less. Within this very small assemblage of landed gentry rested the wealth,
the political power, and the military strength of the domain, thus enabling
the noble class to become an hereditary aristocracy. The numerous re-
mainder of society was made up mostly of toiling peasants who tilled the
soil they did not own and performed other servile duties that fell to their
lot. Their relationship to the lord whose lands they worked was called
manorialism and had little to do with the feudal hierarchy.
During the decentralization of political power that for centuries fol-
lowed the fall of Rome, many displaced warriors sought domestic security
in an inconstant age. Their hope was to find a propertied magnate willing
to accept them as military vassals in return for land. The process created
an integrated feudal hierarchy of lords and vassals that rested like a small
pyramid upon the vast populace of peasants. At the apex of this martial
consortium was the king, who held his realm from God. Below him were
the royal vassals, such as viscount and barons, whose fiefs were generally
expansive. These they parceled out among the higher-ranking members of
the noble class, who then became vassals. They, in turn, were able to con-
tinue the practice of subinfeudation, going down the broadening levels of
the pyramid to the bottom, where one would find a few humble knights
holding modest fiefs, whose income was barely enough to support them
and their families. When a lord sponsored every knight and every tract of
feudal land became hereditary, European feudalism became complete, with
the fief serving as the basic bond of lord/vassal dependency.
A collection of feudal estates, little more than a disparate cluster of
landholdings, soon weakened the power of the king. Most fiefs had been
created essentially for military purposes, and the men who received them
had been trained for warfare and became the soldiers who controlled the
military strength of the kingdom. If war threatened, the king was obliged
to call upon his royal vassals to provide arms for the coming encounter.
They, in turn, called upon their own vassals to answer the call to arms. Be-
cause there was so much intermittent fighting in the Middle Ages, warfare
became an oppressive burden for the knightly class, and an agreement was
reached that limited a knight’s obligated military duties to forty days
a year.
At the heart of the feudal fabric was the armored knight, whose ideal
role in life was to uphold the code of chivalry to which he had dedicated
himself. The term chivalry,defining the code of western knights, appears in
Middle English as chivalrieand is related to the French chevalier(knight).
In late Latin, we find the word caballarius,meaning horseman or cavalier.
The medieval knight, therefore, was an armored horseman, bearing shield,
sword, and lance, the weaponry of his day. Soon chivalry and cavalry be-
come synonymous.74 Chivalry