lord, and it was presumed that his heir would normally take up the same fief, subject to
doing homage to the lord’s heir.
Although this practice of fief holding was new in the 11th century, it had long roots.
The commendation of one man to another had similarities to the process by which Roman
clients had commended themselves to powerful men during the Roman Empire, or even
that by which serfs had commended themselves to landlords during the early Middle
Ages. But what was different here was the presumed social equality between the lord of a
fief and the vassal who received that fief, as there had never been between a Roman
aristocrat and his clients, much less between a landlord and his serfs. The social equality
was reflected in the kiss that was a normal part of the homage ceremony.
Again, there are roots of fief holding in the oath of fidelity that Charlemagne
demanded of the freemen of his realm—essentially a “negative” oath, not to harm the
king in any way—and in the benefices that Carolingian kings gave to their counts as long
as they held their offices. But when fief holding became a fully developed institution in
the 11th century, it was not part of any public or governmental function. Rather, it was a
private relationship between lords involving personal land-holdings. It was in origin
extremely ad hoc, used in many cases as a means to cement alliances or to settle disputes.
Princes and kings, however, soon saw the potential advantages of the fief-holding
system. William the Conqueror divided all of England into fiefs for his great barons.
They themselves had men who held fiefs from them, but the king was the ultimate lord of
English territory and reserved the right to decide what to do with a fief when the fief
holder died. The French and German kings, because they did not start with a clean slate,
as had William in England, had more trouble imposing this concept of fief holding as
something evolving from the king. But during the course of the 12th century they were
able to persuade most dukes and counts that their duchies and counties were indeed fiefs.
Fief holding, which started as a private relationship between aristocrats in the 11th
century and became an instrument of royal power in the 12th, reached its peak in the 13th
century, when the obligations of holding a fief were institutionalized, the ceremony of
homage became both stylized and elaborate, and long lists of fiefs and fief holders were
compiled. By the 14th century, however, fief holding was in decline, as salaries and
retainer fees, rather than fiefs, became standard for aristocrats in binding their knights to
them, and as kings increasingly exercised royal power directly or through judges and
bureaucrats, not through dukes and counts. Fief holding, which is what “feudalism” must
be considered to mean if the term has any precise meaning at all—and what the term
meant when it was coined in the 17th century—had become an insignificant part of social
and governmental relationships by the end of the Middle Ages.
Constance B.Bouchard
[See also: ABRÈGEMENT DU FIEF; FEUDALISM; FIEF/FEUDUM; FIEF-RENTE;
INVESTITURE (FEUDAL)]
Brown, Elizabeth A.R. “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval
Europe.” American Historical Review 79(1974):1063–88.
Dunbabin, Jean. France in the Making, 843–1180. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Evergates, Theodore. Feudal Society in the Bailliage of Troyes Under the Counts of Champagne,
1152–1284. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.
Poly, Jean-Pierre, and Eric Bournazel. La mutation féodale, Xe– XIIe siècles. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1980.
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