FEUDAL AIDS
. In a feudal relationship, the vassal normally owed his lord “aid and counsel.” The first
of these originally meant, above all, military service, but it soon included pecuniary
assistance as well. The word aide began to refer to a variety of taxes or payments to one’s
lord, and when the latter was a king or territorial prince, the payments were required of
many subjects who were not his direct vassals. Four types of aide, however, were deeply
rooted in the feudal relationship and appeared in customals as the aides aux quatre cas.
These aides, confined to specific situations, were the ones that historians usually call the
feudal aides. The four “cases” were (1) when a lord’s eldest son was knighted, (2) when
his eldest daughter was married, (3) when the lord had to be ransomed from captivity,
and (4) when he went on crusade and the vassal chose not to accompany him. The first
two of these were by nature nonrecurring, while the last was not customary in every part
of France. The need for a ransom, while it might never occur, was also capable of
occurring more than once. The ransom of a king, generally an expensive matter, required
payments that went beyond direct vassals. Two such aides—that for Louis IX after 1250
and that for John II after 1360—were major events in the history of royal taxation and
affected so many people that it is hardly appropriate to call them feudal aides at all.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
[See also: AIDES; FEUDALISM]
Brown, Elizabeth A.R. “Customary Aids and Royal Policy Under Philip VI of Valois.” Traditio
30(1974):191–258.
Henneman, John B. “The French Ransom Aids and Two Legal Traditions.” Studia Gratiana
15(1972):615–629.
——. Royal Taxation in Fourteenth Century France: The Development of War Financing 1322–
1356. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
FEUDAL INCIDENTS
. In England, the customs that grew out of feudal tenure but were incidental—not
essential—to it, are called “feudal incidents.” No comparable term exists in French,
although similar practices obtained. The three main incidents, relief, marriage, and
wardship, arose from the fief grantor’s desire to maintain the service owed by fiefs that
had become hereditable. Family control over fiefs was much stronger in France than in
England, where kings routinely abused their incidental rights. In France, the inheritance
tax payable to the feudal lord and called “relief,” or rachat, generally was exacted only in
cases of collateral transfers (i.e., escheats), not when fiefs passed to direct heirs, as was
the case in England and Normandy. Relief usually amounted to the annual income of the
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