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Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of legal, economic, military, cultural, and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe from the 9th to 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.
Feudalism took root in England with William of Normandy's conquest in 1066. Over a century earlier, before the unification of England, the seven relatively small individual English kingdoms, known collectively as the Heptarchy , maintained an unsteady relationship of raids, ransoms, and truces with Vikings from Denmark and Normandy from around ...
A fief (/ f iː f /; Latin: feudum) was a central element in medieval contracts based on feudal law. It consisted of a form of property holding or other rights granted by an overlord to a vassal, who held it in fealty or "in fee" in return for a form of feudal allegiance, services or payments.
Examples of feudalism are helpful to fully understand feudalism and feudal society. Feudalism was practiced in many different ways, depending on location and period, thus a high-level encompassing conceptual definition does not always provide a reader with the intimate understanding that detailed historical examples provide.
Under feudalism, those who were weakest needed the protection of the knights who owned the weapons and knew how to fight. Feudal society was increasingly based on the concept of "lordship" (French seigneur ), which was one of the distinguishing features of the Early Middle Ages and had evolved from times of Late Antiquity .
The principle of commuting for the obligation of military service into payments struck at the root of the whole system. The change of conception was so complete, that tenure by knight-service of a mesne lord becomes, first in fact and then in law, a tenure by escuage (i.e. scutage).
Feudal duties were the set of reciprocal financial, military and legal obligations among the warrior nobility in a feudal system. [1] These duties developed in both Europe and Japan with the decentralisation of empire and due to lack of monetary liquidity, as groups of warriors took over the social, political, judicial, and economic spheres of the territory they controlled. [2]
The crisis of the Middle Ages was a series of events in the 14th and 15th centuries that ended centuries of European stability during the late Middle Ages. [1] Three major crises led to radical changes in all areas of society: demographic collapse, political instability, and religious upheavals.