There remained a few free peasants throughout this period and beyond, with more of them in the regions of southern Europe than in the north. The practice of assarting, or bringing new lands into production by offering incentives to the peasants who settled them, also contributed to the expansion of population.
Castles began to be constructed in the 9th and 10th centuries in response to the disorder of the time, and provided protection from invaders and rival lords. They were initially built of wood, then of stone.
Once castles were built, towns built up around them. A major factor in the development of towns included Viking invasions during the early Middle Ages, which led to villages erecting walls and fortifying their positions.
Following this, great medieval walled cities were constructed with homes, shops, and churches contained within the walls. York, England, which prospered during much of the later medieval era, is famed for its medieval walls and bars gates , and has the most extensive medieval city walls remaining in England today. The practice of sending children away to act as servants was more common in towns than in the countryside. The inhabitants of towns largely made their livelihoods as merchants or artisans, and this activity was strictly controlled by guilds.
The members of these guilds would employ young people—primarily boys—as apprentices, to learn the craft and later take position as guild members themselves.
York city and walls: View of the city looking northeast from the city wall. The spires of York Minster are visible in the background. Medieval villages consisted mostly of peasant farmers, with the structure comprised of houses, barns, sheds, and animal pens clustered around the center of the village. Beyond this, the village was surrounded by plowed fields and pastures. For peasants, daily medieval life revolved around an agrarian calendar, with the majority of time spent working the land and trying to grow enough food to survive another year.
Church feasts marked sowing and reaping days and occasions when peasant and lord could rest from their labors. Peasants that lived on a manor by the castle were assigned strips of land to plant and harvest.
They typically planted rye, oats, peas, and barley, and harvested crops with a scythe, sickle, or reaper. Each peasant family had its own strips of land; however, the peasants worked cooperatively on tasks such as plowing and haying.
They were also expected to build roads, clear forests, and work on other tasks as determined by the lord. The houses of medieval peasants were of poor quality compared to modern houses. The floor was normally earthen, and there was very little ventilation and few sources of light in the form of windows.
In addition to the human inhabitants, a number of livestock animals would also reside in the house. Towards the end of the medieval period, however, conditions generally improved. Peasant houses became larger in size, and it became more common to have two rooms, and even a second floor. Comfort was not always found even in the rich houses. Heating was always a problem with stone floors, ceilings, and walls. Not much light came in from small windows, and oil- and fat-based candles often produced a pungent aroma.
Furniture consisted of wooden benches, long tables, cupboards, and pantries. Linen, when affordable, could be glued or nailed to benches to provide some comfort. Beds, though made of the softest materials, were often full of bedbugs, lice, and other biting insects. Peasants usually ate warm porridges made of wheat, oats, and barley. Peasants rarely ate meat, and when they did, it was their own animals that were saved for the winter. Peasants drank wine and ale, never water.
Even though peasant households were significantly smaller than aristocratic ones, the wealthiest peasants would also employ servants. Service was a natural part of the cycle of life, and it was common for young people to spend some years away from home in the service of another household. This way they would learn the skills needed later in life, and at the same time earn a wage. This was particularly useful for girls, who could put the earnings towards their dowries.
Nobles, both the titled nobility and simple knights, exploited the manors and the peasants, although they did not own land outright but were granted rights to the income from a manor or other lands by an overlord through the system of feudalism. During the 11th and 12th centuries, these lands, or fiefs, came to be considered hereditary, and in most areas they were no longer divisible between all the heirs as had been the case in the early medieval period.
Instead, most fiefs and lands went to the eldest son. The dominance of the nobility was built upon its control of the land, its military service as heavy cavalry, its control of castles, and various immunities from taxes or other impositions.
Nobles were stratified; kings and the highest-ranking nobility controlled large numbers of commoners and large tracts of land, as well as other nobles.
Beneath them, lesser nobles had authority over smaller areas of land and fewer people. Knights were the lowest level of nobility; they controlled but did not own land, and had to serve other nobles. The court of a monarch, or at some periods an important nobleman, was the extended household and all those who regularly attended on the ruler or central figure.
Foreign princes and foreign nobility in exile could also seek refuge at a court. Etiquette and hierarchy flourished in highly structured court settings. Most courts featured a strict order of precedence, often involving royal and noble ranks, orders of chivalry, and nobility. Some courts even featured court uniforms. One of the major markers of a court was ceremony.
Most monarchal courts included ceremonies concerning the investiture or coronation of the monarch and audiences with the monarch. Court officials or office-bearers one type of courtier derived their positions and retained their titles from their original duties within the courtly household.
With time, such duties often became archaic. However, titles survived involving the ghosts of arcane duties. These styles generally dated back to the days when a noble household had practical and mundane concerns as well as high politics and culture. These positions include butler, confessor, falconer, royal fool, gentleman usher, master of the hunt, page, and secretary. Elaborate noble households included many roles and responsibilities, held by these various courtiers, and these tasks characterized their daily lives.
This involved a vernacular tradition of monophonic secular song, probably accompanied by instruments, sung by professional, occasionally itinerant, musicians who were skilled poets as well as singers and instrumentalists. Women in the Middle Ages were officially required to be subordinate to some male, whether their father, husband, or other kinsman. Widows, who were often allowed some control over their own lives, were still restricted legally.
Three main activities performed by peasant men and women were planting food, keeping livestock, and making textiles, as depicted in Psalters from southern Germany and England. Women of different classes performed different activities. Rich urban women could be merchants like their husbands or even became money lenders, and middle-class women worked in the textile, inn-keeping, shop-keeping, and brewing industries. Townswomen, like peasant women, were responsible for the household and could also engage in trade.
Poorer women often peddled and huckstered food and other merchandise in the market places or worked in richer households as domestic servants, day laborers, or laundresses. There is evidence that women performed not only housekeeping responsibilities like cooking and cleaning, but even other household activities like grinding, brewing, butchering, and spinning produced items like flour, ale, meat, cheese, and textiles for direct consumption and for sale.
An anonymous 15th-century English ballad described activities performed by English peasant women, like housekeeping, making foodstuffs and textiles, and childcare. Peasant household: An image of a peasant household, including a woman preparing cheese. Noblewomen were responsible for running a household and could occasionally be expected to handle estates in the absence of male relatives, but they were usually restricted from participation in military or government affairs.
The only role open to women in the church was that of a nun, as they were unable to become priests. During the first year of life children were cared for and nursed, either by parents if the family belonged to the peasant class, or perhaps by a wet nurse if the family belonged to a noble class. By age twelve, a child began to take on a more serious role in family duties. Although according to canon law girls could marry at the age of twelve, this was relatively uncommon unless a child was an heiress or belonged to a family of noble birth.
Peasant children at this age stayed at home and continued to learn and develop domestic skills and husbandry. Urban children moved out of their homes and into the homes of their employer or master depending on their future roles as servants or apprentices.
Noble boys learned skills in arms, and noble girls learned basic domestic skills. The end of childhood and entrance into adolescence was marked by leaving home and moving to the house of the employer or master, entering a university, or entering church service. Developments in philosophy and theology and the formation of universities from the 11th century led to increased intellectual activity. During the 11th century, developments in philosophy and theology led to increased intellectual activity, sometimes called the renaissance of 12th century.
The intellectual problems discussed throughout this period were the relation of faith to reason, the existence and simplicity of God, the purpose of theology and metaphysics, and the issues of knowledge, of universals, and of individuation. Philosophical discourse was stimulated by the rediscovery of Aristotle—more than 3, pages of his works would eventually be translated—and his emphasis on empiricism and rationalism.
Scholars such as Peter Abelard d. The groundwork for the rebirth of learning was also laid by the process of political consolidation and centralization of the monarchies of Europe.
This process of centralization began with Charlemagne, King of the Franks — and later Holy Roman Emperor — Otto was successful in unifying his kingdom and asserting his right to appoint bishops and archbishops throughout the kingdom. From this close contact, many new reforms were introduced in the Saxon kingdom and in the Holy Roman Empire. Yet the renaissance of the 12th century was far more thoroughgoing than those renaissances that preceded in the Carolingian and Ottonian periods.
Conquest of and contact with the Muslim world through the Crusades and the reconquest of Spain also yielded new texts and knowledge. Most notably, contact with Muslims led to the the European rediscovery and translation of Aristotle, whose wide-ranging works influenced medieval philosophy, theology, science, and medicine.
The lateth and earlyth centuries also saw the rise of cathedral schools throughout Western Europe, signaling the shift of learning from monasteries to cathedrals and towns. Cathedral schools were in turn replaced by the universities established in major European cities. The first universities in Europe included the University of Bologna , the University of Paris c.
In Europe, young men proceeded to university when they had completed their study of the trivium— the preparatory arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic—and the quadrivium— arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
Philosophy and theology fused in scholasticism, an attempt by 12th- and 13th-century scholars to reconcile authoritative texts, most notably Aristotle and the Bible. This movement tried to employ a systemic approach to truth and reason and culminated in the thought of Thomas Aquinas d.
The development of medieval universities allowed them to aid materially in the translation and propagation of these texts and started a new infrastructure, which was needed for scientific communities. Royal and noble courts saw the development of chivalry and the ethos of courtly love. This culture was expressed in the vernacular languages rather than Latin, and comprised poems, stories, legends, and popular songs spread by troubadours, or wandering minstrels. A knight was a member of the aristocratic elite who were trained from a young age to be expert fighters and swordsmen, while vassals were generally lords of noble houses who offered fealty and support to the reigning king.
Introduction: Context and Definition of a Serf A serf is a worker bound to a certain piece of land called a fief who is loyal to a vassal lord or noble above him, usually called a lord.
Serfs are tied to the land they work, perform the same menial tasks each day, and receive little or no benefit for their labors. Under the feudal contract, the lord had the duty to provide the fief for his vassal, to protect him, and to do him justice in his court. The vassal owed fealty to his lord. Feudalism in 12th-century England was among the better structured and established systems in Europe at the time.
The noble that owned the land had the power to make laws and the people obeyed them. Because they had so many responsibilities , vassals in the Middle Ages were given more authority and lands.
Another important duty of a vassal was to attend to his feudal lord during court. A vassal is a person regarded as having a mutual obligation to a lord or monarch, in the context of the feudal system in medieval Europe.
The obligations often included military support by knights in exchange for certain privileges, usually including land held as a tenant or fief. Usually there is no difference because knights were vassals of the king.
In exchange the knight would receive loot from battles, his own estate and position in the King's court. Every noble had to be a vassal to a lord. Even if you were a mercenary knight you became a vassal to the king you were fighting for. How did Knights get paid? What did a knight get paid? Charlemagne's knights were given grants of conquered land which quickly put them on the road to wealth.
They might also receive gifts of money or other precious things. However, some knights weren't paid at all. Did Knights have wives? Wives of knights, however, are entitled to the honorific pre-nominal "Lady" before their husband's surname. What did a vassal paid to an overlord? The obligations and corresponding rights between lord and vassal concerning the fief formed the basis of the feudal relationship. Feudalism, in its various forms, usually emerged as a result of the decentralization of an empire, especially in the Carolingian empires, which lacked the bureaucratic infrastructure necessary to support cavalry without the ability to allocate land to these mounted troops.
Mounted soldiers began to secure a system of hereditary rule over their allocated land, and their power over the territory came to encompass the social, political, judicial, and economic spheres. Many societies in the Middle Ages were characterized by feudal organizations, including England, which was the most structured feudal society, France, Italy, Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, and Portugal. Each of these territories developed feudalism in unique ways, and the way we understand feudalism as a unified concept today is in large part due to critiques after its dissolution.
Karl Marx theorized feudalism as a pre-capitalist society, characterized by the power of the ruling class the aristocracy in their control of arable land, leading to a class society based upon the exploitation of the peasants who farm these lands, typically under serfdom and principally by means of labour, produce, and money rents.
While modern writers such as Marx point out the negative qualities of feudalism, the French historian Marc Bloch contends that peasants were an integral part of the feudal relationship: while the vassals performed military service in exchange for the fief, the peasants performed physical labour in return for protection, thereby gaining some benefit despite their limited freedom.
Feudalism was thus a complex social and economic system defined by inherited ranks, each of which possessed inherent social and economic privileges and obligations. Feudalism allowed societies in the Middle Ages to retain a relatively stable political structure even as the centralized power of empires and kingdoms began to dissolve. Feudalism in 12th-century England was among the better structured and established systems in Europe at the time.
Below the king in the feudal pyramid was a tenant-in-chief generally in the form of a baron or knight , who was a vassal of the king.
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