Feudalism

Etymology of the Fief

The etymological roots of the word feudalism are the Latin noun feudum and its cognate adjective feudalis, both of which were common by the end of the twelfth century in Western Europe but which even then had a long prehistory stretching back to the early Middle Ages, and ultimately to Germanic and possibly even Celtic languages. Feudum means fief; this is the origin of the bastard term fiefdom, which has entered common usage to describe an illegitimate or at best morally questionable private or privatized power to influence events in a particular category or place. Whatever else the centuries since the Middle Ages have done with the notion of the fief, feudalism is an idea formulated by intellectuals in response to this legal institution. It is therefore essential to gain an acquaintance with the fief. The meaning of the fief has been difficult to establish throughout history. Medieval analysts found the fief to be a slippery concept. One of the most influential teachers of law in the thirteenth century, the canon lawyer Henry D'Souza admitted: “I never heard an adequate definition of the fief.” The best consolation he could offer was: “However, it can be described well enough with magisterial [i.e., a teacher's] authority.”

About a century and a half later, the equally famous lawyer Baldus de Ubaldis noted during his course of lectures on the Roman law of Justinian that the fief was unknown to the Romans, and further, if they had known of it, they would have disapproved for two reasons. First, the fief seemed to embody an uncomfortable blend of servitude, both of persons and things; and second, a fief brought with it rights of jurisdiction over people, something that according to Baldus's Roman law-conditioned values should only belong to the public authority. This is perhaps the earliest pithy summary of a thesis that would dominate academic work in the early twentieth century, now known as juridical feudalism. The fief that Baldus described was a parcel of rights held by a vassal from his lord in return for a variety of personal services, originally military service. Vassalage itself was a form of personal subjection created by an oath of fidelity and, in many regions of Europe, an accompanying ceremony of personal abasement called homage, resulting in the vassal becoming the lord's man. The lord was more than just a landlord, therefore; he had the right to discipline his vassal in a number of ways. Conversely, the vassal's duties were not primarily conceived as rent, or anything like it, but rather as a set of personal obligations, owed because the vassal was a vassal, not because the vassal held a fief (which not all vassals did anyway). However, by the later Middle Ages, the fief was regarded as a key constituent of the feudal relationship, alongside the oath of fidelity. By the time Baldus wrote, indeed for several centuries before his time, it was hard to say whether a vassal owed service because he had sworn an oath of fidelity or because he held a fief. This is why Baldus thought the fief embodied a mixture of principles that a tidy-minded lawyer trained in the categories of Roman law would rather have kept apart. This blend of the proprietorial and the personal was, therefore, one aspect of the fief.

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