However, over the years, the royal hold over the lands diminished and nobles began to hold land which was passed down as hereditary. Originally the land was granted by the King to the nobles for their lifetime and the King could reclaim the land. In the feudal set-up, peasants were given land holdings that they could cultivate and live on in return for the provided labor to landowners.įollowing the Black Death in the 14th century, feudalism began to decline in England.įeudalism in medieval Western Europe first emerged in France during the 9th and 10th centuries. The Fall of Rome was a catalyst for the Medieval Feudal System Feudalism in Englandįeudalism in England was brought to England by the French Duke of Normandy after his Norman conquest in 1066.Īfter the invasion, William replaced the prevalent Anglo-Saxon aristocracy with a Norman-French nobility and this nobility began using feudal practices.Īfter the conquest, William had claimed all of the lands in England and then divided it between his own soldiers and barons. This is why it rapidly spread to other parts of Europe as well.
Since previous social structures as were present during the Roman era had crumbled in Western Europe, feudalism emerged as a viable alternative for the new social circumstances. It arose because after Frankish armies and soldiers settled down, they were able to secure landholdings. This led to vast land holdings in the hands of these soldiers who eventually became the nobility and the land was further subdivided into smaller land holdings which were called ‘fiefs’.įeudalism in Western Europe arose in the area under the Frankish Empire during the 9th and 10th centuries. It began when mounted soldiers started establishing landholdings of their own, essentially a result of the decentralization of the power in the Empires. So for instance, peasants who didn’t own any land or simply lived on the land of the landowners were the lowest in the social strata.įeudalism in Europe emerged somewhere around the 9th century and continued to exist as a dominant social structure until the 15th century. The status of different classes of society, under feudalism, was determined by the amount of land they owned.
Feudalism DefinitionFeudalism refers to a set of military and legal obligations that shaped society by basing the social hierarchy on land holdings.
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