal that we espouse in our Constitution or any state constitution wealthy people seem to have a different set of rules applied to them people applying to become a oh I don't know Supreme Court justice might have a different set of standards applied to them it would be applied to you if you're in a similar me to situation yeah trying to make it to topical so we have different sets of laws for different sets of people we have the private ownership of functions of government very little redress for your grievances you know where you are in society not because of any documents or anything you've read because you're mostly illiterate you simply know through oral tradition in ritualistic behavior who basically works for who these peasant farmers ended up in their situation not overnight but slowly Rome was in decline their taxes were getting nothing they were crushed by taxes they voluntarily surrendered some freedoms to be shielded from the taxes and then as life got really violent with all the disintegration of Rome and their borders being attacked and Germanic basically immigrants coming in and restriping society through all of this they found a violent tenor of life that they needed some protection for and they were not slaves although the term serf does derive from the latin word for slave which is a service as in their word servile and so the term serfs comes to be applied to them but they were more simply pinned in by a myriad of obligations in a social structure that did not allow them a whole lot of mobility or options and how they were gonna live their life they had to simply work you know pay their their obligations upwards and hope just to be left alone by the bosses on top the new word for slave will eventually emerge in the 11th 12th century in the Middle Ages one little sidebar topic in most societies you're not allowed to enslave people of your own Society so Romans don't typically enslave other Romans or Athenians other Athenians you conquer people in battle other people you enslave one tricky thing that happened in the Middle Ages they might like to have some slaves but you can't enslave your fellow Christian and once Europe was all Christianized there was nobody left you could enslave so we're gonna find a slave you go to North Africa and we do have references of Moorish slaves North African Muslim slaves usually some like house slave owned by some wealthy bishop or something or you find the last pagan people in Europe the last holdouts against Christianity as long as they stay pagans you can still enslave them in fact the term slave is named after them the slobs the Slavic people of Central Europe the Teutonic Knights maintained a slave trade with the central Europeans and for a while we're keeping the missionaries out because they didn't want them to get Christianized because then you don't have slaves anymore so it's a slow transformation these people didn't just wake up one morning and decide to become serfs and the bottom of a feudal hierarchy it's like the old expression about how do you boil a frog now you boil a frog slowly exactly if you take a frog and throw it in hot water it's gonna hop out take a frog you put it in tepid water and slowly raise the temperature it never realizes that things are getting dangerous and it needs to hop out and it'll sit there and boil to death without realizing what was happening to it so it's an old expression and it's sort of what happened to them slowly over the course of centuries they find themselves going from free Roman land holders to serfs at the bottom of a feudal society we tend to glamorize the Middle Ages knights in shining armor and kings and so forth does this structure of society seem familiar do you know any modern versions of this I mean right here in America where you've got a top boss a bunch of enforcer types and a bunch of citizens who are being shaken down for money now don't get all political in their gangs gangsters mobsters the Mafia that's this because this always exists no matter how highly developed the state becomes this always exists underground and never goes away entirely when a state emerges then functions of government are taken over by taxpaying citizens and everything that you would have needed a funeral military society for now is handled by this so how do they maintain themselves I knew mobsters do this extortion so you provide protection to shop owners against violence where does that violence going to come from from them right they will provide the violence that they will protect you from for a price that's how you extraordin shop owners if the police have been paid off if there's something undermining the system otherwise you would go and report this to the police and have them arrested why does that sometimes not happen because this doesn't work perfectly and in places where people have managed to get in and bribe and you know extort their way in then you can basically carve out little fiefdom of your own there okay what is the other thing that gangs do for money unless is this is direct theft but I mean the work they do to make money drug-dealing scene dealing drugs prostitution right anything that the state says is illegal and will not condone and let you do properly they're there to provide it illegally that's how they support themselves and in the 1920s what failed experiment did we engage in in this country prohibition for a while we decided maybe alcohol is a root of all evils we try to make alcohol illegal what was the result speakeasies and Al Capone and the whole gangster movement which we also kinda glamorize don't we in the same way that we glamorized these Knights of the Middle Ages all those knights in shining armor saving damsels in distress and noble kings it's a bunch of poppycock that's a bunch of fantasy nonsense propagated by these people as they saw their world eroding underneath them because in the High Middle Ages towns will emerge in state systems will start to come back again and part of justifying their continued existence was that kind of literature but Knights really were not Noble and gallant Knights were a bunch of rapists thugs and basically lorded over society and did a whole lot of whatever the hell they want it to you don't want to live in the Middle Ages trust me on this it's a fascinating period to study I devoted my professional life to studying this but you really don't want to live there be glad you live here living in a state as you do you're probably complaining about all those taxes you have to pay right income taxes you know property taxes sales taxes on things you nobody really likes paying taxes in our political rhetoric we hear all the time about you know this evil politician that wants to raise your taxes as if instantly that's somehow a bad thing you know what be glad you pay taxes to quote a Supreme Court justice from the early 20th century Oliver Wendell Holmes I like paying taxes with them i buy civilization if you live in this world you're a peasant and some night if you're a peasant woman and some night takes advantage of you has their way with you you have no redress for your grievances there's no court you can rat him out it because he's in a higher station in life than you he's more important than you he runs the manor court even if you get it to some higher court he's part of this upper elite society you're not gonna really get any redress for your grievances in a world like this where at least in principle all people are equal in the eyes of the law in which you pay taxes not to people you're not paying services to people you're paying taxes to support a state system you have the opportunity to improve that system to have redress for your grievances to change the way of your life you can go get educated and do something different back here if you're born a peasant you're probably gonna be a peasant your whole life there's not a lot of social mobility in a world like this in a state system you actually have a fair shake and a fair chance if you're willing to work hard to actually shape your life the way you want to within this system here wherever you're born into is probably where you're going to stay in medieval society particularly in the early Middle Ages was a feudal world in which a small elite caste of military people controlled all the land which really meant all the wealth they sort of piled up with the church and by partnering with them got this idea that they were divinely ordained to have this position and while claiming this religious superiority basically controlled all the wealth and everybody down here waited for some benefits to trickle down to them if you want to live in this world in a trickle down economy where you have a tiny elite that hold all the land and control all the wealth well you can keep voting that way if you want you're looking at the undermining of the state in the returning to a feudal society

Channel: George Brooks

Views: 7,739

Rating: 4.9166665 out of 5

Keywords: feudalism, feudal, medieval, middle ages, Brooks, Humanities, Valencia, state vs. feudal, Fall of Rome, medieval society

Id: 3nt7M0oZV14

Length: 35min 44sec (2144 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2019