‘Feudalism’ was a vital stage in the development of a law of property,
because it spread the conditional holding of land, and generated the
whole legal terminology of ‘landlord’ and ‘tenant’. The Libri Feudorum
or ‘Customs of Fiefs’ added in the twelfth century to the Corpus Juris
Civilisstart with the Emperor Conrad II’s edict of 1037, De beneficiis
regni Italici, regulating relationships between the king, the bishops, and
the holders of church lands south of the Alps. Intervening to stop a war
between the archbishop and the rebellious vavassores of Milan, the
Emperor Conrad could do no more than recognize the customary law
which had grown up around the granting and holding of benefices
further down the social hierarchy. In order to reconcile senioresand
milites, he decreed firstly that a vavassor or lesser knight holding of a
bishop, abbot, abbess, margrave, count, or other person who ‘had
benefices of public or ecclesiastical property’ should not be deprived of
his benefice except by the judgment of his peers. (His fellow knights
would presumably know the conditions on which his tenement had
been granted.) But the most important clause of the edict gave the
nearest heir of a deceased vassal (son, nephew, or brother) the absolute
right to succeed to the benefice. It was to this type of military benefice,
by which the grantor retained superior rights but the grantee and his
heirs were protected from arbitrary confiscation, that Irnerius and the
other masters of the renaissance of Roman law applied the term ‘fief’
and around it that they constructed the doctrines of ius feudale.^62
The nature of the practical arrangements on which the jurists built
‘feudal law’ can be gleaned from the language of charters. ‘Fief’
(feodum) followed beneficium in emphasizing the beneficiaries’
acceptance and consequent ‘holding’ of the granted properties from
superiors.^63 In eleventh-century France ‘benefice’ and ‘fief’ were used
interchangeably of parcels of comital and vicecomital land and juris-
diction held by private lords, and of the castles from which the property
was controlled.^64 The duke of Normandy’s ‘infeudation’ of his domains
to secure military support was by grants of beneficia; and Orderic
Vitalis has duke William, after his coronation as king of England,
stationing Frenchmen as custodians of castles and ‘distributing rich
The law of land-holding 203(2,5), 331 (11), ii. 330 (3), 343. 16 , 439. 29 ; Lotharii I et Lotharii II Diplomata, 178, 183–4,
205, 252–3, 309–10, 390, 441–2; Constitutiones, i. 50, 89–91; Regum Burgundiae e Stirpe
Rudolfina Diplomata et Acta, ed. T. Schieffer, MGH Diplomata (Munich, 1977), 165.
(^62) Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, 84–102, 477; F. Menat, Campagnes lombardes au moyen
âge(Rome: École Française, 1993), 563–601.
(^63) C. Devic and J. Vaissete, Histoire générale de Languedoc(Toulouse, 1872–1904), v, cols.
1061–5; cf. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, 192–240.
(^64) Devic and Vaissete, Histoire générale de Languedoc,v, cols. 366–8, 429–30; J. C. Holt,
‘Politics and Property in Early Medieval England’, Past and Present, 57 (1972), 6–7;
K.-J. Hollyman, Le Développement du vocabulaire féodal(Geneva and Paris, 1957), 47;
Niermeyer, lexicon minus, 415–16; Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, 456.