Society and Morals. Part VI. Feudalism in Europe
After having treated in a general way of the social process which consisted of the breaking down of communistic and patriarchal organisation, and resulting in the subjection and exploitation of the one-time free and equal tribesmen, it behoves us now to investigate more closely that concrete example of this process which was passed through by all European peoples with a resultant organisation which persisted up to a more or less recent period, for it was out of the elements of this “feudalism” that modern or “capitalist” society evolved.
These “feudal States” were for the most part formed among the peoples who over-ran, and finally assisted in the break-up of, the great empire of Rome ; but even in countries where the grip of Rome had not been felt the form of society evolved by the “relatives” of these peoples was inevitably the game.
The drying up of the great plains of Central Asia impelled the barbarian nomads, to whom, hitherto, they had afforded sustenance, to migrate towards the more moist and favourable lauds of the West, and they swept in recurring waves over the face of Europe for many centuries. Their military institutions were given a decided impetus, first, by the conflicts necessitated by their own invasions of already inhabited regions, and secondly, by the inroads upon them of fresh barbarians, after they had settled in Europe.
Gradually military States were formed all over Europe. Once independent tribes were consolidated by conquest into larger and larger aggregations, the first rude outlines of the modern nations were formed, whilst simultaneously the Christian faith became “accepted” by the subdued peoples throughout Europe largely through wholesale conversions made practically compulsory by zealous plunderers like Charlemagne.
Thus, for example, the several small kingdoms in Saxon England were, after hard fighting, at last united in a somewhat precarious unity under Egbert. To quote Green in his “Short History of the English People,” the union “had removed the king, as his dominions extended, further and further from his people, and clothed him with a mysterious dignity,” he was “the ‘Lord’s anointed,’ treason against him being “punished with death.” His leading warriors or thegns “advanced with the advance of the king . . . whilst the common ground of the mark (the Teutonic village) now became folk-land in the hands of the king and was carved out into estates for his dependents. With the advance of the thegn fell the freedom of the peasant. The principle of personal allegiance embodied in the new nobility widened into a theory of general dependence. By Alfred’s day it was assumed that no man could exist without a lord. . . . Gradually the ‘lordless man’ became a sort of outlaw in the realm.” The Norman conquest only intensified this development.
All over Europe a similar process was going on. The one-time free villages were modified so that the inhabitants stood in various degrees of subjection to a lord who himself was subject to a king. Most of the people of the village, or manor as it came to be called in England, were serfs who were compelled to render service to the lord of the manor by cultivating for him the land he was allotted by the king, and also by yielding to him a portion of the products they raised upon their own allotments. In addition, every excuse was made by the baron for the extraction from the serfs of further tolls upon their produce ; normally the serf was prohibited from leaving the village of his birth, but he could obtain permission to live away by paying an annual fine or tax ; again, before his daughter was allowed to marry he had to obtain the lord’s sanction and pay to him a fine.
Among the serfs themselves existed many traces of the old communal spirit and institutions. Their land, for instance, was still divided very much according to the old principies, the portions being approximately equal both in area and quality. Furthermore, the serfs still retained their right to the common pasture lands, and to the forests for fuel. The times of and methods adopted in the labours of the field were largely regulated by the ancient customs, and even the village council or folk-moot maintained a certain amount of influence. “There were no strangers in the manor. It was an offence punishable with fine to harbour one,” says Thorold Rogers, thus showing the persistence of the old exclusive spirit.
But the whole history of feudalism shows the growing hatred of the nobility for the communal rights of the peasants, and records successive attempts on their part to abolish them, and to seize upon the common lands. The Jacqueries in France (14th century), the Peasants’ War in Germany (16th century) were risings of the peasants against these encroachments of the baronage.
The Feudal Church
As feudalism passed through its early formative period, the political utility of Christianity manifested itself with increasing clearness. “Throughout all Christendom,” says Jenks in his “History of Politics,” “bishops and priests were the most intimate counsellors and most enthusiastic supporters of the Crown, and the rich gifts of the kings were amply repaid by the halo of sanctity which the grateful Church thus threw around the person and office of the king.” (P. 84.) Every social relation of feudalism became sanctified by religion. The serf in his hut, the lord in his castle, were ordained for such stations by God—a view of class distinctions which is by no means extinct to-day. Thus the proper conduct for a serf, taught the priests, was that of humility before his superiors and contentment with his lot. He was enjoined to dutifully render to those placed over him, the services and respect they were entitled to. And, although the nobility were requested to respect the feudal rights of the peasantry, considerable latitude was allowed in their case. It was, however, the profound and religious duty of the nobility to uphold the Church of God and to preserve the integrity and prestige of their own class.
The Catholic Church became itself a great feudal power—the Pope corresponded to a monarch, his bishops and abbots to earls and barons. The Church itself owned one third of the land of Christendom and possessed serfs whom it exploited just as did its secular counterpart ; and its local dignitaries claimed a portion or “tithe” of the agricultural produce of the manors. As its wealth grew its greed demanded more and ever more, its devices to this end being numerous and ingenious. The clergy traded on the credulity and gross superstition of the “true-believers” by the sale of spurious “sacred relics”—the bones of saints, chips off the “original cross,” even the sale of “bottles of the virgin’s milk from the holy land” can be read of. The sale of “indulgences,” which were practically permits to commit crime, was practiced widely, and the clergy solemnly promised eternal bliss in paradise to those who left their wealth to the Church, later threatening hell-fire to those who did not, and making such legacies practically compulsory.
With the growing riches of the Church the clergy, especially the higher officials, had in it a vital interest to defend. Organised internationally, and with its millions of superstitious and mentally servile adherents, the Church wielded an enormous social power. Its leaders, recognising that its strength lay in the ignorant beliefs of the masses, set the entire power of the organisation against any swerving from its accepted articles of faith. Whilst it damned all actions contrary to the social virtues of feudalism, it declared heresy the greatest sin of all. Whosoever was suspected of the slightest trace of unorthodoxy in religious opinion was the legitimate prey of this “vulture of the ages.” Every cunning means, every agent, the spy, the informer, were used for its bloody ends. Imprisonment, fiendish torture, and the slow fire at the stake, were its means of enforcing Christian belief and “charity.” Jews and Moors, because of their wholesale heresies and, of course incidentally (!) their not inconsiderable “wealth (which was always confiscated) were among the most acceptable victims.
Every avenue of culture of the age was open to the clergy, and, in the early mediaeval period, to them alone. Therefore, however crude their intellectual achievements judged by modern “Standards, there existed a real chasm between the mental condition of the more important ecclesiastics and that of the great masses whose minds they dominated. But this very domination, and consequently their prosperity, rested, as we have seen, upon the maintenance of the ignorant superstitions of the multitude, and the upholding of crude and barbarously irrational dogmas. Intellectual hypocrisy was, as a consequence,a widespread feature among the clergy, and along with this sapping of their theoretical basis naturally went a disregard in practice, of the ethical “virtues” they professed and so “(hypocritically preached. In theory lovers of poverty and self-denial, the higher ecclesiastics evelled in luxury and pompous display. Nominally celibates, renouncers of the lusts of the flesh, many of them were rotten with voluptuous debauchery. Towards the end of the Middle Ages “it was openly asserted that there were one hundred thousand women in England made dissolute by the clergy. It was well known that brothels were kept in London for their use.” (Professor Draper, “Intellectual Development of Europe,” vol. 2, p. 234.) The history of the popes is a long record of trickery, robbery, and murder.
The Barons, their Estates and Morality
We have seen that the feudal barons, while from the king’s point of view merely local agents distributed throughout his kingdom and responsible to him for their position and power, were in the beginning enabled to occupy these positions with the minimum of friction owing to the fact that they were regarded by the people over whom they held sway as the successors of the patriarchal chieftains they had supplanted and whose attributes they skilfully succeeded in taking over. But patriarchalism, with its reverence for blood connections and ancestral lineage, had succeeded in making every occupation every station—even the chiefship—a hereditary one. This idea was appropriated by the early kings and lords, who thus easily made their posts hereditary, and usually in the male line, as patriarchal custom and military exigences also, demanded. It was, of course, this fact which made kingship and lordship social institutions instead of merely the temporary result of conquest.
Furthermore, though the lord from the first acquired rights over the inhabitants of his district, i.e., power over men, yet the right he was most concerned about—the tribute—was so obviously extracted from the soil (agriculture being almost the only method of production) that, after a few generations, the lords came, quite naturally, to look upon the land of their district as the security for their exactions and as the real subject of their rights. The land persisted unchanged for generations, the inhaitants were a fluctuating and unreliable quantity.
Thus it came about that under feudalism “lordship of the land” was the recognised basis of social power. When an estate was transferred from one lord to another, everything living and erected thereon went with it. ; and when a lord lost his estate he lost his title and his privileges. The land did not belong to the lord, he merely had definite rights over it during his lifetime. He could not sell his estate, for upon his death these rights passed to his heir. Lordship of the land was the inalienable attribute of his family line, the foundation of its prestige and power.
To these several circumstances was due two of the best known features of feudal society—knightly “chivalry” and the “law of primogeniture”—and also to a certain extent a third—the condemnation of usury.
The first, when divested of the romantic trappings with which it has been endowed, is seen to have been an attitude adopted by the nobility with the fundamental object of ensuring the chastity of the women of the aristocracy, so that they should give birth only to legitimate heirs. These, by inheriting the feudal estates and privileges, carried on and preserved the continuity of the baronage, of the ruling class, of the feudal system. With this end in view the marriage union was made strictly monogamous and practically indissolable. It became with the males of the nobility a point of honour not to violate but to protect the chastity of the women who were the means of perpetuating the power of their class.
As for the women, it was their supreme function and virtuous duty to bear a legitimate son and heir to their lord. Moreover, that the estates should not be periodically dissipated and split up by being divided among a numerous progeny, thus weakening the family power, it was provided that only one, the eldest male child, should inherit. Pride of family, and in the blood “purity” of its line of descent, were thus typical features in the mentality of the feudal baronage, together with the physical courage, might, and prowess necessary to a military class forming the ideal of character among the nobility of the period.
But the lord, ever courteous and respectful toward the “ladies” of his own class, had no such feelings, as a rule, toward the women of the workers, whom he frequently made the miserable and powerless victims of his sensual lust. In many instances he was allowed the right to lie for the “first night” with any girl bride of the peasantry upon his estate.
Besides “land rights” the feudal nobles recognised only two other legitimate sources of social power—”divine” ordinance and the sword. But with the development of industry there arose another source of social power, which the lords did not and could not possess in any quantity so long as feudal relations persisted in their purity. This new power was money. Money is, of course, primarily a convenience for the rapid and fluid exchange of commodities. Those who possess it in quantity have access to every form of wealth, and it is therefore eagerly sought. But its possessors lend it only at interest and with sufficient security.
History records abundantly that usury and the mortgage are virulent agents in the destruction of personal relations and in the ruin of debtor land-owners large and small—of everything, in fact, which feudalism on its economic side stood for. Therefore the barons hated and envied the monied merchants and craftsmen of the rising towns and declared money-lending an abomination—though, of course, they were keen enough over obtaining money by seizure or otherwise whenever opportunity offered. The Church, as the faithful reflection of secular feudalism, took up the same position, and branded usury as an invention of the devils, nevertheless, with characteristic hypocrisy practising usury itself, either in secret or disguised, as it, with the lapse of time, accumulated in its own coffers money in abundance.
The City and The Guild
The towns of mediaeval Europe were, for the most part, a development from such villages as offered special facilities for trade and outside intercouse, such as a site at the junction of highways or navigable rivers, or, perhaps, adjacent to a good harbour. To such a favourable spot there tended to gravitate the artisans who were not, or who had ceased to be, attached to a particular village as its official craftsmen, and who now produced goods for sale in the market about which the new town was rising. The market was, from the first, a neutral place where buyers and sellers could freely meet and which later came under the special protection of the king or the Church.
But as feudalism developed, the lords began to eye with rapacious greed the growing wealth of the townsmen under their lordship, and, fearful of the lords’ continual encroachments, the inhabitants made their towns fortified centres of resistance against the baronial power. The fortified towns now became a refuge for fugitive serfs, for they offered them protection from their erstwhile lords ; and usually after residence in the town for a certain period they were regarded as freemen. Thus the town population grew. Then the desire of the barons or of the king for ready money enabled them to purchase various trade-rights and privileges, and eventually to shake off all feudal dues and obtain a charter of independence from the lord or the king direct.
The “free city” was governed by a municipal council, the descendant of the “folk-moot” of the village. It consisted of the descendants of the original holders of the village lands, who, as the immigrant population had increased, had become a sort of exclusive aristocracy, and either became merchants themselves or manipulated the trade facilities of the town in their own interests. To them, therefore, fell most of the material benefits derived from the city’s acquired privileges. Obviously this monopoly of political power by the merchant or semi-merchant oligarchy ran counter to the interests of the actual producers—the artisans and craftsmen. To protect their own interests the artificers had to organise.
Already the followers of each craft possessed as a rule associations for social and religious intercourse, which probably dated from the patriarchal period. But we find these, with the growing antagonism toward the city aristocracy, gradually becoming adapted for, and taking part in, political activities on the one hand, and, on the other, taking on the character of economic organisations for the regulation of industry. After struggles more or less prolonged, these craft “guilds,” as they were called, became strong enough to seize control of the city councils, while on the economic side each craft in time obtained control over the supply and purchase of raw material and the sale of its products, both of which had been largely interfered with and manipulated by the city oligarchs.
To accomplish this economic victory the craftsman had to sink his purely individual interests for the interests of his craft as a whole and its guild organisation, but this offered no difficulties to men in whom patriarchal and communal ideas were even yet far from extinct. The artisan produced, as it were, for his guild. The association frequently purchased the raw materials in the bulk, distributing them equally amongst its members ; and it undertook the sale of the collective products. In individual sales by the craftsmen it regulated the prices at which goods were to be sold, prohibited competition among its members, forestalling in the market, and other means of obtaining exceptional prices. The guild also held itself responsible for the quality of the goods produced by its members, any case of inferiority being considered as reflecting disgrace upon the entire craft. Therefore the shop of the artificer had always to be open to inspection by the guild officials. In production each craft had its own strictly limited domain such as boot making or wood-carving, outside of which its members were not permitted to go, for to do so would be trespassing within the sphere of another craft. When a craftsman had so thrived as to require assistant workers in his extending business, the guild determined the number he might employ. Being the son of a full guildsman was the best title to the right of entry into the guild (a patriarchal characteristic), but usually a long term of apprenticeship had to precede such an entry, for each guildsman had to be “master of his craft.” The guild held itself responsible for the debts of any of its members, and, finally, it possessed its own courts of justice and, what was of considerable political significance, had its own armed militia.
These organisations of the mediaeval workers, to protect their common interests were, in their vigorous prime (and we cannot go here into their decadency, during which they developed aristocratic tendencies, excluding the poorer artisans, who could no longer become master craftsmen and were therefore employed permanently by the guild masters as wage-workers), impressed their principles strongly upon the moral views ofrtheir membership. Any infringement of the guild regulations was considered highly criminal and traitorous, rendering the offender liable to expulsion and therefore preventing him from working at his craft, making him, in fact, an industrial outlaw.
Summing up the morality of feudal society we again see that the class interests of the ruling lords—lay and clerical—and also of the semi-independent craftsmen of the townships, determined their conception of “right and wrong,” just and unjust, exactly as we saw to be the case with the Greek and Roman slaveholders. But, under a system of chattel-slavery, sheer physical force was almost the sole means of holding the slaves in subjection. It was not necessary for a community of interests between master and slave to be hypocritically assumed and inculcated. What the slaves thought was of little or no consequence to their owners : morality was considered no concern of slaves ; it was held to be an attribute of and an obligation upon “free-men” alone.
On the contrary with serfdom, the greater cohesion manifested by the workers made it very necessary to use mental as well as physical means to secure their complete subjection. A psuedo moral code was required for the workers in order to guide their activities along lines consistent with the welfare of their exploiters. But a serf who was compelled to part with both labour and produce to a non-productive lord could never be taught to believe that he was not exploited, that he was a free man, as it has been possible to teach the wage-worker of today. This awkward problem was ingeniously solred by the Catholic clergy, the intellectual and moral guardians of feudalism. They zealously inculcated into the peasantry the idea that the categories king, lord, and serf were of divine ordinance and unalterable, and further, that the present life, with its poverty and riches, is only a preparation for the coming “kingdom of God,” where those who had been meek and humble while toiling and suffering “here below,” would dwell in happiness “amongst the blest.” Such beliefs could, of course, only have been of real social significance and force in an age of “simplicity” such as the medieval period undoubtedly was. Culturally it was, in fact, nothing but a developed barbarism modified by the achievements of Greek and Roman civilisation.
The above outline reveals, then, a function of morality which we have not hitherto touched upon—that of deluding a subject class, of serving as a bulwark of exploitation and oppression. The full development of this, however, yet remains to be considered.
R. W. HOUSLEY