Lords, knights and peasants: feudalism and the manor

In 1086 William the Conqueror’s commissioners asked the same questions about 13,418 places in England, down to how many plough teams and mills each one had.

A word invented later

Medieval people never used the word feudalism. Lawyers and historians of the 17th and 18th centuries built it from feudum, the medieval Latin word for a fief, to describe a society in which land was held in return for service. Textbooks often draw it as a pyramid, with the king at the top, great lords below him, knights below them and peasants at the base. Many historians now think the pyramid is too tidy. In 1974 Elizabeth A. R. Brown called the idea “the tyranny of a construct”, and in 1994 Susan Reynolds argued in Fiefs and Vassals that arrangements varied so much from place to place that one word hides more than it shows. The term is still a useful shorthand, as long as we remember that real relationships were messier and changed over time.

Homage and the fief

The basic relationship was personal. A vassal knelt, placed his joined hands between his lord’s hands and declared himself the lord’s man, a ceremony called homage; he then swore an oath of fealty, faithfulness, often on a relic or a Bible. In return the lord promised protection and, very often, a fief, usually land with the peasants who worked it and the income it produced. The vassal owed military service, typically as an armoured horseman for a set number of days a year, plus advice at the lord’s court and payments on special occasions. Over time fiefs tended to become hereditary, and a powerful man might hold land from several lords at once, which made loyalty complicated in a war. Around 1030 Bishop Adalbero of Laon described society as made of those who pray, those who fight and those who work, a picture that churchmen liked more than many fighters or workers did.

Life on the manor

Most people were peasants, and most peasants lived on a manor, an estate run for a lord or a monastery. Part of the land, the demesne, was farmed directly for the lord. The rest was divided among peasant households in long strips scattered across two or three great open fields, so that everyone shared the good and the poor soil. In a three-field system one field grew winter wheat or rye, one grew spring crops such as oats, barley, peas or beans, and one rested, or lay fallow, to recover. Unfree peasants, called serfs or villeins, could not leave the manor without permission and owed labour on the demesne for a set number of days, along with fees when they married or inherited. They also had their own strips, animals and rights in the manor court, and over the centuries many bought or bargained their way to freedom.

1066 and Domesday Book

England shows how a conqueror could put such a system to work. On 14 October 1066 Duke William of Normandy, a descendant of Rollo, defeated King Harold at Hastings, and on Christmas Day he was crowned at Westminster. He gave most English estates to his Norman followers, who held them from him in return for providing knights. At Christmas 1085 he ordered a survey of the kingdom, and in 1086 commissioners went county by county asking who had held each manor on the day King Edward was alive and dead, who held it now, how many plough teams, freemen, villeins and slaves it had, and what it had been worth then and now. The result, Domesday Book, records 13,418 places and is kept at The National Archives in Kew. Royal power had limits too. In 1215 King John’s barons forced him to accept Magna Carta, which promised that no free man would be imprisoned or stripped of his rights except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.